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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Asklemmy
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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].