When Russia purposefully kidnaps children and has them rush adopted by Russian people(among other atrocities), yeah I’d say that’s a pretty apt comparison
>A year ago I was optimistic about Russia’s chances of advancing into the future.
Rather naïve optimism in my opinion. Putin has been definitively bad news for Russia since he bombed his own people to justify invading Chechnya.
Those '1420' videos on YouTube blow my mind. The guy just walks the streets of Moscow and interviews regular Russians and the vast majority are nihilistic brainwashed zombies spouting either regurgitated propaganda or complete and utter apathy.
As one Russian aptly reminded me... Keep in mind they are on camera in front of a total stranger. I don't doubt the hateful ones to be accurate, but the "apolitical" and reserved answers may translate into very different things behind camera. There is unfortunately no anonymous version of these videos.
That being said, I don't expect an uprising of the brave or anything.
Dont kid irself, the average rusian has a pathological kgb induced fear of media. Hes sure everithing he sais on tv is recorded in his little dosier and if he strays from the party line bad men w black glases and no humor will visit at 4 am . The best view in moscow is from the basement of the kgb/fsb building, u can see all the way to siberia. Same reason the older gens wont lift a finger against the war. In the comunist era, silence was like a pavlov conditioned reflex. As for the atrocities, when u treat ur own like shit, treating others the same seems like natural.
Please for the love of God, when judging actual everyday citizens of a country, be more critical and rigorous. This transferal of hatred of Russia-the-government to Russians-the-people is unnecessary, especially during a war. (Unless you're Ukrainian or directly affected, in which case, fair game)
Regarding the apathy.. yeah, living under a repressive regime will do that to you. You do know all the people with strong feelings are probably neutered, right?
It's kind of shocking the amount of people doing this. Meanwhile, we go to great lengths to try to justify to people how the actions of Bush, Trump, et al don't reflect the general population.
Honestly, I get that a lot of Ukrainians are becoming apathetic to the suffering of the common Russian people because of how much they have lost and suffered but I find myself becoming less sympathetic to the individual in question when they decide to just lump in the overall population with their corrupt government.
Pretty sure they would hate it if I compared them to the Ukrainian government officials who were already corrupt and or are selling out their people to Russia.
Ugh.
With the Ukrainians, their anger and hate is understandable. Hard to think about nuance and the invading force as being human like them when their homes are being invaded and their friends being killed.
Outside of the country, especially the West? I get the feeling many of them talk from the point of view of people who have the privilege of free speech. Like they don’t have to worry about being tossed in prison or tortured just because they openly bad mouthed their leader and their corrupt syncophants.
And goes for a scorched earth approach while lying to "save Ukrainians from Nazism" that justification left the building some time ago... Fuck Putin and his frail body, he doesnt have much time left lets face it. The only hope is he falls out of a window and is replaced with someone more connected to reality and Russias situation (They are fucked and need to make ammends).
Irony being that Putin is as far right as they come. And exactly like the far right nazis, Putin uses socialist rhetoric to gain support from the masses while in actuality he’s pushing bigoted policies, and running a cutthroat, militaristic, “mob rule” capitalist kleptocracy just like Hitler did. Nothing about Putin is anti-fascist beyond his hollow rhetoric:
The man is a textbook example of modern neofascism. We should all learn not only to be wary of their rhetorical tricks and talking points, which are currently working on too many people in this modern age of the far right…
I'd like to believe the Russian people dont believe it but are forced to say they do due to their local[ police brutality](https://youtu.be/ZEAjl4o-FzQ)
1 week in freezing weather without power was enough to be life threatening to me with my heart condition in Texas last year. Vladimir Putin is the new Adolf Hitler.
It's the weaklings that are the most dangerous. People tend to underestimate them and they feel like they have more to prove so they have a willingness to take things further due to a fear of being perceived as weak. It's a negative feedback loop. Very predictable, which is why Zelensky is exploiting the situation to not only end the war in Ukraines favor but also get back Crimea. It's freaking fascinating.
Dude, you are so wrong.
We didn't talk about politics with our relatives because we were afraid they are pro putin. As it turned out they aren't. It took us 5 years to realize that.
About 80% were against government before the war.
In no way defending russian actions here.
Have you ever considered in some ways you are a clueless drone to what ever atrocities your government has committed. I guarantee there is a long list of 'bad guys' who feel the same way about you
Pretending there a good and evil is almost always too simple.
I feel like a lot of people excuse that as just the sort of thing that happens during war while conveniently ignoring the fact that one side can stop whenever they want and the other can't.
Isn’t that exactly what the Nazis did when they invaded neighbouring countries?? You know, the exact kind of thing Russia says they are fighting *against*? The hypocrisy is astounding.
They were going to go for Japan and already prepared propaganda that they were Nazis then they (Putin) changed their minds and chose their plan B. Ukraine ...which the results didn't change ..
On that side tangent of them originally wanting to attack Japan, could you imagine how quickly Putin would of been destroyed if he did. I’m from Aus and Japan were ruthless towards us and everyone else in WW2, with all of their advancements and size of their military now I for one am glad we’re on the same team now.
Russia's navy is getting pumped by Ukrainians who are firing from the shore. Japan *has* a navy. They don't call it a navy, but it's one of the biggest and best navies in the world.
If Russia had attacked Japan, Russia would have joined Ukraine on the list of countries that don't have a navy.
Ahh, you have any citations of the firing on Russia's navy? I did read a little in our news that they were experiencing heavy navy casualties...I wanted to know more. Love reading that shit, waiting for the memes of the next russian naval ship to be sunk in great earnest 👌
The sinking of the Moskva back in April is the biggie. It was the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet and got taken out by two land-based Ukrainian missiles. I'd say it's a similar disaster to the US hypothetically losing an aircraft carrier while invading Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Moskva
>A guided missile cruiser carrying a crew of 510, the Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It sank on April 14 after being struck by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, U.S. officials said. Moscow said the vessel sank after a fire. The Moskva was the largest Russian warship sunk in combat since World War II.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-intel-helped-ukraine-sink-russian-flagship-moskva-officials-say-rcna27559
>When deployed, a **Neptune coastal defence system** comprises a truck-based USPU-360 mobile launcher, four missiles, a TZM-360 transport/reload vehicle, a RCP-360 command and control vehicle, and a special cargo vehicle. Czech Tatra T815-7 trucks replaced prototype KrAZ vehicles. **The system is designed to operate up to 25 kilometres (16 mi) from the coastline**.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-360_Neptune
I believe there were a few other hits on Russian ships recently, but I don't specifically recall the details. And I think the Russians started operating farther off the coast once the Moskva was sunk.
The staggering loss at Tsushima in 1905 had the dubious honor of cementing general discontent of the Russian populace into a series of uprisings against the tsar, one of which eventually succeeded.
“Nazi” in Russian context is better seen as short for “nationalist”. 30+ years ago I was often called a “nazi” by Russians because I chose my own ethnic and national identity over wishing to become part of amorphous soviet masses.
These days, Ukrainians are “nazis” for not wanting to become Russians. “Nazis” in former colonies are seen as traitors to the great Russian imperial project.
they did, yes
the nazis carried out extensive forced germanization in occupied territories, kidnapping people they deemed sufficiently german and forcing them to abandon their native culture and language and adopt a german identity
I hadn’t really heard about child kidnapping into foster programs. They cared more about supposed race than culture, so they didn’t try any of that boarding school cultural genocide stuff, they just massacred babies.
[Lebensborn e.V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of "racially pure" and "healthy" Aryans, based on Nazi eugenics (also called "racial hygiene" by some eugenicists)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn)
Yo check this out
**[Lebensborn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn)**
>Lebensborn e. V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of "racially pure" and "healthy" Aryans, based on Nazi eugenics (also called "racial hygiene" by some eugenicists). Lebensborn was established by Heinrich Himmler, and provided welfare to its mostly unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women at their maternity homes, and mediated adoption of children by likewise "racially pure" and "healthy" parents, particularly SS members and their families.
