No, We Don’t Care About The Ukrainian Flag in Your Twitter Bio
It’s so complicated, and sometimes you don’t have to pick a side
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It’s been two weeks since Russia invaded the Eastern part of Ukraine and destroyed thousands of lives and families, and tensions are running high in the whole world.
People are having opinions about everything nowadays, even when they don’t really have a clue.
To understand this conflict and to form an opinion, you need to start from the beginning and see where this started — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the Russian invasion.
The Fall of the Soviet Union
Officially, the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 after a lot of revolutions in the Russian Empire — Tsar Nicolas II was killed by revolutionaries and not long after, Lenin became the leader of the union.
The communist country suffered under the regime of Lenin and mostly Stalin — it was isolated from the world and nobody really knew what was going on there.
Propaganda was business as usual, and the people that lived there were like aliens when compared to the ‘free world’.
On the 25th of December 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. Gorbachev resigned that day, and the Republic of Russia was founded — Boris Yeltsin became the President of the new country.
No Inch East — NATO Expansion
When the Soviet Union fell apart, the then-leader Gorbachev claimed he heard that United States’ Secretary of State James Baker said: “not one inch eastward”.
In 1991, the NATO wasn’t as full of members as it is now. Countries like Poland, Hungary weren’t member of NATO, and they are now — Ukraine is currently having talks with NATO and the European Union to join, which caused Putin to send warnings.
These warnings turned into war.
Of course, this fact doesn’t justify the Russian invasion, but it explains why he did it — and to be fair, this didn’t come unexpected, did it?
