I don't agree with Russia invading Ukraine. But, if is true that the NATO didn't take Russia seriously until they started mobilizing their army... I think that we have an important issue on global diplomacy.
I'm not sure, but my read on Ukrainian discreteness is that Russia is referring to Kievan Rus as their shared heritage, but that, despite their name, Russia doesn't inherit the culture of all rus-ic peoples, but inherits the particular culture of the principality of Muscovy, which is different from western rus-ics
Great point! The Russia becomes "Russia" in the 18th century by renaming on the will of Emperor. Actually the thin ties from modern Russia to the medieval Kievan Rus' goes to... the northeast province feodal that in 13th century gathered an army to going with war to the southwest (main) part, destroyed the country, destroyed the capital city Kyiv, theft the goods and massacre a lot of population. So the enemy destroying the Kyivan Rus' at first by himself, than fully canceled it as subordinate ally with Tataro-Mongolian khanate, claiming themselves as "proudly origin of Rus'". Don't be misleading : Russia is not the same as Kievan Rus'. They pretending to be look like and you thought that, but in reality they country origins was a threat to the Rus' from the early beginning.
I believe the historical mistake Putin refers to is not the independence of Ukraine gained in 1991. But the “creation of Ukraine by Lenin”. It’s popular narative that neglects the existance of Ukrainians and claims that the language was artificially created. And so was the country that supposedly never existed was created by Lenin.
@@poushie1233so were a Kuban state, a Crimea state, a North Karelia state and many others... It was one of many nonviable statelets created in the chaos of the Russian revolutuon that died as it settled down and went into obscurity.
That's because Ukraine never was a country before and never had a government. That's why truthful Ukrainians who left Ukraine 20 years ago say things to me like.... "back in Ukraine 'everyone' knows they are just Russians!"
Only recently have I discovered your channel. Thank you for your videos. You focus on evaluating sound logical arguments. Your channel is definitely worthwhile subscribing to.
My maternal grandparents were Ukrainians who immigrated to the United States some time prior to World War I. Prior to the War, Ukrainians living in Europe did not have a state of their own; rather, they resided mostly in Austria-Hungary or in Russia. In getting to know my grandparents from early childhood forward, I was acutely aware that they regarded themselves as ethnically Ukrainian, with a distinct language, culture and sense of national "self" that was distinct from, albeit related to, that of Russia. If from the standpoint of childhood ignorance you asked them if they were Russian they would rebuke you, emphasizing that they were Ukrainian. My experience with my grandparents and with the community of Ukrainian immigrants and second- and third-generation Americans of Ukrainian ancestry in my hometown, all sharing that sense of Ukrainian nationhood (not statehood, mind you, but of being a unique nation or people) leads me to reject Putin's first argument.
Could it be that your absence from life of Ukraine as a nation generates compensatory balancing which attempts to strengthen your ties to ti given that US encourages such hereditary consciousness in its citizenry?
To a large degree, Putin is throwing things at the wall to see if anything sticks. It is the third argument, that Russia is threatened, that I agree with, but that I am surprised that Putin made. (I would expect him to perceive that as making him look weak.) All rhetoric aside, the primary purpose of NATO is to eliminate Russia as what is left of the Soviet Union. It is not my place here to say whether that is a good or a bad thing. But it is obvious that survival instinct would dictate that Putin oppose it. And NATO encroaching on Russia's doorstep is the Cuban missile crisis in reverse. I would suggest that most people who say the invasion was unjustified simply believe Russia has no right to exist, but would shy away from saying it so bluntly.
The Ukraine literally means the Borderland. Whose borderland was it? Kiev was the Russian capital and moved to Moscow when the Ottomans threatened invasion. Other slavic and germanic people immigrated later. As Putin said - they are related by history and blood
None who claims eastern Ukraine had a russian identity and wanted to separate, can name a single separatist movement in Donbas before 2014, or give any numbers on the size or popularity of it. Because there was no such movement. Russian speaking ukrainians are russian as much as english speaking Irish people are british.
Absolutely. Ukraine was warned by Russia in 2013 - when they were about to sign a trade deal with the EU - that separatist movements could 'spring up'. Yes, I'm sure these separatist groups just spontaneously appeared and weren't sponsored by Russia. From a 2013 article in The Guardian: « The Kremlin aide added that the political and social cost of EU integration could also be high, and allowed for the possibility of separatist movements springing up in the Russian-speaking east and south of Ukraine. He suggested that if Ukraine signed the agreement, Russia would consider the bilateral treaty that delineates the countries' borders to be void. "We don't want to use any kind of blackmail. This is a question for the Ukrainian people," said Glazyev. "But legally, signing this agreement about association with EU, the Ukrainian government violates the treaty on strategic partnership and friendship with Russia." When this happened, he said, Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if pro-Russian regions of the country appealed directly to Moscow. "Signing this treaty will lead to political and social unrest," said the Kremlin aide. "The living standard will decline dramatically … there will be chaos." » www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/ukraine-european-union-trade-russia
Though they may have been seperatist sentiments, they seem to have been exacerbated and amplified beyond their actual scale by Russia, and prevented from entering into peaceful negotiation by Russia. @@agh0x01
This makes sense. But I don't know if the Russian government oppressed Ukrainian people in the Donbas the sane way as the British government did to the Irish people in the 6 counties.
@fartsfartington9019 Moscow rule over/colonizing of Ukraine before independence 1991 can be compared with British rule over Ireland (including a gen*cide by starvation). Moscow rule after 2014 has turned the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk into a fiefdom of competing warlords, where there is no law except the law of violence, Moscow controls all information, and there are tоrt*re chambers and basements for those who don't comply. Thousands of Ukrainian men in occupied Donbas have been forced into the russian army and k*lled. The (russian) author Sergei Medvedev called the occupation Russias "Jіhаd in Donbas" and compared it to being ruled by ISIS or a South American drug cartel. If you consider that mass graves and tоrt*re chambers have been found wherever Ukraine has liberated occupied territory, imagine what life is like in the still occupied territories. Or what kind of society you have where occupation has gone on for 10 years.
Putin starts by saying Ukraine is really Russia. But, it could be said that Russia is really Ukraine.. if you want to go back far enough. Then he laments Ukraine being armed by other nations. But, Ukraine was already armed until they signed the agreement for their sovereignty which included giving up its arms. By attacking Ukraine, Putin has proved Ukraine needs the protection of NATO.
Fine, let's go far enough and say that Russia is really Ukraine. That's great for Russia, which is really Ukraine, because that would mean that Kyiv is trying to separate from real Ukraine, so Moscow have every right to prevent separatism in its country. Now this conflict seems no more than an internal one, and it's specifically Ukrainian. West interfering with Ukraine internal conflict is violating international law and encroaches on Ukrainian sovereignty. Why did not Putin said that from the start? Seems like a blunder to me
ukraine can protect itself without nato. The talk of joining nato is part of the ptoblem. Ukraine should be neutral like austria after world war 2. Or finland before this current war in ukraine.
Too bad that even with the help of NATO they are still losing and badly, so yeah if Russia produces right now more military equipment than all of NATO combined (according to NYT and other Western sources so not Russian propaganda) then kinetic force will decide who is right
I am a russian speaking ukraining all my life and I didn't feel any oppresion, trevelled around the country (also in ukranian speaking areas) and didn't encounter alienation or watever. And you can occasinally meet some degraded people under some substance in any country. I didn't see any 'torch marches' as in nazi germany in my entire life. Only on russian TV and I belive their frequency and extent was not more than in russia itself. Some minority extremist gatherings did happened in Ukraine but their activity is not more than in any other civilized country. Definitely not the goverment stance. Regarding arson in Odesa the proper investigation and punishment of the guilty never happened and there has never been official findings announced. Some local officials in charge fled to other countries. As I understand the goverment decided to keep silence about the event. That's sad to say the least. At least they could punish for criminal negligence... I do agree with the points stated in the video. Our country has a lot of problems and controversies but they only were used as excuse for casus beli. And lastly you can see very clear picture of their intentions if you watch russian TV. After two years of war they are not shy to state their intentions anymore right on the state TV. You don't need a lot of political background for this. There are a lot videos with english subtitles from russian TV.
There is always justification for anything. If you are stronger, you make the rule. Just ask the US. Borders always move around throughout history. Just ask Israel.
@@ThePereubu1710 If the most powerful and most respected nation does it but not only gets away with it but convinces every other nation on the planet to join I'd say that justifies it.
A small observation regarding the NATO point: Russia has never been invaded since NATO was formed (but, as a side note, has happily invaded other countries). If you look back at the last 220 or so years, the time with NATO is actually the longest time period for Russia without getting invaded. 1812 Napoleon 1853 Turkey in the Crimea 1905 Japan in Manchuria 1914 Germany & Co in WW1 1941 Germany & Co in WW2 Now that's not an argument in and of itself, as there are many other factors than NATO playing I to that, but still important to note. It just makes Putin's whole NATO-is-such-a-threat rhetoric a little less persuasive.
Now let’s take in the fact that nato was created to keep Russia from expanding. We can easily see how much nato has expanded, slowly inching closer to Russia. There were past agreement made for nato to not keep expanding toward Russia borders. No country wants a threat at there border. The Cuban missile crisis didn’t go well. There is a professor on RUclips who talks about the complicated problem but it is worth looking into to have a little background into this conflict.
@@danjacobs6219 you probably mean Dr. Mearsheimer. I've watched his stuff, it's good input. But his approach is very focused on purely strategic thinking and only on the great powers. Here's a few thoughts: NATO expansion: a free and sovereign country joins a coalition based on its own free will. Handshakes and aperitifs follow. Sovjet/Russian expansion: Russia threatens and then invades a nation that mostly doesn't want to join them. War, death, destruction and suppression follow. In Mearsheimer's presentations, those things come across as equal. I beg to differ. Talk to a Polish anti NATO citizen and then talk to a Tchetchen war orphan. See who suffered more under the respective faction's expansion. (the first Russian invasion into Chechnia happened before NATO expansion, by the way) Let's not only think of the two big factions but also of the fate of the people living between them. Again, I'm not endorsing all or even most of NATO's behaviour. They sure have their points to blame. It just seems to me that Russian / Sovjet behaviour is usually 10 times worse. TBC
@@danjacobs6219It is very simple, Finland and Sweden joined NATO as Russia invaded Ukraine. The warsaw pact states and baltic states joined NATO to not be victim of Russian aggression. We see states who protect their interests against an aggressor.
@@TorianTammasRussia did not invade finland during soviet era, and finland stayed neutral. Now that russia is weaker they pose a bigger threat than during cold war. Are you serious? P.S. Saying soviet era may be misunderstanding, lm referring about the cold war, since winter war can be technically said to have happened during soviet era.
Russia now has a much longer border with NATO since Finland joined NATO. Which happened precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine. As Homer Simpson would say... "Doh !"
Yeah, Putin should have stopped advertising NATO if he didn't want it to grow. But instead he is undertaking the biggest ad campaign for NATO in history.
Finland was never a friendly nation to them. Finland was on Nazi side in WW2. There are no family or cultural connections between Russians and Finns. So all in all Finland was treated by Russia as a potential enemy all along.
With their Ukraine invasion, Russia also now has a direct land bridge to crimea and so access to the Black Sea. With their naval base in Syria, that gives them even further influence in the Mediterranean. Their geopolitical aims are levels beyond what you know.
If the people in eastern Ukraine who fled at the beginning of the invasion really wanted to be part of Russia, wouldn't they have ran to Russia instead of heading west?
Also you should consider the fact that non of ex-KGB agent's spoken statements does not reflect his real intentions and underlying reasons. Statement of him is an instrument of achieving his real goals but not a mean of communication.
The days of marching into a country and saying "this land is ours now and if you don't like it we are going to fight for it" are long gone now. Putin is 100% wrong. Just let the Ukrainians live in peace.
Thank you for your overviews, which are always as logical, unbiased and simple as possible. I follow you with interest from Italy. I hope your channel grows, it is a great format!
The analysis is right, the conclusion is a bit off. The fact that Russia had warned the west for years, the west are ignorant to take it seriously. You think a few days before the war could result anything? The west is lead by bunch of weak men. That's the natural result. As they say, strong men creating good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times ...
Outrageous claims of an authoritarian dictator should not be given any merit. The Russians chose violence, so not only is the immediate condemnation appropriate, but also necessary in exterminating authoritarianism from the world.
Let us be clear in regard to the Russian/Ukrainian war: The relationship between Russia and Ukraine became, in the time of the Soviet Union, a marriage of convenience not of love. When the USSR broke up, in a time of weakness the ruling elites of both nations put up with each other. But when Russia became stronger and a divorce became inevitable, Russia did not want to split the house and the kids so now to forcibly settle the issue its way, it terrorizes the wife and her kids and makes their lives unbearable and even desires to kill her and her kids. This is the mindset of the Russian elite and for this reason they are now treating Ukrainians like rats, taking away from them the necessities of life. My strong wish is that the Russian population will not support their elite in these awful crimes and will find the courage to oppose those that have brought so much suffering to the Ukrainian population and to a lesser extent the Russian population as well. Russia could live very well without any of the acquired Ukrainian territories. The greater weapon needed right now is against a prideful and hateful Russian elite and the portion of the population that supports them. This weapon can only come from Russian people of common sense, Russian people of integrity, and Russian people who truly love God who with courage show their opposition to the Russian elite who has misled them. Many of the Russian media members should be ashamed of the statements they have allowed themselves to make and repeat. In their conversations they have put God aside and for this cause they have become foolish.
@@account-369 he spilled same shit westerners say when they try to "buy" you with sweet words. And they play us everytime. That's just who they are. There is a saying, everytime west tries to silence somebody, in most cases, he is doing something right.
You just told a blatantly explicit lie concerning negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, they both had a talk literally days before the invasions. When the president Putin invoked the national security issues regarding NATO's potentially deployed weapons by Russia's borders, Zelenskyy rejected any compromisation or negotiation concerning the topic saying "Ukraine is an independent country and has the right to its choice whether to join NATO or not". Blatant lies do not change truth even if well produced!
Well said, while I like his educational videos, I also listen to his disclaimer at the beginning and read for myself….he clearly presents his bias when saying things like “I am not going to get into that” - why not Ryan? Is it because of the double standards? Willful ignorance only creates a biased perception of reality…😅
@@sirjaymacthegreat You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone. Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit. Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical. Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable. There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor. We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it. There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity. An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive. It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely? We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._ What does all that tell you?
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone. Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit. Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical. Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable. There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor. We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it. There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity. An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive. It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely? We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._ What does all that tell you?
3:42 A more appropriate analogy, in terms of geographical proximity and culture, would be England saying that independent Ireland or Scotland would be a mistake.
It would be an even better analogy to say that US wanted to capture Britain based on the fact that they share common blood and language and used to be in one country
If by Ireland you mean Southern Ireland, it is an independent state. Saying that an independent Scotland would be a mistake is hardly analogous to invading a peaceful country.
@@BuckeyeRutabaga Your analogy stands. Just add language to it. What's spoken in Scotland is a variation of Middle English, much closer to modern English than Ukrainian is to Russian.
Human beings will always have bias. What I love about this man is that he tries his best to overcome his bias and be as objective as he can. Ryan Chapman, keep doing what you're doing, I'm all for it.
The ukraine scenario is closer to ireland than the usa. Also russia published their views on a new pan-european security architecture, they were ignored and the media dismissed russian concerns. In return for withdrawal & dissolution of ussr, certain conditions that were promised by the west were broken. We know this based on declassified files, biographies & transcripts.
The broken promise that is being vaguely referred to were comments made in 1990 by US Secretary of State James Baker. Baker had specifically promised the Soviets that NATO would move “not one inch eastward”. However, this was never codified in any treaty or agreement that came as a result of the talks this statement was included in, and the USSR collapsed shortly after, completely changing the security situation that the talks were about in the first place. As it stands, there is no binding promise/agreement that prevents NATO from allowing countries east of Germany to apply and join. Putin knows this. It’s nothing but rhetoric to gain sympathy for his unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. Don’t fall for it.
Also, the Soviets never agreed to dissolve. The Warsaw pact countries left the pack after the USSR demonstrated it wouldn’t stop them. On the other hand, the republics making up the union took the opportunity of Russian weakness to get themselves out from under the thumb of Moscow, and each declared independence. It turns out authoritarianism isn’t popular with the people that are suppressed by it.
@@bkc7890 Thanks for sharing that info but what about Russia's security irrespective of whether that promise was never officially ratified. Doesn't Russia have a legitimate case to be made regarding Ukraine being allied with the West and showing no commitment to not ease up its attacks on the separatists? How could this not be a serious concern that Russia is being forced to confront?
@@LouisGedo The separatists are propped up by Russia and don’t have nearly enough local support to survive on their own. They would have been crushed in 2014, when the Ukrainian military was practically nothing, without Russian intervention. As for promises made, the administration who made that uncodified promise is no longer in power, meaning the promise doesn’t exist between the US and Russia. Also, it was the Soviets that the promise was made to technically, not the Russian federation, so another degree of separation. An actual treaty with that promise in it would have made it a justifiable argument, but since it was not a formal agreement, there is no responsibility to hold it up. As for actual broken promises and formal agreements, the Russian Federation signed the Budapest memorandum in which they agreed, in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear arms, that they would guarantee Ukrainian sovereign territory as it was. Fast forward to 2014, they’re annexing crimea and propping up separatists because they disagree with the direction Ukraine wants to go. Fast forward to 2022, they are invading the rest of Ukraine.
re: 10:45 , Ryan what leaders begged Putin to negotiate? There were only two that mattered: Presidents Zelensky and Biden Please!! refer me to where either of them offered to institute the Minsk agreement as an alternative to war. or did Biden urge a backing off of Zelensky's Munich intimation that he needs nuclear weapons. I do remember Blinken referring to Russian proposals as " non-starters"
He's biased. He didn't even talk about the coup lead by the US, the non respect of the NATO extension and the minks agreement. Also the attacks on donesk are well documented but he didn't even take a glance at it. It's not the only video where he is showing history on one side. It's the same for his video on China & Taïwan and even on the 2nd world war. This is a representation of our western media nowadays. They are ready to rewrite history to follow their narratives.
I don't think it was a valid reason to invade Ukraine. He kept saying he was responding to NATO expansion. - NATO wasn't really expanding, nations wanted to join because they felt weak to a foreign attack. He then said that there were NAZI & Neo-NAZIs still running around in Ukraine, initiating a special force and start a war. He then said that Ukraine Govt was a rebel regime. Logic says Russia doesn't have a good reason why it invaded Ukraine. Narcissist nations will take anything as an offense if it thinks somebody will invade it for no reason. Its ok to have your own identity, it is not ok to change others identity to match yours. So no, it is not justified. Don't let that big head of yours hit the door frame when you walk out on your last day in office.
