Was Ukraine a threat to Russia before start of Russian military operation?

[gipper]

World sees "great power" in action now and it turns out that parading toothbrushed tanks is a lot different than having an army worth a damn.

Russia's get-by is selling stuff out of their ground and pooling national resources for very narrow tech projects of little use to it's populace.

If Russia was trully victorious SOMEONE WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO LIVE THERE. Nobody wants to immigrate there, many Russians are leaving for a better life elsewhere, population is on the decline. This war has put all these factors into over-drive indefinetly.

Everything you know is wrong. Bill Casey must be so proud, as he burns in Hell.

 

[Dagosa]

"...but if Russia really is what it is sometimes portrayed in Western bourgeois historiography, that is, backward, stagnant, allegedly incapable of creative initiative and independent development, tyrannical and anarchic at the same time, etc., etc., then it is permissible to ask our critics how to explain that this country emerged victorious from the struggle for existence, survived, grew up and even turned into a great power? Had the trials that had befallen her been too easy?

The question of the comparative burden of historical trials should become the starting point for any more or less objective researcher who wants to establish what, in fact, the uniqueness (relative, of course) of Russian history in comparison with the history of the West consists in. Let's start with one specific example.

Richard Nixon, in one of the speeches he delivered when he was President of the United States, repeated with full approval the idea of Andre Malraux that the United States of America is the only country that has become a great power without making any effort to do so. And in this the French writer and the American president are certainly right. Complete security throughout history from outside invasions, a vast territory acquired through the extermination of Indians that did not require much effort, fertile lands, a fertile climate, rich and diverse minerals, and, finally, the fact that in both world wars America captured the lion's share of the fruits of victory at the cost of little blood — all this serves as the basis for the official thesis about the God-chosen of the American people, it is a matter of national pride.

And here is another country, the antipode of America. The Polish historian of the XIX century, the least inclined to Russophilia, Valishevsky, speaking about Peter's transformations, makes an apt remark relating to Russian history in general: "... There will be a huge waste of wealth, labor, even human lives. However, the strength of Russia and the mystery of its fate for the most part lies in the fact that it has always had the will and had the power not to pay attention to spending when it came to achieving a once-set goal".
Behind this characteristic feature of Russia lies the action of a powerful factor completely unknown to the United States: in the XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII centuries, as well as later in the era of Peter I — in the XIX and XX centuries, the Russian land was subjected to a devastating invasion at least once a century and quite often simultaneously from several sides. The state that emerged on this land, in order to fend off the pressing enemies, had to imperiously demand from its people as much wealth, labor and lives as it needed to win, and the latter, since he wanted to defend his political independence, had to give it all without counting. This is how some national habits were formed and strengthened by the intensified repetition, which gave a national character in the aggregate.
Is it right for a serious researcher who has set himself the goal of comparing American and Russian history to ignore the fact, colossal in its consequences, that Russia has lived in a regime of ultra-high pressure from the outside throughout its centuries-old history, and America did not know such pressure at all? No, you don't have the right. By doing so, he will be forced to explain the observed differences not by their actual causes, but by absolutely fantastic ones. But that's exactly what American Slavists do all the time.

According to the calculations of the Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky, the Great Russian nation during its formation in 234 years (1228-1462) endured 160 external wars.

In the XVI century, Muscovy has been fighting in the northwest and west against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Livonian Order and Sweden for 43 years, without interrupting the struggle against the Tatar hordes on the southern, southeastern, and eastern borders for a years. In the XVII century, Russia fought for 48 years, in the XVIII century — 56 years.

In general, for Russia of the XIII–XVIII centuries, the state of the world was rather an exception, and war was a cruel rule.

So what kind of wars were they?

In the XIII–XV centuries, it was the struggle of the Russian people for existence in the most direct and precise sense of the word. Placed by fate on the border of two continents, Russia covered Europe with itself as a shield from the invasion of wild Tatar-Mongol hordes and in gratitude received blows from her in the back.
Russians have barely spread the news of the terrible Batu pogrom in the West, when his spiritual head, the Pope, announces a crusade against the "Russian schismatics" in order to push them into the arms of the Catholic Church with the edge of the sword. When the hopes pinned on the Swedish Crusaders and the Teutonic Order collapsed, Pope Alexander IV (1255) sent a letter to the "Lithuanian king" with permission to "fight Russia" and annex its regions to his possessions. The main threat to Russia during this period came from the East — here the struggle was waged for life and death. But the West (Sweden and the Order) threatened enslavement or at least (in the person of Lithuania) deprivation of political independence. Having not yet had time to form a dense ethnic core, Great Russia had to take up a circular defense.

