China: sends Russia six helicopters (before the war), some children’s toys, a box of consumer-grade hunting scopes, and metal. They are the bad guys who are prolonging the war.
NATO: sends Ukraine weapons and military vehicles worth more than China’s entire military budget, and provides training and logistics support. They are the good guys trying to end the war.
The liberals only read the titles and then come straight to the comment sections so they don’t actually realise any of this unless you spell it out for them.
Lol, if the tide of war is changed into Russia’s favor because of alibaba tier drones while Ukraine has western equipment entirely designed as weapons from the start, then the problem is a lot deeper than china supporting Russia’s invasion
Your original post makes it seem like you think NATO are the bad guys here because they are supplying weapons to Ukraine to defend themselves.
I asked “who attacked who” because to me, it seems pretty clear that Russia, a dictatorship whose government has a history of human rights violations and disregard for human life, is doing a bad thing when they invade a neighboring country and start shooting missiles at civilian homes on a daily basis for a year and half.
Could you explain how this is not a clear “Russia doing bad thing, we should help Ukraine” situation?
I understood. It’s an unserious question, so I gave an unserious answer. China isn’t militarily supporting Russia. They sent some kids toys and the same raw materials they exported everywhere anyway.
Ah, I see what happened. I didn’t address the China part of your original question because I actually agree with you there. They aren’t militarily supporting Russia based on this article. I don’t see why China would do that, since it wouldn’t really benefit them.
I was addressing part 2 of your comment, where you implied that NATO is doing a bad thing by supporting Ukraine. Unless I misunderstood - I assumed “They are the good guys trying to end the war” was sarcasm.
NATO is mostly responsible for the dead Ukrainians. Ukraine has no reason to fight this war. If they lose, fine, the Russian part gets renamed and a higher minimum wage. Only rich assholes lose out. If Ukraine wins they get dead sons and burned schools but the US oil companies are happy.
It is pretty clear Ukraine shouldn’t be fighting this war for the US companies.
While humorous, that isn’t actually how polls work. I’d suggest looking up the statistics. The majority of Ukrainians, even in the Eastern regions, still support defending themselves.
Does that mean that the majority of Ukrainians support fighting the war for the sake of US companies? Or could there be something else they are fighting for?
They are fighting for honor glory and pride. However they will die for it and get none. While all the worst people in mu country will buy a new jetski off the profits they made from the ordeal
Is it possible they are fighting to protect their freedoms and their families? Honor and glory is nice and all but I’d imagine that most of them aren’t Game of Thrones characters.
No, none of that is at stake. Russia has better labor rights than Ukraine. So if they cared about their families, especially the people in the region in question, they would be slfighting for russia.
I have to push back on “none of that is at stake.”
When Russia sends missiles and drones into Kiev that hit civilian buildings, homes, and kill regular people on a daily/weekly basis, is the message they are receiving “Russia has better labor rights than Ukraine?”
They are at war. That is what happens during war. They are only at stake because there is a war on. If the war stopped those would go away. And as Russia would likely increase thr labor standards in territory under their controll things would improve on every front for the lives of the average Ukrainian if the didn’t do the war.
If it were up to Ukrainians to collectively decide whether or not to continue the conflict, Zelensky would not have canceled the elections for his position later this year.
The Ukrainian constitution does not allow for elections to be held during periods of martial law, which was declared at the start of the war.
If there is ever a good time to declare martial law, being invaded by a neighboring country might qualify as a justifiable time.
In any case, it’s constitutional, but Ukrainian political process isn’t what we are here to talk about.
Fundamentally, I agree with you - If the majority of Ukrainians were to decide they don’t want the war to continue, the war should stop. The number show, however, that the people are not ready to give up.
You don’t get to set the topic. If you don’t want to discuss it then nobody can compell you to do so. Don’t pretend it’s irrelevant to the topic you’ve chosen to engage with just because it’s inconvenient for your arugment to engage with it.
The topic is technically “did China supply Russia with weapons etc?” But the topic we’ve been talking about for a bit now is “is the invasion justified,” not “is the Ukrainian constitution constructed in an ideal way.”
