thisislife2

2022: Ukraine economic shock - https://www.eib.org/en/stories/ukraine-trade-inflation

2022: OECD report on impact of Russian war - https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/russia-s-war-of-aggression-aga...

2023: Does Europe need to declare a 'wartime economy'? - https://www.dw.com/en/does-europe-need-to-declare-a-wartime-...

2025: 'War economy:' Is the European 'peace project' at risk? - https://www.dw.com/en/what-is-a-war-economy/a-71996625

2025: Europe Rearms: What Defense Spending Means for Markets - https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/blogs/enterprising-investor/202...

2026: Europe's war economy - https://etedge-insights.com/featured-insights/geopolitics-an...

2026: The Irish Government is helping to usher in a new wartime economy in Europe - https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026/08/29/irish-minister...

You aren't dumb. I have even cited the exact line from it. Read it again. And if you still don't understand it, I'll kindly assume that English isn't your first language - in that case, make a post on https://ell.stackexchange.com/ and they will explain it to you in more simpler terms than I can.

- So contrary to your claim, Ukraine did not make a commitment of neutrality to anyone.

I respect your right to choose to be ignorant.

- The "context" is a standard mishmash of Russian tropes ...

I guess even Henry Kissinger was brainwashed by the Russians -

> ... Russia is strategically threatened on each of its borders: by a demographic nightmare on its Chinese border; by an ideological nightmare in the form of radical Islam along its equally long southern border; and to the West, by Europe, which Moscow considers an historic challenge. Russia seeks recognition as a great power, as an equal, and not as a supplicant in an American-designed system ... Russia was built by an elite who transported serfs to distant fields and by Tsars who proclaimed, “This swamp land will be the city of Odessa or the city of St. Petersburg.” They are sustained in part by a sort of mystic relationship with their hardships and their vision. They had survived centuries under the Mongols. Charles XII of Sweden marched into Russia because he thought it would be easy to impose a Swedish ruler in Moscow. What he found were Russian peasants burning their own crops in order to deny food to the invaders. They would starve themselves before they would let him take over their country. He had marched across Europe, but he had never seen this before. His troops were forced to go south into Ukraine just to survive, where they were ultimately defeated ... Geopolitically, Putin governs a country with 11 time zones. Few countries in history have started more wars or caused more turmoil than Russia in its eternal quest for security and status. It is also true, however, that at critical junctures Russia has saved the world’s equilibrium from forces that sought to overwhelm it: from the Mongols in the 16th century, from Sweden in the 18th century, from Napoleon in the 19th century, and from Hitler in the 20th century. In the contemporary period, Russia will be important in overcoming radical Islam, partly because it is home to some 20 million Muslims, particularly in the Caucasus and along Russia’s southern border. Russia will also be a factor in the equilibrium of Asia.

> ... I favor an independent Ukraine that is militarily non-aligned. If you remove the two Donbas regions from eastern Ukraine, you guarantee that Ukraine is permanently hostile to Russia, since it becomes dominated by its Western part, which only joined Russia in the 1940s. The solution, then, is to find a way to give these units a degree of autonomy that gives them a voice in military entanglements, but otherwise keeps them under the governance of Ukraine.

- ..."everyone's the same" narrative doesn't hold water.

Oh, everyone is NOT the same. If it were not for the political wisdom of the Americans and the Russians, warmongering Europeans would gladly start WW3. Thank god for Trump and Putin!

Again deliberately avoiding the context with selective facts that are irrelevant. I am saying Russia was always prepared to annex Crimea - Putin had declared that 20+ years ago, and repeatedly told this to every western leaders he met during this period, subsequently. That is why Russia has always had agents in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. The coup, and the elimination of Ukrainian politicians that were either pro-Russian or weren't pro-west, was the trigger for the Russians annexing Crimea. That they were in Crimea in February 20 is irrelevant here because recall that the "revolution" began with protests in November 2013. Russian intelligence were keeping close tabs on it (remember the tape leak about the US planning who to install in Ukraine?), and prepared for any eventuality. As it became clear that the West supported the right-wing extremists against President Viktor Yanukovych, and they too were pressuring him to resign and hand over power to the Western backed "revolutionaries" the Russians asked him to sign the transitional plan, offered him asylum in Russia (as he feared he may be assassinated) and activated their plan to annex Crimea ( https://www.politico.eu/article/yanukovych-signs-transition-... ) as it had become clear that Ukraine would no longer be neutral to Russia:

