Possibly, sometimes it seems to be because they know their enemies knew it already and their allies will deny it despite it being said.
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
- Start date
One thing i have heard is that Prigozhin got too much influence based on the abysmal performance of the real army and used it to get officially acknowledged.
Another rumor says that Putin fears a coup because the army is not particularly happy with having to fight a lost war and getting neither proper supplies nor money nor recognition out of it and positions both Prigozhins and Kadirovs thugs against it.
I frankly find it hilarious that Russia is "evacuating" civilians from Kherson.
Oh, NOW you care?
(Apparently various art is being looted, so I can imagine decades from now it being repatriated to Ukraine like art was recovered from the Nazis.)
Oh, NOW you care?
(Apparently various art is being looted, so I can imagine decades from now it being repatriated to Ukraine like art was recovered from the Nazis.)
Or not so hilarious since it’s more likely they’re just kidnapping them.
big victory for Ukraine at the UN, as despite losing the vote it is clear that tolerance for the glorification of Nazis is trending upward
they literally had an unconstitutional overthrow of their elected government followed by the banning of parties and television stations. the only reason you think there is democracy there is because the United States and its European vassals normalized it by shrugging their shoulders much like what happened in Russia in the 1990s with Yeltsin.
All overthrows of governments are "unconstitutional". Yanukovych had about-turned on the platform on which he was elected, and was pursuing a policy which is dismally unpopular in Ukraine. He was doing so because he was a paid agent of a foreign power with his own government advisors stating that Ukraine must be destroyed.
The Russian invasion also aimed to perpetrate an "unconstitutional overthrow of an elected government"-- with the difference that that overthrow was 100% imposed from outside, and had a far, far, far greater death toll. But that one doesn't seem to bother you.
I think there is flawed democracy there. Mostly because the parties and stations that were banned were minuscule and pretty politically irrelevant anyway, and a lot of them were overtly hostile to the country's existence.
In comparison, in Russia, all opposition is tightly controlled by the state, all opposition media is banned. The main opposition leader languishes in jail. All elections are fully rigged. You cannot use the poor democratic credentials of Ukraine to justify invasion when the invaders seek to implement a far less democratic, far more repressive system.
It's certainly trending upwards in Russia, with a neo-Nazi PMC now feeling free to open a huge shiny military tech centre in St. Petersburg, and government figures openly stating their affiliation with said PMC, where only a few years ago they were strenuously denying it.
This resolution was not introduced in a vacuum. Russia introduced that resolution in the same week they opened the aforementioned neo-Nazi run military tech centre in their capital city. The opposing votes were very specific about their objection: that it was introduced as part of the Russian pretext to justify invasion.
You'll note that the amendment states that the pretextual invocation of neo-Nazism seriously undermines the genuine fight against neo-Nazism. Of course, the Russian Federation dissociated from the amendment.
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You don't think democracy exists anywhere, so why do you care?
Why is it the fault of the Ukrainian people that their president betrayed them and decided to be a puppet of Russia. What? Should they just have allowed him to surrender the country to Putin?
And why were those banned? Because they wanted to collaborate with Russia perhaps? The country that currently wants to destroy Ukraine.
"With regards to the resolution in front of us today, the European Union has pleaded for years that the fight against extremism and the condemnation of the despicable ideology of Nazism must not be misused and co-opted for politically motivated purposes that seek to excuse new violations and abuses of human rights.
We would like to stress again that the tragic past of the Second World War should continue to serve as a moral and political inspiration to face the challenges of today’s world.
The European Union is unequivocal in its commitment to the global fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, anti-semitism and related intolerance. Our joint fight against contemporary forms of all extremist and totalitarian ideologies, including neo-Nazism, must be a joint priority for the whole international community.
For all these reasons, the Member States of the European Union had to adapt their approach towards resolution L.5.
For these reasons the EU will vote NO on resolution L5."
The US take...
" victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. We categorically condemn the glorification of Nazism and all modern forms of violent extremism, antisemitism, racism, xenophobia, discrimination, and related intolerance.
That said, the United States continues to oppose the Russian Federation’s use of the UN system to spread disinformation. This resolution is a cynical attempt at best by Russia to further its contemporary geopolitical aims by invoking the Holocaust and the Second World War to malign other countries. This is all the more egregious now, when Russia uses false accusations of Nazism to try to justify its unconscionable ongoing violence against the people of Ukraine.
