alt Hacker News> The second motivation is the belief that the invasion, if permitted, will not stop at Ukraine.
Which, with 20/20 hindsight, we now know was wild paranoia. The Russians weren't even geared up to properly invade Ukraine, they were as shocked as the rest of us when the Ukrainians decided a land war in Asia was a better idea than surrender. They spent something like 2 years back in 2022-2024 retooling for a real war. They weren't preparing to take Poland, they were trying to preserve a sphere of influence in Ukraine.
A Russian motivation that has held up remarkably well in hindsight as we start to get a better idea of the fear and hate motivating Europe and what NATO thinks their strategic objectives are vis-a-vis Russia.
They might well end up in a war with Poland now after NATO has spent 4 years in this Slavocidal posture, but it wasn't on the cards before we embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
> Can we be honest about the motivations of Russia in capturing and annexing other countries, something forbidden by both the post-WW2 international order and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum (which also justifies Europe's security provision to Ukraine)?
I mean, yeah? Everyone acknowledges that except a couple of the UN delegations. Send them a strongly worded letter, that works on the US sometimes. It isn't normal for a major to break international law and it ends up in a million-casualty war where we sponsor bombing runs on their capital.
But if we aren't honest about our own motivations then we end up in situations like this one, where there is a major war and there doesn't seem to be any reason to be provoking and sustaining it. It has been disastrous policy. We shouldn't have done it, we shouldn't have continued it and we should stop it now. We're just pushing the global centre of power towards Asia.
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> there doesn't seem to be any reason to be provoking and sustaining it. It has been disastrous policy. We shouldn't have done it, we shouldn't have continued it and we should stop it now
Stopping the Iran war via total withdrawal might work like that. Western surrender in the Ukraine war (which, we need to keep reminding you, the first actual shots were in all cases fired by Russia) results in a situation far worse.
The bombing runs on Moscow will continue as long as the bombing runs on Kyiv continue. It is absurd to pretend that Russia are somehow agencyless dupes of US policy because you don't like the idea that Putin doesn't care how many Russians are killed so long as he retains power.
> Which, with 20/20 hindsight, we now know was wild paranoia. The Russians weren't even geared up to properly invade Ukraine, they were as shocked as the rest of us when the Ukrainians decided a land war in Asia was a better idea than surrender. They spent something like 2 years back in 2022-2024 retooling for a real war. They weren't preparing to take Poland, they were trying to preserve a sphere of influence in Ukraine.
Them being idiots and thinking they could take Ukraine does not preclude that they were also idiots who thought they could take Poland.
> we embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
We, the people who are supplying Ukraine with support, and I want to emphasise this, have not embarked on this poorly advised policy of war. We are not at war, our soldiers are not fighting. We are selling (and giving) weapons to someone who wants to defend themselves, which is a standard thing for weapon-exporting nations to do.
Russia has embarked on this poorly advised policy of war.
> It isn't normal for a major to break international law and it ends up in a million-casualty war where we sponsor bombing runs on their capital.
Russia did bombing runs on the Ukrainian capital before Ukraine was able to respond.
Can you give Ukrainians a reason why they should not develop nuclear weapons? The Polish? The Lithuanians?
> We're just pushing the global centre of power towards Asia.
Only if "we" is "the Russian government".
The things which the rest of NATO is doing that can be described as "pushing the global centre of power towards Asia" are 75% Trump being a chaos monkey undermining both the USA itself and all the USA's alliances, and 25% the EU member-states bike-shedding union-wide economic-industrial policy.