Well, the good thing about Jerboa is that anyone can just make changes to it and send them to the devs, so now that more people are using Lemmy, it will improve really quickly!

I’d frame the “obsession” in another way. Currently, in the present, the actual present, Russia claims and has control over some territories. Other countries reject this on the premise that those territories, before the invasion, were Ukrainian. Putin’s stance is simply that, before being Ukrainian, those territories were Russian, so the position that they should belong to one or the other is indeed arbitrary.

The Donbass was basically invaded by Ukrainian troops in 1918, and Crimea was literally gifted to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, so why should those territories even be under Ukrainian control in the first place, if the majority of their population is culturally Russian? When Albanians in Kosovo started to protest against Serbia, NATO bombed Yugoslavia; now Russians in the Donbass are protesting against Ukraine, so why doesn’t NATO intervene? Why does NATO support Ukraine against an operation identical to that which NATO itself performed? Well, the answer is simple: NATO bombed Yugoslavia to weaken it, and, as McGregor admitted, the US was planning for Ukraine to attack first. We could also draw a parallelism to the Cuban missile crisis: why is it okay to put missiles in Ukraine but not Cuba?

So, all of this nonsense about aggression, culture, etc. is ridiculous. The US and Russia are fighting each other, both on the battlefield and in the media. There’s no ethics here, both will do whatever it takes (the list of American, Russian and Ukrainian war crimes is nauseating) and will weaponize public opinion as they would weaponize missiles or rifles. There’s no lesser evil, just pure evil everywhere, just think about what the victory of either side would bring about to the world, then choose your evil.

You can accuse anyone of anything and start a trial, that’s how the justice system works.

NATO could have entered the war in Ukraine at any time

And it has. They are spending on this war as much as they did on Afghanistan. They are sending intel and commands directly to Ukrainian officials. And not just weapons and information; according to the recently leaked papers, there are NATO troops on the field too. They are fighting the war in all senses except legally, and, by extension, in the PR sense.

this war -like any war- doesn’t make sense

Every war makes sense. Countries start wars when that’s what benefits them the most. And countries carefully plan and set up future wars.

Why so?

There are two sides in this global-scale hybrid war. Finland and other countries have joined what they believe to be the winning side, or at least the side whose victory would be more beneficial to their political interests. Other countries are siding with Russia and China. Countries joining an alliance voluntarily doesn’t mean the alliance isn’t a threat to the other side. NATO has gradually turned itself into an alliance with the power to defeat Russia.

then we would “magically become democratic”

No, nobody would. The US has just passed the RESTRICT Act, which imposes stronger restrictions than even China has. If you suggest that your country should just let the authoritarian guard down and allow every foreign psy-ops to have a meaningful effect on it, they’ll just laugh at you or you’ll be killed by thugs in an unfortunate and unrelated turn of events.

The only way to get what we want is to wait until the existing superpowers have fought each other into an unstable state, then seize power by violence. Anything else is just wishful thinking to feel better about something you don’t actually ever expect to change.

What does that mean?

NATO will act according to their interests. If they can defeat an enemy, they will do so. If your point is that the US will simply point all its weapons towards Russia and China and then simply smile and let them peacefully develop to overtake the US in every aspect as they are doing, you’re wrong.

Who started the aggression in Ukraine?

Russia did. But I don’t think they should just sit back and watch as the US prepares to deal a lethal blow to them. The US has set up bases all around Russia, formed military alliances with countries near its border. The US has also promoted coups in many post-Soviet states to make their governments US-affine. Even after the 2014 pro-US coup in Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens voted for the seemingly pro-Russian Zelensky, who had promised to normalize relations with Russia and embrace the Russian culture and language in the Donbas region, and were fooled by what turned out to be a new US puppet regime and continued war against the Donbas. Even US officials admit they were planning for the war, just that they didn’t think Russia would strike first. At this point, who even launched the first missile in this particular development of the 2014 war is just a small technicality in a complex hybrid war that’s been developing for years.

Let’s hope for democracy everywhere.

If two authoritarian behemoths are fighting to death as they are, randomly biting and scolding both in hopes that they’ll magically become democratic is a stupid strategy. At best, you will achieve nothing. At worst, one of them will weaponize your innocence against the other, which is quite the case.

Of course. If anti-war activists achieve their goal, Russia will withdraw from Ukraine. Then, NATO will set up bases there, including nuclear weapons, in the most strategically relevant outpost at the Russian border. This, of course, will allow NATO to easily defeat Russia, the largest military power barring itself. Unopposed, it will take on China, the only real contender to the US on the economic front. This will eventually result in the US keeping its hegemony for the rest of our lifetimes, which by simple imperialist logic is detrimental to current global South nations. So as much as I dislike authoritarianism, those activists don’t know what they are doing (or, worse, know it damn well) and stopping them by any means will help the rest of us.

As bad as this may seem, it is actually beneficial to the rest of the world.

There probably were honestly…