The ideal-ness of the constitution has no bearing on whether the invasion was justified, because invading your neighbor and killing thousands of civilians, even if their constitution is not completely ideal, cannot be justified.
I’m officially announcing now that I am going to sleep. Goodnight, and I hope you can all do some reflecting on whether invading neighboring countries is good or bad. I’m done responding to all of this.
Does your definition of “attack” include locking people in a church and burning them alive? How about sponsoring Neo-Nazi paramilitaries to murder and rape people for seaking a language? Shelling cities and civilians in defiance of international cease fire treaties?
Ah, by argue I meant something along the lines of “have an upset and angry discussion.” I disagree with some of the premise of what he said though, so I am going to push back on that.
I wonder though - if Russia hadn’t illegally occupied Ukraine/Crimea, would that have happened?
If Ukrainian neo-Nazis hadn’t trapped ethnic Russians in a building and burned them alive, would Russia have invaded?
My point is: there are no good guys in this conflict. Just two bad guys duking it out, with regular schmucks like you and me getting murdered for no reason. Anything that prolongs the conflict is bad.
We’ve got a document that lays out the timeline in some detail, but I can’t find it right now.
The short version is that this is a continuation of a very, very long conflict between the western powers and Russia for control of Russia’s resources. Like in a broad sense this geopolitical conflict as been going on for hundreds of years - Europe and now the USA want access to Russia’s resources and to do that they have to get rid of the government currently in charge of Russia. In the past this was all kinds of great power bullshit, Napoleon’s attempt to invade Moscow. Then it was the Russian civil war, where all the Western powers invaded Russia to try to stop the Reds, then WWII when the Nazis and their allies wanted to conquer everything east of them, exterminate or enslave the Slavs, and do Westward Expansion 2.0: Eastward Edition. Then the Cold War, where NATO was formed to counter and eventually destroy the Eastern Block. Well, 1991 happened, the USSR was destroyed, A few coups and murders and the shock doctrine ensured that the capitalists could loot everything, but ultimately the West didn’t get the complete control of Russian territory and resources they wanted. Too many former Soviet Oligarchs and gangsters got in the way and control of the region stayed more or less in local hands - Russian Oligarchs in Russia, Ukrainian Oligarchs in Ukraine, and so on. NATO didn’t disband after 1991, and didn’t let Russia join when Putin tried a few times,because NATO’s purpose is conquest of Russia and they hadn’t pulled that off yet. NATO started annexing countries and moving it’s borders towards Russia, forward positioning troops and weapons, and gradually encircling Russia on it’s populous Western borders. When NATO started talking about moving in to Georgia the Russian’s responded, invaded Georgia, and put an end to that. At some point later NATO decided to move on Ukraine, take control, and use it as a proxy to weaken Russia. They used the same tactic by supporting the Islamists in Afghanistan decades prior, and they’d used it in the middle east and few other places. The basic program is - destabilize a country, flood it with weapons, then let their neighbors bleed themselves dry trying to contain the insurgency. In pursuit of this NATO deployed a bunch of Ukrainian Nazis they’d saved after WWII for exactly this purpose and were gradually able to expand their influence in the country. 2013, the President of Ukraine doesn’t want to sign a shitty deal with Europe both because it would fuck over Ukraine and it would fuck over Ukraine’s trade with Russia, and the Nazis, almost entirely headquartered in Western Ukraine, use this as an excuse to take control of popular unrest and stage a coup. It gets nasty, Ukrainian Nationalists burn a bunch of Russian speaking Ukrainians to death, they throw the president out, the new coup government immediately passes laws making the previously legal Russian language illegal. Out East in the regions where most Ukrainians speak Russian, they see a bunch of Nazis who want them exterminated couping the government, they see the new coup government passing laws against their language, they say “Fuck this, we know what comes next” and take up arms demanding that Kiev grant them autonomy - some government autonomy, guarantees on their right to speak their language and protect their culture, basic shit. Kiev says no, tries to send the army in to Donbass to crush them, the army tells Kiev “Fuck you”. Kiev isn’t giving up so they arm all the Nazis and send them in to Donbass and they start murdering people. This turns in to a civil war. During the civil war NATO moves in. They start re-structuring, training, and arming the Ukrainian military loyal to Kiev. They stockpile all kinds of weapons and shit. The Nazis are rotating back from