All in all the northern part of the country got relatively little damage. The front line in the Donbass looks like this, pretty much nuked down to basements:
Areas like Marinka have received kilotons of conventional artillery. Z-channels on Telegram call this process "city-cide" (gradocyd, something like that).
I've been to Ukraine recently and what's really heartwarming is the amount of reconstruction going on in the Kyiv Oblast. Many of the bridges north of the city are almost rebuilt. They were blown up to slow down the Russian armored assault.
I love the project, but the whole premise is broken. People brainwashed into supporting Russia do not deny the scale of devastation and human tragedy. They just attribute it to the Ukrainian military.
So, while documenting the terror is a commendable thing to do, it will not change anyone's mind. Zombies will simply take it as evidence that their propaganda was right all along. "See for yourself how ruthless these Ukrainians neonazies are, killing their own people just to spite the big Russian brother."
>People brainwashed into supporting Russia do not deny the scale of devastation and human tragedy. They just attribute it to the Ukrainian military.
So I completely disagree here, because it's not an either or. You're right that people brainwashed into supporting Russia will, in certain circumstances, accept that the destruction is real but attribute it to Ukraine. And I completely agree with your pessimism.
But the logic of propaganda, and of a brain consumed by propaganda, is a hall of mirrors full of contradictions. Where convenient, and where possible, the scale of destruction will be denied, and where it can't be denied, it will be explained away.
Propaganda can't be defeated by disputing individual one-off statements, the totality of the system of propaganda has to be shown to be so full of contradictions that it takes more effort to sustain than it does to accept the truth.
This guy absolutely gets it. However I'd just like to add a small detail:
It is not enough to try and fish one person out of propaganda because often on some deep level they know. They have lost trust in their friends, family, society, so they go along with the lie because they are sure everybody else will go along with the lie. So they pick the blue pill. They know.
This is sort of my take on the Jan. 6 "Big Lie" folks. Deep down, they know.
That is why there has not been a repeat of Jan. 6, because when there are signs that the National Guard will be deployed, or just that security and police will offer proper resistence, the organizers tell everyone to stand down. They say that justice is worth dying for, but that is not how they behave.
Contrast with many other uprisings in the world where people have been oppressed for decades and are ready to die for the cause.
I would caution you to think that you are immune from what troubles these people and from falling into an us vs them mentality.
The big lie thing would not be possible if not for the many little lies, they weren't galvanized for no reason nor is there any guarantee it won't repeat if nothing changes.
> They just attribute it to the Ukrainian military
Not always, often they just say its an unfortunate consequence of the war.
I also think the use of "brainwashing" here is inappropriate. The issue here is divergent sources and selective sampling mostly, not some systematic rewriting of how they process evidence.
Give anyone access to just the information your average Russian is fed and they'll reach a similar conclusion.
I wish everyone was as rational as you. I see people constantly celebrating the death of Russian soldiers and it grosses me out. They're dumb 19 year olds who believe dumb, wrong shit for the same reason most Americans believe dumb, wrong shit. American interventions overseas since 2001 have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, yet many Americans don't seem to ever think of our troops as problematic.
The headline on CNN right now is "Putin is scaring the world to distract from his problems". If anyone reads that and doesn't immediately recognize it as propaganda (or at best, not real journalism) then they're doing as poorly as the Russians who are pro-war.
Which American country you have in your mind and why? Americas have both democratic countries and dictatorships. It is hard to make a two-continent-wide generalization. Pick up a country, a war, and a side first, then I will tell you.
I feel like you're being pointlessly pedantic and clearly not discussing in good faith. And not even in a correct way - it's a defined and accepted usage of "American" as an adjective to specify things as being part of the US, and especially when "American" is used to describe a concept that clearly has a national origin (a military). No one says "the American military" to refer to the Nicaraguan Armed Forces. I'm going to disengage here but i hope you have a good day
> Zombies will simply take it as evidence that their propaganda was right all along.
Dehumanisation of enemies is as old as the propaganda, and you are doing here exactly that. But to your defense, at least you used the term Zombie instead of Ann officially blessed Orc.
Street 14, Kharkiv. I remember battles in that area. I remember when some of the houses there got hit. One night specifically, I was on a base a ways away, and I heard one of the loudest explosions I’d heard during the war. The curtains in our room even lifted, halfway to the ceiling.
I heard from the people close to the frontline (medics, soldiers) that you're supposed to tightly tape all the glass in the windows so that a nearby explosion cannot blast you with glass fragments.
Actually while planning one SSE operation, we heavily debated the best way to break glass windows. One guy on the team wanted to tape around the edges, attach a suction cup to the center, and break the window with a spark plug. While that would work, and be the quieter option, I decided it would be too slow and too complicated. I was expecting to break a lot of windows, and we only had 2 hours for SSE. So in the end, I decided to just smash the window with a crowbar, and run the crowbar violently along the edges to clear out any big broken glass still not detached from the window frame. Then make entry.
>One guy on the team wanted to tape around the edges, attach a suction cup to the center, and break the window with a spark plug
What does the suction cup do? The way you described it only the edges were taped, so as soon as the glass pane breaks, the center will shatter and the suction cup will lose suction.
Prevent shattering into multiple pieces. Remembering now, you had to hit the window in all corners. It was something complicated like that. Then you get the glass on the suction cup and place it down gently.
I didn’t like this idea, not just because it was complex, but also because it added a bunch of different gear I would have to carry.
I suspect the intensifying divisions in our society are also a result of Russian/Chinese psyops. The "post-truth" era is just a prelude to a greater war the west will eventually have to fight against them.
We must give more powers to the FBI to remove misinformation. Not only on Twitter, but in schools, grocery stores, and kindergartens. Just hammer the truth through their thick skulls 24/7.
No. What made you reach that course of action recommendation based on a suspicion?
Combating misinformation is an important issue, any efforts to do so must be balanced with considerations of free speech, government power, and practicality.
It may be more effective to focus on promoting accurate information and critical thinking rather than trying to force people to accept the "truth."
War is undoubtedly one of the most catastrophic events that can occur in any society. It brings about unimaginable destruction and devastation, leaving behind irreparable damage to both human life and infrastructure. Innocent civilians, including women and children, often become the primary victims of war, leading to severe physical and emotional trauma. In addition to the loss of life, war can also lead to the displacement of millions of people, causing untold suffering and hardship. Furthermore, the economic consequences of war can be severe, as countries are forced to divert their resources towards military spending, leaving essential needs such as healthcare and education underfunded. Finally, the impact of war extends far beyond the battlefield, as it can leave deep scars on a society's psyche, leading to long-term social and psychological trauma. In short, war is an utterly destructive force that brings nothing but pain, suffering, and despair to those affected by it.
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
-M.A.S.H. Season 5, Episode 21, The General's Practitioner.
Economic historians. The duress of war between France and Britain required them to become more efficient. In particular the debt defaults by the British crown meant they couldn’t raise more money without ceding more and more property rights to individuals. This allowed for the incentive for people to develop capital.
See my other comment for footage from Marinka. Marinka is an eastern suburb of Donetsk City.
Avdiivka, Soledar, Bakhmut, Vuhledar, ... all the famous names of the current phase of the war look about the same, since they received about the same level of artillery pressure (kilotons, but of conventional explosives).
I've got a source for you: this Ukrainian is serving in Bakhmut right now. He's a "YouTube guy" in his unit, consistently uploading good quality footage. Skip the talking part and watch
https://www.youtube.com/@MotoLifeUA/videos
Unfortunately there is no (easily discoverable) link to report site faults. Hopefully site admininstorss read this thread eventually.
The 'streetview' canvas doesn't render correctly on Firefox 111.0.1 Linux amd64; instead it shows coloured vertical stripes that slowly 'scroll' from right to left.
Thank-you!
Since the expected permission request pop-up didn't show first time I visited the site, and the address-bar didn't highlight any blocking, and the settings dialog doesn't make it clear whether or not canvas is currently blocked (it has a question and two buttons, neither highlighted) I misinterpreted the default setting.
There is a before/after toggle for the second street. Pretty dishonest to compare summer photos with green trees with winter photos and trees without leaves, they should fix it.
I spent some time talking to groups of denialists. Conversations are something like:
- Hello, your creed is not real, because [some facts].
- These facts are not true, it's fake created by [nasa, globalists, etc]
- It's not fake, because [some facts about facts]
- You get paid by a [globalists, nasa, etc]
In some cases, some of my "imagined characteristics" are used to accuse me of something. My profile does not have this information, the person takes it out of nowhere.
- You are defending [male, gay, female] because you are [gay, male, female, cis, etc]
At the end of the day, the facts don't matter, it's important to stand up for something:
-Your data is wrong, it's not 53% of x or y, it's 0.3%.
- 0.3% is important anyway, it is not changed.
In the case, 0.3% is irrelevant.
Goals change.
- See, some facts:
- And, about [something else, not related to the lecture]
Basically, I see three types of denialists:
- The lonely person looking for some community. The community replaces other traditional groups like the church. These people will defend the creed, often without understanding it. It seems to be 80% of all denialists.
- Rich people with some Christian/capitalist guilt.
- People with a real mental problem
- People who know the truth but earn some money from the creed. These people keep denial alive by creating factoids when they can.
I don't talk to these people anymore. I don't know how to help them and in the end it can be very stressful and sad.
How many streets are in here? It seems that the street view is limited to a few blocks in each case.
When were the photos added? How can people add stuff from Mariupol, for instance?
This kind of stuff is absolutely needed, but regularly uploaded by people on the ground, and showing the up-to-date situation. One should be able to see any conflict zone, including Sanaa Yemen this way.
After they finish building all the new apartment blocks [1]. And Bakhmut currently looks way worse than Mariupol ever did, but I guess the West's attention has mostly shifted elsewhere.
Don’t think the Kiev Independent guys have access to Mariupol right now, I just copy-pasted from Twitter one of the first results of “Mariupol new apartments” search. You’re right, most probably those reporting from inside Russian-controlled Mariupol are pro-Russian.
Russia's goal with Mariupol seems to be razing the damaged parts of the city to cover up the destruction and their war crimes (see the mariupol theater), and rebuild new buildings on top, to proclaim that it's now a much better city under russian leadership.
Of course, ukraine would probably have razed or reconstructed these buildings, but the russian way seems to be explicitly done as a cover-up and propaganda operation.
I really doubt they can afford that level of public spending in other cities, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these construction projects only cover a small portion of the destroyed buildings. To say nothing about the quality of the hastily constructed flats.
Just like sister comment said, people are showing videos of driving around Mariupol.
If should be clear to see how the incentives of Ukrainians and Russians are polar opposite, yet they will both use truth as a weapon of war. I.e. the Russian equivalent of this website shows rebuilt, functioning cities.
Life is returning back to normal after a horrific battle that did not need to happen. Most civilians don’t care so much under which government they live, they just want health and safety first and foremost. Governments and states create the problems, in my opinion. Politicians should serve the people, not create war.
In an ideal world, the states would be replaced with agencies that compete for yearly contracts from neighborhoods. Instead of killing civilians for a flag, the civilians would renew contracts for roads, police etc. from competing agencies and none of it would be bundled together in “a state”.
Most civilians that remained, which is a very different number and group of people from civilians before invasion.
This is almost trivially true, if you don't have a reason or desire to leave a town bombed to bits for several months, then you don't care about your government. People who cared or were candidates to be tortured, left before that. And being a torture chamber candidate required as little as having tattoos or speaking your native language, the language that people who never even lived in your country decided is not real.
