normally peaceful country
War in Ukraine started in 2022 when Putler invaded them for no reason. Nothing happened before that.
Um, sir! Sir! This is Russian propaganda, given an article by Wikipedia itself!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_have_you_been_for_eight_years%3F#:~:text=%22Where%20have%20you%20been%20for,pointing%20out%20to%20what%20Ukraine
What an absurdly nakedly dogshit article, even for fedipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_have_you_been_for_eight_years%3F#:~:text=%22Where%20have%20you%20been%20for,pointing%20out%20to%20what%20Ukraine
This is like HOI4 when another player declares war on you for no reason at all other than "i must paint the whole map of my color"
Alright, I'll bite. As someone who's somewhat ignorant of the situation, what led up to the invasion that would justify it?
Well that depends on your interpretation of what justifies war. If you think nothing does, than obviously nothing will. I don't think Russia is justified, but that their position is understandable. The Ukrainian military shelled Russian speaking civilians in Donbas. They also, deliberately or not, fired over the border and killed Russian citizens in Russia. They dammed a river supplying 80% of the fresh water into Crimea which had rebelled and join the Russian Federation. Ukraine was also seeking NATO membership, which would mean that anything that could have constituted an attack on Ukraine by Russian would have triggered war with all of NATO, meaning that unless Russia acted now Ukraine could have continued to kill Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity with impunity under NATO's protection. Basically with Ukraine in NATO, the US could trivially engineer a full scale war with Russia at any time.
Parts of Ukraine are heavily populated by people of Russian decent, who speak Russian, they are discriminated against by the government and by ethnic Ukrainians. Before the invasion Ukraine had made it mandatory for all public servants to speak Ukrainian for example. The US assisted right wing militia to coup the Ukrainian government in 2014 because the president was seen as pro-Russia.
There was an ongoing civil war, drawn along ethnic lines. The US always intended to escalate this conflict as a way to hurt Russia and Putin decided to strike before he had to face a NATO protected belligerent on the border. You might not agree that this is justification, but I think it puts paid to the suggestion that the war was merely territorial aggression by an inherently militaristic government against a peaceful one.
There's always lots of stuff on the news megathread as well, if you're interested
Oh it's not that it's justified, it's just insane to call a country "normally peaceful" when they had an illegal coup followed by a civil war for the last 7 years, mind you the current government is the result of the illegal coup and the breakaway regions supported the legitimate government.
So, just looking over what happened on Wikipedia, it looks like there were violent protests over the leader not joining the EU. A majority of parliament removed him after a lot of chaos. That decision feels understandable given the circumstance. Parliament is elected, which feels like a more democratic decision than one guy's choice even if you or I disagree. Is there more context I'm missing that would suggest it was a straight up coup?
They removed him immediately after the security forces retreated and the whole government fled the capital, that's paperwork at that point. It's not about whether the legislature can do it - legislatures very often make these kinds of decisions during or after the process of getting physically run out of their chairs by armed men. And that's generally what a coup entails.
This is Wikipedia we're talking about, but it's worth mentioning that the right wing spearhead of the riot viewed it as an insurgency, as was mentioned incidentally in articles like this one:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmjjey/what-the-hell-are-ukrainian-fascists-doing-in-the-hong-kong-protests
It's also worth noting that the event that escalated the protests and led to the government fleeing was a massacre of civilians which was blamed on the police and the government. The evidence seems to indicate that this was a false-flag attack since the civilians were killed by snipers that were in a building that was occupied by the ultra right wing parties involved in the protesters. For an in-depth discussion on the matter I would recommend this article. The author is a Ukrainian political scientist.
Zelensky may have been elected president, but the positions of governors are unelected in Ukraine. And the more you look at the ministers and governors in Ukraine, the more you see they are oligarchs or backed by oligarchs from the government immediately post-Maidan. Also as president, Zelensky has outlawed opposition parties and socialist parties. Nothing is binary, Ukraine can have presidential elections and still be undemocratic.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/the-buildup-to-war-in-ukraine-february-13-2022.html
continues for every day up until Feb 22
You know, I listened to this once without taking much of it in, and I'm glad you pointed it out for another watch. Thank you.
