yogthos

yogthos , 1 year ago

Oh man, wait till you find out what US has done to Mexico.

yogthos , 1 year ago

Given that Russia appears to be winning this conflict, seems that the fever dream and delusions of grandeur are in the west.

yogthos , 1 year ago

Let’s end human civilization in a nuclear holocaust.

yogthos , 1 year ago

How do you think this all ends exactly?

yogthos , 1 year ago

consider yourself enlightened …substack.com/…/the-darkness-ahead-where-the-ukra…

yogthos , 1 year ago

Except, nobody is solely blaming NATO for Russia’s actions.

yogthos , 1 year ago

That’s the conclusion of anybody who’s been paying any attention and has at least a couple of brain cells to bang together. Soon enough this will become obvious even to the most imbecilic members of western public. In the meantime feel free to keep regurgitating the propaganda you’ve been fed for the past two years like a parrot.

yogthos , 1 year ago

I appreciate the sentiment, and for what it’s worth, you’ll never find me making personal attacks or insults to people who engage with me in polite discussion. I realize I could do better engaging with trolls, but I find it difficult not to respond in kind. None of us are perfect, all we can do is try to be better.

yogthos , 1 year ago

I get your point perfectly fine. The reality is that we’re all human, and we react to provocations. That’s why trolling works and why trolls do it. We all react in ways we wish we didn’t because it’s not easy to change your own negative behavior even when you’re aware of it. All I can do is try to interact with people better.

yogthos , 1 year ago

There is actually a lot of information you can read in English language media, but most of it doesn’t make its way into mainstream reporting. However, actual military experts and political scientists give us a pretty good insight into what’s really happening. For example, this analysis from U.S. Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin retired after 20 years of service and 12 years working as a modeling and simulations officer in NATO explains that Russian strategy is not about taking territory. Russia is fighting a war of attrition with NATO. The reality is that Russia inherited a massive military industrial complex from USSR, and it is currently able to outproduce NATO militarily. Furthermore, Russia has a much simpler logistics situation in terms of shipping weapons and supplies to the battlefront. Finally, Russia enjoys air superiority over Ukraine and is able to attack deep within Ukraine to destroy supplies and infrastructure. Ukraine has no meaningful ability to do the same within Russia. Furthermore, this is primarily an artillery war and Russia enjoys a huge artillery advantage over Ukraine. This summary of the state of things John Mearsheimer is a very lucid explanation of where the war is at.

Another huge problem for Ukraine is that it’s entirely reliant on western support at this point both militarily and economically. This means that Ukraine has to continue showing results to the west in order to keep support going. This is how Ukraine got pushed into the current disastrous offensive they’re forced to conduct. Russians clearly expected this given that they spent the past 9 months preparing complex multilayered defences that Ukrainian military is throwing itself against as we speak.

Once this offensive burns out, Ukraine will have spent a significant amount of weapons they received from the west, and lost large numbers of their experienced soldiers. This is already happening and it’s being admitted in mainstream western media fairly openly at this point. Russia is already starting a counterattack of their own in the north, and they’ve taken more territory in the past couple of weeks than Ukraine has taken in two months of their offensive. Russia is increasingly fighting against a depleted and demoralized army. All of this was known before the war started, Obama even quipped this in 2016:

Obama declares Ukraine to be not a core American interest and that he is reluctant to intervene in the country, because Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there. “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Regarding political stability, it’s pretty clear that it’s much higher in Russia than pretty much in any western country. The government is consistently polling between 75% and 80%, and most dissidents have fled at the start of the conflict. We also saw evidence of this when Prigozhin’s attempt at a coup happened. All of the government and military immediately pledged loyalty and denounced Prigozhin. I can guarantee you that anybody who appeared to even remotely support the coup has been rooted out at this point. On the other hand, there is significant political instability in Europe, and anti war parties are polling increasingly high.

