Russia invaded Ukraine to expand. They came up with a dozen lame excuses, like protecting Russian speaking people in Crimea from being insulted and to stop the local government (who they called extremists) from taking abandoned Russian military bases, NATO expansion was never a reason they gave for invading.
In Ukraine proper, his stated excuse was that the new Ukrainian government (formed after the Kremlin installed puppet government was ousted) was comprised of NAZIs who were ethnically cleansing Russian speakers in the East, a total fabrication.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/in-putins-words-why-russia-invaded-ukraine/
Try keeping your revisionist Russia centric anti democratic fantasy history to yourself. I know some random internet blowhard failure broadcasting from mommy’s basement told you this alternative fact nonsense, you have got to stop trusting them.

There’s been more NATO expansion in “buffer” nations since Russia invaded than in the 50+ years beforehand, with more coming because they invaded their neighbor…again.

Ukraine will be a NATO country now, so is our business.
Ukraine was in a treaty with the US, so was already our business. We guaranteed their borders against invasion in exchange for their nuclear arsenal. No nation will ever do a nuclear disarmament treaty with America, we don’t keep our word or we would be fighting there.
Russian expansionism isn’t stopped by ignoring it, it’s encouraged. Trump encouraged the expansionism into Ukraine proper (Crimea was Ukraine) when he recognized Russia’s claim on the seized territory, giving the green light to expand their military operations in Eastern Ukraine (that they denied existed but absolutely were there fighting during Trump’s administration and even before, recall Russians shot down a passenger plane in Ukraine in 2014 and never left).

The EU is supportive enough of Ukraine that they just unanimously agreed to $54 billion in military aid, and the EU is our closest trading partner so again, our business. The MAGA ploy to block any aid to Ukraine to aid Russia (hoping it would look bad for Biden) has failed, the EU miraculously stood up as a unified front and agreed to fund Ukraine.
NATO has agreed to admit Ukraine as soon as possible, something never considered before the invasion.


Ukraine is a lost war, lost by Russia…Russia just won’t admit it yet, but their country will be feeling the loss for decades…loss of their army, loss of an entire generation of young men, loss of their economy, loss of hundreds of trade agreements/partners, loss of trillions of dollars, loss of international standing and cooperation, loss of stability. At this point, even if Russia took Ukraine tomorrow, it would be a loss for Russia. They destroyed their prize, and themselves in the process, and the rest of the world is happy to destroy them through a proxy while Russia engages directly and is crushed daily.
Winning!

https://youtu.be/WhILMFdifhk?si=k-egPJ1oDrqKrd_S

Ukraine has already won this war by destroying Russia. It’s exceedingly likely they will also drive the Russians out and may even take some of Russia a s a buffer zone…Russia is losing badly.

lol….”creep”! Love it. 😂

Putin’s “Leftist talking points”! LOL!!! Not according to Russia. They gave their reasons for invasion at the time, NATO expanding was not among them. 😂

Bwaaahahaha!!! Putin was turned down by NATO?!? Citation please!
Russia walked from even negotiations with NATO in 2015. When do you say Putin asked to join…please provide a video of his speech requesting admission. Doesn’t exist because it didn’t happen. You bought and repeated ANOTHER stupid lie.

NATO was created to protect Western European countries from the Soviet Union expanding into their territories, not to fight communism but USSR expansionism. Russian expansionism is still a threat, and you don’t start a “No Homers” club then admit Homer because he changed his hairstyle…meaning you don’t form an alliance to protect against Russia then admit Russia as a lead member.
Btw- Putin has expressed interest in returning to communist socialist Russia and retaking all satellite nations.

PS- your broken English once again betrays your foreign nationality, “Guess America need an enemy for feed the military industrial complex.” is not a fractured English sentence fragment an American would say and denotes an alien sentence structure in your native tongue. 😂

PS- to debunk your Russian propaganda that NATO agreed to not expand…. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm#:~:text=NATO%20promised%20Russia%20it%20would%20not%20expand%20after%20the%20Cold%20War&text=Such%20an%2
0agreement%20was%20never,included%20provisions%20on%20NATO%20membership.

And what I can find about Putin wanting in NATO is according to him he once floated the idea offhand to Clinton but only if Russia was admitted immediately without waiting in line, meeting basic requirements, paying, or having an acceptance vote, and only if Russia gets the same full power as America without contributing the same amount…not a true, serious, or in any way official application to join. He was not “turned down”, in fact Clinton publicly said he wouldn’t object to Russia entering NATO, but they never applied. It’s propaganda for ignorami, Sucker.

