Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
The trickle of American deaths into the headlines brought most Americans into Teddy's camp. Meanwhile, Wilson had drawn his lines in the sand, and Germany had finally, knowingly crossed them. We were done making excuses; it was time to "make the world safe for democracy."
Trying a little hard for that good quality contribution link, eh?
(But seriously- well written.)
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
That's another version of events that would work against the 'eastern Ukrainians were just so upset with Euromaidan they decided to secede,' I suppose.
I think you can make a legible distinction between foreign psy-ops (organized campaigns conducted at the behest of foreign powers) and organic domestic consensus in principle – in other words, there is a difference between the two – which is all that I meant. You can condemn the one and think that the other is all right.
The ability to distinguish which is which is what I am contesting. The ability to say normal is good and artificial is bad is the easy part of differentiation- the issue is actually being able to say what is 'normal' versus 'artificial.'
It's Russel conjugation all the way down. You psyop, I persuade, the people I agree with listen to reason, the people I disagree with are wrongfully misled.
I'm not sure that it's necessarily true that you cannot measure the impact of propaganda. In fact I'm fairly confident that it isn't true today – maybe it was in 1921. But today you can actually quantify things like the impact the Internet Research Agency had on the 2020 election, not perfectly, but enough to get a measurement on it and talk about the impact it has.
Quiz question- do you know how researchers into Russian propaganda outfits like the IRA judge the effectiveness of Russian propaganda efforts like the IRA?
But even if you grant that it is, it doesn't follow that it is good to run propaganda campaigns (and I would say especially ones that involve untruths, especially on your own people) or that it is bad for domestic governments to resist the influence of foreign government propaganda.
Again, russel conjugation. You have to resist foreign government propaganda. Reasonable foreigners happen to agree with my authentic political positions.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
"Drones suck."
I've made the point more at length before, but I view the advent of drones, as demonstrated in the Ukraine War, as both a military revolution and a revolution in military affairs. It's changed the nature of the civil-populace's relationship with war, as drones have been a democratization of airpower that almost anyone can both contribute to (via the affordability / ease of maintenance) or participate in (ease of piloting / utility).
This wouldn't have mattered as much as it has if the Russians didn't suck- there were severe and fundamental mistakes in the Russian strategy from planning assumptions to allocations of manpower- but the technological innovation of drones is the hard lesson learned.
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.
Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.
Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.
Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
I wish I had your optimism, but I don't think you can make a legible distinction when there are foreign governments running espionage operations in opposite directions at the same time.
When things are hard to measure- and few things are as hard to measure as the actual effects any amount of propaganda has- it's an easy rationalization to attribute unwanted decisions to the malign influence of outsiders while your favored directions are obviously enlightened objectivity of reasonable people.
I'll pass on a million words of Ukrainian legalese and government reporting, but I can speak a bit to Ivan Katchanovski.
Ivan Katchanovski as an author probably isn't your best bet for an objective take, since he's made his theory his career niche and he gets signal boosted as part of the general propaganda wars, partly because he deliberately conflates various elements to make a more reaching case than he has. (For example- the court found that sniper shots came from Hotel Ukraina- it did not identify by who, or how many people were victims of them. In absence of identification, the perpetrator's affiliation is assigned.)
Katchanovski's core claim is that only the Maidan groups could have operated from the Hotel Ukraina because it was used by the protestors, and thus the sniper reports as a whole were a Euromaidan false flag. This... really isn't a strong link, since there was no sort of real access control / accountability in Hotel Ukraina or the Euromaidan protest zones, where if you weren't clearly government you could generally move around. You need active control and screening to credibly argue that no one trying to do a false flag could walk in, go upstairs, and take shots before leaving in the confusion of people hearing shots and thinking they might be under attack, particularly since security services can penetrate protest movements as much as any other sort of agency.
(To be explicitly clear on alternative narratives: the dispute isn't that shots came from Hotel Ukraina, but one framing is that the police never opened fire unprovoked but were merely defending themselves from far-right Euromaidan provacateurs, and another is that Ukrainian attempted a false-flag provocation to justify / prompt a Ukrainian state crackdown. Part of the basis of the later theory is that it was a tactic used by Russia elsewhere, such as in Syria at the start of the syrian civil war, and Russian advisors were present with Ukrainian security services at the time (though the Ukrainian govt. position is that the actors were Ukrainian).)