Genocide is real though and genocidal war is very different from "government changed who cares"
There is a ton of data around American interventions overseas over the past 20 years, the problem is western media doesn't show any of it and so it's invisible for most Americans. Americans did the same thing to multiple countries that we're seeing in the streetviews in OP
Yup. Where do I, an American, go for information on oh I dunno, say the destruction of Yemen and Libya? Al Jazeera? RT? Even if I found interesting data/analysis, who could I show it to here in the US? Half the country thinks AJ is news for terrorists, and the other half thinks RT is news for nazis.
RT is useful resource for discovering concepts that don't follow the western narrative, but absolutely not in terms of having any sort of reliable coverage of facts around these concepts. Or that the concepts themselves have any legitimacy.
AJ is probably the best English speaking mainstream resource for this. I don't really know what to say about the societal problem of people not caring.
It really does seem like a one sided war. Russia is slowly destroying Ukraine but no real effect to Russia. They're slowly ramping up their production of weapons. Russia can do this for another 10 years until Ukraine's economy is slowly suffocated.
IMO to end the war, Russia needs a hard lesson that it can't keep on bombing another soviergn nation and expect rest of world to be chill.
Unfortunately because they have nuclear weapons, Putin knows he can get away with almost anything.
Russia is sending guys into nightclubs on weekend nights in Moscow and St Pete to snatch able-bodied men off of dance floors and forcibly toss them into the busses to replenish their slave armies.
I don't know how long that is a viable strategy. Then again, I don't know how long Ukraine's defense is viable.
Russia is a gas station that can't sell gas. It is being bankrupted. They can't make stuff without German engineers repairing their German machinery. Russia might not last the year. Look at their own ministry of finance budget numbers.
I have otherwise intelligent friends who have unfortunately become immersed in Russian propaganda. With a straight face they will say that everything we see out of Ukraine is a lie. That it is Ukraine bombing their own cities just to make Russia look bad.
It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ukraine bombing its own cities to make Russia “look bad” is such a claim. As is most conspiratorial claims regarding Covid, and so on ad nauseam.
I think that if you see “intelligent” people that have a hard time navigating a scientific and methodological way of finding out the truth, such as when you discard these extraordinary claims due to the lack of extraordinary evidence, maybe you need to re-evaluate what “intelligent” actually means, or how you qualify it.
The most intelligent people I’ve ever met are filled with doubt, because they have the skill I just mentioned. Faced with extraordinary claims they respond “that’s strange, I wonder if it can be substantiated” — they do not respond by fervently trying to convince anyone they meet that something REALLY crazy is going on and we all need to figure out the “real” state of things IMMEDIATELY without regard for method and process.
What I might agree with you in, is that conspiratorial thinking much like alcoholism or gambling addiction, obviously CAN “infect” very intelligent people, because they are at the end of the day just people.
But an intelligent person with a mental illness does not make them less intelligent, nor does it make that mental illness more “real”.
The real and fundamental problem underneath all of this is the so-called “post truth society” we’re increasingly moving into, where what’s actually true doesn’t seem to matter anymore, and people just feel like they’re combatants in a war of ideas, and the more they push their ideas regardless of their truthfulness, the more true that idea becomes.
That might be true for ideology, or cultural movements, but it’s not true for investigative journalism and scientific exploration.
Very smart people join cults all the time, and it's quite well understood that you don't get them to leave a cult by showing them how irrational it is.
The oc likened conspiratorial thinking to other addictions like alcohol or gambling and, while not perfect, I think this is a good analogy. People don't join cults because of its reasoning, they join because the cult provides them with something that was otherwise missing in their lives, such as a strong feeling of dependent community or whatever. The intelligent mind then post-rationalizes that being in the cult is good and reasonable (even over-riding blatant evidence to the contrary). The stronger the mind, the better this rationalizing will be. Conspiratorial thinking follows a similar trend -- it is giving them something they were missing. Gambling addictions, abusive relationships, and so on all have similar rationalization processes where a person's own intelligence is weaponized against them to continue in self-destructive behavior. Humans are weird that way.
> I think the parent is saying that ipso facto joining a cult means that they weren't actually 'very smart', only in appearance.
If by "intelligent" we mean the conventional thing -- learns new things easily, capable of reasoning through complex tasks, would do well in med school/law school/phd programs/finance/engineering, picks up creative disciplines quickly, etc -- then are we sure it's not exactly the other way around?
People become invested in cults and conspiracies for emotional reasons, not rational reasons, and conventionally intelligent people are extraordinarily good at post hoc rationalization. More importantly, they're often better at mitigating or managing some of the downsides (eg, maintaining good-enough status in a cult, avoiding talking about the conspiracy in certain circumstances, etc.).
At least, this has been my experience with some extended family who fell into a cult: the ones I could consider "smartest" were stuck in the cult the longest, because they could rationalize their way into an answer for everything.
This entire subthread seems to be an argument over the definition of "intelligent". In no dictionary definition that I can find does it exclude people who join cults. Yet that seems to be the argument being made here.
From the Wikipedia:
> No True Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect their generalized statement from a falsifying counterexample by excluding the counterexample improperly.
So I think it's a No True Scotsman argument to make to say "well, if they joined a cult, they must not have been intelligent in the first place."
But now I suppose we're arguing over the definition of the No True Scotsman fallacy and that's just a bit too meta for me on a rainy Sunday afternoon, so I'm going to go walk my dog. :-)
At least I think it might be a good idea to question what we individually mean by "intelligent" or "very smart" when we see people that we think harbor these traits behaving in a way that we strongly dislike. The definition of intelligence is not a completely uncontroversial subject.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (...) As is most conspiratorial claims regarding Covid, and so on ad nauseam.
Most conspiracies theories are extremely implausible. However there is a conspiracy theory about Covid that is so extremely plausible that it's the claims that it's not that should require extraordinary evidence.
That theory is that the perfectly pedestrian hypothesis that a lab studying dangerous pathogens could have experienced an industrial accident resulting in a pandemic was covered up by both a totalitarian government and other individuals with a personal interest in the matter.
Where am I going with this? Well, I posit that years of throwing around accusations of "conspiracy theorism" and promoting dodgy "fact checking" that typically involves mere opinions rather than incontrovertible facts has made downright demented ideas like Ukraine bombing itself more palatable. In other words, "they lied to us about Wuhan, they must be lying about Ukraine" or something.
Observe the soldier in the background at the 01:05 timestamp who appears to have taken a water tube from the BSL4 lab. This is concrete proof rather than a mere speculation. It's worth considering why the Russians removed this video.
Following an explosion, first responders and firefighters entered a building to inspect (break into) every room on every floor for signs of fire. It has been reported that some Russian firefighters have been known to steal items during these inspections, as they can deny responsibility after a door lock is broken. The video shows a soldier pouring out water from a stolen water bottle while the director of the BSL4 lab speaks.
There were several investigations conducted by independent Russian reporters into this incident and the subsequent outbreak of an unknown virus in Siberia that occurred shortly after, but I am unable to locate them now.
I think intelligence and interest in the truth are for the most part entirely independent. Someone may easily have the cognitive ability to discern the truth but no interest in doing so, especially when they’ve chosen a personal and group identity that would be threatened by recognition of the truth.
“Extraordinary” is always judged in regard to the judging party’s priors, and people have wildly different priors (and people on both sides will say – with some accuracy on both sides, though very much not equal accuracy – that this is because the other side has priors that are influenced by disinformation spread as propaganda by the other side.)
We all evaluate factual claims and determine whether or not we think they are true or plausible. Each of us is an arbiter of what constitutes and extraordinary claim in the same way each of us is an arbiter of what is moral/immoral.
A kook can be spotted by the way they talk. They have knowledge others don’t. They don’t say, “I’ve read that…” or “It seems like this might have happened.”. They speak with certainty and argue by assertion. Making one claim after another all without evidence. They link together facts by claiming some cabal or powerful person is behind things and a refusal to agree means you are a victim of propaganda. The thinking is disorganized. They have a need to evangelize their ideas and tend to think coincidences can’t happen. Correlation is causation.
At the end of my second paragraph feel free to add, “In my opinion.”. I was stating my criteria for evaluating whether or not someone is a kook. While no one has appointed me an arbiter of such things I do have to evaluate claims and reason about them. Similarly no one appointed me an arbiter of morality but I do have to make moral judgements and determine wether or not a given act is justified or unjustified.
The criterion for extraordinality seems often to be whether it contradicts someone's preconceptions. It seems precarious to apply different levels of scrutiny to claims based on such a basis.
> The criterion for extraordinality seems often to be whether it contradicts someone's preconceptions.
That is what extraordinary means: that it violates our previous experiences, that it is "out of the ordinary". Human beings navigate reality based on previous experience, and most of the time it serves us really well.
Most people have a preconception that aliens do not exist, for example. That doesn't make it true, but it's a reasonable assumption to start at, because the vast majority of human beings (not all) have not had an experience involving extraterrestrials, nor do they trust another human being who has (i.e. secondary confirmation): so when a third party claims that this has happened to them, it's hard to take in, because it's "extraordinary".
The statement that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is nothing but an acknowledgement of the fact that human beings work this way, and that even though it's not a fail-safe way to reason, chances are that you'll end up with a correct conclusion more often than if you simply start every reasoning with "we have no idea what is true".
Primary confirmation of something you can observe or reproduce, or secondary confirmation of the same via someone you trust, are the two primary ways we reason about what we believe, because we are social creatures. In my opinion, when you go down the path of equating all secondary confirmations with each-other, disregarding expertise, consensus, or anything else that might give weight to that secondary opinion because "you can't trust anything anyway", I believe that you are walking down a dangerous and anti-intellectual route, and that this is the reason behind many of the things that are dividing societies worldwide today.
Obviously I'm not saying an expert is correct by definition, nor am I saying that the majority is always right, but both of those statements are more true than false: no wonder that when you flip those statements around, you end up with some "kooky" conclusions.
> Most people have a preconception that aliens do not exist
See, the problem is that you could easily be wrong about what the majority of others believe. And in fact you are wrong on this point (at least for Americans) [1].
It's very easy to get the wrong idea about what the majority believes, due to something called the majority illusion [2]. A broadcast vocal minority can drown out the true majority.
Supposing you could identify the majority opinion, it certainly does not make it the truth, and counter claims are not by definition "extraordinarily" simply because they are the minority opinion. Science and truth are not determined by vote. 81% of Americans believe in god [3]. Does that make it an extraordinary claim that god does not exist?
> That is what extraordinary means: that it violates our previous experiences, that it is "out of the ordinary". Human beings navigate reality based on previous experience, and most of the time it serves us really well.
Hence, two opposing claims are both necessarily extraordinary when both parts disagree, or when each claim violates the other part experiences.
If your thought example is that only two human beings exist in the world, then yes, both claims are equally extraordinary.
But since the world is not composed of two people, if one person fervently believes that the moon is made out of cheese and the rest of humanity does not, the anti-cheesers are not extraordinary, and the singular cheeser would likely be classified as mentally ill.
Have people who have been factually correct historically been classified as mentally ill, heretics and the like? Yes. But that doesn’t mean you should visit a mental institution to get the “truth” behind the invasion of Ukraine.
> But since the world is not composed of two people, if one person fervently believes that the moon is made out of cheese and the rest of humanity does not, the anti-cheesers are not extraordinary, and the singular cheeser would likely be classified as mentally ill.
> Yes. But that doesn’t mean you should visit a mental institution to get the “truth” behind the invasion of Ukraine.
Good, then if the majority is right we just have to ask what the world thinks about the situation in Ukraine. Currently the large majority of the world disagrees with the western point of view. India is not siding with the west, neither does China, neither does Africa or South America.
