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Not surprising. The new powerful countries are China, Iran, and Russia. The west failed to protect Ukraine. The west cares mainly of funding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
The #1 protector of Ukraine was remaining a neutral buffer state, as Ukraine had declared it would do as part of the settlement ending the USSR. There is no protecting a Ukraine that declares it wants to join NATO and to host nukes stationed within five minutes of Moscow.
So how credible is spectator?
It’s a stablished economically liberal, conservative newspaper from the UK. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole, but this is a criterion of embarassment situation, as they support Ukraine and have been historically a supporter of the US and NATO.
And that’s precisely what makes their admissions so valuable since there is zero chance of them having any sort of a pro-Russian bias.
“It’s a stablished, economically liberal, conservative newspaper from the UK”
It’s a far right illiberal shitrag that was one of the leading outlets that attacked & bullied professor Jason Arday and has an array of journalists such as Rod Liddle (recently dead, yay!), who himself wrote:
“I never found out [what sort of teacher I’d be] because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me to be virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one.”
the experts – both american and russian – are saying that there’s going to to be another vietnam war moment when liberals are made aware that ukraine is imminently about to lose like there was when saigon fell; but i strongly suspect that your response is going to be MUCH more common – questioning the validity of the source instead – if anything at all.
ironically, it is the right move to question it, but i suspect that it won’t do much considering that basic facts like the united states congress voting to ban weapons shipments to ukraine for its neo-nazi proclivities are hidden in plain sight.
without seeing videos of helicopters evacuating cia & military assets out of kiev on prime time news like they did with the fall of siagon – ukraine’s loss will likewise be hidden in plain sight.
“Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” Theodore Roosevelt.
Acknowledging that Ukraine is loosing this war of attrition if not supplied with more money, weapons, munitions, and probably even military personnel is a basic fact. The article doesn’t dare any suggestions on where to go from accepting that fact. Make peace on Russian terms ASAP and become a vassal state over the next decade or so, after Russia breaks security guarantees once again? Fight on and become a vassal state over the next 1-3 years, but with more death and destruction? Any silver lining for Ukraine other than hoping for more US, UK, or European arms, and possibly military personnel? Any leverage? The article sure doesn’t say…
Europe is very obviously in no position to fight Russia head on, and only a complete imbecile would advocate for Europe to go to all out war with the biggest nuclear power in the world.
You’re probably right that it would be a stupid idea. On the other hand, it does not feel so much like Europe is choosing to fight Russia head on but rather that Russia is encroaching closer and closer on the European borders every 10 years or so by annexing another part of Ukraine. That was the point I made above:
- 1994: Give up nuclear weapons, Budapest memorandum, oops, 2014 invasion of Crimea.
- 2014/15: Give up Crimea, another round of peace talks and agreements, oops, 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Now: Should Ukraine give up Donbas and Luhansk and demilitarize to appease Russia? Give it another 10 years and Russia finds a pretense to swallow the remaining Ukraine or make it a vassal republic, which will be greatly aided by their demilitarization. What comes next? The same piecemeal tactic with the Baltics or Poland? Another piece of land every 10-odd years?
Every time Ukraine has appeased Russia, Russia came back to bite it a few years later. And please don’t give me the “NATO is encroaching on Russia” talk: At the beginning of the war, 70-odd percent of Ukrainians were in favor of closer ties with the EU. If one takes self-determination seriously, as a lot of people on this instance seem to selectively do for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, one can’t deny a country to choose its allies free from a threat of invasion by its neighbor, who also happens to be the biggest nuclear power in the world.
Who exactly is encroaching faster against the other? Russia by occupying parts of ukriane, or EU/NATO by extending multiple countries east?
Ah, but here’s the difference: Finland, Sweden, and the other Eastern European nations weren’t invaded by NATO. They chose to associate with NATO to protect themselves against Russian aggression. Why should NATO turn them down? To appease Russia? Why does Russia get a say in what treaties or agreements their neighbors enter? What gives them the right to invade and bombard a country for choosing its allies?
Sure. It’s our freedom fighters and then the terrorists of the other side. Do people like you never start to think?
Please do tell me when Finland, Sweden, Hungary, the Baltics, Poland, or Slovakia were invaded by NATO.
Ukraine never had nuclear weapons or the codes. USSR stationed nuclear weapons in Ukraine and Russia is the inheritor state of USSR. And I wonder what might’ve happened in 2014, oh right a western backed regime change that overthrew the legitimately elected government and put literal fascists in charge.