You could argue the plausibility of either chain of events, but Katchanovski dismisses that with language asserting solid control, while using insinuating language to maximize culpability to Euromaidan ('many' Euromaidan shot by far-right snipers... but no proprotional allocation or acknoweldgement of state snipers) and minimize actions by the Yanukovich government ('no massacre order given'- itself a twist of phrase to obscure the lethal force authorization that Yanukovich's government announced, which of course was not a literal order to conduct a massacre). Katchanovski is fond of these sort of semantic framings, such as calling the Russian-instigated separatists a civil war. Katchanovski tries to play to his western audience, but he's not exactly subtle with his attempts to lead the audience.
Multi-lingual word games aren't fun, and the unsatisfying answer is that in the time between Maidan and the reorganization of the internal security services, there was evidence of substantial evidence destruction (such as destruction of weapons believed used in the shootings) and key witnesses- including the internal security service leader- defected to Russia and thus were not available for Ivan's investigation to, well, investigate. Some security service people who were later recognized as being of interest were even turned over in Russian prisoner swaps.
What made the post-Maidan investigation worse/more embarassing for the post-Maidan government is that the post-Maidan government did not actually have firm control of the government aparatus for some time, and even then Ukrainian institutions- including the judiciary- were notoriously corrupt. Pro-Russian corruption was notably present even years after the revolution- such as the significant successes in the Russian invasion itself.
California as a state that is about 33 million acres of forest. That is only 1/3rd of the state, but this is where you remember that california is also about 1/3rd desert, and another 1/3rd agriculture lands. In short- anything that isn't a city or farm is either a desert or a forest. As a result, if your city isn't surrounded by farms or desert, it's going to be adjacent to forests.
California in turn is a state that bought into late-20th-century environmentalism hard, including the belief that any wild fire was bad in and of itself. This is because burned forests are ugly and the pacific conservationist movement was significantly shaped by the beauty of nature. As a result, there was an extended effort to suppress and prevent wildfires and maximize forests in the name of the beauty of the environment.
This was bad ecological conservation, because nature isn't pretty and natural wildfires are needed to clear away dead brush that acts as fire tinder. As a result California has a tendency for exceptionally bad wildfires, especially in droughts, because of above-average underbrush compared to the more systemic burns practiced in the Appalachian forest regions.
Only if you apply the pejorative selectively in one direction but not the other, i.e. that efforts to propagandize the Americans into neutrality are not a psy-op of its own but some sort of moral normal, whereas efforts to propagandize the Americans into picking a side is illegitimate because -reasons-.
By noting that the secessionists were an astroturfed special operation, as demonstrated by the systemic lack of support where Russian green men were not on the ground to carry initial efforts and the Russian state relations (and even more controlled replacements) of separatist 'leaders,' and that the deposed man who won a fair election was also a man fled before he could be tried for actions that would merit deposition in civilized countries, including- but not limited to- attempting a purge of his own unity government by unilateral lethal force that made Soviet-era politicians blanche.
The NovaRussia campaign was Putin's attempt to instigate a popular uprising that he thought would sweep the country after Putin's attempt to instigate a purge of the opposition that had already been invited into a unity government backfired when he tried to treat an oligarchy as a party-dictatorship. The reason why the Russian military had to repeatedly intervene to prop up the popular revolution was because it was neither popular or a revolution.
People don't say Putin = Hitler because the nature of a border between a larger state and a smaller state with an ethnic dispute.
People make the Putin = Hitler comparison on the basis of historical revisionist warmongering based on fantasies of cultural identity and exaggerated grievance, plus systemic war crimes mixed with strategic incompetence born of arrogance and self-delusion.
This can still be a wrong basis for the comparison- the thing that makes Hitler historically distinct is the genocide camps rather than the warmongering or even the war crimes- but people are not making the comparison on the basis of the map.
Given the above I think it is reasonable for the Ukrainians to view this war as an existential one.
