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This is one of those cases where I bent over backwards to try to persuade before banning, including countless warnings on HN itself and dozens of emails back and forth, literally over many years. I don't think you'll find many websites where the moderators try that hard not to ban someone. But that can't go on forever and eventually the slack ran out.
On the one hand, a Ukrainian citizen who was displaced by the war and wants nothing more than for it to never have happened.
On the other, a friend whose in-laws live in the now-Russian occupied parts, who have Russian identifying heritage, who envied the higher Russian pensions, and who didn't care overmuch about whether Moscow or Kiev took their money (both are corrupt). They prefer the notion of being part of Russia, in part because the social benefits are better, but also over resentment of contributed Western interference in the government of Ukraine. They, too, wish the war was over, and that the change hadn't been brought about by bloodshed, but they don't want to go back to the way things were either.
I have a hard time discounting the latter, if only because this guy is among the more level headed people I know and not prone to exaggeration or a war hawk of any sort.
What really bothers me is that the West keeps pussyfooting about; sending money and weapons into a war they can't be bothered to right themselves as if anyone in the world is pretending that means they aren't involved. It has needlessly drawn out the conflict and cost many more lives. They ought to have either stayed out, or entered with the purpose of making a definitive end of it at the original border.
There is a current argument that the tactic is absolutely necessary because the Russian structure absolutely relies on every level from the bottom to the top to be able to reasonably lie about how things are going. If you do nothing, they obviously win; if you do too much, you actually can lose because it is no longer possible for the lies to work properly to prevent more drastic moves. If you do what seems to be happening right now, the lies keep the machine turning at its current pace and they will drive themselves right off the cliff in no time. It was done economically to the USSR and the same thing appears to be happening right now more directly, militarily. It will seem to be this unstoppable force until the last moment, when it all just spectacularly falls apart in one way or another.
They were indoctrinated to be cynical passive conformists for their whole lives, and their parents and grandparents likewise. They will go along with whatever, as long as they don't starve.
There's no point counting on them protesting, and there's no point trying "not to provoke them". They just aren't a factor.
West needs to ignore all that pussyfooting and send enough resources to make the war materially unsustainable for putin. That's all that matters.
It's myopically about one's lies to their superior. At each level, the situation is portrayed less seriously by some amount to make it less "bad" for the individual. That continues up the chain so that at each point, it doesn't make sense for some drastic overreaction to happen. By the time it reaches the top, it's very divorced from reality.
Case in point, given the events of last evening -- the Black Sea Fleet is practically getting erased with no real change in behavior because it is happening slowly. I'm sure the story as it makes its way up the ranks each time is that the damage was minor, it's being repaired, only a few casualties, etc.
Acknowledging how bad the situation is to your superiors is acknowledging how effective naval drones and modern missiles are and how bad your harbor protection and air defense is. Again, they only care about money, not their people. Even in light of clear videos showing air defense being powerless to stop these attacks, they'll deny, deny, deny because they still have paying customers for their technology. Ukraine is taking out their refinery capacity and making those paying weapons customers think twice and change long-term behavior. (See yesterday's story about how India isn't going to get its planned S-400 delivery.)
Yes, russians are incompetent, always have been. But most armies are to some degree, and they have been operating under strict darwinian selection for the last 2 years. They adapted to a lot of early tactics that no longer work. And they have time to adapt if the west doesn't help Ukraine finish the job early enough.
What west does is microdosing the antibiotics with pauses between the doses instead of pumping the necessary dose for 2 weeks and solving the problem. It's VERY irresponsible.
As for naval situation - Russian fleets have always been a joke, the only thing that matters is whether they can block the Black See (they can't), and whether they can use the ships to launch missiles (they can, but if they can't - they can just use ground and air launchers). So there's not much potential wins for Ukraine left there, even if they destroy the whole black see fleet. From Russian POV it's just more sunk costs (pardon the pun) and more PR problems. They aren't very sensitive to either.
