In 2008 Ukraine's accession into the club of war criminal monsters a.k.a. NATO was absolutely not a good idea. NATO leadership is very much responsible for the shitshow we see today and every single one of them should be hung, drawn and quartered for making world peace basically impossible.
NATO was always about getting European bootlicket nations to provoke the Soviet Union, later Russia, and to slowly gain the upper hand in geopolitics.

Had NATO leaders even shown a shred of decency towards Gorbachev in the 90s, post German reunification, maybe Russian hardliners wouldn't have been able to grab power. And we might have a better world today. Fuck Putistan, but Russians as a people are no worse or better humans than the rest of us. We could peacefully coexist in harmony, but that doesn't agree well with max profits in the military industrial complex.

I remember hearing about it when it happened and found it hilarious. Wagner mercs realizing that papa Putin doesn't care if they die (there was some audio clip circulating). Wagner mercenaries have been known to be pretty nasty (not unique to them of course, Americans have Blackwater and its successors).

The Russian impulse to centralize makes Dead Hand a certainty.

Nuclear material decays and as it decays, will not detonate with the energy from the explosive material it was built with. It NEEDS to be replaced on an regular basis, depending on the type it is. It's not a matter of a chance o-ring dry rotting or chance capacitor leaking or chance fuel going bad.

Putin's a bully. There's an implicate threat that Putin will use nukes if he doesn't get what he wants, but he'll never be happy with what he has. The best case scenario is he croaks on his own because he's too damn paranoid to let someone near him assassinate him. He's probably scared shitless from the recent drone attack on his palace.

Russia has blackmail on "The West." That's why they're complicate. Politicians are self serving shits. If they cared about unnecessary deaths, they would have handled Covid better.

Little Green Men

We were pretty much onboard with helping Ukraine, and were providing intelligence and selling them arms.

But Trump is totally a Russian asset, or was at the time. (Russia spent a lot of resources and manpower on Trump's 2016 campaign.) Nowadays, Trump might be catching on that Putin has absolutely no respect for him.

The EU is legitimately currently trying to be the region police (not world police) as we speak. Part of that involves building up our own military industry. The US government is not happy about that, to put it mildly.

They did not choose to. The EU wasn't even a thing when the USA became the de facto world police.
And after WW2 the USA was so dominant that any such attempt by Europes stronger countries would have been in vain

Honestly mostly just the latter. Was joking that they would've maintained them so badly that none of the nukes would make it out of their silos, even if they were still capable of detonation.

While I was aware the warheads require maintainance, @impairedimperator@lemmy.zip definitely said it better than I could.

It's worth noting that in the 1990's while the rest of easter EUR, particularly PO, RO, and CZ tweaked their economies and societies in whatever way was necessary at the time in order to get their asses into NATO and the EU, Ukraine spent 30 years dawdling, unsure if they wanted to face east or west. Shame on them for that. They created their own monster by being irresolute, unlike the Poles and Romanians who also HATE Russia, know history, in some respects share a common history with all of eastern EUR, and see very clearly. A fair amount of UKR's indecision was due to Russian meddling in politics there, but by the time UKR woke the fuck up about Russia's nature and intentions it was almost too late. That timeline takes us to the year 2022, approximately. UKR is still corrupt as fuck, nobody knows who can be trusted and they are putting tremendous effort into reforming their legal system, politics and military structures to conform with EU/NATO norms. If they had been this decided (instead of divided) back in 2014, they'd have been in the EU AND NATO by now. They are paying the price for their dawdling and indecision, fuelled mainly by post-soviet corruption mentality which they are rueing and repenting of almost too late..

I say this as someone who actually supports Ukraine. But I am not blind to their faults, either.

Don't take this the wrong way but as someone who has lived and worked in many of the countries you mentioned - you're full of s**t and your hyper-simplified version of history is as cute as it is cartoonish.

I mean you could replace the Stars and Stripes here with French Tricolour or Union Jack and I still think it works.
The point is more that the lukewarm response to the Crimean invasion emboldened Russia into attacking mainland Ukraine.

