Ukraine

[CM156]

Why?

Come now: We both know why.

 

[Dalisclock]

Its funny that those against American imperialism paradoxically take the stance that America should embrace Russia as a partner in Imperialism and divide an unwilling Europe between them. America forcing Ukraine, and possibly the rest of eastern Europe to submit themselves to a Russian dictatorship is a breach of those countries sovereignty. Its America and Russia jointly subverting the will of both the peoples and the institutions of those nations. Of course this approach also has the added benefit of flattering Russia, allowing it to pretend to be an equal to the US and a superior to Europe rather than a dismal backwater who's entire state resolves around a finite resource.

So is American imperialism justified if it helps Russia feel like an Imperial power again?

Something Something Why does America get to get away with Imperialism Something Something It's only fair if we also let Russia get away with it something something.

I've heard people try to justify Russian Nuclear threats by "Well, the US nuked Japan. Twice even!"

 

[Absent]

I've heard people try to justify Russian Nuclear threats by "Well, the US nuked Japan. Twice even!"

"Such a historical injustice. I didn't get to nuke them even once."

 

[Ag3ma]

Russia chose its own interests over those of Ukraine; Russia's invasion has been selfish and immoral in that respect. But that selfishness and immorality is predictable and normal given the context of US global empire.

You would lose nothing by simply removing the words "given the context of US global empire". It is predictable and normal for Russia (like many states) to seek dominace over its neighbours. Russia was doing so long before the USA had any meaningful presence outside the Americas. Before then it was Germany, or Sweden, or Poland, whoever else suited the justification at the time.

You've inserted the USA only to justify your Americocentrism that refuses to admit the agency of any other states or peoples.

 

[Hades]

It is predictable because of the threat that empire poses to Russia as well as the US's history of violently enforcing its will and destroying other countries by invasion, assassination. It is normal because this sort of invasion is how the United States reacts even to non-threats like Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Russia's actions are justifiable in terms of its own security,

Firstly it should be noted that Russia is absolutely no stranger in destroying countries through invasion and annexation. Russia is not the nation under threat by foreign powers. Its the nation threatening other powers. The post cold war order actually placed very little restrictions on Russia. It was allowed to get filthy rich from oil and gas trade, establish the most brutal dictatorship they desired and even keep several Soviet perks like their UN seat and being considered a great power at least by courtesy. Seemingly the only restriction on Russia was that they weren't allowed to brutally expand beyond their borders and even that one proved pretty darned negotiable until recently.

''Russia's security'' in practice always comes down to other countries having to surrender sovereignty and territory just so Russia feels secure. As such its hardly a ''tragic misunderstanding'' that the west just fails to see Russia's ''defensive'' goals. These defensive goals always involve assassination, invasions, genocide and artificially constructing civil wars within their neighbors. In short ''defensive actions'' even the greatest aggressors would fail to match in terms of aggression.

But the idea that national security can only come at the cost of another nation's security is a very traditional pitfall in the realism school of international politics. After all if every nation is able, willing and downright required to take away the security from other nations in order to feel secure, then this only incentives warfare and makes good faith diplomacy very hard.

 

[Absent]

Also, by the very logic of Russia feeling "threatened" by Ukraine and this justifying the invasion and massacres, all the neighbouring countries should feel justified in waging pre-emptive wars upon Russia right now.

Heck, most nuclear countries should be busy nuking their neighbours.

But nope, it's only Saint Putin the Ever Victimized who's being legitimated in his preemptive conquests, by this drunk-civ-player kind of rationale.

 

[Ag3ma]

''Russia's security'' in practice always comes down to other countries having to surrender sovereignty and territory just so Russia feels secure. As such its hardly a ''tragic misunderstanding'' that the west just fails to see Russia's ''defensive'' goals.

Yes.

This is of course a very well-worn path, popular with tankies. I remember over 25 years ago someone explaining to me that the Soviet Union's aggression was only ever defensive against Western imperialism. Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968 pulled the veil from the eyes of a huge number of Western communist sympathisers, but the really dedicated ones just kept on going, and subsequently transferred their sympathies to Russia.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

this drunk-civ-player kind of rationale.

Then Mr Gandhi should not have threatened the peace-loving Maori people with nuclear annihilation if he didn't want his people slaughtered and his cities razed to the ground.

 

[Gordon_4]

It's important to remember that most of the military's day-to-day is carried out by people younger than 27. This covers junior enlisted through junior NCOs as well as junior officers. A 21 year old who enlisted at 18 has fully trained and settled into their career, and it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an intelligence service member (this airman's job) to have and require access to classified information. The real question and issue is less why did this airman have access to the info and more how was he able to remove it from the secure systems it resides in without triggering red flags; major gaps evidently need to be addressed there.

6 facts about the U.S. military and its changing demographics

The demographic makeup of the country's active-duty force has changed over time, and those changes tend to reflect trends in the broader society.

www.pewresearch.org

 

[Kwak]

-

Until now, military recruitment officers have had to go in person to deliver a paper summons to a draftee's home or workplace.