The reality is that that people care about their economic situation first and foremost. The economy in Russia is doing well, and even IMF is projecting growth. The war has little impact on day to day life in Russia. On the other hand, Europe is now in recession and people are seeing their economic conditions decline. This is the primary driver of political unrest. I expect we’ll see anti war sentiment to continue growing going forward. I recall seeing that Czech president Petr Pavel say that he expects that Ukraine only has around 6 months left, at which point there’s likely going to be collapse of public support in the west. Once western support stops, Ukraine will have no way to continue fighting the war and will have to accept Russian terms. Russia understands this perfectly well, and this is why they’re conserving their resources and fighting a war of attrition instead of making big and costly offensives to take territory. If Russia can grind down Ukrainian army then they can dictate terms.

yogthos , 1 year ago

I think the reality is that the actual conflict is between Russia and NATO with Ukraine simply being used as a proxy. This is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine as they ended up being cynically used by the west in a misguided attempt to weaken Russia. And I’m not exaggerating here, it’s literally the words of Loyd Austin and what a RAND paper that was published before the war suggested. Russia obviously played the role of the aggressor here and bears full responsibility for that, but the war would not have happened if not for NATO ambition to keep expanding east.

What’s truly tragic is that plenty of western experts have been warning about this for many decades. This only became controversial to mention after the war started.

50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/6f627aaf-116a-40af-b497-ecf8006fe2db.pnghttps://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/99020793-213d-4451-80d7-295930705738.png

George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia" back in 1998.___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/832e713d-8963-4ecc-ae1f-8b366830bbd4.png

Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was "the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat [...] since the Soviet Union collapsed"___ https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/706556d4-ae53-4140-9cb2-bb2cfefd9c52.png

Even Gorbachev warned about this. All these experts were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now people are trying to rewrite history and pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked.

yogthos , 1 year ago

Obviously you must think that it’s better to make sure hundreds of thousands of people die and millions more have their lives ruined before giving everything to Russia. If Ukraine simply accepted neutrality before the war and implemented Minsk, then it would’ve kept all its territory. Then Ukraine could’ve settled the war back in March last year, but US and UK said no. Now, Ukraine has lost 20% of its territory, and will likely lose a lot more. Yet, the final outcome is going to be the same. Even western propagandists stopped talking about Ukrainian victory at this point.

yogthos , 1 year ago

That’s a fallacious argument based on a false premise. Russia has always been clear that their concern has been NATO expansion. Ukraine would have lost none of its territory had it chose to remain neutral.

Furthermore, plenty of western experts warned about this literally for decades, yet those concerns were ignored.

Meanwhile, it’s kind of funny of you to talk about setting some sort of precedent when the west has set it a long time ago.

Western nations have invaded Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria just to name a few. This was done unilaterally without UN authorization. In fact, Russian playbook in Ukraine is directly modeled on what NATO did in Yugoslavia where they recognized breakaway regions and had them invite NATO for support.

What you’re essentially saying here is that it’s fine for the west to do these things, but we should bring the world to a brink of a nuclear holocaust when other countries do the same.

The reality is that the west has no moral high ground here unless western countries change their own behavior.

yogthos , 1 year ago

Perhaps it’s not so fallacious as you claim. Putin himself wrote a lengthy article (en.kremlin.ru/misc/66182) which was basically his version of Anschluß that Hitler used as reasoning for taking Austria in 1938. And Russian leaders have written a lot about how they would like to reverse the dismantling of USSR at least when it comes to territory – but since those nations are now sovereign that would amount to annexing those countries.

That article doesn’t say what you seem to be claiming here.

I was talking about the precedent of using nuclear weapons to back offensive actions. USA did something like that during Korea in the 50s, but to my knowledge not since. Well ok, there was Trump, but who knows how serious that was.

And as you yourself admit the precedent is set by US which is the only country to actually commit such an atrocity. However, the bigger point here whether might makes right, and that’s the rule that the west has consistently followed.

Didn’t Ukraine remain neutral about NATO until Russia took Crimea? Only after that they reconsidered that position.

