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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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The most prolific invader in the world - NATO - did a coup in Ukraine, tried to bring weapons and personnel to Russia's most important border near Russia's most populated parts, and has been conducting terror attacks against the Russian population.
The rest of the world has every right to defend against NATO, so you either have a good explanation for what else Russia could have done in this regard, or your criticism of Russia is not serious.
The fact that Russia hasn't done anything nearly as bad as things like the invasion of Iraq - let alone the genocide of Palestine - does make Russia better.
You mean when the largest european democratic movement in decades ousted a Russian puppet who refused to pass a bill ratified by the Ukrainian Parliament?
This never happened.
NATO is a defensive alliance. The closest it's ever gotten to starting a war was Afghanistan and not every member participated.
And before you wind up the next "gotcha", there are lots of dog shit imperialist countries in NATO, but we're discussing the organization itself here.
Georgia, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan?
And also this is your moral foundation? It doesn't matter what crimes Russia is committing so long as they never commit more crimes than the US?
Previously:
Right. I agree that NATO tacitly supports US imperialism but you're also conflating the actions of the US with NATO as a whole. Turkey did not invade Afghanistan for example.
Also the idea that NATO caused the Bosnian Genocide is laughable. The bombing is the only reason it stopped. Your argument is literally "those boys, women and children were CIA assets, trust me bro"
But regardless, I think we're not actually engaging correctly with each other's points here. Let's refocus with some simple facts.
Do Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves from Russian imperial aggression?
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/08/04/us-ethnic-cleansing-serbs-croat/
Some interesting stuff here, it'll take me a while to read through it all.
Nothing really seems to support the idea that NATO conducted a genocide though.
Not 'tacitly', and not just the US' imperialism.
You are blatantly trying to absolve the glorified USian provinces of imperialism and colonialism by downplaying their complicity and willingness in subjecting the world to these horrors.
You are, again, trying to downplay the actions of the US' glorified provinces that is the rest of NATO, and distance them from their own actions.
Turkey did invade Afghanistan. And other places, together with the rest of NATO.
Given that you keep being demonstrated to be wrong about everything, you should stop laughing about things that people who are consistently correct tell you.
The most prolific invader in the world that is engaging in at least one obvious and high-profile genocide doing a coup in a country that neighbours another country's most populated areas and then attempting to bring weapons and personnel to the relevant border is, in fact, an act of aggression, and the rest of the world has every right to defend itself against NATO.
As a response to NATO's aggression.
Notably, you are yet to explain what Russia should have done, despite you being prompted to.
Did Germans have a right to defend themselves from the Allies' 'imperial aggression' in 1930-1940s?
Also, going to note that you are completely fine with terror attacks conducted by your empire, including against the Russian population which you deny any right to defend itself against you.
The rest of the world has a right to defend itself against NATO. The population of the most prolific invader in the world that is currently engaging in at least one high-profile genocide is not the priority in this situation (unless, again, you think that the rest of the world should roll over for you).
Let's look at this from another perspective.
Russia has completely failed it's "special military operation" in Ukraine and is bogged down in a war of attrition with a nation that is not in NATO.
NATO countries are supplying a trickle of arms to Ukraine, but without a single NATO boot on the ground, without a single aircraft carrier, Russia has been stopped in its tracks and has failed to complete the majority of it's military objectives, having even lost actual Russian territory to Ukrainian counter offensives.
Clearly Russia would not stand a chance if NATO decided to invade them.
So that begs the question, if you believe NATO wants to invade Russia, and it's clear Russia couldn't stop them, why haven't they?
Right away going to note that you are yet to explain what Russia should have done about NATO's aggression.
Not sure how this would be relevant even if it wasn't fiction.
Again, you should stop making claims without bothering to double-check them. You are woefully underequipped to make assumptions here.
Non-Ukrainian NATO troops have been involved, both in the form of mercenaries and de jure NATO military personnel, with some of the weapons that Ukraine has been using requiring the participation of NATO troops.
Not sure why you think that this is in any way relevant, but Russia has literally been winning more and more ground, with a very recent takeover of estimated more than 100 km^2 within 24 hours.
Your sources are outdated. Kursk has been liberated.
Either way, this shows that Russia's concerns about NATO are not unfounded, so you are now just contradicting your earlier implied claims that Russia should have just ignored NATO's activities.
This is basically an original German nazi talking point about Slavs being subhuman and standing no chance against Germany for some reason.
