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CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: DEHUMANIZATION DERBY
(blog form)
During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian. Both the state and the civil society have found multiple ways to aid the Ukrainian war effort, and likewise expressions of anti-Russian agitation are, if not formally approved, at least given more leeway than previously. 90% of Finns continue to support giving lethal aid to Ukraine, even while the numbers are falling in numerous other European countries.
For some weeks, there’s been a debate over whether things have been going slightly too far. During this time, multiple celebrities and politicians, including Sofi Oksanen – one of the most important current writers in the country, half-Estonian, known not only for gothy looks but also as a longtime active critic of Russia – announced that instead of spending money on traditional New Year’s fireworks, they’d shell out money on shells – in particular, Ukrainian shells with messages on them.
There’s a service, signmyrocket.com, that promises that they’ll write your personalized message on a shell that Ukrainians will fire on Russian troops. (Some have speculated they’re just using one shell that gets wiped clean and a new message written on it every time the service is used.) Oksanen’s message was “Jaxuhalit” – a maddeningly stupid phrase that is hard to translate succinctly (literal translation would be like “I am giving you a hug for strength”, expect it’s obviously used sarcastically and also written in Finnish equivalent of “I can haz cheezburger?” style argot.)
Anyway, this led to a column (link goes to a fairly readable Google-Translated version) in a major tabloid about how this sort of a thing shows that many Finns have entered into a strange state of mind where they treat the war as a game, engage dehumanization etc. After the requisite accusations of Putinism, it hasled to a surprising amount of nuanced debate on whether this is really the case.
After some back and forth, Jussi Halla-aho, the most important nationalist politician in Finland, made his intervention. A little context about Halla-aho might be in order. He started his political career as a popular anti-immigration blogger, who used his blog followers to form a faction that joined The Finns Party, back then only a minor inchoate populist party, in the early 00s and took it over, turning it into a right-wing nationalist party with immigration as its main issue.
Halla-aho muscled out the former leader’s preferred candidate for party leadership in 2017, leading to some governmental drama as the other parties considered him too extreme, but only stayed in this post for a few years until relinquishing this post to a handpicked successor. Nevertheless, he continues to be the chief intellectual force of the party, and whatever he says will surely have an impact on Finnish nationalist thinking. These days his main method of communication is Facebook, not his old blog.
Now, Finnish nationalism has of course never been pro-Russian, but there has still been a certain amount of division on Finnish populist right on the question of Russian relations. After all, the Cold War era idea that neutrality serves Finland the best and Russia could offer trade opportunities if we ignore all the human rights guff and such continues to have adherents particularly in the older generations having grown up in that era, and pro-Russian narrative from the far-right movements in other European countries have also had some minor effect. Perhaps the only vocally pro-Putin politician in Finnish parliament right now is a conspiracy-theorist bodybuilder who was earlier kicked out of The Finns Party for other reasons.
Halla-aho, however, does not share this view – indeed, beyond being anti-Russia, he can be counted as a genuine Ukrainophile, one of the few Western European politicians to speak Ukrainian (his day job is a researcher of Church Slavonic, so it’s natural for him to know Slavic languages).
Halla-aho’s Facebook post is worth quoting here in full, translated by me by running it through DeepL and doing some light editing:
Halla-aho’s statement carries extra significance since he is the chair of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the highest official post his party carries now. (In some other countries opposition parties might be shut out of parliamentary committee chairmanships as a matter of course, but in Finland they will be allotted posts according to their parliamentary strength, and since The Finns are the largest opposition party, they are entitled to this heavy committee and can nominate whomever they wish.)
Halla-aho’s statement has been condemned by many other politicians, and even the party’s new leader thinks it goes too far. Of course, the most obvious point of criticism is that even if one thinks that war requires dehumanization of the enemy, you know, Finland is not actually at war with Russia. There are no bombs falling here or soldiers desperately fighting in the freezing forests of Eastern Finland. Indeed, what annoys myself about the whole signmyrocket affair is that it almost allows chair-warring celebrities to pretend they’re fighting the war themselves, expect without actually having to get a frostbite while guard a snowy dark patch of a forest somewhere or risk getting a bullet in your throat.
Still, others claim that the whole thing is just being direct about what war entails, i.e., shooting and killing, and that the most important thing is supporting Ukraine whatever way there is, and if getting money to Ukraine involves this sort of a gimmick then so be it.
Since being vocally anti-Russia continues to be a right-coded thing in Finland, and worries about whether the society is getting too anti-Russian (in a way that might lead to, say, violence against Russian refugees in Finland) is similarly mostly left-coded (even if these might be the other way around in current America), the whole debate has some equivalence to various other political correctness debates on the left-right axis. Is it important to Say Things Like They Are, or might that lead to problems? Are things even as the people who Say Things As They Are claim them to be, or are they just being edgy?
Whatever the case is, this war is probably not doing good things for the Finnish psyche, but hey, that’s in the eyes of the beholder – there are factions in the Finnish extremely online right who have basically spent the whole war celebrating how the titanic clash with the ancient enemy is making the society more based. And if making Europe more based has ever been Russia's intention, as the narrative sometimes goes - mission accomplished!
*: Finland’s newspaper of record, which was one of the instances to comment negatively on the rocket-signers. Has been a frequent target for Halla-aho for his entire career.
**: The most famous character of Finland’s best-well-known war novel/film.
Please explain this phrase, how it sounds in Finnish, its meaning and associations. It sounds very comfy.
There's little to explain, ugh. "Jaksamista" would be something like "Keep going", "hang in there", "strength". It has then, in natural verbal processes, been shortened to "Jaksuja" and then "Jaxuja" (replacing ks with x would be a popular Finnish cheezburger style thing and has been parodied and dunked on since forever - someone who isn't a teenager would probably only use it ironically, if that). Then someone decided to pair it with "halit" ("hugs"), so it becomes something like "Keep going - I'm giving you a hug" or "I'm giving you a hug for strength". Then 10 years ago Helsingin Sanomat made a story about what are the most annoying phrases people know and "jaxuhalit" topped the list, after which it has gone through 10 years of people using it ironically, culminating in this little affair.
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Which means that Finland deploying to Ukraine is right and necessary.
We needn't even go that far. If the blogger-turned-politician wanted to do more than signal virtue, he'd have bought more than one shell.
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There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:
They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.
They create bad optics. Given that Ukraine is highly dependent on foreign aid, its public image is important. Tarnishing that image in order to kill small numbers of enemy prisoners and thus jeopardize large amounts of foreign aid seems like a poorly calculated strategy.
So the Halla-aho guy's reasoning seems poor. (Also, killing enemy soldiers is just one of many factors that could advance one's war aims.)
There's also the third and fourth one, in that war crimes generally do not work to advance victory, and do contribute to bad order and discipline in your forces. These are related, but not synonymous, with the 'bad optics' role.
While 'war crimes' is a broad category, ranging from deliberately targeting religious structures (often used as observation posts for local tactical advantage) to mass atrocities, in general the arguments for expedience often disguise broader issues of national capacity. The conceit of 'we must break the rules in order to win' is more a relic of intellectual delimmas, or just self-justification, than a meaningful evaluation of national capacity. War crimes in general just don't help you win wars- by the time you could pull them off and win, you could generally win without them, and if you can't win without conducting war crimes, your margin of strategic victory is far more dependent on other factors... including external support, which comes back to the implications of 'bad optics.'
This is, indeed, the point made by the Finnish Defence Forces on this topic.
There's a number of ways you can take that further as well. One of the key insights of Clausewitz- the 'war is an extension of politics by other means' as it's often raised- is also relevant in this. When war is remembered to achieve political objectives, the conduct of soldiers- if that conduct carries political impacts- also impacts the political strength of the state to resolve the conflict favorably. Given the ever-increasing cost of war, both when it extends in time and the 21st century quality of arms support, political impacts from war crimes can far, far outstrip both short-term advantages of breaking laws of war, but also the direct military impact of poorly disciplined forces.
One of the key points in the early Ukraine war, what I would call a seminal moment that galvanized war support for an extended conflict and moved 'a cease fire as soon as possible, to mitigate the costs' outside the Overton window, was the Bucha massacre. In the last week of March, there was an ambiguous period where it was clear that the Battle of Kyiv had been lost by the Russians, but it wasn't clear what should follow next- the Russians had major gains in the south, the east wasn't lost but was precarious, and while the Ukrainians were starting their counter-offensives in the north it wasn't clear how hard the Russians would fight for the territory. There was quite a bit of discussion in the foreign policy / diplomatic circles about what should follow, and 'Kyiv should make concessions for a cease fire at least vaguely on its terms, even at territorial cost' was still being mooted in key circles, especially in Europe, which was just getting over the initial crisis response but hadn't worked a consensus on how much / how long to support Ukraine.