Ultimately the war will end when Russia can't afford to keep its army in Ukraine or when it loses its army. The first one is easier to achieve, but that takes mass attacks on Russian infrastructure. Not 15 attacks but 100 or 1000. Repeated over and over, so that damage can't be repaired.
The west seems to be very restrictive with how Ukrainians can use the west-provided weapons, and that makes this approach unlikely to work in short term.
So then the last possible strategy is just hoping Russian economy will collapse. Which it will, don't get me wrong - but in Russia it's hard to distinguish collapsed and uncollapsed economy anyway.
This is a very Polish bias :) For the last 30 years France might as well not exist as far as Polish politicians and analysts go. It's bizzare. There's more on TV about irrelevant countries like Hungary or Israel than about France, and when somebody speaks about France it's almost always the most trivial stereotypes. Half the time is cloned conservative propaganda from USA, the other half - from Russia...
As for Baltics - they are doing a good job with what they have, but it's not enough.
> the only thing that will counter Russia's ability to whip a mobilization economy faster is collective sustainable local production done right
That's false. If west sent all the weapons it sent to Ukraine, but did it in the first 3 months - war would be over by now. It is still possible to finish the war quickly or slowly. Each month of delay is prolonging this war nonlinearly (by more than a month).
Estonia and Poland and Czechia have different goals and motivations than Germany, Germany has a different goals and motivations than France, who has different goals and motivations than the US, and within each of those entities are dozens of other entities with their own goals. Jake Sullivan has different goals and motivations than the General Staff, Congress has different goals and motivations than either. Macron has different goals and motivations than the French Parliament, SPD has different goals than the CDU and Greens, etc. etc. etc.
It's just silly. Of course the lowest common denominator is "weaken Russia" but that doesn't mean there are not substantial factions in favor of ending the conflict with victory.
Either way, I didn't mean to imply that was enough for people to want war. Rather, had they been given free choice over which country rules where they lived, that would have been a stronger factor than any nationalist ties they had to the Ukrainian government.
Worth keeping in mind your sample size is ... 1.
Yes, these things truly are the same! Just two sides of the same coin.
I think a better phrasing would be, given the option of who governed where they lived, the social benefits were a stronger draw than any sort of patriotic or nationalistic feeling they had toward Kiev.
I suspect many in Moscow expected this to go like the annexation of Crimea went- probably illegitimate, but small enough that it would be over quickly. After all, how could the tiny country of Ukraine possibly expect to hold a small territory out against the entire Russian military?
Clearly, that's not what happened. I don't think anyone living there now is glad it happened like this, let alone the people who aren't alive to voice their opinion on the matter.
How come? Being ethnic Russian doesn’t mean you’re a huge fan of the Moscow system, and it doesn’t mean you want to be ruled by Putin. When Donetsk and Luhansk voted in the independence referendum in the 90s both regions voted over 80% for Ukrainian independence. That’s not possible if a majority of ethnic Russians hadn’t been in favour of it.
Vast swathes of the east and south of Ukraine, where civilian areas were shelled to rubble by Russia, were populated by a high proportion of ethnic Russians. Look at the drone footage of the rows of apartment blocks shelled out in Mariupol, a city 50% ethnic Russian and overwhelmingly Russian speaking. The Narative of ethnic Russian liberation is far from simple.
It was not a referendum on "independence from Russia" because UkrSSR and RSFSR were distinct entites for 60 years already.
Then again, people could change their mind about being a part of the state of Ukraine.
People can change their minds, but there’s no evidence that significantly happened, or that over 30% of the populations of those regions did so.
The evidence that it has significantly happened is the 2014 LDNR referendums and the following harsh resistance of Donbas militias against Ukrainian forces (absolute majority of the soldiets being locals since how would you convince a large number of Russians to go and risk their lives in an unrecognized state).
Donbas population is basically miners bearing automatic weapons. Not too easy to control if they oppose you on a fundamental level.
