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Comment by jacknews

14 days ago

That's beside the point.

It is a very clear escalation in US/European involvement. Ukraine were prohibited from using long-range western weapons to attack targets inside Russia up until now.

I'm not saying if it's right or wrong.

But it's a very clear escalation in western 'participation'. Russia have for a long time been saying that such action would be tantamount to a NATO attack, and so everyone involved surely understands that this is an escalation in the NATO-Russia face-off.

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jacknews

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ceejayoz  14 days ago

> Russia have for a long time been saying that such action would be tantamount to a NATO attack

They say this every time. When Obama sent non-lethal aid, they used the same line.

  • jacknews  14 days ago

    none-the-less, it is a clear escalation ON THE INVOLVEMENT OF EUROPE AND THE US in the war.

    It is not that Ukraine are escalating the war by using long-range missiles. Of course Russia have been using them all along.

    But it is a clear escalation in western 'participation' in the war.

    • soco  14 days ago

      So "finally replying to constant attacks" gets redefined by putin as escalation, no surprise here. Or is there any other argument I'm missing?

      4 replies →

mapt  14 days ago

That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people.

Normally, if we show up at the flagpole at noon to confront each other, and you throw a punch, you have escalated things to a fistfight, and then my return punch is not an escalation. If I pull a knife, I have escalated things to a knife fight. We escalate from fist to knife to gun. Reciprocation - self defense - does not count.

The only way to torture the term into contextual use is to suggest that Russia is not firing rockets at NATO because Ukraine is not NATO, but NATO is firing rockets at Russia because all these missile systems are not Ukrainian, but NATO. This is Putin's framing, and it incorporates the idea that the missile systems are actually being manned but US & EU soldiers.

If you are not adopting that frame, "escalation" only really works if you explicitly define the context as a Great Powers proxy war with a potential nuclear endpoint, where Ukraine is stipulated for the sake of argument to have no agency.

  • honzabe  14 days ago

    > That is a very particular use of the term 'escalation' which is bound to mislead people.

    I am not the OP, but I think your interpretation is not as obvious as you make it to be. This often leads to misunderstandings.

    AFAIK military analysts use the term escalation as a morally neutral term. Escalation is anything that goes up on the 'scala' (= "ladder", the Latin root of the word). In this interpretation, D-Day would be an e_scala_tion (climbing up the ladder) simply because opening a new front means number_of_fronts_today > number_of_fronts_yesterday. In this interpretation, self-defense and escalation are not mutually exclusive.

    Apparently, the term changed meaning. Many people now treat it the way you do (if I understand you correctly) as something associated with aggression. Therefore, they assume that when someone labels something like an escalation, they mean it is an act of aggression, unjustified, something you should not be allowed to do, and not morally neutral.

    I am not saying you are wrong. I am just pointing out that when people talk about escalation, it is worth checking whether they mean the same escalation.

  • sabbaticaldev  14 days ago

    Right. URSS putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was not an escalation then.

    • throwaway2037  14 days ago

      I only learned about this a few years ago. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis (where Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba), the US installed nukes in Italy and Turkey. This made USSR very upset. Plus, the US was heavily meddling in Cuban domestic affairs. The first two paragraphs are very instructive here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

      My point: I think USSR (and Cuba) had a good reason to install those missiles. It wasn't an unprovoked action.

      2 replies →

  • mistercheph  14 days ago

    If a robber is holding an innocent at gunpoint and the innocent pulls out a gun and starts pointing it at the robber, has the situation escalated?

    • ceejayoz  14 days ago

      I mean, maybe. If the robber is using a replica firearm, the innocent may have successfully deescalated the situation.

      The question in this thread is more along the lines of "if the robber shouts 'fighting back is a red line!', should we avoid fighting back?"

      2 replies →

  • jacknews  14 days ago

    Ukraine is very clearly a proxy war between NATO and Russia, merely framed as a plucky country defending it's sovereignty, though it is that too, of course.

    With all the backlash here, I feel like some kind of radical, but here is a BBC article from 2 DAYS AGO that basically says what I'm saying: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2nrlq1840o

    Although they miss out the bit about a media campaign, and so on, of course.

    This is the BBC, pretty much the mouthpiece of the UK government.

    And although they frame recent actions as trying to give Ukraine an advantage in any Trump negotiations with Russia, the truth is that these missiles will probably not advance Ukraine's military position, but will certainly change Europe and America's standing, possibly to the point of derailing any possibility of negotiation.

    • ethbr1  14 days ago

      > though [Ukraine] is [a plucky country defending it's sovereignty] too, of course

      No "too"

      It is only that.

      If Russia retreated behind its internationally recognized borders and returned Crimea today, Ukraine would stop attacking it today.

      That tells you everything you need to know about who the aggressor and escalator is in this conflict.

      Anything else is a Russian talking point in service to their trying to lose fewer troops while invading a neighboring country.

      5 replies →