Comment by khzw8yyy
2 years ago
All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working.
Edit: it's amazing just how short-sighted people can be. Look, we still bring up the Nazis as an unassailable argument for how something is bad. And yet the war with Germany ended and they are now a US ally fighting Russia. I'm sure in the midst of WW2 the common folk also believed that there can be no peace with Germany, after all the man on the radio said so.
Besides, during WW2 the situation was the opposite: Russia was an ally. And hey, if you study European history at all you'll note that it's a series of wars with shifting alliances.
So do countries, if we're looking at a long enough time scale. There is no end in sight for the war in Ukraine and when the end comes it's likely to be messy. It might be more of a pause than a true end, and one or both sides will likely be pretty unhappy with the outcome. It could be many years before Russia and the west go back to a comfortable economic relationship.
Well, could go many ways. Depends who is going to "succeed" to Putin (which isn't getting any younger) and especially how.
[flagged]
No comment on your politics but saying "Prove me wrong" is basically just saying "Argue with me".
You can rarely prove a prediction or opinion wrong, especially if they're this vague. Only time can, sometimes.
1 reply →
> Prove me wrong.
Neoconservatives are not, and indeed have not held power in the US for the better part of a decade. Indeed not even back when Russia invaded Crimea if memory serves me correctly.
Of course, there's a decent probability that you've redefined "neoconservative" to mean "people whose politics I don't like" as opposed to any definition that's actually useful for an analysis of foreign policy, and concomitantly that you are so myopically focused on one specific component of foreign policy that you would refuse to admit any evidence that might actually prove you wrong.
1 reply →
Talking to people actually living in the place could give you a clue. Putin is a neocon, sure, but no bureaucrat started this war and Ukraine is very unlikely to just fold and submit if the US stop their support. Liberals have also nothing to do with Russian aggression.
48 replies →
[dead]
Maybe the problem is the shortness of sight rather than the lack of an end?
Rest assured, if the powers that be decide that "Russia is good now" they will convince you of the same within 6 months.
My grandparents carried some anti-German sentiments 70 years after the war ended. Maybe you are able to switch your opinions that quickly, most people can't.
3 replies →
War didn't technically "end" between North and South Korea, North Korea is still a pariah state even if we were to accept the Korean war ended many decades ago.
Relationship between Russia and the west will probably be restored at some point but not without a lot of Russians and to a lesser extent Ukrainian getting killed, their economy and infrastructure gutted.
Well, at the current point of time Russia's economy and infrastructure are mostly intact. I'm not sure why is that for a dramatic change.
If you look at Iran, it also has its infrastructure in quite OK conditions - perhaps in better shape than all of their neighbours, and now that may even include Turkey. Russia is larger and has not self-inflicted being a theocracy.
As for the losses of both sides, I'd suggest leaving that to military experts.
As the war drags on we can expect to see escalation in Ukrainian strikes against Russian infrastructure targets such as refineries. Russia is already short of air defense systems and isn't able to provide much coverage for civilian targets. Whether this works will depend on the level of sustained foreign aid for Ukraine.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/01/25/ukrain...
9 replies →
Ending wars and normalising relations can take a hell of a lot of time, though. Just ask people who lived in the Balkans, central or Eastern Europe, Korea, or in Palestine at some point in the 20th century, to name but a few examples. Or those who lived in a constant background of warfare basically anywhere in the world at any point in time. The pax romana and the stability brought by well-managed empires are remarquable for a reason.
I agree that animosity is deep rooted between neighbors. But I suspect it is less deep between distant countries that have had working relationships in the past.
I think there's deep animosity between Russia and much of the West.
It's very easy for Americans to shrug their shoulders and say "we don't care it's a long way away", regardless of whether or not that would be a historic surrender for the global hegemon, but we Europeans cannot. It's on our doorstep. Russia has not just attacked Ukraine, but all of Europe. There will never be normalised relations with Russia whilst he is in power, just as there never could be normalised relations with Adolf Hitler once he had crossed the Rubicon and started WW2.
35 replies →
> All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working.
I don't think your comment is grounded on reality, and it's ironic how it parrots one of Russia's anti-ukraine propaganda tropes: the collective west should just stop backing Ukraine because the faster they cave in, the faster all relationships normalize.
Even if you believe fairy tales about forgetting Russia's perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation and Russia's "our empire will extend to Lisbon" threats, all you need to do is look at the Soviet Union's rejection of peace and a free world up to it's collapse to understand that any talk of normalization is at best thoroughly unsupported and at worst more Russian propaganda.
> All wars have something in common: they end.
Not really? Many conflicts routinely simmer on for decades, and peace treaties that officially end a war rarely resolve conflicts. Israel is fighting I believe it's 4th war against Hamas this century, for example; its broader conflict against its neighbors has been going on arguably at least a full century. The Balkans are somewhat infamous for the depth of history of its conflicts: the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was chosen to occur on the 500-somethingth anniversary of another conflict, for example.
Germany was utterly defeated, that's why there could be a reconciliation. Neither Russia nor the West will be defeated like that, Russian regime will likely survive. That means a chance of some meaningful reconciliation is slim during next couple of decades.
It's true that all wars end eventually. But this happening seems to me a sign that relations might not normalize quite so easily after. Why else would businesses with operations in both Russia and EU be seeking to split themselves apart neatly in advance of sanctions that would make such operations extremely difficult?
Everything has something in common: it ends. Whether it's Peace, Countries, Humans, Planets or, yes ... Wars. It's just a question of timescale.
> All wars have something in common: they end.
The Korean peninsula would like a word with you.
Hundred Years' War between the Kingdom of England and France.
Putin will need to put a gun to his head in a bunker before anything "normal" happens. Russia is a Third Reich level regime at the moment. Hence 300k killed and wounded causes zero reaction from the Russian public.
The Soviet-Afgan war was ended due to public discontent with 100k killed and wounded
Russian independent media have only confirmed 43k Russian casualties, not 300k. (Yes, Russian independent media exist; they are forced to operate in exile.)
https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/c2xj7yny4zgo
Nice try, but that link says 41,731 deceased in the first paragraph, and 43,014 deceased under the the visualisation with the Soviet stars (bit weird). I admit this is based on a machine translation, but I expect that Google and DeepL can get the meaning of "killed" correct.
You seriously think there are only 43k killed and wounded in total?
No Russian attracting enough attention is outside the reach of the Kremlin anyway, unless you avoid tea and underwear your whole life. So i put only marginally more trust in this report than the official figures of 7000 or whatever it is from Puntin himself.