Short-term accommodation was notoriously expensive for students back then (probably even worse now), and I didn't hesitate when they offered me this unconventional housing opportunity.
The bunker had a decontamination zone, air filtering system, massive concrete doors, a large communal kitchen, and numerous small bunk beds. It was adequate for short-term use, but we encountered two main issues:
- It's remarkably easy to lose track of time without natural light cues
- Even with the air filering system wet clothes wouldn't dry properly inside
What was wild to me moving to the US from France was how many office buildings have many rooms without windows: you could be in your office or in meeting rooms and there are just zero natural light. Same in doctor's offices where you're always seen in a windowless window. Would drive me crazy if I had to work there all day.
On this topic, something window-related that’s common in France but rare in the US is functional shutters—it’s so nice to be able to completely close a shutter outside your bedroom window and have pitch blackness, regardless of the light outside. The best you get in a typical American house is "blackout" curtains or shades that leak tons of light around the edges.
Rolling shutters are the norm in Italy. Old houses or country houses have traditional shutters, in the latter case mostly because of aesthetics. They come in two varieties: they open like the doors of wardrobe or they slide on a rail on the outside of the wall. All of them used to be made of wood, they are PVC or aluminum now. Windows with only heavy dark curtains inside basically are not a thing.
No idea about the reason. Some random ideas. 1) no need to protect against excessive cold and wind (curtains are very useful for that) and it's ok to open a window and open or close shutters. 2) hail can break glass windows and shutters protect them. Are hail storms historically common also in northern Europe? Maybe not.
These shutters serve as insulation in locations prone to harsh weather conditions, safeguarding windows from hail damage and designed to endure strong winds.
https://www.shieldenchannel.com/blogs/solar-panels/fiber-opt...
Also not bad for high efficiency net zero type homes to supplement natural light without too many windows compromising the thermal envelope. I personally like the variability of natural light for how it keeps you connected to the outdoors. You know when a cloud is overhead or the sun is rising or setting. I've simulated sunset and sunrise with LEDs through color temp and timing but I've always wanted to experience the solar fiber type.
Examples of such shelters: - general purpose shleter Denis (capacity op to 2000 people): https://podzemibrno.cz/en/places-underground/cover-denis-und... - army headquarters shelter in the Vypustek cave (capacity 100+ people): https://vypustek.caves.cz/en - 10-Z shelter, Brno area civil defense headquarters (capacity 100+ people): https://10-z.cz/en/
Smaller shelters that could be found under many 50s era building were much more rudimentary, usually without idepedent source of electricity and just simple hand cranked filtration system.
For us it was a schock, versus the usual "you can pay it is yours", first come first served that we had back in Portugal.
However while not living in a bunker, we did have parties in some somehow converted into clubs.
Apparently in Bratislava, there is a club inside what was a fallout bunker underneath what was the king's palace but now serves as the residence of the... PM I think? Maybe president? My memory is hazy.
(Not due to the technobunker party sadly -- I was passing through on a weekday and it was sadly closed, so no uhn tiss tiss for me.)
Just for reference, some people in particle physics would use this to refer to O(x) where x is the order of magnitude number. so O(2) would means hundreds. So “low O(2)” would mean low hundreds, say around 200–300.
Then I graduate and enroll in a cushy university (UCSD) and come to find out, they're also having growing pangs, and so in the middle of campus we found ourselves taking classes in Quonset huts. These Quonset huts were bona fide military surplus, though it was already 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
The Quonset huts were extraordinarily different from the classrooms and lab facilities we used on campus; they were, of course, comparatively set out in the wilderness, and very rough accommodations overall.
However, I was a commuting student, and nobody was living in Quonset huts, so after our hourlong class was dismissed, I was able to retreat to the relative comfort of home, or the Theodore Geisel library.
In addition, one of my co-workers was heavy enough such that he could deform the floor in one just by standing up and walking around, so much so that pens/markers would roll off nearby desks as he went past.