If there was a time Russia might have been able to use a near-miss and leverage it into a diplomatic concession, this was probably the last time... until Bucha.
Bucha changed both domestic and foreign Ukrainian politics. For domestic Ukrainian politics, the massacre in Bucha- a city northwest of Kyiv and so outside of even the most 'moderate' of territorial concessions or Russian-speaking areas of influence- served as a demonstration of sorts for Russian intentions for all of Ukraine. Ukrainians already under Russian control from occupation- not combatants, but under the administration- being imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and in some cases raped- was a natural template for what Russia was likely not only already doing, but would continue to do, to other Ukrainian areas. Leaving members of the nation-tribe to Bucha- where the atrocities preceeded the fighting and couldn't even be blamed on fighting for the city- made a national-level political concession basically untenable in the short-to-medium term. That alone would have extended the conflict by several months- and thus a considerable amount of Russian military expense of prestige and hardware.
But Bucha also affected the international space, because it suddenly discredited everyone who had been willing to argue that leaving the Russians in part of Ukraine wouldn't be so bad, and that Russian actions would be limited to the ethnic-russian areas of interest and could spare the rest. Bucha- far outside any claimed Russian area of interest, and not in the context of ongoing military operations- made that sort of concession, a requirement for any sort of Russian sphere of interest in eastern Ukraine, a politically impossible stance for even the most war-fearing European diplomats to push, lest their own publics vote the governments out. And so European elements who might have tried to pressure Ukraine to concede were disempowered, and were largely unable to gather any sort of force for another several months, leaving the gates open for expanding European aid across time and types.
For Russia- whose war plan success hinged on a political capitulation by the Ukrainian government, and political concession by the Europeans- Bucha was an absolute disaster and counter-productive incident at a decisive part of the war. Whatever the goal was at the time, the consequence to the war was absolutely against Russia's strategic interests.
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Also, if you have reputation of treating PoW decently then enemy is more likely to surrender than make doomed last stands.
In addition war crimes are bad also to people doing them and people around and is making harder to have stable sane society after war if typical soldier in your army is a torturer and rapist and whoever else.
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This reasoning would be okay if treating the enemy as animals applied only to this specific enemy and didn't normalize that behavior under any other circumstances, such against Russians in other time periods, innocent people associated with Russians (see also: Japanese-American internment), or other ethnicities, or against cultural elements (such as destroying the statue of Catherine the Great). Needless to say, humans don't behave like that.
It also reduces your credibility. If all your enemies are called monsters, you won't recognize actual monsters. Believing in the Holocaust was harder than it should have been because fake reports of German atrocities during World War I were on people's minds.
I think not. The "drawbacks" that Halla identifies, "both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war" are SUPPOSED to impede your ability to wage war effectively. Because doing co-operate/co-operate on other-side humanisation is better than doing defect/defect on other-side humanisation. If Ukraine (and it's allies) defects and goes hell-for-leather dehumanisation, Russia is encouraged to do the same, which will lead to MORE damage to Ukrainian lives (via mistreatment of POWs, occupied civilians, etc) than if Ukraine hadn't started the dehumanisation spiral.
Indeed, "more dehumanisation please" is an ESPECIALLY dumb argument to make when it's Russia occupying Ukrainian land and not the other way around, lol. This is surely the time to ask for more clemency, not less?
This presumes the Russians are willing to provide clemency if plead to, and is countered by point that Russia invaded Ukraine with the premeditated intention to set up filtration camps and start kidnapping, killing, and otherwise abusing pro-Western Ukrainians as a matter of policy and part of a broader cultural genocide effort in a war to destroy the Ukrainian nation.
To appeal for Russian clemency is to appeal for the Russians to reverse the policy objective which was a goal of the invasion itself.
Well, (a) this isn't very charitable, given that Russia's stated aim is denazification and prevention of crimes against humanity against Russo-Ukrainians, and (b) even if all Ukrainian-US propaganda is true and Russia really is capping any Ukrainian who ever looked fondly at an EU / NATO flag... there is always more brutality to be had. Daring Russia to sink even lower by engaging in anti-Russian dehumanisation will not, I think, have the long-term salutary effect Halla thinks it will: any Ukrainian lives saved from acceleration in victory are likely to be more than counterbalanced by Ukrainian lives lost from the incrementally more brutal Russian counterreaction.
Russia's stated aim is irrelevant to charity. Russia's revealed aim and policies have included multiple crimes against humanity that do amount to international standards of genocide, and in line with Russian narratives justifying such on the rejection of the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationhood.
The Russians will be brutal regardless, and will continue to be brutal over any Ukrainian territory they control both now and potentially in the future.
That's an interesting claim, considering Russia retains maximalist war goals that are not limited to 'just' the 4 claimed sub-regions, let alone the occupied areas.
Well, this post kinda exemplifies my point: @Dean is living in some sort of fantastical propagandistic counterreality where Russia is engaging in Warhammer 40k levels of no-prisoners, collateral-damage, occult-civilian-torture Khorne worship tier warfare. Which they're not, as the very existance of POWs attests. Having norms of war that you're not supposed to violate ever, is therefore a good idea, because you may, as in the case of @Dean, find yourself deranged with bloodlust and disconnected from reality, and without those (hopefully) inviolable norms you may thereby be led to doing something stupid, like playing dehumanisation chicken with an enemy who holds hundreds of thousands of your people under occupation.
Sure, maybe Ukrainians under occupation, and POWs in Russian hands, are not quite as sprightly as one would like, but they're not all literally dead, and therefore ipso facto we have proof that Russians are showing (some level of) restraint / respect for the humanity of Ukrainians under their boots. So I reiterate that Finland's dehumanisation race to the bottom has ample space to make things worse via retaliation.
Citation where I said this, please.
Please identify the argument I made which the very existence of POWs attests. (Or contests.)
My position is that the Russians already engage in dehumanization of the Ukrainians in their occupation zones, entered into the war with an intent of cultural genocide, planned for filtration camps to target non-combattants, and that there is no game of 'chicken' going on because the Russians intended to do this from the start.
Please identify what policies the Russians will inact as retaliation as opposed to what they have already been doing before and were already going to do regardless of Finnish politician positions.
Is your position that the Russians will move from limited torture and murder of civilians on the basis of imperialistic ethnochauvenism to significantly less limited torture and murder on the basis of Finnish politicians, as opposed to increasing war-stress of conscript troops in need of catharsis amidst a grinding war they are poorly equipped or trained to handle professionally?
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I don't think it's intellectually fair to use the word "genocide" (which most people associate with the physical extermination of people) in relation to a situation where children from an orphanage in Mariupol are sent to an orphanage in Russia.
Do you consider restrictions on the study of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine a genocide?
Probably the exact opposite is true. Russians will not be cruel to the local population no matter what, because they consider the local population to be Russian.
Evidence suggests otherwise.
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If you don't think it's fair to apply the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a convention of over 70 years of establishment international law, which even Russia is a a party to, for international standards of genocide, I question your standards of intellectual fairness.
No, nor do they meet the international standard of it. Per Article II of the convention-
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Black Comedy can be found in thinking the Russian state wouldn't be cruel to Russians. Evidence of Russian cruelty to Ukrainians under Russian occupation can be found from Bucha to Kherson.
Get rid of bureaucratic nonsense. I think that this word in everyday use has a completely different meaning.
Both Russians and Ukrainians constantly claim that they find torture chambers in the occupied territories, this is probably just information garbage.
If we talk about Bucha, then we are talking about the alleged incident with the execution of men mistaken for artillery spotters, a guy on a bicycle who unsuccessfully rode onto a convoy preparing for battle and many civilians killed by Ukrainian artillery.
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Unfortunately for the Russians, the Ukrainians get a say as well and it is very clear that they do not consider themselves Russians, in fact they are willing to kill and die over this very point.
The Russians will be cruel because reality conflicts with what they have imagined it to be.
But in all honesty this explanation is not needed either way, the Russians will be callously brutal institutionally and commit random acts of cruelty individually, because that is an intrinsic component of the Russian way of war. My source for this claim is the past hundred years of Russian military history and the enduring hatred towards Russia from the various peoples who have come into conflict with them.
Well, this is definitely not true for Donbass or Melitopol.
Where we see both people who are ready to kill in order to NOT be Ukrainians and people who are generally loyal to the Russian government.
I would be interested to know which countries improved their opinion of each other after the war.
