Lets say there was no pregnant woman or kids, fact of the matter is still at least 48 people were killed during that day, many of them burned alive/fell to their death. They didn't barricade themselves in there for fun, they were being hunted so most likely fell back within that building to protect themselves.

You're throwing the baby with the bathwater here. Just because some elements may have been up played for propaganda reason doesn't mean the general story is fake. It's obviously not fake, and obviously a bunch of pro-Russians got killed as reported by the Guardian and others.

E. this is like denying October Israel massacre happened because you may be skeptical about the beheaded babies story.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Oct 21 2024 10:58am

You mean when the world's most powerful military finally mobilized fully and began operations on the peninsula? I mean, do you see the US formally declaring war on Russia and landing its own military somewhere in Ukraine and doing this there?

Roger that. Well now finally the American neoliberal establishment is accepting that Ukraine probably won't be marching into Moscow with Putin's head on a pike. And now that Trump's re-election is looking likely, they are predicting that Trump will force mediation, which can only be settled by Ukraine conceding land. At the bare minimum, conceding Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, and rescinding any future Ukrainian claims on those oblasts in the interest of international recognition. Russia would then be asked to give up something, probably some kind of demilitarization, I honestly don't know there. But obviously Russia has more "victory points" in this game of war and stands to be the benefactor of the mediation. That's not Trump's fault, but the neoliberal establishment is absolutely livid at the idea of Ukraine having to concede territory.

To me, why should I give a flying fuck about a border dispute like this? (This is a hypothetical, because I just don't) yet Democrats in America are so convinced that Donbass and Crimea are theirs to give away, that they'd sacrifice policy decisions that might benefit them in order to support continued war.

There were plenty of other, easily verifiable atrocities on Oct 7, so the general take-away didn't hinge on beheaded babies. Not least because Hamas was recording, filming and publicly boasting about its various atrocities.

With Ukraine in 2014-2022, the Russian narrative that Ukrainian activists are a bunch of cruel and bloodthirsty maniacs terrorizing the pro-Russian population is absolutely pivotal to their official justification for the war. And there aren't many other verifiable pieces of evidence to support this particular framing. Yes, there were clashes between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces/activists/militias in Odessa and the Donbass, yes, there were typical, run of the mill war crimes committed against each other as they struggled for territory and control. But the burning of that building in Odessa with civilians inside is pretty much the only verified case of explicitly "cruel and unusual" behavior by the Ukrainian side, and it stands in a sea of ridiculous and glaring Russian propaganda. Therefore, it was imho rational that the Western public did not buy into this Russian narrative.

Whatever the original motivations of the West were in this war, by now, it's clearly no longer about territory per se. Now, it's about upholding the America-led, "rules-based" international order in which countries are not allowed to invade or annex their neighbors with military force. The fear is that if Russia is perceived in the rest of the world to have gotten a positive outcome from invading with ground troops, the approach will catch on and be copied by others, leading to a destabilization of the world and an increase of landgrabs and "imperialist" aggression by the major powers against their smaller neighbors.

This stance is exemplified by German Chancellor Scholz, who has consistently and deliberately insisted that "Ukraine may not lose", rather than "Ukraine must win". The truth is that the West was always more committed to Russian failure than Ukrainian victory.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 21 2024 01:24pm

Excellent post.

These aren't 'clashes' this is extermination of political dissidents/opponents and that's why the official government gave no shit about investigating it or bringing people to justice back then, as the Guardian highlights. Kristallnacht was what 91 deaths? and it is solidified in history and a well known abhorrent event. This was an extermination of Russian loyalists by Right Sector nationalists/nazis in one specific city, 48 people, and no one in the west gives a fuck, instead it's minimized and discounted as Russian narrative, with a complete counter-narrative run that this war was completely unprovoked which was just a peaceful democratic uprising.

'Rule based order' narrative tends to breakdown when you gloss over this type of stuff.

Is there any evidence that pro-Ukrainian militias were the primary aggressor during the skirmishes in the Donbass; that they were trying to bring back villages and towns into the Ukrainian fold more so than pro-Russian separatists tried to bring villages and towns into the Russian fold? Is there any evidence that the pro-Ukrainian militias were committing more atrocities and war crimes than the other way round?

In the absence of evidence for a larger trend, one case of excessive violence from the pro-Ukrainian side isn't sufficient to support the kind of narrative Russia wants to build.




The comparison to the Kristallnacht is short-sighted. First, because the Kristallnacht was not an isolated incident, it was the climax of a whole week of anti-Jewish pogroms. Second, because it was explicitly state-sanctioned and intended to advance the "Aryanization" of the German economy by disowning and expelling the Jews and nationalizing their property, which had become necessary to fund the rearmament of the Wehrmacht. Third, because it was preceded by a long series of state-sanctioned legal discrimination of Jews and followed up by the beginning of their deportation to concentration camps.

The Kristallnacht was the culmination of systemic discrimination and violence and part of a larger-scale strategy, the burnt down building in Odessa was not. Odessa was an excess by base-level activists which their superiors covered up because it inconveniently fed into the Russian propaganda.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Oct 21 2024 04:58pm

Yep I would agree that it's about saving face. Which begs me to press US Democrats on why they feel that their saving face is worth uselessly throwing tens of thousands of more bodies into the already miles deep ocean of blood. In truth, I think it's more about sticking it to Trump and hicks than anyone having a modicum of geopolitical knowledge. Most of them didn't know Ukraine existed before this war started.