A Ukrainian drone struck a civilian bus on the Krasnodar-Melitopol route in Zaporozhye Region, with all 11 people aboard escaping unharmed, officials say
You can look at most western countries history and most events will be on the wrong side.
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Rescuing people is too much to handle, but launching yourself in an endless war that causes gigantic amounts of casualties, this is doable? I call bullshit.
The problem isn’t only the neonazis, it’s also NATO. NATO is not purely defensive, just ask Libya.
If we assume what Russia is saying is right, that Ukraine is a Banderite puppet regime installed by NATO and was on the verge of ethnic cleansing, then if they just evacuated the Donbas they’d still have a Banderite NATO regime directly on their border and eager to take back Crimea (which democratically chose to join Russia). While that solves the immediate problem of ethnic Russians being in danger in Ukraine, it creates a new problem of a hostile nation having a launching platform to attack Russia.
The choice was either launching a war in 2022 on their terms or undergoing a national crisis to absorb millions of refugees while preparing for when war came to Russia anyway.
Crises just help fascists, and Russia is going to do nothing other than strengthen the nazis both in Ukraine and in other western countries.
I don’t disagree, actually. I just think Russia was between a rock and a hard place.
Just a followup. Western countries being on the wrong side of history comes with being the “dominant” power for quite a while. That comes when you mix power and people that don’t care much about morals (which is most people who own this power). Russia has also been on the wrong side of history a bunch of times. My point was, history has a meaning but is not all that matters, and you can’t necessarily interpret the present through the scope of history.
Well now we’re adding more assumptions. It’s not just that Ukraine would be nazis, but that they are having NATO involved in the whole thing. And that’s a bigger assumption considering that no one gave a flying fuck about Ukraine (or had a negative view of it, for not such bad reasons) until Zelensky did his little stunt to shame Europe into helping them. And even then, it has been a drop by drop help, because everyone is scared of Russia.
And I don’t see how opening borders and basically playing “nice” could specifically lead to hostility. If Ukraine is a crazy violent country that wants to exterminate Russians, then they would attack eventually either way; evacuating people to Russia before the military conflict would just protect civilians instead of letting them be in the middle of the warzone.
As for Crimea “democratically joining Russia”, that’s a big pill to swallow. I understand your scope of “western propaganda bias”, but once again, no one is really believing Russia to be a democracy or to even like the idea of it, so I don’t really see how a foreign area would democratically decide to join a dictatorship. It makes it feel like this “democratic” process would then be of the same kind that leads Putin to win all elections forever with 99% of votes and dead political opponents, while removing the democratic safeguards preventing too many reelections.
And I’ll also add that in terms of purely cold reasoning, extracting people from Ukraine before going at war also means more people to support the war, so it doesn’t really make sense to rush into it. Especially considering that it was obvious that the US would lose power over time, with Trump and whatever, as well as a lot of other western countries.
That’s the whole problem with the narrative of Russia playing the victim: in the end, starting the war didn’t make sense both on a material and a diplomatic scope. It does make sense, however, if you consider Russia to be the one that wanted to attack (and there are a bunch of reasons, very simply speaking Ukraine was an unpopular country with a lot of land and big food production, it probably seemed like an easy and valuable target).
Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for western countries. That’s why from the very first time I started hearing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine being ambiguous, and people supporting Israel heavily in western countries, I just read about it and concluded that yeah, Israel was obviously wrong in that case, and they kept on proving it afterwards. I have no problem considering that western news can be full of shit, and admitting that there definitely is propaganda going on (just like everywhere, but people still believe that western democracies are actual democracies, and that they are immune to propaganda, for some reason), and making my own conclusions based on what seems to make sense. But with Russia, the idea that Russia did what they did out of morals and out of trying to help against oppression, doesn’t really fit the facts. I can obviously be wrong, but with the way things have been unfolding, I don’t see enough evidence to consider that this narrative is the real one. And sure, maybe some part of it is slightly true and exaggerated, it’s totally possible that there was systemic discrimination against a Russian “ethnicity” in Ukraine, their country was basically a political shithole. But that’s not enough to make the Russian narrative believable.
I’m not just looking to history to predict the future, I’m using very recent history to analyze the present. This is basically a question of who I should believe: the source of every problem in the world for the entire time I’ve been alive (the US and its allies) or one of its victims. Maybe that makes me biased, but I’m just never going to believe anything the US says.
And the assumption I was operating under was “Russia’s claims for why they started the war are largely truthful” and “the US’s claims for why Russia started the war are largely false” which means addressing both the neonazi problem and NATO. It’s not just that there’s neonazis in the streets and in the army, it’s that they’re in the government installed by NATO and doing NATO’s bidding. In that context, it’s completely believable Crimea would want to escape the new Banderite regime that wants to exterminate their language and culture.
