When this whole thing started, I tried to understand the reasons behind it. My research led me to learn about the plight of the ppl in the Donbas and the atrocities committed by the Azov Brigade against their fellow Ukrainians who unfortunately were culturally Russian-Ukrainian and wished to continue their Russian traditions and language. However, Kiev refused to allow it. Over 14,000 ppl died as a result of the conflict in the Donbas, mostly civilians, between 2014-2022 and the western media never really covered it.
The ppl in the Donbas had a referendum for autonomy in 2014 which Kiev agreed to abide by, but they didn’t so the fighting escalated after that. The Russian-Ukrainians asked Russia for help and they supplied food, medicine and probably artillery covertly for a few yrs. However, when the talk of NATO expansion, another broken promise by the West, began in earnest, they finally decided to step in to help the ppl in the Donbas AND to push back on Western aggression via NATO.
That’s pry more than you wanted to hear about my reasons, and I know the war hawks on this thread will try to call into question everything I wrote in their quest to keep the plates spinning in Ukraine. I wish they could have worked out a negotiation to end this war in April 2022 but our State Department put an end to that, which is another thing that made me go “hmmm.” Why wouldn’t they want peace…other than there are huge sums of money being made by multiple entities and they won’t allow the spigot to be turned off yet. It certainly has nothing to do with the Ukrainian or Russian ppl.
I’m also suspicious when I see the public being manipulated into the cult by slogans, flags, and sob stories about “the poor Ukrainian ppl” on 60 Minutes. I usually take the opposite side when I feel like I’m being handled by the media. It’s not my first rodeo.
I find it really hard to understand why we have the same people posting stories, over and over again, about the plight of Ukraine on this site.
What is their purpose?
Do they think there is someone left on Free Republic who does not know about this war?
Ukraine History
1. UKRAINE HISTORY
“The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. The Soviets, during their hasty retreat, shot their political prisoners and, whenever possible, evacuated personnel, dismantled and removed industrial plants, and conducted a scorched-earth policy—blowing up buildings and installations, destroying crops and food reserves, and flooding mines. Almost four million people were evacuated east of the Urals for the duration of the war. The Germans moved swiftly, however, and by the end of November VIRTUALLY ALL OF UKRAINE WAS UNDER NAZI CONTROL.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-Nazi-occupation-of-Soviet-Ukraine
Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by SOME of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for the attainment of their independence.
The illusion was quickly shattered.
In the occupied territories, the Nazis sought to implement their “racial” policies. In the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar (Ukrainian: Babyn Yar) in Kyiv, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. [See also Holocaust: The Einsatzgruppen.]
In the Reichskommissariat, ruthlessly administered by Erich Koch, Ukrainians were slated for servitude. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of the peasantry, were left intact, industry was allowed to deteriorate, and the cities were deprived of foodstuffs as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”). Cultural activities were repressed, and education was limited to the elementary level.
Under such conditions of brutality, Ukrainian political activity, predicated originally on cooperation with the Germans, increasingly turned to underground organizational work and resistance. The OUN groups that streamed eastward in 1941 were soon subjected by the German authorities to repressive measures, including execution, so they propagated their nationalist views clandestinely and, through their contact with the local population, began to revise their ideology in a more democratic, pluralist direction.”
MORE HISTORY
Ukraine rates the 4th in the number of people recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving Jews during the Holocaust.
The history of the Jews in Ukraine goes back over a thousand years. Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus’ (late 9th to mid-13th century). Some of the most important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, rose either fully or to an extensive degree in the territory of modern Ukraine. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes the third-largest in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.
In the Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917-1920), Yiddish was declared a state language, along with Ukrainian and Russian. At that time, the Jewish National Union was created and the community was granted an autonomous status. Yiddish was used on Ukrainian currency in this same period, between 1917 and 1920.[12] Before World War II, slightly less than one-third of Ukraine’s urban population consisted of Jews; they were the largest national minority in Ukraine.
Total civilian losses during World War II and the German occupation of Ukraine are estimated at seven million. More than one million Jews were shot and killed by the Einsatzgruppen [paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass-murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe.]
As ordered by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Wehrmacht cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, providing logistical support for their operations, and participated in the mass murders. Historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen, related agencies, and foreign auxiliary personnel murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million of the 5.5 to 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
After the close of World War II, 24 senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947–48, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.
2. Russian Roulette in Ukraine -2014
VICE News
113 video dispatches
6,420,708 views [Last updated on Jan 8, 2019]
VICE New brings you on-the-ground coverage of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNKsLlK52ss&list=PLw613M86o5o5zqF6WJR8zuC7Uwyv76h7R&index=1
3. Russia’s Brutal Strategy: An analysis of more than 1,000 photos found that Russia has used hundreds of weapons in Ukraine that are widely banned by international treaties.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/19/world/europe/ukraine-munitions-war-crimes.html?action=click&pgtype=LegacyCollection&state=default&module=styln-russia-ukraine&variant=show®ion=MAIN_CONTENT_1&block=storyline_top_links_recirc
4. EXCELLENT ARTICLE
Finnish Intelligence Officer Explains the Russian Mindset
Jon Gabriel, Ed.
April 4, 2022
3016
https://ricochet.com/1214468/finnish-intelligence-officer-explains-the-russian-mindset/
https://the-culture-shocks.blogspot.com/2022/03/evaluation-of-russia-by-finish.html
A more persuasive reason for Putin's actions is to be found in Russian revanchism after losing the Cold War and suffering the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin's academic thesis for his doctorate as a KGB officer projected a recovery of Russian power based on renewed state control of the media and major industries, especially oil and gas. These would expand the Russian state's economic power in relation to NATO and Western Europe.
The next step would be to use the vast new flow of revenue to the Russian state to spend heavily to rebuild their military along modern lines. This was seen as key to facilitating the recovery of territory and influence lost to Russia due to the collapse of the USSR. The ultimate goal was to reassemble the USSR as a combination of subservient states and allies to the extent of the old Warsaw Pact, with Ukraine nominally independent but under de facto Russian control.
I recall first reading of this when Putin emerged as Yeltsin's KGB installed successor. My immediate reaction proved sadly correct: if that was Putin's plan, it would lead Russia into new conflict with the US and Western Europe. And that is exactly what has happened.