this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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[–] rocket_dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 166 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Funny wojak faces but to clear up an apparent misconception here, Ukrainian weren't fighting for abstract concepts like "freedom" and Democracy", they were fighting to stop Russian soldiers from killing their families, raping their children, and burning their homes to the ground.

I hope this helps!

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 30 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (37 children)

I think you'll find they were fighting other Ukrainians (if you can call the carpet bombing of civilians "fighting") to maintain the US financed Poroshenko in power long before Russia went in, about eight years in fact.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 50 points 6 days ago (1 children)

long before Russia went in

There's a problem with this, because Russia has had troops in Ukraine since early 2014, before Poroshenko's government

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 21 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

The Sbovoda interim was also financed by the USA, with Victoria Nuland discussing on a leaked call who to name after they deposed Yanukovich.

Russia had troops in Crimea as requested by the Crimean government, which also seceded via referendum after said coup, as is its right under Ukrainian law. That proved to be the right move given that they didn't have the astronomical number of casualties that Donbas had, with over 14 thousand dead before 2022, most of them civilians, and a huge number of injured civilians and destroyed infrastructure as per the Donbas documentary.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 37 points 6 days ago (2 children)

If America's goal was to put Svoboda in power, they didn't do a very good job of keeping them there, did they?

I have read the Nuland transcript. She's talking about the existing leader of the opposition. Of course she said Yatsenyuk was the guy, he was the goddamn leader of the opposition. He was the one guy avalable with the best democratic mandate at the last election. Yanukovych even offered to make him prime minister at one point.

Russia put troops into Crimea before the referendum, and the referendum was run by the occupying army. Do you normally trust occupying armies to run referendums about whether or not they should get to keep the land they're occupying?

Perhaps if Russia was so concerned about casualties in the Donbas, it should not have invaded and caused hundreds of thousands more casualties.

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Lmao so the US did finance them, did appoint their best liked interim, did have congresspeople on the ground supporting the coup, did send in the money to arm the Nazis but just... quietly let democracy take its course once they spent all that time and money? America doesn't give a fuck if Sbovoda remains as long as the shock therapy has happened already, by then they'll take anyone who'll toe the line.

I want to give y'all the benefit of the doubt and conclude that you think we're stupid but sometimes I think there's a more obvious answer.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 32 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU. The US didn't need to do a damn thing to influence that, a long history of Russian imperialism did it all for them

America spent fuck all on Ukraine in the entire history of its independence up until Euromaidan (pg 167). They simply did not spend "all that money", because a single digit millions of dollars a year is a rounding error in the US budget. American spending on Ukraine in 2013 was 0.00024% of the federal budget.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 18 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

If Ukrainians already wanted to align with the EU, then why did they democratically elect Yanukovych, which the US subsequently couped in coordination with the Banderites?

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 18 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Why did they vote in the guy that said “For Ukraine, association with the European Union must become an important stimulus for forming a modern European state,” and that he was going to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement? That does not seem at all contradictory to me. His sudden U-turn on that was what got the Ukrainian people so pissed at him

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I wasn’t there, and I’m not going to assume that one quote is representative of his entire history or even that entire political campaign. The electoral map shows that in general he was liked by the Russian-aligned electorate and disliked by the European-aligned electorate.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I wasn't there either, but I do know that on his inaugration he said "Ukraine's integration with the EU remains our strategic aim."

Are you saying that since he was more popular in the east, he must have been against EU integration?

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

When Yanukovych was couped, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea seceded. If they had wanted EU integration, why would they have taken such extreme measures, and why did they turn to Russia for support? Russia ran into virtually no problems in annexing and integrating Crimea, because most Crimeans were on board with it. And good thing, too, because their Donetsk and Luhansk neighbors subsequently suffered nine years of Banderite terror.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You're retreading the exact same ground that I already went over with Grapho in this same thread

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You handwaved it away and deflected back to your State department bullet points and atrocity propaganda.

Fact: there was a US financed coup.

Fact: states have a right to secede under Ukrainian law by referendum, and they exercised that right when their sovereignty was violated

Fact: sovereign nations have a right to request aid from their allies. Donetsk and Lugansk exercised that right when Ukrainian Nazis refused to abide by the many ceasefires Russia helped to negotiate.

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[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

America spent fuck all on Ukraine in the entire history of its independence up until Euromaidan

Oh fr? Let's ask as-US-backed-as-US-backed-gets Kyiv Independent then: https://kyivindependent.com/how-us-foreign-aid-transformed-ukraine-through-the-years/

With the signing of a bilateral agreement between Ukraine and USAID in 1992, the agency started working alongside the Ukrainian government to build a competitive market economy, implement crucial social reforms [...] In over 30 years of working in Ukraine, USAID has played a key role in transforming numerous sectors [...] Dmytro Boyarchuk, the executive director of the Centre for Social and Economic Research (CASE Ukraine), said that Ukraine would not have been able to implement vital reforms without the support of international donors like USAID.

Obfuscate it as much as you want, pro-western Ukrainians themselves are telling everyone how maintaining a pro-western system depends on US funds.

The US didn't need to do a damn thing

Nice deflection but the fact is that it did, often and extensively. If the US didn't need to spend that money, then you shouldn't worry, pretty soon they might not be. Let's see how friendly that world is to the US and their chickenshit vassals in the UK et al, I yearn to see it. Most of all I yearn that y'all see it.

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

American spending on Ukraine in 2013

Good thing we're talking about the money it spent on the coup and the aftermath, then.

So the fact that America funded through USAID 9 out of every 10 media outlets means they didn't spend "anything" in Ukraine because... It spends way more fucking money than that everywhere else too?