This stuff you spout is simple to debunk in seconds, and is mostly pure Russian propaganda straight from Sputnik. You should really look into your nonsense before spewing it into the ether like a drunk puppet in Team America. If only you cared that you look like an idiotic knownothing anti democracy anti American nutjob cultist, but clearly that doesn’t bother you.

Here’s a nightcap for you…Trump’s “security” rushing righty media away from his event when protesters start chanting “LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!” 😂

As usual, you have it all 100% backwards. Not surprising since you are a Russian propagandist.
Russia secretly invaded Ukraine in 2014 as pure expansionism, when they finally admitted the invasion their excuse was Russians in Crimea were being poorly treated and a fear extremists would take over Russian military bases, having absolutely nothing to do with NATO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation#:~:text=Russia%20eventually%20admitted%20its%20troops,Russian%20military%
20infrastructure%20by%20extremists%22.

NATO is now “creeping into buffer countries” because Russia started and continues an expansionist policy and threatens its neighbors. Russian expansionism started first. There have been 3 rounds of NATO expansion since Russia started retaking now sovereign lost satellite territories in 2014.
There was never an agreement that NATO wouldn’t accept new members, just as there’s nothing stopping Russia from making allies.
Ukraine was going to be an EU country until Russia’s installed “president” ignored the people and chose Russia over Ukraine and was deposed and expelled so Ukrainians could democratically choose their own leadership which they did. Then Russia invaded.
There was absolutely no chance of them joining NATO until after the invasion, now it’s a near certainty.

Democracy in Europe IS our business. We will be fighting this war at some time, either now while Russia is weak and poor through a proxy or later when we are in a much weaker position fighting them with American soldiers directly…much better to choose now for less money and zero Americans, I know you would prefer to just let Putin re-annex the Balkan states and expand as far as he chooses, returning to socialist communism under his tyrannical leadership, but the free world would prefer to stay free.

And again, it is our business as I clearly explained to you repeatedly because we signed, and actually directed the trilateral disarmament agreement in 92 when we agreed to secure their borders against any incursion and they gave up nuclear weapons the collapsing soviets couldn’t afford to secure themselves. You would make any future agreements, and any current treaties moot and impossible to guarantee because our guarantee is worse than worthless. So shortsighted and not smart. It’s important to keep your word internationally, I know as a MAGgot that doesn’t make sense, just like telling the truth even if it hurts you doesn’t make sense to you…honesty and honor are foreign concepts to your ilk.
It would be nice if you could remember being so wrong so I didn’t have to correct you over and over and over on the exact same topic…but you can’t admit you are wrong so you will forget you were proven wrong, again, and spout the same ignorance, again, forever. So sad and mentally defective….it’s a main feature of MAGA, severe brain damage.

Walk away MAGA policies would hand the world to China, Russia, and N Korea without a word of complaint, then confusion over where our allies are when they come for us.
Ukraine is a war Russia started, one that’s being won by Ukraine with help, and one that has crippled Russia for decades to come WAY cheaper than any American policy could have. Give Joe credit, fine, Joe bankrupted Russia and destroyed their military…I don’t give him that credit, you do.

No, leftists said he would bring us into ruin, and that if he followed trough with his stated intentions he would bring us into war…but he never follows through and caved to China and Russia instead of standing strong for American ideals, interests, and Western democracy. He nearly did start a war by assassinating Iranian government officials and Syrians. I remember when you said ISIS was a nothing burger and not worth paying attention to, right before they took near half of Iraq and Syria, started attacking Americans, and we went to war with them in 2017…who was president then?
We were still at war in Afghanistan when he left office, he had just surrendered unconditionally to the Taliban and Al Qaeda under an agreement they broke repeatedly, but we were still there until Biden (poorly) facilitated the retreat Trump negotiated. Trump/MAGA didn’t avoid or end wars. Nice try at revisionism.

The policy bringing the US near war today is our Israel policy that is the same unthinking blind support for Israel from both parties, same from both presidential candidates. We are in direct military actions endangering American soldiers daily because of THAT conflict, not because of Ukraine. The unbridled ignorance is disappointing even from you. 🤦‍♂️

Ending wars by capitulating like Trump did with Crimea and surrendering unconditionally like Trump did in Afghanistan is not “winning”, it’s losing without even trying and hands the world to dictators.