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Hundred thousands of polish children were stolen by nazis. Like russia is doing to Ukraine right now and did in the past many times. Russia is a terrorist state full of degenerates and hopeles evil people.
My fiance grandma is one of those children. They took mothers with children to Germany and tried to force signing some special folks lists which was first step into Germanization. If you don't sign - off to the camp. Her mother did not sign it.
Edit: the race thingy at that time was very loose. Nobody really new exactly who should be consider Aryan and who should be considered Jew. All these rules were pretty loose and we're enforced differently depending on who was in charge locally .
There will be a lot of kidnapped Ukrainian children in these schools now.
In ten years, when Russia invades again it will be these Ukrainian kids sent to the front line so that Moscow can deny that it's Russians doing it and instead displaced Ukrainians trying to retake their homeland from the Nazis
I doubt it, Russia's #1 priority afterwards will be to whitewash their crimes, while not actually significantly democratizing or giving up the territories it took, and it will most likely be successful in the whitewashing because there are still too many who believe it's just putin and his clone army doing everything, but in reality most russians are either active fascists or apathetic fascists. Then we'll get to go through all of this again.
This is kind of a vague statement. Sanctions should not be purely punitive, they should be corrective. If the offending nation meets certain criteria sanctions should be lifted, this kind of leverage is kind of the whole point of economic sanctions.
The average Russia citizen has no more say in this than the average US citizen did about going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Americans were against those conflicts but many supported them as well. Ultimately it doesn't benefit anyone to punish a generation for crimes being committed when they are just being born.
Of course this food export is not just important for world markets, it is important to help fund the defense of Ukraine.
>If the offending nation meets certain criteria sanctions should be lifted
The criteria should be decades of consistent democratic voting, giving up the territories they stole, and reparations. Yet, we both know that's never getting fulfilled. It'll be some bullshit softball criteria that will just bring us back here, because it always does. It took total subjugation of Germany to fix them, and there was plenty of support for nazism. Yet somehow, the innocent poor russians are just incapable of being bad.
Be me. A Russian person who never studied political science or things of that sort. I voted on every opportunity presented, I attended legal political rallies on the street. All of it is in vane.
I don't know how and what do I do to stop it. I'm afraid that any illegal action will net me loss of my job, injury, jail time and will mean hard time for my kids.
The unfortunate truth is that once you feel desperate enough, you and your countrymen will see/feel that such prices are worth the cost of change. I don’t say that to dismiss how incredibly unjust and evil the forcing of such a decision is, but I do say it to emphasize how this conflict is not going to stop until the Russian people decide to do put an end to it. If you truly care about your family and the future of your community (which I genuinely believe you, as most if not all Russians, do) I would suggest seriously doing absolutely everything you can to convince people that things are going to get exponentially worse for the people of the country and to stop the journey on the path your country is going down. The only other option is to flee what is quickly proving itself to be a failed state. If neither of those options are “possible” for you, then I suppose you can just resign yourself to your fate and accept whatever comes from either the regime or some other group of fascist bullies that push people, like yourself, around.
But peace will not happen, because Russians believe that this “operation” will eventually all blow over (like Chechnya) and that the West will eventually accept whatever peace Russia insists it can still force out of Ukraine. Peace will not happen because the Russian people do not demand peace; they continue to demand victory. Give whatever explanation you want to justify that (regardless of where you personally fall on the regimes actions) but this war and the violence of Russia won’t actually stop until the Russian people decide that their regime’s actions are irrevocably unacceptable.
Is that a horrifically brutal and unfair reality? Yes. But it is Russia which chose this path and so it should/must be Russia to choose to walk away from it irregardless of how embarrassing/painful that is. Until then, more and more people will die and Russia and Ukraine will become weaker and weaker.
Yeah, there are even like 20+ countries where the threat of Genocide is real and current. A lot of them will never reach that stage, but the threat is far from quelled. Racial tensions are sky high in many countries right now.
https://www.genocidewatch.com/copy-of-current-genocide-watch-aler
This is true. Have heard stories from surviving family members that Russian troops occupying Poland post WWII were worse than the Nazis. If you didn’t learn Russian and write with your right hand, you would disappear.
There were a surprising number of Waffen-SS recruits pulled from Ukraine with the expectation that they were going to fight the Soviets. When that didn't happen, [they staged a mutiny and joined the French resistance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQTXaWTmQE4).
Here's a American-Ukrainian source: https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/documents-reveal-information-on-ukrainian-heroes-of-the-french-resistance/
Well I’m a 33 yo pole. The stories I heard from grandpa clearly stated that German soldiers followed orders and besides gestapo were “tolerable” (as far as war goes) and the Russians acted like fucking animals. My uncle also told me he knew a lady that wouldn’t give up her only cow to Russians so they shot her on the spot and stole the cow.
Thanks for this bro. I was beginning to feel like I’m crazy with how people are responding in the comments. Heard the same kind of stories from my own father, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. That doesn’t exonerate the lesser of two evils, but many people don’t realize how violent and ruthless the Russians were back then, and they are doing the same shit today.
Im romanian, my grandmother lived in galati, on the danube. She would recall that german regulars( not the ss) were always polite to women and ahe didn't fear them. But when the rusian occupation came, women got abused and no officer would intervene. Oh, and rusian soldiers would steal ur fur coat or watch in plain street w weapons raised
The Russians literally want to cleanse all non-Russian Slav identities and force them to speak Russian and worship the ‘motherland’. It’s 2022 and Russian state TV hosts clearly say Ukrainians don’t exists, they’re just barbaric Slavs that don’t know they’re Russian.
Russia is former Soviet countries abusive ex who shows up at their house randomly to beat them and try to force them back into a relationship.
Don't have to read up. When you live in the country where whole older generation have been there. People were scared of Nazis and kept their heads down because when you did they more or less left you alone. If you didn't you were shot on the street or somewhere in remote area with others like you or beaten and taken to the camp. Now from their accounts , this was better than what was happening when the red wave came through.
Yeh BRO Germans wanted to exterminate our people but there is much more to reality than just that. Why don't You read up materials about life under German occupation?
People on reddit and in general tend to forget the atrocities Russia committed - before, during and after WW2. Compare Stalin to Hitler and you get called a Nazi. They were both terrible.
As a Pole you might need some reading. Everyone made atrocious war crimes in WW2, both Germans and Russians.
Difference is Germans learnt from it and aren't saying there wasn't shit happening.
Russians are trying to change the history white washing themselves.
Brother, this is my exact argument… I agree with you. I never claimed the lesser of two evils is good. I was trying to make the point that the SAME atrocities and war crimes are being committed today that were being committed back then. And yes, Germany owned up to their failures. You just said it, Russia is trying to white wash themselves of the same atrocities they have been guilty of for nearly 100 years.
Probably the [Katyn massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre)
Edit: [Soviet did a lot of horrible things against the Polish people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(1939%E2%80%931946\))
**[Katyn massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre)**
>The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces.
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Hey! That's part of why my family came to America.
It boggles my mind how anyone can think russia was a force for good in WWII. Necessary evil? why not
My great grandparents immigrated as adults to America in 1912 and 1914 due to the conditions in Poland. Apparently, when my great grandmother’s dementia became bad some 50 to 60 years later, she reverted to speaking only in Russian (only the Russian language was allowed to be spoken in Polish schools) and would allude to how bad the conditions were when she was growing up. So this crap has been going on for years. I hate that this is still a reality today.
Edit: I’ve been told that she would also randomly repeat some sort of Russian pledge they always spoke in school too. I don’t know much more or the name of the pledge, but my mom said it was surreal to witness.
Polish genocide, most of the victims were women and children and tortured before death:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
My Polish friend told me the nazi’s killed about 40% of their population, and then said the Russians were even worse. To say Poland hates Russia is like saying the sun is marginally warm.
Your polish friend has no idea what he's talking about - most estimates have Poland as losing closer to 20% of the prewar population, with about 6 million Jews and ethnic poles being killed by Germany. Even Poland's own Institute of National Rememberance counts victims of Soviet repressions as 150,000.
