Western media have finally change course. They are now admitting that the much promoted Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. In fact, the acknowledge that it never had a chance to win in the first place.

The Hill, the Washington Post and CNN now agree that the Ukrainian army will never achieve its aims.

western MSM has a rare encounter with reality!

That makes it difficult for the Biden administration to get Congress approval for $24 billion in additional ‘aid’ to Ukraine. It does not make sense to pay for a cause that is evidently lost.

b seems overly hopeful regarding the rationality of US congress, but i think hes right- why would we throw more money at them, US politicians have made it clear they do not support bringing Ukraine into NATO if they do not win this conflict. of course, US politicians are prone to lying and misleading

Nothing has come from the ‘peace conference’ which Saudi Arabia arranged on Ukraine’s behalf

lol. lmao even. props to big dog MBS for trying

Despite the onslaught of bad news the Ukrainian army is still trying to take Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine. But it simply does not have enough in men and material to break through the lines.

Even if they would manage to get a local breakthrough there are not enough reserves to push for the necessary follow up. Just one of the NATO trained brigades has still been held back. All others have been mauled in their various deployment zones.

nothing has changed it seems

In the northeast around Kupyansk the Russians have started their own offensive which has the Ukrainians on the run. Ukraine has ordered the evacuation of the area

But Kupyansk is a Russian city and people refuse to leave.

show this to the libs claiming Russians are committing genocide in the regions they capture. curious that these civilians are content with Russian occupation when you believe what western media claims

The Russian campaign is slowly speeding up. As the Ukrainian Strana.news reports (machine translation):

Also in Ukraine, it is recorded that from Kupyansk to Bakhmut, Russia has increased the number of attacks.

"Over the past month, the total number of attacks in the Kupyansk, Limansky and Bakhmut directions has grown significantly. In July, during the week there were 6-6.5 thousand attacks, during the last week-9 thousand attacks, " - said the representative of the National Guard Ruslan Muzychuk.

According to him, the Russian Federation does not experience “shell hunger”.

Aviation is also actively used, and over the past few weeks, more than 50 air attacks have been taking place every day, and sometimes more than 80.

That is bad news for the Ukrainian side which lacks the reserves to counter the Russian onslaught. There are also less weapons coming in from the West. F-16 fighter jets will be delayed for another nine months due to training issues. Tanks and other material are in short supply.

these supply issues sure bode well for the west’s performance in WW3 sicko-hyper

Strana also report of an interview with a knowledgeable Ukrainian soldier (machine translation):

Continuing the topic of the situation at the front, an interesting interview was given by a Ukrainian sniper fighting near Bakhmut with the call sign “Grandfather”. On the air of political scientist Yuri Romanenko, he was introduced as Konstantin Proshinsky (this is a pseudonym).

The fighter spoke in detail about his vision of the situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Russian army.

  1. Mobilization. In his opinion, it is conducted incorrectly. Recruits are sent to the front who have never been trained, and they are often over 50 years old and with a whole bunch of diseases.
  1. No rotation. The soldier says that “the same brigades” are fighting at the front, and people are not taken out of the front line for six months or more. Whereas by Western standards, they can be kept in a war zone for no more than three months.
  1. Behavior of mid-and high-level commanders. According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a “mini-Stalingrad” on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
  1. The Russian Army began to fight better.
  1. Proshinsky believes that Russia has not yet used much of what it has against Ukraine.

The soldier thinks that the Russians will not move from their positions and that a stalemate peace like in Korea would be the end result.

UAF in real dire times— recruiting the elderly, poor logistics, engaging the enemy at inopportune times, and Russia has yet to waver

I believe that to be wrong. Russia’s aim is to liberate at least the four regions that it has claimed for itself. For political reasons it can not stop before that is done.

Should the Ukraine continue to fight after that, Russia is likely to set new aims and take more land.

more editorializing, but it doesnt seem unreasonable. i thought Russia would stick to its original goal of Donetsk and Luhansk, but if Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are receptive to Russian governance, it would be foolish for Russia to give them up

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    136·
    2 years ago

    Mod reports so far:

    Reporter:

    @jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone

    Reason: Go away tankies with your editorialized commentary

    Reporter:

    Nate Cox@programming.dev

    Reason: propaganda

    Hey @jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone and @natecox@programming.dev Why don’t you show up and defend your beliefs in the free marketplace of democracy instead of crying for the authoritarian Stalinist mods to silence everyone you don’t like.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    130·
    2 years ago

    Its just so much fucking blood spilled.

    I can’t get over how many people are throwing their lives away over some dipshits in their respective capitals putting new lines on a map. Nightmarish to see Ukrainians and Russians alike march to their deaths over this shit.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      74·
      2 years ago

      some Ukrainians are being coerced into serving. libs will call me a Russian bot for this, but i dont think the same can be said for Russia. they have enough active military personnel to avoid drafting; they havent even deployed them all

      but yeah, war is depressing. hopefully before we go extinct we will achieve communism and end war

      • cynesthesia [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        62·
        2 years ago

        there were tens of thousands of casualties from wagner’s prisoner troops. they recruited a lot out of prisons - how is that not coercion

      • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        22·
        2 years ago

        Does Ukraine really need to coerce people into serving? I was under the impression that the country had huge numbers of bloodthirsty fascists salivating at the thought of killing “RuZZian orcs.”

