I easily see this war is wrong, and wars are all usually wrong. After all, I'm antiwar and have been so my whole life. It's fine for the Ukraines to defend themselves, but we should not have become directly involved.
Directly involved? Do you see American boots on the ground, ships in the Black Sea, or planes in the air?
We can't right all wrongs and slay every dragon. We are not Crusaders. If this war expands to more countries and brings us closer to ever more direct confrontation with Russia, then that could be an apocalyptic outcome affecting the whole globe.
That’s exactly the point of the American support for the Ukrainian defense effort. Do you truly believe Putin will stop at Ukraine when he has frozen conflicts and border disputes in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Far East? You can look at history and see that no dictator
just wants union with Austria (or whatever their closest neighbor happens to be)
Now, 200k people lay dead, one million are wounded, and something like 10 million are fleeing in panic, without water, heat or electricity. A nation of 44 million is being systematically leveled to the ground. Much of the world is in energy crisis and dire economic straits due to this war and its sanctions.. Famine is spreading. So we have blood on our hands,
Not really. It wasn’t the US army that invaded Ukraine, it was the…which army? Come on, I know you know this.
bear some responsibility for getting Ukraine into war,
No
bear a lot of responsibility for actively preventing escalation beyond crippling the missiles we give them,
Oh no! We didn’t hold our friend back from punching a deserving aggressor in the nose! How
terrible!
and bear responsibility for reigning in Zelensky before he makes it far worse than he already has.
No.
We have birthed Frankenstein's monster
No
and he has gone rogue, off the playbook, off the reservation of sanity.
I don’t recall seeing speculation about Zelenskyy’s rationality. Putin’s, on the other hand, is questioned all over.
I think he could do a false flag act like bomb London in order to force the hand of the US and NATO.
He could, but I don’t think this is likely. I believe that despite some disagreements on the nature of what kind of foreign aid would best suit Ukraine, he’s smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds, unlike his neighbor to the east and north.
He already attempted to do that in Poland and got his ass royally chewed out by the US press.
Two missile strikes of unknown origin aren’t generally considered worth starting a war over. I’m struggling to recall all the details but I believe that the overall conclusion reached was that despite the missiles being Ukrainian, there likely won’t be too many repercussions for Kyiv because they were being overwhelmed by a swarm of Russian missile and drone strikes, and a few accidents will inevitably happen. To simplify further, that was most directly Russia’s fault.
Like Diem in Vietnam, he is expendable if he continues to screw up.
I’d agree with the principle that wartime leaders should be replaced if they prove themselves incapable, but I don’t think any reasonable observer would conclude that Zelenskyy has done that. As it stands, the ground war has been comparatively low-intensity since the autumn season really got going, but before that the Ukrainians had just taken a sizeable bite out of Russian occupied territory.
I’d draw my line at clear blunders from high command yielding the initiative to the Russians and placing Ukrainian forces on the defensive, but I just don’t see that happening.
Col. Macgregor says Putin loves him and will not assassinate him because he makes so many dumb mistakes.
There is a Wikipedia article titled “Assassination attempts on Volodymyr Zelenskyy”. One source claims that a dozen attempts took place overall, with another source saying that at least three had taken place in the space of one week.
While it is true that the article doesn’t list any since March, there are any number of possible reasons for this. Any further attempts may have simply been kept quiet, Putin may have stopped to avoid retaliation, or perhaps he decided that further attempts ending in failure wouldn’t be a good use of resources he needs elsewhere. Or perhaps other would-be assassins saw how many others had been killed in the attempts and successfully avoided that assignment. The reality could reflect none, any, or all of these scenarios, or perhaps ones that I haven’t thought of.
At the end of the day, I am morally opposed to all wars of choice.
OK, let’s look at the choices here. Ukraine had the choice to fight the invasion or be dominated by an authoritarian-turning-totalitarian pariah state, and possibly be subjected to another Holodomor at some undetermined point in the future. Russia had the choice to invade with the predictable consequence of being effectively ejected from the international community and world economy, or to
not invade at literally no cost. Who is fighting a war of choice?
The choice facing NATO is simple, too: Give the Ukrainians second- and third-tier equipment and allow them to effectively end the Russian aggressive capability now, all while having it cost the alliance mere pennies on the dollar, or fight Russia itself on its own members’ territory in 5, 10, 15 years with Article 5 and the American/British/French nuclear arsenals in play, not to mention the Ukrainian GDP going to Russia’s war effort.
Clearly the best choices to everyone are as follows:
Russia: The best time to end the war was before starting it, by way of withdrawing from the Ukrainian border and continuing on in peace. The next best time is now, by suing for peace and delivering justice to its war criminals (including Putin). Clearly that did not and will not happen, so now the initiative is in the hands of the West.
Ukraine: Fight the invasion and reach out to diplomatic contacts for material assistance. Pursue victory and force the Russians to do what they should have done in February or earlier.
US/NATO: Cripple Russia with sanctions and offload surplus weaponry to Ukraine to avoid a war farther West in Europe. Plug up the fossil fuel hole as best they can and police the energy industry to prevent war profiteering/price gouging. Covertly assist Ukraine in conducting sabotage strikes on strategically valuable targets inside Russia, or allow them to do so independently without making a fuss.
You should be too. They end in tragedy.
I am. The only one conducting a war of choice is Russia. Ukraine is conducting a war of survival, and if they lose we’ll be next.