What if these risks were weighed incorrectly?
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PS I watch The Press Project regularly, too bad their views on feminism have failed to make an equal impression 
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Whoâs the judge of whether they were? The objective truth is that wars arenât waged due to oneâs ego or on a whim. If a war was waged then there has got to be a very good reason for that. Assuming otherwise is going on a slippery slope of âeveryone are dumb but meâ.
If it came to a war then the most thinking has already been done. If so, all the possible insight, as well as the insight from the inside, has been considered. You wonât in your lifetime get to operate with all the information that the people making that decision had.
Through that we can only assume and hope they were weighed correctly, but we canât prove, disprove or in any way judge whether they actually were. Unless you have access to the exact same or a wider informational network.
if you open history book, I think you will find some counter examples
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Yes, from me.
I like empathy and viewing things from different perspectives.
I also like facts.
Of course you are not. 
Alas, that is not the topic though. In this topic they did a fantastic job and went above and beyond to provide sources for every single thing in their video. Thatâs impressive, considering that if I open the TV now, Iâll see some âreporterâ in a studio full of cgi tanks and cgi snipers 
Good question. This whole situation means that someone misjudged the whole thing and we ended up having a war in our neighbourhood. Unfortunately the answer to that is that each side with write its own history on who made âthe errorâ.
The real victims are the people on site. I do not think that anyone that found out that their home became rubble and they will probably have to become a migrant cares what the history books will write on who âmiscalculatedâ ⊠
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You will. And you will find counter examples to those examples as well.
That is ignoring the uncertainty of history. It has been manipulated numerous times, and in fact the current events have the most likelihood of entering the history books as âa crazy tyrant has been on a war rampage until the benevolent west has saved the regionâ, etc. Who knows which perspective the books were written and re written from.
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So the fact that Putin decided to invade Ukraine implies that he made that decision carefully, so it must have been the optimal decision, and we should just be thankful that he didnât choose to cause even more death and destruction than he already did and get on with our lives?
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This is Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt:
For the Egyptians he was a hero a great leader and general and there is still a status of him in Cairo.
For the Greeks he was a butcher that almost quelled the 1821 Greek revolution and almost single-handedly changed the course of history of the modern world (The Greek were the first to re-gain freedom from the Ottomans in the Balkans, sparking a domino effect to the other people living there to eventually uprise as well and the European powers supporting them instead of quelling them). Needless to say there is no statue of Ibrahim in Greece. 
Both sides will write their own stories, for the same people. It is all a matter of perspective.
I never said anything of that sort. My initial point was that the entire situation is always misrepresented and the real reasoning is swept under the rug. To the point of even you maintaining that fallacious viewpoint in assuming that heâs the villain. What about a turn of event when the NATO successfully establishes itself and all of its missile launchers and military bases 100km away from the russian borders, and then someone unreliable is chosen in the government on the west and they simply pull the trigger, wiping out all of west russia, and effectively 95% of all its population? What if the weighed decision Iâm talking about is precisely for preventing that from happening, in response to the verbal propositions of doing so being ignored for years?
That would be an interesting what-if for someone whoâs convinced in the âvillainyâ that the worldâs media is pushing.
I know. However the more distant the events are the more they lean to there being only one side. So itâs uncertain which one is taken as the âcanonâ.
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Itâs not omitted. Itâs just that :
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Before the invasion it wasnât context to anything, it was just âa local civil war in east Ukraineâ. It was still talked about, and there was the occasional claim that Russia is covertly helping the pro-Russia movement there, while the other side accused the US of being behind Maidan etc. Still, it wasnât primetime news in the West, just a local civil war, and if you donât care much about foreign affairs you might not hear about it at all.
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Now youâre right that it became essential context, and you will find it in any analysis commenting on the origin of the war, even in mainstream western medias, itâs not hidden. But now thereâs a whole invasion going on, and of course thatâs the front page news. Medias focus on what is happening right now, itâs normal. Thereâs tons of deeper papers you can look into if you want more in-depth analysis (which will rightly mention Maidan and the Donbas) but thatâs not the purpose of the brief news articles.
