xzar_monty

Planned and pushed for by Russia, absolutely, ever since 2014 and before. As Putin has long maintained, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical disaster"[*] of the 20th century, and both Belarus and Ukraine are his attempts to bring the empire back. With Belarus, he has effectively succeeded, but with Ukraine, not. Hungary remains something of a mystery, at least to me. I wonder if anyone anywhere has a good answer that has been made public. [*] I would argue that it's quite obvious that the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century was the formation of the Soviet Union. Very, very little good ever became of that, and nothing good at all compared to all the death and disaster it created. The EU, while "mostly harmless", to quote one D. Adams, is not geopolitically all that important, but it's not all that deadly, either.

Same here. I'm currently working on a project that has something to do with the whole conflict, but not this one particular incident, and there's this damned thing that surrounds so many things around the area right now: there tend to be narratives that are so different from one another that they are apt to confuse the observer. It's really frustrating. I mean, it's not possible that all the Russian stories are false/true and all the Ukrainian stories true/false, but separating the facts from the embellishments and the outright propaganda and lies can be really tricky. It's a real mess.

See? I'm terrible with most things related to military matters. So thanks (to Zoraptor, too).

Oh, absolutely. And I don't think anyone here has ever suggested that any Ukrainian nazis were the reason for the invasion. That still doesn't take away the fact that Ukraine's history with this particular question isn't especially rosy.

Nope -- but you're ignoring Zoraptor's main point which was that although nazism exists everywhere, in Ukraine it is more prevalent than in many other places. As far as I know, this is, indeed a valid argument and doesn't really improve Ukraine's standing, so to speak.

I actually tried to come up with a Coleridgean way to continue that but couldn't think of anything good enough. Anyway, the nazi argument is an interesting one, as it's one of those cases where the mere suspicion of something amounts to proof, which is always troublesome as it's so close to paranoid thinking. (And no, this is definitely not in reference to Sarex who hasn't brought up the nazi card as far as I know.)

Possibly, but what I would like to see, now, is a cogent and well-rounded argument from Sarex as to why Ukraine is not innocent in this war. What, perhaps, are some of the grounds that justify Russia's attack. In concrete terms and not in metaphors; and if the building that was set on fire was not a metaphor, then I'd like to know what that was about. Ukraine, as a country, is probably much farther away from EU membership than Serbia and some other countries that have wanted to join, and it carries an awful lot of bad baggage from the Soviet era. Zelenski himself has some fairly shady stuff in his past, and so on. But none of that would in any way justify an invasion whose intention is to obliterate a sovereign nation. (Btw, isn't Ukraine the only country so far that has voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons? I think it is. What an awful precedent that one is.)

What is this referring to?

I'd love to hear a convincing argument for this. I can't think of one myself. There is no question that corruption, for instance, is still a big problem in Ukraine, but to regard the victim of an aggression like this as somehow culpable doesn't sound reasonable in the least. You can, of course, fiddle with words and argue that a country with a corruption problem cannot, technically, ever be "innocent", no matter what the circumstances, but that would be such a cop-out. EDIT: Whoops. Bugger that bugarup.

The support that comes down to you saying fairly explicitly that you have "nothing against" Russia in this[*]. That just seems to contradict rather sharply with the other sentiment you just expressed, the one I responded to. As for your second question, you're quite right: nothing that we express here either helps or hinders anything. And yes, I was referring to Molotov - Ribbentrop, like Zoraptor said. [*] My memory may fail me, in which case apologies. The two words I put in quotes I do seem to remember fairly well, though. EDIT: Btw, upon recently reading A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes, I learned that not only does revolution devour its own children, as the famous saying goes, but the children of revolution also devour their own children, literally. There are thousands of documented cases from Russia after the revolution, starting, especially, from November 1921. Direct quote: "In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village -- and all of them serve up young children." The country directly to the east from where I live has really had far more than its fair share of brutally traumatizing events.

