As opposed to letting people shoot schoolgirls in your own country? Yes.
Wrong.
There's a reason sovereign authority is vested in nation-states instead of some supranational organization.
Until it comes to International Law and crimes against humanity.....
Would've still been sustainable if they were allowed to buy Russian gas. They've painted themselves into a corner with the sanctions. Keep this up for long, and there'll be many voices from within EU demanding that the sanctions be lifted - exactly how the Russians intended it when they decided to get the Europeans hooked onto their gas.
Build nuclear power stations instead of whinging. Russian gas is not the answer, we've already seen that. Russia can't be trusted.
Food prices are going up everywhere - including Europe.
Agricultural and energy costs are falling, but basic items remain stubbornly expensive for consumers.
www.nytimes.com
There are demand-supply factors to be considered when looking at food inflation, not just the war. Russia's overall CPI inflation following the invasion was actually milder than what followed the Crimea takeover, even though the sanctions now are far more severe:
View attachment 38201
Cost of food in Russia increased 11.68 percent in February of 2025 over the same month in the previous year. This page provides the latest reported value for - Russia Food Inflation - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic...
tradingeconomics.com
Russian food inflation is well over 9%, I have shown you the actual evidence in the last video I posted. 9% is horseshit, it's between 25 and 50+% between 2023 and 2024.
And the ruble keeps falling:
The fact is, Russia has more than enough farmland to stabilize the supply once the extent of the demand becomes clear. But a lot of European countries (especially southern europe) are actually net food importers. So food inflation is actually a much bigger concern for Europe than it is for Russia. Especially if it is accompanied by inflation in energy prices, which it is.
Not what the evidence on the shelves show. Our options for sourcing are far greater than Russia's
No you haven't. The US was the largest donor and theirs was $65bn as of 2012. Yours must've been a fraction of that. But that's besides the point - I'm just talking about the loan amount, not the total figure of what was looted from the colony which would run into the tens of trillions that you'll never be able to repay and I'm not asking that you do.
And lied about it.
www.aljazeera.com
Because it's the principle that matters, not the amount. $84bn is about what we spend on defence in a single year.
We never stole $45tr from you, you never had that to steal in the first. You haven't adjusted the aid since 1947 for inflation. Your cumulative GDP for the last century doesn't even come to $45tr. The figure is horseshit. We also saved you from extermination by the Nazis. And how much do the Cholas and other Indian Empires owe for their piracy, slavery and theft? How much does Russia owe to all the territories it annexed pre-WWII under your retrospective law enforcement scheme?
You can't argue for compensation for things that were not only not illegal at the time they occurred but the norm. That's how law works at any level, national or international, no such thing as retrospective enforcement. Otherwise India would be repaying neighbouring states for slavery and theft, and the Romans, Vikings and Normans would have to pay the UK compensation too. We agreed to a set of rules going forward and Russia has broken them.
You can't just take a wartime loan from the colony and then default on it, not because you couldn't afford to pay but because you decided to renege on the convertibility to get away with not having to pay. That's fraud & theft.
It was borrowed as the British Empire, when land was repatriated, so was the debt proportion. Sad how you have to resort to digging up BS from 80 years ago to try justify the Russian annexation of Ukraine.
Japan would've been nuked anyway. They couldn't hold on to territories much closer to them, let alone India.
Without the US and UK none of that would have happened, all that money was used to stop the Nazis and Japanese from taking over and exterminating you. I'm not even going to continue replying to these century-old strawmans, they're not the topic being discussed and are a waste of server space.
They were the reason that was used to whip up political support. It's difficult to get people to support an invasion because of geopolitical reasons or violations of this or that resolution. So WMDs were the boogeyman they decided to scare everyone with.
And that was a cooked-up pretext. And it shows NATO was willing to lie to its own people so as to get them to support invading a foreign country. How's that different to what Russia or China do?
There we many reasons, which were discussed online at the time, and WMDs weren't top of the list. Very few people regret the removal of Saddam, inside or outside Iraq.
Russia has nukes but so does NATO. All that they're likely to do is to deter the other side from using their's.