I would argue Russia is justified as Ukraine was getting cozy with Nato and Nato is an threat to the Russian people and their way of life and any country collaborating with Nato must be fully stopped
Being normally peaceful is when you shell civilians in contravention of the ceasefire agreement you signed, and the more you shell civilians in contravention of the ceasefire agreement you signed, the more normally peaceful you are.
"I think the death penalty is a horrific thing, and I want to do something about it... so, I'm studying to be an executioner."
The war Ukraine is doing is justified because they're White and the Russians are, somehow, not white enough. But when it was the DPRK who tried to drive the aggressor out of their peninsula The International Community (TM) said that was a big no-no so the US intervened being forced to bomb civilians as a punishment.
When it's the non-westerners who try to free their land, bombs must fall on their homes. See them call for military intervention in Niger and Burkina Faso because they're being anti-French (BASED)
Well that thread was fucking cursed, was not expecting RAMPANT transphobia when I clicked that link.
Damn, and here I thought I didn't pass vetting in Lemmy due to seeming too lib.
normally peaceful country
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
Not a lib or a troll, genuinely want to understand your perspective. Are you saying that when a country is invaded that it should bend over and let it happen because war is bad and resisting means the war continues?
I'm well aware Ukraine is a troubled country, filled with corruption and problematic nationalists, even if from my understanding they have far less power now than in 2014.
What would the ideal outcome be according to you all? Ukraine should give up all the Russian speaking parts or cede the whole country? As shit as Ukraine is Russia seems even worse.
Are you saying that when a country is invaded that it should bend over and let it happen because war is bad and resisting means the war continues?
This is a false equivalency pushed by the western media between 1. "bending over and letting it happen" (disgusting comparison to SA) with it being invasion by "muh subhuman asiatic hordes" and 2. "fighting back the untermensch invaders".
Everybody here advocates for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in which no more innocent lives are lost, with the withdrawal of military forces on both sides, and as another user pointed out below, Russia will ideally take the Donbas/Crimea because otherwise the racial reprisals by Azov and co. against the ethnic majority Russian population would be another humanitarian disaster.
There is a truly peaceful resolution to this conflict, do not take seriously the warmongering fascist propaganda of the West because they want to use this as an excuse to test experimental weaponry against their enemy.
This is a false equivalency
No, it isn't. Russia is making an unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Allowing them to have any benefits from this attack at all encourages them to try this again, which they certainly would. Trusting Russia to keep to an agreement is like trusting a dingo in a nursery. They promised to respect Ukraine's territory in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear arsenal, and this is the result. The United States guaranteed their security as part of this deal. If Russia were honest, they would never have invaded. If the US were honest, they would have put boots on the ground and sent their own military in to counter the invasion. At the end of the day, Ukraine should've just kept the nukes.
There will be peace when Putin is dead and Russia withdrawals.
unprovoked
Shelling Donbas for 8 years and agreeing to peace accords before violating them immediately doesn't count as provocation?
"LE WAR STARTED WHEN PUTIN RIGHT CLICKED DONBAS WITH TANK BATALLION IN 2022, WAIT WHATS THE RUSSO UKRANIAN WAR?!?"
Tfw you uncritically consume so much Murdoch media that your brain leaks out of your ears.
Trusting Russia to keep to an agreement is like trusting a dingo in a nursery.
This is where I stopped reading. Framing global politics through this lens is silly. Russia isn't your cheating ex - they're a global power making strategic decisions based on their material interests, just like every other nation. Trust is just the metric by which we measure how their interests align with our own. And yeah, they're uh... on the other side of the war. Of course there is no trust.
If what you want to say is that Russia's victory would somehow incentivize them to conduct a campaign of imperial expansion, explain how. If your intent was simply to tell us that we shouldn't trust those dirty, no good, double-crossin' Russians, okay, cool. Mission accomplished.
Russia is making an unprovoked attack on Ukraine.
