The Armed Forces of Ukraine were able to advance up to 1,400 metres on different parts of the Bakhmut front during the day, Serhii Cherevatyi, the spokesman for the eastern group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said.
That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors, but it is, as to be expected, based on an uncritical acceptance of numbers and stories from untrustworthy sources, sources with an obvious interest in keeping support for the sending weapons and other military support to UA. This post, for example, coming from Pravda UA and just passing along the message from the MoD. No critical look at any of it from liberals, just cheerleading based on vibes.
That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors
And also reality. Or does Russia still secretly occupy Kherson and Kharkiv? Did they only pretend to launch a major mobilization of new troops and call up prisoners to fill the ranks?
The day-to-day changes of the control map are less clear, especially now that there’s major operational security around the counteroffensive, but I’m speaking of the overall “pattern of the war” here.
Kherson and Kharkiv are both examples of Russia giving up territory with minimal losses. Kherson was a very famous preemptive withdrawal, with Russia going back on its statements that it would protect the people there. I feel bad for the people there who believed it and tried to build back a functioning society, as they were then subjected to UA’s fascistic extremist militants that have wide berth to determine a very low bar for being a “collaborator”.
Control maps don’t mean much by themselves. A party taking a large strip of mud gets very different media treatment depending on who you read and which party gained it.
You raise really good points, but I’m also not seeing much information to support the idea that Russia is doing well in the conflict.
It looks like the Ukrainian outlets are more reliable than the Russian ones, judging by how Ukraine actually is taking back territory and Russians are losing it.
I think that there’s a significant amount of propaganda and distortion so the West keeps funneling equipment to Ukraine. I also think that the equipment Ukraine is getting is doing better than most people have predicted.
Thank you for demonstrating why “tankie” is a thought-terminating cliché. Everything I’ve said is anti-war and sympathetic to the actual victims of this war, the common Ukrainian person and the folks worldwide, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, suffering due to blanket collective punishment sanctions on Russia. You decided I was on the “bad” side and started making things up.
Yeah, unfortunately the .ml in the TLD of the biggest Lemmy instance is not at all coincidental. On the other hand, it seems that a huge proportion of migrant Redditors have a preference for neutral servers with more Libertarian approaches to administration like Beehaw. At least Lemmy itself is FOSS.
Yeah I’m half-anarchist half-demsoc myself and have VERY personal reasons to be against the DPRK so seeing a bunch of privileged white westerners praising the WPK makes me physically ill
The war in general of course. It has been a low-information cheerleading session since the beginning, with a rapid normalization of snufg films and the dehumanization of Russians.
A video of someone getting killed by a shark in Egypt has been making the rounds. It’s horrible and I do not recommend watching it. But it’s incredibly easy to find popular comment chains making jokes or even rejoicing in the death, as the victim was Russian.
Americans did not suddenly acquire basic media literacy skills, let alone embrace media criticism. The same jingoistic fervor used to incite a war of aggression in Iraq is back in a slightly different flavor. This time, the consent that must be manufactured is support for collective punishment against Russia and indefinite military support for Ukraine, hence the dehumanization of “orcs” and the rah-rah gullible acceptance of “we could win!” narratives that depend on positive news about UA actions and negative news about RUS actions.
I oppose dehumanization in all its forms, and despite being Ukrainian I have always been mindful of the humanity in this war.
With that said, the overwhelming majority of the “orc” comments that I’ve seen are directed not towards Russian civilians, but towards Russian combatants. Indeed, on that note Russians have been calling Ukrainians much worse things from day 1 on Russian social media, so if anyone is being dehumanized (and this is coming someone who reads Russian better than Ukrainian) I’d say it’s more so Ukrainians by the Russian side, but I digress.
Name calling aside, I think it’s incredibly dishonest to term the rooting and supporting for Ukraine as “jingoism” when that word describes what has been happening in Russian society for the past year far more appropriately. The American invasion of Iraq was bad and jingoist rhetoric was used to justify it, yes, but the exact same has been happening in Russia to a far more extreme degree during this war.
How can you ignore that while denouncing mere name-calling on social media and passive support in the war from the side of the West?
