I’m just showing these comments I saw earlier, which were interesting. Since it is true, that we’ve been hearing that “Russia is cornered”, since the invasion started. I personally just want this shit to end.
These comments are relating to an article from this week.
I wonder if we will ever know what truly happens on the ground (i.e. when it comes to casualties and many other things)
Vietnam showed that the public is a great threat to the war effort. Governments will not allow media to show what warfare is really like nor how the war is actually developing.
Liberals have never forgiven wikileaks for showing American soldiers celebrating the deaths of civilians, and during Obama’s presidency no less! “But do you mean to say that the adults in the room murder people for money? But that’s absurd! That would mean that American society is just run by a glorified psychotic mafia! And that I’ve been helping them commit mass murder my entire life!”
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that’s absurd! That would mean that American society is just run by a glorified psychotic mafia! And that I’ve been helping them commit mass murder my entire life!”
Americans were mostly against Vietnam because a bunch of their family and friends were coming back in bodybags
I don’t think any amount of Ukrainian casualties would make any big difference in American perception
Americans were mostly against Vietnam because a bunch of their family and friends were coming back in bodybags
And because the draft was more “impartial” in the sense that middle-class white people were sent to die instead of the “volunteer” military we have now where recruiters target poor and disenfranchised minorities to become the foot soldiers fed to the meat grinder while the officers are still upper-middle class college graduates (especially those from the places like the Naval Academy, West Point, or the Air Force Academy).
We saw with the second Iraq War that Americans didn’t really care too much because the well-off upper middle class people just sent their kids to college while the poor black and white people got sent to die in Iraq.
Like you said, Ukranian casualties don’t even matter so I guess this is the evolution of imperial warfare (impartial draft > volunteer army > foreign proxies).
Only when the empire is forced to use conscription. As long as they can use mercenaries, proxies, intel officers and enlistees then there will never be a public mass movement against imperialism. Americans are just too chauvinist to care unless their skin is in the game.
Well that and socialists at the front organising mutinies
The only good american soldier is a defector
Or ones that frag their CO
all the love to them
This isn’t really a post about the news. Try posting this kind of stuff to c/politics next time.
It wont end. They ended Afghanistan to live out thier Cold War Nazi’s revenge against the commies fantasies and turn Ukraine into a burn pit to clear inventory of trillons of unused equipment. The soil and water in Europe’s bread basket will be contaminated for 100s of years. Food prices will skyrocket. The European "way of life " will end to support the inflationary costs of the wars and no western political candidate will ever be able to point to Europe as an example of what’s possible under the crap-it-all-ist system ever again.
Once they get bored of that they’ll instigate a formal 3rd world war in the 2040’s to stop any peace divided.
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They did a coup in 2014 with the help of Nazi militias.
Nice condescending ableism at the end there. Libs stay classy.
Uh… what the fuck are you on? Can I have some?
The coup in 2014 happened because Yanukovych chose at the last minute to not sign a free trade deal with the EU, but rather wanted closer economic ties to Russia. This is despite the fact that the parliament had overwhelmingly approved the original deal. Protests began immediately (this was in November of 2013). Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation were pissed off. Both the protestors and parliament called for Yanukovych to step down. He refused, and enacted harsh anti-protest laws in response. Things escalated. Eventually, after weeks of clashes with the police, the protestors won out and Yanukovych fled. He then begged Moscow to intervene.
This gave Russia all the justification it needed to seize Crimea so that they could have unfettered access to Sevastopol, which is where they had been basing their Black Sea fleet for like 200 years.
So, like… I get that you’re all rah rah communism rah rah… but how are you going to then shit on an extremely popular people’s movement that ousts the entrenched power system? That seems pretty in-line with your professed beliefs.
Were you also dropped on your head as a baby?
Im kind of sick of having the same pointless “debate” about established facts with dumbass ignorant dog-headed do-nothings dickhead like you, about how the “revolution” was led by far-right militias 1 2 3 4 5 because you never engage with the texts, you all repeat same tired thought-terminating cliches while being weird condescending debatebros that think you’re the cleverest pig in the mudpile. So instead I’ll link you this video, which you can ignore, misrepresent, strawman and nitpick instead.
Looking forward to seeing you ask this same question very soon, despite already having had it answered!Liberalism 101:
Liberals do not argue in good faith. Every time they start JAQing off and question the validity of your claims, they mean to attack your character and have no interest in the claims themselves. It is not contradictory that they ask the same questions again and again, because their questions aren’t questions, they’re attacks.
Yeah, but you never know, once in a blue moon they’re genuine, and really it’s more about the lurkers than the poster. However that also means that as soon as they’ve been responded to in good faith it’s immediate mockery if they fail to do so themselves as well
but how are you going to then shit on an extremely popular people’s movement that ousts the entrenched power system?
It would be great if Euromaiden was an actual popular revolution that turned control over to the people, but any legitimate popular energy was hijacked by western-backed right wing forces. This is evident by the fact that the grassroots protest leaders where shut out of the new government to make space for neo-Nazis handpicked the US state department (you can hear Victoria Nuland say “fuck the EU” around 10 mins into this video before selecting the new Ukrainian cabinet).
And hey, I too used to be a smug liberal who looked down upon everyone who wasn’t in lock step with US propaganda, but if you’re trying to convince people of something I’d recommend you don’t bookend every comment with reddit-ass insults to people’s intelligence.
was an actual popular revolution that turned control over to the people
That’s seriously
, like how was it a popular movement when the next president was a literal billionaire oligarch who supported the protests?Wasn’t that guy voted out as soon as there were formal elections though?
It would be great if Euromaiden was an actual popular revolution that turned control over to the people, but any legitimate popular energy was hijacked by western-backed right wing forces.
Nevertheless, that still means there are millions of Ukrainians who would prefer association with the EU over Russia. I think a lot of people take issue with the framing of it all as an artificial coup without popular support because that implies there’s no one in Ukraine who wanted (however misplaced we might find it) to be in the EU and aligned with the US?
It was about 30% vs 30%. Here’s from the UK government Scoping Study:
It is clear from the results of recent opinion polls (see Appendix C below) that the majority of the Ukrainians do not have an informed opinion about the European integration processes. On average, opinion polls show that about 30% of respondents are in favour of European integration, 30% - for the Customs Union, and about 30% are undecided. The share of citizens supporting the two blocks at the same time remains stable (25-30%). One trend during 2011-2012 is noteworthy - the number of supporters of integration with Customs Union increased at the expense of the “undecided”.
Note: Customs Union = Eurasian Customs Union which was the Russia’s alternative with Belarus and Kazakhstan. For the most part, Yanukovych wanted to appease to both sides, and was punished by the ultranationalists for it.
However, supporting EU integration doesn’t mean supporting the coup.
think a lot of people take issue with the framing of it all as an artificial coup without popular support because that implies there’s no one in Ukraine who wanted… to be in the EU and aligned with the US.
I think that implication mistakeningly conflates the protests with the resulting coup. The protests had real popular energy behind them and spotlit grassroots leaders (until the western-backed literal Nazis took center stage). The coup pushed those people and their interests aside in favor of whoever Victoria Nuland favored.
Putin actually outlined it well in his statement in 2022
The offloading of military equipment is just a byproduct
Didn’t Putin say that he would only serve two terms as leader and not change the rules to keep power?
For some reason, I just don’t trust that guy.
This is the height of liberal “analysis”, not a hint of rigor or knowledge of the factional politics or geopolitical pressures that determine what choices are viable for leaders to make
No, instead it’s just vibes based politics arrived at thru bullshit personal intuition
“I DoNt tRuST tHaT gUY” give me a fuckin break, say something thats even half way incisive
I recognize that username, it’s the same person who defended dropping nukes on Japan over on Lemmygrad.
lmao of course, the opinions these maggots share are all stamped out of a DC think tank template
No what matter what, the US state department is always right
these maggots
Agree with everything you say, but let’s not do that.
Someone cited a speech Putin gave.
I pointed out Putin has a long history of lying [and other shady activities]
What part confused you?
Biden has a long history of lying and other shady activities, yet you accept his narrative uncritically.
It is true that politicians are not always truthful. Unfortunately you have to educate yourself to determine what the lies are, not just pick a team and a set of lies to believe.
I am once again begging you Marvel brained libs to recognize that Russia is a country not a guy in a costume.
Are you saying that Putin and Russia are indivisible?
I’m saying the national interests of the Russian Federation are not decided on the whims of an evil madman. And when you reduce them to a single person you fall into self blinding behaviors like completely ignoring a speech to the world about a nation’s cause for war when determining that country’s motivation for going to war.
So, you’re saying the Russian Federation had a vote on the issue?
