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February 24, 2022 at 6:27 pm #136911znModerator
Turkish soccer fans shouting anti-Putin chants at the game. pic.twitter.com/JFaWBsfOm2
— StrictlyChristo🇺🇦 (@StrictlyChristo) February 24, 2022
February 24, 2022 at 11:04 pm #136919znModerator🚨BIG NEWS:
Wall Street lobbyists and their allies in the U.S. government just made it far harder to sanction Vlad Putin’s personal assets and the assets of Putin’s oligarch network. https://t.co/WhfYM0wuD7
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) February 25, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 8:49 am #136932nittany ramModerator13 Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island refused to surrender. All perished. Their last words to the Russians:
“Go fuck yourselves.”pic.twitter.com/AJjaw4teFE
— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) February 25, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 9:38 am #136938ZooeyModeratorFebruary 25, 2022 at 12:47 pm #136946ZooeyModeratorI am reading around, and from what I am learning, I have to say I really don’t understand the reactions I’m seeing all over the place.
I mean…invading is bad, and killing people is bad, and I’m opposed to that.
But to see the reactions of people on Fb and T, it’s as if everyone thinks Putin has done something incomprehensibly crazy and uncalled for, and they’re SHOCKED! Weirdly, on the same day, Israel bombed the shit out of Syria, and the US bombed Somalia, and I don’t see the same sense of outrage. There was a very short piece in the NYT about the Somalia strike that contained this fun sentence:
The command said it was still trying to determine how many Shabab insurgents had been killed in the strike, but it said no civilians were believed to have been harmed.
They can’t tell how many dead people there are, but they know for sure none of them were civilians. Anyway…
So as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control. The US seems to have taken advantage of the situation since the Nazis are pro-EU, so they’ve been assisted financially by the US, presumably for the usual Empire reasons. Meanwhile, the US has broken its promises not to expand NATO, squashed a pipeline deal between Russia and Germany, and I can’t think of one good reason why Russia should be content with these developments.
So…world powers doing what world powers do. None of this is surprising or novel, as far as I can tell, so I don’t know why people are all changing their profiles to show solidarity with Ukraine while calling Putin an unstable madman when none of this seems very different from countless US military actions and CIA interference in sovereign countries that aren’t even right smack on our border.
Also, this new forum eats many of my posts for some reason.
February 25, 2022 at 2:58 pm #136949nittany ramModeratorVideo of Ukrainian father saying goodbye to his kids while he stays behind to fight.
Fuck war.
pic.twitter.com/rvIzotI8pE— Peter Yang (@petergyang) February 24, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 3:02 pm #136950znModeratorRussian tennis player Andrey Rublev writes "No war please" on the camera following his advancement to the final in Dubai. pic.twitter.com/GQe8d01rTd
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) February 25, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 3:05 pm #136951znModeratorSo as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control.
From my admittedly quick reading that’s not the current Ukraine.
And–nothing you’re saying, even it actually is a valid description of the current Ukraine, amounts to a motive for an invasion. It just looks to me like the Russians has no more in the way of defensible motives than the USA had when invading Iraq.
BTW I am Ukrainian. My grandparents joined a wave of immigration in the 1930s that made Manitoba, Canada the world’s 2nd Ukraine. My grandparents could barely speak English. I mention this in passing just as an “interesting fact.” I don’t feel any personal or emotional connection to the Canadian Ukrainian community, let alone to the Ukraine itself. Everything I am saying on this issue just reflects my efforts to understand the event.
February 25, 2022 at 3:31 pm #136942ZooeyModeratorBy Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>Iwas in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military.</p>
There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.How naive we were. The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.
There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are. On the brink of another Cold War, one from which only the war industry will profit while, as W. H. Auden wrote, the little children die in the streets.
The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>In a classified diplomatic cable obtained and released by WikiLeaks dated February 1, 2008, written from Moscow, and addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NATO-European Union Cooperative, National Security Council, Russia Moscow Political Collective, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, there was an unequivocal understanding that expanding NATO risked an eventual conflict with Russia, especially over Ukraine.</p>
“Not only does Russia perceive encirclement [by NATO], and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests,” the cable reads. “Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. . . . Dmitri Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership . . . Because membership remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed concern that elements within the Russian establishment would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.”The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.
The United States and its NATO allies have no intention of sending troops to Ukraine. Rather, they will flood the country with weapons, which is what it did in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
<p class=”has-drop-cap”>The conflict in Ukraine echoes the novel “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In the novel it is acknowledged by the narrator that “there had never been a death more foretold” and yet no one was able or willing to stop it. All of us who reported from Eastern Europe in 1989 knew the consequences of provoking Russia, and yet few have raised their voices to halt the madness. The methodical steps towards war took on a life of their own, moving us like sleepwalkers towards disaster.</p>
Once NATO expanded into Eastern Europe, the Clinton administration promised Moscow that NATO combat troops would not be stationed in Eastern Europe, the defining issue of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations. This promise again turned out to be a lie. Then in 2014 the U.S. backed a coup against the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych who sought to build an economic alliance with Russia rather than the European Union. Of course, once integrated into the European Union, as seen in the rest of Eastern Europe, the next step is integration into NATO. Russia, spooked by the coup, alarmed at the overtures by the EU and NATO, then annexed Crimea, largely populated by Russian speakers. And the death spiral that led us to the conflict currently underway in Ukraine became unstoppable.The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.