I dont support any agression at all but I tend to believe its a bit more complexe than that. We have to keep in mind that NATO was initially created to counter the soviet threat(aka russia). So therefore its fair to say putin is paranoid of an attack from the west and acted desperatly to counter their influence. Also, my next point isnt backup from a source but simply from a historical point. Ukrain is one of the few country that didnt get a proper de-nazifaction. During ww2 when the german invaded the soviet, the ukrainian that saw the german coming praised and cheered for them calling them their savior from the soviet monster. Unfortunately, they didnt knew back then how terrible the nazi were so most of them saw them as liberator/hero. After the war, ukraine fell back in soviet hand and experienced many future atrocity. The illegal rebel regime accusation is a dumb reason from putin tho Interesting take if else I would love to hear you tought on this !
The argument against Putin's second point is, 1. Zelenskyy had said he would abandon any attempt to join NATO. 2. Olaf Scholz had already stated that "as long as he was Chancellor, he would not allow Ukraine to join NATO.
The NATO charter does not allow countries which are engaged in civil conflict to become members. For as long as there was fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine was not going to join NATO.
And yet, Blinken & co. kept going on about an open doors policy. Zelensky later went on to admit in an interview to CNN, that he was explicitly told that Ukraine would never join NATO or the EU, but that they would publicly continue to claim they would. So it looks like the West was deliberately bluffing in order to appear strong and tough to Russia, and inadvertently made things worse in the process. This whole situation reminds me of a situation we had on IRC back in 2014 where two of my staff members were acting all tough and uncompromising to a guy to the point that the guy got pissed off and began DDoS'ing us hard. Then, when I realized that literally the only way to resolve the situation was to negotiate with him, and actually resolved the situation, I was called weak. Then, it all repeated with another guy (those two clearly learned nothing), and once again, I was demanded to never negotiate, never surrender... well, all until we did the maths and realized we needed €5000/month tier anti-DDoS protection to block the guy's full capability, so we once again realized that negotiation was the only way to get out of it, which at that time, meant kicking the entire channel where it all started, ie. complete capitulation. Sure, one could say that me negotiating with the first DDoS'er emboldened the second one, but one could easily claim that in fact, those two staff members of mine acting all tough and uncompromising until we got DDoS'ed, was what actually emboldened the second one as he had learned from the first one that the only way to get the staff to act reasonably was to DDoS. And I think that could easily apply here - in all its acting tough and uncompromising (while behind the back, in fact doing exactly what Russia demanded them to do), they inadvertently angered Russia to the point of invading Ukraine. And I suspect that now, even if they finally make concessions to Russia to end this war, they have already ensured China invades Taiwan, as they have likely made China think that the only way to get concessions from the West is if you do something unspeakable that will shock them. Ie. just like in my IRC situation 2014, the Western leaders here have, with their tough and uncompromising stance, started a chain reaction that will only end well with the West's complete capitulation. Well, if China does decide to have its own go, the West *may* be able to deter them if they show they learned their lesson and this time, making concessions.
@@OBrasilo Taiwan and Ukraine are completely different situations. Taiwan (the Republic of China) has been a part of China since at least the 17th century, and as the last refuge of the Chinese nationalist government it sees itself as the legitimate government of all China. Any conflict between Taiwan and China would just be a resumption of the civil war that ended in 1949. Ukraine was granted its independence by the USSR, who were also a guarantor of its sovereign integrity. As a sovereign independent nation surely Ukraine has the right to determine its own destiny. Putin complains about NATO and the EU constantly encroaching on Russia, so Putin needs to ask himself why former Soviet republics don't want to join with Russia? Putin believes in a Russia as set by Aleksandr Dugin in his "Foundations of Geopolitics" and since he came to power has been working to bring it to fruition.
the argument is “trust us bro, we wont do it”. like they did in 1999 and 2004 and 2007 and 2009 and 2017 and 2020. sure anybody in the russian government will believe this, lol
@Com K well then don't bullshit me about it. I just think that ideally, two larger nations shouldn't use smaller nations sandwiched between them as chess pawns. Although that's not going to happen in my life.
@Com K Surprise: people who don't fight in a war, have this choice of remaining neutral. Also, when I talked about two large nations, I in no way included Ukraine.
@@landmerry_6742 Russia didn't respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Simple as that. Can I tell you what to do if I'm not harming you? You will get on your knees when they want you to.
I might be mistaken, but there is also fourth argument. They also condemned NATO's (or EU's, I don't remember exactly) East expansion a lot, stating that it contradicted agreements made in 90ths.
@@PolishBehemoth that sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy. Nato keeps expanding, going against the promise that they wouldn't and reach a critical red line. This forces Russia's hand to invade Ukraine to make a point and somehow this proves that Nato expansion was necessary? The West (the US in particular) is just as guilty of this war as Russia is if not more in my opinion.
Putin’s reasoning has always been intellectually dishonest. It’s true, Russia probably does feel threatened by Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership. However, Russia has proved time and time again that they are the type of threat that NATO exists to quell in the first place. As an analogy, Putin crying about Ukraine joining NATO is like a bully beating you up because you told the teacher about him bullying you. It doesn’t hold up, and no one who isn’t already compromised believes them.
Russia has proved time and time again that they are the type of threat that NATO exists to quell in the first place... sounds like all your reasoning is "Rusia is a bad guy". same story telling applies to Iraqis and Afganistan ... list can go on and on. Creating and naming enamies are the reasons for thousands years of human wars. a nation or a group of nations seeking absolute geo-political advantage and absolute security over others won't make you safe. the other end of the road is either you destroy your enemy, like Iraq, or set fire on yourself. remember Rusia has nuclear weapon. you may have many smart strategies to win the war and gain absolute advantage over Rusia except one for peace with giving your opponent some room to survive.
Russia never attempted to even one time step across its borders until it was provoked by the West's effort to encroach upon Russian borders via NATO expansion. If NATO had kept its promise made in 1990 not to expand, this war would not have taken place. NATO's behavior since the fall of the USSR has been anything but defensive, proving that it was founded upon offensive objectives.
Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada on the same premises, the US threatened ww3 in the Cuban crisis on the same premises. The invasion of Iraq ,Lybia and other place in the last decades are on even more dishonest premises. I have no support for Putin nor Russia but the level of hypocrisy displayed in the west is baffling. What Putin succeeded with this is to make it harder for a unipolar world to keep existing next time the drum of war will beat on media I hope that it get harder for those that have condemned Russia to pull of the bs out of their playbook. No one as a God given right to bully the rest of the world without being challenged.
Nato was created to bully and destroy the ussr. It was the original threat. It wasn’t created to oppose an actual threat, but only to destroy the economic enemies of the west. It is an arm of western capitalism.
I agree on you on the first two points. But in the last segment you said “they would first need to exhaust their diplomatic solutions.” I’m not sure if you know but the Russians had negotiated with NATO over 10 times to not spread their influence further east. You also state that “the world wanted Putin to negotiate” he did. Read about the Minsk agreement. In the first month of the war, Russia and Ukraine sent diplomats to Turkey to reach an agreement, they had concluded in the neutrality of Ukraine… Boris Johnson PM of UK told Zelenskyy to break off ALL DIPLOMATIC SOLUTIONS and then the war progressed. You clearly didn’t read enough about the topic, you would have known that there already was an agreement that was destroyed by a NATO member… hope you inform yourself a little better next time
Why should Ukraine seek peace with Russia after Russia had invaded? Why do you think Russia is even interested in peace? It just hit a children's hospital with cruise missiles yesterday. That's not an accident. Ukraine has no choice but to fight this war. It's being attacked every single day for the 29 months
Good video, the only thing that really bothers me is what the conclusion is based on in the end: "It seems like the opportunity for diplomacy was there and it seems that Russia didn't take it". It is impossible to know if this was the case, because the public is simply not in the loop. We have no idea what negotiations were conducted behind closed doors, so there is no evidence for your assumption that Russia was not willing to solve the issue with diplomacy in the end.
I am sure Russia was willing to settle the 'issues' diplomatically, but only by the Ukraine and NATO diplomatically granting all of his demands. Further, it is well recognized in contract law that you cannot make a valid contract by holding your gun to somebodies head. Similarly, in international affairs, negotiating while holding the threat of immediate invasion if you do not get what you want from the negotiations is not a valid negotiation tactic. Ergo, regardless of whether or not their were diplomatic contacts between Russia and Ukraine in the weeks immediately prior to the invasion, Russia did not use diplomacy to accomplish its ends.
I agree. There were alternatives to war other than diplomacy and war. For NATO concerns, Russia could have improved its defensive capabilities. For the residents of Eastern Ukraine, Russia could have offered Russian passports, etc.
@@AdrienLegendre Russia DID provide russian passports to the residents of Eastern Ukraine since 2014 (and that's a violation of ukrainian law, btw) as well as to other people around ex-USSR territories, just to have an excuse to invade Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014, 2022) or, possibly, Moldova. Russia isn't interested in those residents (in fact, they were the first and the only (almost) victims of the invasion). They sent eastern ukrainian men to involuntary fight against their ukrainians brothers (and almost all of those who had been sent died), they literally destroyed almost every city and town and village where the slightest resistance was found, etc,etc,etc Yes, i do know what i'm talking about, because i'm a russian citizen myself. Even more, my granny and dad were ukrainians from the future "separatists" territories, so yes, i know what's happening. The only motive Putin has wasn't mentioned in this video. His real motive is to stay as a president for the rest of his life and that's it. He doesn't care how many millions would die. NATO argument doesn't make sense (Putin even said that Finland joining NATO isn't a threat, wtf?), it's just an excuse. Oh, come on. There is a lot i could write on the subject but the truth is that ALL Putin's arguments were fakes and couldn't be taken seriously, because his goals weren't told. No bad guy in chief would say 'I'm a big bad guy and i want to keep being a big bad guy and you all must do whatever i say because i'm a bad guy'. They always hide behind false reasoning and propaganda.
Russia signed diplomatic peace agreements in both September of 2014 and March of 2022,. Each of these deals were honored by Russia until broken by American-backed western Ukrainian forces.
This video has tons of subtle biases that mostly make your analysis like all your videos a case of smug psudeo intellectualism with nothing but motivated reasoning, the most jarring example of this is 4:38. Simply put you lack the actual data to support your claim of the east supporting Russia and the west supporting Ukraine, no doubt you tried to find it but instead you need something that *SEEMS good like it supports your position* to the uncritical so you find a *LANGUAGE MAP FROM 20 YEARS AGO* rather than one that actually answers the question you asked. Logically just because you speak Russian doesn't mean you support Putin or wish to be annexed by Russia. Zelenksy is a native Russian speaker and obviously is very much against Russian integration.
“ motivated reasoning “. I like that . Yes I heard a lot of word choices and framing that indicated bias and steering to s certain conclusion as well . I like this person’s history videos but I am finding the ones on current events to be great examples of “ motivated reasoning “.
quick question "Where on earth do these logics go when Israel is being questioned?" You can question every religion(blasphemy), ideology(shraiah laws), people(American presidents), country (Russia) but its absolutely horrendous when u start to question Israel.
No it's not. It's probably the most criticised country after the US. And Islam is basically not part of public discourse or questioned, at least in western countries, because they think pointing out the obvious flaws of it would be racist.
I dont think nato exspansion would be the line he would take. Because in the tucker interview carson layed it out for him to take that path but putin went on a historical rant, meanwhile Putin knew an western adince was going to consume it. Sorry for the bad english
True, that rant was certainly wasting a good opportunity. Much could have been different if Putin had been a better communicator. He did eventually turn focus to the other points, but most viewers were gone by then.
I'm a Ukrainian from Donbas, east of Ukraine. I appreciate your efforts made for this video and the points mentioned. I also want to quickly say in regards of this map: 4:05. It doesn't show a divide between Ukrainians, nor it shows even divide between the east ond the west of Ukraine. It's just a picture published by somebody on Russian social media which roughly shows Ukrainians speaking Russian language VS Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian. While language never stops to be a big part of the debates within Ukraine, it was never such a big issue to start a war within. What happened is the other Russian invasion which they covered as a "civil war" proclaiming that they are doing that to save the "Russian speaking people", me including. While being born in Donetsk region, I fluently spoke Ukrainian and Russian (the second was used more frequently as my region has been under Russian rulership for a very long time before we gained independence). That being said, I was never ever oppressed just because of the language I spoke. Russia exaggerated the "language issue" to absurdity just so they could invade us in 2014 (adding some other stupid "reasons" on the fly). I still remember those weird people with different accent of Russian walking around the streets of my city with weapons that year. Nobody could understand what was going on. It never felt like a civil war no matter how hard Russians tried to create an image of such on their media. I literally want to vomit every time somebody says that was a civil war
But the majority voted for seperation from ukraine. I dont know if same could ve said for jews or tartar etc others who did not have stake in the situation.
30 years of constant brainwashing is taking it's tall...First of all, not Russia exaggerated the "language issue" to absurdity in order to invade you in 2014, but the US-Puppepts in Kiev when they had their first illegal(unconstitutional) meeting after the Coup in Kiev organised & paid by the CIA & carried out by NAZIS (Radical Ethnic-Chauvinists & Ukro-Supremacists) their first wish was to forbid the Russian language in Ukraine, which the CIA-Puppet Tourchinov vetoed against, but it was still pushed through by the pathetic beggars, liars & assholes Poroshenko & Zelensky in 2019 & 2021 meaning that the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine didn't have the same legal rights as the rest of the population. The Ukrainian "Elites" being not the most sincere or intelligent people in the Post-Soviet Realm, even invented a bullshit category of "Native Ethnicities" for the Ukraine of which of course Russians were excluded..The Russian Language when used by authorities & institutions personell as in media & publications is illegal, although 16 000 000(including 9 000 000 ethnic Russians) Ukros have declared it as their native tong...One can publish a book in pure Portuguese or Catalan in the Ukraine but not in Russian without adding a state-approved & legalised translation...We in Western Europe BTW call such a thing APARTHEID, how are you calling it? What you wanted to quickly say in regards of this map: 4:05 is Bullshit, it's not some map posted by a random Russian guy, but the map of distribution of the people who identify as ethnic Russians & that map also resembles almost exactly the distribution of votes during the last real democratic elections before the Junta in Kiev excluded more than 7 000 000 voters from the democratic process...this exclusion of the ethnic Russians from the democratic process was also one of the main reasons why the US Empire broke the Budapest Memorandum & destabilised the Ukraine through the extremely violent Maidan-Coup & the following "Anti-Terror-Operation" where NAZI Militia units like AZOV, Aidar, Right Sector, Dnipro etc. financed by Jewish Oligarchs like the mobster Kolomoisky & supported by regular Ukrainian Forces & aviation began a large scale Terror campaign against their own ethnic Russian civilians...The Russian military helped the Russian Civilians with the same right under which the US Military & NATO is helping now Kiev & under which the US destroyed Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya & Syria or how Georgia illegally invaded South Ossetia in 2008...
7:33 ''one country can't justify the invasion of another because they believe a government is being aggressive in a civil conflict''... Really? What would be ''the proper'' justification then? Maybe claiming that a country has chemical weapons, which were never found? Or defending democracy? Or to free the people of another country from their government?
A perfect example of how the west uses liberal internationalism as an iron rod to criticise their opponents when pursuing actions aimed towards guaranteeing their State's safety whereas when they do it for not even existential safety reasons it is perfectly justifiable. Alexander Dugin is right in correctly assessing liberalism to have become stale and rigid and therefore totalitarian in its reaction to any sort of opposition to it.
@@marinadowden6038 it’s more like the cuban missile crisis. When nato adds countries and puts arms in those countries aimed at Russia..they are threatened. The Minsk agreement was supposed to halt additions to nato. We, the west, broke the agreement 13 times. A Russian friendly government of Ukraine was overthrown by the USA. So why wouldn’t this be analogous to the Cuban missile crisis!!!
I think his justifications are ultimately irrelevant. As our(NATO/US) response has more to do with our interest than the violation of Ukrainian sovernty. Like we litteraly did nothing in response to the annaxation of Crimia. Putin has brought war to our door and challenged Western global dominance in a way that it hasn't been in decades. It is an open question if we are still capable of summoning the will to respond.
"Putin has brought war to our door" No, he didn't. He brought war to HIS door. Ukraine is not "your door", it's Russia's "door". You were trying to bring your soldiers to Russia's doorstep and now is trying to turn it around. I assume you're from the US or England, you sponsored Euromaidan in 2014 (in RUSSIAS DOORSTEP) and now you're talking about Ukraine being your door... You people are so cynical it hurts me.
@@devrusso I ment ideological doorstep not actual door. I also believe Puntin's fear of us putting weapons in Ukraine pointed at him is warrented because thats exactly what we where doing. My point was he wanted smoke and we where selling wolf tickets.
For all the facts. Look up utube The Grayzone with Max Blumenthal, The New Atlas with Brian Berletic, Patrick Lancaster, George Galloway, Graham Phillips. I will post some of their links in the next comment in case utube deletes
@@romany8125 and what point do you wanna make here, mind i ask? Comparing a war where you can't even intervene and only watch one or both sides with something you could and naturally would intervene doesn't sound fair or relatable at all And either way, let's say we could stop the guy who was beating the guy or "doing" the women, we (or maybe just the police) could still interrogate him and see their perspective (not trying to say rape and beating someone to death is something justified tho, just like this war, everyone is technically in the wrong)
@@whatslifespurpose so long as Angelic Putin isn’t planning an ethic cleansing or persisting with violence in contravention of UN authority, yep, defensive.
Libya was mostly a Franco-British job, just like Iraq was a mostly Anglo-American job. Other NATO members were not necessarily involved. Belgrade is inexcusable, however.
@Ryan Chapman, You are awesome with your analysis. Literally all of the videos I have watched of yours are completely or as completely impartial as one can be. You objectively analyze to the best of your ability and I learn every time I watch your videos. Thank you. P.S. your channel deserves to be way bigger
It doesn't matter what justification there is. All that matters is that in the end, if Putin is able to conquer Ukraine without opposition or not. That's what history will write down. What the winner tells the world.
NO. Russian psychological insecurity does not justify invading surrounding countries to gain defensive geography. No one is invading Russia. Russia has poor performance record improving wherever they invade.
Even a smart guy like him can get hoodwinked by fake news. He is wtong from 7min For the real facts The Grayzone with Aaron Mate The New Atlas by Brian Berletic John Mearsheimer (watch him first) Patrick Lancaster war journo in Donbass utube(his vids are difficult to watch) Graham Phillips in Donbadd George Galloway I wiill try to pist sone links in next comment but most if nit all will be deleted by waartube
I’ve just subscribed to your RUclips channel after watching your excellent presentations on fascism. Your work is a gold standard for that rare commodity of well thought out, nuanced analysis of complex issues that employs with deftness social media’s extraordinary power to present visually and convincingly supporting evidence.
B/S Ukraine and Russia already had a negotiation...until the west and NATO squashed it....why? Because it is the west that wants to cripple Russia and have been working towards it since Putin became president...why because Putin would not allow the west to manipulate Russia as Yeltsin did....who has exspanded borders before 2014? Russia?
I just watched one of your videos on China which I thought was very well argued. In it you talked very perceptively about the West's linear way of thinking and contrasted it with China's lateral way of thinking. I think you could have approached this topic a bit more laterally and definitely with a bit more in depth research.