This you doing apologia for the murder of 200,000 Japanese civilians and Korean POWs?
every single fucking time
So, you’re saying that if it was you and your family were Burmese/Korean/Vietnamese and people were being raped and killed on a daily basis, you would have asked the Americans NOT to bomb?
Also, go outside and touch the grass. This kind of third rate cyber stalking is kind of creepy. Memorize the names of people in your neighborhood and don’t obsess over people on the interwebs.
Tens of thousands of Korean slave laborers died in those nuclear blasts my man. The USA has never given a fuck about helping anyone who wasn’t bourgeois. They dropped the bombs to warn the Soviets to stay out. Try to read history that wasn’t written by Nazi apologists.
So, you personally would have let the Japanese keep on raping and killing your family rather than have the US drop the bomb?
‘Yes’ or ‘no.’
So, you’re saying that if it was you and your family were Burmese/Korean/Vietnamese and people were being raped and killed on a daily basis, you would have asked the Americans NOT to bomb?
So, you’re saying that if it was you and your family were Serbian/Korean/Vietnamese and people were being raped and killed on a daily basis, you would have asked Bin Laden NOT to do 9/11?
spoiler
Also for the record I saw someone else saying they recognised your username from your last warcrimes apologia and so just checked your account on lemmygrad and it was the last comment that had federated with grad
So, you couldn’t actually answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
Also, I don’t think using 9/11 as an example of ending a war is really all that smart.
It’s good that the USA didn’t employ unit 731 to kill hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese/Burmese/Koreans after WW2. That would have been terrible.
The nukes were definitely dropped to save those people.
Wait what
I knew about the nazis BUT FUCKING UNIT 731?!
Yeah it’s called the military industrial complex, maybe you heard of it
Or maybe you actaully believe all those nazis who couped the government in 2014 did it for the “love of democracy” and not for the western paychecks in the form of massive arms transfers
Fuck it doesn’t even need to be arms transfers, lord only knows how much dark money is being sifted around this conflict. Hell, Zelensky was already in either the Panama Papers or was it the other one? Who knows how much pure cash is just floating around or weapons are being sold around Eastern Europe.
Zelesnkyy is a hundred millionaire before the conflict. I have to imagine he’s in the billions by now, after 150+ billion dollars sent to Ukraine that he’s been grafting off of
When do you think the war will end? Just guess at the date. I am curious.
I’m sorry, did you just imply that Russia invading Ukraine was part of some weird US plot to offload out-of-date military equipment?
The US has legalized bribery, military contractors make their money by lobbying for war, ans politicians see military spending as economic stimulus. The SMO is a direct response to the Westerm side (US vassals) constantly escalating and refusing to implement Minsk 2 during active shelling of Donbas population for 8 years. The SMO itself was announced shortly after a significant uptick in shelling of Donbas by UA.
This approach of constant escalation, of pushing far beyond what their own countries would and havw tolerated, is a function of the MIC. It’s a big part of the reason that war is desirable to those making decisions. They frame it as being strategic, a way to increase “national security” and launder a new campaign to “update” arsenals against mounting “threats” (potential peers).
How, exactly, would the US have convinced Russia to invade, in your mind?
Through a decades-long campaign to encircle the country, undermine its trade influence and development, and push hard against red line issues they know will trigger significant responses from them. It is no surprise that poking the bear gets a response and this was all very intentional. Shelling of Donbas by Ukraine escalated massively shortly before the announcement of the SMO, for example.
And did they also convince Russia to invade in 2014, or was that purely Russia’s decision?
What invasion are you referring to, here?
Lastly, just to satisfy my own curiosity: were you dropped on your head as a baby?
@Civility!
As someone who is very much pro-Ukrainian in this conflict and has talked to many Ukrainians, anyone who believes the hype that Russia is days away from collapsing (again) or that Russia’s army is made entirely of uneducated starving peasants who have never held a gun before is taking crazy pills.
War economies can last a very long time, and this kind of attritional artillery based warfare on both sides (they started with almost the same doctrines) with a contested airspace is an absolute meatgrinder.
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There’s a few different aspects to this:
1st is that having a successful war of naked conquest is a very dangerous precedent to have. If this is normalized, then we’re going to see a lot more armed conflict. I’ve seen people here claim all sorts of justifications for Russia’s actions, but Putin himself in the announcement for the “special military operation” was waxing nostalgic about the Russian empire of Catherine the Great. He’s been relatively clear in his statements what he’s doing and why. He wants to build a new “Ruskiy Mir”, where whether you want it or not, Slavic peoples will be absorbed.
2nd is nuclear proliferation. Ukraine gave up it’s nukes for security guarantees from the US and Russia. This sets the precedent that the only way to be truly safe from wars of aggression is to have nukes and threaten your neighbours with them.
Combining these 2 points, to prevent nuclear proliferation and naked imperialism, Russia must not only lose, but be seen to lose internationally and unequivocally.
Finally, there’s the self-interest here: if Ukraine was to lose, Moldova goes next. Moldova would barely be a speedbump to Russia. Moldova is extremely close to Romania, we share a culture, language, and Moldovans get automatic Romanian citizenship if they want it. I have close Ukrainian friends too, but it’s different when you share a language and culture.
I think where you are deviating from the wider hexbear opinion here, and also where I think you’re wrong, is based in a belief that precedents are meaningful first off. Before this war was even thought about, these realities were already clear to all powerful people in the world. Acting from the basic material assumptions (and proving that they are ALREADY true) is not making them true. Not having nukes has been a death sentence to countries (eventually, without socialism) since the moment the first one existed. This war doesn’t impact that nor how rational global actors work. The ability to do “naked aggression” literally never went away, it was just hidden in plain sight with shitty western justifications. Every world power understood this well before this war, and their rational/justifications won’t be impacted. Only new material conditions to work from will arise. Russia’s loss or success actually only would give 1 major new piece of info to the world: is it possible to offensively take in the Imperial core indirectly without the result being total destruction of yourself? That’s what we’re going to learn. We learned from Korea and Vietnam that fighting defensively can work. We learned from middle eastern imperial wars that guerilla struggle is possible to slowly tire out the US.
We will Also learn small details about fighting and material and weapons and strategy, of course. But the worldwide impact is literally just “is it possible to defend yourself from US interests WITH OFFENSE?”
Also I agree with CyborgMarx, best case scenario is Donbas is free to choose to be Russian along with Crimea and Ukraine is forced to reckon with its right wing, fascistic side by being stuck between NATO and Russia after a loss
You’ve obviously put some thought into my position here and tried to understand it, so I will do my best to return the favor.
Realpolitik is certainly prevalent, and my country is no stranger to this. Words on paper are only as good as people’s willingness to do what it says. I completely agree that the majority of the time, “rules-based diplomacy” just means gunboat diplomacy with extra steps. However, that veneer of western justification at least kept the absolute worst impulses of imperialism at bay, even if just a bit. That “just a bit” part is important, because as you quite rightly say, new material conditions will result in new possibilities. What the result of those possibilities are is important. They directly affect my life in substantial ways.
The point about lessons and thinking about this in purely academic terms is difficult when you have friends and family of friends sucked into the conflict. It’s very difficult for me to engage with a point as academic as this being so close to the conflict. I know that is an admission of a lack of impartiality and perspective, but it’s the honest truth.
As I said in another comment in this thread, I see Russia as more fascistic and right-wing than Ukraine. So in my head, what you’re saying with that final sentence is “Ukraine is forced to reckon with its right wing, fascistic side by being stuck between the global hegemon and even worse right wing fascists”.
I disagree entirely that that “just a bit” exists at all. Direct imperial wars were limited only by the conditions and interests of the imperial power, and the justifications only resulted in extra work AFTERWARD the decisions were made to make convincing arguments (or find a way to hide the war).
With all due respect, you’re not just influences by perspective or lack of impartiality, but by your own interests. Being just west of Ukraine means that the fascistic border for expropriation (I mean from the West, but also possibly from Russia) will come closer the further west Russia can push. You benefit at least minmially from global imperialism by having that expropriation lead to imports on your side. I don’t blame you for desiring to not be hurt by that “border” movement, and I have to hope I will stay strong and support my comrades and movement when that inevitably comes to my place and not try to gain/maintain personal benefits. It’s always violent, just usually somewhere else.
This article is the best description for my understanding of Fascism: https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
Russia is just as fascist as every capitalist government. But so far, Crimea hasn’t been experiencing the violence anymore than any other group and less than from the imperial core when they were under Ukraine. If “more fascist” means more violent and expropriating more", which is in line wiht that essay, then I think Russia is less fascist. They have legitimately experienced less of the expropriation than before. I think Donbas would be the same, and there’s a chance that that continues westward as fascism attempts to consume the border regions for profits.
