It’s like every time there’s a war everybody forgets how fucking long they take. WW2 took six years. The Vietnam War took almost 20 years, same with the Afghanistan War. Anybody expecting anything solid within the next couple years is delusional. Ukraine is in it for the long haul.
“We shouldn’t help the rape victim and they should hope that it’s over quickly. Also, it’s actually not rape, it’s a special sexual operation and they deserved it.” - Tankies
OHCHR estimates that between mid-April 2014 and 31 May 2016, at least 9,404 people, of which up to 2,000 are civilians, have been killed as a result of the conflict. The vast majority of civilian casualties, recorded on the territories controlled by the Government of Ukraine and on those controlled by armed groups, were caused by the indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, in violation of the international humanitarian law principle of distinction.
Na better believe Prigozhin, that guy never told a lie or said anything that was totally wrong.
You do realize that direction of the shelling wouldn’t be hard to determine? If you look at the side of a shelled building you know roughly which direction the shells are coming from. In your worldview OHCHR was duped by some elaborate conspiracy of repeated false flag attacks. That doesn’t even pass the sniff test. Also, why bring MH-15 into this? You cannot discredit my OHCHR source by bringing this up, what’s the connection there?
The OHCHR report you linked doesn’t state who bombed, from what I skimmed. But I’m sure you read it and can point me to such a finding?
Speaking of MH-15, who slaughtered people in Bucha? Which side is bombing shopping centres during the day and apartment buildings in the night? We all know that. And now you come with a source which does not establish that Ukraine bombed civilians and you want me to believe it wasn’t the Russian side which has a well-established pattern of doing the exact thing? In Chechnya, in Syria, in Afghanistan?
I’m not saying that you can’t – if the evidence is there, go ahead, post it. But actually post evidence and not what you decided was evidence without even reading half-way through the thing.
I don’t think I can go any more official than the OHCHR, and I don’t think I can convince you of your good vs evil narrative with any source. People got shelled, it’s obviously implied they got shelled by the other side, and no theory to the contrary is put forward in the report.
I’ll let you ponder this: This would be the first conflict in which one side commits all the war crimes. Even more curious, the side which commits no war crimes has a bunch of volunteer units literally using Nazi, SS and Bandera iconography. You know, the guys that marched hundreds of thousands of civilians into the woods and murdered them. Does that seem plausible to you?
Funny how if you’re against another endless war you’re a tankie and support Putin…
I’m neither a tankie nor I support Putin. But I also don’t support NATO and the Empire.
But just as a note, most “tankies” don’t support Russia and know Putin is a conservative capitalist. I mean he is the direct result of the dismantling of the USSR by internal revisionists (tsarists and capitalists) and the CIA.
But again, it’s the Iraq war all over again. And you libs are doing THE SAME THING. It’s hilarious.
There's a load of things I could say, but they would all be pointless, so I'm going to say this. It would be less depressing if you were actually being paid by the Russians.
EDIT: Which, you know, is not actually out of the question.
Me too. We take Putin out, return the USSR, and then we dismantle the far-right apparatus in Ukraine as well. We close all US military bases and shut down NATO.
We then impose on the US strict international laws to never have a military, to interfere or invade another nation again, or it’s dismantled and given to all 3rd world countries it fucked over the past 100 years.
I think you’re remembering incorrectly bro… After 9/11, if you didn’t support invading any vaguely Muslim country you were a traitor. Fucking libs on TV were cheering for killing Saddam and invading Iraq, dismissing any attempts to question why would that even make sense as weak-spined traitorous behaviour.
Also, how can you say that while you support a never ending war in Ukraine?
Is Russia imperialist? Yes. Is this invasion a tragedy? Yes. Did it happen, and will continue to happen for a long time in good part because of the US? Fuck yes as well.
I don’t support Russia invading or winning the war. I don’t support NATO breaking its promises and meddling in Eastern Europe propping up Nazis.
The US Empire is directly responsible for Putin, in the first place. And it’s now directly responsible for the extreme right in Ukraine.
What anyone who’s actually against war wants is for the US Empire to fall and NATO to be dismantled. For Putin to fall and the Russian people to have freedom again. For the Nazis in Ukraine to not have power anymore.
If you support sending billions in weapons to Ukraine (as fucking debt, Ukraine will be in debt to the US and Europe for centuries…), if you support war games in South Korea, Taiwan, if you complained when Biden left Afghanistan… you’re literally a war hawk.
You blathering fool. I’m not your bro and never will be.
When you see a school bully who fights a smaller kid who doesn’t want to give up his lunch money, what do you do? You are the kind of person shouting at the victim to comply to avoid any further bloodshed, right? You’re fucking filth. I think I even watched a Star Trek episode about your fucking kind, lol.
Just for your information: NATO has nothing to do with this. Other than being a scapegoat of course. Quite the opposite, if Ukraine was part of NATO, this war would never happened. Why do you think Poland and the Chech Rebublic were so eager to join it? NATO is a defense pact. But I know, people like you don’t care. NATO is the big boogie man you need to justify your political views.
And no, I don’t remember incorrectly. The Bush regime was republican. They faked evidence to attack Iraq. The were huge demonstations and turmoil Google the Dixie Chicks, listen to American Idiot. I’m not american. I’m german. We were one of the countries who were part of a so called “axis of evil” because we didn’t agree with the war. Shut the fuck up.
I was always pretty left leaning. Never liked US-Imperialism since I got 16 and realised Tom Clancy Novels were pretty one-sided. But if supporting ukraine means I’m a Hawk, so be it. All I know is, I don’t want to be on your side!
We were one of the countries who were part of a so called “axis of evil”
Slight correction, no, they didn’t go that far. We’re “Old Europe”.
It was also when they renamed French Fries to Freedom Fries to protest the French being, well, French, as if the French wouldn’t already be constantly doing that. (Meanwhile Belgium was hoping someone would notice them).
Lol. What a pathetic comment. Are you trying to imply it’s “left“ to sit back and let imperialistic dictators invade other countries?
You said it yourself. Putins war is imperialistic. Wow, if we had only a thing that would defer imperialistic Russia from attacking its neighbours. Oh, we have! NATO!
It is 2023. I am being called a tankie for opposing the escalation of a needless slaughter engineered by the western military industial complex.
It is 2003. I am being called a Saddam lover for opposing the escalation of a needless slaughter engineered by the western military industial complex.
It is 1969. I am being called a commie and probably also racial slurs for opposing the escalation of a needless slaughter engineered by the western military industial complex. manhattan
This channel is leftist but they aren’t communists, as far as I know.
Tldw: This war was completely avoidable. Had the US/NATO kept its promise to not expand eastward none of this would have happened. Even Biden said that 25 years ago. Americans groomed certain Ukrainians for political office, and prevented others from running. There was an opportunity to end the war last year on somewhat decent terms for Ukraine, but Boris Johnson rushed in to stop it from happening, promising massive support. But war exhaustion has caught up and Ukraine is running out of people, and western leaders are already starting to call for the end of the war — except this time it will be on russias terms and Ukraine is going to get fucked. Big western capitalists have had their fingers in this pie because there’s a lot of money to be made in the country. That’s it.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that Putins invasion was a horrific, imperialist move. Any commie you see protesting the war isn’t doing it because they support Russia (Russia is a capitalist country), they’re doing it because they don’t support NATO. We are often the makers of our own enemies here in the west. Viet Cong, Taliban, ISIS, and Russia were all created or shaped by western (mainly US) policies.
Thanks I’ll watch it when I’m home from work. Right now it looks like it’s just some guy talking, whereas the video I linked only talks about things that are public knowledge. I haven’t watched yours yet though.
You didn’t watch the video did you? They don’t mention anything that
All you liberals give cons a lot of shit for being bloodthirsty war hawks but you froth at the mouth at the thought of war too. You’ll look at situations like what’s happening in Gabon and Niger, say “wow the French are fucked and they kind of deserve it for what they did to those countries”, and then develop an amazing blind spot for western imperialism in Eastern Europe.
Obviously this war shouldn’t have happened. Obviously Putin is an asshole. Obviously what’s happening in Ukraine needs to be stopped.
Honest question, but how many times a day do you think about events and try to fit them into one of these two categories? At what point do you start using these terms interchangeably for good and evil?
These days, I try to skip posts from people who crossed that line. Left, right or centre. If someone has limited their mental capacity to binary decisions, it’s not worth arguing with them, because the answer to everything will always be “my team”.
It was never supposed to turn into a real war. They wanted to assassinate Zelenskyy put some Russian plant in as president, annex some more land and call it a night. Obviously Zelenskyy survived and the rest is history.
I always take a peek at the comment history when I see things like this. And this guy basically just woke up to say things like this in one specific thread.
I’m no longer a mod of anything these days, but if I had a mod-hammer I’d send you into the next galaxy.
To say the truth. The Us is collapsing and soon their Nazi vassals in Ukraine and Isntreal will also suffer a complete and utter collapse (god willing)
Lol literally every single line of that post is absolutely nonsense.
The US is on its last legs though.
Lol in what universe? By way metric is the most powerful nation in the world limping along?
It badly needed this win.
If we badly needed a win we wouldn’t be sending 30+ year-old surplus gear. Ukraine would have F-35s instead of the air force trying to pawn off A-10s because we’re retiring them and don’t want to break them down.
The US falls before Putin dies.
Unless he’s a Highlander there’s no fucking chance.
Not the correct response to say to those who hold the purse strings to your war chest. Especially one particular country whose political tide can turn and drown you.
Did I read the same article as everyone else? I don’t get where “failed offensive” is coming from. It was western media that created the impression of an impending counter-offensive that would all but end the war, not anything from Ukraine’s armed forces as far as I know.
Since launching a much-vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia’s main defences," … NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN that Ukrainian commanders deserved the benefit of the doubt. 'Ukrainians have exceeded expectations again and again," he said. “We need to trust them. We advise, we help, we support. But… it is the Ukrainians that have to make those decisions.”
This doesn’t sound like a “failed” offensive to me. The “much-vaunted” part came from the West, not Ukraine. It sounds to me like western officials got themselves psyched up based on nothing and are now whining about it. So like, yeah, critics of the slow counteroffensive, shut up. You sound as ridiculous as the people who acted like Kyiv would be taken by March 2022.
You sound as ridiculous as the people who acted like Kyiv would be taken by March 2022
I mean, in that case Russia was the much superior force on paper, and it didn’t happen because they’re more incompetent than was thought possible for anyone. I think you make a good point but this isn’t a great comparison.
Given the substantial losses of men and equipment and the meagre gains I do think it is safe to assume that the counteroffensive does not go as well as Kiev has hoped for.
Totally – but I think in the west, people were conditioned to expect breakneck speeds similar to the initial invasion and push towards Kyiv by Russian forces or the rapid advance last year of Ukrainian troops that pushed out Russians from Kyiv suburbs and northeastern Ukraine.
In my mind, a “failure” would mean that they gained nothing – not even a few small villages.
We’re watching this conflict unfold from a million miles away, how could you possibly know that they’ve lost most of their combat capability? That wasn’t mentioned in the article. If the article is paywalled for you, I was able to read it entirely with Firefx’s easy-read button.
You should check out Telegram and Youtube, you have numerous videos and photos of destroyed Ukrainian armor, drone strikes on radars and artillery, while analysts count everything. The brigades were already at most 50% of capacity before the offensive, but many have been rendered combat ineffective since, meaning there are too many casualties to be able to continue operations, so the reserve brigades (many of which were meant to exploit the breakthrough if it succeeded) have been rotated in already. In short, Ukraine broke its teeth on the screening line so now they are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the front. After the offensive stalls for good and the Rasputitsa begins, Russia will most likely begin its own offensive, which will be disastrous for Ukraine.
You should check out Telegram and Youtube, you have numerous videos and photos of destroyed Ukrainian armor, drone strikes on radars and artillery, while analysts count everything.
I used to in the first few months of the invasion, but I decided I’d only try to keep up with any significant developments (like if a city changes hands or something new happens, like a particularly brazen drone strike) for the sake of my own mental health.
The brigades were already at most 50% of capacity before the offensive,
Edit: unsubbed from History Legends after noticing a pattern of “anti-woke” comments from him and his weird view of colonialism (inferring that African countries shouldn’t ask for reparations unless Arab countries are willing to do the same for Spain)
In terms of its goals, Kyiv has consistently said that it wants to recapture all of the territory controlled by Russia. In an address earlier this year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that included Crimea.
“It is not an intention, it is our land. Crimea is our sea and our mountains,” Zelensky said.
In September 2022, in his only programmatic paper so far, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Lieutenant General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi offered only a rough sketch of how a Ukrainian counteroffensive might look. In the paper, he spoke of “several resolute, ideally simultaneous counterattacks.” One strategically crucial target Zaluzhnyi mentioned was the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. In Kyiv, all agree this is the main direction Ukraine should focus its efforts. But they are also expecting surprises and deceptive maneuvers. Many, however, doubt Ukraine has enough equipment and fighting power to regain the peninsula.
Even western media tried to downplay it casting doubt from the beginning but the point I highlight is undeniably the planned goal was not achieved and it wont be achieved. Everyone would call that a failure.
But even the fucking Nazis can’t agree on their own narrative and they’re just coping now
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the counteroffensive was “slower than desired”, without getting too specific. Ukraine says it has recaptured a cluster of villages in operations that liberated 130 square km (50 square miles) in the south, but this is a small percentage of the total territory held by Russia.
The presence of Neo-Nazis within a nation’s borders does not give another country just cause to invade unilaterally. The idea that, because Ukraine has Neo Nazis and incorporated groups like Azov into its formal military structure, it makes the Russian invasion justified, is to implicitly accept that bigger, more powerful countries are entitled to “spheres of influence” and thus should be able to unilaterally intervene in their neighbour’s politics when it suits them.
Ukrainians aren’t particularly more supportive of Neo-Nazis than any other white-dominant nation in Europe – it was just an excuse by Russia to invade.
billions of dollars of western equipment and they recaptured a dozen villages.
