this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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You have a very weird idea about what constitutes consent.
Idk seems appropriate considering the US doesn't seem to consent to other countries' sovereignty, after all it was built on genocide so why should it follow the same rules?
either you seriously think Russia's invasion was motivated by the export of dominant financial capital or you just like to add this word like seasoning to sound leftist, not sure which is more embarrassing
It is not easy to gauge what the war is motivated by, as it is waged mostly by one dictator's wishes, but my bets are on territorial gains, resource gains (as eastern Ukraine notably contains quite a lot of resources), cultural expansion (see: banning of ukranian language in schools and government services), and perhaps delusions of grandeur and desire to bring back USSR/Russian Empire (which appear to be entirely interchangeable in Russian propaganda lately), all of which fit the definition of imperialism quite well. It could also just be an internal political game, attempting to repeat the "Crimean consensus" and get Putin's waning ratings back up. That didn't quite work out, so the governance model descended from authocratic capitalism into near-fascism. In the latter case it would indeed not exactly be an imperialist war, but I'm not sure if that helps Russia's case here.
Russia is famously lacking for land and raw materials
You mean Zelensky, right? The guy that sold the country to foreign capital before indefinitely suspending elections, jailing any dissidents, and giving himself absolute power?
I joke of course. You can tell Putin's a dictator, because he was popularly elected multiple times by the Russian people. If Russia were a real Democracyâ„¢, he'd be broadly unpopular among every Russian demographic and chosen by an unelected cabal of wealthy party elites like in the US.
Sure man, it's Russian propaganda in which they're interchangeable. I mean, I'm sure you'd know what with all the Russian media you're busy avoiding.
Strategically important and tourist-attracting Crimea with a land bridge to it would be pretty useful by itself, couple that with prime agricultural land (Ukraine is a massive producer of grain), lots of coal, some oil and gas.
There was not a fair presidential election in Russia since (arguably) 1996, when communists were defeated with significant use of administrative resource by Eltsin administration. Any serious political opposition began to be silenced in 2012. 2020 constitutional changes were actually unconstitutional, and as such were a soft coup. Both 2018 and 2024 elections had massive electoral fraud too.
I'm actually reading official and independent Russian news weekly due to Russia being my home country.
Imagine pretending that the 90s elections in Russia were 'fair' when NATO literally intervened in them on the side of Yeltsin.
EDIT: grammar. I seem to have mixed up both 'intervened in' and 'interfered with' when I initially made the comment.
I concede that elections before then were not really fair either, but definitely not as blatant as 96.
You really like to dance around admitting the fact that the war was started because NATO tried to set up its weapons on the Russian border and use the threat to either coerce or openly attack Russia.
On that note, mind telling us how you think Russia should have reacted to the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014?
NATO has had weapons on the Russian border for 20 years now. There were obviously no plans to "openly attack Russia", as they would have been realized after Russia actually invaded Ukraine. As for coercion, yeah, imperialism sucks, I wish US didn't do it, but it does not justify starting a war with a smaller country with intent to invade it.
I'm not one to give complex geopolitical advice, but definitely not by invading it. Perhaps a good start would be exercising its immense soft power inside the country to help pro-Russian powers (which has been attempted, but extremely unsuccessfully).
Is that why we've seen so many NATO bases in Ukraine clash with the Russian military in the past 2 years? Oh, wait.
Lol. You are saying this about the empire which, among other things, invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria just this century, and which has been committing a highly-televised genocide in Palestine.
Oh, and which also had the Russian government be its puppet in the 90s, and where it killed millions of people through legislative means.
Notably, you did not answer my question:
mind telling us how you think Russia should have reacted to the NATO-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014?
?
Misspoke. I meant 'Palestine'. Brain not braining at this point.
Having read some more of what you wrote, I do have to give it to you that you aren't a chauvinist while also recognising that NATO is at least somewhat bad. However, my criticism of your position stands.
So you acknowledge that they already did it and it wasn't enough . . .
