BillsPhoenix posted:

Ukraine has been continually escalating.

Rust Martialis posted:

Actually he's quite correct in his statement.

"Eighty-two years ago, Nazis murdered 34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar."

The first sentence is pretty unarguable.

"Soviets buried this history..."

Sadly the Soviets did intentionally bury the fact that the goal of the Holocaust was to kill Jews. This has been repeatedly discussed in the decades since by a wide number of commenters. It's not even controversial.

An article from Yad Vashem detailing Soviet government consistent opposition to memorials to slain Jews under Stalin:

https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-commemoration-under-stalin.html

An article from the Wilson Center on the conscious erasure of the centrality of Jews to the Holocaust

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/dont-learn-russians-about-the-holocaust

She quotes Elie Wiesel that "I have learned that the Holocaust was a unique and uniquely Jewish event, albeit with universal implications. Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”

Her view on what the Soviets acted this way is quite plausible:

The Wikipedia article on "Babi Yar Memorials" (link) makes exactly the same points.

The Soviets deliberately and persistently buried the fact that the Holocaust was, as Elie Wiesel said, a "uniquely Jewish event". Only *after* the fall of the Soviet Union was it possible to put up a memorial at Babi Yar to the Jews slain there.

Ed: and we're not even *touching* the subject of Soviet anti-Semitism: "rootless cosmopolitans", Doctor's Plot, etc.

OddObserver posted:

The landslide wasn't intentional, but was from a factory close enough to the site that it unearthed a lot of the victims.

And yes, they had to be shamed by courageous cultural leaders to build the memorial they eventually built, and that one was quite consistent with the Soviet policy of downplaying the Shoah.

quote:

The total number of individuals buried there is estimated at around 100,000, with Jews accounting for the majority of them. The most recent chapter in the tragic history of this site – the so-called Kurenivka disaster – happened in 1961. In an attempt to erase the memory of the crimes perpetrated there, the Soviet authorities repeatedly dumped industrial waste from the near-by brick factory in the Babi Yar ravine, which resulted in a disastrous mudslide that killed 1,500 city residents.

VitalSigns posted:

Oh wow there's actual video of protesters of cops hauling people away for having a sit-in to protest the war

VitalSigns posted:

They're protesting Bernie's decision to support more funding for the war because he is their senator. [/url]

VitalSigns posted:

Yeah that's the funding they were protesting, Bernie voting to arm Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion, I don't understand what's not clear, they had signs and everything.

Panzeh posted:

Yeah it's funny as poo poo, people genuinely expected Ukraine to go along with the agreement while Russia has troops in Ukranian territory. You must run legislative elections in territories that have russian troops at the polling stations and then give these legislators veto power over your foreign policy.

khwarezm posted:

https://twitter.com/I_Katchanovski/status/1717738123893817350
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2023.2269685
Large thread and link suggesting that Euromaiden in 2014 really were behind the sniper attacks. I don't know who Ivan Katchanovski is but his twitter feed does not fill me with confidence that he's a neutral party.

Kchama posted:

Everyone was distracted so nobody answered, but he just plain made poo poo up. There's literally zero validity to his nonsense. The long story short was, one guy was acquitted, and the rest were sent to jail for their role in the murders. He mentions the acquittal but completely neglects to mention the many convictions.

daslog posted:

Many months ago, I posted in this thread that I was opposed to the USA funding another forever war without at least raising taxes to pay for the cost I would summarize the response I got as follows: Daslog you are an idiot, deficits don't matter and this is not a forever war and Ukraine can win.

I still haven't changed my position, but it looks to me that Russia is executing on their traditional was strategy of lose, lose, lose, lose, and then win by exhaustion while absorbing enormous casualties that screw themselves up for generations.

Now I'm not nearly as close to the conflict as many of you goons are, but I still don't see how Russia loses outside of a bullet in the Kremlin.

Collapsing Farts posted:

The biggest issue with any sort of negotiations or peace deals with Russia is that they have zero credibility. So even if Ukraine, today, decided to just let Russia have all the stolen territory in order to get a cease fire, there's basically no actual guarantee that Russia wouldn't just continue the invasion later on.

small butter posted:

Could you elaborate on this? What are some examples of Russia's lack of credibility besides the obvious ("little green men, not Russian soldiers in Crimea," "we're not attacking during the 2021 buildup," etc.)?

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Morrow posted:

It's also hard to point to unpreparedness being a result of a genuine sabotage effort when the Ukrainian government was doing everything it could to downplay the invasion until Russian tanks ran over the border posts.