In the XV century, Russia, having thrown off the Tatar-Mongol yoke, goes on the offensive on all fronts. Up to the end of the XVIII century, with a sword in her hands, she eliminated the direct and indirect foreign policy consequences of the Mongol invasion and domination: gathers the ancient Russian lands captured by Lithuania and Poland within the borders of a single power; overcomes economic isolation, breaks through trade routes to the Baltic and Black Seas; repopulates the devastated South Russian lands and brings to an end the struggle with the Tatar khanates, fragments of the Golden Horde — Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian, Crimean.

Defending or attacking, Russia as a whole was waging fair and inevitable wars at that time: it had no other choice. If the country wanted to live and develop, it had to throw away the scabbard as unnecessary, and prove its right to life and development to its neighbors with a blade for five centuries. In a certain sense, these wars were people's wars with the constant and active participation of the people's armed forces directly, the Cossacks.
Bourgeois historiographers who like to contrast Russia and the West on the basis of insignificant or even existing only in their author's imagination signs, do not want to notice this very important characteristic feature of Russian history, really distancing Russia from all, with only one exception, the countries of Western Europe.
This exception is Spain. Like Russia, which stood guard on the eastern borders of Europe, it restrained the pressure of nomadic Africa in the extreme west. The Spanish Reconquista, like the Russian offensive on the steppe, was a national cause — its driving forces, along with the feudal class, were the cities and the peasantry. And the same factor, the role of a border outpost on a troubled border, has distinguished Spain, as well as Russia, from the general flow of European history. According to Marx, "... the slow liberation from Arab rule in the process of almost eight hundred years of persistent struggle gave the peninsula, by the time its territory was completely cleared, features completely different from Europe at that time..." (c) "The Connection of Times" by Fyodor Nesterov

This post must be part a requirement in the recovery process.

 

[AntonToo]

Tell me, piece of filth, if Russia is so bad, then why do European countries come together every century to conquer it?
Then, of course, they get punched in the face and go quiet for another century, cursing Asian barbarians who do not appreciate European civilization.

Wow, did you just seriously say out loud that Russia is great today because Nazis invaded it in 1941?

I guess that means you think countries all around Russia are amazing considering how often Russia invades them.

Let me explain something to you - nobody wants any part of your near-third-world swamp today. World just wants you to mind your many many own problems in your own plentiful borders.

I know good advice is lost on Russkies like you but I'm an optimist at heart - you old brainwashed, paranoid Soviet nutbags will be in graves soon enough.

 

[Ringo]

Let me explain something to you - nobody wants any part of your near-third-world swamp today.

Oh, yes! Every civilized person wants to be part of a strong, successful gang, and does not want to be its victim. Therefore, every civilized person licks the ass of the USA. And the one who doesn't do it is a barbarian from the Third World.
There was already recently a man with a funny mustache, who thought like you, filth. The Russian barbarians drove him to suicide.

 

[AntonToo]

Oh, yes! Every civilized person wants to be part of a strong, successful gang, and does not want to be its victim. Therefore, every civilized person licks the ass of the USA. And the one who doesn't do it is a barbarian from the Third World.
There was already recently a man with a funny mustache, who thought like you, filth. The Russian barbarians drove him to suicide.

Yep, I know you have to rationalize somehow that United States is thriving, very influential and popular, while Russia is a regressive periah state. I know you can't face up to it.

Take it to grave.

 

[Ringo]

Yep, I know you have to rationalize somehow that United States is thriving, very influential and popular,

Bearded men in slippers with kalashnikovs beat the USA. Just like the little people in the jungles of Vietnam. And if your memory wasn't like a guppy fish, you would remember this and not carry your nonsense about the power of the US & NATO against Russia.

 

[toomuchtime_]

Learned behavior from years of oppression from their leaders.

Actually the natural course of things for everyone until the notion of individual rights developed in the West a few centuries ago, but this concept never took hold in Russia.

 

[AntonToo]

Bearded men in slippers with kalashnikovs beat the USA.