TBH I agree with you that the invasion wasn't justified. Nor was NATO expansion, orchestrating the 2014 coup in Ukraine, and a whole host of other things. (Disclaimer: I'm an anarchist, so I never see the actions of nation-states as legitimate or justified.)
But that actually doesn't matter. At all. The important thing is to consider what to do now. War is fucking bad. People are dying. The environment is being ripped to shreds, both locally and globally. Capitalists are lapping up profits like nobody's business. Far more important than where some shitty, illegitimate national border winds up ultimately landing is whether the participants in this war keep slaughtering working-class people for their own ends. The most responsibility for that lies with the U.S. and its empire, which is using Ukraine to try to harm Russia, no matter how many lives it has to toss into the meat grinder. It has directly intervened in peace talks and ~~sabotaged~~ overridden ceasefire agreements, and may very well do so again. Of lesser but still high responsibility is Ukraine's government, which was U.S.-installed and has been selling itself, its land (massive privatization to the benefit of U.S. corporations), and its people (conscription, etc.) for the sake of a more privileged position within the empire. And of course Russia shares a lot of responsibility, though getting it to back away from that is hardest because nation-states have very little incentive to resign themselves to existential threats like NATO expansion/encirclement.
So what can you and I do about it? We can pressure the participants. You said in another comment that you live in (or your "home country is"?) Russia. You are in a position to actually pressure Russia to stop invading/expanding and to back away as much as you can possibly make it. You should. Good for you. Many people here are in a better position to pressure the West to do similar: to allow ceasefire negotiations to continue, stop the supply of weapons for war, shrink or dissolve NATO, keep their nation's hands off of Ukraine, etc. We should. Working-class people "on both sides" pressuring the entities they have some small amount of influence on to back down isn't contradictory, but is 100% consistent with socialists fighting the class war. Don't forget that the class war is the only justified "war" there is or can be. As Vijay Prashad has said so well, "War itself is a crime."
You know there is like history and real life and stuff that happened prior to the invasion right? Like you don't have to guess or speculate or make up fan theories? Like you can just like read and find out why.
This feigned "who could possibly know" attitude is baffling. Just like look it up
All the reasons I've provided are grounded in actual Russian reality as it was before the invasion. I had been following russian news, from both official and independent outlets, due to actually living there. I don't think I need to look up the obviously made up reasons of "denazification" and "demilitarisation".
since you're such a smart guy who knows what's obviously made up, tell me about Operation Aerodynamic
Shut the fuck up, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about
Never happened but your projection levels are off the charts because the
did ban the Russian language
what a buch of idealist garbage. love to solemnly intone about how "it is not easy to gauge" what the war is motivated by when you haven't read the explicit justifications given in Putin's speeches and therefore cannot critique it even from a materialist standpoint
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/06/putins-full-speech-brics-nato-expansion-and-ukraine-peace-talk-conditions.html
you are a joke, stop attempting to sound leftist and actually do some reading
The people of Donbass want to join the Russian Federation, nobody but Nazis and NAFO dipshits who don't know anything about the conflict care what the corrupt regime in Kiev has to say about sovereignty, if they wanted to maintain territorial integrity then they shouldn't have couped a democratically elected government and tried to ethnically cleanse their fellows citizens for speaking one of their mother tongues
Also don't trivialize rape for the sake of making some half-baked geopolitical analogy, it's gross incel behavior
The territory Russia wants conceded is more than just the Donbas tho, isn’t it.
Isn't it just Donbas + official recognition that Crimea is Russian?
2022 Putin officially annexed the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts into Russia. Some of that area is still under Ukrainian control.
No, honestly that would be reasonable at this point, but the maps I have seen include large swathes of territory outside most of the people’s republics that have been established.
Could be just a negotiation tactic, set the initial claim too high to have more wiggle room in negotiations.
Maybe it's just cope but I don't think they'll be so unreasonable as to keep all of the original claims.
We'll see I guess.
