Western media have finally change course. They are now admitting that the much promoted Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. In fact, the acknowledge that it never had a chance to win in the first place.
The Hill, the Washington Post and CNN now agree that the Ukrainian army will never achieve its aims.
western MSM has a rare encounter with reality!
That makes it difficult for the Biden administration to get Congress approval for $24 billion in additional ‘aid’ to Ukraine. It does not make sense to pay for a cause that is evidently lost.
b seems overly hopeful regarding the rationality of US congress, but i think hes right- why would we throw more money at them, US politicians have made it clear they do not support bringing Ukraine into NATO if they do not win this conflict. of course, US politicians are prone to lying and misleading
Nothing has come from the ‘peace conference’ which Saudi Arabia arranged on Ukraine’s behalf
lol. lmao even. props to big dog MBS for trying
Despite the onslaught of bad news the Ukrainian army is still trying to take Russian positions in the south and east of Ukraine. But it simply does not have enough in men and material to break through the lines.
Even if they would manage to get a local breakthrough there are not enough reserves to push for the necessary follow up. Just one of the NATO trained brigades has still been held back. All others have been mauled in their various deployment zones.
nothing has changed it seems
In the northeast around Kupyansk the Russians have started their own offensive which has the Ukrainians on the run. Ukraine has ordered the evacuation of the area
But Kupyansk is a Russian city and people refuse to leave.
show this to the libs claiming Russians are committing genocide in the regions they capture. curious that these civilians are content with Russian occupation when you believe what western media claims
The Russian campaign is slowly speeding up. As the Ukrainian Strana.news reports (machine translation):
Also in Ukraine, it is recorded that from Kupyansk to Bakhmut, Russia has increased the number of attacks.
"Over the past month, the total number of attacks in the Kupyansk, Limansky and Bakhmut directions has grown significantly. In July, during the week there were 6-6.5 thousand attacks, during the last week-9 thousand attacks, " - said the representative of the National Guard Ruslan Muzychuk.
According to him, the Russian Federation does not experience “shell hunger”.
Aviation is also actively used, and over the past few weeks, more than 50 air attacks have been taking place every day, and sometimes more than 80.
That is bad news for the Ukrainian side which lacks the reserves to counter the Russian onslaught. There are also less weapons coming in from the West. F-16 fighter jets will be delayed for another nine months due to training issues. Tanks and other material are in short supply.
these supply issues sure bode well for the west’s performance in WW3 
Strana also report of an interview with a knowledgeable Ukrainian soldier (machine translation):
Continuing the topic of the situation at the front, an interesting interview was given by a Ukrainian sniper fighting near Bakhmut with the call sign “Grandfather”. On the air of political scientist Yuri Romanenko, he was introduced as Konstantin Proshinsky (this is a pseudonym).
The fighter spoke in detail about his vision of the situation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Russian army.
- Mobilization. In his opinion, it is conducted incorrectly. Recruits are sent to the front who have never been trained, and they are often over 50 years old and with a whole bunch of diseases.
- No rotation. The soldier says that “the same brigades” are fighting at the front, and people are not taken out of the front line for six months or more. Whereas by Western standards, they can be kept in a war zone for no more than three months.
- Behavior of mid-and high-level commanders. According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a “mini-Stalingrad” on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
- The Russian Army began to fight better.
- Proshinsky believes that Russia has not yet used much of what it has against Ukraine.
The soldier thinks that the Russians will not move from their positions and that a stalemate peace like in Korea would be the end result.
UAF in real dire times— recruiting the elderly, poor logistics, engaging the enemy at inopportune times, and Russia has yet to waver
I believe that to be wrong. Russia’s aim is to liberate at least the four regions that it has claimed for itself. For political reasons it can not stop before that is done.
Should the Ukraine continue to fight after that, Russia is likely to set new aims and take more land.
more editorializing, but it doesnt seem unreasonable. i thought Russia would stick to its original goal of Donetsk and Luhansk, but if Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are receptive to Russian governance, it would be foolish for Russia to give them up
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
The red army should have just kept circling the globe putting bougies and nationalists in gulags or to the wall for
years.
Mod reports so far:
Reporter:
@jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Reason: Go away tankies with your editorialized commentary
Reporter:
Nate Cox@programming.dev
Reason: propaganda
Hey @jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone and @natecox@programming.dev Why don’t you show up and defend your beliefs in the free marketplace of democracy instead of crying for the authoritarian Stalinist mods to silence everyone you don’t like.