        • forcequit [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          72·
          2 years ago

          The Ukrainian leader said all officials responsible for military conscription in each region of the country were dismissed.

          Mr Zelenskyy said a probe into military recruitment centres across the nation exposed illegal dealings including bribery.

          The investigations also unveiled reports of officials helping men dodge conscription by fleeing across borders.

          There is currently a wartime ban on travel for draft-eligible men.

          “This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason,” Mr Zelenskyy said on Friday.

          ‘recruitment’ lmao

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          There are a huge number of racists in Ukraine but that doesn’t make it a monolith. When you see things like 76% approval for Bandera, some people support him killing Jews but some were genuinely miseducated on him.

          Also, a lot of these people have families in places where bombs have fallen, will fall, or are currently falling. In the face of a massive enemy like Russia, even as a Ukrainian reactionary there is a good case to be made to just stay and protect your family since you aren’t going to stop the bombs. Being there to rescue a survivor right after a bomb hits is much more likely to help them than making sure a thermobaric missile kills 17 people instead of 16 on the front lines.

      • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        2 years ago

        some Ukrainians are being coerced into serving. libs will call me a Russian bot for this,

        Nah they can’t, even western news outlets acknowledged that zelenskyyyy banned all working age men from leaving the country, effectively condemning them to die in the war as cannon fodder for NATO.

        • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          libs will call me a Russian bot for this, but i dont think the same can be said for Russia.

          I think they were talking about libs calling them a bot for saying Russia didn’t have to rely on coercion. I’d still disagree with that though because afaik Russia actually has been (or at least was at one point, correct me if that’s changed) using conscripts in Ukraine.

      • Aabbcc@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        libs will call me a Russian bot

        Everyone who disagrees with me is a lib is great defense. Chuds will disagree with me though

          • Aabbcc@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I don’t consider myself a lib. Housing should not be an asset for profit. Workers pay should increase based on the value they create. Housing first policy for the homeless. Food prices should not be rising based on corporate profit seeking

            I think I’m still pro market economy, but not in a capitalist sense. A market economy can incentivize progress, but workers shouldn’t be forced to participate at minimum wage through the threat of hunger and homelessness.

            corporate power lobbying has ruined public infrastructure and that’s bad.

            But I’m not backing Russia fully on this invasion thing, so I’m definitely a liberal!

            • somename [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              I don’t think anyone here really supports Russia, in the sense that we want them to conquer Ukraine. More that we don’t see prolonging the war as useful for anything but killing more people and selling more weapons. Peace is what we should all aim for here.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                Yeah. A Russian victory, or at least a favorabel stalemate, is desirable because it would harm NATO, not because there’s anything good about Russia. There’s some argument to be made that it’s likely better than allowing Ethnic Russian Russian Speaking Ukrainians to fall in to the hands of the Banderites that run Kiev, but that’s kind of up in the air.

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      71·
      2 years ago

      This is simply the overture of what will turn out to be the ultimate fight between US and China - the showdown between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism. All the geopolitical events revolve around this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, which is now approaching its zenith.

      What is happening in Ukraine today is likely a cakewalk compared to what is to come. Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity (it won’t recover for the next half a century) and using monetary and economic policies to engineer famines and poverty across the developing world just to slow the decline of the empire. The interest rates hikes, and the sanctions against Russian agricultural products, are literally impoverishing and killing people in the global south.

      He will make sure that America will be the last to go down, even if it means total annihilation in a war against China. The real question is, how will the rest of the world respond to this?

      • daisy [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        53·
        2 years ago

        Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity

        Biden’s a senile puppet. He didn’t do anything aside from sign whatever was put on his desk by staffers and read whatever was on his teleprompter. Europe was ultimately screwed by its own slavish obedience to deindustrialization, a process decades in the making and orchestrated by the forces of finance. This was enhanced by their millennia-old tangled web of bigotries that made it easy for finance to divide and conquer them. They’d have been fucked over in the exact same way regardless of who sat in the oval office or what colour of lawn sign that person had.

        • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          61·
          2 years ago

          I think many people are seriously underestimating the ghoulishness of Biden.

          The Biden administration is significantly a step up when it comes to aggressive foreign policy. There was a clip of Trump telling the Europeans that they have to spend 2% of their GDP into defense and the people in the room were just laughing at him. Biden actually made Europe do it for real.

          Trump was also very keen on pushing Merkel’s Germany to build this massive LNG terminal to pivot away from Russian gas - the project eventually went nowhere. Biden actually made Europe depends on American gas and spending billions to build those terminals for real.

          Trump started a petty trade war with China in 2018, and was reciprocated upon by the Chinese. Biden started a technological sanction against China that has no proportional response. To understand how seriously China sees this issue, you need to read the science fiction novel Three Body Problem, which is extremely popular among the elite and academic circles in China.

          Trump likes to talk big and pretends like he is this genius businessman who can make his adversaries yield, but his “achievements” were literally nothing compared to what Biden had accomplished in just 2 years in office.

          I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.

          My point is that even Obama didn’t dare to step this far, while Biden is picking fight with the entire world. If you look at his entire career, Biden is unequivocally a true believer in neoliberalism, a fanatical ideologue (and in my opinion, a lot more so than Obama).

          • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            24·
            2 years ago

            I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.

            I don’t think Obama is anywhere close to the most racist president in US history, but that speaks more to the quality of his competition than any lack of racism on his part.

            • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              17·
              2 years ago

              I guess the difference is between someone who actively petitions for segregation to prevent black people from renting/buying houses in your neighborhood, and someone who makes the black community so poor that they can never afford to move into your neighborhood.

              Obama has probably done more to prevent the future generations of black families from ever becoming homeowners than the racist Republicans could only dream of. He’s the choice candidate for the “smart” racists.

          • mazdak [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            17·
            2 years ago

            Not an expert on European politics, but the major political parties of the various US client states are always full of empty careerists who are connected in some way to US intelligence. It seems like Trump was never really able to wield the power of the ‘deep state’ because they fucking despised him, whereas with old man Biden their basically running the show now when it comes to foreign policy.

            • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              22·
              2 years ago

              As others have said, much of the personal wealth in America is concentrated in real estate (mortgage debt).

              When Obama became president, he could have easily bailed out the 9 million American homeowners (predominantly low income black and Hispanic families), but instead he chose Wall Street, effectively facilitating the largest transfer of wealth from the black community to the private capital in history.

              In this sense, Obama has prevented future generations of the black communities from ever becoming homeowners again.

              Similar trends are also happening under Biden’s policies today, the so-called “Bidenomics”, where black unemployment has risen much faster than other demographics. These are all austerity measures designed to make poor minorities bear the brunt of the economic impact if only to slow the crumbling of the system itself.

          • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            2 years ago

            I joked yesterday about how I’m not getting the simulated liberalism I was promised but like, I remember someone the other day saying it was simulated too well and to please stop and you said on.

            Are you just using this as your normal account now?

            • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              2 years ago
              Major spoiler for the Three Body Problem

              In the novel, the Trisolarians used super advanced alien tech to screw with particle accelerators on Earth and effectively locking out Earth’s scientific progress, to ensure that when the alien invasion fleet arrives some 400 years later, Earth would not be able to invent and build formidable defenses in the meantime.

              This plotline was repeatedly raised in Chinese media last year when Biden decided to lock China out of accessing foreign semiconductor technology. A lot of people took the Trisolarian-Earth conflict to be an allegory of a US-China war in the future.

                • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  2 years ago

                  There is no proportional response to semiconductor technology sanction from the Chinese side. You can embargo certain raw materials and components that are necessary for semiconductor fabrication, but nothing much beyond that.

                  China is not going to return to the “Maoist planned economy” stage, the era of planners has long gone. To understand China’s economic philosophy of the past two decades, you need to understand Justin Lin Yifu’s New Structural Economics, which touts the principles of 后发优势 (latecomer’s advantage), meaning that China will let the advanced economies to invest in high tech R&D and use its latecomer’s advantage for mass fabrication on the industrial side. Interestingly, Lin himself was a protege of Theodore Schultz, the co-founder of Chicago school of neoclassical economics together with Milton Friedman. He was in fact the first Chinese PhD graduate in the Chicago school of economics.

                  It is a great strategy to build wealth and prosperity for the country where people can benefit from, but it comes with consequences.

                  It needs to be said that this was a deliberate economic strategy that China chose. In 2005, when Taiwan’s TSMC first broke through the 80nm barrier, China’s SMIC was only 1 year behind. The gap was extremely close. However, the deliberate policy back then was to focus on export-oriented consumer goods, where much of the investments eventually went into, and so their semiconductor R&D lagged behind. They were naive enough to think that the US wouldn’t dare to decouple from them if the US depends so much on their industrial products. They first learned this lesson the hard way back in 2018 when Trump started a trade war, and they are now learning the lesson again with Biden.

                  In other words, you can easily think of an alternative timeline where, starting from 2008 during the great financial crisis, when demands from Western consumers had slumped, China could have pivoted towards a self-sufficient self-reliant economic strategy and invested heavily in domestic high tech R&D, which would have alleviated their semiconductor problem they’re facing today. However, it turns out that weaning off the US consumer base proved to be too difficult, or they were being too optimistic of their relationship with the US, and so they now have to deal with the economic trouble they’re facing today.

                  Once again, actions and consequences.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Agreed. My strongest evidence that Biden is just immensely cruel and an absolute true believer is that he worked as a mountpiece for the Credit Card industry for literal decades and was still, relatively speaking, poor when he became VP. I think his assets with his wife might have been like 2 million, or maybe even 1 million, and I think a lot of that was from Jill’s career. Biden somehow, working for one of the most corrupt sectors of the economy, never managed to make any money off of it in decades of doing their bidding. Only a profoundly weird man or a profoundly stupid man could achieve that.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Probably hundreds of thousands of people dead for the ambitions of a handful of gerontocrat crooks and their cronies.

      If you want a really bad thought imagine what the Red Army soldiers from WWII would think finding out that Ukraine and Russia were at war and Banderites had taken control of the government and were leading the charge?

    • FortifiedAttack [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      I remember dozens upon dozens of shitposts on Quora about how Russia was supposedly unable to produce ball bearings because of sanctions. One of the biggest weapons manufacturing powerhouses on the planet.

      Every single one of them would end with the phrase: “Sanctions work, just slowly” – i.e. the usual grift from Neoliberals.

      Always claim that the big victories are right around the corner, just in reach, just gotta wait a little while longer!! Meanwhile they make off into the distance with whatever spoils they managed to gain during their grift.

      • ChapoKrautHaus [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I remember dozens upon dozens of shitposts on Quora about how Russia was supposedly unable to produce ball bearings because of sanctions.

