Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
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.
I often see libs consider the most luke warm criticism of Ukraine or NATO as being support for Russia. It sucks.
Russia portrays its “military operation” as being because of common and well known issues that the left has with NATO, but it was their invasion that tipped public opinion in Finland and Sweden to apply to join, so Russia has already lost in that respect.
oh yeah, so called “public opinion” is definitely crucial to liberal democracy and not just easily shaped by bourgeois media when class interests dictate. great analysis, very map-coloring brain. meanwhile you ignore things like Zelensky talking about leaving the Budapest memorandum or the imminent large-scale offensive against DPR and LPR just prior to the invasion
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/the-buildup-to-war-in-ukraine-february-13-2022.html series continues until Feb 22
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)
I mean, it is literally a defensive alliance if only because if one country is attacked, the others are legally obliged to treat it as an attack on them. It is then also an alliance of Imperial core countries (it was after all, founded in response to the Warsaw Pact).
It is indeed worth mentioning, but I don’t think it’s worth framing it as some sort of public promise that was walked back.
It was NOT founded in response to the Warsaw pact. NATO was formed in 1949. The Warsaw Pact was founded in 1955. The Warsaw pact was founded in response to NATO. NATO was building up West Germany economically less than 10 years after the fucking holocaust. The Soviet Union tried to join NATO in 1954 and was told “no, you aren’t democratic enough.” But they had no problem letting West Germany in while integrating “former” nazis like Adolf Heusinger into their command structure.
less than a third of NATO countries were admitted to NATO through some kind of democratic referendum. It was almost always the unilateral decision of the given country’s bourgeois class, rather than something the people themselves were consulted on. In the cases where democratic referendums were held, it was often in countries that had just been balkanized (former Yugoslav countries, for example), or countries that were just at the outskirts of NATO and were therefore pressured geopolitically into choosing whose “sphere of influence” they were under: Russian federation, or USA. When a nation is compelled under duress to pick sides like that, and a class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the one that usually ends up making the decisions, I doubt the alliance can reasonably be called “defensive.” Its borders keep expanding to encircle and balkanize nations whose main “crime” was being socialist Once Upon A Time. NATO expansion is marching us towards WW3. It is an expansionist and aggressive alliance that merely uses Article 5 to appear defensive and Democratic, while trying its hardest to constantly provoke wars and lay claim to natural resources.
Is the following something a “defensive” alliance does?
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it’s like you ignored the entire thrust of my post, which is that this “defensive” alliance refused to cooperate with a UN inquiry when it destroyed libya (and before that, Iraq), that this “defensive” alliance immediately integrated former nazi leaders into its command structure back in the '50s, that this “defensive” alliance pressures former soviet countries to join or be destroyed, that only 6/30 of the countries that joined this “defensive” alliance did so through democratic referendums. They all claim to come to each other’s defense if one of them is attacked, therefore it’s defensive? This has been the main rhetorical strategy of every expansionist confederation of nations that has ever existed. Far from making an alliance defensive, it creates a huge incentive to put pressure to join on nations bordering the alliance, and creates a huge incentive to deliberately provoke attacks on the alliance (“I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” but as a foreign policy) so that overwhelming force in response is justified. The “defensive” nature doesn’t make sense since it formed FIRST, not SECOND, and since the main “enemy” of this “defensive” alliance (USSR before '91, RF after '91) was rejected from joining on several different occasions. Also the leader of this “defensive” alliance, the USA, keeps invading, bombing, sanctioning, embargoing, and couping any country that doesn’t go along with its foreign policy and private sector interests. And why wasn’t the USSR allowed to join? Because they weren’t “democratic” is the excuse, but neither was West Germany, nor Italy, nor Turkey, and they all got to join. No. the real excuse was because they were the target of the “defensive” alliance, and because they refused to privatize their economy as the marshall plan demanded. The USSR refused Marshall plan money because it was contingent upon them taking high interest loans from the USA and privatizing their economy, opening them up to direct foreign investment, etc., in a word, becoming capitalist. And even after they became capitalist, it is not as though that really put an end to the tensions, since NATO kept expanding anyway.
