this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Help me understand Russia's actions, please (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by thepeoplesinging@lemmygrad.ml to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml
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When Russia invaded Ukraine a few years ago, I was very lib and mostly history-illiterate. I try to be more ML now, but I still don't know a lot about world history. I've heard people saying that, at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO promised they would not move toward Russia, but have since continued to expand eastward. I understand this is threatening to Russia, and I understand why they would want to respond, I'm just not sure why Ukraine specifically was the response? I know we give critical support to Russia in its opposition to the imperial core, so is that the reason? I also know Ukraine is brimming with Nazis in their ranks, but is that alone a reason to invade them? Is my saying Russia invaded Ukraine a misunderstanding in itself? I'm not trying to challenge you guys, I sincerely don't know and want to understand.

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[–] WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

First of all, congratulations on opening your eyes and being willing to listen. That's not a small step. Please start with cfgaussian's post, as it's comprehensive and detailed. But I like to keep these two links handy for my liberal friends who call anything written by non-western people propaganda. They both basically say the same thing, but the first is more historical, and the second is more geopolitical. The second one is written by a former assistant secretary general of the UN who "escaped" the USSR.

https://archive.is/20250319094957/https://thehill.com/opinion/5198022-ukraine-conflict-disinformation/

https://www.meer.com/en/74782-will-the-ukraine-war-be-the-undoing-for-the-european-union

Personally, I'm entirely on board with the Russian "invasion", and my support for it is uncritical. The war should never have happened, but now that it's here, Russia needs to see it through to the end. They were left with no other choice.

[–] Hagels_Bagels@lemmygrad.ml -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Zelensky instead increased weapons imports from NATO countries, which was the last straw for Putin. So, on Feb. 21, 2022, Russia recognized the independence of Donbas, deployed troops there for “peacekeeping,” and demanded Zelensky renounce his quest for NATO military assistance and membership.

When Zelensky again refused, Putin massively expanded his military offensive on Feb. 24. Intentionally or not, Zelensky had provoked Russian aggression, although that obviously does not excuse Moscow’s subsequent war crimes.

So is this article implying that either a) the 2022 'SMO' was planned in a very short amount of time (3 days or so?) in response to Zelensky accepting NATO arms or b) that the "invasion" was already planned for significantly longer by Russia and that Putin would have retracted his plan to launch the invasion over one decision by Zelensky between 21-24 Feb 2022? How would Zelensky look if he rejected arms while in immediate anticipation of an invasion planned by Russia? The subsequent operation really undermines the pretext that Russian soldiers were deployed to Donbass for peacekeeping (the author placed the words in quotation marks).

The author in this passage accuses Russia of war crimes and claims that it's obvious they aren't excused by Russia being provoked. When you say that you uncritically support Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine you didn't mean to include war crimes in that though, right? I just feel uneasy about discourse which seems (to me) to be too generous towards Russia's narrative given their war crimes.

[–] WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 days ago

I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to imply in the first paragraph. Russia shouldn't have mobilised their troops before attacking? They shouldn't have given Zelensky one last try to make things right? 8 years was too short of a time for negotiations? Zelensky needed to go to war so he could look tough? WTF?

The second paragraph is more clear, but just seems to be liberal talking points. Which is fair, because I posted liberal sources, but the primary complaint seems to be that liberals don't support the Russian SMO, so I shouldn't? The war crimes thing is just fluff based on liberal propaganda. I still support the US' entry into World War 2. Despite them being most enthusiastic committer of war crimes on the planet, committing the most horrifying attack on civilians in human history.

[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7112898

https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686

[–] thepeoplesinging@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Thank you. I feel like I understand better now, especially with that first link. Haven't worked through all the sources in the second one yet.

[–] freagle@lemmygrad.ml 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

We need to go back even further than those posts do.

Russia has been invaded over its Western border 3 times in modernity. The first was by Napoleon. The second was by a bunch of Western European nations. The third was by the Third Reich.

Every single invasion was bloody, but the first and third were devastating. Millions of Russians died fighting off Napoleon and millions died fighting off the Third Reich.

And both of those invasions followed the same route crossing into Russia in what today is the border between Russia and Ukraine.

It has been well established for centuries, therefore, that this specific area land is the most vulnerable spot of Russian national self defense.

So that's the first understanding that comes from history that is critical to our understanding of the present. The second is understanding how military campaigns like this work.

How did France invade Russia? What did Napoleon have to do? Well, take a look at a map and you'll see that it's not a short distance. The route goes through many sovereign nations. And we're not talking about just a bunch of soldiers walking to Russia and trying to cross a border. We're talking about a massive army. It requires supplies, which means it requires supply lines. It requires reconnaissance, communications, housing, ammunition, food, defensive positioning and fortifications, etc. This is no small feat. It's a huge undertaking. Napoleon enlisted a number of European countries along the route to support the campaign and historians study the logistics of this invasion very heavily.