        Americans seem to have a weird fascination with ball bearings. In WW2 some intel genius figured the German war effort could be crippled by bombing the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt. The first raid was a desaster; after rebuilding the US Air Forces in Britain for months, they tried again and lost even more bombers. At least Schweinfurt was 98% destroyed.

        German motor vehicle production suffered no noticeable impact.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schweinfurt_raid

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    85·
    2 years ago

    Using a combined arms NATO style attack tactic for the counter offensive when Ukraine basically has no air force was certainly a very smart and good idea with no potential problems. Especially when attacking entrenched and mined Russian positions. Great idea from the NATO military commander failsons

  • Nightcastle [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    82·
    2 years ago

    My american internet friends got so mad at me when I said at the beginning of all this that there should be an immediate ceasefire and surrender to stop the fighting and I was called an apologist for Putin and that this was an unprovoked invasion and you have to protect yourself. These people never experienced military action near their homes.

    • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      52·
      2 years ago

      Every lib I know says this is a genocidal war (despite no proof of any intent to genocide, they just think Putin wants to massacre every Ukrainian ever) and that, responding to that report about crackdowns on draft dodgers, anyone who tries to avoid conscription is a traitor and should be treated as such.

      Absolutely deranged the takes one can dig up when one is not threatened in any way.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        2 years ago

        The only side that wants to “fight to the last Ukrainian” is the NATO side, so it is kind of a genocide just perpetrated by US empire on its puppet state.

        • I wouldn’t actually call it that, just making fun of libs who call basically every war now a genocide, unless the US is doing it/or supporting it
      • Lmaydev@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        They literally admitted to kidnapping children which is genocide by definition.

        Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories:

        Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

        So every lib you know is correct.

        • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
          46·
          2 years ago

          “Ukraine bombing the Donbas region from 2014-2022 to eliminate the ethnicity that lived there, killing civilians and children, is totally not genocide. It’s the people who stepped in to stop them that are the real genociders.”

          • motherfucker [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            As someone who’s been involved in the foster care system in the United States, the vast majority of Americans have no idea what it looks like for a government to shove children through its rusting bureaucratic machine. How do you make sure all of the kids are properly documented? What infrastructure do you have to keep them safe until you can find a more permanent placement? What sources of truth do you have for which parents have which kids? If they conflict, what do you do? How do you make sure the people volunteering or being paid to orchestrate the logistics of this system aren’t joining specifically to have more access to young children who will be hard to get justice for if they’re trafficked? How do you provide resources to the kids so they’re not living in squalor under your care? How do you audit those resources so they’re being used properly?

            None of these are easy questions but they are all ones which the US has answered again and again for decades. With immigration policy, with Child Protective Services, with custody disputes, with juvenile detention, with educational discipline. They have been answered over and over again. If you’re curious, the answer tends to be abuse, neglect, and underfunding. It’s not too much of an ask to fuck over families of color, though.

            But I’m not surprised that Americans react in horror at seeing what it looks like to relocate large amount of children in the middle of a war. They have no idea that these same problems are happening every single day where they live and that their government is FAILING constantly. These people are the runoff and we’re trained to not pay attention to runoff. And I mean REAL attention, not reading about them in an article or watching a TikTok about them and then immediately putting them from your mind. I love that people care about human suffering. It tears me apart that that empathy is so easily manipulated into supporting destruction.

            “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

            • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              It’s my good fortune to know very little about foster care, but I am a parent. Even with perfect execution, foster care sounds like something very difficult for a child to go through.

              • motherfucker [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                The support groups for this stuff are cavalcades of horror stories. I hope for the sake of everyone involved that I’m just too close to the situation personally to see it clearly, but I fully believe the way we treat foster kids in the United States will be remembered much like we now look back on places like

                NSFL content

                Willowbrook. Legit, the photos of Willowbrook are haunting.

                If you want to see what I’m talking about wrt foster care, take a look at the “therapeutic” foster homes who practice something called “Attachment Therapy” or “The Evergreen Model”. Therapeutic foster homes aren’t inherently like this, but the vast majority of deaths and injuries related to this “therapy” have occurred in registered therapeutic homes.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_therapy

        • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          33·
          2 years ago

          Okay, now carry this logic further. By this standard, the US is currently in the midst of a much larger and longer-running genocide of refugees on it’s southern border, including forced hysterectomies and untreated outbreaks of disease.

          So why should anyone believe such a genocidal government’s claims about it’s enemies?

        • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          29·
          2 years ago

          What should happen to children in a warzone, when their parents are either dead or cannot be located? Would leaving children in a warzone constitute inflicting conditions of life on them that would be likely to bring about their physical destruction? If so, does every war constitute genocide?

            • Farman [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
              3·
              2 years ago

              Are they really children? Whatsa child really? Im parafrasing but i remember one of the chapo guests responding something similar to a similar question.

              • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                3·
                2 years ago

                That was TrueAnons very own brace-dark-cowboy who talked about his experience with the Kurds against ISIS / Daesh in the levant. The kurds more or less just picked up whatever was left of the villages that Isis was genociding, which included a bunch of 14-17 year olds whose entire families had been wiped out. Brace said that his group had no soldiers younger than 14, but some of the teens were so desperate.

                • Farman [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  2·
                  2 years ago

                  In the piss pig grandad episode ypg-brace answers to a similar acusation " whats your definition of a child? If its anyone under 14 then no we font have any."

