Russia and Ukraine are both right-wing failed states, but Ukraine is explicitly fascist. They have made every party left of Zelenky's party illegal, they have citizens committing pogroms against roma people without any consequence(I have seen it), even empowering neonazi groups to attack minority groups in Ukraine, and burning down buildings full of communists (who have nothing to do with Russia, this is long before the invasion), they have folded nazi paramilitaries into their armed forces and appointed ultra-nationalists (who openly speak of exterminating races of people) in key positions of the military (who openly refused to obey Zelensky's order to follow the Minsk Accords).

That $8.9T article is a joke, it even puts a literal price on human life. Your argument also doesn't even support what you think it does. The liberals in this thread keep accusing me of being a Putin apologist and blaming the war on his whims. They never admit Russia has legitimate security interests in the region. But the argument that the war was within Russia's interest because they felt that Ukraine joining NATO was an existential threat to their security is exactly what anyone with two brain cells is trying to tell them. The US government knows this, they have known it since 2008 if not long before, but they continue to tell the people of the US that it isn't the case at all. Liberals eat it all up. The Democratic party is run by neoconservatives with a bigger death wish than the ones who go us into Iraq, and nobody who votes for the Democratic party seems to even notice.

The USA lies much more than Russia. The US press dutifully reports every word the US wants it to, in order to maintain access and credentials and be taken "seriously".

NATO is not a defensive alliance, and it never has been. It was set up as an anti-communist alliance, but it is not essentially just a tool for US dominance. Its first action was an offensive action against Yugoslavia, who never attacked NATO. Its next action was to invade Afghanistan, who had offered up Bin Laden in exchange for avoiding the invasion (but the US refused, and stated they don't negotiate with terrorists). Also, Afghanistan never attacked the USA or any NATO member state

Yes, every country must bow down the the United States and its junior partners. I see now. Wars can only have one bad actor, and one reason for occurring, and Ukraine is a shining beacon of democracy, and not a nearly identical country with a nearly identical political system (except until maybe the Nazi & US led coup in 2014).

The world will absolutely not be a better place if the US/NATO wins. The US government serves finance capital and the defense industry before any regular person. Russia sucks, but they don't have control over the rest of the world the way that the US does. The US is not a bastion of freedom or human rights, it the the world #1 jailer and is responsible for millions, if not tens of millions, of deaths around the world in the past few decades alone. While the planet boils from the economic system they defend to the death, they will be rewarding their class with money hand over fist, selling weapons and gas to their client states in europe, and all while telling us that they are fighting for human rights the whole time. The US has even written position papers that the war is good for them (check out the original RAND paper written prior to the war) They think using this proxy war will weaken a potential geopolitical threat, and they have had a huge windfall increasing their sales of LNG and weapons. The US wants to fight russia to the last ukranian and instead of calling for some kind of peaceful settlement liberals are frothing at the mouth for russian blood and calling them orcs, pretending it isn't racist at all

Saying the war occurred because of a complex set of reasons with multiple bad actors, and "apologizing for Putin" are two different things to, my friend.

No, you are misrepresenting what my ideology is. You don't even know what it is, and you don't seem to have the intellectual curiosity to try and even try to understand it

I am sure you will forget about all of this and lose interest in Ukraine in a year or two when Russia is still in the Donbas and liberals have moved onto calling for blood against China, or Iran, or Mexico, or whatever other country the United States sets it sights on.

If it stopped a war, why not say that they won't let Ukraine join NATO? Ukraine doesn't have the right to join NATO just as much as Russia. And just as much as Russia doesn't have the right to "call the shots." It is an offensive military alliance, there are consequences for how its membership grows and it affects the security concerns of other countries. It is so fun to just hear US government talking points repeated back endlessly.

Hmm, it isn't big brained if you followed what was happening. Why would the US dump $150 billion into arming Ukraine if it wasn't in their interests? that kind of money could solve so many problems the US has at home but they are wasting it on weapons and ammunition for a right-wing, failed state that was trying to ethnically cleanse 30% of its country

Words have meaning but you are still unable to define tankie, and your argument is a non-sequitur unless you think whatever a tankie is has nothing to do with describing communists. If that is the case it truly is meaningless

lol, Russia has as much to do with the USSR as Ukraine does. They were both part of the soviet union and were both replaced with corrupt reactionary states with economies that are objectively worse off than when the USSR existed.

Would you be more or less likely to vote for someone if it was felt he poisoned his opponent? I feel like there are two separate things being discussed here. Was it bad that he got poisoned? jfk, of course. Did it change how the election played out? Sure? Did it make the results of the election moot, change the way in which the administration of the election occurred, or assure one side victory? Not really, no? idk if anyone knows that, but i don't think that is even why the Euromaidan occurred according to the people who participated...

I am pretty sure it was explicitly cited by Russia when the invasion started, and in the run up to the war they said over and over it would be avoided if the US could assure them that Ukraine wouldn't join NATO. Blinken publicly said forbidding Ukraine from NATO or assuring any security guarantees was a "non-starter" ... so I guess if they just ignored everything Russia was saying, then maybe they didn't believe NATO had anything to do with the invasion... but that still wouldn't make it true.