I think another point of contention here is that I have a fundamentally different understanding of what the word “fascist” means compared to you, which I’m glad you’ve identified and tried to rectify. Maybe we’re just talking about different things. I’ll read that essay when I have the time, and hopefully the next conversation I have with you I’ll be a bit more capable of talking with common terminology.
Yeah my definition is more “niche” but I just fundamentally disagree withe philosophical underpinnings of definition like Umberto Eco gave and such. I think it’s clearly a liberal definition lacking in material or dialectical understanding of the world and fails to ever define anything really.
Regardless, definition itself isnt the basis of the convo. If what I call fascism was called “time-location-based-expropriation-interests”, we could still have the convo. we’re talking about real things regardless of the word. I still think we disagree after that though, unless the essay also convinces you of an evil you didn’t previously understand and results in you agreeing with my analysis or so.
Yeah nah bro the Russian speakers of the Donbass and especially Crimea don’t deserve to be ethnically cleansed by a bunch of bloodthirsty Ukrainian nationalists hopped up on fantasies of revenge
Also the “naked conquest precedent” in international politics was already set by the US in 2003, hence the neutrality over this current conflict by all states outside the west and it’s puppets
Honest question, do you really think that a fascist victory in Ukraine is better - for the left and for the world, somehow?
Also, do you really think that Russia wants to conquer its surrounding countries just to be embroiled in decades long internal conflict and facing endless local resistance? If so, why did Russia spend the last 8 years pushing for Donbass to be returned to Ukraine via the Minsk agreements? Why did Russia continuously push for a diplomatic solution with the US and NATO prior to the invasion in 2022?
I’m sorry but tracing the history of the events since 2013 simply don’t add up to your assertions here.
I think calling the entirety of Ukraine and all the people in it “fascist” is hyperbole of the highest order.
If you’re going to make the argument that the current Ukrainian government is fascist, then unfortunately the same things but worse is mirrored in Russia, and you have 2 fascist countries fighting.
The diplomatic solution thing is interesting because the main point was not about Donbass at all, but about the Finlandization of Ukraine, determining for them which organizations they can and cannot voluntarily join. Why is it ok for Russia to dictate terms to smaller countries about what they can do, but when the US does it it’s the worst thing in the world? What’s the difference here?
I mean, the Ukrainian government has been the one that promoted Nazis in power, initiated de-communization across Ukraine and removal of Soviet/communist symbols, banned socialist and communist parties and left wing organizations in the country, brutally suppressed and murdered left wing activists and failed to prosecute the Nazis who have committed atrocities against the civilians of Donbass (even worse, they were glorified on state media).
The diplomatic solution thing is interesting because the main point was not about Donbass at all, but about the Finlandization of Ukraine, determining for them which organizations they can and cannot voluntarily join.
This is just patently false. There has been so much white-washing in history that it is actually scary to me. How long before people start believing that it was the USSR that started WWII?
Russia did not object to Ukraine signing the EU Association Agreement - their only problem was the existing tariff-free agreement between Russia and Ukraine that would have allowed EU goods to flood the Russian market but not in return. Putin even offered to hold a tripartite meeting to resolve this problem - the EU rejected this proposal.
In this case, Russia simply has no choice but to terminate its tariff-free agreement with Ukraine, because nobody wants to lose money in business. And for Ukraine that meant losing a lot of its trade revenues, since Russia was its largest trading partner. A problem that could have been easily resolved had the EU been more accommodating, mind you. But they refused, why?
To put it in very clear terms for you: the EU Association Agreement was an economic warfare against both Russia (to destroy Russian domestic industries by flooding EU goods into their market i.e. what “free trade” means to most developing countries) and Ukraine (forcing them to take the IMF loans that would have bound them to perpetual dollar debt and with austerity demands i.e. to cut social spending and education).
Yanukovych did not reject the EU Association Agreement, as opposed to what many media tried to portray after the fact. He said that he needed more time to work this out with Moscow, and merely postponed signing the agreement. However, the ultranationalists were already making their moves, and he was ousted before he could even get anything substantial from Russia, let alone signing the deal with the EU.
It was the EU that determined which organizations that Ukraine can or cannot voluntarily join, not Russia!
What absolutely drives me nuts is that this conflict was rooted in very tangible nuts and bolts issues but Westerners all just think it happened because Putin personally wants to drink the tears of apple-cheeked Ukrainian children because Russians are Chaotic Evil
It’s all mindless orgasmic cheerleading for war which is extra scary since it will fuck up the quality of life for Europeans for years to come
Like you can still think Putin sucks, which he does, but at least acknowledge reality
I agree that Ukraine has engaged in suppression of activists and political parties. At the risk of sounding like I’m doing whataboutism, using suppression of activists and parties to justify Russian aggression when they absolutely suppress their entire population seems strange.
Could you please point out some prominent Ukrainian politicians in positions of power right now that you consider nazist? I do mean that as an honest question, I’m honestly trying to see your perspective here.
On the economic side of the spectrum, Ukraine was never a member of the Eurasian Customs Union. There was never any free trade of goods between Ukraine and Russia. There were talks of potentially joining it and it was floated as an alternative to the EU Association Agreement, but it wasn’t in place. This means Russia could have put as many tariffs and controls on EU/Ukrainian goods as they wanted, there was never any danger of an uncontrolled flood of goods into Russia.
Also, the EU never forced Ukraine into that deal. You can make the argument about Ukrainian ultranationalists if you want, but they aren’t in the EU. At the end of the day, it was Ukrainians, however much you disagree with them, that wanted it.
Also, the EU never forced Ukraine into that deal. You can make the argument about Ukrainian ultranationalists if you want, but they aren’t in the EU. At the end of the day, it was Ukrainians, however much you disagree with them, that wanted it.
The democratically elected president of Ukraine was removed in a western-backed coup and replaced with a new western-friendly president. The US hand picked the Ukrainian prime minister. The Ukrainian finance minister was an American citizen that gained Ukrainian citizenship the same day she became finance minister.
How can you possibly look at that and say it was the will of the Ukrainian people. Do you just mean that the ultranationalists that participated in the coup were Ukrainian?
The Ukrainian will be banned since this is probably the combat footage sub which is filled with people who want to invade the entire world.
Iirc this was r/worldnews, hence my surprise. The WarReport subreddit or wtv it’s called is worse.
Nah worldnews is pretty much the same now. The mods ban anyone with a slightly different opinion on any topic.
Worldnews has been a sewer for years and years
What happened to all the people on Reddit who seemed to have loved peace? Why is every single Redditor a war hungry monster? Did I hallucinate those people?
The number of people who love peace in the abstract is much higher than the number of people who can resist a propaganda campaign to get them to support a war. Never trust someone who claims to love peace until you’ve seen them oppose a war while it was starting
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reddit is astroturfed and full of bots pushing US state department propaganda. Eglin air force base was identified as the most “reddit-addicted” city in 2013, but reddit removed the blog post.
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every redditor who is bloodthristy right now has simply internalized the narrative that Russia attacked Ukraine unprovoked and that the US has done nothing to cause or prolong this war.
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the imperial core has always been genocidal and bloodthirsty, and reddit users are majority in the imperial core.
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You’re thinking of tankies. Tankies are the people calling for an end to the war, and the anti imperialist peace loving democrats are the real Gandhis
Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
liberals don’t have values in a broader sense. in their day to day lives, sure, but about the world at large? it doesn’t impact them, they’ll believe whatever needs to be believed to allow liberalism to keep trucking along and extracting profit. supporting peace looks good so they’ll talk prettily about it in peacetime, but as long as war doesn’t come to the west and everything remains “normal” for them, they don’t actually care.
Reddit libs use the same type of phrases and terminology when describing Russia and other “enemies” of the US State Department, as fascists and far right freaks in Europe do when describing Muslims and Arabs / Middle Easterners (same thing in their mind really). It’s fucking terrifying how quickly they got on board with the whole “enemy of the free world” shit that also got them to support the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
It’s so nice to see so many people so concerned for Ukrainian lives and how they are lost fighting Russia.
I wonder how all of you imagine Ukraine fighting back without even this limited western help. How would this look like and what kind of casualty rate would you expect as Russia would profil their fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture and erasing their nation from history?
Because let me tell you, that doesn’t sound a very peaceful plan and certainly Ukraine is having non of it. Helping them with everything we can seem a way more peaceful plan. But hey, that’s just me, I not a deranged putinist jerking off on his picture like some people here, so I might have a different view.
Helping them with everything we can seem a way more peaceful plan
Yup, supporting an endless war with a trickle of weapons that will ultimately result in a Ukrainian loss, hundreds of thousands dead, and a completely destroyed country that will be full of far-right mercenary groups with Western stockpiles is peace.