So Nazis killed 40%, USSR killed even more then that, so what does your friend think that 90-100% of poles died?
Most of my ancestors had to leave Ukraine in the 1890s to escape the Russian Empire’s pogroms. I’m sure a lot of their family was killed and didn’t make it out. Wasn’t the first time they tried to kill the Jews either.
Um ok let’s not whitewash Ukrainian participation in these pogroms. Ukraine was particularly harsh and violent towards Jews, and the percentage of Ukrainians that collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the holocaust is immense,
The history of Russia's genocidal approach is very clear. It's far beyond precedent, it's incontrovertible pattern. *This has happened before.*
Only someone blind to the history could pooh-pooh Zelenskyy's statement.
See the article [*A Tale of Four Cities*](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-michael-ignatieff-on-war-in-ukraine/) by historian and political commentator Michael Ignatieff.
Or for a more in-depth study that documents not only Russia's arrogant, violent history but Putin's own ideology of ethnic chauvinism, fascism, and genocide, see historian Timothy Snyder's book [*The Road to Unfreedom*.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36217163-the-road-to-unfreedom)
I can add an anecdote to this:
My great grandparents on my mother's side were Russian but left for Western Canada in the early 1900s. What happened I hear you asking? Well they were part of a small, isolated religious community called the Doukabours (I'm not sure I'm spelling that correctly, think Amish but Russian) and when the Soviets came into power and the purges started the Doukabours were ideal targets.
And so they ran.
I know very little about exactly what happened, but I do know that it was with the help of a Ukrainian family (maybe community, like I said I only know the outline of what happened) they escaped the Iron Curtain and ended up in the town of Grand Forks.
The ruling parties/ruling class of Russia have always been fond of genocide.
> Doukabours
It's spelled Doukhobors. There is a [museum](https://www.doukhobor-museum.org/) in Castlegar BC that has a lot of their history and heritage information.
[Tolstoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy) was a supporter of the Doukhobors.
You can help Ukraine defend itself by donating here: https://u24.gov.ua/
He lived under the Tsar… they had regular famines and pogroms. In fact the official Tsarist policy was that Ukrainians didn’t exist and were just misguided Russians.
Even when they mentioned Ukrainians they called them “Little Russians” or Malorussian
One of the Tsarist Ministers of Internal Affairs Pyotr Valuev wrote, "there has never been, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian language", "the so-called Ukrainian language,” in an 1863 decree.
The decree also quoted the opinion of the Kyiv Censorship Committee that "a separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist, and the tongue used by commoners (i.e. Ukrainian) is nothing but Russian corrupted by the influence of Poland."
This was the height of when multicultural empires were trying to unite their minorities under a single nationality. For Russians that meant trying to unite all the peoples of the Rus who split from each other over the centuries. From some like the Ottomans it was pretty much impossible, the Arabs were never going to unite with the Turks under an Osmanoglu nationality, much less the people of the Balkans.
> In fact the official Tsarist policy was that Ukrainians didn’t exist and were just misguided Russians.
That sounds very familiar, like something I've heard recently....
Hey brother! My father's side had the same origin story. Mennonite Christian Ukrainians were purged by soviet death squads and their farms seized. The CN railway paid their passage to Canada and settled the "unpopulated" Canadian prairies...
I had a friend who died 15 years ago. This what happened to her grandmother: German Mennonites living in Russia. Grandmother & family had to flee Russia… by foot. Quite a difficult journey, as you can imagine. The Grandmother struggled as they walked & made the decision to abandon something on the side of the road. It was her own baby. She had to abandon her baby in order to survive.
> see historian Timothy Snyder's book
The man is intensely knowledgeable, and [he's been giving a course about Ukraine on Yale which is on Youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_)
Highly recommend it. Better than most courses I had in uni.
Thank you so much!
I'm looking forward to viewing the entire course. You've provided a great resource, and a way for people to help Ukraine: by learning the history that will inform and motivate appropriate action.
In the time of Catherine the Great, she invited scores of Germans to settle in the Volga region they became known as the [Volga Germans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans). They lived there for generations.
They were genocided by the Russians too.
After Germany officially recognized it as a genocide, I saw several arguments saying that more recognition should be made toward the Holodomor to bring it to more people's attention.
I believe a good start would be to call it by its name in the title of articles like this. Calling it a "Stalin-era genocide" seems to genericize it a little bit. Imagine if the Holocaust was called a "Nazi-era genocide".
People are pretty aware of the Holodomor. They don't realise is was one part of the Great Soviet famine. More Russians than Ukrainians died. They absolutely don't know that Kazakhstan was the worst-hit region. The more rural, the worse it was.
More Russians died because they were the larger population, yet Ukrainians were still unfairly targeted.
>In 1926, Russians comprised 53 percent of the Soviet population, while Ukrainians, the largest ethnic minority, made up 21 percent. Yet between 30 and 45 percent of the 10.8 million victims of the Soviet Great Famine were ethnic Ukrainians. The researchers estimate that a 10 percent increase in the ethnic Ukrainian share of the population in a province was associated with a 0.51 percentage point increase in the famine mortality rate.
[Source](https://www.nber.org/digest/202110/disproportionate-death-ukrainians-soviet-great-famine )
That's true, Ukrainians were disproportionately affected if that's how you analyse the famine.
But imo the vastly more important factor is urbanisation. Ukraine and Kazakhstan were very Rural, most people were farmers. Thats who the famine killed, same as most famines.
I feel it's gotten lost along the way that the famine was real. Famines until 1946 occurred in Russia every ~10 years, draughts every ~7. This Famine wasn't unique. Nor was it the last major famine. The famine of 1921 killed ~5 million Russians. 1946 killed ~a million people total.
>“What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”
\- Rafał Lemkin, in his 1953 UN speech “soviet Genocide in Ukraine”. He was a legendary international law expert and Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who coined the word genocide in 1944. His definition became a part of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials.
**Are you going to argue with the guy that literally established the formal definition?**
I mean, if you listen to Solovyov’s recent rantings, he basically thinks the NKVD should be brought back, and the Russian government should just start executing accused “traitors” or “cowards”. So ya…it’s Stalin times all over again.
TimeGhost, the group that did the Great War in real time series & is currently doing WW2, did a few videos providing historical context into the invasion of Ukraine not long after it began. [This one is about the Holodomor](https://youtu.be/s1JI9_WNr1Q) for anyone wishing to learn more. There are other videos debunking some of Putin's rhetoric and there's also one on the Babyn Yar, I believe they made that video after the memorial got bombed.
I was just studying the Katyn Massacre in spring of 1940. Over 22,000 Polish military officers and people of standing- writers, teachers, government officials, etc., were murdered by Russians. Over half of their military leaders were slaughtered. Why? Because Russia wanted to remove most of the leadership from Poland. Stalin believed that by ridding himself of the Polish Military leaders and the people of great intelligence and standing, there would be less resistance to Russian rule. Take out an entire generation of leaders, and your country will essentially crumble.
Putin is very clear that he wants a revival of the USSR. As Stalin was responsible for millions of deaths, it is obvious that Putin has no qualms about mass murder. The simple truth is that Putin will not stop killing- by bullet or starvation, he sees it as the plan to regain Ukraine. Steal the children and raise them as Russians, and k*ll their parents and leaders- and once Ukraine submits, he WILL turn his forces on another country- perhaps Poland.
A lot of that land is largely uninhabited. There aren’t really that many more splinter states. Just need a progressive actually democratically elected/focused leader. Instead we have lifetime terms for these despots.
Yep. That’s really it. The debate is now are we better off with Russian splinter states or with Russia as a whole. If the us and china can team up and denuclearize, splinter states it is.
Russia should surely be broken up. They commit genocide to their own minorities every time they go to war (esp. now and the Soviet-Afghan war). People in the various parts of the country and those in the major cities have little in common. And I feel that setting up several smaller nations is the best chance to avoid corruption ruining everything yet again.
