I’m just showing these comments I saw earlier, which were interesting. Since it is true, that we’ve been hearing that “Russia is cornered”, since the invasion started. I personally just want this shit to end.
These comments are relating to an article from this week.
I wonder if we will ever know what truly happens on the ground (i.e. when it comes to casualties and many other things)
Ok, so I want to know, if anyone would be kind enough to humor me, what’s the general understanding of the context behind the war in Ukraine here, on Hexbear?
My personal understanding has been shaped by just passively existing on the Internet through this event, and I’m curious if there’s another perspective that I’ve not been exposed to.
Ukraine’s government was overthrown in 2014, and the new government banned certain opposition parties, which alienated a lot of people in eastern Ukraine, many of whom have cultural ties to Russia, and a seperatist movement seized control of Donbas. The two sides signed a cease-fire, Minsk II, but Ukraine violated that cease-fire by shelling civilian targets, causing Russia to answer the request for aid by the seperatists.
The perspective of NATO supporters is that the seperatists are just a Russian proxy while the Russian perspective is that Ukraine’s new government is a NATO proxy. It’s difficult to evaluate what people actually want, but the fact that Ukraine felt the need to ban opposition parties and the fact that there are a bunch of people with Russian ties in the disputed territories indicates that the seperatists have some genuine support.
There were many diplomatic off-ramps that could’ve been taken to avoid the conflict, such as upholding the cease-fire, or perhaps giving the disputed territories a referendum to leave. As it stands, the war has reached a standstill and the general perspective here is that Ukraine can either give up some territorial concessions now, or give up some territorial concessions after throwing a bunch more lives into the meat grinder. Peace now is the best option for the Ukrainian people, but likely US pressure will keep the war going because it’s profitable for the defense industry.
Also, Ukraine has a significant Nazi problem, including both paramilitary groups and the government itself. For instance, Ukraine had to fire their ambassador to Germany after he engaged in Holocaust denial right on TV.
Thank you for the reply! This has been super helpful in guiding some reading and providing some context. It’s very interesting that there was quite a bit of criticism from all sides about the laws outright banning discussion and support of communism. Following that, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of responsiveness to that criticism. Even the Venice Commission was pretty highly critical of it, and of conflating Communism with Nazism.
Afaik, no far-right parties were banned under the law. There are a lot of Banderites in Ukraine and that’s where “Slava Ukrani” comes from. Bandera worked for Nazi military intelligence and wanted an independent Ukraine closely allied with Nazi Germany, and enthusiastically performed pogroms on his own initiative (denying his role in the Holocaust was specifically what happened with the Ukrainian ambassador). The only thing was that Hitler didn’t want Ukraine as an ally but under his direct control, so that’s where they came into conflict.
While there is diversity of opinion on Hexbear (wow that bit sounded really ChatGPT of me I’m sorry, Im literally currently playing with it lol) most folks on Hexbear agree that while Putin’s decision to invade was a reprehensible one, the the decision was provoked by Ukraine and the West via NATO encirclement (and its important to understand that NATO has always inherently been a hostile power to Russia as to why the encroachment of NATO would provoke Russia) and also the War in Donbass and the treatment of the ethnic Russians there.
Right, I know NATO was literally created as a show of united force against the Soviet Union post WW2- when you say encirclement, what does that mean? Is it specifically the growth of NATO to include more States in what’s traditionally Russia’s sphere of influence?
Yes. It’s the fact the US has been making MISSILE agreements with every single nation that borders Russia in Europe. The US promised Soviet leaders that NATO would end after the cold war and then Yelstin that it would remain, but they wouldn’t expand further. By 2014 all that was left was Finland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
To put that in context as to how that was an aggressive move by the US: What happened when Cuba, a US neighbor, attempted to make a missile agreement with the Soviets in the early 60s? Did the US respond with the understanding that this is something the people of Cuba might want, or did they respond by threatening to set the world on fire?