The Russian Federation’s resolution is not a serious effort to combat Nazism, antisemitism, racism, or xenophobia — all of which are abhorrent and unacceptable. Instead, this resolution is a shameful political ploy. It is a thinly veiled effort to justify Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
We fully support the amendments presented today, which re-introduced into this resolution the report by the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism. The report “Notes with alarm that the Russian Federation has sought to justify its territorial aggression against Ukraine on the purported basis of eliminating neo-Nazism and underlines that the pretextual use of neo-Nazism to justify territorial aggression seriously undermines genuine attempts to combat neo-Nazism.” The evidence is clear and was reaffirmed by the amendments passing.
Despite the amendments passing, we continue to have serious concerns with this resolution’s invocation of Article 4 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to justify restrictions on freedom of expression.
We also take this opportunity to note our concerns regarding the process by which this resolution was run. The Russian Federation failed to provide any opportunity for Member States to engage meaningfully in negotiations on the draft text this year. It canceled two of the three informal negotiations and held only one meeting to take concerns on board, which it did not do. This resolution has had a long history of sham negotiations and pitiful attempts to appear to run a transparent process. Even with the restoration of the SR’s report, the Russian Federation skirted procedure and did it from the floor this morning instead of through the L document.
For these reasons, the United States will continue to vote “No” on this resolution, as it has since 2005, and calls on other States to do the same."
You shouldn't lie.
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But then how could he portray Daddy Putin as a hero spearheading a crusade against Nazis, instead of an insane megalomaniac invading a sovereign country?
You say, unironically, in a thread about a proxy war over whether Ukraine will be a US/NATO vassal state, or a Russian one.
Just never mind how you're doing everything in your power to emphasize the actions of one side, whilst playing denialist games over the actions, ideology, history, and hegemonic ties of the other.
"Symbolic", sure. Just never mind the "symbolism" of that move is glorifying and idealizing Nazism, incorporating Nazis into its regular military, and funding and arming Nazis. And once again, is denying the concept of collective guilt really a good look in a thread involving Nazis?
So anyways, here's a picture of Jewish comedian Jon Stewart giving a Ukrainian dude in Azov battalion with Nazi tattoos, an award at a Pentagon-funded PR event at Disney World.
Can't wait to hear how that's "besides the point".
It does indeed boggle the mind how there were so many of them just there, occupying land that was so suddenly and inexplicably depopulated of Poles, but deporting them after the end of World War II amidst a joint military denazification counter-operation is all the sudden racist.
Not my problem you spent 150 pages of a thread putting forth a facade of being educated or actually giving a shit about Ukrainian independence, to be called out on your incapacity to cite the literal genocide committed against Ukrainians by the Soviet Union, when you decided to take the participation of an actual historian in this thread personally. Then proceeded to try to argue your own ignorance proved your point, all along.
Or that you're trying desperately to change the subject from my actual point bringing up this history: Donbas is only heavily populated by ethnic Russians in the first place because of that same oppression, and they're the ones Ukrainian Nazi groups are trying to ethnically cleanse. Because apparently, the only people who can possibly be victims in all this are Ukrainians, for some reason. But do go on about how you're not playing stupid apologetic games to cape for Nazis.
In the course of doing everything in your power to evade the subject of what these Ukrainian Nazi groups have actually been doing in Donbas for the last eight years.
But ultimately, all your natter is fundamentally missing one huge point: I don't give one stinking shit about Russia, or anything Russia's doing. My only concern in this is US/NATO funding, training, and material support for Nazism.
So long as we're outright ignoring the Afghan war was a major contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ushered in three decades of US unipolarity marked by post-Soviet conflict (this very one being yet another), exacerbated civil unrest and conflict in the MENA region both before and after 9/11, sure. But that would require an historical understanding accepting the myriad of ways the US effected the economic and political chaos that created the contemporary Russian Federation, and how the US was a direct beneficiary of that chaos. Otherwise known as "reality".
But dare I suggest US support for Nazism in Ukraine now in the name of proxy warfare, could be the cause of catastrophic blowback in the near future, as was the case for US support for Islamist extremism in Afghanistan during the '80s.
Hol' up. I think I've heard this one before.
"If Russia loses in Greece then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Korea then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Cuba then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in the rest of Latin America then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Iran then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Vietnam then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Cambodia then that threat is effectively contained..."
"If Russia loses in Afghanistan then that threat is effectively contained..."
Nah. Can't be. The totality of US Cold War policy must just be some crazy conspiracy theory, and we're not just doing the same shit over and again but expecting different results this time.
So we're to understand Russia as a laughable shell of its former self, yet simultaneously capable of initiating a nuclear war with obvious catastrophic global consequences. Which is true enough. But, the only way to deal with that threat is bull baiting Russia to push the button, as opposed to, say resolving issues diplomatically or economically by fostering economic interdependence through targeted investment and trade, much as the US has over the course of the last three decades with China.
