NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
So far the United States has said no, but Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.
The problem with this, is that NATO is a defensive treaty, that requires countries to ask to join.
So this characterization of Russian foreign policy is, if true, just stupid. So fucking STUPID.
Quick edit to add: I’m not necessarily calling your assessment of Russian foreign policy stupid. I’m calling this foreign policy justification stupid.
No, the assessment is stupid as well. It’s just parroting propaganda, while ignoring the mountains of information (in some cases literally officially published by the Kremlin, like Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) that Russian leadership doesn’t even consider Ukraine to be a real country and very much does want to annex it because it is “Russian”.
And they have annexed part of it already. That’s the stupidest part of that person’s comment. You can’t say Russia doesn’t want to annex Ukraine when they’ve already done so for territory they control.