“Many things that you state were happening in Donbas is simply based on a Kremlin propaganda or lies or misinformation. Donbas is occupied by Russia. 14000 dead includes dead on all sides, 1/3 of those victims are Ukrainian soldiers. More than 3000 are civilians, killed by shelling by both sides in the war started by Russia. How is that Ukrainian fault?
on the language law. That is simply wrong. Read the law here: https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/...REF(2019)036-e
So what you write is simply not true.
Have you been to Lviv? I was there, post Crimea occupation, I spoke Russian with locals (my Ukrainian is too poor), and I was fine. I suggest you go and see in person.
Proposed by Russia security agreements between NATO and Russia? Seriously? Restore pre-1997 NATO borders and remove all military and arms from Eastern Europe? So Russia can come whenever they want like they did in Prague in 1968 and Budapest? Seriously?
And I am sorry for my non intellectual style - English is only my fourth foreign language, so I find it difficult to express my ideas in a more fluent and eloquent way.
Valdas”
As an American, I’ve long since abandoned the idea that anything I might glean from “locals” here could help me fully understand the intricacies of history or geopolitical issues. Maybe other countries are better for that.
What I have said in reply to your posts, which characterized my statements as ridiculous, was never intended to be personal on my part. It just made more sense for me to address the questions that you had in response to my posts, in responses to your posts, which unfortunately make my posts seem more personally aimed at you than they are. It’s the general discussion that more important than what either of us are saying to each other.
My response about language laws was as a reply to your assertion that there was no genocidal activity in Ukraine against Russians. Have I read the law? Yes, I have, and I am aware of the tortured history of the law, and aware of the other manifestations of language law in Ukraine and what effect they have on citizens, which is why I linked the other relevant laws in effect. My guess is that at least a couple of the people who see nothing wrong with language laws which forbid, or make difficult, the use of native languages in a country, by means of establishing a “national language”, are the same people who railed against past attempts in America to make English the national language, because that would be “racist”. But, if it’s in Ukraine, done by people on “our side” this month, it’s just fine, desirable actually. It’s amazing what people will say if the context is different.
I regret bringing up the definition of genocide as having a language component, as that has resulted in people making straw man arguments, against what I was attempting to say, instead of what I actually said. The definition of genocide is the definition of genocide, and it includes a language component. I didn’t make up the definition, I just referenced it. At any rate, the genocide itself is something of a side issue to whether or not the Russian Security proposals should have been listened to. I only brought it up, because you said it didn’t exist. People can do their own research and decide whether it exists or not.
People can also find for themselves the statements of Ukrainian nationalists who have killed large numbers of ethnic Russian citizens in Eastern Ukraine, and see for themselves the unashamed ethnic hatreds behind those killings of unarmed civilians, and then decide for themselves whether it can be fairly labeled as genocidal in nature. The depredations didn’t happen, nothing but Russian lies? Only the Kremlin does propaganda and lies? That’s quite an assumption to get fully behind. Of course the Kremlin does propaganda, but the U.S. certainly does propaganda and lies as well. We do everything better than everybody. But, how would one know that, if the U.S. and the EU block their citizens from having access to RT, and thousands of other things that private citizens say on social media. Youtube was recently pasting colored disclaimers beneath anything posted by RT, even if it was videos posted 15 years ago of speeches made at international meetings by Russians, the disclaimers saying “RT is a network funded by the Russian government”. Just like PBS and NPR, in other words. But Americans are expected to make the socially “correct” conclusions. Subsequently, the totally unbiased people at Google/Youtube, who have no political ideology, fearing that even access to any information at all might result in wrongthink, deleted those dangerous videos entirely, and Anna Netrebko can’t be a soprano in public any more, and Tchaikovsky has been cancelled because he didn’t rise from the dead to denounce Putin, because we are the reasonable ones.
