How is your post in any way relevant to what's in the Reuters article ?
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How is your post in any way relevant to what's in the Reuters article ?
I don't see why this is a horrifyinng move, in the light of nuclear threats on Russian territory, and, as I said
For clarification, I meant the Canadian side of the border.
Who said it was horrifying ? If anything, its highly objectionable since he just stole the land where he is placing hi-tech weapons from a neighboring country, which sort of undercuts all your previous attempts to compare this to the US.
More like the equivalent of the US annexing Ontario and telling Canada to feck off or they would nuke them and then putting surface to air missile systems there.
The only country that has even been hinting at using nuclear weapons in the region is Russia so yeah if the aim is to use Russian S-400 missiles to shoot down Russian ICBM's then it's somewhat understandable.
From a quick wiki, S-400 is primarily an anti-aircraft defence system. i'm no expert at all, but having an air defence on its borders would be helpful to the Russians given how widespread and quick the nuclear options of the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons are.
That's pretty naive even by your usual standards. There is no need for any air defense system on Crimea as there is no threat to the Russians. The only reason to weaponize Crimea is to assuage the jingoism in Putin's paranoid little mind. If the US wanted to destroy Russia, they would simply seek to remove them from SWIFT banking and watch them slowly crumble from within.
Paranoia or not, it's an air defence system, on the new Russian border. The same exists all over NATO countries, and additionally this is planned which looks like it would be a problem for MAD in a Russia-NATO war.
Its not Russian land by any internationally recognized standard infact the only a handful of mostly rogue or third world states recognize Crimea as part of Russia. The rest of the civilized world recognize it as Ukrainian territory that is currently occupied by the Russian military and have repeatedly condemned the annexation it as illegitimate.
But that's not being discussed here, it's about Russia defending their de-facto territory.
I'm sure the US took the UN's objections to Iraq into account when they were planning their bases there.
The annexion of Crimea was obviously illegal and should be condemned but the fact that they're installing air defence systems does hardly justify this new outcry. Why else do people think they annexed the island, for agricultural reasons? It's just drama scaremongering.
S-400 is a long ranged air to surface missile system, it can be used both against airplanes and ballistic missiles.
That's correct - it's not their territory. They are therefore arming up on a piece of land they just stole from another country and that is broadly unrecognized by the international community.
A more appropriate comparison would've been between Crimea and Sudetenland, and more broadly, Putin's mildly fascistic tendencies compared with Hitler in the 30s.
It's an missile system on annexed land that was taken from another country with the threats of nuclear weapons and it's not only the S-400's. As I've posted earlier in this thread Russia have been moving a lot of troops and advanced military hardware to the Ukrainian border in Crimea in the last weeks, including Ballistic missiles, tanks and a lot of other armored vehicles.
My post in this thread was that this was a limited, militarily very understandable move, especially in the context of the encirclement of Russia by unfriendly countries. At that point you seemed to imply I was taking the thread off-topic. I have no interest in getting into a debate on morality, or on Putin, whom I'm not a fan of, but that is apparently on-topic for this thread
(Just like bringing up one candidate's dodginess in the 2016 thread without mentioning a single word about the primaries or Bernie is me being a Berniebot living in the past, but bringing up the other candidate's cuntishness is what the thread needs)
That's correct - it's not their territory. They are therefore arming up on a piece of land they just stole from another country and that is broadly unrecognized by the international community.
A more appropriate comparison would've been between Crimea and Sudetenland, and more broadly, Putin's mildly fascistic tendencies compared with Hitler in the 30s.
I'm just blown away by this type of propaganda and by your irrational hatred of Putin.
There's nothing irrational about disliking Putin. If you find that odd then perhaps its time to reevaluate your own moral compass.
My moral compass is perfectly fine, thanks.
There is a similarly appalling and hysterical anti-Russian propaganda in Germany at the moment and people are getting sick and tired of it. Debating this whole issue, however, has become pointless.
Its particularly pointless if you start by saying there is a hysterical-anti Russian propaganda without addressing why the negative sentiments exist in the first place.
They exist because Russia is the only country in the world not afraid to stand up to the world's biggest bully. So every trick in the book is being used to portray the country and its president as evil and dangerous, including an unheard of even by the Cold War standards anti-Russian propaganda that brainwashes millions and millions of people all across the world.
Of course it's not irrational. It's only logical that you hate Putin because he continually challenges the US dominance in the world affairs and that sets a bad precedent. Americans aren't used to not getting their way and it seriously pisses them off (and you being a flag waving patriot, too).
