People over here sound so much like CK2 players that I get flashbacks to the thrashfire Pagan Fury dlc soundtrack. “You don’t understand, they’re fighting a genocide! Which is why we must conscript and self-genocide the entirety of Ukraine to prevent the separatist half of Ukraine from being genocided by their allies!”
We can go all the way back to Gorbachev and we won’t find a single root cause of this present situation, but instead many different factors. But I see no reason to assume that the Russian SMO on the DPR and LPR is the sole, deterministic cause of this labour conscription, disregarding all agency of the Ukrainian government and NATO on their own internal policy matters. Japan might’ve started the war against the USA in WW2, but I don’t think it removes the agency of the USA government from putting their Japanese-Yankee citizens in internment camps or nuking Japan twice.
What the other comment seems to imply is that all the issues there are caused solely by Russia’s participation in the Donbas War, disregarding how the article goes in detail about how those things listed (such as the labour draft) are policies made by the Ukrainian government. It is clear as day that the Ukrainian government values retaking the east and privatising its property much more than the lives of the citizens they claim to protect.
Well, if they’re democratic they should let the people (in which case my self-insert would apply) decide what to do. But a reasonable government could, for example, negotiate an immediate ceasefire and acquiesce to the winning side’s demands to prevent further bloodshed. Or it could grab teenagers off the street and tentative migrants and send them to their deaths. Obviously, I already know that the Ukrainian government and their NATO allies prefer the latter, but we shouldn’t pretend there weren’t other options.
Edit:
What would you do if you were their absolute ruler? Surrender?
Well, yes? Assuming I give even half a fuck about people’s lives, I’d prefer a negotiated peace instead of this shitshow any day. Russia’s demands aren’t even that hard to meet, they’re just dragging this out for profit at this point.
The new draft law on the mobilization of workers is intended to “ensure the functioning of the national economy under martial law”, in the words of those drafting the law. It is noteworthy that in early August, Ukraine began to talk about a likely ban against military conscripts leaving the country for three years following an eventual end to military hostilities and martial law. Just such a proposal was recently made by Vadym Denysenko […], head of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future and a former advisor to the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Denysenko said, “I am sure that even after the war it will be necessary to extend the ban on men traveling abroad for at least another three years. Otherwise, we simply will not survive as a nation.”
Please illuminate me in your wisdom, how banning people from leaving while conscripting them to either fight in the front or forced labour is not a form slavery. Whose lives are being saved by arresting people trying to flee the country?
To be allowed to migrate and seek asylum because the people don’t want to die in the front for a piece of land? That’s exactly what I would want if it were me. Would you want to be conscripted for forced labour with the risk of getting sent to the front lines because of some war you don’t want to be part of? And if you say “they definitely want to be part of it,” then explain why the draft and conscription are needed in the first place.
So are we just supposed to allow (heck, even support!) Ukraine despite them implementing a system of modern slavery for their people, blocking civilians from fleeing, and forced conscription, some of it even slated to last even beyond the end of the war, because to even criticise it is “helping Russia”? Helping Russia do what, exactly? Look better than Ukraine? That’s on Ukraine to be the big boy.
This is not Call of Duty, a war is waged for political reasons, and therefore the politics of it should be laid bare.
The new draft law on the mobilization of workers is intended to “ensure the functioning of the national economy under martial law”, in the words of those drafting the law. It is noteworthy that in early August, Ukraine began to talk about a likely ban against military conscripts leaving the country for three years following an eventual end to military hostilities and martial law.
How exactly is Russia’s bombs the only factor in the Ukrainian government imposing labour conscription on their people? Surely if they’re so democratic, they could’ve found some other way to go about fixing the labour shortage.
In early August, deputies of the Ukraine president’s ‘Servant of the People’ party in the national legislature (‘Rada’) introduced a bill that provides for the conscription of forced labor of all those who have not been conscripted to the armed forces. Formally free citizens who already cannot legally leave the country due to wartime restrictions will now also be subjected to forced labor.