I know your point is they don’t do it more than department stores do, and you might very well be right. I think it is probably hard to prove either way.
https://www.e-architect.com/articles/the-psychology-behind-c...
I think there's at least a difference of degree, but I think it's more than that.
This is different from a casino, where the most likely thing you'll do if loitering is to sit at a table or machine and gamble more.
Source: "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" by Schüll
https://www.amazon.com/Addiction-Design-Machine-Gambling-Veg...
People used to think we pumped oxygen into the casino too. It would be a fire hazard, and expensive to buy oxygen and maintain such a system. The casino where I worked for 13 years was so cheap they took away the kleenex from the staff locker room, downgraded the toilet paper, cut out staff parties.
No, just like the existence of books or the internet doesn't relieve you of needing to know stuff.
Everyone has internal sense of time that relies on external natural cues. A watch is a kludgy bolt-on that's not well integrated with one's awareness.
Imagine being stuck sick at home or in the hospital for an extended period of time - you will lose track of which weekday it is.
https://howandwhys.com/michel-siffre-time-experiment-body-sl...
His office featured a Sun workstation on his desktop, and a desk piled rather high with paperwork and whatnot. There was absolutely no wall clock anywhere to be found. His workstation's desktop also did not feature a clock. There was really no indication of the passage of time in that space.
I drank in the import of this, and I asked him if it was true, and he agreed readily. I was sort of amazed. But it was also quite humbling that he could construct such a space, where he could basically throw himself into his work and dedicate as much time as necessary, until his stomach or fatigue drew him back into the real world.
I'm actually not sure if, after a recent post-fire rebuild, if I will have a readily viewable clock in my kitchen or not.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@mikealpharomeotangoindia/video/74960... (in Swiss German)
Vs. America, which is all just "hooray individualism: you're all on your own."
Switzerland is about half the size of Maine. Not everything is about your perceived failings of American culture.
As the nations grow in size you generally end up splitting into states that have more localized incentives and/or you have a more brutal central apparatus like in the large states of China/Russia.
But this is. This is about attitudes, not size.
And even culturally, population size determines attitudes. How do Europeans feel about Brussels? Can you imagine the commission building an EU-wide bunker system?
Not really, it's per capita, not per area. There's nothing physical about America that would prevent it from requiring developers to add a shelter to every housing unit or in every housing development, like Switzerland does. Likewise, there's nothing physical preventing America from building and maintaining public shelters in denser urban areas.
The article also mentioned Sweden has public bunker capacity in urban but not rural areas. There's not physical reason American could not do something like that.
It's kind of amazing - friends of mine consider private school (which cost as much as a college education when I was young) to be a must-have. Imagine paying 20-40k a year for your kid's high school, or sometimes grade school! And these are very successful people who went to public school themselves. One is a college flunk-out.
My wife and I don't have kids, so I guess I don't get it. I suspect it's not just about education, but also classism, trying to ensure the kids end up in the right socio-economic class when they grow up.
Maybe at the very elite end, but I don't think that applies generally. No one's going to Catholic School (IIRC, the biggest single type of private school in the US) because of "who you grow up knowing," for instance.
...
but at least in my local area those two things overlap nigh-identically.
In many other countries it’s rather crumbling infrastructure and massive public spending and bureaucracy with little to show for.
1) wide dislike of any sort of social support mechanism (no public healthcare, poor support for the elderly / infirm / etc)
2) long history of anti-socialism and major fear of anything more radical, "reds under the bed" etc etc
3) little funding going towards big public infrastructure projects - I had a link to a well researched article - but can't now find it - talking about how US roads, powergrid, etc, is all crumbling away because nothing has been invested in significantly for decades
4) things like private prisons, all with profit-making as motive rather than anything wider such as societal good being considered
As a lefty, this all makes me chuckle - the idea that anyone could be foolish enough to think they can do anything alone without a huge lifelong support network just seems ridiculous. Even the most "self-made" founder who "came from nothing" has had to lean heavily on buses, trains, schools, universities, medical aid, electricity, their families, friends, the internet...
