this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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Honestly not a bad take compared to many others I've seen regarding this shit show. Russia doesn't really give a shit about Nazism in Ukraine and is using this war to secure it's strategic assets around the region that had been in under Russian/Soviet control for centuries before the breakup of the USSR. 2014's coup threatened any sort of cooperation in Crimea and hence Russia proceeded to annex it.
Or NATO was going to install nuclear launch sites next door to Russia. But if you gloss over that fact then yes, Russia bad.
Analogy: Mexico lets a US adversary install nuclear launch sites just south of the USA border. How do we think that would go? Mexico would be the pawn.
What's happening in Ukraine is a result of USA/EU actions, and Ukraine not being smart enough to pick up a history book and see how the USA uses poor countries as fodder. They must be shoveling mass money and cocaine at Zelensky. It's all literally a case of "well well, the consequences of our actions." The USA just wants resources and nuclear launch sites.
they certainly do. But America has trouble relating because we were all cushy and safe over here while Russia was ratfucked by Nazi Germany. Russians still know the songs about the Great Patriotic War.
Why? What's the difference of having launch sites in kieve compared to having launch sites in Germany, or even on a submarine in the artic circle? It's not the 60's anymore, we already have more than enough capacity to Russia if it came to nuclear war.
Yeah, because historically it's been America who's done horrible things in their country? Has the US used and abused it's allies? Of course, just go ask the ask the Kurds. But it's ignorant to believe that Russia hasn't practiced their own form of militant imperialism. Militant imperialism that has and is still personally effecting their country.
Yes, we are super desperate for .......sunflower oil and wheat?
Where did this insane theory about nuclear launch sites come from? America hasn't expanded launch sites since 87'. If NATO was wanting more sites, don't you think they would have put some in Poland by now?
Lol, yeah..... Putin hates Nazis, which is why they have a pmc named Wagner, whos previous co founder was a self confessed neo nazi.
Nazism is a problem everywhere in the post Soviet eastern block, including Russia. While the soviets were in power they strictly banned nazi imagery, for obvious reasons. When Gorbachev loosened state control over media and other censorship laws, the swastika became an anti state and anti communist symbol.
This was often adopted by criminal organization in and around the Soviet block. These same criminal organizations had the capital to buy up state controlled companies as the soviets auctioned off state companies to private interes, becoming some of the oligarchy now controlling the Russian state.
they don't launch missiles from dedicated launch sites or missile silos in the ground anymore, they use stealth aircraft or fighter jets to carry the missiles for hypothetical first strike scenarios. airbases that close to russia could let them attack the capital before they could meaningfully retaliate. rando military officers promoted via emergency aren't going to be as willing or able to push the big red nuclear retalliation button as the career politicians and generals in the capital. ICBMs like the ones carried by nuclear subs are easier to detect and intercept (or more realistically retalliate against the launcher), because they have to reach high altitudes to fly with less wind resistance, while nukes deployed via even normal un-stealthed aircraft can be camouflaged more easily, as they don't have to have the range or size of ICBMs. they don't necessarily know just from radar if its a nuke on the plane and not a normal missile, for example, and weapon systems like low-altitude cruise missiles launched from planes relatively closeby to the target could take a path through terrain that would conceal it from radar by using treetops and mountainlines as cover.
Right, that's kinda my point. It was the other person's claim that they invaded Ukraine to stop the US putting installing missile sites. Neither silos or airbases really makes any sense. North west Poland is closer to Moscow by the way of the crow than all but a small part of Ukraine.
and you don't think they would use that "small part" of ukraine? you don't think having access to ukrainian airspace, ideally someday without russian military euipment within its borders, would be helpful at all? like maybe we would want to launch a multi-pronged attack from several locations at once or something?
no one said it was the only reason, there's also the consistently broken ceasefires and ethnic cleansing of russian speakers in the donbass and luhansk republics. and the american interference in ukraine's government. see any UN report from before 2020.
Not really, it's basically a salient flanked by Belarus. Not exactly somewhere you'd want to put sensitive equipment. Especially compared to Poland, where they have buffer states.
I mean, we were talking about Russia's justification of invading Ukraine. Now that justification includes Russia already being there?
Why? What would the west materially gain by fully mobilizing and invading a nuclear power? NATO doesn't care defeating Russia in a totalitarian war, they mostly care about Russian competition in central Asia and the Middle East.
Why invade when you can bankrupt the government via proxy war, just like they did with the USSR. If NATO really wanted to set up an invasion, they wouldn't be slow walking more aggressive military aid.
There's been no evidence for this.....
