The war broke out because Putin covets Ukraine and always has.
Always has? They didn't start talking about annexation till well into the invasion. In the Minsk agreement he wanted the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, didn't even recognize the DPR/LPR right until the start of the invasion. Maybe, just maybe, they actually feel threatened by NATO encirclement, like they've been saying since basically forever, and which even prominent US politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning about. But I guess you prefer pseudo-psychological explanations to realpolitik ones. Fuck reality we got vibes!
Given this, why do you believe if the Ukrainians lay down their arms Russia wouldn’t continue doing exactly what it has been doing — trying to kill their civilian population and deport their children?
Why would they? "His army's conduct" is about par for the course. You should read about how much civilian targets the US hit during the Iraq invasion. Of course the civilians will be a lot safer once the fighting stops. The goal of this invasion is not to kill as many civilians as possible, that would look way different. The Nazis had extermination squads trailing the front just committing one huge massacre after another. They had death camps. This is not what's going on in Ukraine. Fighting age civilian men get imprisoned and "filtrated", but are usually released after a while and then allowed to get Russian passports. "Harmless" old people and women and so on aren't even filtrated. Ukrainian children are returned to their parents if/when they show up. This isn't some extermination campaign.
I already responded to this in a reply to another user:
So it’s perfectly normal to revive a slogan that was last used by fascists? I’m sure the fact that Ukraine also made Bandera a national hero and put up statues of him and named streets in his honor right around the same time that slogan made its comeback is just a coincidence? Totally innocent slogan my ass.
You might be blind in your right eye if you think this isn't some fascist shit. This is like "the swastika is an old Hindu symbol" type defense, only worse because you're ignoring the Hitler portrait right next to it.
Why would the hastily trained Ukrainian recruits be any better than the Russian ones? Ukraine looks to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, since they're now also conscripting HIV positive and mentally ill men. It also looks like Ukraine has higher losses, especially now with the offensive, meaning that over time more experienced Russian soldiers are going to be fighting Ukrainian fresh recruits.
Russia also has more equipment and ammunition. And don't start talking about quality: Most of the stuff that was sent to Ukraine is old stuff, and Russia also has a mix of old and new stuff. Even when you compare the numbers of roughly equivalent types of weapons, Russia comes out ahead in pretty much every category.
These stories about the superior NATO weapons, superior NATO training and whatnot are propaganda. There are warhawks that use this story to dismiss the obvious quantitative difference, bigots that love to believe in Russian inferiority and incompetence, and weapons manufacturers trying to advertise their Wunderwaffen. It's all bunch of crap.
It's going to happen eventually, as they're going to run out of recruits before the Russians do. This is like playing a game of chess to the bitter end, only the pieces are real human beings. Hundreds of thousands of them.
That won't work, it's not just Putin doing this alone you know. You'd need a powerful (the most powerful, actually) faction inside the Russian state apparatus that want to just give up, and there's no real reason to think there is such a group. And no anti-war opposition has enough support to do a coup or win elections.
No defeatist is getting into power. It's not going to happen unless Lenin rises from the dead.
What? When the US attacked Iraq they obliterated the infrastructure with air strikes. Electricity was almost completely out for weeks and wasn't fully repaired for years. Water treatment failed because of the lack of electricity, causing epidemics. Lots of other civilian shit got struck as well. Iraqi infrastructure got fucked way worse than Ukraine's.
The United States never inflicted that level of destruction anywhere close to the scale of that war which has killed over 600,000 people.
Over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence.
An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
Oh I do consider the Russian soldiers victims that should be helped to escape their situation.
madman
No need to figure out how or why this war broke out, Putin is simply mad. It follows from that also that you can't reason with the guy. Do you think this is a children's cartoon?
alternative for them is to die at the hands of the Russian military
You gotta explain this. Last time I checked, the civilians casualties in this war weren't that high, and civilians can and do usually stay clear of the front lines. They might even leave the country if the men were allowed to. So if they weren't soldiers, they almost certainly wouldn't die at the hands of the Russian military.
Look, you can't just present an argument and then tell me not to reply.
The history of Ukrainian support of him is fairly new and is far more complicated than “we like fascists”,
I'd like to hear your arguments why worshiping the leader of an organization that took part in the Holocaust is somehow "complicated". It's not like this isn't some well-known fact. Seriously, this is obviously totally fucked. Why would you feel to need to defend this? It's not, actually, fucking complicated.