Every time the west pushed Ukraine to keep fighting Russia things got worse for Ukraine. But scum like you doesn’t give fuck about Ukrainians, you’re a parasite cheering on for other people to die for some abstract ideals you don’t actually believe in. If you believed a word of what you said, you’d be signing up for the foreign legion and sitting in a trench. Instead, your just cheer on for other people to die. You’re a piece of human garbage and you have blood on your hands.
You keep bringing up that point but I don’t think it means what you think it means. Sure, they didn’t have the launch codes but they were in the physical possession of nuclear weapons stationed on their territory by the USSR. At the very least, this meant they had weapons-grade highly enriched fissile material, even the possibility of which makes neighboring countries nervous, as we are all learning in Iran. They could’ve disassembled them, reverse engineered them, destroyed them, or whatever, but they chose to give them to the successor state of the USSR for the hollow promise of territorial integrity. They could’ve developed their own nukes, but they didn’t. Instead, they trusted the deal and the security guarantees. For that deal, and for the act of breaking it in 2014 and in 2022, it makes no difference whether Ukraine had the capacity of launching those nukes in the 90s.
Yeah, guess what bud, nobody in the west wanted Ukraine to have nukes either. There was literally no possibility of that happening. They didn’t do it because literally nobody would’ve allowed them to do it. They trusted the west, and the west cynically used them as a proxy. While scumbags like you keep pretending it’s about democracy or some shit.
scumbags like you
Welp, there goes the civility. Nevertheless, I wish you a genuinely good day as well as some sense. As for the actual argument in your comment: Why are you blaming the West for not following through on their security guarantees? A few comments back you had pointed out how stupid it were if they went to all out war against Russia. Why aren’t you blaming Russia for not following through on their security guarantees by, IDK, not invading Ukraine? Double-think…
Edit: Had forgotten to pull apart the quote from the paragraph beneath. Now corrected.
The west never offered any security guarantees to Ukraine and Ukraine keeping nuclear material was never on the table. So, your whole premise is utter nonsense. Meanwhile, Russia was perfectly fine with Ukraine doing its own thing until the west overthrew the government in Ukraine in 2014. The only double-think here is you avoiding the elephant in the room.
I felt so dumb after discovering about the sabotage of the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements, the Istambul agreement, as well as the EU involvement in financing pro-EU presidents, far right militias and their probable participation in the Maidan aprising. So, the conflict with Russia was engineered by the EU and the US and Russia warned them there would be a response. This radicalized me a lot and after this I couldn’t trust in a single word from a Western newspaper.
Everytime the West tries to paint a conflict as moral struggle against dictatorship, totalitarianism, terrorism or any other BS reason, it’s because it has ulterior material economic or political motives that it’s trying to hide.
Thank you Yogthos to explain in simple words the real motives behind this damned war.
O7
Tell me about it. From my reading, Minsk 1 failed because Russian-backed separatists attacked the Donezk airport and Minsk 2 failed because Russia did not retreat its unmarked soldiers before the 2020 election. But I’m willing to learn if there is any good good evidence pointing the other way.
This is nothing but a narrative. Countries don’t start wars with superpowers based on small rebel skirmishes. They prepared from the beginning to start a war with Russia. They wouldn’t send CIA agents, military officers and wouldn’t train Ukrainian soldiers with NATO weapons, as well as deliberately back down from peace agreements if their intent was to achieve peace.
Likewise, Ukraine kept shelling rebels in Donbass as well as making use of Neo-nazi paramilitary battalions to suppress the rebels, such as the Azov Battalion. But Russia did not enter in the war based on this alone. Their intelligence saw that situation in Ukraine was escalating towards a war.
This argument works both ways. As I’ve pointed out in another comment, throughout the 2010s, Russia was creeping towards Europe and NATO by military conquest. Crimea in 2014, skirmishes in Donbas and Luhansk through 2021, full-scale invasion in 2022. At some point Europe had to say: Until here and no further. They certainly don’t enjoy risking all-out war with a former superpower and major nuclear power, but it’s safer for them to stall conquest in Eastern Ukraine than to wait until Russia has crept up to the Polish border. Appeasement never works, as the Brits have learned in WW2. At some point, you just gotta say “Stop”, even if that means war.
Sorry, but Russia was not in any way creeping towards Europe, but the other way around. First of all, since the dissolution of the USSR (which was also provoked by a coup with the help of Western powers), the West backed materially many separatist groups in the Eastern block and since the Russian federation was in disarray after the fall of the USSR, specially due to the liberal shock therapy that created the current Russian bourgeoisie, a lot of Eastern European countries started joining the EU zone of influence, one after the other. Then there was the Russo-Georgian war in 2008, 5 years after NATO countries started approaching Georgia to join their block. There was also two separatist wars in Chechnya, once again backed by the NATO countries, the last one which ended on 2009.
