We’re just not keeping our head in the sand here. Ukraine is not taking back Crimea, or even the Donbas. The counteroffensive failed horribly. Cheering for more bloodshed isn’t going to make a better outcome in the end.
"cheering for more bloodshed." Are you telling on yourself? You act like a counteroffensive is supposed to be fast and easy. It's not, war is bloody and deadly and Russia is not going to call for peace until they achieve their objective of overthrowing the Ukrainian government or achieving a peace deal where they can keep Ukraine's economic sectors
You act like peace deals are the same thing as calls for peace. They can still have peace deals to appear they want peace when they started the war in the first place back in 2014
You act as if a peace deal isn't literally someone calling for peace.
Lmao what with the "infiltrators" that cannot be proven? The two oblasts have a large population that is ethnically russian. When a government that had spoken of cleansing russian influence comes into power, it is pretty understandable that that would foment separatism. At best we can prove Russia provided financial aid to separatists, and then later stepped in and negotiate Minsk I and II, which were both broken by Ukraine
Some Russians who maybe maybe not that lived in the area fought against Ukraine which means they wanted autonomy therefore it's ok for Russia to annex and invade Ukraine
Quick question: did you know about any of this before today? Did you know about the Maidan Coup? Did you know about the nearly 15,000 casualties, including over 3000 civilian casualties, in Luhansk/Donbas between 2014 and 2022? Were you aware of the extensive reporting by western sources on far right elements in Ukraine committing crimes against humanity?
If any of that was news to you, do you think it's ever appropriate to pause and reassess your position? Or are you just going to double, triple, and quadruple down on your fairy-tale understanding of the world with smug quips that don't address anything of substance?
Yall calling for the continuation of the war are telling on yourselves. Otherwise you'd fucking be fighting rather than advocating behind a computer for others to die. Too scared to go to Spain and fight the fascists?
Oh man the the US union should've just given up the civil war instead of continuing the fighting. Think of all the good Americans that will die. Let's just let the confederates secede instead of having a bloody conflict
The only progress the counteroffensive has made is in destroying Western materiel and getting scores of Ukrainians killed. They haven’t even reached the second defensive line yet. The total amount of territory retaken is like 100 meters of farmland. I’m calling it a failure because it is a failure.
You act like a counteroffensive is supposed to be fast and easy.
It's September. Their window to make any gains in their counteroffensive has passed. Now they have to fight against the weather on top of the Russians.
"Ukraine should surrender so that they can spare their civilian and combatant lives to Russia which totally won't abuse their land and people as they've done in the past"
Ukraine should surrender now while people still have families to come home to, instead of propagating senseless death.
You're also just making russian demands up? At no point during this war has Russia sought to annex the entirety of Ukraine, which it seems to be whate you are implying they will do.
Please try to remain in reality.
You're linking me to the Woodrow Wilson institute? Lmao get the fuck out of here. Whats next, radio free Russia? If you want a serious answer to what Russia claims just look at what demands they have made - these are the demands negotiations revolve around
There were pogroms and mass murders at the ground level and there were laws targeting Russian speakers from the governmental level. The weapons Trump was impeached for tying political favors to were being used against resistance militias. They were being used to bomb facilities built in the soviet era that pump hot water into people's homes as the local method of heating during the winter. They locked over a hundred people in a building and burned them alive in it. They broke multiple treaties with Russia in order to do all of this. This was the lead up to the war.
I'm talking about the targeting of ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the eastern part of Ukraine (the Donbas region.)
There has been attacks against these people going on since 2014. Thousands upon thousands have died and more have been wounded in this low-grade civil war that became the prelude to the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Here's a western article filtered through western intelligence describing the situation with some glaring oversights, namely that there has been ultranationalist paramilitary forces operating in the Donbas (Azov, Right Sector, C14, National Militia, OUN et al.) with tacit approval from the Ukrainian government since 2014 and that civilian targets have been routinely been used by the military and the paramilitary groups.
Here's a short article written by a former USAID officer (!) published by The Atlantic Council (!!) that describes the problem with far-right militias in Ukraine, just so there's no accusations of bias from me in this discussion.
They've literally been targeting civilians who are of the "wrong" ethnicity for nearly a decade now. If that doesn't count as an attempted genocide, I don't know what would.
Also that's some cheap framing of the discussion btw. Fascism isn't "don't play defence". I take it that you have gotten your picture of fascism from a particular, well-known YouTube series. If so, that series is critically flawed and it does a bad job of defining fascism and how it functions. But that's a different discussion altogether.
I think you will find Putin flooded the Donbas with Russian citizens with the promise of homes and land long before this war, the people you call Russian Ukrainians are just Russians nothing more nothing less.