Putin has become a dictator who uses nationalism, foreign wars, and information propaganda to keep his population in line. It is not surprising that the latest chest pounding about Crimea is in the news now given that Duma elections are set for September 18th and the likes of Ukraine and Syria are great ways to change the subject from rising costs of living inside Russia as a result of an economy that is in the toilet (negative GDP growth yet again). NATO is merely a tool for Putin to create a fake threat to manufacture fear among the Russian population. At the end of the day this is a domestic problem that has everything to do with a corrupt, paranoid dictator attempting to consolidate power inside Russia.
Two good articles that reinforce this:
Putin fires chief of staff, sign of fatigue with old guard
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kremlin-fires-putins-longtime-ally-ivanov-102050885.html
6 reasons why tension is rising in Crimea
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/6-reasons-why-tension-rising-134922985.html
Thank you for posting links from an American website on what's going in the country I live in. Would you like to know what's happening in the States? I can dig up some links from a few Russian bloggers with some great insights, you can use Google Translate.
I thought you might want some objective information from the outside world since most Russian outlets are an echo chamber of pro-Putin propaganda.
Yes, because those western media sources are so objective when it comes to coverage of Russia and Putin, they're not biased at all. Kind of, like you.
Love or hate them, they are light years more objective than your favorite state sponsored Russian media channels that make Foxnews look like the BBC.
And you know so much about Russian media because....you've read all about it in the western media, right?
Probably to push up to Mariupol from Crimea then have their troops in Donbass push down from the other side to surround the area they want as a land bridge to Crimea. Stealing yet more Ukrainian land in the process.
Of course there is an implicit threat to Russia. That's how geopolitics work. This widespread fixation on the person Vladimir Putin as the sole cause of this whole conflict is really no different from the claim that "the West" is to blame for everything bad that happens anywhere.
Btw., that Putin/Hitler-comparison posted above is outright disgraceful. But also kind of funny in its crudeness. I especially like that "Selected person of the year by TIME magazine" part.
Yeah that last bit was pretty funny.
As for Putin, there's a pretty comprehensive case to be made that his corrupt system of governance would be threatened by the spread of Democracy and Democratic institutions by way of a strong EU and NATO, which is why he has created a fake construct suggesting NATO is out to get Russia, which allows him to stoke fear within his population to justify external aggression.
Strongly recommend reading Putin's Kleptocracy (Review here) by Karen Dawisha. It's a pretty comprehensive account starting at Soviet KGB times and leading up to the present on how Putin is basically running a state sponsored organized crime syndicate masquerading as a democratic nation state, where mafia style rules completely undergird the rule of law. The more you delve into this, the more it's clear that this entire mess is to protect the corrupt system of governance inside Russia and that all arguments about NATO are little more than massive straw man designed to obfuscate from the domestic realities of insulating Putin from a revolution from within.
Pretty sure we are talking about a different kind of funny, because I find most of the historical analogies just as funny. As well as depicting lots of things as characteristic for Hitler/Putin politics that are not exactly unknown to Western politics (foreign or internal) as well.
I think the main problem with your argumentation is that it doesn't acknowledge that political and military relations between states have a structural logic that is to an extent independent from the acting states and persons. Instead you seem to try to explain a state's foreign policy mainly from its internal composition. Which leads to the misjudgement that democracies are generally not aggressive in their foreign policy, while more authoritarian states are.
Regarding the current topic: When NATO is constantly working its way along Eastern Europe towards Russia's border since the 1990s, it is not individual paranoia on Putin's side to regard this as a threat (no matter how unpleasant he is as a politician). It lies in the very logic of states as military entities. It's Russia's objective interest to not have a non-allied and formerly hostile army of that magnitude right at their borders. Every step closer on what used to be more or less neutral ground after 1991 is (rightfully) seen as a threat and a provocation, especially the increasing eastward enlargement of NATO (missiles included) and the military campaigns against Russia's ally Serbia during the Yugoslav civil wars.
NATO exploited Russia's weakness after the collapse of the Warsaw pact states and gained strategically important ground. That has objective consequences, democracy or no democracy. So the reemergence of Russia as a more-or-less enemy of NATO was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Generally speaking: There are many structural necessities attached to acting on the political, diplomatic and military world stage that make the acting states much more alike than they like to admit. From the geopolitical point of view, democracy/dictatorship, capitalism/state socialism etc. are largely matters of taste (not entirely irrelevant of course), while the essence of foreign politics - the means by which power and influence is gained and defended - is essentially the same.
