Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
That’s a very one-sided view of affairs though, it’s not like the Ukrainian govt was bombing them for fun, it was a war. Civilians died on both sides-that doesn’t excuse it, but it certainly does not justify an invasion!
The invasion has achieved the exact opposite of what the Russian leadership wanted.
Putin feared Ukraine aligning with NATO, and this invasion has drawn them vastly closer and has deepened cooperation more than it ever would have been otherwise.
Putin opposed the existence of an independent Ukrainian national identity, yet this war has solidified and reified it like nothing else ever could, among both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Putin thought he had the support of the east, yet this invasion has wiped out any sympathy Russian-speakers might have had for the Russian state before.
Putin (falsely) used ‘Denazification’ as a justification for the war, yet this war and Russian actions in 2014 have VASTLY empowered the far-right, giving them disproportionate power relative to their support base.
Putin claimed it was to protect people in Donbass from ‘genocide’ (pfft’), yet now they have been subjected to far worse horrors than in the 2014-2022 period (not to mention the fact Russian actions against Ukrainian civilians have been far worse than anything that occurred in 2014-2022).
The invasion is completely ridiculous and unjustified + strategically idiotic, based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities on the ground from the Russian leadership, which has become increasingly personalist and isolated from reality since COVID.
This is not just a war against NATO, and that is a poor way of framing things. It is, above all, a war against the Ukrainian state and, given the identity-denying and annexationist policies of the Russian leadership, against a great majority of the Ukrainian people, Russian and Ukrainian speaking alike (all data shows the vast majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians oppose the invasion and support the war effort). Why some people are flabbergasted that a national self-defence effort has inspired so much support among Ukrainians is mystifying to me. Of course they’re not going to surrender, what do you think is going to happen and what do you think is viable? Ukraine and Ukrainians are not just chess pieces on a board in Russia-NATO competition, they are millions of real people whose lives have now been RUINED because of the war. It is basic humanity. All people have the right to self-determination and self-defence against an aggressor, and that is not in contradiction with opposing the far-right elements the Russian invasion has empowered.
You’ve got it backwards. The far right elements were deliberately sowed to induce instability on Russia’s borders, and has been so since before and after the Cold War.
Check out Operation Bloodstone. Check out Operation AERODYNAMIC. Check out Prolog. These are all declassified information detailing their activities in Ukraine and the role in destabilizing Russia both externally and internally.
The reason is quite simple actually: Russia’s increasingly close relationship with the EU (especially Germany) as a raw material supplier will eventually pull the EU out of the US sphere. Energy sovereignty has always been a key issue for Europe. When Saddam tried to sell oil in euro, Iraq was immediately invaded. Then Russia began to sell gas in euro, setting the stage for Europe to gain its energy sovereignty.
Thus, Maidan had to happen. The war in Ukraine has to happen. Nordstream bombing had to happen. All to prevent the vassal states from defecting and undermining US hegemony in the region.
No matter who is in charge in Russia, a left wing government or a right wing government, they all have to face the same problem. Putin tried to appease to the West for nearly a decade, only to see the US keep sending military arms to Ukraine openly. If he had been an even bigger idiot he might even wait until Ukraine to be fully armed by NATO and by then it would have been a far worse humanitarian crisis. And then you’d be calling him an idiot for trying to appease the West and ignoring the military buildup in Ukraine.
show me where Russians attacked Ukrainian civilians from 2015-2021 (dont show me Russia funding separatists as evidence, the DPR and LPR have the right to defend their right to self determination). you can say “it was a war” all you want, it doesnt change the fact that there was a ceasefire agreement that was consistently violated by Ukraine.
what do you think Russian leadership wanted? bc it looks like the DPR and LPR, as well as most of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, are occupied by Russia. and Zelenskyyy was supposed to be the “peace and neutrality” candidate, yet he was working towards joining NATO. the Ukrainians west of the Dnieper were already primed to join NATO, the war didnt change anything.
and what are those bs identity politics abt “Ukrainian national identity”? lets focus on material reality, not these flimsy ideas invented to justify imperialism and ur guesses on what Putin thinks abt them
yummy western propaganda!!
no, Ukraine and the west have empowered (and armed) nazis for 90 years! and now you rely more on western propaganda and all their unfounded claims of atrocities. let’s focus on what we have proof for— the Ukrainian use of cluster munitions against civilians in the Donbas, Ukrainian pogroms and segregation against the Roma people, and state suppression of the Russian language. and what is wrong with you saying “pffft” regarding genocidal actions?
lol you are the one isolated from reality. the world sees what the west is blind to. when the fighting is over and Russia still governs 4 previously Ukrainian oblasts, come here again and say the invasion is “strategically idiotic”, it will be funnier then.