Ukrainians repeatedly asked to close the sky, which is de-facto a sort of direct help. Also talks about NATO troops being stationed on the West part. Still no balls.

Second paragraph - only after 2022. Ukraine was denied even buying Western equipment in 2014. Obama is an asshole.

Bruh Ukraine is no more corrupt than Romania/Hungary/Bulgaria. Even during the war civil society was able to defend anticorruption institutions.

The decision not to take Ukraine into EU/NATO is purely based on politics - specifically being afraid of russia.

How interesting! Can you tell me how one would theoretically build a cobalt bomb inside their garage...for educational purposes of course.

/j and in Minecraft

I don't want to get banned for trying to do warcrimes again.

this is a reference to the Battle of Conoco Fields.

Well they had the downside of the russian army being at their borders and a massive russian speaking minority ...

Maybe it's a filter of my English-speaking internet circles, but I've never seen memes like this about France or the UK. So you could replace the flags... The point is that it doesn't seem to happen.

True, the EU didn't exist when they first started to get comfortable with the US being the world cop. But get comfortable with it they did. Comfortable enough to cut military budgets and putting their reliance on the idea the that the US would intervene for them. Standing idly by during the formation of the Iron Curtin. It got so bad, that they proved incapable to get a handle on the Bosian War in their own back yard. It finally took the intervention of the US to give them enough spine to complete breaking up the ethnic cleansing. They had a generation to wind down the US world cop protection and did nothing.

It was never a good idea. And in the end, they have gotten what they should have known would have happened.

"Currently trying". Well, that only took several generations to pull their collective heads out of their asses. Imagine what that industrial/military complex is going to eventually cost EU citizens. Once you get on that particular horse, it's hard to get off.

You probably won't be able to get enough material for a true cobalt bomb.

What you could do, however, is build a Farnsworth fusor. That's very doable in a basement using...relatively easily acquired parts. As long as you keep the operating voltage under 30kV you won't need lead shielding, but you won't be getting many neutrons either. Get a couple plates of lead, get yourself a bunch of cobalt salts (ask someone that does glass art) and put them in the reactor chamber. Then crank that bitch up as high as your transformer will let you, and soon you'll have radioactive cobalt. Then you go to a gun store and buy a block of tannerite, US gun culture makes this a commonly available explosive, and tape the cobalt to it.

Now you have a salted dirty bomb.

If you're feeling really lucky, you could try modifying a time-of-flight mass spectrometer to integrate into your reactor chamber vacuum output, allowing you to collect reasonably pure tritium in tiny amounts. Get enough of that, add some deuterium, figure out a way to ignite it, and you have a thermonuclear device.

Edit: if you manage to pull off any of this, that will be impressive. Reach out to your local university, and collect an honorary degree in mechanical, electrical, or nuclear engineering.

Nuclear material decays and as it decays, will not detonate with the energy from the explosive material it was built with. It NEEDS to be replaced on an regular basis, depending on the type it is. It’s not a matter of a chance o-ring dry rotting or chance capacitor leaking or chance fuel going bad.

That's 1940s technology.

Putin’s a bully. There’s an implicate threat that Putin will use nukes if he doesn’t get what he wants, but he’ll never be happy with what he has. The best case scenario is he croaks on his own because he’s too damn paranoid to let someone near him assassinate him. He’s probably scared shitless from the recent drone attack on his palace.

Not sure why you included this because it's irrelevant and I agree, but I guess if you had to get a quick soapbox Red Herring out, it's not like I can stop you.

Russia has blackmail on “The West.” That’s why they’re complicate. Politicians are self serving shits. If they cared about unnecessary deaths, they would have handled Covid better.