No, Ukraine had a violent coup in 2014 where the legitimate government was overthrown and right wing nationalists took power. Russia annexed Crimea in response to that because the regime that took power started doing these sorts of things to the Russian speaking population:

• hrw.org/…/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munition…
• twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296

yogthos , 1 year ago

Why would you lie about something that’s extremely well documented. Countless western experts have said this for decades. Claiming that this is some sort of an excuse made up by Putin is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Saying this was never about NATO is demonstrably bullshit. And they tried soft diplomacy for literally 8 years during which Ukraine and its western sponsors were supposed to implement Minsk. We now have plain admissions that this was never the plan from the west.

The best thing that can happen to Ukraine at this point is that it loses a bunch more territory and becomes a rump state that will be forced to accept Russian demands which will be far worse than those Ukraine could’ve accepted before the war. The worst case for Ukraine is that it could cease to exist as a state. Anybody who thinks that Ukraine can win this was is living in an alternate reality.

yogthos , 1 year ago

I see you just conveniently omitted the whole 2014 coup when the legitimate government was overthrown in Ukraine and the regime that the west put in power started doing these sort of things to the Russian speaking population

• hrw.org/…/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munition…
• twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296

The only one who’s lying here is you bud.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

A 10% spike basically overnight is very obviously dramatic right now.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Russia is one of the major uranium producers, and it’s where France has been importing a lot of the fuel from.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Yes, it has fluctuated before, I’m not sure why you keep bringing this up. Are you saying prior fluctuations did not have any impact on the market, energy production costs, and so on?

Meanwhile, three months is a pretty short timeline, and it’s likely to keep going up now that Niger is no longer exporting Uranium to France where there is high reliance on nuclear power. I’m also not sure what you’re saying is misleading bout the graph. I’m not really able to follow the point you’re trying to make there. Are you trying to say that Business Insider is somehow misrepresenting the data for some reason?

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

yeah that’s very true

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

I don’t know why they chose to arrange the data like that in the graph, but the relevance here is that Niger just said that they’re no longer going to export uranium to France where something like 75% of energy production comes from nuclear energy and Niger was one of the main suppliers.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

hilarious

yogthos , 1 year ago

the less dronies I have to interact with the better

yogthos , 1 year ago

Exactly, if we look at an actual genocidal situation then we have to look no further than Afghanistan where US has been massacring people for the past two decades and created 2.6 million refugees in the process www.unhcr.org/countries/afghanistan

If anything remotely like what the west claims was happening in Xinjiang then we’d see a huge flood of refugees in the neighbouring countries.

yogthos , 1 year ago

Yeah, that’s a fair point. It’s important to keep in mind that people are accepting the propaganda because they want to believe it and they understand that it serves their selfish interests.

yogthos , 1 year ago

👍

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

archive.ph/uLZy1

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/4323efeb-91d9-481d-88a7-f4fc3c603c73.jpeg

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

lol nah I’m not automated, sorry for taking it the wrong way though

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

😄

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Friendly reminder that simply repeating that Russia could end this war by leaving Ukraine is completely meaningless. It’s clear that this isn’t going to happen, and there’s only one way this war will end. What the west is doing is prolonging the inevitable, the question is what the goal of the west here is ultimately.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Nothing makes this war special, that’s precisely why we can tell how this war will end based on historical precedent.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Then you’re thinking about Vietnam backwards. What you seem to be missing here is that the civil war in Ukraine started after the western backed coup in 2014. And the regions that wanted to separate from Ukraine are where the line of contact is.

Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/9881f4d9-5023-4c4a-8379-779cc4776e1e.png

here’s how the election in 2004 went:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f081fe2a-a9fe-473b-99bc-162d4c405ae4.png

this is the 2010 election:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/1471241b-e5ee-4eec-8465-10708deb1726.png

As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/0dc6494d-a490-44a5-9038-c6c6e1e22709.png

The regime that US backs in western Ukraine is entirely reliant on western aid both economically and militarily. This is precisely the same situation for US as Vietnam where they backed the regime in the south. Eventually, US found the cost of the war to be too high to bear and pulled out, at which point the south regime collapsed. We’re now approaching this point in the war in Ukraine. As Czech president recently pointed out, Ukraine has around six month left. After that point, western support is likely to dry up.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

As far as I know, only Russia calls the Revolution of Dignity a coup.

The coup was extensively documented in western media, I find it incredible that anybody could be completely unaware of all that reporting archive.ph/BAxYc

Were the voting patterns of the 2014 parliamentary elections similar?

I recommend watching the video linked in the comment which goes into a deep discussion of the background politics and the elections.

Even though a lot of it was achieved through Russian propaganda, there was also clearly some organic support for Russia in eastern and south-eastern Ukraine before the war, and not handling that situation well was clearly a mistake of all parties, not excluding Ukraine.

Claiming that this was achieved through Russian propaganda shows a profound lack of understanding of history of the region on your part. The reality is that large portions of Ukrainian population in the east are Russian speakers, and have family ties in Russia going back generations. The coup regime targeting Russian speakers was the primary driver behind the civil war as opposed to Russian propaganda.

It’s not correct to call Ukraine’s legal government a “regime”.

Yes, it’s absolutely correct to call the puppet government US installed in Ukraine a regime. This regime has now outlawed oppositions parties, suppressed independent media, and recently cancelled elections.

That’s certainly a possibility, and wouldn’t be a good thing. USA has upcoming presidential elections, and apparently the hopefuls are dementiac old man and convicted criminal old man. If old man B somehow attains both the candidacy and victory, then that’s pretty much it.

The reality is that Ukraine is not a core interest for US, and as Obama explained back in 2016, Russia will always have escalatory dominance in the region. Russia sees NATO expansion into Ukraine as an existential threat, and now that the war has started there is no chance that Russia will not pursue it to the end. The commitment on the part of Russia is far more firm than the commitment on the part of US.

Furthermore, things aren’t looking good for Ukraine in Europe either. Anti war parties are polling all time high in France, Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Sweden, and many other countries. It is very likely that current governments will be voted out and there will be a backlash against the war because Europe is now entering a recession and living standards are collapsing.

So, as I explained earlier, the most likely scenario by a long shot is that western support crumbles at which point Ukraine will be forced to end the war on Russian terms.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

So you admit that the sources provide a substantial amount of evidence while also claiming that the article doesn’t provide proof of extensive documentation?

You also cannot claim that Russian propaganda played no part in the stark differences in political outlook for the people in eastern Ukraine. Propaganda doesn’t really work without fertile ground to spread it on.

Just the same way western propaganda played a role in western Ukraine. US has the most sophisticated and well funded propaganda engine in the world. Russia doesn’t even come close to that.

That’s just not true, but we cannot go beyond “is, is not” arguments here.

Again, a government that bans opposition parties, tortures journalists, bans media, and cancels elections is the definition of a regime. They started doing these things before the war started.

Is that still true though? Seems like US is pushing a lot of resources into this non-core interest. Could it be that Biden’s admin thinks differently from Obama’s?

Biden admin is obsessed with Ukraine, but that obviously doesn’t make it a core interest for US as a country. In fact, it’s pretty clear that this proxy war against Russia has already had disastrous economic and geopolitical consequences for US. It’s very likely that the situation will get worse by next year at which point democrats will almost certainly lose the election.

I don’t support right wing parties in Europe or US, but unfortunately the left decided to align with the war mongers and the only parties that took a consistent stance against the war were on the right. Now that the support for the war is collapsing, these parties are gaining a huge amount of momentum. This will be a tragedy for the west in the long run.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

Shipping a laptop with Linux makes it much easier for non technical people to use Linux.

yogthos OP , 1 year ago

If humans re selfish and greedy by nature however, it is an argument for creating systems that inhibit such negative qualities while promoting positive ones. We need systems where individual self interest aligns with the common interest. Unfortunately, capitalism is the opposite of that being a system of individual competition that pits everyone against each other. Setting up a capitalist society is akin to taking an alcoholic to an open bar.