this IS a war against NATO. and it was started by NATO. and it can be ended by NATO right now— Russia is open to peace negotiations
this is a ridiculous double standard. if we’re going to talk about NATO pulling the strings of Ukraine, we don’t get to pretend the separatists were authentic grassroots movements unaffected by Russian military involvement in their affairs. and whether or not you ‘count’ the separatists as russian-proxy, they did kill civilians. the ceasefire & it’s breaking are still pertinent details but it’s wrong to characterize the warfare as one-sided
this is true and obvious, it’s a much larger and more intense war. western propaganda does emphasis on russia’s crimes, denies ukraines, & spins tales of russia’s ‘genocidal’ intentions, but the wide scale suffering & thousands of civilian deaths are real. it’s why the war needs to end as quickly as possible.
im not denying separatists were influenced by Russia, but sending arms to a separatist group is nothing compared to directly attacking civilian centers. is a third party sending weapons to Hamas comparable to the actions of Israel? should we condemn those who send weapons to Houthi rebels?
a subjective assessment is “true and obvious”? no western spin will change the fact that this war is one of western expansion and the people of the Donbas were facing ethnic cleansing from Ukraine. the war could end today if Ukraine and NATO were willing to negotiate reasonably.
ah sorry i had no idea i have to spell out exact numbers of combatants, casualties, displaced persons, and length/area of combat zones or it’s “subjective”. don’t be obtuse, this isn’t western spin to say more people are getting hurt in the expanded war than were in the Donbass.
when the separatists you arm & operate your military alongside hit a civilian target with those weapons you do have a measure of culpability. just like NATO has responsibility for the weapons they’ve given ukriane.
its not abt numbers. on one hand is the ethnic cleansing of civilians during an agreed upon ceasefire, on the other is a war between two modern armies. trying to compare the two is obtuse.
this is not materialist. numbers & scale matters. a murder is not the same as a mass murder. a different legal framework doesn’t magically make a many times increase in human suffering and death irrelevant and incomparable to the smaller-scale violence earlier in the same conflict.
we’re leftists, right? we agree that social murder is an aspect of capitalist society, but the capitalist legal system does not recognize this. we’re capable of separating material effects of policy from their legal definitions. i’d urge you to focus less on the legal character of the war and more on material effects on people. legalism is a tool the ruling class uses that obscures & excuses human suffering in our society. the civilians in the donbass were excused by the ukrainians with legal definitions of traitors or dissidents, as russians who were not part of the state & not deserving protections. i don’t accept that and i won’t accept fictions about scopes of operation and who is technically aggressing whom, when a kid gets their leg blown off by a mine that is a life permanently changed or erased whichever legalese you slap on it.
its not abt legal framework, its attacks on civilians vs attacks on combatants. numbers dont make these comparable, they are too entirely different
Russia has attacked civilian targets and infrastructure.
“OHCHR verified a total of 9,444 civilian deaths during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as of August 13, 2023. Furthermore, 16,940 people were reported to have been injured”
you’re still making a legalistic distinction “attacks on civilians” vs. “attacks on combatants” these attacks on “combatants” clearly contain civilian deaths,
so what actually is the difference to you besides who’s doing the murder?e: this is combative, not how i intended it. but i think the fact of civilian deaths emerging from the category of ‘attack on combatant’ is very destabilizing for using that as a discrete category from ‘attack on civilian’, is it not?Removed by mod
A measure of culpability, as compared to the bad faith characterization of full-scale offensive war that lib is making.
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They’re only going to start becoming less ruined once they accept that they have to negotiate.
Yes, of course, a negotiated solution will be necessary. We’re in a frozen conflict because the ‘meta’ of modern warfare is extremely defence heavy, it seems. Once a modern, rich army is entrenched, war-of-manoeuvre is ineffective. You have to grind them down to a pulp before you yourself are turned to dust. Neither side has the capabilities to make serious gains anymore, at least for now, and neither are visibly close to any real exhaustion.
The problem is the Ukrainian state, even if its officials wanted to negotiate, has this and that structural liability preventing it from viably doing so. A large base of the population who still take a maximalist position, a strong element of the far-right in the military that could take over and kill Zelensky for being a Russian-speaking Jew traitor if he negotiates seriously, an economy and military becoming increasingly integrated into western capital circuits whose state leadership is pushing you to fight on (and you want to), and the fact that Russia itself is not offering any meaningful concessions whatsoever anymore.
Peace is a long way off. It’s not easy to change any of these factors, and it’ll be a while before the mutually hurting stalemate starts to change peoples’ minds because the cost of non-victory is so high for both the Russian and Ukrainian leadership, and for large chunks of the Ukrainian population for whom their very national identity and being is torn asunder, given the massive importance of territory to all national mythologies.
It is sad but I do not see any real chance of peace even if Zelensky woke up tomorrow and wanted it more than anything in the world.
I don’t think separatists were fighting for fun but rather because they had no other means of seceding from a country that clearly only wanted their land and not them. I also struggle to imagine that the civilian deaths on the Ukraine side during the Civil War were a tenth as many as the civilian deaths in Donbas, because the dynamic of the war was principally one of aggression towards Donbas (just as the dynamic of the invasion is principally one of aggression towards Ukraine), whatever one might say about the justification of the aggression or the circumstances of it.