The Russians have the parts of Ukraine they want and have fortified heavily which leads my analysis of the situation to be that Ukraine recapturing the taken area is not realistic and their goal of getting Crimea on top of that to be completely delusional
Ukraine needs to get within artillery range of certain major logistical hubs to hamper Russian reinforcement and supply via the southern corridor. And it is close, now. The Russian administrators of Melitopol have already abandoned the place.
With ATACMS, this would have been easier, fyi.
Only people who don’t understand the situation repeat the sort of thing you are claiming.
Furthermore, the US aid to Ukraine was mostly stuff that was destined to be decommissioned. The “billions of dollars” is on paper, not in fact. Nothing Ukraine is receiving from the USA is current gen or in use by the US and therefore isn’t diminishing the US armed forces. Arguably it’s actually increasing US strength, since the USA is now ramping up artillery shell production.
From a strategic standpoint, destroying the Russian military (estimated around 50% of Russia’s MBTs and Airforce) in exchange for stuff you weren’t going to use anyway is a bargain.
no one wants them to hit those places with artillery if the Ukrainians start using American artillery on Russian cities the Americans will have kittens
Russia has nuclear weapons which means there is a line that can’t be crossed with regard to dealings with them
It’s all about plausible deniability. The US didn’t want to arm them with anything that could reach Moscow and hit Russian territory in general, but the Ukrainians have developed the ability to do so on their own, so now US officials I think are more willing to discuss these things, since it can’t be directly traced to them (since now Russia can’t prove it was specifically American armaments or equipment used whenever it gets hit inside it’s territory).
I thought you were talking about artillery. Those drones are just repurposed consumer drones fitted with explosives they aren’t on the scale needed to make a major difference
Nope. Just to be sure I went back and checked my initial wording, and I can see why you thought I meant artillery. I should have specified that they are using their own domestically developed military equipment to strike targets within Russia, which could theoretically allow them plausible deniability to then use a couple of Western-supplied artillery, assuming they could do it in such a way that Russia wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a drone, IED, or proper artillery.
These weapons are the kind of thing the Ukrainians have developed to “retaliate” against random civilian housing blocks whenever Russia craters a command center. They’re basically modern V1/V2 rockets “This will terrify the russian population into submission!!”
How many Russian civilians has Ukraine “indiscriminately killed”, compared to Russia’s “collateral damage” when they target “Ukranian command centers”.
Reading this sort of abject nonsense on a day where a Ukranian market was hit with an S300, killing.a minimum 16 people, or when Russia spent the whole winter trying to freeze Ukrainians to death, or bombs cafés where authors and journalists are known to congregate…
You know what, just fuck you, you genocidal apologist. And fuck Russia, nation of barbarians.
You do realize that increasing us strength and military spending are bad things right? That just means more death and misery to thr world in general and US residents aslo?
This is revisionist. It was clear that Russia’s military objectives in invading the rest of the country last year were to remove Zelensky and put back a friendly government to Moscow. They failed, and now are falling back on what was always the more pragmatic and “reasonable” war goal of holding the pre-February 2022 lines of control + what they still have now. But, now that an all-out state of war exists between Ukraine and Russia, it’s “allowable” in the eyes of the West for Ukraine to try and regain all of its internationally-recognized territory in a way that it wasn’t before.
…have fortified heavily which leads my analysis of the situation to be that Ukraine recapturing the taken area is not realistic and their goal of getting Crimea on top of that to be completely delusional
I don’t mean to deride your analysis, but I also do wonder how much analysis some random Hexbear user can really make. I mean, I can look at maps of assessed control from the ISW and I hear about what goes down in some of the more nationalist Russian telegram channels but I deliberately try to avoid anything that makes me sound knowledgeable in military strategy and tactics.
I will say, that given the general attitude here that we want choices and decisions to be taken that reduce the fighting and scale of death, Ukraine’s approach of incrementally retaking villages instead of throwing everything it’s got in a mad rush to break Russian lines shouldn’t be criticized.
This is revisionist. It was clear that Russia’s military objectives in invading the rest of the country last year were to remove Zelensky and put back a friendly government to Moscow. They failed, and now are falling back on what was always the more pragmatic and “reasonable” war goal of holding the pre-February 2022 lines of control + what they still have now. But, now that an all-out state of war exists between Ukraine and Russia, it’s “allowable” in the eyes of the West for Ukraine to try and regain all of its internationally-recognized territory in a way that it wasn’t before
This whole time the Russians have been talking about wanting the east exclusively the early rush to kiev was consistent with the stated aim of forcing Ukraine to surrender early into the war
I will say, that given the general attitude here that we want choices and decisions to be taken that reduce the fighting and scale of death, Ukraine’s approach of incrementally retaking villages instead of throwing everything it’s got in a mad rush to break Russian lines shouldn’t be criticized.
Even the Ukrainians are talking in that article about how hard it is to breach the Russian defences. The Ukrainians have thrown everything they had in a mad rush to break the Russian lines and only succeeded at retaking a dozen villages. It is ridiculous to assume the side with less soldiers, lacking air superiority, and ran by the most corrupt nation in Europe with vast amounts of support being resold by Ukrainian generals has any chance of defeating the larger power. Early in the war Ukraine had an advantage as it’s soldiers had in violation of the Minsk treaty been fighting in Eastern Ukraine for the last 8 years so were more militarily experienced now Russia has been fighting for a while they will have worked out much of the issues of their organisation
This whole time the Russians have been talking about wanting the east exclusively the early rush to Kiev was consistent with the stated aim of forcing Ukraine to surrender early into the war
The “special military operation” to Denazify Ukraine was not intended to be limited solely to the East. Russia tried to replicate the US operation in Iraq, and had they been successful, they’d be in a very similar position to the US after toppling both Iraqi and Afghan leadership relatively quickly, stuck propping up government with limited popular support. Also, what about everything about NATO’s eastward expansion and Ukraine’s prospective membership? That has nothing to do with injustices against Russian-speaking people.
The Ukrainians have thrown everything they had in a mad rush to break the Russian lines and only succeeded at retaking a dozen villages.
This is literally the opposite of what the article says: “Some [Western analysts] faulted Ukraine’s strategy, including accusing it of concentrating its forces in the wrong places.” Sounds to me like they emphatically NOT making a rush at the targets the West wants them to.
8 years so were more militarily experienced now Russia has been fighting for a while they will have worked out much of the issues of their organisation
Right, just like how that Ukrainian counteroffensive is gonna start any day now… Its warfare. Neither side is honest about their operations, and neither side can afford to be honest about their battle plans, tactics, and strategies in order to actually make use of any of them. When Russia invaded the rest of the country, it was their modernized army that was gonna make quick work of the smaller weaker Ukrainian army. Even NATO was like “uh yeah we expect a protracted guerilla war after a quick Russian victory should Russia actually invade”.
For the record, I wasn’t sure if Russia would actually invade, despite all the classic rhetoric that came from the Kremlin the year beforehand.
This is why you should not defederate hexbear. Good, clean, comment. Just block the troublemakers (it’s about 60 of them) and the threads automatically look more cogent.
NATO is a defensive pact to protect nations from russian aggression, or other states also of course. Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Plenty of geopolitical experts have discussed how financial support of Ukraine is the best investment when it comes to weakening the Russian military. Which makes them less of a threat to NATO
Nice argument, however the population supported it:
According to a Gallup poll conducted in March and April 2012, a survey involving 1,000 Libyans showed 75% of Libyans were in favor of the NATO intervention, compared to 22% who were opposed.[1] A post-war Orb International poll involving 1,249 Libyans found broad support for the intervention, with 85% of Libyans saying that they strongly supported the action taken to remove the Ghadafi regime.[2]
That is a ridiculous argument and you know it, unless your idealism has blinded you. “Something bad happened later so something good can’t have happened before”
Does that mean the Iraq invasion was good? No. However don’t remove all nuance from a discussion about helping the population overthrow a dictatorship, and the potential consequences of that action, just to attempt a cheap shot.
Gaddafi had his problems but sol massively improved under him. Given we back plenty of much worse dictatorships, it wasn’t done for altruistic reasons. It was done because he was giving a cut of the wealth to the masses instead of to neocolonial powers. Incidentally, improving sol and education like Gaddafi was doing tend to trend to democratic transitions over time.
The open air slave markets were a direct result of the intervention. The US backed regime didn’t have a democratic mandate and didn’t have Gaddafi’s entrenched power structures and collapsed.
It was done because he was giving a cut of the wealth to the masses instead of to neocolonial powers
No, a no fly zone was instated because Gaddafi was ordering air strikes on his own citizens, to the extent that his own representative to the UN asked for the no fly zone:
21 February 2011: Libyan deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Ibrahim Dabbashi called “on the UN to impose a no-fly zone on all of Tripoli to cut off all supplies of arms and mercenaries to the regime.”
Yes, the US which is the largest drone striker in the world and where it is explicitly legal for the president to kill US citizens without trial went in with a moral imperative because of air strikes.
Even if the Spanish sabotaged the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin wasn’t made up, and WMD were in Iraq, the cassi belle are not the structural reasons why the invasions happened. You’re being intentionally credulous because you think US empire benefits you. It doesn’t.
So did you actually read those links lmao? Because if you did you have to acknowledge you were wrong about what you’ve said in this thread and I was mostly correct according to your links.
It is not an alliance against the Russian federation. It was an alliance against the ussr. After that it became a rogue army for enforcing us hegemony. Every time it has been used it was to make the world worse. This mercenary core was originally made of nazi generals with nazi soldiers as well. So it really boggles the mind that anyone thinks they could be good for the world.
NATO is a defensive pact to protect nations from russian aggression
NATO is a legacy of the Cold War that was aimless until the Russian invasion lol. The Soviet Union even tried to join NATO when it was first talked about and was rebuffed (and you can’t say it’s because “muh democracy,” as Greece, Turkey, and Portugal - a literal fascist state until 1974 - have all been or are authoritarian states at various points in their NATO memberships).
Plenty of geopolitical experts have discussed how financial support of Ukraine is the best investment when it comes to weakening the Russian military.
Plenty also argued from the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion into eastern Europe would antagonize Russia.
Yeah it’s pretty clear you’re not trying to have a reasonable discussion when you mention that the USSR wanted to join NATO. That was an attempt to undermine the defensive pact by using it’s own rules about inter-member conflicts against it.
One of the core strengths of NATO is that if a country is invaded then the other countries can’t just vote to kick that state out. There is no mechanism to remove another country from the group, by design. So you are either uninformed or deliberately misrepresenting it when you discuss issues with certain members during their membership
Complete nothingburger. What military capability do the Baltic states bring? Isolated geographical position, small countries with small armies and small economies.
So it’s not a factor in the first place. But even if it was, Ukraine handily outranks Poland when it comes to providing capability. They have an extensive (largely state-owned btw) arms industry, very capable engineers, and, in case you haven’t noticed, fighting spirit.
Last but not least they’re punching above their weight in Eurovision. Oh wait that was EU accession, not NATO.
Isolated geographical position, small countries with small armies and small economies.
worse than that what they bring to an alliance is pretty much no extra money or anything else but also a significantly higher chance of getting into a war
frankly I’m of the opinions that everything east of Germany is a pretty cheeky imposition on Russias traditional standing in Europe. You can’t just break all the old rules for operating in Europe and not expect consequences
Traditional standing, yes, as colonial empire. It may be cheeky but why would it be bad standing up against that?
You know what Russia could have done to prevent NATO expansion? Not invade Moldova, not invade Georgia, and deal with Chechnya in a manner that doesn’t smell of genocide. Make sure that Eastern Europe doesn’t feel threatened so that they don’t feel the need to join NATO. Of course the Baltics, Poland, etc, joined, they don’t want to repeat the experience of being a Russian colony.
And just for the record no I’m not actually a fan of NATO, or better put the US being part of the whole shebang. Only positive thing about that is that without Europe in the mix the yanks would likely be even worse.
they have that standing because they have the guns. They still have the guns so they still have the standing
those rules don’t just exist for no reason they are to prevent war between the powers in Europe break those rules and you risk war. It doesn’t matter what the Balkans and Poland think they don’t have nuclear weapons
Oh yes Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine not being in NATO totally prevented war. How could I forget.
It doesn’t matter what the Balkans and Poland think
You’re a hexbear, so presumably self-identify as being on the left. Which then leads me to the question of WTF are you pushing talking points of geopolitical realists, “there are players and there are chess pieces”.
It very much matters what those states think because, as sovereign states, they enjoy freedom of alliance. To deny that means that you think it is all nice and proper for Russia to still treat them as colonies.
Go on, write a letter to an imaginary 6yold niece of yours in Mariopol explaining why it’s better that she lives in a mafia-run police state, than for Ukraine to decide its own fate.
Also, states generally refuse to be poker chips, and they have all right to do so. Thus, by insisting that they be, you invariably create conflict.
Lmao you think there are major differences in qol between two neoliberal hellscapes. Actually that’s not fair. Ukraine has faired even worse since the undemocratic dissolution of the USSR.
It very much matters what those states think because, as sovereign states, they enjoy freedom of alliance
I don’t want to be allied with them because they bring nothing to an alliance except liability.
Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine not being in NATO prevented war between Russia and America, Britain, and France. And that is the big war that can’t be allowed to happen
this isn’t a new phenomenon we are talking about the great game of empire and there are very good reasons why it was always the conventional wisdom to not mess with Russia over eastern Europe. If they are sovereign states then let them be sovereign states and deal with problems on their own
the great game of empire and there are very good reasons why it was always the conventional wisdom
That wisdom is called appeasement and has failed again and again. Empires will empire, if you give them a finger they’ll wait for a bit and then take an arm.
You seem to be completely realism-pilled. I have my issues with Kraut but watch this, it’s good stuff.
If they are sovereign states then let them be sovereign states and deal with problems on their own
If they are unemployed and homeless then let them be independent and deal with problems on their own. The fuck. And you call yourself a leftist.
That wisdom is called appeasement and has failed again and again. Empires will empire, if you give them a finger they’ll wait for a bit and then take an arm.