Particularly given the capture/kill lists that went on in occupied territories along with the systemic torture chambers, with criteria reportedly including things like 'spoke out against Russia' or 'served in the Ukrainian military post-Maidan.' The liquidation criteria has since been met by considerably larger proportions of the Ukrainian population.
The Ukrainian perspective has consistently considered not just the implications of this war, but what the peace terms imply for the prospects and survivability for the next war.
Also most of Ukraine’s few hilly areas are in the east. Everything after Pokrovsk and Kramantorsk will likely be significantly easier.
The Russian's limiting factor for breakthrough isn't terrain, but logistics. If the Russians wanted less rough terrain, there are and always have been significantly flatter areas in the northern and southern fronts they could have taken before they cracked their mechanized forces and downgraded to cold war kit even less capable of breakthroughs.
The time to make a deal would have been about six months into the war when the Russian army only had 180,000 men in theater and were being routed out of Kharkiv.
The Russian terms before and after the Kharkiv have included conditions like the Ukrainians disarming their tankforce to fewer tanks than the Ukrainians captured in the Kharkiv offensive.
Which is to say, the Russians weren't really interested in a credible deal that didn't leave the Russians in a superior position to invade after the deal than before the invasion.
If this sounds like a bad deal-making strategy on Putin's part... yes. Putin is not a good strategist, and regularly sabotages his own strategic goals while depending on westerners to sanewash Kremlin positions into rationalizations for compromise.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Which is a shame, because there are actually valid insights and applications of constructivism in its more limited forms. In the international relations context, constructivism is one of the few 'major' IR theories that recognizes the role of actors as individuals acting according to individual perspectives, and thus able to analyze/predict why key actors would go against a realist/institutionalist paradigm. Things like the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea make considerably more sense from a cultural analysis of a warlord than a state-interest approach.
The prescriptions may be, well, prescriptive- we can change people's perceptions if we do Y so they no longer feel it right to do undesirable thing X- but it also serves as an often much-needed counterpoint to the theories that kindly gloss over individuals as existing at all (realism, institutionalism, etc.) in the name of simplifying the model. People exist. People make crucial decisions. How they make decisions is shaped by what they value in subjective contexts, and those subjective perspectives can change. There's nothing particularly controversial about such limited claims.
It's just that it is as prone to misuse / taken to its absurdist extremes as any other. 'Reshape physical reality by changing enough people's minds' is a fair critique, as is the 'your attempts of social engineering don't necessarily convey the new cultural norm you want them to'- like how the cultural norm of making exceptions to standard values in favor of the favored groups is less 'it is right to favor the favored group' and more 'those standard values aren't actually standards.'
If I had a nickel for every time someone had proposed expanding the British Commonwealth as a way to address a geopolitical question, I'd... have a bit more than two nickels, but it is odd how many there would be in the 21st century alone.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Arguably the best defense any Canadian has against annexation is the balance of the Senate.
Any establishment party in Canada is plausibly closer to the American Democratic Party than the Republican Party. An annexation / accession to US statehood would, in turn, credibly provide an enduring- even generational- advantage in the Senate to the Democratic Party, with all the relevant implications this has for annual budget passing on reconciliation (bare majority) grounds.
This may not be what happens, but absent actual credible expectation that such an annexation wouldn't be against their political interests, this would be a strong bargaining friction against such an effort, since even the success could be politically catastrophic against the principle agents.
Especially since the current situation of an eastern-dominated Canada... isn't bad from an American point of view?
Republicans may not like/share values with the Liberals, but the nature of city-centric polies only caring about two-three zones of interests is that it's far more willing to trade away other interests- especially distant resources- as concessions to their primary trade partners, i.e. Americans. This provides leverage for better deals regarding some interests than you would if they were higher in their own polities' interest list.
An example would be the Canadian dairy system. Very few economists consider it a good deal for the Canadian consumer, but it exists because it's politically powerful. Because it is politically powerful, though, Americans can use credible demands against it to provide for other concessions to walk back those demands, i.e. the Canadian dairy system is subsidized not only formally, but via other concessions.
This wouldn't happen if you broke apart the system willing to provide those sort of concessions for niche-but-politically-dominant interests.