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Of course, as bad as the Holocaust indisputably was, the Soviets did have an interest in playing up the German atrocity stories to distract from and/or justify their own. Narratives around atrocity are always fraught, particularly where they can be leveraged into a casus belli or other justification for outside intervention (see, e.g., the heated arguments over who and what was responsible for various Syrian Civil War atrocities, and whether the U.S. should have stepped in to topple the Assad government). This has been true for hundreds of years - propaganda stories about the sufferings of the noble Greeks under the Ottoman yoke spurred western europeans to support the Greek nationalist cause in the 1820s...many of whom were shocked by the actual conditions on the ground when they got there (i.e., Greeks on both sides or indifferent, Albanians on both sides, the spoken Greek of the time heavily influenced by Turkish loanwords, the nationalists sometimes hard to distinguish from hillside bandits, etc.)
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This statement is, very obviously, factually untrue, as the war will also end if enough Ukrainian soldiers die, or if Ukraine sues for peace, or of any combination of outside actors forces both sides to enter a ceasefire, or if Ukraine is destroyed with nuclear weapons etc. And since his entire "argument" hinges on that statement, if we disregard the issue of war guilt for a moment (I'm getting Versailles vibes), it's difficult to take it seriously.
But anyway, since this new story reminds me of the news story about a similar service in Israel, which gave Israeli schoolchildren a chance to write messages on artillery shells intended for targets in Lebanon and Gaza (yes, that actually happened), I have to wonder: is this writer and this politician Zionist? Have they ever expressed any opinion on Israel's foreign policy? I'm curious.
This doesn't make the state factually untrue, it adds additional truths not included in the statement. Which is true of all true statements, because there is always more true things to add.
Just by adding addition end states of the same categorization scheme, you are supporting the claim of the statement.
I think this "only" quite explicitly excludes all other outcomes.
Only as a qualifier as totality of options, not as an assessment of what will play. If analysis dismisses other options as not going to happen, it doesn't become factually untrue in the normal construct of conversational language.
At which point this becomes a selective demand for rigor on the totality of bounding language, which is itself smuggles in a framing context expectation not claimed by the speaker. Note, however, that the objection wasn't to the totality of the bounding language, but the sub-claims, the disproof of which was by other claims of the same sort.
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Obviously he lists scenarios that he prefers and finds probable, and not "aliens wipe out all human life, and the war becomes irrelevant". So it should be "The war will only end [in an acceptable to me and most Finnish people manner]".
Serious question (please don't take this as an offense — it's not intended as such) — are you autistic? You were the one, I believe, who said that living in Odesa and removing the statue of Catherine was a contradiction. And here you chose the most literal interpretation of this politician's words.
Were I autistic, would I be aware of it? I guess not, but again, I'm no doctor.
Yes, that's what I basically claimed, even though I didn't use the word "contradiction", and I mainly commented on the justification given for the removal, not the removal itself.
That's a hell of a qualifier though, isn't it? When we speak of a war ending or not ending, that's not what we normally mean. I'm not aware what the "back and forth" mentioned by Stefferi was about, or what exactly this statement was supposed to be the response to, but he clearly wrote "The war will only end..." and not "Ukraine / The free world will only win if..." / "A honorable peace is only possible if..." / "Putin can only be defeated if..." etc.
I can only conclude that this Facebook post was designed to be completely propagandistic (which wouldn't be one bit surprising, of course), because it manipulates people's desires for seeing the war end.
What did you expect, an expert and impartial strategic analysis?
When addressing one's people, your own side's defeat is generally not considered as an option.
It's the brazenness of it all that I find somewhat surprising.
So do you agree that it's completely propagandistic or not?
I agree it's propagandistic, for it to be "completely" so it would have to be completely untruthful.
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Yeah man, autists aren't insane. Or replicants, no matter what you have been told.
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"He clearly wrote" a statement that clearly was not supposed to be literal.
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"Moderately pro-Israel" would probably be the best descriptor. The Finnish Nazis would probably describe him as a Zionist, but to me, that phrase implies a fervent, committed defence of Israel, and Halla-aho has never particularly focused on this theme, simply because Israel/Palestine conflict does not loom particularly large in Finnish consciousness (compared to many other countries) and, apart from pro-Palestinian far left and pro-Israel evangelical Christians (both fairly minor groups), there simply isn't all that much interest in this topic. His stated stance is basically that Finland should refrain from condemning Israeli settlement policies in West Bank and should keep buying/selling weapons from/to Israel because that's the pragmatic thing to do, and this sort of a "moderately pro-Israel" stance is also common in the Finnish right simply because pro-Palestinianism is associated with the left.
If one goes here (a page with Halla-aho quotes in English), they can easily find one rather notorious statement on the Holocaust ("Retroactively opposing the Holocaust is nicer and easier than getting involved in solving present-day problems. It is nice to accuse the Germans because cosi fan tutti. Armenians are irrelevant, because Armenians don’t own Hollywood and the American media.") which occasionally gets mentioned when people delve into problematic Halla-aho quotes, but this was made before his political career really got going and he has not expressed similar sentiments since.
Huh? Really?! Does this stance count as moderately pro-Israel "just" in Finnish right-wing circles, or also in Finland as a whole? Because if it does, I find it even more difficult to take any of this posturing seriously.
I mean, it seems pretty moderate of a stance- ignore the human rights violations so we can engage in trade(I’m assuming that, unlike in America, selling weapons to Israel means Israel will pay for them).
It's pretty moderate if that moderation is selective. After all, I'm sure he'd never argue that buying natural gas, oil, raw materials etc. from Russia is the pragmatic thing to do.
Finland used to buy those until 2022, even though Russia had already invaded Ukraine (ie. Crimea) and at the very least stoked the separatist conflict. Not to mention the other projects like Nord Stream, Rosatom constructing Finnish nuclear plants etc.
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For Finland it isn't; because within living memory they had the Russia boot on their neck.
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I'm not sure what you mean. I mainly used the word "moderately" since there's no fervent, explicit support for Israel as some sort of a special country that I'd associate with more committed pro-Israelis. If Israel, for instance, placed itself firmly in the Russian camp in the Israel/Palestine conflict, I don't think Halla-aho would have any major troubles in condemning Israel; a Christian Zionist who seriously believes that it's their God-given duty to defend Israel from anti-Zionists might face a dilemma.
I mean that this stance, objectively speaking, goes beyond "moderate" support, when looking at international relations as a whole. As far as I can tell, only the US provides support to Israel that is even less moderate than this.
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This is an interesting argument to rationalize one's moral failings. Probably rings even truer in the Baltic states. I happen to believe the exact opposite, and indeed his claim forces me to dehumanize Finns (the fraction he represents) in my head – a little bit. This, of course, validates his theory about the utility of such reactions in the context of group conflict, and we have more robust validations down to oxytocin secretion patterns in warring chimps – but the point is, the burden of civilization is suppressing such nifty natural adaptations. Civilization is about decreasing time preference, finding solutions better than the intuitive ones.
Ender Wiggin had it right. People who cannot into consistent morality, who feel the need to call the enemy bugs, pigs (case in point: Russian «patriots»), dogs, pigdogs, Orcs, roaches, rats and such to pull the trigger, who turn murder into a jovial matter – are poor warriors and strategists, deluded and infantile. More importantly they are superficial, morally subhuman. What he suggests is adorning subhumanity as a protective wear for the supposedly soft genuine nature of a civilized Finnish people; but it's not something you get to take off and put back into a closet. Like a beast's hide in a fable, it grows on you. Turks and Azeris, for example, will never take it off, neither will, I suspect, Palestinians and Jews – or Serbs or Kosovars or Croatians, or the current international roster of «Fellas». Nor will Balts. And if, like Germans, you end up receiving some forceful help in this matter, much of your original content and soul and culture will be ripped out as well.
One may hold that the material benefit of supposedly higher morale at wartime and ease of popular conscience after the victory outweighs this loss. What even is lost, tangibly? How are, say, Latvians worse off than Czechs? After all, vaticinating about sovls is just a crazy thing Orcs do. Maybe. It's pretty nice that Ukrainians who actually do the killing are for the most part better than those hysterical Twitter women, activists and Westerners. Even when they are boiling with hatred.
And this is another trivial mechanic of group conflict. People far from the front, especially women and cowards, want to feel useful, to «do their part», and also show they're not traitors sympathizing with the enemy. Thus, they will lie, they will demonize, and they will clap to 50 Stalins. A Ukrainian linguist and politician Irina Farion, an enthusiastic Communist in her Soviet youth, has said recently of refugees from the Eastern regions:
Back then, she received the following in response:
In closing, here's a recent note from Arestovych. It's mawkish, like much of his writing, but I like that the Adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and one of the main talking heads on that side, finds it necessary to cajole the masses in such a manner.
I don't understand that. These people are really fighting to give their nation away to the EU/NATO?
'We must defeat the Russian invasion at all cost so that we may welcome a much bigger African invasion'
???
This seems a curious deficiency. Why are you unable to understand that people have different views on armed invasion versus voluntary association and the travails of dealing with migrants?
I just find it odd that 'nationalists' would run from the Russian Empire to immediately jump into the Western EU Empire.
