Thread by @M4ST3RSP4RK

I think I should clarify my position on the war, NATO and various justifications and talking points, lest everyone go on misinterpreting things.
I'm not American, I'm German. This war is in fact in my backyard and has shattered a longstanding calm rather abruptly.

You have to get into the mindset of this nation: the End of History wasn't just real, it was the culture around here.
A land war in Europe? For the older generations, this reminds of nuclear apocalypse. For the younger, it's an implosion of the safe world order they know.

No one saw this coming. No one took the CIA warnings and leaks seriously.
The European states interpret the meaning of NATO and the EU quite different from the US and this may be the source of the largest confusion.
Seems like a good place to start.

For USA, NATO is "My friends and places I park my nukes at".
For Germany, it is (was) "Fuck the Soviet Union", which handily explains why Germany absolutely stopped caring about it and meeting the 2% threshold once those guys fell apart.
For Poland tho, it's "Fuck Russia". Uh-oh.

See, the reason the Eastern NATO expansion states are so enthusiastic about being in it is because every single one of these has massive historical grievance with Russia and none of them want to relive any of it.
The story of Ukraine is more complex, I'll get to that later.

So to Germany, NATO seemed like a semi-silly but imposing relic, like "Duck and Cover" nuclear war PSAs, or an old derelict nuclear shelter in the inner city under a government building.
The invasion forced us to realize that those things were not only not silly but necessary.

The invasion forcibly aligned Germanys' view of NATO with that of the Eastern expansion states, which can be described as *dummy* bad for Russia.
Its not really describable how the tone of the politicians in charge over here shifted, other than:
We're back. Hold on to your butts.

The social democrat chancellor is championing rearmament. The Green party energy minister said out loud that saving the climate comes after securing electricity for the nation.
Sacred cows are being slaughtered left and right on a scale utterly unimaginable just two weeks ago.

I realize that level-headed NATO planners like Kennan and others pointed out last century that expanding NATO aggressively would be a bad idea for the US, but I wonder if you considered that the Eastern nations were quite directly begging for it.
They only stood to gain.

No one is expecting to get nuked because everyone knows the rules of the game.
Rule 1: don't make war on the other bloc and everything is peachy.
That's really all they wanted, to be free of the menace of the not-Red-anymore Army rolling through their cities.
But Putin...

We've moved on from power politics, possibly naively, but Putin seems, from the justifications he fielded in his recent speeches, to be quite stuck in Cold War thinking.
I've discussed them there and in the next few I will link.

https://mobile.twitter.com/M4ST3RSP4RK/status/1497139067540197378

NATO is an org of nations that want to work together for their common safety. That's why they keep getting applicants.
The Warsaw Pact was fundamentally just the formal list of nations enslaved by Soviet Russia.

https://mobile.twitter.com/M4ST3RSP4RK/status/1497154103251775501

You can leave NATO if you want, but apparently nobody really does.
You want to maybe deviate from the line dictated from Russia? In the Pact?
Prague spring, Hungarian revolution. No. You're a slave.
The slavs didn't want that anymore, so here we are. That's why they wanted NATO.

On to the excuses and justifications for the war. They are *extremely* muddled and it seems like nobody knows whatsoever what the other is thinking.
From what the western analysts have been talking before the war, you could have believed that this was all purely geostrategic.

Before the war, The West was saying:
Putin wants Ukraine because NATO missiles and having a buffer zone, Dneipr river, etc.
Putin was saying:
The Ukranians are probably building gas chambers to kill all the Russophones in the East of the nation, who want to be Russian anyway.

This is of course disregarding the fact that for basically the entire populace of Europe, the idea of *invading nuclear armed Russia* is an idea so insane that it doesn't even bear holding for a single second.
Like I said, End of History culture. War is outside of our purview.

So if what the western analysts said is true I can't tell, I just know that Putins messaging changed after the war began.
We moved on from "protector of the Rus volk" to "Ukraine isn't even real and whatever is in Kiev is a band of Neo-Nazis and junkies."
"Mask-off"?

One way or another, Putin seems to be stuck in Cold War thinking, which is very bad for him and his nation.
If he had just kept his army where it was, he could have continued to bribe German politicians forever and kept the gravy train of fossil fuel money rolling. But no.

A friend suggested he wants to make a legacy for himself. I suppose he has.
Multiple map painting game enthusiasts I know suggested he wants to add Ukranians to his manpower pool like this was Vicky 3. I think those guys are smoking crack.