seems like trying to nail pudding to a wall.
Yeah agreed. My entire point was quite literally that if you understand Russian politics this isn't out of the ordinary. For whatever reason this turned into everyone assuming I'm writing from Eglin AFB. In reality any observer of Russian politics can connect the dots on how United Russia has had a relationship with reactionary nationalism and neo-Nazism for decades. Nationalism is quite literally United Russia's only serious political position.
It's also incredibly jarring because for some strange reason people love to jump to Navalny's fascism (esp in regards to his ideas about Chechens), but there seems to be this weird disconnect with the leaders of United Russia, the majority of whom have said that Ukrainians are not a real people.
Medvedev:
"Ukraine is NOT a country, but artificially collected territories"
The Ukrainian language is NOT a language, but a surzhik (pidgin)
Putin:
At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any,
Today, the ”right“ patriot of Ukraine is only the one who hates Russia. Moreover, the entire Ukrainian statehood, as we understand it, is proposed to be further built exclusively on this idea.
Here's the most fun one Shoigu (a literal founder):
I would not speak about Ukraine as a threat. I think that Ukraine and the Ukrainian people is a brotherly nation. They are not just our neighbors, we are a single people.
He's not even an ethnic Russian! He's Tuvan in Russian cultural tradition, because your ethnicity follows your father (his mother was a Russian living in Ukraine to add to the fucked up 6 dimensional calipers here). What the fuck you mean single people?! You're not even a "single people" with Putin.
Twice as strange is the fact that this is a communist site that constantly does Lenin posting who literally wrote:
No democrat, let alone a socialist, will venture to deny the complete legitimacy of the Ukraine’s demands. And no democrat can deny the Ukraine’s right to freely secede from Russia. Only unqualified recognition of this right makes it possible to advocate a free union of the Ukrainians and the Great Russians, a voluntary association of the two peoples in one state. Only unqualified recognition of this right can actually break completely and irrevocably with the accursed tsarist past, when everything was done to bring about a mutual estrangement of the two peoples so close to each other in language, territory, character and history. Accursed tsarism made the Great Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people, and fomented in them a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in their native tongue.
Now I personally don't believe that Putin and Medvedev actually hold the chauvinist views strongly or more strongly than your average Russian, they are simply political operators, and this is their opening. I suggest everyone read Putin's writing which is full of hilarious tight-rope walking especially as it relates to the USSR. However the realpolitik of the situation is clear and obvious, and it's very much a "play stupid games win stupid prizes" problem for Ukraine, egged on by the US.
What I find more than a little funny since United Russia/Putin/Medevev's leaning into fascism for a literal casus belli (and domestic political management for those paying attention) is the fact that many on this site are fine with or approving of these political moves because the fascism isn't NATO-based.
Beyond that the idea that "all Ukrainians are fascists" in some distinct unique form from every other idiot irredentist country is very weird and racist -- and it's especially weird and racist to the Ukrainians that were murdered by Ukrainian fascists over the last 10 years, and in 1917-1922, and by all the UPA incursions, etc.
As a Ukrainian in America it's been extremely tiring immigrating and growing up and having to deal with people fucking up my name, being xenophobic, and making stupid ass jokes, only for me in my 30's to suddenly become the currently exhalted race in America's POV, when it's entirely usurious to the US political aims. It's also been extremely tiring growing up as a Ukrainian and having to deal with this very real bullshit from my family vis-a-vis Bandera and the fucking hauntological crybaby shit about not being able to do 20th century nationalist war crimes like everyone else in Europe. Do you know how fucking weird/tiring it is for me as a Ukrainian Jew who's mother is Jewish and father is Ukrainian to have to argue with both of them including my own Jewish mother against double genocide theory? That was my 31st fucking birthday the first year the war turned hot. I called them both Nazis and paid for the meal. What's even funnier is that my extended family comes from all over the USSR. Just to my grandparent's level it's Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.
