Geopolitics

Pintu said:
So Putin is the one following the israeli regime example. Now we are in agreement.
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Hardly. If only Israel wasn't surrounded and attacked several times then you might have point.
But they were and you haven't.


 
Fearless said:
Hardly. If only Israel wasn't surrounded and attacked several times then you might have point.
But they were and you haven't.
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We are in 2022 your map is wrong. The Apartheid’s settlements are everywhere.

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And this is starting to get too off topic, even for this topic.
 


The Bulgarian Prime Minister was asked about the possibility of accepting refugees from Ukraine. His reply is telling:
"These are not the refugees we have used to"
"These are people who are Europeans, so we and all other EU countries are ready to welcome them"
"These are intelligent people, educated people...some of them are IT specialists, highly qualified"
"In other words, this is not the refugee wave we have used to, where we do not know what to do, people with obscure past, maybe terrorists"
"These are Europeans who just got their airport bombed, who were shot at, who were hiding in the metro"
"So none of the European countries is afraid from the immigrant wave that is about to come".
 
Giggsyking said:


The Bulgarian Prime Minister was asked about the possibility of accepting refugees from Ukraine. His reply is telling:
"These are not the refugees we have used to"
"These are people who are Europeans, so we and all other EU countries are ready to welcome them"
"These are intelligent people, educated people...some of them are IT specialists, highly qualified"
"In other words, this is not the refugee wave we have used to, where we do not know what to do, people with obscure past, maybe terrorists"
"These are Europeans who just got their airport bombed, who were shot at, who were hiding in the metro"
"So none of the European countries is afraid from the immigrant wave that is about to come".
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It's so depressing seeing stuff said like this by leaders of countries, and them being accepted by the public.

Apparently I'm dumber than a white person just because I'm brown. Feck off man, honestly, and then they'll expect us to have sympathy if something horrible happens to them. A lot of the worlds problems could be solved it we end racial and religious discrimination.

If only war is leaders and politicians killing each other and innocent civilians don't have to be involved.
 
Fearless said:
Says USSR duped apologist.
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Where have I been an apologist for any one?

You're the apologist for a country that kills babies, jails young children and kills innocent people. Same country that has to pay people (like you) to defend it online.
 
hasanejaz88 said:
It's so depressing seeing stuff said like this by leaders of countries, and them being accepted by the public.

Apparently I'm dumber than a white person just because I'm brown. Feck off man, honestly, and then they'll expect us to have sympathy if something horrible happens to them. A lot of the worlds problems could be solved it we end racial and religious discrimination.

If only war is leaders and politicians killing each other and innocent civilians don't have to be involved.
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Of course you are not dumber, however you have to understand their point of view. Ukrainians and Bulgarians have a similar language, they both use cyrillic, both are orthodox. Ukrainians will integrate far far better in Bulgarian society than Syrians. Not to mention that Ukraine is very close to Bulgaria. Another point is that Bulgarian population numbers have been dwindling and this is a chance to improve demographics with immigration. You may not like it, but it's perfectly logical for western countries particularly slavic ones to be more in favour from refugees from Ukraine than Syria or Middle east.

Finally, as you are aware europe has accepted a large number of immigrants from Syria.

Of course, framing it in a way that Ukrainians are smarter or better people is racist and stupid. But even you are probably more likely to help your brother, your cousin, your neighbor than a complete stranger. Are you not? And I'd guess there is more connection in general between different slavic nations than let's say germans and english, or french and italian.
 
PedroMendez said:
I can't access the full text, but I'd be cautious about his arguments considering who the author is.
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Never heard of him, but considering this is like the third “Fukuyama was misunderstood!” piece I’ve read recently, I’m thinking it’s time to actually read the book.
 
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc...been-preventable-n1290831?cid=sm_npd_ms_tw_ma

Russia's Ukraine invasion may have been preventable
The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine's NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake.

The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.

In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as “the steely-eyed strongman” who proved immune to “traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence” and had been “playing Biden all along.” This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia’s horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented.


But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong.

Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia’s willingness to go to war over Ukraine’s NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion.