Everybody is lying. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was lying through his teeth in December when he claimed that Russia had never been promised that NATO would not move eastward. Why do they think that people won’t figure out they are lying? Because they know that most people can’t be bothered to look, they’ll just regurgitate whatever the saw on Facebook, specifically the half-of-the-story things that Facebook doesn’t block. And that’s what most people do, so it works, generally, and all kinds of sentiments can be ginned up in the resulting information vacuum.
https://www.sott.net/article/464659-...ts-border-east
Disinformation, propaganda and lies?
Runup to 2020 election: “Ex-CIA officials have studied the situation and say that the Hunter Biden Laptop story which revealed details of Biden family financial corruption involving huge amounts of Ukrainian money is Russian disinformation” Now: “NYT admits that ex-CIA officials were wrong, the Hunter Biden laptop was actually HunterBiden’s laptop. Backburner DOJ investigation, very backburner, of alleged corruption is ongoing.” Well, information needed to be suppressed and who better to do that than “ex-CIA officials.” They’re credible, in a pinch. Job done. Good work men, that was a close one.
2016: “Members of U.S. intelligence community have disclosed secret network links between Donald Trump tower and Russian Alfa Bank. Intelligence reports lend credence to idea that Trump is a, perhaps unwitting, “Russian asset.”
2022: “Never mind, that wasn’t true at all.” Good work, men.
Have I ever been to Lviv? No. The fact that you spoke Russian there successfully may not mean as much as you think it means, with regards to the idea that perhaps Ukrainian nationalists of the ultra Right variety have been shelling and killing ethnic Russians in the Donbas region for the past 8 years, with part of their plainly stated reason for doing so being the fact of their ethnicity, something which anyone willing to do the research can learn for themselves. That’s not Russian propaganda and lies, as the U.N. has repeatedly documented it as well. I have no reason to doubt that you spoke Russian in Lviv, but that doesn’t change anything.
You are quite sure that you understand the situation in Ukraine, and all things Russia, better than I do, and I am quite sure that you don’t, so that’s an impasse that isn’t likely to be bridged from the sound of it. That’s not a personal attack on you from me, that’s just where we are. I don’t begrudge you your beliefs. Anything I have posted in response to your posts wasn’t directed at you specifically, but was in a continuing attempt to get people to do their own research instead of just blindly following the herd who believe what they believe for no more reason than what they believe is what everybody knows. In this case, Russia is bad, Russia has always been bad (Hungary! Czechoslovakia!) and Russia will always be bad. I’m more than willing to change my views about Russia intentions, or lack thereof, in Eastern Europe, if provided with evidence that Russia is intent on re-incorporating land and peoples into the Russian or Soviet empires, but I never get any evidence to that effect, only people’s “feelings”, and preconceptions, and restatements of “what everybody knows”, repeated loudly, emotionally, and endlessly.
There were statements here in this thread to the effect that Russian proposals included demands for territory.
“megalomaniac who pines for the good old days of Stalin running amuck”
“Ukraine could be the first course of a bloody lunch for the russia mad man...”
“Putin's terms of capitulation requires the dismantling of the army and the capture and/or killing of the political leadership”
“Putin wants to restore Russia to the boundaries of the Soviet Union.”
And so on.
The entire western media has been saturated with stories headlined “What does Putin want?” Every one of them was a list of projections of what the authors wanted people to believe Putin “wants”, all things which exist solely in the heads of the authors, and the heads of those who have already become so saturated with the same tropes that they can’t see anything else. What Putin “wants” with regard to Ukraine is, and was, spelled out exactly in the security proposals shown below. At least we can legitimately
know nothing else. Nothing more than what is in those, nothing less. The things that people, who have never bothered to read the proposals, are claiming that Russia “wants” are all, every one of them, things that only exist in their heads, things that they themselves have added, preconceptions and prejudices. People who are quick to deny that they have conflated their preconceptions about what “Russians” are up to with what Russia was actually asking for, might consider taking a step back and doing some honest reflection about what their world view is, and where exactly it came from. Not that I would expect that from any majority, any time, any where, on any issue.
