I would assume it has to do with the fact that women are often care-givers for victims of land mines after they blow their limbs off. After wars, men are typically dead or wounded so women have to do more physical labor, also making them vounerable to land mines. There has been quite a bit of writing about this in the last few years (for instance in countries like Colombia) and more recently Yemen.

https://reliefweb.int/report/colombia/colombia-women-play-vital-role-mine-clearance

https://www.the-monitor.org/en-gb/reports/2022/colombia/impact.aspx

https://www.oecd.org/social/gender-development/1896552.pdf

https://www.jmu.edu/news/cisr/2023/02/271/09-271-valencia.shtml

TLDR; Women in certain countries get no training or the same training as men, and eventhough they have to deal with land mine related problems (particularly after wars) they usually aren't part of de-mining efforts. The Canadian incentive to Ukraine would mean that more mines would be cleared because more people would be incentivized to clear mines and not just take care of the vegetable victims of said land mines. I personally don't care if an old babushka, a trans man from Poland or Zelensky himself clears my landmines, as long as i don't have to step on them and potentially become a burden for the rest of my life.

5th Abrams destroyed in a direct tank duel with presumably T-72

Thanks. This is very good nuance and contribution. I see your point and agree with it.

Demining will be a problem for post-war Ukraine and will claim many innocent lives.

For sure, regardless of how the war ends there will be casualties where innocent people will be the majority of victims. Land mines are no fucking joke

I hope Russia invades us and puts an end to this insanity.

It doesn't matter how anyone tries to spin it. They can try to cast some story of who fired the first shots, who felt they were justified in the use of violence. Its entirely irrelevant to the legitimacy of a democracy. The government was lawfully and democratically elected and had a responsible to maintain order by crushing the riots with force. The insurrectionists had no legitimate claim to overthrow a democracy and disenfranchise the majority of the country. They were a radicalized minority that seized power by force. Full stop.

Again, and I have to stress this, this is the geopolitical sticking point to which there is no excuse, no rationalization to be made. Ukraine had a legitimate and internationally recognized democracy, one that actually represented the will of the people. Those Banderites and western-aligned rabble overthrow that government with a violent siege of the capitol, sundered the country, started the civil war and forced action out of Russia to defend its interests both longterm as we see now, and the acute Crimean crisis. Its not a question of responsibility, that question is already answered. If the rioters felt unfairly persecuted by the state, their lawful recourse was to petition their government for redress, not hold a coup d'etat. If they felt betrayed when Yanukovych abandoned the EU association agreement, their lawful remedy was to campaign against him in the next election and try to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Ukrainians. Instead a bunch of Nazis with guns were handing out signed copies of Mein Kampf at their revolution.

I don't need to know the exacts of what proportion of the mob were foreign agitators or Nazis, whether the CIA preplanned it, whether the regime overreacted or underreacted. Its all irrelevant to the main takeaway, which is that a radical minority overthrew a legitimate democracy. Which stands in stark contrast to revolutions where a dictatorship faced off against pro-democracy revolutionaries, or revolutions in banana republics with no actual elections.




Because it wasn't 2004 anymore. By 2010 the country held elections that international observers from both east and west recognized as legitimate. Yanukovych won fairly, and the international community on all sides agreed that Ukraine was a stable democracy before a bunch of sinister neonazis came along. Its pure hypocrisy by America to claim now that Yanukovych was somehow illegitimate and his elections rigged when we had observers who made formal reports that the elections were true and accurate representation of the will of the people.
It was the assessment of both east and west that Ukraine had a legitimate democracy. The EU reports put it as;



'Peaceful and constructive'
If you don't get the result you want at the ballot box, use the ammo box

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 6 2024 05:42am

Isn't this exactly what Yanukovych did after he became a wildly unpopular politician? Couldn't handle the mass protests and as such sent out state sponsored death brigades. Don't get me wrong, Kuchma wasn't better and nobody is implying Yanukovych didn't win in 2010, but both of them took great effort to control things like the media and media infrastructure to essentially stay in power. When Black XistenZ says the country has had corruption issues, that goes for all politicians who have had significant power in the country. There is a reason OSCE observers are needed. The difference between people like Kuchma and Yanukovych is that nobody died in the Orange Revolution, during the 2014 protests hundreds were killed by Yanukovych death brigades. These are uncontested figures.

Armed revolutionaries came to overthrow a government and some of them were killed by that government? The claims are certainly contested, Russia media claims Azov fired both on the crowd and the state actors to push their own reichstag moment, the west claims it was peaceful dovelike protesters being massacred by evil death squads. Again its decidedly irrelevant. It was an armed revolution and the government had a responsibility to put it down by force. The nitty gritty of whether the government uses appropriate force isn't as relevant as whether they use successful force, because if they fail, democracy is ended. Those who came to power in the coup d'etat weren't trying to hold elections and allow the majority of Ukrainians to pick their own representation. They overthrew that democracy and banned the majority party, exiled or arrested its members and gave themselves total authority as tyrants are wont to do, holding sham votes only in the regions that supported them while laying claim to the areas they disenfranchised.

That's where the January 6th parallel comes to play. The government had a responsibility to hold back the mob, and to protect the mob from itself. They failed in both counts, using lethal force when it was unjustifiable, failing to use crowd control when it was necessary. And one dumb woman being murdered crawling through a window doesn't somehow delegitimize the entire US government and empower a revolutionary regime to disenfranchise the public and put a dictator in power.

You don't send women to danger zones. That's a braindead logic from stone age times. The reason is simple, endangering women = endangering the future of your society/tribe. Some ancient people had to because there wasn't enough manpower (men power), those civilizations vanished.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Mar 6 2024 06:21am

The figure of hundreds of dead civilians isn't contested. If you want to contest them you would have to do some serious work, as there are death certificates and video of civilians being brutalized. Nobody is talking about armed revolutionaries, but about civilians at Euromaidan (who gradually got more violent as police and state supression grew).

" the west claims it was peaceful dovelike protesters being massacred by evil death squads" - Nope, more or less everyone agrees that the protestors got increasingly more violent. This is also uncontested fact. If you want several western media articles and serious university scholarship on the subject who all agree that there was a degree of violence I would pe happy to provide them.

"It was an armed revolution and the government had a responsibility to put it down by force." - This is so interesting to me, first of all because you absolutely can not prove that the violence was proportionate. Nobody can, because the protests got more violent over time as police supression grew. In Europe, article 11 protects you and gives you the right to protest. It's a shame that Yanukovych disagreed with the European Convention of Human Rights and tried to stay in power by being a strongman, but that was his choice and it didn't work out.

"The nitty gritty of whether the government uses appropriate force isn't as relevant as whether they use successful force, because if they fail, democracy is ended" - This assumes that you can define what is "correct" and "incorrect" democracy and that the state ultimately decides what democracy is. In my country, killing hundreds who exercise their right to protest isn't considered democracy. As much as i despise the American Right, i wouldnt have wanted the National Guard to execute every single person who was at January 6th (who in your opinion definitely should have been put down, as they were armed with far more dangerous weapons than the Maidan Defense Force). It wouldn't be democratic (to me, or to most people).

"holding sham votes only in the regions that supported them while laying claim to the areas they disenfranchised." - Are you talking about Russia? Sham elections and polls in annexed regions with no observers, laying claim to territories because of alternative history claims where they are wildly unpopular? I don't know man, doesn't sound much better to me.