• zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      There's no need to "pick a team"

      That's exactly what being "pro"/"anti" Russian is.

      the denial of the right to self-determination

      This isn't self-determination, it is states feuding over the border line. Might as well apply self-determination to CSA diehards chanting "States' Rights" as Azov dorks.

      I mean more so just as an ethical position

      The only ethical position is an anti-war position. Any assertion that you can ethically fling high explosives across a countryside is false. It can't be done in any context.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          When one state (the aggressor)

          Color Revolution, which resulted in a coup of the sitting government

          which cascaded into a civil war against East Ukrainian seperatists

          that only ended with a Russian invasion in defense of the Donetsk rebels.

          Which was the "one state" that kicked this mess off? Because I can't find it. I see no less than three separate states actively involved for over a decade.

          So if a state invades another with the intention of occupying a chunk of it, setting up a puppet government, and enacting de-Ukrainisation policies in the east, the people being invaded do not have a right to self-defence?

          Change "de-Ukrainisation" with "de-Ba'athification" and that's the argument I have been pitched since 2003, yes. Totally legitimate and 100% justifiable, so long as you can claim an existential threat to your motherland.

          You can say what you will about the Russians and their ham-fisted efforts at mitigating the conflict. But when NATO is proposing the extension of short-range missiles into your next door neighbor's territory, they at least had a better "can't let that smoking gun become a mushroom cloud" argument than anyone in DC did twenty years ago.