So those generic claims of a clear-cut moral superiority are mostly ideology and propaganda, with a few historical exceptions.
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@Raoul actually tends to depend on this line of reasoning when it's America's destructive policies under the microscope - whether it's arm sails to the Saudis, support for various dictatorships, wars in the Middle East, etc. But when it's Russia, that goes out the window and it's all about, as you note, Putin's desperate struggle to retain power and obscure Russia's failing economy (and note - America's enemies' - mostly Russia and Iran these days - economies are always on the verge of collapse).
That's one way of looking at it, which for me is a bit too relativist and doesn't explain causation other than to suggest that all of this is just a "tit-for-tat" geopolitical ping pong game. Another way to look it is as follows: If you are someone with a moral compass who believes that certain rules and norms within Democratic governance represent the foundation of how states should operate domestically and internationally - as in credible, inclusive, and transparent elections, freedom of speech and press, a vibrant and active civil society, human rights, freedom of assembly etc), then you have to concede that organizations like NATO, the EU, and the like, have every right to expand and accept new states who are interested in participating in intergovernmental or supranational governance. This sort of expansion was an organic drift of Democracy and Democratic institutions eastward following the cold war and can't under any credible assessment be perceived as a military threat to Russia.
So why the hostility ? Because Russia's government cannot tolerate the spread of Democracy eastward, especially into former Soviet states, as this would be a clear and present danger to Putin's grip on power, which is based on authoritarianism, control of media, domestic propaganda, military neo-imperialism, revanchism, and the general disregard for the human rights of anyone who questions his regime. Did NATO, the EU, or the US force Putin to behave in such a manner domestically ? Of course they didn't - this is merely an epic strawman ginned up to instill a securitization fear into the Russian public (driven aggressively by domestic propaganda) in order to justify increased nationalism within and militarization abroad.
This has been acted out repeatedly in places like Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and now Syria. In order for anyone to believe that NATO caused this to happen, they would first have to give Russia a moral equivalence that Putin's history of governance has squandered a long time ago.
This is a Tu Quoque Fallacy - an appeal to hypocrisy as a device to obfuscate from the topic at hand. But I do get your point.
I can give the same answer as @Mihajlovic: I do have a moral compass which I'm very assured of. It's only that it is not linked to loyalty to a specific political entity the way yours is to Western democracy (or as I would rather put it: Western democracy's ideological self-description).
The problem with this self-description is that it has to deny that Western societies, like all societies in human history so far, are ultimately based on violence. Externally, in form of militarily backed foreign policy (Clausewitz says hi), as well as internally as a necessary means to preserve its social order.
So this narrative does not blend well with the fact that a pretty significant part of the population of those supposedly non-violent societies is working for agencies comissioned with the use of physical/lethal force (military, police, prison system, private security services etc.). Or the fact that its governments engaged in what you call non-threatening foreign policy have an arsenal of weaponry at their command that can eradicate all life on earth within a few minutes.
And in a way I'm at least partly with you, as I'm aware that I was just talking about the nicer societies in the world, which then again says something about its current general state.
So in a democracy, violence as the foundation of social order is the very big and very pink elephant in the room. And I think your misjudgement concerning the fundamental threat NATO's Eastern Europe policy is posing to Russia is ultimately grounded in this denial.
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To back up my argument and draw the line to the topic of the thread: Here's an open letter to the Clinton administration from 1997, urging them not to invite the first round of Eastern European candidates to join NATO, because of the severe negative impact this expansion would have on relations with Russia. The authors pretty much predicted the development of the 20 years since then within their first three points.
The subscribers are not some peace activists, celebrities and whatnot, but members of the very elite of the US government and military, including several senators, two retired admirals (one having been director of the CIA), two former ambassadors to Moscow, key Cold War strategist Paul Nitze, and former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara (whom I somehow suppose you don't like). The rest of the list is just as impressive, mostly veteran defense experts of all sorts.
http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/nato/postpone062697.html
Have they all grossly misunderstood the nature of NATO politics, despite having spent their professional lives contributing to it - many in key positions - during and after the Cold War?
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So now that the investigation is finished...
"Scenario's"?!!
The Russians won't ever admit it just like they don't admit their civilian bombings in Syria. It's all a part of their "deny, deny, deny, then launch counter accusations" communications strategy.
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They don't even admit Putin's civilian bombings on innocent Russian families in the motherland, staged as a pretext to invading Chechnya.