Recognizing this possibility does not excuse Moscow’s actions, which are heinous. Nor does it mean Russia’s insistence on regional hegemony is fair or ethical. And ultimately, it is no guarantee that Putin would not have invaded anyway. There are other factors — including, but not limited to, Putin's general anger over Kyiv drifting away from Russian influence and domination and his isolation as a decision-maker — that may have been sufficient to drive the invasion.

But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.

Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.
The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

Analysts say it’s widely known that Ukraine had no prospect of entering NATO for many years, possibly decades, because of its need for major democracy and anti-corruption reforms and because NATO has no interest in going to war with Russia over Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has meddled and backed armed conflict for years. But by dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia — without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.

But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.

“It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia,” Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” told me. “But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project.”

The West didn't want to set limits on NATO's enlargement and influence or lose face. So what it did was gamble.

“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”

What's happened has happened, and there’s no going back. But it still matters.

The U.S. must do everything it can do to end this war — which is already brutalizing Ukraine, rattling the global economy, and could quite easily spiral into a nuclear-armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, if things get out of hand — as swiftly as possible, including negotiating on Ukraine's NATO status and possible neutrality with an open mind. And over the longer term, Americans must realize that in an increasingly multipolar world, reckoning with the limits of their power is critical for achieving a more peaceful and just world.



Expanding NATO was always hugely controversial
NATO was originally formed as a military and political alliance between the U.S., Canada and several Western European nations in 1949. It was meant to serve as a collective defense organization to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and its most important provision, Article 5, held that an attack on one member of the alliance was an attack against all of them.

In 1990, the West led the Soviets to believe NATO would not expand further eastward across Europe in exchange for Germany reunification and the agreement that the new Germany would be a NATO member. Most famously, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the NATO alliance would move “not one inch eastward” in exchange for this agreement, but as the late Princeton University scholar Stephen Cohen pointed out in 2018, this pledge was in fact made multiple times by several Western countries.

These assurances were not honored, and NATO has expanded eastward over the years to include many more countries, all the way up to Russia’s borders.

“It is the broken promise to Gorbachev that lingers as America’s original sin,” Cohen said then.

NATO’s expansion was hugely controversial in policy circles in the 1990s. As foreign policy commentator Peter Beinart has noted, around the time the Clinton administration was considering NATO in the '90s to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — a debate that almost caused President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry to resign — many influential voices dissented:

George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”
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The major concern was that expansion would backfire — that it would, as Kennan put it in 1997, “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Indeed, Russia hated it. As Lieven previously told me, for decades the Russian political establishment and commentators have vociferously objected to NATO expansion and “warned that if this went as far as taking in Georgia and Ukraine, then there would be confrontation and strong likelihood of war.”
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Jotun said:
Of course you are not dumber, however you have to understand their point of view. Ukrainians and Bulgarians have a similar language, they both use cyrillic, both are orthodox. Ukrainians will integrate far far better in Bulgarian society than Syrians. Not to mention that Ukraine is very close to Bulgaria. Another point is that Bulgarian population numbers have been dwindling and this is a chance to improve demographics with immigration. You may not like it, but it's perfectly logical for western countries particularly slavic ones to be more in favour from refugees from Ukraine than Syria or Middle east.

Finally, as you are aware europe has accepted a large number of immigrants from Syria.

Of course, framing it in a way that Ukrainians are smarter or better people is racist and stupid. But even you are probably more likely to help your brother, your cousin, your neighbor than a complete stranger. Are you not? And I'd guess there is more connection in general between different slavic nations than let's say germans and english, or french and italian.
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Reread your post and the definition of a refugee before post a post like this. Your post smells bad.
 
If anything what's happening in Ukraine right now has strengthened my long-held conviction that, when push comes to shove, people have way more empathy for other people that look like them -- shock horror, I know, and nigh on impossible to untangle.
 
Kopral Jono said:
If anything what's happening in Ukraine right now has strengthened my long-held conviction that, when push comes to shove, people have way more empathy for other people that look like them -- shock horror, I know, and nigh on impossible to untangle.
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Why the feck is this weird m
narrative being pushed. I have read something along the lines to which it's Kremlin propaganda that is being regurgitated Europe wide to sew division, and I sort of believe it given that 85% of the Russian intelligence budget is spent on propagandising/dividing us. Of course we care more. Tanks are rolling through eastern Europe killing people and this country has a storied history of fighting those people doing the exact same thing.
 
