Europe
Europe community on dbzer0. Intended to be a place to discuss European news, politics, or just general topics from a European perspective. Since this is on dbzer0 expect the community to lean more leftist-anarchist but a wide range of views are accepted here (within reason).
Rules:
1. No Bigotry
Any forms of Homophobia, Transphobia, Queerphobia, Racism, or Ableism will be met with swift and harsh action and will not be tolerated here whatsoever. Bigots will be banned immediately on-sight. This includes apologia of it.
2. No Zionism
Any forms of Zionism or Zionist rhetoric will not be tolerated here, this includes Zionist apologia, accusations of antisemitism towards anti-Zionists, or blatant denial or downplaying of the genocide towards Palestinians. Any attempt to uphold or prop up the IHRA definition of antisemitism, will be treated as Zionism.
Anyone engaging in Pro-Zionist sentiment or apologia will be actioned in accordance with its severity.
3. Stay Civil
Please maintain civil discourse in the community. Do not engage in arguments with others, name-calling, or insults. Note that calling out bigotry or Zionism is not considered an insult. In heated arguments users are encouraged to or even required to disengage failure to do so will result in mod action.
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Spreading of misinformation intentionally in this community is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Spreading misinformation hurts the credibility of the community and can mislead people sometimes in dangerous ways. Users who intentionally post misinformation as articles, comment answers, or in attempt to win arguments will be actioned swiftly.
5. No AI Content
Please do not post articles or content primarily created using generative AI. Generative AI content may contain misinformation or be lower quality and thus is discouraged. Posts and comments featuring it will be removed. However this community does not allow or tolerate Anti-AI trolling or hostility and users who engage in such behavior will be actioned for it, additionally Anti-AI trolling violates Rule 3 and often Rule 4 so it is generally unacceptable already.
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So, once again...Trump just rolled over and let Putin tickle his belly. Why would anyone be surprised by this?
The only path forward is Ukraine's capitulation and the west abandoning their project in Ukraine
And why is that "the only path forward"? Why do Ukrainians need to "capitulate" to Russia?
Because Russia won. The options are Ukraine loses now or Ukraine loses later, one involves a lot more death and risk of escalation
Why would anyone be surprised that a guy on the other side of the planet from the countries in question can't really do anything about this situation? Sanctions don't work against Russia and arming Ukraine just means more dead Ukrainians. What do you want him to do, send US troops to start WW3? Push the EU to start WW3 instead?
If the sanctions didn't work against Russia, their economy wouldn't be in such a bad shape that Moscow needs to lie about it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-economy-worse-shape-than-moscow-says-report-eu-shows-2025-05-13/
You can't sanction a country that already has all the materials it needs. Russia can grow its own food, mine its own minerals, drill its own oil.
Sanctions only work against the third world debt-slaves of the US empire, who have had their food agriculture destroyed and replaced with cash crops. For those countries, being sanctioned is a death sentence for potentially hundreds of thousands of people (in Iraq in the 90s, an estimated 500,000 children died from disease and starvation due to US sanctions). The West therefore assumes that their sanctions are the ultimate weapon, because they work on the people they've been brutalizing for half a millennium.
To put it in terms a liberal can understand, it's like if the Galactic Empire rolled the Death Star up to Alderaan and shot it, expecting it to explode, but the laser just bounced off, and continued to do so on the next couple of dozen shots.
You know what they say, 14th time's the charm!
The scary part is a bunch of these libs would answer yes to this in some form
The guy brags about how he has this magical influence over Putin, and "if he were in charge, none of this would be happening"...but when presented with an opportunity to prove that influence, Putin just says, "Nah, fuck that", leaving Trump with no choice but to shrug and say, "Oh, well...I tried".
If you don't find this pathetically hilarious, then you need to check your pulse.
It's funny that Trump believes he has leverage over Putin, yes.
Your comment implied that Putin had leverage over Trump, which is equally false and hilarious. Sadly, the Western media has pushed that narrative to garner the most martial diplomatic stance possible in this Second Cold War.
