Nobody interested in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

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That's likely true - the reasoning was good but based on wrong assumptions.
But how can you know it wouldn't happen again?

It won't happen soon.
pootin has destroyed the myth of "The Invincible Russian Army", and has decimated his economy.
I take comfort in that.

Me too.
They probably won't throw rockets at Warsaw if they're facing shortages of them for Ukraine.
At least for now.

"NATO."
Think NATO, not Poland.

I placed these quotes out of order;

Americans hosting Ukrainian refugees encounter ‘unbelievably difficult’ process
“Welcoming and resettling refugees or humanitarian parolees is not easy. I can’t imagine an individual or couple doing this without help,” the head of an aid agency said.
May 21, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC
By Mary Pflum
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/amer ... -rcna29580

Peter Hitchens again on Ukraine and propaganda in his column:

...

Not since the wild frenzy after the death of Princess Diana have I ever met such a wave of ignorant sentiment. Nobody knows anything about Ukraine. Everyone has ferocious opinions about it.

The other night I shocked a distinguished Oxford academic by informing her that the lovely, angelic, saintly, perfect Ukrainians had blocked off the water supply to Crimea in 2014.

She was rightly shocked by this nasty, uncivilised act of spite, but it was far more shocking that this highly educated person did not know this important fact.

In the same way almost nobody, in education, politics or journalism, knows about the nasty, racist roots of Ukrainian nationalism, the horrible history of the vicious Stepan Bandera (now a Ukrainian national hero), or the Kiev state’s discriminatory scorn for the Russian language. If Canada treated its French speakers as Ukraine treats its Russian speakers, there would be international outrage.

Worst of all is the widespread ignorance of the fact that President Volodymyr Zelensky, in my view an admirable man, was elected on a programme of peace with Russia. But when he tried to do as he had promised, he was blocked by parts of his own army, who publicly confronted him and humiliated him.

At the same time his political rivals, including the neo-Nazis who very definitely do exist in Ukraine, went on the streets to denounce any sort of deal. President Zelensky crumbled. And the war came.

I have mentioned here before that the first act of violence in this war was actually the Western-backed mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s lawful government in 2014.

This was the true beginning of all the horror. And while it does not excuse the idiotic and brutal Putin invasion, it very much helps to explain it.

Look, I respect those who take Ukraine’s side in this war. They have a valid point of view which I happen not to share. But what I object to is the wholly one-sided nature of public opinion here. It is so bad that it is a positive disadvantage to know anything about the subject.

And it reached its peak last week when the Ukrainian defenders of the Mariupol steelworks, many of them in fact the neo-Nazis of the Azov battalion who proudly wear SS emblems on their official uniforms, surrendered.

The UK media coverage of this event strove mightily not to mention the neo-Nazis and to avoid using the word ‘surrender’.

The Mariupol garrison was said instead to have been ‘evacuated’ into Russian-held territory. Pictures showed them disarmed and being frisked by Russian soldiers. But we are so much in the grip of a one-sided view of this conflict that we could not even admit they had capitulated.

Refusal to accept such obvious reality is a sign of madness.

I personally have no idea what British interest is served by slavishly backing the American policy of stirring up trouble in Ukraine and goading Russia into combat.

Perhaps someone could explain it to me, over a plate of ‘Chicken Kyiv’ and a bottle of vodka. But for any debate to take place, we’ll have to start accepting that there are two sides to this argument.

...

In the Daily Mail, eh?
Yeah, yeah, Pete, whatever.

"Nobody knows anything about Ukraine"? Really?
F*cking tell it to the 3.5 million Ukrainians here! (and to 40 million Ukrainians elsewhere)
Can you imagine they can speak, think, have opinions and make choices? How about talking to them? How about treating them like regular people?

Yes, I'm allergic to Yalta thinking, where non-empire nations were treated as if they didn't have any subjectivity.
Makes me understand what colonialism feels like.

He's not referring to Ukrainians, but mainly to British people, particularly those with strong opinions on the war.

And does he then explain to the British what all the Ukrainians know?
No. He's consistently ignoring the point of view of those most concerned and promotes lies that anyone from Ukraine know are lies.

Treatment of Russian speakers? Half of Ukrainians are Russian speakers, including the president!
"Horrors started in 2014"? Talk to anyone from Ukraine, Russian speakers included, about what it looked like pre-2014 and what direction it went since then!
Why do you think Russian speakers from East and South Ukraine fought against the invading army instead of welcoming it?

This article is just repeating the propaganda employed to justify this genocidal invasion.

There’s video footage of the AZOV regiment surrendering in Mariupol.

Seems like the Russians make them take their top off to check their tattoos.

Many of these are Nazi symbols

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eGg07Fpmc ... e=emb_logo

Yes, Azov battalion started off as a group of nationalist kids and surely some of those nationalist now-not-kids are still there.
Does it in any way justify turning Mariupol to a wasteland with mass graves of civilians around it?

There’s this interview with a captured British fighter and British independent journalist. He says some interesting things about AZOV around 7 min mark

Obviously the fact that he is in custody has to be taken in consideration

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7mLGWs24Ol8

Their training served them well.

Seems Peter Hitchens might also be referring to you.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... ublic-life

Ukraine’s parliament has adopted a law that will require the use of the Ukrainian language in most aspects of public life, a decision supporters say will strengthen national identity but that critics contend could disenfranchise the country’s native Russian speakers.

The law, which passed with a 278-38 majority, will require all Ukrainian citizens to know the state language and that it be used while performing official duties. Those subject to the latter requirement will include politicians, judges, doctors, employees of the national bank and state-owned companies, officers in the military, teachers and others.

The new law also requires that 90% of TV and film content be in Ukrainian and for Ukrainian-language printed media and books to make up at least 50% of the total output.

They also started changing peoples' legal names for them. Vladimir went to bed one night and woke up as Volodomir on his passport. It sounds minor, but to use PH's own example, Canada, imagine if the government made it illegal to show films in French and changed the legal name of every "Jacque" in the country to "James". I think he's right to say there would be outrage.

It means native Russian speakers also support it. A generation ago, only 20% of Ukrainians spoke Ukrainian, the rest spoke Russian. Ukrainian speakers still don't have anything close to majority like that in Verkhovna Rada - people do want to learn Ukrainian as an aspect of severing ties with Moscow. This law reflects it.

The point is, native Russian speakers are the majority in Ukraine, not a minority. And they still wanted to pass this law, with overwhelming support. It's their own choice.

That's what my father, who regularily travels to Kyiv in business, observed: after 2014, people en masse started to learn Ukrainian, to show support for Ukrainian side of the Maidan and Donbas conflict. It reflects their own opinions and choices.

BTW, how much do you know about linguistic politics in Ukraine in USSR time?