Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
I was responding to somebody who said Ukraine was Russian’s near-peer. I didn’t say they should be considered peers now, just that they certainly weren’t when the choice was made to go to war.
The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
> Also, if you're not sure what they're after: Russia has been systematically driving Ukraine forces out of the Donbas because the Donbas has been shelled indiscriminately by Ukrainian forces since 2014. You can argue there's more to it than that, but that's their perspective.
They also seem to be trying to get entrenched in Crimea, and IIRC brought up the idea of some promise that Ukraine wouldn’t ever going NATO, although don’t remember if that was a serious proposal or what.
You implied it.
> The Vietnam War was like 50 years ago. Who cares, sure, I don’t have any investment in whether or not the US and Vietnam were peers decades before I was born. Vietnam certainly has an impressive record.
America clearly wasn't using anywhere near all of the power it had. Neither is Russia now.
It wasn't sending every last teenager and pensioner to the front, like in the final defense of Berlin. But the simple fact is, it was throwing everything it reasonably could have at its optional colonial project, short of causing major instability for itself on the domestic front, or endangering its real (as opposed to imagined) security needs.
Until it was defeated in the way all the Western colonial powers were -- by simply being outlasted by the people that it had a delusional "need" to perpetually occupy.
Neither is Russia now.
An equally unsupported belief.
> You implied it.
No I didn’t. I left that unaddressed because I don’t care to argue it either way, or consider it relevant to my overall point.
NATO explicitly added plans to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit, and has been conducting joint military excercises with Ukraine ever since, the last one happening ~1 year before the Russian war of aggression started. The current huge NATO support for Ukraine also proves the military closeness - to the point that many of the major victories NATO weaponry firing NATO rockets with NATO targeting details to targets identified by NATO intelligence, only with Ukrainian soldiers pushing the trigger.
Not to justify Russia's clear war of aggression in any way, just explaining that Ukraine absolutely was, and likely still is, moving towards NATO membership.
That's the complete opposite of what happened. The key outcome of the Bucharest summit is that Ukraine and Georgia were explicitly denied Membership Action Plans, which would have been the crucial step needed to move their application forward. Instead they got kicked downstairs to "aspirational" status, which they both complained loudly and bitterly about. This was very, very big news at the time.
So no, Ukraine was not "absolutely moving toward membership" as of that date. They might be moving in a different direction now, but if so that's a result of the invasion, not the 2008 summit.
In any case: No, that's not why they went into the Donbas, or why they're trying to hold onto it.
Right now, Kursk is supposedly considered a major success by the Ukrainians. Let's see how that pans out.