Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.

Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.

These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.

Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe

If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.

If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.

We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs

  • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The US funding and arming far right militias as a means of attacking a geopolitical rival has historically always been a good idea and resulted in very few consequences

          • The dogspaw @midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            Funny how all the z apologists don’t actually live in Russia🤣 getting call a Nazi by a literal nazi supporters🤣

                • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  The funny thing about Zelensky is not only is he Jewish, but he is a Russian speaking Jewish man. The parts of Ukraine that overwhelmingly voted for him were not the nazi hotbeds in Lviv but the Russian separatist regions of Donbass and Luhansk. Turns out support for Zelensky was strongest in the regions that wanted to leave in the first place? Why is this? Because Zelensky ran on a peace platform, and presented himself as in favor of Minsk II, against escalation with Russia, and not as much of a rabid reactionary as the (US-backed, nazi-glorifying) Petro Poroshenko, who was put in power through a transparent US-backed right-wing coup during Euromaidan in 2014.

                  The people in the Donbass and Luhansk regions mostly speak Russian. They were part of Russia historically, but Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev all granted more land to the Ukrainian SSR in an attempt to keep them happy and better integrate the agriculture with the industry.

                  This is why there was strong Russian identity in those regions, and strong separatist tendencies. The west half of Ukraine meanwhile, especially near Lviv, is the home of the most far right parts of Ukrainian society, who want to be part of NATO, who glorify nazi collaborators like Bandera, who join fascist street gangs like C14 and ethnically cleanse Roma people living in tents.

                  Zelensky presented himself as wanting to prevent the Ukrainian civil war (going on since 2014) from escalating into a full scale war with Russia, but after he got in office, he made few efforts to actually do this, and rather turned out to be a quite willing collaborator with the United States, and was willing to turn a blind eye to the reactionaries despite himself being a Russian-speaking Jewish man. He made a big show at the beginning of the presidency of filming himself “confronting” Azov battalion and telling them to put down their weapons. But guess what? He had no mechanism of enforcement. They didn’t take him seriously, and made clear their intention to violate any and all attempts to de-escalate. Zelensky, being a man who is Jewish and speaks Russia, is actually the perfect mascot this shit, because his surface appearance covers up the underlying reality. of the Banderite situation in Ukraine.

                • Bnova [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  You wouldn’t know a Nazis if they were goose stepping right in front of you. Nazis obviously do not care for Jewish people but their real enemy is and has always been the left. Otto Skorzeni litterally worked on behalf of the Israeli government. Walther Rauff, the inventor of “gas vans” also worked for Israel. About a dozen Nazis war criminals worked for Israel, and both the Nazis and the Israeli government knew this. Contemporary Nazis fucking love Israel because they’ve created a white ethnostate and admire their ability to have done so.

                  So to answer your question can Ukraine have a Nazi problem with a Jewish head of state? Absolutely, Nazis have no problem working with Jewish people when it serves their interests and it has served their interest to work with Zelensky because people such as yourself who are incapable of seeing through this thin veil guzzle the propaganda willingly and supported giving them a fuck ton of weapons to carry out pogroms on Roma and Russians.

                • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/19/zrjy-j19.html

                  UN report confirms Ukrainians’ use of civilians as “human shields”

                  In March, the Ukrainian government blamed Russian forces for the deaths of more than 50 elderly and disabled residents of a care home in the village of Stara Krasnyanka in the eastern province of Lugansk. According to Ukrainian officials, a fire broke out in the facility following a supposedly unprovoked attack on the innocents by Russian forces.

                  In reality—in a case the report found to be “emblematic” of the war—on March 7, days before the attack, Ukrainian forces had taken up positions within the care home “as it had strategic value due to its proximity to an important road.” Previous requests by the facility to local Ukrainian authorities to evacuate residents were denied due to the fact that Kiev had mined the surrounding area and blocked roads, thereby preventing anyone from fleeing.

                  Do you see what’s happening? These fucking nazi fucks who have absolutely zero respect for human life are manipulating you with lies about atrocities by deliberately putting their own citizens in the crossfire of a war. This is the kind of shit nazis do. And your own institutions are the ones calling them out for it, not just the other side. And you just don’t hear it.

                • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Why do people keep doing this? Why this deflection against admitting that there are many Nazis in the UA military establishment? Is it that important for you that UA be as pure and white as driven snow?

            • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              The letter Z isn’t the new swastika, the swastika is still the swastika and the people who wear the swastika are still the nazis

              You are the only nazi supporter here you bootlicking fascist scum

              The only analogy libs can even make between modern Russia and the nazis is invading another country, as if that was the worst thing the nazis ever did

              Funny how the entire premise of your side relies on minimizing and whitewashing the horrors of the Holocaust

            • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              are you deliberately or only accidentally unable to distinguish between being a “Z apologist” and simply recognizing that the United Snakes created the current geopolitical situation by pitting former Soviet countries against each other and pouring money into the most reactionary ghouls in both Russia and Ukraine?

              don’t actually live in Russia?

              very-intelligent

              I’m not Russian, but you know people besides Americans use the internet right?

              • The dogspaw @midwest.social
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                Russia pit Slavic country’s against each other funny how eastern Europe hates Russia just because they have done nothing but bring suffering and death to that region of the world for centuries funny how they want to align with the west and have money and health care and be able to live and not have Russian missiles fall on there head but america bad

    • The dogspaw @midwest.social
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      Its beyond my mind who you call yourself a communist while cheering on a racist facist colonizer at least china plays lip service to being communist Russia doesn’t even pretend but you people will still larp for them

      • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        colonization is when russians aren’t genocided and get to live in russia

        wanna decolonize eastern ukraine and crimea? give them to kazakhstan

      • Commiejones [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        racist

        Show me links to prove this. I have read multiple interviews from Putin all the way down to soldiers on the front line who all say that this whole war is stupid because they see Ukrainians as their brothers. There are multiple ethnicities in Russia and somehow they manage to get along quite well.

        facist

        That’s not how you spell the word “fascist.” “Fascism” is a is a word with a meaning. It does not apply to Russia as it is now. Maybe don’t use words that you don’t understand and cant spell.

  • YaaAsantewaa@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    I hate Russia with every fiber of my being, but the US and EU supporting literal Nazis who don’t even hide their psychotic beliefs is seriously messed up and it’s why I can never understand this stupid conflict

    Everyone in Eastern Europe has serious issues and they all seem made for each other

  • Nacktmull@lemm.ee
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    Don´t you know that when Azov was integrated into the Ukrainian military they instantly transformed into fighters for democracy, equality of LGBTQI+ people and protectors of the freedom of all minorities? /s (Believe it or not, this is what people on reddit will tell you when you point out that Azov are Neonazis)

  • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Similarly to the fucked up, twisted irony that descendants of the Holocaust were modern pioneers of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, it’s completely and utterly fucked that Eastern Europe has fallen so deeply into the grip of fascism. It’s true that the Ukrainians were treated somewhat differently out of pragmatic considerations by the Nazis, but they were still considered ‘Untermenschen’.

    It’s especially galling when the Ukraine was the economically best off part of the Soviet Union, and center of incredible culture, science, technology. But you don’t see these fucks praising an iota of what was unequivocally the best time to be alive in Ukrainian history. Because they don’t care about the quality of life of ordinary people. They’re predatory, nihilistic death-cultists who should be wiped from the face of the earth.

    History often has a sick sense of humor.

      • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        I would take an article from like, at most a year before the Russians invaded.

        Zelensky assumed office in May 2019, so even if the expectation was that he would do nothing but try to eliminate white supremacists from his military (which probably wasn’t even in his top 10 goals), an article about it from 2019 doesn’t establish anything about the people of Ukraine, the government of Ukraine, or the President of Ukraine supporting or defending Nazis.

  • wramble@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    Neat take, I guess.

    I look forward to the dirt-cheap Russian labor in the decades to come.

  • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I often see criticism of Ukraine lumped in with Russian justifications for invasion, in which case, the war is also warping your views.

    providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs

    The US got heat from other supporters of Ukraine for that even. Russia is also using them. Further cause to support peace negotiations.

    Especially because the actual reason Russia invaded wasn’t over any concern about ethnic Russians in Ukraine (that’s literally one of the oldest bullshit excuses for war) was to prevent NATO from being on it’s borders, and now Finland and Sweden have joined, so Russia’s already lost the geopolitical battle. All they’re fighting for now is dirt.

    • oil and wheat are just “dirt”? millions of civilians who were bombed by the Ukrainian government for the past decade are “dirt”? even if it is just “dirt”, its dirt that provides the perfect launching ground for a land invasion of Russia. NATO is the Nazi Arming Terrorist Organization and anyone fighting against them will have critical support from most of the world (no, the west is not all that exists; most of the world is or has been colonized by the west)

        • That’s a very one-sided view of affairs though, it’s not like the Ukrainian govt was bombing them for fun, it was a war. Civilians died on both sides-that doesn’t excuse it, but it certainly does not justify an invasion!

          show me where Russians attacked Ukrainian civilians from 2015-2021 (dont show me Russia funding separatists as evidence, the DPR and LPR have the right to defend their right to self determination). you can say “it was a war” all you want, it doesnt change the fact that there was a ceasefire agreement that was consistently violated by Ukraine.

