Ukraine

[Generals]

Which legislative body withdrew Ukraine from the ICCPR, ECHR, and ESC, thereby relieving itself of human rights obligations to civilians in the Donbas region?

As far as I can tell: none. Ukraine is still a member of these bodies. Well, can't say for sure about "ESC" as I do not know the body said acronym is supposed to refer to.
You should stop believing all the anti Western bullshit you can find on the internet.

And even if we disregard this falsehood the point still stands that Russia started all this with its invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Deserve has nothing to do with it, but they are at war. That is what happens. Now my sleep hazed brain is an unreliable place at the best of times but my recollection of the last actual war between peers involved the Luftwaffe turning a great deal of London into rubble, and the RAF returning the compliment with Berlin. To say nothing of what was done to Dresden.

Other way around, actually, Hitler wanted military targets in Britain bombed (airfields, mostly, IIRC), then the RAF bombed Berlin and he lost his temper and in revenge ordered British cities to be bombed. A lot more than the British were able to bomb Berlin, at least at that point.

But British history/pop culture focuses on the Blitz, not the RAF bombing of Germany before and after, for obvious reasons.

 

[Hades]

Who's been operating black sites in Donbas, where alleged (and in some cases, proven) instances of mass torture, sexual abuse, and rape have occurred?

The Russian controlled separatists have been pretty consistently proven to commit mass human right violations. So I'd say them. As do human rights watchers. Which is to be expected from a military junta backed by an invader with genocidal desires in Ukraine.

And by "some" in your case, you mean the US and NATO. This isn't about Ukrainian independence for anyone

Russia has been on the record that it IS about Ukrainian independence, or rather their desire to end it. Putin already admitted its not about NATO or about protecting the Donbas. Its about blood, and about soil. We can stop pretending otherwise. Russia says its about its imperial ambitions, Russia says it desire to end Ukrainian statehood and ethnically cleanse its population. If they say that's their goal then so should we. Its not a secret or up for debate, Russia has openly admitted it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

This isn't about Ukrainian independence for anyone,

 

[Silvanus]

Which legislative body withdrew Ukraine from the ICCPR, ECHR, and ESC, thereby relieving itself of human rights obligations to civilians in the Donbas region? Was it the Russian Duma, or the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine?

Who's blocking and (allegedly) raiding humanitarian aid shipments...from Ukraine? Is it Russian paramilitaries, or is it Ukrainian paramilitaries? Eight years' worth of alleged human rights abuses in Donbas as documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Human Rights Council? Who's been operating black sites in Donbas, where alleged (and in some cases, proven) instances of mass torture, sexual abuse, and rape have occurred?

That's both sides, by the way. Which is why I keep referring to this situation as cyclical violence.

Armed forces commit acts of barbarity, and therefore the country from which those armed forces come has no right to self-defence or self-determination, and the lives of civilians in those countries are forfeit. Is that the line you're taking, then?

If we're talking about severity or frequency, by-the-by, the answer to those questions would overwhelmingly be the Russian armed forces and the Nazi paramilitaries they employ. The scale isn't even comparable. Lest we forget Russia has racked up a higher death toll in Ukraine in ~200 days than the US did in Syria over 8 years. Keep that in mind as you dredge the "all sides" argument.

Psst: that was the US. The CIA by the way of its front organization NED, has been up to this shit since Euromaidan, and more recently directly. We're the ones training, funding, and arming these goddamn Ukrainian Nazis who have also (keyword also) been running around Donbas acting like rabid animals for the better part of a decade ethnically cleansing the area of Russians, and we've been doing it the whole-ass time.

What a fucking joke. Russian investment in paramilitaries in Donbas since 2014 vastly, vastly outstrips American money (just like Russian money in the Ukrainian election vastly oustripped American money). It is Russian money that has been overwhelmingly funding the conflict. It is Russian sponsorship that actually set up the insurgency in the first place. It is Russia, not the US, which sent disguised troops over the border to keep it going.

America's funding of Ukrainian forces in Donbas is fucking minuscule in comparison with Russian funding. And the forces Russia is funding are the insurgency, which you seem to keep forgetting. That does actually count for something.

And by "some" in your case, you mean the US and NATO. This isn't about Ukrainian independence for anyone, you can fuck right off with that facade of righteous indignation. This is about whose proxy buffer-state Ukraine will be, US or Russia...that is once the ethnic cleansing is over. And make no mistake, at this point there will be ethnic cleansing; the only question is, will that ethnic cleansing be with the full backing and support of Russia, or the US?

