A World Without Ukraine

Here’s a question I received in the comments:

If Biden will massively increase US aid to Ukraine, couldn’t Russia massively increase its own spending on the war as well, possibly even up to the point of it spending 25+% of its total GDP on this war? That’s what Russia previously did during WWI before it descended into revolution.

There’s another question as to whether I think Russia might deliver a nuclear strike against Ukraine.

These are good questions, and I want to answer them seriously, as they deserve, because I don’t think people are thinking this through.

Yes, both these things are possible but please look at this from the other side. Imagine you are a 30-million nation that’s about to be genocided. Imagine that your infants are about to be gang-raped in front of you. This already happened in the occupied territories, so we know it’s coming. Imagine your entire cultural legacy, your cities, your people are about to be destroyed. And you are a high-IQ people with extraordinary courage and decisiveness.

What would you do?

Would you let yourself be genocided quietly? Or would you take the enemy and the indifferent bystanders who let you get slaughtered with you?

You think only Russia has nuclear? Are you aware that there are many nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Russia? What do you think will happen if they blow up? If you don’t mind a world without Ukraine, don’t you think Ukrainians, placed at the brink of extinction, would be fine with a world without Europe?

Let me tell you, this decision has already been made. Not by any government but by the people who refuse to go quietly into the sunset.

Why do you think Denmark is sending its entire artillery to Ukraine? Because they want to survive. It makes sense to be scared of nuclear. But all of it, not just a small part you’ve selectively chosen to fear.

I was asked to respond to a post by a pro-Russian fellow in France. I might do that later today but for now I want people to sit for a little bit with this thought. If Ukraine loses this war, Monsieur Lemoine is gone, too. Dude is not seriously considering how much he wants to survive and what needs to be done to guarantee that survival. He’s a spoiled Western brat with a completely neoliberalized brain. I’ve known him for a while, and there was never a chance he’d abandon fantasy and join us in reality. His entire way of thinking is based on the idea that people are interchangeable widgets. It’s all “I don’t believe this is rational, so everybody else must think the exact same way.” France, you know? You’d think they should know better by this time but nothing is managing to teach them that cultural differences exist.