Almost complete silence on Hersh' article in Europe by the way. Nothing in the main newspapers. You'd think the Graun would jump at the opportunity. — Benkei
The US (and the rest of the West) can offer Ukraine advice — Xanatos
He's wrong if one believes that what distinguishes revolutions from coups is massive popular participation. — Xanatos
why exactly can't Ukraine tell them: "We think that this is the best deal that we are capable of getting at the moment?" — Xanatos
You do need to keep in mind that the West did not want this war in the first place; Russia did. — Xanatos
↪Isaac
He's wrong if one believes that what distinguishes revolutions from coups is massive popular participation. — Xanatos
At the beginning of [2014] there existed in Ukraine a slightly pro-Russian though very shaky government. That situation was fine for Moscow: after all, Russia did not want to completely control Ukraine or occupy it; it was enough that Ukraine not join NATO and the EU. Russian authorities cannot tolerate a situation in which western armed forces are located a hundred or so kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh.
The United States, for its part, were interested in forming a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia is on the rise, and were eager not to let it consolidate its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of the pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow the U.S. to contain Russia.
Here you have two countries: one wants a Ukraine that is neutral. The other wants Ukraine to form part of a line of containment against Russian expansion. One cannot say that one party is mistaken: both are acting based on their national interests. It’s just that these interests don’t jive.
Russia had begun to take certain steps that the United States considered unacceptable. Primarily in Syria. (Note: NOT Europe!) It was there that Russians demonstrated to the Americans that they are capable of influencing processes in the Middle East. And the US has enough problems in that part of the world already without the Russians.
Russians intervened in the process in the Middle East among other reasons because they had hoped to get leverage to influence US policy in other areas. But they miscalculated. The United States thought that it was Russia’s intent to harm them.
It is in this context that we should be evaluating the events in Ukraine. The Russians, apparently, simply have not calculated how seriously the US side might perceive their actions or the extent to which they can easily find countermeasures. It was in this situation that the United States took a look at Russia and thought about what it wants to see happen least of all: instability in Ukraine.
KOMMRERSANT: So you think Ukraine is a form of revenge for Syria?
GEORGE FRIEDMAN: No, not revenge. But Russian intervention in the process in Syria, while the United States was still addressing the problems in Iraq, and was in negotiations with Iran … In Washington, many people have the impression that Russian want to destabilize the already fragile US position in the Middle East – a region that is of key importance for America.
About this question there were two different points of views in Washington: that the Russian were just fooling around, or that they have found a weak point of the US and were trying to take advantage of it. I’m not saying that Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict was the cause of the Ukrainian crisis, that would be a stretch. But this intervention tipped the balance of opinion in Washington in the direction of the opinion that Russian is a problem. And in that case what does one do? Not confront them in the Middle East. Better to pull their attention away to a problem in some other region.
Now all of this is a bit oversimplified, obviously it is all more complicated than this in practice, but the cause and effect relationship is as I just described it. As a result, the bottom line is that it is in the strategic interests of the United States to prevent Russia from becoming a hegemon. And it is in the strategic interests of Russia not to allow the United States to come to its borders.
I love these sorts of interviews and talks that were given before the full gravity of the situation in Ukraine became apparent. Less self-censorship, politicization and hindsight. Mostly just honest conversation. — Tzeentch
Whose accuracy has been questioned by George Friedman himself. — neomac
either G. Friedman actually believed that the Maidan Revolution was "the most overt coup d'état in history" and later he retracted his own claims, or G.Friedman never thought the Maidan Revolution was "the most overt coup d'état in history" but he expressed his own belief though irony (G.Fridman's conditional is maybe supposed to clarify why he expressed himself in Russian own terms). — neomac
I’ve written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named somebody, they’d be fired, or, worse, jailed. The law is so strict. I’ve never had anybody exposed, and of course when I write I say, as I did in this article, it’s a source, period. And over the years, the stories I’ve written have always been accepted. I have used for this story the same caliber of skilled fact-checkers as had worked with me at the New Yorker magazine. Of course, there are many ways to verify obscure information told to me. — Hersh
So should know one way or the other if the Germans are in control of the investigation, which I think they're not. It's Denmark and Sweden right? The Germans are politically independent enough not to be influenced by the USA. — Benkei
The Germans are politically independent enough not to be influenced by the USA — Benkei
Why should rescuing Ukraine take priority over rescuing Haiti or Sudan? Why should fears of genocide in Ukraine matter more than the ongoing genocide targeting the Rohingya in Myanmar? Why should supplying Ukraine with modern arms qualify as a national priority, while equipping El Paso, Texas, to deal with a flood of undocumented migrants figures as an afterthought? Why do Ukrainians killed by Russia generate headlines, while deaths attributable to Mexican drug cartels — 100,000 Americans from drug overdoses annually – are treated as mere statistics?
