Ukraine Issues (SSR)

To even start to be able to say what I am going to say, I feel the need to clarify that I could not read much more than two paragraphs of this article without finding something that I could not stomach. First, I don’t understand at all how you can consider a near full scale attack on another country a ‘moment of testing’ for anyone. This ‘brazen assault’ on their territory was not just some Russian soldiers marching into unoccupied land. What about all of those people that have been hurt and misplaced by this? For a country that is supposedly the crusader for the underdogs I don’t think we’re doing very much to help Ukraine—the underdog.

Another issue I have with this is the statement that ‘nations have the right to determine their own future.’ If you don’t recall, the United States has quite recently burst into the Middle East to swoop in to determine their future for them. I guess we had reasons to do that grounded back at home, but this whole thing with Ukraine to me feels pretty similar to the Taliban entering Afghanistan. If you want to go even farther back take a look at Vietnam and Korea. The U.S. literally had nothing to do with the conflict in Vietnam other than the fact that we were crusading against communists. Even the American public wasn’t fond of the idea. Don’t get me wrong I have in no way any disrespect towards soldiers of Vietnam, just misgivings and some confusion about the reasons behind us being there. In my opinion if we were willing to step in for those reasons we should be willing to step in for reasons in Ukraine.

As to the portion of the article where we feel that Ukraine needs more than words now and NATO should step in…. Well, that’s a grand idea. Here’s my only question: Why haven’t they done it yet? Why did NATO not step in when this all first started? If Ukraine needs more than words, why aren’t we giving them something more than words? I guess this is what I’m really boiling down to: why haven’t we stepped in yet, and why are we all just pointing fingers at who should be stepping in? The ‘melting pot’ that ‘fights for the underdog’ is leaving the underdog out to dry. I really don’t think it should have taken this long for someone to point out that these people need some back-up. Now that we have there’s a chance nothing with happen. This whole thing feels a lot like Syria. We know what’s going on, but we’re not willing to step in and help because ‘it’s not our territory, it’s not our place.’ If that’s the case, what is our territory? When is it our place to step in?