Are people actually arguing that NATO membership is the reason for Russian attacks on neighboring nations?
Putin literally said he wants to restore the old Russian Empire. What the fuck was thay suppose to mean, then? A joke?
Jfc the number of people who don’t believe the terrible things Dictators say they are going to do is too damn high.
Tankies need to toe the party line.
Putin literally said he wants to restore the old Russian Empire. What the fuck was thay suppose to mean, then?
It meant simply alliances. NED installing nazis and calling it democracy to instigate war on Russia isn’t going to be welcome.
Lmao, fuckin tankies bro, will do or say anything.
I can use the voyager app to tag them and it’s the best feature of the app so far.
wait, how?
EDIT: Nevermind, found it in the settings!
Except criticize any authoritarian government that isn’t the US.
Hegemony means influence over all evil in this world. Everyone else is protecting themselves or licking the diaper. The derangement over “Putin would like USSR’s old influences” means war is not an acceptable view that needed correcting. NAFO troll brigade calling reality “tankie” is just BS.
I’m glad we have a tankie here to give us the Russian propaganda line.
Hmm, invading territory and forcing into alliance is totally what you do with an alliance member
BOOM you have been tagged
Removed by mod
Another one
Tagged
So when do we regime change Russia?
How often does that technique actually improve things in the long run?
They just regime changed us, so that’ll be tough.
Oh this isn’t on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml? I’m so surprised! /MEGA-S
This is a weird comma, usage.
The Goose is usually yelling motherfucker in this meme. The operation apparently had complications.
It’s a goose, man. Can’t you just be proud of him for spelling and stuff?
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it might make grammatical, errors.
It may also ask for some, grapes
Ha! I got that reference!
Why, did they want me, Christopher Walken to caption, memes?
deleted by creator
While Russia is the belligerent actor and it is their fault, pre-2014 Ukraine was hardly “neutral”, having mulled both NATO and EU ascension discussions. The latter being the actual provocation rather than the former. (This isn’t at all to say any of this is Ukraine’s “fault”, only to point out they were not “neutral”)
In early 2013 the Ukrainian parliament agreed to make legal steps towards EU ascension (source 2014 pro Russia unrest in Ukraine)
Which is what Lord Robertson, the former Secretary General of Nato, has stated was the start of the crisis:
"One theory, propounded by realists such as the academic John Mearsheimer, is that Nato expansion in eastern Europe was the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine. Robertson dismissed the idea. “I met Putin nine times during my time at Nato. He never mentioned Nato enlargement once.” What Robertson said next was interesting: “He’s not bothered about Nato, or Nato enlargement. He’s bothered by the European Union. The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an EU accession agreement to Ukraine in 2014.”
Putin fears countries on Russia’s border being “fundamentally and permanently” changed by EU accession. “Every aspect [of society is affected] – they woke up very late to it… I don’t think they ever fully understood the EU,” Robertson said, adding the caveat that the EU was not at fault because accession was what Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, wanted." [end quote]
Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2024/05/george-robertson-nato-why-russia-fears-european-union
And Budapest memorandum means… Nothing?
While this may be correct, it is worth pointing out that NATO member states (especially those on front lines) host soldiers from other NATO states. That means Americans would be in Ukraine (as they are currently in e.g. Estonia). The EU does not have a similar military component.
I guess its worth mentioning that Ukraine was never “neutral” to begin with. Since the fall of the union Ukraine had been in the Russian sphere of influence and they were neutral only to the extent where it wouldn’t undermine Russian control over Ukraine. That’s why the EU accession agreement started this, because it undermined Russian power and Russia was not okay with losing that power. Russia never wanted neutral buffer states, Russia wanted countries that they could control.
Yes good point
Putin has modeled his rule after the Csarist monarchy of the Russian Empire. He notably despises communism and blames it for the collapse of the USSR. He calls himself “president” but many within the state Duma believe the title to be an embarrassing western descriptor and would prefer to bestow on him the title of “pravitel” or “ruler”.
But Putin ran into a bit of a problem. Just as to be called Caesar you need to rule Rome, to be called czar you need to rule over all of Rus. For him, the cultural, historical, and religious significance of Kievan Rus was just too large to be ignored.
