• rocket_dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    22 hours ago

    Funny wojak faces but to clear up an apparent misconception here, Ukrainian weren’t fighting for abstract concepts like “freedom” and Democracy", they were fighting to stop Russian soldiers from killing their families, raping their children, and burning their homes to the ground.

    I hope this helps!

    • johny@feddit.org
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      13 hours ago

      Ukrainians were/are still fighting to defend themselves from an illegal invasion. But America sees and has always seen Ukraine as a proxy to weaken a geo-strategic rival. NATO was not realistically on the table as long as the conflict in the Donbas was ongoing (it would have immediately triggered art.5) to keep promising NATO instead of working on a more realistic path to peace has probably caused the death of 100000s of Ukrainians. And just as with many other imperial proxies in history, the proxy is left to deal with the fallout while the empire retreats to the metropol and prepares for the next conflict.

    • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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      22 hours ago

      I think you’ll find they were fighting other Ukrainians (if you can call the carpet bombing of civilians “fighting”) to maintain the US financed Poroshenko in power long before Russia went in, about eight years in fact.

        • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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          16 hours ago

          It actually started on February 2014 and then abruptly stopped around May for 8 years

      • Skua@kbin.earth
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        22 hours ago

        long before Russia went in

        There’s a problem with this, because Russia has had troops in Ukraine since early 2014, before Poroshenko’s government

        • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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          1 hour ago

          The Sbovoda interim was also financed by the USA, with Victoria Nuland discussing on a leaked call who to name after they deposed Yanukovich.

          Russia had troops in Crimea as requested by the Crimean government, which also seceded via referendum after said coup, as is its right under Ukrainian law. That proved to be the right move given that they didn’t have the astronomical number of casualties that Donbas had, with over 14 thousand dead before 2022, most of them civilians, and a huge number of injured civilians and destroyed infrastructure as per the Donbas documentary.

          • Skua@kbin.earth
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            21 hours ago

            If America’s goal was to put Svoboda in power, they didn’t do a very good job of keeping them there, did they?

            I have read the Nuland transcript. She’s talking about the existing leader of the opposition. Of course she said Yatsenyuk was the guy, he was the goddamn leader of the opposition. He was the one guy avalable with the best democratic mandate at the last election. Yanukovych even offered to make him prime minister at one point.

            Russia put troops into Crimea before the referendum, and the referendum was run by the occupying army. Do you normally trust occupying armies to run referendums about whether or not they should get to keep the land they’re occupying?

            Perhaps if Russia was so concerned about casualties in the Donbas, it should not have invaded and caused hundreds of thousands more casualties.

            • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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              16 hours ago

              Lmao so the US did finance them, did appoint their best liked interim, did have congresspeople on the ground supporting the coup, did send in the money to arm the Nazis but just… quietly let democracy take its course once they spent all that time and money? America doesn’t give a fuck if Sbovoda remains as long as the shock therapy has happened already, by then they’ll take anyone who’ll toe the line.

              I want to give y’all the benefit of the doubt and conclude that you think we’re stupid but sometimes I think there’s a more obvious answer.

              • RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works
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                11 hours ago

                You are backing the Russian invasion of Ukraine which they did to steal minerals and you are criticizing the US doing the same now that POTUS is a Russian asset?

              • Skua@kbin.earth
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                21 hours ago

                Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU. The US didn’t need to do a damn thing to influence that, a long history of Russian imperialism did it all for them

                America spent fuck all on Ukraine in the entire history of its independence up until Euromaidan (pg 167). They simply did not spend “all that money”, because a single digit millions of dollars a year is a rounding error in the US budget. American spending on Ukraine in 2013 was 0.00024% of the federal budget.

                • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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                  14 hours ago

                  America spent fuck all on Ukraine in the entire history of its independence up until Euromaidan

                  Oh fr? Let’s ask as-US-backed-as-US-backed-gets Kyiv Independent then: https://kyivindependent.com/how-us-foreign-aid-transformed-ukraine-through-the-years/

                  With the signing of a bilateral agreement between Ukraine and USAID in 1992, the agency started working alongside the Ukrainian government to build a competitive market economy, implement crucial social reforms […] In over 30 years of working in Ukraine, USAID has played a key role in transforming numerous sectors […] Dmytro Boyarchuk, the executive director of the Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE Ukraine), said that Ukraine would not have been able to implement vital reforms without the support of international donors like USAID.

                  Obfuscate it as much as you want, pro-western Ukrainians themselves are telling everyone how maintaining a pro-western system depends on US funds.

                  The US didn’t need to do a damn thing

                  Nice deflection but the fact is that it did, often and extensively. If the US didn’t need to spend that money, then you shouldn’t worry, pretty soon they might not be. Let’s see how friendly that world is to the US and their chickenshit vassals in the UK et al, I yearn to see it. Most of all I yearn that y’all see it.

                • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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                  20 hours ago

                  If Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU, then why did they democratically elect Yanukovych, which the US subsequently couped in coordination with the Banderites?

                  • Skua@kbin.earth
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                    20 hours ago

                    Why did they vote in the guy that said “For Ukraine, association with the European Union must become an important stimulus for forming a modern European state,” and that he was going to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement? That does not seem at all contradictory to me. His sudden U-turn on that was what got the Ukrainian people so pissed at him

                • Grapho@lemmy.mlOP
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                  15 hours ago

                  American spending on Ukraine in 2013

                  Good thing we’re talking about the money it spent on the coup and the aftermath, then.

                  So the fact that America funded through USAID 9 out of every 10 media outlets means they didn’t spend “anything” in Ukraine because… It spends way more fucking money than that everywhere else too?

                  Also, implying the US only spends the money in a country via direct government cash injection lmao. Most of the money the US spends is channelled through NGOs for propaganda and covert action. Why the fuck would they ever just give money away to a government before it’s thoroughly vassalized. What’s more: there’s ample evidence that US and UK propaganda specialists were employed by Subversive elements within Ukraine as well as extensive funding of NGOs and collaboration with psyop specialists.

                  In future resumes, they cited the Ukraine coup as well as the selling of the civil war as a “war against russian separatists” as an example of a successful psychological operation.

                  • Skua@kbin.earth
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                    18 hours ago

                    This is a consequence of the advertising market in Ukraine dropping in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion

                    Congratulations on citing an article about what happened in 2022 to attempt to disprove my claim about what happened before 2014. Please learn to read dates. This is the third time in this thread that you have either gotten them completely wrong or actively misrepresented them.

        • AlmightyTritan@beehaw.org
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          6 hours ago

          Imma be honest with you chief the amount of times I come here for funny leftist memes and then see a bunch of pro imperialistic takes or starting school yard “nuh uh your crimes are worse then my crimes” is so draining.

          I get that when you gather a bunch of people under one banner of a nuanced concept you are gonna get a range of people from mild mannered to fanatical about it.

          Like this must be why people throw around “othering” loaded terms like tankie and liberal in here.

          This is why I wish it was just high level concept lefty memes, cause you’ll never get satisfying low level discussion online, just high level screeching and slap fights. So now I just try to not engage, just look for memes to talk to people IRL about instead.