How did the Third Reich invaded Russia? First, they made land grabs that were appeased. Then they invaded other countries. In both modes of expansion they built their logistics to support their military campaign of invading Russia.

Understanding the importance of logistics in these invasions gives us the background we need to understand NATO.

NATO is a military that was founded specifically to "counter" Russia. Among other things this includes plans for an invasion, because it has to. But unlike France or Germany, NATO is not a national military, it's transnational, and unlike any other anti-Russian army on the continent in history - it has nukes. NATO emerges just as all the great powers decide to stop warring amongst themselves and instead choose to fight proxy wars in the periphery. So NATO is a transnational nuclear military that forms in peacetime. And what does it do? It expands.

It gains land, money, soldiers, and sovereignty from other European countries as part of its treaty structure. It uses all of that to build a vast logistics network across Europe during peacetime. And it moves that logistics network ever Eastward towards Russia, eventually reaching Ukraine in late 2013 with the first ever joint NATO/Ukraine military exercise.

To Russia, this looks like a slow motion invasion. Which is made worse when we realize that the US worked with the Vatican to spirit away many Third Reich officers under Operation Paperclip, and then hand picked from among the Third Reich officers which ones would lead NATO. Yes. The US staffed NATO leadership with Nazis. Because Nazis were specifically oriented towards the invasion of Russia. It's made worse when we realize NATO conducted Operation Gladio where it established neo-nazi terrorist cells all over Europe as a contingency against Russian invasion. It's made worse when a supposed defensive alliance decides to bomb Yugoslavia for "humanitarian reasons" - the first ever war for humanitarian reasons - which included dropping DU bombs from airplanes into populated areas.

All of this history helps us understand the genuine national security threat that Russia is facing as part of a historical process, not merely a paranoid assessment or set of assumptions. And it helps us understand the rhetoric and logic of escalation since 2014 on both sides.

I encourage you to research the NATO exercises that involved Ukraine. It includes things like simulating and invasion of Kaliningrad and flying B-52 nuclear bombers in Ukrainian airspace.

All of this history fundamentally changes the framing of this particular conflict.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I completely agree. Thank you for adding that important context and historical perspective!

However, for someone who is just beginning to try and understand this conflict and its history, going that far back can be daunting and it may be hard to make the connection to the situation we are in today. That is why i tried in my post to not go back any further than 1991, and from there to lay out as comprehensive, but also as concise of a chronology as i could, of the steps that led to the situation we have today.

I also think that we should not focus entirely just on the NATO angle because while that is certainly important, it is also a more abstract argument and one that is talked about even in mainstream or mainstream adjacent media. What is not talked about nearly as often is the existential threat to the people of the Donbass and the brutal war that was and is being waged against them by the Nazi Kiev regime.

We should not forget to mention the fact that Russia responded to a legal, according to international law (UN charter), defensive request from the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, which also according to international law (at least as it was applied in the case of Kosovo by the EU and NATO), legally declared independence from the illegitimate, coup-installed Maidan regime according to their right to self-determination.

The reason why this is important is because while some could argue that the threat of NATO expansion could perhaps have been addressed in other ways, the question that nobody who denounces Russia's intervention in Ukraine is able to answer is: what was Russia supposed to do about the imminent attack and almost certain ethnic cleansing that the people of the Donbass were facing? What other solution was there, once it was clear the Minsk agreements had failed and the Ukrainian army was massing?

I explained this aspect in greater detail in another discussion i had on this thread: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/6093027

For OP: i recommend reading my responses there and checking out the additional sources.

[–] KrasnaiaZvezda@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Good text but you forgot a very important fact, that is, the second group to have invaded Russia, with the specific goals of enslaving the population for their own benefit, is composed of preciselly the countries that have formed nato as a stronger entity to invade and finally bend Russia to their will.

Mentioning what happens in the 90s would also be a good idea in any longer texts.

[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 1 week ago

ProleWiki has a good article on it as well: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/2022_Russo-Ukrainian_conflict

Helped me with getting an overview sense of it.

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I would just like to say, to anyone who wishes to make a "definitive" post about this topic which we can then direct people to whenever the question is asked: feel free to use my comments on those two posts to put together a summary or a timeline. You can cut out, abbreviate, or summarize what you think is too long winded, not relevant, or too much information for someone who is just trying to understand this for the first time. I also added a bit more context and a few more sources in this discussion i had on another thread: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/6093027

You don't need to credit me, all i want is for this information to be available to everyone.

[–] Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml 18 points 1 week ago

Adding on to what the others are saying, I would like to emphasise that western military strategists had also predicted that NATO expansion would cause a disastrous outcome, and they predicted it many years in advance of NATO actually expanding into Ukraine.

Literally, read this article published in 1997 by George kennan in the NYT.

Literally 25 years before the war it was predicted that NATO expansion could be America's worst foreign policy mistake in the post-cold war era.