As someone once said, no man is an island - or I guess "it takes a village to raise a child" - so paying it forwards or backwards in taxes is a no-brainer if you think about it rationally.
Here endeth the socialist lesson.
I find that the places where there are insane HOAs are just as insane in the houses that aren't under HOAs.
HOAs do that, yes, but that's not why they are so pervasive in the US, even in non-condominium style developments, and intrusive in their government of what goes on in non-common areas.
Around here you have Zillow reporting "HOA dues: $25/yr" and similar.
Pretty sure that's what Zillow does anywhere where there are HOA dues, sure.
And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.
And that a lot of the scoffing online about how Europe is somehow more "enlightened" than the US by having more generous social safety nets is at least partially due to said social safety nets being able to be paid for because the US is guaranteeing military support in the event of a crisis.
Now, under Trump (whether or not you agree), there are going to have to be some hard choices in European capitals on how to fund a military deterrent to Russia if the US policy is "maybe we will, maybe we won't." Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is still the law of the land, but a Trumpist government may decide to provide only the bare minimum support needed.
European countries had cheap higher education and healthcare in 1989 as well, even with higher military spending (and higher than USA has today, which is roughly 3.37%). Estonia and Poland both spend more than the US, and they both manage cheap higher education and public healthcare. This indicates that it's also a choice of priorities, where European countries seem more willing to increase taxes for these kind of services.
Personally I think it has something with the sense of belonging, where Europeans belong to a country, most of them with less than 30 million people. Americans are one in 350 million, so it makes sense to me that it's harder to feel 'part' of the same tribe as the other 350 million people.
But you are right that Europe will have to face some hard choices, both because we get less support from the US, and because Russia is more aggressive than before. Personally I am quite convinced that in 5-10 years most European countries will still have cheap higher education and healthcare, but maybe higher taxes.
Or a Trumpist government may decide to provide no support at all, given how they have treated "the law of the land" so far.
Downvotes are supposedly for culling irrelevant comments, not to express dislike, or am I confusing things?
Most US military spending was on things other then Europe. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afganistan, non have anything to do with Europe.
Lots of military spending was needed even if the US had been by itself. And the US made lots of money selling military equipment to Europe.
Depending on what nations you compare it to, the difference during the cold war was a few % of GDP. Not enough to explain all the difference in social and other state programs. As the difference in spending is often 15-20%pt or more.
So the real difference is clearly willingness for taxation and social programs. And of course nations like Finland and Sweden were never part of NATO.
Funny enough, when talking about European problems I've often found that downvotes happen in the (US) morning (when the Euros are still awake) and upvotes happen in the (US) evening
Switzerland is surrounded by belligerents who have historically been at war with each other. France vs Italy. Italy versus Austria and Germany against everyone.
Your take ignores the history of accomplishment in the US. The founding, the constitution, settling the continent , building great cities, industrialization, defeating Nazis, building the Interstate highway system, landing on the moon and placing satellites in space, creating world changing technology to name but a few.
No. I did some research around the start of the Ukraine war. IIRC, the US Civil Defense program was always half-ass and has been pretty much non-existent for my entire lifetime.
I think the last chance we had for a politician that was somewhat visionary was with the first Obama term but he was too entrenched in the politics to actually drive any real change, with all that bipartisanship bullshit. Now they will just continue to invest in driving a wedge between the population to prevent them from noticing they're in a class war.
America is a country of immigrants. Apart from the brutally oppressed indigenous population, everyone is from somewhere else. Hence the Americans' obsession with heritage (the Italian-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Black Americans, etc.), and even grouping as blocs based on their ancestry - it is because they don't see themselves as being an American nation?