Either way, the Ukrainian people is not going to be in charge of its destiny. If you abhor the Russian language, wait until you see what they speak.
Haha yes 'voluntary'. We just choose to go along the propaganda. How lucky we are to suddenly have a desire for transgenders and gay marriage and open borders!
It's inevitable. These Ukrainians are apparently attempting to become wealthier. With wealth comes migrants.
Unless by this statement, the brave Ukrainian soldier means that he wants to be like Poland and refuse to take in the refugees that the EU asked them to:
'everyone has the right to exist and live in our country.'
I realize @Dean is just having fun with his usual nitpicking here. But in any case – the odds are overwhelming that the Ukrainian guy isn't a lawyer, speaking with the precision of formal logic, and didn't mean to affirm some sort of generalized 'globohomo' ideal. He merely continued his logic of tolerance for ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers – provided they're loyal citizens of Ukraine (or his comrades-in-arms). His 'everyone' clearly isn't an unconditional, open-borders, refugees-welcome pitch, but a protest against the specific form of bigotry that Farion advocates, and perhaps its (less pressing in the current situation, but historically disastrous in Ukraine) sibling forms.
Ukraine's future, of course, is not defined by Sgt. Makhno's wishes, whether real or misconstrued. But that only makes your gotcha even less reasonable.
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This is indeed a curious limitation. Why are you unable to understand why people might want to run from an empire that has, is, and signals a clear intent to continue brutalizing a people, to an association that does not?
Between the two immigration policies, the one that doesn't have the migrants bringing in heavy artillery and conducting war crimes would indeed seem to be the preferable immigration policy.
If you have a desire for transgenders, gay marriage, and open borders, that's on you and your electorate, but that really has nothing to do with voluntary association of a nation to voluntarilly associate without a threat of war for not doing so.
Well, I suppose other than the 'will be invaded by Russian' context, but this isn't an ultimatum extended by Europe, and so any dismissal of the voluntary nature leaves the blame with Russia, not the Europeans.
Clearly not, or else migrants would be going to the wealth in Africa, which is the highest it's ever been in human history, and not to wealthier countries elsewhere. This distinction in grades of wealth is itself held within the European Union, where Ukraine would not be the wealthiest, and thus not in the area where migration flows would be intending to go.
Not clear why you're unable to understand why people might have different levels of care about the importance of migraiton policy over threat of invasion, though. That still seems weird.
Seems like you've solved your racial objection.
If your objection with association with a less brutal neighbor is refugee policy, and have identified a European model that does not entail having to take in refugees, you have just resolved your own objection.
It would have remained a mostly peaceful special operation if the US and EU had not meddled like they did in so many other countries in the last few decades.
Yet the EU intended to distribute them to Hungary and Poland.
Plus at some point being overrun by migrants will have an impact on the Western economies.
The migrants are not leaving Africa to settle in a colder Africa.
There is not.
Hungary is getting punished for its immigration policies, by getting cut off from EU gibs.
Similarly, Poland will get punished, or its American and EU 'allies' will see that they elect a government worthy of investing so much NATO money in, ie a government that celebrates gays and Africans.
And if people like Sgt. Makhno are in charge of future Ukraine, it seems that they will welcome everyone.
Ukraine will be very gay and very African or it will not be.
Even setting aside the factual inaccuracies, this doesn't explain your own inability to understand other people's viewpoint or priorities.
Ah! So you're not arguing the immigrants are going to Hungary and Poland because they're wealthy places now, I see. Will you update your prior argument accordingly?
This does not explain your inability to understand why other people may not care about this as much as a quite violent invasion.
Then why did you raise Poland as an example?
Migrants are going to the EU because there is wealth there, and it's probably easy for migrants to take some of that wealth compared to other wealthy African countries where they have actual border and law enforcement and little welfare.
The EU has laws to force member countries to welcome these migrants even if the member countries don't want them.
I call it a mostly peaceful special operation. There would be way less violence if Ukraine had implemented gun control, disbanded their law enforcement and just let the Russians burn down their neighborhoods, like NATO likes to do at home.
Poland is an example of a country that is ardently anti-Russia and seeks support from NATO and EU, like Ukraine.
However, they do not follow Sgt. Makhno's idea that 'everyone has the right to exist and live in our country.'
And they are getting punished for it by the EU.
Poland would love to have authoritarian immigration controls but they have chosen to bind themselves to globohomo EU/NATO.
Apparently, Sgt. Makhno loves the idea of a globohomo Ukraine where everybody is welcome, but then, why does he even care about Ukraine as a country?
The heads of EU and NATO hate traditional Ukrainian culture and want it erased with the rest of Western historical culture, so what is he fighting for?
Why not just flee to Poland or Germany, UK or USA?
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No, more probable that it would have been an even bloodier affair, possibly even bloodier, and the fight would be in the urban areas of Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. With the same consequences as the siege of Mariupol.
What's your obsession with Africans? It's fine to tell, I won't kink-shame.
Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark are probably getting punished as well?
Africa is a big continent with the youngest, biggest, poorest population, and it's right across from Europe.
That's why most of the migrants to Europe are Africans.
That's correct. They are bound by EU laws to welcome migrants.
EU/Lithuania: In milestone judgement, EU Court slams automatic detention and denial of asylum
Danish refugee law draws criticism from UN, EU
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May I ask why Arestovych stutters, if it isn't a translation artifact? F-Foolishness and W-Weakness? Is it like 'sharing the mood of the mob is capital W Weakness'?
@DaseindustriesLtd explained it well, but Arestovich actually misuses the trope. The use of the capital letter is supposed to invert the meaning of the word, e.g., "Russia has African levels of HIV infection. P - prevention" or "Old women started a brawl for the food thrown out by the local supermarket. D - dignity"
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Something like that. It's a common lexical trope in Russian to refer to a certain kind of toy cube set, with a big letter and the corresponding word+picture on them. Since some of those sets were bad Chinese bootlegs, the words don't always match. Sometimes a joke is made by saying one word but implying another with the letter.
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Most likely. Г-глупость. С-слабость. There's a genre of demotivators inspired by children's ABC books – A-Apple, B-Bee, J-Jello, R-Rope etc., – providing a supposedly archetypal pictorial association for a certain word. (Unrelated, but a meme series of schizophrenic Chinese blocks come to mind, e.g. the marvelous "Ae - 'Pig' - duck.jpg"). Or maybe he was going somewhere with capitalization, maybe to a clever abbreviation, but forgot where.
I knew it was a good idea to ask about this, that link is fantastic. Also the involvement of letter blocks adds a good dash of condescension, which I wouldn't have picked up on.
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I read it as "Capital-F Foolishness"
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A nitpick of sorts, but
Did you DeepL this? I couldn't figure out what this phrase meant (and in fact the whole translation was a bumpy read), so I had to go to the original, and I think it would be better rendered as something like
Back on topic proper, I find it curious how the russophone Ukrainians are probably the one side in this war from whose well-platformed people I'm still seeing some measure of common sense and humanity. The Russian patriots and exile oppositionaries seem to have had their brains melted in equal measure (with the few unmelted chunks gradually integrating with the stew over the past months), and everyone else seems to be resolutely refusing to stick their head out; meanwhile, the Ukrainian-speaking portion of Ukraine only ever seems to go viral with things in the general class of calling for Uncle Sam's nukes, though I should say that discoverability there is much lower to me and I can't rule out that there are still voices of reason.
Thanks. I was just hurrying and screwed up copypasting. There was a proper paragraph.
The issue is that this is not about real corpses but literally about a corpse font, fabricated images where text is arranged out of Russian bodies (very lowtech: they could at least fine-tune stable diffusion, smh). Characteristically, the kind of shit civvies are eager to fantasize about doing.
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Of course, "we are too soft and nice smol beans and beating our enemies means we need to become hard and cruel (like the enemy!)" has been a part of the nationalist repertoire even before this war, expect moreso connected to narratives like "Us Finns (or Westerners in general) are too trusting and naive, we get exploited by lying fake asylum seekers and criminals and terrorists and foreign-aid-dependent dictators", precisely by politicians like Halla-aho. And there's a historical connection too, the Finnish far-right 30s explicitly repeated over and over again that Finns need to learn to hate Russians, writing books with titles like "The Only Way To Speak About A Russki Is While Grinding Your Teeth" and so-on - such tendencies were effectively then pushed deep to the recess by the war and the assorted beatings, but since this idea of deliberately hardening your own supposedly soft constituency seems to be culturally inbuilt in various nations, it perhaps only waited for an opportunity to get out again.