          The invasion has achieved the exact opposite of what the Russian leadership wanted.

          Putin feared Ukraine aligning with NATO, and this invasion has drawn them vastly closer and has deepened cooperation more than it ever would have been otherwise.

          Putin opposed the existence of an independent Ukrainian national identity, yet this war has solidified and reified it like nothing else ever could, among both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

          what do you think Russian leadership wanted? bc it looks like the DPR and LPR, as well as most of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, are occupied by Russia. and Zelenskyyy was supposed to be the “peace and neutrality” candidate, yet he was working towards joining NATO. the Ukrainians west of the Dnieper were already primed to join NATO, the war didnt change anything.

          and what are those bs identity politics abt “Ukrainian national identity”? lets focus on material reality, not these flimsy ideas invented to justify imperialism and ur guesses on what Putin thinks abt them

          Putin thought he had the support of the east, yet this invasion has wiped out any sympathy Russian-speakers might have had for the Russian state before.

          yummy western propaganda!!

          Putin (falsely) used ‘Denazification’ as a justification for the war, yet this war and Russian actions in 2014 have VASTLY empowered the far-right, giving them disproportionate power relative to their support base.

          Putin claimed it was to protect people in Donbass from ‘genocide’ (pfft’), yet now they have been subjected to far worse horrors than in the 2014-2022 period (not to mention the fact Russian actions against Ukrainian civilians have been far worse than anything that occurred in 2014-2022).

          no, Ukraine and the west have empowered (and armed) nazis for 90 years! and now you rely more on western propaganda and all their unfounded claims of atrocities. let’s focus on what we have proof for— the Ukrainian use of cluster munitions against civilians in the Donbas, Ukrainian pogroms and segregation against the Roma people, and state suppression of the Russian language. and what is wrong with you saying “pffft” regarding genocidal actions?

          The invasion is completely ridiculous and unjustified + strategically idiotic, based on a complete misunderstanding of the realities on the ground from the Russian leadership, which has become increasingly personalist and isolated from reality since COVID.

          lol you are the one isolated from reality. the world sees what the west is blind to. when the fighting is over and Russia still governs 4 previously Ukrainian oblasts, come here again and say the invasion is “strategically idiotic”, it will be funnier then.

          this IS a war against NATO. and it was started by NATO. and it can be ended by NATO right now— Russia is open to peace negotiations

          • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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            dont show me Russia funding separatists as evidence, the DPR and LPR have the right to defend their right to self determination

            this is a ridiculous double standard. if we’re going to talk about NATO pulling the strings of Ukraine, we don’t get to pretend the separatists were authentic grassroots movements unaffected by Russian military involvement in their affairs. and whether or not you ‘count’ the separatists as russian-proxy, they did kill civilians. the ceasefire & it’s breaking are still pertinent details but it’s wrong to characterize the warfare as one-sided

            yet now they have been subjected to far worse horrors than in the 2014-2022 period

            this is true and obvious, it’s a much larger and more intense war. western propaganda does emphasis on russia’s crimes, denies ukraines, & spins tales of russia’s ‘genocidal’ intentions, but the wide scale suffering & thousands of civilian deaths are real. it’s why the war needs to end as quickly as possible.

            • im not denying separatists were influenced by Russia, but sending arms to a separatist group is nothing compared to directly attacking civilian centers. is a third party sending weapons to Hamas comparable to the actions of Israel? should we condemn those who send weapons to Houthi rebels?

              a subjective assessment is “true and obvious”? no western spin will change the fact that this war is one of western expansion and the people of the Donbas were facing ethnic cleansing from Ukraine. the war could end today if Ukraine and NATO were willing to negotiate reasonably.

              • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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                ah sorry i had no idea i have to spell out exact numbers of combatants, casualties, displaced persons, and length/area of combat zones or it’s “subjective”. don’t be obtuse, this isn’t western spin to say more people are getting hurt in the expanded war than were in the Donbass.

                when the separatists you arm & operate your military alongside hit a civilian target with those weapons you do have a measure of culpability. just like NATO has responsibility for the weapons they’ve given ukriane.

    • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The Baltics have been in NATO since 2004, so Russia already had NATO on its border. Plus Poland on Belarus’s border. It’s not about having NATO on their border in general, it’s about having NATO in Ukraine specifically. Finland and Sweden joining means nothing.

