On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 04:18 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > Ukraine was a colony of Russia. Putin is trying to return it to that > status. Lenin and others discussed the Great Russian chauvinism that > Ukrainians suffered in the Russian Empire. The right to national self > determination (for some nations) was supposed to be the remedy. The > Russian-Ukrainian war is a war by Ukrainians to preserve their right to > self determination from a foreign power. > >
The right of self-determination is not at issue, Mark. Ukraine exercised the right to independent statehood back in 1991 when the USSR dissolved, and no serious analyst of any political persuasion believes that the Russian aim is to occupy the country and reabsorb it into its federation. As for the territory currently held by Russia, both the Minsk and Istanbul tentative agreements would have maintained Ukrainian sovereignty over the Donbas and Crimea while allowing for a popular vote to determine if their residents wanted a degree of autonomy within that framework. I would still favour the withdrawal of Russian forces and an internationally-supervised peace settlement which gives the people in those territories the right to decide their own political fate, but the Russians pulled that compromise off the table when the Zelensky government declined to pursue it further. The Ukrainians would not be battling at great human and economic cost to regain those territories had they sought a negotiated settlement along those lines nearly four years ago and many Ukrainians, if not their Western supporters, may now be regretting that they did not. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40733): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40733 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117833155/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