So in a way it's only too natural a narrative for him, especially now that it's harder than usual for other politicians to condemn him (not impossible, since they have done so). Indeed, he might find unexpected sympathy for harsh rhetoric even among liberals who would usually condemn him, "I do not usually share things by Halla-aho but this..." not being an unusual occurrence in Finnish liberal social media sphere. As such, one might say that it goes beyond just Russian/Ukrainian war question and is a part of a greater effort to make harsh, "realistic" us/them rhetoric acceptable - strike while the iron is hot, and all that.
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But didn't you fall for the same dynamics? "Subhuman" is not much better than an "orc". And the reasoning of many people who call Z-Russians "orcs" is the same as yours — they [Z-Russians] lack empathy and dehumanize Ukrainians. Of course, there are unironic Nazis who consider Russians "subhumans" quite literally — but they are clearly in minority.
It's difficult not to feel rage at people who cry about a monument to Catherine II being removed (we even had several people like that here) or Tchaikovsky being "cancelled" while being completely silent on dozens of civilians dying every day due to Russian artillery or missile strikes.
What should be the attitude of Ukrainians faced with the prospect of "svinorez"?
Since this was very obviously directed at me and pretty much only me, I assume, I feel compelled to mention that I, indeed, never commented on Russian missile and artillery strikes. But if your point is to insinuate that I somehow rejoice in the slaughter khokhols, then I need to point out that, technically speaking, I also stayed "completely silent" on the civilian victims of the Azov/Kraken/Tornado/etc. units and the SBU, of the shelling of the Donbass, of the starvation blockade of Yemen and Tigray, of the drone strikes in Pakistan, and the list could go on.
Is that supposed to imply political positions?
That's another example of the phenomenon I mentioned. You can easily substitute
with
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The reasoning behind calling Russian soldiers orcs is actually pretty apt as far as analogies go, since the orcs of the Lord of the Rings were based (in individual character and personality) on some of the enlisted he interacted with during his service in WW1 and (on a larger, more general scale) the armies of eastern despots. Admittedly the eastern despots he was being inspired by were far more likely to be called Darius than Vladimir, but it's still a surprisingly apt comparison.
I think "orcs" is better. While orcs are depicted as corrupt subhumans, the main characteristic of orcs is that they are a hostile military led by a conqueror and you have to defeat them to end the war, something that's pretty much true here.
This isn't true: for defeating Mordor and ending the war it was apparently sufficient to throw a certain ring into a certain volcano, and no normal military triumph would have been as effective.
Essentially an assassination attempt on their leader. Hmmm...
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Not completely. I address this irony specifically in the first paragraph, and claim advantage on the account of you missing it. Subhumanity is a moral choice; it is proper to acknowledge this ancestral impulse and suppress it. Sadly, civilians think themselves above this burden just as they are free from burdens of the frontline. This is one of the worst parts of the war, personally. It really makes me despise civilians of all sides.
War, prosecuted as effectively as possible. To the point of terrorism, disinformation, and recognizing philosophers as valid targets. If it works.
Regarding truly civilian matters, I concur with Sgt. Makhno.
As do I. But I think people like Farion are closer to "Nazis" whom I've mentioned — they consider Russians "orcs" not because of what they do, but for who they are. The same as people who call Russians "moksha", "mongols" or whatever. And that's ironic — someone like Alexei Milchakov is quite attractive, probably has IQ above average — not an ugly "mongol" like some propaganda depicts Russians, or an alcoholic from paintings by Lozhkin. Yet it's for people like him, I think, the title "orc" is the most deserving.
Interesting tidbit about Farion — she is being "cancelled" for hitting her cat during one of her streams. I believe the same as some twitch streamer :-)
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Personally, I would prefer Russia to be a normal country and give up imperial ambitions. Or like Germany switch to economical and bureaucratic meddling with some amount of culture warring, but with economy project that is overall beneficial and culture warring that is far less problematic than what say Third Reich was doing.
So I would prefer Russia to be peaceful with their army not murdering 100 000+ people across Ukraine.
But if they are invading countries with mine in the queue? Then well, I will celebrate Russian soldiers horribly dying, support funding lethal aid until project of rebuilding imperial Russia will go away. I funded about 4 suicide drones directly[1], my country already send 230+ tanks and I hope for more.
I am not going to deny that Russian soldiers are human or pretend that it is fine, but given alternatives I hope that Russian army will go back. In body bags if needed.
[1]And yes, I am fine with fact that I substantially contributed to some deaths of Russian soldiers. That was expected effected, though goal was not "murder as many Russians as possible" - goal is to get rid of Russian threat and get them to abandon Imperial Russia project. And I am willing to put substantial resources to block respawning USSR.
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This seems like a pretty reasonable position to take, more pragmatic than most in the west have been willing to publicly state. If this was a more commonly held belief in the corridors of power in the west, the war might have been over by now.
It's anything but. First of all, it completely ignores the jus ad bellum <-> jus in bello distinction and pretends it doesn't even exist. It also assumes that anyone ever tried to convince Russia with words (When? Who? Of what?), and claims to adhere to the universal moral code that only the side that attacks first bears any responsibility for the conflict (I'd be very, very surprised if these people actually believed that).
This reply feels like a non-sequitur, I think you've replied to the wrong comment.
Also for the record, anyone bleating about how nobody has just tried to talk with Russia is either ignorant of the situation or pretending to be so, plenty of people and groups have attempted to provide an avenue for a negotiated end to hostilities, Russia has simply rejected them by insisting that the only "negotiation" they'll accept is one where they get everything they want.
If you want to bring Russia to the negotiating table you'll apparently need to pave the road to it with tens of thousands of Russian dead.
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You also ignore that they aren't making an argument on jus ad bellum philosophy.
If you want to make that something more than an isolated demand for rigor, we can, but the Russians failed that metric at the first stages, while people helping Ukraine can pass it pretty trivially.
This is less of an assumption and more you showing your ignorance. The Americans were publicizing the buildup and raising the potential invasion in late 2021 with the Russians and the Europeans, and ended the year with an international attention campaign in late 2021/early 2022 about the impending planned Russian invasion down to the level of detail of Russian manufactured false-flag casus belli before they were conducted. While doing this they burned intelligence sources in a way rarely seen, even as they publicized years of military assistance and ongoing weapon deliveries with the obvious insurgency implications, such as ATGMs and MANPADs, which in internal signalling terms is a very un-subtle deterence message of 'if you try this, you will get fucked up.'
The American information campaign was derided at the time, for various reasons- the Russians denied they were going to invade, the French thought the Russians would have to be too stupid to invade for the Americans to be correct, and publicized European diplomats at the time made allusions to Iraq War intelligence failures, and everyone thought the Ukrainians would be beaten- but whatever one can say, it's not a lack of attempting to convince Russia with words.
And this is just the American-centric one, and doesn't even include the French efforts, for which Macron endured no small amount of mockery.
Who made this claim when?
(My original comment got eaten. Whatever.)
I ask you not to be obtuse.
If it weren't the US but Russia, or any other nation you don't sympathize with, engaging in such an information campaign, would you earnestly say that it's a real attempt to convince through words, or would you dismiss it as blackmail / strong-arming?
Also, you're talking about something that was done in 2021. But this conflict very obviously didn't begin in 2021.
Multiple commenters here made the argument that I'm being obtuse/autistic if I'm taking the words of a politician literally. Fair enough. Let's then be honest with ourselves: we know that when a politician makes a public argument in the context of an ongoing war, and says that 'one side could not be convinced through words, so they now need to be compelled through force', the message he means to communicate is 'we're the good guys, so we tried everything to resolve this conflict through diplomatic means', not 'we tried blackmailing them into staying passive while the other side gets to do everything it wants'.
I ask you to be competent and historically literate.
I would indeed say that a country warning of an invasion months in advance, publicizing normally unannounced state visits on the topic, engaging in public diplomacy with regional actors who in turn give public dismissals, and publicly changing its defense policy for public visibility at the expense of operational secrecy is, indeed, engaging in real attempts to convince through words, and not conducting in blackmail / strong-arming.
I would also note that blackmail / strong-arming ARE ways to engage in persuasion via words, but this is why I ask for competence and historical literacy.
Only if you move the conflict back to 2014, which is not the context you have been speaking of. The military buildup for the February 2022 invasion very obviously did begin in 2021, with a non-trivial amount of publicly available imagery of the arms buildup where equipment brought west for Russian exercises in early 2021 was not returned with participating units, and imagery of expanded weapons buildups over time were publicized.
Not only is this in recent contemporary history not even a year old in some cases, but basic knowledge of logistics would recognize that the war had a substantial build-up phase that began well before February 2022 to enable the Russians to conduct the invasion. Hence the request for competence and historical literacy.
I disagree this is honesty, and instead would characterize this as incompetence at best, and demonstrating historically illiteracy for what preceeded the February 2022 invasion.
