Why Russia is not declared war on Ukraine? I support Ukraine

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0_equals_true
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26 Sep 2014, 3:21 pm

The Ukrainians remember the forced starvation, and brutality under Stalin. Ukrainian Cossacks have long had their own culture and distinct language.

Ukrainians decided to go their own way, and they are entitled to self-determination as sovereign state.



Last edited by 0_equals_true on 26 Sep 2014, 3:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

0_equals_true
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26 Sep 2014, 3:39 pm

Jacoby wrote:
I'm not sure what your point about Poroshenko's election is suppose to be, you do know there is a war going on in the east of the country? Do you think they really came out and voted and that it was representative of their views? Did you follow the election? Do you know who the other candidates were? There was no real opposition, nor is it tolerated


Not only did both of those parties stand for that election, most of the each had 40% turn out (which is more than hope on in many general elections anywhere), they got surprising penetration even in volatile areas 20% in Dombas. There were loads of independents.

Btw a Conservative estimate of the far right is 2% of the vote.

There was also international observers, more can be said for a Russian election.



Jacoby
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26 Sep 2014, 4:18 pm

0_equals_true wrote:
The Ukrainians remember the forced starvation, and brutality under Stalin. Ukrainian Cossacks have long had their own culture and distinct language.

Ukrainians decided to go their own way, and they are entitled to self-determination as sovereign state.


I support self determination, not just for some and not for others however. The Ukrainian nationalists do not(or at least did not until forced) believe this, the people in Donbass and Crimea or where ever deserve to have their voices heard. Yanukovych was democratically elected with international observers as well and without a civil war going on, he was illegally thrown out of office. Do you believe Kiev would even allow Donbass to vote for its own future?



0_equals_true
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26 Sep 2014, 4:41 pm

Jacoby wrote:
Ukrainians decided to go their own way, and they are entitled to self-determination as sovereign state.


I support self determination, not just for some and not for others however. The Ukrainian nationalists do not(or at least did not until forced) believe this, the people in Donbass and Crimea or where ever deserve to have their voices heard. Yanukovych was democratically elected with international observers as well and without a civil war going on, he was illegally thrown out of office. Do you believe Kiev would even allow Donbass to vote for its own future?[/quote]

No he put down a peaceful protest with bullets, then he fled, rather than face the music.

Why would Donbass get special treatment? It is not a sovereign nation, it doesn't have the history of Crimea. It is a made up region.

Self-determination doesn't mean if you have a faction then you use violence. It means a whole nation you form a consensus.



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26 Sep 2014, 5:25 pm

0_equals_true wrote:
Jacoby wrote:
Ukrainians decided to go their own way, and they are entitled to self-determination as sovereign state.


I support self determination, not just for some and not for others however. The Ukrainian nationalists do not(or at least did not until forced) believe this, the people in Donbass and Crimea or where ever deserve to have their voices heard. Yanukovych was democratically elected with international observers as well and without a civil war going on, he was illegally thrown out of office. Do you believe Kiev would even allow Donbass to vote for its own future?


No he put down a peaceful protest with bullets, then he fled, rather than face the music.

Why would Donbass get special treatment? It is not a sovereign nation, it doesn't have the history of Crimea. It is a made up region.

Self-determination doesn't mean if you have a faction then you use violence. It means a whole nation you form a consensus.[/quote]

The real story might not be so cut and dry, no one knows for sure who shot first at protesters but their are credible reports of it coming from the Maidan side. The fact is that his ouster was still illegal and he was the president that the east of the country overwhelmingly supported. Regardless, the protests in the east of country didn't start as armed insurrection or separatism but the government in Kiev declared them terrorists and sent the military to crush them.



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27 Sep 2014, 1:27 pm

Jacoby you remind me of RT new-think/anti-think.

Unarmed protested were shot by snipers. Snipers is not how you do crowd control under any circumstances. Snipers shot from an elevated and hidden position.

The protest in the east were violent from the start they attacked government building and barricaded themselves in. This was long before the army, were there. It was actually the police that was tasked with dealing with it. Half of them stood by and did nothing. When there was a counter protest thugs attacked them with stick and ganged up on them an beat them, the police did nothing.