Ultimately, none of our arguing matters. We can go around and around in circles, but neither of us know what’s really going on. We can only guess, based on our own prior assumptions about how the world works. All we can really do is wait for history to resolve itself, maybe in a few decades we’ll know what really happened.
👀 👀 👀
The problem isn’t only the neonazis, it’s also NATO. NATO is not purely defensive, just ask Libya.
If we assume what Russia is saying is right, that Ukraine is a Banderite puppet regime installed by NATO and was on the verge of ethnic cleansing, then if they just evacuated the Donbas they’d still have a Banderite NATO regime directly on their border and eager to take back Crimea (which democratically chose to join Russia). While that solves the immediate problem of ethnic Russians being in danger in Ukraine, it creates a new problem of a hostile nation having a launching platform to attack Russia.
The choice was either launching a war in 2022 on their terms or undergoing a national crisis to absorb millions of refugees while preparing for when war came to Russia anyway.
I don’t disagree, actually. I just think Russia was between a rock and a hard place.
Just a followup. Western countries being on the wrong side of history comes with being the “dominant” power for quite a while. That comes when you mix power and people that don’t care much about morals (which is most people who own this power). Russia has also been on the wrong side of history a bunch of times. My point was, history has a meaning but is not all that matters, and you can’t necessarily interpret the present through the scope of history.
Well now we’re adding more assumptions. It’s not just that Ukraine would be nazis, but that they are having NATO involved in the whole thing. And that’s a bigger assumption considering that no one gave a flying fuck about Ukraine (or had a negative view of it, for not such bad reasons) until Zelensky did his little stunt to shame Europe into helping them. And even then, it has been a drop by drop help, because everyone is scared of Russia.
And I don’t see how opening borders and basically playing “nice” could specifically lead to hostility. If Ukraine is a crazy violent country that wants to exterminate Russians, then they would attack eventually either way; evacuating people to Russia before the military conflict would just protect civilians instead of letting them be in the middle of the warzone.
As for Crimea “democratically joining Russia”, that’s a big pill to swallow. I understand your scope of “western propaganda bias”, but once again, no one is really believing Russia to be a democracy or to even like the idea of it, so I don’t really see how a foreign area would democratically decide to join a dictatorship. It makes it feel like this “democratic” process would then be of the same kind that leads Putin to win all elections forever with 99% of votes and dead political opponents, while removing the democratic safeguards preventing too many reelections.
And I’ll also add that in terms of purely cold reasoning, extracting people from Ukraine before going at war also means more people to support the war, so it doesn’t really make sense to rush into it. Especially considering that it was obvious that the US would lose power over time, with Trump and whatever, as well as a lot of other western countries.
That’s the whole problem with the narrative of Russia playing the victim: in the end, starting the war didn’t make sense both on a material and a diplomatic scope. It does make sense, however, if you consider Russia to be the one that wanted to attack (and there are a bunch of reasons, very simply speaking Ukraine was an unpopular country with a lot of land and big food production, it probably seemed like an easy and valuable target).
Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for western countries. That’s why from the very first time I started hearing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine being ambiguous, and people supporting Israel heavily in western countries, I just read about it and concluded that yeah, Israel was obviously wrong in that case, and they kept on proving it afterwards. I have no problem considering that western news can be full of shit, and admitting that there definitely is propaganda going on (just like everywhere, but people still believe that western democracies are actual democracies, and that they are immune to propaganda, for some reason), and making my own conclusions based on what seems to make sense. But with Russia, the idea that Russia did what they did out of morals and out of trying to help against oppression, doesn’t really fit the facts. I can obviously be wrong, but with the way things have been unfolding, I don’t see enough evidence to consider that this narrative is the real one. And sure, maybe some part of it is slightly true and exaggerated, it’s totally possible that there was systemic discrimination against a Russian “ethnicity” in Ukraine, their country was basically a political shithole. But that’s not enough to make the Russian narrative believable.
I’m not just looking to history to predict the future, I’m using very recent history to analyze the present. This is basically a question of who I should believe: the source of every problem in the world for the entire time I’ve been alive (the US and its allies) or one of its victims. Maybe that makes me biased, but I’m just never going to believe anything the US says.
And the assumption I was operating under was “Russia’s claims for why they started the war are largely truthful” and “the US’s claims for why Russia started the war are largely false” which means addressing both the neonazi problem and NATO. It’s not just that there’s neonazis in the streets and in the army, it’s that they’re in the government installed by NATO and doing NATO’s bidding. In that context, it’s completely believable Crimea would want to escape the new Banderite regime that wants to exterminate their language and culture.
Ultimately, none of our arguing matters. We can go around and around in circles, but neither of us know what’s really going on. We can only guess, based on our own prior assumptions about how the world works. All we can really do is wait for history to resolve itself, maybe in a few decades we’ll know what really happened.