What you're saying sounds completely uncontroversial[1] to me, but there are several claims in here that are impossible or really difficult to validate. I see claims like this a lot, and they are often of the shape "most people x" or "the vast majority of x y".
The only time that these claims can be anything other than gut feelings is the case where the speaker is somehow aware of all of the events in the set. Something like "I took 100 samples and 99 of them met the conditions".
This is going to seem pedantic, and I think you'll get a pass from people with the same preconceptions who don't habitually ask "do I really know this?".
> Most people have a preconception that aliens do not exist, for example.
Testable hypothesis, and one I might assume myself. Is it true? Realistically, I have no clue, and I have no reasonable way to judge whether you do either.
> the vast majority of human beings (not all) have not had an experience involving extraterrestrials, nor do they trust another human being who has
Same as above. I think it's incredibly difficult to know much of anything specific about "the vast majority of human beings". And then the ambiguity on what constitutes "the vast majority" makes it more of a quagmire. There are billions of us. A fraction of a percent is vast. The vast majority might as well be infinity when it comes to our ability to know things about it.
Would you agree? I think these claims would be much more robust if you put some constraints on them: ie the vast majority of people in my social circles/media consumption that I trust to have shown me what they really believe. But you'd sound a little kooky if you said that, and it wouldn't be that powerful of a statement.
All that said, I believe your conclusions. I just have a fascination with picking at people's (and my own) confidence in uncontroversial claims that are hard to substantiate.
[1] My favorite types of things to poke at, which probably does make me a bit of a kook.
Edit: I have tried to eliminate "most people x" and "the vast majority of x y" from most of what I write for these reasons. It still comes out inadvertently sometimes.
Edit2:I missed one: "most of the time it serves us really well". Same comment.
"Ukraine bombing its own cities to make Russia “look bad” is such a claim. "
Individual false flag military operations are not uncommon, but widespread destruction of one's own country for propaganda purposes would be extraordinary.
> Individual false flag military operations are not uncommon
There are many historical examples proving that false flag military operations in themselves is not a conspiracy theory, it's something that has happened and will continue to happen.
What is extremely important though is context. A famous false flag operation from history, for example, is the "Gleiwitz incident": Nazi Germany attacked its own radio station in 1939 to justify attacking Poland.
Even at the time, it was obvious that something about this was fishy, because anyone could understand that Poland did not have anything to gain by starting a war with Germany -- a Germany that by the way had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland the year before.
Of course, nobody in the German political leadership actually cared what people believed, much like Russia today spreads misinformation about Ukraine that is borderline laughable. It's not always about the information being believable, it can also be a show of force: I'm lying to your face, we both know it, but what are you going to do about it?
I'm not denying the historical reality of false flag operations, I'm saying they were individual events rather than a prolonged widespread campaign of (self-)destruction.
Interesting question that illuminates why the position of the Overton window is important- it sets the boundaries of which claims are “extraordinary” and can therefore be attacked with this thought-terminating cliche
Extraordinarity is subjective. For you those claims might be extraordinary, for others they may be logical. I can guarantee you a time will come when the positions will be reversed.
Failing to understand this shows you're also having a hard time navigating a scientific and methodological way of finding out the truth, as pretty much everyone else. The problem is that you seem more interested in attacking the intelligence of people who disagree with you than in understanding what makes their claim ordinary for them.
Watching casuals practice "epistemology" (as they perceive it) is a lot like the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect, or watching congresspeople discussing TikTok: in over their heads, and not aware of it (in large part because we live in a culture where what is "true" is by consensus/memorization, and any suggestion of serious epistemic practice is (often emotionally and insistently) dismissed because that "is" "pedantic" or "is" a "conspiracy theory"...both socially conditioned behaviors, in fact (as a boolean)).
Easy way to trigger the phenomenon: introduce the notion of complex causality (as opposed to justification) into a Ukraine war discussion, and observe with fascination the highly probabilistic responses from humans (perform 100 experiments, aggregate the ensuing responses, and you will have a normal distribution, gee, a lot like how ChatGPT works). I have LOTS of practice doing this (on a variety of topics, religion is another easy one) on platforms where longer and finer grained arguments are socially acceptable (they tend not to be on more intellectual sites like HN).
This very thread has numerous artifacts of various associated phenomena, but it's all normal so goes unnoticed.
Here in the Netherlands such voices exist, but they are quite fringe and limited to the usual crowd. In part this is due to the downing of flight MH17 in 2014 by a Russian surface-to-air missile fired by a Russian crew operating in the Donbas to support the separatists (not with the intent of shooting down a commercial passenger plane obviously). The deaths of almost 200 Dutch and the subsequent investigation and trial leave little room for doubting that Russia is the aggressor here.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about the Dutch perspective on this. As an American, this is the kind of thing that gets America to go to war - why didn’t the Netherlands decide to intervene after MH17?
The U.S. shot down an Iranian passenger airliner and promoted the Navy captain who was in charge of the ship that did it. U.S. fighter pilots accidentally killed 20 people in Italy because they wanted to showboat. The Soviet Union shot down a Korean passenger airliner.
One does not go to war over such incidents unless you are already looking for an excuse to do so.
That said, we took responsibility for the Vincennes accident and paid reparations, as I recall. I wonder if Russia will ever do that much to compensate the Dutch.
A typical American reaction is to feel less outrage or feel absolved so long as we gave victims money. I say this as an American. The DOD initially lied about the events. We did not in any meaningful way take responsibility. We didn’t court martial any of the officers involved and the Vincennes received a combat action ribbon for that day.
Lots of societies around the world have a tradition of 'blood money' in the sense of financial compensation for killing or other serious harm. It's not surprising to find that kind of thinking in America since it is a society comprised of migrants from all over the world.
That said, we took responsibility for the Vincennes accident and paid reparations, as I recall. I wonder if Russia will ever do that much to compensate the Dutch.
I wonder if the US will do the same for their adventures in the middle East in the last few decades.
In a serious culture we could discuss these things using spreadsheets and data using strict epistemology, but in this culture we mostly discuss them in simplistic, cherry picked, "just so" stories, and pile on anyone who dares to step outside the Overton Window of consensus "truth".
They shot the plane down on purpose, they took smiling pictures amongst the wreckage, and they prevented the Dutch or anyone else from picking up the bodies.
They shot a plane down on purpose, not the plane. Then they went full CYA mode, as at that time Russian involvement in the conflict was all about barely plausible deniability. Coming out and saying, "yes, we have sent a Russian SAM into Ukraine to shoot down Ukrainian airplanes and accidentally shot down a civilian airliner" was technically an option, but Russia preferred to deny everything and flood the infospace with a hundred conflicting theories.
I just heard this story on NPR a couple weeks ago, it seems that there is unfortunately no conclusive evidence and likely will never be, but they do have strong evidence (intercepted audio recordings) suggesting that Putin was directly involved in supplying the BUK missile system to the separatists that shot down the plane.
I would have agreed with you had Russia accepted that it made a mistake. In the absence of something small as an acknowledgment and a formal apology (followed up by large monetary compensations for the victims’ families), it isn’t obvious to me how anytime can assume it was an accident.
The apology should have come immediately after the incident, without anyone asking for it.
It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. - Epictetus
The other one that seems common seems to be a belief that if only you cede as much territory as possible to anyone who threatens you as soon as possible, then you can prevent a war and surely they won't come back and ask for more.
Which should quickly becomes obvious wouldn’t work with even a little bit of thought. Ceding territory to the faintest of threats is like catering to the whims of a high school bully: the only thing it does is invite more bullying, not only from the original bully but from others too. It’s practically shouting through a megaphone, “I’m a punching bag! Please come punch me, I won’t resist!”
The real mind-hack is that people believe it's exclusively one or the other, and argue vociferously against the other side. George Orwell once wrote of the Spanish Civil War:
"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."
This has always happened, and it's still happening. Anybody remember the Ghost of Kyiv, or the 'fuck you' surrender?
No, 'everything we see out of Ukraine' is not a lie (which in itself is a false dichotomy: we've seen plenty of 'facts' framed in a way that's explicitly misleading), but the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence of the past ~year, not to mention the rest of human history, suggests that a lot of it probably is.
Yeah, but constructing morale-boosting urban legend such as Ghost of Kiev is a bit different, than Russians trying to imply that Ukrainians are nazis who will systematically destroy own cities to make Russian saviors look bad. Don't you think?
Yes, it happens, but for Ukraine, I think you’re concentrating on small media-friendly stories and deemphasizing a larger amount of consensus reality. For example, there’s little argument over where the front lines are and how they’ve changed. There are maps. Sometimes there is temporary confusion when things are changing quickly.
Ukraine is indeed firing artillary at their own cities, but not to make Russia look bad, but to defeat the Russian forces inside those pretty much abandoned cities.
The artillery war is in the eastern parts of the country.
For the major cities like the ones in the link, I think more damage was done by Russia striking with cruise rockets and/or air-dropped bombs like FAB-250 or FAB-500. At least for a moment while Russia had air superiority they dropped bombs like this on Mykolaiv.
It's very easy to attribute the rocket strikes against the civilians (example: the horrible one in Dnipro[1]) to Russia, as they don't really try to cover up anything.[2][3]
IIRC the Dnipro attack was the one where Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych was summarily fired for admitting that the residential building was hit because the missile was shot down by Ukrainian anti aircraft missiles.
I don't think the presidential advisor has access to military data. And the videos floating around show the incoming missile at high speed. IMO, if it really was hit, the trajectory would be different.
Arestovych is basically a pundit. He admitted he doesn't have any insider access to military information, he just aggregates official releases and rumors into some coherent view.
There were many attacks on civilian objects before and after - in fact it seems like 90% of Russian targets are civilian. So I don't think there's any reason to treat that Dnipro attack as something special
In many cases it's a form of a psychological defense - it's way too difficult to live in a reality where your country is killing droves of innocent people so your brain can switch to the "let's pretend that it's a giant lie and continue on" mode. It's the path of the least resistance: "we are the good guys, they are the bad guys, I can live with myself, all is good".
That may be the case for some Russians (though for those living abroad? I'm not sure, there's a reason they're living abroad after all), but for Germans in Germany or Americans born and raised in the US?
It seems to me that at least for these cases, it's more of an "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing. They've lost connection to the society around them and perceive it as hostile, so anything that the mainstream (or the government as the mainstream's enforcer) views negatively they automatically view in a more positive light. And since their enemy is always lying, they'll eat up anything that agrees with that position.
I don’t know about Germany, but in the U.S. it’s almost exclusively people who have established a group identity which demands that they recognize the Biden administration (and generally the American left) as the foremost evil in the world.
You can shut down someones rational mind simply by getting them deeply emotional or stressed. Any primal emotion works: fear, lust, anger, anxiety, shame, etc.
Are they Russians living in Russia? A good friend of mine is Russian and from his recent trip to Moscow to see his relatives his conclusion was they are helpless when it comes to changing their optics on the invasion of Ukraine. And these are highly educated people, including lawyers and doctors, definitely not dumb. Growing up under a dictatorial regime myself I know how effective the influx of propaganda can be, combine that with high levels of paranoia (the west is out to get us!) and distrust among family members, friends and neighbors (you learn how to keep your opinions to your self because you never know who's going to snitch) and what you get is a large portion of the population which doesn't belong to the stereotypical undecuated and easily manipulated bunch supporting a regime involved in war crimes. Not rare at all.
Ah yes, the false flag accusation. I've noticed it's almost always the first thing propagandists turn to, probably because it's effective and basically unfalsifiable. It allows you to project your prior beliefs onto the actors in any situation.