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I'd be very, very surprised if you actually believed that no one never tried to convince Russia with words, as opposed to trying to set this frankly absurd assumption (Russia has diplomats and embassies, and so do its opponents) as the null hypothesis.
Yes, that's what I actually believe, and I know Russia has diplomats and embassies. Where's the evidence of attempts to convince Russia with words?
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220307-macron-bucks-western-trend-by-keeping-dialogue-open-with-putin
This is the most public example, where Macron made an ass of himself by refusing to see that Putin was not serious about negotiating or talking on this issue.
There will be near constant back channel talks between Russia and other nations as the war progresses and there was undoubtedly a great deal of trying to convince Russia before the war (god knows the Germans and French have been trying to court Russia for long enough).
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Right, but can the same be said about Ukrainian civilians abroad or in the rear areas? Who gleefully celebrate in comments under videos of drones dropping grenades on unsuspecting Russian mobiks? Who donate large sums of cash to AFU, and then tell about that on social media? Their life is not in an immediate danger (of course, there are Russian missiles, blackouts and overall decrease in living standards — but the latter can be said about the entirety of Europe, Finland included). It's just the soldiers and civilians near the front and in occupied territories are their in-group, and Russians are out-group. And evidently in-group / out-group distinction doesn't have to be limited to national borders.
Well, the Russian missiles are a major factor here, and if you're male and under 60 (which probably applies to at least the lion's share of people who peruse war kino videos) and located in Ukraine, your ass may potentially get drafted at some point.
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Does the idea that disarmament, mutually agreed restraint and maintenance of norms are positive-sum not pop up in those discussions at all? At the very least, it doesn't seem like anyone (in your story, or what I see from Russian telegrammers or otherwise) is trying to seriously expand the game tree one step further and reason about how the balance changes if the other side also starts unabashedly executing POWs or whatever other ways of killing more $enemy are proposed down the line. I thought a standard European history education should have put some emphasis on how the various conventions of warfare emerged from Europe's historical experience in their absence (even if you want to have the edgy 14 year old's cynicism and say that it's just that the elites were spooked that the normlessness may come back to haunt them), but perhaps the connection from "Tired Professional Gentleman-Soldiers in colourful uniforms none of whom really wanted to be there anyway" to "the loathsome enemy right now barbarously rejecting the obvious truth of our narrative" is too much to draw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
These sorts of international agreements seem to be in a different class from basic rules-of-warfare/human-rights conventions, and anyhow once you go there (as the subthread below yours aptly demonstrates) you just get stuck in a very deep hole of both sides having equal and opposite stories of treaty violations by the other, and why their own violations as alleged by the other side don't actually count. Meanwhile, even in WWII, at least on the Western front both sides (and especially the morally and militarily victorious one!) upheld a pretense of respecting the rights of PoWs, and neither the Ameribrits nor the Soviets followed a principle of "our goal should be to maximise the number of dead Germans". Are you saying they should have?
Back on the object level of the issue at hand, for all it's worth, reports of Russians abusing or executing PoWs so far - especially after the chaos of the first few days - are very thin on the ground, despite what I assume must have been a very large number of people looking very hard for evidence. It stands to reason that they are certainly not killing and torturing as many PoWs as they could. The person quoted by OP seems to suggest that Ukrainians should kill and torture as many Russian PoWs as they could. If they did this, why would Russians not do the same to their Ukrainian PoWs? I can see why the intermediate state where Ukrainians go wild but Russians haven't yet would appeal to him, but at the inevitable new equilibrium where both of them do it, would his side actually be better off than before?
"Here are excerpts from three letters found on dead Germans:
Manager Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Schirach: "The French were taken from us to the factory. I chose six Russians from the Minsk district. They are much tougher than the French. Only one of them died, the rest continue to work in the fields and on the farm. Keeping them costs nothing and we should not suffer from the fact that these beasts, whose children may be killing our soldiers, are eating German bread. Yesterday I subjected to light execution two Russian beasts who secretly devoured the skimmed milk intended for the sows..."
Mateas Zimlich writes to his brother, Fr. Heinrich Zimlich: "There is a camp for Russians in Leiden, you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk to them with a good lash ..."
A certain Otto Essmann writes to Lieutenant Helmut Weigand: "We have captive Russians here. These types are devouring earthworms on the airfield pad, they are throwing themselves at the garbage bucket. I've seen them eating grass. And to think they're people..."
Slave owners, they want to turn our people into slaves. They take the Russians to their place, mock them, starve them to insanity, to the point where, dying, people eat grass and worms, and the shitty German with a rotten cigar in his teeth philosophizes, "Are these people...?"
We know everything. We remember everything. We have understood: the Germans are not people. From now on the word "German" is the worst curse for us. From now on the word "German" discharges the gun. We shall not speak. We shall not be indignant. We shall kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is wasted. If you think your neighbor will kill a German for you, you have not understood the threat. If you don't kill a German, the German will kill you. He will take those dear to you and will torture them in his damned Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull on your station, if you are waiting for a battle, kill the German before the battle. If you let a German live, a German will hang a Russian man and disgrace a Russian woman. If you have killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count the versts. Count one thing: the Germans you have killed. Kill the German! - That's what the old mother is asking. Kill the German! - That's the child's plea. Kill the German! - It's the land itself that cries out. Don't miss. Don't skip. Kill!"
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Note that Ukraine allowed contact of independent organisation with PoW held by them, Russia failed to do so.
See also how people released by Russia looks like.
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I think the main reason you haven't heard about it is that Russia's torture of both POWs and civilians is so routine and well-known that it isn't considered very newsworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3543197-inside-russias-war-camps-ukrainian-pows-detail-torture-abuse/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/russia-ukraine-war-un-report-details-accounts-of-rape-torture-and-executions.html
I find it hard to imagine that this wouldn't be carried by our media with much greater continuing intensity if the evidence situation were actually good enough. More importantly, though, it seems that there are some obvious test cases where PoWs like the top brass of Azov or the handful of international volunteers that were captured came back in one piece as part of a prisoner swap, where disposing of those people would have been a natural choice that would have been very advantageous to Russia if optics of PoW treatment were not a concern (as the Azov leaders and those who would see themselves in their position are valuable to Ukraine by virtue of ideology, combat experience and motivation, and conversely anything from just not releasing them to the full ISIS treatment would have improved Russian morale).
Did you miss what happened at Elenovka? Or do you find Russian version plausible, that it was a Ukrainian strike on their own people because "they started to talk about crimes of Zelensky"? By the way, UN had to disband the group tasked with investigating what happened there because Russia denied the investigators access.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/un-disbands-fact-finding-mission-into-olenivka-prison-attack-in-ukraine/2780833
Just curious, you’re so passionate about the war that you set up a Google ping for themotte when anything critical of Ukraine pops up. (Nothing wrong with that, why not give your POV.) You mentioned last time you are living in Ukraine. Have you considered fighting in the war? I know Ukraine is drafting every young man they can find; I think their recent bill allows recruiters to enter homes to find young men. Or do you have a desk job with the Ukrainian military that permits you to engage in forums from time to time?
Uncharitable, antagonistic, and snide.
Believe it or not, we are actually capable of reading between lines, and just because you write a post in a conversational, friendly tone doesn't mean we can't tell what you're actually saying. No, you are not "Just curious." Don't do this.
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It's false. I read this forum sometimes, but I don't find American culture war that interesting so I rarely post.
I did. But I have a dependant, and some of my relatives including my father are fighting, so if something happens to us, no one would be able to take care of my underage sister. Plus I don't have military experience, my father has. Also I have relatively lucrative job in IT, and I donate most of my salary to AFU. Make of that what you will.
It's false as well.
And that is comical. Interesting that people who laugh at conspiracies involving "Russian bots" fall to the same temptation of accusing anyone of being a "glowie", or an "Ukrobot".
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I thought that both the version of the Russian narrative you quote and the Ukrainian version about them shelling themselves was nonsense (Ukraine was pushing the "Russians shelling themselves" thing about every single shelling that may have looked bad in the eyes of anyone on their side at the time, including anti-personnel mines fired into the urban areas of Donetsk and the near-daily shelling of the Zaporozhye NPP). Surely they would have had better ways to dispose of them if they were interested in this, especially since this sort of shelling presumably only actually killed some hard-to-control small subset of the PoWs on site.
The more plausible explanation was that the Ukrainians shelled it by accident, based on false intel, or because the Russians could have also garrisoned military and equipment at the PoW camp (as they were doing in the NPP) and they were indifferent (as in the NPP) or unaware of the presence of the PoWs. Even in these scenarios, the Russians could have any number of reasons for refusing to admit the UN group, ranging from concerns that the report would find against them regardless of facts (see also the irregularities around their investigation of the Syria chemical weapons incident; it seems quite likely that for a lot of the UN bureaucracy, the US and allies have their thumbs firmly on the scale), via concerns that the group might pass intel to Ukrainians (the Russians repeatedly accused OSCE monitors of doing this since the conflict started, and my impression is that well-connected people on their side do in fact believe this), to the circumstance that they might find even an accurate finding that they were garrisoning valid military targets in a PoW camp to be embarrassing (in fact I'd assume there are some agreements against this as well?).
