3/2
Today we learned about the Ukraine-Russia conflict that's happening right now from a different perspective. Since we are living in Japan and normally we only access to Japanese or perhaps American media, we only see the Ukraine-Russia conflict from one side. Only judging from the footage and the news reports by the Japanese media, I have an impression that Russia was one-sidedly attacking Ukraine because of its own selfish reason. Today, Mr Paterson told us that to understand wars or any incidents, we need to look at history. He told us that NATO was originally formed to balance out military power between western Europe and eastern Europe. However, now that the USSR has collapsed, there is no need for NATO. If Ukraine joins NATO, Russia's safety would be threatened by the high-tech NATO weapons on their doorstep. The US criticised Russia for invading Ukraine for such selfish reasons, however, the US also attacked Cuba during the Cuban crisis, so there is a double standard. Furthermore, Mr Paterson said that the Nazi Ukrainian people who hated the Russians were doing terrorist attacks in regions where Russian people lived. Russia is referring to these victims of the terrorist attacks when they had said that Russia needed to protect their own people in Ukraine.
I'm sceptical about this explanation because of the following reasons. Firstly, if Russia wanted to "protect the Russian people in Ukraine", then they could have done it earlier. I think Russia has other intentions (specifically preventing Ukraine from joining NATO) for invading Ukraine. Secondly, I don't think there is no need for NATO because some countries had joined NATO even after USSR had collapsed. This means that those countries have military threats outside NATO, and that shows that NATO is important for the international society. Thirdly, I don't believe that all of the western Ukrainian people are Nazis. Nazis are extreme people and normally only a fraction of people become right-wing extremists. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine, is a Jewish person so if most of the Ukrainian people were Nazis, he wouldn't be elected in the first place. Although I'm dubious in the explanations, I learned the importance of viewing wars from a different perspective, not only through the filters of the mass media.
Interesting take and good to question and challenge things
ReplyDelete. However, Russia has been trying to protect since 2000, with both diplomacy, realpolitik and threat of military. None of that worked so they finally resorted to a limited invasion. As to NATO stopping Ukraine joining is high on Russia's list of reasons as if Ukraine joins then it puts NATO forces (dominated by the US) on Russia's doorstep in the place that many previous western invasions of Russia have came from. The countries that joined NATO after the USSR collapsed were all exUSSR friendly nations and this was when the S and other NATO leaders had promised they would not be allowed to join (one of the terms for joining NATO is that nations can only join if their joining does not threaten other nations and here it obviously threatens Russia). Even those people who created NATO (George Keenan etc9 argued for it to not continue past the fall of the USSR to keep Europe at peace). And yes not all Ukrainians are Nazi's - even in WW2 Nazi Germany not all Germans were Nazi's either - it doesn't need 100% of a group to seize power, doesn't even need 50% as the 2014 coup by those people showed (watch the Ukraine on Fire doc for a good explanation of the Nazi effect).