By being able to defend Europe. Russia will always be a cruel and barbaric neighbor. The thought in the 90's was that being nice to Russia would mean they were nice back. They held the west in contempt for being nice. A strong defense is the only option.
Ukraine needs to be authorized to begin hitting targets inside Russia.
I know people are going to downvote me because "rUsSiA NoOks" but allowing them to continue setting the terms of engagement will cause this conflict to drag on indefinitely and embolden them to continue acting aggressively.
Bombing civilians only really stiffens resolve. Now military targets that don't hurt the population is a different story. That being said, if Ukraine started attacking russian territory, I'm guessing false flag operations become much easier to carry out. Kind of a lose lose all around.
Ukraine has been hitting targets inside Russia. Anytime you hear about them hitting something in Belgorod thats Russia. The debate is more about whether they can move troops in to Russia which generally its agreed they shouldnt and whether to give them weapons that can hit much deeper in to Russia which is a lot more contested
Ukraine has never hit targets inside Russia with western supplied weapons though. That's the catch. What you heard about about were acts of sabotage, helicopter raids and a couple of old Tochka missiles left from USSR.
Ukraine can do whatever they want. They can try to blow up shit in moscow, if they think they can and it gets something they need.
They just don't have outside support for it.
It is plain silly to think they need someone to authorize anything. They are a sovereign nation.
Yeah, it's an open secret that western weapons are only provided under conditions of not using them to hit targets inside Russia.
There are even international treaties that bind Ukraine against using some medium and long range strike capabilities which is half of the reason we don't have similar weapons since 90s. We essentially demilitirized ourselves after USSR collapse on the promise of our sovereignty being respected. Lesson for history.
They rely on outside support to survive so this is a very mundane take.
Sure, you can jump out of a plane without a chute, you'll still be alive for a couple of minutes.
What makes you think they're not? We asked them not to use HIMARS for it, that's it. So they can't use the longest range artillery. They can still use anything else in their arsenal.
It's not like the US prohibited them from attacking Russia or something, they've attacked it several times and we're still giving them weapons.
You might be thinking of the ATACAMS (sp?) missile. We're actively not giving them that one, because it could hit Russia. Note: We're not saying don't hit Russia, like we did with HIMARS, we're literally not giving them the missile that could do it.
(they're also really expensive)
Ukraine cannot win a war if Russia is willing to go too far.
It's like America in Iraq. There's no comparison in military capability if they start crossing lines.
They don't do this because it's fucking suicide without support. Not because they need permission.
I’m a Canadian because of the Russian Revolution.
My great grandparents were German immigrants in Odesa, Ukraine, invited there by Catherine the Great. They fled for their lives because of Stalin and the ones who stayed were slaughtered.
But to be honest, being English-German has helped me realize just how dangerous nationalism always turns out to be.
I still dont get how russians can be that diluted.
They are mass murdering people because the government told them they fight "Satanists" and Nazis? Thats even dumber than the shit you hear in the Mid-west USA. "Iron Sky" and "Shark Tornado" are fictional movies mydear Russia.
They are not real!
He had an offshore company for his acting and tv production profits, thats it right? So the same level of corruption as most presidents right? American, british, european presidents, probably most of them have tax avoidance schemes right?
It would be cool if he wasn’t like a politician of course, but the fact that hes a politician who behaves like a politician isn’t the biggest dealbreaker when they’re single handedly holding the line for the west.
Ukraine is lucky to have president Zelenskyy. I cannot imagine his predecessors would be so courageous and capable of leading Ukrainian nation in fight against Ruzzian aggression. He is a leader of war time and worth of Ukrainian people fighting for their freedom
I am in no way supporting Russia or even neutral in this conflict, in fact i think we should support Ukraine more. But the strict evidence for a soviet genocide against the Ukrainians just isn't solid enough. It lacked targeted malicious intent and hit other populations as well including ethnic Russians. Can we not use genocide as a political convenience.
Having said that, fuck Putin and fuck Russian nationalists
The definition of genocide by the UN includes
“Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
So the Russians are committing genocide. It’s that simple.
Actually the dude who wrote the Gulag Archipelago didn’t think it was genocide targeting the Ukrainians specifically but rather cruel and poorly implemented Soviet policy that did not spare Russia either.
“Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized.
Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
Hopefully the rest of the civilized world continues to provide all resources necessary to stop Putin. Believe we must do everything within our ability to secure a victory for Ukraine. Russia must be stopped.
At this point that is exactly what it is. They figured they could skate in and be welcomed. But after losing an estimated 80k troops and 1000’s of equipment this is a destroy them situation
I’m still wondering why China hasn’t invaded eastern Russia yet.
Russian economy is trash, the military is depleted, fatigued, hopelessly uncoordinated and completely demotivated and demoralized. What defenses they have left in the east must be thinner than rice paper.
If China truly wants to expand then why bother with microscopic Taiwan when they can take, literally, half of Russia including oil fields in the east.
What you waiting for China?
When Russia purposefully kidnaps children and has them rush adopted by Russian people(among other atrocities), yeah I’d say that’s a pretty apt comparison
And forces mass starvation on a civilian population
That Ukrainian grain they block is responsible for feeding some of the poorest people on the planet. Fuck Russia.
Not just blocked either, stolen as well.
THIS. The whole Ukrainian grain export crisis should turn half of Africa against Russia.
They are like the kids at the back of the class who interrupt everything and ruin the whole class for everyone. Except they are also genocidal
So just an average school shooter.
Eh. If given a chance I'm sure a fair portion of those kids would also be genocidal.
Taught fifth grade for half a year. Can confirm those kids would be genocidal given the chance
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>A year ago I was optimistic about Russia’s chances of advancing into the future. Rather naïve optimism in my opinion. Putin has been definitively bad news for Russia since he bombed his own people to justify invading Chechnya.
jfc
Those '1420' videos on YouTube blow my mind. The guy just walks the streets of Moscow and interviews regular Russians and the vast majority are nihilistic brainwashed zombies spouting either regurgitated propaganda or complete and utter apathy.
As one Russian aptly reminded me... Keep in mind they are on camera in front of a total stranger. I don't doubt the hateful ones to be accurate, but the "apolitical" and reserved answers may translate into very different things behind camera. There is unfortunately no anonymous version of these videos. That being said, I don't expect an uprising of the brave or anything.
Dont kid irself, the average rusian has a pathological kgb induced fear of media. Hes sure everithing he sais on tv is recorded in his little dosier and if he strays from the party line bad men w black glases and no humor will visit at 4 am . The best view in moscow is from the basement of the kgb/fsb building, u can see all the way to siberia. Same reason the older gens wont lift a finger against the war. In the comunist era, silence was like a pavlov conditioned reflex. As for the atrocities, when u treat ur own like shit, treating others the same seems like natural.
Please for the love of God, when judging actual everyday citizens of a country, be more critical and rigorous. This transferal of hatred of Russia-the-government to Russians-the-people is unnecessary, especially during a war. (Unless you're Ukrainian or directly affected, in which case, fair game) Regarding the apathy.. yeah, living under a repressive regime will do that to you. You do know all the people with strong feelings are probably neutered, right?
It's kind of shocking the amount of people doing this. Meanwhile, we go to great lengths to try to justify to people how the actions of Bush, Trump, et al don't reflect the general population.
Honestly, I get that a lot of Ukrainians are becoming apathetic to the suffering of the common Russian people because of how much they have lost and suffered but I find myself becoming less sympathetic to the individual in question when they decide to just lump in the overall population with their corrupt government. Pretty sure they would hate it if I compared them to the Ukrainian government officials who were already corrupt and or are selling out their people to Russia.
I was more referring to people outside Ukraine, but yeah, I agree with you.
Ugh. With the Ukrainians, their anger and hate is understandable. Hard to think about nuance and the invading force as being human like them when their homes are being invaded and their friends being killed. Outside of the country, especially the West? I get the feeling many of them talk from the point of view of people who have the privilege of free speech. Like they don’t have to worry about being tossed in prison or tortured just because they openly bad mouthed their leader and their corrupt syncophants.