Even setting aside any moral objections to partitioning one's neighbors- and involuntary partion is bad, m'kay?- there are a number of downsides that make it not-obviously-preferable even in an amaoral self-interest state.
Add to that your moral objections, and...
No, come on. He came to the UK a year or so okay and had a shopping list, he was going around pointing at our stuff that he wanted. His attitude is completely inappropriate for someone who is, ultimately, asking for us to willingly give him things that he is in no way entitled to by default. Respect, courtesy and self-restraint are not weird, oversensitive expectations at any time but especially not when you're demanding tens of millions of pounds worth of other people's military equipment. ESPECIALLY not when we've essentially destroyed our economic base in retaliation for Putin's attack.
A european political culture where a response by the largest member of the community to an invasion is helmets is, by darwinian necessity, a political culture that cultivates its interactors to be willing to press beyond initial public offerings if they want to maximize their gains, particularly when their stakes are survival. Particularly when members of the political culture are prone to hyperbole as a way of deflecting requests- such as claiming they have destroyed their economic base in retaliation for Putin's attack.
(No, you have not. Particularly if you are speaking the language of pounds instead of euros.)
In international and thus cross-cultural affairs, being clear about your wants and needs, and especially when something is insufficient is a form of being respectful and courteous. People who want to help you can't effectively help unless they understand your position, playing coy 'you should know what I mean' is itself a form of passive-aggression against those not part of the same culture-set/communication-style. This is why one of the fundamentals of cross-cultural communication is to favor clarity over culturally-specific forms of communication (including slang, puns, humor, and so on). What is polite within a culture is not the same as what is polite between culltures, and in absence of shared understandings do not expect them.
Similarly, requesting ('demanding,' if you prefer) more than you will receive is also a form of accepted diplomatic request. A patron may always wish to be asked for less, but the request it provides political advantage to the government to still send 'insufficient' material while maintaining the political advantage/perception that their reasons are reasons of stewardship (husbanding resources with consideration), military responsibility (not giving out more than can be afforded), and sovereignty (not giving exactly what was requested), without exposing less polite realities (national inability to do much more due to decades of systemic underinvestment/mismanagement, internal political divisions that might have electoral consequences). It communicates that you recognize that you will not get everything you want, while approaching negotians with someone signalled to have both value (what they can offer) and agency (the right / position to say no and publicly assert their own interests).
Note that these merits can invert and be presented as flaws if pre-coordinations are done so that the beneficiary only asks for what the benefactor has already agreed to give- an appearance of 'giving them whatever they asked for,' 'not using our own best judgement,' 'not showing restraint when our economy is so bad,' and so on. It would be downright rude to put your benefactors in such an unflattering light... if we care about other people's frames of manners.
Now, these sort of considerations may not be your idea of diplomatic respect and courtesy, but this is where we get back into various forms of cultural chauvinism, such as projecting one's own social expectations to outside cultures and expecting them to align with yours. Particularly when someone is part of a subset of larger audiences who do not share the views, and for whom deference to one could be an offense to the others.
This also where we can get into the distinction between claimed standards and actual standards on various sides of the beseeching / beseeched relationship. Such as, for example, the interests of a patron state who wants to maximize the political value / public credit they receive for the minimal amount of actual investment- i.e. those who want to give token donations when they have considerable ability to give more. Or the reasonable expectations of donor and recipient states abroad- of which 'humility' is often as unassociated with patron states as 'respect,' 'courtesy,' and 'self-restraint' when dealing with their beneficiaries, even though respect, courtesy, and self-restraint are typically reciprocal virtues.
But none of this is the case for Lizzardspawn, whose position over the years has not reasonably simplified to simply wanting Ukraine to act with respect, courtesy, and self-restraint as understood in the general global international relations domain.
As a side note @Dean, you're welcome to disagree with anyone you like on any basis you like but you've really started to slather on the contempt in your comments to people.
And when they provide more serious views with based less from positions of their own contempt of others, I do indeed find that interesting and engage accordingly. Hence why my interactions with even the people I disagree with vehemently on some issues is neutral to amicable on others.
