Comments by "gerhard7" (@gerhard7323) on "Fiona Hill: Absolute victory over Russia is not possible" video.

@afritimm Opinions vary on who exactly broke the Minsk agreement depending on whom you ask, but it's notable that Germany's Merkel, as one of the brokers of that agreement along with France, recently claimed that it was only ever designed to buy Ukraine time, presumably prior to a Russian invasion. Another point of note is that the Budapest Memorandum was signed in 1994 after prior promises were made and noted, recorded in the US National Security Archive I believe, to Gorbachev by James Baker that NATO would not move one inch further to the east after Gorbachev agreed to the Soviet military not intervening in the collapsing East Germany. The 'Ukrainian' nuclear warheads that it surrendered to Russia for decommissioning as result of that memorandum were, to all intents and purposes, property of the Russian state and were effectively useless anyway as they did not have the necessary Russian codes to use them. Now call me old fashioned but the 2008 Nato declaration paving the way for Ukraine and Georgia's accession to Nato was a deliberately provocative act as was the well-documented US CIA led attempt at regime change in 2014 that led to the Maidan massacre. No one comes out of this smelling of roses, but the original sin here looks to me as if it began in the 1990s when the US, starting with Clinton, and the West generally started to treat the end of the Cold War as some kind of victory over the former Soviet Union to be exploited to the max. We are reaping the bitter seeds of that hubris and shortsightedness today.
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I understand your anger, I really do. Just one thing I would add is that journalism has increasingly resorted to telling rather than showing. Freddie, at least I'd like to think, is in the business of showing this woman and her narrative up for what it is rather than telling her or us what to think. Granted it can be a fine line, but anyone with a halfway decent critical eye and intellect can see this woman for what she truly is after this abysmal showing.
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Seems implausible, but nothing would surprise me nowadays.
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@conscious_being We live in a so-called post-truth world so, genuinely, nothing would surprise me anymore. We are told to believe and accept things today that are demonstrably false or tenuous to the point of insanity and yet large swathes of people still do. Politicians used to lie and get away with it for decades because they were protected by deference, patronage, no FOI, extensive secrecy laws etc, but now they just flat out lie to all our faces and see how many people buy into it... hopefully a majority aided by a complicit media. I think your scenario is highly unlikely, but given the current trajectory, only a fool would dismiss it out of hand.
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@guidobolke5618 Speaking in her interview for “Die Zeit”, published on December 7, German ex-Chancellor Merkel said the following: “The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. Ukraine in 2014-2015 and Ukraine today are not the same.” According to the ex-Chancellor, “it was clear for everyone” that the conflict was suspended and the problem was not resolved, “but it was exactly what gave Ukraine the priceless time.”
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@guidobolke5618 The glaring difference being?
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Shady lady from the outset, lots of vacuous politispeak but little else, but the real clincher here was her answer to the NS2 bombing. Even if the US didn't 'do it', which seems highly unlikely, the idea that they don't know who did and didn't in some way facilitate it is insulting to anyone with more than two braincells. Nuland is, 'happy that it is a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea' so why on God's earth would it have made any sense for the Russians to bomb a hugely expensive piece of recently completed infrastructure that they had a substantial stake in?
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