We believe the war was started by a quagmire of situations going back as far as 1991, including things like the 2014 NATO-backed coup of Ukraine and the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. This war wasn't some random unprovoked territory grab dictated by Putin, it's the resolution of western interference in the region for decades. Ukraine had been shelling Donbas and Luhansk for years. NATO brought this war upon themselves, basically. Instigating and prodding at the situation for years.

Also, Russia and Ukraine, near the start of the war, floated the possibility of a ceasefire and NATO pressured them out of it. The USA saw the possibility of a proxy war and started drooling.

We don't support Russia so much as we see them as one unfortunate reality fighting another unfortunate reality. The war's true culprit is capitalism, and as a leftist the only conclusion you should reach is wars like this are senseless and they should immediately stop. And the only way I see this war to stop is if Ukraine immediately surrenders and loses territory, otherwise we'd just be back in 2014 all over again and the situation would repeat. I can vaguely see how that could be construed as pro-Russia, but it's more that I believe diplomacy with Russia is strained, Russia is volatile, and nothing is gained from open warfare with them. Everyone needs to stop fighting, whatever that takes, because the only winners in wars like this are wealthy capitalists, the rest of us lose.

Bruv if you could read you'd see the numerous comments saying we don't support Russia.

"here look at this"

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"two days later russia started the war ! Can you belive it , i consume imperial core media ! "

You will forget again by tomorrow. It's a very human coping mechanism. Then some meany will remind us again. The only reason I'm not so surprised is because I wake up every day with a riddle of tattoos covering my body.

For Ukrainians it's not the case they're being forced or deceived into fighting, it is a war of national survival! It is a war against an aggressor seeking to at the very least oppress Ukrainian national identity if not destroy it entirely as a political and social force.

Russia is not interested in conquering Ukraine. They're interested in goals like keeping Ukraine out of NATO, maintaining access to the Black Sea, and not having ethnic Russians who don't wish to be a part of Ukraine killed on their borders.

The reality is that Ukraine lost its sovereignty when the legitimate and democratically elected government was overthrown in a coup. That's when the war started between the regime in western Ukraine backed by the west and the east. Western media actually reported on this as well

• CNN coverage of Donbas in 2014 https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
• HRW report https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
• Donbas documentary 2016 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs

I agree that at this point Ukraine is basically fucked. There was a possibility to make a deal back in March last year, but US and UK decided to sabotage it. Now, Russia will likely go all the way and there's not going to be an Ukraine left when this war ends.

Ahh, the rare sane hexbear user I still have hopes for you lot you're definitely not as bad as lemmygrad.

However, let me add something:

It is impossible to conceive of peace until there is a mutually hurting stalemate between the two sides in which neither believe they can win

You leave out the scenario of Russians getting kicked out of the country. Which is going to lead to Putin being sent to his Dacha, and if not and he somehow clings on Ukraine having all its territory opens NATO membership which means that the Russian general staff is going to shit bricks and rather putsch than attack.

What do you think happens if Zelensky signs a peace deal that gives up land? He, a Russian-speaking Jew who used to be on Russian TV and regularly went to the country. He would be deemed a Russian traitorous Jew and would be overthrown and possibly killed by the nationalist and far-right elements within the Ukrainian Army

He a) wouldn't do that and b) since when is Ukraine antisemitic you're confusing it with... pretty much all other countries in that area and c) you don't need to invoke far-right fucks (who are a tiny minority btw) the rest of the country would, well, send him to a Dacha.

And ever if: At that point we'd be in the situation many predicted in the first days of the invasion: Fall of the government, but Ukrainians then fighting a partisan war. And Ukraine right now is just in way too good a position to switch to that.

All in all, the way forward to quick peace is clear: Help Ukraine win this thing. It's both the best option from a direct humanitarian POV by cutting the war short, as well as the best option for wider humanity and the future: Not allowing states intending to conquer to get away with such behaviour. Discouraging wars of aggression is important by itself and one of the reasons why Ukrainians fight so hard, they see the universalism in their own national struggle it just all aligns so well.

the moral purity of ''not giving in to the aggressor" doesn't make anybody less dead.

Ukraine has lost. They are not getting their separatist regions back.

Their choices are to keep fighting, which will not change this outcome, or negotiate an end to the war so they can stop dying and start rebuilding. Their negotiating position will only weaken as the war continues absent some one-in-a-million stroke of luck.

This isn't "I kick you and you don't defend yourself." It's "I kick you, you defend yourself, lose, and choose to either walk away or keep getting beaten up." And that's not even digging into the actual causes of the war, which are nowhere near as clear cut as Russia one day waking up and deciding to attack out of the blue.

Minsk I a treaty they've signed that was about greater autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts like them being allowed to speak russian a treaty that was very quickly broken.