Then there’s also NATO expansion, which included Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic in 1999, then Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria Estonia in 2004, then Croatia and Albania in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and finally Finland and Sweden in 2023 and 2024, respectively. From 2004 to 2013, many of those countries (which were part of the old USSR and Yugoslavia) also joined the EU and adopted the Euro currency, fiscal policies and a neo-liberal agenda that included a big financialization of these economies, dependence of the Western European industrial powers and no barriers for Western European manufactures. With a few exceptions, most of the workers of these countries saw a worsening of their material conditions and we saw Western capital taking hold of most of the market.
And then we have the conflict in Ukraine, which did not start in 2014, but it was a development of multiple disputes between EU-backed politicians against Russian-backed ones. The orange revolution in 2004 was a dispute between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, the former pro-EU and the later pro-Russia, the later also winning the elections. After many fraud allegations made by NGOs from… Western Europe and the US, many backed pro-EU groups started calling for protests who then called for new elections. Yuschenko won and Yanukovych conceded defeat. Then again, on 2010, Yanukovych won the elections and called back from the EU integration process trying to get closer ties with Russia. Again, EU took advantage of bad material conditions in Ukraine and backed another color revolution against the pro-Russia president, which was then ousted, and this prompted a response from Russia who took Crimea, which was at the time, immensely pro-Russia. And then we had the beginning of the military tensions between (EU-backed) Ukraine against Russia.
So, in summary, we saw EU and NATO extending their influence in direction of Russia for two decades, backing many separatist groups, which then became integrated to the pro-NATO sphere of influence. So, even disagreeing current Russia capitalist turn, there’s material evidence of expansion of EU and NATO towards Russia, which you cannot find in the other way around.
The devil’s in the detail. As I already pointed out in another comment, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, the Baltics, Sweden, Finland, etc., were not invaded by NATO. They joined NATO. Russia has no say in whether an independent country wants to or doesn’t want to associate with NATO. Russia, on the other hand, invaded Ukraine and is moving the front further and further West since at least 2014. One of these is an expression of the self-determination of the people, the other is a war of aggression. The difference isn’t that subtle, really. If your argument is that it was all a psyop by NATO, then that doesn’t cast a bright light on the concept of a free will and the self-determination of any people, does it? So which people are allowed to self-determine? Only the ones that are against NATO and pro-Russia?
In regard to the western breach of Minsk 1/2, please cite the “openly admitted by top European officials” source. Also, please explain the Minsk 1/2 agreements so that we can understand how the West and Ukraine “broke” them. And did Russia give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees? Istanbul agreement? - once bitten, twice shy.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html
Also, why would Russia be giving up their nuclear weapons. You’re so deeply confused here. Ukraine never had nuclear weapons or the launch codes. USSR stationed nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine, and Russia became the successors state and inherited the weapons. This was agreed by all parties involved.
Correct, under the condition that it didn’t question Ukrainian sovereignty or territorial integrity going forward… guess 20 years are a long time.
Ah yes, everything you don’t agree with is propaganda. It’s incredible how you lib trolls just keep doing these mental gymnastics. But western regimes aren’t even hiding the truth. Here’s no lesser person than the US secretary of state openly admitting this is a proxy war. Here’s The Hill explaining the history of it. But sure you keep on braying about blatant propaganda there.
Fam, WSWS is literally the official online publication of a political organization. That’s like citing the US house speaker on matters of the war in Iran: Of course your answer is going to be colored red, white, and blue. I agree that it’s a proxy war. We’re just disagreeing on who started it and who’s defending against aggression. In my reading, it’s far preferable for the EU to stop Russia’s advance in Ukraine than to stop it in Poland. And they should probably be a bit more serious about stopping it in Ukraine than just sending weapons. It’s ugly already, but it could become so much more ugly if Russia keeps pushing and pushing West.
Oh I’m sorry, I forgot that socialist sources are offensive to fascists.
Poor Russia had no choice but to invade. It’s the only thing they could have done. Nothing else was possible in their predicament. They had no agency whatsoever in this. They were made to go to war by the evil others. People resisting a foreign army on their soil are obviously warmongers. If they had just surrendered they would now be a flourishing beacon of democracy like Belarus. But look what they made Russia do instead. Russia bleeds because of Ukraine’s terrible choices. Poor Russia. Poor poor Russia.
It’s the only thing they could have done.