If the US had used directed weather as a weapon in Iraq, or breached levies to flood cities it would have been proper to laugh at the ironic disaster in New Orleans. Remember, the support for attacking the wrong country to retaliate for 9/11 was incredibly high (yes, thinly predicated on what are now known to be blatant lies…we didn’t care), we were not a nation of innocents…(I personally supported attacking Saidi Arabia and doing limited but overwhelming “police actions” in Afghanistan to completely destroy the actual perpetrators, then rebuild any collateral damage better and make friends, and never bought the rationale for invading Iraq beyond “they tried to kill my daddy”- GB…but who listens to me?)

I felt it was karma specifically balancing the universe for the Ukrainian dam they blew up in a terrorist action just over 2 months ago, not the continuing invasion of Ukraine that’s been ongoing and expanding continuously since 2014 when Ukrainian Crimea was invaded and “annexed” by Russia, a move seemingly universally applauded in Russia.

I think there’s delicious schadenfreude in the very religious country that continues to support repeated violent genocidal expansionism against peaceful neighbors thinly predicated on blatant lies (but that support is waning slightly as the war and truth comes home), the aggressor nation that among numerous war crimes intentionally destroyed a major dam to sew chaos destruction and death as they retreated from portions of Ukraine and set forest fires for the same reason having to deal with forest fires and dam failures as “acts of god”, not even from military retaliation.

I do feel a bit bad for the individuals and families if reports of 12 dead are true (it’s Russian news, so likely untrue), but that number is dwarfed by those intentionally killed in their names by the dam destruction in Ukraine.

Agreed on the narration…it was the only coverage I found at the time….well, there was this but even I found it in bad taste…

Bwaaaahahahaha.
You are the epitome of a laughing stock…you win…here’s your “biggest boob” trophy. 🏆
Oh you dumbshit….The Washington Free Beacon (a right wing publication) and Paul Singer, (a far right mega donor) paid for the Steele dossier about Trump, then later sold it to Clinton. That’s a fact.
Republicans created the Steele dossier, and most, like 90% of it, is confirmed to be correct, none of it was ever proven false (EG- if the dossier said an anonymous source said Russians have pee tape blackmail material against Trump and it is never found, the dossier wasn’t proven to be wrong at all, it just reported the claim). People (like Manafort) went to prison for charges stemming from it.

But you [are] a foolish ignorant man has no idea of any reality because you watch slanted one sided internet propaganda from anywhere as long as it’s anti American. It’s never correct, it never includes legitimate sources, and it’s 100% anti American, anti constitution twaddle and inconsistent lies.

Since you believe anything you see online, watch this unverified report and enjoy… https://youtube.com/shorts/_f1bYWlfApQ?feature=share
And…
https://youtube.com/shorts/lV-pDw6fUTY?feature=share

You said near 3 weeks ago that Bakhmut HAD fallen and was under 100% Russian control, proven by the faked Russian propaganda film of someone raising a Russian flag somewhere and declaring victory, but Bakhmut is still not taken, Russians are losing 1000 troops a day, and Ukraine just got 40000 more troops and billions more worth of current military equipment, Russia is using 70+ year old equipment they’ve never trained with and is dropping bombs on itself.
I’m taking sides, I’m with democracy and stability by treaty.
You are too-siding with Russia, despotism, expansionism, and lies.
Russia is losing ground, losing soldiers, losing equipment, losing borders, losing its long term stalemate with NATO, losing billions from sanctions, and is losing this war. Facts are facts, and you’ve never met a real fact you could agree with.

Russia entered Ukraine because they tossed out the Russia installed “president” (his first “election” was thrown out as a total farce). Yanukovych delayed signing a hugely popular pending association agreement with the EU, choosing to accept a hugely unpopular and bad for Ukraine Russian trade deal, leading to his removal from office and, surprise, cushy retirement in Russia.

NATO had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia breaking the treaty from the 80’s in which they and the United States guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and border security in perpetuity if they gave up their nukes. That included Crimea, which Russia invaded too over nonsense lies.
They declared Crimea under terrorist attack (it wasn’t) and invaded “to protect the citizens”. They did the same in Ukraine, recognizing the terrorist separatists as the legitimate (unelected) government and declaring the real government were terrorists attacking peaceful Russians in Eastern Ukraine. (The same peaceful Russians that shot down a commercial airline full of innocent people completely uninvolved in their conflict).