Either way, you are now claiming that Russia is right to be concerned about NATO's aggression, and that every polity that tries to join NATO should be fought against like the enemies of humanity that they are.
Again, you are quite literally working off of wrong assumptions that nobody who has been following the conflict holds.
There needs to be evidence of NATO aggression against Russia for me to actually try to defend it (which I wouldn't anyway)
So you believe western volunteers are mercenaries?
What would you call Russian prison battalions, kidnapped indian students and north Korean regulars?
Do you know how tiny 100km² is in comparison to the entire of Ukraine?
The reality of the war is a sparsely guarded Frontline across hundred of kms of empty land that frequently changes hands.
Ukraine also still holds land in Kursk according to current osint.
Going to note right away that you are yet to explain what Russia should have done according to you.
Also, going to again note the fact that you are weirdly concerned for the success of a literal nazi government that has banned opposition and does not hold elections (while talking about how democratic the relevant astroturfed movement was) and which wants to plunder the rest of the world together with the rest of NATO, than you are for the right of the rest of the world to defend itself against said plundering. You have even implied that Syria should not have defended itself against you, to boot.
NATO did a coup in Ukraine (not sure how you are going to deny this, as there is already evidence of the US picking and choosing who will get what position in the post-coup government, as well as bragging about spending billions on subjugating Ukraine), then the puppet regime in Ukraine attempted to bring NATO troops and weapons near the border with Russia's most populated areas.
When the most prolific invader in the world does that, that is an obvious act of aggression, especially when they also engage in terror attacks.
There is also the fact that NATO is, as I keep mentioning, the most prolific invader in the world that is engaging in at least one high-profile genocide and must be fought against (unless you also think that Germany and the rest of the Axis should have been allowed to complete the Holocaust and the Lebensraum and to not answer for their other acts of colonialism).
You can call the SS auxiliary troops whatever you want.
Not sure how the former are relevant, not sure why the latter are an issue, considering that they are not mercenaries and that they are/were on the right side of this conflict.
Source your claim about the 'kidnapped Indian students' somehow being involved.
Hahaha.
So, let's get this straight - you think that states engage in warfare until they lose all territory?
This argument is especially silly, considering that Kursk oblast is much smaller than 100 km^2, and is a much, much smaller part of Russia than 100 km^2 area is a part of Ukraine. And yet, you brought up Kursk as some sort of an argument for Russia losing.
Sure, if by 'frequently changes hands' you mean 'Ukraine is losing this territory and fails to retake it'.
5 m^2 of land? Haha.
How long has Putin been in power now?
Going to again note that so long as you do not produce an explanation for what Russia should have done, your claims have no basis.
Considering that you have been unable to do so, we can conclude that you do not have any actual problems with relevant actions taken by Russia.
This is further supported by the fact that you have been caught either lying or being confidently wrong basically every time you tried to assert anything.
For about as long as Merkel was in power in Germany which you are completely fine with.
Going to note that this question isn't relevant here, especially considering that you obviously do not judge Russia by the same standards that you apply to Ukraine and the rest of NATO.
Yes, Russia’s gamble to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table using a minimal amount of troops and minimal force failed, because the US & UK blocked it. So now it’s a slow, grinding war of attrition.
All signs point to Russia winning this war, yet somehow you’re framing it as them losing 🤷 Do you know what their objectives are?
No one in history has succeeded in taking Russia with an invasion force, not even before Russia had nuclear weapons, and now it has more of them than anyone else. Not Napoleon, not Hitler. It’s two-thirds larger than the next-largest country.
The NATO countries have de-industrialized themselves. They’re in no condition to invade Iran right now, never mind Russia. They don’t even have the industrial capacity to properly arm Ukraine. Russia meanwhile hasn’t de-industrialized nearly as much and isn’t running out of materiel.
I believe nothing of the sort. What the US wants is for Russia to be regime changed, Balkanized, and re-neocolonized. And they want it without needing to put any of their own boots on the ground. Ukraine is a pawn on the US’s “grand chessboard.” The US wanted this proxy war. Previously.
Edit to add: Oh, that one was already in my previous comment. Sorry for repeating myself. Here’s a talk by Parenti to summarize.
Tell me you didn’t engage with the material I provided without telling me you didn’t engage with the material I provided. Here’s another: Michael Parenti » To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia
I engaged with it. It's saying the Serbs were responding to a proxy war initiated by the CIA when they were literally just exterminating Bosnians.
You can give me your summary but I'm not reading any more dubious links on the matter, especially when link bashing is being used as a rhetoric device to prevent your argument being challenged.
