I’m literally right here interacting on that exact topic right now. I’ve seen plenty of discussions from the people mentioned about the topic and newsflash, they don’t say that. Y’all just would much prefer to pass around rumors and dismissive charicatures rather than investigating what we actually believe.
Thank you. We can either have a good faith discussion based on facts and evidence and what was actually said, or we can have this cable news-tier bullshit of putting words into mouths and bad faith mischaracterization. I’d prefer the former.
Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup. I treat both of those claims with roughly equal skepticism. I don’t doubt that both movements have some degree of organic support, or that both have received foreign funding and support. I’ll also note that, for example, the American revolution had support from the French, so I don’t consider either movement accepting foreign support automatically disqualifying.
Regardless, the question is what the best scenario is going forward. I don’t see either side as being particularly concerned with the well-being of the people living there, or in actual democratic representation or anything like that. As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests, and I don’t really have a dog in that fight. The interests of states are generally disconnected from those of the people.
In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started. And if that had happened, the people would be happy and comfortable and loyal to whoever provided it. Instead, conditions declined, people became resentful and felt that there was nothing to lose, and now we have this conflict and people are being forced into a meat grinder against their will. It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions and divert the resources used for war towards rebuilding. Likewise, Russia could’ve used the funds they’re using now to relocate the people loyal to them into Russia. This was is wasteful and destructive and benefits no one but the people in power on both sides.
I used precisely one adjective in that comment to describe Russia’s government, could you tell me what it was?
Answer the question, please. It’s not hard.
Surely you’ll have no trouble producing the receipts for what you said then, right? Since you didn’t make it up, can you link to where you saw it?
The great thing about never interacting with a group of people is that you can just make up whatever you want about them.
I used precisely one adjective in that comment to describe Russia’s government, could you tell me what it was?
No response tells me you can’t read.
Yeah, I don’t fully agree with their decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war, just as I don’t agree with Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass in violation of Minsk II, or with the coup and banning of opposition parties that led the disputed territories to declare independence.
The best case scenario, as has been the case since the start, is for a peace agreement to be reached as soon as possible to prevent further loss of life. Which reactionary government controls the disputed territories isn’t worth people dying over.
Russia is terrible on LGBT rights.
Being a tankie doesn’t mean that you agree with everything any non-Western state does, it just means that you’re critical of war and are willing to consider internationalist perspectives.
he’s only giving you things you say with your friends inside of your living room, the only difference is he’s got the balls to say it in front of you all and don’t have to sugar coat it at all.
Things like what, exactly? We must be hanging out in different living rooms.
It did start back up though. And we don’t know if further research could bring the costs down. I’m not proposing it as a magic bullet, just as one potential way to get nighttime coverage.
There’s some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.
Funny you should say that, because if you actually read the article, the event had to be organized in secret to avoid being targeted by far right groups and then dispersed after 30 minutes because those far-right groups showed up to attack anyway.
It’s wild that the US is trying to escalate tensions with China when it’s still busy with Russia.
I’m not talking about changes over time, talking about things I’ve seen recently on here regarding Russia’s current status, in response to news stories and comments discussing the danger of escalation going nuclear.
Shroedinger’s Russian nuclear arsenal. When there’s a story about risking escalation, libs tell me it’s fine because Russia doesn’t have the money to maintain its nukes, so it’d only be a “limited” nuclear exchange. When this story comes out, the libs tell me that Russia has a much larger and better maintained nuclear stockpile, so it’s only necessary for the US to spend more on it to catch up. It’s sort of the same way that Russia simultaneously is on the verge of defeat, yet also has the intention and capability to conquer all of Europe, like Hitler, if we don’t stop him here.
The enemy is both strong and weak, and you never know which one it’s gonna be.
The reason I specified is that random people may make random comparisons all the time, so if I just said “where people did not compare it” it wouldn’t really mean anything. Estonia doesn’t tend to have as many wars they need to drum up support for so they don’t do it as often, but it’s still a greatly overused analogy in general. People said it about Korea. They said it about Vietnam. They said it about Iraq. All of those comparisons were ridiculous in hindsight but worked well enough at the time. It’s basically just a go-to thing you can say and people will just knee-jerk get on board with whatever military endeavor you’re doing at a given time, regardless of what it is.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone name one war the US has been involved in since WWII where a high ranking government official did not compare it to WWII to drum up support?
No, obviously, in the same way it would be ridiculous to claim that every single person who supports separatism is a secret agent for Russia. The claim in both cases is that the movement received foreign support, allowing it to convince more ordinary people to support it than they would have otherwise.
Russia is not the USSR. And most people experienced a decline in quality of life, across every objective metric, following its collapse.
It’s also well known that many people in eastern Ukraine have ethnic, cultural, and family ties to Russia, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of them wanted to have more favorable relations with them. This goes back to when the Soviets transferred the territory to Ukraine in the first place.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Americans don’t actually care about Ukrainians, most people barely knew they existed and couldn’t find the country on the map. The only reason people started caring is because they started being relevant to state interests.
No it won’t. The Ukrainian people do not have the option to vote on whether or not to accept territorial concessions, because they don’t have a democracy, and even what pretense of democracy they used to have has been suspended due to the war. The Ukrainian state may get to decide that, but that is not the same as the Ukrainian people. You don’t seem to be separating the state’s interests from the people’s interests at all.