There are a bunch of sicko neoliberals and insufferable redditors there, yes, but there are also some normal libs and a few comrades, and it seems like a good way to encourage lemmy generally to re-embrace leftism.
I've been using an alt to talk on there and it's honestly not that bad. It's a little bad, but not that bad. I think if we just try to patiently explain ourselves, we have a reasonable chance of reaching people and shifting the general political alignment.
Those of us who aren't up to dealing with ghouls (I am frequently included in this group) can just stay at home here and that's just fine.
Anyway, just an idea. I would appreciate feedback.
i'm an american, so I place the blame on America for prolonging and instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the first place. It was the USA that instigated and guided the 2014 coup in Ukraine, then encouraged Ukraine to ignore the Minsk agreements, and now continues to encourage rejections of ceasefires or de-escalation. The entire war didn't simply pop up out of nowhere. The Russian state didn't simply wake up one day desiring land and then pick a target at random.
Rather, the entire conflict is the culmination of decades of American and western meddling.
I've also known Russian-speaking people in the Donbas, but they were more associated with the separatists, so I haven't heard from them in a long time. They were probably shelled to death by Ukraine sometime between 2015 and 2022.
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These are not mutually exclusive. When the US does a color revolution, they amplify real social problems to get people into the streets. Then groups the US has financed (and armed), usually well before the actual tipping point, are used to steer the revolution in a way that's favorable to the US, with the US diplomatic support hinging on that faction's ascension to power. While the 2014 revolution started with euro-friendly liberals playing piano in the streets, it was quickly coopted by far-right groups.
Here's an NBC article from 2014 where a journalist tries to make sense of why the US required Svoboda, Right Sector, and Fatherland get a majority of the newly formed Ukrainian government's cabnet
There's similar articles from the time trying to make sense of why neonazi paramilitary groups were incorporated into the military instead of purged.
Timothy Snyder (respectable Nazi historical revisionist) and Wikipedia disagree with them? Excellent fact checking.
Here’s a good article on the issue.
Why do you think Russia invaded Ukraine?
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Czar literally means king in Russian. You may not think their electoral system is valid or representative of the people, but they objectively do not have a king.
Russia is the largest country on the planet and extremely rich in resources, they don't need or want to conquer Ukrainian land. Crimea is desirable to Russia insofar as it makes a NATO naval blockade of Russia's Black Sea access near impossible, which Russia recognized as a viable threat after the Maidan coup.
This comment looks ridiculous if you have an understanding of the region prior to 2022. Much of the region was originally Russian prior to the formation of the USSR. Getting included in the Ukrainian SSR wasn't a big deal because they were all apart of the same country, until its dissolution. Now, under the Ukrainian government, a culturally Russian peoples have had their language removed from all of public life and were on the receiving end of anti-Russian pogroms and terrorism. These people do not see Russia as a colonizing empire, hence the people of Donbas and Lugansk seeking independence from Ukraine.
Critical support. Russia's invasion is a reaction to US imperialism. No one here is cheering on the death and destruction going on in Ukraine. We want this war to be over, but the US doesn't. Our understanding is that the US tries to destabilize their adversaries by instigating war or regime change in regions along their borders, so reactions to that are less important to condemn than the US's hegemonic Imperialism.