Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Хahar 🤔]

Clearly that was another flaw with the Ukrainian defense plan, just like France in 1940 with the Ardenne, they planned their defenses around an "impassable" natural barrier that wasn't actually impassable. But first, this was not a surprise attack and the Ukrainians should have been digging trenches and otherwise building fortifications to blunt the expected attack from Belarus. They do have entrenchments in place in Luhansk and Donetsk and thus the attacks from the DPR and LPR have not gotten very far. Second, the "trading space for time" and "bleed the enemy" strategy you refer to implies Kiev needs to be given up and needed to be combined with an evacuation of the capital and Zelensky to Lvov. But Zelensky chose to stay in Kiev, which is good to keep Ukrainian morale high, but it had to be combined with an all-out defense of Kiev or else the result is what we see now; Zelensky is threatened directly within 2 days and is forced to ask for an armistice.

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but do you use the Russian spelling for Ukrainian cities intentionally? "Kiev" is one thing, but no one says "Lvov."

It is not particularly obvious that Lviv is any more just or righteous a name for Lemberg than is Lvov.

[Хahar 🤔]

I'll be real honest, while Putin has brought this upon his forces and himself, i can't help but be unnerved by the huge amount of major weapons NATO+allies are supplying both directly and openly.

Kinda freaks me out to think where the Russian perspective crosses the line from "Ukrainians are using some NATO weapons against us" to "NATO is basically at war with us"

Not to further freak you out, but this strikes me as a totally legitimate fear. For the first, say, 24 hours or so I was surprised that an overtly NATO-supplied Ukraine fighting Russia was basically "fine" when we know that direct NATO-on-Russia combat would get out of hand very quickly. Thing is, aside from the obvious option of leaving Ukraine to its fate, I'm not entirely sure what the other options are, except gradations of sanctions or appeasement.

I agree with this sentiment. I know it's exciting to live in interesting times, but the glee in this thread at remilitarization has been untoward. There has been a dramatic shift in the scope of this conflict over the last 36 hours. With Ukraine openly receiving massive supplies of armaments from NATO (and, if these posited international brigades ever come to exist, manpower as well), the difference between what we have now and an outright war between NATO and Russia becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. This should not be a welcome thought to anyone not in the weapons business.

[Хahar 🤔]

Quite masterful of the EU to simply sidestep NATO militarily. And NATO letting them.

From an anti-war standpoint, steps that take us toward a European army involve massive militarization, which cannot possibly be a good thing. Liberals who were critical of American imperialism can easily be won over to militarism when it's couched in the language of "European values". Certainly from an American perspective, the creation of an independent European military force involves a substantial diminution of American power abroad, which is not good. From my standpoint as a non-white non-European I have no interest in European values or the European political project, so it is distressing that NATO is allowing the European Union to absorb its role, even if there is nothing that can be done about it.

[Хahar 🤔]

Gonna take this with a grain of salt until it is actually confirmed but if true, HOLY SH!T

https://mobile.twitter.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1498715490197274624

Oh my gosh if true that’s amazing and a major blow to Russian morale.

I just thought about it. Those National Guard types are completely nuts and probably coated their ammunition and weapons with lard. Sucks for them, I guess.

Hell yeah, I love when the side I'm on engages in anti-Islamic bigotry, this is the good stuff.

[Хahar 🤔]

Gonna take this with a grain of salt until it is actually confirmed but if true, HOLY SH!T

https://mobile.twitter.com/OccupyDemocrats/status/1498715490197274624

Oh my gosh if true that’s amazing and a major blow to Russian morale.

I just thought about it. Those National Guard types are completely nuts and probably coated their ammunition and weapons with lard. Sucks for them, I guess.

Hell yeah, I love when the side I'm on engages in anti-Islamic bigotry, this is the good stuff.

Evil vs evil, perhaps? Not a shred of sympathy for Kadyrov’s bloodthirsty brutes.* Which doesn’t make this right, but sending these two groups at each other is a win-win.

*Who have committed most of their vile crimes against other Muslims, BTW.

Right, from a broad picture it's clear which side is in the right here and it's just as clear that Ramzan Kadyrov's men are by and large not exactly paragons of decency. But someone sitting at their computer half the world away can easily lose sight of any moral compass, even though our innate sense of morality is the reason we've all taken the side we've taken.