Peace talks and negotiations, on the other hand - that’s war.
No, supporting the attacked people in their defence until they decide otherways.
Also: stop dumbasses who think not giving weapons to attacked people that fight for their own freedom is a way to peace. The whole notion is absurd.
No, supporting the attacked people in their defence until they decide otherways.
You just admitted that ukraine can decide to surrender meaning this isn’t a genocidal war so every supply of weapons keeping the Ukrainian government from doing so is another thousands of lives wasted pointlessly.
You have worms in your brain.
Bye.
No, supporting the attacked people in their defence until they decide otherways.
Then you should support the people of the Donbas who have been fighting for their lives since Ukraine started trying to ethnically cleanse them back in 2014.
Yes we all know this absurd Russian narrative. It have been debunked again and again and again.
You are boring.
I’ve been watching the Ukrainian conflict off and on since 2014, you are fucking delusional. Fuck man, even people like Mearsheimer have been talking about this stuff for half a decade now. Fine, live in your bubble, it doesn’t fucking matter what your or my opinion is, it’s not like any of these processes are democratic in the slightest. Enjoy the show, war-piggie.
Don’t you love when the shelling of civilians is ok since it is the “russian narrative” thank god this person told me those children getting torn apart by artillery the past 8 years don’t count as humans. Otherwise one might have to give a shit beyond their immediate news cycle
Please debunk it here and now for us?
The classic “I know you are but what am I?!” response is all that the westoid propagandists like this person (or NATO bot?) can muster. “Nuh uh, I’m not fake news, you’re fake news! Oh and you’re boring. Nyeah.” Especially now that this farce of a counteroffensive has completely failed, it’s getting harder for them to hold up their embarrassing facade of lies. This is all clear to anyone who actually has even a little bit of understanding about what has been happening in real life, on the ground, exactly as the Ukrainian in the OP image is also telling us.
Well known pro-Putin bots, the OSCE has been documenting ceasefire violations for years.
Why do those people need to conscript men, then?
Does that sound fucking willing to you?
Is it possible the ACTUAL people of Ukraine don’t want to die for this shit?
No, supporting the attacked people in their defence until they decide otherways.
So you’d have been fine with arming the Iraqi people with modern western arms in their struggle against American invaders, neat!
Or the Afghan Soviets against America-back Mujahideen terrorists like Osama Bin Laden
Imagine how many Ukrainian lives would have been spared if they had kept their word with the Minsk agreements and didn’t shell civilians in Donbass. Ignoring that, imagine how many Ukrainian lives would have been spared if they (or lets be real, their Nato handlers) actually sat down and tried to hammer out a peace instead of prolong a lost war at the expense of every last ukrainian life. Of course if you have the russia is ebil psycho genocidal pootin state brainworms then the geopolitics and all material conditions can be ignored and you can keep living in your hyper-propagandized liberal fantasy world.
You can live in your little fantasy with that cute little excuse for a full scale invasion, hundreds of war crimes, thousands dead and millions of people displaced, but we all know that’s a load of bs.
We all know who was in dombas and how many people were shelled.
Hammer out a deal with Putin hahaha ha. You got to be joking. You mean a new one, not like any of the previous ones he doesn’t care about?
You have 0 arguments. You are a pathetic, war crime apologist. Disgusting.
Zero facts, zero sources. Head empty, vibes and propaganda only
I know how many were killed by nazi ukraine regime. 14000 according to un. If 3000 dead is enough for the us to start a war for 20 years, 14000 is enough for Russia to invade one country
Ah, the good ol aboutism, it was strange that it took so long.
14.000. That’s all you know? Maybe read more about this figure and come back then.
oh no! Not a whataboutism!!! We are so owned!🐖 💩 🏀 🏀
lol, they didn’t even know it’s called “whataboutism.” smh. Must be a new recruit.
Shit, they came up with a different name for being shameless hypocrites I guess that makes it fine.
Dammit the UVF made a cute name for what we say, guess those pogroms in Derry are ok now
Didnt the US back a coup in Ukraine back in the early 2010s?
I dont support Russiia, its just another failled capitalist state but I really do not support the imperialistic antagonism of the US.
Also you cant just post “stupid commie learn more” while not citing or demonstrating that you know anything more yourself.
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I didn’t write the following, but I think it is an excellent summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia specifically with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone saying they just didn’t like the war in general and that it’s just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another, similar to what you’re saying. While it’s understandable to feel that way, it is not materialist and it is failing to see the bigger picture. At the very least, I just think it’s something you might consider. The person who wrote that response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net and I hope they don’t mind that I am quoting them here (if so, I’ll delete).
Edit: I’m putting it below a spoiler tag because it is longish and a little OT. Sorry about that, I’m tired.
spoiler
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
You asked for context, we gave you context, you cried “whataboutism”. What a pathetic creature.
Just know that the entire rest of the world is against you and the entire rest of the world will win.
whataboutism 
You have fully retreated into your liberal subject mind palace and there is absolutely zero point in interacting with you, nor was there ever to be frank
Pick up a gun. Go to Ukraine and fight, you fucking coward. No one will miss you when you die for nothing.
their fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture and erasing their nation from history
gonna need some sources on that one
https://twitter.com/narrative_hole/status/1695548095877017857 ukrainian culture be like:
"A crowd of Ukrainians sings the anthem of the OUN, a BRUTAL Ukrainian WW2 organisation that massacred more than 100 thousand people while fighting alongside German N@zis.
Led by Stepan Bandera, it is considered a role model by Western Ukrainians to this day."
that’s the culture Russia wants to destroy?
holy shit i love putin now
You don’t have to say it out loud. We all know that.
My favorite bit of Bandera trivia, is when people say he eventually turned on Hitler and was imprisoned, they don’t say why.
Bandera simply wanted his own Fascist republic and to do away with the undesirables in a Ukrainian way. Hitler basically told him to fuck off and kept his troops in Ukraine, and Bandera was like
as he was put in a camp. After that, the group he had previously led continued to massacre 35k-80k Poles.Literally the two worst people you know poking eachother in the eye and trying to garner sympathy.
You really want to go there lol? You understand the comparison is Russia? Russia. It’s like nazi central there. They killed tens of millions of their “own”. That is one of the most horrible countries in the world that have brought only suffering to their own citizens and all it’s neighbours through all their history. Even their artists are only about how their life is horrible. Nobody wants to be in Russia. Thats Russia. Whatever Ukraine is, at least they are trying to have it better.
Russia’s been purging their nazis for more than a few decades now. The “smart” nazis that didn’t want to be thrown in jail or die resisting arrest fled Russia altogether and sought a place to build up once more. Come 2014 and suddenly all those fascist slav exiles started to congregate in post-maidan coup Ukraine.
Yes of course they have, no nazis in Russia. Brilliant!
Bye.
Haha not happening @NoiseColor@startrek.website, don’t think you can weasel your way out of here without my say so.
Why not watch a video about the dying number of nazis in russia made by whining Russian nazis
https://t.me/heilukraine1959/4860
And afterwards Why not watch some video made by western reporters on the fascist problem in Eastern Europe
How is your reading comprehension this bad?
Scratched liberal going full fascist and entering the active denial of reality stage. The only cure beyond this point is a brick wall.
Did you know it wasn’t Russia that killed tens of millions of Russians? It was actually me
German Jews weren’t German after all? It’s ok, you can just say you support Hitler.
No you don’t. The only way you could possibly need sources for that is if you have just found out about the war and have no prior historical knowledge. Or if you want to troll. Either way, i got no time for that.
Bye.
The only way you could possibly need sources for that is if you have just found out about the war and have no prior historical knowledge.
Dawgs why you gotta do yourself dirty like this
weak response, at least pull out some deranged statement by Medvedev or something
NoiseColor@startrek.website kicks puppies for fun. I don’t need to provide sources.
Childish.
Bye.
Wait, you’re not gonna post your hog?
I not a deranged putinist jerking off on his picture like some people here
Yeah we’re not “Putinists” whatever that means lmfao
Yeah I’m putinist. Putin this nerd in a locker.
Russia wants nothing of the sort. If you’re not some sad troll but actually believe Russia has “fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture” etc, you are so deluded it’s disgusting. It was Ukraine that has been attempting to ethnically cleanse people of Russian heritage that is mostly what kicked this whole conflict off. Russia has been making sure civilians have a corridor to safety while the Ukrainians have been openly talking about purging the population of Crimea if it were able to take it from Russia (which they can’t, not even in their wildest “fantasies.”)