It’s pretty funny that they use the mod report button like redditors, as if this place wouldn’t have mods that toe the party line completely, rather than some guy who turned himself into a chatbot through the sheer power of propaganda.
Reporter:
@lasagna@programming.dev
Reason: support of human rights violations
Why don’t you show up and defend your beliefs in the free marketplace of democracy instead of stuffing your complaints in the authoritarian Stalinist mods mailbox?
Reporter:
Nate Cox@programming.dev
Reason: Harassment
Reporter:
Nate Cox@programming.dev
Reason: Harassment
Double whammy from @natecox@programming.dev stuffing more hatemail in the modbox. The quicker you either 1) show up and actually try and prove why you’re right and the article is wrong. or 2) stop making false mod reports over opinions you disagree with, the quicker you’ll stop getting pinged for wasting everyone’s time.
@natecox@programming.dev are you really going to keep replying to me via mod reports? Are you really that scared of saying hello or incapable of walking away from an unwinnable event?
@natecox@programming.dev this is getting boring, knock off filling my report box with your replies and we’ll call it even.
Alright @natecox@programming.dev you decided to keep going, not me.
“Mods! mods! Delete this tankie at once.”
They think this is Reddit.
support of human rights violations
Hmm maybe we should just report every pro USA comment as this?
Please don’t
Ok 😔
🥰
The burden of the left, we’re forced to comport ourselves to a higher standard because our enemies have no sense of responsibility
comes to an instance commonly defederated because tankies
Sees tankies
OMG I DIDN’T KNOW HEXBEARS WAS ACTUALLY TANKIESWe didn’t spend all spring practicing entrenchment and ambush for nothing!
Show me one place the Ukronazis broke through even the first line of Russian defences. I’ll wait, dorks.
I am still astounded by this part, the utter failure of Ukraine to make any substantial gains whatsoever. I never expected the counteroffensive to succeed, but with the Russian evacuations of the combat zone, and the withdrawals in Karhkiv and Kherson, I pretty much expected the UAF to be allowed to reach the 1st line of defense. The utter failure of the UAF to take only a few tiny pockets, despite their force concentration, just shows the utter failure of NATO to identify an effective doctrine.
Now, with Russia on the offensive again, I don’t really see any possibility of Ukrainian gains in the future. If the counteroffensive was supposed to improve Ukraine’s position on the negotiating table, well, this is their high tide.
It doesn’t seem like a big departure from where they’ve been for most of the war. Well before this I recall the general consensus being that Ukraine was sending out waves of unsupported light infantry and Russia was mulching them with massed artillery fire, and then the process repeated until the UA soldiers refused to advance.
NATO doesn’t really seem to have much going in terms of tactics except “lol air superiority”. A lot of their equipment is shitty and has poor mobility, and they haven’t fought any real battles since Vietnam. All they really know is air superiority, gun run, JDAM, bomb civilians, hot chip, and lie."
lol “editorialized”. i counted two instances of b editorializing in this otherwise well cited article. and one of those is barely editorializing, more of a hypothesis based on prior evidence that Ukraine does not have enough reserves to follow up if they happen to break the Russian line. the other is a guess of Russia’s future actions, but again, its a reasonable guess based on the current status of the Russian army and the general sentiment of civilians in Russia-occupied oblasts.
so come @jemikwa@lemmy.blahaj.zone and @natecox@programming.dev. come @lasagna@programming.dev. defend ur claims in the posting arena instead of cowering in the mod reports
Its just so much fucking blood spilled.
I can’t get over how many people are throwing their lives away over some dipshits in their respective capitals putting new lines on a map. Nightmarish to see Ukrainians and Russians alike march to their deaths over this shit.
Probably hundreds of thousands of people dead for the ambitions of a handful of gerontocrat crooks and their cronies.
If you want a really bad thought imagine what the Red Army soldiers from WWII would think finding out that Ukraine and Russia were at war and Banderites had taken control of the government and were leading the charge?
This is simply the overture of what will turn out to be the ultimate fight between US and China - the showdown between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism. All the geopolitical events revolve around this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, which is now approaching its zenith.
What is happening in Ukraine today is likely a cakewalk compared to what is to come. Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity (it won’t recover for the next half a century) and using monetary and economic policies to engineer famines and poverty across the developing world just to slow the decline of the empire. The interest rates hikes, and the sanctions against Russian agricultural products, are literally impoverishing and killing people in the global south.