I agree, the US should be forcibly disbanded by an international peacekeeping force after the last two centuries of imperialism and genocide. No point in waiting for us to get worse, we need to be stopped now.
You joke (I think) but you actually illustrate why so many people are supporting Ukraine. The reaction of a lot of people to “the US should be forcibly disbanded by an international peacekeeping force” would be one of indignation and fury at the suggestion that foreign powers should violate one’s home and put their loved ones in danger in order to satisfy global political objectives.
Uhh given the last eight years of ethnic cleansing in the Donbas region by our coup regime in Ukraine, it’s really a better example of why so mamy countries around the world are supporting the russian federation here.
That wisdom is called appeasement and has failed again and again. Empires will empire, if you give them a finger they’ll wait for a bit and then take an arm.
No it’s called a sphere of influence and it’s just playing by the old cold war rules.
If they are unemployed and homeless then let them be independent and deal with problems on their own. The fuck.
that video is an hour and a half long. You’ve watched it and everything you said so far hasn’t been anything I haven’t heard before or consider worth hearing
Why should we still play the old war game? How do realists decide which country is a poker chip and which is a player (one area where US and European realists differ btw: In the European view, Russia is not a player)? What do you do if a country doesn’t want to be a poker chip? Can you really ignore internal forces, can it all be boiled down to power politics? Why stick to a theory that was completely blind-sided by the end of the cold war and after that argued to subsidise the east so that it can continue?
we play the old game for the same reason we started in the first place because the major powers have the ability to demand concessions because of the power of their militaries and economies.
Russia is a player because it has a vast army and nuclear weapons
if Ukraine wants to not do as they are told by Russia they are more than welcome to fight them. America and the other powers involving themselves in that fight risks major war however also it has proved ruinously expensive to the actual populations of those countries.
Internal politics only matter if they are backed up by something
this theory wasn’t blindsided by the end of the cold war. At the end of the cold war Russia was weak from crisis (incidentally largely because the Ukrainian local government so badly fucked up running a power plant and the early stages of a disaster that all the money in the soviet union was required to clean up the mess) anyway when Russia was weak and eating itself they couldn’t enforce the rights they had because of their strength now they are strong again they can
It was western media that created the impression of an impending counter-offensive that would all but end the war, not anything from Ukraine’s armed forces as far as I know.
Or from NATO generals. At least not as an overall theme, or after actually understanding the situation on the ground.
I’d say western media recalled the likes of Operation Desert storm, generally “it’s not a war but a drubbing” NATO operations, then saw the Kharkiv counter-offensive, missed that the fast mechanised advance was preceded by slogging advances until a breakthrough was achieved, and then expected the same thing to happen against the Surovikin line. Ukraine simply does not have the capacity to employ NATO offensive doctrine, more or less “hit the opposing force so hard in the air that they’ll find themselves fighting a land war against air superiority on their whole territory”.
And the Surovikin line which wasn’t even the main obstacle as now transpired Russians had positions in literally every single forest belt parallel to the trenches visible from space. And mines, mines literally everywhere, Ukraine turned towards IR imagining to figure out where to best go through them (mines heat up in the sun and are then very visible at dusk).
Russia, of course, also announced the offensive failed the day it started but that was to be expected.
Could be because the dominant narrative is just people (mostly Americans) cheering for more men, women, and children to be forced into the meat grinder by the thousands, just so they (who are cheering from safety on the other side of the world) can feed their twisted sense of justice and pro-American/NATO and “freedom”/“democracy” delusions.
I don’t know anyone cheering for people to die. Everyone I know that supports Ukraine does so because they feel for the victims of the missiles launched by Russia at schools and homes.
Your explanation seems very emotionally charged, which I understand. Can you give anything more concrete? I, and many others in this thread, are very out of the loop.
Everyone I know that supports Ukraine does so because they feel for the victims of the missiles launched by Russia at schools and homes.
What does that support look like?
I, and many others in this thread, are very out of the loop.
Again, I have a hard time believing this is true. This is a war. People die by the hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, in wars. Providing uncritical support (as most liberals and “Slava Ukraine” types do) for any side in a war is still encouraging more deaths on all sides of the conflict. It is not a Marvel movie or gritty political sci-fi thriller that so many people seem to think it is.
The longer the war goes on, the more people will die or be displaced, and the more money from working class people will get funneled into the military industrial complex. Nobody outside of the MIC is benefitting from the death and despair of this war.
Most discussions about the conflict outside of leftist spaces is just liberals and conservatives fantasizing about Russia getting weaker (i.e., its people dying) and America/NATO/“freedom” getting stronger. The rare person will acknowledge that Ukrainian men must die for the latter to be true, but the reality of those deaths is often minimized or even celebrated. As well, anyone who dissents is typically accused of being pro-Russia, a bot, or a paid shill.
Or click on any new thread and see all the highly rated comments like this, lusting for further destruction
It took like two minutes to find these examples, and there’s countless more on lemmy, reddit, and the like. It’s almost undoubtably worse on Twitter or Facebook too shrug-outta-hecks
The support looks like donating supplies to aid the victims of the bombings.
Yes, people are dying and I don’t doubt that there are internet idiots enjoying “carnage”, but I’m still not hearing what else you think people should be doing. Are you suggesting that Ukraine should surrender? Are you saying Russia should stop? Maybe that everyone should stop supporting the Ukrainian government until they sort this out between themselves? What are you talking about? You’ve found examples of unreasonable people with unreasonable stances, but please provide useful information to those of us that touch grass.
I have the feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m referring to comments like this (and god forbid you see a discussion about the war on reddit, where they make up the majority and get the most updoots and golds from kind strangers!!!) who thirst for bloodshed; who’ve been propagandized to think they will benefit from continued bloodshed; and revel in the comfort of knowing they will never experience the violence they wish upon the people of Ukraine and Russia
Haha, you think I’m gonna defend nazis? Nah, they were worse than the soviets, but not by much. You tankied are about equivalent to neo nazis in my book
Please learn reading comprehension in regards the article in question. Or to my message. You seem to have trouble understanding at least one of the two
I don’t like being lied about. I assume it’s you not understanding either what I wrote or the article. Or you just don’t care and I’m just feeding a troll
Gaslighting is when someone shows you your own copy and pasted words and then tells you that an article is a relevant reply to your statement.
You’re a fucking baby. If you can’t engage with something so basic without having a tantrum and pulling reddit debatebro cliches out of a hat then why the fuck are you still here? I told you to act like you gave a shit or shut the fuck up. Why do you refuse both?
This is literally the gaslighter tactic. The moment you call out the behavior you’re framed as the unstable one. I think I’ve made it clear that you’re either wrong about the meaning of my words or you’re actively lying about them, which I think is the most probable here as you keep being a POS about all of this. If you think there is a literal one-to-one correlation between the article and my words, you could’ve shown it to me hours ago. You didn’t. I did read the article, it’s not there. You keep pushing your bullshit without elaborating, so yeah, you’re a troll.
One last try before I block you and go with my day, this is not productive at all.
Gaslighting is when you make someone question their own senses. I quoted your exact words to you.
Stop draping yourself in the cloak of abuse and mental health issues just because you’re a fucking lazy idiot who wants an easy way out of being criticized for your nazi propaganda talking points.
It’s really fucking gross, you should be ashamed of yourself and fuck you.
Oh no what will I do without your continued petulant intransigence and mocking of abuse victims
Thank goodness you made a dramatic pronouncement like that instead of just fucking off hours ago like I suggested. Imagine being the main character and not having a mic drop.
“My terminally online movement is not full of fascists and useful idiots parroting fascist propaganda because of, uhm, history” Yes, tell me again about the freikorps while every day I see another hazoid being besties with Nazis, or being a fascist themselves.
I don’t know if you’re a fascist, I’m currently not interested enough to go checking.
how you call me terminally online
Because you’re on Lemmy defending legacy of a pejorative identifier when confronted with the fact that the modern online tankie community has produced a number of fascist-aligned notable persons over the last years, and keeps spreading and regurgitating fascist propaganda because of the common alignment against the West.
The history is important. In this conversation, history is irrelevant. Stop making it about your honor
“Please stop pointing out we’re friends with fascists, it hurts our feefees. Don’t you know that muh history means I’m very cool and honorable despite being an internet warrior”.
You’re one step removed from a nationalist. Except you’re feeding your insecurity with a different flavour of a myth.
You’re not beating the allegations, you’re treating this the same way a nationalist would. If you don’t see the irrelevance of historical anecdotes here, well, I guess that explains why you’re a tankie.
Haz, Maupin, Dore and all their sphere are fascist. One guy literally went through being an “anti-imperialist” tankie to going to Tucker Carlson and talking about how wokeness is destroying West or something. Even in comments here I see tankies gladly buying and spreading Russian bullshit about Ukrainians being Nazis. Or how when I recently mentioned Russia making genocidal policies against trans people, a lot of people from a tankie sub began whataboutisming me about that. The fact that you totally ignored my larger point (tankie community producing fascists), which you apparently know about and “dunk all the time” on. The fact that you tried to deflect from that by bringing up 50-years-old historical anecdotes which are irrelevant to this particular context. It’s in the same vein as when Israel tries to deflect from accusation of fascism and apartheid by bringing up antisemitism and Holocaust. Of course, what Israel does is much worse than being a breeding ground for online fascists, but the mechanism of deflection here is similar. Don’t try to strawman me on this. No matter which honorable or victimized identity you use, this remains a deflection.
You really need to start using real words for things. You are using “tankie” to describe everything under the sun right now and I literally have no idea what you’re saying anymore.
I’ve actually been extremely consistent with my usage of the term throughout this conversation. The people I’m talking to keep using it for everyone under the sun, that’s true. From a member of a third-world communist party 50 years ago to themselves to Joseph Stalin. My focus is currently on the online English-speaking community/ies of the last 5-10 years who would fit the term
Who else would we talk about in a Lemmy conversation about people on Lemmy supporting Russia? I’ve been telling you the Vietnamese don’t matter in this context from the very beginning.
EDIT: I’ve made myself clear what I was talking about. The context was there, you were the first one to bring up the 20th century people. I could take some responsibility as the term is vague, but too many of you went for the dunks and posturing, making up shit about what I meant on the fly. The problem that truth here is relative and if enough of you decide that is what happened, whatever context I had in mind wouldn’t matter. It’s easy to be cynical about the whole interaction for both of us. Also good for the ego, as being wrong hurts and we all know it. I’m off to bed, will see if you add something else here later. It wasn’t nice to talk to you, bye.
Pretend I’m talking about all communists. If I wanted to do so, I would use the term “communists”. But I don’t see a reason to attack the group I myself belong to
Oh, which successful communists are you talking about?
Also, double genocide theory being holocaust trivialization still applies as it refers to calling the USSR fascist, if you think it is an irrelevant insuniation take it up with the Jewish holocaust scholars.
As I said to the person below, learn reading comprehension or fuck off. I don’t want to engage in a conversation when I’m repeatedly being gaslit on what I said.
It’s impossible to insult successful communists, as there are none. Unless you lower your bar enough to ignore glaring issues like ethnic cleansing of “unloyal” peoples and recreation of the capitalist mode of production.
I’m not interested in the “no U” back-and-forth. If you want to defend online tankie community producing prominent fascists, then do so without deflecting. If you don’t, then stop acting indignant
I didn’t mention Holocaust anywhere you paranoid fuck. Stop deflecting. If you link the double genocide thing once more I will assume you’re just here to defend the resettlements. Which kinda proves my point.
Do you have anything to say about the prominent online fascists or fascist Russia apologists coming from the tankie community, some still publicly identifying as tankies?
I literally lost ancestors to the holocaust. Stop carrying water for fascists by equating the people who ended the holocaust to them. You’re doing work to trivialize the holocaust, according to literally every prominent Jewish historian who studied the holocaust and has spoken about double genocide theory. This is literally a mainstream position outside of communist circles.
Either learn to prioritize not giving the nazis ammo over your desire to be a mini-mcCarthy or learn what the actual differences between communism and fascism are instead of relying on propaganda that benefits the nazis.
Fuck off you gaslighting fascist pig, losing ancestors to Holocaust doesn’t prevent you from being a fascist POS which you proved enough to me already. I have zero respect for you as you keep lying about my words without a pause and kept deflecting criticisms of fascist behavior and ethnic cleansings by deceptively framing my position as something it is not. Which is the same egregious thing fascist supporters of Israeli apartheid are known for. Fuck off and go deport Kalmyks or whatever your favourite hobby is
I am not lying about your words. I am telling you that equating communists and fascists (which you have repeatedly done) is incorrect, and holocaust trivialization, according to mainstream liberal historians, which you could literally look up right now instead of continuing to show your own ass and be incredibly offensive to a communist organizer who lost family to the fucking holocaust.
Is double genocide theory in the room with us now? Why do you keep bringing this irrelevant shit up? How do some fucks equivocating USSR and Nazi Germany relate to the repackaged Russian fascist propaganda I see coming daily from the tankie community? How does it justify the defense of ethnic cleansing you’ve engaged in this conversation? A whole bunch of people sharing community with you came out of woodwork to lie about me the moment I mention the really bad fucking things I see daily among people like you. You all lie, you reframe my words into something entirely different, you keep bringing stuff from time periods completely unrelated to the fucked up shit I see in front of me. My original message had nothing to do with neither USSR nor Nazi Germany, it’s you who decided to push the conversation towards “successful communists” and the DGT. I see the same fascist tactics of deflection as I’d see from Nazis or Israel apartheid supporters. “Oh, you’ve criticized our fascist behavior? But we’ve suffered greatly from Nazis, so it’s you who’s the real fascist actually”. Your offense should be directed towards yourself internalizing fascist tactics and not me calling you out on them.
Is double genocide theory in the room with us now?
Yes, you repeatedly are equating communists with fascists which is the main rhetoric it uses to advance holocaust trivialization, you ass.
How does it justify the defense of ethnic cleansing you’ve engaged in this conversation?
Didn’t you just accuse me of gaslighting?