They are irrevocably annexed as Russian territory. It remains to be seen how much more will be annexed
The people of Kherson don't want to be part of Russia. Why is Russia trying to annex it? Why is the russian military leveling towns, sometimes still with civilians living there, in the very regions they are purportedly trying to liberate? Let's be clear here, neither US nor Russia actually cares about people living there, they just want territory, resources and influence.
Why is Russia trying to annex it?
Oh I don't know maybe because the Kiev regime had been telegraphing for eight years their plans to use the oblast as a vector to reconquer Crimea
You think the Russian military are the one leveling towns and territories they'll have to rebuild and administer, filled with allied civilians? Motherfucker, the Ukrainian army are the ones openly leveling towns to stop any and all Russian advances, angering western advisors by wasting mountains of artillery ammunition while hunting "collaborators" in the regions they're purportedly trying to liberate, only Bakhmut can be said to have been destroyed in equal measure by the Russians, and that was a result of Ukraine turning that town into Redux-Stalingrad for no real strategic reason beyond media glazing
You literally don't know anything about this conflict
Russia is building a buffer zone to push the site of potential NATO bases and weapons systems further and further from Moscow, and to be able to militarily hold that buffer zone (requiring infrastructure, transportation, continuity with Crimea which was annexed for similar reasons, etc.). It views NATO expansion and encirclement as an existential threat, for pretty good historic reasons.
You're right that its intentions aren't altruistic as other users are claiming/implying. It is a nation-state. But its intentions are predictable and inline with those that basically every other nation-state would have in the same situation, because that is the nature of the institution.
"Fuck Nazi Germany for doing ethnic cleansing, and fuck Russia for actually invading and bombing the shit out of it" - liberals who can't define imperialism
Russia literally intends to annex (as in, turn into own territory) 4 Ukranian oblasts, banning ukranian language there, turning over capital to its own oligarchs (or their cronies), all via a means of war. I would like to remind you that Russia is an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy, with overt ambitions of turning itself into an empire. This definitely fits at least multiple definitions of imperialism.
I despise the shit that Ukraine did to its eastern regions for many years. What Russia is doing now is worse on multiple accounts (human suffering, death count, material damage), though.
How?
Like, you are literally suggesting that the rest of the world should just roll over for NATO.
Sure the status quo is violence, but resisting the hegemony is also violent. Do you really want to be as bad as NATO?
There is a better argument to be made for Ukraine being imperialist for brutally repressing the independence movements in Donbass that were themselves in response to the US-backed coup that you seem to recognize for what it is. The war was eight years old by the time of Russia's invasion.
I'm going to take your comment seriously even though I don't know if you're making it in bad faith or not, and I'm going to say that this war was entirely avoidable if Ukraine had just applied their laws. I'm making an assumption here when I say that terrorism is illegal in Ukraine, but I'm fairly confident in this assumption; I mention this because Ukraine had eight years to take terrorism by militias in their country seriously. There's a video of Elensky going out to talk to the militia to tell them to disarm, but they basically didn't take him seriously at all; at this point, the military is supposed to step in and deal with it, one way or the other. They had eight years to send in the military to take out those terrorists who were literally indiscriminately shelling civilian areas in Donbas, but they didn't. Counting the military casualties in this war, over half a million Ukrainians have now died just because the Ukrainian government decided to allow terrorism in their country. The reality is they want the land but they don't want the people who live there who are ethnically Russian; this is not the attitude of good people, it's the attitude of people who want to engage in ethnic cleansing. When they were in a position of power, they could have made peace with Donbas and applied their laws and obliterated the terrorists striking Donbas residents, instead you even had a president promising that while Ukrainian children were attending kindergarten, that Donbas children would be hiding in bunkers; these are utterly atrocious people who are the literal cause of the war (in addition of course to our government who supported them).