There is no one more tired of this Ukraine bullshit than me. That honestly includes being tired of a lot of the contrarian "leftists" who like their lib counterparts suddenly became experts in a region of the world they didn't know existed for the majority of their lives. My one fucking ask is please be normal and stop having these extremely strong opinions on extremely complicated regional ethnic conflicts with centuries if not millennia of bad blood that you have no fucking idea about. Israel has made you guys feel overconfident. Just because the whitest American from Philadelphia is cosplaying as a Middle Easterner is saying how "his people" (Eastern Europeans) have a millennia old property claim, doesn't mean that every ethnic conflict comes from the same place of extremely simplistic made up bullshit that happened within the last century
The contrarians are in fact doing the same thing they accuse Ukrainians of flattening everyone to a single dimensional national ethnicity. Which is ironic because Putin accuses them of doing the same thing while he does the same thing too, see how the enemy of my enemy is not actually my friend because these things aren't binary? More importantly they're fucking fake! They don't exist. There's like 8 "surviving" Ukrainian indigenous ethnicity and some of them are also likely bullshitters that started in the 1300's. This part of Eastern Europe is genocides on top of genocides, it's history is not taught to Westerners, and honestly nobody really needs your opinion that is based on a very small fraction of this history selectively filtered through your personal biases and current political outlook mixed in with extremely propagandized media diets. It's really cool that you're memeing it up with the Hunka the Jewslayer copypasta. Do you know that mainly applies to Lviv? Do you know that literally ~500 km away is Uman which is literally a pilgrimage site for Breslov Jews? Hasidism was born in Ukraine. Beyond that Ukraine has a history of Turkic people including the Tatars and Gagauz. Ukraine is the birthplace of Anarchism. Ukraine has been part of, and become independent from multiple European empires. Ukraine is literally called "borderland" because it has a rich multicultural history. The problem with your understanding of Ukraine is that it comes only from the flat fascist nationalist identity forged after Maidan. The second problem is that you're stupid enough to believe that that's all there is about it, you've taken the Nazi's at their word. Instead of challenging their worldview, you've accepted its historicity and only rejected it's morality just to score anti-NATO updoots in online "discourse".
Remember that it's only through the "help" of your beloved Western countries in which you comfortably sit criticizing people, that this festering rot of Ukrainian nationalism survived one of the only moral purges Bolsheviks ever did. It was America and Canada who allowed these people to freeze their shitty culture in amber in the Midwest, and that allowed them to reemerge when the wall fell to reinvigorate this dying bullshit in Ukraine. It was America who pushed Maidan into a right wing neo-Nazi movement. The first thing that my father learned when he emigrated to this god forsaken country, is that in America if you want to live like it's 1915, 1933, 1947 or whatever year from whatever country, you too can move out to Ohio and make your own shitty little ghetto as you slowly Americanize into the worst mix of regressive provincial attitudes from the old and new world. It is through that weaponized immigration that this cluster fuck ultimately happened. Seriously what kind of ethnic background do you think Victoria Nuland has? It's one of those Eastern European regions that you couldn't find and don't exist on a map anymore, Bessarabia. So while Ukraine may be stained forever by the legacy of Lviv, I don't want to hear shit from the moral aristocrats of the Great Satan. The Ukrainian people as deluded and moronic as they are, they are no different than any other population including you, and ultimately they are victimized by this bullshit, and not just by their own people, but by yours, and of course the Russian ruling class. So next time, ask yourself where Hunka the Jewslayer hid, that was so far out of reach of the KGB cyanide gas that killed Bandera. Then reflect on what "people" are supposedly responsible for that.
I'm not saying "trust Ukrainians", many of them also believe this bullshit. I'm saying stop pretending that the human narratives are as incredibly simple as every Ukrainian is a Nazi and every Russian is carrying the legacy of the USSR. If you wanna be right just stick to the realpolitik.