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I often see criticism of Ukraine lumped in with Russian justifications for invasion, in which case, the war is also warping your views.
The US got heat from other supporters of Ukraine for that even. Russia is also using them. Further cause to support peace negotiations.
Especially because the actual reason Russia invaded wasn't over any concern about ethnic Russians in Ukraine (that's literally one of the oldest bullshit excuses for war) was to prevent NATO from being on it's borders, and now Finland and Sweden have joined, so Russia's already lost the geopolitical battle. All they're fighting for now is dirt.
oil and wheat are just “dirt”? millions of civilians who were bombed by the Ukrainian government for the past decade are “dirt”? even if it is just “dirt”, its dirt that provides the perfect launching ground for a land invasion of Russia. NATO is the Nazi Arming Terrorist Organization and anyone fighting against them will have critical support from most of the world (no, the west is not all that exists; most of the world is or has been colonized by the west)
You’ve got it backwards. The far right elements were deliberately sowed to induce instability on Russia’s borders, and has been so since before and after the Cold War.
Check out Operation Bloodstone. Check out Operation AERODYNAMIC. Check out Prolog. These are all declassified information detailing their activities in Ukraine and the role in destabilizing Russia both externally and internally.
The reason is quite simple actually: Russia’s increasingly close relationship with the EU (especially Germany) as a raw material supplier will eventually pull the EU out of the US sphere. Energy sovereignty has always been a key issue for Europe. When Saddam tried to sell oil in euro, Iraq was immediately invaded. Then Russia began to sell gas in euro, setting the stage for Europe to gain its energy sovereignty.
Thus, Maidan had to happen. The war in Ukraine has to happen. Nordstream bombing had to happen. All to prevent the vassal states from defecting and undermining US hegemony in the region.
No matter who is in charge in Russia, a left wing government or a right wing government, they all have to face the same problem. Putin tried to appease to the West for nearly a decade, only to see the US keep sending military arms to Ukraine openly. If he had been an even bigger idiot he might even wait until Ukraine to be fully armed by NATO and by then it would have been a far worse humanitarian crisis. And then you’d be calling him an idiot for trying to appease the West and ignoring the military buildup in Ukraine.
show me where Russians attacked Ukrainian civilians from 2015-2021 (dont show me Russia funding separatists as evidence, the DPR and LPR have the right to defend their right to self determination). you can say “it was a war” all you want, it doesnt change the fact that there was a ceasefire agreement that was consistently violated by Ukraine.
what do you think Russian leadership wanted? bc it looks like the DPR and LPR, as well as most of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, are occupied by Russia. and Zelenskyyy was supposed to be the “peace and neutrality” candidate, yet he was working towards joining NATO. the Ukrainians west of the Dnieper were already primed to join NATO, the war didnt change anything.
and what are those bs identity politics abt “Ukrainian national identity”? lets focus on material reality, not these flimsy ideas invented to justify imperialism and ur guesses on what Putin thinks abt them
yummy western propaganda!!
no, Ukraine and the west have empowered (and armed) nazis for 90 years! and now you rely more on western propaganda and all their unfounded claims of atrocities. let’s focus on what we have proof for— the Ukrainian use of cluster munitions against civilians in the Donbas, Ukrainian pogroms and segregation against the Roma people, and state suppression of the Russian language. and what is wrong with you saying “pffft” regarding genocidal actions?
lol you are the one isolated from reality. the world sees what the west is blind to. when the fighting is over and Russia still governs 4 previously Ukrainian oblasts, come here again and say the invasion is “strategically idiotic”, it will be funnier then.
this IS a war against NATO. and it was started by NATO. and it can be ended by NATO right now— Russia is open to peace negotiations
this is a ridiculous double standard. if we're going to talk about NATO pulling the strings of Ukraine, we don't get to pretend the separatists were authentic grassroots movements unaffected by Russian military involvement in their affairs. and whether or not you 'count' the separatists as russian-proxy, they did kill civilians. the ceasefire & it's breaking are still pertinent details but it's wrong to characterize the warfare as one-sided
this is true and obvious, it's a much larger and more intense war. western propaganda does emphasis on russia's crimes, denies ukraines, & spins tales of russia's 'genocidal' intentions, but the wide scale suffering & thousands of civilian deaths are real. it's why the war needs to end as quickly as possible.
