Maoo [none/use name]

Dems voters openly accepting 99% Hitler rather than do literally anything but whine about the people fighting back:

I love the combination of insults and degrading what I said while suggesting you never even read it (as you announced you were blocking the instance. Incidentally, instance-level blocking wasn’t possible at the time, to my knowledge. That’s part of Lemmy v0.19.x.

But not to worry! I’ll just share what I said with you again. Be sure to explain how it’s uninformed, stupid, and devalues Ukrainian lives! I’m just too big of a dum-dum to figure it out.

whataboutism

It points out the double standards westerners gladly accept in order to favor themselves and disadvantage others. How hollow the rhetoric is. How much rides on accepting propaganda, such as adopting the term “whataboutism” as a way to deflect from valid criticism. That’s an old cold war term you picked up, probably from society in general, but it was propaganda to help ensure Soviet criticisms of double standards could be dismissed by Amerikkkans.

Minsk 2, like we don’t know Russian army went in there with heavy weapons in 2014 and sponsored separatists

The form of this argument is “whataboutism” btw, lol.

But anyways, Russia’s presence in 2014 was at best covert and there’s little evidence. They did provide some supplies. However, why would this contradict any points made about Minsk 2? Anyone familiar with the diplomatic efforts knows that the West was far more brutal and aggressive, targeting civilians in Donbas, and repeatedly avoided diplomatic solutions. The (ignorant) rallying cry seems to be that Russia should have unilaterally done everything even while the West did nothing and even escalated. They didn’t even honor ceasefires.

that by helping the attacked invaded country, the west is somehow making it worse?

“Helping” is doing the heavy lifting in this sentence. If it’s making the situation worse, it isn’t helping, is it? The “it” matters. The “it” from the West is weapons, loans, and auctioning off the country to Western corporate interests. The latter two get called “aid” even though they throw the poorest country in Europe into deep debt and exploitation. The former is weapons, it is direct support for the war, and whether that is “helping” depends on your understanding of where this war is going, what the realistic outcomes are, and what unexplored alternatives exist to propping up the UA military.

The simple version is that UA is fucked. It is not going to win and “reconstruction”, if it ever comes from the West, will come at the price of foreign ownership, low wages, and further stripped social safety nets. Since it will lose, the question is really: how long do you want this to go on? How many Ukeainians do you want dead? I want none. The US government will accept any number so long as it hurts Russia. Do you accept any amount of dead Ukrainians so long as it hurts Russia? I don’t. I want those people alive.

Sending weapons just ensures more and more Ukrainians dying so that the West can “stick it” to Russia. Not so that UA will win. Not so that the outcome is better. So that the outcome is objectively worse, so long as it’s “hurting the right people”. And all the while, the less horrible options are kept off the table, which is to say, diplomacy. Both by simply avoiding or preventing talks as early as March last year, but by ensuring the Western populace is unable to accept diplomacy at this point. This is why they tell you UA is winning, that Russians are subhuman monsters, etc etc. So that you support endless violence and think diplomacy is a bad idea.

This is also all before we get to the MIC, which drives war to fill its pockets. This is another of the real reasons the “helping” is happening: so that Lockheed-Martin can sell more weapons, keep more millions, all while children are plunged back into poverty. They steal from our children and our lives so that more Russians and Ukrainians may die, and there’s always a new target of the violence ready to go for these bloodthirsty monsters.

Had you decided to listen rather than throw a tantrum, you might have learned these things.

Per the other reply to you, you might recall when I went over our consensus perspective on Ukraine, how it is motivated by understanding the best possible outcome for Ukrainian lives and contrasting this with the bloodthirsty liberal approach you’ve supported (all dressed up in “concern”).

Is it the “uninformed” and life-devaluing comments you’re referring to?

Tell me, what was your reply to that explanation?

You mean our informed comments that actually value the lives of Ukrainians?

Yea, even those were in no way reasonable.

They’re very reasonable, especially as a starting point for negotiations.

1. Ukraine haw a very serious Nazi problem that liberals everywhere recognized right up until it became inconvenient for the war narrative. The Nazi problem is part and parcel of the civil war and failure to abide by Minsk II, as those Nazis were the tip of the spear against ethnic Ruasians in Donbas. Disempowering and jailing Nazi war criminals shouldn’t be controversial.

2. Russia wants to prevent encirclement and to treat Ukraine as a neutral buffer. Given NATO’s advancements despite the fall of the Soviet Union, this demand is already a half-measure. Ukraine being militarized and used as a Western forward military base is not something Western countries would tolerate if the roles were reversed.

3. Ukraine isn’t joining NATO anyways, not anytime soon at least. This is a formalization of the aforementioned neutrality.