No, I don't mean the US and NATO. For the US and NATO has not invaded and annexed Ukraine, which are the acts I'm talking about. That was Russia.

This may irritate you, but Ukraine voted for its government. It wasn't a perfect election by any means, but it was far fairer than any vote Russia has ever run anywhere, and there's no serious doubt that the winning party had a greater mandate than the other candidates. Even in that election, most foreign money was from Russia, not the US-- that's right, most foreign money was behind the losing pro-Russia candidate. You don't like the direction they voted in, so you're happy to flag-wave for the government they voted in to be overthrown by force, and another country's wishes to be forced upon them.

The equivocation is completely pathetic. Only one side has invaded a sovereign state here. Only one side has annexed another country's territory in an imperial land-grab of a size not seen for 80 years. Only one side has been wracking up war crimes on a scale that dwarfs every other participant. Russia.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Psst: that was the US. The CIA by the way of its front organization NED, has been up to this shit since Euromaidan, and more recently directly. We're the ones training, funding, and arming these goddamn Ukrainian Nazis who have also (keyword also) been running around Donbas acting like rabid animals for the better part of a decade ethnically cleansing the area of Russians, and we've been doing it the whole-ass time.

Each one of these claims has a grain of truth. NED has invested heavily in Ukrainian media. Various NATO countries have provided training, funding and arms to the Ukrainian armed forces which elements of which originated as far-right militias. There is evidence for war crimes on both sides of the nearly decade long civil war in the Donbas.

However, these things are not connected into an overarching and self-evident moral truth.

I recently encountered the term "American diabolism", and it's actually a pretty perfect description. The fact that US influence on the world is largely self-serving and often has catastrophic impacts on the people affected does not mean that "America bad" is the single, central moral axis around which the entire universe revolves. That is some spiritual warfare shit, and it's not surprising because a significant proportion of the US left seems to have been infiltrated by conservative evangelicals.

NED invests heavily in Ukrainian media not because it has been told to do so by George Soros and the evil CIA globalist shadow government but because that is its organizational remit. Various NATO countries are engaged in training Ukrainian units not as part of some secret global Nazi agenda, but as part of agreed packages of military support in Ukraine (and because it makes absolutely no sense to send equipment without providing training in its use). NATO equipment has ended up in the hands of units accused of war crimes not because NATO loves war crimes, but because there is no mechanism to compartmentalize military aid.

The idea of an elaborate conspiracy involving thousands and thousands of actors who have no intrinsic reason to cooperate but are somehow managing to conceal a secret agenda to bring back Nazism (because reasons) makes no sense. It is on the level of all the world's scientists conspiring to conceal the truth that global warming isn't real or that vaccines contain mind-control microchips linked to the 5G network. No force on earth is powerful enough to persuade that many people to cooperate in a plan that, in many cases, will directly harm them.

This isn't about Ukrainian independence for anyone, you can fuck right off with that facade of righteous indignation.

I'm pretty sure, for many Ukrainians, it is about Ukrainian independence, or are they in on it too?

And make no mistake, at this point there will be ethnic cleansing; the only question is, will that ethnic cleansing be with the full backing and support of Russia, or the US?

If we live in a world where all war crimes are part of some overarching strategic goal put in place by the secret globalist shadow government, then there has already been substantial amounts of ethnic cleansing. In reality, war crimes are typically the result of spontaneous decisions by individuals on the ground or a lack of discipline and oversight.

US "backing and support" in this case essentially amounts to not threatening the government of Ukraine with punitive sanctions if allegations of war crimes (which are at this point allegations, both sides infowar capabilities are in full swing) continue. Ask yourself seriously if you would be happy with that outcome.

Your problem is that you've become too emotionally-invested in the outcome of this, for it to be anything but the great moral conflict of our time. There must be a "bad guy" and there must be a "good guy" for you.

No, I think the problem is that you seem to struggle to imagine a moral dimension between "completely amoral neo-Imperialist pissing contest that doesn't matter" and "Biblical struggle of good versus evil" The former does not demonstrate a more sophisticated or insightful understanding of the situation than the latter.

There are thousands, if not millions, of individual actors involved in this situation. They are not all part of some secret shadow government hive mind. They all have their own motivations, reasons and perspective on the situation which may be more or less reasonable. The cumulative action of all those people produces the outcome we are seeing. Simply drawing a connection between any of those actors and the imagined US Illuminati deep state shadow-government satanic globalist agenda does not abrogate their own agency within the situation.

I still say withdraw multilaterally, evacuate what few noncombatants are left, and let the genocidal madmen have their stupid fucking Nazi fight over a swath of land nobody actually gives a shit about. Nuke the ones left standing, because fuck 'em, they're Nazis.