He will make sure that America will be the last to go down, even if it means total annihilation in a war against China. The real question is, how will the rest of the world respond to this?
Biden truly scares me, being so casually ending European prosperity
Biden’s a senile puppet. He didn’t do anything aside from sign whatever was put on his desk by staffers and read whatever was on his teleprompter. Europe was ultimately screwed by its own slavish obedience to deindustrialization, a process decades in the making and orchestrated by the forces of finance. This was enhanced by their millennia-old tangled web of bigotries that made it easy for finance to divide and conquer them. They’d have been fucked over in the exact same way regardless of who sat in the oval office or what colour of lawn sign that person had.
I think many people are seriously underestimating the ghoulishness of Biden.
The Biden administration is significantly a step up when it comes to aggressive foreign policy. There was a clip of Trump telling the Europeans that they have to spend 2% of their GDP into defense and the people in the room were just laughing at him. Biden actually made Europe do it for real.
Trump was also very keen on pushing Merkel’s Germany to build this massive LNG terminal to pivot away from Russian gas - the project eventually went nowhere. Biden actually made Europe depends on American gas and spending billions to build those terminals for real.
Trump started a petty trade war with China in 2018, and was reciprocated upon by the Chinese. Biden started a technological sanction against China that has no proportional response. To understand how seriously China sees this issue, you need to read the science fiction novel Three Body Problem, which is extremely popular among the elite and academic circles in China.
Trump likes to talk big and pretends like he is this genius businessman who can make his adversaries yield, but his “achievements” were literally nothing compared to what Biden had accomplished in just 2 years in office.
I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.
My point is that even Obama didn’t dare to step this far, while Biden is picking fight with the entire world. If you look at his entire career, Biden is unequivocally a true believer in neoliberalism, a fanatical ideologue (and in my opinion, a lot more so than Obama).
Agreed. My strongest evidence that Biden is just immensely cruel and an absolute true believer is that he worked as a mountpiece for the Credit Card industry for literal decades and was still, relatively speaking, poor when he became VP. I think his assets with his wife might have been like 2 million, or maybe even 1 million, and I think a lot of that was from Jill’s career. Biden somehow, working for one of the most corrupt sectors of the economy, never managed to make any money off of it in decades of doing their bidding. Only a profoundly weird man or a profoundly stupid man could achieve that.
I don’t think even Obama would dare to cross this line, and Obama was the one who deleted half of the generational wealth of black community overnight, which as Michael Hudson repeatedly reminded us, made him quite possibly the most racist president in the history of the United States.
I don’t think Obama is anywhere close to the most racist president in US history, but that speaks more to the quality of his competition than any lack of racism on his part.
I guess the difference is between someone who actively petitions for segregation to prevent black people from renting/buying houses in your neighborhood, and someone who makes the black community so poor that they can never afford to move into your neighborhood.
Obama has probably done more to prevent the future generations of black families from ever becoming homeowners than the racist Republicans could only dream of. He’s the choice candidate for the “smart” racists.
some Ukrainians are being coerced into serving. libs will call me a Russian bot for this, but i dont think the same can be said for Russia. they have enough active military personnel to avoid drafting; they havent even deployed them all
but yeah, war is depressing. hopefully before we go extinct we will achieve communism and end war
deleted by creator
You’re right of course but it’s a significant degree of coercion away from the way Ukrainian recruiters were grabbing people on the street and throwing them in vans.
tens of thousands of casualties from Wagner alone? that sounds spurious
Bakhmut was a literal meat grinder of human lives, absolutely brutal battle with mass casualties on both sides. Definitely was no where near worth the life lost.
deleted by creator
i stand corrected
libs will call me a Russian bot
Everyone who disagrees with me is a lib is great defense. Chuds will disagree with me though
Are you not a liberal? What’s your political views? I wanna hear
I don’t consider myself a lib. Housing should not be an asset for profit. Workers pay should increase based on the value they create. Housing first policy for the homeless. Food prices should not be rising based on corporate profit seeking
I think I’m still pro market economy, but not in a capitalist sense. A market economy can incentivize progress, but workers shouldn’t be forced to participate at minimum wage through the threat of hunger and homelessness.
corporate power lobbying has ruined public infrastructure and that’s bad.
But I’m not backing Russia fully on this invasion thing, so I’m definitely a liberal!