More Red Herring soapboxing. Try to stay on topic with your next comment.

well maybe you can enlighten us all with some of your insights if you know so much about these things.

that's a lot more work than calling people names. you down?

this is also true. but they also lacked direction and a national sense of self.. right up until the last minute when Russia was about to swallow them and the jaws were closing.
If they had that sense 10 or 20 years earlier they'de be in a different situation. Russia's actions are Russian/Commie imperialism 101.. take an ethnically or politically divided state and
invade it. slowly. Maybe UKR will be better as a divided state. For some bizarre reason, the further south and east you go in EUR the more the Slavs in those regions love their mono-ethnic states, for some reason. Even to the degree of cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Something fundamentally warped about the Slavic mind.

there was a 20 year window where RU was to weak to threaten anybody with any thing. That would have been the time, if UKR had seen the opportunity like the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Romanians did. A costly mistake.

Lmao, why would you unironically tell me this xD

And not in DMs.

I'm no longer that misanthropic, would rather build Solarpunk.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/22540-05-ukraine-could-not-have-kept-nuclear

Therefore, the general permitted lifespan of our nuclear warheads is 12 years. When they remain in operation beyond the identified term of service, they become especially dangerous for the environment. Ukraine does not have specialized facilities, including the material and technological base, for the processing and production of nuclear warheads. Ukraine cannot create such conditions independently. In accordance with the non-proliferation of nuclear technology regime nobody has the right to provide Ukraine this kind of assistance.

There's more in there, but the gist is is that if Ukraine couldn't have maintained the nukes they had then the USSR fell, I don't think Russia could have either.

My point in calling out Putin as a bully is that if he actually has working nukes, he will use then whether or not we abide by his threats or not.

Because I value the gain and spread of knowledge above all else.

You will note that I didn't give you exact instructions, just pointed you in the right directions. None of this is easy, but it is doable. There are maybe a couple thousand Farnsworth fusors in personal operation across the world, for technology that has existed for 70 years.

Someone who just wants to cause harm can go buy a gun. The direction I just pointed you in leads to an illustrious career in genuinely useful engineering. Or failure, followed by doing something else.

Maybe you'll discover an interest. Maybe you'll go on to revolutionize fusion energy, which has been just ten years of R&D away since the 50s. Probably you'll have a laugh and move on.

Scaling is the big issue. If you do what I described, you're probably not even going to be a danger to yourself (apart from the high voltage), unless you are able to rapidly industrialize this. Of course, of you were capable of rapidly industrializing this, you wouldn't need me to point you in the right direction.

The US and other countries not protecting Ukraine sends a massive signal to everyone else that you can only depend on yourself for protection, and that means everyone needs to have WMDs. So take that how you will.

Like the US will go to war with Russia, it's become a vassel state as of late.

So the US should be the world police.

I'd rather build a working fusion reactor or similar, if I'm going for something crazy.

But more likely, I will want simple, Solarpunk tech.

I very much appreciate your thirst for knowledge, and I really love knowledge from multiple fields.

Right now, I'm mostly focused on experimental things, such as ISRIB (has liver toxicity).

And theoretical ways to boost my operating memory.

Farnsworth fusor is what demonstrated the viability of nuclear fusion, and understanding it is step one in making a functional fusion reactor.

Wiped the floor with them too. ZERO casualties vs 100-200 deaths - brutal.

This is pretty much the dilemma the US government faces, right? On the one hand, the public doesn't like intervention. On the other, they can totally do it, and in many cases it will save a lot of lives, or at least seems like it will.

The new MAGA school is basically to disregard the humanity of anyone who's not a ^(white)^ American citizen, which solves it neatly. At great cost in terms of basic morality, of course. The other one was neoconservativism, where you're openly the world police. Theoretically, unilaterally disarming is also an option, but almost nobody is talking about that.

The Democrats, and blue Americans in general, have yet to pick a lane.

Immediately after it happened trump withdraw US soldiers from Syria. I guess Vlad got really upset.

We're not supposed to. But in the instance of Ukraine, we signed a treaty with Ukraine, Russia and ourselves that if Ukraine dismantled their nuclear weapons that the US would defend Ukraine if Russia invaded. And Russia would defend Ukraine if US invaded.

but i guess international law is nonexistant and nobody gives a damn if a country makes a promise

I'm too poor and busy, otherwise, the whole world would not be the place it is...