                  And while i dont like the ypg either the example shows that there are cases were child soilders may be justified

        • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          28·
          2 years ago

          Evacuating kids from an active warzone: genocide

          Bombing the fuck out of them with a drone because one person nearby might have been associated to Al Qaeda: just the cost of war

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          20·
          2 years ago

          Evacuating children from a warzone, the majority of whom are already Russian speakers is genocide, yeah ok buddy and Britain performed a self-genocide when it evacuated kids to the countryside during the blitz, hey if words don’t have meaning let’s get wild with it

        • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          13·
          2 years ago

          the russian state is motivated by genocidal intent against ukrainians, which is why ukrainian children were evacuated from the warzone and then returned to the country when requested

        • Farman [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          6·
          2 years ago

          They are evacuating a warzone. On the other hand the can-adian goverment really is kidnaping syrian children.

    • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      46·
      2 years ago

      Unprovoked invasion is when you let right wing ghouls to ethnically cleanse members of a country’s ethnic majority in a region next door to its border and let NATO use said region as a pressure point.

      Putin apologia is when you don’t want to see slavs die for NATO.

      You tankies just don't get basic critical thinking smdh my dick head

      /s

      • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Fun fact: only 3 countries on the list (Hungary, Slovenia and North Macedonia) held a referendum on whether their countries should join NATO. So much for NATO as the defender of democracy I guess. But the Crimean referedum was a total sham, definitely a fake, I know because I am an expert on democracy.

  • btbt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    76·
    2 years ago

    Don’t worry guys, I hear they’re bringing in some dude called Steiner to start another counter-offensive, everything’s still good 👍

  • Lerios [hy/hym]@hexbear.netEnglish
    48·
    2 years ago

    i don’t understand, its been going bad the entire time, why admit it now? its been 18 months and thousands of lives, wtf

    • Lovely_sombrero [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      35·
      2 years ago

      I think that some very pro-Ukraine voices (especially in the media and Dem establishment) are angry that this counteroffensive is not going well… but they aren’t willing to admit that NATO forced Ukraine into it, so they have to just bemoan how bad it is going. Ukraine made a deal with Russia very early into the war, but as soon as NATO found out about it, Boris Johnson arrived in Ukraine for a completely unscheduled visit and told Ukrainian officials that we will fuck them up (their positions in the government and their future employment prospects) if they don’t cancel the deal. The same with this counteroffensive, we told them to do it.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    42·
    2 years ago

    They’ll just drum up some other backwards ass excuse to throw more money at neo-nazis in Ukraine. This war is never going to end anytime soon and frankly your average burger is literally a world away and views it as team sports.

  • rusticus@lemm.eeEnglish
    271·
    2 years ago

    It amazes me that people don’t realize that defending democracy doesn’t end with this battle. If you give up on Ukraine, then next comes Taiwan, South Korea, Poland, etc etc etc fucking etc.

    This. Is. An. Investment. In. Democracy.

    Edit: hilarious the number of authoritarian disinformation shills and bots freaked the fuck out by my comment. Suck. It. Bitches.

    • ahshidahfuck [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      128·
      2 years ago

      I keep thinking “damn that’s a really good bit” and then I see the username and remember that we’re federated and it’s not a bit. Damn, that really sucks someone really thinks this.

    • WhyEssEff [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      108·
      2 years ago

      Edit: hilarious the number of authoritarian disinformation shills and bots freaked the fuck out by my comment. Suck. It. Bitches.

      smuglord

      • sempersigh [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        20·
        2 years ago

        When they say bots do they literally mean that they think the comments are AI generated or something? Do they really think that highly of AI like as someone who has worked with it if someone had a script hooked up to gpt replying to all these comments it would be incredibly obvious

        On the other hand, perhaps they mean that we’re brainless automatons repeating le outlet propaganda mindlessly without nuance? That has to be the most quintessential example of projection on earth. Literally replying to links and sources with suck. It. Bitches lmfao

        • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I assume they’re pretty young and using it in the same way it’s used in games as an insult. Kind of like how “boomer” used to mean a specific generational cohort and now it just means “person I don’t like”

    • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      89·
      2 years ago

      Did you coup their democratically elected leader in 2014 for democracy too?

      Is that why you sent them weapons to persecute an ethnic cleansing in their borders for eight years? For democracy?

      Americans are the most propagandized people in the entire history of the world.

    • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      88·
      2 years ago

      Hinge Points (Hexbear edition): Ukraine

      The events leading to the war in Ukraine did not happen overnight. It was the consequence of a decade of diplomacy failures, and was 100% preventable if only a couple things had gone differently along the entire chain of events.

      1 ) The 2013 Maidan coup in Ukraine would never have happened if everyone had just gone with Putin’s suggestion of holding a three-way meeting so they can revise the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement such that European goods could not flood the Russian market without paying for tariffs (due to Ukraine’s existing tariff-free agreement with Russia). Putin did NOT object to Ukraine signing the agreement, simply that they revise the clauses for the tariff-related issues. The EU declined to meet.

      Of course, the European imperialists got greedy and wanted to eat into Russia’s market, thinking that Russian economy is too weak to do anything against them and therefore ripe for bullying.

      2 ) The 2013 Maidan coup probably would not have happened if EU didn’t force Ukraine to take IMF loans.