Interesting that you should bring up the Chinese. From my experience on zhihu (Chinese Quora), most chinese recognize that an invasion of another country's sovereignty is wrong, but also that sometimes this doesn't matter realistically enough when faced with strong threat or interest. By that logic also, Ukraine cares not for the ideal of upholding international law and condemning the "wrong", but more about its own interest as a nation--not that I'd criticize this mindset. Much like the matter with Taiwan and China (whether you read the former as a province or more or less independent) , and by extension every area planning to declare some form of independence; techinically, self determination would be "correct", in moral; practically, it would be ambiguous; in terms of many nations' interests, its "correctness" could be easily overwhelmed, and even overrode by another such "correctness", more explicitly, "a government's first consideration is to its people". Speaking of connecting Russia's invasion with our situation in Taiwan, most people also recognize and converse about how this would make China lose more moral highground internationally as the ccp is likened to the invading side. A significant amount of people also note that this must be intentionally done by western media, and as such, very little people will actually care about nuanced differences between the two circumstances. *Just on a side note to provide evidence for my second point, a lot of Chinese were pissed and even stopped supporting Ukraine (mostly verbal support, but still) completely, when the latter complied with Japan's demand to take their emperor out of a video of the three facism leaders who initiated wwII and therefore various inhumane war crimes. Seriously, when it comes to the beef with Japan, it's an untouchable death zone with the Chinese public. Sorry Ukraine, not sorry. So all things considering, Chinese do seem much more ambiguous dissecting this invasion by Putin. People condemn it, yes, but I must say half-heartedly, before moving on to other things like motivations and predictions. I see what you mean about lateral thinking.
@@landmerry_6742 Russia and Ukraine's history. China at large and Taiwan's history. Two very different things, completely unrelated. The comparison is forced and pointless, though some Chinese may make the comparison (though I've seen no data on that, other than your opinion). Internationally, and under international law, Taiwan's status is ambiguous. Ukraine's status is not. There is no question that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, fully separate from Russia. For what it's worth, the Soviet Union is dead, and upon its dissolution, treaties were signed. Putin has no leg to stand on, which is why he's throwing a variety of fantastical propaganda themes at his population, even as the world rolls its eyes at his shameless b**ls**t. Regardless of what some Chinese nationals may think, and whether they love or hate Ukraine and Zelenskyy, there is no valid comparison. (Did I repeat that sufficiently?)
11:00 I don't think that a good argument, since the world was "paying attention" to some degree to the situation in the Ukraine for several years now, yet the development has gone steadily against Russian interests. All diplomatic efforts at best stalled that development briefly. And let's not forget the U.S. involvement in the recent political developments in the Ukraine as documented by the Nuland phone call. How justified were the U.S. kindling the conflict in the Ukraine that led to the present situation. After that Russia was presented with a fait accompli, and Putin didn't want to be presented with another done deal. Another thing to consider is momentum. The decision to start a large scale conflict like the Ukraine-Russian war isn't as momentous as it seems. The hesitancy of western countries to get involved in that war shows the problem: They first need to get enough backing by their citizens, without that support they will lose power, and that also applies to Putin. But that support will wane over time, so it represents a window of opportunity. Also the estimate of the geopolitical meaning of the Ukraine should include its economic meaning (a) because of the oil pipelines running through it and maybe more importantly (b) its importance as "breadbasket of Europe". Note that all of the previous is based on a perspective of "global politics", the same global politics that is the basis for the wars in Irak, Libya, Syria, just to name a few. So while Putin should be condemned for starting that war in Ukraine, the same standards leading to that condemnation should also apply to U.S. and NATO involvements and wars in recent years and even more so in the future.
@@hrogarfyrninga3238 Sadly without effect, and at best sparsely from the established media, which is why, despite some condemnation, U.S. and NATO just did the same over and over again to several coutries.
@@Pengochan The US paid for the war in economic terms (cost them several trillion dollars) and they severely tarnished their reputation with it. They also never launched a full scale invasion and occupation ever since, rather focusing on limited scope military support or operations. Not saying what they're doing is good, however it's something all great powers tend to do. Russia has been doing plenty of that too and there was no big global reaction.
@@hrogarfyrninga3238 The U.S. tax payers paid. A lot of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors made a lot of money (and a part of that money is paid back for political campaigns of Republicans and Democrats alike, even if that's just a small part that results in huge paychecks), but all that is beside the point. Apparently we agree that starting wars, even despite there may be a dplomatic way to avoid them is part of global politics by global powers. That's not a good thing but sadly reality. So the question if Putin was "justified" is the wrong question here, and very subjective anyways. The proper question is: What should have been expected of him, could the U.S. and NATO have choosen another course long before to reduce the likelihood of that invasion, and why didn't they? That Putin / Russia is the main culprit for the invasion is pretty obvious, but how much did the U.S. and NATO contribute to the situation?
@@Pengochan From what I can gather, Putin feels threatened by the mere existence of a Ukraine that isn't politically under is control. Unfortunately for him, Russia signed an agreement guaranteeing its independence. At a time, Ukraine had basically no army, he took away part of its territory. That was the point that showed the world he would take whatever he wanted i it wasn't sufficiently defended. The only thing that may have stopped him is massive deterrence or the creation of a puppet regime like in Belarus. The latter wasn't an option for the Ukrainians. Since they decided to defend themselves as a sovereign nation and didn't want to align with Russia, I don't see what NATO could have done to prevent this situation. NATO likely assumed Putin was a rational man and would not attack, considering the size of the Ukrainian army and the scale of its territory. Putin gambled on the assumptions he made according to the information given to him, both were flawed. Additionally, he has certain beliefs about Russia's history and it's place in the world that don't align with reality. Invading for him also helped seize back power he had lost within the regime. I don't know what kind of deterrents would have needed to be in place for Putin not to take this step. In his mind, he would easily and quickly have overrun Ukrainian defences, taken Kiev, captured Zelensky and installed a puppet regime before anyone could have intervened in time.
4:10 There are no division into “eastern” and “western” Ukraine (as well as division into pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian, which even sounds absurd). It is just one of russian propaganda points. Btw it’s ironic, but not really surprising, that you use a map with russian spelling of Ukrainian names in this moment. In fact there are some demographic differences as in any other state, but the majority of any part of Ukraine is pro-western and anti-russian. In 2014, protests in support of European integration took place both in Donbas and Crimea. A lot of modern figures of Ukrainian culture who advocate independence from Russia come precisely from the east and south of Ukraine (Serhiy Zhadan, Oleg Sentsov etc.). You should research the subject better
Can you, or someone else, comment on what would justify an invasion? Is it too complex of a topic, or do you see a pattern or some kind of key points which when checked, would be a good start for a justification? I come from a place where there's no "army" in its general sense, but a defence force. Thus both practically and ideologically, aggressively taking control of an area is only justified when it's a part of a defensive maneuver. That would, in itself, be comparable to the narrative that Putin is trying to paint, but to me it only works when you're already in a conflict, not as a reason to start one. Another thing I fail to grasp is the "international law" about "ones defense cannot be heightened at the expense of others", or something along those lines. Where can I read more about that, as by the amount of information I got from this video, it hardly makes sense to me. While there are purely defensive weapon systems, a good defense cannot be obtained without the capability of strong offense. How can you strengthen your defense without heightening the risk towards your neighbors at the same time?
International law is very clear, Ukraine WOULD have the right to self defense as soon as Russian tanks and missiles crossed the border. As you will notice, virtually NO american invasion is justifiable along international law, thats why the US isn't a member of the International Criminal Court, which makes it pretty amusing to hear Biden talk about the ICC. Its not complicated at all. If missiles are flying and borders are crossed, there is your justification. There is NO justification for Russia because even the cases they cited about missiles were in the east of ukraine, not russia. Where it gets complicated of course is when its NOT the national army setting off bombs. If the IRA set off bombs in London, as they did, that didn't mean you can condemn a whole nation, and thats the murky bit with ukraine.
@Josef K I don't think you can starve a population with those kind of measures, unless there is a country that is unable to provide food for itself. For example, Cuba has been isolated economically for many years and they are poor but they weren't starving. Also, not wanting to do commerce with somebody should be a free choice. I don't think you can starve a population without the use of violence.
@@mikearchibald744 There was an eminent threat cited by President Putin in that Ukrainian troops were gathering for an assault on the Donbas which was recognised as an independent region much as what happened in Yugoslavia and Russia sent the special operation to try to circumvent further attacks on the civilian population (since the US backed coup in 2014 NATO has sent weapons and trained troops including Na zis targeting Russian ethnic population). Russian troops entered the Ukraine under the article 51 UN Charter pertaining to preempting an eminent threat so it is a bit more complicated than your black and white view probably informed by extremely propagandised main stream media. Didn't you learn anything from the pandemic? And its not amusing that consecutive US governments have been guilty of egregious war crimes and are trying to extradite Julian Assange for no other reason but revealing their crimes while they continue to do more with impunity
Using Putin's logic, we should have attacked the USSR when we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons based on the suspicion that they might become an existential threat in the future. Maybe we should have bombed China when the USSR wanted us to so they didn't become an existential threat. Peter Zeihan has a hypothesis that Russia is attacking because it sees imminent demographic decline and it had to attack now because in the future, it would be unable to do so. So they must extend their borders to more defensible locations, plug certain natural invasion routes, and create defensive depth. If Ukraine fell, Moldova would be next, and then he'd do to the Baltics what he did to the Donbas. Putin thinks of the West as weak, corrupt, and too hedonistic to stand up to him. My own feeling is that Putin envisions himself as Peter the Great mixed with a bit of Stalin. He is permanently locked into a Cold War mindset where the West is terminally weak and decadent but ideologically threatening. We were all deluded into thinking Russia had the 2nd best military in the world, and he shared that delusion. He also had a delusion that Ukraine was going to roll over and play dead. Putin's psychology is not to negotiate for something when he thinks he can just take it. I don't believe he feared the West for a heartbeat. We all thought he had a military far superior to any individual military in Europe and more nuclear weapons than would be needed to deter any invasion. Ukraine was never getting into NATO. He had a grip on Europe's energy. NATO was braindead and it will be all over before the divided and narcissistic Americans can get their act together. He was given the information he wanted to hear and believed it without question because he needed it to be the truth.
Welp but from Putin's point of view at a military level, the "call to negotiate" could just be seen as a stalling tactic, as on the ground this situation is at the zenith of favorable conditions for his invasion. Any later and the conditions of war become less favorable. So I'm not very surprised with his current perception, that he decided to pursue this line of decisions.
Generally, I appreciate the effort put into this video. However, I believe you have missed some critical aspects. For argument 1), you have confused the Soviet Union with Russia. While Russia was a major player in the USSR, not all of their leaders were even ethnically Russian, but other nationalities. Stalin was Georgian, Lenin was a true product of Russian multiculturalism and had a mixed background, Malenkov was Macedonian in addition to Russian, Krushchov was not born in Ukraine but was absolutely obsessed with Ukraine and practically was Ukrainian, Brezhnev claimed to be Ukrainian, but it’s a tough call. Gorbachev was Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish, Andropov is unclear, and so is Chernenko. Even with all that being the case, Ukrainian, modern Russian, and Belarusian identities are still forming, and prior to the Soviet Union, the Russian empire encapsulated these various identities (and the Soviet Union continued to do so). We can’t really say that modern Russia is the the same country as the USSR…at all. Putin said Ukraine’s formation was a mistake, but it was not a Russian mistake, but a Soviet mistake. Big difference honestly. He also did not say and has never said that he is considering removing or halting Ukraine’s independence. There is no evidence to suggest that Russia plans for expansion and/or is acting to take over, occupy, or control Ukraine, but of course they are offering to protect and take back Donbas land for the DPR and LPR, and as the situation unfolds, we will see what happens with Kherson and some other areas that wish to depart from Ukraine. As for Crimea, which you didn’t talk about much, the 2014 referendum is a near identical vote to basically the same decision in the 90s. Overwhelming majority (over 90%) of Crimeans with over 90% voter turnout decided they wanted independence from Ukraine as part of Gorbachev’s Union Treaty. Ukraine illegally vetoed the referendum after the U.S. pressured the Ukrainian government, claiming that Russia could not have access to the Black Sea. If the US had not interfered in the 90s, Crimea would have left Ukraine decades ago. The same result occurred in this 2014 referendum - pretty clear that Crimea does not want to be part of Ukraine. My home town has a sister city in Crimea and everyone who has visited says the people consider themselves overwhelmingly Russian, not Ukrainian. Not a single person was killed in the 2014 transfer of Crimea…there were no deaths. For part 2), while you could argue the semantics of genocide regarding Odessa, Ukraine’s continued bombing and serious violations of seize fires for 8 years in the Donbas could certainly constitute genocide. After the 2014 Maiden coup, the very first law passed by the new “government” was the banning of the Russian language in all public sector work. It’s quite terrifying. In fact, the DPR and LPR referendums were not for independence from Ukraine, but for autonomy within Ukraine…but despite this, Ukrainian government spearheaded by neo nazi battalions began the Anti Terror Campaign and began the assault on the Donbas, where cluster ammunition has killed civilians. Over 14,000 people on both sides (all pretty much Ukrainian citizens, mind you), have died since 2014. France and Germany signed a declaration agreeing to force Ukraine to uphold the Minsk Accord, but when Ukraine continued shelling of civilians, neither country did anything. Russian Parliament had been begging Putin to recognize the DPR and LPR and he was very hesitant to do so. In fact, he rejected the Parliament’s call for recognition of the territories in February 2022, and only finally recognized when shelling was continued during negotiations. You say that Ukraine’s aggression does not warrant invasion, but I beg to differ. Someone needs to stop the death of innocent people. It’s not okay to let people die for no reason other than their ethnicity, language, and belief. There is so much more to this than most people are aware of, and while again, I appreciate your video as one of the least inflammatory, I believe you are missing a lot of context and information which is absolutely critical to this situation. Ukraine’s policies of executing politicians, Western European and U.S. role in 2014 Euromaiden, CIA training program of Azov battalion, etc. all add to to the fire. It’s a horrible situation and it’s even more horrible that this has turned into a good vs evil paradigm. I highly recommend anyone interested in Russian relations to read Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria by Guy Mettan. I also recommend the following article by independent French Think tank: cf2r.org/documentation/la-situation-militaire-en-ukraine/ It is written by an ex-NATO official. Anyway, thanks for the video - it at least sparks some more standard discussion of the topic.
Why did the ukrainian government start shelling its own people? Wasn't it a contermeasure against russian separatism? why didn't you include that in your little essay?
@wrijin I agree completely. In Denmark we have zero political will to acknowledge these matters, but they are very relevant in any decent objective analysis.
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone. Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit. Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical. Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable. There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor. We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it. There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity. An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive. It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely? We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._ What does all that tell you?
This is cherry picking different parts of the "known" story to arrive at a pre conceived conclusion. we are 2 years in now and I am wondering if you want to revise this video to include what we now know about Minsk 1, Minsk 2, Peace negotiations at Istanbul to start with, also throw in some comparison to the Cuban crisis, the Monroe Doctrine. The threat is not a direct invasion by NATO , although Ukraine joining NATO would make that a stronger possibility, the threat is using Ukraine as a door to destabilize the RF and break it apart. This is why RF is less worried about Finland etc joining NATO compared to Ukraine which have stronger family ties. That being said, I have watched your other videos just finished How WW2 started and its very educative.
You haven't explained why Russia's invasion is justified. Why do you think you don't need to explain why literally NO OTHER COUNTRY openly supports or sympathises with the invasion of Ukraine? How can Russia perceive a threat, but literally every other country in the world views Ukraine as a relatively uninteresting country? The answer to that question is that Ukraine doesn't pose a threat to any country because it has limited military capabilities and a small economy. The purpose of Russia's invasion is imperialism. To take the land and integrate it into Russia. You cannot justify imperialism because no country participates in it or tolerates their neighbours participating in it. It's like making a moral argument for theft and assault. Throwing around terms like "Minsk agreement" doesn't make you informed. You're pretending you have relevant information when you don't. Russia's aggression is not justified.
They are both pro-Russian and a part of Russian state propaganda. Ritter is a pederast, and MacGregor is always wrong with his guesses. They’re a joke.
War of 1812 was started by the USA, not the UK. Various hawks and expansionists thought it would be a good opportunity to take Canada while Britain was occupied with Napoleon, plus they were annoyed at the Royal Navy's impressment of American sailors captured at sea, which is reasonable. Britain responded but not with much force as it couldn't spare them from Europe; instead the conflict was the making of Canada as local militias in conjunction with Native groups responded more decisively to the threat.
You need to be very careful about the term 'ethnic Russians'. Just because a Ukrainian citizen speaks Russian as their language of choice does not necessarily mean they want their land to become part of Russia. There were no separatist movements until Putin started sponsoring militant groups in 2014.
Sorry, but if we start redefining borders by ethnic lines, it's going to get terrible. Just look at the South East Europe for example. The idea that all members of one ethnic group have to live in one country is fascist.
I think you're not correctly evaluating the "opportunity for negotiation" that Putin had. He warned, in 2007, that the red line would be Georgia and Ukraine. from back then until this very year the west and Russia has been manipulating Ukraine's politics. I mean there is a record of Hilary Clinton literally choosing who's going to be minister of what in Ukraine, like " no I don't like that guy because (whatever), I prefer that guy " and so on. That's when Putin triggered the low key war that had been playing until the full on invasion. But we kept pushing for years and somehow Russia grew tired of us not listening to the "please stop expanding NATO" demands. Putin is the one that invaded but we clearly pushed them to do so. It is amazing how we continuously fail to see our faults up to a point where it's pathetic. But the real problem is that it makes sure that we'll fight until the last Ukrainian.
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone. Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit. Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical. Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable. There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor. We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it. There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity. An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive. It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely? We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._ What does all that tell you?
Can you correct the part where you said negotiations failed? Because there have been multiple treaties that delayed this invasion from 2014 to 2022. Additionally, the U.S. refused to negotiate in good faith since December 2021. And basically responded by sending more troops and arming Ukraine.
The very notion that the biggest nuclear state in the world felt "threatened" by a defensive alliance is so laughable i'm not exactly sure why it was adressed. Pure boring propaganda
@@hellfire6714 Why does the U.S. feel threatened by middle eastern countries on the other side of the planet. Iraq's invasion was not justified at all. Same foes for Russia, except unlike Iraq, Ukraine borders it. Additionally, Ukraine has historical ties with Russia. The U.S. has no historical ties with Iraq. The U.S. also invaded many Mexican states. Now the Mexicans themselves are considered alien in those lands. People forget that most southern states belonged to Mexico.
@@F_imperialists The year is 2022. The conflict is Ukraine - Russia. You got the wrong video if your mind is on Iraq. Also the "my great great great grandpa set foot here once so it belongs to me forever" mindset is what is killing the Balkans and a lot of other areas - argument built for those of low iq and high agression.
@@hellfire6714 You have to see the big picture. This conflict started in 2014. Please read the treaties between Russia and the west since then. This was long overdue mainly because of negotiations. And no, 1 million Iraqi died because of the U.S. invasion. We will not forget. If the U.S. will never forget 3000 in 9/11, then you should understand how much more pain the death of 1 million causes. Recently, the U.S. sent troops to Somalia again. This is 2022, the U.S. is still doing what it does best.... Invade and murder.