> In late February, a few days after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president was ousted from power, strange bands of armed gunmen began seizing government buildings in Crimea. Some Crimeans held rallies to show support for the ousted president and, in some cases, to call to secede from Ukraine and re-join Russia. The bands of gunmen grew until it became obvious they were Russian military forces, who forcefully but bloodlessly brought the entire peninsula under military occupation. On March 16, Crimeans voted overwhelmingly for their region to become a part of Russia. ( https://www.vox.com/2014/9/3/18088560/ukraine-everything-you... )

Even those in the west now publicly acknowledge that what happened in Ukraine is perceived as a coup by many - A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War - https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia... ).

- This is another factually incorrect statement. Benett met Putin on 5 March 2022, nine days after the invasion had started...

I am repeating what he said. Note that he has met Putin before the war too, where he informed Putin that Zelensky wanted to meet him and talk to him. Putin conveyed he wasn't interested. Benett also points out that Zelensky did publicly renounce Ukraine joining NATO. Benett has also said that all the negotiations were very carefully coordinated with the US, Germany, France and UK. And once Putin and Zelensky compromised and agreed to a deal and a ceasefire, the West then blocked it because they wanted to "keep striking Russia". (And remember, as he says, this is after the west once advised Zelensky to surrender and run away to the US - as the negotiations revealed that Putin was ready to really compromise, they perceived this as "weakness" in Putin and then advised Zelensky to not end the war).

Here's the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK9tLDeWBzs&t=8392s

Even Kissinger has publicly said that it wasn't in the interest of the west for Ukraine to make peace with Russia (in the early stages of war), as the West had already given the Ukrainian military many arms and munitions in preparation, and during the war:

> “We have now armed Ukraine to a point where it will be the best-armed country and with the least strategically experienced leadership in Europe. We shouldn’t end it in the wrong way.” (It was in the Economist ...)

(The underlying implication was that the West was afraid that if Ukraine - Russia ties improved, or if Ukraine felt isolated and angry at the West, those weapons may be used against it).

- He made no such public statement.

It's all in the public domain, even if you wish to ignore it:

> The strategy was set in motion at NATO’s annual summit in Bucharest in April 2008, when the alliance announced that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members.” Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, making it clear that this decision was an existential threat to Russia, and that they had no intention of letting either country join NATO. According to a respected Russian journalist, Putin “flew into a rage,” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” William Burns, who is now the head of the CIA ... wrote a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that succinctly describes Russian thinking about Ukraine joining NATO. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” NATO, he said, “would be seen … as throwing down the strategic gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian relations will go into a deep freeze…It will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” ( https://cirsd.org/horizon-article/the-causes-and-consequence... )

Unbeknownst to the Russians, that was the first step of the trap that the Anglo-Americans had created to draw Russia into a proxy war through Ukraine ...

- All these Russian narratives depend on the listener being lazy and not checking basic facts like the order of events.

Ofcourse I make silly mistakes as I am posting everything from memory - unlike you, I am not paid to post here and so don't have a database of resources to immediately refer to get the facts or copy paste prepared rebuttals. Hopefully my posts here will give your division more work and make you all more sharp (and less brainwashed)!

- Ukraine was not "granted" independence by anyone....

Sure, if you wish to resort to technicalities and legalspeak, that is partly true. But the delaration of independence, and subsequently the constitution of Ukraine proclaimed that it would not join any military alliance. The declaration said:

> The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in any military bloc ...

- The statement alone would've been a severe violation of Ukraine's sovereignty.