I don’t know where this will end up. We must remember, as Putin reminded us, that Russia is a nuclear power. We must remember that once you open the Pandora’s box of war it unleashes dark and murderous forces no one can control. I know this from personal experience. The match has been lit. The tragedy is that there was never any dispute about how the conflagration would start.
February 25, 2022 at 3:32 pm #136939ZooeyModeratorWhy Biden didn’t negotiate seriously with Putin
The two themes that let the Blob carry the day
A couple of decades from now, someone reading an account of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war—if that’s what the Ukraine crisis turns into, as it seems to be doing—may have this thought:
Wait, let me get this straight. So the leaders of the big NATO countries didn’t especially want Ukraine to join NATO? And agreeing to not let Ukraine join NATO—agreeing to not do what they didn’t want to do anyway—might have kept Russia from invading Ukraine? But they didn’t do that? And doing that wasn’t even seriously discussed? Like, virtually no influential American commentators argued that doing this would make sense? How could that be?
Good question! Regular readers of this newsletter may expect me to answer it by launching immediately into an indictment of “the Blob” (the foreign policy establishment) and lamenting the Blob’s lack of “cognitive empathy” (understanding how your adversary, or anyone else, views the world).
Well, you’re wrong about the “immediately” part. Those themes will surface soon enough, but first I’d like to turn your attention to two other themes. These are themes whose promulgation (yes, by the Blob) has stifled serious discussion of how to prevent war in Ukraine (yes, in part by impeding cognitive empathy).
Both are hardy perennials—themes that, over the years, have done untold damage to peacemaking efforts. Maybe if we ponder how little sense they made this time around, we’ll be less likely to fall for them next time around.
1. The Munich theme.
Last week Ukrainian President Zelinsky delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he complained that NATO hadn’t set a firm timetable for admitting Ukraine. His talk generated this headline in the British tabloid the Daily Mail: “Ukraine’s president condemns Western ‘appeasement’ of Putin in blistering address in MUNICH…”
Yes, the headline had “Munich” in all caps: MUNICH. That was a helpful reminder that, in foreign policy circles, the word “appeasement” is almost always a reference to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous performance at his 1938 meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich. With Germany having massed troops along Czechoslovakia’s border, Chamberlain made concessions to prevent an invasion and then emerged from the meeting declaring that there would be “peace for our time.” Which was off by about six years and 60 million bodies.
Ever since then, people who advocate making concessions that could reduce the chances of war have been accused of favoring “appeasement” and have been sternly warned not to repeat the mistakes of MUNICH. No doubt President Biden was aware that he’d have been deluged with that word had he broached the possibility of granting Putin his main wish by ruling out the admission of Ukraine to NATO. (Commentators were sending Munich warnings as early as November and December in response to a different rumored concession.)
The Munich comparison shouldn’t be casually dismissed. For one thing, it’s always regrettable to make concessions to someone who is threatening to invade a country. You’d rather not reward that kind of behavior. Still, paying that price is, I think, the only important parallel between the Munich case and the Ukraine case. And there are at least two big differences between the two cases.
Munich-Ukraine Difference #1: At Munich, with Hitler threatening to invade and seize a chunk of territory, Chamberlain agreed to let him have the chunk of territory he was threatening to seize. Britain and France strongarmed Czechoslovakia into giving Hitler the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of the country. In contrast, the idea behind the NATO-Ukraine concession would have been to keep Putin from seizing the territory he was threatening to seize.
There’s been a lot of talk—from administration officials and others—about how excluding Ukraine from NATO would somehow violate Ukraine’s “sovereign right” to decide which alliances it joins. That’s nonsense. Ukraine has no more of a sovereign right to join NATO than I have to join the Council on Foreign Relations. International alliances, like organizations at the heart of the Blob, get to choose their members.
In short: Chamberlain replaced one kind of violation of Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty—losing territory via invasion—with what was, in effect, another kind: losing territory without the invasion. No one was asking Biden to do that with Ukraine. We’ve been asking him to prevent a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty (losing territory via invasion) by doing something that violates no one’s sovereignty.
Munich-Ukraine Difference #2: At Munich, the guy on the other side of the table was Adolf Hitler. And here’s something to keep in mind about Hitler: He was crazy.
