If it was simple mob extortion it would be reasonable. Zelensky originally agreed when he thought the deal would be to pay for American protection.
But Trump wants the money AND wants Ukraine to surrender. Trump is a stupid mob boss who doesn’t understand why “Pay me and I’ll let the rival gang burn your business.” isn’t going to be accepted.
To me, we are back to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, except this time it’s Ukraine instead of Poland and the US replace Nazi Germany…
In my humble opinion, this is nothing like the Molotov-Ribbentrop. Molotov-Ribbentrop gets a lot of bad advertising due to cold war propaganda, but even western leaders in the west at the time like Churchill admitted that the Soviets had no other option (if you want evidence I have plenty of reference, feel free to ask :)
The Soviets spent the entire 30s warning of fascism and trying to build mutual defense agreements with France, England and Poland and they refused systematically, even when in 1939 the Soviets offered to send 1 million troops together with artillery, tanks and planes, to the Polish and French borders on exchange for a mutual defense agreement, but the French and English ambassadors received orders not to engage in actual negotiations and just to postpone the agreement, since they wanted the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.
Either way even if you fundamentally disagree with what I’m saying, what was the alternative? Poland was going to get steamrolled by the Nazis with or without the soviets controlling the eastern part of it (as proven by the fact that soviets started invading some weeks after the Nazis). What’s more desirable, half of Poland having concentration camps, or the entirety of Poland having concentration camps?
All of this could have been prevented in my opinion if western countries agreed to engage the Nazis together with the Soviet union, as the soviets suggested as an alternative to the Munich agreements. So the lesson in my view is: to fight fascism, listen to socialists (who are the ones who actually defeated most Nazis in the eastern front)
Not to defend the flawed comparison with Trump’s treason, but that’s a very useless take on the M-R pact…
Stalin could have
- not promised the nazis to attack the Poles from the rear
- not attacked the Poles from the rear
- not murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles after high-fiving the nazis after having succesfully attacked the Poles from the rear
I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable than, well, actively teaming up with the nazis
edit: list layout
Stalin could have not promised the nazis to attack the Poles from the rear not attacked the Poles from the rear
Again, please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets.
murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles
I don’t think those numbers are honest, can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don’t go that high
I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable
Again, how is tens of thousands of deaths in occupied Poland (many of which were Nazi collaborators and bourgeois Polish nationalists) preferable to Nazi occupation? Or can you think of an alternative to either of these two options?
please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets
There were several alternatives, actually. But most of them would start with Russia not attacking them in the rear after they moved their troops west to fight off the nazis
can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don’t go that high
Yeah sure, here’s one that estimates between 250k and 1.5m (but which I believe also includes post-war)
But I presume that if you’re the type that already convinced themselves that all these murdered Poles “must have deserved it” in one way or another, then that number probably couldn’t be high enough anyway
Funny wojak faces but to clear up an apparent misconception here, Ukrainian weren’t fighting for abstract concepts like “freedom” and Democracy", they were fighting to stop Russian soldiers from killing their families, raping their children, and burning their homes to the ground.
I hope this helps!
I think you’ll find they were fighting other Ukrainians (if you can call the carpet bombing of civilians “fighting”) to maintain the US financed Poroshenko in power long before Russia went in, about eight years in fact.
long before Russia went in
There’s a problem with this, because Russia has had troops in Ukraine since early 2014, before Poroshenko’s government
The Sbovoda interim was also financed by the USA, with Victoria Nuland discussing on a leaked call who to name after they deposed Yanukovich.
Russia had troops in Crimea as requested by the Crimean government, which also seceded via referendum after said coup, as is its right under Ukrainian law. That proved to be the right move given that they didn’t have the astronomical number of casualties that Donbas had, with over 14 thousand dead before 2022, most of them civilians, and a huge number of injured civilians and destroyed infrastructure as per the Donbas documentary.
If America’s goal was to put Svoboda in power, they didn’t do a very good job of keeping them there, did they?
I have read the Nuland transcript. She’s talking about the existing leader of the opposition. Of course she said Yatsenyuk was the guy, he was the goddamn leader of the opposition. He was the one guy avalable with the best democratic mandate at the last election. Yanukovych even offered to make him prime minister at one point.
Russia put troops into Crimea before the referendum, and the referendum was run by the occupying army. Do you normally trust occupying armies to run referendums about whether or not they should get to keep the land they’re occupying?
Perhaps if Russia was so concerned about casualties in the Donbas, it should not have invaded and caused hundreds of thousands more casualties.
Lmao so the US did finance them, did appoint their best liked interim, did have congresspeople on the ground supporting the coup, did send in the money to arm the Nazis but just… quietly let democracy take its course once they spent all that time and money? America doesn’t give a fuck if Sbovoda remains as long as the shock therapy has happened already, by then they’ll take anyone who’ll toe the line.
I want to give y’all the benefit of the doubt and conclude that you think we’re stupid but sometimes I think there’s a more obvious answer.
Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU. The US didn’t need to do a damn thing to influence that, a long history of Russian imperialism did it all for them
America spent fuck all on Ukraine in the entire history of its independence up until Euromaidan (pg 167). They simply did not spend “all that money”, because a single digit millions of dollars a year is a rounding error in the US budget. American spending on Ukraine in 2013 was 0.00024% of the federal budget.
If Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU, then why did they democratically elect Yanukovych, which the US subsequently couped in coordination with the Banderites?
