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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
So Ukraine doesn't settle for this offer and holds out... and it gets worse for them. Ukraine gets bombed more. Their graveyards expand. More territory gets annexed by Russia.
This is just epic-scale sunk cost fallacy among Western leadership and especially Ukraine. If there is one thing the foreign policy elite class really struggles with, it's accepting defeat. But the costs of propping up Ukraine aren't worth the gains. Slowly but surely the message is sinking in and the wiliest rats are leaving the sinking ship.
Who is going to provide them security guarantees that are innately non-credible? Why would the Russians expect the US, Britain or France to risk ruination over Ukraine? Why risk making a bluff that will be called? Ukraine's not a treaty ally and they can't become a treaty ally, the war is about that amongst other things. The gap in determination between Russia and the Western nuclear powers is too great. It's like the reverse of Serbia, Russia didn't guarantee them, they helped Serbia but didn't make bluffs that would be called.
So there aren't going to be security guarantees that bring on a risk of humiliation or extreme danger for the guaranteeing power. That's not going to happen. No matter how impressive Ukraine's stalling tactics are (and they have fought impressively) the logic of size and numbers is against them and the prognosis is very grim.
Stringing along the understandably desperate and somewhat stupid leaders in Ukraine with insincere promises of guarantees at some unspecified future is ignoble behaviour.
It doesn't get worse.
Before invasion in February 2022 certain western leaders offered Zelensky a ride. Basically they told him not to resist to save human lives. The reality was that Ukrainians would have resisted anyway but most probably would have lost. It would have led to terrible retributions from Russia. Think about Bucha multiplied hundreds of times.
Obviously, we cannot with 100% confidence say what would have happened but the idea is that Zelensky saved a lot of lives. Now pacifists are angry with him that he didn't save all lives. A lot of Ukrainians still perished and still dying on the battlefield.
It is a very hard concept for many to accept.
P.S. Unrelated to the war, but the same unwillingness to accept that some deaths will happen anyway let to higher mortality during covid pandemic. Still majority haven't accepted that despite clear data that Sweden fared best of all. They had about the same mortality from covid that the UK or any other western country and yet their excess mortality was practically zero whereas it was very high in the US. Why? The secret was to tolerate some deaths from covid as inevitable. There was no need to call Tegnel a nazi like some politicians did it hastily.
it's weird, Russia has captured and lost many a town and city over the last few years and recaptured many a town and city over the last few years
and yet it was only in Bucha, during peace negotiations in Istanbul which factions in Ukraine were trying to scuttle, that the Russians just decided to slaughter a bunch of civilians, something which they have gone out of their way, and lost many men as a result, to avoid since the start of the war and to this day
this Bucha narrative isn't believable and claiming Russian control means additionally this unbelievable Bucha narrative multiplied hundreds of times is simply ridiculous
and even if someone accepts the doubly unbelievable claim and even if one accepts the Ukrainian's claim that 400+ something people were killed (and no one should), a hundred Buchas would be 45,000 people dead which would be less than 10% of the likely dead Ukrainians already in this war
and the result will still be the same just like it was always going to be the same
the concept is easy to understand and accept, the issue is the particulars as applied to this war are not credible
I don't think they ever claimed it was just Bucha where atrocities happened/happen, just that Bucha was the most notable example. eg. see this or this, for example.
The issue with the mass graves in Izyum is that there's no realistic way to delineate victims killed by Russians from those killed by Ukrainians.
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Thank you for other examples as it better illustrates the web of belief for people who believe it, but to be frank, as a general rule I'm pretty skeptical believing people who think their cause is existential in nature because one who thinks this also places the cause above honesty, and then on top of it the Ukrainians have a years long history of just laughably ridiculous lies (which the BBC amplifies regularly).
It's been clear from the beginning there was a large and growing chasm between what various factions believed as reality on the ground in Ukraine and it's been unbridgeable most of the time and it's made dialogue about it difficult. As reality comes crashing through the propaganda as things start to fall apart over there, it's making real dialogue about the conflict possible again.
Do you generally believe that "an invading, occupying army commits atrocities" is by definition so improbable that it warrants a basic assumption that such claims are propaganda?
I think it regularly happens and it is regularly lied about, so these claims should be met with enhanced skepticism which can be satisfied with a low amount of evidence.
But I'm unsure why this abstracted statement would mean much in this particular circumstance. I know many specifics about the parties, about the claims, and about the available evidence (at least in the Bucha scenario). I remember the emerging story and the contradictory videos and pictures.