Russia had already tried every other option, over the span of 35 years. So yes, it was the only thing left they could have done.
Good job memorizing your propaganda points citizen.
Imperialists like you can’t seem to shake this rapist mentality of permanent victim blaming.
“If she had only dressed appropriately all this could have been avoided.”
“Had she not resisted, he would have just raped her and she’d still be alive.”
“Look what she made him do.”
When you definitely understand what imperialism is.
Because y’all use a definition no one else uses but the club who rejects reality and browbeats anyone interested in it.
If you guys were in 1917 Russia, the Tsar would have won.
Thank you for taking your precious time from huffing gas, to provide your invaluable insights on this subject.
The material conditions forced them to invade and make more civilians and soldiers, it’s just common sense. Marx told me.
Had no idea so many Ukrainians distrust Zelenskyy, and further, view corruption as a threat nearly as bad as the war itself. It makes the “no elections during wartime” argument even more indefensible.
I’m sure they could have elections, but bear in mind, getting votes from soldiers would take a very long time, since they can’t even get rotated out of the zone when they’re supposed to.
Ah I see the Ruzzian propaganda spouting shills are out in full force again!! Hiiii!!!
Do you think Ukraine is winning and that everyday Ukrainian men aren’t being kidnapped off the street to be sent into the meat grinder?
Legitimately, do you believe Ukraine is winning? The best outcome for Ukrainians right now is a negotiated surrender, otherwise they will continue to be sacrificed for western profits.
Ah yes, Russian propaganda from checks notes… The Spectator 🤣
Shirvan at CaspianReport did a piece on this recently. His view seemed to be that it’s unlikely the frontline is going to move very much more and that current miltary actions from both sides may be for the purpose of gaining leverage during negotiations.
He paints a picture where:
- UA retains sovereignty and is provided a path to EU accession
- UA receives security guarantees
- UA concedes some of its territory to RU
- UA is prohibited from joining NATO
This would allow:
- VZ to claim UA’s sovereignty was defended
- VZ to move UA further into the Eurosphere
- VP to claim RU achieved its goal of stopping NATO advance
- VP to claim RU achieved its goals of better access to Crimea
The whole thing seemed pretty pragmatic, give it a watch if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
Lol tell me when they’ve lost. At this rate, they’ll still be “losing” the war 50 years from now.
Tell me how Ukraine is winning.
By not surrendering.
You have terminal Marvel movie brain.
So Ukraine is not losing even down to the last Ukrainian?
This is what not surrendering is like; busification.org
Damn, old ass gramps like that in the army, this shit should be over in three days.
Wait.
That link is an archive of Ukrainians being kidnapped by the fascist Zelensky government for them to be sent to their death. All in favour of your unrepentant bloodlust against the Russians.
Ok. So they’re winning?
Is it time to ban me?
man you’re a disgusting fascist. Truly shows that you only care about Ukrainians in such when they serve your violent bloodthirst.
By converting a “3 day operation” into a multi year, million plus casualty event for Russia. By going from “west offers to evacuate leader” to “Ukraine offers west drone training”.
Tell me how Russia taking on over a million and a half casualties is winning… Hell how about you describe reality first and then back up such a dumbass request.
By converting a “3 day operation” into a multi year,
Who said it was a 3-day operation?
Tell me how Russia taking on over a million and a half casualties is winning… Hell how about you describe reality first and then back up such a dumbass request.
The Ukrainian government is literally kidnapping Ukrainians and forcing them into fighting against their will. It’s extremely clear that Ukrainians don’t want to fight for their Nazi government. Even fucking liberals are starting to realize this and reporting on the Nazi kidnappers being pushed back by the people.
By going from “west offers to evacuate leader” to “Ukraine offers west drone training”.
Because Ukraine is literally run by fascists, why else would they dig up dead Nazis to give them posthumous awards? Why else do they have fascist slogans, fascist symbols?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/5/zelenskyy-says-wants-ukraine-to-become-a-big-israel
Who said it was a 3-day operation?
US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. It’s also pretty rich to mention 4 year special operation when USA wage completely undeclared not-wars for literal decades like in Afghanistan or Iraq
The working class loses every war.
August polls by SOCIS show that a majority of Ukrainians consider corruption a more serious threat to their state than Russia – and that nearly 57 per cent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky for the prevalence of corruption, nearly double the number in a similar poll from April 2025. The same poll also also projects that three different rivals would beat him in a second-round election, each by a landslide margin of around two-to-one.
Damn. Elections when?
How can you call for elections in such a time of great need? The democratic elected PRESIDENT of Ukraine can not allow elections right now.