But everyone knows that when it comes to a true existential threat, like an invasion of Russia itself by NATO, nukes would be used regardless. If NATO attacked Russians in Ukraine, then maybe not.
NATO would've used a nominally non-nuclear country to invade Russia (like Poland) while providing them arms & ammo. Russia would have to fight them conventionally like they're doing now - Ukraine has invaded Kursk and they haven't been nuked.
Ukraine only invaded Kursk after over 2 years of Russia invading them, and it was against NATO's advice. Ukraine only wants its own territory, it doesn't want Kursk, that's just manoeuvre warfare, they saw an opportunity to take a large amount of land quickly becaus eit was poorly defended. It's now costing Russia a lot of troops to get it back, troops that would otherwise be invading Ukraine.
Without some semblance of conventional parity or defensible terrain, they can't hope to thwart NATO. After the collapse of USSR the Russians lost the latter, and with the demographic decline they were set to lose the former within the next few decades.
Russia has the largest country in the world with a very low population relative to size, it isn't conventionally defensive against NATO in an all out war with or without Ukraine. That said, the idea of NATO attacking Russia directly without Russia first attacking NATO is ridiculous. NATO parliaments would never agree to that.
NATO probably wouldn't have taken all of Russia, as that would certainly trigger nukes at that point - just most of the land with the resources. The large federal cities like Moscow & St. Petersburg would've become city-states with nukes strapped to them like S-vests for defence. All the regions with ethnic minorities (Chechnya, Tatarstan etc.) would've been made independent Republics.
A lot of Russian territories want away from it anyway, for the same reason former Soviet states did, it's an economic basket case. That's nothing to do with us, just formerly annexed territories getting frustrated.
Despite your suggestions, you know full well that NATO bent over backwards to accomodate Russia, especially countries like Germany. But the more did so, the more dangerous Putin became.
You said so yourself. The reason you don't invade someone is because you don't think you'll get away with it as cleanly as you'd like. But when that equation changes, you would invade them. That's what the Russians are scared of.
I also said 'where there's a genocide'. But seriously, what are the odds of getting away cleanly with invading Russia?
There is a trajectory. Even 20 years ago, it would've been laughable to sanction & isolate a country because of their domestic policies toward homosexuality. But that's the road the West is driving down these days.
As President Biden said, the enactment of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) is a tragic violation of universal human rights—one that is not worthy of
www.whitehouse.gov
20 years from now, it may be possible to whip up the public into a frenzy to invade someone for that reason as well. Especially if the Leftist indoctrination continues.
You sanction Uganda for passing a law, but then you kiss the a$$ of the Saudis who do far worse things to such marginalized communities.
And we're supposed to believe that you are principled actors and trust you?
Not going to dive into that one. But there's probably more to it than meets the eye since many allies in the Middle East also have laws against homosexuality, so there must be more to it. In fact a quick read shows there is:
The enforcement of the AHA is part of an ongoing trend of democratic erosion in Uganda, where individual Ugandans and civil society organizations face increasingly restricted civic and political space. There have been increased reports of evictions, vigilante attacks, and police harassment, abuse, and detainment of individuals who are or are perceived to be LGBTQI+, including reports of the Ugandan police subjecting individuals to forced anal examinations – an abusive, degrading practice that serves no investigative or public health purpose.
The sanctions are also very limited and the bulk of it is a reduction in aid.
Most of the world does not recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and yet that's where the US decided to set up its embassy.
True it's Tel Aviv. Biden recognises that, but Trump does not getting back on topic.
The Iraq invasion was in violation of international law, but you did it anyway.
"I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view and from the Charter point of view it was illegal." -- Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General
Yeah, and was Saddam in compliance with the UN Charter? Nope. So what has Annan to say about that?
Countries do what's in their interest - and what they think they can get away with. Applies to you as much as it does to Russia. It's that simple.
Only with your completely f'ed up and biased false equivalency. Did Zelensky attack his own people with Sarin gas? Did he invade Belarus or Transnistria, like Iraq invaded Kuwait? Did he torture and kill millions of his own people? Take hostages?
And who put those sanctions in place?
You create the conditions, and then invade once they play out exactly the way anyone with 2 braincells could've predicted they would.
