I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to a larger war, have a cartoon version in their heads of war and geopolitical strategy. Where there's clear boundaries between the "good guys" and "bad guys", like this is some Marvel film where you don't really even need to watch it to know what happens (spoiler alert: the good guys win!). Perhaps they are the ones who have something, and some history, to chew on.
You either accept a moral responsibility to protect sovereign nations from elimination, and elimination at this point was stated by Russian officials and media as a goal numerous times, or you accept the Russian position of "lands and peoples belong to the strong men" and we're back to the age of conquest, but now with nukes. Not only the former position is morally right, but it also prevents or at least postpones the nuclear proliferation.
This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
I don't recall the United States and Ukraine signing a mutual defense pact, or a treaty that designates the United States as the guarantor of Ukrainian independence. The former position you are advocating for literally amounts to "the United States is the Global Empire, and all changes in state arrangements must be approved by Her". That's fine, but just make that your argument. Trying to morally guilt trip people is pointless because there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument, about some country's sovereignty being violated.
>This is not only about Ukraine, this is about the whole Eastern Europe, and literally about post WW2 order that you seem to be enjoying the fruits of, if only by hanging out on Hacker News.
I'm not sure what purpose you think this sentence serves. If your argument is, again, the United States is the Global Imperial Power and, because I post on HN, I am balking in my responsibility to sufficiently support this Empire, then got it. I'll make sure to "do better".
> there's at least a dozen other conflicts around the world right now where you can make the same argument
Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2. Changing the government, plenty of times, but not erasing borders with the cultural genocide and some forced children "relocation" on top of that.
I didn't say anything about the US as a global empire or whatever, it's the collective World's responsibility to maintain peace and it's failing. But I say that there are clear "good guys" and "bad guys" here, regardless of the history of the US.
I see the Budapest memo referenced a lot but, obviously, it's a memo ... about ways to get rid of nukes. It's not a treaty that obligates anything at all from the United States or anyone else in terms of security support or guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty. I will grant, however, that the Ukrainians (and the Russians, we made promises to them in it too) probably feel pretty slighted with how history turned out in the ensuing decades.
From your link:
>>Another key point was that U.S. State Department lawyers made a distinction between "guarantee" and "assurance", referring to the security guarantees that were desired by Ukraine in exchange for non-proliferation. In the end a statement was read into the negotiation record that the (according to the U.S. lawyers) lesser sense of the English word "assurance" would be the sole implied translation for all appearances of both terms in all three language versions of the statement.
>Which other conflict is waged with the goal of eliminating the country completely and destroy its culture?
There's a lot going on in Africa and the Horn. More or less all feature some degree of genocide or mass killings, objectives of replacing the current government, or redrawing the lines on the map.
>There were no major conflicts of this kind since WW2.
This is absolutely not true. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (the first one), Myanmar and a couple others I'm forgetting all were an order of magnitude larger than this one in terms of casualties. Maybe you mean this is the first major conflict of this kind in Europe since WWII, in which case... maybe, because you'd have to omit Yugoslavia. There's room to argue about that one. Not sure why that's relevant, unless we're going back to the insistence about the United States' role in security on the European continent.
Problem for US and rest of NATO is that Baltic countries ARE in NATO. Once Ukraine goes Vilnus is next. Is USA ready to fight a conventional war in the Baltics? With what manpower? Germany is utterly useless right now and will be for the foreseeable future, French army is way too small same with UK. Very soon you might have to go to the Nukes..
It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
I think what you mean to say is that "NATO is the United States, the rest of the countries are just members". That's not to knock, necessarily, the rest of the members - they've all made choices and assumptions about their own security. I agree, this is a problem, for many more reasons than the fact that only a small percentage of Americans know which country Vilnius is in, let alone where it is on a map.