[*] This can be a problem in its own right, e.g. the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnians by Serbians, the players in the Balkan war each wanted "their" people on "their" side of the border, and murdered or displaced others to make it so. Also, to be fair, a number of European countries no longer collect nationality/ethnicity, including the Swiss, possibly because they don't want such maps to exist for any future nationalists to make use of.
Camouflaged Military Bunkers of Switzerland (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25331474 - Dec 2020 (119 comments)
The forgotten underground world of Swiss bunkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12430234 - Sept 2016 (50 comments)
Turns out not only were Soviet structures all reinforced and even able to survive nuclear blasts, but they also have bomb bunkers underground.
Nowadays this is used mainly during heavy rains, as the gates are watertight:
https://bi.im-g.pl/im/0/9990/z9990270IHG,W-srode-Jarek-Kowal...
When this picture was taken the trains would skip this station, but were otherwise functioning as normal.
The TLDR : they are obliged to have bunkers for a given population in an area thanks to Russian military aggression over the years.
> Finland has around 50,500 civil defence shelters with space for about 4.8 million people
https://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/-/1410869/finland-has-civil-def...
> There are around 64,000 civil defence shelters in Sweden, with space for around seven million people. Shelters can be found in various types of buildings, such as residential and industrial properties, and are marked with a special sign. In peacetime, a civil defence shelter can be used for other purposes.
https://www.msb.se/en/advice-for-individuals/civil-defence-s...
Anyone growing up in Sweden would recognize these orange/blue triangles indicating a shelter, and the large metal doors in your apartment-building cellar, where you store old shit you no longer use.
They also could've joined the EU somewhat earlier, but have refused to do so until the EU changed its rules about NATO membership. Up until 1995, every EU member was also a NATO member.
The last two wars between the Swiss and their neighbours were in 1531 and during Napoleon - who in the end admired the Swiss confederacy and helped rebirth it in its modern form.
That they weren’t waging war does result in excess men who someone else can pay to wage war for them though.
Mercenaries outsource the problem.
Patently wrong: Swiss Neutrality explicitely bans mercenary work by any Swiss citizen.
>The Swiss Guard is considered an elite military unit and highly selective in its recruitment: candidates must be unmarried Swiss Catholic males between 19 and 30 years of age,...
No, but you just haven't understood that they were talking about the past :-).
“The young men who went off to fight, and sometimes die, in foreign service had several incentives—limited economic options in the still largely rural cantons; adventure; pride in the reputation of the Swiss as soldiers; and finally what military historian Sir Charles Oman describes as a pure love of combat and warfighting in and of itself, forged by two centuries of conflict.”
Either way, being a mercenary is explicitly the opposite of ‘fighting for your country’, which is the point I was making.
But in the end it was more successful to just trade with Nazi Germany, buy stolen Jewish gold and stolen gold from occupied countries, send back Jews to be killed, deliver raw material for arms and sell weapons to the Nazis to not be invaded.
[Edit] Sorry, thought this was well known.
* NYT / "The (Not So) Neutrals of World War II"
> https://archive.is/kogL7#selection-275.0-275.37
* "For reasons that are still uncertain, Hitler never ordered the invasion. One theory is that a neutral Switzerland would have been useful to hide Nazi gold and to serve as a refuge for war criminals in case of defeat"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenbaum
* "In 1998, a Swiss commission estimated that the Swiss National Bank held $440 million (equivalent to $8.5 billion in 2024) of Nazi gold, over half of which is believed to have been looted."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gold
* "Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
* "The Boat Is Full"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_Is_Full
* "Seven studies released on Friday by the Independent Commission of Experts (ICE) show that the lion’s share of Swiss munitions exports went to the Axis powers."
> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/banking-fintech/swiss-supplied-...
* "The studies found evidence that the Swiss authorities only superficially inspected goods traffic transiting through Switzerland allowing the Nazis to transfer essential products, possibly even war material, from Germany to Italy and north Africa."
> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/banking-fintech/wartime-probe-r...
Your rant has nothing to do with the article.
"That DNA is inherited directly from World War II, when bunkers were already an established part of Swiss military strategy. In the early ‘40s, when neutral Switzerland was entirely surrounded by Axis powers, the army famously stocked the Swiss Réduit (“National Redoubt”), a series of military fortifications in the central Alps dating to the 1880s, with supplies and ammunition to prepare for a potential Nazi invasion."
From my post,
"Founded in the idea to make it too expensive for Nazi Germany to invade."
https://www.uek.ch/en/index.htm
Making accusations and finding biased sources is easy. Living with a bully next door is not.
The report says exactly what I'm saying,
> "send back Jews to be killed"
From the report: "The measures agreed in August 1938 to turn back unwanted immigrants were implemented ruthlessly; [..] It even happened that border guards struck refugees with the butts of their rifles to bar them from crossing the border"
> "sell weapons to the Nazis"
From the report: By far the most arms were sold to Germany and Italy, e.g. page 200
> "buy stolen Jewish gold and stolen gold from occupied countries"
From the report: "During the Second World War, Switzerland was the most important market for gold from the territories controlled by the Third Reich. Almost four-fifths of the Reichsbank’s gold shipments abroad were arranged via Switzerland."
And until 1997 and a famous documentary, L'Honneur perdu de la Suisse - which was censored until 2006 - the Swiss had absolutely no memory of their real role during WWII.
And see how they treated Paul Gruninger after the war: https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...
Not going to address all that bullshit since that would be a long post, just a random one - Hitler had very detailed plans on invasion of Switzerland and treating it similarly to Austria, simply deprioritized it. Just look at the map, everything around was firmly in Axis, they were not going anywhere, he could just starve them.
The cost of invasion for him would be massive for next to 0 gains - tons of hard-to-conquer mountains, fiercely defensive population that hates to be subjugated, and as Machiavelli said 'most free and most armed nation in the world".
They were not saint, simply neutral, it doesn't seem you understand the concept quite a bit.
Also heard about how they were accepting refugees and jews to the point of clearly facing famine (since they had nowhere to go), then famous 'Das Boot ist voll' happened, and they kept bringing them in regardless? Show me any nation in modern history when facing such existential threat with no hope that would behave so morally. Good contrast ie with current US admin treatment of almost all foreigners. Also helped secretly allies ie set up and access command post in Campione d'Italia - technically an Italian territory but surrounded by Switzerland. And so on...
"lie"
Where?
"bullshit"
Not an argument.
"Hitler had very detailed plans on invasion of Switzerland"
Yes - see the links of my post. But he didn't. And it was not my argument.
"Show me any nation in modern history"
Whataboutism is still not an argument.
I would say, some facts were presented, but in a flame war inducing style. So flagging was likely warranted by normal expectations.
If you would come up with facts in a reasonable way we can discuss them one by one, but you seem to lack that skill. There is some truth to them, and some are twisted half truths ignoring other facts, and rest are outright lies. Maybe next time.
Just one thing - Switzerland never shut any discussion, again a lie, its more free country than most western ones. Half the articles you posted are from Swiss webs, and if you ever followed their media, this is discussed consistently.
"If you would come up with facts"
I gave several sources, I read the official Swiss report and quoted from it to support my statements. Contrary to that, you have stated "lie" a dozen times without any fact or source or any detail.
All these polices operate together its not like the first did one, then the other. Depending on the situation the adjusted policy many times. And they also had many polices that you didn't mention, like an active air war and air defense against Germany (and the allies at time). I don't know what you are basing the claim on that one was more successful then the others.
Also, why are you using a fictional movie as source for anything? I do not think people were actually kicked out, only denied entry. At least I have not read about that, anybody can provide a source for that?
