this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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If it was simple mob extortion it would be reasonable. Zelensky originally agreed when he thought the deal would be to pay for American protection.
But Trump wants the money AND wants Ukraine to surrender. Trump is a stupid mob boss who doesn't understand why "Pay me and I'll let the rival gang burn your business." isn't going to be accepted.
To me, we are back to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, except this time it's Ukraine instead of Poland and the US replace Nazi Germany...
In my humble opinion, this is nothing like the Molotov-Ribbentrop. Molotov-Ribbentrop gets a lot of bad advertising due to cold war propaganda, but even western leaders in the west at the time like Churchill admitted that the Soviets had no other option (if you want evidence I have plenty of reference, feel free to ask :)
The Soviets spent the entire 30s warning of fascism and trying to build mutual defense agreements with France, England and Poland and they refused systematically, even when in 1939 the Soviets offered to send 1 million troops together with artillery, tanks and planes, to the Polish and French borders on exchange for a mutual defense agreement, but the French and English ambassadors received orders not to engage in actual negotiations and just to postpone the agreement, since they wanted the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.
Either way even if you fundamentally disagree with what I'm saying, what was the alternative? Poland was going to get steamrolled by the Nazis with or without the soviets controlling the eastern part of it (as proven by the fact that soviets started invading some weeks after the Nazis). What's more desirable, half of Poland having concentration camps, or the entirety of Poland having concentration camps?
All of this could have been prevented in my opinion if western countries agreed to engage the Nazis together with the Soviet union, as the soviets suggested as an alternative to the Munich agreements. So the lesson in my view is: to fight fascism, listen to socialists (who are the ones who actually defeated most Nazis in the eastern front)
I'd dispute that based on the fact that they declared war on Germany immediately when Hitler invaded Poland, dispite the fact that he was closing the buffer to the USSR. The capitalists' real hope was that Hitler would be more of a bulwark, a guard dog who would be content suppressing communists within Germany's own borders and being militarized and prepared in case the USSR tried to expand. Hitler was granted a lot of leeway in that hope, and it's possible he misread that as either weakness or wanting him to attack the Soviets. But and the end of the day, if he wanted to fight the USSR, and Britain and France wanted him to fight the USSR, then he would've wound up fighting the USSR with little conflict with the other Allies, possibly even with their support. There's a grain of truth to what you're saying but imo it's exaggerated and doesn't fit with the facts/timeline.
They already had a mutual defense agreement with Poland, that's why they intervened at that point. Additionally, they didn't want Nazis to get too big because they were competing for resources and markets, as are all capitalist nations.
I find it very easy to believe that the very nations that invaded the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war and supported the tsarists with no other reason than to attempt to destroy communism, would be happy to see Germany destroy the Soviet Union which, as a nation which had only began to industrialise in the late 1920s (compared to the extra century that Germany and England had had to industrialise), was very weak in military industrial capabilities.
In any case I understand that that's just my opinion based on historical precedents, and there may be more nuance. However, I seem to share the same point of view of many western allies from the period:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)
“We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
Britain and France also had an alliance with Czechoslovakia, which they sacrificed. I'm very confused about where exactly Germany was supposed to invade from without a shared border, and the fact that Britain and France had an alliance with Poland in the first place contradicts the idea that they wanted Germany to invade the USSR.
Of course there was no love between them and the USSR and the capitalists were persuing material interests and all, but there was also a widespread hope/belief that WWI was "the war to end all wars." "Peace in Europe" was a major political selling point.
I read all of your quotes and none of them seem to support your narrative over mine. My only point of disagreement with you is whether Britain and France wanted Germany to invade the Soviet Union, not about the Soviet assessment of the situation. It's not even that big of a disagreement, I agree that they wanted to use Hitler but it's clear they wanted to keep him on a leash and have him serve as a first line of defense, not offense. It shouldn't be that hard to believe that the powers that be wanted to preserve the status quo and their position in it rather than throwing everything into chaos.
You make the point yourself that they didn't want "The Nazis to get too big" but if they invaded the Soviets and emerged victorious, they'd be much bigger and pose a major threat to the other Allies (of course, there was also the possibility the USSR won, which would also pose a threat).
This is basically the thing I'm arguing. The Soviet Union was never an expansionist project in the military sense (they wanted to spread the revolution abroad, such as by assisting the Republicans in Spain and giving weapons to the Vietnamese in their anti-imperialist struggle), never projecting their military force outwards except because of serious provoking by third party foreign actors (such as in the case of the funding and arming in Afghanistan of radical theocratic militias by the US).
