Greup

As for fighting for my country: That is precisely the point. I couldn't care less about my country. My country is just a bunch of lines on a map. It was totally random that I was born within the confines of these lines and not others. Three centuries ago my country didn't even exist. It was a number of smaller areas on a map with some dudes constantly wanting to redraw those lines because they didn't have a playstation or something similar and were bored. Except for the random nobleman who "owned" that patch of land, nobody cared about those lines on the map and much less would have wanted to fight for them. Enter Napoleon and suddenly people here were told that they were Germans and that this conglomerate of lines on a map is something glorious worth fighting and dying for, instead of... well, living in a country that was actually more civilized but with less noblemen still having their heads attached to their necks.
In the following years, people were told that, since they were born inside these lines on a map, they had to hate people for being born inside the neighbouring lines on the map. After the inevitable war, the then "Germans" could finally become Germans, united under a (suddenly beloved) nobleman who called himself emperor. The emperor was of Prussian origin and thus the Germans were told that a militaristic society is the best. With great "Hurray!" millions went to the next war... because... was it even about lines on a map? Or just because going to war is so awesome? Millions of dead later - who absolutely enjoyed the experience of dying for their country (if nothing else), Germans had a brief experiment with nasty leftist ideas like, actually voting for stuff and such.
That ended quickly, when Germans were told that being randomly born to the right parents, they were better than people who were randomly born to different people. And also that the lines on that map absolutely need to be redrawn because people with the right parents need more space and those people being born to parents to the east in areas surrounded by lines called "Poland", "Russia" or "Ukraine" wouldn't need that space, anyway. Oh, and Germans were of course told that being born within the right set of lines, the absolute best is of course to fight and die for that set of lines.
After the inevitable war with even more dead, some people wondered whether those "leftist" ideas weren't all that bad, after all. Voting, inviolability of human dignity, etc. But alas, the lines on the map called Germany had been split into two sets of lines. Both sides were told that it was absolutely preferable to kill their relatives on the other side to allowing them to redraw the lines. If that didn't help it was absolutely necessary to just convert both Germanies, and if necessary the whole world, into a nuclear wasteland.
See, we are kind of fed up with this nonsense of "dying for our country". In between we found out that human rights, like e.g. not getting randomly imprisoned and shot without trial, kind of made sense and that our neighbours weren't as bad as we were told. Even the French. Especially the French. As others have pointed out, had the question been if we are willing to fight for freedom, democracy, etc. the answer would probably have been different.
And finally, let me be honest with you: I support my government in sending billions in money and materiel to help you defend your lives, your right to decide for yourselves, your freedom and, yes, your human rights and the possibility to enjoy your lives. Not the random lines on the map called Ukraine.
 

Maybe a year ago I saw a stunning security-cam video of a couple that had a row with their bully-neighbor. After already months or years of tension, this argument was about the placement of garbage-containers.
After a few minutes of discussions, things heated up and yelling turned into screaming, anger into hate. Shoving became pushing and throwing of objects started. Neither the couple, nor the bully-neighbor showed any restraint.
Suddenly the bully walked away, back to his garage, but the woman from the couple kept screaming and throwing things, even when the bully disappeard in his garage. Where he picked up his assault rifle and then reappeared.
Well now.. instead of running away, or running for cover and calling the cops, that woman thought something like what you just wrote:
"We'll never know where the red line is unless we start inching toward it",
and like you she thought that being a little more agressive towards the bully would not escalate.
She walked, screaming and yelling, up to the bully with the gun and, how surprising, got shot. Not fatally wounded she tried to crawl away, and her husband ran towards her to help. But the bully oh so calmly shot both off 'm point blanc until his magazine was empty. Then he went into garage, reloaded, and blew his own brains out.
That woman found the red line by inching towards it..
 
 

This whole narrative is getting out of hand here. Now don't get me wrong. I mean, sure, in principle this is kind of a proxy war. But IMHO you are inverting responsibilities and this is really where "Ukraine fights this war on our behalf/for us" (mind the discussion here some pages back about what the exact wording should be) breaks down. Let's not forget that it was Russia attacking Ukraine. Not Russia attacking NATO/the West or NATO/the West attacking Russia and of course not NATO/the West attacking Ukraine. The point? It is because Russia or Putin's regime decided to invade that Ukrainians are fighting and Ukrainians are dying. Not because we somehow made them fight or they were caught in the middle or something. Yes, in reality we quite likely sent Russia the signal that we wouldn't care enough to get involved and therefore indirectly encouraged Putin. But at the end of the day it was Putin & cronies who gave the order to invade, not any Western leader.
Now we did get involved, we do support Ukraine and we could possibly do more but we are not at war and since, see above, we are not responsible for Russian soldiers being in Ukraine, IMHO we are not obliged to enter this war. That doesn't mean we can't but since NATO wasn't attacked this is a decision every country has to make for itself. International law absolutely gives every country the right to support the defender of a war of aggression, also by military means. So if you feel your country should get involved more directly, call up your representative in congress or whatever and tell him/her. Nothing wrong with that. But we are democracies and other people have different opinions. Our leaders are not dictators and as long as there is no majority in favour of going to war it is not spineless or whatever for a leader or a government as a whole to not do so.
Note to everyone here: Maybe my perception here is a bit skewed but it seems to me we are seeing increasingly heated fights between... I don't know Hawks and Doves here? I really shouldn't presume to play the Upholder of Moral Standards here but I feel we should have a bit less "holier than thou" and "he that is not with me is against me" and stuff like that.