You can't be saying poverty & a lack of education was creating support for Islamist radicals in Afghanistan and then create the same conditions in Iraq expecting something different to happen.
Even the Republicans don't defend the Iraq war anymore. You need to change your standpoint. It's not defensible.
UN. The sanctions were needed to keep Saddam in check but they also caused suffering. Catch 22 situation. The solution was to remove Saddam. It's very defensible.
The US executive didn't even recognize the Armenian genocide until after Turkey decided to purchase the S400s and cozied up to Russia.
What purpose would it serve 100+ years on?
Same for the genocide in Bangladesh cuz it was done by Pakistan who was a US ally (still is).
It's widely recognised even if not officially, but again what purpose would it serve now. Many Indians dispute Holodomor. Also a small genocide in the Second Chechen War. 80,000 cvilians killed. You keeping digging up old, old horseshit. Typical India, chip on shoulder from century-old BS. Move on already.
It just goes to show that you can get away with anything as long as you do what the US tells you to. This alliance structure is not based on principles, it's based on trading & bartering your morals in order to advance your interests.
You have a lot of small genocides in India post 1947 yourself.
I'm not saying that's wrong per se, I understand that's how the world works and we don't live in a perfect universe. I'm just saying you need to own up to it. Get off your high horse and stop acting like you're some virtuous savior of the people which you're not. Nobody is.
You're trying to blame us for things done by other people last century who now happen to be allies. That's a weak strawman to distract from present events and the 21st century.
Restrict matters to the 21st century or at least post-Cold War please. Otherwise you're just wasting server space re-hashing old BS which can't and won't be changed. @Ashwin
Cuz they wanted the shortest path to reach the Carpathians.
Carpathians are the opposite side of Moldova and NATO has plenty of routes around the Carpathians + aircraft to fly over them of course. It's horseshit, especially when 20 nuclear-tipped SRBMs fired from the Chernihiv Oblast could hit Moscow in under 5 minutes, what relevance do mountains the other side of Moldova have then? They wanted to steal the most valuable land and weren't bothered by security at all, that was just a ruse. So they annexed ~$8tr-worth of Ukrainian sovereign resources. That's the bare facts.
That's what I'm saying. NATO is not a defensive alliance. It's an alliance formed for the purpose of advancing the geopolitical interests of the US - which in the context, can be justifiably thought as the eventual invasion & subjugation of the Russian people.
Article 5 is just to deter anyone from attacking NATO in the meantime.
Defence of the word International Law (rather than what all the dictatorships in the UN will agree to). Stop trying to manufacture BS Indian strawmans. Stopping Saddam Hussein and Serbia's genocide of Kosovans can't be compared to Russia's blantant land theft from a European democracy (Ukraine), or Moldova, or Gerogia. Where was the security issue there? Where's the security issue with Abkhazia now?
Cuz your conventional equation vis-a-vis Russian forces wasn't where you would have liked it to be. Plus, China was looming. If the US got bogged down in Europe, PRC would've ran roughshod in the Pacific.
With Ukrainian forces on the ground, we would only have to conduct an air campaign to vastly change change things. Few weeks neutralising the air defence and supporting amnufacturing with strikes and SEAD and then a few month bombing the crap out of Russian troops positions.
Yep - like I said, it was NATO interventionism. Which was the first straw that convinced Russia that NATO was not simply about defending their own territory.
NATO only intervenes with good reason and does not annex land and resources. Russia simply annexes land with cooked up pretexts which hold no water.
India only invaded after Pakistan bombed our air bases.
India was already supporting insurgents so don't play innocent.
You mean like how you defended Bangladeshis from genocide at the hands of Pakistani forces?
53 years ago and its funny how you justify India's intervention but not NATO's intervention in Serbia.
Oh wait, you didn't. You were complicit and remained quiet because Pakistan was a US ally. The US executive even continued to encourage weapons shipments to Pakistan to fight India.
en.wikipedia.org
Lots of wrongs occurred during the Cold War. You're unable to deal with the present argument so you try and dig up old ones. Typical Indian BS.
You only invaded Yugoslavia because they were Socialists and were friends with Russia. The genocide was an excuse, a casus belli.
