MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]

Archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20230827092741/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-counteroffensive.html

Ukrainian Commander Urges More Defenses in the Northeast

In an apparent break with Pentagon advice, Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top general in the east, called for “all measures” to defend an area where Russia was threatening to take more territory.

As Kyiv and Washington debate where Ukraine should commit troops along the war’s front line, Ukraine’s top general in the east has called for more reinforcements in a patch of territory where Russia is threatening to make additional gains.

Russian forces have managed to push forward around the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk in recent weeks as Kyiv’s forces have made slow headway in their continuing counteroffensive in the south and the east. Russia’s gains, while not significant, have led Ukrainian forces to dedicate some troops to defend parts of the sprawling front line, which stretches for several hundred miles, despite their need elsewhere.

“Enemy units continue to inflict damage with artillery, mortars and aircraft,” Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s eastern forces, said on the Telegram messaging app on Friday. “Under such conditions, we must promptly take all measures to strengthen our defenses on the threatened lines and advance where possible.”

The debate over Ukraine’s strategy has spilled into public view in recent days amid a flurry of news media reports, including from The New York Times, in which U.S. officials have blamed Ukraine’s slow progress in large part on its strategy.

Under the Pentagon’s reasoning, Kyiv should have massed an outsize number of forces on one portion of the front line to attempt a breakthrough. Ukrainian commanders have instead tried to divide troops and firepower in a manner that they consider to be as fair and as equal as possible between the east and south.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine responded bluntly to the American criticism this past week, saying that shifting Ukrainian forces away from places like Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, is what Russia is trying to accomplish.

“We will not give up Kharkiv, Donbas, Pavlohrad or Dnipro. And that’s that,” he said during a news conference on Wednesday according to the Ukrainian Pravda news outlet. “And let all the analysts in the world not even count on it.”

General Syrsky’s remarks were another reminder that despite the public focus on the counteroffensive in the south, other parts of the front line remain volatile.

“The enemy is now regrouping its forces and means, while also transferring the newly formed brigades and divisions from the territory of Russia,” General Syrsky said. “Russia’s key objective is to increase the level of combat potential and resume active offensive actions.” His claims about the arrival of new units could not be independently confirmed.

ave called for the evacuation of Kupiansk as Russian forces edge closer and shelling continues far behind the front lines. On Saturday, two civilians were killed in shelling in a small village just east of the city, according to local officials.

Ukraine took the city back from Russian control last September after it had been under occupation since the war’s early months, and losing it again would be a major blow. It appears unlikely, however, that Russian forces would try to retake the city, since that would put them in the position they faced before they were forced to retreat from Kherson last year, holding a city with a river at its back and limited supply lines.

Russian forces could instead try to push to the Oskil River, which runs north and south, and then use the waterway as a natural barrier against further Ukrainian attacks.

“Kupiansk will not be occupied anymore under any circumstances,” Andrii Besedin, the head of the Kupiansk city military administration, said on Telegram.

The crisis is over

That’s the thing. It isn’t.

Ukraine should perform under the flag of Bandera

Democracy is when The People Decide if trans people should exist but the tax rate policy is written by the rich

You think democracy is a terrible idea?

DID THE SLAVES VOTE IN THOSE ELECTIONS?

If Texas today had a vote to secede then they’d have absolutely every right to secede since the current electoral laws allow for the will of the people to be expressed.

The fact you didn’t stop to think about the slaves is because you’re a fucking cracker.

It’s not well covered in English language history which basically just skips over the fact poland was a viciously fascist state in the 1930s but it does get covered by Timothy Snyder, although he has a pretty firmly anti-Russian slant through his work.

You can see a lot of the works that cover it are in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_minority_in_Poland

60-70 hangings a day to fight “guerrillas”, floggings and torture to control the population, the Belorussians not having access to the education system, and the use of concentration camps to hold political activists, and trade unionists. Language rights were suppressed and the local population were forcibly “Polonized” / assimilated while also being held in an oppressed state as a cheap labor force for Polish settlers who were given the land as an agricultural fiefdom no different in any sense from the lebensraum concept - especially during the Polish fascist period of the mid to late 1930s.

Today the western part of Belorussia is still less industrialized than the east and the divide clearly falls along the line of polish occupation and colonial-settlement.

Ironically it was the atrocious treatment of the Belorussian minority that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland needed to be “rescued” - although the German minority were actually not treated badly.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/polands-president-says-america-and-poland-must-stop-russian-imperialism/

I can’t find the link I originally read but I found the quote here

”It is very simple,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told me last week. “Right now, Russian imperialism can be stopped cheaply, because American soldiers are not dying.” But if we don’t put a halt to Russian aggression now, “there will be a very high price to be paid.”

You’re really going to argue the polinization campaign in Belorussia and Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s was a good thing? A moral gray area?

Jesus fucking Christ.

Hopefully you’re a teenager who doesn’t know what you’re talking about because if you do then you need to eat a brick if you’re really going to take that line, and there are plenty of people alive in both belorussia and Ukraine today who would feed it to you if they heard you saying that including the Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi gangs you are here supporting.

One of the more brutal events of the 20th century that is only overlooked due to the fact that Poland soon suffered worse evils than those Poland inflicted on the Ukrainians and Belorussians at the hands of the Nazis - until the Soviets kicked the Nazis out.

Edit: actually given your world view includes supporting the campaign of Ukrainization and the violent assimilationist policies directed at the ethnic minorities in Ukraine, you have form here. It seems you’re actually very comfortable with violence being used against ethnic minorities given how you’re here supporting multiple instances of it.