He noted that the number of newborns this year could be as low as 7 million.
Kinda subtle but the original source just lists 7 million as a lower limit, but this weirdo website cites it as the prediction. They also use the pronoun “he,” but as far as I know the more famous Qiao Jie from Peking University is a woman. Might want something straight from that conference, which the Global Times doesn’t provide even a name.
I doubt their performance will matter much in such a short notice for the first round, since they were already trailing behind at 8-10%, but whoever joins together with them in the second round might get a good boost. It seems like Luiza González (the leading candidate from the Revolutionary Citizen movement, name unrelated) is taking this issue very seriously (interview with her), while the 2nd place Topíc can barely be found talking about it (despite framing himself as a soldier/security kinda guy).
González-González alliance might be incoming during the second round to confuse all the foreign observers. Anybody with boots on ground/more familiarity can correct me there?
Good point, I mixed up the articles about this, the Guardian doesn’t even list the demands one by one. Here’s one that lists all demands, which don’t list the Nazis or Donbas directly, though those have been complained about before (see Putin speech earlier on). Then you can see this slightly newer negotiation development which acknowledges the DPR and LPR and demands the end of militarisation there and denazify (and therefore the end of the paramilitary death squads).
Now, you don’t seem to understand that Russia can demand whatever it wants, even different things that were not in previous demands. That means that they’ll often drop or return to demands depending on their conditions, and I’m not Putin’s personal spokesman and don’t have to 100% agree with which of their demands is the most important. What prompted this whole conversation is what NATO could’ve done to de-escalate the conflict. Do you know a single guarantee made by NATO to reduce the likelyhood of war or prevent it going on for another 2 years with the risk of nuclear warfare? I’d be happy to hear it.
Also you seem to confuse the meaning of “justified” there. You asked for sources on what demands have been made, those are up in the first paragraph. They don’t justify anything though, only prove that the demands have been made in the past. Now after that you need to verify the veracity of those demands, and here are some sources that you might enjoy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on Azov and Nazis being trained and supplied by NATO and the Ukraine government, and just the wikipedia article on the War on Dombas because you don’t seem to even be aware of it. Then once you come to a conclusion on whether the demands exist and are factual, you can decide if disbanding the Azov brigade and recognising the LPR and DPR are morally justifiable or not. “what sources???”
cute how you ignored everything else, though. Makes you look very sensible and intellectual. You should make an account here
And when Kenneth Boulding gets up and he says—an economist, and you can see what—you can see what—you can see, when you get Britain people like Kenneth Boulding speaking so naïvely, you can see the troubles you get into, the swamps you go into, the baby talk—silliness you get into when you think without Marx, when you think without class analysis—and Kenneth Boulding says, one of America’s leading economists, he says, “Empire is irrational because it costs more than what we get out of it,” “the British—it costed them more in India than what they got out of it,” “the American investment in the Philippines is only about three-and-a-half billion dollars, but we had to give them about six billion dollars in aid,” “it costs us more than what we get out of it,” and that’s when you think without a class analysis, because as we know—as you’re going to know before the evening’s over— that it’s very profitable, because the people who have the three billion dollar investment aren’t the same ones as the people who pay the six billion.
You do understand what justified means? You just gave me examples of the demands, not how they’re justified.
It is definitely justified to ask your neighbour to stop killing your other neighbours, joining Nazis and not letting the people there decide on whether they want to be independent or not. Imagine if the USA had a terrorist group called the keykeykey, and those groups went around killing people for being black or hispanic, and are waging war on the southern regions of Texas. I think you’d agree that it would be justified for Mexico to go “Could you remove keykeykey people from your government? They literally want to kill mexicans and black people in your borders.” Wouldn’t be so nice for the USA to say “no fuck you” like NATO did, would it? Before you ask me “when did NATO ignore the issue,” read your own initial source from nato.int you linked a while back.