Minsk II a treaty that did the same thing which again was broken.

and these are the off ramps before the war during the war you had the peace talks when the russian army was outside of Kiev whose content is dubious because so far only the russians said what it was about

and more importantly every peace talk after that Ukraines position was a restoration of the 2014 borders aka they want Crimea back which sorry is just not reasonable, hell for a lot of those peace talks russia wasn't even invited it was a bunch of countries like Germany, UK and Ukraine but not you know the country currently participating in this war.

This is one of those bits where I say that a country isn't about some piece of land but the people in it which guess what the ukrainian government is feeding into gigantic blender.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT SOME IMAGINARY LINES.

If Cuba decided to 'restore its borders' aka if it attacked the US base on Guantanamo Bay and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Cubans throwing them against the US army blender I would call for the Cuban people to rise up against its government because it doesn't care about its people and I hope you would too, if Mexico decided to take back California I'd have that same stance. It's called being anti-war, something I'm sure you'll now quote how "actually your stance isn't anti-war my which calls for sending billions of military equipment is actually anti-war"

My guess is that you don't know what war is like or have never interacted with anyone that had to flee a war, you really have two options here you can go outside and talk to any ukrainian woman that fled because of the war, tell them to their face that they are giving in to the aggressor when they say how angry they are at the ukrainian government because they don't know where their husband or their two brothers are. You know what I'll make it easier for you find any person in real life that has had to flee a conflict and how they feel about 'giving in to the aggressor'. Or if you feel you don't need to do that go join up the ukranian army do your part to fight the aggressor I mean it's only war right, you've seen some TikToks with war footage and some phonk music accompaning it, war is absolutely poggers I'm sure you'd have a blast fighting some russian orks.

If the Kiev coup regime was concerned about aggression, they could have simply not done eight years of ethnic cleansing in the Donbas and ignored a ceasefire🤷‍♂️

the first 2 , they just involved West Ukraine giving in towards accepting 30 % of your citizens to have Human and Democratic rights as well .. (please read up on Minsk 1 & 2 )

How many of those involve not giving in to the aggressor?

How can it be hammered in to your skull that this is not a story book where good guys win by virtue of their righteousness?

This is geopolitics. An empire wants to conquer an outlying resource rich region it has not been able to bring under it's control. It has provoked a small outlying nation to act as a proxy to weaken it's enemy. Ukraine isn't making decisions. They're just ammunition in someone else's war and the best thing for them would be to mutiny against Kiev and end the slaughter. Status quo antebellum is not on the menu.

That's not what he meant and you know it. He's making light of an obvious double standard regarding the standing in which we hold two sources with obvious national biases.

That's not what I meant dickweed

ISW is a propaganda outlet run by Vicky Nuland, so if that's where you get your information from that explains a lot about your world view. The fact that a lot of people in the west guzzle propaganda isn't really an argument.

Therefore, you you should stick to actual facts of the situation instead of making stuff up.

If you were concerned about the truth then you wouldn't be pretending that the uprising in Donetsk was somehow orchestrated when there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Let's take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here's the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

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here's how the election in 2004 went:

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this is the 2010 election:

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As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

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The reality is that the population in these areas is largely ethnic Russian and after US sponsored coup regime started doing things like banning Russian language, these people rebelled against it.

Furthermore, here's what CNN was reporting the regime doing in Donbas back in 2014 https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296

Here's an article from the human rights watch https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions

And here's a whole documentary of the atrocities these people suffered https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs

Pretending this was somehow orchestrated as opposed to directly caused by the oppression of the regime is the height of dishonesty. Which is pretty weird to see coming out from somebody who seeks the truth.

Plenty of western experts have been talking about this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started. Here's what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:

https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/

https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/

As for a Kupyansk, I’m not at all surprised because as you say, there has been give and take along the border for the entire duration of the war. And since Russia still has its inventory a large amount of artillery, any town is at risk of attack.

Except Russia made many kilometres of progress there and Ukraine is now evacuating from the area. That's not give and take, that's Ukrainian position collapsing. Russia isn't evacuating anybody at any single point that Ukraine was trying to break through for the past 10 weeks.

Institute for the Study of War

Lmao

A lot of people reject the idea that the so-called rebellion in danetsk and luhansk was a grassroots movement

Therefore, that would lend credence to the idea that Khodakovsky is in fact a Russian commander

"A lot of people are saying it" lends credence to nothing.

The war timeline link in your source, by the way, will show you the front has not moved appreciably for nearly a year.

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It's based on the US being in it only half-heartedly. Frankly speaking the US withdrawing from the conflict could end it because Russia will stop once it sees that Europe doubles down (after a moment of shock and denial about us being US puppets etc), but so would America actually committing.

