Comradeship // Freechat

2314 readers

84 users here now

Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.

A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

felipeforte@lemmygrad.ml

But what about Ukrainian self determination? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by SlayGuevara@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So Ukraine has turned into a shit show with on the one hand Russia and on the other hand the US and EU. It is clear that Ukraine is merely a pawn in their chess game. This is clear to me.

I try to make it clear to my surroundings too but one question keeps coming back to me whenever it comes to peace talks: what about what Ukrainians want? Should they accept a split in their country with Russia seizing captured land?

I noticed that I do not have a clear answer to this and I wanted to see some input from you guys. Peace talks should imo be the goal as it would be the end to a bloody conflict and it would further (even if slightly) reduce risk for a bigger war. But it is also clear that Ukraine is just a pawn in those peace talks and everything will be decided between the US and Russia. Is it realistic to acknowledge Ukrainian interest in this? And if so, to what extent can leftist support said interests?

Thank you in advance for your answers. It might make it easier for me to go against the warmongering that has been going on lately, and to prevent people close to me from falling for it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 29 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The people in the four Oblasts annexed by Russia have already expressed their self-determination: they held referendums and chose to join Russia. One can argue that not all people in those Oblasts had the opportunity to vote as some of them were (and are) still in Kiev controlled territory. That is true and after the war they should also be given the opportunity to make a choice.

The same applies for all parts of Ukraine. Get rid of the Nazi regime in Kiev and their murderous thugs who are terrorizing the population and let the people of Odessa (majority and historically Russian city) and Kharkov (same) have a referendum too, and every other region that wants one. The rest of Ukraine can then vote on whether it wants to maintain neutrality, join the EU, or join Russia's EAEU.

That is what self-determination is, not living in a country turned prison camp where the fascist guards arrest you and beat you for speaking Russian, watching Russian media or saying you want to live in peace with Russia and Russian people, abduct you and force you to fight and die for Blackrock's profits and Zelensky's third Miami/Tel Aviv villa.

Until the Nazi regime in Kiev is gone there can be no talk of self-determination, because people are not free to express what they want, and they certainly don't have the power to make any choices. All that power is now in the hands of the SBU, of heavily armed Neonazi groups, of a drugged up megalomaniacal dictator whose legal term has long since expired, and of a parliament that is stacked exclusively with Banderites and corrupt regime toadies.

But most of all you can't have self-determination in a country that isn't sovereign, that is a completely dependent proxy and resource colony of the US and EU.

[–] Rextreff@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are we sure the referendums weren't rigged?

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Rigged how? If you mean in the sense of outright lying about the results or ballot stuffing, i very much doubt that. I remember people from the DPR/LPR were posting videos at the time showing how the voting was being done, and it was basically organized by the local government and staffed by local volunteers. The Russians were just there to protect the polling stations.

And they invited observers too if i remember correctly (though of course the "collective West" and its institutions conveniently refused to send anyone because they said the referendums were illegitimate). Also they wouldn't really need to rig a vote in areas that are as heavily ethnically/culturally Russian identifying as those four Oblasts.

And sure you can say that this still doesn't prove that there wasn't tampering, but how can you prove something like that? Ultimately the burden of proof is on those who allege fraud and rigging. And why doesn't the West, which always accuses Russia of rigging, apply the same standard of skepticism to their own and their allies' votes? Why is it only Russia's votes that are always viewed with such suspicion and assumed a priori to be fraudulent?

However if you mean rigged in the sense that the result was not 100% representative of the opinions of the entire population of those Oblasts then yes, that may be true. One of the problems i mentioned already is that only people in Russian held territory could vote, and the four Oblasts were only partially held by Russia at that time. It's also likely that a certain number of pro-Ukrainian people fled to Ukrainian held territory.

The second problem is that some of those who were very pro-Ukrainian probably just boycotted the vote, so this skewed the end result toward the pro-Russian side. But this factor can be adjusted for by looking at the overall voter turnout numbers, and those were quite high, especially in the two easternmost Oblasts, Donetsk and Lugansk, which had been fighting a war against the Kiev regime for eight years.

I'm not saying it was a perfect process, but it was as good as it could be under the circumstances. It would be better to have referendums in peacetime, but what's done is done and these four regions are no longer in question. Russia has already written them into their constitution and they aren't going to repeat the vote again for these four. Other regions in Ukraine can do it better once there is peace.