Of the various possible answers to such questions, three stand out and merit reflection.
The first is that “civilization,” as the term is commonly employed in American political discourse, doesn’t encompass places like Haiti or Sudan. Civilization derives from Europe and remains centered in Europe. Civilization implies Western culture and values. ...
What makes Russian aggression so heinous, therefore, is that it victimizes Europeans, whose lives are deemed to possess greater value than the lives of those who reside in implicitly less important regions of the world. That there is a racialist dimension to such a valuation goes without saying, however much U.S. officials may deny that fact. Bluntly, the lives of white Ukrainians matter more than the lives of the non-whites who populate Africa, Asia, or Latin America.
The second answer is that casting the Ukraine War as a struggle to defend civilization creates a perfect opportunity for the United States to reclaim its place at the forefront of that very civilization. ...
One final factor may contribute to this eagerness to see civilization itself under deadly siege in Ukraine. Demonizing Russia provides a convenient excuse for postponing or avoiding altogether a critical reckoning with the present American version of that civilization. Classifying Russia as a de facto enemy of the civilized world has effectively diminished the urgency of examining our own culture and values.
There is a misunderstanding. — neomac
The only misunderstanding here is that you seem to believe babbling on about cognitive dissonance is going to help your case any. — Tzeentch
The problem is the one I have described earlier: the U.S. was in the process of turning Ukraine into a U.S. ally on a bilateral basis, completely circumventing NATO.
The Germans and the French had no power to stop that. — Tzeentch
Yet even in the current conditions Western Europeans are still reluctant to discuss about NATO membership for Ukraine. — neomac
With the current condition being large-scale war between Russia and what is basically a NATO proxy, their opinions are even more irrelevant than they were in times of peace. The European powers are a bunch of suckers, piggybacking on the U.S. defense budget and apparently believing that will not completely wipe out their bargaining power. They're essentially U.S. vassals given the illusion of relevance. — Tzeentch
I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that Putin was in condition to keep supporting the separatist fight in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea with the revenue from Nord Stream 2 to destabilise Ukraine ... — neomac
With the amount of bilateral support it was receiving from the U.S., I would pretty much exclude that possibility. — Tzeentch
I’m not sure to understand why you keep talking about “coup d'etat” supported by the US. — neomac
We've got U.S. officials admitting to sending Ukraine billions of USD of support prior to 2014, and to being deeply involved in constructing the post-coup government in Ukraine.
Clearly the U.S. was involved, supported the coup and, as I said earlier, I am still entertaining the hypothesis that the U.S. largely orchestrated it. We know the U.S. is capable of such things, and its fingerprints are all over it. — Tzeentch
A war of this magntitude requires planning and preparation, obviously. Besides, they did not have the power of hindsight and did seek to exhaust the alternatives. Even late into 2021 the Russians were still trying to pursue a diplomatic solution. — Tzeentch
Seems like a rather weak article to me, that presupposes the Russian invasion was a complete failure. While that seems to be part of the western narrative, I see little evidence to suggest it is true.
The Russians invaded Ukraine while outnumbered, with a force that was way too small to occupy all of it. This leads me to believe that the territories they occupied in east and southern Ukraine probably roughly coincide with the initial aims of the invasion.
Mearsheimer makes that point in detail. — Tzeentch
It shouldn't need to be repeated this often, but it appears I've got to say it again...
We're not the ones claiming your narrative is unreasonable. Speaking for myself, I'm perfectly happy with the notion that Friedman didn't mean what he said. It's a perfectly rational theory with good evidence.
You (collectively) are the ones trying to claim our alternative theories are unreasonable.
