Ukraine War: Wagner’s fading thrust

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, butterweedstrover said:

500 years and Ukraine is a provincial language. 
 

The territories Russia is fighting in were the ones that were forcibly Ukranianized. 

Kyiv is how much older than Moscow?

[Varysblackfyre321]

13 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Hey, do you know what Bucha was, the event that happened AS the Russians were retreating. 

A infantile way to stroke fear and relieve pent up exasperation with the failed invasion?

14 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Or you keep believing this was an order from high up.

So do you like deny it happened? Do you think Putin just doesn’t care about it and the other mass slaughters that much to punish anyone?

15 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

cool, provide some internal Soviet documents that prove this

You know Hitler never gave an explicit order to kill all the Jews?

Why do you think Stalin would write down murder millions of my own people?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

5 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

500 years and Ukraine is a provincial language. 
 

The territories Russia is fighting in were the ones that were forcibly Ukranianized. 

Ah, the we have to get into Sudetenland for the German population there.

Kinda amusing how Russia is recycling the classics, when it comes to fighting Nazis.

Edited July 9, 2023 by A Horse Named Stranger

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Anyway, wanted to know, if there's any on the ground update before I got sidetracked by this Russian Nazis are good Nazis because they fight Ukrainian Nazis shenanigans. Or whatever the fuck those past two pages were supposed to be about.

Edited July 9, 2023 by A Horse Named Stranger

[hauberk]

@Varysblackfyre321 and @Ser Scot A Ellison

I stand in awe of the fortitude that both of you have demonstrated this evening. Carry on with your Sisyphean task! 

[kiko]

5 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Hey, do you know what Bucha was, the event that happened AS the Russians were retreating. 

I'm sure you know that the Muscovite unit in Bucha has been personally honoured by Putin.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/19/europe/russia-bucha-brigade-honorary-title-putin-intl/index.html

 

[SeanF]

5 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Yeah, he wasn't the one doing it, but again you have to believe in a malicious plot meant to exterminate Ukrainians (Russians) for no reason in particular besides the fact that they were evil. 

Millions died from famine under Mao due to management, was he exterminating ethnic Chinese. The only people who believed this was Banderites, Nazis, and now western liberals. 

I don’t consider that the starvation of millions of Ukrainians was an act of genocide, strictly speaking.

I view it as a part of the Communist Party’s war against the peasants generally.  They wished to smash peasant resistance to collectivisation and de-kulakisation.

Be that as it may, millions of Ukrainians died of starvation, due to the policies of a government which knew what was happening and which did nothing to alter course, or to relieve the suffering.  And, when local Communist leaders complained, they were liquidated.

And, this is more than enough for Ukrainians to choose never to be ruled by Russia again.

[Derfel Cadarn]

55 minutes ago, kiko said:

I'm sure you know that the Muscovite unit in Bucha has been personally honoured by Putin.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/19/europe/russia-bucha-brigade-honorary-title-putin-intl/index.html

 

I think Ukraine destroyed most of that unit, possibly deliberately sacrificed by Russia to stop th from talking

https://www.newsweek.com/bucha-massacre-killings-russian-units-war-crimes-ukraine-1733168

Edited July 9, 2023 by Derfel Cadarn

[butterweedstrover]

2 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

I think Ukraine destroyed most of that unit, possibly deliberately sacrificed by Russia to stop th from talking

https://www.newsweek.com/bucha-massacre-killings-russian-units-war-crimes-ukraine-1733168

 

3 hours ago, kiko said:

I'm sure you know that the Muscovite unit in Bucha has been personally honoured by Putin.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/19/europe/russia-bucha-brigade-honorary-title-putin-intl/index.html

 

Yeah, we are living in looney land if the argument is Moscow approved of some random shootings during a retreat so they could exterminate (or instill fear) into the population. 
 

Covering it up so that the RAF doesn’t look bad isn’t the same thing, but again none of this is serious, even from someone like Cadarn who believes there was a secret command passed down to them.

[butterweedstrover]

8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

A infantile way to stroke fear and relieve pent up exasperation with the failed invasion? 
 

Delusional, a poorly planned retreat was explicitly planned to randomly kill innocent civilians to help in a project fear. 
 

Again, we’re did this order come from?

8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

So do you like deny it happened? Do you think Putin just doesn’t care about it and the other mass slaughters that much to punish anyone? 
 

I never said that, but you have to claim it in order to make your ridiculous claim that it was an organized execution approved by Moscow seem less insane.

8 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

You know Hitler never gave an explicit order to kill all the Jews?

Why do you think Stalin would write down murder millions of my own people?