@@F_imperialists This conflicted, much every other Russian imperialist conflicted, started the moment an ex soviet state tried to poke it's head out of the gutter. Your "bigger picture" is bigger than you think. Russians think they own everything in the general area of their country. And I do mean OWN. This is a mindset you can only really understand by seeing it first hand
I've seen your video just now, and I'd like to point out the oddness of "Civil war" part, as there were not civil war in Ukraine between "east" and "west" of Ukraine, at least not since 1991. I also think it to be worth mentioning that the war between russia and Ukraine started in 2014, yet it is 2024 when Ukraine faced the full invasion of its territories. Giving that russia invaded Ukraine much earlier, those reasons to invade Ukraine back then might also be worth taking into consideration ( I do not mean to say they are justified). Anyhow, it was a nice try and though having quite a rough view on what was going on in Ukraine, the conclusion is the same - russia's aggression is not justified.
Sober. But sobriety rarely applies to geopolitics. He felt threatened and ignored on his concerns, so he acted. Our position that a sovereign nation should not be invaded removes warfare from humanity, and that's not a realistic perspective on why war breaks out. By using sovereignty as the bar, the West should never have had Gulf II or Afghanistan. Warfare is diplomacy, by other means- Clausewitz.
11:03 All negotiations from November till February have failed. And each time Zelenskiy would start negotiations, somebody like Boris Johnson would fly over to stop them.
Regarding the argument of being threatened by NATO, I think we have to ask whether anyone reasonable could think that is a credible threat? Look how the US struggled and lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. Look how Russia struggles in eastern Ukraine. How could NATO possibly consider invading Russia? You have to ignore the enormous nuclear arsenal, assume that the founding articles of NATO (that it is no threat to Russia) is an elaborate conspiracy between dozens of democratic nations, assume that the leaderships of all these countries are united in a fanatical desire to conquer the largest country on earth and somehow their electorates didn't notice, that the billion citizens of NATO would ever allow such a thing to threaten their lives and livelihoods. In my opinion it's ludicrous to imagine NATO would invade Russia, and we should not give credence to that as a justification for anything.
Agreed. NATO has and always will be a counterweight to imperialist intentions in Europe - including by the way those former imperialists within the alliance. Never has almost every smaller nation in Europe been allied in this way with a few superpowers included to add teeth. The only threat it poses to Russia is its imperialist ambitions. Which most of Eastern Europe is all too familiar with and doesn’t want to go back to.
"How could NATO possibly consider invading Russia?" That is a great question. Russia has always kept to itself (not counting the recent events), yet NATO is constantly threatening Russia but expanding to it's near countries, trying to destabilize Rússia internally or just in general partaking into aggressive rhetoric. We all know the west hates Russia, always did and always will apparently, so yeah, disappearing with Russia is westerners wet dreams ever since the red scare. You have to ask yourself why John McCain was in Ukraine in 2014, why is Bidens whole family involved with Ukraine.
Maybe as someone from inside those countries, you don't easily notice such imperialistic moves like what happened in Ukraine in 2014, but I'm from Latin America and I know. As they say, we are "vaccinated" against this kind of stuff. We can see western imperialism from miles away. And that's what NATO is: a bully, an aggressor who pretends to be the innocent.
@@devrusso a "nato is evil" argument doesn't address the point I was making that it is obviously not a threat to Russia. So using it as an excuse to wage war is disgusting. But there are so many like you blinded by hate that malign dictators literally get away with mass murder.
While invading and conquering is not feasible today there are other threats worth considering. Missile strikes, no-fly zones, port blockades and so on. And your whole argument about "elaborate conspiracy between dozen democratic nations", "fanatical desire" can be translated into "we are the good guys, we won't do bad things". Once one side obtains a leverage over other the rhetoric may and will be quickly changed to we "have the leverage and we can use it against you". Oh and electorate would not notice, they would gladly choose smaller threat of a "swift conflict today" once they are explained to about the big global threat that Russia is. It is the same rhetoric at work in Russia today: "yes we face hard times today, but it is to ensure our security in the future".
There was the admittance of at least one US senator admitting of using Ukraine as a proxy. The possibility of bio-labs haven't been rebutted as well. The US almost went to war for the same reason with the Cuba missile crisis. I personally can't blame them for going into Ukraine. Its just tragic the people who are caught in the cross fire of the fighting
@@immortallegend648 Ukraine is making more money selling to the west bc we have better markets and higher labor standards. The people are far better off with us. Putin is a weak a cowardly man who needs fear and cruelty to remain powerful. His regime will fall and the west will prosper.
Question: Imagine in 50 years, Eastern ally were about to deploy strategic weaponry in Canada. How will the US justify its actions? (I'm assuming the US will take actions immediately considered what happened in Cuba between USSR and US) If the answer is negative, the next question is -- are the justifications even necessary in international political situations that endanger great power's national security?
@@joedirt2862 It's a great point! I think that Estonia and Latvia are different from Ukraine in terms of geographical significance from military / security point of view. By pulling out the map, we can see that if Ukrain joins NATO, there's no geographical / natural barrier beyond Dnieper River which is the divider of west and east of Ukraine. Russia clearly cares east Ukraine much more.
@@NeMayful I think the idea of mutually assured destruction has a serious flaw besides the mutual destruction. That is it's only a deterrent between two countries with nukes. However a country with nukes can invade a country without nukes and only face the retaliation of another country if that country is willing to sacrifice the human race for them. Putin's threat and lack of any country stepping in suggests this is true.
@@joedirt2862 True that Ukraine is not a formal member of NATO, and this is the whole point. From Russia's point of view, Ukraine is a de-facto NATO member - trained and armed by NATO. If Russia waited the moment that Ukraine to become a formal member of NATO, it is already too late -- that will mean to declare a war with all NATO members.
Agree. Most importantly we now know that an agreement was reached early in the war where the Nato question was central, and that it was Ukraine who turned it down, despite very few other concessions were needed, specifically Donbass staying with Ukraine. This argues heavily against the war being a land grab, and supports that Putins main concern was and is the Nato enlargement. Ryan did a good analysis, but these points need more focus instead of using a few seconds to dismiss them at the end of the video.
I think one big thing here is missing and it might be a little confusing... Asking for a justification for an invasion is a very Western liberal thing to do. I remember when USA invaded Iraq the second time the whole slide show that Powell made to UN looked exactly like something that could have been taken out of a court room. But here is the thing. Back in 2007 Putin made it clear in his speech at the Munich Security Conference that he was very unhappy with the way American viewed the world and "ran" the world (sorry i cant remember the quote exactly). But in short he did not recognize USA deciding what was right and wrong in the world. I remember the Western leaders smiling and shaking their head when he said it. So if Putin no longer recognizes the American world order, why is it important that the Western liberal countries feel he is justified invading Ukraine? I think there is from 24/2 2022 a new world order. We in the west can no longer decide for other countries what is the right or the wrong thing to do. We can still say we do, but Putin did just say he dont care anymore. That speech shown in this video has 2 audiences. To the Western Liberal Democracies its a huge middle finger. To the Russian people it is a sign that they now has a new Tsar that will restore the Empire. So with respect to Ryan, this video only makes sense if you still buy in to the idea that Western Liberal Democracy is the future. If you dont, then the video is just pure gibberish only made to justify the "old" world order. On a side note. Right now we are all very black and white about the war. We are all under the influence of propaganda one way or the other. But as with all other wars in the years to come the nuances will be shown...
@@tremorlok6659 Again seen through the glasses of the Western liberal democracy. I dont think Putin, Syria, China etc really care about that anymore. I am pretty sure Putin is not kept up at night if we call them a rouge state
Sevastopol is the key warm water port for Russia's naval surface fleet. That would be another reason why Putin would be very unhappy with Ukraine joining NATO. It wasn't mentioned in the video, and with 1000+ comments, I haven't read enough to see if this was already mentioned.
Crimea is a whole separate case to the "special military operation"... Crimea is (and I quote Gorbachov) Russia's baby, which was a historical ERROR that was finally corrected in 2014.
@@bool_k It's actually the truth, had you done a bit of basic research, even google or Wikipedia you'd realize that CRIMEA has been in the hands of the Russians for hundreds of years! The English and the Ottomans often plotted to get that piece of strategic land OUT OF the hands of the Russians... They were obsessed with it not to become a part of Russian Empire, unless of course you the Ottomans were in the right and you believe Ottomans were angels, meanwhile those dogs were PLUNDERING villages in the Balkan, forcing them to convert to a religion, STEALING their young men and turning them into elite warriors callied janissaries, and making them fight their own kin etc. etc. This part of territory Crimea has ALWAYS identified as pro-Russia ALWAYS!!! I don't remember Krushchev handing out a democratic referendum asking the crimeans if they want to belong to the Ukrainian SSR? Granted part of the Soviet Union, but suddenly they woke up part of a different administration?! Sorry, not sorry you need to do your research and condensing that complex and painful part of Russian history into one silly sentence is retarded and obviously gives the impression that someone (YOU!) doesn't understand history. FYI there were Dutch, French, Belgian, German observers when the "vote" happened, they declared the outcome valid but not the options... As if Crimeans would make the ridiculous mistake of ever aligning themselves with Ukraine! Keep dreaming!
Re; "Was Russia Justified to Invade Ukraine?" It's NOT a case of 'justification' but a case of national survival. When societies are confronted with an existential national security threat, national survival requires a response. Russia has for decades been warning the US led NATO that NATO's eastward expansion is seen by Russia an an unacceptable threat because once NATO is sitting upon Russia's doorstep, it would create a degree of military vulnerability that no nation would willingly agree to, given that nuclear armed cruise missiles fired from near the Ukraine/Russian border would reach Moscow in less than 13 minutes. Plus, given cruise missiles ability to fly below radar detection, Russia might not know it was under attack until just seconds before nuclear detonation over Moscow. It matters not whether NATO would ever launch such an attack, national security demands that Russia never allow itself to be put in that potentially vulnerable of a position. Which is WHY the US was ready to go to war when the Soviet Union put nuclear ICBMs in Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast.
There was no such threat though. It is possible that Russians feel threatened, but doesn't mean it's true. Facts don't care about your feelings, and there is no reason to believe that NATO would attack Russia. First of all Russia has nukes, and no country with nukes got invaded so far. Second if all, the time of Natos existence is the time where Russia has been invaded the least in its history, and NATO was shrinking a it's militaries until the invasion, and even longer while they tried to get piece diplomatically. Btw. The reason why countries join NATO is because of Russia's behaviour, and it's threats. NATO only accepting them, when they ran out of reasons of why not. Where is the threat here, that is supposedly so big Russia had to invade and destroy a country, that wasn't even part of NATO, nor close to joining them, and couldn't have done so itself if it wanted to and Russia didn't have nukes?
Brilliant! There were times, especially at the beginning of the video, that I thought you were headed towards a wrong conclusion. I quickly realized, though, that you were simply stating positions and arguments in a neutral way, and since I'm not neural on this topic I had a gut level "you're wrong" reaction. Bravo! For at least one person your "fleshing out" was indeed useful. I can now separate my emotions from the rational arguments about the invasion.
I don't agree with Russia invading Ukraine. But, if is true that the NATO didn't take Russia seriously until they started mobilizing their army... I think that we have an important issue on global diplomacy.
I'm not sure, but my read on Ukrainian discreteness is that Russia is referring to Kievan Rus as their shared heritage, but that, despite their name, Russia doesn't inherit the culture of all rus-ic peoples, but inherits the particular culture of the principality of Muscovy, which is different from western rus-ics
Great point! The Russia becomes "Russia" in the 18th century by renaming on the will of Emperor. Actually the thin ties from modern Russia to the medieval Kievan Rus' goes to... the northeast province feodal that in 13th century gathered an army to going with war to the southwest (main) part, destroyed the country, destroyed the capital city Kyiv, theft the goods and massacre a lot of population.
So the enemy destroying the Kyivan Rus' at first by himself, than fully canceled it as subordinate ally with Tataro-Mongolian khanate, claiming themselves as "proudly origin of Rus'".
Don't be misleading : Russia is not the same as Kievan Rus'. They pretending to be look like and you thought that, but in reality they country origins was a threat to the Rus' from the early beginning.
That is not the truth since through history, the sovereigns of Muscovy were the sovereigns of all Rus.
@@Nista357 British dynasty are German lmao
@@vladyslavkarpenko9372 Only problem is that it is a lie 😁
@@vladyslavkarpenko9372The name of the Kievan Rus at the time of its existence was literally "Rusia"
I believe the historical mistake Putin refers to is not the independence of Ukraine gained in 1991. But the “creation of Ukraine by Lenin”. It’s popular narative that neglects the existance of Ukrainians and claims that the language was artificially created. And so was the country that supposedly never existed was created by Lenin.
@@poushie1233so were a Kuban state, a Crimea state, a North Karelia state and many others... It was one of many nonviable statelets created in the chaos of the Russian revolutuon that died as it settled down and went into obscurity.
Watch
Europa @ the@last@battle
Everyone it’s all there.
That's because Ukraine never was a country before and never had a government. That's why truthful Ukrainians who left Ukraine 20 years ago say things to me like.... "back in Ukraine 'everyone' knows they are just Russians!"
Only recently have I discovered your channel. Thank you for your videos. You focus on evaluating sound logical arguments. Your channel is definitely worthwhile subscribing to.
He's an idiot who doesn't know what he is talking about in this video.
My maternal grandparents were Ukrainians who immigrated to the United States some time prior to World War I. Prior to the War, Ukrainians living in Europe did not have a state of their own; rather, they resided mostly in Austria-Hungary or in Russia. In getting to know my grandparents from early childhood forward, I was acutely aware that they regarded themselves as ethnically Ukrainian, with a distinct language, culture and sense of national "self" that was distinct from, albeit related to, that of Russia. If from the standpoint of childhood ignorance you asked them if they were Russian they would rebuke you, emphasizing that they were Ukrainian. My experience with my grandparents and with the community of Ukrainian immigrants and second- and third-generation Americans of Ukrainian ancestry in my hometown, all sharing that sense of Ukrainian nationhood (not statehood, mind you, but of being a unique nation or people) leads me to reject Putin's first argument.
Could it be that your absence from life of Ukraine as a nation generates compensatory balancing which attempts to strengthen your ties to ti given that US encourages such hereditary consciousness in its citizenry?
Thank you for your explanation 👍
Glory to Ukraine 😍 💕
To a large degree, Putin is throwing things at the wall to see if anything sticks. It is the third argument, that Russia is threatened, that I agree with, but that I am surprised that Putin made. (I would expect him to perceive that as making him look weak.) All rhetoric aside, the primary purpose of NATO is to eliminate Russia as what is left of the Soviet Union. It is not my place here to say whether that is a good or a bad thing. But it is obvious that survival instinct would dictate that Putin oppose it. And NATO encroaching on Russia's doorstep is the Cuban missile crisis in reverse.
I would suggest that most people who say the invasion was unjustified simply believe Russia has no right to exist, but would shy away from saying it so bluntly.
The Ukraine literally means the Borderland. Whose borderland was it? Kiev was the Russian capital and moved to Moscow when the Ottomans threatened invasion. Other slavic and germanic people immigrated later. As Putin said - they are related by history and blood
Why do you have a Hungarian name then?
Putin seems to talk about Ukraine the same way Hitler spoke about Austria...
Exactly!
@@makmado yes
and after that he will always find excuse
How....they brought nato to his doorstep and are surprised he reacted...hypocrite
Hey man, Hitler breathed air too, watch out now
the difference is that the anschluss war fine
None who claims eastern Ukraine had a russian identity and wanted to separate, can name a single separatist movement in Donbas before 2014, or give any numbers on the size or popularity of it. Because there was no such movement. Russian speaking ukrainians are russian as much as english speaking Irish people are british.
Have you heard of 2014 Maidan coup? That changed things forever. Ethnic Russian Ukrainians were burned alive in Odessa.
Absolutely. Ukraine was warned by Russia in 2013 - when they were about to sign a trade deal with the EU - that separatist movements could 'spring up'. Yes, I'm sure these separatist groups just spontaneously appeared and weren't sponsored by Russia. From a 2013 article in The Guardian:
« The Kremlin aide added that the political and social cost of EU integration could also be high, and allowed for the possibility of separatist movements springing up in the Russian-speaking east and south of Ukraine. He suggested that if Ukraine signed the agreement, Russia would consider the bilateral treaty that delineates the countries' borders to be void.
"We don't want to use any kind of blackmail. This is a question for the Ukrainian people," said Glazyev. "But legally, signing this agreement about association with EU, the Ukrainian government violates the treaty on strategic partnership and friendship with Russia." When this happened, he said, Russia could no longer guarantee Ukraine's status as a state and could possibly intervene if pro-Russian regions of the country appealed directly to Moscow.
"Signing this treaty will lead to political and social unrest," said the Kremlin aide. "The living standard will decline dramatically … there will be chaos." »
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/ukraine-european-union-trade-russia
Though they may have been seperatist sentiments, they seem to have been exacerbated and amplified beyond their actual scale by Russia, and prevented from entering into peaceful negotiation by Russia. @@agh0x01
This makes sense. But I don't know if the Russian government oppressed Ukrainian people in the Donbas the sane way as the British government did to the Irish people in the 6 counties.
@fartsfartington9019 Moscow rule over/colonizing of Ukraine before independence 1991 can be compared with British rule over Ireland (including a gen*cide by starvation). Moscow rule after 2014 has turned the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk into a fiefdom of competing warlords, where there is no law except the law of violence, Moscow controls all information, and there are tоrt*re chambers and basements for those who don't comply. Thousands of Ukrainian men in occupied Donbas have been forced into the russian army and k*lled. The (russian) author Sergei Medvedev called the occupation Russias "Jіhаd in Donbas" and compared it to being ruled by ISIS or a South American drug cartel.
If you consider that mass graves and tоrt*re chambers have been found wherever Ukraine has liberated occupied territory, imagine what life is like in the still occupied territories. Or what kind of society you have where occupation has gone on for 10 years.
you had me at your disclaimer. It's just my 2nd video of your to watch. Direct and clear. lovin' it
Same
Putin starts by saying Ukraine is really Russia. But, it could be said that Russia is really Ukraine.. if you want to go back far enough. Then he laments Ukraine being armed by other nations. But, Ukraine was already armed until they signed the agreement for their sovereignty which included giving up its arms. By attacking Ukraine, Putin has proved Ukraine needs the protection of NATO.
Fine, let's go far enough and say that Russia is really Ukraine. That's great for Russia, which is really Ukraine, because that would mean that Kyiv is trying to separate from real Ukraine, so Moscow have every right to prevent separatism in its country. Now this conflict seems no more than an internal one, and it's specifically Ukrainian. West interfering with Ukraine internal conflict is violating international law and encroaches on Ukrainian sovereignty. Why did not Putin said that from the start? Seems like a blunder to me
Don't forget to take your covid injections. And all the boosters
You are leaving many details
ukraine can protect itself without nato. The talk of joining nato is part of the ptoblem. Ukraine should be neutral like austria after world war 2. Or finland before this current war in ukraine.
