Russia Invades Ukraine 2022

[Ken]

Today is going to be an interesting day in school. Vancouver WA has large Russian and Ukrainian immigrant communities. And I have both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking immigrant kids in my classes. I actually have no idea what the politics of their respective communities are but I'm sure I am about to find out.

My wife taught some of those same families in school, 15 years ago, in the same community. I think when the little green men adventured into Crimea, her connection were quite sympathetic to Russia.
I’d be interested in which your students today support. Probably mixed?

It snowed last night and we are on 2-hour late start weather delay so I expect attendance will be pretty sparce today when school finally gets rolling. But it will be interesting to see if this affects things in class. I'm usually pretty strict about keeping politics out of class but this might be an exception. I doubt the non-Ukrainian and Russian kids will be paying much attention. The really smart and politically aware student types are mostly in AP classes which I don't teach this year.

[Grace]

In case you didn't notice, the West toppled the democratic elections in the Ukraine in 2014 and installed their own puppet government. What is shocking is how poorly the West and America treats their client states. They've basically hung them out to dry - because the West doesn't have any actual ability or will left to get into a hot conflict with Russia. So Russia can basically do whatever it wants.

IMO the current administration emboldened Putin when Biden gave Putin the green light for a "minor incursion" into Ukraine. (Biden’s own words),
Add to that he personally lobbied Dem Senators to vote against Russian sanctions and lifted the sanctions on Nordstream 2, immediately after taking office.

Considering the incompetent exit from Afghanistan, and the issues with our southern border, is it any wonder Putin sees this time of U.S. weakness as a window of opportunity to carry out his war-filled goals to cut through Ukraine and then start devouring little pieces of other countries. Sadly for Ukraine the current administration has been a gift to Vladimir Putin.

[HondurasKeiser]

This is a rather biased headline. When I was growing up, the Ukraine was just part of the USSR. Lenin divided the USSR into different states and one of them was the Ukrainian SSR, or “ УССР”. “Ukraine” simply means “border”. It was the borderlands of Russia with non-Russian countries.

Going back to the 1800s, many Mennonites settled in that area. They were invited by the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great. We now call these people “Russian Mennonites”. They were never called “Ukrainian Mennonites”, because “Ukraine” as an independent country didn’t exist back then.

Looking to the present day, quite a few people in the Ukraine prefer to be part of Russia and democratically expressed their desire to be, starting in Crimea, and now also in the east. Instead of supporting the rights of self determination and democracy, the West and America decided not to recognise this.

I am very disturbed now to see many Republicans and right wing evangelicals openly calling for war. The Ukraine and Russia are not America’s sphere of influence and we need to stay out of border disputes there. We should not have interfered in the Ukraine’s elections in 2014. Doing so caused many people there to lose faith in their own democracy and prefer to ally with Russia instead.

Furthermore, entangling ourselves in these disputes does nothing except strengthen Putin’s political standing at home. This is a popular move in Russia. America fighting it simply means Putin can distract Russians from domestic issues. Why get involved and do this?

This is also a failure of American diplomacy. Instead of helping broker a compromise between the American-controlled client state of the Ukraine and Russia, American diplomacy offered conflict and threats. The bluff has been called. We need American leaders who can use diplomacy effectively, like Reagan did with Gorbachev.

Really Josh? You are taking Putin's side on all of this?

And it is indeed Putin's side, not the Russian side. Unlike Ukraine, Russia hasn't had free and fair elections in decades. We don't actually know what the Russian people want because they haven't had an actual say in the affairs of their own country in decades.

If they ever did...Peter Hitchens has an interesting reflection on the Russia of the 90's and the failure of the West (resultant of our own greed) during the Yeltsin years.

I do not think the world has had such an opportunity since 1945. In fact, it was better, for in 1991 there was no Stalin, no Soviet Communist Party.

Like a knight dead inside its armour, the once-mighty Soviet armed forces might look from a distance like a menace, but they were rotten and done for, and in a matter of months would keel over and fall to the ground.

In fact the problem quickly be-came trying to find any way to govern that vast country at all, as the spells and incantations which had kept it together no longer worked.

What an opportunity this was for the rich, stable, well-governed West to come to the rescue.

