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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Ukraine.

By now, wise people, people who avoid reading the newspapers (newspaper generally lie) have noticed that the news out of Ukraine is bad. After years of relentless and very stupid propaganda, even 'The Sun' ran an article which was basically fine. Torygraph ditto. A bit of lying around the end, some lies by omission but generally thoughtful and not grossly incorrect.

That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:

1- There's a financing issue, sure - Americans, unwilling since Trump inauguration to keep paying for what they started now only want to deliver weapons if Europeans, who were against it initially, pay for them.

Europe, as everyone knows, is mostly broke, with the exception of Germany, which isn't only because it typically doesn't shower money around. Paying through the nose for overpriced weaponry like e.g. Patriot or Aster 30 missiles ($ 2mil per unit) which then are going to be fired, best case, at cruise missiles of equal worth doesn't seem like a winning strategy, especially with the Geran spam being able to destroy anything that doesn't have a rare cannon SPAA sitting on top of it. If there's 50 of them in Ukraine, that's probably too much.

There was a plan of 'magicking' up money by making a loan to buy more weapons, covered by the frozen Russian assets, thus 'risk-free' because 'Russia is going to release those assets as war reparations'. Belgium, which would have ended up having jurisdiction over it refused to go along..

2- Materially, it's bad. We know the gist of the situation: Ukraine has too few men -line infantry is at 20-30% staffing , is outmatched in drones, artillery and air attacks. Russia, being larger, is able to mobilize troops and sustain operations. There is shortage of everything on the Ukrainian side. Civilian cars, drones, men. -save perhaps small-calibre ammunition which is barely used in this war. (allegedly <5% of wounds are from gunshot). Why there is a shortage of cars seems.. mysterious. Germany surely should be able to keep Ukrainians knee deep in cheap trucks. E.g. Dacia Duster cost €20k and there's 100k made per year. A mere 2 billion € a year could give Ukraine 1 4x4 car for every 5 servicemen. What gives?

Ukraine drops some bombs using their few planes, possibly even daily , but Russians sometimes delivers up to 300 a day, although the mean is 160 in 2025. Any bunker, HQ, supply dump close behind the front can be hit. That's pretty modest- just 40 sorties in an Su-34. Ukraine doesn't have what to use - France supplied 800 glide bombs... for the whole of 2024. Promised 1200 for 2025. 4 a day. If Americans have given more, we'd have heard about it. If GDP so high, why so few bombs? Where's the American UMPK? Does US have no huge pile of old bombs you can stick sheet metal & gps modules to? Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?

The true rate of attrition is unknown. Ukraine armed forces, internally seem to believe it's 8 Ukrainians for 10 Russians or something along those lines, if we go by the testimony of this International Legion guy who deserted earlier this year after being allocated to an especially dire 1st rifleman battalion with 50% odds of surviving one rotation. (or so he says). In any case, as Europeans and Americans have shown themselves unwilling to go and risk death, the required rate needed to have been something like 2:10 just to break even, demographics wise.

3- the front. right now, a some amount of troops is encircled at Pokrovsk. Supposedly very few (AMK_mapping, an autist who follows the war hourly says Ukrainians mostly withdrew), but then, it's unclear how dire the situation is, however GUR fed their spec-ops team to the front near Pokrovsk, in an effort to make evacuation easier, to probably little avail (there is an FPV montage of these guys getting blown up already). They operate 3 Blackhawk helos, one of them was apparently downed.

Overall, as you probably know, the situation on the front is bad. Ukraine cannot hold territory, cannot counterattack effectively. Previously, Russia was only being able to push one place at a time, now it's multiples. If you want an overview, here's an interview of AMK_Mapping, a rare pro Ukrainian OSINT account respected by people on both sides. Honestly he seems autistic. The 'mapping' means he's one of the people keeping track of the war online by obsessively reading Telegram channels, geolocating etc. The interviewer is pro-Russian, somewhat overly optimistic I think.

Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore, though the demands Russia has are not viewed as acceptable. I wonder what the frontline troops and officers would say in private.

I've banged this drum for a while, so excuse me for repeating myself, but...

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of? Their government is already among the most corrupt governments in the world, and their "Democracy" was already a proxy battle between Russian and USA color revolutions for most of their lifetimes. If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways. The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.