Too bad that even with the help of NATO they are still losing and badly, so yeah if Russia produces right now more military equipment than all of NATO combined (according to NYT and other Western sources so not Russian propaganda) then kinetic force will decide who is right
I cannot thank you enough. When someone asked "Where can I get unbiased news on this?", I thought of you.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if people listened to this type of news instead of Fox and CNN?
@@ElectronFieldPulse yes, but no. Let those shitty channels remain shitty and get outcompeted.
@ElectronFieldPulse just watched it and it's no different to CNN's view.
This video is too heavy on intellectualism to appeal to most people. Being smart and observant is "woke" now.
I am a russian speaking ukraining all my life and I didn't feel any oppresion, trevelled around the country (also in ukranian speaking areas) and didn't encounter alienation or watever. And you can occasinally meet some degraded people under some substance in any country. I didn't see any 'torch marches' as in nazi germany in my entire life. Only on russian TV and I belive their frequency and extent was not more than in russia itself. Some minority extremist gatherings did happened in Ukraine but their activity is not more than in any other civilized country. Definitely not the goverment stance.
Regarding arson in Odesa the proper investigation and punishment of the guilty never happened and there has never been official findings announced. Some local officials in charge fled to other countries. As I understand the goverment decided to keep silence about the event. That's sad to say the least. At least they could punish for criminal negligence...
I do agree with the points stated in the video. Our country has a lot of problems and controversies but they only were used as excuse for casus beli.
And lastly you can see very clear picture of their intentions if you watch russian TV. After two years of war they are not shy to state their intentions anymore right on the state TV. You don't need a lot of political background for this. There are a lot videos with english subtitles from russian TV.
Thanks!
There is always justification for anything. If you are stronger, you make the rule. Just ask the US. Borders always move around throughout history. Just ask Israel.
I have decided to conduct Z Special Military Operation
Previous, illegal, action does not justify further action. "Well, xyz murdered someone so why can't I?"
Just because it happens does not mean it is right.
@@ThePereubu1710 If the most powerful and most respected nation does it but not only gets away with it but convinces every other nation on the planet to join I'd say that justifies it.
So crime is a useless concept to you? Everybody should do whatever they want no limitations, if someone did it before, and got away with it?
A small observation regarding the NATO point: Russia has never been invaded since NATO was formed (but, as a side note, has happily invaded other countries). If you look back at the last 220 or so years, the time with NATO is actually the longest time period for Russia without getting invaded.
1812 Napoleon
1853 Turkey in the Crimea
1905 Japan in Manchuria
1914 Germany & Co in WW1
1941 Germany & Co in WW2
Now that's not an argument in and of itself, as there are many other factors than NATO playing I to that, but still important to note.
It just makes Putin's whole NATO-is-such-a-threat rhetoric a little less persuasive.
Now let’s take in the fact that nato was created to keep Russia from expanding. We can easily see how much nato has expanded, slowly inching closer to Russia.
There were past agreement made for nato to not keep expanding toward Russia borders. No country wants a threat at there border. The Cuban missile crisis didn’t go well.
There is a professor on RUclips who talks about the complicated problem but it is worth looking into to have a little background into this conflict.
@@danjacobs6219 you probably mean Dr. Mearsheimer. I've watched his stuff, it's good input. But his approach is very focused on purely strategic thinking and only on the great powers. Here's a few thoughts:
NATO expansion: a free and sovereign country joins a coalition based on its own free will. Handshakes and aperitifs follow.
Sovjet/Russian expansion: Russia threatens and then invades a nation that mostly doesn't want to join them. War, death, destruction and suppression follow.
In Mearsheimer's presentations, those things come across as equal. I beg to differ.
Talk to a Polish anti NATO citizen and then talk to a Tchetchen war orphan. See who suffered more under the respective faction's expansion. (the first Russian invasion into Chechnia happened before NATO expansion, by the way)
Let's not only think of the two big factions but also of the fate of the people living between them.
Again, I'm not endorsing all or even most of NATO's behaviour. They sure have their points to blame. It just seems to me that Russian / Sovjet behaviour is usually 10 times worse.
TBC
@@danjacobs6219you forget most of those countries wanted to join NATO because of Russia's aggression.
@@danjacobs6219It is very simple, Finland and Sweden joined NATO as Russia invaded Ukraine. The warsaw pact states and baltic states joined NATO to not be victim of Russian aggression. We see states who protect their interests against an aggressor.
@@TorianTammasRussia did not invade finland during soviet era, and finland stayed neutral. Now that russia is weaker they pose a bigger threat than during cold war. Are you serious?
P.S. Saying soviet era may be misunderstanding, lm referring about the cold war, since winter war can be technically said to have happened during soviet era.
Thanks
Russia now has a much longer border with NATO since Finland joined NATO. Which happened precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine. As Homer Simpson would say... "Doh !"
😂😂😂
Yeah, Putin should have stopped advertising NATO if he didn't want it to grow. But instead he is undertaking the biggest ad campaign for NATO in history.
Finland was never a friendly nation to them. Finland was on Nazi side in WW2. There are no family or cultural connections between Russians and Finns. So all in all Finland was treated by Russia as a potential enemy all along.
With their Ukraine invasion, Russia also now has a direct land bridge to crimea and so access to the Black Sea. With their naval base in Syria, that gives them even further influence in the Mediterranean. Their geopolitical aims are levels beyond what you know.
@@sharrk_34 your geography is shocking .... Russia had access to the black sea without taking Ukraine.
If the people in eastern Ukraine who fled at the beginning of the invasion really wanted to be part of Russia, wouldn't they have ran to Russia instead of heading west?
About 6 million Ukrainian refugees have been accepted by the Russian side
Also you should consider the fact that non of ex-KGB agent's spoken statements does not reflect his real intentions and underlying reasons. Statement of him is an instrument of achieving his real goals but not a mean of communication.
The days of marching into a country and saying "this land is ours now and if you don't like it we are going to fight for it" are long gone now. Putin is 100% wrong. Just let the Ukrainians live in peace.
the bigest mistake is to apply individual morality to nation states.
Nations are made up of individuals. Those individuals make decisions. Nations are just responsible as individuals are.
Truly outstanding. Thank you.
Thank you for your overviews, which are always as logical, unbiased and simple as possible.
I follow you with interest from Italy. I hope your channel grows, it is a great format!
Accurate
Not too accurate fron 7min.
The channel by Patrick Lancaster proves that Ukraine is the aggressor
Also look up The Grayzone by Max Blumenthal
13 killed in trollybus attack
ruclips.net/video/8OYVmkvki7Y/видео.html
Elderly live underground in fear
ruclips.net/video/-brDwwkHUdw/видео.html
The analysis is right, the conclusion is a bit off. The fact that Russia had warned the west for years, the west are ignorant to take it seriously. You think a few days before the war could result anything? The west is lead by bunch of weak men. That's the natural result. As they say, strong men creating good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times ...
Outrageous claims of an authoritarian dictator should not be given any merit. The Russians chose violence, so not only is the immediate condemnation appropriate, but also necessary in exterminating authoritarianism from the world.
Let us be clear in regard to the Russian/Ukrainian war: The relationship between Russia and Ukraine became, in the time of the Soviet Union, a marriage of convenience not of love. When the USSR broke up, in a time of weakness the ruling elites of both nations put up with each other. But when Russia became stronger and a divorce became inevitable, Russia did not want to split the house and the kids so now to forcibly settle the issue its way, it terrorizes the wife and her kids and makes their lives unbearable and even desires to kill her and her kids. This is the mindset of the Russian elite and for this reason they are now treating Ukrainians like rats, taking away from them the necessities of life.
My strong wish is that the Russian population will not support their elite in these awful crimes and will find the courage to oppose those that have brought so much suffering to the Ukrainian population and to a lesser extent the Russian population as well. Russia could live very well without any of the acquired Ukrainian territories. The greater weapon needed right now is against a prideful and hateful Russian elite and the portion of the population that supports them. This weapon can only come from Russian people of common sense, Russian people of integrity, and Russian people who truly love God who with courage show their opposition to the Russian elite who has misled them. Many of the Russian media members should be ashamed of the statements they have allowed themselves to make and repeat. In their conversations they have put God aside and for this cause they have become foolish.
will you find courage to oppose western military excursions?
@@account-369 he spilled same shit westerners say when they try to "buy" you with sweet words. And they play us everytime. That's just who they are. There is a saying, everytime west tries to silence somebody, in most cases, he is doing something right.
If Ukraine and Russia are the “same” (according to Putin), then why doesn’t Russia surrender its sovereignty to Ukraine?
Ukraine have been kidnapped by neonazi ideology, with support of USA.
Thats why there isnt a conversation, the talks are now in the field
Because Ukraine would give said sovereignty away to the US as it gave away its own.
"They are our brothers, same family." So lets make war on them!! Seems a strange reckoning.
You just told a blatantly explicit lie concerning negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, they both had a talk literally days before the invasions. When the president Putin invoked the national security issues regarding NATO's potentially deployed weapons by Russia's borders, Zelenskyy rejected any compromisation or negotiation concerning the topic saying "Ukraine is an independent country and has the right to its choice whether to join NATO or not". Blatant lies do not change truth even if well produced!
Well said, while I like his educational videos, I also listen to his disclaimer at the beginning and read for myself….he clearly presents his bias when saying things like “I am not going to get into that” - why not Ryan? Is it because of the double standards? Willful ignorance only creates a biased perception of reality…😅
@@sirjaymacthegreat You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone.
Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit.
Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical.
Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable.
There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor.
We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it.
There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity.
An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive.
It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely?
We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._
What does all that tell you?
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone.
Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit.
Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical.
Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable.
There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor.
We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it.
There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity.
An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive.
It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely?
We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._
What does all that tell you?
3:42 A more appropriate analogy, in terms of geographical proximity and culture, would be England saying that independent Ireland or Scotland would be a mistake.
It would be an even better analogy to say that US wanted to capture Britain based on the fact that they share common blood and language and used to be in one country
If by Ireland you mean Southern Ireland, it is an independent state. Saying that an independent Scotland would be a mistake is hardly analogous to invading a peaceful country.
@@terryhand the key words are “geographical proximity” and “culture”. Please pay attention.
@@BuckeyeRutabaga
Your analogy stands.
Just add language to it. What's spoken in Scotland is a variation of Middle English, much closer to modern English than Ukrainian is to Russian.
Or US could argue the exact same thing about Canada.
Human beings will always have bias. What I love about this man is that he tries his best to overcome his bias and be as objective as he can. Ryan Chapman, keep doing what you're doing, I'm all for it.
Nice way to treat “family”
The ukraine scenario is closer to ireland than the usa. Also russia published their views on a new pan-european security architecture, they were ignored and the media dismissed russian concerns.
In return for withdrawal & dissolution of ussr, certain conditions that were promised by the west were broken. We know this based on declassified files, biographies & transcripts.
Can you please provide me further resources on those broken promises?
Thanks.
The broken promise that is being vaguely referred to were comments made in 1990 by US Secretary of State James Baker. Baker had specifically promised the Soviets that NATO would move “not one inch eastward”. However, this was never codified in any treaty or agreement that came as a result of the talks this statement was included in, and the USSR collapsed shortly after, completely changing the security situation that the talks were about in the first place. As it stands, there is no binding promise/agreement that prevents NATO from allowing countries east of Germany to apply and join. Putin knows this. It’s nothing but rhetoric to gain sympathy for his unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. Don’t fall for it.
Also, the Soviets never agreed to dissolve. The Warsaw pact countries left the pack after the USSR demonstrated it wouldn’t stop them. On the other hand, the republics making up the union took the opportunity of Russian weakness to get themselves out from under the thumb of Moscow, and each declared independence. It turns out authoritarianism isn’t popular with the people that are suppressed by it.
@@bkc7890
Thanks for sharing that info but what about Russia's security irrespective of whether that promise was never officially ratified.
Doesn't Russia have a legitimate case to be made regarding Ukraine being allied with the West and showing no commitment to not ease up its attacks on the separatists?
How could this not be a serious concern that Russia is being forced to confront?
@@LouisGedo The separatists are propped up by Russia and don’t have nearly enough local support to survive on their own. They would have been crushed in 2014, when the Ukrainian military was practically nothing, without Russian intervention.
As for promises made, the administration who made that uncodified promise is no longer in power, meaning the promise doesn’t exist between the US and Russia. Also, it was the Soviets that the promise was made to technically, not the Russian federation, so another degree of separation. An actual treaty with that promise in it would have made it a justifiable argument, but since it was not a formal agreement, there is no responsibility to hold it up.
As for actual broken promises and formal agreements, the Russian Federation signed the Budapest memorandum in which they agreed, in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear arms, that they would guarantee Ukrainian sovereign territory as it was. Fast forward to 2014, they’re annexing crimea and propping up separatists because they disagree with the direction Ukraine wants to go. Fast forward to 2022, they are invading the rest of Ukraine.
re: 10:45 , Ryan
what leaders begged Putin to negotiate?
There were only two that mattered: Presidents
Zelensky and Biden
Please!! refer me to where either of them offered to institute the Minsk agreement as an alternative to war. or did Biden urge a backing off of Zelensky's Munich intimation that he needs nuclear weapons. I do remember Blinken referring to Russian proposals as " non-starters"
He's biased.
He didn't even talk about the coup lead by the US, the non respect of the NATO extension and the minks agreement.
Also the attacks on donesk are well documented but he didn't even take a glance at it.
It's not the only video where he is showing history on one side. It's the same for his video on China & Taïwan and even on the 2nd world war.
This is a representation of our western media nowadays. They are ready to rewrite history to follow their narratives.
Bingo! Where is everybody now to reply on this question.
I don't think it was a valid reason to invade Ukraine.
He kept saying he was responding to NATO expansion. - NATO wasn't really expanding, nations wanted to join because they felt weak to a foreign attack.
He then said that there were NAZI & Neo-NAZIs still running around in Ukraine, initiating a special force and start a war.
He then said that Ukraine Govt was a rebel regime.
Logic says Russia doesn't have a good reason why it invaded Ukraine. Narcissist nations will take anything as an offense if it thinks somebody will invade it for no reason.
Its ok to have your own identity, it is not ok to change others identity to match yours.
So no, it is not justified. Don't let that big head of yours hit the door frame when you walk out on your last day in office.
I dont support any agression at all but I tend to believe its a bit more complexe than that. We have to keep in mind that NATO was initially created to counter the soviet threat(aka russia). So therefore its fair to say putin is paranoid of an attack from the west and acted desperatly to counter their influence.
Also, my next point isnt backup from a source but simply from a historical point. Ukrain is one of the few country that didnt get a proper de-nazifaction. During ww2 when the german invaded the soviet, the ukrainian that saw the german coming praised and cheered for them calling them their savior from the soviet monster. Unfortunately, they didnt knew back then how terrible the nazi were so most of them saw them as liberator/hero. After the war, ukraine fell back in soviet hand and experienced many future atrocity.
The illegal rebel regime accusation is a dumb reason from putin tho
Interesting take if else I would love to hear you tought on this !
The argument against Putin's second point is, 1. Zelenskyy had said he would abandon any attempt to join NATO. 2. Olaf Scholz had already stated that "as long as he was Chancellor, he would not allow Ukraine to join NATO.
The NATO charter does not allow countries which are engaged in civil conflict to become members. For as long as there was fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine was not going to join NATO.
And yet, Blinken & co. kept going on about an open doors policy. Zelensky later went on to admit in an interview to CNN, that he was explicitly told that Ukraine would never join NATO or the EU, but that they would publicly continue to claim they would. So it looks like the West was deliberately bluffing in order to appear strong and tough to Russia, and inadvertently made things worse in the process.
This whole situation reminds me of a situation we had on IRC back in 2014 where two of my staff members were acting all tough and uncompromising to a guy to the point that the guy got pissed off and began DDoS'ing us hard. Then, when I realized that literally the only way to resolve the situation was to negotiate with him, and actually resolved the situation, I was called weak. Then, it all repeated with another guy (those two clearly learned nothing), and once again, I was demanded to never negotiate, never surrender... well, all until we did the maths and realized we needed €5000/month tier anti-DDoS protection to block the guy's full capability, so we once again realized that negotiation was the only way to get out of it, which at that time, meant kicking the entire channel where it all started, ie. complete capitulation.
Sure, one could say that me negotiating with the first DDoS'er emboldened the second one, but one could easily claim that in fact, those two staff members of mine acting all tough and uncompromising until we got DDoS'ed, was what actually emboldened the second one as he had learned from the first one that the only way to get the staff to act reasonably was to DDoS.
And I think that could easily apply here - in all its acting tough and uncompromising (while behind the back, in fact doing exactly what Russia demanded them to do), they inadvertently angered Russia to the point of invading Ukraine. And I suspect that now, even if they finally make concessions to Russia to end this war, they have already ensured China invades Taiwan, as they have likely made China think that the only way to get concessions from the West is if you do something unspeakable that will shock them. Ie. just like in my IRC situation 2014, the Western leaders here have, with their tough and uncompromising stance, started a chain reaction that will only end well with the West's complete capitulation. Well, if China does decide to have its own go, the West *may* be able to deter them if they show they learned their lesson and this time, making concessions.
@@OBrasilo Taiwan and Ukraine are completely different situations. Taiwan (the Republic of China) has been a part of China since at least the 17th century, and as the last refuge of the Chinese nationalist government it sees itself as the legitimate government of all China. Any conflict between Taiwan and China would just be a resumption of the civil war that ended in 1949. Ukraine was granted its independence by the USSR, who were also a guarantor of its sovereign integrity. As a sovereign independent nation surely Ukraine has the right to determine its own destiny. Putin complains about NATO and the EU constantly encroaching on Russia, so Putin needs to ask himself why former Soviet republics don't want to join with Russia? Putin believes in a Russia as set by Aleksandr Dugin in his "Foundations of Geopolitics" and since he came to power has been working to bring it to fruition.
the argument is “trust us bro, we wont do it”.
like they did in 1999 and 2004 and 2007 and 2009 and 2017 and 2020.
sure anybody in the russian government will believe this, lol
Just checked out your video titles and I’m blown away. You got me hooked upon your way of thinking!
Wait, if improving your security at the expense of another nation's security is bad, what is improving your security by invading another nation?
Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure how Ryan didn't see that and thought it was a good argument.
Both are bad. What should have been done was a balance maintained, but sadly.
@Com K well then don't bullshit me about it. I just think that ideally, two larger nations shouldn't use smaller nations sandwiched between them as chess pawns. Although that's not going to happen in my life.
@Com K Surprise: people who don't fight in a war, have this choice of remaining neutral. Also, when I talked about two large nations, I in no way included Ukraine.
@@landmerry_6742 Russia didn't respect Ukraine's sovereignty. Simple as that. Can I tell you what to do if I'm not harming you? You will get on your knees when they want you to.
Could you do a video on if the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia in 1999 was justified?