I don’t just mean he considered it totally OK to murder millions of people because of their ethnicity. That’s a kind of craziness, but the more relevant kind, for present purposes, is that he suffered from delusions that led him to repeatedly take existential risks. His declaring war on Russia in 1941, which sealed Germany’s fate, is the most famous example, but other examples had surfaced long before he was Germany’s leader. In 1923, he was lucky to get through his failed “Beer Hall Putsch” wounded and jailed rather than dead.
Putin has never—not in his ascent to Russia’s leadership and not in his subsequent foreign policy—shown the kind of casualness with risk that Hitler showed again and again. So there’s no reason to believe Putin would have followed a negotiated deal with the kind of expansionist rampage that ensued in the aftermath of Chamberlain’s deal—when Hitler, within a year, annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. (Hitler was surprised that the Poland invasion led France and Britain to declare war on Germany; risk assessment just wasn’t his strong suit.)
Besides, since any deal with Putin would have made continued adherence to the NATO-Ukraine concession contingent on Russia’s continued compliance with the deal, this “concession” could be easily reclaimed if Putin violated the deal. A promise not to expand NATO is easy to revoke; letting Hitler’s troops occupy part of Czechoslovakia wasn’t.
2. The ‘Putin can’t be reasoned with’ theme.
Depicting Putin as crazy or irrational or unfathomably strange is a common theme in the Blobosphere (and it of course works in synergy with the Munich theme, since it locates Putin’s tactical psychology in the general vicinity of Hitler’s tactical psychology).
For example, in January influential Blobster Michael McFaul, the former US Ambassador to Russia who is MSNBC’s go-to Russia expert, explained in the Washington Post why there was no point in offering Putin things like a freeze on NATO expansion: “If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology—only some of which comport with Western rational realism.”
Also in January, international relations scholar Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic that Putin “simply does not share a common frame of reference about the world with his opponents in the West.” Rather, “deep in the dark recesses of Putin’s psyche,” there are such things as an “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” so strong as to give the West “limited sway in the situation that is now unfolding.” Hence the title and subtitle of Nichols’s piece: “Only Putin Knows What Happens Next: He alone can make the choice to bring Europe back from the brink of a major war.” And hence Nichols’s take on why Putin was massing more and more troops on Ukraine’s border: “No one really knows why Putin is doing this.”
Not everyone would see the Ukraine crisis as a perplexing product of Putin’s eccentricities. Consider the current CIA director, William Burns. Back in 2008, the year George W. Bush fatefully badgered reluctant European leaders into pledging future NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns sent a memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that included this warning:
Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
Burns added that it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering Ukraine NATO membership—a move that, he predicted, would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
So Burns predicted 12 years ago that pretty much the entire Russian national security establishment would be inclined to make trouble in Ukraine if we offered NATO membership to Ukraine—yet now that we’ve promised NATO membership to Ukraine and Putin is indeed making trouble in Ukraine, people like McFaul and Nichols say the explanation must lie somewhere in the murky depths of Putin’s peculiar psychology.
I’m not saying Putin’s calculations are purely about Russian national security. Obviously, Putin is a politician, and he responds to domestic political forces as well as geopolitical ones. But in the domestic realm, too, his pattern of responses is intelligible as the product of a rational mind.
For example: If enough Russians feel their country is being disrespected by the West, Putin can win points by standing up to the West. And, to put a finer point on it: If Russians hear that the pro-Western Ukrainian government is shrinking the Russian language’s role in public schools and closing Russian-language media outlets—both of which the Ukrainian government has done—then standing up to Ukraine could become an especially popular way to stand up to the West. A recent New York Times piece about Putin noted “the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.”
None of this is rocket science! It’s not that hard to get at least a rough idea of the political and geopolitical factors shaping the thinking and actions of world leaders, and to then engage them accordingly. Yet our finest Blobsters, writing in our most esteemed Blob outlets—McFaul in the Washington Post, Nichols in the Atlantic—sit around scratching their heads in abject befuddlement: This Putin character is so weird that there’s no real point in seriously negotiating with him.
In defense of McFaul and Nichols—and other Blobsters who also suffer from cognitive empathy deficit—they may be victims of the cognitive bias known as attribution error. Attribution error can distort our perception of both allies and enemies. The way it works with enemies is that if they do something we consider bad, we’re inclined to attribute this behavior to their internal disposition, their basic character—not to external circumstances.
So if, say, we’re trying to explain why an enemy is threatening to invade Ukraine, we discount explanations involving political and geopolitical circumstance and embrace explanations that locate the problem in the enemy’s fundamental disposition—in his “emotional and visceral attachment to Ukraine” or, more vaguely, in a peculiar “analytical framework” that’s hard for us rational westerners to grok.