The “orc” comments began with Ukrainian fascists’ dehumanization of Chechens, which included but was not limited to people in the Russian military. This became popular in Western communities around the same time as the islamophobic pork fat bullet-dipping incident that was endorsed by the UA MoD. It spread to include all Russians, though it is used primarily by the most vehement Russophobes and simply tolerated by your average cheerleading liberal.
Name calling aside, I think it’s incredibly dishonest to term the rooting and supporting for Ukraine as “jingoism” when that word describes what has been happening in Russian society for the past year far more appropriately.
This is a form of absurd binary thinking. I am not required to “both sides” my criticisms in order to be honest, particularly when what I am criticizing is the dominant and uncritically accepted narrative, including what this post - and the vast majority of comments rezoonding to it - is literally an example of.
If it makes you happy, okay cool Russia is also jingoistic. Now answer me this: do you see any Russian nationalist statements in these threads?
The American invasion of Iraq was bad and jingoist rhetoric was used to justify it, yes, but the exact same has been happening in Russia to a far more extreme degree during this war.
I’m describing a repeated phenomenon in the exact same society to people who absolutely don’t think of it that way. American collective consciousness is very poor at learning past lessons and applying them to current events. One reason is that they don’t teach this stuff in school.
Please feel free to make this case to any Russians here that think their nationalism isn’t comparable to bad examples of prior Russian nationalism.
How can you ignore that while denouncing mere name-calling on social media and passive support in the war from the side of the West?
You said you oppose dehumanization, but here you are minimizing to call it mere name-calling.
I think this would be the appropriate time to point out that Russia can stop this war at any time by leaving, whereas Ukraine can only stop it by convincing Russia to leave. They already tried concessions, and that didn’t work.
And the rest of the world can’t stop the war at all, it can only act to prolong it or favor one side or the other.
This seems like a false dichotomy, Ukraine can surrender as well, as unpopular as it would be. Ukraine has been following the lead of the US, even before the invasion. This has lead them away from any negotiations, right to where they are today.
Unpopular? That’s the word you’d use to describe Ukraine surrendering? Just “unpopular”? Putin rejected the (ostensibly) real goal of Ukraine being barred from NATO before the war even started in order to seek out deeper goals and political control. Then he ran the independence referenda in the Russian-army-occupied settlements, that claimed “independence” over the entire regions (a large chunk of which Russia didn’t even control).
Those referenda are currently a part of Putin’s non-negotiables for a peace deal. So then why would you ever characterise it as Ukraine bringing it on themselves? That they’re the ones who aren’t being serious about negotiations? Are they “prolonging” the war for fun? I hope you don’t actually buy this and it’s just a contrarian bit.
You need to realize that I don’t have a side in this fight, neither one is fighting for “the right thing” here. I exclusively stand with the Ukrainians who are caught between geopolitical forces far outside of their control, and now will be suffering for decades to come (if they aren’t dead already being caught in a warzone at all). I’m not some “pro-Russia” dork.
Then he ran the independence referenda in the Russian-army-occupied settlements, that claimed “independence” over the entire regions (a large chunk of which Russia didn’t even control).
It’s interesting the way you phrase your summary in the language offered by Ukraininan/US/Western propaganda, of course Russian propaganda will have their own way of describing the state of the Donbass territories, and it’s important to carefully analyze both sources in order to have a basic idea of what’s going on. I acknowledge that the language/culture barrier is going to prevent me from having any sort of advanced understanding of the political situation there, but maybe if you have close ties to Eastern Ukraine, you could fill me in?
So then why would you ever characterise it as Ukraine bringing it on themselves? That they’re the ones who aren’t being serious about negotiations?
It’s not strictly Ukraine, as they were victims of a United States-backed coup in 2014, but from my point of view, it’s been a bit of a clown show of leadership from them leading up to the conflict. The United States has repeatedly been shown to be an unreliable ally, and for some reason (well, we know the reason) Ukrainian leadership kept deciding to align with them and talk about their aspirations for NATO membership, even though that would be an obvious threat to Russia.
I can understand why many Ukrainians would prefer to have closer ties to the EU and “the west”, however doing that comes with a gigantic risk of pissing off their larger, more powerful neighbor. None of this is “just”, it’s just reality.
Are they “prolonging” the war for fun? I hope you don’t actually buy this and it’s just a contrarian bit.
