GivingEuropeASpook [they/them, comrade/them] @ GivingEuropeASpook @hexbear.net

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2 yr. ago

The same federal government that let abortion become illegal across half the country?

NATO is a defensive pact to protect nations from russian aggression

NATO is a legacy of the Cold War that was aimless until the Russian invasion lol. The Soviet Union even tried to join NATO when it was first talked about and was rebuffed (and you can't say it's because "muh democracy," as Greece, Turkey, and Portugal - a literal fascist state until 1974 - have all been or are authoritarian states at various points in their NATO memberships).

Plenty of geopolitical experts have discussed how financial support of Ukraine is the best investment when it comes to weakening the Russian military.

Plenty also argued from the collapse of the Soviet Union that NATO expansion into eastern Europe would antagonize Russia.

while losing majority of your combat capability

We're watching this conflict unfold from a million miles away, how could you possibly know that they've lost most of their combat capability? That wasn't mentioned in the article. If the article is paywalled for you, I was able to read it entirely with Firefx's easy-read button.

Do you believe that the people have Donbas have a right to self-determination and representation in government, and that that right would include having some possible roadmap to joining Russia

Of course. They just don't have a right to drag the rest of Ukraine into Russia at the same time. On principle, I support pretty much any separatist movement on the grounds of "why should I care if a country's capitalist class loses some of its economic base?"

should they be forced to either go along with whatever the new government wanted or abandon their homes and flee the country?

No, but if that's what was happening we could all then be criticizing a peacetime government for acting injustice upon segments of its population, instead of advocating for an end to a war. The idea that a country should intervene militarily in order to "save" a group of people isn't one based on honest, good-faith altruism on the part of the country that wants to intervene, if it were, then wouldn't we be in a constant state of war everywhere? (Since there's pretty much at least one oppressed group in every country worldwide at least one other country could claim a right to "protect" them based on shared heritage or language.)

Just because Russia (might) have the military capability to do so when all these other countries might not doesn't mean they should.

And your example is really weird and obscures what's actually at issue. The difference in meaning between the words "bros" and "sissies" goes way beyond just a difference in gender. One is a common and generally affectionate term that men call each other when being friendly. The other is most often used as a misogynistic term to insult men by disparaging their masculinity.

I wanted to give a couple of other examples too, but that's just what I thought of at the moment. "Hey guys" or "hey dudes" also works though.

That's not an excuse to use the version of that phrase which misgenders someone.

When did I say or insinuate that it was?

Nope. Just to be sure I went back and checked my initial wording, and I can see why you thought I meant artillery. I should have specified that they are using their own domestically developed military equipment to strike targets within Russia, which could theoretically allow them plausible deniability to then use a couple of Western-supplied artillery, assuming they could do it in such a way that Russia wouldn't be able to tell if it was a drone, IED, or proper artillery.

hmm okay. I mean, they are both OPEC members after all. It sounds like the war just isn't altering Saudi decision making the way the US would like.

It hasn't needed to

They've taken arms and supplies from Iran and are currently negotiating with the DPRK. Yes, Russia is bigger and can theoretically out-last Ukraine in a war of attrition on a 1:1 basis, but you shouldn't be hoping for something that prolongs the war.

It's a nonsensical comparison to make.

So is using a map of the countries supporting Ukraine to insinuate that the all the other countries must therefore be on Russia's side.

In what way? I think a lot of people are acting like anyone not actively sending arms or money to Ukraine must therefore be "supporting" Russia. Has the Saudi Arabian Kingdom given any weapons to Russia? Have they given any loans to plug the holes in the national budget while the country engages in open warfare? Or are they just viewing a European conflict as irrelevant to their own aims and goals?

the communists and PT libs (with opinions that are pretty close to ours: "war is bad, putin is shit, and we should stay away from the whole thing, but hopefully the end result of this one is a weaker, and not a stronger, american/nato empire")

All sounds very reasonable, tbh even the libs and middle-class positions make sense to me if they are plugged into the same media as US libs.

no they haven't they're using artilery equipment we gave them.

Don't blatantly lie.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-weapons-can-hit-russia-targets-430-miles-away-zelenskyy-2023-9 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-develops-weapon-zelenskyy-says-1.6953132

So, if you wanna say "oh secretly it was still the US that supplied the drones or whatever", extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This whole time the Russians have been talking about wanting the east exclusively the early rush to Kiev was consistent with the stated aim of forcing Ukraine to surrender early into the war

The "special military operation" to Denazify Ukraine was not intended to be limited solely to the East. Russia tried to replicate the US operation in Iraq, and had they been successful, they'd be in a very similar position to the US after toppling both Iraqi and Afghan leadership relatively quickly, stuck propping up government with limited popular support. Also, what about everything about NATO's eastward expansion and Ukraine's prospective membership? That has nothing to do with injustices against Russian-speaking people.

