It’s one thing to bomb the pipeline of a completely cucked and subservient vassal state like Germany that will just meekly take it and say “thank you sir, may i have some more”.
It’s another to do it to a sovereign nuclear superpower like China. At that point you’re declaring war on one and a half billion people who produce one third of the entire world’s manufacturing output.
Good luck and have fun with the consequences.
After Tiananmen they can’t believe in #1
But they did. For a long time they still believed that they could do achieve their goals in China via a slower more subversive approach than the overt 1989 color revolution attempt, via gradual elite corruption and infection with liberal ideology.
This is why up until the “pivot to Asia” happened you still had fairly positive coverage of China in the Western media and cultural sphere. In the 90s and 00s China was portrayed relatively positively in the media. The war propaganda faucet to demonize and dehumanize Chinese people in the eyes of Westerners was only turned on relatively recently.
If they really thought there was no hope of regime change after 1989 they would have started this much earlier when China was much weaker. They didn’t because they didn’t understand China (they still don’t) and they deluded themselves into thinking things were still going their way.
#2 is possible but requires that the elite mistakes money for power
Well, that is how they think. But that’s not the point that was being made. The point is that the logic of capitalism made it impossible for them to resist outsourcing to China, because the profits were too juicy to pass up. China understood this and took full advantage of it.
By the time the western elites noticed their catastrophic strategic mistake it was too late. Now they are panicking and for the last decade or so have been scrambling to try and find a way to reverse what has happened before the window of opportunity permanently closes.
Hence their increasingly reckless and self-harming escalations, with Ukraine, Taiwan, now Iran… They feel they are out of time and nothing is working anymore so they have to constantly take crazier and crazier gambles in hopes of digging themselves out of the hole.
Who is currently advancing?
it weren’t western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy
Not true. What little success they had there was due to British naval drones. Those worked for a while until Russia adapted. Now you hardly ever hear of success anymore.
Ukranian drones did it.
Again, technically not the case. Most of them are Chinese, the Ukrainians just strap explosive shells on them.
the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy
Drones play a large and vital role but they have not and cannot replace the role of conventional artillery. In fact the most effective use of drones in this conflict has been as artillery spotters. The reason why Ukraine relies on kamikaze drones to such an asymmetrical extent is because they have little else left by now. It is done out of necessity, not because it is the optimal thing to do.
Further, there is a certain inherent bias in OSINT toward overestimating the impact of drones on the battlefield due to the fact that they come with their own video footage whereas an artillery shell does not film as it flies toward a target.
Ukraine started this war with their pants down
Not really. Ukraine had the largest and best equipped military of any European country except for Russia at the start of this conflict. They were involved in an active conflict since 2014, had tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed and large swathes of the eastern front heavily fortified, and they had been receiving training from NATO for years as well as weapons.
Then they were further pumped full with all remaining Warsaw pact equipment that could be scrounged up (which was actually a very large amount) when the conflict began.
and indeed if it weren’t for western systems and ammunition they would’ve lost it long ago
This is true.
at the same time they’ve been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent
Quite the opposite. Ukraine began this war with far more of a military industry than it has now. It lost almost all of it to Russian strikes, and what is left are almost exclusively small scale decentralized production which can only produce small weapons (drones first and foremost) and ammunition but nothing on the scale of tanks, artillery systems, air defense systems, etc.
Ukraine is now more dependent on western supplies than it has ever been, and not just in the military sphere. Its entire government is being kept afloat by US and European money which pays the salaries of virtually everyone in the Ukrainian government. It even imports energy. Functionally Ukraine’s economy is dead.
someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF’s foreign legion
Irrelevant. All foreign fighters choosing to involve themselves in this conflict are mercenaries as far as Russia and the Russian justice system are concerned. They have repeatedly said this and have warned how they treat mercenaries. If you still go it’s a case of FAFO.
Because this isn’t 2022, territorial reality has changed, the deal Russia was offering back then is no longer on the table, it’s gone forever and not coming back.
The new regions are part of Russia according to the Russian constitution and will not be given up, and even in 2022 Russia would not have accepted Ukraine in any European military alliance, when the whole reason for this war is that a militarized and hostile Ukraine is unacceptable to Russia’s security. And Europe has chosen to be intractably hostile to Russia for the time being.
This won’t change even if the US disappears out of Europe entirely, and the deal Russia is willing to offer will keep getting worse for Ukraine the longer this goes on.
