That can totally explain the lack of desire to get involved.
That doesn't explain the victim blaming though.
Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal because he refused to capitulate to a stronger enemy.
War is crazy and brutal and engaging in one is going to get people killed. But I don't understand how we can expect some other country to just give up and yet we don't expect ourselves to do the same when somebody attacks us.
Hence my only explanation is that no living person in America truly knows how it feels to be invaded.
That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.
And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.
And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.
>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal
No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
Hundreds of thousands of casualties for Russia too. Haven't they considered just stopping?
Ukraine as client police state is not a casualty free environment either. Really the war started when pro-Russian security services killed over a hundred protesters at Euromaidan, back in 2014.
Someone who genuinely cared about Russian lives, rather than just the regime or contrarianism, would want the Russians to pull out immediately like the Americans out of Afghanistan.
We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.
The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.
> Really the war started with Euromaidan
Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?
>regime, pull out
Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.
(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
I'm not talking about whether you guys should give him money.
But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.
I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!
But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.
No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.
What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".
You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
You've been continuing to use HN primarily for political/nationalistic battle, despite our having asked you more than once to stop. You've also been breaking the site guidelines badly in other ways too (such as with personal attacks, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524157).
Thanks, mopsi, I'm flattered. Have to say, though, I don’t think your valiant and steadfast defense of Ukraine’s e-turf makes as much of a difference as you think it does. Therefore I’d like you to consider putting your feet where your fingertips are: https://www.ildu.com.ua Every warm body makes a difference!
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been breaking the site guidelines very badly for a long time, and we ban accounts that do that.
Since it doesn't look like we've warned you before, I'm not going to ban your account right now, but if you keep doing this, we're going to have to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This means, among other things, not posting flamewar comments (including nationalistic flamewar), not attacking other users, and not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
I personally don't care about ukraine nor ukrainians; I have no stake in the game.
But I think all humans are fundamentally the same and when I see a bunch of humans fighting for their freedom I can understand them. I understand their motivations.
I also understand the imperialistic motivations. I understand russian need for status and pride and their relationship with their grandiose past. I understand all these emotions. All these emotions are exploited by various interests, sure, but nevertheless without those emotions of the masses war couldn't happen.
What irks me is when people do not want to put themselves in the clothes of somebody else at all, an d just conclude that one group of people is not entitled to have a given emotion. So Ukraine is not entitled to defend themselves because <insert_some_rational_reason> but russia is entitled to defend their separatists because <insert_some_rational_reason>.
It's the double standard that irks me.
I think we can agree that war is shit and everybody would be better off without it.
But, no, that's not the proposed alternative. The proposed alternative is that a group of people, in this case the Ukrainians, effectively surrender and become diminished. Future generations of russians will look at them and say "we're justified in treating you ask shit because after all we won and you lost". This happened over and over in history. Hell, this is why most white supremacists think they are the chosen ones, because whites conquered.
So how should I judge the people who want to defend themselves? I honestly cannot blame them from trying their best.
No, you’re still not getting it. This “double standard” is a figment of your imagination, it doesn’t exist. Roughly every country on Earth acknowledges Ukraine’s right to self-defense. A large number of them is materially supporting Ukraine.
They are free to defend themselves till the bitter end. No one is stopping them. And, theatrics aside, support isn’t ceasing either.
But they’re not winning. There’s no right to that.
If you cared about Russian and Ukrainian lives then you would be arguing for Russia to leave immediately. Only Russia can end this war, by retreating back to the internationally recognised borders.
Russia has "vital interests" that the whole world is, according to Russian imperialists such as yourself, obliged to bend over backwards to accommodate.
Well, guess what, we Europeans have vital interests too. Our vital interest is a free and independent Ukraine. Russia is not the only country with interests, you know!
If you think the cost for supporting Ukraine is too high, wait until you see the cost of Ukraine falling and Russian tanks crossing into NATO territory :^)
Cried wolf situation, I suppose. Because the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq was illegitimate and failed, therefore supporting Ukraine is bad (ignoring the totally different facts of the different situation).
Also the exact same politicians and party that was so fucking Gung Ho at bombing the middle east (not even picking a country!) that you were "Unamerican" for not believing straight up lies by the administration (that nobody went to jail for) are the ones crying about defending a Sovereign nation being unilaterally invaded in Europe.
They are also tee-ing us up to attack Iran, and have provably spent money attacking Houthis despite knowing that Europe would take care of themselves.
They are full of shit and they know it. They do not care.
Never-mind that, there's every indication this one is in fact yet another bad one.
The Taliban didn't return to power in Afghanistan, because the war was unjust according to international law, or morally repugnant or any of that. That has never mattered. And it won't ever matter.
The Taliban won because American strategy was defective from the start. While great victories with thousands of Taliban getting massacred were common, none of those contributed the destruction of the Taliban or any other strategic objective. There had been minimal effort to learn from the failures of Vietnam and the idea of learning from British victories against the insurgents in Malaya and South Africa was unthinkable.
And the situation in Ukraine gives every indication of being similar. The Ukrainian side conducts ambitious operations, some of them impressive successes, but ever since the summer of 2023, victory only seems to be getting more distant as time goes by.
What American-Vietnam war and American-Afganistan war had in common was counterinsurgency of the opposing forces embedded with local population (VietCong embedded with local south Vietnamese villagers; Taliban embedded with Afghan villagers). This broke the war for Americans. (If we are pedantic we can observe a similar situation in the second American-Iraqi war with similar outcome for Americans)
This situation is not present in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Why, because Russia can grind out a village a week? Ukraine is inflicting disproportionate losses and is supplied to the hilt by Europe, while Russia's moving closer every day to a Potemkin economy.
Ukraine is inflicting massively disproportionate losses. Meanwhile, Ukraine does very aggressive conscription while Russia mostly deploys volunteers and only resorted to reservists in 2022 in an emergency. It doesn't really add up, does it.
And the collapse of the Russian economy will happen any day now for the past 3 years.
After 20 years of being told the military leadership of the western world had COIN all figured out, you're going to have to give people something more than a prayer that the enemy's economy will collapse all of a sudden. Proud ignorance of the basic facts of the field or of the enemy won't procure much public support any more.
Of course Ukraine conscripts, they're in a war for their survival. They aren't drafting anyone under 25, by the way, so it's not as dire as you seem to think. And Russia's beating people and throwing them in pits if they won't sign contracts to go to Ukraine, so it's not all roses over there.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that Ukraine can continue ceding ground and shredding Ladas full of mobiks until Putin kicks the bucket, or the Russian economy collapses. A healthy economy doesn't have a 20% key interest rate for 8 months straight, you know. We've already seen one large-scale mutiny in the Russian armed forces, too, so who knows what else might happen?
You haven't proposed any sort of alternative to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. What's your idea, cut them off and say "good luck?" How does that benefit anyone besides Russia and the minority of Ukrainians who don't want to fight?
edit: if you're thinking that I care about the financial cost of arming Ukraine, I don't. This is the best money we've ever spent and the only time I've respected our MIC, and I wish we were sending more weapons and more financial support. Every time Ukraine spends $100,000 of aid destroying a piece of Russian armor, that's saving us god knows how much in money spent on deterrence.
You do not get a blank check to engage in nation building boondoggles until a "good one" comes along.