Canadian farmer Arend Feenstra, who moved to Russia through a streamlined immigration program for citizens of “unfriendly” countries who share “traditional values,” has complained that he cannot get a permanent residence permit. The news outlet Nizhny Novgorod Onlain drew attention to his YouTube video.
Feenstra received a three-year temporary residence permit in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region in early 2025. He then brought his wife and eight children to Russia and began farming.
But Feenstra has now learned that to replace his temporary residence permit with a permanent one, he must sign a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The issue is, how do you decide which country is legitimate?
Ukraine’s current government came about because of the Euromaidan uprising, where a bunch of armed men stormed government buildings in the capital in the west, and declared a new, pro-Western government. Not everyone in the country agreed with this direction, particularly some people in the east, but when those people tried to vote against this new direction, the parties they supported were banned. Then, a bunch of armed men stormed government buildings in the east, declared a new government, a new country, and when the central government tried to subdue them, they requested Russian aid and voted to become part of Russia.
You will no doubt tell me that the votes in the east were rigged, that the armed men in the east were nothing but Russian proxies with no popular support, but that the armed men in the west were totally legitimate, and you’ll downplay, justify, or ignore the fact that they banned opposition parties to ensure they won their elections. The pro-Russian side will tell me that the armed men in the west were just Western proxies, and they will cite a leaked phone call where Victoria Nuland handpicked which figures would emerge on top, and they will downplay any concerns about the rebels in the east being Russian proxies.
From where I’m standing, it seems very reasonable to treat both of your claims with equal skepticism. Both groups of armed men have some degree of domestic support and some degree of foreign backing, and I have little evidence or basis to determine the exact proportions. Maybe they’re both primarily proxies, maybe they’re both primarily genuine, but saying that one’s a proxy and the other’s genuine is just biased.
For the government in the west to have the right to govern the east, for it to have the right to defend itself and maintain territorial integrity, then it has to be worth defending. Which, at the very least, means that it needs to be democratic. And if it refused to let the matter of which power to trade with be decided democratically, if the people in the east were denied any peaceful approach within the system to advance their views, then I don’t see how Ukraine’s government could really be called “democratic,” or how it could be said that Ukrainians are “making their own democratic decisions.”
Genuine democracy in Ukraine is likely impossible at this point. Ideally, the conflict would be resolved through a referendum in the disputed territories, but I don’t think there’s any neutral party who could oversee that which both sides would trust and accept the results. So, they’re just going to keep killing each other, and since they both suck and can’t be convinced to stop, my position is to just stay out of it.
Even if the US could afford to keep getting involved in all these conflicts, which it absolutely can’t (we just got out of a 20 year occupation and are $40 trillion in debt), my assessment has always been that Americans will eventually just get bored and move on, at which point Ukraine will have little chance anyway. It would’ve been better to cut the losses from the start and save lives. Now, Russia controls the region anyway, it’s a stalemate, and prolonging it is just throwing more lives into a meat grinder.
Even if your narrative was not one-sided, even if the situation was as black-and-white as you claim, I see no point in fighting if I can’t envision a path to victory. It would hardly be the first time in history that the “good guys” took an L. And if we allow conditions to decline at home while materially supporting this war effort, there’s a good chance the right will take advantage of that and gain power, and that’s a much bigger concern to me than some minerals on the other side of the planet.
What I read is that Ukraine’s parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from the presidency, and hold a new presidential election.
I think it would be good if Ukraine could have new elections, with all regions that are legally part of Ukraine being able to vote. That would include Crimea, the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
I guess the reason that’s currently impossible is because the Kremlin gave weapons, troops, and assistance to rebels in the Donbas, to help them violently take control of the region. Then Russia increased its invasion in 2022.
Literally the first sentence of your link:
How is that any different from the secession referendums held in the east? Protesters took over government buildings, held a vote, what’dya know, the vote went the way the protesters wanted. In both cases, of course, the protesters were carrying assault rifles.
If the capitol police had stopped guarding the government buildings in Washington and let the Jan 6’ers take full control, and then Congress held a vote in favor of the the Jan 6’ers demands, would that be a legitimate vote?
I’m not sure why I’m supposed to be concerned about what’s “legal” when looking at geopolitics. And if I was, I’d probably say that Yanukovych should be reinstated as acting president to oversee new elections (or, if you’d prefer I treat armed men seizing government buildings as “legal,” then I would say that the referendums in the disputed territories were legitimate. You don’t get to have it both ways). Which, of course, is impossible. About as impossible as thinking that Ukraine is somehow going to break the stalemate and regain all its territorial claims. I am a realist and a pragmatist, not a legalist.
I see little difference for the average person between life under the Ukrainian government and life under the Russian government, including before the war. What are the rights Ukrainians have that Russians don’t? I do see a significant difference between being drafted and forced to die in a ditch for the glory of the motherland, vs not doing that. Peace is more important than reclaiming “legal” territory.