All the same can be said about current Russian invasion. US-backed coup wasn't great, Ukrainian attitude to its eastern regions was atrocious, but Russia invading with full force didn't help anyone but wealthy Russian elites (and perhaps corrupt ukranian elites too, not 100% sure on internal ukranian politics): it destroyed yet more regions of Ukraine, killed yet more people, and there's no resolution in sight except for a slightly different frontline.
could you give us your answer as to who you think bombed NordStream 2 so we can laugh at it?
I agree that Russia invading didn't help anyone as terrorists are still striking Donbas as far as I'm aware, but they ARE trying to change that, which Ukraine had all the power to do prior to the war and which Western European powers could have invested just a tenth of what they did towards the war effort in putting a stop to.
Now that's not true; there was an attempt at a peace plan about a year or two ago that we and the UK blocked, there's also the peace plan now that people are trying to push for. You may not like the term concede as your initial post stated, but I would hope you would also support this peace plan regardless because it would end the war. Myself I would be fine with Ukraine keeping their territories provided they can prove that these regions will be safeguarded from future attacks and that the people there will be allowed as much autonomy as any Ukrainian city and the safety as well, but we both know they won't. As I said, this war could have absolutely been avoided if Ukraine had simply administered their anti-terrorism laws; if a similar situation happened back home, do you think our government would have allowed such terror attacks to go on for eight years? Whether Russia or Ukraine controls the territory, I hope both our concerns are aligned in that the people living in these territories MUST be guaranteed safety.
Although all of this is basically true, the fascist slaughter of people in Donbass wasn't even the deciding factor. Whether Ukraine was accepting NATO weaponry, military infrastructure, training exercises, and hopeful, near-future membership was. Russia wouldn't have invaded even to stop the potential genocide going on. It invaded because the U.S. was threatening its western border and escalating the Cold War (again/still). It's exactly as if Russia had made an agreement with Mexico to put military bases and weapon systems right on the U.S.'s southern border. (Or maybe Canada would be a better parallel, due to the proximity the weapons systems would then have to Washington DC.)
So it WAS avoidable. Just on a slightly different basis than whether or not Ukrofascists were happily doing their thing unmolested (which they also were).
How do you explain that on invasion 1 million ukrainians gone to russia? (That’s not counting the 3 millions they occupied)
It’s delayed civil war, cause ukraine couldn’t live like civilized bilingual euro countries
But yeah, invasion is bad
Some of them genuinely wanted to go to Russia (I expect it was a significant percentage), some of them didn't care and it would be easier to go there, some literally didn't have a choice, some were moved to Russia forcibly. However, consider that of the remaining ~35 million Ukrainians ~5 million went to Europe, and of those who remain in Ukraine support for Russia is in low one-digit percentage. Simply put, not that many Ukrainians (outside Crimea) wanted to be part of Russia, and of those who did a lot are dead now as a result of the invasion, and more now hate Russia.
Sure. However, Russia turned a skirmish into a bloodbath, for the benefit of its elites.
Ah, but the last point is the interesting part. It’s definitely not for benefit of elites in russia, with some squinting corruption in ukraine maybe made local oligarchs come out ahead.
Anyway, cause it’s not for benefits of elites, the reasoning is more complicated in russia (like genuine dislike of nato 500 km from moscow).
To the first point, not that many wanted to be part of nato either (when it was shoveled in constitution in 2019 (?) it was like low 30s), or renaming streets for heroes of oun. Yet both happened without any resistance, as donbass has demonstrated what happens to those who try to protest.
Re:numbers it implies some 16 percent sympathizers (as it’s snap decision on invasion, it’s not biased selection I don’t think), and if we include 3(?) million who chose to stay where they were we get near parity.
IMHO russia not being capitalist hellhole could have saved a lot of heartache by assassinating nazis earlier, instead of allowing them to grow unmolested, but then it arrived where it’s either let them cleanse donbas and plausibly join nato, or try to shock them in neutrality. Which they nearly did in march of 2022, and then everything went to shits. But I feel you don’t place a lot of culpability on ukraine before the invasion