Why can't you make it yourself?
@@robertbones326 I'm not really a youtuber, I'm just giving a suggestion, is there a problem?
@@ОлгаЦветковић
Why is it important?
I think EU inaction at the ethnic cleansing next doors was shameful.
@@SusCalvin
Says an anonymous user with no experience in foreign policy what so ever.
I might be mistaken, but there is also fourth argument. They also condemned NATO's (or EU's, I don't remember exactly) East expansion a lot, stating that it contradicted agreements made in 90ths.
and the eaatern expansion is now proven correct by this invasion and talks of attacking finland and estonia
@@PolishBehemoth that sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy. Nato keeps expanding, going against the promise that they wouldn't and reach a critical red line. This forces Russia's hand to invade Ukraine to make a point and somehow this proves that Nato expansion was necessary? The West (the US in particular) is just as guilty of this war as Russia is if not more in my opinion.
NATO I believe, yes. Trading blocs like EU are a lot less scary than military alliances with collective security pacts like NATO.
Putin’s reasoning has always been intellectually dishonest. It’s true, Russia probably does feel threatened by Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership. However, Russia has proved time and time again that they are the type of threat that NATO exists to quell in the first place. As an analogy, Putin crying about Ukraine joining NATO is like a bully beating you up because you told the teacher about him bullying you. It doesn’t hold up, and no one who isn’t already compromised believes them.
its the same as JFK and the cuban crisis, no one wants nukes on their doorstep
Russia has proved time and time again that they are the type of threat that NATO exists to quell in the first place... sounds like all your reasoning is "Rusia is a bad guy". same story telling applies to Iraqis and Afganistan ... list can go on and on.
Creating and naming enamies are the reasons for thousands years of human wars. a nation or a group of nations seeking absolute geo-political advantage and absolute security over others won't make you safe. the other end of the road is either you destroy your enemy, like Iraq, or set fire on yourself. remember Rusia has nuclear weapon. you may have many smart strategies to win the war and gain absolute advantage over Rusia except one for peace with giving your opponent some room to survive.
Russia never attempted to even one time step across its borders until it was provoked by the West's effort to encroach upon Russian borders via NATO expansion. If NATO had kept its promise made in 1990 not to expand, this war would not have taken place. NATO's behavior since the fall of the USSR has been anything but defensive, proving that it was founded upon offensive objectives.
Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada on the same premises, the US threatened ww3 in the Cuban crisis on the same premises. The invasion of Iraq ,Lybia and other place in the last decades are on even more dishonest premises. I have no support for Putin nor Russia but the level of hypocrisy displayed in the west is baffling. What Putin succeeded with this is to make it harder for a unipolar world to keep existing next time the drum of war will beat on media I hope that it get harder for those that have condemned Russia to pull of the bs out of their playbook. No one as a God given right to bully the rest of the world without being challenged.
Nato was created to bully and destroy the ussr. It was the original threat. It wasn’t created to oppose an actual threat, but only to destroy the economic enemies of the west. It is an arm of western capitalism.
I agree on you on the first two points. But in the last segment you said “they would first need to exhaust their diplomatic solutions.” I’m not sure if you know but the Russians had negotiated with NATO over 10 times to not spread their influence further east. You also state that “the world wanted Putin to negotiate” he did. Read about the Minsk agreement. In the first month of the war, Russia and Ukraine sent diplomats to Turkey to reach an agreement, they had concluded in the neutrality of Ukraine… Boris Johnson PM of UK told Zelenskyy to break off ALL DIPLOMATIC SOLUTIONS and then the war progressed. You clearly didn’t read enough about the topic, you would have known that there already was an agreement that was destroyed by a NATO member… hope you inform yourself a little better next time
Why should Ukraine seek peace with Russia after Russia had invaded? Why do you think Russia is even interested in peace? It just hit a children's hospital with cruise missiles yesterday. That's not an accident. Ukraine has no choice but to fight this war. It's being attacked every single day for the 29 months
Good video, the only thing that really bothers me is what the conclusion is based on in the end: "It seems like the opportunity for diplomacy was there and it seems that Russia didn't take it". It is impossible to know if this was the case, because the public is simply not in the loop. We have no idea what negotiations were conducted behind closed doors, so there is no evidence for your assumption that Russia was not willing to solve the issue with diplomacy in the end.
I am sure Russia was willing to settle the 'issues' diplomatically, but only by the Ukraine and NATO diplomatically granting all of his demands. Further, it is well recognized in contract law that you cannot make a valid contract by holding your gun to somebodies head. Similarly, in international affairs, negotiating while holding the threat of immediate invasion if you do not get what you want from the negotiations is not a valid negotiation tactic. Ergo, regardless of whether or not their were diplomatic contacts between Russia and Ukraine in the weeks immediately prior to the invasion, Russia did not use diplomacy to accomplish its ends.
They met multiple times and pictures were publicized
I agree. There were alternatives to war other than diplomacy and war. For NATO concerns, Russia could have improved its defensive capabilities. For the residents of Eastern Ukraine, Russia could have offered Russian passports, etc.
@@AdrienLegendre Russia DID provide russian passports to the residents of Eastern Ukraine since 2014 (and that's a violation of ukrainian law, btw) as well as to other people around ex-USSR territories, just to have an excuse to invade Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014, 2022) or, possibly, Moldova. Russia isn't interested in those residents (in fact, they were the first and the only (almost) victims of the invasion). They sent eastern ukrainian men to involuntary fight against their ukrainians brothers (and almost all of those who had been sent died), they literally destroyed almost every city and town and village where the slightest resistance was found, etc,etc,etc
Yes, i do know what i'm talking about, because i'm a russian citizen myself. Even more, my granny and dad were ukrainians from the future "separatists" territories, so yes, i know what's happening.
The only motive Putin has wasn't mentioned in this video. His real motive is to stay as a president for the rest of his life and that's it. He doesn't care how many millions would die. NATO argument doesn't make sense (Putin even said that Finland joining NATO isn't a threat, wtf?), it's just an excuse.
Oh, come on. There is a lot i could write on the subject but the truth is that ALL Putin's arguments were fakes and couldn't be taken seriously, because his goals weren't told.
No bad guy in chief would say 'I'm a big bad guy and i want to keep being a big bad guy and you all must do whatever i say because i'm a bad guy'. They always hide behind false reasoning and propaganda.
Russia signed diplomatic peace agreements in both September of 2014 and March of 2022,. Each of these deals were honored by Russia until broken by American-backed western Ukrainian forces.
Great analysis. Your videos are educational & informative. Glad i subscribed.
This video has tons of subtle biases that mostly make your analysis like all your videos a case of smug psudeo intellectualism with nothing but motivated reasoning, the most jarring example of this is 4:38. Simply put you lack the actual data to support your claim of the east supporting Russia and the west supporting Ukraine, no doubt you tried to find it but instead you need something that *SEEMS good like it supports your position* to the uncritical so you find a *LANGUAGE MAP FROM 20 YEARS AGO* rather than one that actually answers the question you asked. Logically just because you speak Russian doesn't mean you support Putin or wish to be annexed by Russia. Zelenksy is a native Russian speaker and obviously is very much against Russian integration.
I clicked on your timestamp at 4:38 and it just shows Putin speaking.
“ motivated reasoning “.
I like that .
Yes I heard a lot of word choices and framing that indicated bias and steering to s certain conclusion as well .
I like this person’s history videos but I am finding the ones on current events to be great examples of “ motivated reasoning “.
If you believe in eat or be eaten then you understand Russia position.
if u re paranoid, u can do anything
3:49 Canada would've been a better example as the US took independence whereas Canada was granted it
It’s always such a treat watching your content Ryan. Thank you for having the courage to tackle this subject. We HAVE to do a Podcast together!!
quick question "Where on earth do these logics go when Israel is being questioned?" You can question every religion(blasphemy), ideology(shraiah laws), people(American presidents), country (Russia) but its absolutely horrendous when u start to question Israel.
No it's not. It's probably the most criticised country after the US.
And Islam is basically not part of public discourse or questioned, at least in western countries, because they think pointing out the obvious flaws of it would be racist.
I dont think nato exspansion would be the line he would take. Because in the tucker interview carson layed it out for him to take that path but putin went on a historical rant, meanwhile Putin knew an western adince was going to consume it.
Sorry for the bad english
True, that rant was certainly wasting a good opportunity. Much could have been different if Putin had been a better communicator. He did eventually turn focus to the other points, but most viewers were gone by then.
I'm a Ukrainian from Donbas, east of Ukraine. I appreciate your efforts made for this video and the points mentioned. I also want to quickly say in regards of this map: 4:05. It doesn't show a divide between Ukrainians, nor it shows even divide between the east ond the west of Ukraine. It's just a picture published by somebody on Russian social media which roughly shows Ukrainians speaking Russian language VS Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian. While language never stops to be a big part of the debates within Ukraine, it was never such a big issue to start a war within. What happened is the other Russian invasion which they covered as a "civil war" proclaiming that they are doing that to save the "Russian speaking people", me including.
While being born in Donetsk region, I fluently spoke Ukrainian and Russian (the second was used more frequently as my region has been under Russian rulership for a very long time before we gained independence). That being said, I was never ever oppressed just because of the language I spoke. Russia exaggerated the "language issue" to absurdity just so they could invade us in 2014 (adding some other stupid "reasons" on the fly).
I still remember those weird people with different accent of Russian walking around the streets of my city with weapons that year. Nobody could understand what was going on. It never felt like a civil war no matter how hard Russians tried to create an image of such on their media. I literally want to vomit every time somebody says that was a civil war
But the majority voted for seperation from ukraine. I dont know if same could ve said for jews or tartar etc others who did not have stake in the situation.
30 years of constant brainwashing is taking it's tall...First of all, not Russia exaggerated the "language issue" to absurdity in order to invade you in 2014, but the US-Puppepts in Kiev when they had their first illegal(unconstitutional) meeting after the Coup in Kiev organised & paid by the CIA & carried out by NAZIS (Radical Ethnic-Chauvinists & Ukro-Supremacists) their first wish was to forbid the Russian language in Ukraine, which the CIA-Puppet Tourchinov vetoed against, but it was still pushed through by the pathetic beggars, liars & assholes Poroshenko & Zelensky in 2019 & 2021 meaning that the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine didn't have the same legal rights as the rest of the population. The Ukrainian "Elites" being not the most sincere or intelligent people in the Post-Soviet Realm, even invented a bullshit category of "Native Ethnicities" for the Ukraine of which of course Russians were excluded..The Russian Language when used by authorities & institutions personell as in media & publications is illegal, although 16 000 000(including 9 000 000 ethnic Russians) Ukros have declared it as their native tong...One can publish a book in pure Portuguese or Catalan in the Ukraine but not in Russian without adding a state-approved & legalised translation...We in Western Europe BTW call such a thing APARTHEID, how are you calling it? What you wanted to quickly say in regards of this map: 4:05 is Bullshit, it's not some map posted by a random Russian guy, but the map of distribution of the people who identify as ethnic Russians & that map also resembles almost exactly the distribution of votes during the last real democratic elections before the Junta in Kiev excluded more than 7 000 000 voters from the democratic process...this exclusion of the ethnic Russians from the democratic process was also one of the main reasons why the US Empire broke the Budapest Memorandum & destabilised the Ukraine through the extremely violent Maidan-Coup & the following "Anti-Terror-Operation" where NAZI Militia units like AZOV, Aidar, Right Sector, Dnipro etc. financed by Jewish Oligarchs like the mobster Kolomoisky & supported by regular Ukrainian Forces & aviation began a large scale Terror campaign against their own ethnic Russian civilians...The Russian military helped the Russian Civilians with the same right under which the US Military & NATO is helping now Kiev & under which the US destroyed Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya & Syria or how Georgia illegally invaded South Ossetia in 2008...
I'd like to have heard about the Minsk accord and the Ukrainian coup.
Is that because it distracts from Putin's own words and actions?
@@jakel8627 because it provides useful context
7:33 ''one country can't justify the invasion of another because they believe a government is being aggressive in a civil conflict''...
Really? What would be ''the proper'' justification then? Maybe claiming that a country has chemical weapons, which were never found? Or defending democracy? Or to free the people of another country from their government?
A perfect example of how the west uses liberal internationalism as an iron rod to criticise their opponents when pursuing actions aimed towards guaranteeing their State's safety whereas when they do it for not even existential safety reasons it is perfectly justifiable. Alexander Dugin is right in correctly assessing liberalism to have become stale and rigid and therefore totalitarian in its reaction to any sort of opposition to it.
I don't think he mentioned any of those as being valid justifications?
How does that make it any easier for us who live next to Putin.
Actually, those are wrong, too. Just like how the invasion of Ukraine was evil.
@@marinadowden6038 it’s more like the cuban missile crisis. When nato adds countries and puts arms in those countries aimed at Russia..they are threatened. The Minsk agreement was supposed to halt additions to nato. We, the west, broke the agreement 13 times. A Russian friendly government of Ukraine was overthrown by the USA. So why wouldn’t this be analogous to the Cuban missile crisis!!!
Great clear, succinct analysis, although no mention of the Minsk agreement?
Now, are there similar videos in the US Iraq & Afghanistan invasions?
I think his justifications are ultimately irrelevant. As our(NATO/US) response has more to do with our interest than the violation of Ukrainian sovernty. Like we litteraly did nothing in response to the annaxation of Crimia.
Putin has brought war to our door and challenged Western global dominance in a way that it hasn't been in decades. It is an open question if we are still capable of summoning the will to respond.
"Putin has brought war to our door"
No, he didn't. He brought war to HIS door.
Ukraine is not "your door", it's Russia's "door". You were trying to bring your soldiers to Russia's doorstep and now is trying to turn it around.
I assume you're from the US or England, you sponsored Euromaidan in 2014 (in RUSSIAS DOORSTEP) and now you're talking about Ukraine being your door...
You people are so cynical it hurts me.
@@devrusso I ment ideological doorstep not actual door. I also believe Puntin's fear of us putting weapons in Ukraine pointed at him is warrented because thats exactly what we where doing.
My point was he wanted smoke and we where selling wolf tickets.
Great. The world needs unbiased clarifications such as the one being related to us in this platform. Both sides of the story.
When you see a person being mercilessly beaten or a woman raped, do you intervene or wait till you get both sides of the story?
For all the facts.
Look up utube The Grayzone with Max Blumenthal, The New Atlas with Brian Berletic, Patrick Lancaster, George Galloway, Graham Phillips.
I will post some of their links in the next comment in case utube deletes
Also Jimmy Dore
BBC Newsnight 1mar2014
Neo nazi threat in new ukraine
ruclips.net/video/5SBo0akeDMY/видео.html
@@romany8125 and what point do you wanna make here, mind i ask?
Comparing a war where you can't even intervene and only watch one or both sides with something you could and naturally would intervene doesn't sound fair or relatable at all
And either way, let's say we could stop the guy who was beating the guy or "doing" the women, we (or maybe just the police) could still interrogate him and see their perspective (not trying to say rape and beating someone to death is something justified tho, just like this war, everyone is technically in the wrong)
I saw the Title, saw it was Ryan Chapman, and I busted out the tea 😌gonna be a good video
Yeah, but it was too short, Tohiko.
So he has two independent arguments for ATTACKING Ukraine and then cries when Ukraine wants to join a defensive alliance. Hilarious.
Oh yeah, the defensive alliance that bombed Serbia and Libya.
@@whatslifespurpose so long as Angelic Putin isn’t planning an ethic cleansing or persisting with violence in contravention of UN authority, yep, defensive.
@@whatslifespurpose
Defending others from aggression is still defence.
@@jakel8627with that logic you can justify anything
Libya was mostly a Franco-British job, just like Iraq was a mostly Anglo-American job. Other NATO members were not necessarily involved.
Belgrade is inexcusable, however.
Nice, concise analysis
@Ryan Chapman, You are awesome with your analysis. Literally all of the videos I have watched of yours are completely or as completely impartial as one can be. You objectively analyze to the best of your ability and I learn every time I watch your videos. Thank you. P.S. your channel deserves to be way bigger
It doesn't matter what justification there is. All that matters is that in the end, if Putin is able to conquer Ukraine without opposition or not. That's what history will write down. What the winner tells the world.
NO. Russian psychological insecurity does not justify invading surrounding countries to gain defensive geography. No one is invading Russia. Russia has poor performance record improving wherever they invade.
Great video, as usual! Keep it up! This kind of thinking is so useful in our world!
Even a smart guy like him can get hoodwinked by fake news. He is wtong from 7min
For the real facts
The Grayzone with Aaron Mate
The New Atlas by Brian Berletic
John Mearsheimer (watch him first)
Patrick Lancaster war journo in Donbass utube(his vids are difficult to watch)
Graham Phillips in Donbadd
George Galloway
I wiill try to pist sone links in next comment but most if nit all will be deleted by waartube
Dozens killed by cluster bomb in Donbass
ruclips.net/video/ANNhDKGjNK8/видео.html
Scott Ritter
ruclips.net/video/OSkpIq3T-Zc/видео.html
1min civilians who tried to evacuate were shot
ruclips.net/video/F3dv8Xxo0-Q/видео.html
DW deutsch 2mar2017
Azov in ukraine
ruclips.net/video/aXm_DyZJKZ4/видео.html
Hey. Will you do a follow up video on this. Just wondering.
Ooh look. There's my comment from a year ago...
😂
I’ve just subscribed to your RUclips channel after watching your excellent presentations on fascism. Your work is a gold standard for that rare commodity of well thought out, nuanced analysis of complex issues that employs with deftness social media’s extraordinary power to present visually and convincingly supporting evidence.
Indeed, "Gold standard" and "Ryan Chapman" definitely go together.
What has Putin achieved? Only that Finland and Sweden jas joined Nato😂
B/S Ukraine and Russia already had a negotiation...until the west and NATO squashed it....why? Because it is the west that wants to cripple Russia and have been working towards it since Putin became president...why because Putin would not allow the west to manipulate Russia as Yeltsin did....who has exspanded borders before 2014? Russia?
I just watched one of your videos on China which I thought was very well argued. In it you talked very perceptively about the West's linear way of thinking and contrasted it with China's lateral way of thinking. I think you could have approached this topic a bit more laterally and definitely with a bit more in depth research.
Me was looking for this comment
Are you looking for an exploration of Putin's psychology, or Russia's history of imperialism and dictatorship?
He tends to do this.
Interesting that you should bring up the Chinese. From my experience on zhihu (Chinese Quora), most chinese recognize that an invasion of another country's sovereignty is wrong, but also that sometimes this doesn't matter realistically enough when faced with strong threat or interest.
By that logic also, Ukraine cares not for the ideal of upholding international law and condemning the "wrong", but more about its own interest as a nation--not that I'd criticize this mindset. Much like the matter with Taiwan and China (whether you read the former as a province or more or less independent) , and by extension every area planning to declare some form of independence; techinically, self determination would be "correct", in moral; practically, it would be ambiguous; in terms of many nations' interests, its "correctness" could be easily overwhelmed, and even overrode by another such "correctness", more explicitly, "a government's first consideration is to its people".
