How many days,weeks, months before a war with Russia happens?

[Anonymous]

We dont really know how Ukes are reacting to the Russian rule.

The Russians aren't ruling Ukraine yet.

[Anonymous]

The second round of talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations on Thursday ended without a ceasefire agreement, but the two sides agreed to set up humanitarian and evacuation corridors, according to a top Ukrainian official.



Ukraine's presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the two sides will together provide humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians, deliver food, and deliver medicine to areas with heavy fighting across the country.



The announcement comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country's military has offered safe corridors to civilians to allow them to leave. During a call with members of his Security Council, Putin alleged without evidence or details that Ukrainian nationalist groups are preventing civilians from leaving areas.



Putin again said the Russian military is fighting "neo-Nazis," while asserting that some Ukrainians were "fooled by nationalist propaganda."



During a news conference on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the prospect of another round of talks between the two sides lacks promise. But he said that the two still need to negotiate because "any words are more important than shots."

[Odinson]

Videos mean nothing. There is no way to know who is who

Any army will shoot the deserters.



You cant leave the country... And then come back after the fighting is done.

[Anonymous]

Videos mean nothing. There is no way to know who is who

Any army will shoot the deserters.



You cant leave the country... And then come back after the fighting is done.

That is the way it should be. Any soldier that deserts while his country is under attack, cannot return when the dust settles without facing serious consequences.

[Gaon]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

[Bricktop]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

How do you justify this war?

[Gaon]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

How do you justify this war?

Justify it implies I wanted it. I did not.

[Bricktop]

I don't understand. You want Russia to win?

[Gaon]

I don't understand. You want Russia to win?

Ukraine will not win. The quicker Russia controls all of the key areas of Ukraine will hasten the departure of Zelensky and the end of fighting which is the best realistic outcome.

[Frood]

I don't understand. You want Russia to win?

I want the cessation of hostilities and the Ukraine to back away from all NATO applications. I also want Zelensky charged and new free elections conducted.

[Anonymous]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

How do you justify this war?

NATO, the Biden administration, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, as well as some GOP and democRAT senators wanted this conflict, but not Ukraine and Russia.

[Anonymous]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

How do you justify this war?

NATO, the Biden administration, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, as well as some GOP and democRAT senators wanted this conflict, but not Ukraine and Russia.

Those evil cocksuckers forced this war. Putin never wanted it.

[Anonymous]

The sooner Russia can get this over with the better off we all will be including Ukrainians and Russians.

How do you justify this war?

NATO, the Biden administration, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, as well as some GOP and democRAT senators wanted this conflict, but not Ukraine and Russia.

Those evil cocksuckers forced this war. Putin never wanted it.

Putin resurrected a stupid dangerous failed policy and the result is war.

[Anonymous]

The Biden administration did everything they could to instigate the invasion of the Ukraine. Russia's demands were reasonable and just.

Thinking through the Ukraine crisis – the causes

"It would be extraordinarily difficult to expand Nato eastward without that action's being viewed by Russia as unfriendly. Even the most modest schemes would bring the alliance to the borders of the old Soviet Union. Some of the more ambitious versions would have the alliance virtually surround the Russian Federation itself." I wrote those words in 1994, in my book Beyond Nato: Staying Out of Europe's Wars, at a time when expansion proposals merely constituted occasional speculation in foreign policy seminars in New York and Washington. I added that expansion "would constitute a needless provocation of Russia".



What was not publicly known at the time was that Bill Clinton's administration had already made the fateful decision the previous year to push for including some former Warsaw Pact countries in Nato. The administration would soon propose inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.



Even that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state, concedes that "[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe's dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated."



Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. "Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same." It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer.



George Kennan, the intellectual father of America's containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate's ratification of Nato's first round of expansion would set in motion. "I think it is the beginning of a new cold war," Kennan stated. "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else."



He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia's empire during the Czarist era. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation.



Moscow's patience with Nato's ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. "Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders," Putin complained. Nato expansion "represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?"



In his memoir, Duty, Robert M Gates, who served as secretary of defense in the administrations of both George W Bush and Barack Obama, stated his belief that "the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George HW] Bush left office in 1993". Among other missteps, "US agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation." In an implicit rebuke to the younger Bush, Gates asserted that "trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into Nato was truly overreaching". That move, he contended, was a case of "recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests".



The following year, the Kremlin demonstrated that its discontent with Nato's continuing incursions into Russia's security zone had moved beyond verbal objections. Moscow exploited a foolish provocation by Georgia's pro‐​western government to launch a military offensive that brought Russian troops to the outskirts of the capital. Thereafter, Russia permanently detached two secessionist‐​minded Georgian regions and put them under effective Russian control.



Western (especially US) leaders continued to blow through red warning light after a red warning light, however. The Obama administration's shockingly arrogant meddling in Ukraine's internal political affairs in 2013 and 2014 to help demonstrators overthrow Ukraine's elected, pro‐​Russia president was the single most brazen provocation, and it caused tensions to spike. Moscow immediately responded by seizing and annexing Crimea, and a new cold war was underway with a vengeance.



Could the Ukraine crisis have been avoided?

Events during the past few months constituted the last chance to avoid a hot war in eastern Europe. Putin demanded that Nato provide guarantees on several security issues. Specifically, the Kremlin wanted binding assurances that the alliance would reduce the scope of its growing military presence in eastern Europe and would never offer membership to Ukraine. He backed up those demands with a massive military buildup on Ukraine's borders.



The Biden administration's response to Russia's quest for meaningful western concessions and security guarantees was tepid and evasive. Putin then clearly decided to escalate matters. Washington's attempt to make Ukraine a Nato political and military pawn (even absent the country's formal membership in the alliance) may end up costing the Ukrainian people dearly.



The Ukraine tragedy

History will show that Washington's treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment's myopia and arrogance.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ia-ukraine">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine

[Odinson]

We are not going to have a big war..



Its just wishful thinking.





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