You have a problem with Ukraine choosing its own destiny?
Anyone ? Anyone ? Bueller ?
That's a straw man argument because I never claimed that Ukraine should not choose its own destiny.
It's astoundingly obvious because my argument is against outside influence.
The part you perhaps don't like is that I'm not only against outside Russian influence, I'm also against outside US and EU influence.
In the post:
Ukraine didn’t need any encouragement to go in Europe’s direction and away from Russia, that would be a natural move for any country truly interested in freedom and progress.
given the state of affairs in the early 1990's, that's certainly true at face value. However, the statement carries with it an implication that all initiation of Ukraine's interaction with the West came from within Ukraine, and the West sat idly by, doing absolutely nothing to influence Ukrainian politics prior to Ukraine's self-generated request. And the implication is also that the West confined it's actions to purely what the Ukrainians requested and no more. Given the lack of knowledge of Western business and goverment practices inside Ukraine at the time, the appeal for assistance would of course had to have been almost entirely open-ended.
What has been documented - proudly - by organizations like the
US-Ukraine Business Council and the
US-Ukraine Foundation is that the West essentially schooled many individuals in leadership positions in Ukraine in everything from insurance to agriculture to parliamentary procedure and law, in addition to providing billions of dollars in financing. That is to say, regardless of who technically made the first phone call, the scope and magnitude of Western "assistance" served to develop a whole generation of Western-thinking Ukrainian leadership, as well as the organizations and strategies and techniques to back them up. Given that, one can only surmise that in the 1990's, those (often young) Ukrainians who sought to climb the ladder of success unknowingly opened the door for Western control and loss of national sovereignty.
I don’t get your point.
You’re pissed because people in Ukraine like modern Europe and want to associate with them? You think they’ve been brainwashed, and wouldn’t choose to go that way otherwise?
And don’t pretend Russia didn’t try to influence Ukraine also. The “influence” argument is going nowhere.
There is a lot of manipulation from all sides in Ukraine.
My only primary concern is that we stay the hell out of that mess. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t see any way they survive as an intact single nation. I see the west leaning toward the EU, the east leaning toward Russia, and a handful in the middle leaning toward independence from both.