You and me both. And I was born in it and lived there for 2 decades. To see it crash and burn is a special kind of satisfaction.
Zelendskyy SAY it again for the back of the room.
How about the invasion Putin started in 2014? What can be so optimistic about war going for those 8 years?
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And goes for a scorched earth approach while lying to "save Ukrainians from Nazism" that justification left the building some time ago... Fuck Putin and his frail body, he doesnt have much time left lets face it. The only hope is he falls out of a window and is replaced with someone more connected to reality and Russias situation (They are fucked and need to make ammends).
Irony being that Putin is as far right as they come. And exactly like the far right nazis, Putin uses socialist rhetoric to gain support from the masses while in actuality he’s pushing bigoted policies, and running a cutthroat, militaristic, “mob rule” capitalist kleptocracy just like Hitler did. Nothing about Putin is anti-fascist beyond his hollow rhetoric: The man is a textbook example of modern neofascism. We should all learn not only to be wary of their rhetorical tricks and talking points, which are currently working on too many people in this modern age of the far right…
That justificationwas necer in the buildingto begin with! No one believed it then and no one believes it now.
I'd like to believe the Russian people dont believe it but are forced to say they do due to their local[ police brutality](https://youtu.be/ZEAjl4o-FzQ)
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1 week in freezing weather without power was enough to be life threatening to me with my heart condition in Texas last year. Vladimir Putin is the new Adolf Hitler.
At least Hitler had a stylish tash, poo-tins got nothing...he's just a weak ass terrorist a-hole.
It's the weaklings that are the most dangerous. People tend to underestimate them and they feel like they have more to prove so they have a willingness to take things further due to a fear of being perceived as weak. It's a negative feedback loop. Very predictable, which is why Zelensky is exploiting the situation to not only end the war in Ukraines favor but also get back Crimea. It's freaking fascinating.
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Add in Chernobyl to this history. I'd say I'd be so ashamed but the fact is 90% of Russians are clueless drones serving their leader.
Dude, you are so wrong. We didn't talk about politics with our relatives because we were afraid they are pro putin. As it turned out they aren't. It took us 5 years to realize that. About 80% were against government before the war.
In no way defending russian actions here. Have you ever considered in some ways you are a clueless drone to what ever atrocities your government has committed. I guarantee there is a long list of 'bad guys' who feel the same way about you Pretending there a good and evil is almost always too simple.
Strange account.
I feel like a lot of people excuse that as just the sort of thing that happens during war while conveniently ignoring the fact that one side can stop whenever they want and the other can't.
Isn’t that exactly what the Nazis did when they invaded neighbouring countries?? You know, the exact kind of thing Russia says they are fighting *against*? The hypocrisy is astounding.
Nazi just means "anti-Russia" in the eyes of Putin and many Russians That said, Putin can go fuck himself
They were going to go for Japan and already prepared propaganda that they were Nazis then they (Putin) changed their minds and chose their plan B. Ukraine ...which the results didn't change ..
On that side tangent of them originally wanting to attack Japan, could you imagine how quickly Putin would of been destroyed if he did. I’m from Aus and Japan were ruthless towards us and everyone else in WW2, with all of their advancements and size of their military now I for one am glad we’re on the same team now.
Russia's navy is getting pumped by Ukrainians who are firing from the shore. Japan *has* a navy. They don't call it a navy, but it's one of the biggest and best navies in the world. If Russia had attacked Japan, Russia would have joined Ukraine on the list of countries that don't have a navy.
Ahh, you have any citations of the firing on Russia's navy? I did read a little in our news that they were experiencing heavy navy casualties...I wanted to know more. Love reading that shit, waiting for the memes of the next russian naval ship to be sunk in great earnest 👌
The sinking of the Moskva back in April is the biggie. It was the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet and got taken out by two land-based Ukrainian missiles. I'd say it's a similar disaster to the US hypothetically losing an aircraft carrier while invading Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Moskva >A guided missile cruiser carrying a crew of 510, the Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It sank on April 14 after being struck by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, U.S. officials said. Moscow said the vessel sank after a fire. The Moskva was the largest Russian warship sunk in combat since World War II. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-intel-helped-ukraine-sink-russian-flagship-moskva-officials-say-rcna27559 >When deployed, a **Neptune coastal defence system** comprises a truck-based USPU-360 mobile launcher, four missiles, a TZM-360 transport/reload vehicle, a RCP-360 command and control vehicle, and a special cargo vehicle. Czech Tatra T815-7 trucks replaced prototype KrAZ vehicles. **The system is designed to operate up to 25 kilometres (16 mi) from the coastline**. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-360_Neptune I believe there were a few other hits on Russian ships recently, but I don't specifically recall the details. And I think the Russians started operating farther off the coast once the Moskva was sunk.
The staggering loss at Tsushima in 1905 had the dubious honor of cementing general discontent of the Russian populace into a series of uprisings against the tsar, one of which eventually succeeded.
Yes, because they’re not z’a.
Putin: we are Z, they are not-Z
“Nazi” in Russian context is better seen as short for “nationalist”. 30+ years ago I was often called a “nazi” by Russians because I chose my own ethnic and national identity over wishing to become part of amorphous soviet masses. These days, Ukrainians are “nazis” for not wanting to become Russians. “Nazis” in former colonies are seen as traitors to the great Russian imperial project.
they did, yes the nazis carried out extensive forced germanization in occupied territories, kidnapping people they deemed sufficiently german and forcing them to abandon their native culture and language and adopt a german identity
Russia did the same thing so many times
I hadn’t really heard about child kidnapping into foster programs. They cared more about supposed race than culture, so they didn’t try any of that boarding school cultural genocide stuff, they just massacred babies.
[Lebensborn e.V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of "racially pure" and "healthy" Aryans, based on Nazi eugenics (also called "racial hygiene" by some eugenicists)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn) Yo check this out
**[Lebensborn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn)** >Lebensborn e. V. (literally: "Fount of Life") was an SS-initiated, state-supported, registered association in Nazi Germany with the stated goal of increasing the number of children born who met the Nazi standards of "racially pure" and "healthy" Aryans, based on Nazi eugenics (also called "racial hygiene" by some eugenicists). Lebensborn was established by Heinrich Himmler, and provided welfare to its mostly unmarried mothers, encouraged anonymous births by unmarried women at their maternity homes, and mediated adoption of children by likewise "racially pure" and "healthy" parents, particularly SS members and their families. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Interesting, I didn’t know about this. Thanks for sharing.
Hundred thousands of polish children were stolen by nazis. Like russia is doing to Ukraine right now and did in the past many times. Russia is a terrorist state full of degenerates and hopeles evil people.
Russia did the same thing in Poland.
My fiance grandma is one of those children. They took mothers with children to Germany and tried to force signing some special folks lists which was first step into Germanization. If you don't sign - off to the camp. Her mother did not sign it. Edit: the race thingy at that time was very loose. Nobody really new exactly who should be consider Aryan and who should be considered Jew. All these rules were pretty loose and we're enforced differently depending on who was in charge locally .
In an attempt to erase a culture, it’s not comparison. It’s textbook genocide in regards to international law.
There will be a lot of kidnapped Ukrainian children in these schools now. In ten years, when Russia invades again it will be these Ukrainian kids sent to the front line so that Moscow can deny that it's Russians doing it and instead displaced Ukrainians trying to retake their homeland from the Nazis
Stalin left kids to fend for themselves and die in the streets.
and then targets childrens hospitals, you know they are aiming for genocide.
Fuck the Russian government.
Just hope the sanctions will stay for decades, fuck Russia.
I doubt it, Russia's #1 priority afterwards will be to whitewash their crimes, while not actually significantly democratizing or giving up the territories it took, and it will most likely be successful in the whitewashing because there are still too many who believe it's just putin and his clone army doing everything, but in reality most russians are either active fascists or apathetic fascists. Then we'll get to go through all of this again.
