The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
Yeah but at least in Europe we generally stopped doing that shit. Serbia had a bit of a go at it but generally it’s been quiet since WWII… with the exception of Muscovy.
Imperialism didn’t stop with WWII, I was a bit imprecise, see e.g. Algeria. Also ask Estonians and Poles and… a ton of others how much imperialism had stopped before the dissolution of the USSR.
imperialism isn’t “when a country goes into another country”, it’s a specific relationship of domination and resource extraction and impoverishment of the people living in that country in order to exploit it for the benefit of the imperial core (more often, its bourgeoisie).
it’s really disgusting to see people using the language of the left to describe the USSR abolishing homelessness and poverty in their constituent states, and building schools and homes and providing jobs and extremely low costs of living, as if this is even remotely comparable to the horrors that the Europeans and United States have wrought in developing countries around the world, including sweatshop and plantation slavery, forced starvations, and genocides.
“but they did those good things authoritarianly!” a) literally who gives a shit, and b) every government does everything authoritarianly, it’s the definition of authoritarian. ripping away resources from the rich landowners and distributing them to the poor is extremely authoritarian and I definitely support doing that