Why were these people put into key positions in this “defensive” alliance?
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It’s true tbh, Yeltsin was an absolute dumbass to trust Bill Clinton without getting it in writing.
They’re only upset about the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO because of the fact that the Baltics were able to join. If Putin had amassed enough political capital and military strength earlier, they probably would have intervened militarily there before they could join too.
Nothing is so one-sided. It’s not like portions of Ukraine still under Ukrainian control and not separatist control weren’t also getting bombed in turn. You could see it from Google Maps back in like, 2018. It’s not like the damage magically ended at the trenches and was only on the side controlled by the separatists.
I mean if you’re getting shelled from enemy territory then the way you stop it is by shooting at the enemy artillery in enemy territory. Do you not support the right of Ukrainians in Donbas to defend themselves?
They were fighting against the wholesome Banderite Nazi government of Ukraine. There is no sympathy for them.
it’s factual the separatists did cease-fire violations, we shouldn’t sweep inconvenient facts aside & tarring everyone pointing them out as banderites. the rhetoric around here is getting way too dogmatic to start denialism because it slightly complicates the overall narrative of NATO aggression
no reasonable person would ever think a dozen LPR guys taking some potshots at ukrainian positions justifies NATO arming neonazis but putting our fingers in our ears about separatist/russian misbehavior makes us look like idiots
Sure, but the majority of cease-fire violations on the separatist side were in response to being attacked by Kyiv military or paramilitary forces. It doesn’t count as breaking a ceasefire if the other side hasn’t ceased fire.
Do you not support the rest of Ukraine’s? And what about all the people in the Donbass that relocated to parts of Ukraine still under control of Kyiv? After the separatists took power there many people went to western Ukraine. Do those people not have a right to one day return to their homes?
Ukraine could have stopped their war against Donbas at any time. In fact they were legally obligated to according to the Minsk agreements that they signed. Ukraine had no legal or moral right to continue attacking Donbas after they signed a ceasefire.
Not a lot of people went to western Ukraine. Most people went to either Russia or other parts of eastern Ukraine. Western Ukraine is pretty far away from the conflict.
Do you think only Ukraine violated the agreement? Why is on them to honor it when the rebels weren’t?
People in the political minority in Eastern Ukraine went to Western Ukraine so they’d be in the majority, in the period between the ouster of the Kremlin-prefered leadership in Kyiv and the rebels getting organized. This was in the news back in like 2014, so it’s likely been buried in the more prevalent discussions about the Minsk agreements and the subsequent invasion of the wider country.
With all ceasefires, both sides claim that the other violated it. I have no reason to give the Donbas separatists the benefit of the doubt anymore than I do Ukraine. It’s not like either side is openly communist, Russia isn’t some left wing workers state anymore, it’s not like they’re trying to reverse the economic and political changes of 1991, only the borders.
For a self-styled Marxist, you don’t seem to appreciate the idea of states being historically progressive or reactionary beyond “is it socialist or not?” Starting in 2014, Ukraine started moving in the direction of ethnonationalist policy. Palestine isn’t socialist, but I think socialists usually understand that if they are going to give one side benefit of the doubt, it’s the insurgency trying to resist the supremacist military trying to dominate them.
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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
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.
Like a few years ago when the DHS or whoever reported that they had “lost” 1,488 migrant children from our concentration camps
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.
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)
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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.
A measure of culpability, as compared to the bad faith characterization of full-scale offensive war that lib is making.
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They’re only going to start becoming less ruined once they accept that they have to negotiate.
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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.
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.
Russia could have stuck with the accepted modern method of Imperialism though, wherein you don’t invade countries with armies but instead you use soft power and economic integration. That’s what the US was trying to do even in Russia, what with how American Hollywood movies and TV shows being released there and American companies moving in there. It was supposed to change Russian public opinion and enable the subordination of Russian capital to Western capital but Putin was able to co-opt Russian capitalism so when all the Western companies like McDonald’s left, there was domestic alternatives.
Problem was the west was more succesful in Ukraine and other former Soviet states, and the Russians losing at that method as Western Ukrainians looked at the EU more and more, feeling culturally closer to Poland than Russia.