When after years the latest round of yet another condemnation of [insert perjorative adjective][insert pejorative noun] is neither interesting or charitable, as with most posters the response is either ignored or countered based on interest in the topic and letting the bailey stand unchallenged in the public forum.
Not only are you taking the least charitable possible view of what people write, but you're also clearly stating that the only reason that anyone could hold their perceived opinions is stupidity or ignorance.
Objection! This is a least charitable possible representation of what I have written.
In no framing did I say that the only reason anyone could hold their perceived opinion is stupidity or ignorance- I attributed to Lizzardspawn specifically (by form of pronoun address) reasons of cultural chauvenism and/or fragility (which are not synonyms for stupidity or ignorance).
That Lizzardspawn is assessed to have a position for [reasons] does not claim or imply that other people can only reach the same position for the same [reasons].
None of us are going to win or lose the Ukraine war from here, and I think that you would have more interesting and more worthwhile conversations if you took other people's views more seriously.
This belies an assumption that taking certain people's views more seriously would lead to fewer, rather than more, unflattering critiques of their position or person.
This is The Motte. It is a war metaphor for a reason, and while it is a place that aims for light over heat, light is often unflattering, and can make the subject of it appear worse with more of it.
Sure, though also in ways contrary to what you probably meant. The crux of the stance, after all, is recognizing the nature of the dilemma.
The Tyrant's Dilemma, to reiterate, is the decision to resist conquest or join the expansionist conquering empire. Unlike the Tyrant Dilemma, the Israeli-Tyrant did not want them to join the empire. The Palestinians of yester-years ago were not facing conquest. The lands they wanted were already conquered, and where the final borders might be was in dispute, but one of the major basis for conflict was the Tyrant not taking and incorporating the people for its own purposes (i.e. absorbing as Israeli citizens for use in further wars of expansion).
The dilemma facing the Palestinians was not 'do or do not resist the Tyrant's claim on you.' In some aspects, the Tyrant willingly released them from the Empire, and tried another form of co-existence, which in turn could have led to another. This is certainly un-Tyrant behavior, and while there is plenty of behavior- many may even say tyrannical- to condemn, it is not the Tyrant of metaphor.
There are certainly dilemma to be found, but it isn't the Tyrant's Dilemma. Choosing to frame it as a Tyrant's Dielmma is itself a false dilemma, which does indeed explain why the Palestinians keep losing to Israel.
Funny how Palestinians are supposed to accept being truly defenceless while Ukrainians are defenceless if they have 50k troops.
Reality is funny at times. The punchline is that Russia and Israel are not analogous in what it takes to mitigate invasions.
The violent people overthrew the government, shelled the Donbass for 10 years straight and have been pushing for wwIII for the last two years.
Yes, the Russians are bad for having done all this with their NovaRussia intervention, and these are indeed a good three reasons why the cease fire without mitigating the longer-term Russian threats to Ukraine is liable to be both unstable and a longer-term cost to the Americans and Europeans.
We could even add the Russian attempts at pushing a self-coup during the Maidan Revolution, where their attempt to lead the Ukrainian government to purge members and supporters of the Ukrainian government including the unilateral authorization of lethal force after the sniper campaign led to the president fleeing to a hostile country before he could be justly impeached or tried as would be expected in other states.
He dares to makes demands, to criticize us ...
Your cultural chauvenism / fragility is showing.
If whichever collective 'us' you are trying to appeal to has such a fragile ego as to take offense at a lack of groveling obeisence, it frankly deserves critique and contempt for being offended at a lack of groveling obeisance. Not only is it a sign of a fragile ego that will be perpetually offended, and thus safe to dismiss as 'Pope insists Catholicism is one true faith,' it's also indicative of an inept understanding of international relations (where performing ritual humiliation of yourself for benefactors is poor strategy) and strategic self-interest (where requiring ritual humiliation of your benefactees is poor practice).
Given that groveling is both a bad strategy for the state doing it, and a bad strategy to demand it for the state that might receive it, any 'us' who wishes to insist upon it deserve a good deal of criticism and demands to stop such ineffectual, shallow posturing that primarily benefits ego.
Any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region would be well-aware of the extremely complicated cultural, linguistic, and political realignments within the patch of territory currently known as “Ukraine”.