Shelling the Donbass for 8 years doesn't count I guess
Trusting Russia to keep to an agreement is like trusting a dingo in a nursery
This is a deeply ironic thing to say considering none of this would have happened if Ukraine just kept to the Minsk Agreements
There will be peace when Putin is dead and Russia withdrawals.
I'm not trying to be rude because your original question seemed to be asked in decent faith, but this is an absurdly simplistic and unrealistic view.
Do you actually think that if Putin had a heart attack tomorrow the war would end? This is war caused by over a decade of political decisions and serious material interests. No one in Putin's government, party, the media, or even the opposition would support a Russian surrender or peace agreement that doesn't maintain regions like the Donbas.
And beyond that, Russia has no incentive to withdraw prematurely but plenty of very serious reasons not to.
I'm not trying to be rude because your original question seemed to be asked in decent faith, but this is an absurdly simplistic and unrealistic view.
It's a different lib this time, probably an aussie, let em have it
There is a lot of concern trolling and "good faith, I just want to know" in front of a lot of bigoted people. I can understand the aggressive stance.
I totally agree, but plenty of people taken that stance already so I thought there might be value in taking a different tack.
It’s not unprovoked. Ukraine commited human rights abuses against Donbas and Russian majority regions. Russia stepped in to protect those people from Ukraine. The only real peace will be with the complete destruction of the fascists and removal of Zelensky.
AKSHUSJALLLYH WE NEED TO SPILL MOAR INNOCENTS BLLOOD BCUZ RUSSIA LE SUBHUMAN ORK DINGO UNPROVOKED ATTACK NUKES NUKES MURICA MUST PUNISH BY INVADING THEM HURRRRRR!!!!!
LOL shut the fuck up you demented ape, I guarantee that whatever western shithole you're typing this from has its fair share of "unpunished invasions".
Russia is making an unprovoked attack on Ukraine.
Wrong and incredibly stupid. Although this recent encroachment was a strategic blunder by the Kremlin, there was plenty provocation from the West, escalating ever since Russia started opposing actions America took as global hegemon back in the early 2000s (like the actual invasion of Iraq) to the foreign interference and antidemicratic coup of Euromaidan back in 2014, which is when you'd know the war really started if you'd bothered to look into this issue further than channel 9 and that one soy video on YouTube about Ukraine's nukes.
At the end of the day, Ukraine should've just kept the nukes.
"We should have more puppet states of the genocidal American empire armed with WMDs, what's the worst that could possibly happen??"
Trusting Russia to keep to an agreement is like trusting a dingo in a nursery. They promised to respect Ukraine's territory in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear arsenal, and this is the result.
This is literally just "LE RUSSIAN DISHONEST DINGO ORK HORDE, GENETIC LIARS MUST DESTROY BCUZ BREAK PINKIE PROMISE!!!!" More racist right wing warmongering against the Russian people to excuse an incredibly violent escalation of conflict so NATO can secure its imperialist interests on a mountain of innocent Russian and Ukrainian corpses. That stupid treaty is irrelevant because it holds no more weight than the given international laws that state a country has to respect the sovereignty of its neighbours and pursue no military encroachments onto their territory. Something that every western nation has either broken or supported the breaking of for a third world nation.
And most of all, why the hell should Russia accept a treaty on "muh independence" drawn up and solely policed by a corrupt oligarchic settler colonial police state that has its own fucking record of genocidal unlawful invasions into foreign lands near and far? Where the is the fucking UN in all of this?
Inb4 "M-MUH WHATABOUTERY"
So you'd accept living in a city where the code of criminal justice is written and policed by a violent mafia syndicate? Fuck off, it is absurd to follow the laws written by a hypocrite with your worst interests in mind.
It was literally just America pre emptively securing an excuse to kill thousands of Russians in retaliation should it ever even think of threatening it's murderous interests by reforming the USSR starting with Ukraine.
At the end of the day you're just another racist useful idiot for the Wests genocidal warmongering agenda against its enemies disguising a perverse desire to cause a level of slaughter on par with world war 3 behind a crude sense of justice.
