“Russians in Ukraine were killing Ukrainians even before Putin invaded” may not be the slam dunk you seem to think it is 
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Yes. the period between 2014 and 2022 saw combat and the shelling of cities in the Donbas. Fighting that causes ~25,000 civilian casualties and ~1.5 million refugees is properly classified as a war.
Wikipedia has a different word for that.
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So the “special military operation” is properly classified as a war, just as everyone outside Russia knows? I’m glad that’s cleared up.
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You act as if the violent separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas weren’t funded by Putin to begin with. Next you’ll be telling us that the 2014 referendum in Crimea wasn’t rigged and that the Russian soldiers/“little green men” present there at the time were “on vacation”.
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I’m going to assume good faith here. The existence of an “ethnic enclave” and a group of separatists doesn’t grant Russia the right to mount an invasion. That was a lesson I thought we had learned in the late 1930s.
More importantly, that insurrection was prompted and funded by Putin and Russia and a means of destabilizing Ukraine and stealing territory. To call this a “civil war” is to misunderstand that history.
ETA:
And failed to learn it here, yes.
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Where have I heard that one before?
The capitalist South Vietnam was losing that war, which is why the US army invaded.
The Communist North Korea was losing that war, which is why the Chinese People’s Army invaded.
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Are you familiar with the term “begging the question?” Because it is what you are doing here when it comes to the “truth.”
Even if you are not familiar with the term, I do hope that you will see the irony in these two statements, coming just a few lines away from each other.
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That’s not what you’re doing. Your parroting of Russian disinformation has been thoroughly debunked by several commenters upthread.
I’m kind of busy today. But I doubt if reading about John Adams would make me more comfortable with torture, looting, and the terror bombing of civilians.
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You’re correct that international law does not consider an ethnic conflict on a border as a justification for an invasion, but what did I say that is not true? The voting in the Ukrainian election in 2014 was largely along ethnic/linguistic lines and a pro-Russian politician from Donetsk, a guy named Yanukovych, was elected. Kyiv, the capitol, is an extremely pro-western area of Ukraine and the locals really didn’t like Yanukovych and rioted, with a significant number of neo-Nazis participating in the riots, driving Yanukovych out of office. His replacement was installed by a procedure not found in Ukraine’s constitution and was from the faction that had narrowly lost the previous election. Donetsk, where Yanukovych is from, Luhansk, and the Crimea, all areas with a majority of ethnic Russians and which had supported Yanukovych refused to recognize the new government and either voted to join Russia (the Crimea) or declare independence (Donetsk and Luhansk). Fighting started shortly after that, with armed para-militaries attacking the separatist areas. How is that not an ethnic conflict?
Svoboda, the extreme right neo-Nazi party has as a statement of its goals, the “de-Russification” of Ukraine. They blocked the peace deal that was negotiated in 2015 (the Minsk agreement) because it would have recognized Russian as a second official language and given the eastern, heavily Russian areas of the country a status similar to Quebec’s with relation to Canada. I think that when major players in a conflict have removing recognition of another ethnicity as a major goal, that the fighting is properly called an ethnic conflict.
I do think there’s a smokescreen covering what is going on over there. The absolute intolerance for ANY dissenting views or facts has obscured most of the history and background. Stating things that are objectively true, like countries representing 2/3 of the world’s population are neutral or pro-Russian has gotten me accused of being a trolley. In other forums I have been personally attacked for pointing out that gallup did a poll in Crimea after it joined Russian and found overwhelming support for that move or for listing the easily googled percentage of ethnic Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk (surprise! they’re the majority of the population there.) Prior to the invasion, there was no partisan line on any of the events going on in Ukraine, so whatever political bent you have, you can easily find a source you trust that will confirm everything I’ve said, but very few people reading this will take the effort to move their mouse and type a couple of words into a search bar. They will, however, type more characters to attack me for disagreeing with the party line. That’s actually sadder and scarier than anything going on in Ukraine right now.
Oh, yes, it’s all so very ethnic. Who are we to talk about such ethnic matters? /s
And your point is? Because, again, even if all of that were true (and it’s not), none of that would in any way justify what Russia is doing.
Or are the Nazis in Ukraine (who do not hold political power) somehow worse than the Nazis in Russia (who do)?
ETA: I remember that Gallup poll. I also remember that they did not ask the people who had fled from Crimea.
You seem confused. You seem to believe that all ethnic Russians in Ukraine support Russia and want to join Russia, but that is not really the case.
Also, do you happen to remember when those poor betrodden separatists shot down an airliner with a Russian missile? That seems kinda relevant.
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Maybe don’t get your data from Reddit.
“On 2 March, the UN General Assembly adopted — by an overwhelming majority of 141 against 5 — a resolution rejecting the Russian Federation’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and demanding that Russia immediately withdraw its forces and abide by international law.”