The Ukrainians have thrown everything they had in a mad rush to break the Russian lines and only succeeded at retaking a dozen villages.

This is literally the opposite of what the article says: "Some [Western analysts] faulted Ukraine's strategy, including accusing it of concentrating its forces in the wrong places." Sounds to me like they emphatically NOT making a rush at the targets the West wants them to.

8 years so were more militarily experienced now Russia has been fighting for a while they will have worked out much of the issues of their organisation

Right, just like how that Ukrainian counteroffensive is gonna start any day now.... Its warfare. Neither side is honest about their operations, and neither side can afford to be honest about their battle plans, tactics, and strategies in order to actually make use of any of them. When Russia invaded the rest of the country, it was their modernized army that was gonna make quick work of the smaller weaker Ukrainian army. Even NATO was like "uh yeah we expect a protracted guerilla war after a quick Russian victory should Russia actually invade".

For the record, I wasn't sure if Russia would actually invade, despite all the classic rhetoric that came from the Kremlin the year beforehand.

Totally – but I think in the west, people were conditioned to expect breakneck speeds similar to the initial invasion and push towards Kyiv by Russian forces or the rapid advance last year of Ukrainian troops that pushed out Russians from Kyiv suburbs and northeastern Ukraine.

In my mind, a "failure" would mean that they gained nothing – not even a few small villages.

You joke (I think) but you actually illustrate why so many people are supporting Ukraine. The reaction of a lot of people to "the US should be forcibly disbanded by an international peacekeeping force" would be one of indignation and fury at the suggestion that foreign powers should violate one's home and put their loved ones in danger in order to satisfy global political objectives.

The presence of Neo-Nazis within a nation's borders does not give another country just cause to invade unilaterally. The idea that, because Ukraine has Neo Nazis and incorporated groups like Azov into its formal military structure, it makes the Russian invasion justified, is to implicitly accept that bigger, more powerful countries are entitled to "spheres of influence" and thus should be able to unilaterally intervene in their neighbour's politics when it suits them.

Ukrainians aren't particularly more supportive of Neo-Nazis than any other white-dominant nation in Europe – it was just an excuse by Russia to invade.

It's all about plausible deniability. The US didn't want to arm them with anything that could reach Moscow and hit Russian territory in general, but the Ukrainians have developed the ability to do so on their own, so now US officials I think are more willing to discuss these things, since it can't be directly traced to them (since now Russia can't prove it was specifically American armaments or equipment used whenever it gets hit inside it's territory).

The Russians have the parts of Ukraine they want

This is revisionist. It was clear that Russia's military objectives in invading the rest of the country last year were to remove Zelensky and put back a friendly government to Moscow. They failed, and now are falling back on what was always the more pragmatic and "reasonable" war goal of holding the pre-February 2022 lines of control + what they still have now. But, now that an all-out state of war exists between Ukraine and Russia, it's "allowable" in the eyes of the West for Ukraine to try and regain all of its internationally-recognized territory in a way that it wasn't before.

...have fortified heavily which leads my analysis of the situation to be that Ukraine recapturing the taken area is not realistic and their goal of getting Crimea on top of that to be completely delusional

I don't mean to deride your analysis, but I also do wonder how much analysis some random Hexbear user can really make. I mean, I can look at maps of assessed control from the ISW and I hear about what goes down in some of the more nationalist Russian telegram channels but I deliberately try to avoid anything that makes me sound knowledgeable in military strategy and tactics.

I will say, that given the general attitude here that we want choices and decisions to be taken that reduce the fighting and scale of death, Ukraine's approach of incrementally retaking villages instead of throwing everything it's got in a mad rush to break Russian lines shouldn't be criticized.

Ah, all good then.

Ukraine escalated by violating the ceasefire.

Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I'm always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.

If Russia wanted to ensure the safety of the people of Donbas (which is a big if tbf), what should they have done differently, at any point leading up to the conflict?

If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like "Come across the border and we'll set you up with a Russian passport".

Did I read the same article as everyone else? I don't get where "failed offensive" is coming from. It was western media that created the impression of an impending counter-offensive that would all but end the war, not anything from Ukraine's armed forces as far as I know.

Since launching a much-vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia's main defences," .... NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN that Ukrainian commanders deserved the benefit of the doubt. 'Ukrainians have exceeded expectations again and again," he said. "We need to trust them. We advise, we help, we support. But... it is the Ukrainians that have to make those decisions."

This doesn't sound like a "failed" offensive to me. The "much-vaunted" part came from the West, not Ukraine. It sounds to me like western officials got themselves psyched up based on nothing and are now whining about it. So like, yeah, critics of the slow counteroffensive, shut up. You sound as ridiculous as the people who acted like Kyiv would be taken by March 2022.