I don’t think anyone here really supports Russia, in the sense that we want them to conquer Ukraine. More that we don’t see prolonging the war as useful for anything but killing more people and selling more weapons. Peace is what we should all aim for here.
Yeah. A Russian victory, or at least a favorabel stalemate, is desirable because it would harm NATO, not because there’s anything good about Russia. There’s some argument to be made that it’s likely better than allowing Ethnic Russian Russian Speaking Ukrainians to fall in to the hands of the Banderites that run Kiev, but that’s kind of up in the air.
Does Ukraine really need to coerce people into serving? I was under the impression that the country had huge numbers of bloodthirsty fascists salivating at the thought of killing “RuZZian orcs.”
The Ukrainian leader said all officials responsible for military conscription in each region of the country were dismissed.
Mr Zelenskyy said a probe into military recruitment centres across the nation exposed illegal dealings including bribery.
The investigations also unveiled reports of officials helping men dodge conscription by fleeing across borders.
There is currently a wartime ban on travel for draft-eligible men.
“This system should be run by people who know exactly what war is and why cynicism and bribery during war is treason,” Mr Zelenskyy said on Friday.
‘recruitment’ lmao
No they definitely need to conscript. Most people don’t want to give up their lives for some war, no matter their ideology.
Disgusting waste of lives.
All of this should have fucking ended but Boris Johnson fucked it all. Fuck him and fuck all the liberals that have been spewing bloodthirsty vile shit calling for tens of thousands of lives to be wasted in a fucking meatgrinder for some lines on a map. I do not give a fuck about the Ukrainian state, I do not give a fuck about the Russian state. Lines on a map are not people.
These people deserved better than bloodthirsty assholes.
deleted by creator
Yeah even the CIA was saying that Ukraine would be defeated in 48 hours, but Boris Johnson was so commited that he decided to go there himself and mess everyone up.
My american internet friends got so mad at me when I said at the beginning of all this that there should be an immediate ceasefire and surrender to stop the fighting and I was called an apologist for Putin and that this was an unprovoked invasion and you have to protect yourself. These people never experienced military action near their homes.
an unprovoked invasion
NATO expands: I sleep
Donbass Secedes and wants to be Russian to avoid ethnic persecution from Lviv: Real shit
Fun fact: only 3 countries on the list (Hungary, Slovenia and North Macedonia) held a referendum on whether their countries should join NATO. So much for NATO as the defender of democracy I guess. But the Crimean referedum was a total sham, definitely a fake, I know because I am an expert on democracy.
Same, I got called a Nazi for saying we shouldn’t send them “lethal aid”, as if flooding a warzone with bullets is how you get less people shot.
“But it will only be the bad people getting shot more”
Need to have more good guys with a gun after all.
…those guys with Swastikas tattoos are the good guys right?
Oh nohoho, patented Slava Ukraini, old slavic symbols!
Every lib I know says this is a genocidal war (despite no proof of any intent to genocide, they just think Putin wants to massacre every Ukrainian ever) and that, responding to that report about crackdowns on draft dodgers, anyone who tries to avoid conscription is a traitor and should be treated as such.
Absolutely deranged the takes one can dig up when one is not threatened in any way.
The only side that wants to “fight to the last Ukrainian” is the NATO side, so it is kind of a genocide just perpetrated by US empire on its puppet state.
- I wouldn’t actually call it that, just making fun of libs who call basically every war now a genocide, unless the US is doing it/or supporting it
I think they saw Bucha and were like yep the whole thing is about genocide. Now imagine if they declared a genocide every time the US committed a war crime lol
There’s more evidence ukraine did bucha than Russia anyways.
NYT is running an article today saying they are making progress https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war.html so I am not sure about western media changing course.
I do think MoA jumped the gun, tbh. There were attacks all across the front today.
NYT, famously always on the right side of history
Right or wrong isn’t the point. The point is the tune hasn’t changed.
Lazy posting on my part tbh.
It’s looking like the consensus is what’s changed. WaPo and the Hill have turned on the counteroffensive while NYT continues to beat the drum.
NYT is just lagging behind the pack.
They’ll just drum up some other backwards ass excuse to throw more money at neo-nazis in Ukraine. This war is never going to end anytime soon and frankly your average burger is literally a world away and views it as team sports.
According to Proshinsky, many of them are trying to arrange a “mini-Stalingrad” on the positions, forcing them to go into frontal assaults on well-fortified Russian positions.
