so the loss of a product makes you want to donate but loss of life puts you on the fence. Wondering how’d make you feel if say, Romanians had to flee and no one would care since there isnt much made in romania.
I'm not the donation type myself but I think in this instance you chose your target wrong, as us, Romanians (I'm from Romania myself) have genuinely really tried to help our Ukrainian neighbours in these very dark times for them. I'm not going to give links to news stories, google is your friend for that, is enough to say that many of us, Romanians, were very pleasantly surprised ourselves of the whole thing, we're generally a little on the nihilistic side, so in a way that was also good for our national psyche.
Back to your question, and I can only answer for myself, yes, I would expect pretty much the same reaction and help that we gave to the Ukrainians from our neighbours if all this had happened to us, no matter if they're Bulgarians, Serbs or Hungarians.
I am a native of romania, gave up my citizenship for obvious reasons. Regular citizens have indeed stepped in. However, the government actively discourages arrivals from ukraine, and while the prime
minister claimed they made preparations for half a million ukranians, that has proven to be false [1]. In effect, its mainly those of us that donated that helped ukranians, because tax payers money surely didnt.
The reason i chose romania while not directly stating that op is from that country, at least by user name, is because i didnt want it to turn into a personal thing.
I find it appalling that some will show ignorance, considering that romania is essentially financed by the western world. Even during this conflict romania’s only defense is nato, because the country lacks a proper army. We all know why and we all know that wont change. The expectation being that they (nato, us, eu) will “come and do it for us” and i simply dont share that mindset.
Having said that, some in romania have contributed to the country’s neighbour aid, while some simply dont care. But they do have a sense of entitlement. For instance, I am not entirely sure why you’d expect help from your neighbours given the above. Romania needs to be able to defend on its own and help those in need on its own before expecting handouts from pretty much everyone else, and now is the time to do it.
Edit: grammar and all sorts. Bored of explaining fellow romanians that contributing to refugees is a duty and not an option. Romania is on the eternal receiving side and sometimes we have to contribute as well. Government wont, thus its up to regular folk. Glad that op and paganel are happy to rip the PR benefits from those that did contribute to this crisis.
> I am not entirely sure why you’d expect help from your neighbours given the above
Because it's the human thing to do, honestly, I expect from my country's neighbours to have humanly feelings, so to speak.
Only reading this latter comment of yours I realised that when you talked about help you most probably were talking about military (or something like that) help, in which case of course that the answer is more complicated.
This risks getting OT but imo us paying that protection fee (because that's what it is) of 2% of our budget each year (now expected to pass to 2.5%) is fair enough. Don't see how we would be able to put up an army worthy of that name that would stand a Russian invasion almost all by itself. The money just isn't there, i.e. for us doing it all ourselves. Maritime/sea defence is very expensive, air defence is very expensive, the whole cyber-security staff is pretty complicated and, while we might have some people for it, we most certainly don't have enough. We should play to our strengths, and, to be honest, we're not strong enough to stand up against the Russians all by ourselves, we never were.
