The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

[Riedquat]

I mean specifically the radioactive souvenier malarky.

Hopefully not more than the fools who took it.

[Madner Kami]

I mean specifically the radioactive souvenier malarky.

Hopefully not more than the fools who took it.

My emotions after news like this are rather uncomfortable to my conciousness. I don't feel any empathy for the predictable victims of these actions, not after everything uncovered so far and I don't just mean Bucha and the many as of yet unknown but predictable repeats and much worse. I mean the state-propaganda and intercepted calls, the pictures of people cheering their clearly underequipped troops being sent into a war they have no chance to come back alive from, while still definitly going to kill and harm Ukrainians before they themselves inevitably become sunflower-fertilizer.
Russia in my mind, has reached the point of Germany in 1942/43. They're stuck and can't win anymore, though localized offensives may still yield results, these results will ultimately only come at the expense of the already depleted ability to hold these gains. The troops on the ground know this, whether conciously or subconsciously and the atrocities against the civilian population mount ever higher as a result of the frustration, be that through artillery-bombardement, siege or looting/raping/pilaging in the conquered territories, death-squads hunting imaginary enemies including.
And just like the german population in those years, they cheer, recieve obviously terrible news in a sugar coating, while recieving the loot the few returning troops brought back. On the telephone, women are telling their clearly emotionally distraught men that they need to "kill these Ukrainian shits (paraphrasing words like Khokhol and similar, much worse slurs which could be adequately subsumed as "Untermenschen") faster, while jokingly and yet completely seriously discuss how this same murderer could bring one of those beautiful cars home with him...

I feel terrible while thinking these things and writing them down and yet... I don't shed a tear for a single person of Dresden. They had it coming. And not just on an individual level, but as a society. Being indoctrinated by state propaganda only goes so far. I accept children not being able to know better and mourn their lost chances of having a wonderful life. They truely can't know better. But the soldiers? Their women? Their families? They can know better. They choose not to. And they conciously choose to dehumanize the victims of their utterly broken society.

I shouldn't feel this way. Don't want to feel this way. I need to remind myself, that #notallrussians, but at the same time... #toomanyrussians

[CharlesPhipps]

Given the fact plenty of these people are conscripts, I have more sympathy.

But there are a lot of outright evil people here and I don't begrudge the Ukrainians calling them orcs or invoking Red Dawn.

[CmdrKing]

It’s frustrating because the best thing is to end hostilities as bloodlessly and swiftly as possible, but given how little Putin’s word is worth, the only routes to this are a praetorian guard moment or sending so many conscripts back to Russia in a closed casket state that Russia is logistically unable to prosecute the war any further. And I see no reason to trust in the former at this stage.

[Riedquat]

It’s frustrating because the best thing is to end hostilities as bloodlessly and swiftly as possible, but given how little Putin’s word is worth, the only routes to this are a praetorian guard moment or sending so many conscripts back to Russia in a closed casket state that Russia is logistically unable to prosecute the war any further. And I see no reason to trust in the former at this stage.

Even then the worry is that Putin, being definitely a sociopath and possibly a psychpath, might lash out with chemical or even nuclear weapons when he's run out of other options. I honestly believe that he doesn't understand that the civilised world is as disgusted with his actions as it is and believes the condemnation is just politically motivated. There's quite a bit missing upstairs there, which makes him extremely dangerous for the world at large, and almost certain to commit more atrocities.

[CmdrKing]

The hope for that eventuality is that circumstances would only seem to be an existential threat to Putin himself, not his staff, and that those between him and launch would refuse such orders.

Of course that only really applies to the unthinkable, where launching incurs such a high risk of retaliation. Chemical attacks are much harder to read… and also may have happened at small scale, it’s hard to be entirely sure when this is the army who dug trenches in the fucking red forest of Chernobyl. Although given the existing sanctions they may lack the means to produce delivery mechanisms they wouldn’t also destroy their own troops, and would likely lose that capacity quickly if they did try to deploy them at scale.

[clearspira]

Here is a genuine piece of graffiti found in a bombed out building in Ukraine, left by a Russian soldier. It reads “Who permitted you to live so wonderfully?”

Kind of says it all really. These conscripts were sent to a country to free it from Nazis and what they found filled this man with either envy or disgust at just how much nicer it is than Russia.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I mean specifically the radioactive souvenier malarky.

Hopefully not more than the fools who took it.

Radiation being as hard to detect as it is, I worry that there will be a lot of third-party bystanders exposed, especially since you know the Russian state is going to be tight-lipped about any risks associated with handling the jacket of a soldier who came home, for example. Messy stuff, radiation.

[CharlesPhipps]

It’s frustrating because the best thing is to end hostilities as bloodlessly and swiftly as possible, but given how little Putin’s word is worth, the only routes to this are a praetorian guard moment or sending so many conscripts back to Russia in a closed casket state that Russia is logistically unable to prosecute the war any further. And I see no reason to trust in the former at this stage.

This war is frustrating for people who want to think of war as something with no good guys or bad guys and we all share a basic humanity. The Russians have invaded with no real justification, commit atrocities left and right, and have shown their goals are nothing less than the destruction of Ukrainian identity. We've even hit the "mass rape" bingo of just pure fucking evil.

What is that old saying? History is mostly black and gray but sometimes it really is just black and white?

[CmdrKing]

Ah, yeah, you're right, the Russian people are Unpure and should be wiped form teh face of the earth, to the last child.