this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I'm sorry, who is actually running Ukraine? Is it the Azov lot and their like?
One of the two sides of this war has warmongering ultranationalists in government. It's not Ukraine.
Zelenskiy just a couple of weeks ago did a photo op with Azov fighters. The Ukrainian government gives money and arms and propaganda support to Neo-Nazis. No other government does that. Even Russian Neo-Nazis are fighting for Ukraine. Yes the Ukrainian government is ethnonationalist.
Zelenskiy:
Such a brave push back on the Nazis. He has a point. Naming every street and bridge after Bandera is going to be confusing, I'm sure the Nazis will agree.
If your proposed plan for dealing with the likes of Azov is "let Putin's Russia win" then you do not actually have a problem with the far right being in power in Ukraine, you just have a preference in your flavour of far right. Frankly if I were in Zelenskiy's position and a fascist told me he wanted to go die to defend democracy from other fascists, I'm not about to discourage him, I'm gonna chalk it up as a win-win
Are you reframing the arming and promoting of SS worshipping white supremacists as some sort of clever antifascist tactic? Seriously anybody helping with resurrection of the genocidal Nazi ideology in Ukraine needs to be tried at Nuremberg. Russian conservative brainworms are far from "master race must cleanse the land of untermenschen" type shit, of course that's better. How is this even a debate?
Putin's regime is also far right, so you're just arguing about shades of fascism here.
However, only Ukraine is a democracy. Russia is not.
No, I'm saying that the Zelenskiy has got to pick priorities and the invading army committing war crimes all over the country is the one he put at the top. Which of the two countries is waging an offensive war to annex territory? Which one of the two has the imperialist mob boss in power? Which one of the two has clung to its colonial empire? You don't give a fuck about opposing fascism, you've just seen the West supporting something and decided that you're going to do the opposite of that
You think the Ukrainian army is not committing war crimes? First ethical army ever. You wouldn't expect these guys with the SS Totenkopf patches to be this standup, but here we are, clean as a Wehrmacht. Oh wait! They shelled civilians regularly since 2014. Maybe they should have stopped like they agreed to and this whole thing could have been avoided? Nah it's all Putin's fault.
Zelenskiy isn't really the boss now is he?
And on the colonialism: Look at all that Soviet infrastructure in Ukraine. Pretty good, pretty similar to how it looks in Russia, right? Living standards, education level, life expectancy, all that stuff was pretty similar between Russia and Ukraine in 1989. Now look at West Africa. Does that look like France to you?
Evil Soviet colonialists, bringing infrastructure and healthcare and factories and public pools!
Maybe both sides should have respected the Minsk agreements, but neither did. Both were followed by a failure for either side to reach a full ceasefire and then a major offensive by the DPR.
At no point have I said Ukraine is acting flawlessly here. But you're still comparing a flawed democracy with some fascists living in it to an invading militaristic empire with a centuries-long track record of imperialism openly asserting claims on the grounds of blood and soil. Not to mention that it seems to function specifically for the benefit of the unfathomably wealthy man who has literally had the constitution changed to specifically get around term limits just for himself and his buddy.
I can't wait to hear your explanation of how Zelenskiy is an imperialist and Putin isn't. Is it because he's being mean to poor little Russia by not giving them all the things Putin wanted for his birthday?
Oh Canada and Australia have good infrastructure, pretty similar to the UK, I guess they weren't colonies either then? Or are swimming pools actually a fucking ridiculous metric to use? But besides that, I was referring to Siberia. You know, where Russians colonised their way to one of the largest empires in all of history and most of it is still part of Russia.
Who's doing the blood and soil thing? Is it the people flying the literal blood and soil flag? Nah couldn't be!
Flawed democracy my ass, Zelenskiy is doing the opposite of what he promised and was elected for, has criminalized the opposition and consolidated the media. The Nazis have complete freedom to operate and state backing.
Zelenskiy is an imperialist because he is sacrificing (more like throwing away) Ukrainian lives for the benefit and under the direction of the US empire. He's a collaborator.
Russia (all the former socialist countries really) actually were colonized in the 90s. Those countries are being exploited by western capitalists and controlled through western capitalist media and NGOs, and therefore do not have sovereignty or democracy. There's some pushback (like Orban), but the only country that actually managed to free itself from the imperial domination was Russia (they fucked Russia too hard and it flipped). The empire then baited Russia into a war to weaken them. They activated their old pals the Ukrainian Nazi shits they worked with during the cold war and by attacking ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine they made it impossible for the Russian leadership to ignore this situation.
Oh, okay, so to be clear, according to you:
Invading another country to take its land and people = not imperialism (as long as America doesn't like it)
Fighting back against that invasion = imperialism
You aren't worth engaging with. You're just unbelievably horny for the right wing authoritarian country with a big army because it once painted itself red.
Yes, Russia is not primarily motivated by gaining resources, they're motivated by self-preservation and public pressure to stop the ethnostate Nazis next door from doing ethnic cleansing and having the civil war spill over. Whatever land the Russians take isn't going to be worth their losses for a really long time. That doesn't obviously mean they're unhappy if they capture anything of value, but it's pretty clear they were trying to avoid this situation.
That civil war in Ukraine was potentially going spill over, plus a hostile military force (and/or NATO troops) there is great lever to threaten Russia into submission. They could use any instability inside Russia (fueled by them) as a pretext to move weapons or troops into Russia proper. Just the threat of that could cause Russia to cave.
The US and EU look at eastern Europe as a great opportunity to exploit and plunder, and were trying to increase their grip on the region. In the case of Ukraine, they supported pro-western libs and Nazis to install thoroughly pro-western regime that would allow them to loot and plunder and station troops there.
You could argue that this became so big and generated so much blowback, that the US empire is now also looking at this as an existential problem (not existential for the US state really, but for the empire), but it didn't start out this way. They were just in the usual "crush resistance, expand influence, loot resources" mode, but they could just as easily have chosen to just wait and see and back off for now, without this causing any existential problem for them.