Ukraine Thread

**Seamus Fermanagh** · 01-29-2015, 19:35

Lots of negotiation and paperwork and publicly recorded votes on both sides favoring approval.

The Russian claim that this was an annexation only flies if the Russians are asserting that East Germany was never a real state of its own in the first place and that their legislature, therefore, had no authority to enact such a treaty. While arguably correct on one level there are too many public assertions regarding the "independence" of Warsaw Pact nations by the Soviets to make this argument readily acceptable.

Writ large, the Russian claim is based on Hungary and Czechoslovakia having been Soviet responses to "internal" dissent -- they had a right to squash them because they were REALLY just provinces -- and that the "province" of East Germany really still belongs to Russia as the inheritor of the Soviet Union.

In short, this is just political theater.

**Gilrandir** · 01-30-2015, 10:11

Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh

Writ large, the Russian claim is based on Hungary and Czechoslovakia having been Soviet responses to "internal" dissent -- they had a right to squash them because they were REALLY just provinces -- and that the "province" of East Germany really still belongs to Russia as the inheritor of the Soviet Union.

Yet Hungary and Czechoslovakia were never officially accepted as members of the USSR, while DDR was made into a part of another country.

Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh

In short, this is just political theater.

... aimed to justify what Russia did with the Crimea using the kettle-pot approach.

**Gilrandir** · 01-30-2015, 10:25

Perhaps, some will call it propaganda, yet the reason why I'm posting this one is to let people from outside Ukraine see one of the important factors keeping the Ukrainian army afloat.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/28/ukrai...eers-soldiers/
On Russian soldiers in Ukraine:
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/19/r...InQwA.facebook