Beat USA at what? Turning their country into a stable semi-democracy? Sure, they are back to being the fundamentalist shithole they were, only now with much better understanding what will happen if they dabble in international terrorism again (which was the point of the invasion).

We left because we've never had any interest in occupying their country indefinetly, not because "kalashnikovs"

Either way USA remains highly influential, you just have nothing else to talk about.

 

[toomuchtime_]

I do speak Russian, I follow whats going on there politically, whats on their state media (de-facto the only media at this point) and opinions Russians have (esp after the war broke out) and all the arguments they make.

In that bubble it would be quite likely that YOU would support the war. You may belive that Russophobe-Nazis controlled by the West took over Ukraine, that they are oppressing and bombing ethnic Russians and children (Dombili Bombas for 8 years), that Crimea and other regions have joined Russia volatarily, that NATO is out to get Russia etc etc. etc.

Hell, just look at all the bs our local village idiot Gipper parrots here everyday...though it's possible he is a Russian sock puppet.

No, if I were in Russia, I wouldn't trust the state media and I wouldn't accept bizarre laws that would throw me in prison for saying war instead of special military operation because I grew up with a sense of my right to distrust the government and to oppose oppressive laws that limited my individual rights, and that is my point, the Russian people never had that sense of their rights, not under the Czars or communists or under Putin's government so they accept what they hear on state TV because they simply don't imagine they have a choice.

 

[Ringo]

Actually the natural course of things for everyone until the notion of individual rights developed in the West a few centuries ago, but this concept never took hold in Russia.

Yes, because while the enlightened people of the West were talking about democracy, while flogging the darkies and robbing the genociding of indians and africans, Russia was busy fighting for its existence, including against the "civilizers". And time after time saving their sorry asses from their own dictators.

 

[Ringo]

We left because we've never had any interest in occupying their country indefinetly, not because "kalashnikovs"

Oh yes, sour grapes.

 

[AntonToo]

Oh yes, sour grapes.

Truth is not sour grapes.

America had no interest in occupying that land and at some point it's time to bring the troops home. 20 years is enough.

 

[toomuchtime_]

"...but if Russia really is what it is sometimes portrayed in Western bourgeois historiography, that is, backward, stagnant, allegedly incapable of creative initiative and independent development, tyrannical and anarchic at the same time, etc., etc., then it is permissible to ask our critics how to explain that this country emerged victorious from the struggle for existence, survived, grew up and even turned into a great power? Had the trials that had befallen her been too easy?

The question of the comparative burden of historical trials should become the starting point for any more or less objective researcher who wants to establish what, in fact, the uniqueness (relative, of course) of Russian history in comparison with the history of the West consists in. Let's start with one specific example.

Richard Nixon, in one of the speeches he delivered when he was President of the United States, repeated with full approval the idea of Andre Malraux that the United States of America is the only country that has become a great power without making any effort to do so. And in this the French writer and the American president are certainly right. Complete security throughout history from outside invasions, a vast territory acquired through the extermination of Indians that did not require much effort, fertile lands, a fertile climate, rich and diverse minerals, and, finally, the fact that in both world wars America captured the lion's share of the fruits of victory at the cost of little blood — all this serves as the basis for the official thesis about the God-chosen of the American people, it is a matter of national pride.

And here is another country, the antipode of America. The Polish historian of the XIX century, the least inclined to Russophilia, Valishevsky, speaking about Peter's transformations, makes an apt remark relating to Russian history in general: "... There will be a huge waste of wealth, labor, even human lives. However, the strength of Russia and the mystery of its fate for the most part lies in the fact that it has always had the will and had the power not to pay attention to spending when it came to achieving a once-set goal".
Behind this characteristic feature of Russia lies the action of a powerful factor completely unknown to the United States: in the XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII centuries, as well as later in the era of Peter I — in the XIX and XX centuries, the Russian land was subjected to a devastating invasion at least once a century and quite often simultaneously from several sides. The state that emerged on this land, in order to fend off the pressing enemies, had to imperiously demand from its people as much wealth, labor and lives as it needed to win, and the latter, since he wanted to defend his political independence, had to give it all without counting. This is how some national habits were formed and strengthened by the intensified repetition, which gave a national character in the aggregate.
Is it right for a serious researcher who has set himself the goal of comparing American and Russian history to ignore the fact, colossal in its consequences, that Russia has lived in a regime of ultra-high pressure from the outside throughout its centuries-old history, and America did not know such pressure at all? No, you don't have the right. By doing so, he will be forced to explain the observed differences not by their actual causes, but by absolutely fantastic ones. But that's exactly what American Slavists do all the time.