“We’re coming home!” Crimea celebrates after 97% vote for joining Russia
“We came back home to Mother Russia. We came back home, Russia is our home”
96.77% of Crimeans vote to re-unite with Russia
“We are going home, Crimea is going to Russia”, said the republic’s prime minister
Majority of Crimea citizens one year after referendum do not regret joining Russia
Crimea celebrates 2 years since historic referendum to rejoin Russia
Return to Russia: Crimeans Tell the Real Story of the 2014 Referendum and Their Lives Since
The Majority of Crimeans Are Still Glad for Their Annexation:
“it is incontrovertible that most […] Crimean residents welcomed joining Russia. Numerous polls at the time of the annexation and in its immediate aftermath revealed broad support for joining Russia”
“Crimea’s annexation in 2014 gave residents grounds for optimism, with a majority of Crimeans hopeful that their lives would change for the better.”
“The majority of Crimeans do not experience Russian rule as oppressive, alien, or unwelcome. Instead, based on the evidence of our surveys, they are reasonably happy to be living in Putin’s Russia.”
—Foreign Affairs Magazine, official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, arch-imperialist US neocon think tank
with Russian companies owning majority share in any joint projects.
So they are taking a page out of China’s playbook? If that is really the case that’s a very positive development for Russia. It would be good to see them finally come to their senses on economic policies.
Germany, Finland, Netherlands for sure. Also Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Not to mention the Butthurt Belt states: Poland and the three Baltic villages. Romania too.
It’s better to ask who in Europe is not fascist. The number of European countries that are not yet already there or well on their way can be counted on one hand.
They do when they feel like it and they don’t when they don’t. Just like every other western country.
this is true that the offramp was always going to be Russia keeping Crimea and the Donbas, and Ukraine getting some kind of security guarantees that fall short of NATO membership
That was the offramp back in 2022. It’s not anymore. Ukraine and its Western handlers rejected that deal when they walked out of the Istanbul negotiations, reneging on a deal which the Ukrainians themselves had proposed which would have gotten them everything back except Crimea and the Donbass. Now the reality on the ground has changed significantly and that deal is not being offered anymore by Russia. The new terms are significantly less generous:
Russia will be keeping Crimea, Donbass and the other two new regions in their entirety. Either Ukraine surrenders the rest of these regions in a deal or Russia keeps going until they have them. And if this conflict goes on for another year or so even more regions may end up being lost. The longer this goes on the worse the peace terms will be for Ukraine.
As for “security guarantees” the only country that can give that is Russia. The US will never give Ukraine any security guarantees that would risk drawing the US into a direct war with Russia, whereas the Europeans are completely impotent and their “guarantees” meaningless. There will be no Ukraine in NATO or NATO in Ukraine.
And a regime change is coming as well. Zelensky is a dead man walking, whether the US forces him to hold elections which he will inevitably lose, after which he will be of no further use and an inconvenient loose end who knows too much, or whether his own Nazi buddies turn on him and take him out if it looks like he’s trying to make a deal.
The terms didn’t need to be this harsh, nor did this awful conflict need to drag on this long, or even begin at all. Ukraine could simply have abided by the Minsk agreements and it could have kept the entire Donbass and everything else it wanted short of Crimea itself and NATO membership. It could have not walked out of the Istanbul negotiations. It could have continued to negotiate with the Russians instead of passing a law literally making negotiations with Russia illegal.
Every time they chose violence instead of peace they just made things worse and worse for themselves.
They are usually a niche demographic, but present in any country.
The difference is that in the Baltics and Ukraine this is not a niche demographic anymore. Pro-Nazi views are either the norm or they appear to be because the state has been legitimizing and endorsing pro-Nazi views while suppressing the opposite viewpoint.
You see, most other countries do not officially celebrate SS regiments with parades, they don’t name their streets after or erect monuments to Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust and brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of people, and they don’t teach children in schools to hate people of a certain ethnicity while teaching that Nazi collaborators were actually national heroes and freedom fighters, all while monuments and graves of the real liberators and anti-fascist fighters are destroyed.
If you feel nazis are your main baddie, it might be better to understand what makes them tick.
Are you implying that Nazis are not “baddies”?
What makes Nazis tick is hate and sadism. There is nothing deeper to understand there. And as long as that hate continues to be taught and endorsed by a country’s institutions, from the state to the educational system to media and NGOs, as is happening in Ukraine and the Baltics, the problem will only get worse.
Sounds great until you remember that the current governments of Romania, Germany, France, Britain, etc. are all arming and funding Nazis in Ukraine and enabling ethnic cleansing by a genocidal apartheid occupation regime in Palestine.
it can not be allowed for groups that espouse extreme ideologies to even gather the smallest of support
but it can be allowed to give billions of Euros and tons upon tons of weaponry to swastika-tatooed Hitler worshippers bent on ethnic cleansing. It can be allowed to prop up a corrupt, kleptocratic, dictatorial regime that has cancelled elections, placed all media under state control, declared WW2 Nazi collaborators to be their national heroes, imprisons, tortures and brutally murders journalists, political opposition, people who make online posts against the government or the war, and people who just don’t want themselves or their relatives be forcibly drafted into a war against their own brothers. That can be allowed, right?