Copy and pasting from my previous post. The war in Ukraine is a failure of diplomacy, of parties refusing to listen to each other’s concerns. It could have been easily prevented if one party had been more accommodating of another, but this was never going to happen, because the animosity served the interests of certain parties as you shall learn below:
Hinge Points (Hexbear edition): Ukraine
The events leading to the war in Ukraine did not happen overnight. It was the consequence of a decade of diplomacy failures, and was 100% preventable if only a couple things had gone differently along the entire chain of events.
1 ) The 2013 Maidan coup in Ukraine would never have happened if everyone had just gone with Putin’s suggestion of holding a tripartite meeting so they can revise the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement (AA-DCFTA) such that European goods could not flood the Russian market without paying for tariffs (due to Ukraine’s existing tariff-free agreement with Russia). Putin did NOT object to Ukraine signing the agreement, simply that they revise the clauses for the tariff-related issues. The EU declined to meet.
Of course, Russia was looking out for its own economic interests and wanted Ukraine to join their Eurasian Customs Union, which was flatly rejected by the EU for being incompatible with the DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement), which would have required Ukraine to liberalize its economy (i.e. remove tariff barriers to allow foreign goods to enter), while the Customs Union would have a common external tariff to prevent “re-exportation”. Nonetheless, it should be noted that Russia did not reject Ukraine from signing the AA-DCFTA so long as their economic concerns were addressed.
(Note: Ukraine did get screwed by the AA-DCFTA which was signed after the Maidan coup, just as Russia warned. Europe ended up protecting its own market while taking advantage of cheap Ukrainian agricultural imports, and they didn’t even get the loans like the Greeks did (which was a disastrous and shitty deal for Greece). That’s how bad Ukraine was treated by the EU - their economy literally crumbled after siding with the EU post-2014)
Instead, the European imperialists got greedy and wanted to eat into Russia’s market, thinking that Russian economy is too weak to do anything against them and therefore ripe for bullying.
2 ) The 2013 Maidan coup probably would not have happened if EU didn’t force Ukraine to take IMF loans.
Ok, you’re Ukraine, signing the agreement with EU is going to lose you trade revenues with Russia if you don’t revise the clause of tariff, fine, but now you’re being forced to take IMF loans that demand cutting social spending and education as well? That’s just you signing your own slave contract.
Ukraine’s then president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom I assure you was very pro-EU and not a Russian stooge in any way, was stumped by the demands and asked for more time to negotiate with Russia. He did not reject the EU agreement, nor did he take any deal from Moscow. He simply postponed signing the agreement, and that was enough to be couped by the fascists before he could do anything about it.
Of course, the imperialists have always had in their minds the perfect economic warfare against both Russia (destroy its domestic industries by flooding Russian market with EU goods through “free trade agreement”) and Ukraine (through IMF debt that demanded austerity). They simply couldn’t help not impoverishing the countries at their periphery through their cleverly-devised economic policies.
3 ) The 2014 Ukrainian Civil War would most likely not have happened if the fascist coup regime didn’t ban Russian language in Donbass.
Ok, so the coup happened, you’re now under a new management. Fine, but the fascists couldn’t help themselves by lashing out at the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
The very first act of the coup regime on February 22nd, 2014 was to repeal the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law, a 2012 bill that granted the status of regional language to Russian and other minority languages. The law was in full accordance to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages for the preservation of language-minority rights and had widespread societal support in Ukraine. The repeal of the Kolesnychenko-Kivalov Language Law by the fascist regime marked a severe infringement of minority rights and their intent to ethnically cleanse Russian culture in the country.
Clashes between both sides started to ramp up and the highly tense situation would quickly devolve into the Ukrainian Civil War.
Russia was forced (by design, I should say) into the conflict because the Ukrainian army was being mobilized to fight against the Donbass separatists, a region where ethnic Russians are the majority.
