Socialists predicted that Ukraine would be betrayed by the US, there’s literally a 2+ year-old meme in the comment section of this post with the picture of Zelensky being welcomed by Gaddafi, Saddam and Bin Laden

Regarding the Ukraine problem in particular and the situation of Ukraine during socialism in Europe, I have already made a comment demystifying some of the most pervasive anticommunist, russophobic propaganda. Please give it a read and show me your thoughts :)

If you think my solution is “utopian”, check out this data from OurWorldInData (hopefully a Bill Gates outlet won’t be suspect of tankieism or pro-russian tendencies for you) for GDP per capita in Ukraine since the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Ukraine never recovered its soviet levels of production and of quality of life for people. The USSR was no utopia, it was a very real thing, and it was materially and significantly better for Ukraine than whatever options exist now.

OK, please tell me how the NATO block is any better in this regard, haven’t you literally just been witness to the most open genocide in history and NOBODY in the west did anything to stop it?

because Putin wants more power

They managed to get a Russia loving president in US

Holy moly “great men historiography” and “Russia is behind everything I hate” both in one single comment, that’s quite the feat. Great job firstly ignoring the material analysis and geopolitics of the situation and trying to explain history as “big man makes decision”, and then falling for the racist trope that the USA isn’t capable of electing a fascist without external interference, as if the US wasn’t founded in the fascist principles of the Lebensraum and slavery->segregation

If Ukraine falls

Ukraine will not fall. The objective of Russia in this war isn’t pure expansionism further to the west, it’s the imposition of its political principles and strategic desires in its sphere of influence. The Russian government knows it cannot control successfully for a long period of time the now (understandably) anti-Russian radicalised sections of central and western Ukraine, what it wants are concessions in geopolitical and strategic terms. Mark my words: the war in Ukraine will stop sooner than later, and after it, only some sections in eastern Ukraine will be annexed to Russia.

Furthermore your reasoning of “if this nation falls, there’s gonna be the next”, is exactly the way Russia feels about its geopolitical allies. In 1990, there was an agreement that NATO wouldn’t push beyond Germany, and that has been violated first with Poland and then with more countries. Why push a US-backed military alliance to the borders of the US-declared main geopolitical enemy? What consequences do you expect from that? Imagine a Russian-led military coalition pushing for the annexion of Mexico.

Ukraine rejected the US offer because it didn’t offer any safety guarantees

Regardless of safety guarantees, the resources of western Ukraine will be plundered by the NATO block, whether it be EU or the USA I cannot know, but mark my words when you see the economic situation of Ukraine in 2030

This is just a reiteration of what we’ve already seen in the russian empire and in the USSR

Comparing the Russian Empire and the USSR is the most ahistorical thing you can possibly do. During the Russian Empire and for all of history before that, Ukraine was a people without a nation. Oppressed, without representation, without borders, without a right to education or even learning to read in their language.

The Bolsheviks, with their first constitution in 1917, granted the right to self-determination and secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire, which Lenin referred to as “the prison of peoples”. Quite literally after Poland seceded in this legal fashion, the Polish government decided it wanted to return to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth borders, and proceeded to unilaterally invade Ukraine and part of modern Belarus. It was the Red Army of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics, that fought off the Polish invasion and established a lasting Ukrainian People’s Republic for the first time in history.

This wasn’t without controversy: while Lenin argued for the right to representation and to a Ukrainian Republic within the USSR, others like Rosa Luxembourg argued for a united, more homogeneous sort of socialist soviet nationality that outgrew former nationalisms. It is partially thanks to Lenin that Ukraine ended up having its own borders, administration and representation.

I know what you’ll say: “but Holodomor! Genocide against Ukrainians!”. The famine of the USSR was a sad and unintended consequence of bad policy during the collectivisation/dekulakization process of the early 30s. Millions of people died both within Ukraine and without it, especially as well in Central Asia and southern Russia. As bad as it was, and as avoidable as one can argue it may have been, there’s simply no evidence of any intent of attack towards Ukrainian people, it’s not precedented by anything similar, and it’s not followed by anything similar in the entire history of the USSR.

In those decades and the ones to come, Ukraine would obtain and solidify its own nationality, people would for the first time obtain generalised literacy in their own language, the right to study in their language up to university level, a majority of publications (both journalistic and literary) in Ukrainian, and the very next president of the USSR Nikita Khruschchyov would be Ukrainian.

Attempting to construe a history of oppression of Ukrainians in the USSR is nothing but fictitious, anti-communist and russophobic propaganda, meant to create a divide between Ukrainians and Russians. There are clear geopolitical reasons to do so, and there are clear reasons why Ukrainians are very much afraid or simply hate Russians, because of the modern proto-fascist state that the Russian Republic has become. But creating a line between this capitalist country, the socialist USSR, and the feudalist Russian Empire, is simply an attempt to divide Eastern Europe further and to push Ukraine towards the EU and away from Russia. This point can be argued for without resorting to russophobic and anticommunist myths. We’re smarter than this.

it’s surrender

That’s generally what happens when, you know, you’re losing a war.

If Russia withdrew their troops, there would be peace immediately

That’s technically true. However, Russia uses military force in its sphere of influence for a reason, not solely because Putin bad (which he is, I’m a commie and Putin is fascist-adjacent at best).

Russia, like all big capitalist countries, wants to secure a sphere of influence in which it can do easy trade, influence the politics, and generally have support from these countries. The US does this for example with western Europe through NATO, and with less diplomatic methods by supporting coups and invading other countries. China does this through economic trade and through massive investment projects. Russia is in a weak position internationally, barely recovered economically from the dismantling of the USSR, and it’s surrounded by former soviet republics very much in a similar plane (barely economically recovered from the 90s crisis as a consequence of the dismantling of the USSR).

