The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I'm really digging the international "yes we can" vibe surrounding Ukraine. It's unfortunate that we're just supposed to kinda watch it play out from the west.

I keep half-expecting someone to step in... but I suppose the possibility of a nuclear exchange is too real for any nation to risk it.

At this point, I wonder if Russia would just nuke Ukraine if it somehow lost. Not that I expect they'll lose when they can just keep throwing bodies at them.

Also though on more conventional military pursuits, tanks and boats move pretty slow and it tends to be an international fiasco just getting them into place when you have to go past or next to borders.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Edit: tried to link the image but the text in it from a reddit post was

It's crazy that there is a livestream of a burning nuclear power plant in a battlefield between two major European countries but before you can see it you have to watch a Domino's ad

and how this comment really captures the mood

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

On another note, this uh...has really brought some ugly things to the surface. In a way it's kind of a change to see the opinions stated outright, but uh...some people are being really racist about this. Not in a dog whistles and poor word choice way, either.
https://twitter.com/non_philosophy/stat ... 0815396872

The one that really stands out for me is

it's really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed

[McAvoy]

On another note, this uh...has really brought some ugly things to the surface. In a way it's kind of a change to see the opinions stated outright, but uh...some people are being really racist about this. Not in a dog whistles and poor word choice way, either.
https://twitter.com/non_philosophy/stat ... 0815396872

The one that really stands out for me is

it's really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed

That and the Russian accusation of Ukraine committing anti Jew crimes.

It's like stumbling and tripping into being on the right side by accident.

[CharlesPhipps]

The strangest fucking thing is all the Right Wing militias signing up to defend the Ukraine against Russia since the latter is a white ethnostate and they're both Slavs.

Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces, a research group says.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/worl ... raine.html

The Russian attack on Ukraine has prompted a flurry of activity among far-right European militia leaders, who have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines to confront the country’s invaders, according to a research group.

In recent days, militia leaders in France, Finland and Ukraine have posted declarations urging their supporters to join in the fight to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion. The posts have been located and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that specializes in tracking extremist groups.

Rita Katz, the director of SITE, said that numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia.

The motivation to travel to Ukraine, she said, was to gain combat training. It was also ideologically-driven, she added, since these far right groups viewed the fight against Russia as a fight against communism, clinging to World War II historical narratives, and associating modern-day Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, with the former Soviet Union.

“Instability in Ukraine offers white supremacy extremists the same training opportunities that instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has offered jihadist militants for years,” said Ali Soufan, who heads The Soufan Group, which has been documenting for several years how the conflict in eastern Ukraine has emerged as an international hub of white supremacy.

“Civil wars and insurgencies frequently draw in outside volunteers; some may initially join for humanitarian purposes but still exacerbate and prolong the conflict and violence,” he said in a statement to the Times.

The apparent mobilization of far-right groups could be problematic for the Ukrainian government, playing into Mr. Putin’s depiction of Ukraine as a fascist country, and his false claim to be waging war against Nazis who control the government in Kyiv. In reality, Ukraine has a democratically elected government and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish.

Some of the activity appears to be centered on the Azov Battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard that has drawn far-right fighters from around the world, SITE said. That group came together following the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and saw action against pro-Russian militias.

In one declaration, posted this week on the messaging app Telegram, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a leader of the Azov Battalion’s political wing called for a “total mobilization” of the group, and pointed volunteers toward recruitment resources online.

Earlier this week, Carpathian Sich, a Ukrainian group, posted donation information to its Telegram channel, seeking money from its followers via PayPal, as well as with the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron cryptocurrencies.

The same information was shared on several Finnish and French far-right sites, among them “OC,” a white nationalist site. This week, the group posted a pro-Ukraine statement on its Telegram channel, encouraging its subscribers to make donations to Carpathian Sich. A subsequent post said, “Just like the U.S.S.R., Putin will be defeated,” by aligning “French nationalists” with the Ukrainian people.”

Neo-Nazi and white supremacist Telegram users from Finland also encouraged fellow Finns to join the fight alongside Ukrainians, SITE reported. One post said, “the age-old duty of the Finns has been to wage war against the Russians.”

“Russia has always been persecuting us, and that snake will not drop until it knocks its head off,” said the post, according to SITE. “The best solution would be to make a collective surprise blow and knock out Moscow to the Stone Age.”

[BBally81]

That and the Russian accusation of Ukraine committing anti Jew crimes.

It's like stumbling and tripping into being on the right side by accident.

Which is a "pot" moment considering Russia has its own racism problem including anti-Semitism, a report released in 2018 by the Russian Jewish Congress and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) criticized high levels of antisemitism in Russian federal, local and social media and noted how potential antisemitic incidents involving vandalism, attacks against property were not reported as antisemitic-related crimes.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

The apparent mobilization of far-right groups could be problematic for the Ukrainian government, playing into Mr. Putin’s depiction of Ukraine as a fascist country, and his false claim to be waging war against Nazis who control the government in Kyiv. In reality, Ukraine has a democratically elected government and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish.

Really?

edit: the rise of far right groups is an obvious concern, but I'm asking about projected concerns about the government being implicated.

[Madner Kami]

Europe's far right has an identity problem. Normally you'd expect them to be anti-russian, but you can almost always find russian money in their coffers, if you dig a bit.
Also, coming from another angle, the Azov-Batallion wouldn't exist, if Russia hadn't provoked the Donbas-rebellion and annexed Crimea.

Ukraine does have a problem with it's past though, undeniably. The universal worship for Bandera, a guy who openly helped the Nazis and got tens of thousands of (mostly russian) Slavs and jews killed and deported into concentration-camps, doesn't exactly help the country. But then again, just like with the Azov-Batallion, if Russia hadn't fucked Ukraine so hard for generations (check out "Holodomor" for example), then the Ukraineans wouldn't have felt to turn to such a mass-murderer as their saviour. Russia keeps producing it's own problems. When they complain about the US fucking up, you can almost always point at Russia and say: So do you.

[phantom000]

A cease-fire has been declared, only to collapse.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wi ... e-83266522

Russian and Ukrainian sources are both blaming the other side so its hard to tell who actually broke it. Russian forces would be the main suspect but its not inconceivable that it was the Ukrainians. Although if it was Ukrainians that broke the cease fire I would be more inclined to put it down to human error than a deliberately plan. Maybe some soldier on the ground panicked or perhaps just didn't get the word to stop shooting, of course that applies to the Russians as well so we may never know what actually happened.

(Kinda like who fired the shot at Lexington)

[Frustration]

On another note, this uh...has really brought some ugly things to the surface. In a way it's kind of a change to see the opinions stated outright, but uh...some people are being really racist about this. Not in a dog whistles and poor word choice way, either.

Honestly, I suspect large numbers of these comments are trolls. For the rest... well, it's no different than a person of any given ethnicity being loudly concerned about any perceived oppression, discrimination, or bad fortune to come the way of that ethnicity.

We're used to hearing horror stories about sub-Saharan Africa, even though there are reasonably civilized and stable places of all kinds in that very large region. Massive destabilization on the edges of Europe is something we haven't seen in a long time.