Lmao.
repackaged Russian fascist propaganda I see coming daily from the tankie community?
You need to open a history book specialized in how fascist systems exist and operate. Russia is literally just a belligerent bourgeois democracy. Putin is beholden to the oligarchs, a word for capitalists with an orientalist connotation. There is not the transition from primarily extracting increases of productivity from abstract surplus labor value to concrete labor value which marks fascism economically.
What “tankie community” lol? There isn’t a unified one. Do you mean us, who generally oppose the war and want a negotiated peace so Ukraine stops losing the war so expensively (in blood of conscripts)?
There’s no equating, I specified which things I have issues with. You’ve been deflecting from those things by bringing up Holocaust, which is a tactic used by fascists. Also saying that there are prominent fascists who call themselves tankies or communists is not related to Holocaust in any way. The only way you can link it is by malicious use of the aforementioned tactic.
defense of ethnic cleansing
When I bring up ethnic cleansings done by USSR and the first thing you do is deflecting by lying that I said they were equal to Holocaust, this is defense of ethnic cleansing. When called out on that, you continued to do so, so I can’t write it off as you being unaware of what you were doing. The moment you called me out on the thing you thought I was doing, I corrected you. When you got called out, you just ignored it and kept doing the same thing.
Russia is just a […] democracy
Thank you for verifying you don’t know shit. Trivializing fascism we go.
You need to open a history book specialized in how fascist systems exist and operate.
Generally it’s a bad idea to hinge the whole question of whether a country is fascist on a single esoteric economic factor. Which part are you talking about: the slave labor? the war economy? You’re a bit word salad-y there.
What “tankie community” lol?
The one which decided to come out on me with your fascist deflections. Or the same which keep calling Ukrainians Nazis, following the same propaganda tactic used in the War on Terror. The same from which fascists like Haz, Maupin, and Hinkle sprouted and got popular in. Or the same which tried to do whataboutism when I brought up Russian genocidal policies on trans people around a month ago. Those which pretend that created via a Nazi coup DNR is actually an embattled Russian minority defending itself and not a blatant puppet-state. The one that tried to justify Russian invasion to me countless of times, the one that parroted Russian narratives on Bucha. What I’m doing here is basically describing my every second interaction with tankies to you.
Obviously there’s not a single community, but there are large nodes, and even if there were none, this wouldn’t mean the patterns of behavior can’t be criticized.
Lmao new tagline dropped.
No one on hexbear supports Russia, it’s a neoliberal hellscape that’s somehow even worse than the us on LGBTQ rights. We just dont uncritically consume state department propaganda.
I think it’s bad for thousands of ukrainians to die in war they cannot win, which they do not want to fight, purely so NATO can accomplish some esoteric geopolitical goal, but that’s just me shrug-outta-hecks
Who said anything about despots? These are opinions of people, not rulers. Citizens of Africa, Asia, South America have suffered under US hegemony, so they view the Russian State different than you do.
A compromise now is bad for russia, russia basically has to be able to extort Western Europe to not to be crippled for decades. Germany is apparently working to that end now.
It’s so fucking funny when the geopolitics understanders who have been drip-fed NATO propaganda state the clear opposite of reality and think they made an insightful comment.
Russia has all but won the military conflict, as has been made clear by this utter failure of a “counteroffensive.” Russia is doing better economically than before the SMO, despite the supposed economic wunderwaffen sanctions that only backfired and hurt NATO countries. Russia has only gained support by most of the rest of the world and has showed the global south that the US/NATO are indeed paper tigers. Russia has all the leverage now. So yes, for Russia to compromise right now would be bad for them because they don’t need to compromise, they can keep going as they have been and eventually have their demands met, or Ukraine/NATO can recognize they’ve lost and make a bid for peace by acquiescing to Russia’s demands before more lives are needlessly lost.
Ukraine on the other hand will be crippled for decades regardless of how things pan out. Ukraine is now deeply indebted to Western countries, has already had all national assets sold off, has had a major chunk of its working-age population killed or maimed, and is beholden to a fascist, nazi-worshipping government.
As for Germany, yeah they have been working to the end of hobbling themselves for decades too by allowing their remaining industrial capacity to be completely gutted, kowtowing to their US masters that bombed their infrastructure to prevent them ever again getting oil from ‘The Bad Country,’ they have irreparably removed nuclear power as an option even as they’re facing an impending energy crisis (in large part because of aforementioned no-oil-from-bad-country), and are right now also sliding towards right wing populism.
Yes, but the liberal pro-EU protestors got sidelined by literal neo-Nazis. The following President was basically handpicked by the US Ambassador. There’s plenty of western media from 2015-2021 about the integration of Azov into the Ukrainian military structure, the rehabilitation of World War II collaborators, and the suppression of the Russian language. The people of the East are, in principle, just as entitled to wish to join Russia as western Ukraine is to join the EU.
Look, the heckin’ wholesome slava ukrainis didn’t know where he was so they had to shell everywhere! It’s like playing Battleship, except it’s mostly other random innocent people that you hit
Ukraine escalated by violating the ceasefire. Russia escalated further by sending in troops. I didn’t say it’s “okay,” but the blame isn’t just on their side.
If Russia wanted to ensure the safety of the people of Donbas (which is a big if tbf), what should they have done differently, at any point leading up to the conflict? Because I’d like to condemn Russian escalation, but it’s a little hard for me to do so if I don’t have an answer to that question.
Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I’m always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.
If Russia wanted to ensure the safety of the people of Donbas (which is a big if tbf), what should they have done differently, at any point leading up to the conflict?
If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like “Come across the border and we’ll set you up with a Russian passport”.
They did do that. My coworkers aunt was finally granted Russian citizenship and was ecstatic. They granted citizenship to a number of refugees in the war.
Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I’m always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.
Minsk II was the one I was referring to, but it’s a fair point.
If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like “Come across the border and we’ll set you up with a Russian passport”.
Ok, let me rephrase that then. Do you believe that the people have Donbas have a right to self-determination and representation in government, and that that right would include having some possible roadmap to joining Russia, or should they be forced to either go along with whatever the new government wanted or abandon their homes and flee the country? Because I think that a lot of this mess could’ve be avoided if Ukraine had simply given them a referendum, but instead they banned opposition parties, which says to me that they knew how the people there would vote.
This is like saying that the US should’ve invaded Cuba when they started taking nationalizing property instead of doing what the other person said and accepting refugees and asylum seekers. There’s always another way besides war and violence.
There isn’t always another way besides violence. The German invasion of the USSR was a war of extermination. Laying down and dieing is not morally superior.
Fair enough. If you’re defending yourself, then I suppose that’s true. Which is incidentally another reason Ukraine has the right to defend themselves.
I don’t think the US dumping tons of weapons is actually helping defend themselves, it just seems to be getting conscripts killed. If they had actually negotiated after that karkiv offensive maybe you could have made the case?
Well it’s keeping them having some sovereignty over their own country instead of it falling in 3 days like everyone thought. Does Ukraine want to lose a bunch of their territory? That’s the question and considering how hard they’re fighting, it doesn’t look like they do. If the average Ukrainian wants the ability to defend and keep their home, then I want that for them, too.
And war is unpredictable. Maybe Russia will lose the appetite for war soon, or maybe Ukraine will want to negotiate (but I’m sure they want to take what they can before then). Winter is coming.
Does Ukraine want to lose a bunch of their territory?
It already has, and not in the way you think. In 2013 Ukraine had a president unwilling to take an IMF deal, and opted for the Russian one. The maidan coup happened and now they have a president who does whatever the money men want.
Even now there’s a website up for openly privatizing Ukraine, and the ultimate outcome in a NATO victory explicitly is going to be the privatization of the breadbasket of Europe.
I mean, ya, the IMF sucks and further privatization of Europe is bad. But that doesn’t mean you have to support Russia while they bomb and kill civilians or make fun of Ukrainian citizens for trying to defend their home and their lives.
The extent of “support” for Russia has been extremely critical on hexbear. You all just say that anyone not falling over themselves to slava ukraini is a Russia supporting Putin bot.
Not in any of the threads that hit the defederated servers at least. I’ve seen maybe two people from hexbear ever criticize Russia or mention something they did bad, while everyone else constantly shits on and memes on Ukraine and their defense effort. You guys say you do, but don’t actually do it.
Have you considered that maybe that’s because of the threads that you pay attention to? Step outside of the Ukraine war stuff if you want to actually test that hypothesis of yours.
Well you’ve been on lemmy for 3 months, and just started running into us in only the last month, meanwhile we’ve been chatting and having struggle sessions about this type of shit for years to various degrees. (especially since 22)
Ever since the illegal dissolution of the USSR, Russia has been a capitalist shithole, the treatment of LGBT people there sucks. They are what we made them, politically.
You construe a lack of support for Ukraine with ‘shitting’ on them. I want to see the US drop support for Ukraine because it would mean that people like you and I stop dying on a daily basis for lines on a map. There have been many chances for a negotiated end, and from where I’m sitting the US went out of its way to blow those opportunities.
The US did blow those opportunities because the people who own the US government profit wildly from this conflict. With no Afghanistan, they need another endless war to fill their wallets up with.
If Russia was after lives they would be bombing the shit out of Ukrainian infrastructure. They currently hold the territories where the people who were being bombed by the Ukrainian government live.
They have been bombing tons of infrastructure. They’ve been hitting all over cities, hospitals, dams and reservoirs, etc. They’re probably not going to bomb the places they currently control for obvious reasons but that doesn’t mean they’re not hitting places with civilians they don’t currently control.
Right, but they didn’t full out invade, like Russia is doing. They definitely considered it, though lol. And it would’ve sucked for the people of Cuba if they did, just like it did for Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, or the populace of every other country that’s ever been attacked.
Putting American boots on the ground is not the only way that the United States brings death and destruction to a region to further (or protect, as some Amercan politicians call it) American, and more broadly western, hegemony (or American interests, as craven ghouls call it). The use of proxy forces like in Afghanistan during the 80s, coups like those carried out in Chile in 73 and, well really most of South America in the latter 20th century, sanctions against countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and the DPRK (which are explicitly put in place to make life worse for the people living there and produce people who would be willing to commit violent acts to overthrow the local government not adequately subordinate to the United States), facilitating the mass murder of people opposed to the pro-america regime or too supportive of communism like in Indonesia and South Korea several times, all bring massive loss of life and terrible suffering. The crimes against humanity carried out by the United States and on their behalf are so terrible and widespread that it is difficult to name a country that has not had blood spilled to advance American hegemony in it. Like Cuba.
At that though, the United States is no stranger to directly deploying troops to crush opposition to American hegemony. Like in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan again, and the RSFSR immediately after the revolution. War is terrible, but it is not out of the question to enforce American hegemony.
In Ukraine, the United States is not interested in preserving democracy or the self determination of the Ukranian people. It never has been in any of the countries or among any of the organizations that receive its support. The United States ultimately wants to have control over the Russian economy to use as a source of cheap labor and resources. That was the USSR and later Russia were denied, several times, entry into NATO, an ostensibly defensive alliance for the region that Russia is in, and the purpose of the rapid privatization of post-soviet economies after ‘91. Ukraine is caught in the terrible position of being used to advance the United States’ goal in the region. Support for Ukraine will be dropped when the United States government believes that it is no longer useful or viable to support them against Russia, after who knows how many people are dead and permanently injured, and how many more whose entire lives have been destroyed.
Russia has fought through proxy forces and propaganda a ton as well. They were doing the same thing in Ukraine in Crimea and the Donbas regions and it’s partially what led to this whole mess. Yes, America bad I would love for them to leave all those other countries alone. But that doesn’t mean no one else can do evil in the world. Blame the people causing the dead and permanently injured, bombing out whole cities with civilians, not the ones giving Ukraine a chance to defend against it. The difference is the US was the aggressor in those other scenarios while in this one they are just helping out the defender. Yes it’s to help their own interests, but the Ukrainians don’t care, they just want someone to help them defend their land and home and families.
I mean the US didn’t. US-backed Cuban exiles did. There’s a big difference. If US had attacked with it’s full might, you guys would’ve been saying Cuba should surrender as much as Ukraine should right now, because there is no way they would have won. They would’ve been a smear of an island, probably closer to Haiti. They goodness Kennedy didn’t listen to his warhawk generals on this point at least.
Oh! Well then we see eye-to-eye in that case. I think Western support to Ukraine should be limited to accepting refugees and providing humanitarian aid, not weapons. I think Ukraine should be open to ceding territory in negotiations in order to end the war and prevent further loss of life. There’s always another way besides war and violence. I’m all about peace, glad we’re in agreement.
There are countless of well-documented examples of the American empire sponsoring terrorist attacks, sabotage and assassinations against Cuba. To this day the American empire upholds an illegal an unprovoked blockade of the island as well as occupying the land on which the Guantanamo naval base and torture black site is placed.
Before the revolution, America ran Cuba as a colony, leeching off the hard work of Cubans. If anything, the history of American relations with Cuba has been one of profound violence.
But okay, most of the times they made sure to put in a middle-man to do the actual dirty work which absolves them of all sin I guess.
That’s basically what Russia was doing in Ukraine by propping up pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine. But I guess it’s fine when they do that, bendy they succeeeded, it’s only bad when America does it, because they failed.
And are you saying you would’ve been fine if the US did a full-scale invasion of Cuba then, because they did all that other stuff? Otherwise, that was all unrelated and besides the point.
Do you believe that the people have Donbas have a right to self-determination and representation in government, and that that right would include having some possible roadmap to joining Russia
Of course. They just don’t have a right to drag the rest of Ukraine into Russia at the same time. On principle, I support pretty much any separatist movement on the grounds of “why should I care if a country’s capitalist class loses some of its economic base?”
should they be forced to either go along with whatever the new government wanted or abandon their homes and flee the country?