Putin said the purpose of the operation was to "protect the people" in the predominantly Russian-speaking region of Donbas who he falsely claimed that "for eight years now, [had] been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime". Putin said that Russia sought the "demilitarisation and denazification" of Ukraine, and insisted Russia wouldn’t occupy any of Ukraine….all pure lies. He now says he intends to remove Ukraine from the map and Ukrainians from the gene pool.

It had absolutely nothing to do with NATO….NATO wasn’t considering giving Ukraine, Sweden, or Finland membership before the land grab invasions. You lackwit. If anything it was fear that Ukraine might join the EU….but really it was the loss of their installed Russian president that was beholding to the Kremlin, not any of the lame excuses they’ve made since.

You just love to rewrite history and always expect everyone else to be as ignorant of reality as yourself. Sadly for you, some people have memories longer than a methed out gnat and know why things happened, not just what the perpetrators of crimes say today that contradicts everything they said yesterday and before.
There’s no agreement to not expand NATO. Who told you that, Putin?

But has the actual history, or the nuclear treaty, or the ousting of the Russian planted president by the populace and installation of their chosen president (exactly what you hoped for with Trump on Jan 6 except instead of 2000 people it was the entire country performing a coup) been given on your fake propaganda websites? If so, you missed it all.

Keep in mind, it was neither his genocidal tendencies nor his expansionism that were used as the public excuses to attack Saddam, it was a false narrative about a successful nuclear weapons program (and other fantasies about weapons of mass destruction) and another false narrative about his ties to and support of terrorists, both lies created by the Whitehouse.

I think we violated master Tzu's teachings and went to war not knowing our enemies or ourselves, a sure recipe for failure.

@newtboy
you were not the only one who put me on the defensive for supporting chis hedges.
so if you feel singled out,i apologize.

the point of this post is put into light an adored spokesperson for the left,and a commentator who is also left leaning (and many of his upvoted videos can be found on the sift) to make a point.

and by your comment,you are struggling to reconcile the two.
but you DID reconcile,and you did so by giving maddow a tacit pass and condemning kyle for being a "complete bombastic liar".

when the truth is:
they both are...kinda..sorta..

they both are approaching,and making their points by using biased and slanted data to influence you,and i for that matter,into adopting their viewpoint.

these are not outright and pernicious lies.they are lies that serve a purpose and i find maddows far more egregious,because it is far more subtle..and you appear to have bought it.

she did so by using the innocuous word "might",yet her inferrence cannot be mistaken.they call it the "dog whistle".this is a wink and a nod that those dirty ruskies own our new president.

wink wink...nudge nudge..know what i mean?

now kyle is not exactly lying either.
he is using russias reaction to the new deployment from putin himself.who has stated that there was an agreement that there would be no new encroachment after the GDR,but that simply reveals the cleverness and political saavy of putin.

the real truth is this:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/

or is it?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html
from 2009?

maybe this is the truth?
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russia-us-nato-deal--20160530-snap-story.html
from 2016.

well,personally i am going with the LAtimes and der spiegel.
brookings is a right wing think tank with deep tentacles in the pentagon and DoD.

but CNN reports that poland LOVES the new troops:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-welcome/

look,
while i will agree that putin is a vicious thug,who murders political opponents and tortures dissidents.that he is ruthless and relentless political player.

i do not see any evidence of russian hacking influencing our elections,nor do i see a new russian empire pushing for those cold war expansionism days.

the only entity/country i see pushing for expansion and a renewal of the cold war..is us..the pentagon and the department of defense,and those juicy juicy defense contracts!

i feel my time on the sift is coming to a close.
having to defend my admiration for a pulitzer prize winning,war correspondent and author is just...weird.

at least i know i am biased,but i do my best to self-correct.

Yeah, and the gov't did that whole 9/11 thing too, right?

ask Hungary about soviet expansionism...didn't exist, did it?

That's a simplistic argument to make, that Russians 'tried' democracy and it failed. The fact is that Russian's never got to experience democracy at all, with the coming of Yeltsin into power the centralized market system was thrown out overnight for a capitalist economy, workers were issued shares for the companies they worked in, the Russian currency collapsed, pensions were stopped, all due to western economists (who arrived in droves) believing that the spirit of entrepreneurship would suddenly infect the souls of people who lived under communist rule for over 60 years.

But what happened was that some individuals within that system started buying out the shares from the workers who needed to sustain themselves at that point, seizing massive control of various industries, thus creating the oligarchs. The same people who now own various football clubs in the UK.

