Idk seems appropriate considering the US doesn’t seem to consent to other countries’ sovereignty, after all it was built on genocide so why should it follow the same rules?
imperialist
either you seriously think Russia’s invasion was motivated by the export of dominant financial capital or you just like to add this word like seasoning to sound leftist, not sure which is more embarrassing
It is not easy to gauge what the war is motivated by, as it is waged mostly by one dictator’s wishes, but my bets are on territorial gains, resource gains (as eastern Ukraine notably contains quite a lot of resources), cultural expansion (see: banning of ukranian language in schools and government services), and perhaps delusions of grandeur and desire to bring back USSR/Russian Empire (which appear to be entirely interchangeable in Russian propaganda lately), all of which fit the definition of imperialism quite well. It could also just be an internal political game, attempting to repeat the “Crimean consensus” and get Putin’s waning ratings back up. That didn’t quite work out, so the governance model descended from authocratic capitalism into near-fascism. In the latter case it would indeed not exactly be an imperialist war, but I’m not sure if that helps Russia’s case here.
The people of Donbass want to join the Russian Federation, nobody but Nazis and NAFO dipshits who don’t know anything about the conflict care what the corrupt regime in Kiev has to say about sovereignty, if they wanted to maintain territorial integrity then they shouldn’t have couped a democratically elected government and tried to ethnically cleanse their fellows citizens for speaking one of their mother tongues
Also don’t trivialize rape for the sake of making some half-baked geopolitical analogy, it’s gross incel behavior
The territory Russia wants conceded is more than just the Donbas tho, isn’t it.
The people of Kherson don’t want to be part of Russia. Why is Russia trying to annex it? Why is the russian military leveling towns, sometimes still with civilians living there, in the very regions they are purportedly trying to liberate? Let’s be clear here, neither US nor Russia actually cares about people living there, they just want territory, resources and influence.
“Fuck Nazi Germany for doing ethnic cleansing, and fuck Russia for actually invading and bombing the shit out of it” - liberals who can’t define imperialism
Russia literally intends to annex (as in, turn into own territory) 4 Ukranian oblasts, banning ukranian language there, turning over capital to its own oligarchs (or their cronies), all via a means of war. I would like to remind you that Russia is an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy, with overt ambitions of turning itself into an empire. This definitely fits at least multiple definitions of imperialism.
I despise the shit that Ukraine did to its eastern regions for many years. What Russia is doing now is worse on multiple accounts (human suffering, death count, material damage), though.
There is a better argument to be made for Ukraine being imperialist for brutally repressing the independence movements in Donbass that were themselves in response to the US-backed coup that you seem to recognize for what it is. The war was eight years old by the time of Russia’s invasion.
I’m going to take your comment seriously even though I don’t know if you’re making it in bad faith or not, and I’m going to say that this war was entirely avoidable if Ukraine had just applied their laws. I’m making an assumption here when I say that terrorism is illegal in Ukraine, but I’m fairly confident in this assumption; I mention this because Ukraine had eight years to take terrorism by militias in their country seriously. There’s a video of Elensky going out to talk to the militia to tell them to disarm, but they basically didn’t take him seriously at all; at this point, the military is supposed to step in and deal with it, one way or the other. They had eight years to send in the military to take out those terrorists who were literally indiscriminately shelling civilian areas in Donbas, but they didn’t. Counting the military casualties in this war, over half a million Ukrainians have now died just because the Ukrainian government decided to allow terrorism in their country. The reality is they want the land but they don’t want the people who live there who are ethnically Russian; this is not the attitude of good people, it’s the attitude of people who want to engage in ethnic cleansing. When they were in a position of power, they could have made peace with Donbas and applied their laws and obliterated the terrorists striking Donbas residents, instead you even had a president promising that while Ukrainian children were attending kindergarten, that Donbas children would be hiding in bunkers; these are utterly atrocious people who are the literal cause of the war (in addition of course to our government who supported them).
All the same can be said about current Russian invasion. US-backed coup wasn’t great, Ukrainian attitude to its eastern regions was atrocious, but Russia invading with full force didn’t help anyone but wealthy Russian elites (and perhaps corrupt ukranian elites too, not 100% sure on internal ukranian politics): it destroyed yet more regions of Ukraine, killed yet more people, and there’s no resolution in sight except for a slightly different frontline.
Although all of this is basically true, the fascist slaughter of people in Donbass wasn’t even the deciding factor. Whether Ukraine was accepting NATO weaponry, military infrastructure, training exercises, and hopeful, near-future membership was. Russia wouldn’t have invaded even to stop the potential genocide going on. It invaded because the U.S. was threatening its western border and escalating the Cold War (again/still). It’s exactly as if Russia had made an agreement with Mexico to put military bases and weapon systems right on the U.S.'s southern border. (Or maybe Canada would be a better parallel, due to the proximity the weapons systems would then have to Washington DC.)
So it WAS avoidable. Just on a slightly different basis than whether or not Ukrofascists were happily doing their thing unmolested (which they also were).
How do you explain that on invasion 1 million ukrainians gone to russia? (That’s not counting the 3 millions they occupied)
It’s delayed civil war, cause ukraine couldn’t live like civilized bilingual euro countries
But yeah, invasion is bad
Some of them genuinely wanted to go to Russia (I expect it was a significant percentage), some of them didn’t care and it would be easier to go there, some literally didn’t have a choice, some were moved to Russia forcibly. However, consider that of the remaining ~35 million Ukrainians ~5 million went to Europe, and of those who remain in Ukraine support for Russia is in low one-digit percentage. Simply put, not that many Ukrainians (outside Crimea) wanted to be part of Russia, and of those who did a lot are dead now as a result of the invasion, and more now hate Russia.
It’s delayed civil war, cause ukraine couldn’t live like civilized bilingual euro countries
Sure. However, Russia turned a skirmish into a bloodbath, for the benefit of its elites.
