Russia's War Against Ukraine

[fran]

I've posted it before but the podcast Battleground: Ukraine hosted by Patrick Bishop and Saul David. It takes an in-depth look at the war.

They changed the format to 2 podcasts a week. The Wednesday podcast is an interview and Friday with news and listener questions.

Highly recommended!

[FarAway Sooner]

Thanks for the link, fran!

Jarhead, even if we just spare the people of Ukraine from "cultural cleansing" by the Russian Empire, I'll consider it money well spent.  If it makes you feel any better, we can certainly be even more half-hearted, halting, and stingy with our reconstruction aid than we have been so far with our military aid.

I don't begin to flatter myself with the belief that all the weapons that we are sending to Ukraine are finding their way to the battlefront.  So long as we stop the Russians, and set a precedent whereby the violent annexation of a sovereign country by a regional superpower is still "no longer cool", I'll consider it a victory.

That was a line we ourselves blurred when we went into Iraq based on faulty intelligence, but that is a conversation for another day.  Getting us back to the original topic, here is an interesting article on the challenges that the war has presented for families of mixed Russian/Ukrainian couples.  It certainly reminds one what a tragedy this whole mess has been.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/3/19/how-ukrainian-russian-couples-are-faring-after-a-year-of-war

[Tripoli]

I've posted it before but the podcast Battleground: Ukraine hosted by Patrick Bishop and Saul David. It takes an in-depth look at the war.

They changed the format to 2 podcasts a week. The Wednesday podcast is an interview and Friday with news and listener questions.

Highly recommended!

For those who are interested, this is a good podcast, which covers the war from a variety of Points of View.  Last week had an interesting take on the cyber conflict, which is a not-often-covered aspect of the war.  See here: https://shows.acast.com/battleground/episodes/33-david-alexander-on

[Skoop]

Diversions can help to break the monotony sometimes too.

I think it's realistic to suggest that the Ukrainians are NOT a safe, stable democracy.  Nor would they be if there had not been an invasion of the rest of their country last year.  Assuming they retain their sovereignty after the war with Russia, I think we owe them a lot of help reconstructing. 

But we also need to exercise A LOT of vigilance when we do that.  As we (hopefully) learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy-building is extremely tough, particularly in societies with little history of it.

That said, I think we can agree that Russia needs to be opposed and "rooted against", if not slavishly or in a fanboy fashion.

The dollar amounts for contracts that have already been promised for rebuilding are staggering. Someone will profit, but it is unlikely to be the people of Ukraine. Furthermore, until our own leaders, both civil and military are held accountable for their failures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, no lessons will be learned, no changes will be implemented and the same tragic mistakes will continue to be made.

Fair point, but Ukraine is actually doing what we wanted done in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq......fight like hell.

Sad to hold them accountable for previous failures.  But those lessons could guide us going forward.  In a sense what not to do versus what should be done.

[GDS_Starfury]

The dollar amounts for contracts that have already been promised for rebuilding are staggering. Someone will profit, but it is unlikely to be the people of Ukraine. Furthermore, until our own leaders, both civil and military are held accountable for their failures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, no lessons will be learned, no changes will be implemented and the same tragic mistakes will continue to be made.

it seems that both Germany and Japan ended up rather well after their post war rebuilding and reconstruction.  people and businesses here in the US and overseas also did rather well.  its one of the few upsides of this kind of realpolotik.  I think youre also ignoring the fact that, unlike  Iraq and Afghanistan, the Ukraine actually wants a western style government and society.  that makes things a lot easier. 

[Jarhead0331]

The dollar amounts for contracts that have already been promised for rebuilding are staggering. Someone will profit, but it is unlikely to be the people of Ukraine. Furthermore, until our own leaders, both civil and military are held accountable for their failures in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, no lessons will be learned, no changes will be implemented and the same tragic mistakes will continue to be made.

it seems that both Germany and Japan ended up rather well after their post war rebuilding and reconstruction.  people and businesses here in the US and overseas also did rather well.  its one of the few upsides of this kind of realpolotik.  I think youre also ignoring the fact that, unlike  Iraq and Afghanistan, the Ukraine actually wants a western style government and society.  that makes things a lot easier. 

Yes. All is wonderful and everyone will be happy and nothing else matters but killing Russians and there is no use asking questions or using our brains. Just keep accepting what you're told.

[GDS_Starfury]

ya, and youre going to have to do better then brandt whos in his own class of nut job.

[Jarhead0331]

ya, and youre going to have to do better then brandt whos in his own class of nut job.