4. Independence of Luhansk and Donesk is a demand that says, “you couldn’t abide Minsk II and that leaves this as the only option”. Ukraine and their Western masters had nearly a decade to democratically deal with the breakaway states per their own agreements and chose to instead ramp up a civil war targeting ethnic Russians right on Russia’s border. The failure od the status quo ans the West’s ability to follow their own rules is the proximal issue Russia is reacting to.

5. Ukraine isn’t getting Crimea back. This is a formalization that would simply amount to normalizing relations in peacetime.

Those terms are obviously so Russia can keep conquered territories while removing Ukraine’s ability to defend itself so Russia can take the whole thing in a few years.

Russia could take the whole thing any time they wanted to, lol. They have complete air superiority and a much more powerful arsenal and manpower and tactics. They could do the American thing - the NATO thing - and destroy the rest of the country, targeting Kyiv and civilian infrastructure en masse. Instead, they are choosing a war of attrition that achieves many of their objectives without just rolling over the whole country.

Neutrality is far safer for Ukrainians and always was. A neutral Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded by Russia in the first place.

Also there was no ethnic cleansing, no idea where you’re getting that.

Then you haven’t been paying attention. Like… at all. It’s been going on since 2013/2014. Please educate yourself on the derussification efforts undertaken by Ukraine targeted at ethnic Russians as well as their ruthless targeting of the Donbas.

The baltics joined NATO like 15 years ago and Ukraine’s application was denied so there’s none of that either

None of what?

And even if both were true those terms mean annexation for Ukraine in the future so in no way acceptable.

Ukraine is already not a sovereign state, lol. Their political leadership was chosen by Nuland et al behind closed doors as part of Euromaidan. Neutrality would actually be the most sovereign they have any chance of being, toyed with through economic courtship rather than couped and destroyed.

And again, Russia can annex Ukraine wherever it wants to. Most of it, at least. Poland would probably claim Western Ukraine for itself with various bullshit excuses.

You are confused and are including open demands Russia made of the US / NATO prior to the invasion. Russia has not demanded that Ukraine somehow de-NATOify Baltic countries.

Russia’s initial negotiation demands were things like this:

• Denazification.
• Demilitarization.
• No application to NATO.
• Independence for Luhansk and Donetsk.
• Recognition of Crimea as Russian territory.

These are in no way insane demands given the context of NATO encirclement, the civil war and ethnic cleansing at their doorstep, and the fact that Russia is obviously never giving up Crimea. It is also… the lead-in to negotiations, which Ukraine started balking at around the same time reports came out about Western prevention of Ukraine participating.

I don’t see any of that, personally.

Any chance the liberal in your head is editoriakizing some straw men?

Ethnic cleansings in those territories are a fabricated casus beli for Russia ‘green man’

The ethnic cleansing was and is part of official Ukrainian policy. Do you think the sneaky Rooskies infiltrated and forced Kyiv to drop Russian as an official language, one that could be learned and used in schools in Donbas? Did they cleverly rename the streets to Bandyerite fascist names? Did they create the Azov Batallikn, Righy Sector, etc - the Ukrainian fascist groups weaponized against the ethnic Russian civilians of Donbas and now directly incorporated into the government and armed forces? Did Russia secretly create the entire Kyiv side of the civil war that heavily targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure on the Donbas side?

Cool to learn, I didn’t know that.

You should do more listening to hexbears because that sounds nothing like us.

Russia repeatedly made peace talk attempts early on. Western powers that actually call those shots rebuffed them. Boris Johnson himself intervened, allegedly.

The answer to the real question, which is why Russia isn’t unilaterally ending the war, is that its objectives have not been met and/or the status quo is acceptable to them. The former is the exact same as saying why Russia invaded in the first place.

So why do Western powers want this was to go to the last Ukrainian? NATO military tactics that assume air dominance without the air dominance. Zero expectation of a win, despite the propaganda.

Ok, I will not be defending those actions of NATO

You’ll just ignore their relevance to why NATO approaching your doorstep is, in fact, hostile and aggressive.

NATO was literally created to oppose the USSR and the left in Europe generally, and did not disband after the fall of the USSR, instead taking up further aggression and at greater range, and keeping a very clear encirclement position around Russia. The bases got larger, the spending increased, and membership was sought to undermine any countries stepping out of line of the American-imposed order.

non hostile sovereign state

Non-hostility is when you do ethnic cleansing against the ethnicity the neighboring country is named after, engage in a war right by the borders to support that ethnic ckeansing, violate your treaties to end that war, and cozy up your coup government to the military organization intended to encircle that country, an org that regularly engages in aggression.

The Balts were immediately used as forward positions for NATO and were allowed to keep their state programs and industry. Belarus got the same treatment as Russia.

You should probably know the answer to your own snarky questions before you ask them.

Siri, what’s imperialism?

I don’t have the time for the classic tankie “reply with a wall of text and deflections”

This is literally a deflection to avoid dealing with the (inconvenient) basic facts you should’ve learned before having any opinion on this topic in the first place.