Fucking demonic troglodyte, you want to die in a sea of nuclear fire that badly? Sure then, go book a one way trip to the sun and take your bloodthirsty imperialist fantasies with you so the rest of humanity can live in peace.
At the end of the day, Ukraine should've just kept the nukes.
Would have been pretty useless. Keys to the nukes were in Moscow. Ukies tried to crack them, couldn't do it, returned it to get money, then squandered the money.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
It's right there in the last paragraph of the overview, lol.
just an FYI the Ukrainian government is attempting ,since the colour revolution, to destroy the usage of minority languages , beginning with Russian, Belarusian, and Yiddish (!!!). Considering the government's affiliation with reactionary militias, this doesn't bode well.
Personally I find the common usage of genocide pretty broad, but the specific targeting of an ethnic group in Ukraine means the word genocide fits to describe what the Ukrainian government has been trying to do for the last 7 years before the war properly started.
I don't want to be mean since you didn't just call us ruzzian bots and shills. But, to call Ukraine just a "troubled" country and insist that Russia must be worse somehow shows that you do not yet have the necessary understanding of historical backgroundthat led to the war in the first place.
As to what I think the best outcome would be, obviously if all working peoples in Russia and Ukraine who get subjected to these wars joined together in a common class struggle to create a dictatorship of the proletariat that would be great. But left wing parties aren't doing very well in Eastern Europe unfortunately. So, barring some upsurge in left wing mobilisation, areas that have a majority of ethnic Russians should be given a choice to either join the Russian federation or create an independent state, Ukraine should be barred from joining NATO, and all Azov/right sector militants should be tried for their crimes of 2014.
Tbh I don't see any of this happening within a peace deal considering the military situation heavily favours Russia over NATO, I think the end result will be determined simply on whether or not the Russian army would like to make Ukraine into a rump state and what message they are wanting to send to Africa, Asia, and south america as we enter a world without total American dominance.
At this point, yeah, they probably should. The counteroffensive is failing.
I won't pretend to speak for the rest of hexbear, but I don't see a positive future for Ukraine no matter what happens next. Blame Russia, blame NATO, it doesn't matter - we are where we are. But realistically, what do you think is going to happen to those Russian-speaking Ukrainians if Ukraine doesn't cede the Russian-speaking territory?
The current invasion is the product of the 8-year civil war in Ukraine and Ukraine's bad faith sabotage of diplomatic efforts at a peaceful resolution to that conflict. OOP calling Ukraine "normally peaceful" is a demonstration of their illiteracy on even the history of where the country was 4 years ago.
Yes. Some countries are not worth fighting for. The Nazis in should not have fought against invasion at the end of the war and instead surrendered. Some are. The USSR needed to fight the Nazis because losing means genocide. Ukkkraine doesn't need to fight Russia because losing means not getting to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from the donbass.
Oh yeah totally, they don't need to fight Russia, they should just give up and let Russians do what they did in Bucha to the whole country. Of course Russians are known to peacefully incorporate conquered territories with no harm done whatsoever to civilians.
Some countries might not be worth fighting for, I guess that's true. Some other countries are always worth fighting against though, and Russia is one of them.
Some other countries are always worth fighting against though, and Russia is one of them.
lmao heres the admission that this entire bloody mess is a proxy war between the West (america) and Russia..
Oh yeah totally, they don't need to fight Russia, they should just give up and let Russians do what they did in Bucha to the whole country. Of course Russians are known to peacefully incorporate conquered territories with no harm done whatsoever to civilians.
...and heres the attribution of war crimes not to the savage nature of war and armed, violent conscripts, but to the inferior nature of "LE RUSSIAN PEOPLES, SUBHUMAN ORK LE BAD!"
inb4 "MUH WARCIMES DENIAL"
nah I'm not denything Russian troops committed warcrimes, but I'm not going to attribute that to some innate savagery of the Russian people, this disgusting bullshit is the result of the war itself, and we sure as hell know that Russia was not solely responsible for the current conflict (EU stabbed the bear with EuroMaidan).