That system will now be supplanted by electronic notifications — i.e. emails — issued through systems including the web portals that Russians use to pay their utility bills, taxes and other services.

The electronic notification will be binding from the moment the government hits send.

And with the new law, draftees are immediately banned from leaving the country.

Those who fail to show up at a recruitment office promptly will soon face a raft of new restrictions related to banking, selling property and even gaining access to a driver's license.

 

[bluegate]

-

Until now, military recruitment officers have had to go in person to deliver a paper summons to a draftee's home or workplace.

That system will now be supplanted by electronic notifications — i.e. emails — issued through systems including the web portals that Russians use to pay their utility bills, taxes and other services.

The electronic notification will be binding from the moment the government hits send.

And with the new law, draftees are immediately banned from leaving the country.

Those who fail to show up at a recruitment office promptly will soon face a raft of new restrictions related to banking, selling property and even gaining access to a driver's license.

Time to start burning shit down for Russians, I suppose.

 

[Terminal Blue]

This thread has instead been home to fantasist rambling about the irrelevance of concerns about NATO beside what is framed as Russia's imperial ambitions (which are simultaneously mocked because the enemy must be both too strong and too weak).

Because of how non-coincidentally your defense/indulgence of Russia resembles similarly hypocritical defenses of Israel, it's incredibly easy to flip this around. You are the one arguing that a state with one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals is existentially threatened by some hypothetical invasion by a defensive alliance. You're happy to reference the UK's military spending to imply some kind of militaristic ambition while ignoring that Russia's military spending is (on paper) around the same (while also benefitting from numerous advantages like greater purchasing power and not needing to pay competitive salaries).

Russia has to be strong enough to oppose the US, otherwise it wouldn't be useful to you as some imaginary counter to US global influence and would be fit only to be ground under the bootheel of the "great powers". Yet Russia must also be weak enough to be existentially threatened, thus justifying any action it takes in the name of self-defence.

The reason we mock Russia is because Russia invites mockery. Outside of your distant adoration from a safe and comfortable position half a world away, Russia does not hide what it wants or claims to be. Russia openly presents itself as a rising Imperial power, it openly puts out its HOI4 fever dreams of taking back the territories to which it feels it is entitled without regard for the people who live there. It openly indulges national debate about the need to eradicate minorities or ethnic groups which stand in the way of its inevitable march to greatness. Russia is worthy of mockery because, at the end of the day, it is none of the things it claims it is or that you seem to desperately need it to be. It is a sad, miserable, cruel little state that, fortunately for us all, has proven thoroughly incapable of realizing any of its ambitions.

The hypocrisy at the heart of the US is that it presents itself as a bastion of democracy and global security while frequently engaging in actions that undermine these things in service of its own ends, and while the US government is far less competent and all-powerful than you seem to want to pretend, very little about this hypocrisy is funny. The hypocrisy at the heart of Russia is that Russia openly seeks to present itself as an aggressive military superpower that everyone should fear, yet is simply too incompetent to be particularly frightening.

The fact that a lot of very real human beings are currently dying over this idiotic posturing is not lost on anyone except, seemingly, on you.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I'm amazed how all this leak went down and that it wasn't the usual suspects the leak turned up on.

 

[thestor]

It was an air force guy, right? So, at least it wasn't a military leak.

 

[XsjadoBlaydette]

Something about the placement of that play button inspired me.

 

[Silvanus]

Gulagu.net, a Russian anti-torture initiative, has conducted a 77-minute video interview with two members of the Wagner paramilitary group, who were involved in the battles for Soledar and Bakhmut.

During the interview, they openly state they've executed children as young as 5 or 6; were involved in killing hundreds of civilians; and killed wounded prisoners of war.

“I shot a 5-year-old in the head”: Wagner convicts confess to killing children in Bakhmut and Soledar

A Russian organisation has released videos in which Russian convicts from the Wagner Group confess to murdering Ukrainian children in Bakhmut and Soledar. According to one of the killers, unarmed 15-year-old Ukrainians “can hardly be called civilians”.

www.pravda.com.ua

Some key quotes:

I executed the order with this very hand, I killed the children. You understand, by order. The fact that we… We were given the order to wipe out and kill everyone… We went and killed everyone – women, men, pensioners and children, in particular, the small ones, 5 year-olds.

Residents were going outside. And there was an order: everyone aged 15 and over – shoot all of them at once. 20–24 people were shot, 10 of them were 15-year-old and 17-year-old teenagers.

Mainly with a knife. We cut the throat. We film it. When Prigozhin said sledgehammer, we took a sledgehammer and killed [a man] with a sledgehammer. This is his method. He is a horrible person.

This is the force that Russia's government has entrusted with a central role in the conflict in Ukraine, trained on Russian military bases and sponsored with government money, and now financed to set up a military tech centre in the Russian capital.