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Though the same group proves that PoWs were treated awfully by Russia.
So apparently really bad treatment is happening, though without routine murder of surrendering Ukrainians. Always nice to be passing some standards.
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The claimed goal was German surrender. Which is more than the US demands from Russia today, namely, retreat to 2022-01 or 2013 borders. The Russian people also aren't burned alive by tens of thousands, with the alternative being putting themselves at the mercy of a regime as bloodthirsty as Stalins.
I don't think you would prefer this being the goal, and those being the methods.
You're making a series of statements that I think are all correct, but I don't understand what this has to do with the question at hand of whether it is actually advantageous for Ukrainians or their Finnish allies to call for reducing their side's adherence to norms and conventions such as that you should not execute prisoners of war (or, basically equivalently, reducing their efforts to enforce their side's continued adherence; non-adherence can be expected to follow naturally if adherence is not enforced).
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The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
Fact check. All those people just wanted to get rich and we never invaded any of those countries.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
Honestly thought about doing a top-level posts. Polands economical miracle sums up this entire war. Russia offered their colonial possessions nothing and once every 50 years a famine. The West offered wealth. Maybe if Russia didn’t want colonies and offered economic development all these Slovak countries would want to be friends with them.
Mershemere meet Poland. Maybe he could study their economy and realize why no one wants to be friends with Russia.
The Russians built Ukraine's heavy industry in the Soviet period, it was a key industrial region of the USSR. It had a lot of power infrastructure, which is ironically making it harder for the Russians to destroy it, now that consumption is much less. Post breakup, Russia paid off all of Ukraine's share of Soviet debt and supplied cheap gas. The attached article makes the case that Russia supplying gas at below market rates limited Ukrainian economic modernization and encouraged corruption. Nevertheless, that could be said about all economic aid.
'Russia offered their colonial possessions nothing' is false. They made a generous offer in 2013, promising to bail out the indebted Ukrainian economy with bond purchases and lower gas prices. They were consistently supplying below market price gas back in the 2000s and 1990s, keeping Ukraine from complete economic collapse.
The reason Ukraine didn't want to be friends with Russia is not because Russia was not willing to provide but because US-based, US-aligned NGOs like the Endowment for Democracy and Open Society Foundation were paying billions to politically influence the country directly, manipulating media, education and governance.
Isn’t Ukraine under Russia control at 1/3 the income of Poland joining the EU and at a slower growth pace? Like look at the data. And besides the fact Russia literally starved Ukraine.
The whole western whore analogy your trying to make makes no sense. Does Japan not have their own culture?
Ukraine under direct Russian control was doing fairly well. Their income only recovered to 1991 levels in 2006. Have a look at Russia. Would oh-so-corrupt and incompetent Russian governance really have hurt Ukraine that much?
Look at this data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=UA-RU
It was a mistake to break up the Soviet Union completely, these countries were not supposed to be separate. Their economies were interlinked, there was no sound political basis for self-government in most of them. Ukraine inherited huge heavy industry that it didn't need, without the domestic energy to use it properly. I reckon that if you told Ukrainians in 1991 'if you elect for independence and freedom from hated Russia your economy will crater, won't even recover for 16 years, your country will depopulate, get brain-drained and go from rough parity with Russia to half their income' they would've thought again about independence.
And now they're looking at hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded because... why? So they can aspire towards reaching the level of income Russia already has in 15 or 20 years, provided they get EU membership at some later date? The above graph doesn't even count the war damage, which is going to be severe.
Well they do but it was heavily manipulated by the US who rewrote their constitution. You know how they have this weird censorship of genitals in Japanese pornography? Like tiny lines that don't cover anything, even though the actual content can be rather more perverse than showing a penis. That's because of the tortured interplay between the US officially enforcing freedom of speech and pre-existing Japanese obscenity laws. Or to put it another way, can you spot any differences in Japanese culture between 1944 and 1954?
Yeah, yeah. Median monthly salary in Russia is around 400-500 USD
https://tass.com/economy/1301957
Just a little lower in Ukraine. Somehow this huge GDP and revenues from exporting raw materials didn't translate in passable living standards for people outside of several large cities.
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So why didn’t Russia maintain Ukraine then? USSR failed. Stick to reality. If you lose you lose. They lost and turning to genocide should not be an option when you lose economically.
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This still isn't quite the same thing as having no cultural agency. The Kerberos Saga is just one of what are certainly multiple internal assessments of WWII, the occupation, and their impact on Japan.
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Ah, one of the most persistent tropes of Russian propaganda. "Stupid Ukrainians/Lithuanians/Estonians! We, Russians (or rather American engineers whom we invited), uplifted you, built your industries, infrastructure, and that's how you repaid us! Just look at those stoopid Finns who rejected our generous attempt to conquer them and build industries for them, and now all those northern ooga-boogas live in squalor"
When globohomo pays "billions" to supposedly brainwash Ukrainian population — it's bad. When Russians do it, corrupt politicians and put their agents everywhere (most of ministers, head of SBU etc. under Yanukovich were literally Russian citizens even before Maidan) — it's good. Got you.
Please don't. Allow Ukraine to reform its economy and reorient toward other markets who don't try to ensure political compliance through economic means (enriching oligarchs of both countries in the process).
Well it's a persistent trope because it's literally true! The Russians did provide below-market rate gas and they did pay off Ukraine's share of Soviet debt. You can't deny that.
They admitted it themselves. Victoria Newland said the US invested $5 billion in Ukrainian democracy and civil society since 1991. If you want a citation, it was a remark at the US-Ukraine Conference, National press club, December 13, 2013. You're surely aware of the phone call where she literally discusses who will be minister in the new government. Clearly this investment was very effective, it obviously achieves better and cheaper results than Russia providing actual economic assistance in terms of acquiring influence.
Firstly, I have no power to decide these issues. Secondly, if Ukraine wants to reform their economy that's their business - but receiving cheap energy is a boon not a curse. No Briton bemoans the copious reserves of coal they were bequeathed. Saudi Arabia is not weakened by its oil wealth. Sound management can prevent dutch disease and similar effects. Thirdly, how is 'promoting civil society and a good form of government' with billions of dollars not acquiring political compliance through economic means? The money still filters back through to those in high places - Hunter Biden didn't earn his sinecure from Burisma with his petrochemical knowledge.
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All that shines isn't gold.
Would you be upset if Andrew Tate invited your sister to join him in his mansion and become rich by showing off her body?
Would you slap your sister if she told you she was considering it, because you don't treat her right and she needs some of that self-care mmmh mmmh?
No, because slapping is a poor way to persuade people.
Also, if that would happen then thing went horrifying wrong before and I prefer actions taking far earlier.
It works in Afghanistan.
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You are making a big assumption that the west doesn’t treat people well.
But sure she can stay with him if she’s not a prostitute and she flirts with rich guys looking for a wife.
Oblivion awaits the childless, godless West.
Absolutely haram.
Let’s stick within real arguments here instead of if you disagree with me your sisters a prostitute. I think that’s a reasonable standard
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I'm trying and I can't understand what you're all arguing about? There are three actors in this game. It is true that Poland joined NATO, as the prospect of access to the closed EU market and subsidies from Germany, France and the UK is very tasty. It is true that the US is interested in expanding its sphere of influence. And it is true that for Russia, the expansion of NATO and the EU is a loss of market access and unacceptable security threats.
That is, Poland has reasons to join NATO/EU, the US has reasons to increase its influence, Russia has reasons to perceive expansion as aggression.
All of these things can be true at the same time. Right?
I reject this part.
Though it would be accurate to treat it as a threat on Russian imperialism and pre-empting USSR 2.0. That is exactly why Poland and other joined NATO and Ukraine wanted to join.
Russia is not entitled to having an imperial sphere of influence.
First, the presence of nuclear weapons does not guarantee security in the medium term. Especially when your opponent has much more financial and human resources. Secondly, the loss of buffer states creates huge opportunities for proxy wars. Starting from attempts to arm the non-systemic opposition, ending with the Ichkerian separatists.
Isn't that enough reason?
It seems to me that starting proxy war against NATO is a poor way to avoid proxy wars against NATO.
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Ukraine was never a military threat to a nuclear armed country so security is false but loss of culture/economic control is true.
And there is the fourth actor Ukraine whose opinions should matter the most.
There seems to be discussed the expansion of NATO in general. In the case of Ukraine, I would replace Poland with Ukraine and not much would change. (Although the armed coup and the right of the population to self-determination make this case more difficult).