We can go round and round over past decisions that are the “real” culprit for war in Ukraine but it won’t stop the fighting today. Sure, Ukraine could’ve surrendered in the first 24 hours and saved lives, but historically speaking, occupations also result in loss of life as the people who didn’t want to be part of Russia would still be Ukraine and wouldn’t just accept a Moscow-aligned Kyiv government.
The fighting would also stop if Russian troops turned around and went back to Russia, but I think some people are more interested in hurting US foreign policy than they are in peace.
You are unsurprisingly distorting the past. Ukraine circa 2014 had two offers on the table for economic integration, one with the EU and one with Russia. The EU deal demanded the exclusion of Russia, the Russian deal did not demand exclusion of the EU. The sitting President chose the Russian deal, and then there was a west-backed coup that put him out of office and put in someone who would take the EU deal.
The “game” was one that Russia was not allowed to succeed at.
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There are many countries caught between two powers that manage ok (see Taiwan and South Korea as examples) – Northern Ireland is different because it’s not its own country and was brought along with the rest of the UK out of the EU with zero preparation despite one of its main trading partners being Ireland, which still is in the EU.
Russia says reactionary things about western Europe, but you are just kind of asserting that it refused to let Ukraine be involved with trade relations.
This is true, but it seems to me that the west pushed too hard on this from a strategic standpoint by refusing to let Russia join NATO back when it tried. I’m glad that they made this mistake – it’s better for multipolarity – but for them it was surely a mistake.
China’s situation can hardly be compared, or else must be compared from a much earlier state. While there are criticisms to be made of Deng’s policies, he did not allow for the wholesale gutting of domestic industries the way that most of Eastern Europe did. He allowed foreign capitalists to take ownership but kept the manufacturing power where it was, allowing it to be used for development of the country rather than selling it off. It should be unsurprising that traitors like Yeltsin had no interest in preserving long-term national sovereignty in this way.
Perhaps China, too, will one day be hijacked by compradores and turned back into a backwater like the former USSR states and Yugoslavia were, but that’s not how things are now.
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If you’re talking about neocolonialism, neocolonialism still requires boots on the ground. Why do you think AFRICOM has military bases throughout Africa or why jihadist separatist groups like Boko Haram curiously always align with the strategic goals of the US state department? There were Danish troops rampaging around Mali before post-coup Mali told the Danes to fuck off back to Scandinavia. Just because Western troops were “invited” to those countries by neocolonial puppets doesn’t mean they don’t represent just another form of foreign occupation. At least when Russia invaded Ukraine, you could argue that Russia was trying to safeguard the Russian minority. Not sure what kind of excuse you could pull for French troops in “ex” French colony Niger (despite the coup, French troops are still in Niger).
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?
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One of the first actions of the maidan government was to suppress the use of Russian language in the east. Why are you accusing Russia of a theoretical that Ukraine actually did?
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I don’t think Putin would annex western Ukraine, that certainly wasn’t part of the discussion in any of the several previous iterations of negotiations over the civil war.
I just noticed that a self-styled communist user was implying that Mexico invading Texas would be bad because of it violating US sovereignty. Take that fucking hammer and sickle off of your profile picture, you miserable poser. You’re a neoliberal with radical aesthetics and an embarrassment.
Anyway, it’s also worth noting that Ukraine is perhaps the most historically-revisionist country in Europe (followed by Poland). The cult of Bandera is now basically just saying whatever they want about what happened during the Holocaust, or rather they are saying anything short of “the Jews had it coming,” and the government promotes it. Things weren’t looking great before, either. Whatever Russia has to say about textbooks in Dobas – aside from correctly having most of them printed in the native language of their readers, i.e. Russian – would be a clear improvement over this.
afaik Donbas didn’t care intrinsically about the EU, it cared about the actions of the reactionary government that was installed by coup in order to push Ukraine towards the EU over Russia.
Francophone Belgians are not french. They barely were part of the same country. While for centuries there wasn’t an distinction between Ukrainian and Russian. Half of Ukraine has only been part of Ukraine since the 1920s.