I wonder what the reactionary imperialist Vladimir Putin would do to Ukraine in the absence of NATO.
Probably the thing he did for the >20 years prior to that?
Slava Rossi!
They’re not “fighting NATO”, they’re fighting for their own imperialistic bullshit.
history started on 2022
When you definitely know what imperialism is
imperialism, state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas. https://www.britannica.com/topic/imperialism
Gee, totally not what Russia is doing, my bad
/s
Using Britannica 's definition of Fascism is like using the Klan’s definition of racism.
Here’s the actual definition, which doesn’t fit modern Russia at all, but does fit neatly onto the US and most of the EU.
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm
Bonus excerpt of Lenin calling out Kautsky for doing exactly what you’re doing with the definition:
This definition is of no use at all because it one-sidedly, i.e., arbitrarily, singles out only the national question (although the latter is extremely important in itself as well as in its relation to imperialism), it arbitrarily and inaccurately connects this question only with industrial capital in the countries which annex other nations, and in an equally arbitrary and inaccurate manner pushes into the forefront the annexation of agrarian regions.
Fighting border disputes is not imperialism. Since 1992 Russia has engaged in military conflict almost exclusively with its neighbors (totalling about 5 countries depending on how you count conflicts) and has not ever taken over any of its neighbors through these conflicts and managed their economic affairs to Russia’s benefits.
By comparison, the US has engaged in military conflict with none of its neighbors, and yet in the same 34-year span has engaged in military conflict with 12 - 15 countries depending on how you count military conflicts. And the objectives were either total domination and economic extraction, total economic devastation of countries operating outside their economic control, or disruption and elimination of resistance to their control. In most cases, the US took over hugely profitable economic operations like mining and opium farming or destroyed competitive economic operations like oil and gas and food production that directly competed with US corporations.
One of these is imperialism. One of these is the border disputes arising from being the target of Western dominance-oriented aggression for 175 years.
I cant see what west has to do with this conflict aside from providing aid to Ukraine which is fighting for its independence. West definetely wasnt the force that initiated this conflict. Like think about it the borders of Ukraine were determined by USSR which was controlled by russian elites, hell even if it wasnt modern Russian government admires them(I really cant wrap my head around their current ideology that tries to combine admire both Russian empire AND USSR which rebelled against said empire).
Also fighting one form of imperialism isnt a justification for another thats how you end up justifying inhumane. Your point about a border conflict is rather vague too as any direct imperialist expansion can be considered a ‘border conflict’ if you stretch it enough.
‘and has not ever taken over any of its neighbors through these conflicts and managed their economic affairs to Russia’s benefits.’ Well except they do it through bribing corrupt officials and helping them advance every way they can, I am saying this as a resident of a country influenced by this.
Long comment that a comrade had typed out
he whole Ukraine conflict goes back to 2013, when President Yanukovych was about to sign the EU Association Agreement which would be a stepping stone towards ascending to the EU. The far right Nazis hated Russia, obviously, so Ukraine joining the EU was a very big deal for them.
On the other hand, Russia (and Putin) had no problem with it, except for one part: Ukraine and Russia had tariff free agreement, and Ukraine signing the Association Agreement would complicate things.
Back in 2010, the Eurasian Customs Union was established and was composed of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was an attempt to revive the Soviet era heavy industry chain in these post-Soviet states. It was also explicitly a customs union (as you can tell from the name), which means that it is a protectionist bloc that would help prevent foreign interference in the form of free trade arragements. Ukraine was also a country that was being courted by the Customs Union, because, well, it was a post-Soviet state and inherited some very advanced shipbuilding and aviation industrial capabilities.
The EU Association Agreement was a targeted attack against Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union. Unlike their Russian counterpart, the EU Association Agreement is explicitly a free trade agreement, which means that if Ukraine signed the agreement, it would not be allowed to join a customs union (protectionist bloc) in the future. Ukraine was forced into a dilemma where it could only choose one side: the EU or Russia.
This became a problem for Russia because Ukraine and Russia had existing tariff free agreement, and the free trade deal with the EU would allow European goods to enter Russian market without tariffs, but Russian goods cannot do the same against the European market. This was all made clear in Putin’s statements back in 2013, who explicitly said that this was an attempt to flood the Russian market with European goods to destroy its domestic industries.