And the threat to Russia is not Ukraine, it is the United States and NATO, of course.
NATO is not militarily invading a nuclear armed power. Not worth it. Russia would be ignored like N Korea.
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this sounds a bit funny for Pole given that we are word-class at complaining and doomposting :)
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Damn, how many invasions did I miss?
In all seriousness, the US (or more broadly speaking, the west in general, don't know why you're leaving western europe out here) didn't "expand into eastern europe", it was invited in, largely because eastern europe was sick of Russia and what Russia had to offer.
Just because a country is invited doesn't mean they have to. The Soviets didn't base nukes on Cuba. If Mexico invited China to join a military alliance they wouldn't be allowed to do so.
Those deals didn't specify that they had to implement mass immigration, a George Soros social policy and end up getting sanctioned by the EU for not doing things that were never in the deal. Furthermore, the either you are with us or you are against us policy of the US gives countries the option of either submitting and becoming vassal states or being more or less blockaded. Countries that want independence from the US either have nukes or are under constant threat or pressure from the US.
And? Note that some fairly minor countries like Poland decided that they prefer to not get it and are not "more or less blockaded" by USA.
UK Brexited over immigration among over things and I do not remember it being "more or less blockaded" by USA.
How that connects to "the US expanding right into Eastern Europe"? Unless you have overly rose image of USA competence and argues that EU is its puppet without any power.
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I fail to see what this has to do with the US, you're describing largely internal European matters here.
Oh don't be so dramatic, if you believe that all the nations aligned with the US/West are vassal states then you have an unusually broad definition of vassal state to be sure.
The point you seem to be flailing towards here, is that choosing to trade/align with someone opens you up to being influenced and I don't think that this was something missed by the leaders of the various nations that have chosen to flee "Russias orbit" in the post cold war era. They chose to align themselves with the west in general (and the US in particular) because they believe that it is a better deal than what they experienced with the Russians and I cannot blame them.
If the Russians (or anyone else for that matter) wishes to seriously challenge US hegemony, they could start by offering a better, credible alternative. The fact that so much of eastern europe is willing to fight, bleed and die in order to remain part of "Globohomo" should probably be a wake up call that Russia is pushing a seriously bad product.
And I suspect that the best thing that homolobby can do for itself in Ukraine is to play on repeat Putin complaining about homolobby and satanist nazi jewish gay Ukrainians.
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That's false — Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam and many other countries are neither American "vassals", not they are blockaded (though I object to the use of the term "vassal" to the US-aligned countries)
Americans didn't base nukes in Poland either (despite Poles expressing their desire to have them there).
So why do you deny their agency? They didn't have to, but they DECIDED to join.
Vietnam is pretty much aligned with the US nowadays, actually.
Probably because it's beneficial for them from the economic standpoint, and also because the US is a counter-weight to the Chinese influence in the region. Not because the US strongarms Vietnam.
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After Russia was kicked out of areas it occupied/controlled by force. Large part of that conquests was result of alliance with Third Reich and Hitler.
They were invited by nearly everyone for obvious reasons.
You do know that Slovakia and Croatia entirely owe their existence to Hitler's legacy, don't you? Without him and his decisions, neither country would exist.
Do you still hold their independence to be legitimate?
You also know that Poland signed a nonaggression pact with the Third Reich, and took part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, don't you?
That is blatantly false, for multiple reasons. Dropping "entirely" would help a bit but still would be untrue.
And I am not calling for rolling back anything communist adjacent - I would not support undoing electrification of many rural areas of Poland on basis "it happened under communism". And I am not going to kill myself because I was born during communist rule. Or deconstruct motorways where construction started under Hitler.
But i would support undoing things done by Third Reich and USSR regimes that were unwanted.
Yes.
Yes. BTW, Trans-Olza is nowadays in Czechia.
Huh?
whooops!
It was supposed to be "But i would support undoing things done by(...)"
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Both Slovakia and Croatia existed as distinct parts of Czechoslovakia (it's in the name) and Yugoslavia before Hitler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banovina_of_Croatia
They did not preserve their independence past WW2.
Yes - "distinct parts" i.e. administrative areas and not nations, which is what they currently are, and claim to be.
Their independence after 1991 was, disregarding foreign help for a moment, only possible because they had a bygone legacy as independent states that was possible to resurrect, and they only existed as independent states pre-1945 due to Hitler's decisions and the Third Reich.
They weren't just "administrative areas". Croats, for example, already existed as a separate ethnonational entity back then.
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Can we put this argument to rest? No one forced Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe into NATO. Russia likes to talk about "sovereignty", but evidently it's "sovereignty for me, but not for thee"
We shouldn't, because expansion doesn't necessarily entail the use of force. Applying to join NATO doesn't automatically mean membership. On the part of the governments of NATO members, there needs to be a political will and decision to, technically speaking, invite those countries, and decide that they should join. That's still expansion.
Well, yes. As can be seen from case of Ukraine.
And Ukraine also demonstrates how it ends if you fail to run away from Russian bear quickly enough.
This is nothing but snark, and definitely not an argument. What was the window of opportunity for Ukraine to run away, in your view? When was it too early, and when was it too late?
Directly after fall of communism and some time later. Plenty of stuff was stolen during that time in Poland but Ukraine went far further and economical growth was anaemic later.
The made some steps since 2014 but it was too late to avoid Russian invasion and may be also too late to avoid conquest by Russia.
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Why? It's like the meme "I consent, I consent, I don't". I think Mexico has the right to join any alliances it wants as well (though the US in that case can withdraw from NAFTA etc.). In that scenario, Mexico has to decide whether it wants to prioritize relationships with China or the US, and accept drawbacks of their decision. Poland and Baltic states made their decision — Russia had nothing to offer them, apart from chauvinistic sneering and cheap gas that they might later use to twist their arms politically.
So do the governments of NATO member states have any agency in all of this or not? For Poland and the Baltic states to make that decision, there needs to be a palpable intention on NATO's part to expand westwards, a call to be answered. Mexico can only join any alliance if it gets invited by that alliance, presumably because it wants to expand into the American continent. The issue here is not what it does or does not have a right to do.
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Sidebar but was recently on /r/combatfootage and it's insane both how much HQ video is coming out of the conflict (especially the drone bombings which are, frankly, grim as hell) and how partisan most people are on random gunfights between Ukrainian and Russian young men with no particular power over their own destinies.
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Thanks for the interesting and high quality post.
Well, if it's so simple, why not have another crack at Leningrad? Why not send whole brigades, kit and all, to fight in Ukraine? That would kill a lot of Russian soldiers. The real answer is that he knows perfectly well Finland would suffer severely if they attacked Russia. Clearly killing Russians is not the solution to everything.
The previous guy in that role got kicked out of the job for being insufficiently careful in his wording, apparently suggesting that Ukraine wasn't going to join NATO. I thought that was the official story, that Russia invading Ukraine was bad in part because Ukraine certainly wasn't going to join NATO anyway, at least in the short term. I suppose the lesson people learnt from that is that one should err on the side of being anti-Russian for political gain, regardless of how this might impair diplomacy. How exactly do we plan to negotiate with people we've spent our time decrying as subhuman? Might former Axis allies calling Russians subhuman not be counterproductive, providing grist for their propaganda mills?
Most European countries are rich and cowardly and currently at low risk, to the first approximation. And Ukraine's limits are equipment, not soldiers anyway.
So sending equipment is relatively cheap, enough for Ukrainians and enough to harm Russian imperialism long term.
Europe will send F16 and 400 modern MBT before sending soldiers.
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One facet of this whole affair I considered mentioning (but didn't, partly since it meant I managed to keep it within 10 000 words and didn't have to split posts) was that a few days ago Anton Monti, a Finnish-Italian writer who used to be a fairly notable figure in Finnish radical left (autonomist communist) circles in the early 2000s, made some bizarre tweets where, in addition to a strange attack on Estonians as "beneficiaries of Soviet Union", he said that Finland should - instead of sending tanks to Ukraine, which has been under discussion - "send tanks to Russia", ie. take back the areas lost in 1940/1944. Monti has gone through some ideological twists and turns, but taking a brazen irredentist nationalist position like this led to a fair amount of hooting and hollering, including accusations that this, too, was some sort of a Putinist plot (some magazines have suggested that Russians are trying to stoke take-back-Karelia discourses in Finland to create a potential casus belli). Oh, and he happens to be the partner of the deputy mayor of Helsinki, too...
This is indeed a frequently-made point about the most belligerent statements by public figures, like Monti's. "We can't allow fear of Russia make us engage in self-censorship like during the Cold War" and "It doesn't matter whether we hold our tongues or not, Russian propaganda is going to twist whatever statements we make to their liking anyway" are generally some of the replies.
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