Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[OttoVonBismarck]

Some participants, such as those who raped, those who ziptied and shot civilians, and those who ordered missile strikes on hospitals and train stations, are worthy of dehumanization.

Fair enough. But you wouldn't go ahead and discuss the merits of calling Arabs orcs for example would you? I just find it to be in bad taste with this particular group of ours here.

I mean Arab society produces the inhuman behavior of Arab individuals. It has always been strange to me people don't want to accept that. Arab society is brutish and monstrous, and in need of massive reform.

[Josquius]

Some participants, such as those who raped, those who ziptied and shot civilians, and those who ordered missile strikes on hospitals and train stations, are worthy of dehumanization.

Fair enough. But you wouldn't go ahead and discuss the merits of calling Arabs orcs for example would you? I just find it to be in bad taste with this particular group of ours here.

I mean Arab society produces the inhuman behavior of Arab individuals. It has always been strange to me people don't want to accept that. Arab society is brutish and monstrous, and in need of massive reform.

It has problems and needs massive reform is valid.
Its subhuman and absolutely beyond redemption is not.

Though that is a fantasy story idea I've had floating in my head. Imperialist power attempts to civilize orcs, turns out they're pretty bloody smart in a different cultural setup.

[Duque de Bragança]

The comments under the articles included some French people wondering the source of British Russophobia and suggesting it was because of the White Russians (who were far more of a thinig in Paris) and hatred of Russia for having a revolution

Don't read news comments, you only have yourself to blame for that.

Le Figaro has quite a few pro-Putin trolls but they are easily recognisable. Lately, they have been outnumbered by people making fun of their pro-Putin stance, however.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Again, I don't want to relativise the sins committed by Russian aggressors and I personally certainly have no shortage of zeal when it comes to wanting to curtail Russia and its historic plague on its neighbours. I wish for the Ukrainians to kill as many of the invaders as they can (and we can enable them to) as quickly as possible, and I wish for them and us to condemn Russia to isolation for decades if necessary, until they are ready to join the modern world.

But it's very easy to continue the gypsy example with your comment. You cannot find a single person in Hungary who will tell you they have problems with all the gypsies. They only have a problem, they'll describe, with those who act despicable.

I think you're missing a few things.

1. Gypsies are a minority population spread around Europe, that have no country of their own. Thus their entire existence is bound up in "minority ethnicity" politics. Any negative commentary or views on their society have to be assessed through that lens.

2. Despite #1, if Roma people practiced, as a societal norm, broadly monstrous things, they would be worthy of societal critique. (I know so little about those people that I have no idea if they have evil cultural practices, if they do I'm unaware of it.)

There is a difference between levying valid societal critique of monstrous societies and discrimination against individual human beings who happen to come from that societal/ethnic background, particularly when those persons are immigrants into Western countries etc. There is for example no conflict in saying Arab societies are broadly monstrous, but being perfectly fine with individual Arab-Americans living their lives peacefully and following American laws and norms as immigrants.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Few roundup comments:

1. Germany holding back on sending Leopard tanks and advanced APCs is fairly reasonable. These are complicated weapon systems that are both expensive, necessary for Germany's own military and most importantly--completely useless right now to the Ukrainian military. It takes months not days or weeks to get a tank crew trained on an advanced MBT like that. I also don't think Germany has ever even committed to sending Leopards, they committed to working on sending a few hundred APCs they also have robust anti-tank guns on them, but Leopards are considered possible. The APCs are sitting in sort of mothball storage right now, so they don't directly take away from Germany's military to get them back to working order and ship them. But the question of where and how to train Ukrainians on these systems is the realistic thing. These are important things to figure out, but they matter in months not days or weeks--simply because such systems will only be useful to the Ukrainians in a longer time span and we have to figure out the logistics of training Ukrainian tank crews.

2. Trump sent a lot of lethal aid to Ukraine, while Obama basically did not want to send lethal aid to Ukraine because of fears of exacerbating relations with Russia. So how does this square with Bidengate and claims that Putin was close to Russia? It's complicated, and frankly has to be understood in the lens of remembering the Trump Presidency. Trump was a deeply stupid President and also deeply ignorant of the details. Huge swathes of American policy under Trump were probably ran more from the cabinet level than in any recent American Presidency, simply because Trump had systemic disinterest in them.

Trump and his White House roared from one controversy and one grievance to the next, and chaos would be left in their wake. The cabinet level officials who could work around that tended to make it long term, those that couldn't, didn't. But when the "Trump Eye" wasn't on your part of the house, frankly a cabinet secretary under Trump had more independence than probably seen in any modern Presidency the norm for modern Presidencies is area expertise political appointees inside the Executive Office of the President work closely with the President and kind of drive policy, often times many cabinet secretaries are little more than figureheads in some Presidencies. Big exceptions are DoD and DoJ which have typically been given some level of strong institutional independence regardless of the President. Note that the cabinet secretaries being figureheads is fine--they are usually politicians with minimal knowledge of the agency they oversee who are mostly using the cabinet appointment to burnish their political resume for either future higher office or future more lucrative lobbying and corporate board jobs.

Strong evidence suggests Trump did briefly delay aid to Ukraine to try and stir up trouble for the Bidens in Ukraine, but it did eventually get sent, and it represented one delivery in time of a lot of deliveries during his administration. So what gives? Was Trump really pro-Ukraine? I don't think he was,  but I think his Secretary of Defense was. Trump actually gave the military a lot of free reign to push things in directions they wanted while he was President, many of his interferences in the DoD were dealing with superficial / nonsense political things, or issuing pardons to war criminals who said nice things about him on far-right podcasts.