Winrar said:
The sanctions against Russia are understandable, but I worry that they're just gonna become reliant on China and aid it further in becoming a superstate.
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China is already a super state. Their ability to affect global supply chains was proven when US and China had a trade war during the Trump administration.
 
I'm not really convinced people actually care more about Ukranians than Uyghurs or Yemeni. The media and our governments clearly do as they're reporting on it and actually following the will of people to take action but i don't think the average person bears any ill will to the latter and would be completely sympathetic towards them if they were aware of their situation.
 


The penny seems to have dropped for Zelensky. NATO want Ukraine to be a protracted insurgency and cannot/will not intervene directly. He's right to call NATO out but was highly foolish to get himself into the position he did. What he's saying, funnily enough, is also the kind of thing that commentators in the primary thread thought was heretical last week: Ukraine is for America what Afghanistan was in the 80s. That's their role within NATO and now everyone seems to be realizing it (thanks for helping us to cripple Russia, your sacrifice has been appreciated, good luck). Hopefully this means negotiation will begin quicker and a west/east split can take place.

For context: it isn't clear that war could have been avoided and (western) Ukraine will get EU membership, which is not nothing, but surely these goals can be achieved now rather than later and with a ceasefire/end of war?
 
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GazTheLegend said:
Why the feck is this weird m
narrative being pushed. I have read something along the lines to which it's Kremlin propaganda that is being regurgitated Europe wide to sew division, and I sort of believe it given that 85% of the Russian intelligence budget is spent on propagandising/dividing us. Of course we care more. Tanks are rolling through eastern Europe killing people and this country has a storied history of fighting those people doing the exact same thing.
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What a strange post. You write that it's kremlin propaganda in one sentence and then immediately write that of course you care more in the next.
 
caid said:
I'm not really convinced people actually care more about Ukranians than Uyghurs or Yemeni. The media and our governments clearly do as they're reporting on it and actually following the will of people to take action but i don't think the average person bears any ill will to the latter and would be completely sympathetic towards them if they were aware of their situation.
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I don't think they (mostly) actively hate Yemenis. There's just an impression that they're different and look different and think differently and they're in a region that is 'constantly at war' so I won't care as much.

Ukrainians however....I mean, look at this beautiful tik toker spreading news about the war! Look at this cute blonde child who's died? This is Europe, we don't do war in Europe.

Some of the reporting is implicit, some of what people have said has been rather more explicit.
 
caid said:
I'm not really convinced people actually care more about Ukranians than Uyghurs or Yemeni. The media and our governments clearly do as they're reporting on it and actually following the will of people to take action but i don't think the average person bears any ill will to the latter and would be completely sympathetic towards them if they were aware of their situation.
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They dont hate Yemen. But maybe they care more about Ukraine, much more. 8 years war in Yemen, 4 pages in the caf. 8 days war in Ukraine 490 pages in the caf. You dont need to look further.
 
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Giggsyking said:
They dont hate Yemen. But maybe they care more about Ukraine, much more. 8 years war in Yemen, 4 pages in the caf. 8 days war in Ukraine 490 pages in the caf. You dont need to look further.
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Its tempting to make this direct comparison but I'm not sure its an entirely appropriate one in my opinion.

There has also been 8 years of conflict in Eastern Ukraine before this, involving potentially clandestine Russian troops as well but I don't remember there being a particularly long thread about that either.

I don't think its unusual that people on here and in the West in general care more about this conflict than the Ukraine one. Its right on their doorstep and has the potential to pull the continent into a war, including the now non-zero possibility of nukes, where the Saudi/ Yemen war just...has none of those things. I don't even think that's bad. My in-laws care far more about what happens in Middle Eastern countries than they do what happens in East Asia (most of them didn't even know who Kim Jong-Un was or that there's a conflict between 2 Koreas) or South America. I can tell you that precisely zero of the ones living in the Middle East/ North Africa currently have any interest at all in what's happening in Ukraine.

