HN user
"Invaded" implies a hostile, or at least forceful takeover.
That's not what happened. In fact its local government reached out to the US and agreed to come under its wing as a de-facto protectorate, which it saw as a preferable alternative to Canadanian/British (and in any case German) intervention.
Khrushchev in particular had a strong southern accent.
You can take the matter up with his granddaughter if you like:
I remember my grandmother saying that Khrushchev spoke Ukrainian all the time and that it was so embarrassing because it wasn’t the real thing! That said, Khrushchev was a Russian. It’s erroneous to say that he was Ukrainian—as Henry Kissinger just did, in a recent article. He did not transfer Crimea to Ukraine because he was Ukrainian. He was a Russian.
You can even go back to the 90s and promises that NATO made that it would not expand to eastern Europe
And I encourage you to do so, because if you look at the actual event protocol it simply doesn't support what you're saying.
The bottom line is that whatever was said verbally at the time was understood by all participants to be part of the brainstorming process in the course of negotiations of what would eventually become the 2+4 Agreement. And simply put, this particular proposal did not make it into the agreement. As one notable observer put it: "It was tough, everyone knew that only what is written in black and white in the contract counts."
That's why Gorbachev insists (in an interview you can easily find) that even though he felt that NATO expansion was against the "spirit" of the negotiations, there were no statements about NATO expansion that rose to the level of a "promise". We also have Shevardnadze's equally stringent denial (per the sibling commenter), and strong counterweighing factors, such as Russia's greenlighting of the first round of ascensions (PL, CZ, HU) in the 1997 CFE Treaty, which by itself renders the "broken promise" theory unequivocally moot. And some notable language in the NATO-Russia Founding Act signed in the same year as well.
The war was at least partly instigated by our refusal to promise to keep Ukraine neutral and out of NATO.
That's a severe misreading of the article you cite in association with this statement. Simply put, that's not the language of the article, and that's not an implication it makes.
How would you feel about Russia making trade deals with Mexico, sponsoring pro-Russia politicians,
So far so good. Whatever one may feel about Mexico taking that direction -- it is after all a sovereign state. And while such circumstances would certainly be a matter of concern to the US, the idea that they amount to something in response to which the US would need to launch a full-scale invasion of Mexico (or that such a move could possibly be beneficial the US in any way) would, of course, be seen as batshit insane.
... and selling advanced military gear to them?, ... How would you feel if Mexico was attacking us with cruise missiles supplied and operated by Russia?
If this happened only after the US launched an invasion of Mexico as plainly stupid and unprovoked as Putin's invasion of Ukraine -- all rational observers would agree that Mexico would of course have a perfect right to defend itself -- indeed, "by any means necessary".
Including the procurement of advanced military gear of virtually any conventional description, from whichever source it could find.
It's a question of balance and proportionality.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect that the status gradient simply shouldn't matter. It's perfectly natural (and useful, healthy) to weigh what people say according to their status, to some degree. It's just human relations, as you say.
Where things become problematic is when their putative status becomes the primary or overriding factor. That is, "X is true (simply) because Y said so" environments. Or "You're just an L{N}, but I'm a L{N+k} so even though I don't actually know what I'm talking about, I don't have to listen to you" environments.
Those are the ones you want to avoid.
Yatsenyuk ... who decided to seek NATO membership
In August 2014, and only after Russia invaded both the Crimea and the Donbas. In fact even after the invasion of just the Crimea (in March) his government was still playing it safe, and renouncing any intent to join NATO (Reuters, March 18):
Ukraine's new pro-Western leadership is not seeking membership of NATO, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said on Tuesday, in comments intended to reassure Russia and Ukraine's large number of Russian-speakers.[0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-nato-idUKB...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas#August_2014_inva...
The Americans knew that NATO expansion into Ukraine could provoke Russian intervention, and they did it anyway.[0]
Except they didn't.
The footnote you cite describes Burns's concern, but not what actually happened: NATO rejected Ukraine's membership appliction in 2008, and Ukraine itself formally disclaimed aspirations of joining NATO in 2010, stating that Ukraine would remain a "European, non-aligned state."
And there the situation sat until 2014, when Russia invaded anyway, making any objections it might have had to Ukraine joining NATO instantly and forever moot.
This idea that the West was aggressively dragging Ukraine into NATO is just a soundbite you heard somewhere, but has no connection to reality.
This was going all fine until we started fucking with that Red Line.
Except that's not what happened.
It's just a soundbite you heard somewhere, but has no basis in reality.
You can follow this thread, if of interest:
I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.
It could, maybe. Provided the people you appoint have some measure of credibility and integrity. Or at least seem to have some kind understanding of the basic mechanics by which governments (even when reduced to a bare minimum) need to operate.
Elon and Vivek plainly do not fit this description, and that should be screamingly obvious by now.
Its greatest leader was Georgian, while three others were Ukrainian.
That's a very odd adjective choice to apply to the Georgian one.
The other 3 are usually cited as Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Chernenko, but the former two were of Russian ancestry.