If I think the Ukrainians lied about Bucha, I'm not going to believe any further claims about other "atrocities" without a fair amount of independently verified evidence. The BBC repeating "Ukrainians found X" is nowhere near that standard.
I don't particularly blame the Ukrainians for the comical levels of lying because they believe they're in an existential war, but a casualty of that is they have no credibility.
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Of course not. Is it not also possible that a country that has engaged in false propaganda to engender support might lie about atrocities that again helps generate support?
That is, one should not believe that Russia is unlikely to commit atrocities (there almost certainly were some as its war) but also one should not believe the Ukrainians that something truly awful beyond the normal cruelty of war occurred.
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I think this gloss you are using is abstracting away too much detail. You can remove detail from almost any scenario to make it not sound "improbable by definition" - imagine if I told you that Donald Trump is a cannibal, and then if you were skeptical, I asked you if you generally believe that "an omnivore avails itself of a source of animal protein" is by definition so improbable (...).
The combination of it being a small army controlling the area for a short amount of time, the ethnic similarity of the two peoples, the lack of claims of a proportional scale from other, larger places where the same army was in control for a longer amount of time, the conspicuous lack of independent verification and the incongruences in early evidence (such as, as I mentioned in another response, the white armbands on the depicted victims), and the existence of a means and motive for the Ukrainians to make it up (extremely friendly and uncritical media-NGO complex, the knowledge that rousing sufficient moral indignation in the Western public may be necessary and sufficient to win the war) and parallel anti-motive on the Russian side (they had enough trouble just fighting the Ukrainian military, and were equally aware that Western support weighs more than anything either Russia or Ukraine can bring to the table), together warrant the basic assumption.
I think this is very much in the eye of the beholder: Western progressives happily lump together "White" Poles and Germans, but that didn't stop any number of atrocities on the ground in WWII. They also wouldn't generally distinguish between "Black" Hutu and Tutsi in any context that wasn't directly related to the relevant genocide. From someone far away (maybe you are not, but I am), it's hard to qualify feelings on the ground. Surely those genetically similar, Abrahamic-religion-followers in the former British mandate of Palestine are getting along nicely.
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Russians do not slaughter more civilians in Ukraine because they are not able to. That's how powerful Zelensky's defence is.
Obviously, Russia is still very powerful and is able to take over more territory but it is relatively small size.
Not believing that Bucha is reality is like believing that ivermectin is effective in treating covid and covid vaccines are pure poison (instead of not very effective in stopping infection but moderately effective in elderly reducing death and severe outcomes).
No offense, but this is just obviously wrong! If old Vlad's terminal goal was to kill civilians, he could crack open the silos and there's not much Zelenskyy could do to stop it.
But even setting that aside, Russia has been targeting military and dual-use infrastructure successfully. If they wanted to, they could shift all of those fire missions to hitting purely civilian targets like schools,* orphanages, museums, street vendors etc. Late last year, Russia demonstrated a conventional hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile with multiple reentry vehicles; they targeted it at a missile plant instead of downtown Kiev.
*ones that aren't be occupied by Ukrainian troops, that is. Relevant to this topic, Amnesty International went a-seeking for evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas indiscriminately without justification (and they did find that) but while they were looking, they also found evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas because Ukraine was staging military assets there.
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This is pure polemic. In what way are those two beliefs similar?
You are trying to argue for your position by tarring its negation by association. Would you find a "counterargument" like "Believing Bucha is reality is like believing that Donald Trump is a fascist dictator who was hypnotised by the KGB in 1980 to advance Putin's agenda" convincing? I'm sure we could find some people who believe both, too.
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You simultaneously believe Russia was powerful enough to slaughter hundreds in Bucha because they controlled it with soldiers, but are also not powerful enough to slaughter hundreds of people in each of the many dozens of other towns and cities they've captured and controlled with soldiers over the last few years?
How are soldiers powerful enough to massacre hundreds in Bucha but soldiers in other towns and cities not powerful enough to massacre the civilians there?
I think people were massacred at Bucha, I just don't believe Russians did it and a more believable narrative is Ukrainians killed people who accepted help from and/or collaborated with the Russians, and I also believe ivermectin was an effective early treatment for Covid and also that the Covid injection is ineffective at best and dangerous, so I guess we'll just leave it at that.
QOD. I rest my case...
If you don't have a response, don't respond. If you have a response, issue it. Responding that you aren't going to respond is just wasting people's time.
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