And again:
Do Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves from Russian imperialism?
I’m “link bashing” because I’ve already covered this territory—with sources/evidence—several times on Lemmy, though not nearly as many times as the Ukraine war.
Okay? No one is saying otherwise.
Again no one is saying otherwise. As for Russian “imperialism,” I already covered it elsewhere in this very post, and dozens of times before.
I'm very confused now. Because it seems like we actually agree with each other then and I'm not sure why we're fighting.
I think NATO sucks, but I also think Russia does. The only thing I care about in this situation is Ukrainian autonomy.
If you believe Ukraine has a right to self defense and self determination then we're in agreement.
Notably, you seem fine with Ukraine invading Iraq and Syria.
Also notably, you do not seem to care about Russia's autonomy, Syria's autonomy, Iraq's autonomy, etc.
Do Iraq, Iran, Russia, Syria (before your invasion), Palestine, Libya (before your invasion), Afghanistan, non-occupied Korea, etc. have a right to self-defense and self-determination?
When do you think Ukraine invaded Iraq? You mean the Soviet union controlled my Moscow?
In the 2000s. The Ukrainian troops were officially congratulated by the US.
Haha.
At least study a little bit about this topic.
You probably also think that the most successful anti-colonial force that massively improved people's lives not only domestically but also abroad by aiding liberation movements (in their fight against you) was somehow bad.
Tankies gonna tank.
Hope you pass the purity test when they come for you.
Going to note that you didn't dispute anything of what I brought up (and you did not even acknowledge the fact that you have been supporting Ukraine invading Iraq), but just decided to make a personal attack against me. This is despite you being shown to not have a good understanding of history and of current events that you speak confidently about.
People who literally support their tanks crushing independence of countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas sure do love to say that to people who oppose colonialism and nazis, as if that is somehow bad. All while not being able to refute any of the 'tankies' claims. The word 'tankie' just means 'a person who is correct'.
Going to briefly elaborate on the USSR, though: off the top of my head, the USSR not only successfully resisted the Lebensraum and put an end to the Holocaust, it also aided the liberation movements in Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, etc., and the USSR improved lives domestically with things like guaranteed housing, guaranteed access to education and elimination of illiteracy, guaranteed access to healthcare, world's first achievements in the sort of women's rights that we take for granted today, 60% increase to life expectancy (relative to the pre-WW1 statistics) in the first 30 years of its existence, elimination of famines that were common in the Russian Empire, and so on.
You don't really have an argument for why the USSR was supposedly bad, and it's time to admit that to yourself.
I think we agree that, in the abstract, Westphalian states have a right to self-defense. That’s been the consensus for almost 300 years, and it’s baked into the UN charter.
But two things can be true at the same time: that the Ukrainian state has a right to self-defense and that the US, NATO, and Ukraine poked the bear for decades to get this reaction. Western promises to Russia were broken and red lines were crossed, over & over for decades, until the inevitable breaking point due to perceived existential threats.
Did the post-coup eastern & southern separatist states not also have a right to self defense against the Ukrainian coup government and the fascist Banderites that Ukraine and the US armed, trained, and supported? Were those separatists wrong to request aid from Russia for almost a decade before the 2022 invasion? Russia was very patient given the circumstances.
Russia does indeed suck, but less so than NATO at the moment. The primary difference is the Global North’s neocolonialism, which is modern-day imperialism.
Previously:
You don't have any problem with Russia removing Ukraine's right to self determination?
Why does Russia's defense rely on the oppression of other states?
At the end of the day, millions of people are dead or injured because of Russian bullets. Do their lives mean so little to you?
Russia didn’t take Ukraine’s right to self-determination because the US already took it. The US isn’t helping Ukrainians any more than it’s helping Palestinians. It’s using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. It. Does. Not. Give. A. Fuck. About. Them.
We haven’t given Ukraine anything: it’s all lend-lease. Whoever survives this war, and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, will be paying the US back for using them as a bait and as proxy warriors against Russia. For the last three years Ukraine has been auctioning off the commons to wealthy Americans & Europeans. They’re privatizing whatever was left that hadn’t already been privatized in the first round of Western neocolonial shock therapy.
If NATO—lead by the US—hadn’t worked for twenty years on backing Russia into a corner, it wouldn’t have felt it needed to. The cold war nuclear balance of power was still working after the USSR collapsed. It was still working under Reagan and G.H.W. Bush. It didn’t start to break down until the neocon agenda took over US foreign policy during the Clinton administration. NATO enlargement started in 1999. NATO should have been disbanded after the cold war ended.