No, but if that’s what was happening we could all then be criticizing a peacetime government for acting injustice upon segments of its population, instead of advocating for an end to a war. The idea that a country should intervene militarily in order to “save” a group of people isn’t one based on honest, good-faith altruism on the part of the country that wants to intervene, if it were, then wouldn’t we be in a constant state of war everywhere? (Since there’s pretty much at least one oppressed group in every country worldwide at least one other country could claim a right to “protect” them based on shared heritage or language.)
Just because Russia (might) have the military capability to do so when all these other countries might not doesn’t mean they should.
On principle, I support pretty much any separatist movement
The idea that a country should intervene militarily in order to “save” a group of people isn’t one based on honest, good-faith altruism on the part of the country that wants to intervene, if it were, then wouldn’t we be in a constant state of war everywhere?
I don’t see how you can hold these two positions simultaneously. If part of a country wants to leave, and the government of that country says, “No, and we’ll use force to stop you,” and another country says, “Hey, seperatists, we’ll support you,” then where do you stand on all that? You’re pro-seperatist while being anti-supporting seperatists? That doesn’t make any sense, you could look at just about any successful seperatist movement and see that they recieved foreign backing from someone and that it was likely a crucial factor in winning, for example, French support in the American revolution. This foreign support is generally less motivated by altruism and more by the assisting nation’s geopolitical goals, but it’s all the same to the seperatists who need it to survive.
To me your stance is coming across as, you support the seperatists, but also they should’ve backed down immediately when Ukraine used force to avoid a war, but in that case it seems like you don’t actually support the seperatists in practice.
I don’t see how you can hold these two positions simultaneously.
They’re about different things. One is an opinion about bottom-up, community activism and the principle of self-determination, and is a belief that exists independently of the material conditions and reality of global politics. France only supported the Americans in order to “get back” at England. They later regretted it when the Americans supported the French Revolution. When I say I support separatism, I am thinking specifically about how Lenin released all of the Russian Empire’s colonial nations, regardless of how it might adversely impact the Soviet states’ security prerogatives.
If part of a country wants to leave, and the government of that country says, “No, and we’ll use force to stop you,” and another country says, “Hey, seperatists, we’ll support you,” then where do you stand on all that?
Like I said with France and the 13 colonies – no country is actually saying that or has ever said that. France didn’t go “yeah, we love what you’re trying to do 13 colonies and support your beliefs wholeheartedly”, they went “oh cool, this will help us regain New France one day and really piss off our archrivals.” Likewise, Russia, having lost Ukraine (and the Eastern Bloc), is trying to regain its lost glory, and it just so happens that they can exploit Donbas separatism in order to do so.
My understanding of the Donbas is that it was largely populated by Russians from the Russian SFSR during the era of open borders within the Soviet States, which also makes things different than Catalans, Kurds, and Scots, for example.
Like I said with France and the 13 colonies – no country is actually saying that or has ever said that. France didn’t go “yeah, we love what you’re trying to do 13 colonies and support your beliefs wholeheartedly”, they went “oh cool, this will help us regain New France one day and really piss off our archrivals.”
Saying “oh cool, this will help us regain New France one day and really piss off our archrivals” is still supporting them. That’s my point, seperatists often rely on geopolitical rivals supporting them for ulterior motives. You can’t really cleanly separate bottom-up political activism from opportunistic rivals with ulterior motives, because in practice the former will generally rely on the latter. Generally when you’re fighting a civil war, you don’t have the luxury of turning up your nose at offers of assistance for the sake of purity. So if your position is supporting seperatists movements except when they recieve foreign backing, you’re not going to find yourself supporting many seperatists movements in practice, at least in cases where they have to fight.
If this was still like 2018, I’d be out there supporting the various brokered deals that included Russia at the table. Framing the current conflict as a civil war is inaccurate, as it lost the characteristics of a civil conflict when Russia attacked the rest of Ukraine in February 2022. What was a protracted, simmering war between a fraction of the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed Separatists on the fringes of the nation’s territory, with a dynamic akin to plenty of regions around the world throughout the latter half of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.
So if your position is supporting separatist movements except when they receive foreign backing, you’re not going to find yourself supporting many separatist movements in practice, at least in cases where they have to fight.
I wouldn’t say that’s my position. I support separatism, but I also oppose war in most of its forms, since it means the destruction of people’s livelihoods, and heritages, which of course cost many lives in the process too. People here often talk about ending the war in Ukraine as fast as possible because of the violence, so wouldn’t the morally and ethically consistent viewpoint be to support what would prevent war too, not to argue for or justify foreign interventionism? No war but class war, you know?
Within the context of Ukraine, the DNR and LPR didn’t have the relationship with Russia that, going back to the French and American Revolution example, the American colonists had with the French. American separatists didn’t become subordinate to French military leadership or to French foreign policy goals. The newly-independent Americans didn’t then ask to join the French Empire.
As an aside, France’s support for the Americans failed them in their ambitions and led to the collapse of the Ancien Regime, which if we’re to take it as indicative of the outcome and legacy of foreign-backed separatist conflicts, means that this isn’t gonna be good for Russia long term.
I support separatism, but I also oppose war in most of its forms
Ok so what happens if a government says, “No you can’t secede and I don’t care how many of you want to?” Nations aren’t generally keen on giving up territory, especially in cases where the relationship is exploitative. Renouncing force means renouncing the threat of force, which can often leave very little leverage for a seperatist movement to work with.
Personally though, I’m inclined to agree somewhat with your point that seperatism isn’t always worth the conflict, and for that reason I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the stance of being predisposed to support seperatist movements. Imo, it’s better to take a pragmatic view, evaluating the specific conditions on a case by case basis.
I would argue that if Russia withdrew and the seperatist movements surrendered, there would still be a conflict between the Russian speaking population and the Ukrainian government. I suppose it’d be possible for Russia to offer citizenship and relocation assistance to everyone, but it would mean displacing a lot of people and I’m not sure it’s realistic. Do you have examples of historical precedent in a comperable situation?
Within the context of Ukraine, the DNR and LPR didn’t have the relationship with Russia that, going back to the French and American Revolution example, the American colonists had with the French. American separatists didn’t become subordinate to French military leadership or to French foreign policy goals. The newly-independent Americans didn’t then ask to join the French Empire.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the DNR and LPR would want to join Russia for legitimate security reasons at this point. If you want to label them as Russian proxies and Ukraine as a US proxy, I don’t mind, but I think the reality is that while both are influenced by foreign governments, they also both represent some degree of genuine support.
As an aside, France’s support for the Americans failed them in their ambitions and led to the collapse of the Ancien Regime, which if we’re to take it as indicative of the outcome and legacy of foreign-backed separatist conflicts, means that this isn’t gonna be good for Russia long term.
I don’t think you can extrapolate like that from a single data point under pretty different conditions.
what if…no you can’t secede and I don’t care how many of you want to?
This is what happens with every seperatist movement pretty much though, and yet i dont see many calls for arms and civil war Cascadia, Scotland, Catalonia these days. The people there know it would mean the destruction of everything they hold dear.
…possible for Russia to offer citizenship and relocation assistance to everyone, but it would mean displacing a lot of people and I’m not sure it’s realistic. Do you have examples of historical precedent in a comperable situation?
I mean, I don’t think there’s any way of getting around displacing people - if it joined Russia I’m sure there are people who’d want to leave for Ukraine, and of course we’re already talking about the reverse.
I can’t think of specific examples but there’s definitely been examples of mass migration or offering of citizenship due to “political solutions” meant to avoid conflict and reduce the spectre of war. Just off the cuff though, I can think of how people of Northern Ireland are able to hold Irish passports, or the numerous migrations that happened in the 20th century when borders were changed or imposes as parts of treaties (the part of Germany that is now Poland, the Muslim/Hindu migrations between Pakistan and India during partitioning, etc)
These aren’t good or something I’m arguing for, but I believe that it was preferable to all out war.
I don’t think you can extrapolate like that from a single data point under pretty different conditions.
Me too, that’s why I said it at the end as an aside, it was more of a glib comment than an actual thesis.
I’m perfectly fine with a negotiated settlement. Ideally, the areas where more people want to stay in Ukraine should stay with Ukraine and the areas where more people want to join Russia should join Russia. That would minimize the amount of displacement while allowing people to live under the government of their choice. My real issue is that Ukraine won’t negotiate at all, even on Crimea, and I just think that’s unreasonable.
the Muslim/Hindu migrations between Pakistan and India during partitioning
This was the biggest example that came to my mind and it’s not exactly comparable but it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of relocation.
My real issue is that Ukraine won’t negotiate at all, even on Crimea, and I just think that’s unreasonable.
For the same reason that every country tells its own seperatist movements “no”. I believe that Russia should’ve waited things out because its the open state of war that gives Ukraine enough diplomatic cover to push to its pre-2014 borders. Had it done so I think given another decade or two, Ukraine would have to accept reality and cede it formally in exchange for concessions of some sort (again, thinking of historical precedent).
While I’ve been describing and explaining sovereignty as a concept I do believe it presents inherent flaws indicative of its origins with European royals and its having been imposed across the world.
it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of relocation
Of course not, but a war with shifting frontlines (since I was suggesting it as an alternative to invasion) would be inherently more destructive. (Although forced relocation can be committed as a war crime too).
I believe that Russia should’ve waited things out because its the open state of war that gives Ukraine enough diplomatic cover to push to its pre-2014 borders.
That’s kind of a fair point I think but I don’t think the Donbas would ever be able to join Russia in this timeline. Without Russian intervention, the separatists likely lose and the years that follow establish precedent for Russia control of Crimea but also for Ukrainian control over Donbas. I think it’s a valid, if cynical, argument to say that Russia should’ve cashed out with Crimea instead of going all in to try to take Donbas, but it means leaving the separatist out to dry. I do kind of agree with it though, I guess it comes down to what happens to the separatists if Ukraine wins, and I’ve seen people say they’d be genocided but I don’t really buy that, seems speculative and like propaganda.
Valid, but cynical arguments make up a lot of foreign policy takes :/. Part of why I speak how I do is because I want to live in a world that one day won’t be ruled by realpolitik and for people to matter when it comes to the foreign policies of nationstates.
I guess it comes down to what happens to the separatists if Ukraine wins, and I’ve seen people say they’d be genocided but I don’t really buy that, seems speculative and like propaganda.
Most of the people I’m talking about were either born there or have lived there for longer than Ukraine has existed as a state. Those people should be the ones in charge of the fate of Crimea, regardless of their ethnicity. I don’t believe in blood and soil nationalism where only certain ethnicities get to be full citizens.
By “the Uighers” I assume you’re talking about Xinjiang? The most serious separatist movement there is the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, the US recognized these guys as a terrorist group in 2002. The US continued to recognize them as a terrorist group until 2020, when the US decided that it would be more politically convenient for them to not be terrorists anymore. The overall populace supports the central government. It’s 90+% approval for China overall, I can’t find a breakdown by region. If the people of Xinjiang were to lose faith in the central government and decided to go their own way then I would support them. The important part is that is has to be the people, not terror groups, not US-backed NGOs, and not US-backed protest movements, that support the separatism movement.
It’ll take some 6 months but then they’ll start having air support and soon air superiority.
However, Ukraine doesn’t have 6 months. They don’t know how the US election will go, it they will still have an ally in the US. They MUST press on so into the meat grinder they go.
Yeah and they’ll need every minute of it to get to a point where the cjjan ico Russia out. F16 jets won’t come at.keast for another 6 months, they can’t sit on their hands until then, so until then, the meat grinder it is…
It’s crazy to me that any military doctrine as a base assumption relies on air superiority. How could you ever assume that if facing off against a peer nation? Though I guess with nuclear armament there’s an assumption that you’ll never face off against a peer level natuon
That’s what 70 years of exclusively using your military as the enforcers of neo-colonialism does. Turns out what works for leveling a low-tech guerilla hideout in Vietnam or Afghanistan isn’t so effective when your opponent has comprehensive SAM networks.
Brigading is clicking on the article that is on the top of all brigading
Why is it inherently bad to be negative towards NATO and good to be positive towards Russia, China or the DPRK? I thought you guys liked nuance.
I have yet to see anyone do genocide apologetics or dismiss human rights violations. Thinking critically and investigating claims is a good thing, and you thinking otherwise shows how pathetic you are.
New drinking game:
Take a shot when libs call people disagreeing with them “brigading”
Take a shot when libs use the word Tankie or authoritarian without being able to define them.
Take a shot when libs fail to provide a source.
Take a shot when the only source they can provide is Wikipedia, Kiev independent or Radio Free ____
Take a shot when they do double genocide theory.
Take a shot when they use bigoted language.
Take a shot when they act like smug little shits and then cry foul when they get treated like smug little shits.
Here is the thing. It’s only liberals that threats this as a football game were you have to cheer on one of the teams. If you actually know the history and some form of idea about the geopolitical stage, you can be on the side that actually wants peace. Not “until the last Ukrainian is dead” that the west wants.
Why would you do that? How does it sound funny to you that US propaganda is so important to you that you would poision yourself if you weren’t surrounded by it? It get you were trying to make a joke but the joke is that, " if I encounter anything other than US propaganda I need to self harm so I don’t acknowledge it."
It is just wild to me that you exist in a state where this seems like a banger post.
You do understand reality exists right. It isn’t just US propaganda vs Russian propaganda. There is an actual objective truth that can be found. It isn’t particularly hard. No one here is claiming to have special wisdom here.
Yeah, take a shot every time one of us dirty commies denies the existence of Saddam’s WMDs. The biggest propaganda machine in history would never lie about it’s rivals.
It’s wild that I didn’t even mention brigading, but most of the comments from hexbears are defensive about it. It’s not brigading to comment on posts on other instances, so stop feeling insecure about it. Especially when there are so many other valid reasons people hate you guys.
Yeah my bad, I mistook you for another idiot.
Of course we are defensive about it! Its a tiring accusation.
Yes so much to hate like analysing news, investigating claims and not tolerating bigots. Gets you big mad.