the front lines with combat experience and are getting integrated in to army units while their civilian Nazi counterparts are getting more and more control over western Ukraine’s government, civic institutions, and culture. This goes on for years, Ukrainians kill thousands of Ukrainians. Meanwhile Russia, who doesn’t want any of this shit happening in their neighborhood, is trying to get some kind of peace negotiations going to stop the conflict and stabilize Ukraine before it falls apart and turns in to a failed state. Well, Ukraine and a bunch of NATO goverments say yes, we’ll talk, lets resolve this, then the Ukrainian Nazis break all the ceasefires and shitcan the peace talks. Happens twice, the accords were called Minsk I and Minsk II. We later find out that Germany and France, who were acting as restaurants of the peace talks, never had any intention of fulfilling the peace conditions and were just buying time to arm Ukraine. Eventually it’s 2020 or something. Ukrainians are sick of this, they don’t want to be at war with their own countrymen, they don’t want to get dragged in to war with Russia because of Nazi psychos, so they vote for Zelensky. Zelensky’s a very charismatic guy, well known from television, speaks Ukrainian and Russia. He runs on a peace platform, says he’s going to uphold the cease fire and start negotiations. Well, once he takes office he goes out to the front and tells the guys at the front to shot shelling Donbass. The guys who are running the Front are Nazi fanatics, they tell him he’s not in charge and he can go fuck himself and they keep shelling. So now Zelensky knows how Ukraine really works, he starts working with NATO and the Nationalists as basically a cheer-leader for Kiev and Galacia’s agenda. Doesn’t really have any power but he looks good on TV. This whole thing finally comes to a head when someone decides that the Ukrainian army, with all it’s NATO training and equipment and guns and NATO provided Nazis, is ready to go crush Donbass. There’s a big build-up - Ukraine is mobilizing it’s army to go in to the east of the country and fight the Donbass republics plus whatever Specops guys Russia has sent in there. Russia is mobilizing part of it’s army at the Ukrainian border and making threatening noises.
Now, it’s February of 2022. Russia has it’s troops on Ukraine’s border. Ukrainian troops are moving East in to Donbass. Putin is making threatening noises, but no one thinks he’ll actually pull the trigger and cross the border. Well, for whatever reason, and it’s still unclear what he was thinking, he pulls the trigger. He claims that he’s doing it to protect Russian speaking Ukrainians from the Banderite Nazis who intend to genocide them (probably in the driving them from their homes sense rather than the extermination of all men, women, and children sense but who knows with Nazis?). That might even be true. But other reasons are that he was finally sick of putting up with NATOs bullshit after decades of post-cold-war hostility, or he had a bad understanding of the situation and thought he could win a decisive victory with that swift attack on Kiev, or maybe he thought people in Ukraine were more angry with their government than they were and would demand some kind of end of hostilities? Who knows, high level commanders and presidents aren’t always very bright and aren’t always getting good intel. Whatever happened, Russia made us all look like idiots by invading (pretty much no one, including me, thought he’d actually do it), and now there was a hot war between NATO forces and Russian forces, except everyone inside NATO pretends that it’s between Ukraine and Russia.
So, that’s the very, very, very short, basically no details, rough sketch version of what lead up to the war. I didn’t even mention stuff like the activities of Ukrainian Nazis in Canada and the US, or all of Russia’s security concerns, or the weird fucked up relationship between the Russiand government and the US government, or how Russia didn’t really invade Crimea because the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet and tons of support personnel were already stationed in Crimea so they really just changed the flags, or the role of propaganda in NATOs decisions on which weapons to send and which weapons to withhold, or what Trump’s trade war bullshit likely had to do with all this, or a trillion other things.
Suffice to say, there’s a lot of history behind this conflict. And since it’s very unlikely either side will definitively win there will probably be more wars in this on-going geopolitical struggle between whoever is in charge of the west and whoever is in charge of Russia in the future, even if NATO and the Russian federation both collapse tomorrow. There’s no way we’re going to make it through the 21st century without intense wars over the vast unexploited resources of Siberia.
nah I’m just not going to read a novel to respond to you. I’m giving other people I disagree with reasonable replies. Your reply is unreasonable engage with though. Feel free to try again though with a more reasonable response.
