There’s no communism without liberation from capitalism. The reactionary communists-in-name-only serve the capital with their support of Russia/China/etc
Me getting banned from lemmygrad entirely for calling this shit out.
Oh man, that reminds me I have a screenshot of a tankie saying “mark my words, Ukraine will not exist in 1 month” from like… 3 months ago? And I really wanna follow up on that but I don’t think my sarcasm will play well with their essay writing sign up process.
It's insane. It's international politics as team sports.
Oh man, that reminds me I have a screenshot of a tankie saying “mark my words, Ukraine will not exist in 1 month” from like… 3 months ago? And I really wanna follow up on that but I don’t think my sarcasm will play well with their essay writing sign up process.
They'll just say something along the lines of "Well right now Russia is ACTUALLY fighting NATO and Ukraine has ceased to exist, so checkmate, shitlib"
I had a guy on reddit WAAAY back when the war was just starting (when it was clear they would invade, but either had not yet or had literally just begun hours before) tell me all the Ukrainian citizens had to do was not resist and accept their Russian citizenship, the Russian soldiers were their ethnic bretheren, it would all be over nearly bloodlessly in three days, and of course Putin would not harm anyone if he didn't have to.
I was in disbelief that he believed this was true, or that he could believe there was any possibility they'd just stand by and let themselves be invaded. A month or so later I dug out the thread and called him out for his ridiculous bullshit (which had already been ridiculous bullshit when he first said it) and he gave me some version of "any bloodshed is the fault of Ukraine" and cursed me out.
I fathom neither how anyone sees Ukraine as anything other than the victim in this war, nor how anyone could ever have thought this would be quick and bloodless.
Be it the US, Russia, China, or whatever. All imperialism sucks. Let people live however they see fit between their own borders. This is why I never understood tankies. Why call out US imperialism but stop short at calling Russia out
I’ve been trying to keep an open mind about the hexbear people even if I disagree with them a heap. One thing I don’t understand is the constant defense of their stances with ‘critical support’ I can buy into some of their arguments but like, shit, I hate the west, too, but I’ll ‘critically support’ them and their non aggression pact over whatever the hell Russia is doing.
It’s a very messy situation there in Ukraine, and my support goes to whatever will stop it. I have no sides in this game, my close ones are on both sides of the actual conflict and this is terrifying. Stop fighting, and then make talks.
That’s a disclaimer.
Now one correction on the post: what happens is not ethnic cleansing, and we should not call it that way, for it shows incompetence and may hurt us when talking about real ethnic cleansings, like Myanmar and whatnot. No one pushes Ukrainians away from their land or seeks to genocide the population (even though, as in any war, civilians get hurt dramatically). The proper wording would be forceful reintegration, which, I gotta stress, is super bad, but it is not cleansing.
Ukrainans do have an identity of their own, an identity that doesn’t go anywhere, including in those migrated to Russia long ago. Sure, Putin’s plan is to reinstate the idea of a brotherly nation, one we shared our core history with throughout almost entire timeline, but even if you look from the position of “turning Ukrainians into Russians” (which is still not how ethnic cleansing is defined), this is simply not possible. Again, I’m speaking this as Ukrainian AND Russian by bloodline, I know what I’m talking about.
What really happens is an invasion, an occupation of the country in order to reinstate a puppet state which has been there, partially, before 2014. It is more akin to USSR driving tanks through Eastern Europe than anything else. Essentially making “friendly” puppet regimes as a form of political control. Very sad Putin didn’t learn from past mistakes, doomed to repeat them through a never-before-seen massacre - the one my people, on each side, struggle with.
Did you honestly read the last paragraph, for example? The one where I talked about similarities between current situation and what USSR has done in the past and denouncing both?
Or did you skim the text and went straight into anger posting?
For starters, US press releases should not be your go-to source of factual information. Ever. It’s like going to the site of Moscow Kremlin.
Here’s a press release from the United Nations still confirming your point of view, but which is way more credible: press.un.org/en/2023/sc15395.doc.htm
But even it mentions those things mostly through Ukrainian-sided official statements, which include things like “million Crimean kids deported to Moscow since 2014” (sorry, what?), which destroys a lot of trust in the content of the statement.