I also understand why the countries locally may be more willing to let in refugees from Ukraine than Syria or Yemen, though I personally and morally wouldn't make that distinction.

I think the thing that bothers me is when people try to pretend that distinction doesn't exist and hasn't been spouted in the media in, at best a distasteful, and at worst, openly bigoted way.
 
africanspur said:
I think the thing that bothers me is when people try to pretend that distinction doesn't exist and hasn't been spouted in the media in, at best a distasteful, and at worst, openly bigoted way.
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You summed up what I want to say.
 
Giggsyking said:
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Pretty clear this is uninformed shit stirring, like so much of the reporting of the migrant crisis.

There are different policies for nationals of different countries. Those with an EU/EEA/CH passport will just be returning “home”. Ukrainians, those citizens of third countries who were resident in Ukraine, and those citizens who were already refugees in Ukraine are being giving residency permits in the EU. Unsurprisingly, other nationals of third countries who just happened to be in Ukraine when the invasion happened will be expected to return home – including British citizens!

If you were granted entry to the EU from Ukraine with incomplete travel documents, you will also have far more restricted access as to where you can travel within the EU.
 
TMDaines said:
Pretty clear this is uninformed shit stirring, like so much of the reporting of the migrant crisis.

There are different policies for nationals of different countries. Those with an EU/EEA/CH passport will just be returning “home”. Ukrainians, those citizens of third countries who were resident in Ukraine, and those citizens who were already refugees in Ukraine are being giving residency permits in the EU. Unsurprisingly, other nationals of third countries who just happened to be in Ukraine when the invasion happened will be expected to return home – including British citizens!

If you were granted entry to the EU from Ukraine with incomplete travel documents, you will also have far more restricted access as to where you can travel within the EU.
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The tweet is definitely agenda driven. The proof they uploaded is that one of them called an unknown person (presumably from the police), asking them "so you're confirming to me that the federal police ordered to take PoC/black people out of the trains", to which this unknown person replies: "ordered? It's our duty.." and then they cut the video.

The official statement of the police is that they are checking the paper work of the people who are coming from Poland to send back those, who don't have proof they are actually coming from Ukraine. In a statement from a couple of days ago a spokesperson said the number of people they pulled from the trains are in the triple digits and it's indeed mostly Africans.
 
africanspur said:
What a strange post. You write that it's kremlin propaganda in one sentence and then immediately write that of course you care more in the next.
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We care more but not for the insulting reasons suggested. We care more because it's on the border of Europe - anywhere else seems further away. A fire two streets over is less frightening than fire in the house next door. We care more because of the threat of nuclear war. Current events absolutly have the possible consequence of the extinction of all life on earth. To pretend otherwise is buying in to this Russian narrative that is being pushed by their troll farms. If you don't want to understand that and instead want to paint moral Grey's about the UK or NATO or whoever else, go ahead, but we've got nothing to discuss further.

They want to promote division so we only see Ukrainians as racist animals not worth saving. The irony there would be any such culture is a spillover from Russia itself.
 
GazTheLegend said:
We care more but not for the insulting reasons suggested. We care more because it's on the border of Europe - anywhere else seems further away. A fire two streets over is less frightening than fire in the house next door. We care more because of the threat of nuclear war. Current events absolutly have the possible consequence of the extinction of all life on earth. To pretend otherwise is buying in to this Russian narrative that is being pushed by their troll farms. If you don't want to understand that and instead want to paint moral Grey's about the UK or NATO or whoever else, go ahead, but we've got nothing to discuss further.

They want to promote division so we only see Ukrainians as racist animals not worth saving. The irony there would be any such culture is a spillover from Russia itself.
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Honestly, I'm trying not to react badly but this is such a ridiculous and quite rude post.

Europeans do care more and part of that is indeed that its close by and part of it is because of the threat of Russia's nuclear arsenal too. Part of it is because they're white and blonde and Christian and 'civilised' and people can relate to them more. To deny this outright and call it Russian propaganda is ridiculous.

For you to push that aside, pretend its all Russian propaganda, accuse me of moral gray about the UK or NATO, when I have done no such thing, is ridiculous.

When people are talking about this, they're talking about how other Europeans have responded, not how the Ukrainians have responded.