It, frankly, blows my damned mind that European leaders will let virtually every nation on Earth walk all over them, colonize their lands, commit mass rapes, murders, terrorism and ethnic cleansing, but somehow Russia's action are a step too far. There are nearly less English left in London than their are Ukrainians left in Kiev. What's been the greater crime?

What if world leaders just put on blinders, and let Russian people drive all the way to Kiev without firing a shot? What if they told fictions about how they are just immigrants looking for a better life? How dare you accuse them of having dual loyalties? They're perfectly capable of it. It's what they've been doing the last 50 years.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?

Well, assuming a friend of mine accurately recounted the views his Ukrainian expat friend expressed to him, having their menfolk killed and their women raped by the vile Tatar hordes, and thus having their pure Slavic bloodlines tainted, as unlike them, the Russians aren't really part of the West, but are the degenerate mongrel halfbreed descendants of Genghis Khan's Asiatic hordes.

If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways.

Well then, you might be heartened to hear that while said expat argues that Putin and his orcish army are the biggest threat to the Ukrainian people, the second biggest threat to the Ukrainian people is Zelenskyy, who was installed by International Jewry to punish and destroy the Ukrainian people in vengeance for the Khmelnytsky uprising back in 1648-1657.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?

Well, maybe the recent example of how it went in the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics as Russia-aligned puppet states? Reading Telegrams at the time, they managed to degenerate the nicest, wealthiest, most industrialized and most pro-Russian regions of Ukraine into two ridiculous Mad Max failed states of tortuous adventurer warlords, with a drafting effort that makes the current Ukrainian one look tame. The conditions and governance sounded so surreally bad that I'd have chalked it up to shameless war propaganda, except it was all coming from people wholeheartedly on the Russian side of the fence and in on the action.

One can come up with all sorts of arguments a totally overrun Ukraine would end up nicer than LPR/DPR, like another Belarus or something, or arguments it could be about as bad. "As bad" is godawful compared to Europe with migration. The current grinding forever war seems way nicer than LPR/DPR, or even a serious risk of going LPR/DPR.

In Germany, we had a natural experiment of being either a client state of the US or Russia. The outcome makes it very easy to understand why a lot of former Warsaw pact countries desperately wanted to join NATO as the cold war ended.

For all your whining about Jews enacting the Great Replacement of the White race, I would wager that orders of magnitude more have fled from Kiev to the safety of London to escape the war than have fled from London to Kiev to escape the Great Replacement.

In general, one would think that Belarus would be some White supremacist utopia. No Black or Brown people ruining everything. Nobody replacing anyone. No social justice types pushing gay, immigrant or women agendas (at least outside the labor camps). High religious conformity, in particular 0.1% Judaism and 0.2% Islam. Strong political decisions instead of endless bickering. They would probably let in White guys in exchange for a few years of military service.

But for some reason, while people in most wartorn countries are generally willing to emigrate or seek refuge in a safer country, the victims of the atrocities in London you mentioned are generally reluctant to do so, compared to Ukrainians or Syrians.

The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.

I think the party line of Moscow is that culturally there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that they are just a cultural splinter group of Russia which has to be brought back home into the Reich. At best, Ukrainians under Putin can hope to survive as 2nd class Russians with a weird backwater accent.

For all your whining about Jews enacting the Great Replacement of the White race, I would wager that orders of magnitude more have fled from Kiev to the safety of London to escape the war than have fled from London to Kiev to escape the Great Replacement.

Does that actually prove one is less likely to result in the end of a nation than the other?

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?

The Western part simple- nationalism. It's a very powerful ideology, derived from the tribal instinct. You can't discount it, and it's why Russia never intended to conquer all of Ukraine. Basically the interesting parts (strategic, resource, industry) are east of Kiev.

Lot of the people in the eastern part of the country were never that invested into the whole nationalist LARP. You can find videos of Ukrainians executing those traitors weekly. (nsfw, obviously. Two old people and a small dog getting blown to bits trying to cross the front line)

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?

They are afraid of the same things that all conquered nations of Russian empire were afraid of. That they will become second class citizens only to be exploited by Russian elite centers around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. An actually realistic proposition is that Putin will press them into military service and send them to war against Baltic states. You know - the same thing that Putin did to "liberated" and annexed Luhansk and Donetsk republics.

