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‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander
(www.kyivpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Maidan wasn't about NATO. Support for NATO membership of Ukraine only sky-rocketed once Russia invaded (after 2014, that is), and by now is overwhelming.
Maidan was about EU membership. Should the EU also not exist in your mind? And yes btw the EU is also a defensive alliance (it's a gazillion of things). Russia's invasion wouldn't have happened had Ukraine been a member. Hence why Russia's stooge Yanukovich was ordered to stop EU accession: Because then Russia wouldn't be able to invade, any more. Ukraine would be as safe as the Baltics and Finland have been all this time.
Oh and btw after the 2004 NATO enlargement (including the Baltics) Putin said that he saw no threat to Russia from that, and also that every country was free to choose their alliance.
Lmao
Ah fuck can't find the right snippet right now (it was a press conference with Schroeder) but have Putin saying the exact same thing about Ukraine, not the Baltics.
And the Duma says a lot of things, but it certainly doesn't dumat', not in this Russia.
I don't put a lot of stock in some YouTuber I've never heard of stiching together snippets of a lengthy diplomatic remark. That's a surefire way to lose context in an environment where there is tons of hedging and caveats as a matter of course.
But taking it at face value for the sake of argument: he said Russia's stance on NATO expansion hasn't changed.
Putin is saying in the snipped exactly what the subtitles say. My Russian is rusty and never was particularly good but it's still good enough to tell.
Also he's not any random youtuber. NFKRZ is Russian, and currently in Georgian exile (the other option would've been to get forced to fight in Ukraine). Probably the best (not excessively analytical like Vlad Vexler) source on Russia you can get in the west if you don't speak Russian.
I trust the translation, I don't trust that there is no important context lost (again, diplomatic speak is filled with hedging and caveats).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=m7MZs-QdrFI&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I've come to realize I gotta preface a lot of what I say on other instances like this: Russia is an imperialist country and I'd laugh if Putin got forcibly removed from power. I'm a communist.
No, the EU should not exist either. No neoliberal institution should exist, including things like the IMF, World Bank, USMCA, NATO, the EU. Should all become memories. Yeah except that's not the world we've got quite yet.
I can't really talk much about what should happen. Money, bosses, landlords, and banks shouldn't exist either, but too bad, right? And yeah we can say all day what would have happened had Ukraine become an EU member nearly a decade ago, but it didn't happen and now we're stuck in this situation. It's all alternate history now. Best case scenario I see right at this moment is a ceasefire even if that means Ukraine loses territory.
The EU isn't any more neolib than its member states, in fact, often much less so. It raised worker's rights and living standards pretty much everywhere, it's actually doing shit against anticompetitive behaviour because Berlaymont isn't nearly as caught up in national industry entanglements as, well, the national governments.
Is it without fail? No, no government is. But it's kinda telling that the forces behind Brexit wanted the UK out so that they could continue to park their assets in tax havens, regress on worker's rights, well, things nobs do.
All in all what you're seeing from the EU, overall, is European SocDem pan-continental compromise stuff. I can definitely fucking imagine worse, especially considering our history of being at each other's throat all the time.