Russia has wanted to negotiate reasonable peace terms since the beginning of the war, but it has been repeatedly scuttled by NATO/Ukraine, most famously when Boris Johnson intervened to make sure peace did not happen.
All of that is the reality of the situation, but the propagandists and those who ate up all their lies like to project the crimes and failures of their own masters onto their enemy, and we end up with the mirror world that this sorry know-nothing fool believes in.
That is the official Russian narrative. Do you have anything more than that?
This is the official Western narrative. Do you have anything more than that?
It is simply demonstrable reality, I don’t need anything more than that.
What should Ukraine negotiate for? What does Ukraine get in exchange for territorial surrender?
So far, Putin has broken and ignored:
- Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation
- The Budapest Memorandum
- The Sochi Accords
- Treaty on the Russia-Ukraine State Border
- The Minsk Agreement
- The Second Minsk Agreement
If a new treaty were to be negotiated, why would Ukraine expect Putin to follow it? What would be the consequences if he did not?
Putin broke the Minsk Agreements, huh?
Anyone who wants to can go find out the truth of that claim and they will find that it was Ukraine/NATO that broke the agreements which is literally the reason it came to war. This was admitted to openly even by Angela fucking Merkel, who said they only drafted the agreements to buy time for Ukraine to build up more arms and continue antagonizing the Donbas.
The Angela Merkal who urged Ukraine to stop fighting when Russia invaded Crimea? The Angela Merkal who routinely advocated appeasement?
As far as Ukraine breaking the agreement, I assume you mean the accusation of continued shelling? When even the DPR claimed responsibility for fighting as well, claiming Minsk 2 did not apply to Donetsk.
You still haven’t answered: what should Ukraine negotiate for? Given the fact that Russia has broken every treaty on Ukrainian borders since 1995, why should Ukraine trust another negotiation?
They should negotiate to stop the mass murder going on.
Some hypothetical war in the future is not worth butchering millions now. That’s psychotic thinking.
Stop thinking of countries as people. Countries are not people. That fallacy leads you to deranged ideas that see so many people die.
They should negotiate to stop the mass murder going on.
What does that look like? A dissolution of the russian federation, complete Russian disarmament, ane the imprissonment of Vladimir Putin would stop this. Why isn’t Russia offering that? Why aren’t you suggesting that?
What do the people of Ukraine get from negotiating with Russia? Why should they trust Russia to uphold an agreement when Russia has already broken every agreement?
Give concrete answers or admit you don’t have any.
What does that look like? A dissolution of the russian federation, complete Russian disarmament, ane the imprissonment of Vladimir Putin would stop this. Why isn’t Russia offering that? Why aren’t you suggesting that?
Give concrete answers or admit you don’t have any.
Here’s your concrete answer for your concrete answer; The complete dissolution of the federal government of the United States of America and complete balkanization of the country resulting in every state becoming their own country. The complete liquidation of the Armed Forces and the nuclear armaments program of the United States. And the imprisonment of every living American president and federal politician for crimes against humanity.
This and the same actions performed to each and every NATO country is required for world peace.
Why isn’t NATO offering that? Why aren’t you suggesting this?
Because that’s not realistically going to happen and hundreds of thousands more will die before you recognize it.
Unlike you I want the killing to stop, unconditionally. That is my only concern. I don’t give a fuck what country “wins”.
You have conditions for the killing to stop. That’s because you are deranged and lack empathy for the real victims of this war. Instead you abstract your empathy to a fucking nation state.
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Keep pretending you care about ukraine, asshole. We all know you’re gonna forget about it as soon as the US has decided it’s proxy war has killed enough people and withdraw any aid.
How would this look like and what kind of casualty rate would you expect as Russia would profil their fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture and erasing their nation from history?
Which Russian leaders have said this? Cite sources or fuck off.
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Is that a bad thing?
Clearly the best solution is to fight until the last Ukrainian. You’re saying that arming and propping up an unsustainable government is peaceful, which is objectively insane. Let’s say that NATO didn’t arm Ukraine, Russia surrounds the capital back in February, decapitates the government, and they surrender ceding the Donetsk and Luhansk and signing a neutrality pact. How is that objectively not more peaceful than the current meat grinder?
I’m not American or from a NATO country. You are deranged if you think that dumping your weapons helps anyone do anything but commit suicide. You are at best turning Ukraine into Iraq with your “help”
Ukraine is a country and has no thoughts about anything. It’s not real.
The people dying on the frontlines are real. They are the cost, here.
You think they are glad to die like this for national borders? Dying in the mud, choking on their own blood?
Square your concept of this war with the necessity of conscription. Really let that sink in what that means. They are not there dying willingly.
Russia would profil their fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture and erasing their nation from history?
When you invent reality, you can argue for anything and have it be incontestable.
I wonder how all of you imagine Ukraine fighting back without even this limited western help. How would this look like and what kind of casualty rate would you expect as Russia would profil their fantasies of removing Ukrainian culture and erasing their nation from history?
What casualty rate are you expecting if there is no fighting? This is a nonsense assessment, you are making the absurd argument that Russia are running some sort of mass murder machine to delete the people from existence and this is just evidently not true as we see in every town, city and village that they’ve taken.
If you drop this absurdist fantasy you have about some sort of existential battle for survival the entire idea that you are “saving lives” by perpetuating an endless unwinnable war completely falls apart. You’re not saving lives, you’re creating a meat grinder using those lives for the sake of harming Russia. You don’t give a fuck about Ukrainian lives, Russian lives, or any lives. You are a nationalist who wants to save the Ukrainian STATE. The state is what you care about, along with its allegiance to the western empire. And you are willing to expend as many lives as is necessary in order to maintain it.
You deliberately conflate people with the state. When they are not the same thing. If the state ends the people don’t magically end, they still exist and just live under a different state. I am not a nationalist. I do not give a fuck what group of bourgeoisie exploit the people. Picking between one group of billionaire exploiters over another group of billionaire exploiters is absurd.
Nationalism is a disease and you need to rid yourself of it. You are advocating for the deaths of hundreds of thousands for the sake of it. Instead you should join in with wanting to save the lives of PEOPLE, not states.
I don’t expect you to do that of course, because you’re ideologically committed to cheerleading for the western billionaires in their competition with these eastern billionaires. You see them as your team against their team. And as long as you see everything in that way you’ll always be like this. Meanwhile those of us that aren’t on either team just want people to survive and recognise that cheerleading for either side only causes more death. The fastest end to the war is the best one for the families that would be destroyed by its continuation.
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Maybe Redditors need to have this explained in meme terms to understand.
You, as a liberal, are like Lord Farquaad from Shrek. While you send Ukrainians to die for capital F Freedom (also known as Privatization and Profteering by those pesky RuZZian disinformation bots) you sit back here at your brunch spot saying “Some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
(i.e. when it comes to casualties and many other things)
Obviously this is just kinda coming out of my ass, but I’m almost certain that 100,000 people have already died. Can’t say what the exact number is obviously, but I imagine it’s the kind of thing that the lib media would rather not release because it would dampen people’s enthusiasm for it
Here is an estimate for ukraine. https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/how-many-people-have-died-in-ukraine
Russia should be 1:4 or 1:5 based on artillery ratios.
Author self identifies as a “moderate conservative”. Bad source.
But he posts the metodology and it seems ok. There is always some error. And we can never be sure in these cases but 190k seem more resonable than the 70k nato is claiming.
The methodology is completely pulled out of his ass.
There’s a lot wrong with it but the main thing is using linear regression for “do you know someone who has died of X?” This is cannot be a linear relationship. As the number of casualties goes up, the % of people who know a casualty logarithmically approaches 100%.
This means the % of people who know a casualty will rise dramatically at first, and taper off. It also means it’s not a good indicator for actual deaths.
Overall, the analysis suggests that up to 188,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians may have died in the war – though this figure is likely to be an overestimate, since people who died of Covid likely had fewer friends than those who’ve died in the war
The fuck? How does that assumption track at ALL? Lmfao
You died of covid? Probably a friendless loser
It asumes people that died of covid are older. So their friends are more likley to be already dead or also died of covid.
The US is estimating at least 70,000 Ukranian battlefield deaths. And Russia has likely suffered similar casualties.
There do seem to be more and more Western sources that are at least acknowledging the massive death toll on the Ukranian side, and some talking heads are gently floating the idea of negotiations.
What a lot of people fail to grasp about why Ukraine isn’t advancing more quickly despite having superior equipment and training than the vast majority of the Russian army is the realities on the ground. For example, NATO tactics assume no, or very few mines. Ukraine is the most heavily mined place on Earth now. NATO tactics assume air superiority. Ukraine has very few fighter jets, and won’t receive new ones from Western countries for several more months.