Why does he sound like a Russian apologist? Russia is neither socialist or anarchist, so what would make him a Russian apologist?

Did he die? Did they also poison all of the people who would have voted for him?

This is an article written by an American journalist, how is it "bullshit Russian propaganda?" Could you provide some evidence that what this journalist wrote is factually incorrect?

Have you ever entertained that there is a possibility that people disagree with you on this, who might not be Russian propagandists? Maybe people exist who don't think Russia is good, but also see that there is a lot more to this conflict than as presented by corporate media in the anglosphere? If you so easily dismiss everything as untrustworthy and propaganda simply because. you disagree with it, then it sounds like you aren't thinking critically... you are just completely indoctrinated with another sort of propaganda.

I am also confused by your statement. Did NATO respect the sovereignty of Yugoslavia? How about Afghanistan or Iraq? Libya or Syria? The United States and the militia's it is backing illegally occupies about 30% of Syria right now, the part with 90% of Syria's oil... How is that not exactly the same as what Russia is doing to Ukraine? Before you claim this is whataboutism you should consider that history also matters, and when people from NATO countries claim that what Russia or China does X, while ignoring the current (and long history) of their own country doing X, it just sounds very disingenuous. Most likely because it is.

It absolutely was a civil war, it began with a US-instigated coup, with US state department officials calling the shots for who will lead Ukraine afterwards and passing out bread and cookies to the protestors (very different to how they treat protestors at home only six years later) ... You should listen to the leaked phone call with victoria nuland if you think the US wasn't involved.. Anyway, the civil war had led to thousands dying and Ukraine had effectively lost control of a large part of the country for nearly a decade... sounds like a civil war to me.

You are delusional if you think that Russia will "get their teeth kicked in and get beaten out of the country"... Ukraine is literally losing, or at best, in a stalemate. They are in the process of losing the third army they have raised and Russia has not fully mobilized... I don't think Russia was right to invade, but they had a much better reason to do so than the US when it invaded Iraq, or Syria, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or really any other conflict short of ww2

I am confused by that quote. It could just as easily be read from a pro-Russian-invasion stance as not. I am not pro-Russian invasion btw) The US abandoned the intermediate nuclear missile treaty with Russia unilaterally, which changed the security architecture of eastern Europe. Then they began to pour arms into Ukraine, while encouraging Ukraine to make a bid to join NATO... which was something that Russia had told the US was a red line for their security interests in 2008. "War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want. - William Tecumseh Sherman"

There was a discontinuity in Ukraine's government in 2014, which was been acknowledged by many international organizations, like the EU, and which Ukraine used as a pretext to ignore other old treaties and agreements... so idk how it really applies. It would be cool if countries that militarily occupy other countries or bomb other countries would stop. Like it would be cool if the US got out of Syria too, but i bet a majority of US citizens would agree, but US "democracy" doesn't really allow them much of a say in those sorts of decisions

Any NATO member can veto a new country from being admitted to NATO. If the USA wanted to avoid the carnage unleashed by this devastating war, why not make assurances that Ukraine will not join NATO? That would have saved so many lives and so much human misery. Instead, they armed Ukraine to the teeth and are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.

It's okay. Reading comprehension isn't everyone's strength.

Did that change who would or would not vote for him?

Wait, is that 50,000 people including the 14,000 the UN said were killed by the Ukraine military in the Donbass before the Russian invasion?

Ukraine had been fighting a civil war for almost a decade... how was it a peaceful nation?

Israel and Turkey both said a peace deal had been reached (or nearly had been reached) before the UK/US intervened.

Define Tankie. You could replace Tankie with communist in nearly any sentence it is uttered, and it just sounds like a republican right-winger (talking about nearly anything they don't like)

Should "peaceniks" support sending weapons to Ukraine too? Pretending that Putin is the singular reason this war happened is ridiculous.

Did the US electing Obama end racism? Did it mean that suddenly the US state was no longer racist or white-supremacist?

It doesn't matter much if their president is Jewish, when there are literal Nazi's in control of large parts of the military and other parts of the government. Zelensky was elected to enforce the Minsk accords, and the Nazi's in the military laughed in his face and humiliated him, so he did the self-serving thing... like any other politician. As an anarchist and a socialist, you should be more concerned that Zelensky outlawed basically all leftist parties and orgs, while sparing all the right-wing ones... this was even before the invasion.

This article explicitly calls the invasion a war crime. Did you read it? Pretending that history began when the Russian army stepped foot in Donbas doesn't erase the actions the provoked the war on the part of the NATO-aligned countries. If you think that Putin is the singular reason this war occurred, then you should admit your understanding of the conflict is shallow and uninformed.

Could you explain how his election was not free or fair?

Would you say that the events during the Euromaidan in 2014 were a free and fair election?

If Ukraine had honored the Minsk agreements, or followed through with the peace agreement they signed at the beginning of the invasion (that Boris Johnson and the UK/US intervened to quash), then maybe Russia would have already gotten the fuck out of Ukraine?