      Ok, you’re Ukraine, signing the agreement with EU is going to lose you trade revenues with Russia if you don’t revise the clause of tariff, fine, but now you’re being forced to take IMF loans that demand cutting social spending and education as well? That’s just you signing your own slave contract.

      Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom I assure you was very pro-EU and not a Russian stooge in any way, was stumped by the demands and asked for more time to negotiate with Russia. He did not reject the EU agreement, nor did he take any deal from Moscow. He simply postponed signing the agreement, and that was enough to be couped by the fascists before he could do anything about it.

      Of course, the imperialists have always had in their minds the perfect economic warfare against both Russia and Ukraine. They simply couldn’t help not impoverishing the countries at their periphery through their cleverly-devised economic policies.

      3 ) The 2014 Ukrainian Civil War would most likely not have happened if the fascist coup regime didn’t ban Russian language in Donbass.

      Ok, so the coup happened, you’re now under a new management. Fine, but the fascists couldn’t help themselves by lashing out at the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Literally one of the first things the coup regime did was to ban Russian language in Donbass. Clashes between both sides started to ramp up and the highly tense situation would quickly devolve into the Ukrainian Civil War.

      Russia was forced (by design, I should say) into the conflict because the Ukrainian army was being mobilized to fight against the Donbass separatists, a region where ethnic Russians are the majority.

      Of course, the imperialists couldn’t help it: they believed that they could cripple Russia’s economy by involving it in two fronts - Syria and Ukraine - at the same time. Surely Russia had no capacity to fight two wars at the same time? Crimea was immediately annexed by Russia for obvious reasons, and I still remember Western pundits laughing at Russia thinking that there’s no way they have the capability to build the Crimean Bridge.

      4 ) Implementing the Minsk agreements could have marked the peaceful ending to this conflict.

      Ok, the Ukrainian armed forces were defeated by the Donbass militia aided by Russian military in the civil war. A peace deal had been brokered. Russia said: “ok we don’t want to deal with this Donbass shit anymore, can you take them back please? Just promise not to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing in the region. We just want to continue doing business with Europe, we’ve been sanctioned enough and we really don’t want to get bogged down by this shit in Ukraine.”

      Minsk was supposed to be the path for a peaceful return of Donbass to Ukraine, but with increased autonomy to the local governments, so that nobody can impose a nation-wide ban on language and culture without regards for the people living in the regions.

      However, the fascists couldn’t help it and immediately broke the truce, leading to them being beaten once again. The German chancellor Merkel and the French president Hollande actually had to drag Putin back to the negotiation table and promised to be the guarantors of Minsk II: that Ukraine will really stick to the plan this time.

      Interestingly, both Merkel and Hollande have since admitted publicly in 2022 that the Minsk agreements were simply to buy time for Ukraine to be militarized. Why does Ukraine need time to militarize? There really is only one answer to this question: to militarily re-capture Donbass and Crimea instead of implementing the peace plan.

      5 ) NATO arming Ukraine exacerbated Russia’s security concerns

      Ok, so you have a peace plan, but instead of start holding talks toward a concrete resolution, what Russia saw was Ukraine being armed and trained by NATO over 7 years.

      Once again, Russia proved to be the idiot in this conflict by actually believing that Ukraine was ever going to implement Minsk agreement. And yes, Putin is an idiot. Surely his good friend Angela Merkel would never lie to him?

      Of course, the Western imperialists truly believe in the supremacy of NATO military equipments and tactics that if you have a fully NATO-trained Ukrainian army, they would be able to beat Russia’s obsolete military quite easily.

      I will also add that the Nazi regiments, now fully incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, have never been prosecuted for their atrocities committed against civilians in the Donbass. They were glorified as heroes in state media.

      6 ) Biden’s aggressive policy in Ukraine made Russia’s worst fear came true

      In 2021, the new Biden administration began to pivot aggressively against Russia. After the meeting between Biden and Zelensky (who was elected as a peace president and was supposed to bridge the divide between Ukraine and Russia) in Washington, the latter started to spout aggressive rhetorics that increasingly alarmed the Russians, such as talks about Ukraine joining NATO.

      That former Soviet republics joining NATO has always been the thorny issue for Russia since the end of the Cold War, and Ukraine was to be the center-piece of this increasing encirclement of Russia that has been ongoing since the 1990s. There is not a single government in Russia, whether they lean left or right, that will not be alarmed by this development, given their prior encounter with the Nazis some 80 years back. And it’s the same Banderites in Ukraine this time, not some generic fascists.

      7 ) The last ditch effort to stop the war

      At this point, at least for the Russians, it was pretty clear that the new administration is going to ramp up its belligerent foreign policy against Russia. There was only one last thing to do: a last ditch effort to persuade Washington to stop its aggression.

      The Russian diplomatic team prepared hundreds of pages of proposal, hoping to convince the other side of the seriousness of its security concerns, and Russia-US summit was conducted in June 2021 to resolve the crisis. Instead, the US sent Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine, first in August 2021, then in December - completely laughing in Russia’s face about their security concerns.

      Zelensky started to talk about joining NATO, commenting about abandoning the Budapest Memorandum that was the basis of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the increased mobilization of military units towards the eastern front (Donbass), and the increased shelling of the regions by the Ukrainian side.

      The diplomatic solution has failed.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      85·
      2 years ago

      Suck. It. Bitches.