In any event, whatever the roots of cognitive empathy deficit and other unfortunate Blob-typical tendencies that have surfaced lately, the damage is done: Once again, it seems, the Blob has prevailed. Thanks to people like McFaul and Nichols, there was, so far as we can tell, no serious attempt to negotiate with Putin—to offer the kinds of concessions that lay discernibly at the core of his motivation. And now that Putin has recognized Ukraine’s breakaway republics and ordered troops into them—an act of aggression and a plain violation of international law—the political costs for Biden of making concessions will be even higher. (And the real costs of making concessions—in terms of the magnitude of wrongdoing that would now be rewarded—is higher.)
As the aggression unfolds—and possibly expands well beyond the Donbass region that comprises these two republics—expect to hear people like McFaul and Nichols claim vindication: Putin’s as bad and irrational as they said he was! You may even hear some Hitler analogies.
But remember: What we’re seeing from here on out is what Putin did after we followed the advice of McFaul and Nichols and refused to negotiate seriously with him. What we’re seeing is what happens when you don’t try “appeasement.”
Note: Obviously, we don’t know for sure what concessions might have forestalled Russian invasion. But in late January Foreign Minister Lavrov signaled that the NATO-Ukraine concession, along with concessions about missile placement in Europe, would have done the trick. Also obviously, I don’t know what the Biden administration may have offered Putin in private. It’s conceivable that they offered more than we know about. (But beware: Now that negotiations have failed, the administration may try to make its private offers to Putin sound more accommodating than they were.) In any event, this piece is only partly about what seems to have been Biden’s failure to seriously negotiate. It is also about the undeniable fact that mainstream media devoted virtually no time or space to people who were advocating serious negotiation.
February 25, 2022 at 3:35 pm #136957znModeratorRussian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday repeated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s odd claim that Putin’s “decision on the operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine was made so that, freed from this oppression, Ukrainians could freely determine their own future.” Ukraine freely elected a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a 2019 landslide.
Ukraine’s Jewish community is not happy with the “de-Nazify” rheoric. Kyiv Chief Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch told Haaretz he has no idea what Putin is talking about, and anti-Semitic “incidents are very rare and the government takes care of them.” Putin is “totally nuts,” Ilya, a Jewish businessman in Kyiv, told Haaretz. “The Jews of Ukraine are an integral part of Ukrainian society and we never faced Nazism here, or fascism, and we feel safe in Ukraine. We don’t feel safe when Russia says there are Nazis here.”
This is not a new claim by Putin and his Russian allies, though. And Zelenksy tried to head it off on Wednesday, hours before Putin launched his invasion. “You are told we are Nazis, but how can a people support Nazis that gave more than 8 million lives for the victory over Nazism? How can I be a Nazi?” he asked Russia. “Tell my grandpa, who went through the whole war in the infantry of the Soviet Army and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine.”
So, what does Putin mean by “de-Nazify?” Stephen Colbert asked journalist and Russia specialist Julia Ioffe on Thursday’s Late Show. “Is he speaking in a vocabulary that is for, you know, domestic consumption, that we don’t understand?”
Ioffe said that when Ukrainians protesters ousted a pro-Kremlin president from Kyiv’s Maidan square in 2014, “there was a very active right-wing nationalist, sometimes neo-Nazi, contingent, but it was a minority on the Maidan. And Russian propaganda took that — they often just take like a little bit of truth and spin it into this, you know, cotton candy of lies.” Russian state TV is saying the same thing eight years later, she added, and “I think there are a lot of Russians, especially those who watch state TV, who think it is a country run by Nazis, even though it has a Jewish president.”
But the Nazis are a powerful enemy in the imagination of all former Soviet regions, including Ukraine, and Ukraine has been throwing the Nazi label back at Putin, too.February 25, 2022 at 3:42 pm #136958znModeratorPutin says he will ‘denazify’ Ukraine. Here’s the history behind that claim.
Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked the Nazis on Thursday when he announced his decision to launch a large-scale military operation in Ukraine.The rhetoric around fighting fascism resonates deeply in Russia, which made tremendous sacrifices battling Nazi Germany in World War II. Critics say that Putin is exploiting the trauma of the war and twisting history for his own interests.In his narrative, the West overlooked the role the Soviet Union, Russia’s predecessor state, played in the fight. In the war’s aftermath, the United States and other Western nations formed the NATO military alliance as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
Now, Putin sees NATO as an existential threat — and Ukraine’s bid for membership as a red line for Russia’s security.The irony now, Snyder said, is that Putin appears to be “fighting a war the way that actual Nazis did,” invading neighbors on the pretext that their borders are irrelevant.But Putin’s attempt to recast Ukraine’s government as fascist drew widespread condemnation Thursday, including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is both Jewish and had family members die in the Holocaust.