      But Ukrainian bombing of the Donbass absolutely was a factor as well. For 8 years Russia tried the diplomatic route to get them to stop, but despite signing agreements, Ukraine just ignored them and kept bombing anyway.

      • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        The Baltics have been in NATO since 2004

        The baltic route to invading Russia is a lot more difficult than the Ukrainian route. Ukraine was always the “red line” for them because of the topography, and the closeness to moscow. Also they were pissed when the baltics joined. The brits declassified that informal promises were made to Gorbachev (ugh…) to not expand NATO eastward in March 1991 if he dissolved the USSR. Of course these informal promises weren’t in writing and were never kept. the USA denied they were ever made, but luckily the brits declassified

        • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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          Really no one should be shocked that an informal promise wasn’t honored. If a legally binding treaty can still be ignored by a sovereign power, informal promises are always worthless and no one should be pointing to them and going “but they promised!”

          • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            Yes. Gorbachev was a clown who got clowned upon. Still, I think it’s worth mentioning, because it reveals that the West was always willing to be deceptive about NATO expansion, and what the role of NATO actually is (i.e. it is not a “defensive” alliance but a reactionary alliance of imperial core countries to protect the superprofits afforded by imperialism and neocolonialism)

            • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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              I mean, it is literally a defensive alliance if only because if one country is attacked, the others are legally obliged to treat it as an attack on them. It is then also an alliance of Imperial core countries (it was after all, founded in response to the Warsaw Pact).

              It is indeed worth mentioning, but I don’t think it’s worth framing it as some sort of public promise that was walked back.

              • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                It is then also an alliance of Imperial core countries (it was after all, founded in response to the Warsaw Pact).

                It was NOT founded in response to the Warsaw pact. NATO was formed in 1949. The Warsaw Pact was founded in 1955. The Warsaw pact was founded in response to NATO. NATO was building up West Germany economically less than 10 years after the fucking holocaust. The Soviet Union tried to join NATO in 1954 and was told “no, you aren’t democratic enough.” But they had no problem letting West Germany in while integrating “former” nazis like Adolf Heusinger into their command structure.

                I mean, it is literally a defensive alliance if only because if one country is attacked, the others are legally obliged to treat it as an attack on them

                less than a third of NATO countries were admitted to NATO through some kind of democratic referendum. It was almost always the unilateral decision of the given country’s bourgeois class, rather than something the people themselves were consulted on. In the cases where democratic referendums were held, it was often in countries that had just been balkanized (former Yugoslav countries, for example), or countries that were just at the outskirts of NATO and were therefore pressured geopolitically into choosing whose “sphere of influence” they were under: Russian federation, or USA. When a nation is compelled under duress to pick sides like that, and a class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is the one that usually ends up making the decisions, I doubt the alliance can reasonably be called “defensive.” Its borders keep expanding to encircle and balkanize nations whose main “crime” was being socialist Once Upon A Time. NATO expansion is marching us towards WW3. It is an expansionist and aggressive alliance that merely uses Article 5 to appear defensive and Democratic, while trying its hardest to constantly provoke wars and lay claim to natural resources.

                Is the following something a “defensive” alliance does?

  • duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    See my profile, I’ve been arguing with a bad person about this for days. “But Russia is also bad, therefore I must pretend to be above the fray, even though all of my words and actions and thoughts support amerikkka!”

  • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Fuck all Nazis, regardless of country. That being said, “denazification” was a disgusting lie told by an imperialist who has plenty of Nazi’s living in his own country to deal with so he could commit cultural genocide.

    • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      so he could commit cultural genocide.

      look, zelensky is a jewish person who sees israeli apartheid as a model to be followed but i wouldn’t go so far that as to say he wanted to do cultural genocide. it’s just azov and the right sector who wanted to.

      and as we all know azov and the far right militias are now in command of the ukrainian army / government. they don’t exist anymore. so it’s all good.

        • Redcat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          Exactly. And why would Putin talk about denazification? We read the same articles from CNN and MSNBC about Ukraine’s nazi training camps, about Zelensky’s inability to get the far right militias to stop killing eastern ukrainians, or the constant and widespread worship of nazi iconography combined with a redemption of banderism. None of this add up to a need for denazification.

          One would have to be a cynic to exploit words like those of the security council of Ukraine, when they claimed that asians are subhuman and that russians are are asians.

          The Russian government is truly mad if it believes it must do something just because tens of thousands of russians were killed by genocidal militias. Why, in international community tems those don’t even add up to a single american life.

          • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            I’m concerned you’re doing a satire, and I’m concerned that it means you’re being a tankie. Fuck Russia. You don’t get to whitewash the murder and torture and deportation of civilians as a justified war on Nazi’s in the region.