Theres also the false equivalence of the war ending peacefully, full withdrawals from both sides, with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and the war ending with Ukraine's lands being raped and pillaged by out of control asiatic hordes (classic fascist warmongering propaganda).
All in all this post is peak racist virtue signalling and hypocrisy typed in all likelihood by Ameri
fatcan hands.I'll put it to you in a way that your teenage mind can comprehend: We're with Thorfinn in that violence is le bad.
Now fuck off to McDonald etc. etc.Edit: Sorry to all fat people for associating you with child killing imperialist wastes of oxygen.
Miss all on accounts my man. I'm Polish and we know full well what it means to live under Russian rule. We remember September 1939 backstab and 1944-45 campaign of bringing freedom by Soviets. My family on all imaginable sides has suffered significant loss from those. Time passes but Russian soldiers somehow behave the same, as proven by the current conflict. So maybe there's more to it than just "armed conscripts", I don't know what it is exactly, but I do fully associate that with Russians. Feel free to call me racist for that, comes out fairly funny given Poles and Russians are Slavs.
Oh and conscripts you say? Didn't Russians claim it's fully professional army back then? So maybe it's a matter of training. I also don't think what happened at Bucha can be attributed to actions of a few rogue conscripts, it had to come from a higher level of command.
Time passes but Russian soldiers somehow behave the same, as proven by the current conflict. So maybe there's more to it than just "armed conscripts", I don't know what it is exactly, but I do fully associate that with Russians. Feel free to call me racist for that
Ok, you're a racist.
I and others have responded in good faith and with actual information elsewhere in this thread, but having read this and some of your other comments we probably shouldn't have bothered. You lack any real understanding of any aspect of this conflict and you're clearly not open to learning anything because your thinking is clearly clouded by bigotry against a specific people. Until you move past that prejudice you're never going to open to anything that might counter it. I hope you do eventually, and not just for the sake of understanding this conflict.
Would you have preferred that Poland exist under indefinite Nazi occupation? If Poland is the best route from one to the other and the Nazis have an existential enemy in the Soviets, the military is going to cross over one way or another. Speaking not for the state of Poland (fuck them, those Holocaust collaborators) but for the people (minorities particularly), it is much better to get at least some insulation from the Nazi genocide via the Soviet occupation rather than, what? Another year or two before the Nazis invade and this time take over the entire country with zero state effort to protect vulnerable populations first and much less hope of the Soviets ultimately defeating them? It just doesn't make sense to me.
Insulation from Nazi genocide, as if hundreds of thousands of Poles were not sent to Syberia and Katyń didn't happen. As if Soviets didn't collaborate with Nazis forming the Ribbentrop - Molotov pact. Soviets are perpetrators of WW2 in the same way Nazis are. It's just Stalin got backstabbed by Hitler the same way he stabbed Poland in the back in 1939.
I also wonder what exactly do you mean by Polish state being Holocaust collaborators? You do realize there was no Polish state under Nazi / Soviet occupation, except for the London one? How could it have collaborated in Holocaust?
People were right though, hexbear is just a Russian propaganda tube. I don't know if you people are paid to do this subhuman work or are you really believe in this alt history bullshit you're spreading, I feel sorry for you one way or the other.
As if Soviets didn't collaborate with Nazis forming the Ribbentrop - Molotov pact.
The pact was the correct move after the western powers (and Poland, afaik) refused to more proactively join the Soviets in crushing the Nazis. The Soviets could not defeat the Nazis without being able to actually reach them on land and the Soviets could not defeat the Nazis if war started then and they were alone (as the western powers hoped would happen). Given the western powers not taking the Nazi threat seriously and the geopolitical implications of that, the pact was entirely correct.
It's just Stalin got backstabbed by Hitler the same way he stabbed Poland in the back in 1939.