That leaves us with Stalin and Chernenko in our multicultural icon set. The latter having of course served but a year, mostly as a walking corpse.
Trump won both the electoral and popular votes and won all the swing states.
That's not what "landslide victory" means.
In fact Trump's electoral total was scarcely different from Biden's in 2016, and his popular vote margin was far narrower. Historically speaking, both of these are much closer to dead heats than they are to what are generally considered to be landslide victories (like Clinton's wins in 92-96, and Reagan's in 84-88).
You're only saying it's a "landslide" because Trump keeps saying that in his speeches.
But as usual he's either simply lying, or has no idea what he's talking about.
Israel is a democracy desperately suing for peace with its neighbors, and at no point in history has initiated a war to expand its borders (or for any other purpose).
'56, '67 and '82 were all unambiguously started by Israel.
It is also currently engaged in an effort, which it initiated on December 9th, to expand its illegally annexed territorial holdings in Syria as we speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Israeli_invasion_of_Syria...
And I certainly don't think anything about Israel requires Palestinian statelesness.
But it is the explicit policy of its current government, and the overwhelming (probably safe to say >90 percent) sentiment of Jewish Israeli population, nonetheless.
Indeed, Israel has a sizeable Arab/Palestinian minority (~20%) that have full rights and full voting rights.
Perhaps you'd like to tell us about the JNF, and what happens when non-Jewish citizens attempt to purchase or lease land from it.
After that, you can tell us what happens when a non-Jewish citizen seeks to marry and obtain citizenship and residency rights for their spouse, and how this differs when a Jewish citizen makes the same application.
And after that you can tell us about the 14,000 Palestinians annexed into Israel after the latter's illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, who were then forcibly expelled according to criteria determined by the occupying regime -- despite their having "full rights", in your view.
And then you can tell us about the Nation State Law, and the not-so symbolic language it contains.
The answer to (1) is "None of them". In the most recent cenus before the war, the all identified as solidly (>70 percent) Ukrainian.
(2) Coal + industrialization + peasants seeking a better life.
The question referred to the Crimea, not the Donbas.
If you wish, you can answer the question: "Can you explain the circumstances which caused the Crimea have a majority Russian-identified population?"
I'd be genuinely curious as to your response.
Wars aren't started by referenda, legal or otherwise.
They're started when one side chooses to initiate massive, disproportionate violence against the other.
Israel's founding did not require anyone to become stateless.
Only that they have no meaningful rights of self-determination within the proposed Jewish State.
Leading numerous regions that are heavily ethnic Russian, including Crimea, to declare their independence.
I have three questions for you:
(1) Can you name one of the regions Putin is attempting to annex, aside from Crimea, that was "heavily ethnic Russian?"
(2) Can you explain the circumstances which caused that particular region to have a majority Russian-identified population? (In just a sentence or two, please).
(3) Something else happened in 2014, in between the two events that you claim happened. Why is this missing from your chronology?
You're leaving out the part where the "skilled leader" says "We want X, Y, Z, W, and the kitchen sink. And if you don't give it to us, we're going to blow your pretty little head clean off, motherfucker."
Obviously it was the Bosnian-Serb phase of the conflict, aka "The Bosnian War" I was referring to.
Which is generally considered to have started with the events of April 5th-6th.
If you are ukranian, pray that ...
Telling people what to think, based on where you think they are from.
How delightfully imperial of you.
~23K civilian casualties there after 3 years of war, about half of them attributable to Ukrainian strikes.
What is your basis for this belief?
There's no "why" to what Trump has been saying about Greenland, Panama and Canada. At least not in terms of anything that he seriously believes the US needs to actually do.
It's just another part of his shlock-and-awe campaign, like all these appointments of obviously unqualifed people to important positions. He does stuff like this to get people riled up, and ready to believe he's capable of anything. And always talking about him, non-stop.
So what changed my point of view? Russiagate.
And that's your cardinal error.
To come to an understanding of what's been happening to Ukraine -- you need to focus on Ukraine, and its history, along with the history of the region. Especially in regard to what all of these countries have had to put up with for the past 400 years.
Not the US, and its never-ending internal scandals and naval-gazing shenanigans. The idea that stuff like the Russiagate can begin to matter in comparison to what's actually happening in Ukraine ironically reflects a profound Western-centric bias.
Your secondary error is to adopt as an axiom that "anti-Putin" and "pro-West" are on a common axis, and part of a zero-sum game.
And hence to be anti-Putin is to be "pro-West", and a sucker for its propaganda.
I also found out that it wasn't Russian operatives shooting at the Maidan protestors from the top of a building. It was neo Nazi Ukrainians.
Except you didn't "find this out". Your read it on a blog somewhere, and it never occurred to you to dig behind this assertion and fact-check it.
The West does Propaganda too.
Then just ignore it, and use your brain instead.
It's not that hard, really.
And the main thing they wanted is what they've said all along - Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO or host foreign military bases. Everything else was negotiable - they were even willing to compromise on the exact status of Crimea!
That wasn't what Putin said in his December 2021 ultimatum.