It doesn't reflect well on keyboard warriors to cheerlead bigotry or spew racism toward Chechens (both of which have happened in this thread) or glory in death and destruction. The subject of this thread is a horrible thing, and while it might be pointless to try to get people here to treat it with the gravity it warrants, I'd like to call it out when it gets egregious.

[Хahar 🤔]

The last beating of black people in the Ukraine would have been by the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen in 1941.

Unlikely there were any black people in Ukraine in 1941.

Ukraine had quite a prevalent African-Ukrainian population.



Pictured here (L-R) are: Dmytro Voronovskyi, Volodymyr Bolharyn, Slavko Lomachynska, Oleksandr Likhvald and Yuriy Lavrenyuk.

What are you talking about?

[Хahar 🤔]

As someone who voted to Remain, the absolute inertia by the EU against countries like Hungary for it's democratic backsliding is a a disgrace, particularly given the pressure (and reciprocation) exerted against Balkan members. Hungary (and to some extent Poland) have been given preferential treatment on account of them being perceived to be... more 'western.'

This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, it makes no sense to compare the situation of actual EU members vs prospective members. The latter are subject to harsh conditions and always have been (the standards have arguably been raised in the past decade, but that's mostly because many countries look back critically on the 2004-2007 enlargements and want to proceed more cautiously). Sanctioning a EU member is a completely different process, and one where the deck is stacked against such efforts (for understandable if flawed reasons). Violations of the rule of law weren't even contemplated as grounds for sanctions until recently, a consequence end-of-history hubris on the part of the EU's founders which is easy to mock in retrospect but was universal back then.

It's also patently false to say there's been "absolute inertia" in this area. Both the Parliament and the Commission have been making the case for sanctioning Hungary (with the, again, very limited and ad hoc mechanisms available) for years at this point. In all cases, the only real roadblock has come from member states, especially since most of the proposals so far have required unanimity, and Hungary always had its Visegrad allies to count on. Now, the commission has finally come up with a proposal that only requires a qualified majority, so hopefully we can finally expect this to go somewhere, but one way or the other, the ball now is clearly in the member states' court.

I also have no idea where this notion that Hungary is seen as "more Western" comes from. I've never met a Western European who thought Hungary was Western but Bulgaria wasn't, or something. Maybe that's a thing in Britain but not over here.

At the end of the day, it's all well and good to criticize the EU (I certainly do it plenty!), but it would be better to criticize it for the right reasons, and with a modicum of knowledge about how its internal mechanisms actually work. These lazy intellectual shortcuts are how you people ended up with Brexit, and I expected better of a poster like you.

You claim that "this is wrong on so many levels" and then you say nothing at all to actually dispute any of what afleitch said, and then you blame him for Brexit and impugn him as a poster. He's not the one who comes off as being in the wrong here.

[Хahar 🤔]

You might want to read my post again. I've refuted every single point Afleitch made, sometimes word for word. I've also never blamed him for Brexit, and if having high expectations of a poster is "impugning" them, then guilty as charged I guess. This is the sort of post I would have shrugged off coming from a generic US poster, because I know they rarely have a chance to keep up with EU politics, but from Afleitch it genuinely surprised me.

What a bizarre reaction.

Your argument is that the EU hasn't been inert, it just hasn't actually done anything of any substance, which is totally different. That's not as obvious an argument as you think it is, and the condescension here is unwarranted.

Has the EU been 'inert'? Yes. Of course there is delay and internal politics at play. That there is now targeted movement does not erase that.

No, EU institutions have not been inert - as I pointed out they have been active on the Hungary issue for several years, but have been stymied by Hungary-allied member states. Blaming the EU for that would be like blaming Congress for passing a law that was vetoed by the President.

No, it's like blaming the US government for failure to act when a bill is vetoed by the president, which is an entirely reasonable reaction.

[Хahar 🤔]

https://twitter.com/sotiridi/status/1572568782748680194

It's Russian mobilization.

It seems like a pretty dumb decision by EU countries to deny Russian citizes visas right now.

Why would EU countries want a bunch of 5th columnists? They are only fleeing because the war is about to come to them, not because they weren't in favour of the war.

The non-crazies mostly left Russia already.