Three of Zelensky’s great uncles were executed as part of the German-led genocide of European Jews during the war, the president said on a trip to Jerusalem in 2020. His grandfather, who was the brother of those killed, survived.“Forty years later, his grandson became president,” Zelenksy said in an address.>The Ukrainian leader also fired back at Putin’s Nazi claim Thursday, saying on Twitter that Russia had attacked Ukraine just “as Nazi Germany did.”February 25, 2022 at 3:46 pm #136959Billy_TParticipantMy own take:
Starting a war is evil, no matter who does, and I don’t feel the slightest obligation to remain silent about that, even though the US has “done it too.” All too often, of course.
In fact, I think we all have a moral obligation to condemn whoever starts them, and maybe if everyone did that, instead of tying oneself up in knots about matters of supposed hypocrisy, they’d happen less often.
To stretch a sports metaphor to the breaking point: I see myself as a moral free agent. I don’t wear team colors. So, just as I feel no obligation whatsoever to root for the home team, or stay silent when that team does bad shit, I see no reason to remain silent when other “teams” do bad shit.
I think the world would be a far better place if no one felt the need to wear team colors, or shake their poms poms for their respective nation-states. They’re fictional entities to begin with. Our moral and ethical compasses aren’t.
February 25, 2022 at 3:48 pm #136937ZooeyModeratorSome history:
A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
<dl class=”po-hr-cn__authors”>
<dt class=”po-hr-cn__byline”>BY</dt>
<dd class=”po-hr-cn__author”>BRANKO MARCETIC</dd>
</dl>https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea
February 25, 2022 at 3:49 pm #136962znModeratorPutin’s invasion of Ukraine, explained
Putin declared a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Now, Europe is witnessing its first major war in decades.
By Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer Updated Feb 25, 2022, 8:36am EST
* https://www.vox.com/2022/2/23/22948534/russia-ukraine-war-putin-explosions-invasion-explained
Russian troops are closing in on Kyiv, threatening a city of nearly 3 million people as Russia’s war against Ukraine extends into its second day.
In the early morning hours on Friday, Russian airstrikes targeted Kyiv as Russian forces began entering the capital. Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails,” to defend against the invasion. United States government officials have warned that Kyiv may fall soon, as Moscow moves into Kyiv with the goal of regime change.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking earlier on Thursday, said Ukraine was alone in defending itself. “Who else wants to fight with us?” he said. “Honestly, I don’t see anyone.” He continued to call on Europe, and the West, to impose harsher penalties on Russia, and told Moscow that Ukraine was ready for negotiations to “stop people from dying.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia would not negotiate a settlement unless Ukraine puts down arms, setting up the possibility of a bloody battle for Ukraine’s capital city.
After months of threats, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine. It began in the early morning hours of Thursday, local time, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was launching a “special military operation” in Ukraine, a move that was followed up by reports of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv.
The Ukrainian foreign minister confirmed soon after that “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strike.” By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts. According to the Pentagon, Russia launched more than 100 missiles into Ukraine, an opening salvo that defense officials said may be leading up to full-on effort to take the capital of Kyiv. At least 137 Ukrainians have been killed so far, Zelensky said Thursday.
Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe could lead to the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. It could cost thousands of civilian lives and create hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the violence in Ukraine. About 100,000 Ukrainians have fled so far, according to a United Nations estimate.
Putin’s announcement came while the United Nations Security Council held a special session in
New York on the Ukraine crisis, and bombing began shortly thereafter, according to news reports. In his address, Putin claimed “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. Putin claimed that the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “responsible for bloodshed.”
The tension over Ukraine has been building for months but escalated quickly this week when, on Monday, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood. He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said, that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.
Putin’s escalation comes after the United States warned, again and again, that a larger invasion by Putin was imminent, and after the US and its European allies imposed significant — but far from all-encompassing — sanctions on Moscow. On Thursday, the US imposed the harshest penalties yet on Russia, including on the country’s largest banks.
Putin’s “Nazi” rhetoric reveals his terrifying war aims in Ukraine
“President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Wednesday, soon after Russia began its strike. “Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC News that he’s “convinced” Putin is attempting to overthrow the Ukrainian government.
The United States imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia, and other allies joined them in putting harsh penalties on Russia. On Friday, the European Union said it would directly sanction Putin and Lavrov.
But this is all unlikely to stop Russia from waging its campaign in Ukraine, leaving Ukraine — and the world — is in a perilous and unpredictable moment.
Hours before Putin’s announcement of an invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an impassioned speech against war, one directed to a Russian audience, as a final plea: “War takes away guarantees for everyone,” he said. “No one will have any kind of guarantees of security. And who will suffer from that the most? People.”
Ukraine is under siege
We are still learning the extent of Putin’s bombardment as his war unfolds. As of Friday, Russian troops had reportedly entered the outskirts of Kyiv after hours of Russian airstrikes. US officials have warned Kyiv may soon fall — with little clarity about what may come next.
Ukrainian leaders believe political assassinations appear to be a real possibility. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelensky, speaking in a T-shirt on Thursday night.
Reports of fighting in the city of Kharkiv, in the east, and in other parts of Ukraine continued on Friday.