Still, some children are taken to Russia, this is true, and a lot can be done differently. I support the idea to take kids from orphanages situated in a literal warzone (don’t you?), but I don’t like the idea of teaching them all things Russian, although it should be noted they are taken from the Donbass region which has always been heavily dominated by Russian, not Ukrainian, culture and language. Those people are and were already closer to Russia than to Ukraine, they have strong ties to Russia, which is why the separatist movements emerged there in the first place after 2014.
Same are the reasons Crimea has got into Russian occupation with absolute majority of locals cheering and welcoming this (this is true, I’ve been on the ground at the time) - the region is dominated by ethnic Russians, and they never really had strong cultural ties to Ukraine in the first place.
Again, delivering those kids a more balanced picture would absolutely be amazing. But it is not literal conversion from Ukrainian culture to a Russian one.
Man you can fuck off pretending to “have no side in this game”. You are a blatantly obvious Russian apologist, and everyone knows it. Go back to your lemmygrad account and stay there.
Could y’all please stop assuming the worst intentions and also sending me to Lemmygrad, the place I was banned from for having my own head?
I step heavily against the war in Ukraine, and I’ve been part of the anti-war protests that broke out in 2022. My relatives live in a city shelled by Russian army, they often live without electricity (got a battery pack for astronomical money, those are hot in Ukraine rn for obvious reasons), and at the same time some of the family’s men are hiding from Ukrainian drafts that are carried out literally on the streets. I don’t want them to die, in their homes or on the battlefield. Neither do they.
And at the same time, I don’t think saying “Russia bad boo-hoo not gonna listen to anything” is gonna help anything at all if your goal is to save people’s lives. I add important context (here: orphans are taken from warzones of Donbass to safety, by both sides of the conflict) that might be helpful at looking on some of the things from a different perspective.
I’m gonna clash and I do clash with both Ukraine-saint mob and actual Russian apologists (this gets no less violent), and I’m gonna do this again and again, because angry mob is the enemy of the truth. And when we don’t do what is actually best, when we fanatically embrace a position (which most of Lemmy appears to do) - we make people suffer way more than they should. On this particular matter, it’s kids that suffer.
You can call me Russian apologist. They can call me a Western bootlicker. At the end of the day, I do what I think is right - and if you have something to counter my words with, I’m ready to listen.
The bloodline argument only goes for insider knowledge of how those two nations interact and assimilate (I have a lot of russian Ukrainians as friends and family, and am mixed blood myself), plus it highlights again that I have close ones on both sides and I’m neither pro-Russia nor pro-Ukraine.
Sure, this doesn’t make me a political expert in the slightest, though if you have exact counterpoints - feel welcome to voice them.
Also, for the record, I’ve been banned on Lemmygrad, and if you can’t reason and only go crowd downvoting, you’re not defender of the truth but an angry mob.
If anyone can tell me why they downvoted this additional explanation, I’d be supper happy. But it’s easier to not read, push arrow down and claim me Nazi.
Russians steal Ukrainian children, they’ve multiple times been caught mass executing civilians too… Their side iterates that Ukraine doesn’t exist, like Putin implied.
Putin wants to eradicate the Ukrainian national identity.
The official narrative is that Ukrainian government is illegitimate and ruled by Nazis, abd the country needs to be “liberated” from their rule. It doesn’t strongly assume destruction of Ukraine the state, but clearly indicates that Russia or its puppets should be in charge.
And even then, there are many stateless nations, and I don’t think Ukrainian identity is the one that is easy to erase.
Absolutely, it doesn’t justify any actions of Russia in Ukraine, and I never said so.
I just say the Putin’s endgame doesn’t necessarily include Ukraine losing statehood (but it would certainly become a puppet state with all the negative consequences).
Could you please send said essay? Genuine request.
I answered on “deportation of children” in another thread. Long story short - those are kids from orphanages in Donbass, and I’d rather have them moved to safety (which both Russia and Ukraine do) than left to die in a warzone. Don’t see how it constitutes ethnic cleansing.
Fuck off. The only way this ends is for Russians to learn to stop murdering their neighbors. There is one belligerent and one defendant. The belligerent must cease belligerent behavior.
