Jack Albrecht
3 min readApr 19, 2022

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Your continued use of qualifiers makes discussion tedious. “comparitively” defensive, sliding scales, “wasn’t particularly fascist.”

A fortress is completely defensive if it is well inside your borders. That was NATO’s purpose. Expanding NATO to the borders of Russia is by defenition offensive. There is no believable argument to this.

Let’s make the easy analogy: You live decades next to your neighbor. Then your neighbot joins a miliatry group that was formed to oppose your family who has lived in your house for generation. Then you neighbor builds towers with trebuchets on the lot line to your house. If you tell me that you would not find the activities of your neighbors aggressive and provocative then you’re either lying or a moron. Noone with human experience more than a two-year-old (and probably even a two-year-old) would believe that is not aggressive and provocative. That is NATO since the mid-90s.

After the 2014 Ukrainian coup (and it was by definition a coup, as the elected president fled the country and the new president was elected by non-democratic means), openly fasicst elements in Ukraine were integrated into the government, including three key cabinet posts — including national defense!!!! — and three provincial governors. Actual Nazis (not Neo-Nazis, but groups that fought with the Nazis in WWII and have existed in Ukraine since then) were integrated into the official military. Not broken up. Not banned. Accepted and integrated as part of the official government and military. That is pretty fucking fascist. In Germany and Austria, the heart of 20th century Naziism, the actual Nazis never held even close to a majority of political or military power. The difference is that Nazis are very willing to use massive violence as a negotiation tool.

In 1991 when the USSR broke up, the Donbas tried to leave Ukraine. Their referendum was overturned by (as far as I understand Ukrainian constitutional law at that time) unconstitutional means.

The situation has been complicated since even before 1991.

There are no “good guys” here except for the non-combatant average citizens of Ukraine, including the Donbas. NATO — and particularly the US, Russia (particularly Putin), Ukraine (particularly Zelensky), all of them are using Ukraine and Ukrainians for geopolitical and economic gain.

I don’t care whether you agree with me or not. I’m just calling bullshit on what I see as clear bullshit. NATO should have been disbanded after its stated reason for existence, the USSR, broke up in 1991. Instead, it has been used as a boondoggle for (mostly) US weapons manufacturers and financiers (who control the IMF).

This does not condone or excuse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But this war didn’t start in Feb. 2022. The 14,000–15,000 Ukrainians who died only between 2014 and 2022 also matter.

Your claim to “know” that Russia wants to take over Ukraine is also bullshit. Only the top Russians “know” that. We will only know after the fact if ever what their actual goals were. We do know that NATO destroyed Libya after promising not to do more than a no-fly-zone (and getting Russia and China to agree to the NFZ based on that promise). None of us “knew” that NATO (particulary the US, France and UK) would destroy the country ahead of time, just as we — and you — don’t know what Russia is going to do if it conquers Ukraine.

I could go on for hours, but I see no point. I’m done. Bye now.

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Jack Albrecht

US expatriate living in the EU; seeing the world from both sides of the Atlantic.