IFN Staff
About 100 people showed their support for Ukraine during a peaceful demonstration in the Square in Downtown Statesville on Friday. Participants held signs and waved flags for about two hours.
Photos
Photo Gallery: Demonstrators express support for Ukraine in Downtown Statesville
Are they ready to bear arms for Ukraine? Isn’t peace a better option?
Let’s say you, in good faith, signed an agreement w/your neighborhood watch group to tear up the deed to your house in exchange for mutual assurance that none of you would take each other’s houses. A “new” man moves next door. He scoffs at what he considers a stupid move on all of your parts. He takes a look @ your house and sees it has a garage while his doesn’t. He knows you don’t have a deed and rely entirely on the agreement you signed with neighborhood watch to keep someone from taking it. He is a thug, knows he won’t meet any real resistance from the neighborhood watch because he charmed its president & managed to get some compromising pics of him. So, he begins by taking your backyard pool & holding all night parties and is now ordering you & your family to move out or he will kill all of you and burn your house to the ground. You appeal to the Pres of the neighborhood watch and he tells you, “Just give him the place because he just wants a peaceful neighborhood, and you’re being difficult.”
That, in a nutshell, is what’s taking place. The U.S. agreed to provide military support against aggressors, should the need arise, to Ukraine, in exchange for that nation surrendering it’s nuclear arsenal, and now Putin/Russia threatens to use its nuclear weapons to annex Ukraine for the resources it possesess. And, Trump has decided the U.S. will not abide by the terms of the agreement while Ukraine did so.
Maybe you would be fine with your family living in its car, parked in an empty lot at night, but what happens when a stronger bully orders you out of it because it has gas and his car doesn’t. Where does the aggression end? What kind of person promises to defend you if you give up your means of defense and then tells you to give the bully what he wants so he doesn’t have to do what he promised? How much trust would anyone watching this EVER put in that traitor to you & the agreement the neighborhood group made with each other?
Putin/Russia cannot be trusted. Russia invaded Ukraine. To give Ukraine to Russia is a fool’s mission and simply crazy. Why just give up and let Putin have Ukraine after all the literal blood, sweat and tears the people of Ukraine have shed? Putin has bombed apartments, day care centers, childrens’ hospitals and cancer centers – the innocents in their homes.
Falling for Russian propaganda and those who make money from his association are traitors to Ukraine and to us, We the People of the USA. It is mind-boggling that we have Americans who fall for the Russian schtick.
Exactly!
Peace at any price is not the answer. Putin will not stop. Also we promised Ukraine that if they gave up their nuclear weapons we would protect them. Under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, USA and Europe are contractually bound to defend Ukraine! That Memorandum
was signed three years after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and at the time, Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the WORLD behind the United States and Russia. To coerce Ukraine into transferring its arsenal to its former fellow Soviet state Russia (for further arms reductions), President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Great Britain’s Prime Minister John Major assured Ukraine of its sovereignty and defense in exchange for eliminating its nuclear capabilities. To simplify it for you, Ukraine was talked into giving up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees. If USA and the West had let Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons, Russia would not have dared attack a nuclear armed Ukraine. Ukraine is NOT begging for money.
Ukraine is just asking USA and Europe to keep their word and promise.
If Russia stops fighting, there will be no more war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukraine.
WOW!! 100 people. That is approximately .0035% of the population of Statesville. That certainly looks like a mandate to me. Read the history of the reasoning for the invasion (I certainly do not support the invasion). However, the US and NATO broke an agreement with Russia during the Clinton administration about NATO expansion and that is what Russia is angry about. Plus, hundreds of millions of dollars cannot be accounted for. Where is all that money? Your money? Read the facts instead of falling lock step with the uninformed.
So, what did we get for our nearly $180 billion dollars so far (which works out to a little over $500 per U.S. citizen)? Without a single casualty of the U.S. armed forces:
• Thousands of Russian military vehicles and aircraft have been destroyed
• Russia’s military has been seriously depleted and demoralized
• Most Russian warships in the Black Sea have been sunk or removed from harm’s way
• U.S. arms manufacturers have been working around the clock, providing good paying American jobs
• The Defense Department has tested and made improvements to our weapons systems in real war conditions
• Drone warfare has taken technological leaps in a very short time frame.
• And most importantly, Ukraine has contained Russia to their eastern fronts, thereby protecting Europe and NATO nations.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. And not something we should just walk away from.