I was speaking more along the lines of the endless emotes and troll comments. I don’t think people have a problem with many of the comments that have actual meat to them, even if they vehemently disagree with what’s said, like I often do. The ones posting the same trollface emote fifty times though? That’s assnine and annoying. Then those same users complain that nobody wants to “debate” them. That’s not debate. It’s not even a conversation.
take a step back and notice that those comments are in response to someone else engaging in bad faith behaviour. Hexbear does not have a downvote function, which has fostered a culture of mocking people acting in bad faith. If you do not like people dunking on idiots, then get mad at the idiot
It’s true that US propaganda machine is unparalleled, but at this point one has to work hard not to see the gap between the narrative they’ve been fed and the reality.
Russian economy was supposed to collapse within months, Russia was supposed to be isolated geopolitically, Russia was supposed to run out of weapons, Russian military was supposed to crumble, western wonder weapons were supposed to be game changers, and so on.
It’s been around two years now, and literally every one of these predictions has turned out to be completely false. This is openly reported in mainstream western media nowadays.
Given that, I fail to see how any person capable of even a modicum of critical thought continue going along with the narrative.
And we see this same behavior manifest itself in many other areas. For example, people continue to believe articles claiming that China’s economy is going to collapse despite decades of such articles being false.
Continuing to believe media that has been so consistently wrong does require at least a certain amount of gullibility in my opinion.
Pretty telling that the new line being fed to NATO worshippers is ‘don’t say anything critical about our objective failures’. This is, ironically, the same message Goebbels pushed when failures began to mount on the eastern front after Stalingrad and then Kursk. As the Soviet steamroller continued to Berlin, the line in the media was ‘it is unpatriotic to say we are losing’. And then they lost.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
I do, but evidently you don’t since your comments make it pretty clear that you are on the side of literal self proclaimed nazis. And there’s nothing ok about that.
Yea, they’re defederated from your instance. You can check it out in the instances list of each instance under “blocked”, here’s yours: lemmy.ca/instances
you don’t really have to support Putin per se, many of us including myself would feel glee watching him be put up against a wall by communist revolutionaries, but supporting NATO is a pretty big dealbreaker given NATO’s imperialist and fascist history. e.g. Several Nazi German officials being put into NATO’s government. Gladio and funding of fascist stay-behind groups in the event of Soviet invasion. Yugoslavia. Libya. I certainly want NATO to be destroyed, hopefully from within rather than without to prevent nuclear war, and unfortunately for us, the reactionary state of Russia seems to be the best bet to maybe have that eventually occur.
also, stop calling things “wars of aggression” unless you’re going to call everything a war of aggression, my god. what an annoying thought-terminating cliche.
Very typical lib talking point though. What socialist spaces do you get your news and information from? Any at all? Or do you just immerse yourself in liberal spaces then end up repeating everything they say and wonder why socialists all call you a liberal? Serious question btw. What socialist media and socialist spaces do you actually participate in and follow? How can you possibly consider yourself to have gotten rid of the liberal brainworms you’ve had your entire life if you continue to immerse yourself within the liberal superstructure?
I think you all made things pretty clear when you consider that the only thing I’ve actually done here is make it clear that I don’t support Russia in this war and am being blasted for being a “lib” for doing so.
You’re being delusional. I don’t owe you anything.
And not use misgendering language? We all make mistakes at times, it’s what happens, and it’s fair to ask questions to better understand, but being against it after you’ve been informed strikes me as silly
The only way I think it can be construed as misgendering language is if the parts of the idiom or turn of phrase are parsed individually, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do with an idiom.
If this sentence is misgendering myself, then I’m the Queen of England. I get that this guy is a shithead but pretending that he’s also doing something wrong here seems to be playing for some esoteric own.
I don’t think ronjonguaido is a shithead, I don’t think that it was done on purpose or anything, and I can see what you mean - I didn’t myself pick up on it being misgendering language. I think maybe it comes down to intent? I dunno. On the one hand sure there are phrases, but on the other, maybe we should question the gendering of idioms? Way out of my league tbh.
The idiom isn’t gendered, a component of it is. Likening someone to ‘the little dutch boy with his finger in the dyke’ makes no claim on the gender status of the referent and is equally applicable across all genders. If they insisted on calling you Mr. Egon, then sure, that’s misgendering, but ‘go off king’ is a established turn of phrase that I have also seen generically applied because it likewise makes no claim to the gender status of the individual referred.
I’m not saying it’s not a thing, but I have literally never seen it used, and I couldn’t find an ngram viewer with a corpus end date after 2019.
It would never occur to me to say “go off queen” , in much the same way it would never occur to me to say “yass slay king” regardless of the gender of the referent, making them both gender neutral in my use.
There’s a lot of gendered turns of phrases, which doesn’t necessarily make them acceptable. I make a lot of mistakes myself it’s alright, it’s what happens.
Wait until you find out that “go off queen” is also a thing. I wonder why “go off king” and “go off queen” has to both exist. Could it be that this idiomatic expression is a gendered one and that using the expression on someone who doesn’t identify with that gender is a form of misgendering?
I haven’t seen either of these phrases, but in my experience even when something is supposed to be the equivalent versions of each other, it somehow feels different to hear and say. Like, it feels alright to call my group of friends “bros” but not “sisses.” Could it be that “go off queen” and “go off king” have different connotations despite the fact that they should mean the same thing?
The reason that one version of the “go off” phrase (identical in every way to the other except for one word that specifies gender) might feel to you like it has different connotations is because we live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t assign value the same across all genders. That’s not an excuse to use the version of that phrase which misgenders someone.
And your example is really weird and obscures what’s actually at issue. The difference in meaning between the words “bros” and “sissies” goes way beyond just a difference in gender. One is a common and generally affectionate term that men call each other when being friendly. The other is most often used as misogynistic term to insult men by disparaging their masculinity.
And your example is really weird and obscures what’s actually at issue. The difference in meaning between the words “bros” and “sissies” goes way beyond just a difference in gender. One is a common and generally affectionate term that men call each other when being friendly. The other is most often used as a misogynistic term to insult men by disparaging their masculinity.
I wanted to give a couple of other examples too, but that’s just what I thought of at the moment. “Hey guys” or “hey dudes” also works though.
That’s not an excuse to use the version of that phrase which misgenders someone.
It’s funny seeing the replies to your comment crying about “not brigading” but then the vast majority of the comments in this post come from hexbear users commenting tankie shit
And why aren’t you responding to anything? So much for being a socialist, you have zero engagement with anything other than liberal beliefs and do absolutely nothing to defend your position or challenge yourself.
Lol, I’ve responded to plenty. Do you seriously expect me to respond to each of the 100+ comments that have been left by HexBear users? It’s not like any of you are capable of changing your mind about anything. Waste of time.
And again, all I have done is said that I support Ukraine. I also happen to be a socialist. Why is that so hard for you to wrap your head around?
Because you don’t support the people, you support the bourgeois state and your position boils down to “I am willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect it.”
This is not socialist ideology. This is first and foremost nationalism, which variant of it I am as yet uncertain as you’ve said nothing about what your “socialism” entails. I am unable to assess whether you’re a nazi or a plain old liberal that pretends to be a socialist by saying you like welfare while still completely and totally supporting capitalism and liberal institutional design to maintain the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. The german gothic aesthetic you choose for your username certainly doesn’t help the suspicions I have over what you really are though, literally retvrn.
The german gothic aesthetic you choose for your username certainly doesn’t help the suspicions I have over what you really are though, literally retvrn.
Fuck you for concerntrolling coward.
Why do you think it is a negative to have autism?
Why are you using terminology for autistic people being overstimulated as a way to insult me?
I have never seen one of these alleged “socialists” engage on this point. I would really like to see their rationale, and it’s really frustrating that none of them will respond.
They just dance around and repeat that they’re a “socialist”, but never point to a single socialist principle that informs their perspective
They never engage with it because they know damn well that they have no excuse. Rather than engage in something that they are completely caught out on they resort to non-engagement.
Ironically this strategy of online rhetoric is literally in the handbook from the 77th brigade that was leaked, British military psyops. However I suspect these people just learned it naturally from many bad experiences with how that went for them. This picture from their webpage makes me laugh every time because it’s literally fedposting : https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/6e61333c-3115-410c-9cf0-dddd01eda1e6.png
You know, thinking about it, i don’t think i have even seen a self-described “socialist” even bring up theorists or figureheads that they say influenced them. At most, it’ll be something like “someone told me they read Chomsky and they gave a quote that sounded pretty good” or “Bernie/AOC/The Squad say some pretty good things and i agree with them”. I don’t think i’ve ever seen someone talk about Kautsky or Bernstein or any of the other reformists.
Why is that so hard for you to wrap your head around?
Because you were defending the US revolution to own more slaves and commit more genocide elsewhere in the thread, which isn’t a particularly socialist position.
Here’s you having it explained to you why the American Revolution was mainly undertaken so that the American ruling class could continue expanding and genociding and enslaving and then you refusing to even read it
You’ve all got to get used to the way federation works. Because everyone is federated with different instances the /all/ page is different for different instances. This means that when a thread reaches /all/ on a specific instance you will get a lot of their users showing up at the same time. This is true of all the large instances, lemm.ee and lemmy.ml pour into our threads all at once when they reach the top of their feeds, but it’s different for every site so you get this outcome where a lot happens all at once.
Daily reminder that we all see this pop up on our feed too and you’re going to have a higher quantity of people from other federated instances commenting by virtue of their being more of them active. No one is getting pings telling them it’s time to go to X thread and post Y take, that’s just a main character mindset people get into when they want to think they’re the underdog and the ‘other side’ isn’t playing fair.
Are the Hexbear users who are saying Ukraine is being ungrateful repeating Kremlin propaganda or are the Hexbear users who are saying Ukraine has a point repeating Kremlin propaganda?
Is Kremlin propaganda just ontologically what a Hexbear user says?
I’m referring to the concerning number of users from your instance who seem obsessed with parroting what has been confirmed to be Kremlin propaganda and lies spread through deliberate misinformation campaigns. Obviously, this isn’t all HexBear users, but you guys clearly have a general problem with this kind of stuff.
Acting as if ending the war is Ukraine’s responsibility, rather than one of the country engaging in a literal invasion.
Anyone who doesn’t take the 2014 referendum with an extreme grain of salt is slotting nicely into Russia’s current playbook.
I seriously don’t understand why so many of you dickride Russia, other than “west bad”. The current Russian government is antithetical to so many of the values you claim to champion.
Numerous comments people claiming that the Maidan Revolution was actually a US backed coup, with zero evidence provided outside of Kremlin and state operated mouthpieces of course.
Possibly the most egregious yet: apparently the Bucha massacre was a hoax. Remember all those videos we saw of Russian soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians? Apparently they all must have been doctored, or were actually Ukrainian soldiers dressed up as Russian soldiers gunning down their own people.
One of my close friends is a Ukrainian photographer/videographer who was among the first on the scene after the Russians left Bucha. You’ve very likely seen some of his photos before. I can only imagine the rage he’d feel if he were to read some of the bullshit that these comments are attempting to spread.
Honestly, my opinion of HexBear has reached a new low after this thread. I used to be against defederation, but now I can at least understand why people don’t want to be associated at all with your instance.
EDIT 2: This post was locally removed on HexBear. I think that says enough on its own.
I seriously don’t understand why so many of you dickride Russia, other than “west bad”. The current Russian government is antithetical to so many of the values you claim to champion.
Seriously, who? Who is “dickriding Russia because west bad”? The current state of Russia is the result of the USSR’s undemocratic dissolution and the subsequent shock doctrine, obviously it’s antithetical to our values. Everyone knows that. People aren’t being blinded by “west bad” - because they generally aren’t literal children who can only understand the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. What they’re doing is critically analyzing media and history.
Hate to employ the dreaded whataboutism, but it seems to me this critique applies more to the opposite side. You say people are “Slotting nicely into Russia’s playbook”, “parroting Kremlin propaganda”. On their own, these are empty thought-terminators. You’re not concerned about understanding reality, just about making absolutely sure you’re 100% not on “Russia’s side” of this issue, because they’re the bad guys in this dichotomy.
I seriously don’t understand why so many of you dickride the west, other than “Russia bad”. The current western governments are antithetical to so many of the values you claim to champion.
You guys say that but I’ve never seen a hexbear criticizing Russia or their side of the story, only accept it as gospel. You say you don’t do that but then blindly accept their time line for the Bucha massacre or pretend their reasons for attacking a sovereign nation are real or ignore a bunch of irregularities in their 2014 referendum voting. Russia leaving is apparently never an option when they talk about possible solutions, only Ukraine giving up territory. You say the world isn’t only good guys and bad guys but because when the things you guys say are actually analyzed, it’s obvious that it’s a lie. The west is bad, everyone else is less bad. Therefore in any thread with Ukraine, because the west is on their side, they are the bad guys. Even though Russia also has a corruption problem and Nazi problem and has a history of invading their numbers for decades. But they have the bigger military, so I guess all their neighbors have to give up their best territory to Russia for free and their citizens shouldn’t expect to do anything about it and the the rest of the world has to let them.
Meanwhile, many of the people who criticize Russia in this attack don’t dickride the West at all and hate plenty of things about it and will say it in the same thread or tons of others. Like they should definitely decide whether they’ll fully support Ukraine or not, but we all know that to do that they’d have to get more support from their voters, which is often more difficult said than done, especially since Ukraine isn’t actually in NATO.
Russia leaving is apparently never an option when they talk about possible solutions
Yes… it isn’t. Thats how reality works. Russia isn’t going to just up and leave. They aren’t going to have thousands of their own people killed and then just… nothing. They have goals, they want to meet them, and if not then at least get somewhat of a victory. The people in Russia aren’t going to like “oh, we just left”. I don’t fucking understand how people can say “the war ends when russia [just up and leaves]”. This isn’t fantasy land, that isn’t how it works. Russia will leave, if Ukraine negotiates a peace with them. If Russia wants land then UK has to negotiate for that not to happen.
A ton of people in Russia don’t care that much about the war. They’ve had protestors and even people who report their news and propaganda speak out about it. There’s no reason they should be there. They can easily leave, it’s very much an option. Now the Ukrainians are fighting for their homeland, so they have just as much a motivation to not give up either. But they also have support from the strongest military in the world.