However, Putin was not objecting to Ukraine joining the EU, he simply asked that the tariff issue be sorted and proposed a trilateral meeting between the EU, Ukraine and Russia to work out the specific details. The EU rejected Russia’s proposal, and pushed Yanukovych into committing to the deal. Again, forcing Ukraine to make a choice between the two.
Furthermore, the EU deal came with additional conditions: Ukraine would also have to commit to IMF loans and implement austerity (reduced spending on healthcare and education) as well as privatizing parts of their land (which had remained illegal in Ukraine even in the 2000s).
Around that time, Moscow also floated an alternative proposal that would have given Ukraine pretty much the same deal, but without the austerity part. Instead, Ukraine would actually get discounts on Russian energy.
President Yanukovych hesitated. Contrary to popular narrative, Yanukovych did not agree to a deal with Moscow. He had remained a pro-EU politician, and simply hesitated because the conditions were unfair to the Ukrainian people.
But that was already too much for the Banderites, who saw Yanukovych as betraying their cause, and set off the Maidan revolution by late 2013. Attacks and hostilities against ethnic Russians, who predominantly occupy the eastern regions of Ukraine (the Donbass and Crimea) ramped up.
On February 22nd, 2014, a coup was initiated and the far right nationalists took over the government. Yanukovych fled. The next day, on the February 23rd, the very first act of the coup regime was to repeal the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Language Law, a 2012 law that granted official status to minority languages in the country, including the Russian language.
The act invoked strong condemnation from the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, and seeing that an ethnic cleansing was about to take place, they rose up as a separatist movement against the Maidan coup regime. The Ukrainian civil war had erupted, and Russia - seeing that the ethnic Russians were about to be slaughtered - intervened. The rest is history.
For that, Russia would be subjected to an international sanction so deep that it would kill their economic growth for the next 4 years, and barely able to breathe when Covid hit in 2020.
Also, completely unrelated - the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which guaranteed cheap natural gas supply to the EU, was commissioned in November 2011, just a little over two years before Maidan coup happened.
The problem with NATO came later after the Ukrainian fascists were defeated in the civil war, and paused with the Minsk Agreement. The fascists violated the truce fairly quickly, and were beaten again in 2015, and the Minsk II was forged, with German Chancellor Merkel and the French President Hollande giving their promises to Putin that Ukraine would take it seriously this time, for real.
Importantly, the Minsk Agreement would hand the Donbass back to the Ukraine authorities, under the condition that the local governments would be given the autonomy on cultural matters (such that Ukrainian politicians cannot simply ban the Russian language without the agreement of the local population). However, Russia would keep Crimea.
Ukraine never even bothered to adhere to the Minsk Agreement. Instead, over the next 7 years, they would be armed and trained by NATO, and reformed the Ukrainian Armed Forces to a formidable fighting force. Implicit (and not so implicit) in Ukraine’s actions showed that they intended to retake Donbass and Crimea by force. Putin continued to wait.
By 2019, President Zelensky was elected as a peace president with popular support from the ethnic Russian heavy regions (not part of the separatist state). However, when Biden took office in early 2021, a visit to the White House completely changed Zelensky’s outlook, and he went back on his promise to bridge the divide between ethnic Ukrainians and Russians. Instead, his rhetoric changed significantly and teased about joining NATO.
This raised the alarm on the Russian front, and resulted in the US-Russia Summit in June 2021, when the Russian side prepared hundreds of pages of proposal on the various scenarios for de-escalation. The Americans ignored Russian concern, and in August 2021, and then again in December 2021, the US sent Javelins and Stingers to the Ukrainian side, further flaming the tension.
By early February 2022, the Ukrainian military had been mobilized, and artillery shelling into the separatist territory ramped up by an order of magnitude. Russia made its move.
Also, another yet completely unrelated incident - Nord Stream 2 pipeline completed its construction in 2021, and was awaiting commission at the time the war broke out.
I cant see what west has to do with this conflict
That’s the real crux of the analysis, so let me share how I understand it.