Had not Marshall Plan aid revived and rebuilt a ruined Western Europe after World War Two?

Had Britain and the other occupying powers not vowed to bring democracy, freedom and the rule of law to a prostrate Germany?

Was this not a moment for an equally unique act of generosity and far sight?

No it wasn't. What was unleashed instead was an army of carpetbaggers from the West, shouting about the free market, who quickly found their match in the crooks and corruption experts, many of them high Communist officials, who rushed to exploit and fool them.

At the same time formal 'democracy' was introduced – that is to say, there were some elections, which were of course rigged by big money.

And in the minds of Russians whose savings were vaporised, who were turned out of their homes by thugs, who lost their jobs and pensions, democracy became a swear word.

People and governments who now claim to despise Vladimir Putin for his aggression, for his suppression of freedom and for his corruption did not seem to be bothered by these things when his forerunner, Boris Yeltsin, did them.

It is a fascinating contrast.

Yeltsin, a former Communist machine politician with a far from perfect past, ordered tanks to shell his own parliament, while his police shot down demonstrators.

He savaged Chechnya. His own re-election to the presidency stank of money.

Corruption under his rule was so flagrant and grotesque that, when he quit, many Russians welcomed with relief the return of what the film-maker Stanislav Govoryukin called 'normal corruption'.

Yeltsin, often paralysed with drink, was a welcome guest in the West, even the White House, despite his embarrassing and crude behaviour.

But Yeltsin, unlike Putin, did nothing to control the oligarchs, allowed the West to continue its rape of Russia's economy, and – above all – made no protest against the humiliation of his country by the continued expansion of Nato eastwards across Europe.

This was by then a more or less openly anti-Russian alliance (who else is it directed against?).

It wasn't just that the West had promised not to do this, as numerous documents now show beyond doubt.

It was that it was stupid, and created the very crisis it claimed to be protecting us against.

Interestingly the leading protesters against this Nato expansion were not Russian nationalists but highly intelligent and experienced independent figures.

Michael Brendan Dougherty said something similar yesterday:

Not just predictable, but predicted. Twenty-five years ago, not long before his death, the man [George Kennan] who pioneered the policy of containing the USSR throughout the Cold War emerged from his retirement as a cragged old man with a warning:

Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

As NATO expanded, not even Russian liberals could quite comprehend what was happening. In 2014, Canadian diplomat Chris Westdal recalled a talk he had with Yegor Gaidar, the reformist minister under Boris Yeltsin’s government. Gaidar said NATO expansion would “bring out the worst of Russian instincts.” The introduction of the Baltic states merely worried him, but something else bothered him much more.

The notion of Ukraine in NATO, he suggested, was worse than preposterous — it was insulting. It was evidence, if more was needed, that the West would not take Russia seriously, that it would not concede that Russia had legitimate security interests it was bound as a major power to protect.

Gaidar’s pleas fell on deaf ears, of course.

Putin is course primarily responsible for his own actions. ISIS was responsible for their atrocities, but the prospect of a difficult radical Sunni insurgency was also predictable and predicted. Foreign actors do get a vote in the events of the world. That’s rather the point we’ve been trying and apparently failing to make.

[mike]

At issue here is quite a few people in this territory want to be part of Russia. Russia has said they’re going to defend those people’s choice.

Yes, I am pretty sure the Ukrainian populace just loves what is happening.

Well, Luhansk (1.4 million people), Donetsk (2.3 million), and Crimea (2.4 million) all have been lobbying for a while to become part of Russia, or else to be independent states with warm diplomatic relations with Russia. That's 6.1 million people out of the Ukraine's 41 million total, or 15%.

Do you have an argument for why these people should be forced to be part of the Ukraine? More importantly, exactly whose military is going to enforce such an occupation? Kiev doesn't have enough of a military force to do so, and the West has been either unwilling or unable to do so. When it came to Russia annexing Crimea, the soldiers literally tore off the patches on their uniforms and put on Russian ones. There was no invasion or occupation. The people simply became officially part of Russia, and were happy about it.