I do hope they come to some sort of negotiation soon, but saying it never would have been this bad if Russia got everything they want from the beginning and the world stayed out is appeasement and we already know how that ends with the Nazis.
So a post that highlights the many offramps to the current conflict, and describes how Ukraine can no longer “win” is Kremlin propaganda?
The other is a post that describes that Ukraine has killed civilians in the Donbass under Zelensky, do you dispute this?
You claim that these are examples of “confirmed Kremlin propaganda”. What sources and/or authorities confirm the opinions contained in these posts as Kremlin propaganda?
Possibly the most egregious yet: apparently the Bucha massacre was a hoax. Remember all those videos we saw of Russian soldiers gunning down unarmed civilians? Apparently they all must have been doctored, or were actually Ukrainian soldiers dressed up as Russian soldiers gunning down their own people.
There is no video evidence of the Bucha massacre though? It is based on Ukrainian investigation and an Amnesty investigation. Granted I tend to believe it happened, or at least I disbelieve the counter narrative that the UAF did it, but I don’t know what videos you’re talking about
See, this is what everyone is talking about. At lest you believe it, but so many others only believe the Russian propaganda and when someone disproves it, they just say it’s western propaganda, which is apparently not true but Russian propaganda is?
There’s tons of photos, videos, satellite images, and accounts by locals. It’s been investigated by the UN Commissioner of Human Rights and numerous news agencies who published their proof. Most of the footage was of the aftermath but it’s still proof, especially when combined with drone and satellite footage from before the reporters got there. Or you think the bodies were faked (been disapproved) and reporters from CNN, BBC, AFP, and more didn’t see what they saw when they entered the area? They saw a bunch of fake Halloween corpses and couldn’t tell the difference between that and real dead civilians, who had been raped, burned, and murdered? Or actors? Some of The Russian lies are unbelievable so it’s incredible to me that people keep buying into them.
Yeah I’ve seen a lot of the evidence, journalistic investigations, which were pretty compelling I just noted there’s no direct video evidence. But I do also believe UAF committed severe damage retaking the territory. There is a lot of evidence of civilian murders in UAF retreats in Mariupol as well. AFRF executing prisoners like in the NYT video, or the indiscriminate front line fire against civilians, the Kyiv corridor and southern campaign were a guerilla mindfuck. Civilian casualties are a lot lower now, but the urban conflict at its height was just incredibly brutal and indiscriminate.
It’s possible to believe both at the same time and I applaud you for being able to hold both thoughts in your head. I’m not even being sarcastic, I’ve never seen a hexbear user criticize Russia or say they’ve ever possibly done something wrong in the war or it’s lead up. So just by admitting the possibility that they could’ve done it, even if the UAF have done terrible things too, you’ve made me feel a little better. It’s nice to see some nuance finally lol. And ya, war is hell.
spoiler> I seriously don’t understand why so many of you dickride Russia love how liberals manage to weave in casual homophobia whenever geopolitics comes up, you people make me sick
It’s not because of blind allegiance to Russia or anything like that, people have positions counter to your narrative as the result of actually paying attention to events, as they’ve unfolded, over years.
Impressive how mad you babies get when people don’t swallow the lies you’re peddling, expecting them to be taken as implicitly true or something.
Talk about swallowing lies after regurgitating Russian propaganda? You are all blinded yourself by your hate for the US that you are willing to deny massacres or genocides.
What Russian propaganda? I live in the US, I have more of a problem with my government than a government on the other side of the planet, no matter how scary the liberals try to make them sound.
And it’s not even an exhaustive list. I’ve seen others parrot the idea that Ukraine was doing a genocide in Donbas, a Russian accusation without proof, for example. This is what I mean about you guys skeptical about every side of the story except for Russia’s.
Also, which side do you think the Russians are supporting in the US? Because it’s not the left…
Also, which side do you think the Russians are supporting in the US? Because it’s not the left…
I frankly don’t care who the Russians are supporting politically in the US because their propaganda capacity is near insignificant. Also, the Democrats are a right wing political formation, they will fight to protect landlords and break strikes.
If they’re spending their time messaging to a bunch of powerless leftists on their own closed off server they’re wasting their time, what does that even accomplish?
Just because they used the word “dick” doesn’t mean it’s homophobic/mysognist. Also it doesn’t detract from their other points.
The insurgents had been shooting people and using bombs or mortars and artillery since at least 2014. They even shot down airplanes back then. It wasn’t just the Ukrainian government.
OK, but why take the Russian propaganda for their word? And at some point you have to take some evidence of historical accounts or you’re just going going by conspiracy theories.
The insurgents had been shooting people and using bombs or mortars and artillery since at least 2014. They even shot down airplanes back then. It wasn’t just the Ukrainian government.
Yes, since the coup shit has been absolutely fucked, and all diplomatic solutions have been derailed.
I don’t take Russian propaganda at their word, I also have decades of history to reference, all the rabid-ass Ukrainian propaganda, plus literally paying attention to shit going on in the last decade
Just because they used the word “dick” doesn’t mean it’s homophobic/mysognist. Also it doesn’t detract from their other points.
I had to circle back to this one because the comment in question was not just misogynist for using " dick", but because of the implication that dickriding bad, why else use it in that context if it was intended to read as a positive connotation?
As soon as libs feel like it’s a “safe” target they just let loose with the misogyny and homophobia.
I didn’t address the threads they presented as evidence because I didn’t see anything wrong.
Edit: Lmao they’ve responded with a post that points out Ukraine has been killing people in the Donbas before the war started and a post that highlights the many offramps to the current conflict
Ok so why don’t you teach all us damn talkies a lesson and explain to us how you stop the war then other than libs usual line of Russia just gives up and goes home for no apparent reason.
Because currently either land changes hands at some point or everybody on one side dies and libs keep insisting the first option is a no go.
So please, inform us. We’re all very excited to hear what you have to say.
it’s an extremely viable off-ramp in fact that’s how the majority of wars have ended
as Ukraine have tried military force and it didn’t work then an outcome that doesn’t relly on the Russians just deciding to give up on the whole idea for no reason might be better alligned with reality
The same group that did when the USSR invaded. The same group that did when the US invaded. They’re terrible people, but you can’t argue their strategy wasn’t effective.
Allright, I guess we’ll just wait until all the able-bodied ukrainians have been killed (despite themselves not wanting to fight) and then the land will be ceded. I’m sure its much better if thousands more die first!
Lots of assumptions on what would happen to Ukraine, and you are also implying that Ukraine is not an “authoritarian” (a word with no meaning) borderline oligarchy, so that’s fascinating.
But yeah, even if these assumptions were true, then yeah I think it’s better for people not to die in an unwinnable war, than for people to die and then for the same thing to happen. I’m a big fan of people Not Dying actually.
Good thing the bucha was debunked, but if it hadn’t been I’d probably have urged you to look inward since you’re the one who tried to use the tragedy as a way to score a cheap point, despite it not detracting from my overall arguement
That’s what Lenin did and it saved countless lives. The Tsar kept feeding people into a meat grinder and the communists took power of the promise that they’d end the war, and they had to accept heavy concessions but they did it. Which position do you agree with, Lenin’s or the Tsar’s?
Ceding land to a foreign aggressor is not a viable off-ramp. Get real.
This is nationalist rhetoric. Claiming to be a socialist and yet obsessing over the borders of one bourgeois state over another bourgeois state is one of the reasons you are being called a liberal here. You are a nationalist cheerleading for one group of billionaires to rule over the people instead of another group of billionaires, all while hundreds of thousands of people get killed in the name of that. Meanwhile socialists are out here saying we don’t want people dying and do not give a fuck what borders exist as long as people aren’t dying, the best solution is the quickest and fastest way to minimise death.
You are defending the state, not people’s lives. You are sacrificing people for states and borders. You are a bourgeois nationalist, and you would have advocated for the same thing in every past conflict. You’re not even a social chauvinist and they were shitbags, you’re just straight up nationalist.
Ironic when liberals act how they claim communists act. I mean I know it makes sense logically, that it’s all projection with scratched libs, but it’s still so weird to see in practice
I mean the Ukranians are doing suicidal infantry attacks against entranched positions with conscripts ffs, it’s just too on the nose
In the post-ww2 period we had a long period of people being anti-nationalist as a result of experience of what nationalism and this obsession with borders instead of people causes.
The current crop of liberals have no experience or connection to this and are incredibly easily led by the ultranationalists into supporting them, because nationalists share a priority with ultranationalists.
The primary issue here is nationalism. We need an absolutely massive anti-nationalism movement. Anti-nationalism is anti-fascism.
Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
You know what? I never thought I’d say this but I’m with Ukraine on this one.
This whole counter offensive insanity is so militarily nonsensical that it had to have been mounted to please the West with a “win” so that they’d stay in the war. Real Chiang Kai Shek committing the best of the KMT army to Shanghai to impress the Westerners energy.
The West is standing on the sidelines, supplying just enough equipment to keep the embers going and judging the ordinary Ukrainians going to their deaths by their hundreds.
Fuck the clowns in charge in Kiev and fuck the Nazi militias obviously. But at this point the men being sent to the front are old men and boys dragged off the street against their will. Sending them to die to appease the West is fucking sick.
Ukraine has been invaded. Are you suggesting they do not fight back?
NATO is not war. No NATO country has been attacked. Engaging against Russia directly would put NATO at war with a nuclear power. I cannot imagine that this is your plan.
Not just “the West”, but everybody is on the sidelines as far as direct engagement goes. Most countries are assisting Ukraine where they can. Some to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Most have imposed crippling sanctions. So. “sidelines” is a bit misleading from that perspective.
Even Russia’s allies are “on the sidelines”. You certainly do not see much overt support from China. They have even maintained ( in fact stepped-up ) diplomatic relation with Ukraine.
Or are you trying to imply that the underlying cause of everything here is something other than Russia’s continued invasion? Everybody could truly go back to the sidelines if Russia just left.
The only other path is for Ukraine to win. Are you supporting that or not?
Right, but it’s not like every country not filled out in green is actively supporting Russia in the same way. In terms of countries supplying Russia the way the US, NATO, and the EU are supplying Ukraine, I’m pretty sure it’s just Iran and North Korea. The US has largely failed to isolate Russia the way it wanted to, but Russia hasn’t been able to get the kind of support from its allies that Ukraine has (like, unless there have been some Chinese Type 99s tanks spotted in operation by the Russians that I hadn’t heard about, I’m not exactly tracking the front every day).
In what way? I think a lot of people are acting like anyone not actively sending arms or money to Ukraine must therefore be “supporting” Russia. Has the Saudi Arabian Kingdom given any weapons to Russia? Have they given any loans to plug the holes in the national budget while the country engages in open warfare? Or are they just viewing a European conflict as irrelevant to their own aims and goals?
but Russia hasn’t been able to get the kind of [material] support from its allies that Ukraine has
It hasn’t needed to. Ukraine wouldn’t be a functional state at all by this point were it not for the tens of billions of dollars in aid as well as all the military equipment slowly depleting the west. Russia on the other hand, has been doing quite well in holding it’s own economically despite the sanctions and in holding the literal defensive line against all the NATO weaponry. It’s a nonsensical comparison to make.
They’ve taken arms and supplies from Iran and are currently negotiating with the DPRK. Yes, Russia is bigger and can theoretically out-last Ukraine in a war of attrition on a 1:1 basis, but you shouldn’t be hoping for something that prolongs the war.
It’s a nonsensical comparison to make.
So is using a map of the countries supporting Ukraine to insinuate that the all the other countries must therefore be on Russia’s side.
but you shouldn’t be hoping for something that prolongs the war./
lol, what do you think I’m “hoping” for? Stating the fact that Russia can easily do what it has been doing indefinitely (but Ukraine cannot) has nothing to do with my hopes.
So is using a map of the countries supporting Ukraine to insinuate that the all the other countries must therefore be on Russia’s side.
No one ever did any such thing, just noted that support comes in many forms other than military equipment, which Russia has mostly already covered for itself, even if it buys drone parts from Iran. Unlike Ukraine which now relies wholly and entirely on outside help for all of its material need. You changed the goalposts for what “support” means to make it sound like only military equipment counts as support, which is foolish because it isn’t what Russia needs. You’re just trying to move the goalposts all over the place to make it seem like you have some kind of valid point, but you don’t. Even if countries are not sending unneeded tanks, Russia still has plenty of support all over the world, mostly from countries who rightly recognize this as a struggle against the imperialism of the US and NATO which is beneficial to any anti-imperialists (including any actual leftists, even though so many western “leftists” drink deeply of their overlord’s propaganda).
You changed the goalposts for what “support” means to make it sound like only military equipment counts as support, which is foolish because it isn’t what Russia needs.
I’m pretty sure I mentioned here or elsewhere that financial aid was being given to the Ukrainian government in order to keep their civil service paid. South Korea just approved some of that recently.
Whenever anyone in the West brings up “global support for Ukraine” that’s what they’re mostly talking about, I merely clarified that because people are operating on different definitions of what constitutes “support”. When I consider “support for Ukraine” vs “support for Russia”, I’m comparing money, arms, and diplomatic positions or comments made by a country’s leadership. When I do so, I see:
Countries supporting Ukraine with money and/or arms
Countries that have condemned the war/invasion and nothing else, maintaining their existing relations with both Ukraine and Russia while also criticizing NATO in some cases
Iran + the DPRK, plus maybe Belarus for allowing it’s territory to be used
Russia still has plenty of support all over the world, mostly from countries who rightly recognize this as a struggle against the imperialism of the US and NATO which is beneficial to any anti-imperialists
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line at reflexively supporting anything the United States opposes? Like, I get that the US successfully re-aligned Ukraine’s foreign policy over the last decade or two, an unequivocal and blatant expansion of US influence and control, and so a successful Russian invasion would result in undoing that American victory, but I fail to see the benefit of Ukraine being in Russia’s sphere of influence for socialists, beyond the fact that Russia isn’t the dominant world power. Is that really it? And if so, how is it beneficial to replace one imperialist domination with another?