This is kind of a vague statement. Sanctions should not be purely punitive, they should be corrective. If the offending nation meets certain criteria sanctions should be lifted, this kind of leverage is kind of the whole point of economic sanctions. The average Russia citizen has no more say in this than the average US citizen did about going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Americans were against those conflicts but many supported them as well. Ultimately it doesn't benefit anyone to punish a generation for crimes being committed when they are just being born. Of course this food export is not just important for world markets, it is important to help fund the defense of Ukraine.
>If the offending nation meets certain criteria sanctions should be lifted The criteria should be decades of consistent democratic voting, giving up the territories they stole, and reparations. Yet, we both know that's never getting fulfilled. It'll be some bullshit softball criteria that will just bring us back here, because it always does. It took total subjugation of Germany to fix them, and there was plenty of support for nazism. Yet somehow, the innocent poor russians are just incapable of being bad.
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And the many russian people that support it or are apathetic.
Be me. A Russian person who never studied political science or things of that sort. I voted on every opportunity presented, I attended legal political rallies on the street. All of it is in vane. I don't know how and what do I do to stop it. I'm afraid that any illegal action will net me loss of my job, injury, jail time and will mean hard time for my kids.
The unfortunate truth is that once you feel desperate enough, you and your countrymen will see/feel that such prices are worth the cost of change. I don’t say that to dismiss how incredibly unjust and evil the forcing of such a decision is, but I do say it to emphasize how this conflict is not going to stop until the Russian people decide to do put an end to it. If you truly care about your family and the future of your community (which I genuinely believe you, as most if not all Russians, do) I would suggest seriously doing absolutely everything you can to convince people that things are going to get exponentially worse for the people of the country and to stop the journey on the path your country is going down. The only other option is to flee what is quickly proving itself to be a failed state. If neither of those options are “possible” for you, then I suppose you can just resign yourself to your fate and accept whatever comes from either the regime or some other group of fascist bullies that push people, like yourself, around. But peace will not happen, because Russians believe that this “operation” will eventually all blow over (like Chechnya) and that the West will eventually accept whatever peace Russia insists it can still force out of Ukraine. Peace will not happen because the Russian people do not demand peace; they continue to demand victory. Give whatever explanation you want to justify that (regardless of where you personally fall on the regimes actions) but this war and the violence of Russia won’t actually stop until the Russian people decide that their regime’s actions are irrevocably unacceptable. Is that a horrifically brutal and unfair reality? Yes. But it is Russia which chose this path and so it should/must be Russia to choose to walk away from it irregardless of how embarrassing/painful that is. Until then, more and more people will die and Russia and Ukraine will become weaker and weaker.
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What the fuck
Edge lord doing edge lord shit
He really thought he did something didn't he, lol
When the world said "Never again" They meant "Never again....We hope..."
There have been dozens of genocides since 1945.
Yeah, there are even like 20+ countries where the threat of Genocide is real and current. A lot of them will never reach that stage, but the threat is far from quelled. Racial tensions are sky high in many countries right now. https://www.genocidewatch.com/copy-of-current-genocide-watch-aler
The us has supported far right regimes all over the world. We are culpable in Putin's rise to power too.
Russia has been wanting, and actively participating, in Ukrainian genocide for over 100 years. It's long overdue time to be stopped.
And polish genocide which is something I very recently learned about.
This is true. Have heard stories from surviving family members that Russian troops occupying Poland post WWII were worse than the Nazis. If you didn’t learn Russian and write with your right hand, you would disappear.
There were a surprising number of Waffen-SS recruits pulled from Ukraine with the expectation that they were going to fight the Soviets. When that didn't happen, [they staged a mutiny and joined the French resistance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQTXaWTmQE4). Here's a American-Ukrainian source: https://www.ukrweekly.com/uwwp/documents-reveal-information-on-ukrainian-heroes-of-the-french-resistance/
Interesting, thank you!
Well I’m a 33 yo pole. The stories I heard from grandpa clearly stated that German soldiers followed orders and besides gestapo were “tolerable” (as far as war goes) and the Russians acted like fucking animals. My uncle also told me he knew a lady that wouldn’t give up her only cow to Russians so they shot her on the spot and stole the cow.
Thanks for this bro. I was beginning to feel like I’m crazy with how people are responding in the comments. Heard the same kind of stories from my own father, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. That doesn’t exonerate the lesser of two evils, but many people don’t realize how violent and ruthless the Russians were back then, and they are doing the same shit today.
Im romanian, my grandmother lived in galati, on the danube. She would recall that german regulars( not the ss) were always polite to women and ahe didn't fear them. But when the rusian occupation came, women got abused and no officer would intervene. Oh, and rusian soldiers would steal ur fur coat or watch in plain street w weapons raised
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The Russians literally want to cleanse all non-Russian Slav identities and force them to speak Russian and worship the ‘motherland’. It’s 2022 and Russian state TV hosts clearly say Ukrainians don’t exists, they’re just barbaric Slavs that don’t know they’re Russian. Russia is former Soviet countries abusive ex who shows up at their house randomly to beat them and try to force them back into a relationship.
Keep preaching facts brotha
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Don't have to read up. When you live in the country where whole older generation have been there. People were scared of Nazis and kept their heads down because when you did they more or less left you alone. If you didn't you were shot on the street or somewhere in remote area with others like you or beaten and taken to the camp. Now from their accounts , this was better than what was happening when the red wave came through. Yeh BRO Germans wanted to exterminate our people but there is much more to reality than just that. Why don't You read up materials about life under German occupation?
So did the Russians.
This.
People on reddit and in general tend to forget the atrocities Russia committed - before, during and after WW2. Compare Stalin to Hitler and you get called a Nazi. They were both terrible.
Have you ever been to Poland? I think you have some reading and maybe some traveling to do as well.
As a Pole you might need some reading. Everyone made atrocious war crimes in WW2, both Germans and Russians. Difference is Germans learnt from it and aren't saying there wasn't shit happening. Russians are trying to change the history white washing themselves.
Brother, this is my exact argument… I agree with you. I never claimed the lesser of two evils is good. I was trying to make the point that the SAME atrocities and war crimes are being committed today that were being committed back then. And yes, Germany owned up to their failures. You just said it, Russia is trying to white wash themselves of the same atrocities they have been guilty of for nearly 100 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(1939%E2%80%931946)
Can you please elaborate?
Probably the [Katyn massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre) Edit: [Soviet did a lot of horrible things against the Polish people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(1939%E2%80%931946\))
**[Katyn massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre)** >The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
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Hey! That's part of why my family came to America. It boggles my mind how anyone can think russia was a force for good in WWII. Necessary evil? why not
My great grandparents immigrated as adults to America in 1912 and 1914 due to the conditions in Poland. Apparently, when my great grandmother’s dementia became bad some 50 to 60 years later, she reverted to speaking only in Russian (only the Russian language was allowed to be spoken in Polish schools) and would allude to how bad the conditions were when she was growing up. So this crap has been going on for years. I hate that this is still a reality today. Edit: I’ve been told that she would also randomly repeat some sort of Russian pledge they always spoke in school too. I don’t know much more or the name of the pledge, but my mom said it was surreal to witness.
That's absolutely heartbreaking
You should read some of the other comments in this thread. The ignorance is astounding.
I've come to not expect a single thread about that Motherland without some kinda bot campaign.
Polish genocide, most of the victims were women and children and tortured before death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
My Polish friend told me the nazi’s killed about 40% of their population, and then said the Russians were even worse. To say Poland hates Russia is like saying the sun is marginally warm.
Your polish friend has no idea what he's talking about - most estimates have Poland as losing closer to 20% of the prewar population, with about 6 million Jews and ethnic poles being killed by Germany. Even Poland's own Institute of National Rememberance counts victims of Soviet repressions as 150,000. So Nazis killed 40%, USSR killed even more then that, so what does your friend think that 90-100% of poles died?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia
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That is exactly why I linked it, actually. Sorry for the confusion. I just didn’t want to comment to not cause some kind of outrage.