Again, you are aping the justifications from a militaristic capitalist state, while completely ignoring historical materialism.....
i wasn't talking about invading and mobilizing, but a multi prong nuclear first strike to take out nuclear launch and control facilities. an invasion may or may not happen afterwards to secure the region.
as for evidence of ethnic cleansing, i already mentioned the UN reports but i'll post.
https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf
https://press.un.org/en/2022/ga12483.doc.htm
https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14823.doc.htm
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-problem-vladimir-putin-s-denazification-claim-war-ncna1290946
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_14th_HRMMU_Report.pdf
https://www.state.gov/reports/2018-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/ukraine/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/02/the-historian-whitewashing-ukraines-past-volodymyr-viatrovych/
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/white-supremacists-other-extremists-respond-russian-invasion-ukraine
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality-of-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine-is-far-from-kremlin-propaganda/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline/
https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/mappingmilitants/profiles/azov-battalion
Is not saying anything about ethnic cleansing. Everyone knows there's been crimes against humanity committed by both pro Ukrainian and pro Russian forces.
Is a un voting resolution about the spread of nazi ideology.... nothing to do with ethnic cleansing.
Is literally a un security council meeting about Russians killing civilians.....
Lol literally an opinion piece that starts with ... "Of the many distortions manufactured by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify Russia’s assault on Ukraine, perhaps the most bizarre is his claim that the action was taken to “denazify” the country and its leadership."
Is a document laying the blame for the vast majority of human rights violations on Russian led forces.....
"Russia-led forces in the Donbas region engaged in: enforced disappearances, torture, and unlawful detention; committed gender-based violence; interfered with freedom of expression, including of the press, peaceful assembly, and association; restricted movement across the line of contact in eastern Ukraine; and unduly restricted humanitarian aid."
I would do the rest, but I can tell by the titles that they don't hold any evidence that says there's been any ethnic cleansing. You managed to link more evidence supporting ukraine cause than ones justifying any of Russias claims.
Hilarious.
The problem with this take is that why would Russia take pieces of land in Ukraine just to invite unprecedented sanctions against itself? Russia has lost hundreds of billions of US dollar assets and their oligarchs have been hit even harder, with overseas assets and properties seized.
The annexing of Crimea in 2014 invited sanctions that practically erased Russia’s economic growth that had been gaining ground since 2001, which took near 4 years (44 months!) to even get back to the pre-sanctions level (even worse than the 2009 global financial crisis and the Covid recession in 2020). So it’s not like they didn’t anticipate this would happen.
Yes Russia is lucky their economy didn’t collapse, but what is the point of a land grab in Ukraine when you lose businesses from your European partners? Tens of billions and years of construction went into Nord Stream (both pipelines) just to be abandoned, and then bombed? It is clear that Russia felt that it had to make this decision because the situation had devolved to the point where an invasion of Ukraine has become the least worst for them (emphasis here is failure of diplomacy).
The imperialism of the 21st century is one of super-imperialism, where you can simply cut off their financial access to the world’s most liquid asset (US dollar) and watch them struggling to survive. This is how the hegemon gets its “free lunch” from the rest of the world, simply through printing currency out of thin air and having total control of that currency, which comprises 85% of the world’s transaction. And this is why de-dollarization is at the forefront of the countries who wish to escape the claws of US imperialism.
not luck they have spent decades making their economy more sanction proof in the lead up to this as they saw it coming
It’s both, Russia did make its economy more resilient to sanctions, but ultimately it is not an industrial nation but one of resource colony.
Make no mistake, Russia is food and energy self-sufficient, it will survive even in the harshest sanctions, but it would still be very painful for the transition because it lacks many industries. It would have taken years to rebuild the Soviet era industrial supply chain if they were really cut off access to imports from the rest of the world.
Russia got lucky that China and the rest of the world didn’t join the Europeans in sanctioning them. One factor could be that the US overplayed its hands, by seizing all of Russia’s foreign reserves ($300 billion) and cutting off SWIFT access actually had the unintended detrimental consequences as it scared the other countries into thinking that they better find ways to get out of the US dollar regime in one way or another, or this too would be their fate one day if the US isn’t happy with them.
They already knew this, since this behavior from the US is hardly new. Just look at Cuba, Iraq, Iran, DPRK, etc. Although I guess the difference here is scale, since if you sanction Iran or Cuba that's not going to affect most of the world's nations, so it's relatively easy to ignore.
I think it did motivate material actions to some extent though, as we’re seeing with the expansion of BRICS and dedollarization within these countries.
I think they do care a little bit in that for the last 8 years those nazis have been engaged in a civil war right next to the Russian border and believe that ethnic Russians are inferior. Russia doesn't need to be ruled by saints to be annoyed at that turn of events