This is how Russia treats its second class citizens, yes, but eastern Ukraine doesn't actually have young people left. Western Ukraine has demographics that up until recently were at least not worse than average for Eastern Europe(that is, still quite bad). Eastern Ukraine has demographics that are Manchuria-tier. Russia's not raising a big slave army out of it, no matter how brutal their conscription laws. That's why the Russian army is increasingly muslim- same reason.

Yeah, it wouldn't just be that the Ukrainians would now be Russians - they'd be (considered to be) stupid hick Russians, traitorous hohols who almost sold out their birthright for a song, idiots with a dumb accent with the best of them aspiring to move to the central cities to lose their accent and identity to be accepted in the in crowd and the rest being proles and cannon fodder. Why wouldn't they aspire to prevent this?

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was as much a nationalist move as it was a failure of the political and social situation in the USSR at the time.

Ukraine is, like many European countries, strongly nationalist. European countries, generally speaking, are very nationalist, even if their elected leaders and the decisionmakers in Brussels aren't - half the anger over the immigration fiasco is that the largesse given to immigrants from North Africa is seen as selling out the country to invaders, so naturally political parties with a stronger nationalist bent are gaining all over Europe.

More importantly, Eastern Europe has felt the touch of Russian control before, and they strongly dislike it. They are going to pick up rifles. Whether the fight was futile, they're being used or gaslit by western intelligence agencies, they still decided to fight when it was largely considered a foregone conclusion that Russia would steamroll them. The fight is not about winning, same as it has since the beginning, but about hurting the enemy and making the Russians pay in blood for every inch.

The older Ukrainians remember life under Russia. They'd rather die than go back to that. The war, and subsequent resistance, caught the limp-wristed bureaucrats by surprise, because they have no idea or concept of what nationalism means anymore, other than a bunch of dimly-remembered, mealy-mouthed paeans about how it was this great evil that was responsible for two world wars.

Further west, the hand-wringing from European leaders is more practical; they worry about Russia's expansionist tendencies not stopping at Ukraine, and America not footing the bill for their defense.

It blows your mind because you’re looking at a strawman. The Europeans who elected these leaders don’t see it this way. As for the Ukrainian response…

Imagine that your county government gets taken over by—gosh, I know this sounds farfetched—roving gangs of immigrants. Then some keyboard warrior across the pond tells you: “don’t worry! They’re just protecting you from the other scary minorities, the ones who look even less like you. It’s the only way you’ll avoid ethnic cleansing.”

Would you believe them?

Ukrainians aren’t choosing the hard route because they just love the EU. They’re doing it because they hate Russia more. Better to die on one’s feet.

At least the Russian immigrant invasion comes with guns so shooting them is acceptable. If Russia wanted a bloodless victory they should have just plead for asylum endlessly like the entire third world is doing for the west.

That…is utterly facile.

Do you think you could explain how that strategy would serve any of Russia’s goals?

Takeover by the ballot box? Just walk in claiming political persecution, wait a few dozen years until they're sufficiently entrenched as a minority then start agitating for special rights to reengage a 'reformed' Russia. No grand takeover by superior slavic force of arms, but Muscovy managed to paralyze the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth with a single subverted member and they are repeating it with Hungary.

I mean, what IS Russias strategic goal. Subversion of the west relative to Russia? "Do nothing, win" is a leading strategy now. Restore the Russian Empire as a massive dickwaving contest? Say the magic word "anti imperialist" and tankies fall over themselves spreading cheeks to get buttblasted by noble communist Russia. Secure borders forever? Nukes already exist.

Whatever it is, going in guns out dicks out doesn't work. The west is uniquely vulnerable to Magic Words and Russia simply needed to speak human rights claims and they'd be free to run wild within western europe. Europeans can't bring themselves to admit that their experiment in humanitarian superpower leadership has rotted them from the inside, and they are happy to have their people exploited raped and murdered by anyone with the magic lable of refugee.

The third world manages to reproduce. How's Russia doing for TFR?

Surprisingly low for such a misogynistic culture. Female economic empowerment in Russia is almost an accidental byproduct of rampant alcoholism incapacitating male productivity. Yes Igor you sperm me so good with your vigorous maleness. Go take nap, you stud, I must clean banya.

I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?

