Thanks, this seems like a sensible analysis that also accords with my knowledge of the situation prior to the current fighting. The conclusions drawn reflect the outcomes we have seen from other recent internationally-backed conflicts, which makes sense.

As always, the losers are the people who live inside the actual disputed territory, regardless of their background or political affiliations. It won't be Putin's or Zelenskyy's children who step on the landmines long after the shooting stops. No matter how many countries say they commit to remove them.

[+] yogthos@lemmy.ml -14 points 1 year ago

I think the reality is that the actual conflict is between Russia and NATO with Ukraine simply being used as a proxy. This is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine as they ended up being cynically used by the west in a misguided attempt to weaken Russia. And I'm not exaggerating here, it's literally the words of Loyd Austin and what a RAND paper that was published before the war suggested. Russia obviously played the role of the aggressor here and bears full responsibility for that, but the war would not have happened if not for NATO ambition to keep expanding east.

What's truly tragic is that plenty of western experts have been warning about this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started.

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:

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.

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"

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.