Doesn’t it matter that Russia is arguably more of a neoliberal state in line with the domestic social, economic and political agendas of far-right parties in the US, UK, and EU, than many Western countries currently?
Most countries are assisting Ukraine where they can.
lmao here i am living in a 200 million people country where nobody gives a single fuck about ukraine
even more political groups and discussions rarely involve ukraine except when lula decides to own zelensky in some way, no one here cares about nato’s proxy war
even more political groups and discussions rarely involve ukraine except when lula decides to own zelensky in some way, no one here cares about nato’s proxy war
I mean why should they? Brazil as a country (you mention lula, so) isn’t in NATO so it doesn’t have an ideological reason to support Russia or Ukraine in the matter. There’s nothing to be gained geographically for Brazil either, since whoever controls Kyiv doesn’t directly impact any strategic concerns for Brazil afaik.
You say no one cares, so while I think most people in Canada and US hope that Ukraine “wins”, does that mean apathy in that regard or would you say most people are passively hoping Russia achieves its war goals?
i think most people here are just apathetic towards it, yea
as for smaller, more involved groups, you have the english-speaking libs and the middle class which are just nyt-brained to the core (on every single issue, so you can guess their opinions), and the communists and PT libs (with opinions that are pretty close to ours: “war is bad, putin is shit, and we should stay away from the whole thing, but hopefully the end result of this one is a weaker, and not a stronger, american/nato empire”)
the communists and PT libs (with opinions that are pretty close to ours: “war is bad, putin is shit, and we should stay away from the whole thing, but hopefully the end result of this one is a weaker, and not a stronger, american/nato empire”)
All sounds very reasonable, tbh even the libs and middle-class positions make sense to me if they are plugged into the same media as US libs.
If your goal is to prevent deaths, surrendering would have been the ideal yeah.
Zelenksy tried to surrender to prevent further deaths, and Boris Johnson refused to let that meeting happen because NATO isn’t finished using Ukranians as crash test dummies.
Zelenskyy tried to surrender and Boris Johnson stopped him?! Ooooookay… He maaaybe (all “unnamed” sources) expressed an opinion, which the U.K. learnt the hard way, that you cannot negotiate with dictators. There can be no “peace in our time” with dictators hellbent on destruction.
To cast that as “Ukraine was stopped from surrendering” is just obscene … and yet another Kremlin talking point.
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.
Foreign Affairs is a Kremlin propaganda outlet now?
Or do only people you disagree with require sources, so that way you can keep gleefully believing whatever the fucking and spewing it everywhere you go
Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia
Hmm let’s look at the source on that: Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukranian language paper headquartered in Kyiv, owned by a Ukranian investment company also headquartered in Kyiv.
You do understand how propaganda works, right? It works by zooming in on molehills until they appear like mountains. So while I wouldn’t rule out that Johnson the Idiot said something unwise to Zelensky government, I also don’t automatically think that it means Zelenski was “forced to not give up”.
You are not immune to propaganda.
Who gives a shit what you “wouldn’t rule out” when even western media goes against you? Get your head out of your ass
Okay, but it is literally a propaganda source that is aligned with Ukraine lmao. We know it is propaganda, we are presenting it because even the ukrainian propaganda acknowledges it as factual.
I also don’t automatically think that it means Zelenski was “forced to not give up”.
Ukraine negotiates ceasefire.
BJ tells Ukraine to not go through with it.
Ukraine does not go through with it.
Why else would Ukraine have reversed course if not for one of its NATO puppetmasters commanding it to? Either it’s that, or BJ making a really impassioned argument for sending a bunch of Ukranians to an early grave and Zelensky fell for it, or Zelensky just changed his mind all on his own and the timing is a pure coincidence.
Considering there’s people in this thread complaining were spreading Russian propaganda by posting a press release FROM UKRAINE I’m starting to think their accusations may not be entirely in good faith.
which the U.K. learnt the hard way, that you cannot negotiate with dictators. There can be no “peace in our time” with dictators hellbent on destruction.
If the UK is convinced that you can’t negotiate with dictators, how does the UK keep entering into arms sales agreements with Saudi Arabia? Do the contracts just appear out of thin air at BAE?
I am referencing to a dictator that is hellbent on invasion of other countries. We had plenty of relations with Russia before they decided to invade Ukraine and they were a dictatorship before. We have plenty of relationships with China now and they are a de facto dictatorship.
The Saudis used their British weapons to bomb Yemen and create one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent memory. The UK sold weapons to Saudi before, during, and after the Saudi involvement in Yemen.
Perhaps Russia should have merely bombed Ukraine to the point of starvation. Then they’d be a good dictatorship that the UK would be happy to carry out business negotiations with.
What’s going on in Yemen is incredibly complicated. I’m not condoning everything Saudi Arabia is doing there, far from it, but to call it out as a good vs evil war is frankly a simpleton view. Saudi is bad there. Everyone is bad there. It’s a huge mess. But I think it’s important to recognise that the Saudis aim is to restore order in a neighbourhood country, to prevent Iranian influence from growing and to suppress violent Islamic fundamentalism.
But I think it’s important to recognise that the Saudis aim is to restore order in a neighbourhood country, to prevent Iranian influence from growing and to suppress violent Islamic fundamentalism.
“Restoring order is when you bomb hospitals and exacerbate famines and the more people that die, the more order it is.”
The Saudis are committing genocide in Yemen. No ifs, no buts. To claim they have a good reason to be out there doing it is genocide apologia.
Holy shit man just realize you have no ideology or clue, stop talking and educate yourself on what the actual fuck is going on in the world. It would be a far more productive use of your time.
They did say saudis bad tho, we should give the same nuance we expect from others. I don’t suppose the commenter you’re replying to supports Saudi arabia, it’s just odd that the nuance they’re seemingly willing to grant the saudis wont be given to Russia
No, Ukraine has a specific military campaign (the bombardment of Donbas) that he opposes along with the expansion of NATO. He has very clear demands, whatever you think of them.
That was initiated by pro-Russian insurgents and has led to lots of death on both sides. It’s not like the opposing forces haven’t been bombarding either. It’s like if England started attacking the North during the US Civil War because they retaliated against the South attacking them, and of course they both speak English. I’m guessing you also believe in the Russian propaganda line about a genocide happening there, even though there’s no proof? It was obviously just an excuse for Russia to get more control over Ukrainian territory after their Russian puppet President got ran out of the country.
Putin had denazification as a demand. That’s not super clear at all. His clear demands are Ukraine staying out of NATO, which it was already up for agreeing to do, and surrendering territory, which is obviously the one it doesn’t want to do, because no country would want to do that. That’s the problem one but hopefully they come to something eventually.
It’s bizarre to me that most hexbear users are less anti-war than some protestors and TV journalists that live in Russia itself who want their own country to leave. I agree with you guys on so many other stuff, but I can’t get behind supporting the aggressor in a war, especially as they’re shelling hospitals and apartment buildings.
The Donbas secessionists want to leave because the Maidan coup started pushing the country towards Ukrainian ethnonationalism, and eastern Ukraine is very Russian. Russia did back them, but Putin did not fabricate a popular opposition to the Maidan government.
Denazification is a pretty clear objective when the entity that you are seeking to denazify has battalions that are openly and explicitly Nazi as part of their doctrine. Purge those units, prosecute former members, ban Nazi hate crimes (like greasing bullets with pig fat) and ban Nazi symbols like Swastikas and Wolfsangles. It’s really not difficult, the US military nearly passes that bar and even the German military does (though it has closeted Nazi cliques).
Ya but we’re not in a war for our very lives. Hopefully they can get around to doing it after the war. Russia also had a Nazi problem with the Wagner group and a growing antisemitism problem but for some reason you can extend critical support to them but not Ukraine?
I was talking about Russia demanding it, not Ukraine doing it of their own volition. You are genuinely delusional if you think Ukraine is interested in such a thing. The Azov Battalion formed as a paramilitary circa 2014 to spearhead the aggression on Donbas, and since then became an official part of the military, still a couple years before the invasion, along with a few other explicitly Nazi groups. This, along with lionizing Bandera, pushing holodomor shit, and advancing ethnonationalist policy shows a clear trend. In terms of “state adoption of Nazi shit” Ukraine is easily the world leader and has been for some time, even over much worse and more destructive countries like the US.
Wagner is a PMC organization. There are Nazis in it, but it’s not a doctrinally Nazi organization nor is it actually part of the Russian government like Azov is Ukraine. Russia likewise isn’t pushing fascist hoaxes or ethnonationalist policies (however much we might both dislike Putin’s revanchist rhetoric).
What’s going on in Ukraine is incredibly complicated. I’m not condoning everything Russia is doing there, far from it, but to call it out as a good vs evil war is frankly a simpleton view. Russia is bad there. Everyone is bad there. It’s a huge mess. But I think it’s important to recognise that the Russians’ aim is to restore order in a neighbourhood country, to prevent American influence from growing and to suppress violent Neo-Nazi extremism.
I think sending a nazi-ish mercenarygroup into the meat grinder against an even more nazi-ish group so that they both wipe each other out (like what happened in Bahkmut) is good actually
"It’s not clear how Zelenskyy himself responded to Johnson’s reported push to halt peace talks. On the same day of the British prime minister’s arrival in Kyiv, Zelenskyy told the Associated Press in an interview that “no one wants to negotiate with a person or people who tortured this nation.” “It’s all understandable,” he continued. “And as a man, as a father, I understand this very well.” But, Zelenskyy added, “we don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.”
Also the only time the word “surrender” shows up is in a quote here where it was the west telling Zelensky to surrender and flee.
If your goal is to prevent deaths, surrendering would have been the ideal yeah.
This has literally never been true in any war ever. Foreign occupations rarely tend to be bloodless and I doubt a Russian one would have been an exception. At no point were any of the peace talks about Ukraine’s surrender – only renouncing it’s NATO ambitions in exchange for the withdrawal of Russian troops, as per:
“In the weeks ahead of Johnson’s April 9 visit, high-level diplomatic talks held in Belarus and Turkey had failed to yield a diplomatic breakthrough, though reports in mid-March indicated that Russian and Ukrainian delegations “made significant progress” toward a 15-point peace deal that would involve Ukraine renouncing its NATO ambitions in exchange for the withdrawal of Moscow’s troops.”
At no point was surrender on the table - that would have likely lead to Zelenksy’s detention and execution in the early days of the invasion.
I don’t think Zelensky was too keen on capitulating to Vladimir Putin’s demands to destroy his country, after sending in GRU hit squads to kill him and his family multiple times at the outset of the war.
Ukraine has plenty of opportunities to win. It could have chosen to chart a more balanced position between the EU and Russia. It could have given the Donbass some independence referenda and just let them go. It could have actually tried to adhere to the numerous Minsk Agreements to deescalate and prevent war. It could have negotiated for peace while the Russians were pulling back after its previously more successful counter offensives.
But each time its leaders ignored the off ramp to peace and pursued delusional maximalist goals, egged on by promises of EU and NATO membership which even Zelensky acknowledged publically were just carrots dangled in front of Ukraine.
Now there’s no pathway to any sort of Ukrainian victory and the most realistic scenarios all involve Ukraine permanently giving up Donbas and Crimea. The only difference between the likely outcome now and just giving them a referendum in 2014 is a couple hundred thousand Ukrainian graves.
I’d respect the EU and NATO more if they had actually followed through with their promises to Ukraine instead of this Charlie Brown football bullshit.
Your comment makes me want to see a fan cut of Captain America where he just gets the shit beaten out of him and his limbs ripped off and he dies and every five minutes “I can do this all day” but it never turns around and he fucking dies. He never appears to make a come back. He just keeps getting his ass kicked and never stops saying the line. Except it’s not his ass getting kicked, it’s some random children he took off the street and forced to be child soldiers or he’d kill them. And he just keeps saying “I can do this all day” while tens of thousands of people keep getting killed and not once for any reason or goal that progress is made towards. Just tens of thousands of dead bodies every month. “I can do this all day” except he’s not even there he’s on an internet forum. It’s still tens of thousand of dead bodies but not his. And he’ll never give up. But he’ll never get any closer to winning. Just death to countless people who aren’t him. He can do it all day. And every time he says it you can tell he feels really cool and badass. He’s Captain America. He doesn’t quit just because it looks bad.
Very sound argument. After all it was the civil liberals, western anarchists and debate perverts that convinced Hitler in the market place of ideas that invading Poland was “bad vibes” and so he killed himself from that hard own.
Or was it something else? Nah, after all reality is always the thing you imagine it to be.
Youre in a thread of an article about the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive. I will now imply you are having sexual relations with a man as a negative thing.
Do you think it is realistic that Russia will unilaterally pull out? The war will end when Russia leaves, but Russia isn’t going to leave until they are pushed out, negotiations are had, or Ukraine is destroyed. The first possibility is becoming increasingly more unlikely, and the last is something that nobody should want
That leaves negotiations. I think Ukraine should come to the table while they still have some leverage, which is decreasing every week that they throw their men into the meat grinder without meaningful gains.
It doesn’t leave only negotiations. Russia tried for 10+ years in Afghanistan. The US the same, there and in Vietnam. There is such as giving up and going home. That’s the “win” a small state can inflict on a large one. I don’t think that’s where Ukraine and Russia is headed, but there’s a quick for Ukraine and a slow “win” for Ukraine.
For sure there’s a real risk Ukraine isn’t winning this war. But there’s never been a war where there’s absolute certainty one side will win, until we get to the “downfall” times.
You do realise that it was Ukraine who refuesed to negotiate and not the other way around? Also, mind reminding me who it is that is performing a failing counteroffensive?
Wait, so your ideal is instead of negotiations, in the same vein as Afghanistan, Ukraine experiences this horrible war for another 9 years and then becomes a state ruled by the fighters involved in the war with the most extremist far right ideology rule it as a theocracy? To be clear that ideology in this case is Nazism.
You don’t sound like an ally of the Ukrainian people.
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