At other times and on other matters, Trump showed a weird obsequiousness to Putin. There isn't entirely a rational way to understand the Trump Administration's actions in regard to Russia, because it wasn't a cohesive administration. Trump wasn't minding the store that closely on a lot of issues, on a personal level he certainly gave tremendous signs of being very sympathetic towards Putin. However, on many areas of policies where the U.S. interests intersected against Russia, he largely seemed to do whatever the people he had appointed wanted to do and seemed to for example follow the lead of Jim Mattis on Ukraine. One reason that Mattis likely stayed in the administration as long as he did is frankly because he was getting his way on most things most of the time, he just eventually couldn't stomach the periodic Trumpian meddling.

3. I think American foreign policy with regard to Ukraine would be difficult to predict in a Trump Presidency. It is something that needs to be heavily questioned of Trump during the campaign. Trump is vain and runs almost entirely on ego, if his political enemies successfully build a narrative that anything but full-throated defense of Ukraine is weakness, then whatever his actual beliefs Trump would be prone to doubling down on supporting Ukraine--in fact he may be inclined to show no one is more bold than him on Ukraine, and threaten very dangerous and bellicose things towards Russia during the 2024 campaign season.

4. Trump has a purely transactional view of NATO and our European allies. He sees no value derived from American control over NATO and views the Europeans as "taking advantage" of America's defense spending. This is actually one of his core political views--you can literally hear him saying things like this about NATO, and South Korea and Japan as far back as the 1980s (which is when he first started threatening to run for President), Trump really doesn't understand the modern notions of power projection and all the strategic benefits America gets from these enviable relationships. Supposedly Mattis, Tillerson and a bevy of foreign policy and military experts actually spent considerable time trying to run "basic education" meetings on Trump so he could "get it", that these relationships are really to our benefit arguably even more than they are to the other states. It did not work, supposedly Trump looked bored and uninterested, ended the meetings early, and was entirely unpersuaded. Europe needs to figure out a genuine model of robust military power projection and self-defense independent of the United States--I say that in spite of the fact it isn't in my country's interests per se, but I think it is to the betterment of the "West" as a whole.

[Syt]

Austrian chancellor Nehammer met with Zelenskyy yesterday in Kyiv. And he just announced that he will meet Putin tomorrow in Moscow. 

[Duque de Bragança]

Austrian chancellor Nehammer met with Zelenskyy yesterday in Kyiv. And he just announced that he will meet Putin tomorrow in Moscow. 

Hedging his bets, Austrian neutrality-style. 

[Sheilbh]

Austrian chancellor Nehammer met with Zelenskyy yesterday in Kyiv. And he just announced that he will meet Putin tomorrow in Moscow. 

Not sure. I can see arguments for still calling Putin (except for Bettel ). I think it's fair for countries that still have relations with both sides and that both sides are comfortable talking to hosting foreign ministers etc - but that's basically just Turkey and Israel.

I'm not convinced there's much value in an EU country's leader actually travelling to Moscow right now.

[Eddie Teach]

Maybe he has Bolshoi tickets.

[Tamas]

Austrian chancellor Nehammer met with Zelenskyy yesterday in Kyiv. And he just announced that he will meet Putin tomorrow in Moscow. 

Not sure. I can see arguments for still calling Putin (except for Bettel ). I think it's fair for countries that still have relations with both sides and that both sides are comfortable talking to hosting foreign ministers etc - but that's basically just Turkey and Israel.

I'm not convinced there's much value in an EU country's leader actually travelling to Moscow right now.

There is some value in it for Putin.

[Zanza]

Besides making sure there is no nuclear escalation I see nothing worthwhile to discuss with the Russian government right now. But that topic is hardly one for an Austrian politician,more between US and Russia.

[Iormlund]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1513079795306962944

Kadyrov's Tik Tokers publish a war crime selfie (listen to the background). What a time to be alive...

[Syt]

Austrian chancellor Nehammer met with Zelenskyy yesterday in Kyiv. And he just announced that he will meet Putin tomorrow in Moscow. 

Not sure. I can see arguments for still calling Putin (except for Bettel ). I think it's fair for countries that still have relations with both sides and that both sides are comfortable talking to hosting foreign ministers etc - but that's basically just Turkey and Israel.

I'm not convinced there's much value in an EU country's leader actually travelling to Moscow right now.

Supposedly the trip has been agreed with the EU. I suppose representing a non-NATO country helps?

[Sheilbh]

Besides making sure there is no nuclear escalation I see nothing worthwhile to discuss with the Russian government right now. But that topic is hardly one for an Austrian politician,more between US and Russia.

Yeah. The argument I have for Macron, Scholz (and to a lesser extent Michel) maintaining calls with Putin is to feed him information about how badly this is going which he may not be getting from elsewhere and to monitor his mental state.

I think the argument for that is probably weaker now, especially after Bucha but also after the move from Russia to focus on Donbas.

Supposedly the trip has been agreed with the EU. I suppose representing a non-NATO country helps?

Maybe - I mean I'd be interested to know what they mean by the EU given the comments from the Polish government over calls with Putin (a view which I imagine is shared by other countries such as the Balkans, Slovenia, Slovakia etc but more diplomatically).

[Tamas]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1513079795306962944

Kadyrov's Tik Tokers publish a war crime selfie (listen to the background). What a time to be alive...

Holy shit.