In the early hours of the offensive, Russians had reportedly entered Ukraine from the north, south, and east, “assaulting by land, sea and air,” according to Reuters. Ukrainians are fleeing major cities, and residents are taking shelter underground, in subways.
Russia seized the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency is monitoring developments there “with grave concern.”
At Antonov International Airport, a global cargo hub located about 16 miles outside of Kyiv, Russian paratroops and Ukrainian forces engaged in a three-hour firefight. The Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs says the military has regained control. The Pentagon estimates that Russia has fired more than 160 ballistic missiles into Ukraine.
Why is Putin attacking Ukraine? He told us.
“This is a deliberate, cold-blooded, and long-planned invasion. Russia is using force to try to rewrite history,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters. The alliance met today to plan for ways to strengthen the defense of neighboring NATO countries Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland.
Russia has remained defiant and insists that is not actually launching a full-scale war.
The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union
Over the last few months, Putin had amassed close to 190,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, a force that military analysts said was clearly prepared and ready to launch an invasion.
Such an invasion would — and does — contravene security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements, Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.
But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is also helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “were one people — a single whole,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.
“It’s not about Russia. It’s about Putin”: An expert explains Putin’s endgame in Ukraine
Last year, Russia presented the US with a list of demands, some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”
Ukrainian firefighters arrive to rescue civilians after an airstrike hit an apartment complex in Chuhuiv, Ukraine, on February 24. Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a non-starter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on Monday showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.
“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation. “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”
The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained, Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false.”
As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned, and other statements he’s made — with any sort of realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation Wednesday night.
This is the culmination of eight years of tensions
This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and invaded eastern Ukraine and backed Russia separatists in the eastern Donbas region. That conflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date.
Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union. US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.
President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.
“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”
Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International’s index.
Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “de-nazifacation” of Ukraine.
To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelensky is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army.
Ukrainian servicemen get ready to repel an attack in Ukraine’s Luhansk region on February 24. Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images
Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.
“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, a research organization in Arlington, Virginia, said at the time. “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use force in defense of these independent Republic’s Russians citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”
It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Wednesday, those next steps became clear.
How the rest of the world is responding
The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion on Ukraine. Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it a “dark day for Europe.”
“The events of last night mark a turning point in the history of Europe,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.
All leaders have vowed consequences for Russia. As President Biden said: “The world will hold Russia accountable.”
Biden announced Thursday afternoon that the United States will impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies. Along with penalties from the United Kingdom and Europe, these are the “massive” penalties the West had been warning Putin about.
The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On Thursday, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany. Biden had previously said that the US will continue to provide defensive support for Ukraine, and some are calling for the US and its partners to provide more lethal aid to the largely outmatched Ukrainian army.
Russia largely knows that the US and its partners to not want to commit themselves military, and, early Thursday as he launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal: “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.”
NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. Experts said NATO also had other options, including activating the NATO Response Force, a 50,000 troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion.
Yet these are largely defensive measures — which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of sanctions. Thursday’s announced sanctions didn’t include some of the most dramatic options, like cutting Russia off from Swift, the electronic messaging service that allows entities to communicate about global financial transactions, and targeting Russia’s energy sector. But the penalties are still some of the harshest sanctions ever directed at Russia or a major power like it. That will come with potential costs to the global economy, and especially to Europe and the United States. The price of oil spiked to more than $100 per barrel on Thursday before coming back down.
“This is going to impose severe cost on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time,” Biden said while announcing the sanctions. “We have purposefully designed these sanctions to maximize a long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our allies.”
February 25, 2022 at 3:59 pm #136963znModeratorA US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
I dont accept that as the actual history. I know some circles are promoting that take. But I don’t think the facts support them.
February 25, 2022 at 3:59 pm #136964Billy_TParticipantAlso,
I’ve been on the receiving end of “blame America first!” accusations a thousand times, and they always piss me off. But I think some of my fellow leftists do have a habit of doing just that, forgetting, ultimately, in cases like this, especially, it really doesn’t matter if the US failed to negotiate in good faith with Putin. He still never needed to start a war with Ukraine. Even if we did all of those terrible things Hedges mentioned, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would still be wrong, totally unnecessary, and unprovoked.
Ukraine was and is no threat to Russia. And just as America has a history of wildly exaggerating the Russian threat, Russia has a history of wildly exaggerating threats from beyond its borders.
We had no right to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, etc. Russia had no right to invade Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Crimea, etc.
A pox on all their houses. War is wrong.
February 25, 2022 at 4:09 pm #136965Billy_TParticipantStill stretching and mixing metaphors:
My given team — the place of my birth was obviously beyond my control — does something terrible. I say so. I feel no constraints about saying so. Why would I feel the need to remain silent when other teams do bad things? Hypocrisy? Um, no. Not relevant.