Stalin identified (what I've usually seen translated as) "Hitlerism" as the immediate mortal enemy of the Soviets since well before the pact. Incidentally, Hitler also publically identified the Soviets as mortal enemies of the Nazis, making all sorts of accusations about "Judeo-Bolshevism". These two governments were not allies and it's an abomination of historical revision to characterize it as such.
Stalin expected Hitler to violate the pact eventually, since the Soviets gained tremendous advantage from stalling and developing their semi-feudal infrastructure into something more modern. He did not, however, expect the Nazis to invade as soon as they did, was caught very unprepared, and suffered horrible losses both of soldiers and civilians (in Poland and the USSR proper) as a result. That last part is something that should be criticized, but you cannot criticize his actual errors coherently in the fantasy framework of him and Hitler being teammates.
I also wonder what exactly do you mean by Polish state being Holocaust collaborators? You do realize there was no Polish state under Nazi / Soviet occupation, except for the London one? How could it have collaborated in Holocaust?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-historians-under-attack-for-exploring-polands-role-in-the-holocaust
It's illegal in Poland to make claims like this, so it would not surprise me if you aren't very familiar, but on a municipal level there absolutely was collaboration between existing Polish government officials and the Nazis.
Here's another article from the most Atlanticist source you can find in journalism: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/poland-holocaust-death-camps/552455/
People were right though, hexbear is just a Russian propaganda tube. I don't know if you people are paid to do this subhuman work or are you really believe in this alt history bullshit you're spreading, I feel sorry for you one way or the other.
If my quotes denote sections (with this being the fourth), then the first section of this comment (that the pact was correct) is a claim that isn't very popular in western historiography but definitely is present. The second and third sections (Stalin and Hitler were always enemies, that the Polish government collaborated in the Holocaust) are the standard position in western historiography even though the Stalin/Hitler one gets distorted in pop history. In countries like Poland and Ukraine, these positions are much less common in part because of reactionary campaigns by those governments to revise history in the direction of Holocaust denial (see section three of my comment and Banderites in Ukraine, respectively).
Nothing I've said here is in the realm of a crank opinion to mainstream western historians. I can expand on the western powers not being interested in stopping the Nazis until it became a direct need for their own survival, but it felt like too much of a tangent.
Poland literally refused to ally with the Soviets, did imperialism by trying to restore the PLC during the 1920 war, prevented the soviets from aiding german & Hungarian communists, betrayed Czechoslovakia by seizing territory in accord with hitler and did an aforementioned non-aggression pact with the funni mustache guy. Poland literally did everything it could to alienate itself from allies and torpedo its own country. Poles still try to desperately become the next member of the cracker country club and which always will/has ended in their OWN country being destroyed.
Miss all on accounts my man. I'm Polish blah blah blah les Russian skull shapes WW2 Poland sad backstory blah more muh Russia subhuman le bad blah blah blah 'muh bad apples apologia' strawman blah blah I can parrot more racist western propaganda against Russians and still be right because same phenotype blah blah Russian superiors all genocidal bcuz trust me bro I'm racist blah
Your opinion was already rejected at "I'm Polish" lmao fucking fascist "no LGBT zones" having theocracy ass motherfucker
Again you admit to your ridiculous view of the Russian people hinging on you being a massive racist piece of shit. This conveniently feeds into being a warmonger who wants to see more innocent people suffer and die for NATO weapons testing because "Russia ork le bad". If you weren't blatantly making up the things you said about your grandparents you are a bloody disgrace to their suffering and have learned nothing from their terrible experiences with war. Fuck off back to whatever right wing hellsite you came here from you murderous bastard.
You believe it when your media scapegoats Russia as le bad instead of your billionaires, think anyone who disagrees with you is a Russian bot, and believe that Russians are subhumans but that's not racist because trust me bro fr?
And all this somehow doesn't make you a right winger?
You're a fine fucking specimen mate.
Yeah, exactly, Russia ork Le bad, couldn't have said that better myself, thanks!
LMFAO ofc you couldn't, its your entire ideology dumbass!