That is one of my points - Superpowers have never cared about the sovereignty of other countries when their own political self-interest was involved. There are umpteen examples of this in history and modern times. You can see it with the Ukraine war too - Russia invaded it to protect its self-interest, and the West now doesn't end it to protect its own self-interests.

- The Cold War was triggered by the same Russian suppression of independence of other European nations

The cold war was triggered because the Russians and the western superpowers couldn't reach an agreement to define their spheres of influences clearly. The superpowers then did what they always do - fight amongst themselves through proxies. The rest of us suffer.

- Since the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, Russia is the only country to have invaded another European country by force and declared its territory to be its own.

You had to carefully choose your words to write that sentence, didn't you? Otherwise NATO invasions post 1975 shows how little the Western superpowers have cared about international law or sovereignty even in Europe...

- That's the difficult thing with lying: you have to have a really good memory to cover all the ways that the truth can slip out.

No, the problem with the West today is that they rely too much on politics of propaganda than value politics - Western politicians increasingly think that just because your propaganda is good enough to fool some of their own citizens, others will also be fooled by it, and thus there is no need to have any dialogue with those who disagree with it. Their mentality is if anyone doesn't agree with you even by a small iota, they should be identified as "enemies". Such a black-and-white way of thinking is why even established parties in the West are losing election left and right to even fringe extremist parties - Western citizens now find it hard to see any difference between such politicians and the extremist parties. It is a failure to recognize that the politics of propaganda isn't enough. You need to have dialogues with people who don't agree with you, and listen to them seriously, without attacking them. It is also why they are increasingly alienating people, like me, around the world, even when we don't have any animosity or hatred towards the West.

And we also have the embarrassing leaked tapes of one of the brains behind the "revolution" discussing how to install the "right" Ukrainian leaders (aka western puppets) - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957 ... Ofcourse, once the opposition had been decimated violently, and the west's open role in the coup revealed, that was quite easy to do so - all the "surviving" Ukrainian leaders knew that they had to submit to the western superpowers to politically survive in Ukraine. And they did so openly and blatantly.

- Can't be true.

The medals, the manufactured controversy over the dates are all irrelevant. It has always been public knowledge that for Russia, not losing Crimea and its naval base has always been the primary goal in negotiations with Ukraine. Even the unrest in Crimea, involving a referendum against the Ukrainian government, demanding independence / autonomy was supported by Russia. And if Ukraine was unwilling to renew its lease of Crimea to Russia, annexation was always the plan. Nearly 2+ decades back, Putin had publicly said that if Ukraine joins NATO, Ukraine would do so without Crimea and the Eastern regions. In other words, the political and military plan was always ready (if negotiations failed) as Plan B, and the western backed coup was one of the "red lines" that triggered Crimea's quick annexation.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has publicly stated in an interview that he took a message from Putin to Zelensky that Russia would not invade Ukraine if he publicly committed to not join NATO. Zelensky was willing. But all subsequent negotiations (before and during the war) failed because the western superpowers always dissuaded him from signing and committing to "permanent neutrality" - the original condition on which the USSR had granted independence to the Ukrainians, and the condition on which the Russians had guaranteed Ukraine's sovereignty.

- I honestly don't know what "civil war" you are talking about.

Lookup on the failures of the Ukranian side to uphold the Minsk treaties (which, as I have already shared, has now been acknowledged by the leaders of the west, and Ukraine, as a ruse that they didn't have any intention to honour, but were only using to buy time, especially after the coup).

- Stalin infamously misjudged Hitler's intentions ...

Not exactly. You again deliberately ignore that the first parties he approached for an alliance were the British and the French, because Germany and Russia have a history of animosity. Stalin knew that a German invasion would inevitably happen, and he wanted to buy time because he knew the Soviet economy and military wasn't ready to face any western superpower, alone. (The experience of fighting the Germans, with an impoverished army, during WW1 were still fresh for the Russians). That is why he reluctantly joined hands with Hitler, who, again, was never his first choice, to buy time to strengthen Soviet military positions. It was always an uneasy alliance, with both prepared for one to turn against the other. (Stalin was right that the Russians were ill-prepared for a war, as at the start of the war, they even struggled against smaller foes due to poor logistics and being ill-equipped. Hitler and his generals thus concluded that the Soviet military was weak, and turned against them, hoping for a decisive victory. The timing may have taken Stalin unaware. But the Russians managed to hold their own, and as a realignment of forces happened, ultimately repelled the German invasion resulting in Hitler's defeat).