When it existed, the Russian Empire tried to erase the other eastern Slavic languages from their shared cultural memory. They acted as if there was no Ukraine and never had been, just as with Belarus. According to the Tsarists, Ukrainians had always been Russians and had no history of their own. The Ukrainian and Belorussian languages were banned. Ukrainian nationalism was a threat to the underlying myths of Russia and threatened the czars’ attempts at creating an “All-Russian People.”
Putin is emulating their rule and presents himself as a tsar-like figure. He’s built a massive, opulent palace for himself, with gold-plated double-headed eagles, a clear Imperial Russian symbol, everywhere—even in his personal strip club. Similarly, the Russian Orthodox Church helps him pacify the population and supports whatever myths Kremlin wants to glorify. He wanted to go down in the history books as a grand unifier of Russian lands—if not under the same government, then definitely as the hegemon of the Russian world.
Putin wants it both ways, to take credit for the Soviet legacy and, at the same time, be viewed in the same light as the emperors and czars of old. Therefore, he’s had to bring back and reaffirm the old, imperial myths and values—and to do that, he has to get Kyiv under his thumb. After all, it was the restored Kievan Rus that became Russia, the “Third Rome.” Ukraine going its own way, claiming Kievan Rus as its legacy, moving away from Moscow, getting autocephaly for its own orthodox church—all this runs contrary to Russian state mythology.
These imperial myths are what define Russia, what it even means to be a Russian. Without them, Russia just stops being Russia in the eyes of many. Putin is convinced that if this social glue is disrupted, then Russia will just split up in pieces again—and if he allows that to happen, then his legacy is ruined. For him, there can be no separate Ukrainian language, culture, or history.
That is where his mind is at, stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries.
TIL that Tzar derives from the roman Ceasar!
Valuable insight thanks
In early 2013 the Ukrainian parliament agreed to make legal steps towards EU ascension
EU, unlike NATO, is not a military alliance.
You’re not thinking forth dimensionally, Marty!
Putin feared the EU because it was expanding far faster than NATO. EU expansion offered valuable trade links to former soviet countries and in turn required they implement anti-corruption legislation, and in the words of NATO secretary general Robertson above “changed every aspect of society”. That’s what Putin was afraid of.
Look at what happened to Georgia.
Old soviet regime runs economy into the ground. In 2003 pro-democracy NGOs help organise a peaceful student protests that culminates in the Rose Revolution. Autocratic government out, democratic government elected for first time, immediately start plans to align with EU to recover the economy.
2006 signs joint statement with EU on economic cooperation. Also opens pipeline cutting out Iran and Russia and delivering Azerbaijan oil directly to EU friendly Turkey.
So in 2008 Russia invades Georgia’s Tskhinvali and Abkhazia regions in an attempt to destabilise the country. This fails.
2013 Georgia signs deeper level of EU cooperation. Ukraine parliament makes legal guarantees it’ll start to align with EU.
Putin was out of time, his Caucasus route to the middle East was closing forever, economic influence via the black sea was closing off, so he grabbed Crimea. It was the EU not NATO that surrounded him.
And that’s what the NATO secretary general said.
It was the EU not NATO that surrounded him.
Yeah like with rapists, I don’t really care for their reasoning. NATO is a military alliance, EU isn’t, so even if we assume that worrying about nearby military alliances is a “justified” reason to, idk, invade your neighbouring country, it still isn’t a justification, as EU is not a military alliance.
In terms of Moscow’s loss of control, the EU was proving far more effective than NATO. Like the NATO secretary general said, the EU spread represented the start of the crisis, but the invasion was Russia’s fault. Because they’re belligerent assholes…
The whole Ukraine crisis started with the offer of an EU accession agreement to Ukraine in 2014
I think the crisis technically started with a military invasion. If not that, then we could go back and forth on this to the founding of NATO and before.
Them saying that is like someone who beat their wife to death saying “it all began with her having glanced at a man who walked past.”
I think on this occasion I’ll defer to how a secretary general of NATO chooses to phrase it
Literally leasing a very important port city (Sevastopol) to the Russian navy counts for nothing?
