While there are reports of people being sold into military slavery or fooled to sign the contract, majority are there voluntarily - whether following an ideology, desire to avoid prison or simply money.

As sad as it is that people have to make those choices, they still made them and given how pootin has weaponised political apathy, they also don’t care about their actions until they meet a drone.

Nah, my original message was a quick braindump full of shortcuts. I’m glad you gave me the opportunity to formulate it orderly.

Bro. I have Ukrainian roots and I’m very confused about the Ukrainian stuff :)

All I know about Finland is that Soviets attacked it and, essentially, lost, so I guess Finland didn’t have much choice - it was the known evil of the Stalin and the who-knows-what with the Germans that weren’t even their neighbours.

I’m sure there were actual Nazis both in Finland and Ukraine, but I don’t see how Finland could have stayed independent and neutral in that situation.

But again, I know way too little about those parts.

so first things first. pogroms and volyn were terrible and seems like Ukraine is working through that.

the point i’m making here is that the binary “worked with nazis” leads nowhere, and we have to bring things into the historical perspective.

today we have the luxury of retrospective and know what fascism is and its dangers. which, ironically, doesn’t seem to stop us from sliding into it.

things were very different and slightly less binary in 1941. after all, the German American Bund (aka First US Nazi party) was dismantled only in December 1941. to make matters worse, germany, france and poland were all researching on the “re-settling” of jews to madagascar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

what makes a difference for me is that while the main nazis (germans, italians, japanese and soviets) were all about “we are better, let’s enslave the neighbor monkeys”, ukrainian nationalists in that time were about fighting against occupation. polish, soviet, nazi and then again soviet. in that order.

they lost, and as usual with history, it’s written by the winners but the fact that (the modern nazi) ruzzia appears to have inherited fear of bandera from the (fairly nazi) soviet union, tells me that it’s worth looking at him not only from the ruzzian perspective.

I’m afraid you are misinformed. Stalin and Hitler were Nazi mass murderers and best buddies. Bandera, while not an angel, was imprisoned by Hitler and murdered by Stalin.

“Bandera was a nazi” was soviet and now ruzzian line, this statement is neither true nor false, but repeating it helps spreading ruzzian propaganda.

This is why the military came up with the idea of force multiplication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication

In short, it’s something you can give a soldier or a weapon so that they become more effective. A gun in the knife fight is one example.

Ruzzian war doctrine, if I understand it correctly, was “shoot artillery until the area is flat, advance with meat”. So artillery is their force multiplier and matching and countering that is essential.

Add to that better training, cross-unit communication and cohesion, better weapons and you don’t need to match soldier per soldier. Especially if you are in defence - the attacking side usually takes greater losses.

So while staffing is a major issue for Ukraine, luckily it doesn’t automatically translate into their loss.

Never been to Canada. Must be rubbing off :)

Ah, I see, you’re referring to those “good russians” some people keep mentioning.

Guys, I really enjoyed your conversation. Deep, insightful and respectful. Given a chance, I’ll buy you a beer.

Thank you for this

I personally prefer an analogy of a surgeon. Cutting people with sharp objects is bad, but when it’s for the benefit of a patient, it is a lesser damage and thus acceptable. Utilitarianism, if you like.

Those dead Russians came with an intention of killing as many Ukrainians as possible to achieve the aim of their leader. Killing them is a shame, but it’s the last available measure to reduce the number of people killed.

So to your question, if wishing to stop the killings makes one Ukrainian, then yes, everybody here is one. I thought just humans, but sure.

There’s a difference between getting excited over seeing a dead body and feeling hope that Ukraine is not losing when seeing invaders stopped.

Yes, they are humans, but they are humans that took the weapons and came to another country with the intent of killing people.

It’s just business https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-black-widows-scam-soldiers-death-benefits/33390012.html

They are humans and must be seen as such. The crazy part is that it’s humans like you and me that decide to do terrible things.

After ww2 there was a question whether fascism is something specific to Germans, they have an unusual number of psychopaths, etc.

And the conclusion was that it’s just normal people doing their everyday work. Be it accounting or operating a gas chamber.

Slip into fascism is gradual and no country is immune from that.

My bad. The 1:1.3 is the KIA:WIA ratio. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/61678

Also they’re happy to declare MIA because that let’s them skip a payment to the widow.

The UN is a do-nothing by design. The only way it can influence something is by creating peer pressure, which, quite obviously, has little effect on big bullies with veto rights.

And ironically, demanding a UN-governance is actually several steps down from the maximalist demands of pootler - they started with the idea of complete elimination of the Ukrainian state, went into demanding territory that they will take decades and millions of lives to occupy, now to a neutral, not even puppet government.

They’re winning so hard.

I read they’re now at 1:1.3 for KIA:MIA and not because of lacking healthcare, but they don’t bother trying to evacuate the wounded.

Now I’m really curious about what happened. Did the ruzzians try to break the cauldron or out of?

If anything, ruZZia already lost and Ukraine already won this war simply because ruZZia could not (and will not. Yes Ukrainians are tired, but their army and the support from EU is much better that at the beginning, while ruZZian situation is the exact opposite) achieve any of its goals from 3 years ago.

So the question is not whether there’s a win scenario for Ukraine, but how bad ruZZia will lose.

it’s fascinating that from the headline it’s absolutely unclear whether the protests are even related to the 16 kills. if i were glancing (and wasn’t aware of the situation), i would’ve thought that 16 were killed as Israeli finally listened to the protesters or something.

“protesters in Israel” (must be some foreigners) vs “Israeli strike”.

while they actually demand a ceasefire that will allow for release of hostages, and their government does everything to avoid that ceasefire. oh, and then there’s “strike kills 16” leaving it ambiguous whether military or war crimes.

also ceasefire implies both sides are fighting. from what i can tell Hamas pretty much stopped fighting almost two years ago.

“Israeli protesters demand their military to stop attacking Gaza, as Israeli army kills 16 civilians and journalists in an attack on a hospital in Gaza in another apparent war crime”.

how about now?