Speaking of connecting Russia's invasion with our situation in Taiwan, most people also recognize and converse about how this would make China lose more moral highground internationally as the ccp is likened to the invading side. A significant amount of people also note that this must be intentionally done by western media, and as such, very little people will actually care about nuanced differences between the two circumstances.
*Just on a side note to provide evidence for my second point, a lot of Chinese were pissed and even stopped supporting Ukraine (mostly verbal support, but still) completely, when the latter complied with Japan's demand to take their emperor out of a video of the three facism leaders who initiated wwII and therefore various inhumane war crimes. Seriously, when it comes to the beef with Japan, it's an untouchable death zone with the Chinese public. Sorry Ukraine, not sorry.
So all things considering, Chinese do seem much more ambiguous dissecting this invasion by Putin. People condemn it, yes, but I must say half-heartedly, before moving on to other things like motivations and predictions.
I see what you mean about lateral thinking.
@@landmerry_6742 Russia and Ukraine's history. China at large and Taiwan's history. Two very different things, completely unrelated. The comparison is forced and pointless, though some Chinese may make the comparison (though I've seen no data on that, other than your opinion).
Internationally, and under international law, Taiwan's status is ambiguous. Ukraine's status is not. There is no question that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, fully separate from Russia. For what it's worth, the Soviet Union is dead, and upon its dissolution, treaties were signed.
Putin has no leg to stand on, which is why he's throwing a variety of fantastical propaganda themes at his population, even as the world rolls its eyes at his shameless b**ls**t.
Regardless of what some Chinese nationals may think, and whether they love or hate Ukraine and Zelenskyy, there is no valid comparison. (Did I repeat that sufficiently?)
11:00 I don't think that a good argument, since the world was "paying attention" to some degree to the situation in the Ukraine for several years now, yet the development has gone steadily against Russian interests. All diplomatic efforts at best stalled that development briefly.
And let's not forget the U.S. involvement in the recent political developments in the Ukraine as documented by the Nuland phone call. How justified were the U.S. kindling the conflict in the Ukraine that led to the present situation. After that Russia was presented with a fait accompli, and Putin didn't want to be presented with another done deal.
Another thing to consider is momentum. The decision to start a large scale conflict like the Ukraine-Russian war isn't as momentous as it seems. The hesitancy of western countries to get involved in that war shows the problem: They first need to get enough backing by their citizens, without that support they will lose power, and that also applies to Putin. But that support will wane over time, so it represents a window of opportunity.
Also the estimate of the geopolitical meaning of the Ukraine should include its economic meaning (a) because of the oil pipelines running through it and maybe more importantly (b) its importance as "breadbasket of Europe".
Note that all of the previous is based on a perspective of "global politics", the same global politics that is the basis for the wars in Irak, Libya, Syria, just to name a few. So while Putin should be condemned for starting that war in Ukraine, the same standards leading to that condemnation should also apply to U.S. and NATO involvements and wars in recent years and even more so in the future.
Condemnation followed very quickly
@@hrogarfyrninga3238 Sadly without effect, and at best sparsely from the established media, which is why, despite some condemnation, U.S. and NATO just did the same over and over again to several coutries.
@@Pengochan The US paid for the war in economic terms (cost them several trillion dollars) and they severely tarnished their reputation with it. They also never launched a full scale invasion and occupation ever since, rather focusing on limited scope military support or operations. Not saying what they're doing is good, however it's something all great powers tend to do. Russia has been doing plenty of that too and there was no big global reaction.
@@hrogarfyrninga3238 The U.S. tax payers paid. A lot of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors made a lot of money (and a part of that money is paid back for political campaigns of Republicans and Democrats alike, even if that's just a small part that results in huge paychecks), but all that is beside the point.
Apparently we agree that starting wars, even despite there may be a dplomatic way to avoid them is part of global politics by global powers. That's not a good thing but sadly reality.
So the question if Putin was "justified" is the wrong question here, and very subjective anyways. The proper question is: What should have been expected of him, could the U.S. and NATO have choosen another course long before to reduce the likelihood of that invasion, and why didn't they?
That Putin / Russia is the main culprit for the invasion is pretty obvious, but how much did the U.S. and NATO contribute to the situation?
@@Pengochan From what I can gather, Putin feels threatened by the mere existence of a Ukraine that isn't politically under is control. Unfortunately for him, Russia signed an agreement guaranteeing its independence. At a time, Ukraine had basically no army, he took away part of its territory. That was the point that showed the world he would take whatever he wanted i it wasn't sufficiently defended.
The only thing that may have stopped him is massive deterrence or the creation of a puppet regime like in Belarus. The latter wasn't an option for the Ukrainians. Since they decided to defend themselves as a sovereign nation and didn't want to align with Russia, I don't see what NATO could have done to prevent this situation.
NATO likely assumed Putin was a rational man and would not attack, considering the size of the Ukrainian army and the scale of its territory. Putin gambled on the assumptions he made according to the information given to him, both were flawed. Additionally, he has certain beliefs about Russia's history and it's place in the world that don't align with reality. Invading for him also helped seize back power he had lost within the regime. I don't know what kind of deterrents would have needed to be in place for Putin not to take this step.
In his mind, he would easily and quickly have overrun Ukrainian defences, taken Kiev, captured Zelensky and installed a puppet regime before anyone could have intervened in time.
4:10 There are no division into “eastern” and “western” Ukraine (as well as division into pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian, which even sounds absurd). It is just one of russian propaganda points. Btw it’s ironic, but not really surprising, that you use a map with russian spelling of Ukrainian names in this moment.
In fact there are some demographic differences as in any other state, but the majority of any part of Ukraine is pro-western and anti-russian. In 2014, protests in support of European integration took place both in Donbas and Crimea. A lot of modern figures of Ukrainian culture who advocate independence from Russia come precisely from the east and south of Ukraine (Serhiy Zhadan, Oleg Sentsov etc.).
You should research the subject better
Can you, or someone else, comment on what would justify an invasion? Is it too complex of a topic, or do you see a pattern or some kind of key points which when checked, would be a good start for a justification?
I come from a place where there's no "army" in its general sense, but a defence force. Thus both practically and ideologically, aggressively taking control of an area is only justified when it's a part of a defensive maneuver. That would, in itself, be comparable to the narrative that Putin is trying to paint, but to me it only works when you're already in a conflict, not as a reason to start one.
Another thing I fail to grasp is the "international law" about "ones defense cannot be heightened at the expense of others", or something along those lines. Where can I read more about that, as by the amount of information I got from this video, it hardly makes sense to me. While there are purely defensive weapon systems, a good defense cannot be obtained without the capability of strong offense. How can you strengthen your defense without heightening the risk towards your neighbors at the same time?
International law is very clear, Ukraine WOULD have the right to self defense as soon as Russian tanks and missiles crossed the border. As you will notice, virtually NO american invasion is justifiable along international law, thats why the US isn't a member of the International Criminal Court, which makes it pretty amusing to hear Biden talk about the ICC.
Its not complicated at all. If missiles are flying and borders are crossed, there is your justification. There is NO justification for Russia because even the cases they cited about missiles were in the east of ukraine, not russia. Where it gets complicated of course is when its NOT the national army setting off bombs. If the IRA set off bombs in London, as they did, that didn't mean you can condemn a whole nation, and thats the murky bit with ukraine.
@@mikearchibald744 You're right. It's pretty easy, actually. The aggresor is in the wrong, the defender is in the right.
@Josef K How do you starve a population without using violence?
@Josef K I don't think you can starve a population with those kind of measures, unless there is a country that is unable to provide food for itself. For example, Cuba has been isolated economically for many years and they are poor but they weren't starving. Also, not wanting to do commerce with somebody should be a free choice. I don't think you can starve a population without the use of violence.
@@mikearchibald744 There was an eminent threat cited by President Putin in that Ukrainian troops were gathering for an assault on the Donbas which was recognised as an independent region much as what happened in Yugoslavia and Russia sent the special operation to try to circumvent further attacks on the civilian population (since the US backed coup in 2014 NATO has sent weapons and trained troops including Na zis targeting Russian ethnic population). Russian troops entered the Ukraine under the article 51 UN Charter pertaining to preempting an eminent threat so it is a bit more complicated than your black and white view probably informed by extremely propagandised main stream media. Didn't you learn anything from the pandemic? And its not amusing that consecutive US governments have been guilty of egregious war crimes and are trying to extradite Julian Assange for no other reason but revealing their crimes while they continue to do more with impunity
> everyone begged him to negotiate
He's been trying that for 20 years lol
Yes this guy is very biased. Putin has been trying to negotiate for years idk what media this guy has been consuming not to know this
Not to mention the myriad times the west has undermined any type of diplomatic solution eg Minsk Accords
Using Putin's logic, we should have attacked the USSR when we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons based on the suspicion that they might become an existential threat in the future. Maybe we should have bombed China when the USSR wanted us to so they didn't become an existential threat.
Peter Zeihan has a hypothesis that Russia is attacking because it sees imminent demographic decline and it had to attack now because in the future, it would be unable to do so. So they must extend their borders to more defensible locations, plug certain natural invasion routes, and create defensive depth. If Ukraine fell, Moldova would be next, and then he'd do to the Baltics what he did to the Donbas. Putin thinks of the West as weak, corrupt, and too hedonistic to stand up to him.
My own feeling is that Putin envisions himself as Peter the Great mixed with a bit of Stalin. He is permanently locked into a Cold War mindset where the West is terminally weak and decadent but ideologically threatening. We were all deluded into thinking Russia had the 2nd best military in the world, and he shared that delusion. He also had a delusion that Ukraine was going to roll over and play dead. Putin's psychology is not to negotiate for something when he thinks he can just take it.
I don't believe he feared the West for a heartbeat. We all thought he had a military far superior to any individual military in Europe and more nuclear weapons than would be needed to deter any invasion. Ukraine was never getting into NATO. He had a grip on Europe's energy. NATO was braindead and it will be all over before the divided and narcissistic Americans can get their act together. He was given the information he wanted to hear and believed it without question because he needed it to be the truth.
Welp but from Putin's point of view at a military level, the "call to negotiate" could just be seen as a stalling tactic, as on the ground this situation is at the zenith of favorable conditions for his invasion.
Any later and the conditions of war become less favorable. So I'm not very surprised with his current perception, that he decided to pursue this line of decisions.
Generally, I appreciate the effort put into this video. However, I believe you have missed some critical aspects. For argument 1), you have confused the Soviet Union with Russia. While Russia was a major player in the USSR, not all of their leaders were even ethnically Russian, but other nationalities. Stalin was Georgian, Lenin was a true product of Russian multiculturalism and had a mixed background, Malenkov was Macedonian in addition to Russian, Krushchov was not born in Ukraine but was absolutely obsessed with Ukraine and practically was Ukrainian, Brezhnev claimed to be Ukrainian, but it’s a tough call. Gorbachev was Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish, Andropov is unclear, and so is Chernenko. Even with all that being the case, Ukrainian, modern Russian, and Belarusian identities are still forming, and prior to the Soviet Union, the Russian empire encapsulated these various identities (and the Soviet Union continued to do so). We can’t really say that modern Russia is the the same country as the USSR…at all. Putin said Ukraine’s formation was a mistake, but it was not a Russian mistake, but a Soviet mistake. Big difference honestly. He also did not say and has never said that he is considering removing or halting Ukraine’s independence. There is no evidence to suggest that Russia plans for expansion and/or is acting to take over, occupy, or control Ukraine, but of course they are offering to protect and take back Donbas land for the DPR and LPR, and as the situation unfolds, we will see what happens with Kherson and some other areas that wish to depart from Ukraine.
As for Crimea, which you didn’t talk about much, the 2014 referendum is a near identical vote to basically the same decision in the 90s. Overwhelming majority (over 90%) of Crimeans with over 90% voter turnout decided they wanted independence from Ukraine as part of Gorbachev’s Union Treaty. Ukraine illegally vetoed the referendum after the U.S. pressured the Ukrainian government, claiming that Russia could not have access to the Black Sea. If the US had not interfered in the 90s, Crimea would have left Ukraine decades ago. The same result occurred in this 2014 referendum - pretty clear that Crimea does not want to be part of Ukraine. My home town has a sister city in Crimea and everyone who has visited says the people consider themselves overwhelmingly Russian, not Ukrainian. Not a single person was killed in the 2014 transfer of Crimea…there were no deaths.
For part 2), while you could argue the semantics of genocide regarding Odessa, Ukraine’s continued bombing and serious violations of seize fires for 8 years in the Donbas could certainly constitute genocide. After the 2014 Maiden coup, the very first law passed by the new “government” was the banning of the Russian language in all public sector work. It’s quite terrifying. In fact, the DPR and LPR referendums were not for independence from Ukraine, but for autonomy within Ukraine…but despite this, Ukrainian government spearheaded by neo nazi battalions began the Anti Terror Campaign and began the assault on the Donbas, where cluster ammunition has killed civilians. Over 14,000 people on both sides (all pretty much Ukrainian citizens, mind you), have died since 2014. France and Germany signed a declaration agreeing to force Ukraine to uphold the Minsk Accord, but when Ukraine continued shelling of civilians, neither country did anything. Russian Parliament had been begging Putin to recognize the DPR and LPR and he was very hesitant to do so. In fact, he rejected the Parliament’s call for recognition of the territories in February 2022, and only finally recognized when shelling was continued during negotiations.
You say that Ukraine’s aggression does not warrant invasion, but I beg to differ. Someone needs to stop the death of innocent people. It’s not okay to let people die for no reason other than their ethnicity, language, and belief.
There is so much more to this than most people are aware of, and while again, I appreciate your video as one of the least inflammatory, I believe you are missing a lot of context and information which is absolutely critical to this situation. Ukraine’s policies of executing politicians, Western European and U.S. role in 2014 Euromaiden, CIA training program of Azov battalion, etc. all add to to the fire. It’s a horrible situation and it’s even more horrible that this has turned into a good vs evil paradigm. I highly recommend anyone interested in Russian relations to read Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria by Guy Mettan. I also recommend the following article by independent French Think tank: cf2r.org/documentation/la-situation-militaire-en-ukraine/
It is written by an ex-NATO official.
Anyway, thanks for the video - it at least sparks some more standard discussion of the topic.
Why did the ukrainian government start shelling its own people? Wasn't it a contermeasure against russian separatism? why didn't you include that in your little essay?
@wrijin I agree completely. In Denmark we have zero political will to acknowledge these matters, but they are very relevant in any decent objective analysis.
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone.
Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit.
Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical.
Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable.
There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor.
We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it.
There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity.
An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive.
It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely?
We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._
What does all that tell you?
This is cherry picking different parts of the "known" story to arrive at a pre conceived conclusion. we are 2 years in now and I am wondering if you want to revise this video to include what we now know about Minsk 1, Minsk 2, Peace negotiations at Istanbul to start with, also throw in some comparison to the Cuban crisis, the Monroe Doctrine. The threat is not a direct invasion by NATO , although Ukraine joining NATO would make that a stronger possibility, the threat is using Ukraine as a door to destabilize the RF and break it apart. This is why RF is less worried about Finland etc joining NATO compared to Ukraine which have stronger family ties. That being said, I have watched your other videos just finished How WW2 started and its very educative.
You haven't explained why Russia's invasion is justified.
Why do you think you don't need to explain why literally NO OTHER COUNTRY openly supports or sympathises with the invasion of Ukraine?
How can Russia perceive a threat, but literally every other country in the world views Ukraine as a relatively uninteresting country?
The answer to that question is that Ukraine doesn't pose a threat to any country because it has limited military capabilities and a small economy. The purpose of Russia's invasion is imperialism. To take the land and integrate it into Russia.
You cannot justify imperialism because no country participates in it or tolerates their neighbours participating in it. It's like making a moral argument for theft and assault.
Throwing around terms like "Minsk agreement" doesn't make you informed. You're pretending you have relevant information when you don't. Russia's aggression is not justified.
You need to listen to Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor. And you need to judge Russias actions against those of your own country’s.
They are both pro-Russian and a part of Russian state propaganda. Ritter is a pederast, and MacGregor is always wrong with his guesses. They’re a joke.
What about Minsk agreements. Could you please explain them
Short answer: no.
03:50 Actually, this was basically the war of 1812
Glad someone pointed out.... The British would’ve certainly reclaimed Js had they hv the power to do so
War of 1812 was started by the USA, not the UK. Various hawks and expansionists thought it would be a good opportunity to take Canada while Britain was occupied with Napoleon, plus they were annoyed at the Royal Navy's impressment of American sailors captured at sea, which is reasonable. Britain responded but not with much force as it couldn't spare them from Europe; instead the conflict was the making of Canada as local militias in conjunction with Native groups responded more decisively to the threat.
As a Russian, everything Putin says is not a justification but an excuse.
As a Russian, everything Putin says is a should-be obvious fact
His speech definitely sounds like he's trying to justify the unjustifiable.
@@icarusmakarov9365 just don't fact check him and you should be fine.
Actually when you look at the map of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Ukraine should be smaller than it is.
You need to be very careful about the term 'ethnic Russians'.
Just because a Ukrainian citizen speaks Russian as their language of choice does not necessarily mean they want their land to become part of Russia.
There were no separatist movements until Putin started sponsoring militant groups in 2014.
Sorry, but if we start redefining borders by ethnic lines, it's going to get terrible. Just look at the South East Europe for example. The idea that all members of one ethnic group have to live in one country is fascist.
Didn't the Soviet Union declare that Ukraine was its own country when they insisted it have its own UN seat?
I think you're not correctly evaluating the "opportunity for negotiation" that Putin had. He warned, in 2007, that the red line would be Georgia and Ukraine. from back then until this very year the west and Russia has been manipulating Ukraine's politics. I mean there is a record of Hilary Clinton literally choosing who's going to be minister of what in Ukraine, like " no I don't like that guy because (whatever), I prefer that guy " and so on. That's when Putin triggered the low key war that had been playing until the full on invasion. But we kept pushing for years and somehow Russia grew tired of us not listening to the "please stop expanding NATO" demands. Putin is the one that invaded but we clearly pushed them to do so. It is amazing how we continuously fail to see our faults up to a point where it's pathetic. But the real problem is that it makes sure that we'll fight until the last Ukrainian.
Our elite play lots of these games behind closed doors that the American Public is never made aware of
To be fair, this could've been handled with diplomacy if both sides agreed to stay away from Ukraine and leave it independent.
@@artorhenThe Ukrainian parliament wanted to approach the EU. President Yanukovytch refused after pressure from Putin. This led to a series of riots.
You know Russia has (according to the United Nations) destroyed or, quote, ‘damaged beyond repair’ roughly _80-95%_ of all the buildings in the city of Mariupol? Within the first three months of the war? That was a city with a pre-war population greater than 39/50 U.S _state capitals._ And it’s just fucking gone. It got Dresden’d. It got Hamburg’d. Berlin’d, Warsaw’d, Stalingrad’d, Rotterdam’d, fucking _Hiroshima’d._ It’s just gone.