I didn’t even post that. Very reasonable of you to not pay attention to basic details like who you’re responding to.
Almost as if you’re simply putting on a facade of open-mindedness to cover for he fact that you will not engage with any ideas more complex than “Russia bad, NATO good”.
Ah, sorry, you are right about getting the person wrong. The way lemmy is laid out on the app I’m using doesn’t show the post before you, so I just assumed you were the same person.
In any case, that doesn’t change what I said. I’m not going to read a novel then dissect it piece by piece when the premise of the entire post is “going to war and forcefully occupying a neighboring country can be justified.”
I’m not saying all of Russia is bad, by the way. I admire Russia for a lot of reasons. The decision to invade their neighbor, however, cannot be justified, in the same way that the vast majority of the United States’ wars cannot be justified.
that post was maybe 1500 words to summarize 100+ years of regional conflict with special attention on the last 10 years written in plain language. no special jargon or references to theoretical concepts. if that’s a “novel” for you, it definitely explains your grasp of this situation and affirms the critique that you are willfully ignorant and incapable of analysis beyond “russia bad.” and this is why people make fun of libs like you. many libs smugly dismiss conservatives as having “simple/childlike” worldviews and value systems. then they promptly adopt their own perfectly mirrored positions and petulantly stick their fingers in their ears like you’re doing here.
I read it. Same answer I’ve been giving the whole time still applies. Nothing justifies an invasion and the murder of thousands of civilians. The majority of the Ukrainian people support continuing to defend their homes, including in the eastern regions. It is up to them to decide what they want to do. If they want to concede, they will do that. It’s pretty simple.
Anyway, I’m done responding now. Good luck with your lives.
Ukrainians were couped every decade to make them hate Russians. 1991, 2004, 2014, and note how Zelensky was elected as a peace candidate, to stop the civil war. Instead there was a military buildup to invasion and multiple ceasefire breaches. In the meantime between those coups, Ukrainians seemed to gravitate towards at least neutrality and peace. Ukrainians will have been repeatedly violated by USA and now they are dying for Uncle Sam imperial interest while their country is being peacemeal sold for the peanuts and the war fervor as in every war ever fry their brains.
In any case, that doesn’t change what I said. I’m not going to read a novel then dissect it piece by piece when the premise of the entire post is “going to war and forcefully occupying a neighboring country can be justified.”
It’s like one page. You asked for an explanation of what’s going on. Take it or leave it. Sorry it’s not formatted very well I had to type it on the fly at like 3am.
Guys you can’t justify a war with hundreds of thousands of deaths where one side is sending missiles at civilian buildings on the daily, it’s just not going to happen.
His comment is quite literally a 5 minute read and gives a decent summary of three decades of complex geopolitical context. If you can’t be bothered to read for 5 minutes your opinion is probably worth very little and you should avoid sharing it.
In 2014, the Ukrainian government was overthrown and the new government shifted towards Western alignment while banning opposition parties. Many people in Ukraine, especially in the east, have cultural ties to Russia and disagreed with the change, but were left with no means of having their voices heard because they were cut out of the democratic process, and that’s why the resistance groups exist in the first place.
Good point never thought of it like that before. I love Bill Clinton, Neoliberalism is radical. Did you know he played the saxophone? So cool. Slava USA
Just an endless slew of clickbait “China bad” headlines all the time. Really makes you wonder about if there is some sort of systemic problem with western media.
It’s going to be hilarious in a year or so when we’ll have LLM bots churning these types of articles out even at respected news outlets, and all critics of this narrative will still get smeared as being bots themselves
Lol all states are bad. “China” as a concept can barely represent the true diversity of the people living in that across and around that huge chunk of land, as much as “USA” can barely represent each individual there.
Everyone is a little bit authoritarian. It’s the intent and end result that gives it meaning. You don’t see France being criticised these days do you despite their citizenry being vocal about their regime’s mismanagement. We’ve even seemingly had a Western media blackout effectively on it for the past month (they’ve had riots/protests).
