No. It was Russias inability to accept sovereignty of Ukraine. How is that hard to comprehend?

We saw what the US did in Venezuela for simply cozying up to China, so I’m not sure what you expected Russia to do when it’s smaller neighbour is inviting its biggest adversaries to settle at its border.

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Defletter 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, we are in agreement that empires bully their smaller neighbours. This is bad, right? You agree that this is bad... right?

	▲	nujabe 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed.

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irlib 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Finland is a small country, and it joined NATO without Russia so much as flinching. Ukraine is nothing like small. It's bigger than France, for instance, with almost 50M people. Attacking it was just plain madness.

	▲	bluegatty 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was not madness. If Zelensky fled, Ukraine would have collapsed. It was not an 'attack' so much as it was 'military rolling into Kyiv, nobody stopping them' - like the tanks rolled into Hungary. The anomaly was that they decided to fight back. And Russia's Army was not what it was, and they didn't go in with enough for a proper fight, yada yada.
	▲	nujabe 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You know very well that Finland and Ukraine are not the same. Ukrainian territory has been controlled by Moscow for centuries and their ties go much further. > Attacking it was just plain madness. I get why Putin did it. You don’t want Ukraine to become a porcupine like Taiwan or some de facto NATO state. You have to also remember that this was also a de-Nazification operation, there a lot of Nazis in Ukrainian uniform [1]. > Ukraine is nothing like small. I said smaller. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols...

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axus 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

China is a good example for the US and Russia for what to do.

	▲	nujabe 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		An excellent one for sure. Can’t beat “do nothing and win”.

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jongjong 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Governments are a bad idea. That's the root problem. People are stupid for thinking they need a government. You don't need laws. Laws are designed to oppress. Think in your own life how many times the law harmed you vs helped you... Europe, Russia, Ukraine, USA. These concepts do not exist; they are fictions... But the fiction can kill you if you believe it; just like a schizophrenic having hallucinations; those can kill.

If the fiction doesn't benefit you; there really is no incentive for you to believe it, and you shouldn't... You can be sure it's benefiting someone else. Do you want to die for the people who created this nightmare reality?

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PsylentKnight 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fictions... that allow you to have clean running water, own personal property and get an education? If you want to see what life looks like without a government, just look at Haiti. Gangs fill the power vacuum when the government loses its monopoly on violence

	▲	jongjong 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, that's just what happens in Haiti.

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arcanemachiner 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're just describing an alternative fiction with a lot less public buy-in, which from the outside looks about as plausible as the Sovereign Citizen movement that became infamous a few years back.

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hsuduebc2 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Organized groups which are created historically as opposition to another organized groups are bad idea or these are made up too?

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jongjong 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes it's a bad idea. Everyone should just think individually; "is this fiction working for me personally?" If the answer is no, then you shouldn't support it. If the people from some other organized group which "threatens you" are so brainwashed that they think they benefit from their humongous group (when in fact, they're just treated as a meaningless, tiny number), then you may have to bare the pain of their idiocy for a few generations or so until their masters exploit them out of existence. It's an unfortunate situation. The sheep get slaughtered, but unlike sheep, you can't force the sheeple to breed; and they don't; deep down they know how miserable their existence is.

In reality, the group has little power over you as an individual. It derives most of its power from your own compliance. The compliance of others is a lesser factor in your oppression.

You don't need to believe in alternative fictions unless you created it. You just need to wait it out and pretend hard! Create your own fiction, exploit every loophole! Let the idiots realize their idiocy on their own and rebel on their own later once they realize they were fooled. You have to be a radical realist, wait it out and bare all the costs in the meantime. It's better to bare the pain of system dysfunction for decades than to go along with it and find yourself at the front of the firing line later, fighting against what you helped to create.

	▲	TheOtherHobbes 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>In reality, the group has little power over you as an individual. I'm sure everyone in Ukraine is delighted that the nightly air raids are a mere narrative device, and they can choose to opt out of them by pretending hard.