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0 pointsemteycz4y ago0 comments

Nah, he is just ensuring Ukraine gets support to join immediately, and inflicting enormous damage on Russia in the process. He'll be remembered as "The Man Who Ended Russia in a Week". Russians are going to be embarrassed about their nationality for the next 100 years at least.

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ailef4y ago· 2 in thread

There is no chance Ukraine will join NATO in the short term (and possibly ever), let alone immediately. This would trigger an Article 5 invocation that would compel NATO members to send troops to Ukraine, escalate the conflict even more, possibly leading to a global war, which no one wants to do.

janto4y ago

Putin has now demonstrated the need for NATO membership to Ukrainians. If they get a choice, my bet is they would join eagerly.

ailef4y ago

Yes, but this point is kind of moot given that it was NATO membership expansion in the first place to start the tensions.

You can look up articles from 2008 and see that even Germany (Angela Merkel) was adamantly opposed to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO, because there was no credible threat from Russia and she knew this would create instability in Europe. The fact that there was no credible Russian threat is easily confirmed if you do a Google search for "ukraine russia" before 2008: you hardly find anything noteworthy. The whole narrative only changed around 2014.

Now we're at the situation where the Ukrainian people, and also Russians and the entire Europe (at least economically), are paying huge costs because we couldn't avoid seconding foolish US foreign policy choices.

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