To prove that claim, it's not sufficient to show your theory is possible. No one disagreed it was possible. You have to show that the alternative is impossible. Not merely that one of the possibilities is that Friedman didn't mean what he said, but rather that it is the only possibility. — Isaac
Relevant mostly to neomac's style of nonsense, but many other US fanboys here — Isaac
Debates that make sense to me should be principled and computationally affordable ways to assess people's arguments and evidences — neomac
You cannot debate people who reject that a) Russia has had long standing objectives and an agenda towards Ukraine and b) Ukrainians themselves are actors in their own country and in their own politics. Everything is just the US, nothing else matters. If you argue something else, you must be a US fanboy.“One-sided” in what sense? Take the example of the Orange Revolution. This was an example of competition between West and Russia prior to 2008, because Putin publicly campaigned for Yanukovych in Ukraine and Russia, while Western pro-democracy organisations were supporting Yushchenko. In other words in Ukraine there were 2 foreign powers taking sides wrt domestic political competitors. 2 foreign powers are 2 sides, not one. — neomac
The idea that political arguments can be weighed by some kind of objective metric is something most if us left behind in college. — "Isaac
All we can ever do on a site like this is enquire about people's reasons for holding the views they hold. The entire enterprise if pointless otherwise. If you're going to answer "because of some reasons", then we might as well give up here. I'm asking about what those reasons are, I assumed you had some. — "Isaac
If you argue something else, you must be a US fanboy — ssu
Not sure to understand what you are talking about here. — neomac
I don’t see how the pre-war “amount of bilateral support” to Ukraine could have rendered the Russian resistance unsustainable in a counterfactual scenario that is way less challenging than the current conflict. — neomac
First, let’s clarify the terminology here: to me “coup d'etat” typically means a violent/illegal overthrow of a regime by institutional figures like politicians and military (e.g. Trump backed US capitol riot can be accused of being an attempted coup d’etat). “Revolutions” are typically violent/llegal overthrow of a regime but stemming from ordinary masses.
Second, Maidan Revolution was a popular revolution. And as far as I know no Ukrainian politicians/military plotted to forcefully remove Yanukhovic. Indeed, Yanukovych signed a transition deal with Ukraine opposition brokered by Russia and the European Union (https://www.politico.eu/article/yanukovych-signs-transition-deal-with-ukraine-opposition/).
Third, the revelations about Victoria Nuland are not enough to support the claim that the US participated in a coup. The US supported the popular revolution and pro-European political candidates, but they may just have lobbied and supported campaign/propaganda to amplify or direct consensus over certain politicians (even the American domestic politics works that way). It would be different if you could provide compelling evidence that the US (intentionally) financed the armed revolutionaries (as the Americans did in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion).
But even in this case, talking about “coup” and “orchestration” doesn’t seem to me more than an attempt to mount a preconceived polemic dismissive of the pro-Western Ukrainian movements, as if the Ukrainians didn’t have enough domestic reasons to be deeply dissatisfied with Yanukhovic and Russian interference and revolt (compare it with the recent revolts in Iran). — neomac
Nothing so “inevitable” then. — neomac
The small number of troops at the beginning of the war was likely because Russians didn’t expect the kind of fierce resistance the Ukrainians demonstrated... — neomac
It would be easier if you specified at what point of that video Mearsheimer is offering arguments in support of your belief that "the territories they [the Russians] occupied in east and southern Ukraine probably roughly coincide with the initial aims of the invasion". — neomac
The entirety of the corporate media’s attention given to the story consisted of:
A 166-word mini report in Bloomberg;
One five-minute segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (Fox News);
One 600-word round up in The New York Post;
A shrill Business Insider attack article, whose headline labels Hersh a “discredited journalist” that has given a “gift to Putin”.
The 20 outlets studied are, in alphabetical order:
ABC News; Bloomberg News; Business Insider; BuzzFeed; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Forbes; Fox News; The Huffington Post; MSNBC; NBC News; The New York Post; The New York Times; NPR; People Magazine; Politico; USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
Reuters, for example, has published 14 separate reports on the topic since Thursday. Every large media outlet in America (and many medium-sized and even small ones) subscribes to Reuters, republishing content from their newswires.
One of the main tasks of a newsroom editor is to follow the newswire and follow up on Reuters’ content. This means that editors around the country have been bombarded with this story every day since it broke, and virtually every single one of them has passed on it – 14 consecutive times.
Fact-checking website Snopes also sprung into action, calling Hersh’s claim a “conspiracy” that rested on a single “omnipotent anonymous source.”
Notice that they had absolutely nothing to say when random people were saying Russia blew their own pipeline.
The most incredible thing about the backlash against Hersh’s article on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is the fact that it’s clear no establishment media outlet has any intention of carrying out the basic journalism needed to confirm or refute what he’s reported, — Jonathan Cook
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