      Liberals don’t be misogynist challenge (impossible)

      Also I upvoted this at first because I was absolutely sure it was a bit. I guess I’m still getting used to Hexbear being federated.

    • AlicePraxis [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      83·
      2 years ago

      “democracy”

      The current Ukrainian government exists as a result of the Maidan coup that ousted a democratically elected president. This war would have never happened if not for that.

      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        65·
        2 years ago

        Democracy means a western puppet regime, authoritarianism is when you don’t obey American marching orders to send half your country to certain death

      • Currently_on_Nitrous [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        61·
        2 years ago

        I blame Vice and Netflix. People saw Euromaiden through Vice’s reporting and the documentary that was on Netflix and just assumed it was leftists in favor of democracy kicking out a Russian backed dictator.
        The wiki page on the coup even lays it out plainly. Straight up Nazis like the Misanthrope Division kicked out elected officials.

        • AlicePraxis [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          49·
          2 years ago

          “Misanthropic Division” JFC never heard of that one before. as if they couldn’t make it any more clear they’re the bad guys

          • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Yep. A lot of the discourse around nazis in Ukraine focuses only on Azov battalion but i think that’s limiting discourse since it ignores Svoboda, C14, Misanthropic division, Kraken, right sector, patriot of ukraine, social national assembly, and countless others, many of which predate A.B. and go back to the 1990s or even earlier, like OUN-B, which goes back to nazi collaborators Yaroslav Stetsko and Stepan Bandera in WW2 and never stopped existing

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      82·
      2 years ago

      michael-laugh

      I would say you have an infantile conception of geopolitics, but I would wager that most infants are more knowledgeable by way of ignorance.

      Let’s see, we have murderous dictator’s exile island, murderous dictator’s exile peninsula, Nazi shithole, etc etc etc

      Pick up a gun and fight, coward

    • Poison_Ivy [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      82·
      2 years ago

      This. Is. An. Investment. In. Democracy.

      Investing in Democracy by immediately banning opposition parties in Ukraine and the current government being the result of a manufactured coup against an elected government.

      • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        50·
        2 years ago

        Actually, it’s a result of dissatisfaction with that Government. Zelensky got popular for his reformist Plattform after all, promising among other things improved relations with Russia.

        He didn’t deliver, and before the war as I understand it, the popularity of “Servant of the People” was declining, as I understand it.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                I don’t think he ever had that much control. There aren’t a lot of Fascist party members in the Rada, but there are always a lot of fascists around the members of the Rada. I guess you could call it soft-power control of the country. They don’t directly occupy many of the positions, but they have enough influence to be very influential, if not the dominant force.

        • NoGodsNoMasters [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          2 years ago

          the popularity of “Servant of the People” was declining, as I understand it.

          The Wikipedia chart for polling on what was supposed to be 2023 parliamentary election (unclear when it will actually happen but it’s definitely not as originally scheduled because of martial law):

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          There’s at least rumors that the Banderites running the front told him to fuck off and remember his place when he tried to start negotiations to end the conflict.

    • Tomboys_are_Cute [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      81·
      2 years ago

      Taiwan, South Korea, Poland

      One of these things is not like the other. South Korea and Taiwan are both areas that should be re-unified with the countries that amerikkka cut them off of, if there is a Formosan population to return it to that may be a solution with Taiwan as well. What’s your beef with Poland?

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      81·
      2 years ago

      Ukraine? The west? Democracy? Were you born yesterday? Since when has the west ever cared for democracy outside of propaganda value?

      Just going to post an excerpt of Samir Amin’s thoughts on this from the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

      1. The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control over the planet through a combination of:

      a) so-called neo-liberal economic globalization policies allowing financial transnational capital of the Triad to decide alone on all issues in their exclusive interests;

      b) the military control of the planet by the U.S. and its subordinate allies (NATO and Japan) in order to annihilate any attempt by any country not of the Triad to move out from under their yoke…

      1. The current development of the Ukraine tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the Triad.

      The Triad organized in Kiev what ought to be called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.” To achieve their target (separating the historical twin sister nations—the Russian and the Ukrainian), they needed the support of local Nazis.

      The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim at promoting democracy, is simply a lie. Nowhere has the Triad promoted democracy. On the contrary these policies have systematically been supporting the most anti-democratic (in some cases “fascist”) local forces. Quasi-fascist in the former Yugoslavia—in Croatia and Kosovo—as well as in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, Hungary for instance. Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist powers. The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that which rules the relations between the U.S. and Latin America! In the countries of the South the Triad supported the extreme anti-democratic forces such as, for instance, ultra-reactionary political Islam and, with their complicity, has destroyed societies; the cases of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya illustrate these targets of the Triad imperialist project.

      What is in any way democratic about the above? What is democratic about the imperial triad ruling the world by force and instigating a coup in Ukraine to serve their own interests? Seems very authoritarian and the opposite of democracy to me.

      You can find the full summary here

    • Flaps [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      76·
      2 years ago

      I’m amazed how you libs always manage to write off anything that even moves slightly from the narrative provided by NATO mouthpieces as ‘bots’ or ‘shills’. It’s dehumanizing and only proves you’re so propagandized engaging with you is almost futile. Some comrades have taken the time to respond to your brainless comment with a wall of text giving a much broader view of the events that led to the war in Ukraine. I know you NAFO idiots don’t like reading, but please try. If you do, great. But I’m assuming you won’t, here is a pig. With. Poop. On. Its. Balls. PIGPOOPBALLS

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      74·
      2 years ago

      Why aren’t you at the front then, coward? You believe in the cause, yet you’re sitting here posting while people are being forced to fight and die on your behalf.