Also, the Russian have their experience with false flags (a while back with Finland and recent ones with apartment bombings) and as it often is with propagandists, accusations are also confessions.
What a grab bag of bigotry, it's almost impressive to smush all that together into one grand conspiracy. For bonus points though consider adding "round earth liars", and it's almost a shame it's missing some kind of ivermectin related point.
Lenin: Oh we're not establishing peasant proprietorship, it is, you see there are poor peasants and rich peasants and we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants and they soon hang them from the nearest tree. *cackle*
It predates modern day Russian, Soviets, or even Bolsheviks. It goes back to Mensheviks who initially developed such psyops to get into and hold power. They had their own inspirations of course but this is really where this evil exploded. It isn't some big secret - the ends justify the means, so lie, make false equivalencies, get people all stirred up and questioning reality and sow distrust as much as possible. Once you get in power you'll put things in order what could possibly go wrong? Things are dire and can't get any worse, so get in power by all means necessary.
With the backdrop of the Cold War they turned it outwards, if you aren't familiar you can get a good feel for the vibe from any Adam Curtis documentary, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
The problem is that once trust collapses and nobody believes in the media, the institutions, and everybody is aware that people lie -- the trick really is to get you to lie also, even a little bit -- a society can get completely untethered from reality.
> It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.
A lot of conspiracies do end up true, coverups are a thing, who can you trust? What even is real?
It is not that your friends are bad people or lack critical reasoning skills. They got shaken out of solid ground and now are in a question-everything mindset.
What is oddest about this one, which I have not heard before btw, is that Russia claims (boasts) of bombing Ukrainian cities, especially the electricity infrastructure.
The problem is that normal people are easy to manipulate by people who know what they are doing.
All our history is pretty much masses of people manipulated to hate other nations so that ruling class / political / spiritual leaders can get what they want.
Do you think Germans somehow evolved to a different, mean, heartless kind of being before and during WWII? No, they were normal people who were manipulated by people who were somehow skilled in manipulation.
In my opinion there are only two things that can meaningfully save nations from sliding into darkness. One is teaching empathy to other people regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, race, occupation, upbringing, age, religion, class or nationality. And another is teaching history of the world so that people can see connection between what is happening contemporarily and some stupid things humanity has done in the past.
Same for me: People that argument that the western world, NATO and Ukraine were antagonizing Russia and it‘s a just war. I can‘t wrap my head around this mindset. I minimized my interactions with those friends.
It’s not a just war, it’s a Russian imperialistic aggression, but let’s not pretend that there weren’t so many enablers and provocateurs on the NATO/US side. Minsk agreements were basically abandoned from the start and no one enforced them, EU ignored Crimea annexation and continued pumping billions of dollars into Russia (you can see these billions now in form of rockets and bombs in Ukraine), NATO has been expanding to the East and antagonising paranoid Russia.
>Minsk agreements were basically abandoned from the start
Because Russia broke them on the first week, yes.
>EU ignored Crimea annexation and continued pumping billions of dollars into Russia (you can see these billions now in form of rockets and bombs in Ukraine)
How is that western/NATO aggression ?
>NATO has been expanding to the East and antagonising paranoid Russia.
NATO is not an entity that looks to engulf everything. Countries see themselves next to Russia, see the bullshit that happens when Russia doesn't honor its agreements with the CSTO members (Amernia and Azerbaijain duking it out make everyone realize how much of a joke the CSTO is), and decide to join NATO. There is no "NATO expansion", there is no agreement of not letting new countries join either. Noone is forced at gunpoint to join NATO.
All these countries applied to NATO, but it was NATO that accepted their application. It could also refuse their application or just tell them they won’t be accepted if they apply, like they did when Russia joined NATO partnership and wanted to become a member. Inserted NATO decided to expand to Russian borders but not accept Russia. Which was logical, what is a purpose of a military alliance without a powerful enemy?
> All these countries applied to NATO, but it was NATO that accepted their application.
As an eastern european, I hate this rhetoric. Some country feels threatened by Russia, joins NATO, and this is presented as NATO bullying Russia. The country that joined, its citizens and their will is not a subject in this discussion. The country is a thing, discussed like you would discuss a nuclear warhead or military base - it's just a tool the powerful use for their means.
How about you consider what the sovereign people want and stop thinking about them as political playthings.
This "Russia wanted to join NATO but was denied" argument is the same sort of half-truth revisionism like that "NATO promised to not expand east-ward" thing. What may have been "promised" in private conversations behind closed doors by people who most likely weren't even qualified to give such promises doesn't count much unless there's some sort of written agreement.
There is a formal agreement that Germany doesn't station foreign NATO troops in former East Germany. And guess what? There are no foreign NATO troops stationed in former East Germany to this day.
Russia didn't apply to join though, they (Putin) expected special treatment.
The Labour peer recalled an early meeting with Putin, who became Russian president in 2000.
“Putin said: ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’
And he said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
> It could also refuse their application or just tell them they won’t be accepted if they apply, like they did when Russia joined NATO partnership and wanted to become a member.
Russia never applied, they wanted to be special and be asked to apply, they where told that they would have to apply like everyone else.
Number of times Russia attacked any NATO state is exactly 0, same as number of times NATO invaded Russia. What’s your point here?
On the other side, why so limited question? Why not comparing the number of times NATO states invaded some country, and compare with the number of times Russia invaded some country. The relation would probably be somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1.
And btw, why do you call NATO a defensive alliance when it wasn’t involved in a defensive war, only in criminal aggression, if we use international law classification.
> Why not comparing the number of times NATO states invaded some country, and compare with the number of times Russia invaded some country. The relation would probably be somewhere between 10:1 and 100:1.
Are you actually citing all the wars Russia was involved in since IX century? I don’t even know where to start with this, but maybe consider that “Russia” is not some thousand year old unchanging state, it has been morphing and changing drastically. Even reasoning about USSR and modern Russia as equivalent entities is just plain wrong - different economies, different basis, different system of government, ownership and decision making, vastly different territories even.
So I would stick comparing modern states between each other, not some small feudal entities from IX century
Oh, enablers and provocateurs on the west against the underdog Russia. Cry me a river. I absolutely do not like many aspects of the way how US behaves in this planet. What I do not understand is that how anyone thinks that you get any sympathy by trying to fight US/west by being a failed PoS totalitarian developing country. Make yourself a better country than US, wait a decade or a couple and see how old enemies are joining you.
To become richer (better maybe not the right word to apply to USA, there are many places that are much better) than USA, you have to have the same military might and ability to influence the whole world. This kind of might is directly connected to capital a state controls, and I don’t see anyone outpacing USA any time soon - the cake has been cut long time ago.
> Minsk agreements were basically abandoned from the start and no one enforced them
Why would Ukraine follow Minsk when Russia won't even follow the Budapest Memorandum?.
Russia never follows agreements when it doesn't suit them and only uses them as leverage or as way to freeze conflicts for them to restart in the future.
First Minsk agreements were broken, then there was Minsk II that required Ukraine to do specific changes, like federalisation, to which Ukraine leaders agreed, but never proceeded with.
Budapest Memorandum was broken in 2022, Minsk II was in 2015. And Russia is not a side of Minsk agreements, at least not directly.
I didn’t say that Russia has any just reasons to break any international agreements, because it doesn’t.
However, we’re talking about Minsk II, that looked to me like a good deal for all parties involved, and I think it had the potential to bring peace to these lands first time in 20 years.
In what world is Minsk II a good deal for all parties?. It literally gave Ukraine nothing aside from "we stop killing your soldiers". It did exactly what Russia seeks to do, freeze conflicts so they can start them again.
I don’t think “independent states” applies here, especially right after USSR dissolution. There was a lot of corruption, a lot of capital “redistribution” and outside meddling. They got some feeling of security, but also became a tool of US imperialism and a frontline that supposed to take the first hit/make a first strike.
I would prefer to be in a neutral position.
After over a generation the effects speak for themselves - those who aligned with the west are now democracies(even if at times lead by populists) with healthy economies which were invested into.
Meanwhile those who either aligned with Russia or remained under its influence have very little of the liberty my generation already got used to, rampant corruption and stagnant economies.
Personally I prefer the former, as many citizens of the latter really, but they don't have a say in that due to their circumstances.
As for safety: Ukraine was supposed to remain neutral in exchange for the nuclear stockpile on its territory, but all it got is an unprovoked invasion from Russia, which doesn't respect such agreements and it's enough to neighbor this country to understand this.
Is US handing out passports here in Europe? Are they deporting kids to US, invading countries to make it their own territory? Poisoning politicians that alignn with Russia? Sorry but I haven't seen that. However, we've seen plenty of that coming from Russia.
And you wonder why countries like to join NATO (under agreement, begging them to accept), and not Russia (under force). Strange right?
How's that win-win relationship working out for Ukraine right now?
"The Ukrainian military already is bleeding Russia in the Donbass
region (and vice versa). Providing more U.S. military equipment and
advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it ... Increasing
military advice and arms supplies to Ukraine is the most feasible of these
options with the largest impact, but any such initiative would have to be
calibrated very carefully to avoid a widely expanded conflict."
- 2019 paper from the RAND Corporation titled Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground
Moldova for sure. Baltics or Poland highly likely, and that would mean a direct confrontation with NATO. The nuclear threats now are peanuts compared to what would happen then.
I've assumed reality where there's no "NATO expansionism" (as GP was complaining about US forging alliances), so Poland and entire post-Soviet block wouldn't be in the NATO at all and would be full-time enjoying "Ruski Mir".
Hard to find words to express how shitty that would be.
I think it varies case by case. Sorry, I don’t believe in a equal and just relationship between the biggest economy in the world and economies that are few order of magnitude smaller. As well as I don’t believe in a relationship between 40 years old man and 17 years old girl.
But let’s imagine that this is a win-win relationship, say between Estonia and NATO. I understand that Estonia is getting from them, but what USA is getting?
What did USA gain from joining the allies in Europe during WW1 and WW2? Besides the moral and humanitarian reasons, which I actually believe played a big role even though I'm not American and I know it's easy to be cynical online and disregard those, they also gained a larger market for their products. US hegemony has benefitted the US for decades. Same thing applies now, the more countries that are friendly and politically aligned the better. And NATO isn't just the US, the Baltic airspace is currently being protected by Portugal and Romania.
You claim that the economy of EU+UK is "a few order of magnitude smaller" than US?
USA is getting a strong partnership next to one of its worst enemies.
Let me pose this question: If US would drop out of NATO, would that mean all NATO countries would drop out, or would the rest of NATO still form an alliance?
To be fair, it's actually very easy to wrap your head around that. Consider this for a moment: does anybody pretend that if Mexico were to ally itself with Russia, right on the US's doorstep, that the US would sit still and "respect Mexico's sovereignty to ally with whomever they want"?
The US would be unanimously condemned if that would happen, but that reasoning is dependent on Russian propaganda that this war is because of NATO provocation. If that was the case, why haven't Russia invaded Finland? Why does Putin say that it's of no consequence that Finland and Sweden has applied for NATO membership?
This war is not about Russia not wanting NATO or EU on its borders. It started in 2014 when Ukraine was about to start moving closer to the rest of Europe, and further from Russia. Russia thinks Ukraine belongs to them, it's nothing but pure imperialism.
The same thing is happening in Belarus by the way. Lukasjenko is propped up by Putin, and in reality they're basically part of Russia now, with Russian military units and even nuclear weapons.
> Why does Putin say that it's of no consequence that Finland and Sweden has applied for NATO membership?