Here some information about the denial of asylum:
"According to the Bergier Commission final report, during the Second World War, Switzerland granted asylum to 25,000 Jews while denying around 20,000 refugees (of which a significant portion were estimated to be Jewish) admission to the country in total.[42] However, Serge Klarsfeld, the French-Jewish historian, activist and Nazi Hunter stated in 2013 that the Swiss authorities rejected fewer WWII Jewish refugees than believed. Based on his own research, Klarsfeld claimed that the number of entry denials was closer to 3000."
> The report on arms revealed that from 1940 to 1944, 84 per cent of Swiss munitions’ exports went to Axis countries.
Of course more trade goes to Axis in this period, as Switzerland was surrounded by the Axis on literally all side.
And Switzerland was in desperate need for food and coal. It would have been literally insane not to sell things like munitions to Germany in that situation.
https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...
Treatment of Paul Gruninger wasn't good, nobody is questioning that. But he was just fired, not shot or imprisoned. A reasonable punishment for what he did. And the people he let in were not evicted.
And that despite rejecting some, many Jews were accept into Switzerland and survived the war that somehow isn't talked about much. And of course the Swiss Jews survived the war unlike most other places in Europe.
Somehow Switzerland is made out to be a villain when in reality they did a lot and resisted more then many other states would have in the situation. Switzerland didn't do as much as they could have, but that's true for pretty much every nation. Given of how terrible and hopeless the Swiss situation seemed, I think overall their conduct in WW2 was pretty reasonable.
Literally every nation that traded with Germany, received gold stolen from Jews, Austria and Czechia. That includes the US and everybody else. But Switzerland is somehow uniquely singled out and is talked about in this context far more then anybody else.
Switzerland went through WWII without suffering much - and never came clean after WWII until the 1990s, remaining a rear base of nazi and neo-nazi networks during the second half of the XXth century.
Also its a waste oversimplification to claim 'never came clean until 1990'. That is only in regard to one specific issue and discussion and managing of that issue had been ongoing for a long time.
> remaining a rear base of nazi and neo-nazi networks during the second half of the XXth century.
And it was a base for anti-nazi networks threw-out the war as well.
And politically Switzerland was never close to being extreme right wing or joining the nazis. Switzerland is a free country that is open to lots of foreigners and international organization of all kinds. Including spy agencies from every country under the sun.
What official government policy support nazi networks? What exactly do you want Switzerland to do?
Excuse me, but I was there in the 1990s when the documentary "L'Honneur perdu de la Suisse" was aired and the during the debate around the Nazi bank account and the stolen Jewish goods or abandonned Jewish bank accounts.
The Swiss authorities, both private (banks) and public, resisted any inquiry until they were forced to, mostly by American Authorities who threatened to ban Swiss banks from operating in the USA.
The documentary cited above led to trials against the documentary makers and the television network, and a ban on any diffusion until the European court of Justice ruled in their favor after ten years of legal strife.
Your reaction shows that most Swiss refuse to engage with what was clear war profiteering and collaboration *before, during and after WWII" with the Nazis and their successors. Even official accounts nowadays admit this: https://www.ekr.admin.ch/publikationen/d710.html
>What official government policy support nazi networks?
Blocking Jews from seeking refuge and sending them back to Germany; not because of fear of German retaliation, but fear of "Verjudung" - "jewification".
>What exactly do you want Switzerland to do? During the war, After the war, admit it, instead of refusing any attempt to right wrongs or even threatening with lawsuits anyone who talks about it.
https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/12882741-paul-gruninger-trait...
It's like asking for sources when someone talks about the US having been to war with [INSERT RANDOM COUNTRY].
As someone from the region: I also have read this a few times in different sources over my life, with no controversy about it at all. This is pretty much how it is written in the history books and it also makes sense.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68199e8e-5ad4-8012-8026-09fa353b60...
There must be a name for this sort of false argument.