That’s so much more cooperation than talking with NATO or “aiming to get closer ties with the EU”. Not to say that Russia had tons of trade deals with the EU, so does Morocco and everyone who wants something in that region.
If I had to guess if say Putin saw NATO expansion as a problem but rather slow and so not urgent. Whereas EU expansion could actually be a worse because of how quickly it spreads. Not least because countries seeking deeper trade ties with the EU are basically committing themselves to anti-corruption reforms and thereby slipping from his grasp long long before any serious talk of NATO is happening (see: Georgia, or my long summary elsewhere in these threads)…
Ukraine is a sovereign nation. It is allowed to make treaties with other sovereign nations.
Or do you believe the US should invade Brazil because it is part of BRICS?
Cuba is, like, right there. The prime example of what happens when countries in the western hemisphere try to enter into military alliances with non-us countries such as the soviet union
I feel you’ve not read my first paragraph (or last quoted sentence) closely enough…
That’s a very interesting take I haven’t heard of before. My understanding was that a primary reason Russia invaded Crimea was due to the oil reserves there that Russia wanted. I guess it extends beyond that.
Russia doesn’t need the Crimean oil reserves, it’s more than they wanted Ukraine to not have it. Even then, energy security wasn’t as much a motivator as was securing access to Sevastopol, a critical warm water port and the only place capable of housing the black sea fleet. Although control of that port, in turn, is largely to do with projecting energy control over a wider region.
Russia was leasing Sevastopol from Ukraine (til 2042). It had become increasingly important to Russia’s other objectives being a staging location for supporting the incursion into Georgia, and also Russia’s involvement in Syria. Both of which are key to Russia’s broader goal of region control and energy security (not Ukraine per se).
It may be that Russia was far more sensitive to EU membership than NATO because EU membership travelled much faster and was already outflanking them (see map at bottom)
In the early 2000’s, increasing ineffectiveness of the old Soviet style leadership in Georgia was bankrupting the country and making corruption rife. This was increasingly apparent to international businesses there and a student population that enjoyed (somewhat miraculously) the relatively free press in the form of TV stations critical of the regime and its corruption.
Subsequently, foreign NGO presence helped organise and contribute to the peaceful 2003 Rose Revolution which saw the older soviet influence brushed away in favour of new democratic parties. (Put your favourite conspiracy / neocon / deepstate analysis hat on, a major financier of the NGOs was George Soros)
The new leadership sought to put Georgia on better economic footing and in 2006 together with the EU issued a statement on the 5 year Georgia-European Union Action Plan within the European Neighbourhood Policy which was a major snub to Russia.
Russia’s desire to maintain a foothold within Georgia subsequently provoked the 2008 Russia Georgian War over Georgia’s northern ‘South Ossetia’ region. Not only because Georgia is the gateway to projecting power into the Middle East, but more immediately because in 2006 Georgia opened the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline which cut Iran and Russia out of the picture and connected Azerbaijan oil fields up directly with EU friendly Turkey.
Russia failed to make anyway headway with their support of South Ossetia. Then in 2013, Georgia and the EU took the next step in closer alignment, an Association Agreement. With Russia’s efforts to expand influence into the Caucasus region curtailed and weakening in power to project strength over energy producing regions, Putin saw the need to permanently secure Sevastopol as becoming critical.
The Ukrainian parliament had begun legal alignment with the EU the same year.
Hence in 2014, Russia took Crimea.
(If you look at the map of EU plus Georgia, you can see how close EU alignment could be seen to have ‘provoked’ Russia to act. Though very much only in the sense that they are anti democratic and imperialist)
The EU deal agreed by Yanukovich was sabotaged by US dominated IMF. It is a categorically false narrative that peace in Ukraine requires rejection of EU trade or membership. It is fair to say it is not Russia’s preference that EU expand to CIS/USSR states. Though a clear problem with EU governance is US appointing all of its representatives based on NATOism.
Do you have a link to further reading on how it was sabotaged?
That commenter is a full-on revisionist tankie. Yanukovich was a Russian puppet who sabotaged the EU deals which sparked the Euromaidan protests.