When was the last time France massacred protestors by using tanks to turn them into red paste?
When was the last time France rounded up its citzens based on ethbicity and religion and put them into reeducation camps?
Western media blackout? Maybe in your bubble mate, though I tend to follow these things deliberately so I’m not best placed to say. Western media is a joke regardless - owned and controlled by a few wealthy and powerful individuals, who sadly almost all hold similar politics beliefs.
How much control do you really have over a government that only has two parties? FPTP is a failure. It leaves government without accountability, pisses on the principle of equal representation, and shifts power towards the few areas that may actually flip.
If you lose this federal election, so what? Eventually, people will get angry enough at the current ruling party to flip.
If you vote, so what? Unless you’re in a swing state, your vote might as well not exist for the presidential election.
What about representation in the house? Well, again, your vote doesn’t really matter unless you’re in a swing district (which tends to be suburban). If you’re urban (liberal) or rural (conservative), you might as well not vote either.
China is bad. Really bad. You’d know if you could afford to travel instead of being some poor idiot experiencing the world through propaganda on the Internet.
Ukrainians also get shipped Chinese consumer drones to configure into weapons and Holosuns, so I think it evens out
Telegraph: “One Chinese company sent 1,000 drones to Russia in the two months before the war, according to figures compiled by Molfar Global, an open source research organisation. That firm, Shantou Honghu Plastics, describes itself as a wholesaler of children’s toys on its website and social media profiles.”
“The Ukrainians, and the Russians too, have figured out ways to modify these devices they’ve purchased online to make more and more creative ways to drop explosives from these small consumer drones,”
Telegraph: “Chinese firms have also sent optical sights to more than 50 Russian companies from the start of 2022 through the first quarter of this year. Imports of these products nearly doubled to $2.5 million last year, compared to the one prior.”
More informative source: thefirearmblog.com/…/holosun-optics-on-ukranian-a… (lol, a crowdfunding project funding a country’s military is sad, and the fact they could only upgrade 30 guns is even more sad. In 2014 too during the coup)
However, large numbers of Holosun optics have been fielded during the defense of Ukraine. During the war, they have been seen on AK-style rifles, AR-style rifles and even machine guns. While the battlefield performance of the optics is difficult to verify, Ukrainian troops continue to field them. Even bodyguards for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been seen using Holosun optics. Outside of Ukraine, the Estonian Defence Forces use Holosun optics on their LMT R-20 assault rifles.
The Pentagon is mad that Congress forced them to stop buying Chinese drones. Apparently there are no available replacements in some categories and even where there are, they are many times more expensive.
Rural communities have been using Huawei equipment for internet because it’s cheap and fast. The federal government became upset and demanded they rip everything and replace it with American parts. I think it costs like $12 billion, but the US didn’t even give the communities 50% of the required amount to switch over
Genius move by Intelligent American Government Officials to make the economy flow while throwing out Chinese Spyware. Commies can only dream of this level of efficiency.
Banned from tendering in the National Broadband Network in 2012, banned from participating in the 5G network in 2018, called for removal of surveillance/security cameras in 2018, funded undersea cables in the pacific to block Huawei in 2018, purchased Digicel to prevent Chinese involvement in 2021
US, UK, CAN & AU, 5eyes has been frothing over this for a while
The $2.1 billion deal to acquire and run Digicel Pacific is being funded largely by the government, which will provide $1.9 billion toward the acquisition.
Telstra said it would contribute $360 million and own 100 per cent of the company’s ordinary equity.
“Australian officials were concerned about whether a Chinese company or potentially a Chinese state-owned entity might look to buy Digicel’s Pacific arm and there were some geopolitical and geostrategic concerns about a Chinese company owning a major telecommunication company in the Pacific region, which is of course so close to Australia,” said Amanda Watson, an expert in Pacific communications at the Australian National University.
That’s especially since Digicel Pacific uses a 4,700km undersea cable from Sydney that was largely funded by the Australian government in 2018 in an effort to prevent PNG and the Solomon Islands from contracting Huawei for the project.