If they all want to fight so bad, why are the men not allowed to leave the country? Why has Zelensky recently announced a crackdown on draft dodging? Why are there so many videos of men getting dragged kicking and screaming into vans by military recruiters kidnappers?
So it's perfectly normal to revive a slogan that was last used by fascists? I'm sure the fact that Ukraine also made Bandera a national hero and put up statues of him and named streets in his honor right around the same time that slogan made its comeback is just a coincidence? Totally innocent slogan my ass.
I think them conscripts would rather do something other dying for their country. I know I would.
Have you ever read Catch-22? Yossarian likes to go on about how everybody is trying to kill him. If you're a Ukrainian soldier it's not just Putin who's out to kill you. It's your own government too, and apparently the average western lib on this very internet forum.
I really think "Slava Ukraini" is a fascist slogan, because it is. Since you're mad at me for pointing it out, I suspect it might be you who would get banned if you said what you really think.
In April 1941 in German-occupied Kraków, the younger part of the OUN seceded and formed its own organisation, called the OUN-B after its leader Stepan Bandera. The group adopted a fascist-style salute along with calling "Glory to Ukraine!" and responding with "Glory to the Heroes!". During the failed attempt to build a Ukrainian state on lands occupied by Germany after its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, triumphal arches with "Glory to Ukraine!", along with other slogans, were erected in numerous Ukrainian cities.
Read an article some years back about someone installing Linux on a hard drive.
Not on a computer with a hard drive. On the embedded ARM core inside the hard drive. One of them anyways, I think this particular hard drive had three CPUs inside it actually.
"Slava Ukraini" is fascists slogan used by, and mainly associated with, the mass murderers of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews. I guess that doesn't count as terrorism in your worldview.
XTerm. I used to use rxvt-unicode, but it only supports 256 colors and gave me grief when I tried to get some emacs color theme working. There's only one thing I miss, which is that rxvt-unicode reflows lines when you resize the terminal, which xterm won't do. Oh and urxvtc starts very slightly faster, but no big deal.
I also looked at kitty, and I like that the author of that one tries to champion new features, like full keyboard support on par with X11 apps. But it takes noticeably longer to start and the latency also feels worse.
Better acceleration, steeper inclines, tighter curves at same speed, better ride quality and less wear. As someone has mentioned below, normal trains could go a lot faster than they do in practice, because the ride quality, wear and wind resistance get atrocious, and the tracks need to be exceptionally straight. Making a maglev go fast is more feasible, though you still have the wind resistance issue obviously.
I've seen videos and articles that suggest that many Ukrainians fight because they are forced to do so by other Ukrainians. And what do you mean eradicated? Do you know of some secret extermination camp nobody else knows about?
"Ackshually, technically, totally fair." This clearly only affects this one group of people in practice. The law was obviously made to garner the bigot vote and distract from the incredibly unpopular shit this government is pulling. This "technically" shit is only deflection. I mean it works great on people who are Islamophobic but don't actually want to admit that to themselves. Plausible deniability.
impose it onto others
How are these children "imposing" anything onto others? You see one abaya, and now you're forced to accept Mohammed as your prophet? Do you know what "impose" means? You used it correctly just two sentences before that.
Always has? They didn't start talking about annexation till well into the invasion. In the Minsk agreement he wanted the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, didn't even recognize the DPR/LPR right until the start of the invasion. Maybe, just maybe, they actually feel threatened by NATO encirclement, like they've been saying since basically forever, and which even prominent US politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning about. But I guess you prefer pseudo-psychological explanations to realpolitik ones. Fuck reality we got vibes!
Why would they? "His army's conduct" is about par for the course. You should read about how much civilian targets the US hit during the Iraq invasion. Of course the civilians will be a lot safer once the fighting stops. The goal of this invasion is not to kill as many civilians as possible, that would look way different. The Nazis had extermination squads trailing the front just committing one huge massacre after another. They had death camps. This is not what's going on in Ukraine. Fighting age civilian men get imprisoned and "filtrated", but are usually released after a while and then allowed to get Russian passports. "Harmless" old people and women and so on aren't even filtrated. Ukrainian children are returned to their parents if/when they show up. This isn't some extermination campaign.