Back Hack posted:

The funny thing with France is that they were so smug about how Russia wasn't going to invade because they signed a peace-agreement with Russia that guarantee Russia wouldn't invade Europe, a couple of days before they did. What fools.

mlmp08 posted:

Macron visited Russia between 2 and 3 weeks prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The main points of discussion were on easing tensions and trying to come to agreements on disputes regarding the Minsk and Minsk II accords. The text of these agreements from 2014 and 2015 were vague, so it was very easy for either Ukraine or Russia to point to portions that they thought the other side was still violating. For example, the Minsk accords called (with no timeline) for elections to let Donetsk and Luhansk vote on self-governance, rather than being part of Ukraine proper. Ukraine argued that these elections could never proceed as long as separatists controlled the government there (and election proceedings), and the accords didn't specify a timeline. Russia argued that Ukraine was welching on the deal by refusing to hold the elections. Another example was that the accords called for heavy weaponry and foreign fighters to be withdrawn from the area to create a buffer zone, and Russia simply said they had no troops nor heavy equipment in the Donbass, despite evidence to the contrary. Other agreements included an immediate ceasefire, which led to arguments between Russia, Ukraine, and separatists on who was responsible or how severe breaches in the ceasefire were.

Both Minsk and Minsk II were considered complicated and fragile and open to interpretation, even at the time of their signing. Some of the pro-Ukrainian militias as well as separatist groups immediately announced that the agreement didn't mean anything to them back in 2015. While the US would make the case that Ukraine did some of the measures and Russia acted on almost none, any objective viewer would see that regardless of who was "more" in the wrong, the totality of the Minsk II agreements never came to pass. And occasionally, Russia would say they had nothing to do with Minsk II, because it was an agreement between non-Russian separatists and Ukraine, so not even a Russian issue, etc.

After Macron visited Moscow in February of 2022, he was somewhat hopeful, but it was still reported both by Russia and France as being tense and with outstanding agreements to be made if they were to avoid conflict.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/07/europe/ukraine-russia-news-monday-intl/index.html

Reporting following the meeting from France24:



Russia launched the February of 2022 invasion over two weeks later.

mlmp08 posted:

I don't think they signed anything in February of 2022, just talks and discussions. And the Minsk II agreements of 2015 were signed by a pro-Russian separatist leader, a Swiss diplomat (in role as OSCE representation), the former president of Ukraine, and the Russian ambassador to Ukraine.

the holy poopacy posted:

If you take the ~300k casualty figures at face value, that's 0.2% of Russia's population, or one in 500. Most of those are wounded rather than killed, so depending on the kill ratio that means the (likely under) reported death toll from covid is 3 to 4 times higher than the toll from the war in Ukraine. Given Russia's demographics 0.2% is enough to cause some problems over the very long term, but those issues will take years to really show up. These aren't the kind of numbers that would trigger any widespread catastrophe in the short term, so I'm not sure why the lack of widespread catastrophe would be a reason to doubt them.

Kraftwerk posted:

There just isn’t enough of the good stuff left to do it. It’s time to stop huffing the copium and face facts. Ukraine is losing this conflict. small tactical victories are not changing the fact that Russia has fought wars of attrition for its entire history and has always won them. It will win one against Ukraine too and the west has only itself to blame for it.

BougieBitch posted:

Bar Ran Dun posted:

I’ve been thinking about something in the context of “ceasefire” suggestion.

There isn’t any credible talk possible until after the US presidential elections. For all the rhetoric around the failure of the recent bill to pass, it is extremely unlikely that US military aid actually stops. It’s like the debt ceiling, a game played by the GOP to extract anything they can, but one they eventually blink on. The only way it actually stops is a Trump win.

Everything before that is meant to confuse and obfuscate. Europe has about a year to prep and ramp up to make up for a bad potential outcome, if the election go the wrong way.

A big flaming stink posted:

surely you cannot be claiming that concentration camp prisoners lashing out at those around the concentration camp in any way justifies israel's genocidal campaign?

Kalit posted:

Kind of ironic, considering you stated it's an impossible "war" (i.e. attempted genocide) for Ukraine to "win" (i.e. survive) early on:

And yet....

haddedam posted:

True 5th gen like f35 would help Ukraine conduct air operations with complete impunity as russia lacks the technology to target them.

Air superiority would end the conflict way faster since all the equipment we donate already assumes they are being used under air superiority.

Charlz Guybon posted:

Russia has proven itself so weak that Poland by itself intervening in the Ukraine war would win it outright. Eastern Europe won't have to do anything.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I think maybe small butter is exaggerating for comedic effect, not that Luxembourg is thinking of taking Russia's Third Rome title.

DTurtle posted:

The discharge petition for the Senate package was formally introduced in the House on Thursday and has received the support of 177 out of 218 Representatives needed. A second discharge petition for a bill including border stuff was also introduced and has received the support of 14 Representatives so far.

The last succesful discharge petition was in 2015. However, if it gets enough support, Johnson might just give up and formally bring the vote to the floor without the discharge petition being officially successful.

OddObserver posted:

Israel funding.

Deteriorata posted:

As long as they're paying cash, they're going to get what they want. It would take an act of Congress to cut them off at this point.