(February 16, 2023 at 4:57 am)pocaracas Wrote: Do the Ukrainians want to be ruled by a Russian puppet government? I'd say that the 2014 revolution and subsequent elections suggest otherwise.
This seems like a good question to me. The answer depends in part on whom we define as "the Ukrainians."
The Ukrainians in the eastern part of the country, especially in the regions that were added to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922, think of themselves as Russian. They speak Russian, they prefer a pro-Russian government, if not exactly a "puppet" one.
Note that of the many people who have fled Ukraine in the past year, over 2 million have gone to Russia.
Zelensky won a landslide election by promising to make peace with Russia. That's what people there want. When the US kicked the pro-Russian government out and replaced it with a pro-US one, this was not done with the approval of the people. After that, constant shelling of the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine began.
Quote:At the heart of the matter, I think, we have who is responsible for this conflict.
Since the Russians are the ones who placed troops in another country, we say they are responsible.
The Russians claim that they were forced to do this by "The West", by NATO expansion, and so the US becomes responsible... and thus we have these two not-really-compatible points of view and the war continues until the smaller child gives up.
Assigning responsibility sort of depends on the point in time at which you start measuring. The US considers acts of war to include things other than military invasion. Intentionally destroying another country's economy, for example, is an act of war according to the Pentagon. How about removing elected officials and replacing them with hand-picked substitutes favorable to a foreign power?
Certainly bombing the Nordstream pipelines is an act of war.
There is no question that the US has taken actions in Ukraine that were intended to threaten and weaken Russia. Scholars of the region have been saying for 30 years that NATO in Ukraine would be an existential threat to Russia. Obama, for example, wisely said that getting Ukraine into NATO was not sufficiently in America's interests, considering the predictable result.
You're correct that there's a great deal of childish thinking. We're hearing a lot of "He started it because he hit me back."
Anyone who wants more tanks, more weapons, more fighting, is a childish macho man, and pro-war. Just because we don't like one side or the other, that doesn't make it anti-war to support more war.
