The Russian Invasion of the Ukraine.

[JoeMorgue]

I feel like the American Confederacy is a valid comparison here.

They were never a country despite "Self determination."

 

[angrysoba]

Huh. Here I am cracking wise, and it turns out the situation is already beyond parody.

It gets worse. Dugin split off to form the Eurasia Party.

I guess we have always been at war with Eurasia.

 

[Arcade22]

What does Putin want from this war? It's easy: total domination of Ukraine. He and other Russian imperialists see Ukraine in the same way extreme British unionists see Scotland: as a core essential part of their country's identity.

Putin and like-minded imperialists won't tolerate Ukraine becoming increasingly connected to the West. It doesn't matter if Ukranians have their own wishes, what matters is maintaining the "traditional" political and cultural submissiveness of Ukraine.

They are incensed and enraged by Ukraine daring to emphasize its own culture, language and history over "Great Russian" centric narratives where everything Ukrainian is "rightfully" relegated to peripheral unimportance. This what Putin meant when he said they had "squandered" everything Russia had given them since Catherine The Great.

This is a war born out of Russian imperialist revanchism and irredentism.

 

[JoeMorgue]

"Russian identity" sounds an awful like "The USSR again."

 

[crescent]

Here's an interesting BBC article about how different the coverage in Russia is.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60571737

It's not Russia Today, but it indicates where the editorial push is coming from.

The pro-Russian disinformation tactics have come up with one twist that I had not seen before this current conflict: Strawman debunking.

1: They take an old photo or video from another conflict, or one from the current conflict that shows destroyed Ukrainian equipment.

2: Manipulated it so that it appears to show damaged Russian equipment from the current conflict. (Usually by adding in Z to match marks on Russian equipment).

3: Make a social media post or news story showing both, accusing pro-Ukrainian people of being the ones who doctored the imagery.

4: This includes showing the source of the original video, geolocating it to another conflict, or pointing out that the damaged equipment is of a type not used by Russia, or showing metedata indicating that the video is from an earlier conflict (lots of video from the 2014 fighting is used for this).

So if you see a video debunking site/post that is debunking a video you had not previously seen - get skeptical. There's a good chance that the altered version of the video/pic was never released by itself in the first place, existing only to be debunked. It's a sort of a strawman argument, in the form of digital manipulation.

The pro-Russian people do this to try to make it appear as if the pro-Ukrainian people are just as dishonest as they are. Make us doubt any information coming out that favors Ukraine or that suggests that Russia is not doing well in the conflict.

The BBC article that The Don linked to shows an example of this, and this is one I've seen popping up in English-language social media and being seen as credible by otherwise objective people.

 

[ponderingturtle]

The Belgian population doesn't want (as far as I know, and I am Belgian) to be split between the Netherlands and France.

Belgium has a certain personnality (modesty, good social protection...), that it wants to keep.

Bah why should that matter? I am sure some sufficient differences can be stoked by France and Germany to get enough violence to easily justify it. Really Belgium was never a proper country anyway, like Ukraine it was always just someone else's territory and the pretense of sovereignty needs to be put to an end.

 

[Ryokan]

There is nothing in International Law that stipulates that parts of countries can just secede if they hold a referendum.
Michel's argument about Crimea is just propaganda without any legal basis.

Which begs the question...

Why are people engaging this person? Why do people let him set the agenda for this thread?

 

[Andy_Ross]

But if we would take over the Northern part of Belgium, evict a lot of the people there, supplant them with our soldiers and other people, until we have a majority and then hold a referendum to join the Netherlands, it would be alright?

It worked for Northern Ireland

 

[JoeMorgue]

Which begs the question...

Why are people engaging this person? Why do people let him set the agenda for this thread?

Because he represents a line of "thinking" held by a lot of people in the real world, so understanding/debate/debunking/counter it is a useful skill to develop.

 

[Arcade22]

"Russian identity" sounds an awful like "The USSR again."

Russian imperialists see the Soviet Union merely as a continuation of the Russian Empire, which it arguably was in practice after Stalin effectively made Russia the model for the whole union in terms of culture, language and such. They don't care about the economic system but rather the authoritarian Russian imperialism.

 

[GrandMasterFox]

Okay question I have zero illusions I receive a logical or indeed even coherent answer to.

The USSR broke up about 23 years ago. Why now? Why not in 1992 or 2042?

My guess? It's what Yes Prime Minister referred to as the Salami Tactics.
It's not like Putin jumped all in at once. He went after Georgia in 2008, went after Crimea in 2014.
Heck, he might have went after Ukraine in 2020 to keep the 6 years gap and was only postponed because of Covid for all we know.