With the mimimal amount of information I have available to me, I don’t “agree” with Putin’s decision to invade (but, who gives a fuck what some guy on the internet thinks anyway?), at the same time, it was an inevitable result of the ongoing development of history. The real tragedy is the dissolution of the USSR, which was certainly flawed, but has left every member state and many others around the world worse off. Thank you, USA.
NATO support has thrown fuel onto this brutal conflict and is absolutely heinous, in my opinion. A swift end is what I have been hoping for from the beginning, but it only prolongs it further.
They tried surrendering to Russia in 2014 and it only got them 8 years of peace before Russia invaded again. How long do you think it’d take next time, 6 years? 4 years?
You are correct that it’s a false dichotomy. Because what I said wasn’t a dichotomy at all, but your statement that surrendering to a foreign country and ceasing to be a nation, stopping teaching your language, culture and history and instead becoming willing servants to the master Rus race is an equivalent option to Russia leaving an internationally recognized nation alone, no longer killing their citizens and destroying their infrastructure… well that’s a false dichotomy.
It’s an option, yes, but there’s no equivalence. And I expected someone to respond to this effect, and so picked my original words carefully.
Because, you see, while current citizens of Ukraine may still exist as Russians if they accept Russia’s demands, Ukraine itself won’t. That’s the end goal here, and Ukraine realizes that now. Originally they thought Russia just wanted a port, and grudgingly gave them Crimea with the understanding that hostilities would cease. But that wasn’t enough. Russia wanted to run Ukraine as a satellite country just like Belarus. At that point, Ukraine is no longer a sovereign nation.
So no, they can’t just give in to Russia. The options are to fight until Russia leaves, or become Russian. No option exists to be Ukraine and not have Russia leave.
This was tried in North America by the way… Europeans came in and destroyed the language, culture and history of the people living there and took their land as their own. It wasn’t right then, and it isn’t right now. And Ukranians don’t want to have to live through the horrors of residential schools, changing treaties and biological warfare. They’d rather learn from history than repeat it.
It sounds like you have some severe misconceptions about the geopolitical factors sparked the conflict, and Russia’s reasoning for the invasion (reasoning that I don’t agree with, for the record).
That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors, but it is, as to be expected, based on an uncritical acceptance of numbers and stories from untrustworthy sources, sources with an obvious interest in keeping support for the sending weapons and other military support to UA. This post, for example, coming from Pravda UA and just passing along the message from the MoD. No critical look at any of it from liberals, just cheerleading based on vibes.
And also reality. Or does Russia still secretly occupy Kherson and Kharkiv? Did they only pretend to launch a major mobilization of new troops and call up prisoners to fill the ranks?
The day-to-day changes of the control map are less clear, especially now that there’s major operational security around the counteroffensive, but I’m speaking of the overall “pattern of the war” here.
Kherson and Kharkiv are both examples of Russia giving up territory with minimal losses. Kherson was a very famous preemptive withdrawal, with Russia going back on its statements that it would protect the people there. I feel bad for the people there who believed it and tried to build back a functioning society, as they were then subjected to UA’s fascistic extremist militants that have wide berth to determine a very low bar for being a “collaborator”.
Control maps don’t mean much by themselves. A party taking a large strip of mud gets very different media treatment depending on who you read and which party gained it.
While personnel losses can be debated, there is no debating that Russia is losing territory.
The torture centers in Kherson were also there to protect the people there, right? /s https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/04/13/ukraine-russian-torture-center-kherson
How does that contradict anything I said?
You raise really good points, but I’m also not seeing much information to support the idea that Russia is doing well in the conflict. It looks like the Ukrainian outlets are more reliable than the Russian ones, judging by how Ukraine actually is taking back territory and Russians are losing it.
I think that there’s a significant amount of propaganda and distortion so the West keeps funneling equipment to Ukraine. I also think that the equipment Ukraine is getting is doing better than most people have predicted.
“Common narrative” in regards to the war in general or Bakhmut specifically? Because @FaceDeer@lemmy.ml sure as hell is right about the former…
No point replying to them. They’re a pro-war tankie and want Russia to win.
