You can always tell when someone is polluting HN with Russian propaganda from these small details other than their obviously toxic pro-Putin narrative…
Ukraine was attacking russian minorities in donbas and lugansk.
I'm not pro putin, i'm just saying that we're not any better than him, while acting so, and that we're destroying our own countries with sanctions, that don't hurt putin but hurt as. Maybe we deserve them though, but i'd prefer better economy for us.
“Donbas and lugansk” is not a thing. You are incorrect about very basic details in these issues, that I’d advise actually listening to people that know “Donbas” refers to both Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, for starters, unlike yourself.
Azoic is a tiny group relative to the whole population that barely registers as a factor in Ukrainian politics. Using them as a reason to invade the nation of Ukraine is a ridiculous excuse. How can a government be nazis if their leader is Jewish? It’s contrived conspiracy theory nonsense.
I think it’s worth pointing out inaccuracies like this when they are shared by someone who is clearly engaging in whataboutery and the spread of misinformation across several comments in this thread.
Is it really whataboutery if we're not any better than the russians.... and meanwhile destroying our own economies while not really hurting russia that much?
The Russians have been shown to have slaughtered civilians, indiscriminately bombed and shelled residential areas, looted, raped and abducted people on massive scale.
What do you mean by ‘not any better than the Russians’? What has Azov or anyone else in Ukraine been doing that rises the the same level?
Russia has been promoting and funding racist and white supremacist groups just as bad all over Europe. The only thing about Azov that’s different is they are anti Russian.
I know Azov are an unpleasant lot and have distributed hate propaganda and harassed people, but as part of the national guard they are under military command and discipline. Furthermore politically speaking they were utterly insignificant and got absolutely nowhere in elections. The whole ‘fighting nazis’ line is utter garbage.
They were. Most of the right-wing elements (there weren't that many of them as Kremlin propaganda would like you to believe) were purged as part of this process, or left the battalion themselves.
There's a decent article on this (from a strongly pro-Ukraine publication) that expounds on this theme in a relatively neutral way (IMHO). The sad thing it's in Russian, but should be readable through the magic of google translate if you're interested enough.
This [1] is an article from Time in 2018. You can find other countless similar articles elsewhere. You'll find that the narrative before and after the Ukraine war took an extremely hard 180 to the point of absurdity. Just one segment from the article:
"After the worst such [anti-Islam terror] attack in recent years—the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019—an arm of the Azov movement helped distribute the terrorist’s raving manifesto, in print and online, seeking to glorify his crimes and inspire others to follow. .... It might seem ironic for this hub of white nationalists to be situated in Ukraine. At one point in 2019, it was the only nation in the world, apart from Israel, to have a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime Minister. Far-right politicians failed to win a single seat in parliament in the most recent elections. But in the context of the white-supremacist movement globally, Azov has no rivals on two important fronts: its access to weapons and its recruiting power."
There's also stuff like [2] which is a freedom-of-information act report from the Department of Homeland Security. They're concerned about the fact that "Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azo[v] Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist-white supremacists (RMVE-WS) to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia".
This whole thing is becoming increasingly absurd where the information warfare is gradually moving from propaganda to 1984.
Azov isnt unique because it has extremists. It's unique because:
* It was founded by a nazi and most of its members appear to be nazis.
* It committed atrocities in a civil war against ethnic russians.
* It was instrumental in keeping ethnically russian majority areas of Ukraine under Ukraines control.
* It was made an official part of the army and lavished with praise by poroshenko despite being largely nazi and having committed atrocities because territory.
* When Zelensky came to them asking them to lay down their arms and help end the civil war they told him no and denounced him as a traitor.
Officially they have little power or democratic mandate but they told the president that the war shall continue until its bitter end and he capitulated. In the west nazis dont have that kind of power.
I don't think these sort of things are very comparable. Of course you'll always find extremists in militaries. But in this case the military itself integrated a real Nazi militia as an independent state force. It would be like if the US marines officially recognized the Aryan Brotherhood and gave them their own unit, including with integrating overt Nazi symbols as part of their uniform.
Sure, I would definitely agree they are worse in a lot of ways. I don’t really agree their existence is proof that all of Ukraine is a new Nazi Germany and therefore the invasion by Russia is justified. Maybe that’s not what you’re saying either, but that’s where this conversation started.
No, that's definitely not what I'm saying. And I also didn't read the original post that way. There are a lot of problems in Ukraine (outside of this war) and they have also done some pretty awful things. Many of the things that go unstated in our media can go some way towards explaining the war, but there's a difference between explaining and justifying. And I increasingly feel that that nuance is being lost in society, which divides us all even further.
The original is flagged now, but if we read it differently it makes sense we are coming away with different interpretations. In my opinion the person doesn’t seem particularly well informed about basic facts - getting the names of places and regions wrong - and their main argument seems to be that the US has done bad things, so there’s no point inconveniencing ourselves to try to stop Russia and I’m not really sure that follows. I didn’t (personally) find a lot of nuance in the discussion. I do agree that in general nuance and understanding are missing a lot of the times these days.
They seem to mainly be celebrated by people today (at least by the types who celebrate that sort of thing) for their white supremacism rather than their leftist policies.
The authoritarian far left and far right are very close together, with a tiny bit different politics, but the same end results. It's not a coincidence that the commies and the nazis started the WW2 together... somehow the modern left forgets the soviets/communist involvement.
Of course, these Russian minority casualties died as collateral from Russia and Russian backed separatists as well as from Ukraine. And more saliently, Russia is the aggressor so none of those people would have died if they hadn’t put Ukraine into an existential position.
Nonsense. Assad deliberately used chemical and kinetic weapons on civilians, moreover neither the US nor other western countries are using this as a pretext for annexing Syria. There is no analogue.
I am sorry, people in Syria. We can't condemn the use of heavy weapons against civilians, because... checking notes... NATO members used heavy weapons against civilians in 1999.
Ukraine deliberately shelled civians for 8 years, so what?
Their routine tactics of dealing with rebels is to bomb civians dear to those rebels. When they don't hope to make territorial gains, they wish to inflict some damage and civian targets are way easier to hit.
This week, they're using freshly supplied M777 to bomb areas of Donetsk they could not reach previously. Such as by hitting four schools in a single day.
