I just hope that when the shit will hit the fan for India, then US, EU and related countries will remember to let India deal with it alone and not provide them assistance!
Liberal international relations work on the same game theoretical principles as any group interaction with a prisoner's dilemma-type payoff matrix. The optimal strategy for any individual is to betray, to not do work on the group project and still receive good grades, to fake your credentials on your CV and still get the job, to subsidize the murder of Ukrainians and still receive economic benefits and international sympathy.
Of course, if everyone refuses to work on the group project, you receive a failing grade. If everyone fakes their credentials, the company fails due to lack of expertise, if every country prioritizes their own interests over avoiding conflict, the world goes back to the pre-WWII era of rampant warfare, colonialism and exploitation. The optimal strategy for groups is to zealously persecute defectors.
This is the reason why this decision is much more relevant to India's future than you think. It's the reason why the West seems like a vindictive in-group that doesn't tolerate dissent. It's the same old mechanism that instructed the first multicellular organism to destroy cancerous cells. The mechanism that makes guppies instinctively reject their own conspecifics if they don't participate in the dangerous inspection of predators. The mechanism that drives our conceptions of justice, vengeance and shame.
A country that went through partitioning and other West-induced "adventures" knows it.
Let me guess - you believe this is some kind of civil war, and Russia is the peacekeeping force. So - well, please do some reading. What it is, is an imperial war against Ukraine, intended to destroy Ukraine as a nation and grab their people and resources. Russians are razing entire cities to ground; they killed about hundred thousand people in Mariupol alone.
To compare, the victim count of the "civil war" in Donbas was ~hundreds. Hundreds people, not hundreds of thousands. And am unknown number of those were Russian operatives.
So while going with Putin might not be the right action, just betting on the west’s goodwill its certainly foolish.
It will many many decades, may be Centuries, before Ukrainian understand that tolerating Nazism is not a good plan and undermining the culture that gave Buddhu and Gandhi is immoral. It may take more time to realize that this war is completely manufactured outside of Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_China%E2%80%...
Sure, would be nice if they also officially joined, but complaining this way about their current choice is hypocrisy.
I speak to Chinese and Taiwanese colleagues, also to South Korean colleagues. All are against the Western-led anti-Russia war.
We are in a bubble here. A huge bubble and we believe that we are the only right people with the only right opinion.
Do they support Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
What did Russia think Europe and the US were going to do? Russia seems to have gambled on the idea that Europe and the US would let the invasion happen unimpeded. It turns out Russia was wrong about that.
Russia also seems to have been wrong about the effectiveness of their own forces and the resistance they would face from Ukrainians.
Isn't the simple solution here for Russia withdraw from Ukraine, pay reparations, help with the extradition of those soldiers who have committed war crimes, and work on restoring international relations?
I would too. But that is not what is happening, instead we have Russian-led war against Ukraine.
Russia invaded neighboring sovereign nation with the goal of annexing the territory. Dichotomy is simple: If you want to live in a world where this is okay, you can support Russia.
Now, the hypocrisy is that europe is probably happy India is buying ressources from russia, and then sell them back to them, since they don't really have alternatives.
What the west is doing is taking anti-war measures to actually make it stop.
Anti-war is to do everything to stop the war specifically diplomacy and talking to the enemy. Making deals, even if the enemy is an absolute psychopath.
There isn't a war, according to one of the combatants, so "ending the war" is a too vague. What does "end the war" mean when one of the combatants claims that there is no war? I think it's better to discuss how to end one the nasty results, and I chose the deportations of children. Not for any particular reason, just because it's of the concrete things we all want to stop.
The Russians have deported a staggering number of children (almost as many children as live in Berlin), both from areas near the frontline and areas far from it. Could you describe what the west might to do to stop those deportations? Something more effective than delivering weapons?
Or are you suggesting that we should just allow Russia to invade other countries with impunity and give it parts of Ukraine as a ransom? We've already done that the previous time, we know how it ended: in Russia invading again.
I do think Chinese and Indian media are largely pushing the same narratives as you and Russia, but polling colleagues about politics isn't going to be very accurate
