Losing thousands (possibly tens or hundreds of thousands) more soldiers forcing that.
Playing macho may seem cool from your chair, but if Ukraine could force that without significant losses, it would already have by now.
Their behavior also shows that they don't see their victory as that close and certain. Even though the statement itself is by a stronger side definitely, unlike in the first few months since the war started.
And why then it's a problem that Russia wreaks havoc in Ukraine?..
And I don't see Western states acting in their best interest anyway. I actually see something between slow surrender to the worst of their competition and some weird kind of "let no one win", trying to empower the worst savages while simply not working with those of competitors who shouldn't necessarily be their adversaries. You can also take a look at the people which reach the top in European and US political classes, these are of, eh, declining quality.
Also for my second point - an event in the future still can't be the cause for an event in the past, justification or not.
Other than that - large parts of NATO \ West "civilization offering", so to say, were about freedom and human rights.
And large parts of the Soviet alternative were about humanism and equality and unification.
And if it's casual for you that people were not supposed to believe in any of that in either case, then I don't get it why people here are so eager to point out Soviet hypocrisies as if they were any different.
It'd be probably also awesome for realpolitik fans to not forget how real world works in terms of errors. Right now an error in your security systems means some protest, some Assange or Snowden, some scandal. Getting into realpolitik too much would shift those errors to justified terrorist acts. Well, I suppose that may be one reason why some countries are so eager to get rid of nuclear energy despite all the green agenda in PR. Single point of failure and all that.
Well, then the solution is abolishing the law making these loans so easy. It will make things easier for students themselves (only after a transient process, though, which itself is going to be hard - but that can be softened by, say, abolishing it gradually, for different categories of students).
I'm not from the US, I think I've heard that banks are obligated to give those loans with some characteristics?
It's going to cost much less if getting a student loan becomes much harder, because universities still need people paying.
If anybody can get a loan, the cost becomes inflated.
Just a thought.
Actually makes sense.
Trying on 6GB. As a Linux user I usually don't need more RAM, so haven't added any yet.
About rogue member states not being thought of when NATO was being created - when NATO was being created, even France and UK were more likely to behave like "rogue member states" and they did in some little known cases (Biafra, for example, or the Suez crisis). And Turkey was full-blown fascist (well, it didn't stop being that at any point since then till now, just Westerners conveniently assumed that it changed like Japan, say, one my relative in the US from Jewish side is just in complete denial that it hasn't as it wasn't civilized by bombs, while at the same time uneasy with my cousins going to Germany).
About NATO having its hands tied against Turkey due to Ukraine - if A happened before B, you can't justify A with B. So you can't justify Turkey getting away with everything it does by Russia vs Ukraine taking all the attention.
Russia's military budget in size is sufficient for anything Russia would need defense-wise (and even aggression-wise, TBF) to a full extent. It's just that most of the money was being stolen through all these years. It's rotten to the bone.
About glory days - USSR's military was really something "second best" somewhere in the 50s, when it was a system built for some actual overarching doctrine.
With every year passing Soviet bureaucracy was more and more entangling itself into a knot of financing and prestige and cabinet power struggles, so by 80s it would have like 4-8 simultaneously produced and operated models of tanks, with similar technology and details etc, but similar wouldn't mean interchangeable, in fact there would be almost no interchangeable details between them. It was similar in any other area. Standardization (which Commies love to present as planned economy's advantage) was a farce.
The bureaucratic system responsible for every part of the system would fight tooth and nail for some external benefits and provide some external service, soldiers and students would be used on harvest campaigns and housing construction, and the main purpose would be cemented, never reevaluated (I mean, everything changes in 5 years in real world in any area, and the Soviet doctrine has not evolved much between Korea and Afghanistan), and in fact lost.
Which is why, say, Soviet personnel carriers wouldn't protect against anything. Their purpose was to move fast, be amphibious, be hermetic, be cheap to produce. Cause the plan was that after all the boom-boom stops in the Global Thermonuclear War, one would need to move infantry over burnt irradiated land, fast.
It really was in planning and function a bit like the Galactic Empire, be it the Azimov's one or the Star Wars one.
If you support the side opposite to Russia, be it Ukraine or NATO, you sort of support Turkey, cause of the context of alliances and relations. Turkey is in NATO and Turkey is friendly with Ukraine.
Point is, we’re not talking about B/Turkey.
We actually are doing that right now. If you don't want to, you can leave this conversation. That's the way conversations work.
And B/Turkey being bad doesn’t mean that A/Russia is excused from their terrible behavior.
Yes, it isn't. You seem to imply that I said it is. I haven't.
And (gasp!) Just because I oppose A/Russia doesn’t mean I support B/Turkey.
Not in general. But in our specific situation you sort of do through that opposing side being Turkey's friend more than Russia itself.
The entire argument is bad faith and lacking any logic or critical thinking.
On all sides.
Now, about bad faith - if people like you yelling "whataboutism" can prevent a conversation on a certain subject, then it's not really whataboutism. If they can do that without preventing that conversation from happening, then maybe it is. "Whataboutism" is not a basic concept. Once we turn to logic instead of some list of common fallacies, we don't need it (and also logic beats any such shortcut).
Same with "critical thinking".
but by the russian proletariat for the reestablishment of an RSFSR.
"Russian proletariat" is mostly ansyn or Trotskyist, when political, just informing you. EDIT: And also it's a very little portion of the society.
And most of those sporting Commie symbolic just use it cause USSR big, USSR strong, USSR everybody fear, USSR boom, but somehow later boom.
No, it doesn't really, they just don't want to do anything. Everything happening in Ukraine started happening much later than Turkey happened.
And about NATO design not conceiving of something - when Turkey was admitted to NATO, there were people still alive who saw not their parents and grandparents, but their children and grandchildren killed before their eyes in 1915-1921.
It was conceived that if somebody really wanted to get rid of that thing, then it'd be possible to make a shortcut on paperwork with all the military power. 1952, remember. But then again, it was 1952, you know, colonial powers still being that and not caring much about genocides of brown people. So nobody would see Turkey's current behavior as a problem.
Ukraine itself is not a "genuinely pluralistic democracy" despite appearances, it's almost as corrupt and authoritarian as Russia.
It's not the case where only Russia has to become more democratic cause democracies usually don't fight each other.
But for Russia to stop being a threat it's sufficient to just lose this war finally. It won't recover its ability to attack anyone anytime soon, and when it will, the process of recovery itself is going to naturally ensure that it's not interested in attacking Ukraine.
So yes, you are right about oligarchs and the general structure of the societies.
Essential assets you are talking about are what exactly? If you mean factories and plants, then actual equipment in most of them was obsolete even in 1991, and through the 90s and 00s has mostly been scrapped.
There are some remaining and even functioning, yes, but whether state ownership is going to prevent those from slowly crumbling due to growing obsolescence, irrelevance and lack of expertise, I'm not sure.
Basically industrial capacities are something to be created from scratch mostly.