In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia. That wasn’t just a single decision made from Paris. It took Napoleon 15 years to have what he needed to invade to Russia. What did he need? Control over all of Europe. Why did he need it? Because he needed soldiers, materials, and most importantly, logistics. One cannot simply take an army from Paris and March them all the way to Russia without supply chains, and if your supply chains stretch from Paris to the Russian border, they’re going to break easily.
So Napoleon spent 15 years militarily dominating all of Europe which created the necessary preconditions for him to invade Russia. That was a Western European invasion of Russia and it was incredibly bloody and devastating. One of the most important aspects of Russia’s defense against the invasion is that they had troops stationed deep into Western Ukraine. Napoleon had to go North and invade through Lithuania, and that was more defensible for Russia. If Russia had not been able to force this through its garrison on Ukraine, Napoleon’s invasion would have occured over what is today the border between Russia and Ukraine, because that border is much easier for an invasion force to cross.
Russia repelled essentially the combined force of all of continental Europe in that war, but at a very cost.
The next major invasion of Russia was initiated by Western Europe and the US as part of WW1. The US, Britain, and Japan invaded from the East, and Western continental Europe invaded from the West. Specifically they didn’t want Russia to choose for itself that it would be communist. They thought they could stop Russia from choosing it’s own system of government by invading them. But how did they get to Russia? WW1 required the creation of supply chains and the mobilization of forces across all of Europe. Because they were already mobilized and operating logistically, they were able to push their troops just a little further to reach Russia. They ultimately failed to achieve their goal because their troops were tired and their systems were strained after years of war, especially at that distance.
The next time Russia was invaded was by the Third Reich. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, had stated quite clearly that his goal was to invade and occupy Russia. But again, he couldn’t just raise an army and send it across all of continental Europe for the same reasons Napoleon couldn’t. So, the Third Reich had to militarily occupy all of Europe first, aggregate their resources and recruit soldiers, build logistics and supply chains across all of Europe and only then could the Third Reich invade Russia. And their first target was Ukraine. They invaded and built up logistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, and then using their position in Ukraine were able to invade Russia through the least defensible border. Western Europe had again invaded Russia.
What all three of these invasions have in common, besides being invasions of Russia by Western forces for the purposes of dominating Russia and controlling it, is that it required military occupation, mobilization, and readiness that spanned the entire continent of Europe. Russia could see Napoleon coming 10 years before the invasion. The USSR could see the Third Reich coming 10 years before the invasion. When you look at the invasion not as a surprise attack but rather the results of a decade of physical mobilization of military logistics spreading from the command centers of Western Europe across all of continental Europe, you might get where I am going.
NATO is the modern formation of this Western attempt to invade Russia. NATO starts with all of Western Europe agreeing to pool their military resources and stop fighting each other. It requires that all members give up sovereignty over the parts of their country that NATO logistics and readiness require. Soldiers on NATO bases are not subject to local laws. NATO started off in Western Europe and has been expanding it’s supply chain and logistics across all of Europe, this time not by fighting but through comprador governments, economic pressure, and propaganda. As NATO builds military bases, recruitment, aggregates material and soldiers from all of continental Europe, it looks a lot like Napoleon or the Third Reich from the perspective of Russia. Which is why Russia said that Ukraine joining NATO was a red line. Russia has never been able to easily defend against an invasion via the border with Ukraine. It always suffers heavy losses. It’s an indefensible border.
So from the perspective of Russian military security, it looks like NATO has been expanding across continental Europe, accruing material and soldiers, building supply chains and readiness, and traveling from West to East towards Russia, establishing bases all long the Russian border. No matter how many times NATO countries say “it’s for defense”, it looks exactly like every other time Russia was invaded.
That’s why it looks like the West is the problem here. The West is creating a military readiness threat that Russia cannot defend against without massive losses, potentially can’t defend at all with the advances in warfare. So Russia’s national security assessment was that, like in times of Napoleon, like in the aftermath of WW1, and in response to WW2 and NATO expansion, it must have military readiness and deep layered defenses on the southern border where Ukraine sits or it faces an existential threat of invasion that it may not be able to recover from.
I cant see what west has to do with this conflict aside from providing aid to Ukraine which is fighting for its independence. West definetely wasnt the force that initiated this conflict.
The euromaidan years prior is 100% supported and heavily influenced by the west.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