My comment only implied that Putin holds the dominant role in their relationship. For all his tough talk, Trump goes as soft and submissive as a toothless puppy whenever Vlad enters the chat. Then he spends days gushing about how wonderful it was just to talk to him, regardless of the actual outcome. It's like watching a 12 year old girl with a crush.
He does that with almost everyone. he talks them up around the time he needs to talk them, he talks shit about them when he needs to posture to his base. The liberal obsession with the personalities involved while seemingly having no interest in the practicalities of even their own stated desires is utterly bizarre. Claim to support Ukraine and then demand for them to die, even when every honest analysis showed them having no shot at success from day 1.
I don't think the Ukrainians would agree with your assertion that their desire for independence is based on a "liberal obsession with the personalities involved". I know for a fact that if it was my country being invaded by a hostile neighbor, I would hope someone out there would help us fight back...and not just encourage my people to surrender.
Would this have been your advice to the Vietnamese when the Americans invaded their country? On the surface, they didn't stand much of a chance either...so why didn't they just give up and let the US take what they wanted, in order to "save more lives"? Why would any country resist being invaded by a hostile foreign power? By this logic, the aggressor should always win...and no one would ever be safe.
Ukraine's 2014 coup d'etat brought US-backed fascists into power, which fractured the country into a civil war. The oblasts in the east and south sought independence in order to escape the ensuing ethnic persecution, but in response, fascist paramilitaries invaded the donbass and escalated it to violent ethnic cleansing. Eight years of attempted ceasefires were broken by the West^[https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/02/10/ukraine-zelensky-minsk-peace-russia/] before Russia finally intervened.
"8 Years Before" Donbass Documentary
You do know that you would be killed in Russia for showing your pronouns, right?
So why do you keep simping for their propaganda?
Ukraine has been sovereign since 1990. They are not a part of Russia anymore since then.
So even if your fascism misinformation was correct, it still wouldn't give Russia the right to invade.
What fractured the country into civil war, was Russia annexing Crimea during the Euromaidan revolt.
Let's be honest, they were hardly going to leave their nuclear submarine bases in the hands of a hostile government, were they...
You understand the chronology.
BTW, even Western-based polling consistently showed the clear majority of Crimeans supported the referendum.
The war in the Donbass was also discrete from Crimea (where there was never armed conflict).
That's the thing with international law...you can hold a referendum if you want to, but it doesn't mean you get to just give the land to someone else. The entire country needs to decide on that...not just one region.
If those people want to become Russian citizens, they have every right to apply for citizenship and move to Russia. No one is stopping them. But they don't get to take the land with them. That land belongs to Ukraine. All of Ukraine. Taking it, without the rest of the country agreeing to let it go, typically results in civil war.
The problem however, is when foreign countries like Russia intervene in order to tip the scales and take that land for themselves. That is illegal. That is an act of aggression. It is an act of war. Not just civil war, but open war between nations.
Ukraine didn't start that. They didn't attack Russia. Russia attacked them. And then continued their effort to steal more land, by openly invading the country.
Watch (at least) the first fifteen and a half minutes (the introduction).
Nah, it was these guys
But the persecuted peoples of Donetsk and Luhansk have got their way in the end
Lol! Do you know how easy it is to find a few hundred racists willing to wave flags and yell obscenities in front of a camera? You can find people like that in Russia too.
Ukraine was independent before it was couped in 2014 by the US and pushed to fight against Russia, intentionally breaking agreements with Russia and fomenting war precisely so it could be carved up by the US and the EU and turned into a neo-colony. If my country was being invaded by the country my leadership was instigating a war with for years, agreeing to treaties and then intentionally breaking them, multiple times in the decade prior to the invasion, while said leadership is blatantly profiting off of it, I would certainly blame my own government for inciting such a situation, and plenty of Ukrainians do.
Comparing Vietnam to Ukraine is such a fucking cracker take that it must hurt your arm. Vietnam was colonized and brutalized by France and then invaded by the US, two nations which are thousands of miles away and otherwise had no base of support in the region. They were fighting an actual people's war of liberation against a force who had literally taken over more or less the entire nation, enslaving it for a century. Ukraine didn't even exist until the fall of the Soviet Union and has been a corrupt oligarchy since. Liberals are so clueless yet so confident in showing how they refuse to learn a single thing.
