Is WWIII inevitable?

[shadow]

that is if you believe the joining-NATO excuse

your analogy won't apply if the real reason for invasion is -- Putin wants to take back what he believes belongs to russia

the same way china believes taiwan belongs to china

Gusto bumalik sa Glory days.


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[Flipo]

Gusto bumalik sa Glory days.


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Back in the USSR

[shadow]

Yun mga freeze na assets sa mga oligarchs, gamitin sa pagbayad ng mga weapons na ipapadala sa Ukraine.

Para yun pera din ng Russia and gagamitin against sa kanila.


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[Deestone]

[Egan101]

What irony! Or is the world just filled with prejudice?


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[uls]

What irony! Or is the world just filled with prejudice?


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coz ukrainians are white, blonde, and have blue eyes

White Americans and Europeans see them as "one of us"

di nila ma-take it's happening to their kind of people

ok lang when palestinians, syrians, iraqis, afghans are being killed

white people see them as savages

but white, blonde, blue eyes... they're real people

double standard ang West

[tsupermario]

Gusto bumalik sa Glory days.


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agree!

In 1997, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between NATO and Ukraine, and in 2002, he publicly declared Ukraine’s interest in NATO membership, to little opposition from Russia. The NATO membership issue has ebbed-and-flowed within Ukraine, as presidents alternated in power who were either more pro-Western or more pro-Russian. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko advocated during his 2005-2010 tenure for Ukraine to be granted a NATO membership action plan (MAP), a program of preparation for entry into the alliance, while successor President Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the idea after 2010. Russia did not respond to any of these pro-NATO moves by Ukrainian presidents with military threats and aggression.

Russia knows further NATO expansion to the east is highly improbable because certain alliance members have long balked at the prospect, making the required consensus impossible to attain. Russia also has an authoritarian ally within NATO, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who can help stave off any future consensus, and other NATO members such as Germany and France do not support membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or other post-Soviet states. The security guarantee that Russia demands now goes much further than membership issues. Putin’s Feb. 21 speech shows he perceives any security cooperation between Ukraine and NATO, from modernization of airports to training exercises, as a “knife to [Russia’s] throat.”

Even after a new pro-Western government in Ukraine that followed the 2014 incursions again embraced the goal of NATO membership and Ukrainian public support for such a move rose, Ukraine’s accession was that much more unlikely because of the alliance’s reluctance to embrace new members embroiled in territorial disputes. If Putin’s main concern now was to keep Ukraine out of NATO, he had nothing to fear in 2014, when he first invaded Ukraine and had even less to fear in 2021, when he embarked on the current escalation.

If Not NATO, What is Putin’s Escalation About?

A longer look at Putin’s two decades in power shows that, above all, he fears political competition in the neighborhood. When mass protests over rigged elections swept across the post-Soviet space in 2003-2005, toppling the Georgian and Kyrgyz incumbents and preventing the pro-Russian candidate from taking office in Ukraine, the Kremlin exploded with fiery rhetoric about Western-backed anti-Russian plots. A recent book on conspiracy theories in the Russian media since 1995 shows that the 2003-2005 “color revolutions” were the top source of conspiratorial, anti-Western narratives. All 1997-2002 NATO enlargement summits are lower in the ranking of analyzed events. American realists have long argued that Russia was too weak to strike back with actions, but evidence shows that the Kremlin did not react with strong rhetoric either. Instead of decrying NATO expansion, Russia prioritized complaints about Western political “meddling” in its neighboring countries, by which Russia meant U.S. and European support for domestic democratization drives.

In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and instigated an armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, NATO membership for Ukraine hadn’t even been on the agenda. Rather, the spark for Russia was the ouster of the increasingly authoritarian pro-Russian President Yanukovych, following months of street protests. Those “Euromaidan” protests had erupted after Yanukovych backpeddled, following pressure and bribery from Russia, from signing a trade agreement with the European Union.

So why was 2014 so concerning to Russia that it chose to invade? Given Putin’s rhetoric about Euromaidan as a Western-backed plot, the most obvious conclusion is that he was afraid that regime change and democratization in Ukraine might reach – – or at least set an example for — Russian society and destabilize Putin’s increasingly consolidated authoritarianism. Research on the color revolutions and on the third wave of democratization in the region shows that this neighborhood effect was real. In other words, it’s not NATO at its doorsteps that’s so concerning to the Kremlin, but political competition, because it threatens authoritarian stability and introduces prospects of democratization.

Russia's Invasion of Ukraine Is Essentially Not About NATO

president putin for life

[Egan101]

coz ukrainians are white, blonde, and have blue eyes

White Americans and Europeans see them "one of us"

di nila ma-take it's happening to their kind of people

ok lang when palestinians, syrians, iraqis, afghans are being killed

double standard ang West

The Americans branded us brigands and terrorists in our effort to repel them after the Spaniards left. At least, we didn’t suffer the same as the genocide of the Native Americans.


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[uls]

but nobody likes a bully

bully?

who are the biggest bullies in the world?

Russia? China?

or the European colonizers

the British who used to own 25% of the world



how many millions did the Europeans kill?

-

coz when you're western-centric

coz when you drank the West's Kool-Aid

of course you'd never see Western powers as bullies

[dr. d]

The Americans branded as brigands and terrorists in our effort to repel them after the Spaniards left. At least, we didn’t suffer the same as the genocide of the Native Americans.


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they may not have killed too many people,
but they, along with the spaniards and the japanese, killed much of our culture, replacing it with their own.

we were the americans' first big-time attempt at colonization, according to our history teacher.