What Russia "wants" with respect to its neighbors is not the problem. It's the large scale ground invasion, indiscriminate killing of civilians, kidnapping children, torturing journalists, shelling cities to rubble.
There's absolutely nothing reasonable about Russia's attitude. You don't get to pick what clubs your neighbors decide to willingly join. Does Poland get to demand that Belarus not join CSTO? Does the US get to demand that Canada leave the IPCC?
We have evidence of this where the US almost triggerd nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, which again was a response to Jupiter nuclear missiles being stationed in Turkey.
So why would Russia be OK with hostile military bases all along its border?
How is that relevant? Nobody built any "forward operating and missile bases" in the entire Eastern Europe, and those that used to be in Western Europe have been largely dismantled in the decades that followed the Cold War. What "hostile missile bases" are you talking of? Can you name a single one?
I notice you avoided the hypothetical about China putting military bases along the US border in Mexico and Canada because there's no answer to that: everybody knows we would never accept it. So why should Russia?
That's quite a retreat from "building missile bases along borders".
But you're still wrong. NATO's primary role is to provide command structures and planning capabilities to coordinate multinational military responses. Military forces and installations remain under national control and are only made available to NATO command structures when member states voluntarily choose to contribute them to a specific mission. Essentially, NATO functions as a coordination bureau rather than a unified standing army.
As for Ukraine specifically, the prospect of joining NATO was shelved by Germany and France in 2008 due to Russian objections. Public support in Ukraine stood at 20-30%, and after a Russian-backed candidate was elected president in 2010, all efforts toward gaining membership were halted. The topic did not resurface until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
They already bordered Lithuania and Estonia, and Poland if you count Kalingrad. Their own actions have now brought Finland in, quadrupling the amount of Russia/NATO border they have. Oops.
Maybe Russia needs your proposed defensive army and huge border fortifications, if they're so petrified of a NATO invasion? The Wagner Group managed to roll most of the way to Moscow largely unopposed.
It seems most of the world a) wants the US to stop meddling but also b) blame them for whatever is broken abroad due to their inaction.
Sounds like Ukraine wanted to be part of the US Empire, rather than their own country.
With Finland having joined NATO in 2023 there is a land border with Russia, so…
But yes, as you touch on later land invasion through Ukraine is far more a threat to Russia than invasion through Finland.
It will happen. It is inevitable. That Russia has lost the war against Ukraine has been obvious for some time, and sooner or later the war will end with the frontlines remaining roughly where they are now, if not farther east. After that, NATO membership for Ukraine will be one of the few realistic options to prevent renewed Russian aggression.
As for the claim of "NATO on Russia's doorstep", a former Russian foreign minister has for decades described NATO as an organization that offers free security to Russia. This is because NATO binds its members together and stabilizes each individual country. This dynamic is evident in the current support for Ukraine: NATO countries consult extensively with one another before making decisions, because poorly thought out initiatives could endanger all allies. As a result, their actions are proportional, measured and clearly communicated well in advance. For a country allegedly concerned about its security, such neighbors would be a godsend.
But the truth is that NATO and other forms of international cooperation turns invasions of neighboring countries from winnable small wars into unwinnable quagmires, and that's what truly bothers the Russians. Foreign support has turned Russia's war against Ukraine into one of the greatest failures in Russian military history. In a month or two, the casualties will exceed one million, with very little to show for it.
What might you even do differently? Switzerland is mountainous terrain. One could conceivably hold off a column of armor with the right geography with an irregular militia; ied the start of the column and it blocks itself in a chokepoint. You can’t do that in the ukraine. It is board flat wheat fields. You can mine it which both sides have done by now but that is about all you can do defensively over such a porous surface for mechanized infantry. There is no hold point. Frankly it is bewildering to me why russia did not take over the country in 30 days or so considering. This should have been a desert storm situation for russia. Clearly something is going right defensively to protract this war for so long on the part of ukraine.