The reality is that despite being better equipped and trained, there are still several extremely difficult obstacles in the way of them reclaiming their land, and so they’re taking it fairly slow in an effort to not throw lives away unnecessarily. Even so, every square inch they liberate is paid for in blood.
Still, I’m optimistic about the next few months. Ukrainians just reached the first Surovikin line near Novoprokopivka, and the latest reports suggest they’ve already entered the eastern side of that village. If they can take it and the high ground in that area, they’ll have about 12km of contact with the trench network. If they can make a breakthrough at any point along that line, they can assault the length of it from 3 different directions, and collapse a whole front.
Also, with the death of Prigozhin, there’s a decent chance of more unrest in Moscow, which would likely move Russians off the front line to quell any dissent back home. That, combined with morale among the Russian forces being at an all-time nadir makes me optimistic about Ukraine’s chances of advancing to Tokmak this year. And Tokmak is a lynchpin of the entire Russian defense in the area. It’s a major hub, as it is where all of the rail lines from the east join the west. If the Ukrainians control Tokmak, practically the entire area south of the Dnipro will be cut off from supplies.
So yeah, fingers crossed!
They cannot be said to be better trained if the training they have is total dogshit for the situation. They are unequivically worse trained than the russians. This is insanely contrarian thinking. Training cannot be better in the ideal, it can only be better in the material.
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“We trained them wrong as a joke” vibes.
being better trained is when you have m4s and leopards and being worse trained is when you have aks and t-90s
Yes. Both things are true. It’s not like some weird gordian knot that you have to strain your brain to figure out. The majority of the Russian army at this point are very poorly trained mobilized soldiers. They still have a few veteran units, but after a year and a half of fighting, most of them have been replaced with mobiks. And Russia is now calling for another 450,000 people to be conscripted, despite having very little in the way of equipment to give them.
“They were given some of the best training in the world. The reality of war, fighting against a comparable force without air superiority and in the context of 200-year-old technology is just something no one could have predicted.”
“Also, the country with the second most extensive military in the world and a pervasive military culture is about to have its forces depleted against its neighbor, which has less than a quarter of its population and which is by far the poorest country in the region.”
This isn’t delusion or blind hope at all. I fully believe you.
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Ukrainian: I am so sick of this meat grinder of a war and Western propaganda is full of shit.
Western lib: Yay for more meat in the grinder!
I don’t know what you expect the Ukrainians to do. Give up? Just accept another huge chunk of their territory being taken from them? Fuck that. They’re fighting an oppressive imperialist power. They have my full support. Y’all can get fucked.
Give up? Just accept another huge chunk of their territory being taken from them?
Yeah, they’re not getting that territory back, ever. The counteroffensive is a failure.
if they have the wrong equipment for the task at hand, wouldn’t that mean that they are worse equipped?
if they have run through their “last reserve brigades” as the redditor in the OP screenshot says, when will they have the time to train their new guys “better”?
you are for sure optimistic about Ukraine’s willingness to throw lives into the grinder
Big “the South only lost because they ran out of bullets” energy.
Spectacular mental gymnastics, 9.8/10
Alright there, bud. Please tell me where anything that I have said has diverged from objective reality.
All of it tbh. Think about it, if NATO tactics are as inappropriate as you’re making them why did they even train with them? Seems like a pretty basic thing to consider.
They’re just plain old losing because they’re a much weaker force than Russia. The actual truth is Russia’s army isn’t nearly as weak or as disorganized as western media pretends they are, it’s actually a pretty large and modern professional army. Ukraine’s army probably had good professional soldiers in the beginning but not nearly as much as Russia, and now most of them are gone. Recruits with a few months of training aren’t going to win a fight against a bigger and better trained army.
Unless NATO steps in with actual boots on ground Ukraine is going to lose, there is no scenario where they win unless like you said there is a revolution in Russia, which again seems pretty unlikely no matter how much western media pretends Russia is unstable or whatever.
You’re high on opinion articles from western media written by propagandists, not people knowledgeable in warfare.
Damn near 10 to 1 Russian artillery fire rate advantage for over a year now, plus total air superiority and you still think Ukrainians are “better equipped”
Also in what universe are the new Ukrainian conscripts “better trained” than the war hardened veterans of the regular Russian army, who haven’t suffered even a twentieth of the casualties of the professional Ukrainian units
You’re literally just making shit up and hoping no one with actual knowledge of the situation notices
fingers crossed!
Yay, hoping for Ukraine to become even poorer and then what’s going to happen to the millions of Russians living in Crimea and eastern Ukraine? Do they just get genocided or flee en masse in another Nakba, lib?
:eat-ass: :PIGPOOPBALLS:
Now the Ukrainian army is less trained and has inferior equipment to fight this war then they did at the start
Even poorer? WTF are you talking about? I want them to get their land back, and kill the fuckers invading them. I want them to get the tens of thousands of children Russia abducted back. I want them to get reparations for the invasion.
what’s going to happen to the millions of Russians living in Crimea and eastern Ukraine?
I couldn’t give one single, solitary fuck.
Do they just get genocided or flee en masse in another Nakba, lib?
Well, flee if they’re ingelligent, I suppose.
Hey, so what the fuck was Obama and Biden doing in :ukkkraine: 10 years ago?
That said, :hitler-detector: :eat-ass: :PIGPOOPBALLS:
Hey, so what the fuck was Obama and Biden doing in :ukkkraine: 10 years ago?
Very little. When Russia invaded the last time around, the US was too scared to send military hardware for fear of provoking Putin. So they sent MREs instead. Fucking MREs. What a joke.
I was referring to the late 2013 coup, you daft bellend.
I saw all this shit happen in 1080p in 2014 when I became politically literate.
I couldn’t give one single, solitary fuck
Did you miss that they were referring to Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity?
The reality is that despite being better equipped and trained, there are still several extremely difficult obstacles in the way of them reclaiming their land, and so they’re taking it fairly slow in an effort to not throw lives away unnecessarily. Even so, every square inch they liberate is paid for in blood.
?xd this is literally what vatniks say about the approach taken by russian armed forces btw.
Ok? Well, they’re either lying, or they’re stupid. There is a massive amount of evidence that that is not true. For instance, just look at how they approached taking Bakhmut using human wave tactics into entrenched, well armed forces. Or their multiple failed attempts to retake Vuhledar. In both cases, it was not exactly tactical. They just kept pouring men and machines into a heavily fortified area just hoping, I guess, that the Ukrainians were asleep at the trigger. And the kicker is, neither place was particularly tactically important.
They gained no additional ground after taking Bakhmut because it’s in the low ground and to advance, they’d have to take the fortified heights around it. Bakhmut offered no strategic benefit as far as logistical hubs go, and that’s even before it was leveled. A smarter army would have bypassed it, but word came down from on high to take it at any cost, so that’s what they did.
For instance, just look at how they approached taking Bakhmut using human wave tactics into entrenched, well armed forces.
I don’t think any of those things will happen. IIRC the consensus from the newsthreads here was that unless the war ends on the ground this year or next then Western support would stop and then Zelenskyy would be forced to make peace.
Which sucks, because negotiating peace when you have capacity to wage war puts you in a much better position than negotiating peace when you have no other option
Reminder that Russia made it clear since the beginning that they only wanted three conditions: denazification, Ukraine pledging neutrality by not joining NATO, and recognition of the sovereignty of the Donbass republics.
The peace talk in April 2022 was sabotaged by Boris Johnson. The Western imperialists wanted this war to keep going. The blood is on their hands.
Despite having superior equipment and training than the vast majority of the Russian army
Thank you for debunking yourself mid post to save everyone’s time
For example, NATO tactics assume no, or very few mines.
Ukraine is the most heavily mined place on Earth now.
NATO tactics assume air superiority.
Ukraine has very few fighter jets, and won’t receive new ones from Western countries for several more months.
You are correct. Nato does not understand the realities on the ground. Now the Ukrainian army is less trained and has inferior equipment to fight this war then they did at the start and when switch to their “primative” soviet tactics and actually make gains their western masters start pulling out the calipers.
Thank you for debunking yourself mid post to save everyone’s time
Uh, what? A significant portion of the Russian army at this point is mobilized soldiers with days of training. This is not Western propaganda, unless you’re saying that the Russian milbloggers and Russian posters on Russian telegram channels who say the same things are Western plants.
Now the Ukrainian army is less trained and has inferior equipment to fight this war then they did at the start
What? Are you completely out of your gourd? They have vastly superior equipment now than they did at the start. Cluster munitions, Bradleys, Leopards, self-propelled howitzers… The Ukrainians are better prepared to fight this war now than at any point in their history.
I mean, I know you guys are a lot of tankies, but Jesus. Use your brain.
