Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary leader whose plane crashed weeks after he led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership – shows what happens when people make deals with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves into a fourth month, with only modest gains to show so far, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he rejected suggestions it was time to negotiate peace with the Kremlin.
“When you want to have a compromise or a dialogue with somebody, you cannot do it with a liar,” Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Literally yes. If they capitulate it’s only a matter of time before Putin tries again, either by fomenting a revolution and installing another pro-Russia dictator, or restarting the war. This is a fight for the very survival of Ukraine.
Survival of human beings 👎
Survival of the nation 👍
Putin is trying to kill both. Those human beings deserve to live and they deserve a country too – the country they are dying to defend.
I think them conscripts would rather do something other dying for their country. I know I would.
Have you ever read Catch-22? Yossarian likes to go on about how everybody is trying to kill him. If you’re a Ukrainian soldier it’s not just Putin who’s out to kill you. It’s your own government too, and apparently the average western lib on this very internet forum.
If you believe this why are you not advocating for the Russian conscripts who are forced to fight a madman’s war of aggression and territorial expansion? Like sympathizing for the Ukrainian troops forced to fight is fine but I think you fail to realize the alternative for them is to die at the hands of the Russian military.
Only one side here is engaged in a purely optional war of territorial expansion. And it isn’t “the west” or Ukraine.
Oh I do consider the Russian soldiers victims that should be helped to escape their situation.
No need to figure out how or why this war broke out, Putin is simply mad. It follows from that also that you can’t reason with the guy. Do you think this is a children’s cartoon?
You gotta explain this. Last time I checked, the civilians casualties in this war weren’t that high, and civilians can and do usually stay clear of the front lines. They might even leave the country if the men were allowed to. So if they weren’t soldiers, they almost certainly wouldn’t die at the hands of the Russian military.
The war broke out because Putin covets Ukraine and always has. He is a kleptocrat and dictator with no interest in his own people’s happiness or their rights; he seeks personal enrichment and power and that is his goal here as well. I think “madman” is a perfectly acceptable way to describe him, and we haven’t even begun to discuss his army’s conduct in the war.
Russia is targeting Ukrainian civilians specifically. It is even targeting children.
Given this, why do you believe if the Ukrainians lay down their arms Russia wouldn’t continue doing exactly what it has been doing — trying to kill their civilian population and deport their children?
There’s absolutely no evidence Russia would let anyone leave and quite a lot of evidence they would continue committing war crimes against them.
Edit: and this article literally just got published today: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/world/europe/russian-ukraine-torture.html
Always has? They didn’t start talking about annexation till well into the invasion. In the Minsk agreement he wanted the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, didn’t even recognize the DPR/LPR right until the start of the invasion. Maybe, just maybe, they actually feel threatened by NATO encirclement, like they’ve been saying since basically forever, and which even prominent US politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning about. But I guess you prefer pseudo-psychological explanations to realpolitik ones. Fuck reality we got vibes!
Why would they? “His army’s conduct” is about par for the course. You should read about how much civilian targets the US hit during the Iraq invasion. Of course the civilians will be a lot safer once the fighting stops. The goal of this invasion is not to kill as many civilians as possible, that would look way different. The Nazis had extermination squads trailing the front just committing one huge massacre after another. They had death camps. This is not what’s going on in Ukraine. Fighting age civilian men get imprisoned and “filtrated”, but are usually released after a while and then allowed to get Russian passports. “Harmless” old people and women and so on aren’t even filtrated. Ukrainian children are returned to their parents if/when they show up. This isn’t some extermination campaign.
In what sense does any amount of anxiety justify a war of territorial aggression and the committing of war crimes against a population and the deportation of its children?
If Russia was worried about NATO there are many better ways to handle that than creating a bunch of corpses. Or trying to take Ukraine’s territory, which again they have already demonstrated their desire for after doing it in Crimea.
I have actual sources of the war crimes they’ve committed. Where is the proof they’re not committing the well-documented war crimes against the civilian population that you assert? That it’s simply temporary?
Because it is actually an extermination campaign. Putin wants the land and he doesn’t want the people on it. His actions to this point make that quite clear.
Ukrainians would disagree; they’re the ones to want to fight and if their government tried to give up, they’d throw them out and find someone willing to keep going
If they all want to fight so bad, why are the men not allowed to leave the country? Why has Zelensky recently announced a crackdown on draft dodging? Why are there so many videos of men getting dragged kicking and screaming into vans by military
recruiterskidnappers?