CascadeOfLight

SO glad to Ukraine finally getting an airforce

Not to mention the Snake Island debacle.

If you don't recall, right at the start of the war, a small Ukrainian National Guard unit was stationed on "Snake Island", a tiny island in the Black Sea. A Russian warship approached the island and told them by radio to surrender. The commander replied "Russian warship, go fuck yourself!". The Russian warship opened fire and blew them all away. For their brave sacrifice, Zelensky posthumously awarded the "thirteen brave soldiers of Snake Island" various medals and honors, and "Russian warship, go fuck yourself! became a shining symbol of Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression, plastered over the west's print and social media for days, until whatever the next thing was replaced it.

How it actually went:

About two weeks later, it turned out they actually had just surrendered and been captured. And there weren't thirteen, there were EIGHTY ONE of them. One of the soldiers told a reporter their commander was "an idiot trying to get us killed" and that Zelensky "didn't even care to know our names".

The Russians have also NOT killed POWs.

This is a war between armies of hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side. It's statistically impossible that neither side engaged in killing POWs, the question is who did it more? What is the culture of the army? Is it something done occasionally by individual units, hidden from commanders, or is it just accepted by the entire command structure?

During the battle of Mariupol, after cornering Azov (the hardcore Nazi unit) in the metalworking plant, the Russian forces offered them literally like a dozen chances to surrender.

To the extent that the Russian public was getting seriously angry about it!

The Azov commanders wouldn't give in*!

*They surrendered just days later

And how did the Ukrainians react to this?

Having followed this war closely from the start, the "vibe" I get is that Russia is continuously humanitarian, frequently offers Ukrainians the chance to surrender and treats POWs well on the whole as a matter of military policy, and I feel confident saying the majority of mistreatment of POWs by the Russian side would have been done by Wagner, not the RU Army. Conversely, the Ukrainian army, riddled with rabid fascists and roving paramilitaries barely under the control of the political leadership, has constantly tortured and killed POWs and gloated about it on social media. I realise I should have saved the evidence, but that wasn't exactly the frame of mind I was in while seeing it at the time.

But when the OFFICIAL Twitter account of the National Guard posts shit like this

I think it's safe to say 'humanization of the enemy' is not on the agenda.

My retirement plan is for a NATO-backed fascist paramilitary death squad to gun me down for harboring trans people

Corbynistas

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh brother

Not from around here are ya

"How come all the anti-imperialists are so reactionary?"

First the affirmative action, now this!!

Here's an article from the AP on how the WHO team had full access to everything they wanted to see during their visit to Wuhan.

You'll notice that link goes through the Wayback Machine, because the article now just says page unavailable.

Which is weird, because the search result clearly shows the text is still there.

Would "impartial" Western media really do that? Half-assedly delete the inconvenient truths that they themselves reported?

They support Russia because the Kiev regime has been trying to genocide them for the last nine years! After the coup against the president that the Russian speaking areas voted for the new coup government immediately banned Russian as an official language. They made it illegal to teach it in schools! They attacked and persecuted people across the Russian speaking area, especially the Donbass. For instance in Mariupol, Kiev sent the overtly fascist Azov battalion to attack and break up a march in celebration of the 69th anniversary of the Soviet victory in WW2, using APCs and live ammunition. Now why would they attack on Victory Day, the day of symbolic victory over the Nazis? The officers of the Mariupol police station refused to go out and beat up marchers, so they were quietly murdered. Here are the events depicted even by western empire media, back before they'd had the 'Slava Ukraini' chip installed.

As for the early days of the war, here I go posting it again:

I assume you don't consider the Marine Corps Gazette to be Russian propaganda.

To also be absolutely clear, no Ukraine is not fighting for its existence. Russia's interest in territorial gain extends only to the areas of majority Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian populations.

Such as may be discerned from any one of these maps here

Yanukovych was the president illegally deposed in a coup in 2014, with the area voting >80% for him matching almost exactly the territory still held by separatists at the start of 2022

This one's really interesting: Zelensky ran on a platform of peace in the Donbass and reversing the ban on Russian as an official language, which he immediately reneged on after becoming president

Land currently held by Russia. If they try to take any more, it will most likely be towards Odessa, both to cut off Ukraine from the sea and because it's a firmly Russian-speaking area.

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This is for the very simple reason that it's literally not possible, in the modern world, to hold territory in which the native population does not want you to remain. Trying to do so will only result in a very long, very costly anti-insurgency campaign and your eventual defeat. This is exactly what NATO was hoping for when they baited Russia into attacking, that they would try to occupy and hold the whole of Ukraine. Instead, Russia only bit off as much as it could chew and is now allowing the Ukrainians to waste all their soldiers and equipment by attacking into impenetrable fortifications. When that's done, they'll counter-counterattack, grab some more Russian speaking land, and then let the limping Kiev rump state collapse under neoliberal austerity shock doctrine privatization administered by their 'allies' in the West. Ukraine could have avoided all this by upholding either of the two Minsk agreements that were painstakingly worked out by diplomats from both sides, but unfortunately the hand of their masters in Washington was too strong.

For all his faults, there are moments when I still have to appreciate him. Like watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJGYmfTaFRw

This babyfaced brit fuckwit is in absolute overdrive trying to steer the framing and questions to the 'correct' viewpoint and he just gets battered aside by a wizened ancient spouting facts. To the point of having to disclaim beforehand that the interview might not meet acceptable thought-cleanliness standards for the civilized mind.

They have as much agency as anyone who could be brutally assassinated in an instant does.