You can see the list through the link. A lot of countries not shown on your Reddit map voted Yes.
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Is it you? I think it’s you.
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Hyperbole at worst, minimal in comparison to your own veritable walls of prevaricating text…
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You seem to be entirely unconcerned that Vladimir Putin benefits from your statements, even though you claim not to support Russia.
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I know a bit about the Founders, though not quite as much about Adams. [For context: Editor credit on one tome about Jefferson; research credit on three others; solo-author of one article. All peer-reviewed.]
Adams didn’t defend because he believed them innocent of murder. He at first defended them because nobody else would. He also believed in upholding the law. He also believed that it was important to show that the colonials could give a fair trial. Finally, he also believed they had acted in self-defense. He believed them not guilty of murder, but to be sure, he was defending a specific charge. In essence, he got them off on a technicality.
After a long discourse about how important it is for “that twenty guilty persons escape the punishment of death, than one innocent person be condemned, and suffer capitally” (quoting Fortesque there, but also quoting others), he gets into specifics.
He starts by defining homicide:
The law divides homicide into three branches; the first, is justifiable, the second excusable, and the third felonious; felonious homicide, is subdivided into two branches; the first is murder, which is killing with malice aforethought, the second is manslaughter, which is killing a man on a sudden provocation:
He then gets into what is an 18th century version of a Stand Your Ground defense:
I must in treat you, to consider the words of this authority, the injured person may repell force by force against any who endeavours to commit any kind of felony on him or his, here the rule is, I have a right to stand on my own defence, if you intend to commit felony; if any of the persons made an attack on these soldiers, with an intention to rob them, if it was but to take their hats feloniously, they had a right to kill them on the spot, and had no business to retreat; if a robber meets me in the street, and commands me to surrender my purse, I have a right to kill him without asking questions
It’s a bit uncomfortable for those of us who aren’t a fan of that defense (you can justifiably kill someone for feloniously stealing your hat), but there it is.
He continues:
If you are satisfied that the people, who ever they were, made that assault, with a design to kill or maim the soldiers, this was such an assault, as will justify the soldiers killing in their own defence.
Adams defense of the soldiers, then, is that the colonials had gathered with what were clearly felonious intentions. Therefore killing them was justified.
Continuing:
In the case here, we will take Montgomery (LP: one of the soldiers), if you please, when he was attacked by the stout man with the stick, who aimed it at his head, with a number of people round him, crying out, Kill them! Kill them! had he not a right to kill the man. If all the party were guilty of the assault made by the stout man, and all of them had discovered malice in their hearts, had not Montgomery a right, according to Lord Chief Justice Holt, to put it out of their power to wreak their malice upon him.
The rest of the defense is spent in painting the colonials as a riotous mob basically “asking for it.”
Except he didn’t say that. He said “Facts are stubborn things,” which is quite different.
He then went on, in that very same sentence, to argue that a riotous crowd throwing snowballs at soldiers was justification for killing. And of a charge of manslaughter rather than murder was more justified.
if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated.
[Emphasis mine]
That trial isn’t your best example, to be honest. We like to hold it up as a model of impartiality, but in some ways (many ways?) Adams’ defense of the soldiers is pretty close to how the state defends cops who kill unarmed innocents. Imay regret openign this can of worms, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that a grand jury recommended against charges of murder for the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, because they were unable to consider the charge of manslaughter. Justice along the lines of John Adams? No, that grand jury was a travesty. Not just because they weren’t allowed to consider manslaughter, and nobody is lauding the AG in that case for being fair hewing to the idea of the Founders.
In general the Founders aren’t a good example for much of anything specific, since their beliefs are all over the place, and in general completely foreign to the way we think today.
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And yet, Gallup polling in 2013 was far less enthusiastic, with the majority only favoring becoming an autonomous region and not joining Russia.
IMO, the selection bias of polls after Russian troops were in place, who were more secret police auxiliaries rather than mainline military, was likely to be through the roof. What sane person would trust a pollster that they dislike the current regime?
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Why, it’s almost like they were flawed human beings, bound by their historical context, and not the flawless deities that some like to make them out to be… funny that.
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Wow. That was a boatload of misinformation. Thanks for clarifying.
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While Ukrainian fascist and ultra-nationalist groups certainly participated in the protests, so did anarchists, progressives and liberals. You make it sound like he wasn’t liked by the demonstrateers in Kyiv because he wasn’t sufficiently pro-Western. The reality is that, after he did his about -face on EU membership, it became clear that he had become a hand-puppet for Putin – just another kleptocrat in the style of his master, complete with his own private zoo.
You may not be aware that you’re repeating Russian talking points, but you are.
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