Over 200 schools were hit within the first _three months_ of the war. The United Nations estimates over _10,000 cases of rape._ Civilian casualties likely exceed the amount of people that have died in fucking _Gaza,_ for goodness sake. We have _dozens_ of cases, all spread out, of Russian soldiers firing upon civilian vehicles. Kharkiv has been struck with over a _dozen_ missile strikes _every single day_ for over a _year_ now, almost all of which go on to strike purely civilian targets. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the 4th of April, 2024, Russia has bombed roughly ~1,682 hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine. Over _1,500 hospitals and healthcare facilities._ Like, holy fucking shit.
Ukrainian POWs are being released severely malnourished and mistreated. I watched a video of over a hundred Ukrainian POWs exiting a bus after finally arriving back in Ukraine following a prisoner swap, and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single one of them looked like they just walked out of fucking _Auschwitz._ I’m serious. I actually went and compared real photos of Auschwitz prisoners out of disbelief, and I’m dead serious when I say they looked almost identical.
Russia has been deliberately targeting energy infrastructure throughout the winter, and almost every single fucking day they hit another apartment complex. The global community overwhelmingly agrees they have been, and currently are, targeting highway intersections at rush hour. They are also being tried for simply fighting- which is a war crime. So is driving around in vehicles marked as ambulances, but we have photos of Russia doing that. We have Ukrainian civilians being forced to wear Russian uniforms so they get shot at by Ukrainian troops while they dig mass graves to put the bodies of _other_ Ukrainian civilians who died being forced to dig trenches.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and deported to what are literally called ‘re-education’ camps within Russia- hastily made prisons built out of former convention centres, and the like. There are dozens of reports of them being forced to listen to the Russian national anthem on repeat, being forbidden to speak Ukrainian, being told their parents abandoned them, etc. Do you not know just how many people… children, even… report not just witnessing torture take place, but _being_ tortured, personally? The sheer rate of human right abuses in these ‘re-education camps’ is actually fucking unfathonable.
There are _dozens,_ fucking _dozens_ of cases of them launching missiles at civilian structures, and then launching a _second_ missile roughly 30 minutes after. All the time. Over and over and over again. This is clearly an attempt to kill firefighters and medical workers- it’s called a ‘double-tap’ strike. Torture chambers are found en-masse wherever Ukraine liberates territory. I know of videos of fucking _children,_ crying, while confessing to having been tortured there. Apparently, the torture rooms for _children_ are just the same as the others… with the exception that they have _carpet._ That’s the difference. I remember reading testimony (from a fucking _child,_ my god), about a guy he saw hanging from the ceiling, suspended by hooks in his body, with blood pooling half an inch deep on the floor.
We have mass graves filled with literally hundreds of civilian bodies, many with their hands bound, being found in liberated territories. Bucha wasn’t the only massacre… it’s just the most well-known. Every other day we detect a new one that wasn’t there yesterday suddenly appearing in the occupied territories- ominously filled in holes in church yards and stuff. We see them appear on satellite feed. How do you explain a hole in the ground filled with 500 dead civilians… curiously, where 95% of which were women? Ages ranged from 80 year old grandmas to 6 year old girls. I’ve literally seen fucking photos of it.
There are videos, made by Russian soldiers, of them openly laughing about the war crimes they have committed. We have leaked footage of a Russian teleconference call literally discussing the logistics of kidnapping children. Russian state-owned media regularly features people openly advocating for the deliberate murder of literally millions of Ukrainians. I remember one clip I watched of someone suggesting Russian soldiers systematically drown Ukrainian children in the Dnipro river. Putin literally denies the existence of a Ukrainian identity.
An article was published exactly 48 hours after the start of the war, on the dot, by Russian state-owned media. It called for, quote, the ‘liquidation’ of the Ukrainian leadership; referred to, quote, the ‘Ukrainian Question’ (sound familiar?); and celebrated the assimilation and obliteration of Ukrainian culture. An exact quote is ‘did the old fools at Berlin and Paris think Kyiv would forever remain out of Russian hands? That the Russians would forever remain a divided people?’. Said article was taken down a few hours later, so clearly it was leaked by accident. Thankfully, it’s available on the Internet archive.
It also talked about Ukraine in past-tense, so it was likely published automatically, and intended to as a celebration for when Russia conquered Ukraine, which explains the to-the-minute perfect timing. It also just goes to show they really did intend to conquer Ukraine in mere days. Which makes sense, we found parade uniforms in the 60 kilometer long tank column that rode in a straight line directly towards Kyiv from the minute the war began, after all. You know, the one Ukraine blunted entirely?
We have over a dozen instances of Ukrainian soldiers being castrated- one of them was caught on video, for the love of god. There is literally a fucking example of Ukrainian civilians being murdered in a literally fucking gas chamber by a Russian general. But it’s just the one example, so no biggie, right? There were photos that surfaced of a Ukrainian soldier, whose head was _fucking decapitated and impaled upon a stick_ outside of Bakhmut. They literally _directly_ struck a tiny, 5x5 meter large _Holocaust Memorial,_ in the middle of an empty field, with no other buildings of any kind around for _ten miles._ It was just a small circle with a statue in the middle, dedicated to a massacre that occurred in that very field, miles away from civilization. It was less than five meters wide, and yet the _very top of the statue_ was _directly_ struck by a _precision guided missile,_ blowing it to pieces. A fucking _Holocaust Memorial._
What does all that tell you?
Can you correct the part where you said negotiations failed? Because there have been multiple treaties that delayed this invasion from 2014 to 2022. Additionally, the U.S. refused to negotiate in good faith since December 2021. And basically responded by sending more troops and arming Ukraine.
The very notion that the biggest nuclear state in the world felt "threatened" by a defensive alliance is so laughable i'm not exactly sure why it was adressed. Pure boring propaganda
@@hellfire6714 Why does the U.S. feel threatened by middle eastern countries on the other side of the planet. Iraq's invasion was not justified at all. Same foes for Russia, except unlike Iraq, Ukraine borders it. Additionally, Ukraine has historical ties with Russia. The U.S. has no historical ties with Iraq. The U.S. also invaded many Mexican states. Now the Mexicans themselves are considered alien in those lands. People forget that most southern states belonged to Mexico.
@@F_imperialists The year is 2022. The conflict is Ukraine - Russia. You got the wrong video if your mind is on Iraq. Also the "my great great great grandpa set foot here once so it belongs to me forever" mindset is what is killing the Balkans and a lot of other areas - argument built for those of low iq and high agression.
@@hellfire6714 You have to see the big picture. This conflict started in 2014. Please read the treaties between Russia and the west since then. This was long overdue mainly because of negotiations. And no, 1 million Iraqi died because of the U.S. invasion. We will not forget. If the U.S. will never forget 3000 in 9/11, then you should understand how much more pain the death of 1 million causes. Recently, the U.S. sent troops to Somalia again. This is 2022, the U.S. is still doing what it does best.... Invade and murder.
@@F_imperialists This conflicted, much every other Russian imperialist conflicted, started the moment an ex soviet state tried to poke it's head out of the gutter. Your "bigger picture" is bigger than you think. Russians think they own everything in the general area of their country. And I do mean OWN. This is a mindset you can only really understand by seeing it first hand
I've seen your video just now, and I'd like to point out the oddness of "Civil war" part, as there were not civil war in Ukraine between "east" and "west" of Ukraine, at least not since 1991.
I also think it to be worth mentioning that the war between russia and Ukraine started in 2014, yet it is 2024 when Ukraine faced the full invasion of its territories. Giving that russia invaded Ukraine much earlier, those reasons to invade Ukraine back then might also be worth taking into consideration ( I do not mean to say they are justified).
Anyhow, it was a nice try and though having quite a rough view on what was going on in Ukraine, the conclusion is the same - russia's aggression is not justified.
Sober. But sobriety rarely applies to geopolitics. He felt threatened and ignored on his concerns, so he acted. Our position that a sovereign nation should not be invaded removes warfare from humanity, and that's not a realistic perspective on why war breaks out. By using sovereignty as the bar, the West should never have had Gulf II or Afghanistan. Warfare is diplomacy, by other means- Clausewitz.
No. Russia was wrong.
11:03 All negotiations from November till February have failed. And each time Zelenskiy would start negotiations, somebody like Boris Johnson would fly over to stop them.
Regarding the argument of being threatened by NATO, I think we have to ask whether anyone reasonable could think that is a credible threat? Look how the US struggled and lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc. Look how Russia struggles in eastern Ukraine. How could NATO possibly consider invading Russia? You have to ignore the enormous nuclear arsenal, assume that the founding articles of NATO (that it is no threat to Russia) is an elaborate conspiracy between dozens of democratic nations, assume that the leaderships of all these countries are united in a fanatical desire to conquer the largest country on earth and somehow their electorates didn't notice, that the billion citizens of NATO would ever allow such a thing to threaten their lives and livelihoods. In my opinion it's ludicrous to imagine NATO would invade Russia, and we should not give credence to that as a justification for anything.
Agreed. NATO has and always will be a counterweight to imperialist intentions in Europe - including by the way those former imperialists within the alliance. Never has almost every smaller nation in Europe been allied in this way with a few superpowers included to add teeth. The only threat it poses to Russia is its imperialist ambitions. Which most of Eastern Europe is all too familiar with and doesn’t want to go back to.
"How could NATO possibly consider invading Russia?"
That is a great question. Russia has always kept to itself (not counting the recent events), yet NATO is constantly threatening Russia but expanding to it's near countries, trying to destabilize Rússia internally or just in general partaking into aggressive rhetoric.
We all know the west hates Russia, always did and always will apparently, so yeah, disappearing with Russia is westerners wet dreams ever since the red scare.
You have to ask yourself why John McCain was in Ukraine in 2014, why is Bidens whole family involved with Ukraine.
Maybe as someone from inside those countries, you don't easily notice such imperialistic moves like what happened in Ukraine in 2014, but I'm from Latin America and I know. As they say, we are "vaccinated" against this kind of stuff.
We can see western imperialism from miles away. And that's what NATO is: a bully, an aggressor who pretends to be the innocent.
@@devrusso a "nato is evil" argument doesn't address the point I was making that it is obviously not a threat to Russia. So using it as an excuse to wage war is disgusting. But there are so many like you blinded by hate that malign dictators literally get away with mass murder.
While invading and conquering is not feasible today there are other threats worth considering. Missile strikes, no-fly zones, port blockades and so on. And your whole argument about "elaborate conspiracy between dozen democratic nations", "fanatical desire" can be translated into "we are the good guys, we won't do bad things". Once one side obtains a leverage over other the rhetoric may and will be quickly changed to we "have the leverage and we can use it against you".
Oh and electorate would not notice, they would gladly choose smaller threat of a "swift conflict today" once they are explained to about the big global threat that Russia is. It is the same rhetoric at work in Russia today: "yes we face hard times today, but it is to ensure our security in the future".
There was the admittance of at least one US senator admitting of using Ukraine as a proxy. The possibility of bio-labs haven't been rebutted as well.
The US almost went to war for the same reason with the Cuba missile crisis. I personally can't blame them for going into Ukraine. Its just tragic the people who are caught in the cross fire of the fighting
They are a proxy bc the US and Ukraine provide value to each other. Being a US proxy is one of the best geo political outcomes a country can have.
@@Yakobis they provide value not to Ukrainian people nor US citizens, but the corrupt politicians in both countries.
@@immortallegend648 Ukraine is making more money selling to the west bc we have better markets and higher labor standards. The people are far better off with us. Putin is a weak a cowardly man who needs fear and cruelty to remain powerful. His regime will fall and the west will prosper.
First time in any of your videos, I feel like tilt towards a particular side. Arguments were fine but tilt was visible.
Question: Imagine in 50 years, Eastern ally were about to deploy strategic weaponry in Canada. How will the US justify its actions? (I'm assuming the US will take actions immediately considered what happened in Cuba between USSR and US)
If the answer is negative, the next question is -- are the justifications even necessary in international political situations that endanger great power's national security?
Russia already has 2 NATO countries on its border. If it takes control of Ukraine then it will border 6 NATO countries.
@@joedirt2862 It's a great point! I think that Estonia and Latvia are different from Ukraine in terms of geographical significance from military / security point of view. By pulling out the map, we can see that if Ukrain joins NATO, there's no geographical / natural barrier beyond Dnieper River which is the divider of west and east of Ukraine. Russia clearly cares east Ukraine much more.
@@NeMayful Ukraine isn't
Part of NATO though. So he is infact creating a situation that doesn't exist.
@@NeMayful I think the idea of mutually assured destruction has a serious flaw besides the mutual destruction. That is it's only a deterrent between two countries with nukes. However a country with nukes can invade a country without nukes and only face the retaliation of another country if that country is willing to sacrifice the human race for them. Putin's threat and lack of any country stepping in suggests this is true.
@@joedirt2862 True that Ukraine is not a formal member of NATO, and this is the whole point. From Russia's point of view, Ukraine is a de-facto NATO member - trained and armed by NATO. If Russia waited the moment that Ukraine to become a formal member of NATO, it is already too late -- that will mean to declare a war with all NATO members.
I am curious of a new more in-depth analysis now after more than 2 years.
I agree so much more to look at
Agree. Most importantly we now know that an agreement was reached early in the war where the Nato question was central, and that it was Ukraine who turned it down, despite very few other concessions were needed, specifically Donbass staying with Ukraine. This argues heavily against the war being a land grab, and supports that Putins main concern was and is the Nato enlargement. Ryan did a good analysis, but these points need more focus instead of using a few seconds to dismiss them at the end of the video.
Good on you Ryan, really finding these videos of yours to be very helpful, good on you mate, take it easy.
I think one big thing here is missing and it might be a little confusing... Asking for a justification for an invasion is a very Western liberal thing to do. I remember when USA invaded Iraq the second time the whole slide show that Powell made to UN looked exactly like something that could have been taken out of a court room.
But here is the thing. Back in 2007 Putin made it clear in his speech at the Munich Security Conference that he was very unhappy with the way American viewed the world and "ran" the world (sorry i cant remember the quote exactly). But in short he did not recognize USA deciding what was right and wrong in the world. I remember the Western leaders smiling and shaking their head when he said it. So if Putin no longer recognizes the American world order, why is it important that the Western liberal countries feel he is justified invading Ukraine?
I think there is from 24/2 2022 a new world order. We in the west can no longer decide for other countries what is the right or the wrong thing to do. We can still say we do, but Putin did just say he dont care anymore. That speech shown in this video has 2 audiences. To the Western Liberal Democracies its a huge middle finger. To the Russian people it is a sign that they now has a new Tsar that will restore the Empire.
So with respect to Ryan, this video only makes sense if you still buy in to the idea that Western Liberal Democracy is the future. If you dont, then the video is just pure gibberish only made to justify the "old" world order.
On a side note. Right now we are all very black and white about the war. We are all under the influence of propaganda one way or the other. But as with all other wars in the years to come the nuances will be shown...
Because justification defines policy. It’s the difference between allowing a country to go after what’s theirs and classifying them as a rogue state.
@@tremorlok6659 Again seen through the glasses of the Western liberal democracy. I dont think Putin, Syria, China etc really care about that anymore. I am pretty sure Putin is not kept up at night if we call them a rouge state
@@isaacasimov3846 Putin clearly does care about western policy or else he wouldn’t have felt existentially threatened by Ukraine joining NATO.
@@tremorlok6659 yes he do care what we do that threaten Russia. But he does not care how we judge him or what our liberal moral view.
Short answer: No
Long answer: Noooooooo
I love this video! But if I may ask can I ask what happened to your guide to american free speech video?
Sevastopol is the key warm water port for Russia's naval surface fleet. That would be another reason why Putin would be very unhappy with Ukraine joining NATO. It wasn't mentioned in the video, and with 1000+ comments, I haven't read enough to see if this was already mentioned.
Crimea is a whole separate case to the "special military operation"...
Crimea is (and I quote Gorbachov) Russia's baby, which was a historical ERROR that was finally corrected in 2014.
@@ABC-ABC1234 I like how you state by yourself that you are simply parroting a russian talking point
@@bool_k It's actually the truth, had you done a bit of basic research, even google or Wikipedia you'd realize that CRIMEA has been in the hands of the Russians for hundreds of years! The English and the Ottomans often plotted to get that piece of strategic land OUT OF the hands of the Russians... They were obsessed with it not to become a part of Russian Empire, unless of course you the Ottomans were in the right and you believe Ottomans were angels, meanwhile those dogs were PLUNDERING villages in the Balkan, forcing them to convert to a religion, STEALING their young men and turning them into elite warriors callied janissaries, and making them fight their own kin etc. etc.
This part of territory Crimea has ALWAYS identified as pro-Russia ALWAYS!!! I don't remember Krushchev handing out a democratic referendum asking the crimeans if they want to belong to the Ukrainian SSR? Granted part of the Soviet Union, but suddenly they woke up part of a different administration?! Sorry, not sorry you need to do your research and condensing that complex and painful part of Russian history into one silly sentence is retarded and obviously gives the impression that someone (YOU!) doesn't understand history. FYI there were Dutch, French, Belgian, German observers when the "vote" happened, they declared the outcome valid but not the options... As if Crimeans would make the ridiculous mistake of ever aligning themselves with Ukraine! Keep dreaming!
Re; "Was Russia Justified to Invade Ukraine?"
It's NOT a case of 'justification' but a case of national survival.
When societies are confronted with an existential national security threat, national survival requires a response. Russia has for decades been warning the US led NATO that NATO's eastward expansion is seen by Russia an an unacceptable threat because once NATO is sitting upon Russia's doorstep, it would create a degree of military vulnerability that no nation would willingly agree to, given that nuclear armed cruise missiles fired from near the Ukraine/Russian border would reach Moscow in less than 13 minutes. Plus, given cruise missiles ability to fly below radar detection, Russia might not know it was under attack until just seconds before nuclear detonation over Moscow. It matters not whether NATO would ever launch such an attack, national security demands that Russia never allow itself to be put in that potentially vulnerable of a position. Which is WHY the US was ready to go to war when the Soviet Union put nuclear ICBMs in Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast.
There was no such threat though. It is possible that Russians feel threatened, but doesn't mean it's true. Facts don't care about your feelings, and there is no reason to believe that NATO would attack Russia. First of all Russia has nukes, and no country with nukes got invaded so far. Second if all, the time of Natos existence is the time where Russia has been invaded the least in its history, and NATO was shrinking a it's militaries until the invasion, and even longer while they tried to get piece diplomatically.
Btw. The reason why countries join NATO is because of Russia's behaviour, and it's threats. NATO only accepting them, when they ran out of reasons of why not.
Where is the threat here, that is supposedly so big Russia had to invade and destroy a country, that wasn't even part of NATO, nor close to joining them, and couldn't have done so itself if it wanted to and Russia didn't have nukes?
Should make an update on this, a lot more information came out.
Brilliant! There were times, especially at the beginning of the video, that I thought you were headed towards a wrong conclusion. I quickly realized, though, that you were simply stating positions and arguments in a neutral way, and since I'm not neural on this topic I had a gut level "you're wrong" reaction. Bravo! For at least one person your "fleshing out" was indeed useful. I can now separate my emotions from the rational arguments about the invasion.
Such nonsense.