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Iâm not going to pick sides and stuff, but for anyone tired and depleted by the news headlines and in need of some light-hearted gossip to take their mind off things
(unfathomably) rich people and their problems, amirite
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peak 2022 here we come:
What a time to be alive
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The reasons of the events that sparked that âjust a civil warâ were exactly the same as they are now. The context has not changed and it actually only progressed to become worse than it were. And not thanks to the âcurrent villainâ I might add.
The honest title to that âcivil warâ would be âAs a response to breaking the promise made in 1990 to not expand NATO eastward of Germany by Czech, Hungary, Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia in 2004, Albania in 2009, and the preparations to which has begun in Ukraine in 2010, as well as NATO breaking the indivisibility of security pact signed in 2008 with Russia (page 5), Putin has launched a counter measure by annexing Crimea, which has sparked a civil warâ. Suffice it to say the current title wouldâve been exactly the same except for the last 2 clauses. When we get this close and intimate it becomes uncertain whoâs the actual âvillainâ here.
To me it sounds like a very much âforeign affairâ type thing. And very much like a worthy news. The only âbutâ is that it presents the western bloc as doing something bad, which is apparently unacceptable.
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Whatever, in my opinion killing people in a war is never justified, except in two cases:
- The enemy has killed many people in your country
- The enemy has invaded your country.
With these criteria, I donât see any justification for Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine.
Putin is not the only villain in the world of course. The Iraq war was equally unjustified.
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Frankly I find this a very partial take, but whatever I donât even want to debate it here.
More importantly, itâs besides the point we were discussing.
You were surprised that western media âomittedâ the situation in Donbas. My point is just that (i) it wasnât omitted, but (ii) itâs not surprising at all that a local internal conflict in Ukraine wasnât primetime news elsewhere before it erupted into a full-blown war. Thereâs plenty of ongoing conflicts around the world that arenât primetime news either; foreign affairs in general is not the most mediatic topic (unless you look for it or in specialized media).
Thatâs it, I wasnât even debating who was âthe villainâ.
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Very true which should have us very worried that once something âbecame newsâ, our societies âgot outragedâ, but before it got dangled in front of us as newsworthy, we didnât really care even though people were still dying.
It begs the questions:
a) Could the news have opted out for making even an invasion newsworthy?
b) Has that happened before in other wars âfar awayâ ?
c) If someone has the power to make you act and react, how many of your decisions are really your own?
Concerning c, in particular, how scared were people of covid even 1 month ago and now it is ânot news-worthyâ?
Are we humans or just âsapient tumbleweedsâ, going wherever the wind blows? 
I do not have children so I shouldnât care, but some of you should really start getting worried about what kind of world you are going to pass down to the next generations.
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Media here has continued reporting about the civil war, actually â but very little, probably because of the little relevance it had seemed to have for the rest of Europe.
Oh, they have been from time to time in the past; now itâs just something that people are aware of anyway. I was even surprised when I recently learned that thereâs a not too small number of people in the Donetsk and Luhansk region that do not share that opinion.
Just as a sidenote: Of course you will rather meet Ukrainians who are supportive of Russia than those who arenât â because why would the latter like to go to Russia? And then also share this unpopular opinion with Russians? That would be truely weird.
Not really. In the first days of the war, I saw several very ambivalent portraits of Zelenskiy. They were all surprised that he is doing so well now. I mean, Putin obviously also expected him to just run away, and I think Western politicians and media also did.
Even Putin must have realized by now that this was probably the worst mistake of his life.
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I understand that thereâs a selective bias but also your sentiment is incorrect. Almost nobody has a negative view on russians in ukraine outside of some mad ultra nationalists. And not that many people in russia have negative opinions on ukranians either. The nations themselves have little to no mutual hostility. Which is why there are a ton of people from both sides residing, temp working or even permanently living in the otherâs country.
This entire political situation has nothing to do with the nations. It concerns only the governments from both sides and the victims from both sides.
As to why we visit each others countries is because itâs where the money is at. Entrepreneurs host their business in ukraine because of lower taxes and costs of logistics, rent, etc, and individuals from ukraine come to work in russia because the relative income is higher so they can send a ton of money back home.
Who I encounter here are just regular people, not the supporters of the russian government.
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I think Flemish, Dutch and German people in general also donât have a negative view of each other. But when one of them invades the other (like the Dutch did in Belgium in 1830 and the Germans did in Belgium in WWI & WWII and in the Netherlands in WWII), it may take a few generations before it fades into the background.
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