There are Ukranian nationalists to be found elsewhere. Amongst our own Mennonite history, we have a sorry chapter in our past when we ourselves aligned with Nazis in the Ukraine in nationalist action against the Soviet Union. They lost, badly. The nationalists this time simply don't have the numbers to win, other than perhaps holding on to a much smaller independent territory. They did not make their case to the people listed above for why they should be part of a united "Ukraine".

Might makes right

[Ken]

At issue here is quite a few people in this territory want to be part of Russia. Russia has said they’re going to defend those people’s choice.

Yes, I am pretty sure the Ukrainian populace just loves what is happening.

Well, Luhansk (1.4 million people), Donetsk (2.3 million), and Crimea (2.4 million) all have been lobbying for a while to become part of Russia, or else to be independent states with warm diplomatic relations with Russia. That's 6.1 million people out of the Ukraine's 41 million total, or 15%.

Do you have an argument for why these people should be forced to be part of the Ukraine? More importantly, exactly whose military is going to enforce such an occupation? Kiev doesn't have enough of a military force to do so, and the West has been either unwilling or unable to do so. When it came to Russia annexing Crimea, the soldiers literally tore off the patches on their uniforms and put on Russian ones. There was no invasion or occupation. The people simply became officially part of Russia, and were happy about it.

There are Ukranian nationalists to be found elsewhere. Amongst our own Mennonite history, we have a sorry chapter in our past when we ourselves aligned with Nazis in the Ukraine in nationalist action against the Soviet Union. They lost, badly. The nationalists this time simply don't have the numbers to win, other than perhaps holding on to a much smaller independent territory. They did not make their case to the people listed above for why they should be part of a united "Ukraine".

Nearly every large country on the planet has disparate ethnic groups within its borders. But in the modern world we learn to get along rather than going to war to redraw national borders along ethnic lines. That is the fundamental principal of the post-WW2 international system. The only countries that have really violated this principal are Russia, Israel, and China.

Are you in favor of giving Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California back to Mexico? Those states all have very large Spanish-speaking populations, some of whom might well prefer such a result.

[temporal1]

Today is going to be an interesting day in school. Vancouver WA has large Russian and Ukrainian immigrant communities. And I have both Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking immigrant kids in my classes. I actually have no idea what the politics of their respective communities are but I'm sure I am about to find out.

My wife taught some of those same families in school, 15 years ago, in the same community. I think when the little green men adventured into Crimea, her connection were quite sympathetic to Russia.
I’d be interested in which your students today support. Probably mixed?

It snowed last night and we are on 2-hour late start weather delay so I expect attendance will be pretty sparce today when school finally gets rolling. But it will be interesting to see if this affects things in class. I'm usually pretty strict about keeping politics out of class but this might be an exception. I doubt the non-Ukrainian and Russian kids will be paying much attention. The really smart and politically aware student types are mostly in AP classes which I don't teach this year.

The judgment+bias you display about your school’s students (just in this post) indicate you need to stick to your assigned curriculum.
Snow day? This would be a great time to keep students away from gov schools.

There is a significant Russian population in the PNW. They deserve not to be typecast/disparaged on public forums, esp not by those they entrust with their children. None do, Russian or not. Students or parents. Be a professional, stick with the curriculum.

[Karstan78]

The news is reporting a Turkish vessel has been hit.

https://www.reuters.com/world/turkish-o ... 022-02-24/

We are all waiting to hear Biden‘s address.

Ernie you mentioned they are travelling south, to Romania? They would be better to travel along this way towards Germany.

[Josh]

Nearly every large country on the planet has disparate ethnic groups within its borders. But in the modern world we learn to get along rather than going to war to redraw national borders along ethnic lines. That is the fundamental principal of the post-WW2 international system. The only countries that have really violated this principal are Russia, Israel, and China.

Are you in favor of giving Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California back to Mexico? Those states all have very large Spanish-speaking populations, some of whom might well prefer such a result.

If the majority of the citizens in those states wanted to be part of Mexico, yes, I think that would be far preferable to going to war. Don't you think so?

[Josh]

Might makes right

I'm simply saying people have a right to self-determination and the consent of the governed. I do not think that arbitrary lines drawn on a map are worth going to war over. (Then again, I don't think anything is worth going to war over, but that's a different topic.)

[mike]