Russia has been complaining about that for 10 years now, and Azov only got more entrenched in government while the Donbas war got escalated and fed supplies by NATO. I think you mistake me saying that Russia had some valid points with me thinking that they’re perfect and above criticism. But they certainly have a point that declaring war on a separatist region after a coup is incredibly abhorrent, and to do that while glorifying Nazi collaborators like Bandera, toppling monuments to those who defeated the Nazis and having people with swastika tattoos and Nazi symbols in their paramilitary death squad just makes it too on the nose.
If your neighbor beats up their wife/girlfriend do you think it would be justified to kick down their door, beat the man into submission , kill their children, thrash the entire apartment and call it a job well done? Would it be more justified if you before-hand told that you would do it?
Now you’re talking about the subsequent war (in very inaccurate terms, I must add), instead of the guarantees that NATO could’ve done before the war to avoid it happening. But since you like individualistic and simplistic analogies, have another one. If your town has a keykeykey faction going around killing minorities and preventing them from even getting their own representation in government, toppled their preferred mayor and are doing terrorist attacks on the regions most populated by black people and mexicans, would it not be justified for bigger neighbouring city (that has a lot of mexicans) to ask for it to stop over 8 years, and after it proving fruitless to send in a swat team as requested by the local population? If it were me, I’d be begging for that swat team after 1 year, let alone 8.
Now imagine that this bigger city has been blocked from interfering there by another bigger city on the other side, which specifically sells weapons to this keykeykey, and no matter how many pretty speeches on the UN congress they make, the rival city refuses to concede to even disbanding or stopping selling weapons to the keykeykey. You can complain all you want that the Russian forces have “thrashed the apartment” but this war has been going on for 10 years now, not just since 2021. You can probably see how your analogy fails to properly represent the death toll (thousands) and civilian displacement (more than 1 million people) of the Donbass war as “beat their wife,” coming right after the 2014 coup, which is why I usually don’t do analogies.
Because in this case the English source looks better than reality?
I think you misunderstand there buddy, I don’t throw away sources. I read them critically. You can give me any sources I can reliably read and we can talk about them. Problem is, when I do talk about them you change subject. Which I bet is why you chose a blog in Russian rather than a text I can read. Unlike you, I don’t have Russian language proficiency, and I’d like it if you respected that.
I guess your Russian is not that good then. It’s a blog post that goes over the 2020 population consensus data.
I guess your English is not that good then, I said it’s from the census in the reply:
The only source listed is the Russian census, which comes straight from the Russian government.
Since you like those sources and clearly are fluent in Russian, you can help me translate the excel file hosted in the Russian Govt website here to check on those “study languages.”
I honestly don’t have anything else to say about the rest of your comment. It goes too off the tangent to really focus on any individual part there.
Oh, I see. I guess we will never know why all those statements you threw out which I mocked were “obviously wrong.” Nor your taking issue with me paraphrasing you saying that “lots don’t know English” as if I made it up. Or your confusing statement that NATO doesn’t call the 2014 coup the “Revolution of Dignity.” Or that the USA backing a coup doesn’t implicate the defence organisation they lead. Or that Russia denies their support for the LPR and DPR. Or your myriad of other bizarre claims that you throw around and then immediately forget about in the following reply.
You throw so much bullshit at such an alarming rate, but don’t even acknowledge when shown to be incorrect on each (even complaining that my reply debunking some was too long), which is the hallmark of a bad faith debatebro. Grab a microphone and camera, learn to talk really fast and go own some libs in uni campuses like the Ben Shapiro impersonator you want to be.
Just in case you completely skipped it, here again is a source on the Russian demands before the war that you keep ignoring. Next comment is going to be like “and yet again I see no sources, I’m very smart.”
You’re just going on and on about how you don’t care but you still keep coming back.
It’s a saturday, cooking day. Me staring at the food boiling is just mildly less entertaining than you. Ironically it also requires a bit more effort. It’s like morbidly browsing mensa teens on quora, but this one actually has a parasocial relationship with me.
Edit: not to mention, when I did not come back, you came crying to me a week later that I didn’t prove you wrong enough, and you have a deep need to prove wrong or be proved wrong. Debatebros are so needy.