Being dead, some of them. Being subject to the same treatment as inhabitants of medieval city would be after being conquered by a foreign army (pillage, rape, all that stuff). Of course, we're in civilized time, so most pillage would not be in the form of literally Russian soldiers going door to door and taking all valuable stuff. I mean, that happened too, many times, but there's just too many doors. The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over. In fact, one of the reasons why it was so easy for Putin to take over was because the shit that's was going on was so bad, people were thinking anything that is going to stop it would be better. So, that's what would happen to Ukraine - and since its the conquered land, it won't stop for a long while. Plus, of course, anybody who has any genuinely Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, would be ruthlessly eliminated.

The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people

There's no chance of Ukrainians surviving as "people" - collectively - as opposed to just collection of humans with no common identity, if Russia wins this war (by wins I mean full victory, capturing Kiev, overthrowing the government, etc). The whole premise of the war is that there's no such thing as Ukrainian people - it's just some Russians that are stupid enough to speak in weird broken Russian and sell out to the West, and it's time to put a stop to it. And if Russians win, they definitely will put a full stop to it. I mean, they won't murder everyone, it's not Africa, and they may allow people to call themselves "Ukrainians" if they behave, but no idea of having anything like a nation with independent identity would not be tolerated. Some Ukrainians find it unacceptable. If you want to understand why Ukrainians fight, you need to understand them, as they are, and not some weird caricature existing only in your mind.

If they stuck with Western Europe their Jewish President will just adopt a program of flooding them with 3rd worlders as "Replacement Migration" and they'd be ethnically cleansed inside 50 years anyways

That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.

The main pillage would be that Russians would own everything and you would have to pay them for being their bitch. And Russia has a flourishing prison culture - in fact, most of Russian culture by now is quasi-prison-culture or heavily influenced by it - so they know very well how to make somebody their bitch and how to extract maximum value from that. If you read the history of the 90s in Russia, it happened all over - until Putin took over.

At this specific level, there simply isn't that much difference between the two countries. "Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.

"Until Putin took over" the trajectories of them were quite similar.

Well, yes and no. You need to look at it in dynamics, not at one moment, but over the time. In early 90s, yes, things were pretty similar, except more money in Russia, but Ukraine had its share too. Then the paths diverged. Russia essentially rejected the "Western" way - in part because people implementing it were also grotesquely corrupt, though Putin's gang (which weren't strictly speaking his yet, just the one he belonged to) were about as corrupt, but not obviously so. There were also other factors, including the Chechen war, terrorism, etc. - and, of course, the conscious choice by Putin to set up Russia in opposition to the West.

Ukraine, while being close beside in corruption, has had also strong independence/nationalist vibes - which at times had been anti-Russian but not necessarily so. There had been a lot of fractions, and most of them were for at least keeping decent relations with Russia, while staying independent. Ukraine leaned towards integrating with Europe (remember, the explosive wokification by that time hadn't happen yet and "Europe" didn't mean "import Syrians, introduce censorship and trans your kids" yet). That said, for a while they hadn't been that far apart - in fact, at one time the most popular politician, among all alive, in Ukraine had been none other but Vladimir Putin. Putin overplayed his hand though, and helped to install Yanukovich, who had proven too much even for Ukrainians that were used to corruption.

And when it went sour, instead of taking a step back and trying to play the same long game he played before - after all, there were a lot of corrupt politicians in Ukraine, and Putin probably could choose another one to puppet and keep manipulating Ukraine while seemingly staying out of the fray openly - he decided to put the boot down. In Russia, putting the boot down worked spectacularly well - billions of dollars invested in Russian opposition led to it having absolutely zero power very soon and Putin eliminating any trace of dissent. Not only that, but the "moral power" that the dissidents held in the USSR, is mostly gone too - except for rare personalities like Nemtsov or Navalny, who Putin just openly murdered with nobody being able to object, there's not ever any influential opposition figures. In Ukraine, however, it did not work at all. That's about where the trajectories, previously following if not the same then adjacent paths, split drastically. Putin chose to build his new Russian Empire, Ukraine preferred to stay out of it.

So yes, the genesis is common, and a lot of common themes, but there are very important differences.

That's complete nonsense. I mean, if you know only about problems in a handful of Western European countries, you could conclude every country is like that, but it's not. Ukraine has completely different problems and Zelensky has no intention and no inclination to do any of that, neither did any Ukrainian politicians. I realize how you want to present it as another case of evil Joos doing evil Joo stuff, but that's just ignorant nonsense, not discussing real facts on the ground.

I'll accept the rest of your post at face value, but this...

