| > USSR was rebuked by every single European nation it tried to enter into a defense treaty with against Germany That does not imply eastern European states joined the Soviet union willingly. > If you want to categorize what the USSR did in that period as conquest and genocide would you say the same about the US annexing Hawai'i? Unless Hawai'i joined willingly, it is by definition conquest, yes. I'm not aware of any subsequent nationality or ethnicity based mass killings, but if they took place, that is, again, genocide by definition. > you can't talk about the USSR without someone bringing up historical events they don't understand. You are correct, I don't fully understand that part of history. Could you explain how using military force to expand the Soviet empire wasn't conquest, or how the Holodomor wasn't genocide? > The US & UK also intervened to put Putin into power in 1999, continuing a long-standing tradition of destabilizing regions and not really caring until the consequences spill over into a country like Ukraine that "looks like us" and live in "a civilized country with McDonalds" You disprove your point in the same sentence that you make it. Russians look very similar to Ukrainians, and they've had McDonald's since 1990, while Ukraine got its first in 1997, and has less than half as many McDonald's per capita as Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal... |