>It is much cheaper and safer to fight this war in Ukraine rather then trying to liberate Lithuania
This is what I do not understand, the "safer" part. How exactly is it "safer" to intentionally antagonize the old Cold War adversary over a country that even President Obama admitted is not a strategic interest to the United States? To attempt to steelman this, we should support/arm/fund the Ukrainians as a means to degrade and destroy (by proxy) Russian combat power just in case they invade Lithuania next - or maybe to try and prevent them from being of use to the Chinese in a new Pacific War - knowing full well that they know invading a NATO country means WWIII in Europe (and probably the Pacific, who knows). This sounds awfully similar to the "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" refrain that I heard all the time in the lead up to GWII and thereafter as we extended our stays in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's the most compelling argument in favor of support I can come up with. I still think it's wrong, though.
Do they know that? Will Germany magically stop using Russian gas, reinstitute draft and manage to produce more than a dozen tanks a year? All the signals pre-invasion of Ukraine pointed to no. Unlike Ukraine right now Baltics CAN be taken by a surprise air mobile assault, some of those countries have 20%+ of population who subsist on healthy dose of RT and worship Putin the Tsar, they will serve as pawns we see now in Donbass.
Practically how does NATO actually liberate them. Does it have the stomach for the full scale high intensity war as we see in now in the East Ukraine? Not just Putin, I am also not sure of that. Who is going to lead the American armoured division drive to capture Kaliningrad..
Yeah, it’s fair to question the real commitment to Article 5 that some NATO members have given their entanglement in a number of other economic engagements. I tend to think that there’s kind of a priority list of NATO members in reality that differs from what’s on paper. Germany? Absolutely. France and the UK? Of course. But Lithuania and Turkey? Poland I still think is a red line since, well, it’s been a red line since 1945 I suppose.
I don’t know that I’m as confident as you are in the Russian VDV’s ability to competently conduct an airborne invasion given their, shall we say, clumsy implementation of combined arms war in Ukraine thus war. I’d also love to see a citation that 20% (really?) of the population in the Baltics wouldn’t freakout and instead either actively support or be indifferent to a Russian invasion.
I am not certain they could, but it is not me who makes decisions, and those guys thought they could take Kyiv in 36 hours. It seems doable as paras could be reinforced much faster. The big problem is the none of those countries have depth to absorb initial attack, Ukraine's terrain is not great for the defender but at least it is a large country.
I was incorrect about the 5th column number. Lithuania is actually the best in this category with very few non-citizens. Seems like many left and some naturalized, current total is more like 8% not 33% like it was in the 90s. Latvia has the most but it is still much less than 20%.
It's never the "same exact thing", but parallels are obvious and numerous. What more, Russia is already openly talking about some of the things they want to "reintegrate", and if you are familiar with the finer details of Russian internal politics, you can easily name a few more that aren't necessarily floated often (such as North Kazakhstan, which is "South Siberia" in irredentists' parlance).
So yes, even if you do give up on Ukraine, it won't stop there. In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
BTW, I should probably add at this point that I'm ethnically Russian as well as Russian citizen, although I've been living mostly out of the country for the past decade. But I still remember very well what our nationalists are, I'm familiar with the kind of political musings Putin gets his inspiration from, and my firm belief is that this is going to be a much bigger war than most everybody in the West currently anticipates.
I appreciate the perspective. It does conflict a bit with that of Russian friends I have here in the US, but that's probably to be expected (no one familiar with this should assume that Russians have a uniform distribution of views on politics). I'd tell you that I've walked patrols in some of the same mountains that Soviet soldiers did in Afghanistan, and have read some (but obviously not all, who can) of the material from folks that Putin takes his influence from. What I'd also tell you is that starting WWIII over Kazakhstan is not going to go over well in the United States. I don't think you were implying that, but I frankly consider that issue Russia's business and not mine, and not that of the United States.
>In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient.
At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.
Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all. The most damning evidence of this is that those columns that were blitzing towards Kyiv early in the war had Rosgvardia units in them, the whole purpose of which is to suppress street protests etc - and they even packed their riot gear! This is the kind of thing you do if you expect the city to fall right away, and your sole problem then is simmering dissent.