The fact that all of these western leaders talk of the USSR using the Molotov-Ribbentrop as an "odious but necessary defensive measure", proves to me that they understood that the USSR wasn't something they needed to be militarily defended of by a weaponized Germany acting as a buffer, hence that can't be understood as Germany's role in the situation in my opinion.
I don't think this distinction mattered to the capitalists. Whether we're talking about military expansion or about supporting a socialist revolution in Germany, the capitalists didn't want it to happen and Hitler could serve as bulwark against both. Had he kept to his own borders, Britain and France would've been perfectly satisfied with that result. Instead, because he invaded Poland, a country he, again, would have had to go through to reach the USSR, they declared war. I really want to emphasize and repeat this point: If Britain and France wanted Hitler to invade the USSR, what physical route was he supposed to take?
But, as you mentioned, the Soviets had supported the Republicans in Spain - even if they were too vulnerable to launch a military invasion of Germany, there was a possibility of them supporting a revolution in Germany, and Germany of course was politically unstable. The capitalists already had their "win" of the German communists being defeated and the class conflict appearing to stabilize, that's plenty of villainous motivation on its own.
It seems completely implausible to me that they wanted Hitler to invade but then when he started moving his borders closer to making that possible, they suddenly flipped out and did a 180 and declared war instead.
Fait point. Let's put it that way: Trump is trying to share Ukraine's resources with Russia the way laymen understand Nazi Germany and USSR agreed to devide Poland's territory in 1939.
Not to defend the flawed comparison with Trump's treason, but that's a very useless take on the M-R pact...
Stalin could have
I think all of these alternatives would have been more desirable than, well, actively teaming up with the nazis
edit: list layout
Again, please tell me what was the alternative to Soviet occupation in Eastern Poland, once Poland rejected a mutual defense agreement against Nazis with the Soviets.
I don't think those numbers are honest, can you provide a source for that? I know about the Katyn massacre and about other events in which Nazi collaborators/Bourgeois Polish nationalists were killed (as well as some innocent civilians), but AFAIK the numbers don't go that high
Again, how is tens of thousands of deaths in occupied Poland (many of which were Nazi collaborators and bourgeois Polish nationalists) preferable to Nazi occupation? Or can you think of an alternative to either of these two options?
There were several alternatives, actually. But most of them would start with Russia not attacking them in the rear after they moved their troops west to fight off the nazis
Yeah sure, here's one that estimates between 250k and 1.5m (but which I believe also includes post-war)
But I presume that if you're the type that already convinced themselves that all these murdered Poles "must have deserved it" in one way or another, then that number probably couldn't be high enough anyway
Great, please name one of them that doesn't imply complete occupation of Poland by Nazis, I've asked you already several times to do so and you keep avoiding it. To me, a great alternative would have been the mutual defense agreement that the Soviet Union spent the entire 30s pursuing with England, France and Poland, which the latter countries repeatedly rejected. What's your alternative?
That's a book on migrations and deportations, not a book on casualties, it doesn't seem to support a claim of "hundreds of thousands murdered" which you made in your previous comment, could you please elaborate?
Again, you're conflating murdered with deported.
I explicitly mentioned in my previous comment that there were innocents caught in this process of class war and collectivisation of the economy in times of war, which I deeply lament. I just can't envision an alternative reality where, after a decade of denying mutual defense agreements with the Soviets, there was a better alternative to Soviet occupation as opposed to Nazi occupation.
It most certainly includes direct casualty numbers as well, for Poland and many other conflicts.
Well, I think that's the main issue here. Siding with the nazis, attacking Poland in the rear when they were fighting the nazis, committing horrible crimes against the Polish population and POWs ... You really, really cannot imagine not having to do even one of those
I ask that you read Denna F. Flemmings, The Cold War and Its Origins 1917-1960, Vol I, at least the chapters regarding the build-up to and early days of WWII (Chapter 4-6/7).
Could you paraphrase the parts of the book that would be relevant?
It's hard to paraphrase all that, the short of it is that there were no alternatives, not at that point.
I get that the book you want me to read claims, like the previous poster, that the only option Russia had was to secretly team up with the nazis and attack the Poles from the rear
But my question is not so much to repeat that but to support it with arguments
My arguments are the same as those laid out in the first comment by AES_Enjoyer, as are those of Denna.
Importantly, you never stated what those "several alternatives" are.
Well I'm not sure if that's from the book you suggested, but if it is I must say the language is a tad bit romanticized lol. Might I suggest better sources
I don't know if the other three chapters you suggested get any better but in your quote it only argues that collaborating with the nazis was "their only option" if you first agree to start from the premise that they *checks notes* "just had to claim those territories" to which they "had a far better right"
Imagine if the UK or the US had allied with the nazis and attacked Western Europe in the back, out of fear and begging them for spoils... (as some politicians argued, I might add)?