How “well-equipped” and “well-trained” they are in a vacuum is trivia compared to how well-equipped and -trained they are for the conflict at hand. It seems undeniable that Russia is functionally much better equipped if they have air superiority on ground covered in mines.
This is not Western propaganda, unless you’re saying that the Russian milbloggers and Russian posters on Russian telegram channels who say the same things are Western plants.
Alright, show us those Russian milbloggers and posters you are referring to, or at least mention them by name.
What? Are you completely out of your gourd? They have vastly superior equipment now than they did at the start. Cluster munitions, Bradleys, Leopards, self-propelled howitzers… The Ukrainians are better prepared to fight this war now than at any point in their history.
Yeah I’m sure those 200 Leopard tanks are gonna last them a long time. They’ve made such amazing progress during the last 3 months of counteroffensive, haven’t they?
Maybe this will come at a surprise to you, but armies are generally better prepared before they grind down their armament and personnel over a gruelling 18 month war. Moreover, you can’t just replace troops like you replace weapons.
I mean, I know you guys are a lot of tankies, but Jesus. Use your brain.
Try using your own every once in a while. It helps.
For example, NATO tactics assume no, or very few mines. Ukraine is the most heavily mined place on Earth now. NATO tactics assume air superiority. Ukraine has very few fighter jets, and won’t receive new ones from Western countries for several more months.
So NATO trained Ukrainians with tactics completely unsuited to the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting. Do you think this was because of malice or stupidity?
Yes. The answer is yes.
So NATO trained Ukrainians with tactics completely unsuited to the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting. Do you think this was because of malice or stupidity?
Neither? You can only train people on the things you have experience with. Ukraine is fighting a unique war from the perspective of NATO trainers. That doesn’t make the training the Ukrainians have received worthless. They have benefitted quite heavily from training in squad tactics, combined arms, etc. Military training is far more extensive than just: “Hey - avoid minefields.”
I mean yeah, fighting against an enemy with roughly equal equipment and capabilities is an alien experience to NATO militaries lol
Sounds like you think it’s stupidity, because the obvious first step in “teaching what you know” is recognizing whether the situation even remotely applies. If I’m trying to teach you to deep fry with a waffle iron, I’m the dum-dum and you are my victim.
But I’ll offer a third option: casual negligence driven by a lack of care for Ukrainian life. When commands things there’s no expectation of success, you don’t cross the Ts or dot the Is.
Better trained is when you run headlong into long range fires, minefields, dragons teeth, AT trenches, and several layers of fortifications, under skies controlled by the enemy, hoping your wunderwaffen and inherent superiority will carry the day
Kursk?Still, I’m optimistic about the next few months. Ukrainians just reached the first Surovikin line near Novoprokopivka, and the latest reports suggest they’ve already entered the eastern side of that village
Oh goodie le epic bacon army entered a village much reason for optimism.
What are you optimistic about, the war continuing? So silly
Look at all of the brigading of hexbear in this thread! And by that I mean folks in other instances participating in a thread that was probably on their front page. Can you imagine!?
I hate how lemm.ee users always brigade us so much! It’s incredibly brigading of them to come into a thread thats on their front page too! And they all more or less agree with each other! That’s Brigading! They should agree with meeee! Brigading is when a post shows up and you click it, and they do this all the time! Ugh! And they’re all so uncivil too! Just because I disagree with them! I’ve been nothing but civil and they always just out of the blue call me a bot or a Tankie!
Literal Ukrainian living in the country on the verge of being drafted into the meat grinder: pls stop the war
Huge brained liberal who is better than them: Sorry sweetie, time to go die to own PUTLER
Liberals talking about peace and diversity:
Liberals talking about Ukraine: Draft dodger! Get him! Hang the traitor! Kill the orcs!
Libs in this thread:
It will be interesting to see the Ukrainians cut their teeth in the surovikin line. If they manage to break thru the outer layer I predict a total victory in as little as one year!Ukrainians at the surovikin line:
Please, we just want to go home.
deleted by creator
Ok, so I want to know, if anyone would be kind enough to humor me, what’s the general understanding of the context behind the war in Ukraine here, on Hexbear?
My personal understanding has been shaped by just passively existing on the Internet through this event, and I’m curious if there’s another perspective that I’ve not been exposed to.
Copy and pasting from my previous post. The war in Ukraine is a failure of diplomacy, of parties refusing to listen to each other’s concerns. It could have been easily prevented if one party had been more accommodating of another, but this was never going to happen, because the animosity served the interests of certain parties as you shall learn below:
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 tripartite meeting so they can revise the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA-DCFTA) 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, Russia was looking out for its own economic interests and wanted Ukraine to join their Eurasian Customs Union, which was flatly rejected by the EU for being incompatible with the DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement), which would have required Ukraine to liberalize its economy (i.e. remove tariff barriers to allow foreign goods to enter), while the Customs Union would have a common external tariff to prevent “re-exportation”. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Russia did not reject Ukraine from signing the AA-DCFTA so long as their economic concerns were addressed.
(Note: Ukraine did get screwed by the AA-DCFTA which was signed after the Maidan coup, just as Russia warned. Europe ended up protecting its own market while taking advantage of cheap Ukrainian agricultural imports, and they didn’t even get the loans like the Greeks did (which was a disastrous and shitty deal for Greece). That’s how bad Ukraine was treated by the EU - their economy literally crumbled after siding with the EU post-2014)
Instead, 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 (destroy its domestic industries by flooding Russian market with EU goods through “free trade agreement”) and Ukraine (through IMF debt that demanded austerity). 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.
The very first act of the coup regime on February 22nd, 2014 was to repeal the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law, a 2012 bill that granted the status of regional language to Russian and other minority languages. The law was in full accordance to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages for the preservation of language-minority rights and had widespread societal support in Ukraine. The repeal of the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law by the fascist regime marked a severe infringement of minority rights and their intent to ethnically cleanse Russian culture in the country.
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.
If you were Russia, what would you think of the American’s responses? Would you think that they were being serious about addressing your security concerns? If you told your harasser to stop, and they resume stalking you the following week, what would that tell you?
Soon, 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.
While there is diversity of opinion on Hexbear (wow that bit sounded really ChatGPT of me I’m sorry, Im literally currently playing with it lol) most folks on Hexbear agree that while Putin’s decision to invade was a reprehensible one, the the decision was provoked by Ukraine and the West via NATO encirclement (and its important to understand that NATO has always inherently been a hostile power to Russia as to why the encroachment of NATO would provoke Russia) and also the War in Donbass and the treatment of the ethnic Russians there.
Right, I know NATO was literally created as a show of united force against the Soviet Union post WW2- when you say encirclement, what does that mean? Is it specifically the growth of NATO to include more States in what’s traditionally Russia’s sphere of influence?
Yes. It’s the fact the US has been making MISSILE agreements with every single nation that borders Russia in Europe. The US promised Soviet leaders that NATO would end after the cold war and then Yelstin that it would remain, but they wouldn’t expand further. By 2014 all that was left was Finland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
To put that in context as to how that was an aggressive move by the US: What happened when Cuba, a US neighbor, attempted to make a missile agreement with the Soviets in the early 60s? Did the US respond with the understanding that this is something the people of Cuba might want, or did they respond by threatening to set the world on fire?
Ukraine’s government was overthrown in 2014, and the new government banned certain opposition parties, which alienated a lot of people in eastern Ukraine, many of whom have cultural ties to Russia, and a seperatist movement seized control of Donbas. The two sides signed a cease-fire, Minsk II, but Ukraine violated that cease-fire by shelling civilian targets, causing Russia to answer the request for aid by the seperatists.
The perspective of NATO supporters is that the seperatists are just a Russian proxy while the Russian perspective is that Ukraine’s new government is a NATO proxy. It’s difficult to evaluate what people actually want, but the fact that Ukraine felt the need to ban opposition parties and the fact that there are a bunch of people with Russian ties in the disputed territories indicates that the seperatists have some genuine support.
There were many diplomatic off-ramps that could’ve been taken to avoid the conflict, such as upholding the cease-fire, or perhaps giving the disputed territories a referendum to leave. As it stands, the war has reached a standstill and the general perspective here is that Ukraine can either give up some territorial concessions now, or give up some territorial concessions after throwing a bunch more lives into the meat grinder. Peace now is the best option for the Ukrainian people, but likely US pressure will keep the war going because it’s profitable for the defense industry.
Also, Ukraine has a significant Nazi problem, including both paramilitary groups and the government itself. For instance, Ukraine had to fire their ambassador to Germany after he engaged in Holocaust denial right on TV.