According to the calculations of the Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky, the Great Russian nation during its formation in 234 years (1228-1462) endured 160 external wars.

In the XVI century, Muscovy has been fighting in the northwest and west against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Livonian Order and Sweden for 43 years, without interrupting the struggle against the Tatar hordes on the southern, southeastern, and eastern borders for a years. In the XVII century, Russia fought for 48 years, in the XVIII century — 56 years.

In general, for Russia of the XIII–XVIII centuries, the state of the world was rather an exception, and war was a cruel rule.

So what kind of wars were they?

In the XIII–XV centuries, it was the struggle of the Russian people for existence in the most direct and precise sense of the word. Placed by fate on the border of two continents, Russia covered Europe with itself as a shield from the invasion of wild Tatar-Mongol hordes and in gratitude received blows from her in the back.
Russians have barely spread the news of the terrible Batu pogrom in the West, when his spiritual head, the Pope, announces a crusade against the "Russian schismatics" in order to push them into the arms of the Catholic Church with the edge of the sword. When the hopes pinned on the Swedish Crusaders and the Teutonic Order collapsed, Pope Alexander IV (1255) sent a letter to the "Lithuanian king" with permission to "fight Russia" and annex its regions to his possessions. The main threat to Russia during this period came from the East — here the struggle was waged for life and death. But the West (Sweden and the Order) threatened enslavement or at least (in the person of Lithuania) deprivation of political independence. Having not yet had time to form a dense ethnic core, Great Russia had to take up a circular defense.

In the XV century, Russia, having thrown off the Tatar-Mongol yoke, goes on the offensive on all fronts. Up to the end of the XVIII century, with a sword in her hands, she eliminated the direct and indirect foreign policy consequences of the Mongol invasion and domination: gathers the ancient Russian lands captured by Lithuania and Poland within the borders of a single power; overcomes economic isolation, breaks through trade routes to the Baltic and Black Seas; repopulates the devastated South Russian lands and brings to an end the struggle with the Tatar khanates, fragments of the Golden Horde — Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian, Crimean.

Defending or attacking, Russia as a whole was waging fair and inevitable wars at that time: it had no other choice. If the country wanted to live and develop, it had to throw away the scabbard as unnecessary, and prove its right to life and development to its neighbors with a blade for five centuries. In a certain sense, these wars were people's wars with the constant and active participation of the people's armed forces directly, the Cossacks.
Bourgeois historiographers who like to contrast Russia and the West on the basis of insignificant or even existing only in their author's imagination signs, do not want to notice this very important characteristic feature of Russian history, really distancing Russia from all, with only one exception, the countries of Western Europe.
This exception is Spain. Like Russia, which stood guard on the eastern borders of Europe, it restrained the pressure of nomadic Africa in the extreme west. The Spanish Reconquista, like the Russian offensive on the steppe, was a national cause — its driving forces, along with the feudal class, were the cities and the peasantry. And the same factor, the role of a border outpost on a troubled border, has distinguished Spain, as well as Russia, from the general flow of European history. According to Marx, "... the slow liberation from Arab rule in the process of almost eight hundred years of persistent struggle gave the peninsula, by the time its territory was completely cleared, features completely different from Europe at that time..." (c) "The Connection of Times" by Fyodor Nesterov

Most of the western European countries went through the same tribulations, but while defending themselves or attacking others, the concept of individual rights that could not be limited by the state developed and that led to democracy, the concept that the state exists to serve the needs of the people, but that notion never took hold in Russia, so Russia is seen as culturally and politically backward by most of the world, and rightly so.

In your post, you assert the right of the government to fight wars against real or imagined enemies regardless of the welfare of the people, but who should make that decision if not the people? In fact, what is the state if not the people who live in it? By what right does any small clique decide for all the people whether they should suffer the hardships of war?

 

[Ringo]

In your post, you assert the right of the government to fight wars against real or imagined enemies regardless of the welfare of the people, but who should make that decision if not the people? In fact, what is the state if not the people who live in it? By what right does any small clique decide for all the people whether they should suffer the hardships of war?