You're also right that either Putin or Ukraine could give up at any point. That's rather orthogonal to his point, though.
It is disputable. If Ukrainian forces were defeated conventionally, the resistance would just move underground, to a guerilla warfare.
But it's a strange argument. On one hand it's factual, but what do you want to say with that? That Ukraine completely subjugated by Russia would be preferable to the current state? For whom? Ukrainians clearly prefer the current state of things over subjugation, but then people like you basically claim that they're wrong in their preference.
This sounds a lot like propaganda. Also, "giving up" doesn't mean giving up unconditionally. An agreement can be made that provides guarantees for the safety of the people.
We already have several of those. In Helsinki in 1975, all European countries (including the USSR) agreed to refrain from violently changing borders in Europe.[1] In Budapest in 1994, Russia reiterated the commitment, promising to respect sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons.[2] How do you suggest these, or any future agreements, should be enforced when Russia chooses to violate them?
Not to mention that Russia has become one the most oppressive countries in the world. What guarantees do you expect from a country that severly abuses the human rights of its population? That they won't abuse Ukrainians more than they do ethnic Russians when Russian officials imprison people for anti-war poems, raid gay bars, beat and rape protesters and murder dissidents?
This premise is important because understanding the causes, or motives, of the war is central in thinking about possible resolutions. If the cause of the war is Putin's crazy wickedness and its goal is the extermination of Ukrainians, there is no peace possible. If the cause of the war is an actual problem of politics, resources, national cohesion, alliances, you name it- then something can be agreed upon that stops the conflict now, saves the lives of hundreds of thousands on both sides, and buys a few more years. It will not be a just solution but it can be an acceptable one. And works the other way around too: if you don't want the conflict to stop, for whatever reason, you will tell people that no agreement is possible because the end goal of the other side is total extermination.
Honest question, obviously you know and understand this much better than I do, so feel free to bash my ignorance.
>Gaza is just a region of Palestine. Palestine is an occupied territory. A fast and enduring solution to the conflict is that Israel ceases its military and civilian occupation of Palestine and withdraws to its internationally recognized borders: those of pre-1967. Period.
Lol. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL. Lmao.
Ukrainians have seen that play before. Many, many times. Every single time it's just a maneuver for Putin to get into a better position to fuck them over in the future. Budapest Memorandum, Minsk 1, Minsk 2, multiple local ceasefire agreements, the Black Sea Grain Initiative... what happened to Prigozhin being a nice recent example.
https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/pwks16.pdf
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/ukraine-russi...
The culture wars seem to be true, it is a very convenient narrative for an outside audience. But Putin doesn't need the resources, or rather the people who are interested in the resources are a bit lower in Putin's food chain. Putin himself needs to stay in power if he doesn't want to go to jail for life and lose everything, along with his "Ozero" cooperative, because that's exactly what any next president whom Putin doesn't have by the balls will do.
And for that he needs conflicts with the old narrative of a "strong leader" who will enemies "kill in a toilet" and therefore no one but Putin is good enough. And Ukraine does not stand out here against the background of him past "merits", because it is quite natural for authoritarianism to increase the degree of violence, otherwise a weak "leader" autocrat will be swept away by a more brutal neighbor in the "elites", or even a "color revolution" will work.
This was the case in 1999 with Chechnya when Putin blew up houses in Russia pretending it was Chechen terrorism. In 2008 with Georgia the Kremlin propaganda called it a "small victorious war" after which the whole world stuck its tongue up its ass and Putin liked it. Then in 2014 Putin decided to repeat the "small victorious war" now with Ukraine, and again the whole world was imitating stormy activities instead of listening to the opposition in Russia, which was already shouting that Putin is a thief and a murderer. And now it's turned into a full scale war in 2022, and it's only going to get worse from here until Putin die.
That's roughly how things are IRL in my opinion, so resources are not the goal here.
Anyway, on a related note, this is perhaps the best series of videos I've seen on the historical background of the war.