Team USA breaks the Prime Directive all the time. Say so. Other superpowers break it. Say so.
Spock would approve.
February 25, 2022 at 10:04 pm #136980ZooeyModeratorThis doesn’t seem right.
Graphic ⚠️
A Russian tank swerves & runs over civilian car.
Peacekeepers my ass.
This is sheer cruelty. pic.twitter.com/JMMgTobm9X— Ann is still European 🌍Stand with Ukraine 🌻🇺🇦 (@56blackcat) February 25, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 10:25 pm #136982Billy_TParticipantZooey,
You did the legwork, and it couldn’t have been easy. But it’s too much for me to sift through, and the formatting here isn’t cooperating with your efforts. It’s not really readable for me. Could you distill it down to an essence or two? Your own take from those articles?
Also, to each their own, but I personally don’t see Russian State TV (rt.com) as worth a damn in this situation. The same would go for any “official” media for the US, Ukraine, or any other nation in the midst of war. It’s just not going to be credible.
The world has gone mad. Just read about bomb threats and a campaign of harassment at a hospital in NH, cuz the hospital wouldn’t treat a patient with ivermectin. And now Ukraine.
I get the feeling Sapiens want to join the Sixth Extinction.
February 25, 2022 at 11:14 pm #136987ZooeyModeratorListen to what #NoamChomsky was saying back in 2015 about #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/SelROpdmGA
— JohnQ PhD Hons Bull💩 detect’n (@johnq63175976) February 26, 2022
February 25, 2022 at 11:20 pm #136988ZooeyModeratorZooey, You did the legwork, and it couldn’t have been easy. But it’s too much for me to sift through, and the formatting here isn’t cooperating with your efforts. It’s not really readable for me. Could you distill it down to an essence or two? Your own take from those articles?
I don’t know what is happening with formatting. It’s been since the board got upgraded. I don’t think it likes live links in text that’s copied from html. I don’t know, though. All those articles got caught up, and zn had to do something so they even showed up, but he can’t do anything about the embedded code. Or something. Still figuring it out.
Anyway…I don’t know what to make of it. I said this earlier, and I still stand by it, but I have a lot of questions, like “wtf is Putin hoping to accomplish?” Among others.
So as far as I can gather, Ukraine is an inherently unstable country with a Russian-speaking eastern side, and a western side that speaks something else. They’ve had a series of corrupt, authoritarian grifters run the country as it vacillates between between pro-Russian and pro-western sympathies, and when the people started protesting against the corruption in 2014, the movement was co-opted by nazi sympathizers who took control. The US seems to have taken advantage of the situation since the Nazis are pro-EU, so they’ve been assisted financially by the US, presumably for the usual Empire reasons. Meanwhile, the US has broken its promises not to expand NATO, squashed a pipeline deal between Russia and Germany, and I can’t think of one good reason why Russia should be content with these developments.
ZN says that isn’t quite right, and I haven’t read his Vox article yet. I dunno. I resisted reading anything about this at all until this morning because it’s the same old shite anyway, innit? Powerful people are bastards, and none of them are any good.
I recommend the Jacobin article. Hit the link and avoid the format hell.
https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea
February 26, 2022 at 1:17 am #136989znModeratorThis is along the same lines. 86 footnotes.
I have to admit I still don’t buy it. From what I have read, the 2014/15 situation is not the Ukraine of 2022.
And even if the old situation held in the present, that in itself is no justification for an invasion. Not only is it no justification, it’s very very likely not even the actual reason.
To me, this is no more explainable or defensible than the American invasion of Iraq. And if anything in some respects, using the kind of criteria used to assess Putin’s invasion, Iraq deserved it more–if that is you accept those kinds of justifications.
Zooey, I had to delete that article because of the formatting nightmare it is. It’s just one huge unreadable hot mess. It’s fixable though. When you post it again here’s what I suggest. Do not post it straight into the post box here. Post it first in a word processor like word or in your email. Doing that will strip out a lot of the intrusive formatting that gets copied when we use this new, updated version of the huddle. Then after it has been stripped out that way, post it here.
February 26, 2022 at 6:44 am #136991Billy_TParticipantNotepad++ is a free alternative to Notepad and Word, and helps make it more secure to cut and paste. It strips away html tags, which can hide stuff if you cut and paste directly from site to site. You can see what’s on the page before you paste it elsewhere. I’ve been using it for years. Helps a lot with formatting poetry, for instance.
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
- This reply was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.
February 26, 2022 at 6:53 am #136993Billy_TParticipantWiki has an extensive article (with more than 300 references) on Maidan/Ukraine.
February 26, 2022 at 7:14 am #136994Billy_TParticipantTo state the obvious: there are a lot of competing versions of events in Ukraine right now, and even more when it comes to its past. It appears there’s a lot of divergence even within Ukraine — east to west, especially. And since Russia has the most time zones of any nation-state on the globe . . . it’s a given that opinions differ dramatically there.
