[bulbar]

Living in Europe I have a different perspective on defense. Without it, we would already be living in Russian labor camps. You can't just stop funding military and your military industry and expect other actors to just play along and be friendly from now on then.

[LtWorf]

How many times have germany, sweden, italy invaded russia in history and how many times has russia done the opposite?

Either you're going to be surprised or you're just in bad faith.

[bulbar]

When the Nazis attacked, it was important for the Soviets and the world that the Soviets had a huge army. So yeah that kind of supports my argument.

Doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Putin transformed the young post cold war democracy of Russia right back into a dictatorship and is now in a full scale war with another country and would have already invaded everything he thinks should be part of 'great Russia'.

A country needs an army because at any time there are just too many aggressors out there. Who that is exactly might change over time, right now Russia clearly is one of them. As the US threatened Greenland and it's raging war against Iran (which course itself is an aggressive dictatorship), it's also a current aggressor against which European countries need an army.

[LtWorf]

They had already been at war with japan for a while at that point…

[bulbar]

If you intend to discuss, you need to state an explicit argument.

[LtWorf]

My argument being that your claim that Russia is capable of invading Europe is fear mongering to convince people to pay for wars they don't need.

[bulbar]

Nobody needs the Ukraine war. It's only 35 years ago that the cold war ended, and Russia just tried to invade another European country after invading parts of it (Krim), so assuming they might attack another European country is not fear mongering, from my perspective.

Finland agreed which is why they joined NATO basically over night when Russia attacked Ukraine.