Ask Lemmy

The point regarding the Budapest Memorandum is that the US made it clear that it was not legally binding, and already violated it in 2013 in Belarus. In 2014, the west intervened directly in Ukraine, aiding the Banderite faction in overthrowing the democratically elected moderate, Yanukovych.

Oh, cool, well in that case, totally cool for Russia to invade and violate the agreement, too. I mean, why should Russia get left out of all the imperialist fun?

Regarding Russia and the referendum for the DPR and LPR to join the Russian Federation, the war started in 2014, with the Banderite coup. Russia did not start the Ukrainain Civil War, it entered the Civil War 8 years after it started.

The idea Russia waited 8 years is just bullshit, and you know it because it's already come up repeatedly. We've already established that Russia didn't wait 8 years. We've already extensively talked about how Russia invaded before the vote to secede. ~~Russia invaded, THEN DPR and LPR requested aid from Russia once they were already effectively under Russian control.~~

Hell, we can say they directly intervened militarily. The "little green men" were admitted to be Russian Spetsnaz, and Russia admitted to blocking Ukrainian armed forces. Russia directly interfered from the start.

Kiev has been shelling the Donbass region and killing thousands of civilians there for over a decade at this point, which is why they voted to join.

If there's truth to this, I'd be open to sources. I unfortunately cannot be aware of everything that happens in every conflict, so I admit it's possible I'm uninformed here, but I'd need a source. Reminder that you are the one who gave me grief for not providing evidence.

As for Nazis in Ukraine, the key point distinguishing them is that they are extremely common, open, and close to the levers of power:

Look, I'm not going to try to pretend that that patch in such proximity to the leader of the country is anything other than alarming. But I'm also not going to try to pretend that photos of... looks like less than a hundred people in all the photos you've shown, is enough to prove a systemic issue. Once again, even though I've explicitly professed an interest in seeing a quality source, even though I'm talking to someone who tried to give me grief for not providing evidence, you're still not providing any real evidence that this is a truly widespread and systemic issue. Hell, I can't even recognize the patch circled behind Zelenskyy with all of 20 pixels allocated to it, and the infographic doesn't even seem to be relevant to the pictures you include with it, although it does appear exactly once in the set of pictures you shared earlier.

As for the DPR and LPR requesting assistance, they requested on the 23rd, with letters dated the 22nd.

Hmmmm looks like you might be correct here. Difficult to find hard information on it. I'll strikeout my above statement as the fact it had been discussed previously is still relevant to the point I was making.

That said, Russia once again weakens the argument for you. Russia themselves handed out medals specifying the start of the campaign as being February 20th. There are also some reports that the "little green men" may have began appearing as early as mid February, although I'm having trouble finding anything to definitively prove that. Sources have reported that special forces were put on alert as early as the 18th. Russia was very clearly preparing before then, and there's plenty to suggest they'd begun actively taking steps in the region, including suspicion that some of the protests at the time weren't as "home grown" as Russia wants it to be believed. Combined with them shipping in special forces and lying about their involvement, it seems quite reasonable to assume that Russia had already taken steps to create the impressions of favorable protests and to secure the allegiance of government officials.

Keep in mind, you say those governments requested Russian support when the link I'm about to share in the next paragraph shows that support in Crimea for Russian annexation was as low as 23%, so just because the local government made the request does not mean it accurately reflects the will of the people. Given what we know of Russian planning and involvement in the region, I think it's reasonable to suspect that Russia made an attempt to influence local leadership to act in their favor, regardless of what the local people wanted.

As for the map, it’s the electoral map for support of Yanukovych, so no, I can’t provide an electoral map since then as the civil war has been going on since 2014.

Well I stumbled across some polling that suggests support for joining Russia in 2013 was as low as 23% and had been actively decreasing, which makes it EXTREMELY suspicious that Russia claims the vote to secede won with NINETY FIVE POINT FIVE PERCENT OF THE VOTE. That's just absurd to trust at face value. There is zero good reason to blindly trust results of 95.5% in favor of what Russia wants in an election run by Russia in a region that clearly espoused just one quarter of that level of support only a year beforehand. There's just no fucking way that was an honest vote with that in mind.