We know this movement was orchestrated by Muscovite who is not even Ukrainian or has any ties to the region, he was an advisory to the Crimean government.



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27 Sep 2014, 1:56 pm

You are making certain assumption about Yanukovych supports at the time he was elected, and now.

You are assuming that people voted on him purely on the the ethnic lines, or simplistically to be closer to Russia.

It was Yanukovych himself that baited the Russians, he was offering the EU, trying to play the Russians, then pulled the rug from under his promises to his people. I expect he was to be well rewarded.

That is why he isn't as popular in the East now as you seem to suggest.

No national state can accept the idea, that another nation can control one of its regions by proxy, or run an insurgency. This is not acceptable under any international definition of sovereignty. Would Russia accept the same thing of Turkic, or Mongolian, Nordic people in the Russia federation?

Russia pretends not to be at war, yet it lost most of paratrooper platoon, and it tried to bury the bodies in secret, lying to the families about what happened. The traffic going in an out of the border is well documented.

This whole "we are not at war"/"this is not a pipe" is soviet style new think, except during soviet period they played this game with their own people, now they are trying on with the rest of the world. They know that can convince everyone, but they know there is enough gullible people to create some doubt.

Generally speaking the Russian trouble makers in places like Estonia, Georgia, Central Asia, etc are not people with a long heritage there. This is a soviet era technique of infiltration by encouraging people to settle, which creates a pretext to go in. It might remind you of someone else. Can you guess?

Interesting that Belarus is buying Moldovan apples that were destined for Russia, so much for the Commonwealth of nations, and the Russian answer to sanctions.



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27 Sep 2014, 3:11 pm

0_equals_true wrote:
Jacoby you remind me of RT new-think/anti-think.

Unarmed protested were shot by snipers. Snipers is not how you do crowd control under any circumstances. Snipers shot from an elevated and hidden position.

The protest in the east were violent from the start they attacked government building and barricaded themselves in. This was long before the army, were there. It was actually the police that was tasked with dealing with it. Half of them stood by and did nothing. When there was a counter protest thugs attacked them with stick and ganged up on them an beat them, the police did nothing.

We know this movement was orchestrated by Muscovite who is not even Ukrainian or has any ties to the region, he was an advisory to the Crimean government.


They did what the people in Kiev did, if you considered EuroMaidan to be peaceful protest then so were anti-Maidan protests in eastern Ukraine. While EuroMaidan protesters were largely unarmed(at least without guns) there were extremists among them who were and wanted to topple the government from the start. Do you really believe those people were all there because they just wanted association with the EU?

Who was behind the sniper attacks is in question, the fact is that it made very little sense for the Yanukovych government at the time to order this when they were working on a peace deal at the same time with the opposition and obviously since these attacks were the catalyst that ousted him from power. Yanukovych had been previously forced from power and did not resort to violence back in 2009 in the dubbed Orange Revolution so why would he do that in 2014 when the stakes weren't as high? The presence of extremists amongst the protesters should be again noted, they were the primary force behind occupying the square and assorted buildings as well as the primary combatants with the police. The idea that these attacks were the work of some provocateur is not far fetched knowing the parties involved.

You have to understand there are more players in the game than just Russia, the US and EU have aggressively tried to push Ukraine out Russia's sphere of influence and into theirs. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote extensively about the importance of Ukraine in his "grand chess game", in short he believes that without Ukraine that Russia cannot challenge American hegemony. Knowing this, why the US has spent $5 billion in "developing democracy" in Ukraine starts making a lot more sense. US foreign policy in general over the last 20 some years has been extremely expansionist with the main goal being to kneecap Russian influence. Putin's actions seem a lot more measured and rational knowing what proceeded them, likening him to Hitler and this massive propaganda push against him over the last couple years is entirely political in nature.

