World Peace... For One Year?

That’s la peace

@tpr said ^

But after a revolution you can argue it is a new country. Correct or not, that is the position of Russia.

Well, that's not the position of Russia!

According to the Russian Government, Russia invaded the Ukraine in February 2022 to carry out a 'denazification' of the country (see Putin's claim that war on Ukraine is to target Nazis is absurd. Here's why).

Putin also later claimed (using some erroneous history) that there's no such thing as the Ukraine, that there are no Ukrainians, and that they're all just Russians! There are many, many sources on the Internet debunking this, including “There is no Ukraine”: Fact-Checking the Kremlin’s Version of Ukrainian History from the London School of Economics.

"that's not the position of Russia"

• It is the position of Russia about the Budapest Memorandum.
  The 2014 invasion of Crimea already violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine, so the USA and US were obliged to intervene.

As for the 2022 special military operation several reasons were given
Denazification like the Azov battalion carried nazi symbols
Demilitarization with hints of biological weapons of mass destruction
Support the Donbass insurgents against a threatening crackdown
Grab minerals in the Donbass
Support the Russian speaking minority
Prevent a reconquest of Crimea
Establish a land connection to Crimea

Personally I believe it is all about Crimea.

Likewise the USA cited many reasons to attack Iran:
Weapons of mass destruction: 408.6 kg UF6 at 60%, could with much effort be worked to 157 kg U at 90%, i.e. 2 nuclear bombs
Ballistic missiles
A menacing navy
Regime change
Human rights
Grab their oil

Personally I believe it is about the oil and because of pressure by Israel.

@tpr

I think the objectives you state are the current objectives of the Russians, and I never believed the bit about denazification. I think the Russians had to scale back their objectives when the attempt to capture Kiev failed in 2022. However, it's clear the original objectives were to capture the whole of the Ukraine with an early push on the capital.

I'm not sure why the Russians are still fighting in Ukraine. They're achieving nothing and haven't really achieved anything significant since 2022. Even their frenemies, like Modi, are now telling them it's time to end the war. This war has now gone on longer than the First World War and is just as pointless.

"the Russians had to scale back their objectives when the attempt to capture Kiev failed in 2022"

• Yes, it is a miracle Ukrainians could avoid Kyiv to fall.

"the original objectives were to capture the whole of the Ukraine with an early push on the capital"

• I do not think so. The 3 pronged attack from Belarus, the Donbas, and Crimea show taking Kyiv, securing Crimea and the Donbas as 3 objectives. The first objective failed miraculously, so they focused on the 2 other with some success: an uninterrupted land connection with Crimea has been conquered.

"why the Russians are still fighting"

• It is easy to start a war, it is harder to stop it. It was the same with Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

"They're achieving nothing and haven't really achieved anything significant since 2022."

• It is a stalemate, like in the First World War.

"it's time to end the war"

• Yes, I hope the American envoys can broker a peace.
  Easiest would be a cease fire and freeze the front line, but Ukraine wants to reconquer terrain and Russia wants to conquer the whole 4 oblasts Donbas, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, that they have formally included in the Russian Federation.

"This war has now gone on longer than the First World War"

• And longer than the Second World War too, but not as long as the Vietnam and Afghanistan Wars.

Forget world peace, I just want forum peace at this point rofl ;p

@tpr said ^

I do not think so. The 3 pronged attack from Belarus, the Donbas, and Crimea show taking Kyiv, securing Crimea and the Donbas as 3 objectives. The first objective failed miraculously, so they focused on the 2 other with some success: an uninterrupted land connection with Crimea has been conquered.

You may be right - I don't know Russia's battle plans, I'm just going by what was reported at the time, which may well have been wrong. After all, at the time many papers reported that the Russian columns gathering at Ukraine's border were just a threat meant to extract concessions from the Ukrainians. Then, when the tanks rolled over the border, the reporting was that Ukraine would last two weeks. So wrong on both counts and likely wrong on Russia's plans as well!

@TitusPlaysChess123 appears to ask me: "Didn’t Trump order to attack Iran? Forgive me if I’m wrong ._."

Yes. Of course he did. Let's not miss the point, shall we?

Would you be happy with Iran having nuclear weapons? Would you wish to sit idly by while that happens, and only later say "golly, I wish somebody had stopped that" ?

A brilliant author recently wrote about what he calls "suicidal empathy." As I understand the term, at least (although I would not attempt to put words into the mouth of such a brilliant writer), it's the tendency of well-meaning but misguided people to have real, or at least performative, sympathy for those who would harm or even destroy them. It's very stylish now. And it leads to much bad, I think foolish, policy from the Left.

Foolish policies like "ooooh, let's defund the police." And "oooooh, prisons are, you know, like, just wrong!"

In any event, consider how Iran has handled its own dissidents. Consider who Iran helps to fund. Should we say "oooh, EVERYbody has, like, a right to nuclear weapons, you know?"

I think not. I think being indifferent or even sympathetic to the spread of nuclear weapons would be to have suicidal empathy.

Consider this more obvious case of potential suicidal empathy: If Hitler had been on the verge of building nuclear weapons, would we have been happy to sit back and let that happen? Would it not have changed the future drastically, and in a horrifying, bad way? I, for one, would NOT have wanted to see the world sit back and do nothing under such circumstances, on the misguided theory that we had "no right" to prevent that from happening.

But that's just my opinion, obviously. And, needless to say (although I'll say it anyway), others may feel differently. But I frankly don't understand how they can.

Yes, Trump attacked Iran -- its military and its strange, hard-to-explain, hard-fought store of highly-enriched Uranium.

I wish Iran would just give up its desire to vastly enrich and then hang on to such enriched Uranium. There would be no rationale for continued war if Iran would do that, would there?

And, like Trump himself appears to do (notice that he's NOT massively bombing civilian infrastructure, even though that would be easy to do now), I have sympathy for the ordinary Iranian citizen and have known my share of them "back in the day."

But I don't have any sympathy for the spread of nuclear weapons coupled with long-range ballistic missiles. Especially not in the era of October 7. That would not be genuinely, functionally empathetic.

@Noflaps said ^

@TitusPlaysChess123 appears to ask me: "Didn’t Trump order to attack Iran? Forgive me if I’m wrong ._."

Yes. Of course he did. Let's not miss the point, shall we?

Would you be happy with Iran having nuclear weapons? Would you wish to sit idly by while that happens, and only later say "golly, I wish somebody had stopped that" ?

A brilliant author recently wrote about what he calls "...

You do realise that the USA also has nuclear weapons.

By your logic, shouldn’t both sides be morally wrong?

The topic is if can we achieve world peace for one year, HOW THE HECK DID IT GET TURN INTO POLITICS?

@AveraWyvern said ^

Forget world peace, I just want forum peace at this point rofl ;p

yesss