Personally i just find it extremely hypocritical to constantly talk about how much Europe loves democracy and at the same time steal an election from the candidate who was about to win it and then go on to ban that candidate, who is clearly polling far ahead of all others, from standing in the repeat elections.
The reality is that these right wingers are not being banned from elections for their extremist views (which they undoubtedly hold, i’m not saying they don’t), they are banned because they are anti-EU and want peace with Russia instead of war. That is the “extremism” that is intolerable to the Brussels bureaucrats and their comprador lackeys in the Romanian state. A leftist candidate with the same popularity and the same views toward the tyrannical EU and the self-destructive European drive to war against Russia would be treated exactly the same, if not worse.
Democracy as been shown, countless times, it is a very fragile system, vulnerable to players willing to manipulate and distort it in order to achieve personal gains, at the detriment of a large majority.
This has always been happening for as long as “liberal democracy” has existed. The worst offenders of manipulation and distortion of democracy are the mainstream media, who constantly manipulate public opinion in favor of the so-called “moderate” and “centrist” parties that have been getting elected for decades in Europe. This is also to the detriment of a large majority.
Or do you seriously believe that the policies of either the Tories or the Labor party in the UK have benefited the large majority in Britain? How about Macron in France, has he not been a detriment to the large majority of his citizens? So much so that the French voters overwhelmingly rejected his party (yet he somehow is still in charge…)? How about the SPD, CDU and Greens in Germany? How is it not to my detriment as a German citizen for them to cut social spending in favor of massive rearmament? How is it not a detriment to the large majority of Europeans for these parties to push us into a war with Russia? Why is that still allowed?
Why is it that it is not allowed to democratically vote for candidates who oppose the EU (which is a fundamentally neoliberal and highly undemocratic institution that makes it impossible for countries to have left wing economic policies and is now led by unhinged warmongering lunatics who want to pump hundreds of billons of Euros to their friends in the arms industry) and who want peace instead of war?
Giorgia Meloni in Italy is just as much a fascist sympathizer as these right wingers in Romania, but the reason why she was not treated this way is because she was willing to bend the knee to Brussels.
The lab was in China but it the experiments were run by the US. The NIH admitted they funded illegal gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Have you considered that this was perhaps a US bioweapon “accidentally” deployed against China? The US has a history of this: it used biological weapons in Korea in the 50s and lied about it for decades.
And if that is the case (not saying it is; i’m still not 100% convinced of the lab leak theory) then it backfired spectacularly as China took the most serious measures of any country on earth to keep its people safe. No other country managed to maintain Zero Covid for as long as China did.
Over 1.2 million people died in the US. One third of their entire population was infected, potentially suffering long term health damage. In China it was just over 5,200 deaths, not even one hundredth of the US numbers with a population more than four times that of the US.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
If that to you says “lax safety precautions” then we are not speaking the same language.
The fact that you ridicule the lack of evidence and imply that this indicates China is covering something up is telling. If there was evidence you would say they are guilty. If there is no evidence then they are also guilty. That is called an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. There is nothing that can convince you otherwise because you have already decided what you want to believe and you don’t care what the evidence or lack thereof indicates.
By that same logic i could claim that the lack of evidence just “proves” that the US are very good at covering their tracks and erasing evidence of a bioweapon attack. Do you see how that logic is bad because it can be used to justify virtually any conclusion?
Why is it always the Chinese government that supposedly hides things? How about it’s actually the US government that has been hiding the truth all along?
Be that as it may let’s put the speculation aside and stick to the facts:
The fact is that China responded to the best of their abilities to a novel and highly contagious disease, which may or may not have been released from a US funded lab. It is objectively demonstrable (the stats prove it) that China had the world’s most successful Covid response. It is not China’s fault that the rest of the world is so incompetent or indifferent to the wellbeing of their citizens.
Were a few mistakes made in the initial confusion when nobody yet knew exactly what they were dealing with? Probably. It’s almost unavoidable to make mistakes when first encountering a situation you have never faced before. That doesn’t imply any kind of deliberate conspiracy. The real test is how did each country deal with it once it was understood how serious the situation was.
Germany is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Neonazis and genocidal fascists.
The EU is the far right. They support Nazis, war, rearmament, and genocide.
Iran doesn’t have a nuclear arsenal, and Ukraine never did.
Why do Zionists keep posting and bragging about the atrocities they commit?
There is no end to the moral depravity of the EU elites.
ah yes, we “warmongers” who warn against bombing the energy infrastructure of another country because we don’t want a war
talks about Russian-Chinese pipelines getting bombed and then claims that the resulting war would have been “caused by China”… 🤡