Thank you for demonstrating why “tankie” is a thought-terminating cliché. Everything I’ve said is anti-war and sympathetic to the actual victims of this war, the common Ukrainian person and the folks worldwide, and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, suffering due to blanket collective punishment sanctions on Russia. You decided I was on the “bad” side and started making things up.
No war but the class war.
sure thing rf
Lying is bad, yo
👍🏻
Yeah, unfortunately the
.mlin the TLD of the biggest Lemmy instance is not at all coincidental. On the other hand, it seems that a huge proportion of migrant Redditors have a preference for neutral servers with more Libertarian approaches to administration like Beehaw. At least Lemmy itself is FOSS.They choose it because it is a free domain…
Yeah I’m half-anarchist half-demsoc myself and have VERY personal reasons to be against the DPRK so seeing a bunch of privileged white westerners praising the WPK makes me physically ill
Go on
peak baizuo
The war in general of course. It has been a low-information cheerleading session since the beginning, with a rapid normalization of snufg films and the dehumanization of Russians.
A video of someone getting killed by a shark in Egypt has been making the rounds. It’s horrible and I do not recommend watching it. But it’s incredibly easy to find popular comment chains making jokes or even rejoicing in the death, as the victim was Russian.
Americans did not suddenly acquire basic media literacy skills, let alone embrace media criticism. The same jingoistic fervor used to incite a war of aggression in Iraq is back in a slightly different flavor. This time, the consent that must be manufactured is support for collective punishment against Russia and indefinite military support for Ukraine, hence the dehumanization of “orcs” and the rah-rah gullible acceptance of “we could win!” narratives that depend on positive news about UA actions and negative news about RUS actions.
I oppose dehumanization in all its forms, and despite being Ukrainian I have always been mindful of the humanity in this war.
With that said, the overwhelming majority of the “orc” comments that I’ve seen are directed not towards Russian civilians, but towards Russian combatants. Indeed, on that note Russians have been calling Ukrainians much worse things from day 1 on Russian social media, so if anyone is being dehumanized (and this is coming someone who reads Russian better than Ukrainian) I’d say it’s more so Ukrainians by the Russian side, but I digress.
Name calling aside, I think it’s incredibly dishonest to term the rooting and supporting for Ukraine as “jingoism” when that word describes what has been happening in Russian society for the past year far more appropriately. The American invasion of Iraq was bad and jingoist rhetoric was used to justify it, yes, but the exact same has been happening in Russia to a far more extreme degree during this war.
How can you ignore that while denouncing mere name-calling on social media and passive support in the war from the side of the West?
The “orc” comments began with Ukrainian fascists’ dehumanization of Chechens, which included but was not limited to people in the Russian military. This became popular in Western communities around the same time as the islamophobic pork fat bullet-dipping incident that was endorsed by the UA MoD. It spread to include all Russians, though it is used primarily by the most vehement Russophobes and simply tolerated by your average cheerleading liberal.
This is a form of absurd binary thinking. I am not required to “both sides” my criticisms in order to be honest, particularly when what I am criticizing is the dominant and uncritically accepted narrative, including what this post - and the vast majority of comments rezoonding to it - is literally an example of.
If it makes you happy, okay cool Russia is also jingoistic. Now answer me this: do you see any Russian nationalist statements in these threads?
I’m describing a repeated phenomenon in the exact same society to people who absolutely don’t think of it that way. American collective consciousness is very poor at learning past lessons and applying them to current events. One reason is that they don’t teach this stuff in school.
Please feel free to make this case to any Russians here that think their nationalism isn’t comparable to bad examples of prior Russian nationalism.
You said you oppose dehumanization, but here you are minimizing to call it mere name-calling.
Interesting.
I think this would be the appropriate time to point out that Russia can stop this war at any time by leaving, whereas Ukraine can only stop it by convincing Russia to leave. They already tried concessions, and that didn’t work.
And the rest of the world can’t stop the war at all, it can only act to prolong it or favor one side or the other.
deleted by creator
This seems like a false dichotomy, Ukraine can surrender as well, as unpopular as it would be. Ukraine has been following the lead of the US, even before the invasion. This has lead them away from any negotiations, right to where they are today.