Vlad yearns for the days of the Russian Empire. Apparently he doesn’t know how things ultimately panned out for the tsar.
Sure he does. But like all strongmen, he believes he’ll be the one that ends up different.
2014 is the exact date of US coup and change of Ukrainian alignment.
You mean the civilian revolution of almost 1M citizens that restored their constitution and took power away from Putin’s sockpuppet, who then tried to claw back Crimea in retaliation? It wasn’t neutral before 2014, and Russia won’t allow it.
Nah, obviously the US, which has shown by electing Trump twice that it has its shit together, concocted the devious plot and paid off everyone involved just to attack Putin, the benevolent ruler of Russia.
None of the CIA/NGO Maidan movement recruits got anywhere close to a government job. “Restored constitution”??? They went full on ethnostate apartheid. “Putin sockpuppet” is the one that tried to get an EU trade deal. Scuttled by IMF.
I don’t understand this meme. Ukraine was more or less a neutral state before 2014 and then there was a pro-Western coup that removed the democratically elected gov and set off the violence that is still going on. That’s what drew Russia into the conflict.
Former President Viktor Yanukovych actually denied democracy by choosing not to sign a trade agreement with the EU, which was overwhelmingly approved of in parliament and by the public, in 2013 and he was ousted by Ukrainians. The Russians then became involved by fueling counterprotests and annexing Crimea.
AFAIK there were no US sponsored groups, no boots on the ground, but vaguely some 5Bn USD given to Ukraine for defence between 1991 and 2014.
First there was an EU agreement. But then IMF added conditions to make the agreement impossible. That is what caused it/whole to be rejected. Nazis committing a black flag execution of protesters blaming it on government was the coup that caused Yanukovych to flee. The US installed coup rulers imposing apartheid against Russian speakers, and the Odessa massacre is what caused Crimea to leave, and Donbas to demand autonomy.
Odessa massacre? I’m a pinko sympathizer and try to hear out so called “tankies” because they often have a point. but it is just ahistorical to call it a massacre. There is video footage of the pro maidan protesters bringing construction scaffolding to the building to help people escape.
Lmfao “caused Crimea to leave” bro seriously has no idea frfr
“Euromaidan was a Western coup!” is peak vatnik delusion.
Guess the Nuland-Pyatt call was fake then? US totally wasn’t puppeteering 🤡
lmao
The embarrassment of the Nuland-Pyatt call was that our diplomats were speaking quite undiplomatically about our partners and the then-opposition in Ukraine, not that it implied a coup. Euromaidan happened over a desire to integrate with the EU, while our diplomats said “Fuck the EU” in a private call about the players in the ongoing negotiations, preferring the UN. Unless your argument now is that the US was actually in opposition to Euromaidan and EU membership all along, or that the UN is a CIA plot too?
Keep peddling your “Color Revolutions were a CIA plot!” fantasies though.
Good satire, I almost fell for it. 9/10.
What did I get wrong? What do you disagree with?
The past leader of Ukraine was in Putin’s pocket. Zelensky actually changed this and obviously being annexed kinda makes it hard to be neutral, so I’m not sure where you got that from.
So was Ukraine neutral before 2014 or not? The meme seems to be saying it was neutral and I’m also saying it was more or less neutral.
Are you disagreeing with the meme?
The past leader of Ukraine was in Putin’s pocket. Zelensky actually changed this
Huh, that is interesting. Can you tell us any more about his predecessor?
- Misuse of meme format.
- Ungrammatical while insulting others’ intelligence.
- Additional relevant things happened in Ukraine 2014 than the annexation of Crimea. Do you know what they are?
- There’s nothing wrong with insulting intelligence. As long as you don’t use it as a counter argument, it’s not even an ad hominem.
- Tankies are fucking idiots.
There’s nothing wrong with insulting intelligence.
I was pointing out how it’s funny to make basic grammatical errors while doing so.
Tankies are fucking idiots.
Excellent contribution to the discourse.
Wrong instance
Seems right to me
You’re on world, not ml. People don’t fall for that as easily here.
Fall for what? Correction on a meme and pointing to basic political history in Ukraine?