It still all comes down to reading the proposals carefully, and deciding for yourself, without dishonestly adding into the calculus your own prejudices about what Russia was “demanding”, all the nonsense about territorial demands and the dismemberment of the Ukrainian government, and all the rest. Were the Russian proposals unreasonable? Just read them, they re not complicated or vague. And why would the U.S. refuse to grant any of those, and was American intransigence worth the resulting dead Ukrainians?
And if people are going to argue with the scant number of those who have asked the questions I have asked, do it with the relevant facts on the ground today, not with what everybody knows is going to happen in the future, or talk about Hungary in 1956, or what’s to become of Sweden in 2064, as those are not arguments, those are feelings, and guesses.
If we could just scrape away all that noise, and merely look at exactly what Russia was asking for, and, for once, just try to attempt to understand
why they might have been asking for that. Anyone who ever had any honest desire to enter this discussion in an educated way, would have read these as far back as December when Russia took the unusual step of publishing them for everyone in the world to see, just so everyone would know that the obfuscation which was sure to follow from the West, was just that. True to form, the U.S. responded to these proposals, in writing, the content of which the U.S. refused to publish publicly, as distinct from the Russian transparency about exactly what their needs were, and their complete transparency about what would happen if the diplomatic attempts a peaceful resolution were snubbed. Which they were.
In the first post I made in this thread, there was a suggestion for people to search out these documents and read them, and then decide for themselves if there were valid reasons for the West to refuse them. From all the statements I have seen here since, about Russia demanding territorial acquisitions, and “the dismantling of the army and the capture and/or killing of the political leadership”, and all the rest, it has been obvious that few here have ever bothered, which explains all the wild eyed and completely dishonest and, yes, there is no other word for it, regret to have to say it, ignorant, hyperbole about what the Russian goals were. And are. There is nothing in the security guarantees that Russia was asking for that would have necessarily resulted in the loss of a single human life, which is the crux of what I have maintained from the outset. If anyone who reads these, still wants to argue that fact after reading them, I don’t know what else to say. If things revert to form, those who won’t read them, will continue to talk about Hungary, Sweden, and God only knows what else.
This insistence on always reverting to saying that whatever happened in Hungary in 1956 is all we can ever expect from different Russians 70 years later, because, you know, they’re Russians! They’re all the same! Can’t help themselves, so it’s best for the world to just confiscate their assets. The notion that capitalist Russians are exactly the same as Communist Russians, with exactly the same geostrategic goals and methods comes from the same intellectual wellspring as “The Negroes will rape our women! That’s what they always do!” “The Roma want to steal your stuff. That’s what they always do.” 1956!
Can we get past that? Apparently not.
Macron is not Napoleon. Putin is not Stalin, no matter how religiously you may believe that.
The question should be, as it has been, what was Russia asking for, and why was it refused, and were the consequences of that refusal avoidable.
Here are the two Russian proposals, one to the U.S. and one to NATO, which they offered in December. Just read them or don’t. Because if you don’t read them, it makes it an awful lot easier to blame Putin for everything, and keep banging on about Hungary in 1956 and the Slavic Menace.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/l...ssia-mfa02.htm
https://mid.ru/print/?id=1790803&lang=en
With any luck, this will all be over fairly soon, the killing will dwindle down to, one can only hope, a level less than it has remained at for the last 8 years, and people who slavishly follow the same single narrative from the same outlets which were not taken off the air in the West, will be left wondering why Ukraine capitulated since they and all their friends knew that Ukraine was “winning”, what with the “Ghost of Kiev” “the Brave Sailors of Snake Island”, and the rest of the made up stories.
And, FWIW, people might want to make sure they understand the full story about “Russia attacks maternity hospital”. If we are going to talk about propaganda.
I don’t have a crystal ball, but if the talks from yesterday are any indication, and if the U.S. can be sidelined as much as possible, and it ends up being up to the EU, Ukraine, and Russia, it may end up looking very much like what Russia was asking for in the first place, which would have hurt no one. It would be good for it to be over, and tragic that “diplomacy by other means” came into play after 15 years of regular diplomacy that went nowhere.
But, maybe it goes another way.