The Yugoslav civil war started 4 years before NATO intervened at all, there was also a genocide, no land was annexed by NATO. Invading Russian forces were present in Ukraine from the very start (2014), they annexed the most valuable land.
Accept the f*cking facts and stop lying to yourself.
Compelling reasons are obviously generated to prepare the ground for invasion. Or suppressed if found inconvenient.
The genocide wasn't generated it's a fact.
en.wikipedia.org
I'm sure we would've seen a large scale mutiny among regular Russian forces if they didn't think what was being done to ethnic Russians in Ukraine wasn't compelling enough and Putin was simply asking men to go to the front & die for no reason. This was the country that overthrew the Monarchy cuz of the conditions brought on by WW1.
You mean like when Prigozhin marched on Moscow before bottling it and very little was doen to stop him had he no quit. Nobody else has nearly enough organisational capacity to do it. You also have the fact that >1 million Russian emigrated and nearly 20,000 have been imprisoned for criticising the war.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Then you have all these assassinations of Russian by Putin, some of which were in India:
en.wikipedia.org
We don't consume Russian media & national discourse so we don't know if they found compelling reasons.
Your media does that for you. It's basically a human centipede with Russian media at the front, follwed by Indian media, followed by you.
That was admittedly a miscalculation. They thought (and wanted) to take over as bloodlessly as they did in Crimea but that didn't turn out the way they thought it would.
1 million have also emigrated. It was a miscalculation because they started believing their own lies about it being a coup.
That's the part of Ukraine that had the most ethnic Russians - and the part that would've allowed the easiest path to link up with Transnistria. They had the means to reinforce from two directions (Donbas & Crimea) and with the sea on one side, they only had to fight Ukrainians coming from one direction.
They would only have to fight Ukrainians coming from one direction if they invaded the entire Eastern flank of Ukraine too. Instead they left that so poorly protected (so concerned they were about security
) that just over 1,000 Ukrainian troops took over half of Kursk inside a week. Instead they sto9le the most valuable land to link up with the other land they had stolen earlier, which would then be formally annexed too. What did Moldova do to them other than existing?
It was just common-sense strategy, not a plan to steal resources specifically. It's not like Russia doesn't have huge mineral & energy deposits itself.
Russia does have huge mineral deposit but it wants to control more in order to gain more control over markets and more power. It wasn't a commonsense strategy at all if they were actually concerned about security.
The Islamists in the Middle-East don't need the Russians to motivate them to attack Jews. They were doing what they did on Oct 7th on a smaller scale since forever. But Israel got lax with it's nature of pre-empting attacks because they were wary of disturbing the normalization process that was happening with neighboring Arab states. So a lot of intelligence could not be acted upon for fear of upsetting that process. The incidents at Al-Aqsa and the Arab world's reaction was concerning.
Hamas took advantage of that.
Two points:
1) Hamas said it was in the planning for 18 months - do the maths.
2) Even randomradio said that Russia would likely destabilise other areas to create problems for the US before trying to retract it when they actually did.
This isn't what Western media is saying BTW, this is what my own intuition tells me. Nobody benefited more from the war in Gaza than Russia. That's no coincidence.
But Israel now realized that this will continue to happen forever, Hamas & Hezbollah will never sit quiet long enough to allow normalization to complete, and Israel doesn't have the resilience to sit through these attacks forever. So they are acting decisively against the terrorists.
The idea of wiping out Hamas won't happen though, just like the idea of wiping out crime. Their best bet is to control the border with Egypt and therefore control what gets to Hamas.
I'm saying Israel needs American support much more than Ukraine does.
They really don't, their enemies are weak as piss, they're battering them already. The only real threat to Israel is that a continuation of the war leads to the Arab world taking up arms against them en-mass. They should ceasefire and keep control of the Phili corridor to prevent Hamas remnants from rearming.
You say yourself that Europe is capable of financing (and winning) the war against Russia by itself (and I agree) - so why doesn't Europe just step up its spending to support the war effort to defend their own continent instead of leeching off American resources that could've been used to defend & support Israel which doesn't have a whole continent backing it?
It is but it's not an ideal situation and it's not how NATO is supposed to operate. Plus furthering the War in Gaza isn't really in Israel's interests if it turns into a regional war.