Thank you for the reply! This has been super helpful in guiding some reading and providing some context. It’s very interesting that there was quite a bit of criticism from all sides about the laws outright banning discussion and support of communism. Following that, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of responsiveness to that criticism. Even the Venice Commission was pretty highly critical of it, and of conflating Communism with Nazism.
its a Deeply Divided Country , they only present you the Western Part as “Ukraine” wihle denying any agency of the Eastern Part thats under Attack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk
Afaik, no far-right parties were banned under the law. There are a lot of Banderites in Ukraine and that’s where “Slava Ukrani” comes from. Bandera worked for Nazi military intelligence and wanted an independent Ukraine closely allied with Nazi Germany, and enthusiastically performed pogroms on his own initiative (denying his role in the Holocaust was specifically what happened with the Ukrainian ambassador). The only thing was that Hitler didn’t want Ukraine as an ally but under his direct control, so that’s where they came into conflict.
Hey I just want to thank you for engaging in this discussion in good faith. Its always good to be curious and ask questions when you encounter a perspective different than your own (unless that perspective is some rabid racist baying for the blood of the innocent lol).
I just want to give you a video that’s very approachable that helped give me some context on this whole war. It’s only 18 minutes long. https://youtu.be/LL4eNy4FCs8?si=Csj6WpYhwOEDeRbx
Just watch this video (about 12 and a half minutes):
https://hexbear.net/post/347083
For a more “academic” (by that I mean one by a professor at a university), see this: https://hexbear.net/post/347122
Ty for the links! I’ll give it a watch
Just wanted to say I appreciate you wanting to engage in good faith
My understanding is less complete than many of the other socialists. The other communists can explain this better than I can.
Capitalist Logic behind expansion into Russia
The American state continues to exist because its inhabitants an elevated standard of living due to unequal exchange with the third world. It operates on a more developed and sophisticated method of colonial extraction that it inherited in its more primitive state from the British Empire.
It’s current form leans more towards predatory finance, withholding access to USD and trade networks which other more theoretically developed socialists will be able to explain in more detail.
The simplest way to illustrate this logic, which is the only logic governing the state, is you can recursively extract wealth by taking low value-form (unrefined, i.e ore) goods from a vulnerable country, use your means of production to turn them into higher value from goods (i.e stainless steel medical needles) and sell it back to the third world country in order to buy more raw materials. You use this surplus to buy land, corporations, additional means of production, at home, in the colony, and abroad, and use this advantage to set up the necessary apparatus to keep this extraction going in perpetuity. Else the ‘native’ population will seek to retain this surplus value in order to develop their own means of production and cut out the colonizer entirely. The American state cannot survive if this happens, the only way to keep the economy moving once the logic of capital has broken (no returns on investment) and maintain the living standards expected by the American population is to transition to a centralized planned economy.
Inevitability of Communism and Socialism, peaceful transition and violent reaction
The American state has done this many times in the past when it felt threatened, it used a command economy to a great extent during the Roosevelt Era (WW2) and the Keynesian period that followed it. There was even an understanding between the Roosevelt Administration, and CPSU under General Secretary Joseph Stalin, that the American economy, in its highly potent and planned form, would logically, eventually, peacefully transition to the fully planned and superior socialist mode of production. Post WW2 would be peaceful co-existence between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the natal centrist Social Democratic United States, this was obviously quashed after the death of Roosevelt, and the existing internal powers of the United States in the 1940s to now would never cede power.
The problem with the Keynesian model of the Roosevelt period, is that domestic production and full employment gives labor - workers - an almost unlimited amount of proportional leverage. The United States saw massive organized labor action in the early 20th century. The Communist Party of the United States had meetings and marches numbering in the tens of thousands in New York City alone. The marginalized communities of the United States, black radicals, indigenous radicals, and queer radicals would consolidate and force the United States into socialism. White supremacy would be rooted out by revolutionary workers councils, that we know as soviets. The transition to socialism in the United States, and therefore, the world, was inevitable.
In order to prevent this, the former aristocrats and golden-era bourgeoisie, inheritors of the American, and British Empire, enjoyers of the virtually unlimited amounts of wealth, the ability to wield virtually unlimited power, to commit unrestricted violence, access to personal armies, personal islands, yachts, women and children, accumulated via the aforementioned methods of extraction described above, would defend their positions, and defend their holdings, just as anybody in power today, and their forebearers have done (else we would have transitioned to socialism already, as power structures do not hold the tides history at bay on thin air).
Russia Today
Fast forward to today (because I’m getting tired). The Soviets, the lone surviving internationalist socialist revolution, was brought down by material limits and 70 years of an uninterrupted defensive war against the United States. The democratic socialists, social democrats and Keynesians had long ago lost the struggle for power in the United States, the path of peaceful co-existence permanently foreclosed - if it ever existed to begin with, and now the international positions of socialist construction were scattered to the winds. The Communist Party of China strategically retreated, using their vast and highly educated population to seize the means of production from within the world capitalist system.
The Russian Federation, spitting on the ashes of the Soviet dream of a socialist world and the bodies of every democratic socialist riddled by the guns and bombs of reaction, attempted to build a capitalist order amid the unending Western looting of public assets, land and means of production in the 90s. The traitors to the Soviet Union were promised the same levels of wealth and power held by their Western counterparts, they could not bear the embarrassment of being the dredges managing a resource colony pillaged by the West, they wanted autonomy and power - and they had both the education and opportunity to do so. Putin represents this consolidation of Russian national interests, the antithesis of the internationalist mission of the Soviets that they killed. The Russian national bourgeois, the scum that they are, did not want to cede power to the far greater global bourgeois.
I cannot say why the Russian capitalists did not integrate into the world capitalist system. Maybe it was pride. Maybe, from the West, it was spite. Maybe enough Marxist Soviet education persisted to allow them to remember what happens to the little capitalists.
This bloc has its own interests to defend. Not enough capital to export into other countries - not enough to carry out imperialism, not enough to buy out means of production abroad, not enough financial muscle to meaningfully subsume sovereign governments to their whims. Russia only exports roughly 5% of the Capital that the United States exports. Their only paths to international influence and national defense involve picking up the pieces of the anti-colonial struggle left behind by the Soviet Union - on behalf of capitalist governments, little capitalists like them, rather than the side of the labourers armed, educated, and trained by the Soviets. So weakened is their position that they are occasionally, even patronizingly, forced to align with socialist movements. Rarely. America is the biggest threat to the Russian Federation, and it will align with anyone willing to do so.
America and the Russian Federation: Big Bourgeoisie vs Little Bourgeoisie
America sought to completely obliterate the Soviet project, to win the great game of conquering Russia undertaken by the great capitalist powers, started long before the creation of the first Petrograd Soviet. It succeeded in shattering the once independent and self-sufficient eastern European republics. Destroying and shattering the independent socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Only the stubbornest Russians resisted. Absorbing the right-wing reactionary institutions empowered by the United States to overthrow the secular left-wing Soviet Union. The United States was once again fighting it’s own reactionary puppet just as it had in Afghanistan.
Ukraine is one of these reactionary puppet states. Still loyal to its western owners. In order to keep and advance the unending extraction of surplus value and extend its reach to Moscow the west inflames racial tensions that were once virtually inexistent and pathetic during the anti-racist and solidarity-based Soviet era. No one listened to these fools until the Americans gave them guns. No one listened until they started shooting and killing.
American Race Wars
The fighting in the Donbass and Crimea is the culmination of a one-sided race war set alight by the United States. Architected by the same fascists that would do the same at home if given the opportunity. Inheritors of the same apparatus created by those that truly did fight a race war against Jews and Slavs during the second world war - NATO - when the United States absorbed the ashes and remaining radicals and fighters and leaders of Nazi Germany into the ranks of their anti-socialist crusade. Right wingers never let a good opportunity, good means, good weapons, fighters and terrorists - go to waste.
Ukrainian fascists, the big bourgeoise’s faction of choice, would fight a holy race war on their former neighbors in the Soviet Union. Once acceptable differences were enflamed, and the most violent were now given access to high explosive artillery and told to fire into the capital cities of Russian majority provinces.
The race war in Ukraine was supposed to draw the Russian Federation into another Afghanistan, to turn it even more into an international Pariah and swing the entire world capitalist system like an executioner’s axe on the little bourgeoisie. But the anti-materialism and rot at the heart of the world capitalist order is clearly setting in. They clearly can’t do it. The mistakes piled on that anti-colonialists in the Global South sense the weakness of their former masters. And they’ve brought a decent portion of the little bourgeois from all over the world together under the leadership of a Communist Superpower that governs almost 1/5th of the entire World Population.
My explanation is not representative of other socialists views or interpretations, I’m not a party member or part of a cadre, I am just a poster.
GOOD post