Information coming from the Ukrainian government is heavily propagandized and that is the information we receive in the US. I've followed the conflict in its entirety and I can tell that Russian sources give a much more accurate portrayal of what is happening on the ground. The current government in Kiev has been claiming a Russian invasion almost every day since March, they claim they are fighting 100,000 literal Russian troops in Donbass while at the same time saying they are weeks or days away from crushing the separatists.(At least until the last offensive by the rebels) The UA claim that they aren't shelling cities and say that the separatists are shelling themselves, they've literally drawn up pictures to illustrate this farce. They've lied totally about the amount of fatalities that this war has caused, there is literally no reason to trust a word that they say.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QxZ8t3V_bk[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-S5GMmdML8[/youtube]



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28 Sep 2014, 11:08 pm

Jacoby wrote:

Information coming from the Ukrainian government is heavily propagandized and that is the information we receive in the US. I've followed the conflict in its entirety and I can tell that Russian sources give a much more accurate portrayal of what is happening on the ground. The current government in Kiev has been claiming a Russian invasion almost every day since March, they claim they are fighting 100,000 literal Russian troops in Donbass while at the same time saying they are weeks or days away from crushing the separatists.(At least until the last offensive by the rebels) The UA claim that they aren't shelling cities and say that the separatists are shelling themselves, they've literally drawn up pictures to illustrate this farce. They've lied totally about the amount of fatalities that this war has caused, there is literally no reason to trust a word that they say.


Meanwhile, the Russians deny supplying the Separatists with weapons, and say that the Russian truck convoy which preceded the Ukrainian army getting chased all the way back to Mariupol contained only food, water, and medical supplies.



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28 Sep 2014, 11:33 pm

staremaster wrote:
Jacoby wrote:

Information coming from the Ukrainian government is heavily propagandized and that is the information we receive in the US. I've followed the conflict in its entirety and I can tell that Russian sources give a much more accurate portrayal of what is happening on the ground. The current government in Kiev has been claiming a Russian invasion almost every day since March, they claim they are fighting 100,000 literal Russian troops in Donbass while at the same time saying they are weeks or days away from crushing the separatists.(At least until the last offensive by the rebels) The UA claim that they aren't shelling cities and say that the separatists are shelling themselves, they've literally drawn up pictures to illustrate this farce. They've lied totally about the amount of fatalities that this war has caused, there is literally no reason to trust a word that they say.


Meanwhile, the Russians deny supplying the Separatists with weapons, and say that the Russian truck convoy which preceded the Ukrainian army getting chased all the way back to Mariupol contained only food, water, and medical supplies.


Which goes to show your ignorance since that humanitarian aid convoy was inspected by the Red Cross and by Ukrainian border guards. Their delaying of the convoy and all the whining in the western media about it being an "invasion" or trojan horse was totally cynical, the UA opposed it because it broke their siege of the civilian population of Luhansk. Who is liberating who again?



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29 Sep 2014, 12:46 am

^^So you trust both the Red Cross and the Ukrainian border guards, at least in this context?



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29 Sep 2014, 1:22 am

staremaster wrote:
^^So you trust both the Red Cross and the Ukrainian border guards, at least in this context?


The implication of that being what? It's not an issue of trust, just facts. There really wasn't anything mysterious about that convoy, the Russians were open about its intentions and let everyone who wanted a look to have one. It was such a fake narrative to ring up paranoia of Trojan horse and is a perfect illustration of the propaganda campaign being waged in Ukraine right now. The UA still won't even admit to shelling civilian areas, I can find you some pictures of its aftermath and you can judge for yourself if you'd like.



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29 Sep 2014, 1:55 am

^^All of the photos I saw of the convoy showed trucks half empty at the time of inspection. My implication is not that the Red Cross and Ukrainian border guards were bought out or intimidated, but that some off-loading took place before the inspection. Also, I was trying to imply that if the Red Cross and Ukrainian border guards said something about Russian troops operating on the wrong side of the border in support of the separatists, then you might find fault with their analysis.

I'm not trying to say that Russia and the Ukrainian seps are behind all of the evil in the east of the country, but that Russia has its own interests in this conflict and is not any more trustworthy than Ukraine or the west.

What do you think about the recent spike in Russian military "training fatalities", or the branding of the "Organization of Soldiers' Mothers" as a tentacle of the CIA?