Where are the damn ATACMS, America? Guarantees of delivering Abrams for years on end no-matter-what?

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I can kinda see where you get the homophobia but the racism?

Calling someone a cocksucker is just an insult. Might not be used as much today, but watch Scarface for more examples.

And from Wikipedia:

Vatnik or vatnyk (Russian: ватник) is a political pejorative used in Russia and other post-Soviet states for steadfast jingoistic followers of propaganda from the Russian government.

So racist? No. I'm making fun of people who swallow Russian propaganda without thinking.

Oo, now share the one of a Russian beheading a live Ukrainian soldier on camera.

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Would you support the richest region of a country to separate by locals-only referendum so they don't have to support the poor ones anymore?

Edit: found someone who finally linked some actual evidence I can observe so I may remove all of this text I crossed out and recant my entire statement depending on how convincing it is.

Edit 2: The War in Donbas, 2014...
Sounds like Ukraine went Tankie Mode to put down separatists, except instead of using literal tanks to do it, they sloppily shelled with artillery at great range. Poroshenko was in charge at the time. It was almost ten years ago but I remember just barely well enough that I still hate his fucking guts even to this day.
Finger pointing abounds as far as who exactly is responsible for all the "Russian Volunteers" who "Appeared" "of their own free will". Truth is, even if someone else may choose to blame Russia about it, my own ethical consistency doesn't let me, because even though there are some certain and concrete differences, I am ok with people who aren't Ukrainian traveling to Ukraine and volunteering to submit themselves under the command of the Ukrainian military. I understand this is going to piss off both sides. It would be hypocritical to be against one side sending outsiders to fight in Ukraine while making excuses to permit the other side sending outsiders to fight in Ukraine.
The fact remains that Poroshenko's administration handled this extremely fucking poorly to say the least and that handling included the slaughter of over THREE THOUSAND CIVILIANS.
Even IF the actions of the Ukrainian leadership did not directly result in some proportion of those civilian casualties, it still happened on their turf and under their watch.
This is part of why Poroshenko lost to Zelenskyy in 2019. During 2018, Zelenskyy stated in interviews that he wanted to negotiate with Russia to bring peace to the rebellion in the Donbas region instead of blasting it to hell like Poroshenko was. Too little too late. Oh well.

It would have been nice if a neutral party could have swept in, disabled all combat capability from either faction in Donbas, overseen a vote without any guns held to anyone's heads, with full public observability by the entire world - except there are no neutral parties. Everybody is on a side.

Maybe no single nation should be in charge of Crimea and Donbas. Not even Ukraine.

Sadly, I don't think it's likely that the world will come together to oust all armed personnel, whether insurgent or loyalist, from these regions, using UN Peacekeeper forces, until shit calms down enough for the civilians who live there to self-determine their future without being coerced. Except it's highly arguable that this will fucking count as coercion TOO. -_-

Anyway,

My stance is still that Russia should have stayed the fuck home, and should go back there, and if they JUST did that, then no one else would have to die in the Donbas region.

... Unless the separatists breached the ceasefires AGAIN.
AND AGAIN
AND AGAIN AND AGAIN
AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND...

you say this shit as if anyone enjoys the fact that people who live there are embroiled in a war.

This only became the case when Russia invaded.

Nobody who purports the position that Ukraine was enacting genocide ever shows evidence of ethnic cleansing happening in the Donbas region prior to the Russian invasion. Of course, evidence of it happening after the Russian invasion is everywhere: all the civilians Russia executed in the street, visible from satellite images even before areas are taken back by the rightful sovereignty of Ukraine to whence it belonged prior to the invasion. By Russia.

All people ever tell me is "trust me bro" or try to assert that absence of evidence is evidence of a coverup, which are, notably, the same techniques american conservative fascist GOP-Simps use when trying to convince others that trans people are pedophiles and rapists.

> my source: this propagandistic youtube video

my. how credible.

People will stop dying in Donbas when Russian invaders stop killing the Ukrainians who live there.

Damn, I thought your rules preclude you from making such a racist remark against a nationality. You can go join Trump with calling places "shitholes".

I find this weird support for Russia fascinating. They are clearly not free from nationalists and extremists sentiments themselves. Their own state media is calling for pre-emptive nuking of cities, Ireland being an acceptable collateral when nuking the UK, and their own former prime minister Medveded is yelling on twitter about achieving "Greater Russia". Here's someone who was awarded "Hero of the Russian Federation" by Putin himself.. It's almost as if Russia doesn't actually care, and they are just using it for their propaganda.

Also lol, they're saying they're not going to execute them because they aren't barbarians and giving them time to retreat, and then you take offense to that? That's such an odd stance. I personally applaud when someone says they want to avoid unnecesairy deaths, but you do you.

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