'These are middle class people'. Are they? Because they're white? But Ukraine's GDP per capita is around the same as the North African nations for instance.
 
GazTheLegend said:
We care more but not for the insulting reasons suggested. We care more because it's on the border of Europe - anywhere else seems further away. A fire two streets over is less frightening than fire in the house next door. We care more because of the threat of nuclear war. Current events absolutly have the possible consequence of the extinction of all life on earth. To pretend otherwise is buying in to this Russian narrative that is being pushed by their troll farms. If you don't want to understand that and instead want to paint moral Grey's about the UK or NATO or whoever else, go ahead, but we've got nothing to discuss further.

They want to promote division so we only see Ukrainians as racist animals not worth saving. The irony there would be any such culture is a spillover from Russia itself.
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These are explanations for why we should selfishly care more about the war itself, because it has a higher chance of impacting us than a war in Yemen does.

It does not explain why we care more about the Ukranian people, or why we're more positive towards Ukranian refugees. Why not let them stay in Ukraine and die? If anything it might be more useful for us, because out of all the people fleeing a portion of them will fight. If we selfishly want Ukraine to win that's good, if a lot more Ukranians die then so be it. Not our problem, just like Yemen isn't.

Yet we obviously do care way more about Ukranians, so something is up. Here in Norway the biggest anti-immigration party wants to accept a lot of Ukranian refugees. Not only that, they want to use the opportunity to stop accepting non-European refugees, to make room for more Ukranians.

During the whole Syria thing there was constant talk about "helping people where they are". How it's the right thing to do, how it's more efficient, etc. I haven't heard that phrase used unironically even once here. Why not? Not all of Ukraine is under direct/imminent threat. We could help them set up giant refugee camps and maybe send some food and blankets, just like a lot of us wanted to handle previous conflicts.
 
africanspur said:
Honestly, I'm trying not to react badly but this is such a ridiculous and quite rude post. .
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You are essentially accusing anyone on redcafe that cares about the plight of the Ukrainian people as being racist. I am sure you can find evidence of some idiots being racist morons anywhere. But it's not helpful to paint the entire Western world that way.
 
GazTheLegend said:
You are essentially accusing anyone on redcafe that cares about the plight of the Ukrainian people as being racist. I am sure you can find evidence of some idiots being racist morons anywhere. But it's not helpful to paint the entire Western world that way.
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That is not even remotely what I am saying, about either redcafe or about the Western world at large.

Have you read my posts on this page?
 
Some of the reporting has been so insensitive, they should have been "cancelled".
Just goes to shows how deeply racism is etched in the Western world. They don't see a problem with calling Middle East uncivilized and being more sympathetic about Ukrainians because they are blonde and have blue eyes.
Tbf we have come far in terms of tackling prejudice and discrimination but I'm not sure if society will ever be able to eliminate this deep rooted sense of feeling more empathy and camaraderie with a person who looks more like you.
 
Shell has defended its decision to purchase Russian crude oil despite the invasion and bombardment of Ukraine.
The oil giant said in a statement that the decision to purchase the fuel at a discounted price was "difficult".
It confirmed that it had bought a cargo of Russian crude oil on Friday but it had "no alternative".
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba hit out at the energy company, asking on Twitter: "Doesn't Russian oil smell Ukrainian blood for you?"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60638255.amp
 
GazTheLegend said:
You are essentially accusing anyone on redcafe that cares about the plight of the Ukrainian people as being racist. I am sure you can find evidence of some idiots being racist morons anywhere. But it's not helpful to paint the entire Western world that way.
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I think you're taking this a bit too personally, he hasn't said that at all.

There's just far too many examples for you to wave it away as idiots being racist morons. Multiple journalists in the media have made explicit reference to skin colour, race, religion, uncivilised countries in the middle east etc. You have multiple examples of politicians of European countries making reference to the fact these refugees aren't Muslim. No one has said it's the entire Western world but it's definitely a bigger part of the Western world than you currently seem to think it is
 
@Mciahel Goodman what do you propose the West to do at this moment? Whatever foreign policy mistakes were done in the past, Russia has now invaded Ukraine. The war is real.

So how to proceed if you could determine Western policy from this moment on?
 
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