Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
The point regarding the Budapest Memorandum is that the US made it clear that it was not legally binding, and already violated it in 2013 in Belarus. In 2014, the west intervened directly in Ukraine, aiding the Banderite faction in overthrowing the democratically elected moderate, Yanukovych.
Regarding Russia and the referendum for the DPR and LPR to join the Russian Federation, the war started in 2014, with the Banderite coup. Russia did not start the Ukrainain Civil War, it entered the Civil War 8 years after it started. Kiev has been shelling the Donbass region and killing thousands of civilians there for over a decade at this point, which is why they voted to join.
As for Nazis in Ukraine, the key point distinguishing them is that they are extremely common, open, and close to the levers of power:
This has been true since 2014, when the Banderites took charge. As for the DPR and LPR requesting assistance, they requested on the 23rd, with letters dated the 22nd. We also know that Russia was heavily involved with talks between the Donbass and Kiev prior to 2022, and that the seperatists voted to join in September 2022. They would have been at war for 8 full years with Kiev.
The Kiev regime killing civilians in the Donbass region is well-documented even by western orgs. Further, Kiev has been found guilty of war crimes.
As for the map, it’s the electoral map for support of Yanukovych, so no, I can’t provide an electoral map since then as the civil war has been going on since 2014.
Oh, cool, well in that case, totally cool for Russia to invade and violate the agreement, too. I mean, why should Russia get left out of all the imperialist fun?
The idea Russia waited 8 years is just bullshit, and you know it because it’s already come up repeatedly. We’ve already established that Russia didn’t wait 8 years. We’ve already extensively talked about how Russia invaded before the vote to secede.
Russia invaded, THEN DPR and LPR requested aid from Russia once they were already effectively under Russian control.Hell, we can say they directly intervened militarily. The “little green men” were admitted to be Russian Spetsnaz, and Russia admitted to blocking Ukrainian armed forces. Russia directly interfered from the start.
If there’s truth to this, I’d be open to sources. I unfortunately cannot be aware of everything that happens in every conflict, so I admit it’s possible I’m uninformed here, but I’d need a source. Reminder that you are the one who gave me grief for not providing evidence.
Look, I’m not going to try to pretend that that patch in such proximity to the leader of the country is anything other than alarming. But I’m also not going to try to pretend that photos of… looks like less than a hundred people in all the photos you’ve shown, is enough to prove a systemic issue. Once again, even though I’ve explicitly professed an interest in seeing a quality source, even though I’m talking to someone who tried to give me grief for not providing evidence, you’re still not providing any real evidence that this is a truly widespread and systemic issue. Hell, I can’t even recognize the patch circled behind Zelenskyy with all of 20 pixels allocated to it, and the infographic doesn’t even seem to be relevant to the pictures you include with it, although it does appear exactly once in the set of pictures you shared earlier.
Hmmmm looks like you might be correct here. Difficult to find hard information on it. I’ll strikeout my above statement as the fact it had been discussed previously is still relevant to the point I was making.
That said, Russia once again weakens the argument for you. Russia themselves handed out medals specifying the start of the campaign as being February 20th. There are also some reports that the “little green men” may have began appearing as early as mid February, although I’m having trouble finding anything to definitively prove that. Sources have reported that special forces were put on alert as early as the 18th. Russia was very clearly preparing before then, and there’s plenty to suggest they’d begun actively taking steps in the region, including suspicion that some of the protests at the time weren’t as “home grown” as Russia wants it to be believed. Combined with them shipping in special forces and lying about their involvement, it seems quite reasonable to assume that Russia had already taken steps to create the impressions of favorable protests and to secure the allegiance of government officials.
Keep in mind, you say those governments requested Russian support when the link I’m about to share in the next paragraph shows that support in Crimea for Russian annexation was as low as 23%, so just because the local government made the request does not mean it accurately reflects the will of the people. Given what we know of Russian planning and involvement in the region, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that Russia made an attempt to influence local leadership to act in their favor, regardless of what the local people wanted.
Well I stumbled across some polling that suggests support for joining Russia in 2013 was as low as 23% and had been actively decreasing, which makes it EXTREMELY suspicious that Russia claims the vote to secede won with NINETY FIVE POINT FIVE PERCENT OF THE VOTE. That’s just absurd to trust at face value. There is zero good reason to blindly trust results of 95.5% in favor of what Russia wants in an election run by Russia in a region that clearly espoused just one quarter of that level of support only a year beforehand. There’s just no fucking way that was an honest vote with that in mind.
The question isn’t if Russia is justified in invading Ukraine, but if Donetsk and Luhansk are entitled to self-determination and the ability to request aid from Russia and secede from Kiev. Given that the west overthrew their president, it makes sense that Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would secede.
I already gave you evidence of Kiev killing civilians in the Donbass region:
Regarding the prevalence of fascism in Ukraine:
Regarding the request for aid and the short timeline between then and Russia entering the civil war, as I said, Russia was already heavily involved post-2014, after the west coup’d Yanukovych using Banderite factions. I never denied their involvement, I centered the DPR and LPR.
Regarding the Crimea poll, a little something called Euromaidan happened in between then and the annexation. Things change quickly when the far-right sieze your country.
Almost. The real question is whether or not those acts were genuinely self-determined or if they were heavily corrupted by Russian influence. There’s evidence that Russia wanted to take action to annex parts of eastern Ukraine and had begun planning before the coup, as you like to call it. There’s evidence that they intervened militarily. There’s evidence they stoked separatist sentiment. There’s evidence that Russian nationals were in Ukraine trying to frame their actions as the will of the local populace. Russia themselves has managed to make that self-determination questionable at best.
You’re right, I’m sorry. I got distracted in trying to go through the previous comment and must have gotten mixed up when I got back to it. I’ll review some of this in the morning, been at this too long for one day as is.
Russia acted militarily in February of 2014, in the early days of what you describe as the west’s coup. They did not wait until after 2014 or even mid-2014.
Ah, yes, with all signs pointing towards the population moving away from Russia, it can only be a western-backed coup if the populace gets pissed enough at leadership cozying up to Russia, in direct opposition to that. I’ve never seen anyone provide any actual good evidence that it was a western coup, although I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find western nations encouraged things along. Probably not to the extent that Russia encouraged things in their favor in eastern Ukraine, though. Almost certainly not given Russia actually directly acted militarily, even if they lied about it for a while before coming clean. I see you put a link related to it in the list you provided here, so I’ll look at that tomorrow, too, but from what I’ve seen from the last few people who tried to convince me of this, the evidence could probably at best be very generously described as sparse.
The overwhelming evidence points to the west systematically undermining Ukrainian autonomy, empowering Neo-Nazi elements as a deterrent against Russians (who the Nazis still hate for their communist past), and the populations in Donetsk, Luhansk, etc siding with the President they elected (as I showed you earlier). Either way, evidence behind the western-backed coup: