To him this is likely "a mild disagreement" as ukrainian civilians are being actively targeted by Russian missiles. Quite a tone deaf and horrible point of view.
That too but I was referring to language differences.
Untrained/unexposed russian won't understand UA language. They wouldn't even be able to pronounce it correctly if their life depended on it.
> Untrained/unexposed russian won't understand UA language.
As a Russian who is hosting Ukrainian refugees I can definitely say this is false. I can understand probably around 90% of raw speech in Ukrainian without any support and 0 prior experience.
No, Russia's goal is to keep Ukraine in their sphere of influence and prevent democracy from taking hold there, because if that happens in Ukraine people in Russia might start to think it's possible there as well. Also there are geographical reasons regarding border defense which are somewhat understandable, but overruling the will of the people of Ukraine for that is not considered acceptable anymore in this century.
Russia's actions in Bucha, Mariupol and just about everywhere in this war (Cherson during occupation comes to mind) have been horrid, as is its disregard for its own soldiers, many of whom are just used as cannon fodder. Russia is targetting civilians all over the place.
Those other wars are horrible too, but comparing them just by number of casualties is disingenious.
It is not for lack of trying on part of Russia. They send plenty of missiles in that direction. It's just that Kiev is protected by modern air defenses more than any other Ukrainian city.
So far Russia has not hesitated completely destroying relatively large Ukrainian cities. If you need a link to the pictures, let me know.
That's quite a russian narrative. Mariupol alone is in vicinity of 100k civilian casualties. Kyiv holds because of air defense and denying ru air superiority by shooting them down.
Ukrainians have plenty of issues with invading forces. Plenty.
Official UN statement is 1300 death in Maripol.
Please do not spread false info. Do some research first before talking. It creates a fake narrative where people fall into. Not good.
> “The actual death toll of hostilities on civilians is likely thousands higher,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said... Bachelet added that right now it is "impossible to know" the exact death toll.
Even Russia doesn't think it's that low, and they've reason to want to undercount.
> Russian officials say that 3,000 civilians were killed in the attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, in Moscow's first estimate of the death toll since the siege several months ago.
That’s not a reasonable reading of that statement.
> To date, OHCHR has verified 1,348 individual civilian deaths directly in hostilities in Mariupol, including 70 children. These deaths were caused by air strikes, tank and artillery shelling and small arms and light weapons during street fighting. The actual death toll of hostilities on civilians is likely thousands higher.
The other comments by the same poster in this thread do not lead to the “honest” conclusion.
If the UN says "To date, OHCHR has verified 1,348 individual civilian deaths directly in hostilities in Mariupol" and then some dude says "Official UN statement is 1300 death in Maripol" that is an honest reading.
It isn't an accurate reading, but if you spend any time at all on the internet you will detect that honest people are often quite inaccurate. And wrong even while being able to back their opinions up with evidence. But it still isn't fair to imply that they are liar, lying or spreading lies. They are just wrong. Happens to literally all of us.
Even if hypothetically he was a habitual liar in every other comment he ever made on HN, this is not a showcase of lying.
If I tell you I went to a McDonalds potato warehouse, and that I counted twenty potatoes, but "there's a lot left to count", it would not be a reasonable summary of my statement to say that "the warehouse contains twenty potatoes".
The ICC has arrest warrants out for Putin for his war crimes. I really can't believe you're wilfully this ignorant to say there has been no civilian targetting. How are cluster bombs on cities not pure indiscriminate murder?
Search video. For example, Kharkiv was targeted by cluster ammunition, that's norm. Moscow terrors to drive out disloyal population, to hinder economy, to distract defenses from the front.
"Poland forced Germany to attack" (1939) by Putin, Moscow propaganda supports genocide. Atrocities in Bucha, Izum is result. Relatives? They speak nothing or support "liberation" by occupants.
Yes, there are lots of family and friendship ties between the countries. It's sad that Putin has destroyed any chance of good relationships in the future, and basically solidified Ukraine as a nation in opposition to his aggression.
I lived in Ukraine and when you cross the border between Russia and Ukraine you will notice absolutely no difference. Everything is the same. People, infra, houses, food. Only the language is different.
Second the recommendation, learned a lot watching this.
If you don't have time to watch all 23 episodes, the last one is a bit of a summary, discussing the history of European imperialism and colonialism, particularly Nazi German imperialism (conquering Ukraine was a central strategic goal of WW2), and pointing out some European hypocrisy in their reckoning of this history, and how Russia is exploiting that to pursue its own imperialist and colonialist goals.
Timothy Snyder is the worst source, he is academic on payroll of government and 100% biased.
On top of having zero credentials yourself, you're also making some pretty weird, muddled arguments here:
"Snyder is on the government payroll! Okay so maybe he isn't. But Navalny attended Yale. And so did some people who ended up working for the government. So plainly Snyder in the pocket of ..."
As can be seen in the first seconds of the lectures, Timothy Snyder is a professor at Yale [1], a private university, so he cannot be considered a government employee.
Additionally, even in government run universities in the west, there is the concept of academic freedom[2], meaning that faculty are able to teach their material freely without having to fear retaliation from the government (in the United States, this is effectively limited to "tenured" professors, it's more general in other countries.)
By your argument, we should disregard everything Noam Chomsky says on politics because he is a professor (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an elite university deeply interconnected with the government, and thus must be considered a mouthpiece for US government propaganda.
No. Can you people do not turn off your technical rooted in science pragmatic pedantic brain when talking about politics ? MIT is technical university, why I have to explain on HN that there is great difference between technical crowd from MIT and politicians who brewed at Yale ?
Yale have more in common with United States Military Academy At West Point where [1]
> The runner up after Harvard is Yale University, claiming 5 U.S presidents as alumni.
> Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower are the only 2 U.S. presidents who attended the United States Military Academy At West Point. They are also 2 of the most important military generals in American history
Except Ukrainians are prepared to fight Russia to preserve their freedom and independence, that's the main difference. The majority of Russians just put up with a totalitarian regime after another because that's what they were always used to do. Also there are language differences, but almost everybody over 40 in Ukraine can speak Russian, mainly because Moscow tried very hard and pretty much succeeded erasing their history and culture.
Even Russia is very diverse ethnicaly and culturaly, as expected of such a huge country. The differences between the Far East, Sankt Petersbug, Daghestan and Buryatia are quite significant.
And what’s your point? You could say the same about the US and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand, or any number of Spanish speaking countries in the Americas, or any number of countries in Europe, Africa, Asia... should we support one invading the other?
