People saw what happened in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam and actually decided that it's good to do it again. Holy fucking christ.
From memory (so maybe wrong) former Yugoslav states also suffer from land mines. Land mines are one of those rare "yeah, no, fuck that" things that every country agrees is just evil. So the US supports using them. Like chemical weapons that the US has given various leaders/nations over the years. What a great lover of humanity our nation is...
I mean the Russians have been using antipersonel mines for most of the conflict. It's not some new thing for the area. The UXO/landmine problem is already locked into the area for decades.
I mean the Russians have been using antipersonel mines for most of the conflict
And that is still a war crime that deserves criticism
Falkland Islands too. I think they only recently cleared the entire place of land mines.
Fuck I'm for arming them in general, but this is...
Why is the manufacture of these things even allowed?
They gave up their nukes, and the Russian rhetoric (not that I expect anybody other than a few yt radicalized chuds believes it) sounds pretty genocidal. Plus they did kind of invade, in what does not appear to be either a class war or intervention in ongoing violent genocide.
You can't just analyze this conflict based entirely on events since 2022 when you first started hearing about it in the news. There's a whole half century of events leading up to this, and as of now it's taboo to talk about any of that throughout much of the western world. But by way of linear time, those events are necessary to actually understand what's happening. Otherwise, all you have to go on is propaganda and vibes, and that's what I'm seeing in your two sentence summary.
This is primarily about NATO wanting to encircle Russia, and the card they've chosen to play is using Ukraine as proxy by installing a fascist, rabidly anti-Russian government during the Maidan coup in 2014. Ukraine is not a sovereign state under this coup government. But even if you want to somehow argue they are, if their sovereignty means allowing NATO to militarize one of Russia's largest and most vulnerable land borders with short range nuclear missiles, then it's clearly an existential issue for Russia who has every right to intervene on that.
I'm not going to cry that they broke the Ukraine nuclear disarmament treaty when Ukraine, the US, and NATO as a whole routinely violate every single promise and treaty they've ever made with Russia. In fact, a major condition of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was for NATO to agree they would not continue to expand into the former Eastern Bloc, Ukraine chief among them. Russia tried for far too long to assimilate into the global capitalist system only for the economic and proxy wars to continue and for the encirclement to accelerate, signalling that NATO never had any intention of ever allowing Russia to coexist as a great power on the world stage, regardless of Russia's willingness to liberalize and subject their own people to devastating, crushing, massively deadly austerity during shock therapy.
But also think about how Russia took most of the LPR and DPR in just the first weeks of the war. It's because those areas were already in a civil war against Ukraine. Ukraine has been shelling civilian population centers in the east of the country for years, they were ethnically cleansing Eastern Ukraine of Russian speakers, they have literally banned the Russian language. You can't say "Russia's fault, they invaded first!" when they were joining an existing war on the side of the people Ukraine was trying erase, regardless if that wasn't their only motive.
To their credit, Russia exhausted every diplomatic option they had before NATO had Ukraine abandon all negotiation and peace talks. Ukraine was signatory to the two Minsk agreements in which they promised to cease their ethnic cleansing in the east of the country and accept a ceasefire, but we know now it was entirely in bad faith. They were never intending to follow through with this, rather they were buying time to militarize with the help of NATO.
All this is to say, Russia is clearly not the aggressor here when you look at the actual timeline of events. The story that gets told 24/7 in western news media is blatantly a farce.
Imagine siding with NATO - the most prolific invader in the world.
A bunch of countries invaded Germany in WW2, does that make them the bad guys? Context is everything.
How many many Ukrainians should die to defend their landlords house? Wages are higher in Russia. If they took over it would be an improvement. However it seems that Russia merely wanted to try to prevent ww3
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Look, Jack, we're going to cause global dimming by filling the air with particulate matter of all the people who get exploded. And that's how we'll solve climate change.
Yeah I'm reading this as they're going to shit up southwestern Russia with these things as much as possible while they're still invading it. Awful...
The children; they yearn for the mines.
(Halfway stealing someone else's bit, acknowledging maothelawn)
Cool instead of doing anything good in their last days the Biden administration is doing even more warcrimes sweet.
Hey, no, just because the democrats are doing it when they don't have to doesn't meant they want to. They are just "easing the transition"
I remember liberals acting all terrified about what horrors Trump might unleash on the world as his previous term was coming to an end. But once again, Biden has proven to be far worse, trying to speedrun as many atrocities as he can while still holding the reigns like the petty war criminal that he is. And the libs just praise him.
Yeah now that the election is over they can be as blatant as they want with zero electoral repercussions cause the American political memory is that of a goldfish
yeah I was complaining yesterday about the shortage of leftover landmines in random places, glad to see the US taking action on important topics like this.
This is 100x worse than ATACMS. This shit is a scourge on humanity. The fact that the US is not a signatory of the Ottowa Treaty is tantamount to a warcrime in and of itself. Ukraine itself i a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty and it should be illegal for it to receive shipment.
Ukraine itself i a signatory to the Ottowa Treaty and it should be illegal for it to receive shipment.
Ukraine use both this and cluster mines since the beginning of conflict. They even use that small brightly coloured mines on civilian centers in Donbas where they are picked up by children and explode.
To be fair; this war only happened because treaties are best used as toilet paper.
But also fuck anyone who uses these
And of course ghouls on lemmyworld are arguing why this is a good thing. I'm so glad I defederated them
: ONLY I HAVE THE BRAINS TO RULE THE LYLAT SYS- I MEAN UKRAINE, JACK
Activating the cursed capitalism lobe of my brain, it's creating a market for the mine-clearing NGOs of tomorrow
Just kidding they don't have that kind of foresight
Biden has a steadfast commitment to Ukraine's fight against future generations of Ukrainians.
So no modern aircraft. Only 'protocols of the elders of Zion' larpers get those. Nothing that could fucking end this shit. No decapitation strike. Gotta keep the meat grinder going!
But land mines, sure, here's a bunch!
What the makes you think a 'decapitation strike' or 'modern aircraft' would end the conflict? You do realize Russia is an entire modern state and not just Putin? Just because you don't know other prominent Russian politicians doesn't mean they don't exist (and are also in favor of the conflict). It's a idealistic move at best, catastrophic escalation at worst.
a promise kept Jack
we did it Joe! We saved the Soul of the Nation 