My man do you seriously think Russia is paying this dude to post pig poop balls on an obscure image board full of people who already hate the west? That's not a rhetorical question - I've been investigating him for a while and I think that's exactly what Russia is doing. They're paying the members here to spread disinformation to one another, increasing the total amount of disinformation available to web crawlers. It's disgusting.
Edit: if you're serious, PM me. I've got more proof where this comes from.
I'm not right wing, but i agree with them that some people are subhuman
Backstab? You mean liberating western Belarus from temporary Polish occupation?
Oh yeah, Russia committed a great crime by saving the people of Poland from the Nazis. The only possible reason this could have harmed your family is this: your family were Nazis
They don’t need to fight Russia. With a Russia victory, the criminals who bowed to the west will be dealt with and the people in Donbas will be freed from the violence Ukraine inflicts agaisnt them
Tbh I don't even understand how a music tour could possibly be relevant to this. Typical whataboutism.
I feel bad that nobody is really giving you a straightforward, genuine answer so I'll try to do that. I'm gonna try to sum up the Hexbear viewpoint, stripped of any irony:
- Russia as a state is a chimera of the worst facets of the USSR and American-style capitalism, it is bad
- Ukraine has very similar issues, I would argue the problematic nationalism is stronger than you put it
- Russia was antagonized by years of violence in the Donbas region and NATO expansion
- The previous point doesn't negate the fact that Russia has committed the crime of starting a war of aggression
- Western support for Ukraine is not motivated by any noble ideals like 'defending democracy', but rather because the conflict harms Russia and provides a meal-ticket program for the military industrial complex
- As with pretty much all wars, the people who will be harmed the most are the working classes of all countries involved. Any serious person who calls themselves a leftist should recognize that the best outcome is whatever benefits those people the most.
As for your question on what the ideal outcome is, I don't really know what to tell you. I would like to see an agreement reached that minimizes the future risk of conflict, and for said agreement to be reached sooner rather than later. What that agreement entails would definitely need to be worked out through mediated talks. Do I think that is likely? No. What I think is very clear is that as things are the war is probably going to drag on for a very long time, kill a shitload of people, and end in a way that doesn't restore any stability to the region. The reason people here spend a lot of time shitting on all the people cheerleading the conflict is because they seem oblivious to that reality.
The war started years ago between Ukraine and the separatists, and they reached a cease-fire, and Ukraine violated that cease-fire which is what promoted Russian intervention.
I don't have too strong of an opinion about what the ideal outcome looks like. But I believe that possible diplomatic solutions have been ignored or torn up. I believe that the US, because of the military industrial complex, has pressured Ukraine into more aggressive and intransigent approaches, to the detriment of the Ukrainian people. For example, Ukraine has staunchly refused to consider any territorial concessions, including Crimea which they haven't controlled since before the ceasefire.
Personally, I think the most realistic scenario that minimizes casualties in the short term, as well as having the best chance at peace in the long term, would be if Ukraine cedes the disputed provinces to Russia. But mostly I just don't want the people of Ukraine and Russia to keep getting fed into this stupid meat grinder just to move a line on a map. Maybe there's a solution where the provinces remain in Ukraine but are given a special degree of autonomy, and everyone agrees to play nice. Maybe they can agree to a ceasefire while a referendum is held, overseen by some neutral third party. I think we've probably passed a point where those two are realistic possibilities, but the point is there should be some willingness to compromise and negotiate. Demanding Russia's immediate withdrawal from all occupied territories is just not realistic. They've been trying to do it their way and all it's gotten is getting a bunch of people killed and no closer to a solution. Maybe it's time for somebody to sit down at a table.
What would the ideal outcome be according to you all? Ukraine should give up all the Russian speaking parts or cede the whole country?
Yes. It would save a ton of lives and damage NATO and the West.
As shit as Ukraine is Russia seems even worse.
NATO and the entire West is way worse.
Not the both-sides. Yes Ukraine should give up all non-Ukrainian parts and be put under an international (sans the west) force dedicated to denazification.
There's been a few of these threads for the last couple of days. I think the propagandists are working.
knowing history makes you a Putin bot