It doesn't matter because he is
the biggest liar. It was absolutely not what he and Russia were saying late 2021, before they realized how weak their military was. His and Russias actions show that he can't be trusted for a second.
Fabricate? Someone needs to read about 20th century history x) I don't need to fabricate anything, the US has been involved in over a hundred regime change operations, either covertly or explicitly, to further its geopolitical goals. The Soviets as well, before somebody comes with the whataboutism.
Did you consider evaluating or researching their claims? From your comment, it suggests you're rejecting information that doesn't align with your preconceived notions.
This is a common bias we all suffer from. But we should be aware of it and try to work against it at times, especially when the consequence is dissolving friendships.
Before responding: please note that I do not believe Ukraine bombed itself, or that I diminish the suffering and casualties that have happened since the war.
This site allows you to select a number of streets and see a before/after picture. The site does not allow you to select the many streets that are entirely unchanged, or of which the changes are minimal or even positive (if those even exist).
Propaganda exists in every war, and comes from both sides. The intelligence test isn't to chose which side is right, it is to discern which bit of information is taken out of context, blown out of proportion, or factually incorrect. Is Russia wrong for starting a war? Yes. Is it completely its fault and totally unprovoked? Probably not. Is the Ukraine completely free of sin? Also probably not.
Please explain how it could conceivably NOT be completely Russia’s fault that they chose to aggress another country with the casus belli being made up history that wouldn’t pass as legitimate justification even if it were true.
I will explain my reasoning behind "Is [the war] completely [Russia's] fault and totally unprovoked? Probably not."
On the 21st of March 2014, the European Union signed an association treaty with Ukraine. This treaty was seen by many as a first step for Ukraine to join the EU. Note that the treaty itself doesn't mention this, nor does it actually do this. It is a clear indication of the preference of Ukraine to 'belong' to the EU, and break away from under the former USSR's blanket though.
Russia clearly stated that it was very much opposed to the treaty, and the concept of Ukraine joining (even just in spirit) with the EU. This objection goes back to negotiations between the UN and the then-newly-formed Russian state directly after the cold war ended. Russia wanted a buffer between its border and that of the UN. The position of Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus were deemed to be part of that buffer, and UN agreed to this demand (verbally, not in writing, a crucial detail).
Russia has since repeatedly noted that it was very unhappy with the position of Ukraine, and the fact that the government switch in the Maidan revolution was endorsed by EU representatives. It perceives the association of the Ukraine with the EU as a breech of its demands of a buffer zone between it and the UN. It has clearly articulated this in repeated sessions at meetings and slowly escalated the rhetorics in those speeches/meetings.
It is never another country's fault when you attack it, but you cannot claim it is unprovoked; Russia's claims regarding the buffer states have been clear since the end of the cold war, and their demands were well known to both the UN and the EU. They poured oil on a simmering fire, and now the house is on fire...
> It is never another country's fault when you attack it, but you cannot claim it is unprovoked; Russia's claims regarding the buffer states have been clear since the end of the cold war, and their demands were well known to both the UN and the EU. They poured oil on a simmering fire, and now the house is on fire...
These countries are not "buffer" states for Russia to toy with, they are countries that have every right to join whatever alliances they want.
And you must see how unsurprising it is that they all want to join NATO when Russia views them not as their own countries but as buffer regions for Russia.
I thank you for taking the time to explain your statement.
My rebuttal to your devil's advocate points in support of the Russian position: Ukraine is a soverign nation. Furthermore, every inhabitant of Ukraine have basic human rights.
Of course, neither of those points matter to someone whose ethical system boils down to realpolitk. Some well-known corollaries include:
- Might makes right.
- Rules for thee, but not for me.
- A ruler should prioritize the preservation of power and stability over morality.
- Justice is simply the advantage of the stronger.
If the defence of a pruported Russian casus belli is that they are inconsistent with any consistent notion of rights, then it is self-defeating. And if the defence is Russia arbitrarily getting provoked, then there is not a rational argument to be had.
Anyways, I digress. As a soverign nation, Ukraine has the right to enter into any agreement they wish - with the obvious caveat that they may not compromise the soverignty of another nation or the human rights of their inhabitants. Trade agreements and defensive alliances are trivially within the bounds of such constraints. As a soverign nation, Ukraine is not the property of Russia, so Russia has no business deciding its fate.
In summary, I acknowledge your position is similar to Bill Burr's bit on domestic violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rksKvZoUCPQ, but like him I don't think "a reason" entails a marginally or otherwise valid justification.
To what comment is this comment directed? That quote does not appear to be from this thread.
I think it is fair to say that there are typically reasons for war to occur (even if the chain of causality isn’t reflective in the claims of the belligerents). An example might be the US into Afghanistan after the Taliban did not extradite the leadership of Al Qaeda. Was the attack of 9/11/01 not “getting provoked to wage war?”
Will we now get downvotes, some meme-based dismissals, mind reading, clairvoyance, or the various other common responses? Let's wait and see...please express your experience of "reality" via action, humans...ideally: explaining to me how I "am" "wrong".
- You're posting unrelated links with no context. There is no actual content in your comment.
- The links in question are not relevant to my comment. There is no counterfact there. If I give you the benefit of the doubt, you are probably confused by my use of a negative, and you probably forgot to consider the context in which it was used.
- In the spirit of harping on epistomology 101: What facts exists to support the notion that Russia's unjust invasion of Ukraine can be blamed on Ukraine? (Hint: None)
Hyper confident opinions, stated in the form of facts....shocking.
Imagine if people wrote code with the same style of logic and epistemology they practice when discussing metaphysical affairs.
Assume whatever you would like, and enjoy assuming that all your assumptions just so happen to be factual...I doubt it will cause much harm to me, though I am less sure the same is true for those you proclaim/perceive to have concern for.
Do you think this sense of omniscience you are experiencing is genuine? Because that's what you're technically claiming, you know, and the links above are some of the best tools available to deal with the phenomenon.
Perhaps now I will receive another example of the proof that satisfies you people, yet another opinion that your opinion is correct.
And on top of all this, you people think you care for the well being of others. No wonder this planet is in the state it is.
> Is Russia wrong for starting a war? Yes. Is it completely its fault and totally unprovoked? Probably not. Is the Ukraine completely free of sin? Also probably not.
So tell me exactly, what was the grave sin that Ukraine committed that would justify the invasion and all the atrocities that followed?
> Is it completely its fault and totally unprovoked? Probably not.
This is a case of victim-blaming. Russia has been responsible for the deaths of citizens of other nations for decades, yet no one was willing to go to war over it. Prior to the conflict in 2014, no Russians had been killed, so they fabricated a narrative about a "Nazi regime in Ukraine" in order to justify starting the war. Once the war had begun, talk of provocation became meaningless. Ukraine has every right to defend itself by any means necessary, including weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons.
I think we should be critical of any information that is coming from states engaged in the war and their supporters. I imagine Ukraine is generating as much false information as Russia, prime example is information about losses in personnel and equipment, both sides report small numbers of their own losses and astronomical losses suffered by the enemy.
I think we will learn actual truths about this horrific war only after decades has passed and historians will be able to dig out all the Russian crimes, all civilian and militant’s death tolls.
I hope this war will stop as soon as possible, it creates nothing but piles of corpses and destroyed cities. I can’t imagine how Ukraine will build itself up after all this is over.
It's a form of propaganda to shame anyone who doesn't believe things unconditionally. The comment you are replying to is an example, using shame and insults to herd you into their preferred narrative.
> It's a form of propaganda to shame anyone who doesn't believe things unconditionally.
Not necessarily. If someone doesn’t believe something that is universally believed and for what there exist undeniable evidence (for example the fact that the Earth is round) then shaming this kind of thinking is not propaganda, it’s just stating the fact.
Yes, it is either psychological warfare or some for of bullying to puff your sense of self. If one were confident in the facts, then manipulation using shame wouldn’t be needed. Perhaps the person using shame as argumentation should reflect on whether they really hold a belief or if they enjoy professing facts in ignorance.
No, everything, absolutely everything must be ascertained with a critical eye, backed by evidence. Even the curvature of the earth, which thankfully is relatively easy to prove to yourself. Nevertheless, it does not have special status compared to any other piece of knowledge. You can excuse people for mistakenly believing in falsehoods like flat earth when the wool is being actively pulled over their eyes in a dozen other ways, from religion, political propaganda, corporate lies for profit, and predatory employment practices. Why are shame and insults fair game for flat earth but not Christianity or unquestioning patriotism or support for capitalism? Shame and insults only cause people to dig in their heels deeper. If your goal is to raise the veil of ignorance you are failing. Everyone is ignorant in many ways.
And your point isn't even relevant. Scientific facts and politically charged events aren't even remotely the same when it comes to ascertaining truth value. Never in history has there been a war where only one side spews propaganda.
> Even the curvature of the earth, which thankfully is relatively easy to prove to yourself.
Do you test it each time someone claims that it's flat? I doubt it.
> Why are shame and insults fair game for flat earth but not Christianity
Where have you been living the last 50 years? Christianity is absolutely fair game, at least in the West (or maybe the Western West? you'll have different reactions in Poland). Best to reach for Islam if you want a religion you're in theory allowed to make fun of but not in practice. But even there, it's not society that punishes it, it's a small number of extremists that the mainstream tolerates for political reasons.
And you're not allowed to criticize capitalism? One of us really must've jumped dimensions recently.
> Everyone is ignorant in many ways.
But it's not really the same. There's a difference between "I have no clue how DNA works" and "gravity does not exist and we're just not falling into space because the government has people with invisibility cloaks holding us down".
| It's absolutely fantastic to me how people can just suspend reality and start believing the most absurd notions.
There are three specific components to this.
* It's important to understand, that brains are fundamentally survival machines, and agnostic to truth. If it gives delta-advantage, brains itself lie, hallucinate, and make up falsehoods to justify, and rationalize whatever that advantage is.
* Living in a society introduces linear dependencies on other people's beliefs. Knowing, or behaving-as-if-knowing a "truth" when that "truth" is being negatively selected for, leads to a disadvantage, leads to no one actively speaking up for it, leads to only ever hearing the "pro" side. This is doubly so, when the party line has boots attached to it.
* If you look at that list of lies above, you notice how extreme length they went. There is a bug in the brain, whereby when being told a big enough lie, internally the brain goes "surely this couldn't all be lies, right?", adjusts a little bit on the basis of "propaganda", then assumes the rest as "truth". This has been term'd "big lie": the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
> that brains are fundamentally survival machines, and agnostic to truth.
It isn't true that brains are agnostic to the truth. Having an accurate model of the bits of reality you'll encounter is quite important for survival (a superstitious tribesperson won't believe that they can throw fireballs at incoming lions).
> Knowing, or behaving-as-if-knowing a "truth" when that "truth" is being negatively selected for, leads to a disadvantage, leads to no one actively speaking up for it, leads to only ever hearing the "pro" side.
Something we are sadly finding out for ourselves these days... with professors being removed from their positions for giving a platform to other academics with unpopular views: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/06/resignation.html?m=1
To my way of thinking, when a vote comes down to a margin that narrow, something else is seriously wrong. Frankly, democracy is probably not the right model when that kind of polarization is present.
There's a term that applied in other fields to large-scale systems that are that incredibly sensitive to their input parameters: chaos.
Is this a serious question? I'm not from the US, and though I follow your politics I of course have a limited perspective - but is it really a common perspective to draw an equivalence between the claims regarding election integrity for 2016 and 2020?
Speaking from my own American perspective, with both progressive and conservative friends, the answer to your question about whether it is a common perspective, is "yes". For the last several elections, whichever side loses thinks the election was stolen.