Lol, there is a mother load of evidence to prove the Nazis planned to kill the Jews. There is zero evidence that the Soviets while dealing with a famine across the entire country redistributed food from Ukraine with the goal of eliminating their population. 
 

What we do know is Stalin was shocked by the numbers, no evidence of Hitler being shocked by the Holocaust.

[butterweedstrover]

8 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Ah, the we have to get into Sudetenland for the German population there.

Kinda amusing how Russia is recycling the classics, when it comes to fighting Nazis.

Read the Minsk agreement, the goal was to reintegrate Donbas into Ukraine. Russian imperialism after the USSR was to borrow from the western playbook of no direct control but through control of institutions, diplomatic leverage, and economic entanglement. 
 

At least according to Putin, the USSR went bankrupt trying to spend money to prop up outside territory. The French method in west Africa is a more cost affective way. 
 

Now they have a bunch of land filled with pensioners and burnt cities they have to pay off, not exactly part of their master plan. It isn’t going their way, but they need to take something now that they failed to change the regime so they can a. Crest a buffer zone and b. Complicate any attempts to get Ukraine approved into NATO.

[butterweedstrover]

8 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kyiv is how much older than Moscow?

Kievan Rus is is as much Belarus and Russia as it is Ukraine. 

But since your asking, Moscow has had political control since the 15th century and yet for some reason imperial Russia never once exterminated the population. 
 

Which, once you realize Russians and Ukrainians are both Rus it makes more sense. They are all the same ethnicity so why exterminate each other? 
 

As for language, there is a lot of ways to kill a language, and yet 500 years later millions still speak it, in fact the soviets forcibly increased Ukrainian land and language. 
 

For some reason you believe the goal of Russian imperialism is to destroy Ukraine, but I guess we have to believe things in order to dissuade anyone from negotiating and demanding the most extreme military aims. 
 

It’s surprising how far right most liberals have become in this regard.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Kievan Rus is is as much Belarus and Russia as it is Ukraine. 

But since your asking, Moscow has had political control since the 15th century and yet for some reason imperial Russia never once exterminated the population. 
 

Which, once you realize Russians and Ukrainians are both Rus it makes more sense. They are all the same ethnicity so why exterminate each other? 
 

As for language, there is a lot of ways to kill a language, and yet 500 years later millions still speak it, in fact the soviets forcibly increased Ukrainian land and language. 
 

For some reason you believe the goal of Russian imperialism is to destroy Ukraine, but I guess we have to believe things in order to dissuade anyone from negotiating and demanding the most extreme military aims. 
 

It’s surprising how far right most liberals have become in this regard.

So… as Kyiv is much older than Muscovy why would Muscovy and it political successors be the cultural heartland of the Kyivian Rus?  Shouldn’t the Russians be looking ar Ukraine as the cultural wellspring rather than Muscovy as the cultural wellspring?

Shouldn’t the leadership of the decendents of the Kyivian Rus be coming from Kyiv… not Moscow?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

20 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

For some reason you believe the goal of Russian imperialism is to destroy Ukraine, but I guess we have to believe things in order to dissuade anyone from negotiating and demanding the most extreme military aims. 

To destroy Ukrainian… Culture.

That is what I believe the Russian goal is.  Not to kill all people of Ukrainian decent but to force them to perceive themselves as merely Russian with no cultural distinction from Russians.

Am I wrong?  You said yourself that the Russian goal is to make Ukraine “friendly to Russia”.  I’m just perplexed as to how using “Russian tactics” that have “disproportionate impact on civilians” will achieve the Russian goal of making Ukraine “friendly to Russia”…

Edited July 9, 2023 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[butterweedstrover]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… as Kyiv is much older than Muscovy why would Muscovy and it political successors be the cultural heartland of the Kyivian Rus?  Shouldn’t the Russians be looking ar Ukraine as the cultural wellspring rather than Muscovy as the cultural wellspring?

Shouldn’t the leadership of the decendents of the Kyivian Rus be coming from Kyiv… not Moscow?

That’s a long history, if you want to learn what changed, or why the capital was not Kiev. 

The prince of Rus who founded Moscow eventually went onto to dominate other Rus states, but Moscow was further from the front lines were orthodox Christians were being attacked by Catholics, it was a safer place to build a capital that wouldn’t be sacked all the time.

[Derfel Cadarn]

44 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

 

Yeah, we are living in looney land if the argument is Moscow approved of some random shootings during a retreat so they could exterminate (or instill fear) into the population. 
 

Covering it up so that the RAF doesn’t look bad isn’t the same thing, but again none of this is serious, even from someone like Cadarn who believes there was a secret command passed down to them.