im not denying separatists were influenced by Russia, but sending arms to a separatist group is nothing compared to directly attacking civilian centers. is a third party sending weapons to Hamas comparable to the actions of Israel? should we condemn those who send weapons to Houthi rebels?
a subjective assessment is “true and obvious”? no western spin will change the fact that this war is one of western expansion and the people of the Donbas were facing ethnic cleansing from Ukraine. the war could end today if Ukraine and NATO were willing to negotiate reasonably.
ah sorry i had no idea i have to spell out exact numbers of combatants, casualties, displaced persons, and length/area of combat zones or it's "subjective". don't be obtuse, this isn't western spin to say more people are getting hurt in the expanded war than were in the Donbass.
when the separatists you arm & operate your military alongside hit a civilian target with those weapons you do have a measure of culpability. just like NATO has responsibility for the weapons they've given ukriane.
its not abt numbers. on one hand is the ethnic cleansing of civilians during an agreed upon ceasefire, on the other is a war between two modern armies. trying to compare the two is obtuse.
this is not materialist. numbers & scale matters. a murder is not the same as a mass murder. a different legal framework doesn't magically make a many times increase in human suffering and death irrelevant and incomparable to the smaller-scale violence earlier in the same conflict.
we're leftists, right? we agree that social murder is an aspect of capitalist society, but the capitalist legal system does not recognize this. we're capable of separating material effects of policy from their legal definitions. i'd urge you to focus less on the legal character of the war and more on material effects on people. legalism is a tool the ruling class uses that obscures & excuses human suffering in our society. the civilians in the donbass were excused by the ukrainians with legal definitions of traitors or dissidents, as russians who were not part of the state & not deserving protections. i don't accept that and i won't accept fictions about scopes of operation and who is technically aggressing whom, when a kid gets their leg blown off by a mine that is a life permanently changed or erased whichever legalese you slap on it.
its not abt legal framework, its attacks on civilians vs attacks on combatants. numbers dont make these comparable, they are too entirely different
Russia has attacked civilian targets and infrastructure.
"OHCHR verified a total of 9,444 civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine as of August 13, 2023. Furthermore, 16,940 people were reported to have been injured"
you're still making a legalistic distinction "attacks on civilians" vs. "attacks on combatants" these attacks on "combatants" clearly contain civilian deaths, ~~so what actually is the difference to you besides who's doing the murder?~~ e: this is combative, not how i intended it. but i think the fact of civilian deaths emerging from the category of 'attack on combatant' is very destabilizing for using that as a discrete category from 'attack on civilian', is it not?
im going to disengage after this bc i dont think either of us have anything to gain by continuing. i do respect ur opinion on this tho, and even tho i have some disagreements, i also agree with much of what youve said and dont think our difference in opinion is a dealbreaker.
the last rebuttal ill give is this: combatants and civilians are materially different— one has and is using weapons. and intentional civilian attacks have a higher rate of success than accidental civilian attacks, so intent matters. also the supposed russian attacks on civilian targets are spurious and fog of war makes it difficult to make value judgements at this time. what i was focusing on is what we know: the situation in the Donbas before February 2022.
thank you for ur input, its helpful to have differing views heard to prevent this place turning into an echo chamber
Ukraine certainly likes to destabilize it: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html
i straight up used ukraine's violence against civilians as an example earlier in the thread
Obviously they do that to, but my point there was specifically the human shield thing
A measure of culpability, as compared to the bad faith characterization of full-scale offensive war that lib is making.
They're only going to start becoming less ruined once they accept that they have to negotiate.
I don't think separatists were fighting for fun but rather because they had no other means of seceding from a country that clearly only wanted their land and not them. I also struggle to imagine that the civilian deaths on the Ukraine side during the Civil War were a tenth as many as the civilian deaths in Donbas, because the dynamic of the war was principally one of aggression towards Donbas (just as the dynamic of the invasion is principally one of aggression towards Ukraine), whatever one might say about the justification of the aggression or the circumstances of it.