Imagine if China managed to convince Mexico to join a military alliance and then moved to deploy troops, military bases, and likely nuclear weapons right on the border.
You can imagine all you want, but that's not what happened in regard to Ukraine.
What did happen is that Ukraine formally renounced its NATO aspirations in 2010, but Putin invaded anyway in 2014.
Or to to cite a more recent example, like the Russian armed forces mudering thousands of its "own" people in the siege of Mariupol (these being the 80 percent or so of the population who were Russian speaking, across the 5k-20k civilians estimated to have been killed). And damaging or destroying 90 percent of the buildings they used to live and work in.
I dont think Russia was threatened by Ukraine, but NATO and more specifically the US.
How?
What specific steps did the US/NATO take in your view, that were equivalent to "putting your hand in a cage with the rabid dog"?
Or per your other post, tell us, please -- how, exactly, was it "pointing a gun" at Russia?
Also per your other post:
My point is that the current situation was entirely predictable, and in fact, it was widely predicted.
Okay - so who predicted what, and when?
Tell us please where they said: "If the US/NATO does X, there will be war" and then the US/NATO followed that up by doing X.
With careful attention to what X, actually, and in fact, was.
And what actually happened afterwards.
Killing half a million Ukrainians so that a country whose population is a third Russian doesn't vote for the Russian-friendly candidate over some Western-backed candidate who wants to exterminate and expel Russians,
Nowhere near a half a million have been killed.
The country identified as 17 percent Russian in the last census.
No one one from the Ukrainian side was going to, or is ever going to expel or exterminate anyone.
No one from Ukraine I talk to (including people very close to events at the time) gives any credence to the "coup" theory.
You obviously have no understanding of the Language Law, or what it actually does. And anyway it was passed in 2019 and so had nothing to do with events of 2014.
People in the West talk about the Ukraine situation all the time, from every angle, include quite obviously very pro-Russian angles. Not just online, but right there on major channels like Fox and CNN. There are no "allowed" or "disallowed" viewpoints, or any other repercussions or constraints.
Everything you're saying above is sheer lunacy, basically.
They were being surrounded by military bases and missiles placed overtly within ranges that would greatly increase the chances/effect of a preemptive strike.
Can you point to where these "bases" were, and where these missiles were being "overtly placed"?
Of course you can't, because absolutely nothing of the sort was happening. Western nukes haven't budged from their placements in the 1980s. No new bases were being built that affected first-strike capability in any way. The West was never going to attack or blackmail Russia, and not even its own regime believes it was ever going to.
There's simply no truth in the statement you just mindlessly parroted. It's just a soundbite that somebody came up with, to mess with your head.
I'm saying both Ukraine's surrender and the Russian pull-out are equally hard to do from their respective perspectives.
Which is completely ludicrous, of course.
For Ukraine, "surrender" means accepting permanent occupation and subjugation.
For Russia, it means they get egg on their face, basically. It will just go back to its corner and sulk for a while. Definitely very doable, as it's something they've done many times in the past.
There's simply no comparison.
And there's no symmetry at all between the two sides in this conflict.
Your handle says it all.
From the limited information given, it certainly sounds like they're circling the wagons, and are already in the process of managing you out. Or are hoping that you'll get the hint, and will spare them the trouble.
Or perhaps not. It's hard to tell without more specifics (such as the content of the greasy jokes), and more background context. Which you can't reveal here, for obvious reasons.
So the best thing you can do for yourself is grab a friend (who knows you well enough to catch and criticise you when you're doing something wrong), and ask them to do you a favor, which is to go out for a bit of food and/or drink, and listen to you go over the play-by-play of the various unpleasantness you've experienced, and as much of the background context as you can.
Tell them you appreciate their judgement and you'd really like to know if it was something you did which triggered these reactions, or if it's all from them, or both. In the "Am I the asshole?"† sense.
Even if you what you may have said/done to trigger their reactions may seem fairly trifling, and even if their reactions were ultimately unfair, it would still benefit you to know what the basic chain of causality was.
Also: most likely your performance isn't quite "fine". Or it may seem objectively fine, but still, your manner or dealings with these people may be slightly off somehow. This is something you can ask your manager about directly (in person if at all possible), without revealing your broader concerns. They may well give you vague/wishy-washy answer, but at least that will tell you something.
What do from there? That I wouldn't know. But at the very least, you can benefit from the reflections and feedback you get from what a (reasonably) close friend might tell you.
And then from there -- listen to your gut. In general, in this life, when we get to the point of asking ourselves "Should I stay or should I go?" then that basically means it's probably time to go. It's just a question of timing, and making sure finances are in order (which in the current job market basically means having another job lined up already).
One last thing: Don't worry about the camera toggling, and what it supposedly means. It's really easy to misconstrue this stuff, and it may have been entirely random. Either way, it should carry much less weight than the overtly negative verbal stuff you've been hearing. That kind of stuff is definitely worth running by a friend, if you are fortunately to have one available near where you live.
Best of luck. It's a supremely shitty industry in many ways, and it's just what these people do.