Also, implying the US only spends the money in a country via direct government cash injection lmao. Most of the money the US spends is channelled through NGOs for propaganda and covert action. Why the fuck would they ever just give money away to a government before it's thoroughly vassalized. What's more: there's ample evidence that US and UK propaganda specialists were employed by Subversive elements within Ukraine as well as extensive funding of NGOs and collaboration with psyop specialists.

In future resumes, they cited the Ukraine coup as well as the selling of the civil war as a "war against russian separatists" as an example of a successful psychological operation.

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This is a consequence of the advertising market in Ukraine dropping in the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion

Congratulations on citing an article about what happened in 2022 to attempt to disprove my claim about what happened before 2014. Please learn to read dates. This is the third time in this thread that you have either gotten them completely wrong or actively misrepresented them.

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It's one of many examples of US funding, many of which I've already cited in this very thread which you refuse to acknowledge (even to refute) unless you can find a fucking Phoenix Wright gotcha lmao.

It doesn't matter a single fucking bit why they would die without US funding, what matters is that they would, and thus they're entirely at the behest of their benefactors. It's also awfully convenient that you choose 2014 as a cutoff point for US involvement in Ukraine but you fail by that metric also. Regardless, Ukraine is thoroughly a puppet state of the US and its many crimes in the Donbas region are not a matter of debate. The ICJ has by and large rejected the atrocity propaganda lawfare of Ukraine and NATO and the probe has found evidence of genocidal intent in Donbas.

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[–] Fidel_Cashflow@lemmy.ml 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

umm actually history started on February 24th, 2022 ☝️🤓

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 24 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It actually started on February 2014 and then abruptly stopped around May for 8 years

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[–] johny@feddit.org 30 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Ukrainians were/are still fighting to defend themselves from an illegal invasion. But America sees and has always seen Ukraine as a proxy to weaken a geo-strategic rival. NATO was not realistically on the table as long as the conflict in the Donbas was ongoing (it would have immediately triggered art.5) to keep promising NATO instead of working on a more realistic path to peace has probably caused the death of 100000s of Ukrainians. And just as with many other imperial proxies in history, the proxy is left to deal with the fallout while the empire retreats to the metropol and prepares for the next conflict.

[–] rocket_dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Really spot on except America isn't exactly retreating, it's just now under the leadership of an administration that would prefer to have Russia as an ally.

Instead of two imperialist powers fighting via proxy, they could just work together and strip smaller counties of their natural resources, side by side. Imperialism united.

[–] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 days ago

Ukraine was always getting stripped of its resources and immiserated; the IMF loan required them to privatize and sell off their ports, power grids, factories, schools, etc for pennies.

[–] Fidel_Cashflow@lemmy.ml 55 points 6 days ago (2 children)

history truly is a flat circle

[–] Grapho@lemmy.ml 42 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This image is almost 3 years old already lmao.

If any libs want to learn how tankies see the future you might want to read about the past for once. Pop history doesn't count.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 32 points 6 days ago

That's the kicker, Leftists are correct far more often than liberals yet libs never put 2 and 2 together.

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[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 27 points 6 days ago (1 children)

US is fatal even for itself

[–] shawn1122@lemm.ee 23 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

US is in a state of slow implosion. Rest of the world needs to look at collaborating while excluding the US.

My guess is China will fill the void left by the disintegration of USAID in order to boost its global standing.

I strongly encourage all nations to begin violating US intellectual property rights. Nations like India already do so with pharmaceuticals.

Eventually other nations will need to take on the mantle of tech and pharmaceutical research and development and we don't want to live in a world where all this progress is lost.

Americans have chosen to nuke their own democracy and we need to minimize the damage done to the rest of the world as much as possible.

[–] menemen@lemmy.ml 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (8 children)

My guess is China will fill the void left by the disintegration of USAID in order to boost its global standing.

China will take large chunks. But I think we will also see a decentralization as china won't be able to take it all. Countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Brazil and so on will probably increase their regional soft powers a lot.

This process also already started years ago, but will be catalyzed by this.

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[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 20 points 6 days ago

thanks for the weapons USA!

Wh... What do you mean they were loans instead of gifts?

[–] belastend@slrpnk.net 16 points 6 days ago

Almost as if a preventable policy shift happened.

[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

With rare exception (Israel) America can seem downright schizo from administration to administration.

[–] alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 25 points 5 days ago (1 children)

This was always Ukraine's fate.

The OG coup happened under the Obama admin, the far-right were forced into government under Trump pt I, Ukraine was forced to sell off state assets and take billions in loans by the Biden admin, and now the US is preparing to pick the bones clean over the next decades.

It's nice that yall are recognizing that the US isn't there to help the Ukrainian people now, but we're all gonna repeat this next war.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I stopped being Charlie Brown falling for the football 23 years go, when I saw that the consent manufacturing for the second Iraq war rested on no hard evidence.

Edit to add that the bone picking has been going on for two years already. Everything must go, including seaports.

[–] Toasted@lemm.ee 8 points 5 days ago

Libya was what got me, i was a chump cheering while i watched it on CNN but the more I thought about it the less sense it made then i read the shock docturine and some chomsky. Libya went from the highest score for quality of life in africa to literal slave markets. For what? So some slimy fucking americans can take their resources instead of negotiating for them?

Not even just changes in administration. The U.S. will often suddenly move on or just decide you will work better as a villain for internal politics. The US basically told Saddam Hussein that we wouldn't care if he invaded Kuwait only to then use that invasion as justification to make him a boogeyman for the next decade.

[–] sommerset@thelemmy.club 11 points 5 days ago

Good Nazi is a dead nazi

[–] androidul@lemmy.ml 8 points 6 days ago

based man, I’m so sad about this.. hope EU+UA will forge an even more powerful alliance!

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