Weird. The only Democrats or liberals I've heard complain that an election was stolen were talking about the Bush vs Gore, where the Supreme Court decided that it could make the call.
Maybe you're talking about Gerrymandering, which is a very real method of undermining democracy, but I've never heard anyone refer to it as election theft.
Mostly the 2016 talk revolved around the idea that the electoral college was illegitimate, and Hillary Clinton's majority of the popular vote should have been what determined the presidency.
Confidence in the previous election generally falls along partisan lines, where those who supported the loser are more skeptical than those who supported the winner. You're probably familiar with Republican skepticism about 2020, so I'll point you to the numbers on Democrat skepticism about 2016.
In 2018, 66% of Democrats [0] believed it was "definitely true or somewhat true" that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president." Moreover, in January 2017, during the certification of the 2016 election, Democrat legislators made objections to votes from more states than did Republicans in January 2021. [1]
But the thing is, it's not an equivalence, right? We know for a fact that Russia tampered in the 2016 US election. The republican candidate literally asked for their help on live TV, his campaign met with them, several people close to him during his presidency were indicted for contact with Russia. In comparison, the claims regarding election integrity for 2020 are circumstancial and baseless (in the sense that if I were the Republicans and there indeed was no cheating,
but I wanted to convince the public, I wouldn't do anything differently). How can anyone look at this seriously and see anything comparable?
There's a big difference between information warfare and tampering with vote tallies, which is what the poll asked, and which was the basis on which Democrats objected to their certification.
Additionally, I'm not making any argument about the validity of claims on either side - just pointing out that the skepticism falls along partisan lines.
This false equivalence of things is another Russian propaganda method. The US bombed Iraq? Therefore Russia has a right to genocide peoples and annex territories. Someone said “not my president” in 2017? Therefore Republicans are entitled to coercing officials to throw out votes they don’t like.
Who cares about the Nord Stream these days? It was completely discredited even before it was blown up, just like Schroeder. Nobody wants it, not even the people who pushed for it inside Germany, not to mention other countries.
So first I was told that Russia blew it up to cut off natural gas supplies so that some European nations would have a very cold and bad winter. Now it's discredited even before it was blown up. Okay.
I think NordStream is a great example. It was a big deal. I'm actually surprised that you're the only one that mentioned it. Everyone (I know and discussed with) agrees that Ukrainians obviously didn't bomb their cities, but everyone (including me) would also prefer to blame Russia for exploding NordStream, even if that doesn't make sense (unless it was a huge false flag).
It's a tough pill to swallow, but (at least in my circles) most people did it and after the initial shock entertain the possibility that it was actually done by the US/EU.
Just to be clear: it doesn't really change my perspective on the war or anything else - whoever did this was putting pressure on Russia and I support it. This move made "peace supporters" sponsored by Russia toothless, and cemented European support for Ukraine.
There are people here on HN who do this, and not just the green-name accounts that get spun up, spew nonsense for a few days before being downvoted to the point that they're shadowbanned. There are years-old accounts who do carry a lot of water for Putin - a mixture of this blatant denialism and jUsT aSkInG qUeStIoNs.
There's a practice of selling older and higher karma accounts on Reddit, that are then used for marketing or propaganda, since they can pass new account filters that many subs have. I wonder if that is the case for HN as well - because it does seem really strange when someone who spent years talking about docker, go, and react suddenly starts posting about "NATO expanded eastwards" or somesuch.
I don't know if that would be more less sad than the prosaic explanation of people just being evil and dumb.
It's pretty interesting that kremlinbots have recently started posting raw HTML links (<a href="...">). It's like they're working off a script and can't be bothered to make even slight changes to account for the fact that HN doesn't support HTML input.
Don't know if you're trolling, or making a joke but I'll bite just once: I believe it doesn't matter, that Russia was going to invade whether the US wanted to stop or encourage them, whether they were displeased or excited or even if they were indifferent to the matter altogether. There are a lot of people who remove any agency from Putin or Russia and talk like Joe Biden himself texted all the various Generals in the Russian Army instructing them to invade and that Putin just ran with it out of embarrassment.
You believe US motivation “doesn’t matter” here - why? Because it has no influence over the situation? In that case, idk what we’re even arguing about. If however the world’s dominant imperial superpower *does* have some influence, then its motivation and goals *do* matter. Right?
People decide who their enemy is and call it a day. A lot of people decide that enemy is their own governments. They’re not smart. They treated wisdom as a dump stat and figure they could compensate with int.
Westerners deciding in droves that their governments are the worst and Russia is never at fault is suspicious though. I guess if those Westerners equally despised Russia, that would show some integrity, but what we see is people “deciding” to assist Russia in its endeavors even when those endeavors are stealing foreign children. Like when there was a post about ICC’s warrant for Putin here, of course the commenters arrived with “how dare the West prosecute crimes”
Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd frontman falls into this group. It sucks. The guy who wrote so much about the negative impact of war. But then you think about how much hatred he seemed to have for his government and it’s not hard to see him falling for any narrative that supports that view.
It sucks. Humans just suck. Bigotry is just a subset of the same misguided reasoning that 95% of people seem to use for forming their opinions.
>Westerners deciding in droves that their governments are the worst and Russia is never at fault is suspicious though. I guess if those Westerners equally despised Russia, that would show some integrity
This was the Soviet attitude to dissident Andrei Sakharov. Because he said he did not care about American atrocities, and that he only had an opinion on Soviet atrocities, they used this to try and discredit him.
Do you think the Soviets were correct to vilify him for this?
>Like when there was a post about ICC’s warrant for Putin here, of course the commenters arrived with “how dare the West prosecute crimes”
After the Hague invasion act and the subsequent refusal by the ICC to prosecute western war crimes it kind of became kind of a joke of an institution. Look, all you have to do is threaten them with violence and they back down!
This is why South Africa, for instance, has explicitly refused to respect the warrant.
Russia is now considering cloning the Hague invasion act. As with most Russian evils it tends to treat US behavior as a template for what it can get away with and since US citizens havent been so good at holding their own country to account...
If you’re upset that the war crimes of a country A against country B are left unpunished, it is still immoral to condone war crimes perpetrated by a country C against country D.
If country C is committing crimes at 100x the magnitude it’s worth realizing that maybe the law is powerless but that doesn’t need to drive our feelings towards which countries are the bad actors.
I also have seemingly intelligent friends who believe 2000 years ago a woman gave birth to a child without having intercourse. Us human are great at making up stories.
There are two sides of an information/propaganda war currently fighting.
After the last few years of information war at home, it doesn’t surprise me that people are sucked into the false narratives of both sides rather than taking the time and effort to try and make sense and discern truth ourselves.
This trope unfolds in an even more absurd way in the Russian-speaking media space, where participants are trained in genocidal thinking. Every bombing of a Ukrainian city is met with a cheering applause and reveling in how those Ukrainians got what “they deserve”, but then (or simultaneously?) the narrative switches into “Ukrainians bomb themselves”.
There are always people who go through mental contortions to justify to themselves that their own side is spotless. However, in this case there is a common and much more valid objection that the framing is hypocritical, or at least based on a different and much less appealing set of standards than the implied "attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime and humanity must unite to punish whoever engages in it".
In all of these cases, the criticism of the invasion itself was already much more ambivalent in Western society - I went to a protest against the Iraq war in 2003 as a schoolkid in Germany, and was accused of "childish anti-Americanism" for it by a teacher - and the attendant destruction was nearly universally shrugged off as somewhere between "sad, but that's just how war is" and "to save this city we had to destroy it". Suggestions that the US government or its allies should face repercussions or even a war crimes trial were widely dismissed as far-left ravings (and one should not forget that when this was actually tried, they sanctioned the ICC (https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-why-has-the-icc-excluded-t...)). Considering that the remedy for this particular case of violence implicitly suggested by the authors of OP's website seems to be to militarily empower the US and its allies further, I think the moral case being made looks rather less clear-cut.
We don't naturally approach narrative with science or sound logic. These are intentional acts. They must be learned and applied.
Intelligence is a broad categorization. It is unlikely to apply exhaustively to any person.
Propaganda takes an obvious lie, and surrounds it with acceptable narratives. Those surrounding narratives are attached to emotional identity. Once a person accepts the surrounding narratives as part of their identity, they have implicitly accepted the obvious lie. Whether or not they accept the lie as stated directly is a matter of semantic argument, not logical deduction.
We are not machines. We do not follow a series of instructions based on logic and arithmetic. We are mammals.
A machine cannot accept vague narratives. It must be explicit about every logical connection, because everything it is and does is written in a "context-free grammar". Since all context-free grammars can be translated into pure mathematical functions, machine belief is pure logic.
Humans do not have that feature. We use "context-dependent grammar" to communicate. That means our narratives can, and often do, include ambiguous conclusions.
This is a powerful tool: we can express unknowns without resolving them. This allows us to extend our knowledge outside of what is already known. It allows us to work with vague data, draw impossible conclusions, then put those conclusions to the test. This is the foundation for science itself, yet science is not the only path ahead.
Ambiguity must be resolved with decision. Not only is it a lot of work to decide every time language gets ambiguous, making that decision at that step in the process makes the decision itself as arbitrary as possible.
Thankfully, we have an optimization: worldview. By constructing a system of beliefs, we essentially give ourselves a precomiled library of narratives. Whenever we interpret ambiguous language, we can quickly check our library for a narrative that resolves the ambiguity.
Of course, this really gets into the weeds: language is full of complex high-order patterns, and any one of them can contain or resolve ambiguity. Multiple narratives may resolve an ambiguity ambiguously: effectively moving the problem instead of solving it.
Because humans build a worldview out of narratives, that worldview can contain flawed logic, and even outright contradictions. It still works, because any time a person tries to resolve an ambiguity using a conflicted set of worldview narratives, they simply choose which narrative applies to that ambiguity. This choice is most easily determined by emotion: what result feels right.
People don't get their narratives exclusively from the outside. We also invent new narratives. I suspect that we do this by hallucinating fictional stories that bridge the narrative gaps in our worldview.
If you have ever talked with someone who has Autism Spectrum Disorder, you may have noticed a pattern of direct questions and dry logical answers. It's well known that people with ASD have difficulty directing their focus away from external stimulus. Studies have also shown that people with ASD report more hallucinated physical experiences than people without ASD. I suspect this leads to a fundamental need for logically categorized worldview: if you can't ignore a narrative, you probably need to find room for it in your existing worldview. If you are already bombarded with both real and hallucinated simulation, you will probably feel too worn out to hallucinate your own narratives, which would make narrative gaps and contradictions stressful.
If you have ever talked to (or read about) someone who has taken a trip on LSD, psilocybin, etc., you may have noticed a pattern of wildly fictional stories, some of which continue well after the trip as a part of the person's worldview. Hallucinagens are known to cause many arbitrary and random connections across the brain; where connections would normally follow the "grooves" that were carved by lived experience. The experience of a trip is well known to help restructure unwanted patterns of behavior (like addiction), and also to result in new unwanted behavior patterns (like fear and anxiety). Because hallucinagens don't replace cognition entirely with the noise of hallucination, having someone else guide the experience can be very effective. Without guidance, it's possible for negatively engaging hallucinations (like fear or anxiety) to become a focus of the experience, carve new grooves in the brain, and become a lingering experience after the trip has ended.
How can we intentionally curate our worldview?
Critical thinking allows us to reconsider the narratives we hold as beliefs objectively. We can copy those narratives into a place that is totally detached from emotion, and criticize them. By doing this intentionally, we can more easily accept the result, and change our worldview. This is like hallucination, but following the strict rules of logic.