In an ideal world, revenge always finds a way, but this time the war can literally drag on till the last Ukrainian soldier, and who will stand to benefit from that?
Without international troops stepping in (which would be a hugely consequential escalation against a nuclear nation), Ukraine just really can’t turn the tides of the war, which was clearly demonstrated by failure of the counter-offensive.
My point is, as much as I’d like Putin to respond for everything and borders set back to where they should be and reparations paid, this is not feasible. This is not gonna happen magically. And while people daydream of that outcome, thousands of others - my close ones among them - get killed, again and again, in a stupid stalemate that benefits no one and hurts everybody.
No one was there to stop US when they invaded half the world. No one is there to truly stop Russia. Because superpowers do that, and, as terrible as it is (and my sincere hope goes it can be solved in the future), your sheer determination to crash them and make them stop bullying their neughbors isn’t enough.
We need to protect human’s lives, we need to stop the bloodshed and negotiate real security guarantees for Ukraine - not from Russia, but from EU & US, so that attacking Ukraine ever again would be a military and political suicide.
Stop your revenge lust and think of actual people, right there, forced to both sides of the frontline. They die. They die for nothing. They don’t turn the tides.
I support Putin, because there is no practical alternative in the near future.
It’s not like Russia has a well-oiled transition machine where if he were to leave office, everything would smoothly shift to a new regime that brought unicorns and love to all.
We’d be rolling the dice on a rogue’s gallery:
Maybe we’d get someone Yeltsin-ish, who is buddy-buddy with the West by allowing the widescale plundering of Russia’s assets, and further driving their quality-of-life metrics into the dirt, starting the cycle that leads to another strongman.
Maybe we’d get someone even more militant than Putin, especially if the war leaves them spiritually depantsed. Launches nukes or directly engages a NATO member. Putin may have a taste for blood, but he’s not on a suicide mission.
Or maybe we’d just get someone incapable of holding the federation together, creating a new Balkan-style slow-motion crisis. Whee! Squabbling new nuclear states with the GNP of a Carl’s Jr. franchise and unknown leadership… that’s not going to cause proliferation issues.
I still believe there are options to wind down the war, but the West will refuse anything that smacks of a concession for as long as possible. Conversely, I suspect what Putin wanted from day 1 was some form of formal concession-- the fact he got foreign powers to give up something is more important than the specifics delivered, for the sake of displaying his power at home.
Putin is big part of the reason why there is no alternative. It won’t emerge specifically because of him.
Which, in turn, means we have to consciously go through the path of uncertainty (i.e. fight Putin) before it hits us anyway. Waiting is delaying the inevitable, all while people die and economy is crumbling.
Ukraine is one of those messy topics nobody ill-informed should like touching tbh
This is ironically very correct.
I dont want to see Ukrainian citizens and soldiers exterminated, but I also dont want to see Russian citizens (drafted as soldiers) and soldiers exterminated
There is a very easy solution to that, available exclusively to Russia.
I don’t think that Ukraine should exist as an extension of Russian territory, but I also dont think it should exist to be an armed-to-the-teeth thorn in Russia’s side
... why do you think it's armed to the teeth? Do you think it was always armed to the teeth? Guy (in the gender-neutral sense), Ukraine's military was a fucking joke before 2014. You remember what happened in 2014? Russia invaded and annexed a good sixth of the country. If Russia didn't want a heavily armed thorn in its side, it shouldn't have given Ukraine, which had shown no desire to challenge Russia, a reason to become heavily armed.
Or do you think the alternative of letting Russia take yearly bites out of Ukraine as it proclaims that Ukraine isn't a real nation and Ukrainians don't exist is viable?
I dont think those weird nazi militant groups should be branded as ‘war heroes’ by people (READ : US Media), but there’s proportionally so few of them that calling all Ukrainian armed forces nazis is factually incorrect
Man, the neonazi paramilitaries haven't been a factor since late 2015.
I also dont think that punishing the population of Russia (who, by and whole, are innocent) with economic sanctions will do ANYTHING to benefit the goodwill between countries, and will only solidify any current deals with China/NK that the ‘West’ seem to hate them having
The economic sanctions are important in reducing Russia's ability to replenish its industrial and military capacity and has had strong effects in reducing the quality of Russian refurbished tanks and reducing the number of missiles they can produce and lob into Ukrainian hospitals each month.