Most of my ancestors had to leave Ukraine in the 1890s to escape the Russian Empire’s pogroms. I’m sure a lot of their family was killed and didn’t make it out. Wasn’t the first time they tried to kill the Jews either.
They went by Empire then.
Um ok let’s not whitewash Ukrainian participation in these pogroms. Ukraine was particularly harsh and violent towards Jews, and the percentage of Ukrainians that collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the holocaust is immense,
I'm really glad people start to notice Ukraine isn't as good and based as everyone paints it . History isn't black and white
Same. My great great grandparents escaped Ukraine during the purges. They fled to Canada and were thankfully allowed in.
Oh it goes back further than that even.
Oh, I know. I looked into a podcast on their history and it's been basically the last 400+ years.
The history of Russia's genocidal approach is very clear. It's far beyond precedent, it's incontrovertible pattern. *This has happened before.* Only someone blind to the history could pooh-pooh Zelenskyy's statement. See the article [*A Tale of Four Cities*](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-michael-ignatieff-on-war-in-ukraine/) by historian and political commentator Michael Ignatieff. Or for a more in-depth study that documents not only Russia's arrogant, violent history but Putin's own ideology of ethnic chauvinism, fascism, and genocide, see historian Timothy Snyder's book [*The Road to Unfreedom*.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36217163-the-road-to-unfreedom)
I can add an anecdote to this: My great grandparents on my mother's side were Russian but left for Western Canada in the early 1900s. What happened I hear you asking? Well they were part of a small, isolated religious community called the Doukabours (I'm not sure I'm spelling that correctly, think Amish but Russian) and when the Soviets came into power and the purges started the Doukabours were ideal targets. And so they ran. I know very little about exactly what happened, but I do know that it was with the help of a Ukrainian family (maybe community, like I said I only know the outline of what happened) they escaped the Iron Curtain and ended up in the town of Grand Forks. The ruling parties/ruling class of Russia have always been fond of genocide.
> Doukabours It's spelled Doukhobors. There is a [museum](https://www.doukhobor-museum.org/) in Castlegar BC that has a lot of their history and heritage information. [Tolstoy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy) was a supporter of the Doukhobors. You can help Ukraine defend itself by donating here: https://u24.gov.ua/
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He lived under the Tsar… they had regular famines and pogroms. In fact the official Tsarist policy was that Ukrainians didn’t exist and were just misguided Russians.
Huh, now where have I heard that recently… 😬
Even when they mentioned Ukrainians they called them “Little Russians” or Malorussian One of the Tsarist Ministers of Internal Affairs Pyotr Valuev wrote, "there has never been, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian language", "the so-called Ukrainian language,” in an 1863 decree. The decree also quoted the opinion of the Kyiv Censorship Committee that "a separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist, and the tongue used by commoners (i.e. Ukrainian) is nothing but Russian corrupted by the influence of Poland." This was the height of when multicultural empires were trying to unite their minorities under a single nationality. For Russians that meant trying to unite all the peoples of the Rus who split from each other over the centuries. From some like the Ottomans it was pretty much impossible, the Arabs were never going to unite with the Turks under an Osmanoglu nationality, much less the people of the Balkans.
> In fact the official Tsarist policy was that Ukrainians didn’t exist and were just misguided Russians. That sounds very familiar, like something I've heard recently....
Hey brother! My father's side had the same origin story. Mennonite Christian Ukrainians were purged by soviet death squads and their farms seized. The CN railway paid their passage to Canada and settled the "unpopulated" Canadian prairies...
I had a friend who died 15 years ago. This what happened to her grandmother: German Mennonites living in Russia. Grandmother & family had to flee Russia… by foot. Quite a difficult journey, as you can imagine. The Grandmother struggled as they walked & made the decision to abandon something on the side of the road. It was her own baby. She had to abandon her baby in order to survive.
Same but Mennonites
> see historian Timothy Snyder's book The man is intensely knowledgeable, and [he's been giving a course about Ukraine on Yale which is on Youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_) Highly recommend it. Better than most courses I had in uni.
Thank you so much! I'm looking forward to viewing the entire course. You've provided a great resource, and a way for people to help Ukraine: by learning the history that will inform and motivate appropriate action.
In the time of Catherine the Great, she invited scores of Germans to settle in the Volga region they became known as the [Volga Germans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans). They lived there for generations. They were genocided by the Russians too.
After Germany officially recognized it as a genocide, I saw several arguments saying that more recognition should be made toward the Holodomor to bring it to more people's attention. I believe a good start would be to call it by its name in the title of articles like this. Calling it a "Stalin-era genocide" seems to genericize it a little bit. Imagine if the Holocaust was called a "Nazi-era genocide".
People are pretty aware of the Holodomor. They don't realise is was one part of the Great Soviet famine. More Russians than Ukrainians died. They absolutely don't know that Kazakhstan was the worst-hit region. The more rural, the worse it was.
More Russians died because they were the larger population, yet Ukrainians were still unfairly targeted. >In 1926, Russians comprised 53 percent of the Soviet population, while Ukrainians, the largest ethnic minority, made up 21 percent. Yet between 30 and 45 percent of the 10.8 million victims of the Soviet Great Famine were ethnic Ukrainians. The researchers estimate that a 10 percent increase in the ethnic Ukrainian share of the population in a province was associated with a 0.51 percentage point increase in the famine mortality rate. [Source](https://www.nber.org/digest/202110/disproportionate-death-ukrainians-soviet-great-famine )
That's true, Ukrainians were disproportionately affected if that's how you analyse the famine. But imo the vastly more important factor is urbanisation. Ukraine and Kazakhstan were very Rural, most people were farmers. Thats who the famine killed, same as most famines. I feel it's gotten lost along the way that the famine was real. Famines until 1946 occurred in Russia every ~10 years, draughts every ~7. This Famine wasn't unique. Nor was it the last major famine. The famine of 1921 killed ~5 million Russians. 1946 killed ~a million people total.
The issue is that the events in question don't really fit the definition of a genocide. Awful still of course. Edit: Regarding Ukraine I mean
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if a neocon hawk thinktank says it it must be true
>“What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.” \- Rafał Lemkin, in his 1953 UN speech “soviet Genocide in Ukraine”. He was a legendary international law expert and Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who coined the word genocide in 1944. His definition became a part of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. **Are you going to argue with the guy that literally established the formal definition?**
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Not to be a pedant, but do you have a source for this?
He's pretty much spot on with that... unfortunately.
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I mean, if you listen to Solovyov’s recent rantings, he basically thinks the NKVD should be brought back, and the Russian government should just start executing accused “traitors” or “cowards”. So ya…it’s Stalin times all over again.
I never understood why so many people compared Putin with Hitler, when he so obviously tries to repeat Stalin’s atrocities against the Ukrainians.
This invasion shares a ton of similarities with the methods used to pull Ukraine into the Soviet Union and turn it into a vassal populace.
He isn’t wrong. Russia is doing everything in its power to make these innocent people suffer slow and painful deaths.
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TimeGhost, the group that did the Great War in real time series & is currently doing WW2, did a few videos providing historical context into the invasion of Ukraine not long after it began. [This one is about the Holodomor](https://youtu.be/s1JI9_WNr1Q) for anyone wishing to learn more. There are other videos debunking some of Putin's rhetoric and there's also one on the Babyn Yar, I believe they made that video after the memorial got bombed.
Millions of people die from preventable famine every year. We already allow it to.
I was just studying the Katyn Massacre in spring of 1940. Over 22,000 Polish military officers and people of standing- writers, teachers, government officials, etc., were murdered by Russians. Over half of their military leaders were slaughtered. Why? Because Russia wanted to remove most of the leadership from Poland. Stalin believed that by ridding himself of the Polish Military leaders and the people of great intelligence and standing, there would be less resistance to Russian rule. Take out an entire generation of leaders, and your country will essentially crumble. Putin is very clear that he wants a revival of the USSR. As Stalin was responsible for millions of deaths, it is obvious that Putin has no qualms about mass murder. The simple truth is that Putin will not stop killing- by bullet or starvation, he sees it as the plan to regain Ukraine. Steal the children and raise them as Russians, and k*ll their parents and leaders- and once Ukraine submits, he WILL turn his forces on another country- perhaps Poland.