We can also accept narratives from trusted sources. If we feel confident that someone else has already performed the critical thinking, it's easy to accept their result as a shortcut. The obvious problem here is that that person may be wrong, or even dishonest. The more insidious problem is that that person is not likely to share all of the narratives in their own worldview: instead they share only the narratives they changed. The worldview you apply that change to may be compatible but different, resulting in a completely different result.
We may also continue living without any intentional curation. A conflicted worldview does not inherently need resolution. Many stories contain contradictions that remain unsolved until the end: maybe you are living in the middle of your story, and find the conflicts exciting. Living this way is called "cognitive dissonance". Like two notes a half step apart create many harmonic voices, two contradicted narratives allow for a very large set of potential resolving narratives. A life lacking direction is full of possibilities.
Dissonance is uncomfortable: our reaction to it may be to resolve it with critical thinking, but simple avoidance is a much shorter path to comfort.
If we want to help people change their beliefs, we should focus on the narratives that construct those beliefs. In order to know what those are in the first place, we must practice empathy. It's hard work, and it feels like the wrong strategy. Even worse, it feels insidious, because intentional empathy is very similar to propaganda.
The 2016 elections in the US were the culmination of years of work. The Russians used their weird news network and social media operations to magnify useful idiots, promote QAnon, and create maximum chaos.
I see this argument a lot, oftentimes when people are trying to justify Chinese or Russian geopolitics. It’s something like “The US has done so many bad things. ____ is just doing the same thing.” Do you need someone to explain why comparisons like that are effectively useless?
It’s so dishonest and cheap I’m surprised to see it on HN and not on Reddit where it belongs, but here we are.
Mate, it’s democracy vs dictatorship. Russia didn’t invade the US, it invaded Ukraine. We would keep fighting even without US support. Freedom is non-negotiable.
I fought mostly with the TDF and SSO - all of us were volunteers or professional military. I personally haven’t met anyone who said they were forced to fight. Except for Russian POWs who claimed they were forced.
There wasn’t much support in the very beginning - sure, some javelins and NLAWs. Whether they were the difference maker is unclear.
I see a lot of American “free thinkers” (who all think the same) push the argument that it was US provocations that lead to the war.
While there are many many many (many…) counters to that, I will let the russians themselves offer their counter. Check out Putin’s essays on Ukraine - he (and the majority of russians) hold a deep belief that Ukraine is just part of russia, and that it should be returned to russia.
As far as picking friends - who is giving military aid to help repel an aggressor, and who is killing, raping, torturing civilians?
Can you detail what you mean by "US-instigated provocation". As far as I understand the only provocation is helping show with Ukraine that ethnic/cultural Rus people can live and indeed prosper in a democratic society, so the ills of Russia are demionstrably Putin-mafia induced.
This sort of thing makes perfect sense if you somehow manage to excise from your brain the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine and no one attacked Russia. You can discount everything the US and Russia says but that fact remains.
1. An accident they first blamed on Russia (false flag), then denied, now continue to deny. Notably, they haven't apologized. They haven't helped the families. They don't care. Friendly fire on civilians in NATO countries? They can't even own up to it.
2. Ukraine claimed the Snake Island soldiers were killed in action, when in reality none were.
3. Ukraine supported, magnified and repeated the lie. The official Ukraine Twitter account magnified the false claim, repeatedly.
We're molecules in a weird soup, nothing is really fixed... depending on the emotional context, the tension of the era, the global fatigue, objectivity can take a massive blow. Social childish regression in a way.
If you talk to a Ukrainian, they will tell you that the war will end when they win the war. I.E. they won’t stop fighting until the Russians are gone.
So if the regions remain under Russian control, the fighting will continue. Given Russia couldn’t conquer Ukraine first time round, it seems unlikely that they will be able to support a sustained campaign against a country that isn’t going to give up, until it’s over. Most likely outcome is that Russia attempts to hold the invaded territory for a period of years and eventually leaves when it becomes untenable for Russian leadership
The war will also continue until the Russians win, since they have already formally annexed a few regions, and the Crimea is strategically and historically important.
So if I had to guess, the war ends when the US president changes and they no longer want to support the ongoing conflict, and a demilitarized border is created between Ukraine and the lost regions.
> The war will also continue until the Russians win, since they have already formally annexed a few regions, and the Crimea is strategically and historically important.
They have already formally annexed, and subsequently lost a tonne of the area they formally annexed.
Nothing happened.
Crimea is also Ukrainian territory and not Russian, when they lose it im sure they throw another hissy fit like they do nearly every week now. But no one will give it any mind as Russia does it weekly.
> So if I had to guess, the war ends when the US president changes and they no longer want to support the ongoing conflict, and a demilitarized border is created between Ukraine and the lost regions.
My guess is the war ends when enough Russians die that the Russians back at home decide they have had enough of the war.
If the war continues until Russia wins simply because they annexed regions, then surely the next step is to annex a few more regions for fun and profit.
Georgia and Moldova seem more obvious, but there is a reason that in the current wave of Russian aggression Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO and the Baltic republics and other countries of NATO’s eastern flank have been among the most assertive about the need to support Ukraine; there are lots of obvious targets if the US isn’t willing to assist Russia’s neighbors in resisting aggression.
Any end of the war that shows aggression pays off dividends means the start of many other aggressions elsewhere, a new world order of might-makes-right that can only stabilise again once everyone is armed with nukes.
I don't think any outcome at this time would be a success for Russia, but feeding the meatgrinder until the world runs out of Ukranians just to send a message about aggression seems stupid.
Of course might-makes-right, the current world order was built on that - the military superiority of the US after WW2. Since then the champion of that new world order didn't shy away from invading other countries.
You write: "until the world runs out of Ukranians". This is very offensive, as it erases the process by which some Ukrainians are dying.
Anyways, back to basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
Population Growth rate Decrease -0.39 (2020)[2]
Birth rate Decrease 9.8 births/1,000 population (2020)[2]
Death rate Neutral decrease 14.6 deaths/1,000 population (2020)[2]
Life expectancy Decrease 71.54 years (2020)[2]
• male Decrease 66.49 years (2020)[2]
• female Decrease 76.43 years (2020)[2]
It is Russian that are deciding collectively that the world should run out of Russians. This is a sad fact, I wish Russians would get fairness and hope some day.
> The war will also continue until the Russians win, since they have already formally annexed a few regions
They didn’t control much of the territory they purported to annex when they annexed it, and they’ve lost more of it since. The PR effort represented by that annexation is not a sign that the war will progress until Russian victory, if anything its the opposite.
> and the Crimea is strategically and historically important.
Crimea being strategically and historically important is certainly the reason it was invaded and seized in 2014, but its not something that makes Russian victory inevitable.
> So if I had to guess, the war ends when the US president changes and they no longer want to support the ongoing conflict
A US president abandoning Ukraine would definitely impact the course of that front of the war, and might result in a complete Russian victory over Ukraine [0]; that won’t end the regional war that started with Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, it will just shift the active fronts to Moldova and Georgia.
Not to mention the impacts on other areas of friction between the same China/Russia/NK/Iran bloc and the US, particularly in Syria, that will result from a demonstration of America’s lack of resolve, especially if it is accompanied by easing of the resistance in the European front of what has already become a global conflict.
[0] it might also shatter US relations with European allies especially the Eastern flank of NATO, which has been pushing support for Ukraine against Russian aggression harder than anyone, including the US, for reasons which should be geographically and historically obvious. It’s clear that there is a faction in the US, including at least the leading contender for the main opposition party’s nomination for the Presidency, that would see that as a plus, too, though why is less clear.
Thanks for the link, but I didn't see any answer that relates directly to the question we are discussing.
We can look at the general support for the Ukrainian establishment instead.
According to that survey,
The polling shows that in February 2023
31% strongly approve
40% somewhat approve
7% somewhat disapprove
4% strongly disapprove
18% difficult to answer/no answer
of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. This is a drop from 48% strongly approving in April 2022.
The polling also shows that the percent that strongly approve of the activities of
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky have dropped from 74% in April 2022 to 58% in February 2023.
And support of The Parliament of Ukraine is low, with only 9% strongly approving.
So, I don't think that there's strong enough support of The Ukrainian establishment to conclude that the population agrees with their stance that "the war will end when the Ukraine wins the war" (not that I'm sure that is the Ukrainian establishment's stance).
>>>If you talk to a Ukrainian, they will tell you that the war will end when they win the war. I.E. they won’t stop fighting until the Russians are gone.
>> Do we know if that's the view of the average Ukrainian?
Unless I misunderstood the question being discussed, it is answered precisely and directly.
"Do you believe that Ukraine will win the war?": 82% yes, 15% likely yes
"What will be the territorial boundaries of Ukraine as a
result of this war?" 74% internationally recognized borders, 8% w/ Donbas but w/o Crimea, 9% status quo ante bellum.
The thing in question is a stance on military policy, not a probability estimate. You can't go from probability estimate ("I think it is most likely that we will have the same borders as before the invasion") to policy stance ("I will not accept peace until we have the same borders as before the invasion").
The policy stance is directly implied by the probability estimate. This is certainly true if you accept my anecdata of ~6-8 of my relatives from the south of Ukraine and Kyiv who are, to a person, adamant about the vital necessity of winning the war to ensure their kids won't have to fight another one 20 years from now. There's absolutely no dithering in Ukraine about what the goal is: 1991 borders and one or both of EU and NATO memberships, with the NATO membership very likely being first.
These people didn't suffer for 13 months to accept some half-ass appeasement of a ceasefire to give Putin some breathing room to regroup.
> The policy stance is directly implied by the probability estimate
I think this is not the case. The policy "we won't accept peace until we achieve x" is very different to "we won't accept peace until we achieve x conditional on the achievement of x being probable"[0]. The first implies a kind of "to the last Ukrainian"/"you'll have to take it from my cold, dead hands" attitude, the latter doesn't.
[0] A conditional such as this is implied by your claim that "The policy stance is directly implied by the probability estimate": if the probability estimate leads to the stance, then it stands to reason that the stance may change if the probability estimate changes, which would (in this case) contradict the very nature of the stance (specifically, the "to the last Ukrainian" aspect discussed above).
I think all Ukrainians are very thankful that the US for helping them in their hour of greatest need, to defeat a genocidal invader.
Wanna know what they think of China? The answer is, they don't think of China. This is because, while China can afford the big boy pants and has probably already purchased them, they haven't put them on yet.
>Given Russia couldn’t conquer Ukraine first time round, it seems unlikely that they will be able to support a sustained campaign against a country that isn’t going to give up
They're pretty much going to have to give up at some point. The west can't feed them with sufficient arms and ammunition to keep up and it has blown through all of its spares. It can ramp up to match, but probably not within the next 2 years which is too late.
Western media has been putting a spin on this in the last week (e.g. blinken's "Ukraine will have to recover some territory through political means"), but it's pretty clear if you look at the production numbers, current shell rates, etc.
It's also why some Republicans are starting to feign being anti-war - to try and make this "Biden's" war, so in the event of failure the failure gets chalked up to him.
Canada, any single major NATO nation could produce arms in sufficient quantity, to make a major difference.
It's all about cost, not capability. And right now, that cost is being spread over dozens of nations, quite a few of them with wealth greater than Russia.
And that was GDP before sanctions.
So yes, 100%, we can supply the Ukraine forever. And beyond this, many countries are sending good, but aging equipment. Even artillery, ammo has age limits.
So we send older, but well maintained gear, and then buy new, refreshed supplies. That's what is happening in Canada, at least.