Its not that I’m surprised at this point when anticommunist propaganda turns out to be projection, it’s more that im still surprised at how often it pops up
I’m not sure if I fully understood your comment, but here’s my response based on how I read it. Let me know if I’m off base.
Stalingrad was one of the worst and most destructive sieges in human history and I assume everyone in the former USSR knows about it. If your own generals are forcing you in to a hopeless frontal assault against a fortified position Stalingrad seems like an apt comparison. I refer to pretty much any well entrenched strong point as Pavlov’s House, for instance. And if I’m reading this right he’s saying his commanding officers are behaving, foolishly, like the Nazis.
That’s it?
THAT’S the counteroffensive?
THAT WAS JUST THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME!
This whole fiasco has more than a few similarities to the somme if I can toot my own horn
The counter offensive is more than a military maneuver. It’s an idea. Light itself.
And if we can harness that light to light up a high school gymnasium, to light up a Starbucks, to light up a Walmart, than perhaps we can light up the world.
POV: you are a Russian minefield
Using a combined arms NATO style attack tactic for the counter offensive when Ukraine basically has no air force was certainly a very smart and good idea with no potential problems. Especially when attacking entrenched and mined Russian positions. Great idea from the NATO military commander failsons
I can only imagine the number of dead and wounded Ukrainian soldiers. This didn’t need to happen.
My friend’s Ukrainian husband just got out, but he’s still in some sort of family visa limbo. He’s story from the last two years is just trauma laden with trauma.
So much fucking senseless death and human tragedy just so the US Empire can stave off its encroaching decay a few years more.
And the ironic part is, if anything, this whole event has only accelerated its demise.
Even more ironic that the supposed ruler of the empire can’t even comprehend what’s happening because he’s a demented old fuck.
I mean Hitler was probably on as many drugs and zonked out like ol’ Joe after Kursk 1943 (read “Blitzed”, it’s so great) but a dying empire sending 1,000s to their death in minefields or a braindead 80-year old zombie… that’s gotta be a first, right?
Even more ironic that the supposed ruler of the empire can’t even comprehend what’s happening because he’s a demented old fuck.
putin is losing in iraq
See also: the war on terror.
The MIC raked in the dough while the USA suffered several domestic setbacks that they still haven’t recovered from. Good job, guyz!
The sick old man of the world.
Glad he got out. That’s something, at least.
This is really weird. I just read on quora that Russia has almost no tanks left. I’m not joking.
I remember dozens upon dozens of shitposts on Quora about how Russia was supposedly unable to produce ball bearings because of sanctions. One of the biggest weapons manufacturing powerhouses on the planet.
Every single one of them would end with the phrase: “Sanctions work, just slowly” – i.e. the usual grift from Neoliberals.
Always claim that the big victories are right around the corner, just in reach, just gotta wait a little while longer!! Meanwhile they make off into the distance with whatever spoils they managed to gain during their grift.
It’s February 2022. Russia has no tanks left etc :ti
Shit wha’ts the doctor manhattan emoji?
Thanks.
There’s enough content on Quora to keep the dunk tank going until the sun explodes.
i don’t understand, its been going bad the entire time, why admit it now? its been 18 months and thousands of lives, wtf
I think that some very pro-Ukraine voices (especially in the media and Dem establishment) are angry that this counteroffensive is not going well… but they aren’t willing to admit that NATO forced Ukraine into it, so they have to just bemoan how bad it is going. Ukraine made a deal with Russia very early into the war, but as soon as NATO found out about it, Boris Johnson arrived in Ukraine for a completely unscheduled visit and told Ukrainian officials that we will fuck them up (their positions in the government and their future employment prospects) if they don’t cancel the deal. The same with this counteroffensive, we told them to do it.
Don’t worry guys, I hear they’re bringing in some dude called Steiner to start another counter-offensive, everything’s still good 👍
deleted by creator
The situation is more complex than the media presents it as. The conflict started in 2014 when the Ukrainian government was coup’ed and banned opposition parties, causing seccesionists to rise up in eastern Ukraine. The involved parties signed a cease-fire agreement, but Ukraine violated it by bombarding cities in the disputed territories. Russia sent troops in in response, at the request of the separatists.