China's only #3 on the list of countries with the most nukes and a vastly bigger global strategic threat to the US than Russia ever has been or ever will be, yet the idea of a nuclear exchange with China is considered laughable simply on the premise China has no one to nuke but customers.
Slow your roll there, Buck Turgidson. Maybe you should be asking yourself which countries have leverage over whom, and for what reasons, before handing Major Kong his cowboy hat and telling him it's time to saddle up.
No, I'm saying whichever country eventually wins the proxy war, the losing power will ensure the victory is pyrrhic at best by inflicting maximal economic damage. In other words, denying Ukrainian natural resources to the victorious power -- and any regional strategic value by way of infrastructural damage -- without cost sufficient to ensure a negative RoI. The next-best alternative to winning a conflict, is to deny the victor the spoils.
If your response to that is "yeah that's evidence of sunk cost fallacy in Ukraine"...well, yeah. It's why I brought up Afghanistan in the first place: the US baited the Soviet Union into an economically unsustainable war in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda repaid the favor to the US with 9/11.
That's my point, realpolitik is fundamentally irrational, having no feasible answer to forever war and cyclical violence. It's use and endurance is dependent upon those things.
I'm sure you prefer to believe that, as opposed to economic and policy elites simply having shared values, interests, and investments upon which consensus can be built and consent manufactured, while simultaneously suffering from sociopathic myopia.
If you believe that the US fully controlled Ukrainian domestic policy, you've got brainworms. They overwhelmingly support a policy direction you don't like, so you've equated that to being a US puppet. There's bugger all else there-- except for a paltry amount of US finance in the Ukrainian political system. Russia, on the other hand, bought one of their Presidents, and is now attempting to directly control it by force.
One side has acted a thousand times more aggressively towards the other: to invade, sponsor insurgents, demolish its infrastructure, torture its civilians, annex, ethnically cleanse, deny access to water and heat. Whilst Ukraine has never attacked Russia.
Yes, I'm focused on one more than the other. Kind of like how it would be rank foolishness to play "both sides" games in a thread about America sponsoring insurgents in South America.
If your concept of "collective guilt" is to hold entire nationalities responsible for the actions of their government, then it never holds any validity to begin with: it's idiotic and racist from the off.
Literally every step you've described there, by the way, is widely practised by the Russian government. Will you ascribe the same "collective responsibility" to Russian civilians, then?
You shouldn't need to hear how it's beside the point; whataboutism always is.
Russia does not care about any of this. It's pretext. They adorn Nazi-tattooed paras with military/official commendations all the time, and you're asking me to believe they're actually motivated to invade their neighbours to stop them doing it too? Please.
Depopulating areas on the basis of ethnicity has always been racist. I don't give a toss what manufactured excuses you're willing to parrot to justify it.
Your "actual point" in bringing it up was a tangled mess of ahistoricism and irrelevant apologia. You have to utilise some tortured logic indeed to argue that since the Soviet Union practised racist cleansing in the past, therefore it justifies racist cleansing and full annexation now, as well as the destruction of the Ukrainian state.
Literally haven't evaded it even once. It's not relevant to Russia's reasons for invading, of course: it's a pretext. It matters to them not a whit, which makes it questionable why you're banging on about it as a deflection for the actions of Russia.
Lol, what absolute horseshit. You've been dehumanising and demonising the civilians of Ukraine for dozens of posts, now, for the sole purpose of excusing annexation and invasion.
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The Soviet Union overthrew itself.
I'm getting really, really tired of this garbage American exceptionalism you all seem to have where the US, and particularly the US government, are the only people in the world who can be attributed with any agency at all. I'm tired of it because it's no different to the right-wing version, and by that I mean that deep at its core is a kind of American (well, white American) supremacy where US global hegemony is not due to the fact that said hegemony works in the interests of many people around the world who voluntarily buy into it but some intrinsically superior quality of American people that just naturally makes them freer and better and the natural master race whose steely Aryan gaze cows the lesser races into obedience. Fuck that.
The Soviet Union collapsed because of the failure to resolve internal disagreements due to a political system that could not accomodate disagreement, because of long-standing dissatisfaction within the constituent and satellite republics with the comparative dominance and favouritism shown to the Russian SSR and ultimately because hardline members of the government carried out a coup to prevent reforms that could probably have prevented the disintegration of the union.