The Baltics have been in NATO since 2004, so Russia already had NATO on its border. Plus Poland on Belarus's border. It's not about having NATO on their border in general, it's about having NATO in Ukraine specifically. Finland and Sweden joining means nothing.
But Ukrainian bombing of the Donbass absolutely was a factor as well. For 8 years Russia tried the diplomatic route to get them to stop, but despite signing agreements, Ukraine just ignored them and kept bombing anyway.
The baltic route to invading Russia is a lot more difficult than the Ukrainian route. Ukraine was always the "red line" for them because of the topography, and the closeness to moscow. Also they were pissed when the baltics joined. The brits declassified that informal promises were made to Gorbachev (ugh....) to not expand NATO eastward in March 1991 if he dissolved the USSR. Of course these informal promises weren't in writing and were never kept. the USA denied they were ever made, but luckily the brits declassified
Really no one should be shocked that an informal promise wasn't honored. If a legally binding treaty can still be ignored by a sovereign power, informal promises are always worthless and no one should be pointing to them and going "but they promised!"
Yes. Gorbachev was a clown who got clowned upon. Still, I think it's worth mentioning, because it reveals that the West was always willing to be deceptive about NATO expansion, and what the role of NATO actually is (i.e. it is not a "defensive" alliance but a reactionary alliance of imperial core countries to protect the superprofits afforded by imperialism and neocolonialism)
It's true tbh, Yeltsin was an absolute dumbass to trust Bill Clinton without getting it in writing.
Sure. but that's a lot of dead people to defend the principle of not letting Russia get what they want. We could have said "fine, we won't expand NATO" and either Russia would have backed down or been forced to abandon that "pretense". But we didn't. We got into this dick measuring contest of "Ukraine can join if they want to 😤" and provoked a war. Which we wanted, in order to fight Russia without using American troops. But it's completely to the detriment of citizens in both Ukraine and Russia.
Ah yes, I'm sure that's why
sent exactly 1,488 panzer tanks to 
Must just be a coincidence that white supremacists and nazis all love those numbers
14 types of one tank and then 88 types of another tank
I don't think Germany's malfunctioning military even has 1488 ready to deploy tanks in total lol
OK that sounds way more reasonable than what I said but I'm just gonna leave what I said because the underlying point still stands
Like a few years ago when the DHS or whoever reported that they had "lost" 1,488 migrant children from our concentration camps
all I was referring to was the fact that they all literally criticized the move, in typical diplomatic hand-wringing ways. Say anything about other countries' military aid, it doesn't change that they still issued statements, it just makes them hypocrites (big shock).
Also, they sent 14 of one kind of tank and 88 Panzers, Germany doesn't even have a thousand tanks in its possession.
Pfft, as if. Oh the Europeans always do that. They'll whine on TV about how this War is unfair, or that french colony should be freed. Then they'll send volunteers to help with Iraq and Afghanistan. They are just as bloodthirsty, but they are cowards about it.
Getting heat doesn't matter if everyone falls in line anyway.
Why do you consider this bullshit, exactly? Do you disagree that russians in eastern ukraine were treated unfairly?
It's the excuse used every time a country wants to claim dirt from another one, at least historically. Is that all it takes to justify a war now?
Would you be defending France if they invaded Belgium in order to protect French-speakers? Mexicans and other Spanish speakers are threatened in the United States, does that mean Mexico is entitled to invade Texas and Florida?
The idea that Russia has any right to protect anyone besides its own citizens in its own borders is based on the idea that Ukraine is "meant" to be in Russia's sphere of influence, but I don't believe in spheres of influence.
If Mexico could win that conflict, unequivocally yes I would support them. The US has repeatedly committed kidnappings, forced sterilization, and summary executions against those populations. The US government should be destroyed, but even just those state governments being destroyed would be great.
No, the idea is that countries are not people, people are people. If a country is going to fuck people over and those people want a specific other country to intervene, the people running that other country are free to intervene. Who gives a shit about what a federal government says about a region that deservedly hates it?