We don’t write off the Russian narrative as baseless, but we do have a range of opinions about the conflict, aknowleging that historical context. Personally, I believe that there were (and are) diplomatic solutions that would minimize loss of life but they are being ignored, in part because of domestic pressure from far-right groups in Ukraine, but mostly from US pressure to have a conflict for the sake of the military industrial complex.
deleted by creator
but they are defending themselves from an invader, and I don’t understand why the pressure to stop is on them and not the invader here
Donbas has been defending their homes and their right to speak their native language for 8 years. Russia is not invading Donbas they have been invited. Russia is trying to stop a civil war. When western nations have assisted one side in civil wars in places like The Congo in the 60s or Yugoslavia Somalia and Haiti in the 90s they called it peace keeping.
Unfortunately Ukraine has refused to stop fighting even when faced with insurmountable odds and the USA and its vassals have given them the false hope that they could win. Had nato stayed out of the conflict Ukraine would have surrendered a long time ago likely well before the referendum on joining Russia. The DPR and LPR would have been free nations not part of Russia but seeing that the entirety of the western world was against their peaceful existence as an independent state they held a referendum on joining Russia.
TLDR: Its really not an invasion when the people of the occupied territory want you there.
deleted by creator
Should the defenders of the DPR and LPR be forced to only fight on their own territory? If Russia’s army doesn’t push out of Donbas then all the collateral damages happens to the place they are trying to defend. “the best defence is a good offense.”
The way to win a war is to kill enough of the enemy’s soldiers that they are unable or unwilling to continue fighting. Russia is just going where Ukraine’s army is. The more Ukraine resists and refuses to let the people of eastern Ukraine choose their own path the more of Ukraine is going to be occupied.
deleted by creator
I guess I see where you’re going tactics-wise but they didn’t just occupy, they straight up want to annex all of the land they took, and they would have probably also annexed kherson and kharkiv if they didn’t retake them first.
Those areas will likely be annexed and I am betting Russia will take Odessa too. The majority of Ukrainians east of the Dnipier are Russian speakers. Before 2014 the number of Ukrainians who said Russian was their mother tongue was consistently polled around 40%. Again this was a civil war between Ukraine’s Banderites and Russian speaking Ukrainians. If Nato and Russia never got involved the DPR and LPR would have probably gained their independence and split the country in 2 on the same line.
Russia spent 8 years trying to negotiate a settlement peacefully and Ukraine used that time to build up their army and never implemented any of agreed measures. Putin didn’t want a war NATO did. “The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger” -Merkle.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s involvement Ukraine’s army ratcheted up its attacks on Donetsk. Russian was goaded into action. They were given the choice between 2 bad options, invade, or let Ukraine kill civilians that share Language, cultural, and Family ties with Russia.
Say someone is kicking a dog and you say “stop it.” They keep kicking it so you get in the way and despite you saying “be chill, lets talk this out” They now want to fight you so they can go back to kicking the dog. All their friends show up pushing them to fight you. They just wont stop and even if you are giving way more than you get you get hurt. Wouldn’t you feel like you should take the guys other dogs as well as the one he was beating?
deleted by creator
What diplomatic solutions do you think could be reached? From what I understand wouldn’t the only thing Russia would accept is being able to keep all the stuff they annexed?
Yes, at this point I think that’s looking like the most plausible end to the conflict, regardless of whether we keep throwing people into a meat grinder for the next 20 years or not. Ukraine’s stance is that they won’t consider any territorial concessions at all, including Crimea which they haven’t controlled since long before the conflict started. I don’t think that’s realistic.
There were better options for Ukraine that would’ve avoided this outcome. If they’d upheld the cease-fire, if they’d allowed them to have a voice in a democratic process, maybe if they’d given them some kind of status of an autonomous zone. But with all the bridges burned at this point, the options are considerably narrower.
As for Russia, the thing is even if they withdrew, that wouldn’t necessarily settle things because there’s still Ukrainian seperatists. I didn’t agree with Russia’s intervention, but I’m not sure what they could’ve done differently to stop or prevent the shelling of Donbas. You could argue that they’re just a Russian proxy, but a lot of people there do have cultural ties to Russia, and if the support isn’t genuine, then why did Ukraine feel the need to ban the opposition parties? And you could just as easily say that the Ukrainian government is just a US proxy.