So Russia is actually helping the West's offensive capacities, by increasing military spending, and refreshing hardware.
And they could ramp up again, but it's not going to make a difference in the next six critical months especially without putting the economy on a war footing and suppressing civilian production like they did last time.
If China decides to supply Russia, it'll make even less of a difference. Russia already outproduces the US in steel (key input into shells, and a bottleneck in both wars). China outproduces by a factor of 10.
Nothing is "critical" about the next six months. In fact, it's possible nothing much will happen in the next six months, if Ukraine opts to spend it training the >100k troops it just called up during the late fall and winter, waiting for the armour from the West to be delivered, and building up a stockpile of ammo. Ukraine has this choice because Russia just exhausted its offensive capability in a mid-winter offensive that didn't accomplish much and has stalled out. Russia is spent as an offensive force until the mid-summer at the very earliest.
If China decides to supply Russia, it won't be in the quantities sufficient to make much of a difference, because they don't wish to trigger significant retaliatory sanctions, certainly not right now when the Chinese economy is in a vulnerable state of coming out of the COVID-era funk. China significantly underproduces Western countries in terms of military industrial complex, quantity but especially quality. I don't want to pull numbers out of thin air but it's Nx, N > 1.
I knew it would come. "Racism". The last refuge of the rascal, throwing dispersion.
Stating reality in China, is not racism.
It's junk because it's of poor quality, and even worse, poor quality control. Personal experience has shown me so, steel product from China is junk.
And no, I won't disbelieve my eyes, and experiences, nor will the many other people I know who have experienced what Chinese "steel" is like.
Car parts, every manner of tool, I've seen steel snap like twigs, screwdriver ends break off, plyers deform when used, brake calipers snap, while North America made parts do not, including tools 50 years old, rusted, stronger than Chinese steel junk.
Chinese steel is junk. Everyone knows this. It's junk.
Well China has produced half of the steel in the world and half of the finished steel products for many years. I can't think of a rational reason to believe that all that steel is constantly snapping "like twigs."
Are these tools all contemporaneous of each other and sold at the same price point? China will sell you anything you want. What most companies want today is planned obsolescence.
Ah, the old "but western companies demand cheap, so china makes cheap" argument.
A nice, classic deflection. Goes right up there with the racist deflection.
No. Western companies ask for spec, Chinese companies say "sure" when they bid, but then just make junk.
With junk parts.
Such as junk Chinese steel. Because they can't make quality steel, because the QA, and knowledge, and capability, and work culture isn't there. Note again, how it was only the early 2010s, when Chinese companies were able to make tiny little steel balls, reliably, and round enough, for ball point pens.
Russia is pulling out T54s on the battlefront, their T14 Armatas are still busy breaking down on red square, their planes are scared shitless and don't even dare fly close to the frontline, they're blindly firing S300s/S400s as a poor man's Grad, versus a Ukraine that receives 5% of the previous generation of crap from the western world. Add to that a highly motivated army (versus whatever clownery the russian army is) and Ukrainians that would rather see their entire country disappear than give in, because they remember the Holodomor.
There is no good alternative here at all. Either they let Moscovians do what they want on their soil, including rapes, brutal murders and so on, or try to get these areas back. Both are extremely tough moral choices for every normal person. But frankly, looking long-term at the fate of people living under the Moscovian regime and those not dependent on it, it's probably better if they liberate these areas.
Compare Kherson (liberated after being conquered by Russia without a siege due to a corrupt traitor) to Mariupol or Bakhmut (under Russian assault for a long time).
Russian assaults are just hundreds of dumb artillery guns firing non stop to try and reduce the other side to rubble. And of course cruise missiles launched at civilian targets. You’ll find countless examples of areas that are just leveled.
Ukraine doesn’t do that. They have precise weapons that they do fire into occupied areas. They certainly aren’t randomly firing shells into their own cities for the lols.
One army is mostly exercising maneuver warfare. The other one is mostly digging-in inside apartments. Yes there are examples of both sides doing both. The truth isn't a nice collection of anecdotes though.
The truth is overwhelmingly one sided. It’s not close, at all. Ukraine is not a flawless actor but that isn’t an excuse to completely disregard the magnitude of offenses.
Each side is basically creating an echo chamber for their citizens to believe, so they will keep supporting an ongoing war until “the other side” is “100% defeated” so it “can’t attack us again”.
I have seen this rhetoric in every proxy war, including Yemen since 2014 and Syria even before that. Sadly the same thing repeats in every conflict but most people don’t know that.
Running out of resources doesn't mean they will suddenly stop shooting. It isn't binary.
It means the intensity of artillery and missile strikes is decreasing. It means they have to import arms from Iran. It means they are now using ancient T-62s and recently started pulling T-55s out of storage.
Well, if it was your country being invaded and the others have occupied your cities, how would you proceed? Tell them that it is okay and you will let it go?
The fact is, the country responsible for razing entire cities to the ground is not Ukraine. Russian incompetence tore down Mariupol, not ukrainian resistance.
Absolutely, but if you have one regardless, it’s much better to finish it properly the first time around, so you don’t have to do the same thing twice.
They do bomb them. Or do you think it's the Russian or rebel forces bombed Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014, and the Zaporizhia nuclear plant since the war started? There is a ton of blatant lies being told by the pro-Ukranian side before and after the start of the war. For example, the infamous "air conditioner explosion" was later confirmed to be a targeted strike of the Luhansk state administration building by the Ukrainian government.
That's a disingenuous argument, you know perfectly well that they weren't referring to cities on the frontline under Russian control. Rather they were referring to cities like Kyiv or Lviv who also get bombed despite not being anywhere near the frontlines.
> For example, the infamous "air conditioner explosion" was later confirmed to be a targeted strike of the Luhansk state administration building by the Ukrainian government.
"Confirmed" by Radio Free Europe, a notable russian propaganda outlet. The only sources they're basing it on are the OSCE saying it's probably rockets, the fucking Daily Beast and CNN saying that the explosion patterns looked like it came from airbust weapons, that could have been fired by an Su25/Su27. Yes, the ukrainian forces have those. You know who else does ? The russian troops explicitly supporting the DPR and LNR with logistics and hardware. The reality of things is, we have no idea who did it, whether it was a false flag, a mistake, an actual ukrainian attack, or anything else.
>do you think it's the Russian or rebel forces bombed Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014
Luhansk and Donetsk were being invaded by a foreign country. Why should Ukraine not be able to respond to an invasion, or to terrorists being funded by said foreign country ?
> Russian or rebel forces bombed Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014, and the Zaporizhia nuclear plant since the war started
The important distinction to be made, there were no rebel forces, but the separatist forces. You are giving too much grandeur to the group that is used to torturing people [1]. The takeover was controlled by Russian officers as well [2]
Also the unofficial existence of anti-retreat forces in Russian forces devalues your argument.
If they shoot the deserters, do they really care about the civilians? Especially considering that their propaganda will tell it's "bad" Ukrainians anyway. It defies logic and that's exactly how Russia loves to operate (see: Putin's speeches)
This meme just won't go away, because most people don't believe how barbarous and cruel Russians can be. [3]
And note that just because there are pro Ukrainian lies does not mean the Ukrainian and Russian governments and media mouthpieces lie the same amount! I personally do not have the data to make an informed assessment, but I would be unsurprised if the Ukrainian side lies less than half as much as the Russian one.
You mean the anti-air rockets that landed in Poland after they were fired to protect civilians against Russian missile strikes? That "bombing" of Poland?
Yes, that missile. Zelensky contradicted western reports that it was Ukrainian AA and stated repeatedly that it was a Russian missile attack on NATO territory.
So we are in agreement then that western reporting is generally accurate and the missile attacks on civilians across Ukraine are acts by Russia and not false flags ordered by Zelensky?
That's just politics and an open secret anyway. Ukraine doesn't want to officially say "Yes, our anti-air rocket missed and accidentaly landed in Poland", and Polish politicians (and people) are happy to officially pretend to believe and forget this story. Because it was an accident, and the only reason the rocket was in the air is Russia anyway.
Maybe in the ideal world we should always be open about everything, but unfortunately media, propaganda trolls and the people like you come and twist a single incident into some "both sides are equally bad" bullshit.
"Accidentally landed in their territory" pretty notably omits the civilians slain, though. Should someone be forgiven for an accident if they deny it was even them, months later?
Ukraine denies this incident to this day, and has never apologized or made it right to the civilians they killed.
They repeatedly false flagged the incident, however.
In my opinion, the undeniable horror of Russia's crimes makes it even more important to point out when Ukrainian forces do something bad as well, and to push back against it. Russia is overall committing far more evil than Ukraine, but if we have a mindset of "as long as we are less evil than the Russian government it's OK" then that leaves a lot of room for us to fall.
That being said: it's totally true that military forces aligned with Ukraine have shelled Ukrainian cities, in Donestk and Luhansk. Usually it is to strike at Russian military targets, but sometimes it is extremist factions like Azov who genuinely want to kill civilians and children. There is plenty of video evidence.
What is Putin asking exactly, is there anything the West/Ukraine could do (or could have done) for negotiating an end to the war? Some western leaders such as Macron have met with Putin in the early stage of the conflict, it wasn't clear to me what exactly they were trying to negotiate.
That there is no such thing as Ukrainian people, only Russians, and Ukraine must be a subject of Russia and Ukrainian identity should be made illegal. Not sure where you'd start negotiating something like that if you were Ukrainian, though.
Everyone should look around for 'undeniable' signs of war profiteering. We need more diplomacy to move towards peace and prevent the exploitation of conflicts for financial gains. Instead what we see is sites like this where only thing that they do is demonise one side while showcasing horrors of war. While other hand of humble sponsors throw even more military to make more destruction.
Julian Assange speaking in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1581698912447975424
Nova Ukraine is a 501(c)3 registered non-profit organization (EIN 465335435) dedicated to raising awareness about Ukraine in the US and throughout the world and providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Here is the thing about NGO's
In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and 1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neoliberalism. At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development, agriculture, energy transport, and public health. As the state abdicated its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and develop agencies, which in turn are funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the first place. Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned missionary zeal, guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they diffuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between the government and the public, between empire and its subjects. They have become arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators. In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species. It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the US preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order to make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context. – Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer, about the NGO influence in India.
Same thing is happening in Georgia[1], Lybia[2]
[1] Radio War Nerd EP 369 — Georgia Protests & NGO Colonialism, feat. Sopo Japaridze
Sadly I stopped paying attention to that conflict when I learned there is an elephant in the room that no one seems to notice - huge oil and gas pipes going from Russia to Europe through Ukraine which at the beginning and during the war gave Russia $1 billion USD PER DAY making it Ukraine/Europe the biggest sponsor of terrorism.
> Sadly I stopped paying attention to that conflict when I learned there is an elephant in the room that no one seems to notice
Are you American by any chance? Believe me, this elephant is noticed, was talked about daily by every European country almost every day of the past year, and is being acted upon all the time. What do you imagine the alternative is?
I.don't know why some people may think they should not care, but I'd say it's somehow dangerous not to. This war is already pretty consequential, and will become even more so, even for people far away.
If you don’t care you can simply close the page. HN rules don’t allow editorializing the titles of the stories, OP just put the page title there like we do for every single story on this site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/10ee9at/destroyed_...
Areas like Marinka have received kilotons of conventional artillery. Z-channels on Telegram call this process "city-cide" (gradocyd, something like that).
I've been to Ukraine recently and what's really heartwarming is the amount of reconstruction going on in the Kyiv Oblast. Many of the bridges north of the city are almost rebuilt. They were blown up to slow down the Russian armored assault.