These post-soviet republics, such as Ukraine or Georgia, adopted capitalism (as Russia did) in a very quick and disorderly fashion, and the resulting oligarchs and capitalist owners ended up fumbled in a mix of pro-russian and pro-european/US positions.

The EU and the USA both exert pressure on these countries to try and bring them to their side. Being economically and politically stronger, they can use trade, diplomacy, intelligence and economic means to alienate these countries front the Russian sphere of influence. Russia, in a more precarious and weaker economic and political position, simply doesn’t have the means to maintain the diplomatic, economic and intelligence means to maintain these countries aligned to itself.

The war in Ukraine, much as the interference in Georgian and Romanian elections by the EU, mustn’t be understood as a struggle between freedom and oppression. It’s sadly just a struggle between two capitalist empires, namely Russia and US/EU, fighting for the control of smaller countries that they want aligned to themselves.

Once Russia doesn’t have the means to economically, diplomatically and through intelligence, to influence its former sphere of influence into staying by its side, the only option left is the military route. The US and the EU know this, and they keep trying to mess with Russia’s sphere of influence for gains to their empires. The reality is that there is no good side and no bad side: it’s just struggle between opposing empires.

So yes, technically if Russia withdrew its troops, there would be peace. But this peace would mean that firstly the surrounding regions around Russia, and Russia itself, would become colonies and vassal states of the western world. It wouldn’t mean “freedom” for Ukraine, as we can see by the exploitative contract for the minerals of Ukraine that the US offers. If you think the EU will offer something substantially less exploitative towards Ukrainians, you’re wrong.

Ukraine, sad as it is, as long as it remains a state between empires, will suffer the effects of both. And only socialism in Europe and Russia can offer a meaningful response to this.

Point systems that prevent you from air travel or entering other provinces because you dared criticize the almighty government

That’s… just not real… Your understanding of Chinese policy comes from curated western sources with vested interests in putting a dystopian and totalitarian understanding of China and its government in our countries’ people (we’re both westerners). There are systems in place to prevent certain convicted criminals from freely moving around there country, but that has little to do with criticising the party.

Regardless, big data on traffic doesn’t imply knowledge about the particular vehicles and drivers inside said vehicles. You’re just going ahead and assuming “dystopian control of people” because it’s China.

The horrible and dystopian part for the comment above yours is the fact that it happens in China, which is ontologically bad and oppressive

Your take is that changing traffic management is a violation of human rights?

What’s your solution to that

“Espouses but fails to uphold” sounds more like negligence to me. Negligence would be allowing fascism through inaction (like democrat administration). But the US does far worse than that (funding genocide and propping up fascism elsewhere)

Dingdingding, right answer here!

It depends. AI can help writing good code. Or it can write bad code

I’ll give you a hypothetical: a company is to hire someone for coding. They can either hire someone who writes clean code for $20/h, or someone who writes dirty but functioning code using AI for $10/h. What will many companies do?

Lol, if you want to try and move the goalposts from my “murdered Poles”

No, my claim is that you’re equating deported with murdered when you quote said book talking about “hundreds of thousands of murders”, not that murdered after deportation don’t count.

Yet again you fail to provide an alternative to the military occupation of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union. The only possible alternative was Nazi occupation. I’m not trying to justify Katyn, I’m saying that the invasion itself was justified and that’s proven by the fact that you cannot even theoretically come up with a better alternative with 80 years of hindsight.

Imagine how we would look at the US if they had decided it was more profitable to just team up with the nazis instead

I don’t have to imagine, the US not only teamed up with but propped up fascism all over the globe. I’m Spanish myself, the Franco dictatorship was legitimised by the USA for its entire existence, but I could bring up Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile, or an endless list of fascists supported by the USA. Invading eastern Poland and preventing it from being invaded by Nazis isn’t “teaming up with the Nazis”, I’m sorry that you can’t see beyond cold-war propaganda.

Yeah no, I’m not a military enjoyer in general, so idk what destroyer means or what’s the origin, I meant it more as a wordplay. But thanks for the clarification!

The fact that she deserves it doesn’t imply things will get better after her getting fired, it just implies she’s a terrorist working for terrorists. Like, the name of the ship category you’re commanding is “Destroyer”

It most certainly includes direct casualty numbers as well

Good, then we both agree the source doesn’t support the “hundreds of thousands murdered in Poland” claim.

For the last time: I have asked at this point in 4 different occasions what was the desirable alternative to a Soviet military occupation of eastern Poland after the Polish, English and French rejection of a mutual defense agreement with the USSR.

The fact that you fail to provide an answer after being clearly prompted 4 different times to give one, is enough evidence to me that you simply don’t have one. I will then state the obvious: the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Poland likely prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Roma and other ethnicities from being genocided by the OTHERWISE INEVITABLE Nazi invasion.

You really, really cannot imagine not having to do

No, I really cannot pretend knowing more about defeating fascism in Europe that the nation which ultimately defeated fascism, at the IMMENSE cost of 25 million lives in the struggle against Nazism. It’s easy to go with our hindsight and categorise the oppression of bourgeois and nationalist elements of Poland as unnecessary and “barbaric”. But you known what, I’m not Polish, I’m Spanish. I’m from the country where the communists did not go far enough, and the result was losing a preventable civil war against fascists which murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents, and the 4 decades of fascism that followed. So, no, my claim is NOT that I know more about fighting fascism than those who actually defeated it.

even though everyone knows that’s not true

Source: it is known

There are relatively few comments in the thread talking about Russia at all, and calling the Euromaidan a US coup is not Russia apologism, it’s literally discussion about US+Ukraine.

You can’t see a post about the two-sidedness of US policy without invoking the Russians.