Current Affairs Ukraine

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tsubaki said:
Honestly what the fk are some NATO countries doing right now:

www.newsweek.com

Vaccine Delivery Canceled to Country That Did Not Condemn Russia

Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on Earth, has lost a shipment of over 440,000 COVID-19 vaccines.
www.newsweek.com www.newsweek.com
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Bangladesh one of the worlds biggest grain importers iirc, you can understand why they wouldn’t want to annoy Putin.

And even if you didn’t linking Covid vaccines to UN votes is morally awful.
 
Yarrgh said:
Fair points. Most people will be up in arms when they can't heat their homes because it costs too much. Strength of conviction can waver very easily.
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If thats actually true, then imagine how fast the Russian people will be up in arms when its not just their heating costs that went up.
 
tsubaki said:
Pete all I would say there is that we (the western public) don’t know how trashed his military is getting, we don’t know Russia will eventually run out of money and we don’t know Putin will be at risk of a coup from this.

We do know that the longer this war goes on, the worse Ukraine will be and we also know that large numbers of people across the world are dependent on Ukrainian food supplies.

Putin could have raised this peace deal for all manner of reasons, many of which could be nefarious. If that is what they are, the world needs to see that they are because there is a very real prospect that they (Russia) could win here.
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If the west stops buying his gas and oil, as seems imminently likely, he’s stuffed, well and truly. He won’t even have a way of selling the oil to China. We just need the political balls (are you listening Germany) And the nettle has to be grasped at some point anyway, or he will just try the same with his ‘nuclear’ threats on another country.….
 
Glasshalffull said:
Well, I'm bowing out of this particular debate, now, pal, because we're seeing the same things, but just interpreting them differently.

Either the 'kindling' that we allegedly provided sparked Putin to go over the edge, or it didn't. If it did, then the author is implicitly saying that the war could have been stopped without the kindling being in place. If it didn't, then I don't know why the condescending half-wit wrote the interminable thing in the first place.

The way the article is written, there's a very fine (if any) distinction between kindling, provocation, and cause/trigger for this war. I would contend that some of the alleged kindling has possibly had an exstinguishing, or fire retardant, effect. Weapons in Europe that can reach Russia might well have stopped Putin leaning on Western Europe with 'dire consequences if you don't do what I want' threats, while central European countries, now NATO members could by now have been given the full Ukraine treatment without that membership. The places rolled over and smashed so far are non-members, after all.

I now permanently rest my case in this particular vein of the Ukraine thread. Thank you for the benefit of your views, though.
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The disconnect here is that international relations scholarship generally treats counterfactuals as fundamentally unknowable. We don't know what would have happened, because we don't have a working time machine or the ability to cross into that reality. (At least, I don't. But then, I wouldn't tell you if I had one of those, now would I?)

We can put a probability estimate on the counterfactual. We can say that the actions that were taken surely aggravated Putin, which likely pushed him towards war, based upon his actions and what we know about security relationships. We don't know where his tipping point was, and therefore we do not know what he would have done in the absence of those actions. Insisting on reducing the counterfactual to a knowable binary isn't considered a good way to think about uncertainty as a result. It's considered superior to think about the counterfactual as a Schrodinger's cat box, where we can say with some (but not great) confidence that what we did moved the odds towards the cat in the box being dead rather than alive. What we don't know is what the dice roll that determined the outcome was, and therefore whether a change in tack would have resulted in a different outcome.

There's no need to respond. I just wanted to address the misunderstanding regarding where the author is coming from, versus where you're coming from in the paragraph with the bolded terms. If you want to criticize the article for sidestepping the debate about whether Putin is hyperrational and security-maximizing or bent on reassembling the Soviet Union, that's a fair criticism. I think the author would argue that entering that debate isn't the point of the article, and that the point is to bring to light how the "us vs. them, good vs. evil" framing that a reductivist media pushes both conceals our hypocrisy from a public that is just now tuning in, and risks sparking an escalatory spiral with the potential for dire consequences.
 
Paulie said:
Got to hope this excels the desire to find a non fossil fuel energy solution.
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Funny enough, look at the next big push from the Vote Leave campaign and the usual suspects. This will be the next big battle. Wonder where the money for this is coming from? Fossil fuel lobbyists in overdrive and we can expect them to have a lot of money behind them

 
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