??? I never mentioned any command, secret or otherwise. The Russian armed forces don’t appear to need any command to commit atrocities.

[maarsen]

12 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Well I don’t agree with that assessment of my beliefs. I understand why Russia is fighting this war and why they can’t give up and I hope the Russian state survives. 
 

Not because it is doomed to be oppressed or miserable, but because it is an alternative to the western form of imperialism which focuses on a glutinous population with no sense of national purpose. 
 

Russian imperialism I like because it counterbalances Western imperialism. 
 

I think at the core of my disagreement is framing this war as a fight for Ukrainian sovereignty as a western dominated Ukraine would have as much independence as a Russian dominated Ukraine. Actually less because Ukraine shares far less with Europe than it does with Russia. 
 

Most of the tactics people use to describe the Russian military as uncivilized: human wave attacks, massive uncoordinated artillery attacks, civilian casualties, internal repression, forced mobilization, etc. is the same as Ukraine. 
 

Well the west is trying to teach (force) them to use NATO tactics but the UAF is finding that to be less than useless. 
 

You should see how the UAF handled the war in Donbas circa 2015, it would have western liberals explode with indignation. Complete disregard for civilian casualties, torture, intimidation tactics, etc.

"Russian imperialism I like because it conterbalances Western imperialism" is a really silly argument. This is like saying a punch to the left side of one's head is fine if counterbalanced by one to the right side of said head.

[polishgenius]

Am I really seeing Stalin apologia here ffs

[butterweedstrover]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

To destroy Ukrainian… Culture.

That is what I believe the Russian goal is.  Not to kill all people of Ukrainian decent but to force them to perceive themselves as merely Russian with no cultural distinction from Russians.

Am I wrong?  You said yourself that the Russian goal is to make Ukraine “friendly to Russia”.  I’m just perplexed as to how using “Russian tactics” that have “disproportionate impact on civilians” will achieve the Russian goal of making Ukraine “friendly to Russia”…

Well first you seemed to claim Bucha and Holdomor were Russian plans to exterminate the civilian population. 
 

If you no longer stand by that then we have to deal with the fact that Ukraine was expanded by the Soviets, and much of these lands were forcibly Ukrainianized. 
 

What interest did Russian imperialists have in promoting a regional dialect? Well the Ukraine means borderlands (of Rus), they are the edge of the Rus people, and hence they have been attacked more, by Poles, Hungarians, etc. 

This can give the rise to nationalism and a unique sub-identity, which is useful but also dangerous. On one hand it can help strengthen control of a region prone to raids, but it can also give rise to the extermination of the Russian language and people. Hence Bandera.

That’s the reason they look to Bandera, they have no national hero unconnected to Russia, or Rus. 
 

The new government also tried to erase Russian language and culture, but you can only achieve so much when your culture is tied to another, you just end up destroying yourself. 
 

Now Russia has to separate Ukraine nationalism with Ukraine as a regional identity, so they try to pin that on the government, not the people, and the nationalist paramilitaries. The territory in the east, which is already heavily Russian, is trying to have the far right nationalist tendencies removed. 
 

But here is the thing, those Banderites, Azov, etc. we’re from RUSSIANS, not UKRAINIANS. It was Russians who moved to Ukraine who wanted to promote fascist ideas against the government in Moscow thinking Ukraine is a better center for the Rus world. 
 

Where is the right sector based mostly? Not Lvov but Kharkov. Azov wasn’t from the west, they were from Mariupol, in Donbas. The UPA figures were the ones who flooded the east (not western Ukraine) trying to exterminate Russian influence (since that land was never historically part of Ukraine). 
 

So any effort to undo that is to remove the affects of this ideology by promoting patriotism to Russia in places taught to hate them. 
 

Now I agree killing civilians is hurting their objective, but they have to balance that with a need to win the war militarily. However they’ve sacrificed a lot of military mobility in order to avoid civilian casualties (by Russian standards).

[butterweedstrover]

12 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

??? I never mentioned any command, secret or otherwise. The Russian armed forces don’t appear to need any command to commit atrocities.

Well firstly Russian soldiers aren’t animals, they don’t rape and kill randomly. They are innocent boys who think they are serving their country. 

Even the prisoners who fought for Wagner, those treated well, had a high rehabilitation rate. The MOD mistreated them, but Prigozhin honored the contracts. 

Now in war rape/killings happen, but you have to believe it’s systemic or part of a political order from Moscow in order to claim Bucha was evidence of a Russian plot to kill civilians. 
 

If Russia was fighting this war to exterminate the population, things would look very different.