There is a very easy solution to that, available exclusively to Russia.
Not really. While only Russia can revert troops and say “oh you know we were wrong, we remove every soldier and pay reparations forever and ever, we’re deeply sorry, never again”, this is obviously not going to happen.
Russia did suggest many, many peace talks, and it never yielded anything, with Ukrainian side outright refusing further diplomacy. Yes, concessions have to be made to reach peace, but the peace is entirely possible, and Russia doesn’t mind it.
Not really. While only Russia can revert troops and say “oh you know we were wrong, we remove every soldier and pay reparations forever and ever, we’re deeply sorry, never again”, this is obviously not going to happen.
Yes, it is indeed obvious that Russia has no intention of withdrawing its troops or willingly vacated occupied Ukrainian land, or respect Ukrainian sovereignty.
Russia did suggest many, many peace talks, and it never yielded anything, with Ukrainian side outright refusing further diplomacy. Yes, concessions have to be made to reach peace, but the peace is entirely possible, and Russia doesn’t mind it.
Did you not follow the peace talks at the time? Fuck, do you not remember Zelenskyy's initial offering of peace terms?
and the moment they actually stop and declare peace, the US and EU will seek to tear the rest of their government apart and try to start a civil war, like they’ve done at least 15 times they got involved in a conflict in the last 23 years
If that were true, it would have been a good reason not to invade a neighbor.
and the moment they actually stop and declare peace, the US and EU will seek to tear the rest of their government apart and try to start a civil war
No, no they would NOT. The West hates Russia atm, but it’s a single entity that they can somewhat parley with. The absolute last thing the West wants is the worlds largest nuclear stockpile being split haphazardly between warring factions.
and the moment they actually stop and declare peace, the US and EU will seek to tear the rest of their government apart and try to start a civil war, like they’ve done at least 15 times they got involved in a conflict in the last 23 years
what
Dont get me wrong, Ukraine should have the right to defend itself and its borders from violent invasion. But IMO if they’d joined the EU prior, they wouldnt be scrambling to gather the monetary and political resources to defend itself, and the fact that the US and EU started giving them more than their entire GDP in weapons and aid merely weeks after kind of reeks of proxy war
What the fuck do you think Ukraine had been trying to do before the war? And 'reeks of proxy war'? Is that what you call it when a country is invaded without provocation and supported by countries which think that maybe returning to the 19th century way of doing things might not be great for international stability? And more than their entire GDP?
Jesus Christ. As someone who was accidentally correct once said
Ukraine is one of those messy topics nobody ill-informed should like touching tbh
Any predictions at this point are nothing more than wild speculation. Fuck's sake, Putin's personal caterer led a mercenary coup attempt on Moscow. How firm or how weak Putin's grip on power is in light of absurdities like that is an absolute mystery to all of us on here. Hell, might be a mystery to the powers that be, and even Putin himself.
The West attempted desperately to keep economic ties with Russia open until it was apparent that the war would not end quickly; the idea that the decisionmakers in our governments are drooling at the prospect of Russia falling apart and cratering trade for the next decade instead of desiring a quick return to normality is just... not in-line with the historic priorities of the post Cold-War West.
dont think it should exist to be an armed-to-the-teeth thorn in Russia’s side
I live right next to Russia, an hour's drive from the border. One thing many westerners don't seem to fully grasp is that Russia is a very blatant bully state. Always has been, for centuries. Russia as a state goes by the motto "might is right" and only understands the language of violence, or threat of violence. This is why all of us in the small states in the eastern parts of Europe are/were so eager to join NATO and arm ourselves to the teeth—it's the only way we could avoid being steamrolled by Russia's imperialist ambitions and incorporated into their corrupt authoritarian hegemony.
I don't like what US and by extension NATO has been doing in the world, either (project Gladius, South America, Cuba and all that shit), but Russian hegemony is much worse. At least we have freedom of press, LGBT+ rights and somewhat functioning democracy under the western hegemony. For small players it has always been the choice between joining one hegemony voluntarily or (attempted to) be incorporated into a worse hegemony violently, as we see with Ukraine now.
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