Follow up…ok, I think I have got the only solution that makes any sense: Putin and Prig are in love but cannot admit it to each other or themselves.  Only a rom-com scenario makes any sense in what we have seen - hear me out (and yes I am sober as I type this) 
Prig and Putin have known each other for years - him a working class ex-con trying to go straight, Putin a golden haired princess who is so lonely at the top.  They have been sharing stolen glances and smiles for years but neither has the courage…their worlds are too far apart.  Prig is desperate to get Putin to really see him, instead of a boom box outside in the rain he rolls up to Moscow with T90s and MLRS.  It was a romantic gesture of the highest order.  A demonstration of power and masculinity while being vulnerable at the same time.
Putin, like a sexy fox, flees to St Petersburg to hold up with a couple girlfriends…he can’t cope with all this - it is too much too fast.  He is into Prig but the man is both intoxicating and terrifying.  Putin throws out threats but he really does not mean them, inside his heart is pounding - should he?  He mustn’t.  He is so confused right now.  Should he call in airstrikes or run out on the M4 into his man’s arms?
Prig is wailing into the night with an electric guitar (and AD systems), he is in love so hard it hurts.  He bashes out With or Without You by U2…Russia holds it breath, the two star crossed lovers both in love and hate at the same time.  They resent each other for making that love into something that threatens to consume them both.  Finally Lushenko, a girlfriend to both from way back I the day talks them both off the ledge - “you are both love struck fools, stop now before you say something you cannot take back!”
Prig realizes it first.  Putin is a fox to be lured and must feel in control.  Prig has come on too strong.  He dials it back, goes back to the dorm and tells all the guys “he totally scored” but inside he is tortured by the waiting game.  
Putin has fooled himself that he is back in charge but deep inside knows it is too late.  He says strong words but everyone at work knows the truth - FFS would they just do it already.  Their love is self-destructive and wholly doomed but neither can look away - it is a storm that must happen….to be continued.

ahh man, this is worthy of a Monty Python skit.
Kremlin decides that goal to "demilitarise" Ukraine has largely been achieved (yahoo.com)
So apparently Russia just wanted Ukraine to not have any of it's old legacy weapons.  😎
 

Sort of. I don't exactly mean the colloquial sense of the word, which I prefer to call a fight or a shouting match in order to distinguish what I mean by argument. I was raised by a logician, so I use the word argument in the sense that philosophers use the word. In philosopher jargon there are two different senses which are both expressed by the word argument. The first meaning is an element of language that is constructed with multiple premises plus a conclusion. The second, which is the sense I was using, is a discussion between two or more people who disagree about something. You use arguments in the first sense to support your position in an argument in the second sense.
It is important to emphasize that an argument in the second sense is not the same thing as a fight. There is no reason for it to be heated or disrespectful (in fact if it starts getting heated, it's time to take a break). The parties in the argument should never (and I mean never) insult each other. It differs from a debate in that there are no judges and there are no winners. In fact your goal shouldn't even really be to win. You should be completely unafraid to concede a point if your opponent has made a good case for it. And you should not defend your position to the death if mounting evidence is making your position unreasonable. The goal in an argument is, ultimately, to learn.
I was raised to believe that arguments are good things. They are how we expose ourselves to different perspectives. They help us grow. You should never be afraid to have an argument with someone. But again, an argument, as I understand the word, is not the same thing as a fight. Fights are not constructive. In contrast to arguments, which help us break out of our echo chambers, fights are likely to keep us in our echo chambers. Fights should always be avoided.

Let's grab a beer or six sometime and I think I can dissuade you from the idea that Q-Anon isn't culturally American. We'll start with Hofstadter, go to that whole Mikey and the pop rocks thing and end with modern evangelicalism. But way off topic so, until then...

I think you took a wrong turn ending up on this forum.  Maybe your GPS is screwy or you have trouble reading a map. but you might want to look again to see where you really want to go - it ain't here.

Acronyms such as BDG are forever written into my brain since those days.

Ok, I think that just about wraps up this topic, so glad we could come to rational common ground.  I am pretty sure the Canadian government will find and fleece me in my tax bracket over this, as they have demonstrated so much acumen to do, but so be it.
You guys in the "non-negotiable" camp do you, I hope maybe you found a few things to think about and mull over, I know I did - the entire post-conflict thing is something to unpack, but we need to get there first.
 