Of course, the imperialists couldn’t help it: they believed that they could cripple Russia’s economy by involving it in two fronts - Syria and Ukraine - at the same time. Surely Russia had no capacity to fight two wars at the same time? Crimea was immediately annexed by Russia for obvious reasons, and I still remember Western pundits laughing at Russia thinking that there’s no way they have the capability to build the Crimean Bridge.
4 ) Implementing the Minsk agreements could have marked the peaceful ending to this conflict.
Ok, the Ukrainian armed forces were defeated by the Donbass militia aided by Russian military in the civil war. A peace deal had been brokered. Russia said: “ok we don’t want to deal with this Donbass shit anymore, can you take them back please? Just promise not to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing in the region. We just want to continue doing business with Europe, we’ve been sanctioned enough and we really don’t want to get bogged down by this shit in Ukraine.”
Minsk was supposed to be the path for a peaceful return of Donbass to Ukraine, but with increased autonomy to the local governments, so that nobody can impose a nation-wide ban on language and culture without regards for the people living in the regions.
However, the fascists couldn’t help it and immediately broke the truce, leading to them being beaten once again. The German chancellor Merkel and the French president Hollande actually had to drag Putin back to the negotiation table and promised to be the guarantors of Minsk II: that Ukraine will really stick to the plan this time.
Interestingly, both Merkel and Hollande have since admitted publicly in 2022 that the Minsk agreements were simply to buy time for Ukraine to be militarized. Why does Ukraine need time to militarize? There really is only one answer to this question: to militarily re-capture Donbass and Crimea instead of implementing the peace plan.
5 ) NATO arming Ukraine exacerbated Russia’s security concerns
Ok, so you have a peace plan, but instead of start holding talks toward a concrete resolution, what Russia saw was Ukraine being armed and trained by NATO over 7 years.
Once again, Russia proved to be the idiot in this conflict by actually believing that Ukraine was ever going to implement Minsk agreement. And yes, Putin is an idiot. Surely his good friend Angela Merkel would never lie to him?
Of course, the Western imperialists truly believe in the supremacy of NATO military equipments and tactics that if you have a fully NATO-trained Ukrainian army, they would be able to beat Russia’s obsolete military quite easily.
I will also add that the Nazi regiments, now fully incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, have never been prosecuted for their atrocities committed against civilians in the Donbass. They were glorified as heroes in state media.
6 ) Biden’s aggressive policy in Ukraine made Russia’s worst fear came true
In 2021, the new Biden administration began to pivot aggressively against Russia. After the meeting between Biden and Zelensky (who was elected as a peace president and was supposed to bridge the divide between Ukraine and Russia) in Washington, the latter started to spout aggressive rhetorics that increasingly alarmed the Russians, such as talks about Ukraine joining NATO.
That former Soviet republics joining NATO has always been the thorny issue for Russia since the end of the Cold War, and Ukraine was to be the center-piece of this increasing encirclement of Russia that has been ongoing since the 1990s. There is not a single government in Russia, whether they lean left or right, that will not be alarmed by this development, given their prior encounter with the Nazis some 80 years back. And it’s the same Banderites in Ukraine this time, not some generic fascists.
7 ) The last ditch effort to stop the war
At this point, at least for the Russians, it was pretty clear that the new administration is going to ramp up its belligerent foreign policy against Russia. There was only one last thing to do: a last ditch effort to persuade Washington to stop its aggression.
The Russian diplomatic team prepared hundreds of pages of proposal, hoping to convince the other side of the seriousness of its security concerns, and Russia-US summit was conducted in June 2021 to resolve the crisis. Instead, the US sent Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine, first in August 2021, then in December - completely laughing in Russia’s face about their security concerns.
If you were Russia, what would you think of the American’s responses? Would you think that they were being serious about addressing your security concerns? If you told your harasser to stop, and they resume stalking you the following week, what would that tell you?
Soon, Zelensky started to talk about joining NATO, commenting about abandoning the Budapest Memorandum that was the basis of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the increased mobilization of military units towards the eastern front (Donbass), and the increased shelling of the regions by the Ukrainian side.
The diplomatic solution has failed.