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Fuck Ukrainian Azov Nazis and fuck anyone who defends them (www.thenation.com)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/news@hexbear.net
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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

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[+] 10 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (20 children)
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  • [–] 37 points 3 years ago*

    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.

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  • [+] 24 points 3 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (15 children)
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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (13 children)

    dont show me Russia funding separatists as evidence, the DPR and LPR have the right to defend their right to self determination

    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

    yet now they have been subjected to far worse horrors than in the 2014-2022 period

    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.

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  • [+] 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (12 children)
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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    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.

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  • [+] 11 points 3 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (9 children)
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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [+] 9 points 3 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)
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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    Russia has attacked civilian targets and infrastructure.

    "OHCHR verified a total of 9,444 civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine as of August 13, 2023. Furthermore, 16,940 people were reported to have been injured"

    you're still making a legalistic distinction "attacks on civilians" vs. "attacks on combatants" these attacks on "combatants" clearly contain civilian deaths, so what actually is the difference to you besides who's doing the murder? e: this is combative, not how i intended it. but i think the fact of civilian deaths emerging from the category of 'attack on combatant' is very destabilizing for using that as a discrete category from 'attack on civilian', is it not?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    i think the fact of civilian deaths emerging from the category of 'attack on combatant' is very destabilizing for using that as a discrete category from 'attack on civilian', is it not?

    Ukraine certainly likes to destabilize it: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    it's not like the Ukrainian govt was bombing them for fun, it was a war. Civilians died on both sides-that doesn't excuse it, but it certainly does not justify an invasion!

    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.

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