Ultimately, I just don’t trust the same politicians and media that lied us into Iraq to present an honest account of things, or to have the interests of the people at heart. Even if Ukraine was able to reclaim Donbas, and even if we say it’d be good if they did (which considering their inability to get along, I’m not sure of), I just don’t think it’s worth the cost.
deleted by creator
I totally agree with you there. Sometimes people here can get a little too pro-Russia for my tastes, but generally there’s skepticism towards sources from both sides, while a lot of places are more one-sided and uncritical (towards one side or the other). We believe that multipolarity is a good thing for the world (especially for developing countries), but also Putin is not a socialist and sucks in various ways (transphobia for example). He’s the enemy of our enemy, no more, no less.
But yeah war sucks, and I’d like it to end as soon as possible, in a way that lasts, regardless of where the line gets drawn. I wish it were possible to return to the ceasefire arrangement, or to return to before 2014 when Ukraine was more neutral and everybody got along. They’re both capitalist countries so the whole thing’s kinda dumb and at the end of the day, I just want everybody to be able to go home to their families.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I can’t and won’t speak for every hexbear, but I personally want the war to end as soon as possible. The failure of the counteroffensive to make any actual gains, far under-performing the expectations of most Russia-optimistic commentators (by Russia-optimistic, I mean people who think that Russia is on the trajectory to “win” the war) just goes to show that Ukraine is not going to be able to achieve its war aims. The only thing that could change the trajectory at this point would be full NATO entry into war, which would begin WWIII and be quite likely to lead to nuclear war and the subsequent deaths of billions of people.
Given that Ukraine isn’t going to win, then the only thing that is going to end the war is a negotiated settlement. That settlement would have to concede to Russian war aims, since again, they’re winning. Those aims seem to be the recognition of Russian territorial gains in the war, as well as a neutral status for Ukraine (de-militarization/de-Nazification have been dropped.) I think pro-Ukraine commentators would call this a defeat for Ukraine, but in my view this is the best deal that Ukraine could plausibly get at this point. There’s simply little remaining equipment that NATO is willing to give away that Ukraine is capable of deploying. For example, the F-16s are 9+ months away from being deployed, and I don’t see how a handful of old fighter planes are going to make any difference going up against the most sophisticated anti-air missle systems in the world.
So, reality checks for NATO, Ukraine and the western press are good, because the alternative is throwing away more life for zero return.
deleted by creator
Finland maintained neutrality and sovereignty in its domestic politics throughout the cold war despite neighboring the USSR and having joined the Axis powers. A “finlandization” of Ukraine is certainly possible (and is probably the best that Ukraine is going to get). All states are influenced by other nation-states, so a post-war Ukraine is going to have both western and Russian influences to various degrees. What Russia finds a provocation is NATO military forces in Ukraine.
Again, I feel for those who have lost their homes in the war. However, the war could be ended today on the negotiation table, or it could be ended 12 months later at the negotiation table and the only significant change will be that even more Ukrainians have lost their homes.
I’m not saying that this is a good or happy situation, but I think that it’s the reality of the situation.
deleted by creator
It’s very simple: we are leftists whose only position in this war is to support whichever side that is more beneficial the survival of working class movements.
NATO/Ukraine winning means the resurgence and victory of fascism in Eastern Europe and Russia, it means replicating what Ukraine has done to its own people (banning socialist and communist parties, persecution and murder of labor activists, rise of violent fascist gangs, mass privatization of public utilities to foreign capitalists, and the inevitable neoliberal shock therapy being perpetrated in the region to impoverish the working class as if those countries haven’t suffered enough). Essentially, a repeat of post-Soviet Russia shock doctrine in the 1990s. The Western media literally have been salivating on the prospect of collapsing Russia’s economy with their “sanctions from hell” as though collective punishment is going to stop the war somehow.
As much as we criticize Russia for their problems, it is nowhere near as severe as the fascism problem in Ukraine today, which is being actively promoted and glorified by NATO and Western media. For one, the Communist Party of Russian Federation is still the second largest political party in the country, despite them not being as radical as we’d like them to be. Meanwhile, Ukraine is actively decommunizing the country to erase its own Soviet legacies.
On a higher level, though, we as Marxists see this as the ultimate clash between neoliberal finance capitalism (represented by the US) and industrial capitalism (represented by China). As followers of Marx’s thesis, we believe that industrial capitalism remains most viable path towards socialism. The Russia-Ukraine War is thus a proxy war between two systems: Ukraine representing the expansion of finance capital led by Washington into Russia to ultimately weaken the rise of China; and Russia which is resisting the encroachment of Western capitalism and is being increasingly pulled into the sphere of Chinese socialism.