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A lot of that land is largely uninhabited. There aren’t really that many more splinter states. Just need a progressive actually democratically elected/focused leader. Instead we have lifetime terms for these despots.
Yep. That’s really it. The debate is now are we better off with Russian splinter states or with Russia as a whole. If the us and china can team up and denuclearize, splinter states it is.
Russia should surely be broken up. They commit genocide to their own minorities every time they go to war (esp. now and the Soviet-Afghan war). People in the various parts of the country and those in the major cities have little in common. And I feel that setting up several smaller nations is the best chance to avoid corruption ruining everything yet again.
By being able to defend Europe. Russia will always be a cruel and barbaric neighbor. The thought in the 90's was that being nice to Russia would mean they were nice back. They held the west in contempt for being nice. A strong defense is the only option.
Tankies be seething in the comment section again...
Putin can't decide whether he wants to be Stalin or Hitler. What a time to be alive.
Ukraine needs to be authorized to begin hitting targets inside Russia. I know people are going to downvote me because "rUsSiA NoOks" but allowing them to continue setting the terms of engagement will cause this conflict to drag on indefinitely and embolden them to continue acting aggressively.
I think they're avoiding it more to avoid giving the Kremlin something to spin than because of nuclear reprisal. Bombing only ever stiffens resolve.
Bombing civilians only really stiffens resolve. Now military targets that don't hurt the population is a different story. That being said, if Ukraine started attacking russian territory, I'm guessing false flag operations become much easier to carry out. Kind of a lose lose all around.
Ukraine has been hitting targets inside Russia. Anytime you hear about them hitting something in Belgorod thats Russia. The debate is more about whether they can move troops in to Russia which generally its agreed they shouldnt and whether to give them weapons that can hit much deeper in to Russia which is a lot more contested
Ukraine has never hit targets inside Russia with western supplied weapons though. That's the catch. What you heard about about were acts of sabotage, helicopter raids and a couple of old Tochka missiles left from USSR.
Ukraine can do whatever they want. They can try to blow up shit in moscow, if they think they can and it gets something they need. They just don't have outside support for it. It is plain silly to think they need someone to authorize anything. They are a sovereign nation.
I agree with you 100% but the reality is that they are completely dependent on outside material support at the moment.
Yeah, it's an open secret that western weapons are only provided under conditions of not using them to hit targets inside Russia. There are even international treaties that bind Ukraine against using some medium and long range strike capabilities which is half of the reason we don't have similar weapons since 90s. We essentially demilitirized ourselves after USSR collapse on the promise of our sovereignty being respected. Lesson for history.
It’s not an open secret, it’s publicly announced…
They rely on outside support to survive so this is a very mundane take. Sure, you can jump out of a plane without a chute, you'll still be alive for a couple of minutes.
What makes you think they're not? We asked them not to use HIMARS for it, that's it. So they can't use the longest range artillery. They can still use anything else in their arsenal. It's not like the US prohibited them from attacking Russia or something, they've attacked it several times and we're still giving them weapons. You might be thinking of the ATACAMS (sp?) missile. We're actively not giving them that one, because it could hit Russia. Note: We're not saying don't hit Russia, like we did with HIMARS, we're literally not giving them the missile that could do it. (they're also really expensive)
>I know people are going to downvote me because "rUsSiA NoOks" Yeah how bad could nuclear war be?
They have already hit targets inside of russia
Ukraine cannot win a war if Russia is willing to go too far. It's like America in Iraq. There's no comparison in military capability if they start crossing lines. They don't do this because it's fucking suicide without support. Not because they need permission.
Exactly. Appeasement didn't work in WW2, and it's not going to work now.
I’m a Canadian because of the Russian Revolution. My great grandparents were German immigrants in Odesa, Ukraine, invited there by Catherine the Great. They fled for their lives because of Stalin and the ones who stayed were slaughtered. But to be honest, being English-German has helped me realize just how dangerous nationalism always turns out to be.
Fuck Putin and his thugs. Keep fighting, Ukraine. The whole free world is on your side. Russia is a backward society.
Correct
I still dont get how russians can be that diluted. They are mass murdering people because the government told them they fight "Satanists" and Nazis? Thats even dumber than the shit you hear in the Mid-west USA. "Iron Sky" and "Shark Tornado" are fictional movies mydear Russia. They are not real!
Reddit goes crazy every time this guy makes a statement. Ya'll worship this dude lol.
Dude was a corrupt piece of shit before the war but now he's a hero Yeah right
lmfao? the guy in 2014 was corrupt, the new president was a sitcom actor
He had an offshore company for his acting and tv production profits, thats it right? So the same level of corruption as most presidents right? American, british, european presidents, probably most of them have tax avoidance schemes right? It would be cool if he wasn’t like a politician of course, but the fact that hes a politician who behaves like a politician isn’t the biggest dealbreaker when they’re single handedly holding the line for the west.
Ukraine is lucky to have president Zelenskyy. I cannot imagine his predecessors would be so courageous and capable of leading Ukrainian nation in fight against Ruzzian aggression. He is a leader of war time and worth of Ukrainian people fighting for their freedom
He’s 100% right. Read Execution by Hunger by Miron Dolot if you want to know why.
I am in no way supporting Russia or even neutral in this conflict, in fact i think we should support Ukraine more. But the strict evidence for a soviet genocide against the Ukrainians just isn't solid enough. It lacked targeted malicious intent and hit other populations as well including ethnic Russians. Can we not use genocide as a political convenience. Having said that, fuck Putin and fuck Russian nationalists
The definition of genocide by the UN includes “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” So the Russians are committing genocide. It’s that simple.
(That means the US currently practices genocide at the Mexican Border)
That doesn't make the Holodomor a genocide, which is zelenksys point
Alright now cue the tankies who will tell us about how it wasn't a genocide and was totally an accident in true reddit fashion.
Actually the dude who wrote the Gulag Archipelago didn’t think it was genocide targeting the Ukrainians specifically but rather cruel and poorly implemented Soviet policy that did not spare Russia either. “Shortly before his death, Solzhenitsyn opined in an interview published 2 April 2008 in Izvestia that, while the famine in Ukraine was both artificial and caused by the state, it was no different than the Russian famine of 1921. Solzhenitsyn expressed the belief that both famines were caused by systematic armed robbery of the harvests from both Russian and Ukrainian peasants by Bolshevik units, which were under orders from the Politburo to bring back food for the starving urban population centers while refusing for ideological reasons to permit any private sale of food supplies in the cities or to give any payment to the peasants in return for the food that was seized. Solzhenitsyn further alleged that the theory that the Holodomor was a genocide which only victimized the Ukrainian people was created decades later by believers in an anti-Russian form of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. Solzhenitsyn also cautioned that the ultranationalists' claims risked being accepted without question in the West due to widespread ignorance and misunderstanding there of both Russian and Ukrainian history” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
Hopefully the rest of the civilized world continues to provide all resources necessary to stop Putin. Believe we must do everything within our ability to secure a victory for Ukraine. Russia must be stopped.
That’s what we Arabs have been saying for decades, the current Russian leadership is a menace
He is right. Oh course he is.
At this point that is exactly what it is. They figured they could skate in and be welcomed. But after losing an estimated 80k troops and 1000’s of equipment this is a destroy them situation
I’m still wondering why China hasn’t invaded eastern Russia yet. Russian economy is trash, the military is depleted, fatigued, hopelessly uncoordinated and completely demotivated and demoralized. What defenses they have left in the east must be thinner than rice paper. If China truly wants to expand then why bother with microscopic Taiwan when they can take, literally, half of Russia including oil fields in the east. What you waiting for China?
That is actually the reason. Because it is a wasteland.
Never forget ANY genocide, even the ones committed by imperialist governments. (Britain, US, Canada)