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finishsneezing ,

Do you think anyone doesn’t know what a proxy war is? Or are you sheepishly trying to shift away the blame from the country that started this war?

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

I think you don’t know what a proxy war is because US officials now openly say that it is a proxy war. Here’s former United States ambassador to Finland openly saying this in a mainstream US publication:

he United States, NATO and our European Union allies have been propping up Ukraine to fight a proxy war, but the effort amounts to doing half a job.

finishsneezing ,

I don’t understand how what your saying is a response to my post. I don’t even understand how your statements are internally coherent: „I think you don’t know what a proxy war is“ <> „because US officials now openly say it is a proxy war“. Also I don’t think someone who was an ambassador to Finland 18 years ago can be counted as a „US official“.

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

What specifically are you having trouble understanding here. The war is between US and Russia, and plenty of US officials have active openly acknowledged it.

Mitt Romney - We (Americans) are losing no lives in Ukraine…

Mitch McConnell - “People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”…

Richard Blumenthal - We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost…

RAND published a whole study where it advocated for a proxy war in Ukraine as a way to weaken Russia. We also now know that US also sabotaged negotiations last March that could’ve ended the war. Given all that’s now known, it takes stunning amount of intellectual dishonesty to pretend this isn’t a proxy war.

dan ,

“We also now know that US also sabotaged negotiations last March that could’ve ended the war.”

What’s your source for this statement?

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

commondreams.org/…/boris-johnson-pressured-zelens…

finishsneezing , (edited )

Stop posting links and work on your poor reading comprehension.

Even though it is beside the point, Mitt Romney doesn’t say what you’re claiming, neither in the video nor the tweet you linked. McConnell says nothing about a proxy war in that statement and neither does Blumenthal. You are extrapolating political affiliation from half-statements or even single words and interpret them how you choose. I don’t know about RAND and I do not care, because I never said it wasn’t a proxy war, but are these really the strongest evidence you could find?

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Sounds like you would do well to follow your own advice here if you genuinely believe all that.

finishsneezing ,

I haven’t posted a single link.

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah, you just make stuff up.

finishsneezing ,

Like what?

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Like your whole argument that this isn’t a proxy war between US and Russia.

finishsneezing ,

When/where did I say that?

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

this you?

Do you think anyone doesn’t know what a proxy war is? Or are you sheepishly trying to shift away the blame from the country that started this war?

finishsneezing ,

Lead me through your thought process, please. Where exactly in these two sentences did I say that this isn’t a proxy war? Because once again, for around the fourth time today: what you claim to have been said, was in fact not said.

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

Saying “Do you think anyone doesn’t know what a proxy war is?” can be interpreted to mean that this is not a proxy war, and claiming that it is one relies on people not knowing the meaning of the term. Kind of weird that you don’t understand that. However, if you agree that this is a proxy war then the rest of your comment is pure nonsense. Also, hilarious how you brush off the RAND study I linked given the role RAND plays in shaping US foreign policy.

finishsneezing , (edited )

It seems you often interpret things the way you feel, instead of what was actually being said. You just did it again - I never said I agree this is a proxy war. As I said before, whether it is or isn’t is beside the point I‘m trying to make.

Funny how you call out the one thing I haven’t addressed after ignoring my rebuffs several times. Still, I took a quick look at the RAND study; it’s from 2019, they argue strategies to weaken Russia. After 2014, a move like that was already on the horizon - thinking about this stuff is their job. How you get from that to calling it „advocating“, and the claim it is a proxy war, and even think this is actual evidence of anything, is beyond me. There even is an editor’s note „There because Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine have mischaracterized this research“. That is my point.

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

It seems that you like to play word games instead of speaking plainly then focus conversation on psychoanalyzing people you’re attacking instead of making any actual points in the discussion. If you read the study and missed the part where it says that a war in Ukraine would be a way to weaken Russia then I don’t know what else to say to you. The fact that they had to add a note to distance themselves from what they suggested actually shows the opposite of your point.

Meanwhile, Stoltenberg has now publicly acknowledged that Putin made clear to NATO in a draft treaty before the war that it could avert it if NATO agreed not to keep enlarging. But NATO rejected the offer.

Then lastly on Sweden. First of all, it is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm#:~…

So, yes it’s a proxy war that was directly caused by NATO expansion. Plenty of western experts have been saying this for many decades. Then people started peddling your simplistic narrative after the war started. Here’s what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:

truthout.org/…/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-…

truthout.org/…/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalatio…

50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6f627aaf-116a-40af-b497-ecf8006fe2db.pnghttps://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/99020793-213d-4451-80d7-295930705738.png

George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia" back in 1998.___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/832e713d-8963-4ecc-ae1f-8b366830bbd4.png

Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was "the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat [...] since the Soviet Union collapsed"___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/706556d4-ae53-4140-9cb2-bb2cfefd9c52.png

Even Gorbachev warned about this. All these experts were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now people are trying to rewrite history and pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked.

finishsneezing ,

It seems that you like to play word games instead of speaking plainly then focus conversation on psychoanalyzing people you’re attacking instead of making any actual points in the discussion.

… I simply don‘t appreciate having words put in my mouth in order to make me a strawman.

You are an apologist of Russia‘s war of aggression, which is what I have said from the start and which you have made abundantly clear.

yogthos OP ,
@yogthos@lemmy.ml avatar

You are an apologist of Russia‘s war of aggression, which is what I have said from the start and which you have made abundantly clear.

Here you are putting words in my mouth. What you’ve done from the start is make personal attacks on me and lying. I have nothing more to say to you.

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