The people as a whole felt robbed, they blamed democracy for that, failing to see how the economic reforms worked against them, instead of blaming the transition many more people assumed it was democracy that was at fault. What should have been a long term phased switch into a market economy like the one seen with China was rushed within the space of a few years, incomes and welfare of course fell. Look at how gradually China introduced free market zones, by cordoning them off to small regions, then allowed foreign direct investment there. The whole motto of their capital development was "import 1st product, assemble 2nd product, manufacture 3rd product".

The current Putin government is full of KGB cronies who have muscled their way into acquisition of the most important sectors of the economy, most significant of them being the oil sector, which is wholly responsible for the economic boom in Russia. The war in Iraq and possible war with Iran has seen the Oil price soar year on year since 2000 and Putin's coming into power and the economic boom in Russia, that's not coincidental. This is why Putin visited Iran, instability in the Middle East sustains the high oil price and Russia's development.

Putin did give something to the Russians, and that is pride in their nation, a seeming return to the heyday of the Soviet Union with it's planting of flags in the Arctic, stance against the American government and nuclear armed patrols that hark back to the Cold War era. But it also came with government control of oil resources, elimination of civil rights, elimination of freedom of press, state control of media, needless military expansionism, Byzantine rule of government, political oppression through assassination of those who oppose the government.

Just this past month he imposed a collective freeze on food prices until after the elections sometime in January, this was done so as to keep the appearance to Russia's poor that the economy was doing well when in reality food prices across the world are rising, once elections are over they can remove the freeze.

A good article on "Why Putin Wins" is Sergei Kovalev's article , who gives a realistic breakdown of Russia as it is now and what is its future. As Scott Horton says in "What Putin Wants":

The challenge will be for America more than for Russia. In America, there is still a hope that the democratic process can work to effect a rollback of creeping authoritarianism and a restoration of the beacon of hope that the land once held up to the world. In Russia, all sight of that beacon is lost.

Your argument that non-democratic states like Kingdom of Saudi Arabia offer a higher standard of living is ridiculous, most of the population lives in poverty as the wealth is concentrated in the Royal family and even then only through the continual oil production, almost everything it produces is sustain through government subsidization, much more of its products are simply imported. Jordan differs because they possesses a technocrat King who believes in development, that doesn't mean tomorrow a tyrant will take power.

And am sorry but slave like hours on minimal wage for 90% of the population making Nike shoes does not translate into a higher standard living for the Chinese as a whole, not to mention that development is confined to the coastal areas, while inland China lives in poverty due to lack of investment and encroaching desert taking away valuable agricultural land. China possess an incredible amount of income disparity, firms are still mainly controlled by the Chinese government. It is true that there is slowly an emergence of a middle class, that is being educated abroad and not going back to mainland China, because opportunities in the west are much better.

The argument that ANY government policy has a potential to achieve strong economy is simplistic, the market system works because various agents start to develop products and services to supply a demand of other agents. That requires freedom of enterprise, the ability to freely form business solutions. That means reform laws that actively invite business activities to take place. Communism or centralized market economy does not lead to a strong economy because the demand and supply signals do not exist, the government decides what is important to produce and does it. It leads to a mis balance and a concentration of power in the hands of the few, this is why the USSR failed, and why China started to put in place free market reforms in the 80s. States in the Middle East still sustain their perverse development through oil money, without which all of them would quite realistically fail, as they are overly reliant on foreign labor and are not actively developing their skilled labor force, not to mention the sheer amount of corruption that occurs between those in high office and citizens.

Your mention of a few democratic states that are in poor shapes is simplistic again, they are not failures of democracy but rather a lack of proper reforms and rule. Brazil is doing rather well now actually even though government corruption is still rife as is political instability. Nepal is constitutional monarchy, where the King has assumed emergency powers and holds all executive power so I have no idea why you lumped it in there. Albania on the other hand has had successive government instability with the neighboring war, socialist, democratic governments in succession, the economy however is steadily developing even though stability has been hard to attain since 1990.

The idea behind democracy is that citizens can have a say in where their nation is heading, being elected to government doesn't make saints out of people where they suddenly selflessly try to achieve economy development for the people as a whole. The African nations where strong armed authoritative ruler one after the other prove this, as does Hugo Chavez who after winning the trust of the poor is now concentrating all executive power under his own control, as does Iran where Mahmoud's promises to the poor for oil revenue sharing amounted to nothing but continuous tensions and sanctions from the west.

I think you need to further broaden your understanding of the complexities of government rule and policy with regards to economic development as they are rather basic right now.