But demonizing entire peoples is part of how warmongers get us to support this awful shit to begin with. It's one reason why my take is no war but class war, personally.
The demands of Russia were that Ukraine would basically be demilitarized, security would be monitored by Russia and China through the UN, and Ukraine would be prohibited from formally or informally being a part of NATO, and the prior existing Mink Accords would be followed.
If you want to claim that Russia can't be trusted, etc, that's a different argument. But the deal that was put forward, over a million lives ago, wasn't about land captured.
It has the option to not in the state of emergency. That "rule" was passed as war was imminent. They are not prohibited from holding elections.
And regardless of if you think that's a good idea or not, it's not "democratic". Because words have meaning.
And all this because the largest country in the world wanted more land
That's . . . . not true? What Russia demanded was Ukranian neutrality as regards NATO, etc, along with concessions in the Donbass. They were supposedly making peace with that in Istanbul, when Johnson in particular moved to stop it.
Again, you can say that isn't true, nobody should trust Putin, or that Russia has no right to demand that. But to claim that it's a land grab as if it's a fact isn't correct.
The West pretty much showed to Russia in the 1990s and 2000s that it was going to consider international relations a zero sum game. So Russia is of course going to work to make the problems the US and UK have worse, as the US has done with Russia.
Lol what? You think that because Russia spread some money around Brexit only exists because of Russia?
It's like the idiots in the US that ignore 70 million people voted for Trump, and want to pretend the only reason for that is that Russia spent $100,000 on Facebook ads. Because they don't want to address the actual problems that's destroying their societies. Much easier to just claim it's all Putler or something.
Russia's more than happy to throw gas on the fire, for sure.
But they didn't start it. They're taking advantage of the failures of capitalist neoliberalism in the West for their own advantage, but - and this is crucial - the existence of those failures is not something paranoia about Russia can address.
In the US, you literally had people from the Democratic party discussing how BLM was a Russian front, because the Russians were happy to show how the US treated people. But Russia didn't put those racist cops, Russia didn't give them immunity - Russia didn't make the US have the world's largest prison population that's overwhelmingly minority.
You don't want Brexit, don't have wealth gaps and massive housing costs so people can be pushed to blame their shitty lives on Polish immigrants.
So you're rejecting all political influence you would have in the Democratic party.
And the problem is this isn't reciprocal. Look at the NY Mayoral election for a recent example. Vote Blue No Matter Who and prioritizing the lesser evil is ONLY ever applied one way.
There's a great article from 2020 where the NY Times says the quiet part loud - several articles about how Democratic party insiders were "willing to risk party damage to stop Sanders". https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/democratic-superdelegates.html. Reminder this was during an election they claimed was existential for the US. Like the one in 2024, where they pushed, without a real primary, a candidate who had never won a single delegate.
All this would be one thing if the centrists with their stranglehold on the party actually won. But they don't. The GOP is firmly in control of the US - and yet the same broken party leadership remains, precisely because your logic empowers them.
You want to make accusations that I'm electing Trump? No. It's your unquestioning support of Democratic failure that enabled today.
Sure, and I get that.
But demonizing entire peoples is part of how warmongers get us to support this awful shit to begin with. It's one reason why my take is no war but class war, personally.