Comparison to Germany in 1930s is fairly straightforward. Both Germany and Russia believed that they have suffered considerable humiliation in the last major conflict (cold war for Russia), lost "their" lands in the process, and were plunged into an economic black hole. In both, this triggered an embrace of irredentism and the overall ideology that can be summed up as "we'll be back, and then you'll be sorry". Both produced increasingly authoritarian regimes that, as they solidified their rule, started to look more and more at "their" lands among their neighbors. Both accused one of their neighbors of persecution of "their" ethnic minority, and justified the invasion and occupation of said neighbor on those grounds.
As for WW3 - no, I don't think it'll start over Kazakhstan. But if you wait long enough, it might start over, say, Latvia. The problem is that, with every country that the collective West allows Russia to overrun, NATO Article 5 is perceived as less of a real deal and more of a bluff. Basically, if US is unwilling to fight for Ukraine for the fear of escalating into nuclear, why would it fight for e.g. Latvia when the likelihood of that escalation would be even higher? Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine. So if you "draw the red line" there, you might find that line rather faded by the time Russia comes close to crossing it. They might cross it simply because they don't believe you have the guts to do anything about it by then.
Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far. Don't get me wrong - they are doing very well, exceeding all expectations by a large margin, and have plenty to show for it. But, at the end of the day, this is still a country of 50 million people with a $6 billion defense budget (2021) fighting against a country of 150 million with a $66 billion defense budget. Ukraine has had several mobilization waves since the beginning of the war, while Russia is still relying mostly on contractors and PMC. Ukrainian industry - which is largely in the east - is already devastated, while Russian manufacturing capacity is still fully intact, limited only by sanctions. If Russia were to truly switch to war footing to the same degree that Ukraine already did, Ukrainians won't be able to hold the line - not because they're bad at it, but because Russia can afford to overwhelm them with bodies and munitions. So you can't just assume that if we sit and wait long enough, the Russian advance will stall indefinitely, and that'll solve the problem long-term because all forces will remain tied in Ukraine.
A couple things. First, I agree, as an English-only (for the most part) speaking outsider it does seem that there's a strain of irredentism that exists in Russia, and in a couple other places in Europe to be honest, that's becoming more popular. I'm not yet convinced that this means an invasion of Latvia or Lithuania is imminent, which is related to my second point.
>Putin did not expect it to be a fight at all.
I genuinely don't get this, though I agree with you. Still, how could Putin possibly expect Ukraine to roll over after the Maidan Revolution, which had clear and obvious western support? Perhaps he was nervous and figured that event was an actual threat to him? Especially given the United States', shall we say, cavalier attitude in selling arms abroad it seems really really obvious that Ukraine would of course happen to find themselves in possession of the latest in battlefield tech. Surely a lesson has been learned here, especially given that Russia's most advanced combat power has been significantly depleted in this endeavor - and without those modern weapons NATO can mop the floor with them using F-18s built in the 1990s. Same with tanks, not to mention drones.
Third,
>Because Latvia is a NATO member? American isolationists will say that NATO isn't worth getting nuked over anymore so than Ukraine.
Agree. I said this in another comment but I think it's pretty obvious that, 30+ years after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union ceased to exist it's probably a good idea to assume there is some kind of priority list within the NATO members for who actually matters. I would venture to guess that certain former-Soviet countries that were added after the fall of Soviet Union are at the bottom.
Finally,
>Adding to the problem is the overly rosy picture of Ukraine successes in this war so far.
Also agree. When I discuss this with my too-well educated and too-well traveled friends, they sound like they've spent too much time on reddit. If you actually pay attention the war has somewhat stalemated, with slight favor to Russia at this point as they repair and rearm for what I assume will be a push to the western edge of the Donbas. Despite all this, these friends still believe in these now debunked myths (the Ghost of Kiev for one).
All of this just makes me want us to try to figure out a diplomatic solution. I don't know that Putin or Zalenskyy are in a position, politically, to seek one, so you may end up being correct that a compromise in one conflict leads, for Putin, to the initiation of another. I hope you're wrong.