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29 Sep 2014, 3:28 am

staremaster wrote:
^^All of the photos I saw of the convoy showed trucks half empty at the time of inspection. My implication is not that the Red Cross and Ukrainian border guards were bought out or intimidated, but that some off-loading took place before the inspection. Also, I was trying to imply that if the Red Cross and Ukrainian border guards said something about Russian troops operating on the wrong side of the border in support of the separatists, then you might find fault with their analysis.

I'm not trying to say that Russia and the Ukrainian seps are behind all of the evil in the east of the country, but that Russia has its own interests in this conflict and is not any more trustworthy than Ukraine or the west.

What do you think about the recent spike in Russian military "training fatalities", or the branding of the "Organization of Soldiers' Mothers" as a tentacle of the CIA?


Off-loading? That doesn't make any sense, what would the point of that be? The UA did claim for a bit that the Russians were trying to use them as cover to smuggle military equipment or bodies after it became clear they were smuggling anything in besides humanitarian aid but that narrative was squashed too as the trucks were inspected when they returned empty to Russia as well.

Russia's direct involvement has been fairly overblown, while there are many Russian volunteers there are also foreign volunteers and mercenaries fighting alongside the UA and its paramilitaries. Most of the equipment that the rebels have was surrendered to them or captured, they're fighting against mostly conscripted youth who don't want to be there and essentially skinheads. The military of Ukraine was in ill repair before this conflict and their leadership was gutted and their replacements were chosen for their loyalty not their competence whereas the rebels are made up defectors, former Berkut, veterans, and just people defending their homes. When you understand who is actually fighting and what side the populace is on then its makes a lot more sense to how these rebels who are outgunned and outmanned have been able to have so much success. The extent of Russia's involvement I think is mainly turning a blind eye to Russian nationals who volunteer and border hopping. If Russia really wanted they could take Kiev by the end of the week, look at the war in Georgia a few years ago if want to see what a Russian invasion looks like. If Russia was so directly involved to the extent that the Kiev government claims then the entirety of Ukraine would of been conquered by now. Putin has actually pretty strongly advocated for federalization from the very start as opposed to independence or annexation into Russia as most of the rebels want at this point.



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29 Sep 2014, 7:01 pm

The whole issue of the humanitarian convoy is a complete red herring.

Where you have tank and artillery battalions, where there is documentary evidence both on the ground and satellite moving in and out across the border. They really haven't got foot to stand on. It is kind of hard to hide a tank battalion on a road, and they no made attempt to do this. This area is fairly flat an open. It is not tora bora.

The humanitarian convoy was a PR exercise, nothing more.

Russia denial isn't really to fool anyone who has a the capacity to check, geo-locatate. It is to fool want to believe Russia no matter what.



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29 Sep 2014, 9:41 pm

0_equals_true wrote:
The whole issue of the humanitarian convoy is a complete red herring.

Where you have tank and artillery battalions, where there is documentary evidence both on the ground and satellite moving in and out across the border. They really haven't got foot to stand on. It is kind of hard to hide a tank battalion on a road, and they no made attempt to do this. This area is fairly flat an open. It is not tora bora.

The humanitarian convoy was a PR exercise, nothing more.

Russia denial isn't really to fool anyone who has a the capacity to check, geo-locatate. It is to fool want to believe Russia no matter what.


There is zero evidence of about 90% of the Ukrainian's claims, they say they have some and will produce it and never do and most people in the west don't seem to follow up on it. Most of the so called evidence produced by NATO and Ukrainian government are social media posts which have no credibility and have been caught faked on numerous occasions. When you've followed the entire conflict and took in information from all sides as I have, it becomes abundantly clear that you can't trust anything coming from NATO and the government in Kiev.

Let me take a step back and say what my agenda is here, I oppose war and find it abhorrent. I find US interventionism to be more often than not harmful in the long run to our interests and to the people we're supposedly helping, I believe that our government lies in order to justify its actions and even takes an active role in creating these crises to pursue their own ends. The world isn't some chessboard, these things effects the lives of real people just like you and me. When you talk about nuclear war as anything but a defensive last resort then I have to question your sanity. If that's what you threaten then what moral high ground do you have to criticize anybody as a global threat? Might does not make right.