[foverzar]

Why imply that Ukrainians motivation somehow excludes NATO from the equation?

NATO provides intelligence, training, counsel and supplies. You can't just pretend it's not involved and that at some point this war didn't become Russia's proxy war with NATO.

[mcv]

Russia may see it as a proxy war, but Ukrainians don't. To them, it's entirely about the future and freedom of Ukraine.

You've got to understand that while the current generation of Ukrainians grew up in relative freedom, their parents and grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. And now with Putin trying to subjugate Ukraine, they fear that their children may grow up in a similar situation, and possibly worse, with all the Russian talk of genocide.

So that's why they're fighting so hard. They're fighting for their lives, their freedom, and that of their children and grandchildren. That's an incredibly powerful motivator, and I'm absolutely convinced that they'd fight just as hard without foreign support. But that support does give them a better fighting chance, enabling them to fight Russia on equal footing, instead of relying mostly on partisan/guerilla warfare, which is actually what NATO expected to happen.

With or without support, I don't think this is a war that Russia could possibly win; there's just too much at stake for Ukraine, and not enough for Russia. People are generally eager to fight for their own lives and freedom, but not to subjugate others. Especially not a brother nation, as Ukrainians and Russians used to see each other before this.

[foverzar]

IMO, these bitter-sweet kind of "freedom fighting" narratives just too rarely represent real life, and the iceberg of this conflict is surely huge.

There is too much "nothing happened at Tienanmen Square" kind of stuff for "long-sought freedom" kind of scenarios to be believable.

[mcv]

I don't deny that it's rare, but this is a pretty clear and blatant case of it.

That the people of China don't fight for freedom like this is a completely different issue, though maybe not as different as the reason Russian don't. For Ukraine, the situation is quite different, though: they have tasted freedom for 30 years, and there's a clear external party who undeniably wants to take it away from them. Can't get much clearer than that.

[foverzar]

It's only that clear and blatant, when you cozily watch it on TV. A nice captivating narrative with clear morals, "good", "bad" and all the other storybook stuff that literally never happens in real life.

I'm sorry, but I just feel like your impressions of it are naive, as you reason in categories that don't have weight for real actual individuals in real actual life.

"Fighting for freedom after tasting it for 30 years" is something that only exists in storybooks. In reality it's always powerful people making the decisions and then agitating other people into submission.

Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on. Ukrainians, Russians, Chinese, whatever. Denying them this is a very typical dehumanization and manipulation tactics, commonly found in western supremacist culture, i.e. "why don't they fight for freedom" tropes.

[mcv]

I suggest you read and watch a bit more about how Ukrainians themselves feel about this situation. Their fighting spirit is higher than I've ever seen in a war. And it makes total sense if you think about why.

Yes, powerful people make the decisions, but those decisions are meaningless if nobody obeys them. You see that in Russia without hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country in order to avoid conscription. They have no faith whatsoever in Putin's war, and don't want to fight in it. Ukraine, on the other hand, doesn't just have much of its own population willing to do what they can, they also have many foreign volunteers who believe sufficiently in their cause to help them. That is not something that happens when the decision only comes from the top. This is a massive difference between Russia and Ukraine, and it's visible in the vastly different morale of the soldiers on the ground.

> Real individuals are preoccupied with much more mundane things, like providing for their families and so on.

Yes, but how are you going to do that when your country is being invaded by someone who wants you dead? This is exactly why Ukrainians are so eager to fight and Russians are not: the effect the war has on them personally.