Dmitry

Why should I make a stance of if we should intervene more or less? It’s simple we intervene when it’s in our own self interests. Iraq, Afghanistan for the natural resources and Syria and Libya for their geographical significance surrounding the Mediterranean. We don’t get involved in far flung dictatorships because they simply don’t interest our governments and that’s where the hypocrisy lays. If Ukraine was some far flung African or Asian country the same level of restrictions simply wouldn’t be put on Russia, I actually agree with the restrictions as you can go to the world war 3 thread and see but I don’t have this same hypocritical good vs evil stance you seem to take. NATO been the bringers of peace and justice is the most hypocritical nonsense going anyone with a brain can see that.

Putin should face war crime charges and I hope the prick dies, but there’s plenty of blood on western leaders hands as well.

 

The thing is Dmitri, you’re talking like the break of the Soviet Union is a bad thing. Ask the countries that were occupied, and I’m pretty sure they’ll disagree. And Marxism? Let’s not even go there. Putin can’t just decide, because there’s a history of “ownership” prior to 1991, that he has a right to take them back. If he succeeds in breaking Ukraine, where does he stop? I’m living in a country that was Governed by the Soviet Union, borders Russia and the fear that “we’re next” is very real. Nothing good can become of this, and Putins quote that if there’s an unsuccessful Russia, then there’s no point in having a World, are the words of what can only be described as a mad man. Anyway, there’s a football match on. Hope you can watch it somehow, but you do have to realise why the World are distancing themselves from Putins Russia.

 

Wow. ONLY 800 innocent civilians have died. Ok then. All’s ok.

 

You’re taking my point out of context. If civillians were targeted there’d be god knows how many casualties. A damn sight more than 800.

 

I think there’s still over a thousand under the rubble after the last targeted attack.

 

Are you saying that all those pictures of bombed out residential blocks are fake? What other reason is there for mass shelling and destruction of residential areas if not to target civilians?

 

There has already been a lot of confirmed misinformation and incorrect images being flung around social media.

Neither you or I know what’s real and what isn’t - that’s a fact.

Look, every civilian casualty is tragic, whether it be 8, 800 or 800,000.

What’s also tragic, is the almost universally acceptable persecution, discrimination and racism towards Russian people. To suggest Dmitry should be banned from here is equally as bad as suggesting someone ought to be banned from here because they’re black or brown.

If you wish to virtue signal your empathy towards Ukraine feel free to do so, but don’t persecute innocent folk while doing so.

 

Strange post

 

Care to elaborate?

 

I've made no comment whatsoever about Dmitry and don't intend to.
Nor have I ever made racist statements about Russian people.
I accept that there is always a certain amount of disinformation from all sides in a war. But there are nearly two million civilians evacuated from urban areas and day after day of shelling residential areas in multiple towns and cities. Whole towns are being razed to the ground. To suggest that the sheer volume of pictures and information about targeting of civilian areas is not real is ludicrous.
Your stance on this is extreme and bizarre, to say the least. I can only imagine that you have some kind of agenda that you are not making explicit.

 

I think civilian targets does not mean firing guns at individuals walking around, it means residential buildings in residential areas have been targeted and hit while individuals hide in basements, underground stations and therefore mostly escape instant death. The destruction of residential buildings is indisputable. It's on film.

The fear in ex-soviet states is real. My lady friend has abandoned Latvia to permanently join me here in Belgium and England, while her family in Latvia have packed emergency bags ready to leave. They do not want a return to Soviet times.

 

Some would argue Churchill was a war criminal for what the allies did to dresden, but when was the last time Britain entered a war as the aggressor or even started a war ?

Our role in warfare, at least land war, has pretty much always been as the attempted saviour. Even in Iraq.

 

It's always been described in British press releases as a potential saviour. Whether that's 100% true or not is definitely open to debate.

 

Churchill was a great speaker and rallied the nation at a desperate time for the country but he was a warmonger and a dreadful organiser of campaigns that usually ended up in defeat and mass casualties,

 

The one thing we do know for certain is that a sovereign state has been invaded against its wishes resulting in thousands of completely avoidable deaths, Its infrastructure being systematically destroyed. This kinda trumps anything else on anyone's agenda.

 

Very difficult to argue against that.

 

Yes but some on here would suggest that you can’t actually know that @Rogered Tart. I guess a lot of us have had the wool pulled over eyes.

 

Because that is where the Ukrainian army hide there tanks, Troops and missiles putting their own public at risk, They have great PR and scream murder and war crimes but they are as bad

 

Bradford City discussion?

 

There are some really interesting view points in this thread, not least from @Dmitry (and I certainly wouldn't presume to tell him what his political philosophies should be) but there are a few areas where I might be able to provide a bit of context and possibly counterpoint for some of the statements within this thread.

Firstly a disclaimer, I'm not a historian or a politician so I'm not about to tell anyone on here that their view is wrong but my personal opinion is that Putin is absolutely at fault and any perceived transgressions by NATO have been hugely exagerated as a means to an end for his own power ambitions. The reason why I think that my perspective on this situation is a bit different to most people is that as well as a love of cinema which means I've seen far more 1920's/1930's silent Russian films than is strictly necessary, I studied Russian at school (now mostly forgotten) and this meant that I was exceptionally lucky and got to visit Russia during the era of the USSR at a time when very few people were allowed across the iron curtain in either direction so I have some first hand knowledge of Western and Eastern Bloc life which is relatively uncommon. I can't remember for certain but this would be early spring 1990 or maybe 91, Eastern Europe was just starting to move away from the grip of communism but there was no indication that USSR would start to change and I spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (now St Petersberg.)

