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
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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?im going to disengage after this bc i dont think either of us have anything to gain by continuing. i do respect ur opinion on this tho, and even tho i have some disagreements, i also agree with much of what youve said and dont think our difference in opinion is a dealbreaker.
the last rebuttal ill give is this: combatants and civilians are materially different— one has and is using weapons. and intentional civilian attacks have a higher rate of success than accidental civilian attacks, so intent matters. also the supposed russian attacks on civilian targets are spurious and fog of war makes it difficult to make value judgements at this time. what i was focusing on is what we know: the situation in the Donbas before February 2022.
thank you for ur input, its helpful to have differing views heard to prevent this place turning into an echo chamber
Ukraine certainly likes to destabilize it: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html
i straight up used ukraine's violence against civilians as an example earlier in the thread
Obviously they do that to, but my point there was specifically the human shield thing
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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.
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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.