And I believe that you think it's okay for Israel to get limited, possibly insufficient, support if it means things cost a bit less for you in Europe as a result. That's what I mean by throwing them under the bus.
Israel is fighting a few f'ing terrorists at the moment, the only real threat is them turning it into a regional war by over-cooking it. No enemy forces are currently annexing their territory or even nearly likely to, the opposite in fact. Europe is facing the world's second military, which is annexing a country.
Newsbreak: The other side doesn't agree and they've made their intentions very, very clear. Heck, Iran directly launched ballistic missiles onto Israel and you think they're not clear as to where they stand?
It took several months for that to happen but yes we know all about Iran and their involvemnet in starting this whol shit-show.
I never said it was ok for Russia to invade. I merely pointed out that historical context matters & things are more nuanced than the "Russians are evil & NATO is without fault" line of argument you were harping.
Putin is f'cking evil. There is zero-doubting that. He locks up his own people for criticising the war, he sends men on meat assaults, or shoots them if they refuse. He kidnapped 20k children from Ukraine and has an ICC arrest warrant. He also had Moscow aprtment blocks bombed in 1999 to get himself elected in an election he was otherwise destined to lose. British colonialism and Bangladesh aren't context, they're strawmans. As for Iraq and Yugoslavia, I've pointed out a thousand times why they're false equivalents and hold no water. If you think they're the same then you must have eaten a lot of dogshit as a child thinking it was chocolate.
Yes, Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine. But NATO also shouldn't have invaded Yugoslavia and Iraq.
Both Yugoslavia and Iraq are better off for it. Former-Yugoslavian countries are now democracies and Iraq is rid of a mass-murdering war criminal.
worldpopulationreview.com
Ukraine will only be worse off as a result of Russia's invasion - one part will have lost all democracy and sovereignty and the other part will lose most of its sovereignty and its democracy will be meaningless and restricted.
The US should have actively discouraged any discourse within the alliance that seeks to attack countries that did not attack NATO. But the US leadership at the time decided to do the opposite, and as a result diluted what NATO stood for. That in turn heightened Russian apprehensions.
If we stood by and watched a genocide on the European continent, you would still criticise us for that anyway. We did the right thing.
Post-Soviet Russia actually wanted to work together with NATO.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its member States, on the one hand, and the Russian Federation, on the other hand, hereinafter referred to as NATO and Russia, based on an enduring political commitment undertaken at the highest political level, will build together a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area on the principles of democracy and cooperative security.
Russian democracy failed in 2011. Watch 'Turning Point: The Cold War and The Bomb' then come back and try and talk sh1t about Putin not being evil.
How to watch "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War" on Netflix and other services – including free options.
www.justwatch.com
They even put forces under NATO command in order to mount a much more mindful, surgical policing of Yugoslavia to prevent genocide & bring perpetrators to justice. But NATO decided to lay that proposal by the wayside and bomb the country en masse, even non-combatant targets, and refused to provide a part of the policed territory for Russia to oversee under SFOR/KFOR.
en.wikipedia.org
They did that with Vietnam and Korea before remember and with Germany post-WWII. Never again thanks. Russia isn't trustworthy under Putin at any level.
That broke all semblance of trust and solidified the notion that NATO does not want peace with Russia and did not want to accommodate Russian security concerns in the interest of peace in the least bit. That was what delegitimized moderates in Russia like Yeltsin and gave rise to hardliners like Putin.
Nah, again watch:
How to watch "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War" on Netflix and other services – including free options.
www.justwatch.com
The only real difference economically between the two was increased European trade with Russia under Putin which made him look objectively better but now we're turning him back into Yeltsin economically.
Hopefully, Trump and subsequent Presidents bring NATO back onto the rails where it was supposed to be. An instrument of defence, not of intervention, and not of offence. If Trump does that, I'd say he deserves the Nobel Peace prize. One could say he already deserves it for making the Abraham Accords happen.
You talk crap, if NATO didn't intervene you could be sure Russia and China would have dictatorships popping up everwhere.
Hopefully Indians will just get some sense and learn to compare things properly instead of twisting facts to suit their allegiances and dependencies.
rsf.org