Such a convenient way to disregard any opinion that differs from your own intransigent views.

[GDS_Starfury]

    ok Mr Pot.  have you met Mr. Kettle yet.  I am he.

[Sir Slash]

Yeah, they're always Nut Jobs when they're saying things you disagree with but, Prophets when saying things you agree with. Isn't that true for us all? So do the people who think that withholding Civil Rights in time of war is necessary, approve of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII? Because that's precisely why we want avoid those kinds of things isn't it? You know, like men who do things saying it's for the good of whoever or to prevent whatever. Because there's a war on you know and don't bother me with details, just do as I say until I say stop doing it and do something different. Because I say you have to.

Precisely why we have a written set of rules that protect us from men, and women, like that and all their Bogey Men who they would use to take our freedoms from us, nut jobs or not.

[Pete Dero]

https://www.gu.se/en/news/dictatorships-advancing-globally

70 per cent of the world's population now live in dictatorships, according to this year's report on democracy from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg.

"On the same day that we concluded this year's democracy report, President Putin of Russia ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This war is being waged by the same man who, 20 years ago, triggered the third wave of autocratization in the world," says Staffan I. Lindberg, Director of the V-Dem Institute.

[FarAway Sooner]

Shoot, we don't need to look further back than the Red Scare to know that we can get carried away when we face what we think is an existential threat.  One of the hardest things about preserving a democracy is that you have to constantly thread the needle between internal oppression and external threats.

I'm not sure exactly what we're arguing about at this stage--or really, what Jarhead and Starfury are arguing about.  I'm not sure either one seems interested in figuring it out, but I'm also not sure either one cares. 

My sense is that any of us ought to be able to respond to any thread (even this one) with thoughtful, critical questions and articles.  If there's confusion here, I suspect it relates to the "so what?" aspect of different lines of thinking.  Otherwise, it's too easy to infer sinister motives to different lines of questioning. 

[JasonPratt]

Meanwhile, former president Medvedev threatened to zorch the ICC with a hypersonic missile for daring to call for the arrest of Putin on war crimes.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-threatens-to-blow-up-icc-with-hypersonic-missile/ar-AA18QozP?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=f354a6ec53cd487bbdb0824f3b160d3e&ei=39

The corruption in Ukraine is a complicated problem -- including Russia having taken advantage of the corruption to undermine Ukraine, which is at least one corruption Zelensky has definitely been trying to get rid of (for obvious reasons).

The corruption in Russia is a very different kind of complicated problem. On one hand, the world actually does need Russia functioning stably in order for the rest of us to function at the level of modern nations (if only for the sake of Russian palladium for example). On the other hand, this and Ukrainian genocide is their version of functioning stably.

[MengJiao]

Shoot, we don't need to look further back than the Red Scare to know that we can get carried away when we face what we think is an existential threat.  One of the hardest things about preserving a democracy is that you have to constantly thread the needle between internal oppression and external threats.

I'm not sure exactly what we're arguing about at this stage--or really, what Jarhead and Starfury are arguing about.  I'm not sure either one seems interested in figuring it out, but I'm also not sure either one cares. 

My sense is that any of us ought to be able to respond to any thread (even this one) with thoughtful, critical questions and articles.  If there's confusion here, I suspect it relates to the "so what?" aspect of different lines of thinking.  Otherwise, it's too easy to infer sinister motives to different lines of questioning. 

Well, a lot of this stuff is totally classic in every possible way.  Political systems are all about power and that can definitely be a sinister thing even when used with the best of motives.  Power is inherently frightening and that's one of the main ways that power works.  People have seen this for thousands of years ( see for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory)
You could say that somehow the cases we see (and that the framers of the US Constitution were well aware of)
are extreme -- that nukes or cryptocurrency or social media or drones or AI or something has changed the nature of power -- but probably not by all that much.  Or so it seems to me.

[JasonPratt]

Sometimes people use real threats for political power and oppression, the Red Scare being such an example: there really was a real threat, which has become (in the long run) a serious problem for the United States. And people did take advantage of that threat for their own purposes. Hitler and Stalin using each other as an excuse to be supervillainous to their own populations (and to other people nearby they could reach, including Poland) are a classic example.

Speaking of Poland: the Polish ambassador to France says Poland will kick into the war if Putin defeats Ukraine.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/polish-ambassador-to-france-poland-will-be-forced-to-enter-war-if-ukraine-fails-to-defend-itself/ar-AA18Phxv?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=e1cf5530453740dc94d9a7d1f61b4c0d&ei=46

...THEN THE WINGED HUSSARS ARRIVE!