What a sophisticated moral perspective. I'm so glad you've graduated beyond childlike notions of good and evil.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

I can't believe I'm saying this but I miss Sean, this guy is somehow worse

 

[Dalisclock]

I can't believe I'm saying this but I miss Sean, this guy is somehow worse

Wait, is Sean gone?

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

Wait, is Sean gone?

more quiet in this thread then the other guy is being

 

[Gergar12]

Nuclear blackmail to grab land is always bad. I may make jokes about taking central Canada from the Canadian government in real life, but only after the Canadian government without blackmail from the US agrees to it via a vote by all Canadians. If the US invaded, I wouldn't support the war. But no if you are a Putin shill, or a misguided appeaser like Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, and these two idiots.


I meant the "leftist" protesters in the video.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

In other words, what the CCP wants is to replace the US in global geopolitics, or at the very least to rule alongside the US in a system that allows both their spheres of influence.

The latter, mostly... Not that they'd complain if the former happened.

Utimately, however, I don't think it's sustainable. India has serious problems, but is not that far behind China. Brazil, if it sorts out its weird national trauma and horrendous inequality, is a serious candidate for economic power. The EU is a mess right now but enthusiasm for the project within the core EU countries remains high and represents a huge concentration of economic power. If anything, the world is trending away from small developing countries that are easy to bully, and I think long term we will see more countries adopting transnational economic unions or third neighbor strategies as a means of countering the influence of economic superpowers.

India is probably the most interesting out of that lot because their antipathy towards China is encouraging them to work closer with the West insofar as it comes to regional/Indo-Pacific security despite their government's closer ties to Russia. Yeah, they got a shitload of socio-cultural problems to get sorted if they want to really kick things into high gear economically but shear inertia will drag them there eventually assuming they don't monumentally shit the bed.

I'd also add the ASEAN group, should they opt to form a trade bloc. Some very interesting stuff happening.

 

[Eacaraxe]

As far as I can tell: none. Ukraine is still a member of these bodies. Well, can't say for sure about "ESC" as I do not know the body said acronym is supposed to refer to.
You should stop believing all the anti Western bullshit you can find on the internet.

Apparently, the BBC is "anti Western bullshit I can find on the internet".

Рада одобрила отступление от Конвенции о правах человека - BBC News Русская служба

Верховная Рада Украины утвердила положение о временном отступлении от отдельных международных обязательств на территории Донбасса, предусмотренных международными соглашениями о защите прав человека.

www.bbc.com

Armed forces commit acts of barbarity, and therefore the country from which those armed forces come has no right to self-defence or self-determination, and the lives of civilians in those countries are forfeit. Is that the line you're taking, then?

The line I'm taking is the US and NATO should under no circumstances or pretense be supporting forces that commit atrocities, or committing them, and by doing so have forfeited any claim to waging a just war -- or any moral or ethical high ground.

But had the US and NATO done that from the beginning, there would never have been a war, as the US and NATO would never have astroturfed a neo-Nazi protest movement to overturn a free and fair election the outcome of which they simply didn't like, in an attempt to "Arab spring" former Warsaw Pact states.

If we're talking about severity or frequency, by-the-by, the answer to those questions would overwhelmingly be the Russian armed forces and the Nazi paramilitaries they employ.

And now we got a fallacy of relative privation on the field!

One, by the way, with a particularly poignant historical parallel. What precisely happened the last time European and North American countries collectively decided those Nazi chaps were a decent enough sort, and certainly finer to stand behind in the inevitable scrap against the orientalist Russian hordes? Certainly the Russians were worse than the Nazis then as they are now, after all. How'd that work out in the long run, again?

America's funding of Ukrainian forces in Donbas is fucking minuscule in comparison with Russian funding. And the forces Russia is funding are the insurgency, which you seem to keep forgetting. That does actually count for something.

I'd like to see a citation for that, which didn't come from the US Department of State or a right-wing think tank. Because the US is better at laundering money than the Russians, doesn't mean the Russians outspend the US.

This may irritate you, but Ukraine voted for its government. It wasn't a perfect election by any means, but it was far fairer than any vote Russia has ever run anywhere, and there's no serious doubt that the winning party had a greater mandate than the other candidates.

Which one? The 2010 election which was internationally accepted as free and fair by states, state organizations, and NGO's as observed by a record number of election observers -- the one where the "Russian stooge" won, and the US engaged in aforementioned astroturfing? The 2014 one, where the Ukrainian government disenfranchised Donbas and wouldn't allow observers from Russia or CIS?