Unpopular? That’s the word you’d use to describe Ukraine surrendering? Just “unpopular”? Putin rejected the (ostensibly) real goal of Ukraine being barred from NATO before the war even started in order to seek out deeper goals and political control. Then he ran the independence referenda in the Russian-army-occupied settlements, that claimed “independence” over the entire regions (a large chunk of which Russia didn’t even control).
Those referenda are currently a part of Putin’s non-negotiables for a peace deal. So then why would you ever characterise it as Ukraine bringing it on themselves? That they’re the ones who aren’t being serious about negotiations? Are they “prolonging” the war for fun? I hope you don’t actually buy this and it’s just a contrarian bit.
You need to realize that I don’t have a side in this fight, neither one is fighting for “the right thing” here. I exclusively stand with the Ukrainians who are caught between geopolitical forces far outside of their control, and now will be suffering for decades to come (if they aren’t dead already being caught in a warzone at all). I’m not some “pro-Russia” dork.
It’s interesting the way you phrase your summary in the language offered by Ukraininan/US/Western propaganda, of course Russian propaganda will have their own way of describing the state of the Donbass territories, and it’s important to carefully analyze both sources in order to have a basic idea of what’s going on. I acknowledge that the language/culture barrier is going to prevent me from having any sort of advanced understanding of the political situation there, but maybe if you have close ties to Eastern Ukraine, you could fill me in?
It’s not strictly Ukraine, as they were victims of a United States-backed coup in 2014, but from my point of view, it’s been a bit of a clown show of leadership from them leading up to the conflict. The United States has repeatedly been shown to be an unreliable ally, and for some reason (well, we know the reason) Ukrainian leadership kept deciding to align with them and talk about their aspirations for NATO membership, even though that would be an obvious threat to Russia.
I can understand why many Ukrainians would prefer to have closer ties to the EU and “the west”, however doing that comes with a gigantic risk of pissing off their larger, more powerful neighbor. None of this is “just”, it’s just reality.
With the mimimal amount of information I have available to me, I don’t “agree” with Putin’s decision to invade (but, who gives a fuck what some guy on the internet thinks anyway?), at the same time, it was an inevitable result of the ongoing development of history. The real tragedy is the dissolution of the USSR, which was certainly flawed, but has left every member state and many others around the world worse off. Thank you, USA.
NATO support has thrown fuel onto this brutal conflict and is absolutely heinous, in my opinion. A swift end is what I have been hoping for from the beginning, but it only prolongs it further.
Anyway, not every person you disagree with is “doing a contrarian bit”. My positions aren’t even that far outside of the mainstream.
I am sad to see Reddit like/dislike downvoting behavior propagated to lemmy.
Did @14specks@lemmy.ml not contribute to the discussion?
They tried surrendering to Russia in 2014 and it only got them 8 years of peace before Russia invaded again. How long do you think it’d take next time, 6 years? 4 years?
You are correct that it’s a false dichotomy. Because what I said wasn’t a dichotomy at all, but your statement that surrendering to a foreign country and ceasing to be a nation, stopping teaching your language, culture and history and instead becoming willing servants to the master Rus race is an equivalent option to Russia leaving an internationally recognized nation alone, no longer killing their citizens and destroying their infrastructure… well that’s a false dichotomy.
It’s an option, yes, but there’s no equivalence. And I expected someone to respond to this effect, and so picked my original words carefully.
Because, you see, while current citizens of Ukraine may still exist as Russians if they accept Russia’s demands, Ukraine itself won’t. That’s the end goal here, and Ukraine realizes that now. Originally they thought Russia just wanted a port, and grudgingly gave them Crimea with the understanding that hostilities would cease. But that wasn’t enough. Russia wanted to run Ukraine as a satellite country just like Belarus. At that point, Ukraine is no longer a sovereign nation.
So no, they can’t just give in to Russia. The options are to fight until Russia leaves, or become Russian. No option exists to be Ukraine and not have Russia leave.
This was tried in North America by the way… Europeans came in and destroyed the language, culture and history of the people living there and took their land as their own. It wasn’t right then, and it isn’t right now. And Ukranians don’t want to have to live through the horrors of residential schools, changing treaties and biological warfare. They’d rather learn from history than repeat it.
It sounds like you have some severe misconceptions about the geopolitical factors sparked the conflict, and Russia’s reasoning for the invasion (reasoning that I don’t agree with, for the record).