"Faith, belief" - you guys toss these around like they are hard truths and it is starting to irritate.  Second is the black and white calculus that anyone does not align with as "defeatists etc".
We are not investing billions, in the middle of post-pandemic recession, and risking a slow roll towards nuclear Armageddon because we have "faith and hope" that anyone will "do the right thing" - a concept we cannot even agree on internally.
We are doing it because of what we know.  We know Russia cannot win this war and we know Ukraine cannot lose the peace.  A significant portion of the populations of the west don't have faith in their own governments, let alone one 7-time zones away.
I honestly have watched the Ukrainian government steer a brilliant narrative, a few missteps but rock solid.  But Reconstruction/Post Conflict is like wedding - everyone loses their freaking minds!
You want to propose a non-negotiable push to the pre-2014 borders, then you need to answer the question of how to deal with those regions who have been outside of Ukraine for 8 years, because that post-game show directly impacts what we know.   
 

Some of the conversation over the few pages have referenced the former Yugoslavia.  Which brings back... well, not so good memories.
I was a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia in latter half of '93.   During the Croatian offensive in the Medak in Sept of '93, I was with the 2 PPCLI when we went into the sh*tstorm to try to stop the ethnic cleansing going on.  The Croatian army attacked our unit during that operation, a thing that the Croatian government denies to this very day.  Despite us photographing the Croatian dead after the battle and collecting their ID, etc.    We had god damn evidence and to this day, the Croatian government position is that they never attacked us.
Part of our job, beside trying to keep the warring factions apart, was to document evidence of ethnic cleansing and I was in charge (I was an officer) of a evidence collection team.  So, literally thousands of photos, videos.  Transcripts of interviews with witnesses and victims.  Six months exposed to that living hell, day after f*n day....
So I had the evidence, because sometimes our official recording devices ran out film or tape and we used our personal recording devices to finish up at a site.
After I got out the military, I found myself sometimes on various military forms about games, such as this one.  Arma forums, military wargame forums... that sort of thing.  And as it happened, I ran into forum members from Croatia and Bosnia Serbs and we would get into it.
Universally, every Croatian or Bosnian Serb forum poster denied what happened there.  And I was called a liar on many occasions for telling them them the truth of that war as I was there and they weren't.  And I have evidence to back up my claims.  No one believed me and if I offered visual proof, they didn't want to see it or they disclaimed it as fake.
I remember a particular Bosnian Serb who was not in the war but we got deep into the weeds discussing what happened during that war.  Deny, deny, deny.  It never happened.  Until videos that the Bosnian Serbs took of them killing civilians and dumping them in mass graves what was recorded by the very soldiers who committed the atrocities surfaced and made it onto their local media and they couldn't deny it any longer.  Those videos were part of the process besides sanctions that resulted in some notable Bosnia Serb / Serbian leaders being turned over to the ICC for prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.  After the revelation came out, this individual on that forum who I had spent hours engaging with about the culpability of Serbs in the atrocities simply ignored me from that point onwards.  I will never know why.... was it that he discovered that I was right all a long and he was wrong and he was ashamed (as he would have been) or he simply wanted to hang onto his delusion of what narrative he wanted to believe was true and he knew that I would keep chipping away.   
Denial is a powerful thing.   I don't understand why it has such power but it does.  People can dismiss an outright objective reality because to accept the truth is to undermine what they think reality is or should be.   I don't get it and is beyond madding to see the denials in the face of objective reality happen over and over.
Sigh.   I don't know why the hell I rambled on with this.  Maybe it was a story I need to tell to remain sane in light of the same brutality I witnessed back in Bosnia happening in Ukraine now.  Or maybe I still am the greater fool for believing my experiences in Bosnia can be an object lesson to others about holding onto a narrative that is personally comfortable but runs counter to all the real evidence to the contrary.   DMS, I am looking at you....
The truth will come out after all this is over.  At least, I hope it does.  The truth of this war needs to be told and codified so generations that follow can know what really happend.
Now at the end of this and reviewing it, I feel that I should have deleted this or apologize for it.  
I am hitting post. It is my truth.  Let people accept it and learn something from it or ignore it.  I needed to say this for a long time.   
 
 

Oh, that’s a scoop, right? So the express.co.uk is a reliable source now? LOL. It’s rather the tabloid of Internet news AFAIK. 
Sweden did send 5000 AT4s a week or two ago to Ukraine and this week they decided to send 5000 more (putting them on Putin’s “unfriendly” countries list). It’s not exactly breaking news. 
Regarding jets: So what country/organization would a Swedish fighter jet belong to if not the Swedish Air Force? The Swedish Mad Fighter Jet’s Association? ROFLMAO, but  I guess express.co.uk have inside news unbeknownst to the rest of the world. Anyways, a signals intelligence airplane is not really a threat to Putain (French spelling), is  it? And it would not be over Belarus but close to the Belarus border if anything. Whatever. 
Just try to be as sane as possible and don’t refer to tabloid media as some kind of objective truth, will you.
Cheers, 
Greup