> Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk?
It is one of the most respected courts on the planet, and the verdict is long and detailed when it comes to describing the smokescreen Russians deployed to hide their role. All the key facts are nicely laid out, notable people and events are mentioned.Nothing described there is meaningfully contested by anyone other than talking heads on the Russian state TV and the cheap whores who parrot their talking points in the west. The commander of the 2014 invasion force is a public figure and used to hold multi-hour livestreams where he talked about the same things; namely, that his forces were directly responsible for the war, and that there was no groundroots support for them among the locals in Ukraine. He often complained that the 2014 invasion stalled because Moscow did not allocate him enough soldiers, tanks and artillery to work with. > So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.
Not at all. There are more recent examples too, from the 1990s:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just some of the oldest examples of this. At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling to take these "people's republics" propped up by Russian military with any credibility. Russians have been abusing the concept of peoples' right to self-determination for about as long as the concept has existed, to justify territorial expansion. > Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.
No, the level of US and European involvement does not warrant such framing. North Korea has gone further than any of them and deployed actual troops by tens of thousands to the frontlines in support of Russia, and yet nobody calls it a North Korean-Ukrainian war because that would be a poor description of the nature of this war. |