 

[bluegate]

Some key quotes:

Lucky for him he was just following orders then. /s

Piece of human trash.

 

[Terminal Blue]

During the interview, they openly state they've executed children as young as 5 or 6; were involved in killing hundreds of civilians; and killed wounded prisoners of war.

I dunno, something is sus there.

There used to be this deeply weird group of people who would go around pretending to be holocaust survivors. Some of them even got quite famous by publicizing accounts of their made-up holocaust experiences, but what tended to catch them out is that those experiences were almost always too perfect. Like, it wasn't enough to have survived the holocaust, the entire holocaust needed to have happened to them.

This gives me similar vibes, but obviously in reverse. It seems like someone who has a deep psychological need to see and present themselves as dangerous and powerful, a trait that is coincidentally common in both convicts and neo-Nazis. This doesn't mean it's all bullshit. There's enough evidence to say pretty conclusively that Wagner certainly do like to video themselves killing POWs. But I'm not buying for a second that this cirrhotic suicide squad reject and his fellow LARP Nazis killed 10% of the estimated remaining civilian population of Bakhmut in a single day without anyone noticing. Darwin doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.

Killing people, real people with a limbic system and a desire for self-preservation as opposed to video game NPCs, is not particularly easy. In order to carry out genocide, the actual Nazis had to develop these very convoluted systems and procedures for managing the potential for resistance amongst large groups of people. Walking into a basement with 400 frightened and panicking people seems like a good way to find out that humans are still fundamentally apes and why noone wants to end up in the chimpanzee enclosure.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I dunno, something is sus there.

There used to be this deeply weird group of people who would go around pretending to be holocaust survivors. Some of them even got quite famous by publicizing accounts of their made-up holocaust experiences, but what tended to catch them out is that those experiences were almost always too perfect. Like, it wasn't enough to have survived the holocaust, the entire holocaust needed to have happened to them.

This gives me similar vibes, but obviously in reverse. It seems like someone who has a deep psychological need to see and present themselves as dangerous and powerful, a trait that is coincidentally common in both convicts and neo-Nazis. This doesn't mean it's all bullshit. There's enough evidence to say pretty conclusively that Wagner certainly do like to video themselves killing POWs. But I'm not buying for a second that this cirrhotic suicide squad reject and his fellow LARP Nazis killed 10% of the estimated remaining civilian population of Bakhmut in a single day without anyone noticing. Darwin doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.

Killing people, real people with a limbic system and a desire for self-preservation as opposed to video game NPCs, is not particularly easy. In order to carry out genocide, the actual Nazis had to develop these very convoluted systems and procedures for managing the potential for resistance amongst large groups of people. Walking into a basement with 400 frightened and panicking people seems like a good way to find out that humans are still fundamentally apes and why noone wants to end up in the chimpanzee enclosure.

I don't think you're wrong, but I have to say that Wagner seems like the right company to make strides in dehumanizing the enemy. I mean, during World War II, the US Army saw a marked increase in soldiers' effectiveness in killing the enemy by just switching from plain bull's-eye targets to human silhouettes in basic training and shortening shooting drills so that the trainees didn't have time to think about what they were shooting at. We even have a name for this- "killology".

 

[Silvanus]

I dunno, something is sus there.

There used to be this deeply weird group of people who would go around pretending to be holocaust survivors. Some of them even got quite famous by publicizing accounts of their made-up holocaust experiences, but what tended to catch them out is that those experiences were almost always too perfect. Like, it wasn't enough to have survived the holocaust, the entire holocaust needed to have happened to them.

This gives me similar vibes, but obviously in reverse. It seems like someone who has a deep psychological need to see and present themselves as dangerous and powerful, a trait that is coincidentally common in both convicts and neo-Nazis. This doesn't mean it's all bullshit. There's enough evidence to say pretty conclusively that Wagner certainly do like to video themselves killing POWs. But I'm not buying for a second that this cirrhotic suicide squad reject and his fellow LARP Nazis killed 10% of the estimated remaining civilian population of Bakhmut in a single day without anyone noticing. Darwin doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.

Killing people, real people with a limbic system and a desire for self-preservation as opposed to video game NPCs, is not particularly easy. In order to carry out genocide, the actual Nazis had to develop these very convoluted systems and procedures for managing the potential for resistance amongst large groups of people. Walking into a basement with 400 frightened and panicking people seems like a good way to find out that humans are still fundamentally apes and why noone wants to end up in the chimpanzee enclosure.

Good point. That incident supposedly took place in March-- after the majority of the remaining civilian population of Bakhmut had already been moved into bunkers. On the other hand, March did mark the time Russia/Wagner seized the ~half of the city east of the Bakhmutka river, so a lot of additional area/buildings fell under their control. It's probable that will have included chunks of the civilian population.

I took the numbers to be exaggeration, but the sheer indiscriminate attitude to be telling nonetheless.