War is the continuation of politics by other means, and the political question that led to the war was simply whether Ukraine would send it’s resources east or west. That’s what the war is being fought over, not some high-minded ideal. And the minerals are not worth the cost, neither in cold financial terms, nor in terms of the lives being sacrificed for them.
It’s unfortunate that Ukrainians are being used as pawns in the Great Game like this, and I do feel for them. If my government had sent them more aid for domestic development and to actually improve people’s lives, then perhaps people in the eastern regions would’ve been more inclined to stay. There are countless other countries in the world right now that are in a similar situation right now, where our neglect and lack of investment is pushing them towards China, and we could earn their loyalty for pennies on the dollar of what we’re spending on bombs.
There’s also regions in the US that are economically neglected, providing a fertile breeding ground to the far-right, which is, frankly, way more urgent to address than any other concern on the planet. I mean, if the US goes full Nazi, then what does it matter if it maintains it’s influence over the far reaches of Eastern Europe? We should get our own house in order before we go worrying about expanding the empire.
When Russia murders political opponents, does that make its votes legitimate? I don’t think Ukraine is killing political opponents without even a trial.
Yeah the US has economically neglected parts. I’m not American myself, I’m European, and over here we have Russia waging the largest war on our continent since World War 2. Zelenskyy did win an election in 2019, an election which, as far as I can tell, was more legitimate than Russian “elections” for a long time.
If you want to focus on America then fair enough. Here in Europe I don’t want a future where Russia can invade any part of our continent, whenever they want, and rule it without question. If Ukrainians willingly chose to be close to Russia then that would be fine, but that isn’t what has happened.
That was after banning the opposition party popular in the east, though. You can argue that it’s more legitimate than Russia, but that doesn’t mean it’s legitimate.
Then I’ll give you a “fair enough” too. You are closer to the situation, and there are many ambiguities that could reasonably be interpreted in different ways.
My experience is generally that there’s little tolerance for nuance or for respectful disagreement on the topic. I’ve opposed to every military intervention the US has been involved in in my lifetime, and my impression is that the government uses military solutions as a first resort rather than the last. I might see this conflict differently if I hadn’t spent 20 years trying to convince people we have no business being in Afghanistan, and if I wasn’t currently trying to convince people we have no business sending bombs to Israel. I set a high bar for military interventionism.
I’m sure Ukraine’s democracy is flawed but I also just don’t think Russia should be invading Ukraine, or making demands of Ukraine, for example the demand that Ukraine can never join NATO. If Ukraine were to democratically choose to become a strong ally of Russia then fair enough, but that’s not the same as Russia using force and threats to make Ukrainians behave a certain way.
Obviously the war is terrible though since it is causing so much suffering, for both Ukrainians and Russians to be honest.
Yes military intervention is often bad. I guess I do believe in defence though. I wouldn’t want my country, the UK, to be taken over by force, so I think defence makes sense. The UK has a lot of flaws but I think a successful invasion of the UK could make life here much worse.
What is defense and what is offense depends entirely on which political entities you consider legitimate. If you treat the DPR as legitimate, then it was offense for the Ukrainian government to try to assert control.
In the Vietnam war, when the US was sending troops halfway around the globe to try to force a puppet government on the Vietnamese and kill all who resisted, all you have to do is treat the South Vietnamese government as legitimate, and suddenly it transforms from an “offensive” war to a “defensive” one, because the US was simply “defending” the South Vietnamese government. Afghanistan, likewise, if you treat the puppet government we set up there as legitimate then you could claim that the occupation was merely “defending” it. Even the Roman Empire often justified it’s conquests by saying they were merely defending an ally. Find two tribes that like to kill each other, name one your ally, wait for a conflict, bam, now you have an excuse to send troops in and acquire new territory for your empire.
Who was on the offense or defense in the American Revolution, or in the American Civil war? That question is entirely dependent on whether you believe the colonies/the South had the right to declare themselves a separate political entity. This is, in my view, a very arbitrary and subjective lens through which to understand conflicts.
A state’s legitimacy depends on whether it represents the will and the interests of the people. Offense, defense, legal, illegal, I don’t see why any of that would matter from that standpoint. Every revolution or revolt in history was an illegal act of aggression on behalf of the rebels, but just blanket condemning all revolutions on that basis is absurd. We have to look at what they were actually fighting for. John Browns illegal act of aggression was intended to free slaves, the Confederacy’s illegal act of aggression was to preserve slavery, and it’s on that basis, not the basis of legality or aggression, that we can understand who’s right and who’s wrong.
When I evaluate the Civil War, I’m not interested in examining the legal minutia to determine whether or not states had the legal right of secession, in order to determine which side was the aggressor. I’m only interested in what the outcomes would actually mean for ordinary people. Even if the Confederacy had had the legal right to secede, then I would still support the outcome that leads to slavery being ended, because that’s what materially benefits the people. Therefore, that is the criteria that matters.