The difference is, now he is getting some opposition. Because fool us once shame on us, fool us 3 times...

 

[JoeMorgue]

I mean "Why now" within the context of "The justification is Ukraine is really theirs, so Putin is justified in taking it"

How the Ukraine anymore or less part of Russia now then it was 20 years ago or 20 years form now?

 

[crescent]

The Russian space agency Roscosmos has said it will not launch satellites part-owned by the British government without guarantees they will not be used for military purposes.

Jeez, that really sucks. Those poor Brits will now be forced to pay SpaceX to launch them instead. And that's terrible, because SpaceX launches them for 1/3 the cost. I mean, the poor British government will now be forced to launch three satellites for what the Russians charged to launch one.

 

[GrandMasterFox]

I mean "Why now" within the context of "The justification is Ukraine is really theirs, so Putin is justified in taking it"

How the Ukraine anymore or less part of Russia now then it was 20 years ago or 20 years form now?

I thought the justification is because it needs to be de-nazified?

 

[dasmiller]

Okay question I have zero illusions I receive a logical or indeed even coherent answer to.

The USSR broke up about 23 years ago. Why now? Why not in 1992 or 2042?

I've been wondering this too. My gut reaction is always to assume that it's some internal pressure. That may be the case; Putin's certainly using it to suppress any political opposition.

It may also be the case that Putin simply decided that the international furor over the previous invasion had died down sufficiently that he could get away with a new one. Russia has been doing a new invasion every 5-8 years*, so we were due for the next one.

But of course that's just speculation. I'm not satisfied that we (I) understand why Putin decided that Feb 2022 was the time to do it.

*Russian invasions since the 1991, extracted from Wikipedia:
1994: Chechnya
1999: Chechnya
2008: Georgia
2014: Ukraine
2022: Ukraine

ETA: Kinda ninja'd by GrandMasterFox

 

[theprestige]

My reply should be understood in the context raised by erwinl.

In addition, I really don't think that the violence currently displayed by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine is acceptable or justified. But this doesn't me that political concessions by Ukraine should be automatically ruled out, because Putin has done something very bad.

You want to reward Putin for doing something very bad, instead of resisting him and his evil deeds. Why is your solution to evil always to back down and let it win?

 

[Arcade22]

I mean "Why now" within the context of "The justification is Ukraine is really theirs, so Putin is justified in taking it"

How the Ukraine anymore or less part of Russia now then it was 20 years ago or 20 years form now?

The Ukranians had a revolution and kicked the Russian puppet president out of office. The Russians then invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in order to handicap and try to break the country, forcing them to give into Russian domination.

8 years later and the Russian occupation has not even come close to breaking Ukraine. Putin is old and apparently extremely afraid of dying to covid. It's not unlikely that he thought he couldn't wait any more and that a full invasion is the only way to fully crush Ukraine before he dies. He must secure his legacy and position in Russian history books.

 

[crescent]

I don't know exactly. However, it has been suggested that Putin's playbook is Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics.

I believe the Timothy Snyder brought this up when the Maidan protests happened back in 2014. Childlike Empress was very annoyed at the suggestion which is further confirmation that it may be true.

Ultimately one of the goals that Dugin spells out is:

Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics". Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible.

This might hit the nail on the head. The self-congratulatory article that was published then retracted used the highlighted words exactly, more than once. "The Ukrainain problem" is almost a proper noun in that article.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Fighting in Mariupol is especially vicious. I suspect this is the kind of thing that the rest of Ukraine has in its future assuming Putin doubles down (which seems almost inevitable).

Horrible conversation with the deputy mayor of Mariupol. Says residential areas heavily bombed, including his father's neighbourhood.
"The situation is awful, we are near to a humanitarian catastrophe. We have been under more than 15 hours of continuous shelling without pause."

“One district of the city is nearly totally destroyed ... We cannot count the number of victims there but we believe at least hundreds of people are dead. We cannot go in to retrieve the bodies. My father lives there, I cannot reach him, I don't know if he is alive or dead."

“The Russian forces are several kilometres away on all sides. The Ukrainian army is brave and they will continue to defend the city, but Russia does not fight with their army, they just destroy districts.

“We believe in our Ukrainian army, but we are in a terrible situation.”

https://twitter.com/joelmgunter/status/1499016901963440128

If infantry are unable to push through Ukraine because of heavy resistance, I suspect that this tactic of shelling from a distance will become more common.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Also it's 2022. "The Nation State" isn't what it was in the Napoleonic era.

If a country wants to stay a sovereign nation but maintain stronger ties with this nation or that nation or make internal divisions between different areas there's a billion and one ways to do that that wouldn't even make anyone blink an eye.