Yeah, and they’d be a much, much better partner.

Ukraine isn’t in the EU.

It started out as an alliance of western European states, the US and Canada in the aftermath of WWII. At that point, they were pretty sure nothing unexpected was going to happen soon, and I doubt they saw it as anything more than a gentleman’s agreement that could easily be broken off. It’s evolved into the military arm of the collective West slowly and probably mostly recently.

Turkey was added (along with Greece) in the 50’s, probably on the basis of being a weak nation, easily commanded, that they didn’t want to fall to the Soviets. Hungary on the other hand was added after the Cold War, in the period where the West thought that it was the end of history and they didn’t even have to try, everything would magically go great.

Go hit the bottle again. It absolutely is a defensive move. Them and other countries near Russia were happy not being in NATO until Putin started attacking neighbors… He’s made it clear he wants to restore the USSR and its power…

Ukraine’s mistake was not moving faster/sooner to join NATO…

If Russia has legitimate reasons, why are all the reasons they give for their actions always a bunch of lies?

Why did they have to stage false flag terror attacks on their own soil to justify an attack? Why do they have to doctor footage, make up fake citizens, and twist history?

If they have the truth on their side, why not tell the truth?

“every single war it’s faught”

So that would be Afghanistan.

The Balkans were just generally on fire in the 90s and NATO enforced a no fly zone and sent peacekeeper forces after the fact.

There’s a few more peacekeeping missions and no-fly zones (Lybia for example), then some training missions, some humanitarian missions (Pakistan for example), a few air campaigns against non-state entities (“terrorists” but realistically that’s often just a matter of perspective), and a bunch of anti-piracy actions.

So it’s “every single war” with heavy emphasis on single.

I’m assuming that your meaning is that every single offensive campaign NATO has taken part in was one it started without provocation. That’s a very interesting argument, so please provide specific evidence to back the claim you are making that every single NATO offense was an aggressive one. And don’t just give me some form of “do your own research”, you’re making a claim so back it up.

Furthermore, reading between the lines, it seems you may possibly feel that these alleged aggressive moves by NATO justify Russian imperialism, in this specific case the invasion of Ukraine. If that’s the case, do you think Putin’s comments regarding the reestablishment of the Soviet Union have nothing to do with the war?

Strange, and which countries did NATO invade then?

Because the only case NATO was called was after 9/11, but since it was about invading an other country all of it was voluntary. So the majority didn’t even participate.

Oh the Russian speaking population that sprang up in rebellion from nowhere in pretty much a single day with a clear and organised command structure from day one, with matching gear, uniforms and weapons and a bizarrely poor understanding of the local geography despite supposedly being locals. You know they attacked a movie theatre because they thought it was a local government center? Those rebels? The ones the locals didn’t recognise? The ones whose casualty numbers had a weird correlation with Russian servicemen dying from unexplained causes? Those rebels?

Now I normally don’t call ‘Russian bot/troll’ too often but Russian propaganda about this is so poor I have a hard time coming to any other conclusion.

Stop listening to Russian propaganda? By and large it didn’t exist.

While that is unfortunate, it’s still better than the alternative…

The situation for Ukrainians in cities Russia took control over is soo soo much worse than you can imagine. Torture, killing most adult males, horrific abuses - and you say that pushing Russia back and reclaiming cities is the worse choice???

Ukraine will never be a prosperous country again in either of our lifetimes.

and who’s fucking fault is that? you have absolutely no sense of decency.

There has been Russian agents pretending to be locals since then. That doesn’t make it civil war, it makes it an invasion

Remember when Russia was planning false flag attacks on their own territory so they could blame it on Ukraine before invading, but then they got called out and no such attacks happened because Russia knew the world knew and the Russians would know too who did it if Putin had his own population slaughtered again (like he did to first get elected), and then they invaded anyway without literally any justification at all?

Why is it sociopathic to want Ukrainians to be free instead of being tortured and abused daily for the next several decades?

I don’t think you actually believe Ukrainians will be safe if they stop resisting. You should know, because if the majority of Ukrainians actually would prefer Russian rule they’d just stop fighting and no amount of weapons sent to them would keep the war going.

And yet, they chose to resist.

Not really. Being open minded doesn’t mean you give equal credence to nut jobs, conspiracy theorists, racists, etc.

I wouldn’t listen to a Nazis opinions on Jews.

I wouldn’t listen to a zionists opinion on Palestine.

And I don’t listen to a tankies opinion on Ukraine.

Pay walled.

Except if you’d read the article you’d see that’s bullshit and doesn’t support your claim at all.

Quotes from the text: “And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.”

“Still, the claim that the West forced Ukraine to back out of the talks with Russia is baseless.”

And calls it “putin’s manipulative spin”

You original argument wasn’t about what’s good for “Democracy”, it was about what’s good for “Mankind” - they’re quite different things: as I pointed out, Democracy somewhere, even if perfect, isn’t good for people elsewhere (because it doesn’t represent them at all), and that’s without going into the whole point of “Is a Democracy which is deeply subverted (like in the US at the moment) actually a good thing even for the locals?” or maybe “How subverted must a Democracy be before it turns into a bad thing even for locals?”.

I think your NATO point is indirectly largelly about America because most of the military power in NATO is that of the US and if NATO collapsed without an American power collapse (or just America turning isolationist), America would still be a major military power in its own right, and the EU (which does have a mutual defense part in its treaties, but which not really used ATM because NATO exists and works) would be as well (and a NATO collapse would force strengthening EU internal military cooperation, something which people like Macron have already been pushing for) and they would be facing the likes of Russia and China with parity and would likely align as two big blocks when need just like China aligns with Russia because of convenience, not mutual love.

The other alternative NATO collapse scenario, what I call the nasty scenario, would be a total collapse of whatever is left of Democracy in America (in turn leading to a collapse of NATO) or at least extreme isolationism, which would leave EU vs China (+Russia as its poodle) and America in “splenderous” isolationism or worse. However in that scenario my point still stands that for all the unalligned nations in the World it wouldn’t really matter if dominance was of “Democratic” nations or “Authoritarian” ones because neither regime represents foreigners.

I do however agree that the secret for stability for Mankind is a multipolar world, not because one side is “Democratic” but because when there are more than one dominant side, attacks against unalligned little guys by one of the sides tend to pull in support from other sides of the multi-pollar world, making them far more risky than they would be in a World with a single dominant power.