Maybe they weren’t actually in the US back then and it’s just a tiiiiny misunderstanding. That’s the only way I could take such a laughably inaccurate take in good faith and I certainly want to extend total good faith to our great dissenting commenter who came here only to bring правда to this cesspit of pro-ukraine anti-genocidal propaganda.
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Well, there’s the problem.
You’re relying on an opinion poll that did not include Crimeans who had fled to unoccupied Ukraine, and which was conducted after Russian rule had become a fait accompli. Do you think that pro-Ukrainian Crimeans would have felt free to speak their mind under Russian occupation?
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Claiming that Mark F. was wrong is one thing. That would have been fine. Happens all the time that people disagree here. You didn’t do only that. You also said some wild claims that derailed the conversation (re: propaganda and civil war).
When people responded to your claims, you didn’t provide evidence, but said you were being attacked. Much later, you included a map which is wrong. (See Kathy’s post and Jesse’s post and bucaneer’s below )
Stop pretending that you are receiving unfair treatment. You voluntarily came to BBS for this discussion. Here it is. You get what you give.
ETA: links to @Jesse13927 and @bucaneer (after Slow Mode was turned off)
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Let me count the ways. Well, some of them, at least.
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The election that put Yanukovych in office happened in 2010, not 2014.
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The Euromaidan protests started in 2013 when Yanukovych abruptly ditched his campaign promise to work towards EU membership (which had probably brought him support from a wide enough base to win the election) and instead pivoted towards Russia. It was not some riot based on personal dislike.
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When the Ukrainian parliament initiated the impeachment process against him, Yanukovych fled to Russia on a Russian military plane, which was (not unreasonably) interpreted by the parliament as a de facto resignation from office. The rest of the process was exactly as dictated by the constitution: the speaker of the parliament became acting president and immediately started organizing new presidential elections.
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Many of the leaders of the “separatists” in Donbas (e.g. Gubarev, Borodai, Girkin, Pavlov) were not locals, but arrived there from Russia to stir trouble. If there ever was a “civil war” in Ukraine, it lasted maybe three months tops in 2014 when it became obvious that there was not enough local support for the “separatists” and Russia started to move its regular military units without insignia into Ukraine.
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The right-wing Svoboda party that you credit with blocking the Minsk deal was an opposition party with 6 out of 450 seats in the parliament at the time (it is now down to 1).
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The map of countries that support the latest UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion looks like this (143 for, 5 against, 35 abstained, 10 absent):
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Lacking, as we do, omniscience, we are limited in our ability to say whether some statement is True or not by our ability to gather and interpret evidence and its trustworthiness.
It is a matter of simple logic that you would expect and predict an overwhelming support for a new regime, in the immediate aftermath of a military invasion replete with a known force of intelligence agents and secret police. Some of those polled will be invaders. Some will be hopeful that the new regime will deliver what they said they would. Many of those polled will say whatever won’t get them disappeared at 3am, because I don’t give a toss if it was Gallup who did the polling, the person answering the questions won’t know that, for all they know it’s a secret agent, and they’d be insane to act as if it wasn’t. Some will say “fuck no” anyway, and be at risk of being disappeared at 3am. And others would say “no”, if they weren’t refugees.
That’s not to say it’s impossible that the majority in Crimea honestly and legitimately voted “yes” to Russia. It’s just that it’s impossible for anyone to say it was an honest and legitimate poll, for all the reasons above. And if you can’t prove that it was, then it wasn’t.
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I’ve acknowledged in the past here the pro-Russian sentiment that exists there and the (debateable) legitimacy of Russia’s historical claim to Crimea. I don’t ignore the facts that Putin also sent Russian troops there and helped his local supporters do some election rigging. He’s a corrupt kleptocrat with imperialist ambitions, so that sort of thing is in his nature.
As for rigging and irregularities and intimidation, there are easily available reports from independent observers* who were on the scene. And if you think any mass plebiscite – or indeed any large-scale vote – ever comes out with a 97% result unaided by chicanery or a rejection of the vote as illegitimate by a large portion of the electorate… well, I can understand why your points wouldn’t sound out of place on RT.
[* observation was complicated by the fact that most NGOs that usually do it stayed away because the refendum was deemed illegal by the standards of the international community. That left a smaller-than-normal group of independent observers and a bunch of ones who were already pro-Russian]
If the elected leader is seen by a large and ideoogically diverse and decentralised group of citizens as illegitimate and/or contemptuously betraying key promises he made, and those perceptions are borne out by reality, I have no issue in their spontaneously demonstrating against him. I do have a problem when said leader responds by having his heavily armed security forces violently attack them.
You might want to look up the definition of the term “coup” as commonly used by political scientists, historians, and other experts. Kremlin propagandists are fond of using it to describe Euromaidan, but they apparently no longer understand the distinction between a coup d’etat and a popular revolution.
Not knowing that difference might prompt one to draw a false equivalency between supporting Euromaidan and supporting the fascist 6 January insurrection in DC in a misguided attempt at a “gotcha”. What an embarrassing own-goal that would end up being!
No, I and others have first de-bunked your statements and then pointed out that they sound just like the bogus ones pushed in the West by Putin’s propaganda machine. You, in contrast, have not responded to any of those reality-based replies except to complain that you are just trying to engage in civil discourse and are being treated poorly. There’s a term for that behaviour.
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I think this is why you may be having so much trouble. This kind of language exhibits a pro-Russian bias. Crimea did not “join” Russia. It was invaded and illegally annexed. That it was an illegal invasion and annexation is something that is widely recognized, both by a whole host of countries as well as a UN resolution that a majority of countries voted to pass.
When you write “Crimea joined Russia” you are using the language that Putin’s Russia uses to justify an illegal act. This casts doubt on the other claims you make.
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… and that’s how it, and you, lose the moral high ground
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Fuckin’ A. That’s an indisputable fucking fact.
Great idea, it was; opening this thread back up so as to better give outright mininformation a platform.
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But… but PEACH MUST FREEZE!!! /s
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Depending on how you look at it, you could say that Ukraine invaded Russia, you know, in an inverted merger kinda way. /s
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Would you call that a Blue Shift or Red Shift?
Based on how Russian troops have performed in the field, maybe it’s a Yellow Shift?
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With the training given to conscripts, probably a brown shift too.
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Posting this here for future reference in case anyone wants to talk about “civil war in Ukraine” again, or insist that “DNR” and “LNR” were in any way independent entities. The European Court of Human Rights recently published a ruling which says that Russia was entirely in control of the “separatist” areas since at least 11 May 2014 when they held “independence referendums”.
This is part of a large case where the governments of Ukraine and the Netherlands are suing the government of Russia over the shooting down of flight MH17 and a long list of crimes committed in Donbas (attacks against civilians, torture, rape, abductions, etc.) The ruling so far is only concerned with the admissibility of the case - i.e. whether Russia can be held accountable since it did not officially claim control over “DNR” and “LNR” until very recently. You can read the whole 230 page decision and the 810 page annex which summarises the evidence considered by the court, but here are some of the most pertinent conclusions:
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Putin’s Buddy’s Alternate History:
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“Hungary’s chief of general staff claimed WWII was a “local German-Polish war” that escalated due to a lack of peace efforts.”
To ironically quote a guy I once knew (who used to say this now and then positively un-ironic):
Ach, wenn der Führer das doch noch erlebt hätte!
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