One thing that many westerners will not realise is just how poor everyone and everything was at that time. Think of the most deprived part of the worst western city that you've ever seen and you're not even close. Red Square aside, Moscow was an absolute hole, there was no litter but it was incredibly rundown and filthy through industrial grime, the roads were abysmal but there were hardly any cars and there were special lanes that were only availble to communist officials. The pavements were worse, all the utilities were above ground so you had to avoid pipes and cables crisscrossing everywhere, if they were surfaced it was poor quality and there was loads of bloody ice (changes in alcohol duty meant that cheaper aftershave had become a vodka substitute for some people which is not a good mix with rubbish pavements and months old rock solid snowdrifts.) The normal shops were empty or non-existant, the only shops we were allowed in were exclusive to Western travellers or party officials but the currency was worthless so £5 spending money for the trip saw me eat/drink and come home with a suitcase of memorabilia with change left over to allow me to smuggle a few Roubles home (it was a closed economy so at the time it was illegal to take currency out of the country.) Black marketeers were everywhere, they had to avoid our minder and the authorities but we were constantly being approached for ilicit currency trades (I think the official rate was £1 = 10 roubles but the street corner rate was anywhere from 50-100 for anyone who had $ or £ available), military equipment such as watches (so many watches), hats, medals, uniforms were constantly being offered for $/£ and if you were wearing Levis then someone would definitely make you an offer. Leningrad was much prettier to look at than Moscow but the people were just as poor. At one point, some teenage school trip high jinx resulted in a toilet roll accidentally (?) being launched out of a hotel window and streaming down to the pavement below and the one thing that I still remember most clearly about that trip (ahead of the Bolshoi, St Basil's and the Winter Palace etc) is seeing people rush to gather up armfuls of toilet paper from the road and stuff it in to their shopping bags to take home.

That's only 30 years ago, the increase in living standards and infrastructure since then is immense and for most of that time Putin has been in charge and has helped drive those changes. If you or your parents have gone from the type of things described above to a standard of living comparable to what we have now, whilst you might have some reservations about the methods, you're probably not going to be too bothered and although he is obviously not universally admired within Russia he has accumulated a huge amount of goodwill off the back of this economic turnaround which is one of the reasons why Putin is so popular.

Another key area is personal freedoms, we had to have an official tourguide, we had to stay at Westerner only hotels and spend money at Westerner only shops much like how you see N Korea operate now in travel documentaries. Of course it was much worse for the locals, ordinary Russians weren't allowed anywhere near "luxuries" like that and that's before you consider all of the KGB and labour camp stuff that was a constant threat for anyone who thought differently - a malfunctioning lift took some of us up to a "secret" floor of our Moscow hotel and when you end up somewhere that you shouldn't be in a police state and the lift doors open up to reveal a high security steel vault type door behind a steel cage with security cameras you get freaked out very quickly no matter how innocent your reasons are for ending up in that place.

Once again, viewed through UK eyes, some of the autocratic stunts that Putin has pulled over the years does leave you wondering why Russians put up with it but in reality, they're still broadly better off than under the comunists and even when it comes to voting in democratic elections, even if some candidates end up being excluded for one reason or another, we're still talking about a net improvement since Soviet times.

The last thing I want to mention is about the flow of information, I know that these days we're all familiar with fake news and disinformation but when you're in a Russian school and one of the pupils tells you that it's OK to talk to them and they don't mind that you've been told to lie to them about supermarkets (i.e. full of food) and other capitalist ideas, it does make you think that on balance of probabilities I'm inclined to trust BBC above RT. However, what I really want to bring up is the lack of information and how easy it is to be to be oblivious to what is going on around you.

One of the criticisms I've seen in this thread is that Russians should have explored all the available Westerm news outlets and then come to the realisation that the Kremlin line is wrong. The reality is that if all of your usual information are saying that something's true and most of your friends/family etc are saying that it's true, you are very unlikely to have any reason to explore further. And yes, we have seen footage of anti war protests in Russia but these are not going to be visible to the vast majority of Russians and will go unnoticed and it's very easy to miss the signs of seismic events if you don't know that they're taking place.

The reason I know this is because of what happened whilst I was in USSR. From our perspective it was a perfectly ordinary extraordinary school trip but back home there had been panic and school meetings about what was going on. It turned out that one of the biggest geopolitical events of the 20th century had taken place whilst we were in USSR, communism had collapsed and no one on that trip had any idea that anything was going on. We had caught the overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad in the early hours of the morning and shortly after daybreak there were tanks in Red Square and the transport links had been restricted. In Leningrad we were none the wiser, in hindsight there were potentially a couple of small clues: none of the TV's in our hotel rooms worked and we did see a person with a Russian flag (the White/Blue/Red tricolour not the hammer and sickle USSR one) but other than that there was nothing. We got on the plane to come home, which was full of school kids (including some from Eton), the airport shut behind us and the USSR started to fall apart. If I can miss that, I'm never going to be too critical of anyone who isn't fully abreast of current affairs.