Or we are just pretending once again Ukraine just spontaneously manifested from the luminiferous aether -- but somehow had been subject to a decade of Russian conspiratorial proxy-shadow-war -- in February, 2022?

The equivocation is completely pathetic. Only one side has invaded a sovereign state here. Only one side has annexed another country's territory in an imperial land-grab of a size not seen for 80 years. Only one side has been wracking up war crimes on a scale that dwarfs every other participant. Russia.

Pity that same outrage is evident in the case of the country inhabited by white, Christian, neo-Nazis Europeans, and not for example, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Khazakhstan, or Armenia.

One could add Syria to that list, of course, but not that we'd want to. It is, after all, the instance in which the US was arming, training, and funding ISIS and al-Goddamn-Qaeda of all fuckin' people, who went on to moronically fight each other instead of Assad or loyalist forces. You know, because Russia Bad.

Likewise, I'd be totally remiss if I didn't mention the last time the US baited Russia into invading a third-party state by arming, training, and funding a bunch of extremist lunatics. With the specific stated goal of provoking Russia into unsustainably spending capital, materiel, and people as a form of economic warfare (which wasn't that the point you just made?).

Y'know, Afghanistan? because that worked out well in the long run, and totally didn't come back to bite the West in the ass later.

However, these things are not connected into an overarching and self-evident moral truth.

Nope, just good old fashioned realpolitik. Make of it what you will.

I recently encountered the term "American diabolism", and it's actually a pretty perfect description. The fact that US influence on the world is largely self-serving and often has catastrophic impacts on the people affected does not mean that "America bad" is the single, central moral axis around which the entire universe revolves. That is some spiritual warfare shit, and it's not surprising because a significant proportion of the US left seems to have been infiltrated by conservative evangelicals.

And now we're in the "shit the US government and its intelligence community openly admits it's done and has declassified documents it hosts on its own webpages, is conspiracy theory" phase of the debate. Because apparently, leftists are secretly conservative evangelicals, who are notoriously anti-imperialist and not nationalist in the least.

NED invests heavily in Ukrainian media not because it has been told to do so by George Soros and the evil CIA globalist shadow government but because that is its organizational remit. Various NATO countries are engaged in training Ukrainian units not as part of some secret global Nazi agenda, but as part of agreed packages of military support in Ukraine (and because it makes absolutely no sense to send equipment without providing training in its use). NATO equipment has ended up in the hands of units accused of war crimes not because NATO loves war crimes, but because there is no mechanism to compartmentalize military aid.

Hey remember that time the US intelligence community was illegally skimming off the top of illegal weapons sales to Iran, to illegally fund and arm Nicaraguan right-wing death squads? How 'bout that time NATO troops and contractors under the umbrella of UNPROFOR were operating a global sex trafficking ring out of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars?

Hanlon's razor is significantly blunted in the face of the decades' of documented proof of Western malice, with regards to the political fates of second and third world countries and their peoples. Just sayin'.

No force on earth is powerful enough to persuade that many people to cooperate in a plan that, in many cases, will directly harm them.

So how's that situation going with the MAGA Republicans, again?

I'm pretty sure, for many Ukrainians, it is about Ukrainian independence, or are they in on it too?

I'm sure it is, but nobody in a position to call shots or run audibles on this play gives a shit about them.

The rest of this crap.

Disavowing collective guilt and invoking the Nuremberg defense is totally the optics you want to present in a conversation about Nazis and their level of influence in a foreign government. Well fucking done.

 

[Eacaraxe]

What the hell is going on with anti-western militaries not stockpiling precision-guided-munitions(PGMs), Russia doesn't have them, and Iran doesn't have them in large numbers but does have ballistic missiles and ATGMs, I don't know why they always love defensive weapons. Even China doesn't have that many PGMs.

You can't win a modern ground war without PGMS unless you want your planes shot down, your drones falling out of the sky, and your helicopters blowing up.

Instead, they rely on costly air-launched ballistic missiles. I get it when China is basically a police state you need another national security army to counter coups and that costs lots of money.

Short version of a long story: the nascent NATO realized it could never defeat Russia or China in a conventional war -- fresh out of World War II, the Soviet Union had a military an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the former Allies' combined, that was far more battle-tested, with superior materiel (case in point, the first US MBT that was on rough parity with its Warsaw Pact counterpart was the M60A3, and the first technically-superior MBT was the Abrams). NATO had to do more with less, which meant maximizing combat effectiveness of each individual component and stacking force multiplication.

Think of it in 4X game terms. They built wide, we built tall.