To put it quite simply, we see that neoliberalism represents a dead end where fascism is the imminent outcome. Western imperialism winning will truly doom the Global South for they will be the first ones that will be sacrificed to the gods of free market as the global capitalist system crumbles from within.
deleted by creator
The sooner Ukraine loses the less Ukrainians die. We aren’t nationalists so we don’t value national sovereignty(at least inherently).
Among other reasons.
deleted by creator
What about the defenders the attackers are defending? This is a civil war. Russia is assisting the defenders of the civil war.
deleted by creator
Fair enough.
It’s not about cheering for a side, it’s about seeing reality for what it it.
deleted by creator
We don’t want them to lose, we want the war to end. At the moment, that would mean ending in Russia’s favour. Ukraine has been propped up by the west since last year. Without American money and weapons, they would already have collapsed. A staggering number of people have fled, and hundreds of thousands of men have come back from the front with life-changing injuries, which means their economy is going to really struggle for the next few decades. The West will have to pull out eventually, and then Ukraine will have to sign some peace agreement which likely won’t be in their favour. However, continuining until the West says “enough is enough” (and after Iraq and Afghanistan, who knows how long that will be) will force more people out of the country and deplete the working population inside the country even further. What does Ukraine have to gain by sticking it out?
deleted by creator
In that case, I’m not sure you do understand. They will never get the Donbass or Crimea back (at least not during this conflict); every Ukrainian death that happens now is happening for no reason, and is actively going to make their recovery harder. I’m saying that by packing it in now, they’d be cutting their losses. Do you think losing now would be worse for them than losing further down the line, when their population has been further depleted?
God that is such a brain dead stupid take.
explain?
Short answer: We don’t want Russia to win we just want USA and NATO to lose.
deleted by creator
They’re responsible for the worst atrocities committed since 1945, including not only shielding perpetrators of the worst atrocities between ~1933 and 1945 from prosecution, but rewarding them with status, money, and influence. The US and its NATO lapdogs stand with their feet on the throat of the global south, preventing them from developing and threatening their hegemony, as well as actively exacerbating climate death through capitalism.
The US and it’s NATO lapdogs are responsible for the position we find ourselves in at this moment: staring down the barrel of climate death and hastening to pull the trigger because it will affect our bourgeois masters the least and the last. The only way to liberate humanity is to overthrow the US led “rules based” hegemony.
I’ve run out of time to tie this into the Ukraine conflict due to real life intruding on my posting habit. Hopefully a comrade can pick up my keyboard as I fall, lol
deleted by creator
Russia isn’t really capable of being a global hegemon, and a multipolar world is better for the periphery who can play the major powers off each other.
deleted by creator
The Russian Federation, you don’t gotta hand it to them. But liquidating tens of thousands of conscripts in order to preserve the Ukranian state as currently constituted, while the state cracks down on Communists and Anarchists, dismantles unions, bans opposition media and political parties, and operates under martial law is nothing worth defending either. The people would genuinely be better off if the Ukrainian state conceded. If negotiations were carried through to completion over a year ago. Great power conflicts between rival capitalist nations are not an effective site of struggle for proletarian revolution, no matter how you slice them. It would be ideal if people stopped getting killed.
The status quo is gone. Changed irrevocably. The outset of the kinetic war, and the resulting economic war have imposed permanent changes in global geopolitics and the economic system. We are left only with the potential outcomes. The NATO victory, where the global imperial hegemon succeeds in making one of its key adversaries geopolitically irrelevant, or the NATO failure, where a different reactionary capitalist state prevails, but the concentration of power in the imperial core wanes. Ukraine is left a smoldering crater littered with landmines and unexploded ordinance which will take generations to recover - regardless of the outcome.
It is a truly fucked up situation, but the vast majority of the English-speaking Internet seems to be inundated with pro-Ukranian war propaganda, and at the very least we have been skeptical of the viability of this war effort from the outset. In a lot of places, simply commenting on the apparent state of affairs has been branded as defeatism and propaganda. I think in general, we aren’t excited about the prospect of the Russian Federation, as currently constituted, becoming more powerful - but embracing the United States and its allies to see it punished is not a viable path either.
We don’t have to worry about Russia becoming “more powerful” because the only way they can achieve that under the current climate of unprecedented sanctions is by abandoning neoliberalism and adopting socialist policies. If they manage to overcome that, and that’s a big if, then they are already on their way towards socialism, so it doesn’t matter much to us leftists anyway.
