B-1 83 said:
oh no said:
Russia didn't need to be our enemy. Cold War has been over for a while.
re: Ukraine: USA and the west didn't need to keep provoking Russia with nato expansion threats, something they promised they wouldn't do. They didn't need to install an anti-russia government. They didn't need to operate 46 biolabs there. They didn't need to turn it into a money laundering playground for elitists where their sons serve on the boards of Ukrainian companies. They didn't need to make silly comments about "minor incursions". ..but USA did all of that. And then after the incursion, USA sabotaged a multi-billion dollar subsea energy project that was supposed to bring cheaper gas to western Europe as well as sent Boris Johnson to prevent negotiated peace talks that would have ended a senseless war and deaths.
USA shouldn't be totally isolationist, but they need to stop wasting our money all over the world meddling in everyone else's affairs and provoking wars that we then need to fund and shadow run.
I will say that for free. Russia doesn't need to pay me to say that. ...and my grandmother, my Babushka, was born and raised in Kiev.
I wonder if your grandmother would rather live under Russian rule or free Ukrainian rule?
She died in 2007 as an American citizen. She was a tenured university professor, wrote several books, and had exhibits of her subject matter displayed at the Smithsonian in DC. She left Kiev after WWII. Actually, she was rescued by American Red Cross when the Syrets concentration camp near Kiev was liberated. (Nazis put a lot people in camps; not just jews.) The country she grew up in was USSR. Ukraine did not exist as its own independent state until the early 1990s, over 30 years after she left.
She loved and took pride in a lot about her homeland and always wanted to share her culture with her grandkids. She was happy the USSR fell apart, abandoned communism, and adopted a constitution as a federal republic, but considered herself Russian even after Ukraine was formed as its own state. A lot of older Ukrainians don't have a lot of state pride and consider themselves Russian.
She visited relatives in St. Petersburg and Kiev often (as well as other relatives in Bulgaria and Belarus). She considered Kiev and St. Petersburg as cities in the same country even though technically Ukraine was its own new country. My Babushka didn't recognize Ukraine as its own country and spoke often of corruption all over that whole region until she died. I doubt she knew how much worse that corruption would get after she died.
My guess, if we had told her before she died that she had to abandon her homes in Massachusetts and Alaska and move to Kiev, would she rather it be Russian government or Ukrainian government, she'd probably say Russian, but I'm certain she would not want either side killing each other.
I can't defend Putin for invading. It is possible to admonish Putin and still be critical of the US for provoking the "minor incursion" in Feb 2022, intentionally preventing a peace deal in April 2022, only so we can keep sending our money and assets over there to keep operating a shadow war with Russia for what's going to end up being over three years. It was not necessary.