Somehow on my phone in :estonia-burning: I can access RT and came across this article where the US was coping at South Africa to abandon it’s partnerships with Huawei because “you need to use :lmayo::amerikkka: technologies”. Anyways, South Africa told :amerikkka: to :PIGPOOPBALLS:
I love watching Congress fuck over the Pentagon. Just the worst people in the world slapfighting over fake money. Probably a bad idea to let hundreds of lead huffing jet ski dealers whose only qualification is buying more TV add time than their opponents run a global empire.
My favorite instance of this was the US Army begging congress not to buy more Abrams tanks because they were already too expensive to maintain but congress overruling them and ordering them to buy more to keep the factories open.
99% of the resistance to doing anything good is because the current bad thing provides jobs for like 500,000 people and no one wants to make an effort to help those people
Focusing on Chinese drones that end up in Russia while completely ignoring the Chinese drones that end up in the Ukraine is some cherry picking I expected from the Telegraph. Products and components are made in China, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.
People need to start distinguishing between the little quadcopters you can buy at walmart, and fucking reaper drones. Headlines like “China is selling drones to Russia” makes it seem like it isn’t a $150 drone bought off fucking aliexpress
That lack of distinction is 100% on purpose since China dominates the consumer drones market and they’re so versatile and capable that countries all over the world including the US buy DJI drones for military operations
Taiwan (Republic of China) and China (People’s Republic of China) are different governments that both lay claim to the same territory.
The TL;DR is that in 1949 the communists won the Chinese civil war and the remaining nationalist opposition retreated to Taiwan, beginning the state of affairs that we have today.
PRC considers Taiwan part of its core territory and will not renounce its claims. RoC has, since 1991, officially recognised that they can’t retake the mainland, but there’s ongoing debate about whether or not Taiwanese reunification or an independent Taiwan is the end state.
There is no surprise that communist China would and is supplying their northern neighbor.
If anyone is actually surprised about this, then maybe they’ll be surprised when I give them an amazing deal of being able to buy the official deed to the Golden Gate Bridge for only $300 and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Just constant me at 123-456-7890 for details.
I mean, China is notorious for its foreign policy being primarily based on realpolitik rather than ideological allegiance, so the adjective “communist” before China is irrelevant to who they will sell weapons to.
Because modern China is not socialist and its leadership has no intention of moving in that direction (indeed, they are moving in the opposite direction, including under Xi).
well if you trade metal to Russia, and metal goes in weapons, you are basically handing them weapons of mass destruction if you think about it smuglord
It looks like the data is from Malfar Group which dubs itself as open source intelligence (whatever that means). Looking at their website, it is all Ukraine related. That’s fine in and of itself but it should be noted by them or The Telegraph. But The Telegraph is not exactly a paragon of journalistic integrity.
China is widely suspected of supplying Russia with equipment and materials to support their war, however no-one has adduced anything concrete to support that theory so far.
The article itself doesn’t cite much in the way of sources or evidence, other than mentioning a report by Molfar, the open source intelligence agency. Molfar has published reports on the same topic in the past, but there hasn’t been anything recently.
If the Telegraph had new information or evidence they would be shouting a lot louder than this. This is most likely them covering up for a quiet day by dredging up some old rumours and repackaging them as news.
They exercise editorial control and they exercise it vigorously, so when they report on something it’s for a reason.
Does your comment intend to imply they’re just presenting some economic data points or something? It seems kind of inane to pretend that they don’t have a lens where this is a bad thing. That China bad etc etc.
My comment had no purpose other than to be pedantic for it’s own sake because that is how the internet has taught me that intelligence is demonstrated and I want to appear intelligent
One Chinese company sent 1,000 drones to Russia in the two months before the war, according to figures compiled by Molfar Global, an open source research organisation. That firm, Shantou Honghu Plastics, describes itself as a wholesaler of children’s toys on its website and social media profiles.
They are toy drones lmao. Yeah they seem upset alright.
Tianjin Huarong Aviation, has transferred four Airbus helicopters to Russia since the war began
Whoever sold these European-made helicopters should be worried. Whoever is in charge of sanctions and export control rules in the EU will probably look into this.
Update: Airbus has at least one helicopter factory in China, so these weren’t necessarily manufactured in the EU. Anyway, still not looking good for people involved.
telegraph.co.uk
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