I will however concede that Stalin wasn't much of a military strategist - his idea of warfare was brutal numeric superiority in the frontline, throwing men after men in wave after wave, to overwhelm the enemy. It worked, but at a heavy cost. (We see this same Russian strategy in Ukraine too, though Putin is being more pragmatic in his mobilisation).

- Lithuanian government accepted all demands, and Russian forces did not leave until 1994 ... Most of Central and Eastern Europe was covered by communist dictatorships

And ofcourse, this is again something to be seen in isolation, and we should all ignore the development of the cold war, right? Selective picking of a political event without the underlying context is easy to twist to fit some narrative. Post WW2, as Russia supported the independence of western colonies, and communist revolutions everywhere, the western superpowers again turned hostile towards USSR. It in turn obviously took countermeasures to protect itself. The west too were busy installing and supporting their own dictators during this period.

- The Helsinki peace process and the agreement reached there has little to do with generic anti-American rhetoric.

Oh, it isn't anti-American rhetoric. European superpowers were just as bad.

- One of the key adopted principles was that no European country may invade another country by force...

And you seriously think the west has upheld that since 1975?

That's only true if you ignore the illegal NATO bombing of Yugoslavia by the US, UK, Germany, Turkey etc. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal under modern international law because it has no UN approval. Similarly, all unilateral NATO military actions are also illegal. As was NATO bombing against Libya. As is the attack on Iran.

In other words, Russia as a superpower is not doing anything different to what western superpowers do (or have done).

(I think it is time to end this discussion, as we both understand each others position on this issue. Thank you for your time.)

> We have our own experience with Munich in 1938, when the powers bound to us by treaty deceived us, betrayed us and served us up to Hitler like a roasted chicken. ( https://x.com/RobertFicoSVK/status/2101382211370893658 )

That is also a fact. But your predictable response to this would be sidestep the facts (that this was typical superpower politics) and say, "Oh no, he is a Putin / Russian stooge" (at some point, this kind of propaganda gets really tiring).

- National governments were replaced with communist dictatorships under Russian control ...

Again, you disregard west's own hostility towards USSR in taking those actions. I also find it funny how quick the west is to attack any kind of "revolution" that is against their own interest, but to quickly praise similar "revolution" whose leaders are aligned to the west - "My dictators are ok, only yours are bad!". Today, you in the west have no problem with the US invading Venezuela and violating its sovereignty, or supporting and defending a genocide by your allies in Gaza, or killing children in Iran, or fully backing and whitewashing a "revolution" in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected leader ... all that is ok for you. But, at the same time, you also want us to think that the only "evil" in this world is your enemy (the Russians) ... like I said, all this kind of propaganda has become tiring to us in the Global South.

It is also very clear that the western superpowers wrongly thought that Russia was weak and could be conquered and divided amongst themselves. And Ukraine was the proxy they used to test it. You westerners prove that with your cowardice in not fighting alongside the Ukrainians ... If the west wants to preach from a moral high ground, the west needs to display the very ethical and moral values that they espouse. Sadly, they don't.

- Only morons go around yapping about "Russian security concerns" when Russia itself is the main threat to peace and security in Europe. ...

You guys are like the bullies that humiliate and provoke someone weaker repeatedly. And when they one day fight back and hurt you, go crying to your mama that you are the real victim.

> it was agreed in Helsinki that using force to violate territorial integrity and redraw European borders was unacceptable conduct for any European state.

And ofcourse, you guys have always upheld that, have you? (cough NATO invasions cough). Look up every western action against another country that was done without UN approval - it's all illegal to the rest of the world. Like I said, you guys have no moral standing to preach to the rest ...