We aren't discussing any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region. We're talking a podcaster and a podcast audience, who are in turn being used to shape the perceptions of an even less informed broader audience whose opinions have collective weight and impact on American policy makers decisions.
None of these things are actually materially important.
These framings are actually materially important, because the go on to shape the material inputs for the capacity to wage war.
Part of the insight 'war is politics by other means' is that the extension of policy into war also entails the inverse- politics is war by other means, because politics is what establishes policy that governs the conduct of war.
Policy may be boring, it may involve a lot of non-material elements, but it absolutely is materially important, hence why every serious power-building or power-seeking institution in the world invests non-trivial amounts of effort and thinking on information advantages. Part of information conflict is the language you choose to pursue it in- and that is a choice, because the choice itself has impacts.
All of them, since they'd die as russian also because everyone dies regardless. Same as how every Ukrainian would have still died if Russia didn't invade at all. Since net death over time is the same, you can either quibble on the timeliness or you can quibble on the nature, but trying to do both is often smuggling a conclusion. 'Is it better to die a Russian or die a Ukrainian' would be a more like-to-like framing, let alone 'Is it better to die killing for Russia or die killing a Russian.'
As far as nature goes, the Tyrant's Peace dilemma has always been a false dilemma, because submission doesn't escape the fate supposedly avoided (death), and the submission to the tyrant entails the consequence and the usual depravities of being used by the tyrant to fight the next war, which repeats the same dilemma except the conscript is on the other side fighting for rather than against the warmonger.
LNR and DNR were being bled white even before the war, and Putin's revanchist ambitions went well beyond Ukraine. It's not like Ukrainian human dignity mattered any more than the Russians Putin has pushed into his sunk cost fallacy meat grinder. Putin's stupidity was always going to end up getting a lot of people killed, and would only grow in scale of risk if Ukraine had validated his myopia. If he had the ability to invoke the Ukrainians as his canon fodder before the Russians of Saint Petersburg and Moscow regions, he would, and we know because he did just that when he had the means.
Dean
Flairless
9mo ago
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has resigned, a sign of yet more changing of the times as the Prime Minister since 2015 marks the end of an decade of Liberal Party rule of Canada, and possibly yet another political dynasty scalp Donald Trump may claim. While Trudeau's critics and issues go far beyond Trump, the internal-party revolt since the US 2024 election will put another person on the podium right as Donald Trump assumes office, part of a broader realignment in the West as governments including Germany, France, and others have seen falls- several deliberate- to re-roll priorities and mandates in (temporal) alignment with the change in the US presidency. (Canada's 2025 election, much like Germany's, is/was scheduled for October. Canada's parliament is suspended until 24 March where a new PM will (hopefully) be chosen.)
Broadly associated with the more progressive-woke politics, Trudeau's liberals are expected to face a shellacking, though whether that's as part of Canada's experience of the anti-incumbant wave of the last decade, a backlash to progressive politics, or Trudeau's own personal contribution. (Last year, 49% of respondents in a Canadian survey characterized the PM as 'Arrogant,' which is often just the first and more polite words in some lists.)
A (much) longer political obituary can be read here for those who are curious. Regardless of one's views of the man, the sun will continue to rise, the earth rotate, and life will go on.
But we may never get another world leader on camera in blackface.
If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.
Why believe that, when the disputed territories are disputed on the basis of Russian fiat beyond any sort of linguistic borderline and an ethnic dispute that resolved to 'we deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation, you are misled russians'?
And previous claims that Russia had no territorial disputes were later reversed?
And that war-start propaganda- including the pre-emptive victory lap way- identified Kiev itself in the realm of disputed/contested (vis-a-vis the weath) and mocked anyone for thinking Kiev wasn't part of the Russian claim?
The war did not start over a dispute over border territories. The war started as an attempt to take over the country in it's entirely. All of Ukraine is 'disputed territory,' it's just that much of the disputed territory is beyond Russia's military-industrial capacity to take.
...did you mean to cite a study whose own abstract emphasizes how ineffective Russia internet propaganda was in 2016?
Like, literally the conclusion is-
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