For this leftist, it’s not an easy task to sort through it all, find trustworthy sources, etc. etc.
Thanks, youze guys, for posting articles from diverse sites like Jacobin, etc. My own preference, however, is to find out what you think about these things. In your own words, etc.
In the midst of a Camus kick, rereading some of his works and books about him. The world really is absurd, but his voice, his courage, the tremendous obstacles he overcame . . . it all somehow gives me hope. Wish he were alive today, along with Orwell, Gandhi, Einstein, Day, MLK, etc. Jim Morrison would help too.
February 26, 2022 at 11:46 am #136999wvParticipantI posted a Fair article and some comments, but they disappeared 🙂
Ah well. I’ll repost the article without comment:https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/
February 26, 2022 at 12:26 pm #137000Billy_TParticipantI tried to post a couple of links and articles from Jacobin, but it didn’t work. Used Notepad ++ for the headlines, but shoulda used it for the entire excerpt too. Two links, one excerpt, one photo. Software probably didn’t like the double articles.
Will just try an excerpt from the excerpt, and no links:
Socialists Fight for a Future Without War
By
Ronan BurtenshawWar is nothing but organized killing, and there can be no justification for it. Today we must do what we can to support Ukrainian refugees and to show our solidarity with the brave protesters across Russia who insist that war is not carried out in their name.
. . . .
There is no force more destructive in human society than war. With every day and every mile it advances, it tears apart the fabric of life around it. Schools close, transport stops, the streets empty, and that is the deep breath before the plunge. When the wave itself arrives, it brings with it fear like few of us who do not live in war zones can truly understand: the sounds of bombs, the images of destruction in places just minutes from your home, then the sight of blood and injury and death. In the end, that is what war is: organized killing.
That is the reality facing millions of people across Ukraine today. It is brutal and tragic and heartbreaking in equal measure. There should be no equivocation on the Left in condemning Vladimir Putin’s invasion and the murder it brings in its wake. Context matters when it comes to conflict, but there can be no justification for sending tanks and planes into a sovereign country. It is a historic crime. We must do what we can to support the Ukrainian refugees who are its victims, and to show our solidarity with the brave protesters in cities across Russia who insist that it is not carried out in their name.
Today, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, elected with an overwhelming mandate by the Ukrainian people in 2019, called on the Putin government to end the violence and negotiate. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a democrat should back that call.
February 26, 2022 at 12:37 pm #137001Billy_TParticipantAnother one worth reading from Jacobin. Just saw it. Strong historical perspective, context, etc.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/putin-anti-bolshevik-tsarist-mythic-history-ukraine
An excerpt:
Putin’s Anti-Bolshevik Fantasies Could Be His Downfall
By
Mario Kessler. . . .
De-communization
“Do you want de-communization?” asked Putin, citing the demolition of Lenin monuments in Ukraine. “Well, we are very happy with it. But we must not, as they say, stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real de-communization means for Ukraine.” Lenin’s internationalism and Putin’s Great Russian chauvinism are, indeed, incompatible.
All this should show socialists in particular that the man ruling the Kremlin is their bitter enemy. This is true regardless of all the cardinal errors of the West. The Putin government bears full responsibility for the current war, taking up the imperial desires of tsarist Russia, which Joseph Stalin resumed after the break with the Bolshevik internationalism of 1917.
Putin presents himself as the patron saint of all Russian minorities who he alleges are threatened by “genocide.” This historical lie may have further consequences, for Russian minorities also live in the Baltic States. Will their NATO membership deter Russia from invading — even in the case that a (reelected) Donald Trump sends signals that give Putin a free hand? As improbable as this sounds, what is currently unfolding sounded just as unlikely only weeks ago.
All the more important is a broad international peace movement to hobble Russia’s current war and oppose future military buildup. Anyone in Russia who dares to protest against the war deserves the greatest possible support — however small the possibilities may be at present.
February 26, 2022 at 1:01 pm #137002znModeratorTo state the obvious: there are a lot of competing versions of events in Ukraine right now
Just someone from a different discussion group:
Michael ZajacUkraine has a democratically elected centrist government, with a Russian-speaking president of Jewish descent, and cabinet ministers with Armenian, Jewish, Russian, and Ukrainian ancestry.In the last parliamentary election in 2019, the far-right parties joined in a bloc, but still couldn’t even get half the five percent of votes required for official party status. They hold a single seat as an independent in the parliament of 450
Ukraine’s far right has some representation in local governments and conducts attention-hungry demonstrations, but has little real political influence. One or two volunteer battalions have a reputation as haven for the far right, but they are organized around Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians who literally defended their own home towns from Russian and Russian proxy forces, so they don’t even fit the stereotype pushed by Russian war propaganda.
Ukraine’s government is significantly farther from fascist than most of Europe or the Russian Federation.</p>
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