Posted on 10/12/2022 4:15:03 PM PDT by Timber Rattler
The tax payer is not deciding to give a gift, rather the Biden administration is. Also the Biden family has a history of profiting from payoffs for favors in Ukraine which makes the distinction a bit more than a technicality.
Not on condition of control!
Well there is certainly precedence for there being some kind of condition like the one Biden bragged about on tape with a certain Prosecutor fired. Just not any kind of condition that will help regular people in any of the countries involved. The war means pickens for the vultures.
That is a “hypothetically, yes once the pigs fly” statement. You need to read the press conference transcripts and Q&A.
Earlier in the year Zelenskyy challenged NATO to explain when it’d start the actual process of formal application followed by annual plans.
In December he pointed out that for years Ukraine’s assisted NATO and had a partnership with NATO but still had no idea what else NATO expected from him as a precondition for application. NATO explained - removal of its oligarchal influences, deal with the Poroshenko legacy of corruption, stabilise things with Russia, achieve economic stability. They might as well have added “and put the moon on a stick”.
By March Zelenskyy had publicly conceded that the open door was constrained by the reality that nobody wanted Ukraine to walk through it.
By April he AND his negotiators had explicitly told the Russians that they were abandoning NATO membership ambitions. In fact the Ukrainian negotiator said this sore point with Rusdia was “easy” to resolve... Because Ukraine wasn’t going to apply for NATO membership.
Meanwhile, NATO had ruled out even considering an application from Ukraine while “NATO standards” hadn’t been met, but further said that a NATO summit later this year would discuss long term strategy and nothing would happen before that.
On paper Russia got all the assurances it had insisted on...
But Russia had already moved the goalpost. Instead of demanding Ukraine make the concessions, it demanded NATO tear up its open door policy, roll back to 1997 NATO status, kick out a bunch of NATO members, and vow never to expand further.
THOSE are the conditions NATO tells Russia to GTF over.
Russia doesn’t get to dictate NATO expansion policy. Bullshit interpretations of defunct James Baker pledges to the long dead USSR do not bind NATO in the 21st century, certainly not when it is dealing with independent nation states that are also UN members.
We know that Russians brought mobile crematoriums because we saw these in aerial and satellite photos.
I believe the reason they brought these is even more sinister.
Russians planned to defeat Ukraine in 72 hours and then start their “normalization” operation, which involves mass murder and torturing people to death.
I believe they sent these mobile crematoriums so they could hide the bodies.
30 countries with vetoes there. Germans in agreement with France assured Putin that they will veto Ukraine for the next 30 years.
As sad as it is it was clear that Ukraine won’t be allowed to join.
In addition to that - at the time before Russia’s smaller invasion in 2014 Ukrainian public didn’t even want to join. They were naive about Russia and thought Russia would never invade them.
“Russia denies planning any attack but accuses Ukraine and the United States of destabilising behaviour, and has sought security guarantees against NATO’s eastward expansion.”
So it was just Russia that was still talking about Ukraine joining NATO, even though Ukraine had already been rejected in their bid to join NATO years before, and had not reapplied. All the while Russia was lying about the invasion they most definitely were planning.
Seems pretty simple to me.
Because as has been explained repeatedly to Russia, a foundational principle of the NATO alliance is that ANY nation can apply... and if there’s unanimous agreement between the members that it meets NATO standards for membership, its application can be approved.
The reality is, Russia has never applied, wouldn’t attempt to meet the membership criteria even if it did, and Putin bears such ill-will to the freedom of the Warsaw Pact region that its membership would be a farce.
Things could’ve been so different if Russia hadn’t pursued a path of kleptocracy and paranoia after the Cold War, and celebrated freedom instead of resenting its loss of the Soviet empire.
Biden has handled it badly but Trump would’ve likely said the same thing to Putin in December if he’d known what a paper tiger Putin’s Russia is.
Was he tolerant of Kim’s delusions? No. And he told Putin to drop the stupid nuclear threats.
Either you believe Trump had balls and would’ve responded to Putin’s ridiculous blackmail demands with a blunt “pound sand!” or you believe he’d have opted for appeasement...
Which is it?
Appeasement might’ve saved a lot of money and lives in the short term but then Putin would’ve triumphed, taken two Oblasts without firing a shot, punked the USA, sent out the signal to China that blackmail works, and destroyed the founding principle of the United Nations.
So there were no hood options. I don’t think the war could’ve been averted unless Trump had been prepared to add “we’ll bomb you back to the stone age of you put one boot in Ukraine” to “pound sand”.
In effect, he might as well have called Putin’s bluff by giving Zelenskyy wjat he’d asked for in August... A definite yes to formal membership of NATO with Budapest guarantees extended so that not just UK/USA bit all of NATO acted as guarantors.
Not quite as powerful as Article 5 cover, but the next best thing.
(addendum: a definite yes in principle, ie that at some future date subject to Ukraine fornally applying and meeting the standards, and having unanimous consent, NATO WOULD admit Ukraine - and Russian objections would have no influence on that process.)
And the blood-thirsty shall report the dead.
The war would have been over months ago if the US withdrew their support. Thousands of civilians have lost everything, including their lives, because of our “support.” And nobody asked me if I was cool with giving Ukraine over 50 billion dollars in weaponry and military support, especially when we have many Americans who continue to need help from their govt.
nobody asked you...
WTF?
do you not understand how our system works?
Russia’s population was already declining before the war. It was 142 million in 2019 and is projected to be under 130 million by 2050. Men fleeing the country to avoid conscription won’t help. The male life expectancy is 66 (vs. 78 in the US). In Soviet times the rate of women having abortions was very high...I don’t know if that has changed in the past 30 years.
Counterfactual history is at best educated guesses, so we can’t know for sure if Putin would have refrained from an all-out invasion of Ukraine if Trump were still President. Putin expected to defeat Ukraine quickly and either annex it or install a pro-Russian government in Kyiv. If he had done that, he might have decided that NATO was nothing to worry about and invaded the Baltic countries.
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