Ah yes pointing to the completely organic resistance movements that cropped up simultaneously with Russian equipment and Russian soldiers contributing. But of course the US psyop’d 80% of the entire country to be in favor of EU membership. And the strong definitely not russian backed leader said no, I will carry on the true will of the Ukrainian people, which is to be subservient to Russia. And the people unjustly protested and got righteously shot for it. And then the totally not russian tanks rolled in.
Ah yes pointing to the completely organic resistance movements that cropped up simultaneously with Russian equipment and Russian soldiers contributing.
I have no idea how you define “completely organic”, but there were substantial protests in the Donbas and Odessa regions against Euromaidan. Protesters camped out for months and trade unionists organized. At one point, Right Sector locked a bunch of people in a union hall in Odessa and burned them alive. Many people in Donbas were and are pro-Russia, in the sense that there was (and is) a pro-EU vs. pro-Russia rift in th4 country. There was massive violence against and by a large number of organizations that did not all coordinate together in substantial ways. Trade unionists, anarchists, communists, pro-Russia liberals, ethnic Russians fruatrated by Russophobia, people pissed about Euromaidan, people supportive of Euromaidan, far right segments like Right Sector, pro-Kiev nationalist liberals, etc etc.
This was fairly well-reported during and after these events.
But of course the US psyop’d 80% of the entire country to be in favor of EU membership
The US certainly does fund NGOs to push its agenda and amplify domestic voices that it finds favorable. It is a very boring kind of conspiracy fairly openly. This is why the US started crying foul when Georgia wanted to implement a new law that is basically the equivalent of the US requirement that foreign agenta register themselves. It would mean a ton of NGO staff woild need to register. You could call that a psyop if you wanted to I guess, but I would just call it a standard US influence campaign that takes existing organic sentiment and helps it along while positioning favorable candidates for duture office in better stead than their opponents. Something similar has happened recently in Bangladesh, with a conspicuous crop of NGO affiliates heading transitional teams.
Though, of course, what you saw in Euromaidan was not a play by “the rules”, it was a coup and then installation of a pro-EU successor. Nuland is on record talking about who they would be choosing for Ukraine. I thought liberal electoralism was all about the people choosing their candidates through elections, not street fights.
And the strong definitely not russian backed leader said no, I will carry on the true will of the Ukrainian people, which is to be subservient to Russia
This is of course nothing Yanukovych ever said. He certainly responded to Russian pressure and favored economic integration with Russia over thr EU, though, and in typical modern Ukrainian fashion was fairly corrupt. This applies to every Ukrainiam president, though.
And the people unjustly protested and got righteously shot for it.
Euromaidan became a battleground of various opposing forces and was a crucible for far right groups. I recommend reading as many contemporaneous accounts as you can. It was a wild time.
And then the totally not russian tanks rolled in.
? I thought we were talking about Euromaidan and the 2014 coups. Do you mean in Crimea?
We caught one!
?
do you?
Why yes, I do. That’s why I asked in a sassy way.
then please educate the masses.
don’t be afraid to share knowledge. if they’re facts they are indisputable.
yes because youtube is a reputable source.
I’m curious as to what you think a reputable source is. One that agrees with you? I’m sure there are plenty of YouTube videos that do, are they disreputable and untrustworthy, simply because of the platform?
a reputable source is one that provides the source of their information.
youtube content creators get their information from other Youtube content. It’s like a human centipede of misinformation.
in rare occasions youtube can be reputable if it’s content of the event as it happened, like when George Floyd was murdered and body cam footage was leaked online.
however, with better AI that can create archival footage like that, it’s harder to trust just any video.
point is, sources matter when you want to prove your dissertation.
Removed by mod
took you long enough, and it was a shite of misinformation.
how disappointing. expected, but disappointing.
It did not contain any misinformation, just basic facts about what was happening in Ukraine in 2014 - Euromaidan, separatist movements, far right consolidation, etc. Things reported on constantly by mainstream Western press for 8 years. There is at least one overzealous mod that is removing my comments, comments that contain no misinformation, and with no requests for clarification or any actual challenge to what I said.
Feel free to ask me this question on a less censorious instance.
Well he asked you first
No, he asked op.