Nobody has wanted that anywhere. And yet it's happened regardless. I refuse to accept "That won't happen because nobody wants it" as an adequate rebuttal.

There are many people who do not live in France, Germany, and the Anglosphere countries, but who would like to. On the other hand, Ukraine is a postcommunist balkans country; even the majority of its own population doesn't want to live there, because it sucks. 'Mass immigration to Ukraine' is not a realistic scenario because even the migrants don't want it. Seriously, nobody wants to live in a burnt out rubble heap with a GDP per capita on par with India.

Nobody has wanted that anywhere. And yet it's happened regardless. I refuse to accept "That won't happen because nobody wants it" as an adequate rebuttal.

In fact, not only did they not want it, but they were told by Representatives, Senators, and Presidents, that it would never happen. Just another click on the ratchet.

Nobody has wanted that anywhere.

That's not true of course. The whole woke blue tribe wanted it and still wants it. We could have a long discussion as to why they want it, but for the purposes of now, it's enough to notice they exist and are politically active and influential - in fact, in the West, they own the majority of the media, the academia and significant part of government apparatus. It is not the case in Ukraine. Yes, there are some voices in Ukraine aping the woke slogans, but they are mostly doing it because they want their European friends to like them, and neither them themselves are not truly woke nor there are any significant woke tribes in Ukrainian politics. Ukrainian politics is a tangled and ugly mess, but woke is not a significant part of it. The situation if very different there, so trying to apply what you see in, say, Germany or Holland, to Ukraine is completely useless.

It is instructive to watch/read/listen to Ukrainian internal propaganda. Machine translation is fine. Very much not about freedom, democracy, and minority rights. A lot about how russians are dirty mongolians that need to be kept out of the White continent.

I don't need machine translation, I speak (and, of course, read) Ukrainian freely. So I know very well what Ukrainians thought about Russians in 1980s, in 1990s, in 2000s and now. And, also, I know how wokeness is not something that is a major concern there. In 20 years, if the war ends, and Ukraine survives, and joins EU, and EU survives that long, it may become a concern. There's much about freedom, but it's only freedom from being murdered by Russians, not about freedom to trans the kids. People think because the wokes prance around with Ukrainian flags, that means Ukrainians are woke. But that's silly - they would prance around with any flags the Central Committee tells them to, be it Ukraine, Hamas, Iran or Mexico. They don't know the first thing about the actual country, and making conclusions about the country based on that is insane.

In my experience, the median European who "prances around with Ukrainian flags", if we take this to mean showing the Ukrainian flag on their online profiles and such, is a center-right-to-centrist liberal type moreso than an advocate of wokeness.

I dealt with a violently homophobic Ukrainian probably-an-actual-nazi who said that he would take tiddy skittles and bend over to suck black cock while being rammed by pakistanis if that would ensure Russia gets turned into glass. Its like the Sandanistas pretending to like Juche and gifting Kim Il Sung a stuffed crocodile, any ideology is acceptable so long as it comes with guns and ammo.

I can totally understand it, when your country is being literally destroyed, you do what you have to do. I am sure if conducting daily gay parade in the Independence Maidan in Kiev would somehow get Ukraine enough weapons and power to kick Russia's ass, about 90% of the population would sign up in a blink of an eye. But it's not that simple, unfortunately. I'm just saying there's virtually no organic wokeness in Ukraine politics anywhere. Any wokeness you notice would be because they think it'll help them to achieve some practical purpose (and there's probably just one major practical purpose they need to achieve now). It's completely different from Western Europe where there's a large organic woke support. Again, if Ukraine would get peace and gets into the EU and so on, maybe in 20-30 years they'd develop their own woke class - EU certainly would work hard to achieve that. But right now it's just not the case.

On the first days Russians fired into random civilian cars, with the BMP engaging pensioners who didn't know they were at war right at the start pretty famous now. This was at the point where it was going to be a 3 day special operation, and at least their command was sure that Ukraine would just fold - then there was Bucha where soldiers ran riot. That was all Feb-March 2022, and things did not get better from there.

There's quite the list of warcrimes now (you may not agree all of these happened, but most Ukrainians would if you're trying to understand their theory of mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war_(2022%E2%80%93present)). In addition, it seems that capture/kill/torture lists were common for the advancing troops. Remember, early on Russia was super confident, and sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus - (RUSI has a report here: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022 - in particular there were standardized torture equipment found in trucks, which is brutal as fuck, these are not people who anyone should be indifferent to ruling over them).

