Hiphophopper wrote:
I'm not directly referring to the pipeline issue, more to the conflict as a whole. Media coverage is in no way neutral so cannot be considered totally reliable. We currently have a Ukrainian refugee and her son living with the couple next door to us and over the look at few months they've almost become part of the family...but they has also told me a lot about the darker side of Ukraine.
Don't get me wrong Putin is a nut job and needs to be defeated ASAP, but please don't for one minute think that Ukraine is a perfect place, full of nice euro type people...it really isn't.
Or that we in 'the west' are completely blameless. NATO has been using Ukraine as a base for 'excersises' which is nothing short of poking that big russian bear with a stick.
I don't have any such illusions. Pretty much everyone describes Ukraine as a fledgling, flawed democracy, rife with corruption. And people are people, there will be good and awful people everywhere which is why you need institutions and institutional norms to controls things. I think it's fair to say Ukraine is miles of head of Russian in those regards, Russia in fact seems to hardly care about such things.
As for the last point, Russia can fuck off, they don't get to tell other nations how to conduct their affairs. NATO hasn't imposed itself on any country, the expansion of NATO has occurred because of countries requesting entry, mostly for protection from Russia (e.g. Finland, Sweden, and now most recently Ukraine).
The US would be just as unjust in invading Mexico or Cuba if those countries were sidling up to Russia or China and allowing them to conduct military operations there.
As far as media bias goes, yes it's obviously there, so use those critical thinking skills people should have learned in school. The media most people consume is just sound bites with no depth anyway, but the depth is there for anyone who cares to look for it.