Comment by sras-me | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sras-me | Hacker News Reader

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> He favours the aggressors.

What is your response to this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD_KEFpuIro

Transcript here: https://singjupost.com/transcript-jeffrey-sachs-on-the-geopo...

>What was Putin’s intention in the war? I can tell you what his intention was. It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality. And that happened within seven days of the start of the invasion. You should understand this, not the propaganda that’s written about this.

>Oh, that they failed and he was going to take over Ukraine. Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Understand something basic. The idea was to keep NATO. And what is NATO?

>It’s the United States off of Russia’s border. No more, no less. I should add one very important point. Why are they so interested? First, because if China or Russia decided to have a military base on the Rio Grande or in the Canadian border, not only would the United States freak out, we’d have war within about ten minutes.

>In 2022, Sachs appeared several times on one of the top-rated shows funded by the Russian government, hosted by Vladimir Solovyov, to call for Ukraine to negotiate and step away from its "maximalist demands" of removing Russia from Ukrainian territory.

>Sachs has suggested that the U.S. was responsible for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. In February 2023, he was invited by the Russian government to address the United Nations Security Council about the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#War_in_Ukraine

Putin acts pretty rationally, just with flawed information. "Launching a full-scale invasion on the capital with the intention of negotiating neutrality" is a crazy plan he would never come up with. That's like beating someone up to get them to like you. The initial goal of the invasion was clearly to remove the democratically elected leadership of Ukraine, and then either incorporate it into Russia or (more likely) to install a puppet government that's more favorable of Russia.

On day 7, the three-day military excursion to Kyiv had stalled, the Russian army was scrambling to establish supply routes and figure out logistics for a war that should have been over, and Putin was trying to convert a stalemate into something he could call a success. Nobody at the time would have claimed that his behavior on day 7 was reflective of his plans on day 1, when days 3-7 were clearly not going his way.

> "Launching a full-scale invasion on the capital with the intention of negotiating neutrality" is a crazy plan he would never come up with.

That you really can't know, and

>That's like beating someone up to get them to like you.

Is a very flawed analogy.

Well, the EU has a Russian military base at its border, and did not escalate any war because of that?

I don't know, may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat. Or may be NATO have some other ways of dealing with this threat.

> may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat

Or maybe Russia see eastern and central Europe as their sphere of influence, which they lost. And now they're using any excuse to try to re-establish that.

What kind of NATO danger did they expect from Georgia?

Russia had zero reason to see de-militarised Europe as a threat.

I don't know, may be Russia see NATO + US as a much bigger threat than how NATO see Russia as a threat.

That's certainly true now, even if it wasn't true before. So why would Putin act in a way that was absolutely guaranteed -- win, lose or draw -- to fortify and entrench NATO's presence on Russia's borders?

His NATO excuse never made any sense. Don't invade anybody, and you have nothing to fear from NATO.

>His NATO excuse never made any sense. Don't invade anybody, and you have nothing to fear from NATO.

May be he is/was worried about USA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOkl2XgZlw0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzgPJeYZaOU

>It was to force Zelensky to negotiate neutrality.

Umm, no. Bullshit. That's my response. It's the 3rd time in a decade Putin pulled this off. Let's not pretend this is anything about NATO obligations. He wants to take back land he feels was always his (aka the most common reason for war)

Liars going to lie, ehh? No, the reason for this milirarny operatia was to exterminate Ukrainian nation, erase it from the history. Destroy and disperse it. There is enough proof for this, starting with the Putin's manifest about non existence of Ukrainians.

The only reason why Russia is so much against NATO is the article 5, because it makes attacking peaceful nations expensive and risky for Russia.

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