You simply have no idea what it means to live next to strong nomads for centuries. For example, North American Indians killed several settlers and this was the reason for declaring them "A good Indian is a dead Indian" and generally declaring them subhumans worthy of destruction. Russia has been experiencing regular invasions of thousands of nomadic hordes from the south and east for several hundred years and unlike the Indians from the Stone Age, they were people standing at a higher stage of development, moreover, later supported by the power of the powerful Ottoman Empire.
Huge efforts, both material and human, were made to prevent invasions that led to the destruction of material objects, the murder of people and the hijacking of prisoners for sale into slavery. During major raids, the number of prisoners numbered in the tens of thousands. A huge number of people died on the way to slavery, many people were killed during raids.
Creation of protective lines along rivers and forests stretched for hundreds of kilometers was done. It was a huge burden on the state. For centuries! And this required unity of all people and centralized command, without this anarchy and the death of not only the country but also its people.
None of the European countries knew such tension. And this is still not counting the war on the part of the West.

 

[Stann]

Tell me, piece of filth, if Russia is so bad, then why do European countries come together every century to conquer it?
Then, of course, they get punched in the face and go quiet for another century, cursing Asian barbarians who do not appreciate European civilization.

It didn't get the name evil empire for no reason. They do this to themselves. Look at today backing cyber terrorism and regular terrorism. Never mind all the regular corruption including bribes and vote rigging and abusive power. The Russian adoption laws, foreign agent's law, gay propaganda law and , gay violence, environmental destruction, targeting journalists, crackdown on dissidence, abusing migrants and of course the all encompassing Russian war of terror against the Ukraine. What's not to like about the repressive government. What do repressive governments breed, But more ignorance,hatred and lies.

 

[Ringo]

It didn't get the name evil empire for no reason. They do this to themselves. Look at today backing cyber terrorism and regular terrorism. Never mind all the regular corruption including bribes and vote rigging and abusive power. The Russian adoption laws, foreign agent's law, gay propaganda law and , gay violence, environmental destruction, targeting journalists, crackdown on dissidence, abusing migrants and of course the all encompassing Russian war of terror against the Ukraine. What's not to like about the repressive government. What do repressive governments breed, But more ignorance,hatred and lies.

What a bunch of garbage....

 

[toomuchtime_]

You simply have no idea what it means to live next to strong nomads for centuries. For example, North American Indians killed several settlers and this was the reason for declaring them "A good Indian is a dead Indian" and generally declaring them subhumans worthy of destruction. Russia has been experiencing regular invasions of thousands of nomadic hordes from the south and east for several hundred years and unlike the Indians from the Stone Age, they were people standing at a higher stage of development, moreover, later supported by the power of the powerful Ottoman Empire.
Huge efforts, both material and human, were made to prevent invasions that led to the destruction of material objects, the murder of people and the hijacking of prisoners for sale into slavery. During major raids, the number of prisoners numbered in the tens of thousands. A huge number of people died on the way to slavery, many people were killed during raids.
Creation of protective lines along rivers and forests stretched for hundreds of kilometers was done. It was a huge burden on the state. For centuries! And this required unity of all people and centralized command, without this anarchy and the death of not only the country but also its people.
None of the European countries knew such tension. And this is still not counting the war on the part of the West.

Again, western European countries also faced centuries of wars and were still able to arrive at the place where the state was seen as being there to serve the needs of the people, but in Russia the people are only seen as existing to serve the needs of the state, and by state, the particular group of people who have wrested control from the last group, so first the Czars made the decisions, but by what rights? And then the communists made the decisions, but by what right? And now the ultra-nationalists make all the decisions, but by what right? The state, after all, is nothing but the people who live in it, so by what right does anyone else make decisions for them?

 

[ESay]

As has been reported in western media since the Obama/Nuland coup of 2014, (you likely miss it) we know the Ukes have attacked eastern Ukraine killing some 14,000 people. Why would they do that? It must be that eastern Ukraine (Donbass) must contain mostly ethnic Russians (also widely reported in western press). Seems likely they would vote to leave the Uke Nazi regime trying to murder them.

No? Yes?

Idiot. I already gave you a link that says that the number of 14000 includes casualties of Ukrainian servicemen and sepsratist militants.

 

[Ringo]

 

[AntonToo]

Idiot. I already gave you a link that says that the number of 14000 includes casualties of Ukrainian servicemen and sepsratist militants.

It must be mentioned also that there were very few casualties in 2019-2021