> Well, your country being invaded by an incompetent horde of brutal assholes surely influences your ability to dispassionately assess the strategic situation, and the motivations of said assholes.

Dude, I'm not the hyper-patriotic type of Ukrainian :)

> I can understand it's hard to hear that the people slaughtering your countrymen aren't 100% at fault...more like 95% at fault, with the other 5% being sustained multi-decade provocation from....the country that is giving you every weapon imaginable to repulse the murderers.

You seam to have _very_ poor imagination then (ATACMS long overdue? DPICM? Abrams? Finally start teaching Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s? Some Patriots maybe?). Also, now you seem to be putting words into my mouth since I've never said that it is "100%" their fault.

> I would argue it wasn't a conversation of "wouldn't it be nice if" but them making decisions about who would be the leadership of Ukraine, which isn't something that should be decided by US State Department officials.

Can you provide exact quotes where they are making such decisions?

> These days we call it "information operations" and "psychological operations".

Your point being?

> Don't be naive. The bottom-rank locals in any revolution don't get a paper trail directly back to the US government. Most people who are getting suitcases of US dollars have enough sense to keep their mouths closed about where it came from. $50,000 from an American who "works for an NGO" so the Maidan protesters can buy supplies -> $1,000 spent on supplies "with their own money" and $49,000 quietly pocketed.

I'm not being naive and I stand by my words. I remember back in 2004 there were indeed significant amount of people on Maidan Nezalezhnostii who were being paid daily to stand there with orange stripes. In 2014 main driving force of the revolution were middle-class people donating stuff or risking their lives directly by participating. All other forces were at best secondary and at worst inconsequential. Opposition politicians where routinely booed by the revolutionaries due to their meek positions and indecisiveness.

It seems you are intelligent person, but think you are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than you actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in your knowledge base ;)

> In order to retaliate with nukes, their nuclear deterrent and MAD has to be credible. Which brings us back to why they were so pissed off in 2007 about ABMs in Eastern Europe: putting an ABM umbrella on their doorstep means you can shoot down their nukes (boost-phase intercept profile), which means the conventional invasion of Russia can proceed with impunity.

That is strategic nukes. What about tactical nukes delivered by cruise missiles? Won't Russia just tactical nuke the shit out of theoretical NATO army that is in the process of assuming attack formation near their border?

> I don't think most intel analysts are stupid, just human. On the contrary, the most consistent problem I see with them is the same Dunning-Kruger Effect seen on HN: they are intelligent, but think they are smarter/more knowledgeable about certain specific domains than they actually are, and come to egregiously bad conclusions due to underestimating the gaps in their knowledge base.

You provided both a detailed description and a great example of described phenomenon in the same message ;)

> The US approach to imperial domination doesn't rely on "painting the map" directly. We dominate people's central banks and financial systems instead.[7][8] It's all about maintaining the Petrodollar/global reserve currency system, which allows us to essentially tax the entire planet and give every country monopoly money in return. Monopoly money which we also spend on our gigantic military, which enforces the acceptance of said monopoly money.

I know cool-realpolitik-kids like to explain everything in the world with "petrodollar", but I don't see how it is really relevant for invasion in Afghanistan, for example. Also, petrodollar system in not straight up win as such people seem to assume when describing it in edgy and simplified way e.g. "we just give everybody fake-monopoly money and force them to accept it with our military!!1". You can read a simple and balanced analysis that also discusses flaws of petrodollar system in [0].

> I'd say these are business as usual for brutal sociopathic Soviet-trained leadership, and also the only way that Russia has any hope of controlling the vast territory it's trying to bite off from Ukraine: get rid of all of the locals. Then there is no one to support an insurgency, no one to vote the "wrong" way during referendums, etc...

But why do they need all the referendums/annexations business if they invaded just to not let spooky-scary NATO in? BTW Russians themselves don't claim that they invaded only (or even mainly) because of NATO, so I don't know why you chose it as (another) hill to die on.

> That would be the case if NATO adhered to the letter of its own laws/documents/policies. But I think the Russians don't consider that possibility as something they want to bet their future on. It would mean putting the future safety of the Russian State entirely in the benevolent hands of NATO decision-makers. I think after the 2007 ABM dispute, any perception of NATO benevolence in Putin's mind was shattered. Maybe we'll carve out a special exception for Ukraine. Maybe we'll re-write NATO's Articles to remove the "no existing territorial disputes" clause. Or maybe the US would just bully/bribe every other member into voting "Yes" to Ukraine. These sound unbelievable to most Westerners, but they are probably all realistic risks in the brain of a KGB field agent. So after Ukraine's constitutional amendment in 2019 [9], Putin probably decided to seize the initiative. If he spent a few months figuring out exactly how to respond, that would put him Summer-Fall of 2019....planning to execute an early 2020 full annexation. Then COVID hit, and Putin waited until the global pandemic was stabilized before setting in motion staging his troops for invasion (Fall 2021 with a planned January invasion)...then he had to delay AGAIN after Big Daddy Xi told him "Don't fuck up my Olympics with your war." So world events may have delayed a Spring 2020 invasion until Spring 2022, which means we're actually witnessing the fastest possible turn-around time for a Russian offensive, assuming Ukraine's amendment was the straw that broke the camel's back. It also means Putin may have planned an invasion while notoriously-anti-interventionist Trump was in office, but ended up getting puppet-on-warmonger-strings Biden in the White House by the time everything was ready. shrug Entirely supposition on my part.

So what stopped spooky-scary NATO from accepting Ukraine after it first applied in 2008? And how much more time did sneaky US need to finally "bribe" all the other members to accept Ukraine as-is after the previous war? It is another favorite Russian propaganda talking point ("NATO was plotting to accept Ukraine!!1") when in reality it seemed to be completely not interested.

[0]: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/