Arguing that events in history are causally connected is a good way to get attention, but it's seldom particularly convincing because you can make those connections basically anywhere. The material reality is that Afghanistan cost the Soviet union basically nothing, so any argument to the effect that the war there contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union is essentially an argument that said war altered the culture or perception of the Soviet Union among its own citizens, and that is impossible to really evidence. The Soviet Union wasn't well known for having opinion polls or independent social research.
I mean, Western intelligence services are not really hiding the fact that many people who went to volunteer in Ukraine are being placed on watchlists, so it seems like the risk of "blowback" in terms of Western far-right elements using this conflict for training purposes is already being factored in.
But if your argument is that the secret Nazi shadow government in Ukraine will break out the swastikas and invade Poland, then that's laughable because even if such a shadow government existed, even if it could secure the loyalty of the armed forces and the compliance of the political system, it's just not going to work. Ukraine might potentially come out of this war with a relatively powerful military given sufficient NATO support, but it will also be a military that is reliant on NATO countries for any kind of sustainment. I mean, I know the Russians have also "donated" a lot of equipment, but the future for the Ukrainian military is very much looking NATO standard.
That was the Soviet Union. Also, Churchill and Stalin actually made a secret deal (without American involvement) to respect each other's spheres of influence in Europe. Stalin conceded Greece in exchange for British non-interference in Eastern Europe. Nowadays it's very easy to downplay how ideologically opposed Britain and the US actually were at that point. In some ways Churchill and Stalin had a lot in common.
Again, the Soviet Union. Also, not really involved in that one, it was really China that was heavily involved.
The logic of the cold war is often extremely silly. We're talking about two countries which could trivially have ended the world and, thanks to their respective nuclear doctrines, would almost certainly have done so had they ever gone to war, but if we're buying the line that Russia now is defending itself from NATO expansion and the hypothetical risk of nuclear weapons being positioned in neighboring states (even though they already are, and the risk of Ukraine having any kind of nuclear-sharing agreement is about as likely as Ukraine developing its own nuclear weapons at this point) then deploying nuclear weapons to Cuba was a deliberate provocation that warranted a military response.
"Russia" (again, Soviet Union, Russia didn't exist) was never "in" Latin America.
"Russia" (again, Soviet Union) supported both sides in that one.
Again, paranoid CIA fantasies aside "Russia" (do I need to keep saying it) was never really involved in Vietnam.
See above.
Other than the fact Russia wasn't a country, this is really the only one that applies, and given that you yourself have argued it "majorly" contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, it seems like you actually agree it achieved the desired outcome.
Anyway, you missed a bunch of conflicts Russia was actually involved in, but I guess bombing civilians in Chechenya while your best pal George Bush cheers you on doesn't really fit the narrative.
The cold war is over. The Soviet Union doesn't exist. Europe is politically and economically unified under a supernational federation and has enjoyed a long period of peace which have left it partially demilitarized. Russia is at war with a country that used to be part of the Soviet Union, and some of the biggest material supporters of that country are other countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union.
Yes, those are not contradictory statements.
North Korea has nuclear weapons, and can't even provide enough food for its population.
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Kherson: Russia to withdraw troops from key Ukrainian city
Russia orders its military out of the Ukrainian city, the only regional capital captured in the war.
www.bbc.com
This happens right after the midterms. Call me paranoid but it seems like Putin was hoping for the red wave but that's not happening.
I'm not discounting that, though they have been allegedly evacuating the area for the past week or so. It's unclear if those evacuations were mandatory/coerced.Kherson: Russia to withdraw troops from key Ukrainian city
Russia orders its military out of the Ukrainian city, the only regional capital captured in the war.
This happens right after the midterms. Call me paranoid but it seems like Putin was hoping for the red wave but that's not happening.
Though it's clearly so the Russians can pull an end run on London through Wales, a move nobody saw coming.
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Eacaraxe doesn't really understand the difference between wanting having closer ties with the west because a countries government and population jointly want more ties to the west for the benefits it brings, or being in the Russian sphere of influence because the Russian army beats the population down and installs a pro Russian puppet as president.
From Belarus, to Ukraine, to Kazachtstan. Any country unfortunate enough to find itself in Russians sphere of orbit is either led by a corrupt authoritarian who's bought by Russia, or gets brutalized by the Russian army to ensure such a corrupt authoritarian remains in power.
Of course not! The nuclear weapons in Cuba were just to protect the world from the American imperialist running dogs, who of course had no right to protect themselves because they are evil.
But then Wales would close down its businesses, and may God be with any Russian soldier who runs into a Welsh man who can't get to the pub.
I would bet a tenner that is going to be a plot point in the next Modern Warfare.