 

[Avnger]

Short version of a long story: the nascent NATO realized it could never defeat Russia or China in a conventional war -- fresh out of World War II, the Soviet Union had a military an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the former Allies' combined, that was far more battle-tested, with superior materiel (case in point, the first US MBT that was on rough parity with its Warsaw Pact counterpart was the M60A3, and the first technically-superior MBT was the Abrams).

This is fucking laughable. You've really been hitting that kool-aid, haven't you?

US Armed Forces size 1945: 12.2 million

Demobilization of United States Armed Forces after World War II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Please find a source, any source, that shows the Soviet Union Armed Forces as greater than 122 million (aka an order of magnitude larger than the US alone) members in 1945. You're going to have a hard time as the total population of the Soviet Union was only ~170 million at that time...

Demographics of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Eacaraxe]

This is fucking laughable. You've really been hitting that kool-aid, haven't you?

US Armed Forces size 1945: 12.2 million

Demobilization of United States Armed Forces after World War II - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Please find a source, any source, that shows the Soviet Union Armed Forces as greater than 122 million (aka an order of magnitude larger than the US alone) members in 1945. You're going to have a hard time as the total population of the Soviet Union was only ~170 million at that time...

Demographics of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I usually have you on ignore, but this is spectacularly poor research so I'll just have to respond.

World War II: A Statistical Survey by John Ellis.

The Red Army had 12.4 million combat troops on the Eastern front at the end of the war.

That number of 12.2 million for US Armed Forces is the sum total across all four branches, across 55 theaters of war including the homefront, and that number includes auxiliaries, support and logistics staffing, security, wounded, and demobilized staff awaiting discharge. Three million of which were in Europe, again, not all combat troops and not all of those combat-ready or combat-effective. That is, in fact, an order of magnitude less than what the Red Army had.

As of V-E Day. As of 1947, the US demobilized down from its peak to 1.5 million -- again, across all branches, theaters, and MOS. According to EUCOM, 128,000 of which were stationed in Europe. At that point, the Red Army still had 2.4 million in combat troops alone -- again, an order of magnitude.

The Wikipedia page you linked explains this, no need to actually cite anything further, really. It helps if you read the Wikipedia page before linking it.

 

[Elijin]

Youre using that phrase wrong, enjoy some light reading here

 

[Gordon_4]

I'd also add the ASEAN group, should they opt to form a trade bloc. Some very interesting stuff happening.

Man we should really be making big in-roads, like really proper ones, with all the friendly countries in our sphere.

 

[Generals]

Apparently, the BBC is "anti Western bullshit I can find on the internet".

Рада одобрила отступление от Конвенции о правах человека - BBC News Русская служба

Верховная Рада Украины утвердила положение о временном отступлении от отдельных международных обязательств на территории Донбасса, предусмотренных международными соглашениями о защите прав человека.

www.bbc.com

But your statement is totally disconnected from the BBC's. So either you twisted the bbc's statement or just parrotted someone else who did. The article is very clear, Ukraine didn't leave anything. It asked for a suspension to follow the rules in Donbas as long as hostilities persisted. Guess who started and fueled these hostilities? Russia.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Man we should really be making big in-roads, like really proper ones, with all the friendly countries in our sphere.

Yeah, lot of bullshit to overcome with that. Mostly of our making.

 

[Avnger]

I usually have you on ignore, but this is spectacularly poor research so I'll just have to respond.

World War II: A Statistical Survey by John Ellis.

The Red Army had 12.4 million combat troops on the Eastern front at the end of the war.

That number of 12.2 million for US Armed Forces is the sum total across all four branches, across 55 theaters of war including the homefront, and that number includes auxiliaries, support and logistics staffing, security, wounded, and demobilized staff awaiting discharge. Three million of which were in Europe, again, not all combat troops and not all of those combat-ready or combat-effective. That is, in fact, an order of magnitude less than what the Red Army had.

As of V-E Day. As of 1947, the US demobilized down from its peak to 1.5 million -- again, across all branches, theaters, and MOS. According to EUCOM, 128,000 of which were stationed in Europe. At that point, the Red Army still had 2.4 million in combat troops alone -- again, an order of magnitude.

The Wikipedia page you linked explains this, no need to actually cite anything further, really. It helps if you read the Wikipedia page before linking it.

Still waiting where you show "The Soviet Union had a military an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the former Allies' combined, that was far more battle-tested, with superior materiel."

Here's what you've actually proven so far: The Soviet Union had a military an order of magnitude larger than the rest of the former Allies' combined, the rest of the former Allies' troops deployed to Europe combined, the US troops deployed to EUCOM. Hmmm why have those goalposts moved so far?