But honestly, and I am truly being straight with you here, I think the more likely truth is you’re a bit of a dumbass who doesn’t know your history and you don’t actually realize what you’re supporting here but your ego won’t let you let go.

You mean the areas populated by Belorussians and Ukrainians that was conquered by Poland from Russia in the war of 1922 when Poland took advantage of the civil war to seize a big chunk of Belorussian and ukraine and taken back by Russia when the polish state collapsed following the Nazi invasion of Poland?

None of the Russian parts of the MR pact were populated by mostly polish people, with the exception of Lviv which is still part of Ukraine today.

It’s a selective reading of history to call Belorussians and Ukrainians the rightful property of Poland especially in light of the brutal Polonization campaign they suffered, being reduced to serfdom by Polish invaders.

As it happens I’d actually support restoring that part to Poland, Lviv, and also the Hungarian bit of Ukraine to Hungary since both of those ethnic minorities, along with the ethnic Greek minority, have all been suffering a lot under the rule of the Ukrainian nationalists and have also faced restrictions on their internal self determination such as language rights being suppressed or in the case of the Greek minority also religious persecution.

You mean when the USSR pushed the Nazis out of Poland and liberated Auswitch is that the event you’re talking about?

Im glad you acknowledge that Ukraine and the west does not have a moral leg to stand on but I hope you eventually take the next step and recognize that means the hundreds of thousands of dead and permanently injured Ukrainians and Russians makes this a moral travesty and a crime against humanity.

Recognizing the moral right lies with the separatists but choosing to support the use of military force against them because “fuck Russia” makes you the bad guy.

You: let’s talk about something else because I’m feeling really fucking stupid right now

I guess you’re saying you fully support Putin’s crackdown on Grozny then right?

Get your deflecting moronic ass out of here and have a think about what you are actually supporting right now and today in Ukraine.

Because you’re not supporting democracy and freedom. Not at all.

unless their right of internal self determination is compromised

Oh wait what’s that?

Lmao that’s what happened after the Ukrainian nationalists starting arming Nazi militias and banned their political parties you clown.

Banning their political parties and denying them the right to use their own language or practice their own religion or have their own political representation is called denying them their right to internal self determination.

The one where they voted to secede and the multiple elections over the past decade where they voted for political parties that were then banned by the Ukrainian government which is now also refusing to hold constitutionally mandated elections for fear of how they’d vote again.

You didn’t answer my question:

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine?

Why does “they voted for it repeatedly for a decade” not compute for you?

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine? Because they don’t, not after a decade of being brutalized by far right militias and seeing their cities shelled by the Ukrainian military and being denied the right to speak their language or practice their religion.

When you talk about “Russian backed separatists” you realize those separatists live there don’t you? You know what the word separatist means right?

Ukraine is using military force to deny them their right to self determination and the only reason you want to call the referendum illegitimate is because the people who live there chose the wrong answer.

You don’t value their views at all. They don’t matter to you. Which makes your position immoral and bloodthirsty.

“That referendum and those elections don’t count because the USA said no” truly the voice of democracy and freedom.

I guess it was Putin that forced Zelenskyy to ban the political opposition? Because the damn Putin bots kept voting wrong.

So the argument is that Ukraine never stood a chance in this war and the politicians in the west always knew this but they’ve been pushing the narrative that “Ukraine can still win” because it serves their purposes to send Ukrainians to die in the theory that this will weaken Russia.

The concept is known as a “bleeding sore”, going back to the Napoleonic wars when Britain used the same strategy in Spain against Napoleon. It doesn’t matter that Ukraine can’t win because the wests purpose is served by the conflict itself more than the resolution.

Note how the mask often slips and pro-war advocates talk about how “cost effective” this war is for the west because it’s Ukrainians dying and not Americans. The Polish President said this just yesterday. Ghoulish.

The west only drips in weapons, enough to keep Ukraine in the fight but laughably inadequate to win, or even reach the “first line” of Russian defensive works. The purpose of the west is served by keeping the conflict open because it’s Ukrainians and Russians dying.

I can give you a list of (deservedly or not) respected western geopolitical thinkers who were pointing out the only outcome of this war is a lot of dead Ukrainians going back to 2014. The western leaders knew this all along and they cynically decided to push for conflict and the abandonment of the Minsk II peace protocols because they saw an opportunity to get Russia bogged down in an Afghanistan-style strength-sapping conflict.

The shift in the narrative is that instead of simply beating their chests with slava Ukraine war chants, the absolute failure of the counteroffensive makes it obvious that Ukraine can’t win, and once that is acknowledged then it becomes morally untenable to argue Ukrainians should continue dying to try to force the culturally Russian regions to remain part of Ukraine.

The key issue for me is the right of a people to self determination.

The people who live in the eastern parts of Ukraine are overwhelming Russian speaking and identify as ethnically Russian. They voted three times in various ways for some form of preserving their cultural rights, only to have their expression of Democratic will met with violent militias, shelling, and other violence, and then finally voted once again to secede from Ukraine, largely motivated by the extreme hostility from right wing Ukrainian nationalists who were banning the use of Russian, imposing assimilationist education policies, banning political parties that represented the people there, and even banning the free exercise of religion if that religious practice looked to the Russian Orthodox Church for leadership.

The principle of the self determination of a people to choose their own government demands respect and Ukraine has no right to impose their will on a population that doesn’t want it.

You should look at what the people who actually live there, in the east not just those in Kyiv, have been saying for a decade. They don’t want to be part of Ukraine anymore and it’s because of the extreme violence Ukraine has inflicted upon them since 2014.

Wait until right sector start talking about how they were stabbed in the back by western liberals