Why the constant support for Russia, then? I suppose one can make a joke that this is at least the second example in a hundred years of Russia and Germany planning a future for Europe and it backfiring spectacularly...

Daniil Orain is doing commendable work, but to regard that as representative of how things are in Russia and with Russians in general is naive almost in the extreme. So, when the school system is being inundanted with propagandistic material, you cannot scoff it away as easily as that, by pointing at "silly Russian educators" whose schemes can be easily bypassed. No: if their plans come to fruition, the results are going to be devastating (in terms of historical truths) on a massive scale. There is no doubt that there will still be people who are interested in truth and will go to great lengths to find out about it, but you seem to completely miss one of the main aims of this drastic change in the curriculum: to ensure that less and less people will be honestly curious in the first place. Like, for example, any terrorist trainer will tell you: start indoctrinating them when they're young enough and they'll be yours. This is the aim.

This is not a particularly enlightened comment when it comes to the question of how internet use can be limited and how people are affected by what they are taught.

The new Russian history textbooks appear superb. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/world/europe/russia-textbooks-ukraine-war.html https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/08/07/such-unique-times-are-rare-in-history

Apologies for a very belated reply, but may I suggest that you drop the "wow" and then say the rest of it in your best Gandalf voice.

According to our papers at least, last night saw possibly the largest amount of drone strikes in Russia so far.

Agreed, on that point. What looks especially bad on the home front is that the new right-wing government is extremely keen to make entry as difficult as possible to quite a few people, especially "different" people, but then someone like this person was given permit just like that.

@Mamoulian War: There's a fair bit of hoo-hah in Finland about why that war criminal was let into the country in the first place. Very justifiable questions, in my view.

I don't see that over here; the experts are simply debating whether it was a bomb or a missile. There was the same discrepancy with the Kerch bridge bombing: the possibility of a suicide / homicide mission was taken into account quite early on in our media. Experts can be quite terrible, though, no question, and we've had plenty of instances of all kinds of silliness since Peace In Our Time or whatever. In fact, there's a quote somewhere to the effect of "My son, you would be surprised to learn how little sense and understanding the world is ruled with", though I can't remember where. (And yes, I know political rulers and technical experts are not the same thing.)

You're not completely off. People whose dementia has progressed a lot tend to have weak immune systems, so they're prone to infections and such, from which it happens to follow that one of the most common causes of death for people with late-stage dementia is, surprise surprise, pneumonia. Your question is valid, though. There are fatal diseases that don't kill you as such, they just make you very vulnerable to various other things that will kill you. (Some people whose cause of death is marked as dementia will actually die from malnutrition.)

This song is still superb after all these years. I remain fascinated by the rather violent streak that some of Simon's songs display; this is clearly one of them.

@BruceVC: Here's a good example of a question posed to a Russian around the theme of evil American conspiracies and all the rest of it. The question was posed by a Finnish diplomat who has met Putin several times and whose knowledge of both Russia and the US is is quite extensive. "The world that we used to live in until February 2022; was that world really intolerable for Russians to such an extent that breaking it was worth everything that it entailed?" The Finnish diplomat received no answer at all.

Putin felt secure enough about a complacent west to start a war in the first place, so it's not as if he hasn't made horrendous miscalculations before.

What an absolute nightmare for a pilot of a private jet to see Prigozin get on your plane.

There are, interestingly enough, levels to this self-deception, and a Russian journalist pointed out some of them in an interesting piece he wrote some months ago (won't go looking for the link now, sorry). In essence, he posed some counter-questions to people who tend to think in these terms and found that some of them can be persuaded or at least made to reconsider their position with well-posed questions, sometimes as simple as "So why are we killing Ukrainians, then?". But for some, no reasoning can work. It's exactly the same as with full-blown conspiracy theorists or clinically paranoid people: they are out of reach. It's very sad. (I think this is a genuinely difficult problem for concerned fellow humans and even psychiatrists: how to reach someone who's gone down the rabbit hole.) As for the text in question, there's a book coming out in January 2024, so it'll take some time.