This was already address in another thread. Short summary...

It's not a treaty, but a memorandum, it really only "mandates" that we will support them in the UN security council, it's not enforceable, and Russia already shit all over it.

My point in calling out Putin as a bully is that if he actually has working nukes, he will use then whether or not we abide by his threats or not.

You seem to be arguing against a position you imagine I hold rather than what I've explained.

Every comment so far has been me trying to re-assert that position and you more or less ignoring it to put your straw man icing on the rest of your comment, like this here.

It's like debating if a house is on fire where one half of the debate thinks the other half is only talking about house fires because they think aliens are real, so they spend half their time disproving aliens.

You assert that Putin will use Nukes if the west helps Ukraine too much. I assert that Putin would use Nukes regardless if he had them.

Okay yeah that's where we differ, and I don't think we'll be able to convince each other of our respective positions.

The weird part is when you deviate to try to prove to me (and other readers) that Putin is a bully.

Putin is very obviously a bully and worse, so it doesn't make sense to tell me that.

Your generalizations and reductionism is so over the top and absurd, I wouldn't even know where to begin or what the point would be. It's not hard to tell that you're just regurgitating bits and pieces and are not actually familiar with the history (not to mention the historiography) of that part of the world. The tale of Ukraine (and the former Soviet bloc more generally) after 1990 is not a simple one to tell, contrary to what you think and wrote here.

I'm not here to educate you - you need to learn to do that yourself. All I am saying is that you're wrong and need to research the issue much further in order to gain a good understanding of the topic you're trying to engage in.

Am I wrong in my assessment? Well, there's only one reasonable way to find out. Good luck!

The palestinians also did not have a national sense of self untill they were occupied for the better half of a century ...
The german national identity needed Napoleon to really take of (and many more work Like that )

And 'mono ethnic states' was bog standart for emerging nationalnstates - it just took some.places longer to create a national state and the according nationalism - hardly anything specific about 'the slavic mind'

Ukrainians decided to stay in the Soviet Union. That's rejected and thrown out and the nation dissolved by one drunken imbecile.
Ukrainians decided to leave the Russian Federation. That's fine, it seems.
Ukrainians choose a government that doesn't choose Europe. They're overthrown in a U.S. backed fascist coup.
Eastern Ukrainians democratically choose to secede. That's rejected by the West and the coup government.
What's left of Ukraine chooses a peace candidate. He has no control and the Nazi's just keep fighting.
Now Ukrainians can't vote at all.

Ukrainians faults are in our stars and stripes. America did this. America always does it.

This is why y'all hate Putin. Russia is no longer weak.

They have more natural resources than any other nation in the world, especially per capita. That's all you need to know about the West's aggression toward them.

What about "Palestinians" "occupied" "under the Turks" for 1200 years during the Ottoman Empire. The Era that immediately pre-dates the 20th century. No national consciousness to speak of for centuries when ruled by non-arab Turks who still consider Arabs to be lesser than Turks. Add a few non-muslim European-ish Jews to the land and suddenly Palis have a national consciousness where they never had one before? It seems to be forgotten that BOTH sides- Israeli AND Palestinians walked away from the UN plan in 1948. I guess they wanted to settle it themselves, out in the streets. Well, now after 80 years we see who is winning. It's not fair to cry foul now. Both sides gave up that option back in 1948.

Strong is relative. We'll see how strong Russia is after they are defeated by Ukraine.

It's relative to what I was talking about, natural resources, not GDP. And I even said it was more so per capital, BECAUSE it's not as populous.

Not only is Ukraine not winning, it's not such a flex when backed by the world's richest governments.

Ukraine is no different than Israel in this matter, another fascist ethnostate proxy for Western imperialism.

Ukrainians can't even vote. The men can't even leave to escape this Nazi death cult.

Fuck "Ukraine".

So you're saying in soviet union a single person could force the entirety of its people against their will? Were you ever outside of america?