Russia warned the West a thousand times, a thousand different ways between the mid-1990s and 2022. The US didn’t listen because this is the war it wanted.
Think of what the US would do if Russia or China couped Mexico, trained & equipped their regular military units and fascist paramilitary units, and made promises to have Mexico join their “defensive alliance,” which would bring nuclear missiles to the Texas & California borders. We actually have some idea of what from the Cuban missile crisis, which brought us to the brink of Armageddon[^1].
Again, which lives? Did the lives of eastern & southern Ukrainians mean so little to you? Because until I made mention you probably weren’t aware of them or the nine years of fascist terror they endured before Feb. 2022. Do the lives of the men now being shanghaied off the streets and thrown to the meat grinder mean so little to you that you want Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian for the US? Because they’re not fighting for self-determination, they’re fighting for the Ukrainian oligarchs[2] who are compradors to US empire.
Zelensky was a comedian groomed by oligarchs. He played a president on TV and then ran for president on TV. This was planned out in advance. Zelensky has never been in control because he was an actor in way over his head, beholden to US comprador oligarchs, and his life is openly threatened by high-level Banderite fascists should he get out of line. And he’s quite wealthy now, an oligarch in his own right. He’s in no way a “servant of the people;” that’s an act played by an actor.
Your image of Ukraine and Ukrainians is exactly the image the US government and corporate media want you to have. That’s how they manufacture consent. They want you to imagine Ukraine as a happy, scrappy, proud, independent, brave, homogeneous, unified democracy of white Europeans, who were attacked for no reason while peacefully minding their own business. They want you to think that history began 3½ years ago.
[^1]: And it wasn’t the USSR that started the escalation: they were reacting to the nuclear missiles the US had installed in Turkey & Italy[3][4].
EDIT: People should stop claiming that the gang of states that are currently engaging in at least one genocide, keep invading everywhere, doing coups is a 'defensive alliance'.
This is silly.
That's quite a fantasy you have concocted there.
Firstly, just describing any pro-NATO movement, i.e. a movement that supports literal colonialism, as 'democratic' is extremely silly. Especially when such movements are known to be created by NATO and include literal politicians and open nazis. Going to also note that you are fine with the perpetual dictator Zelenskiy.
Secondly, everybody is familiar with things like the leaked correspondence between USian representatives in Ukraine picking who gets to be in what position in the new government weeks before the completion of the coup, as well as them bragging about how much money they spent on subjugating Ukraine.
Thirdly, you can't even name what was supposedly so bad about Yanukovich. It's pretty obvious that his sin - in your eyes - was that he did not sell Ukraine off to NATO.
Oh no. An elected president vetoed a bill that was being protested against by the same people that you love being in power.
Mind sharing why an elected president vetoing a bill justifies NATO completing yet another coup? Sounds like your standards are very much not applied uniformly.
This is, again, silly.
Do you want to tell us that Ukraine was not trying to join NATO in the years 2014-2022, and that no relevant claims were made by NATO?
This is also very very silly.
Nobody can seriously claim that invasions of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine (complete with a very obvious genocide), Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Korea, etc. - all done by NATO - were 'defensive'.
The only 'defensive' thing about NATO is how it protects its members from facing justice for centuries of ongoing colonialism, including for settler-colonial and other genocides.
Between Iraq and Afghanistan, there is not a single de jure member of NATO that did not participate. And those were very obviously wars started by NATO, with NATO invading those countries.
There is also the fact that not every glorified USian province sending troops neither makes those non-NATO actions, nor negates other forms of complicity in the activities.
If every member of this organisation is a 'dog-shit imperialist state' - and they all are, - then we can conclude that there is no defense that can be levied for the organisation itself that is the most prolific invader in the world and that is currently engaging in at least one high-profile genocide.
This is also silly.
Russia did not invade Afghanistan and Syria. Russia literally helped Syria against your invasion forces and DAESH (which has since become yet another de facto part of NATO, if it ever wasn't).
Russia fought against the separatist in Chechnya with NATO's support. The part of the Russian government that supported the separation of Chechnya were shelled with tanks by pro-NATO forces.
Georgia was literally the one that attacked the Ossetian separatists. This is doubly silly, considering that you support Chechen separatists.
Again, the rest of the world has every right to defend itself from NATO. Look at what you did to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Palestine. On what grounds should the rest of the world just roll over for you?