President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that Ukraine’s partners “are afraid of Russia losing the war” and would like Kyiv “to win in such a way that Russia does not lose,” Zelensky said in a meeting with journalists attended by the Kyiv Independent.

Kyiv’s allies “fear” Russia’s loss in the war against Ukraine because it would involve “unpredictable geopolitics,” according to Zelensky. “I don’t think it works that way. For Ukraine to win, we need to be given everything with which one can win,” he said.

His statement came on May 16 amid Russia’s large-scale offensive in Kharkiv Oblast and ongoing heavy battles further east. In a week, Russian troops managed to advance as far as 10 kilometers in the northern part of Kharkiv Oblast, according to Zelensky.

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    • DeadPand@midwest.social
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      6 months ago

      More like money people don’t want their money fucked with anymore than it has been by this war

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      So much of the current internal domestic Russian zeitgeist is the idea of national strength compared to other nations. Pride comes with their strongman. If they are finally faced with the truth that neither Russia or its strongman are strong, it could lead to Russia/Russians trying to assert it in other ways to try to rationalize it. Or Russia could simply collapse from within orphaning hundreds of nuclear warheads leading to opportunists selling warheads to the highest bidders. The only thing worse than Russia having nuclear weapons is every two-bit terrorist or backwater dictator getting their hands on them.

      Keep in mind none of this in my mind means we stop supporting Ukraine economically and militarily. Russia made its bed. We can’t choose our actions based upon trying to save Russia from itself.

      • Beetlejuice001@lemmy.wtf
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        6 months ago

        I once mentioned how Billionaires will eventually get Nuclear Weapons and was ridiculed. Turns out it’ll happen sooner than I thought. Truly a carrot and stick situation.

    • breakfastmtn@lemmy.caOP
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      6 months ago

      I think that’s one of the meanings. If a Russian loss led to the sudden collapse of the Russian state or a radical retraction of the Russian economy, who knows what the consequences would be?

      I don’t think that’s a justification for not letting Russia lose, but it is a big bag of who-the-fuck-knows.

      • BigFig@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Imo it’s the find out part of Russians fucking around. Don’t give a fuck what repercussions or hardships they face next, THEY started this shit

        • breakfastmtn@lemmy.caOP
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          6 months ago

          The concern isn’t about the consequences faced by Russia, but the impact on the rest of the world. Like, if Russia were to collapse, I think most would agree that Egyptians don’t deserve to find out what suddenly not having $1.7 billion in wheat would mean, right? I don’t think anyone has any idea what that would mean for, say, Tajikistan and other post-Soviet states with economies closely tied to Russia. Collapse would be chaos and it wouldn’t stay confined within Russia’s borders.

          And, again, I don’t think that justifies preventing Russia from losing. There are worse concerns for Russia winning. And the idea that Russia neither winning nor losing could be a sustainable final state is probably a fantasy.

    • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      While we really don’t want a state with thousands of nukes to splinter, I doubt that any policy writers in DC feel that way, given the eulogies they gave to Navalny, a guy who had politics somewhere around Mussolini’s and made Putin look like a dove.

      But also the fact that we have like 8000 tanks in the desert that we’re not sending tells me that they’d rather fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood than actually break Russia so who knows.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        6 months ago

        While we really don’t want a state with thousands of nukes to splinter

        People said that would happen after the fall of the USSR too. Turns out treaties and agreements can do a lot to stop things like that quickly.

        On the other hand, such an agreement is what Russia is violating right now.

        • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          Yeah, circumstances are very different now. Back then the Russian bourgeoisie thought they’d get to join the club. Now they have very little incentive to abide such deals.

          Also there’s way more right-wing psychos.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Russia didn’t splinter with the fall of the USSR. People who had control of the nukes retained their control. And Ukraine was forced to move theirs to Russia.

        • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          i remember several nerds mentioning how theyd see nuclear weapons on the black market around the fall of USSR and notified the feds. apparently it was a pretty major undertaking.

        • freebee@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          I think this hard divider in history is a false narrative. In a sense, the current war, is a continuation of the USSR falling apart, and exactly 1 of those quickly made treaties is to blame: the one that de-nuked ukraine in return for safety guarantees.

        • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny#Political_positions

          Navalny co-founded the National Russian Liberation Movement, known as NAROD (The People), which sets immigration policy as a priority.[437] The movement allied itself with two nationalist groups, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and Great Russia

          Those groups are both pretty big on fashy iconography

          In the same year, he released several anti-immigration videos,[439][440][441][442] including one where he advocated the deportation of migrants.[443] In one of the videos, in which he advocates for gun rights, he compares Muslims from the Caucasus to removedroaches and mimics shooting one who attempts to “attack” him.

          His views on foreign policy evolved over time.[448] He had initially supported the Russo-Georgian War in 2008,[456] having asked the Russian army to strike the Georgian General Staff, calling Georgians “rodents”[457] and requesting that all Georgian citizens be expelled from the Russian Federation.[458] He later apologized for insulting the Georgians, while stating that his principled position remained unchanged.

            • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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              6 months ago

              IKR. The way such easily accessible information was entirely ignored in western media insane.

              People look at me like I’m crazy when I say portraying the guy as Putin’s biggest rival is sillier than if Russian papers started claiming Pete Buttigeig was Trump’s biggest rival, since at least Mayo Pete didn’t come in 4th in a mayoral race.

              • Maeve@kbin.social
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                6 months ago

                Yeah. I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t even think of Wikipedia. I just figured anything relevant would be not there or held in “talk.”

    • 8ender@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I was thinking the collapse of the state, and China picking up some of what’s left.

    • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I don’t think so, not necessarily. It means that the existence of russia stops some countries from doing some things, if you remove russia, those countries will not be counterbalanced anymore

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      Probably a broader umbrella of bad stuff. If Putin goes, there’s no real successors, so it’s kind of anyone’s game to be the next dictator, and chaos potential is very high. This is actually by design, as a form of coup-proofing.

      It might not be MAD, and in fact probably won’t be directly, but massive proliferation? Sure, lots of people would trade a lot of guns for a nuke. One of the splinter states invading NATO directly? Could also happen. Russian oil and gas going off the market really fast, and putting Europe in a tough spot? Almost certain, at least to some degree. And then at the end of it, who knows what the map of Eurasia looks like.

      When they say unpredictable, they mean unpredictable, and they have great reason to be wary of unpredictability.