If you don't recall, right at the start of the war, a small Ukrainian National Guard unit was stationed on "Snake Island", a tiny island in the Black Sea. A Russian warship approached the island and told them by radio to surrender. The commander replied "Russian warship, go fuck yourself!". The Russian warship opened fire and blew them all away. For their brave sacrifice, Zelensky posthumously awarded the "thirteen brave soldiers of Snake Island" various medals and honors, and "Russian warship, go fuck yourself! became a shining symbol of Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression, plastered over the west's print and social media for days, until whatever the next thing was replaced it.
This is a war between armies of hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side. It's statistically impossible that neither side engaged in killing POWs, the question is who did it more? What is the culture of the army? Is it something done occasionally by individual units, hidden from commanders, or is it just accepted by the entire command structure?
Having followed this war closely from the start, the "vibe" I get is that Russia is continuously humanitarian, frequently offers Ukrainians the chance to surrender and treats POWs well on the whole as a matter of military policy, and I feel confident saying the majority of mistreatment of POWs by the Russian side would have been done by Wagner, not the RU Army. Conversely, the Ukrainian army, riddled with rabid fascists and roving paramilitaries barely under the control of the political leadership, has constantly tortured and killed POWs and gloated about it on social media. I realise I should have saved the evidence, but that wasn't exactly the frame of mind I was in while seeing it at the time.
::: spoiler But when the OFFICIAL Twitter account of the National Guard posts shit like this
:::
I think it's safe to say 'humanization of the enemy' is not on the agenda.
They support Russia because the Kiev regime has been trying to genocide them for the last nine years! After the coup against the president that the Russian speaking areas voted for the new coup government immediately banned Russian as an official language. They made it illegal to teach it in schools! They attacked and persecuted people across the Russian speaking area, especially the Donbass. For instance in Mariupol, Kiev sent the overtly fascist Azov battalion to attack and break up a march in celebration of the 69th anniversary of the Soviet victory in WW2, using APCs and live ammunition. Now why would they attack on Victory Day, the day of symbolic victory over the Nazis? The officers of the Mariupol police station refused to go out and beat up marchers, so they were quietly murdered. Here are the events depicted even by western empire media, back before they'd had the 'Slava Ukraini' chip installed.
I assume you don't consider the Marine Corps Gazette to be Russian propaganda.
To also be absolutely clear, no Ukraine is not fighting for its existence. Russia's interest in territorial gain extends only to the areas of majority Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian populations.
This is for the very simple reason that it's literally not possible, in the modern world, to hold territory in which the native population does not want you to remain. Trying to do so will only result in a very long, very costly anti-insurgency campaign and your eventual defeat. This is exactly what NATO was hoping for when they baited Russia into attacking, that they would try to occupy and hold the whole of Ukraine. Instead, Russia only bit off as much as it could chew and is now allowing the Ukrainians to waste all their soldiers and equipment by attacking into impenetrable fortifications. When that's done, they'll counter-counterattack, grab some more Russian speaking land, and then let the limping Kiev rump state collapse under neoliberal austerity shock doctrine privatization administered by their 'allies' in the West. Ukraine could have avoided all this by upholding either of the two Minsk agreements that were painstakingly worked out by diplomats from both sides, but unfortunately the hand of their masters in Washington was too strong.
This babyfaced brit fuckwit is in absolute overdrive trying to steer the framing and questions to the 'correct' viewpoint and he just gets battered aside by a wizened ancient spouting facts. To the point of having to disclaim beforehand that the interview might not meet acceptable thought-cleanliness standards for the civilized mind.
No! But actually, yes! Here is a high-ranking Azov fascist talking about various things (how the west supports them because they enjoy fighting and killing, how the Maidan would have been a "gay pride parade" if not for a very active fascist element) but most importantly what would happen if "Russia split into five or so Russias". This has been the US State Department's goal since 1993, to divide up Russia into a group of powerless fractional states and enslave them through austerity and debt peonage, so they can exploit their natural resources and labor cheaply - EXACTLY as they did to the Balkans, directly across from Russia.
The threat of the fascist Kiev regime is that it is attacking, subjugating and ethnically cleansing the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens of the Donbass, who formed militias and fought back against their extermination for eight years. If the AFU had launched a huge invasion and pushed deep into the region, it would be too late for Russia to reverse the operational momentum - ESPECIALLY if, as was continuously threatened, Ukraine joined NATO or their invasion (overtly) included NATO personnel, at which point Russian intervention would start a nuclear war - and they would be left with a group of victorious, energized, viciously anti-Russian fascists on their doorstep. Would those fascists diligently stay on their side of the border? No, of course not. As Andriy Biletsky, founder of the Azov battalion puts it, it is their "crusade to lead the Aryan peoples of the world against the Jewish-led untermenschen". Russia would be subject to continuous destablization by Nazis crossing the border, with the ultimate goal of bringing down the Russian state.
Ukraine, or crucially rather the US State Department puppetting Ukraine, vigorously waved a red flag in front of Russia's nose for eight years, getting closer and closer until finally Russia was forced to invade or face a direct threat to its existence. And how gradually they invaded! It took about a week for the Duma to vote on recognizing the DPR and LPR as sovereign states, and then vote on signing a defensive pact with them, and then finally start moving soldiers into position.
![CascadeOfLight [he/him]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/4be38b64-63e3-40a3-8581-0ec11349c485.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Sometimes they go entire flights without intersecting the ground!