    • sharedburdens [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      69·
      2 years ago

      This. Is. An. Investment. In. Democracy.

      Wow democracy defenders sure are bloodthirsty, how about we stop “investing” in the pile of bodies you’ve created in the name of a coup government that you call democracy?

      • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        32·
        2 years ago

        If anyone’s going to attack Poland (which they won’t.) it’s gonna be from it’s own sabre rattling. There’s nothing more that pleases people from PO to PiS and anything inbetween than it’s neighbors getting losses, be it Germany, Russia, Belarus and any country that’s not in its own sphere of influence like the rest of the Reddit Belt

      • Aabbcc@lemm.eeEnglish
        15·
        2 years ago

        Democracy is when you vote once every 2 years to pick which of the people (who don’t represent your interests) you want to represent your interests :)

        Oh and then 9 people you didn’t elect will tell you what you can and can’t do

        THAT’S what’s at stake

    • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      51·
      2 years ago

      Billions must die for glorious US unipolar hegemony democracy. More blood for the blood God. More skulls for the skull throne.

    • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      46·
      2 years ago

      It amazes me the amount of people who don’t realize they could defend democracy better themselves by going to Ukraine and putting themselves on the front line.

      If you think the Battle For Democracy is so important, and that it’s going to be won at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead Ukranians, go put your money where your mouth is. Stop shoving them into the meat grinder so callously and claiming that they’re heroes for Defending Democracy, whatever the fuck that even means. Go jump in with them and make a real impact. If it’s a cause you care about go participate

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I wish someone would remind Brandon. The 21th century is going to be a nightmare unthinkable in human history no matter what, but it would be nice if we didn’t include a global thermonuclear war.

        • TheCaconym [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          it would be nice if we didn’t include a global thermonuclear war.

          I’m convinced they will

          When the crumbling of the empire becomes too obvious, they will

    • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      27·
      2 years ago

      Question for ya, a legitimate one.

      If Russia is so weak as to be apparently held in check and or clowned on by Ukraine, an army a fifth of its size, logically Poland or any other Russian border state would have nothing to worry about, right? They all have larger and better equipped militaries.

      If that’s the case, why do you think Russia can possibly be a threat to the west?

    • Nagarjuna [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      2 years ago

      Those are bad examples of democracies, since Poland is captured by the right wing and Taiwan and Korea only swing left when there’s a popular uprising. These countries have elected bodies, but they don’t reflect the will of the people.

      I’d encourage you to take a look into the foundation of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea.

      As far as defending democracy, call me when New Zealand or Bolivia are under attack.

    • AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      2 years ago

      Democracy is when rich capitalist nations fight each other to the death of innocent civilians

      name LITERALLY ONE TIME when the United states fought for and achieved gains for common people of a foreign land

    • ZapataCadabra [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Was it democratic when Zelensky banned every socialist party in the country? Was it democratic when an unelected coup government in Ukraine banned the Russian language from official use, prompting the Russian majority regions to demand autonomy? Was it democratic when Zelensky was voted in on the promise of enforcing Minsk II which would have given autonomy to the Donbass and ended the civil war, but then he immediately reneged on that promise and continued to bomb his own country?

      The Russian Federation is by no means a force for good, but if you look at the US it has never “invested in democracy” because it doesn’t care about democracy. It cares about client states getting in line. Pakistan is only the most recent coup they’ve encouraged.

    • pooh [she/her, love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      You are aware that both Taiwan and South Korea were both US backed dictatorships that only embraced “democracy” relatively recent and after intense and sustained public pressure, right? And that the US/NATO had secretly worked to rig elections in Italy and Greece (at least this is what the CIA has actually admitted to)? The idea that the US or NATO cares about protecting democracy is a complete joke to anyone with even a basic knowledge of Cold War history. You really should do some serious research and educate yourself on the topic.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        South Korean “democracy” is about as sketchy as it gets, given the influence of cults on the government and the government’s general use of crackdowns to control the labor force. It’s still a very heavy handed government, even if the faces change once in a while.

        • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          Didn’t it take untill Moon Jae-in for South Korea to have a president actually finish their term and not go to prison? Seems like a hell of a democracy if almost every leader goes to jail for massive corruption and being a puppet for Samsung / Hanwha corporations.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      post-1991 Ukraine is a proxy of NATO. I feel bad for the people there, but not the government, or the US-backed reactionaries. The truth is, after the USSR was destroyed, former soviet countries like Russia and Ukraine became ruled by reactionary capitalists who bent the knee to the west, and the west did nothing in return but continue to expand NATO, and now pits former soviet countries against each other, getting thousands of people killed just to destabilize and privatize and loot the region even further. I hope one day you’ll be able to see through the veneer of “democracy” rhetoric and see this.

    • tastysnacks@programming.devEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      Its worse than that. They’re OK with soldiers coming into their country to rape and kill women. Well, they’re OK with soldiers going into Ukraine to rape and kill Ukrainian women anyway.

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        2 years ago

        Its worse than that. They’re OK with soldiers coming into their country to rape and kill women. Well, they’re OK with Azov going into the Donbas Republics to rape and kill Dontest and Luhansk women anyway.