Where were you when Ukraine was bombing Donbas for eight years with the death toll estimate of 14,000?
Ron
Ron,
I dislike posting politically charged content on this forum, but your rather one sided rewrite of history conveniently leaves out a few facts.
The revolution was not about joining NATO, or even the EU. Although there was the desire by some in Ukraine to join the EU (or even NATO), Ukraine was in bad shape economically with corruption having been a very real problem for many years. The EU was already dealing with the economic mess in Italy and Greece, and had little interest in letting Ukraine join the EU. The EU did agree to test the waters, so to speak, and offered to provide some loan guarantees, free trade, and visa free borders so that Ukranians could work in EU countries, but only pursuant to Ukraine working on cleaning up its corruption. This was the "Ukraine-EU Association Agreement" that the Ukrainian parliament passed by a large majority. Instead of ratifying that agreement, Yanukovych defied the paliament's vote and decided to side with Russia and take the $15 billion offered by Russia. The people of Ukraine saw this as just more corruption as usual, rebelled, and removed Yanukovych.
Very soon after the revolution, Russia began building up troops along the eastern border of Ukraine claiming they were just military exercises. At the same time, the Russian speaking people in the Donbas and southeast regions held protests against the newly installed Ukrainian government. Putin saw this as an opportunity and sent in weapons and soldiers wearing no insignias, later to become known as "little green men", to inflame those protests and turn them violent while he invaded Crimea. Ukraine responded in kind and sent their military to the region to fight the little green men, which Putin then used as justification to launch artillery barrages from the Russian side of the border into Ukraine and openly invade those regions with tanks, artillery, and more soldiers. So began the Donbas War.
Regarding Obama, he is often laughed at by rightwingers in the US for only sending blankets to aid the Ukranians in their struggle to retake Crimea and the eastern portion of their country. Although likely not true, that is how the right wing sees the restraint given at the time.
So now its 2022 and once again, under the guise of being just military exercises, Putin places troops along Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus and then once again invades Ukraine and threatens to use nuclear weapons against any country that comes to their aid.
Although I doubt any of the many countries involved have any moral high ground upon which to stand, the fact is, Russia has now invaded Ukraine twice in the past 8 years and is now threatening the entire world with nuclear war.
This is not a soccer game where fans cheer on their favorite team in hopes of a win. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a serious threat to everyone on the planet, complete with all the horrors of war, innocent people dying, and a humanitarian crisis of epic proportion.
That should, at the least, make everyone feel very sad...
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Topic: OUR, window on the world. (Read 310672 times)