Russia is breaking way more agreements than any other country.
Yes, including the US.
lol
I know a lot of Ukrainians...many who were students at the time of the Maiden protests. It had nothing to do with the US. At all. They simply didn't want their country taken over by Russia again.
Prior to 2014, Ukraine was already moving away from Russian influence. The Yanukovych government actually represented a reversal of policy that went back over 2 decades, since Ukraine first declared its independence from Russia. Once he was ousted, Ukraine went back to the direction it had been heading, before he changed that course. That wasn't a coup. It was the end of one.
Putin never approved of Ukrainian independence. He was determined to prevent Ukraine from getting closer to Europe, by any means necessary...and Yanukovich was just another attempt to sabotage that relationship. When the Ukrainians realized who he was really working for, they took to the streets in protest.
This wasn't an attack on Russia, although it was an open rejection of their influence.
And if you actually understood anything about Ukrainian history...you would know that the comparison to Vietnam's history, is much closer than you're willing to admit. Ukraine has been occupied by Russia for centuries. Treated as a vassal state, and subjected to horrendous abuses at the hands of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union. The ruling class in Moscow has always viewed Ukrainians as peasants and lesser people.
Why do you think they were so eager to be free, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed?
Yeah based on your posting I'm not surprised you know Maidan participants and parrot their talking points. You're describing the affects of western influence, and a common one at that, dividing a region into camps and luring one to work for the colonial powers against the regional interests. The imperialists empower some groups against others, and in this case they empowered literal white supremacists with the promise that they would become true blue europeans if they only sacrifice their neighbors, and themselves. To argue that a slavic nation is doing the right thing by getting pulled into a feud with it's neighbors in order to join forces with the imperialist, colonial camp is again the most cracker take you can possibly have on the region.
The only people who wanted to be free from the the USSR were literal banderite fascists who were tired of having to hide their love of pogroms. The quality of life in Ukraine and all of the former Soviet Union plummeted and has never recovered. The best comparison of the Ukrainian leadership post 2014 in the Vietnam context is to the comprador catholic french speaking Vietnamese who hoped to exploit their own relatives to live it up with genocidal fascists and colonizers
It's pretty weird that you're talking about Ukraine, while discounting the views of actual Ukrainians in your assessment. All you seem to know is what Ukraine looks like from a Russian perspective.
That says a lot.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-negotiated-end-war.aspx
The majority of Ukrainians want a swift, negotiated end to this war. The data typically disagrees with cracker sentiments but the crackers always act like their position is correct. This is the crux of crackerdom.
The Ukrainians who you are prioritizing are not only a minority of Ukrainians but they are literally neo nazis
You didn't really read the results of those pills, did you? You just picked one sub-stat to focus on. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want Russia to leave their country, and give back what they've stolen, regardless of how that happens. Fight or negotiate...they want Russia out.
The poll states clearly that the majority of Ukrainians are okay with ceding territory to Russia in exchange for ending the war.
The polls also exclude 10-12% of the population who live in the Eastern parts of Ukraine, and that group is almost always in favor of the pro-Russian choices in any polling, which means the numbers are actually higher than the polling suggests in favor of ending the war and ceding territory
If Putin really got everything he wanted, then wouldn't there have been some kind of deal reached?
Why would Putin need to make a deal in order to get what he wants?
So fewer people die.
He could make it so no people die, just by calling off the invasion. If he hasn't done it by now, what makes you think that's what he wants?
I don't think you're being serious anymore.
What isn't serious about it?
An invading force can withdraw from the conflict any time they want and it would end the war. Which would prevent any further deaths.
The fact that Putin still keeps invading means he doesn't care about the lives of Russian soldiers or the lives in the country he is invading.
Unfortunately, NATO is a thug which only understands force; it can't be reasoned with.
This is not about surprise.
It is just bad news. Evil is growing on both sides.