The idea that everyone opposed to war already left Russia and anyone who would like to leave now must be a fifth columnist is really something.

[Хahar 🤔]

Does jaichind truly believe that people are gonna freeze to death or was this meant as a figure of speech?

It's hard not to get the impression that a lot of people don't understand what winters in North Western Europe are actually like, isn't it? Yes there will be problems, but the deep, terrifying colds that you get with a true Continental Climate are essentially not a thing: outside the highest upland regions they don't turn up as a constant issue until you reach, as it happens, Ukraine.

While this is certainly true, I think that some Europeans might be underestimating the effect that winter might have. Even if people aren't freezing to death, more people will die of pneumonia or the like than in winters past.

[Хahar 🤔]

Not quite sure why Russia has increasingly become a "Black Intolerant" country, especially considering the legacy of the Soviet Union, where it was not uncommon at all for members from "Sister Socialist Countries", to be able to easily obtain things like work, residency, and educational visas not that long ago.

I believe this phenomenon of racism against Black folks actually goes back towards the final years of the Soviet Union.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/688835?journalCode=jmh

Life wasn't so great if you were an African student in the Soviet Union long before that:

What Happened When Black Students Marched on Red Square in 1963

[Хahar 🤔]

In Moscow, they are also gearing up for the 1 year anniversary of the war.

“23rd February. For Victory, For Our People, For Truth”

Something odd here that I've noticed before in official Russian graphics is "ZА" being used in place of "ЗА". I am unsure if "Z" is an accepted typographical variant of "З" (if so, I've never seen it), but I assume that this is about branding, and so it's interesting to see that the "Z" branding is still in use months after I forgot about it.

[Хahar 🤔]

Do the leadership of Transnistria even want to be cannon fodder for faraway Moscow which can't support them? If the Ukrainians do move against Transnistria, it will be after the Transnistrian leadership accept a deal they can't refuse. There's no reason for Ukraine to risk a drop of their soldier's blood for land that isn't theirs.

As far as I know, the leadership of Transnistria consists of Viktor Gushan and his company Sheriff. It's a little difficult for me to follow the exact energy politics of the region because contemporary sources are sketchy, but the basis of Sheriff company rule for Transnistria's entire history has been free Russian natural gas. Russia tried and failed to get a stronger commitment from Transnistria to support the Ukrainian war last year, which suggests that Sheriff is currently the dominant party in the relationship in the Sheriff-Kremlin relationship, but it's hard to seriously argue that Russia has not supported Transnistria or that Sheriff would get a better deal if its state were dissolved and incorporated into Moldova.

[Хahar 🤔]

When it comes to Transnistria, I personally doubt anything will happen. Everything that's been released all seems like information messaging, probably from intelligence services.

Reading this thread has been a frustrating experience the last few days for people looking for real discussion of this question because it's all been sniping about one particular poster's opinions instead of discussion about Transnistria. The way I see it, there are three possible ways for Transnistria to be incorporated into the Moldovan state:

1) Russian fuel subsidies to Transnistria end, leading the government to collapse.
2) Sheriff voluntarily agrees to dissolve the Transnistrian government and subordinate itself to the Moldovan state.
3) Transnistria is incorporated into Moldova by force.

The first option is certainly possible, and it's difficult to get reliable up-to-date sources on this subject, but it does not appear that Russia has stopped sending free natural gas to Transnistria. This in turn means that it is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future. Transnistria has not been an ideal partner from the Russian perspective in this current war, but as long as Russia is continuing its offensive war it makes no sense to abandon Transnistria, especially considering how marginal the costs are.

I just don't see how the second option is plausible; even if the Moldovan government is somehow able to offer Sheriff a deal as good as the one it has now (which is hard to conceptualize, given that Sheriff operates by exporting cheap Russian products to the West), what happens when a new government alters the deal? Independence gives Sheriff security.

The third option is probably not inconceivable now, since Moldova appears to have significantly reduced its dependence on cheap Transnistrian electricity over the last year, but I'm not sure whose interests it would be in. Is the propaganda value of a victory over Russians for the Ukrainian government worth the cost of opening up a second front? Would an offensive war have propaganda value for the outside world? Would the Moldovan government really want to try to integrate this territory into its state at this time, especially if it was just the site of a war? It makes a lot more sense for all of this to just be saber-rattling.