Imagine you believe that, like many Ukrainians do - and there is a solid argument that their resistance prevented Buchas across most of the country. Put yourself into that frame, imagine you believed the above. What would you do if that was your country, your home, and you knew people who were killed or tortured? People here reasonably say that one of the key lessons of the 20th century is do not be ruled over by people who hate you - if its true for the red tribe USA than the Ukrainians should be celebrated surely?

I would fight, and I think the situation is far less bleak than @No_one paints it, both now and over all the past times we've seen this argument (we're almost on year 4 of the special operation to de-nazify Ukraine, and with a few more years of this pace Russia will at last have all the Donbas, is this really a situation where Russia is going to occupy the country soon?). For example, I do note that Russia is taking a lot more long range hits this year, to very difficult to replace refining (only one (1) refinery has not been hit, and those cracking towers are not easy to patch) and strategic air assets no less. We're still in the hard pounding, Ukraine might break but it isn't over yet. It's a very interesting war.

sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus

[citation required]

Arresting foreign funded activists is obviously the right thing to do, but it's rather easy to expel them and massively less problematic. That said, I've never seen a single indication they had a naughty list. Although it'd make sense for them to have one, after all that has happened in Ukraine.

There is a citation in my post - RUSI's paper right there. It's open source, and they list where they got the information from where possible. You can disagree (especially where it's author interviews or him with a clearance seeing multiple copies of captured Russian equipment or the same documented instructions), but here you go if you cannot open the link for some reason, it's footnote 70: In Kherson, see BBC News, ‘Inside Russian “Torture Chambers” in Ukrainian City of Kherson – BBC News’, Youtube, https://youtube.com/watchv=AE_45TrZqU8, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kharkiv oblast, see John Ray, ‘Ukrainian Retraces Steps to Torture Chamber where he was “Electrocuted and Beaten for Six Days”’, 22 September 2022, < https://www.itv.com/news/2022-09-22/ukrainian-retraces-steps-to-torture-chamber-where-he-was-beaten-for-six-days>, accessed 18 March 2023; in Kyiv oblast, see Erika Kinetz et al., ‘“Method to the Violence”: Dogged Investigation and Groundbreaking Visuals Document Bucha “Cleansing”’, AP News, 11 November 2022; author observations around Bucha, June 2022 and Kharkiv oblast, October 2022.

In particular, I would also highlight this from right at the start of the war: "The population was divided into five core categories:

  1. Those deemed leaders of Ukrainian nationalism who were specified for physical liquidation on a high-priority target list, or for capture to enable show trials.
  2. Those suspected of intending to support acts of resistance who needed to be recruited or suppressed including anyone associated with Ukrainian law enforcement, local government, the military or related to officials that were not actively collaborating.
  3. Those who were deemed apathetic.
  4. Those actively collaborating with Russian forces.
  5. Individuals who were necessary for running critical national infrastructure and had to be controlled.69"

Source 69 above, is: The methodology was set out in an instruction issued by the Russian Presidential Administration and obtained by the Intelligence Community of Ukraine. Author interview with Q (Senior Field Counterintelligence Officer in Ukrainian Agency 4), Ukraine, February 2022; author interview with G; author interviews with R (former head of Ukrainian agency 2), Ukraine, February 2022; author interviews with J (deputy head of Ukrainian agency 5), Ukraine, August and October 2022; see also Erika Kinetz, ‘“We Will Find You:” Russians Hunt Down Ukrainians on Lists’, AP News, 21 December 2022.

I am confused how you missed it? I dug through your AI and the links weren't easy to find - or were not there - but this one was directly next to the text.

*edit: Oh, for others of a paranoid persuasion, that RUSI link is also a good overview of what an occupying force of high levels of brutality but using dumb troops of not high numbers and limited time might do to you and your family if you were ever occupied - and its very readable.

It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc, and Russia will not allow them to do so. Russia persecutes the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives, etc.

To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference. But it's also hard for slavs to tell the difference between the blue and red tribes; why there's so much fighting about the narrative in public schools is likely tricky political analysis for the FSB. It's also vanishingly unlikely that Ukraine will see replacement migration, even Ukrainians don't want to live there, much less non-Ukrainians.

TIL that Galicians have trouble with gaining independence from their cultural overlords from Iberia to Eastern Europe.

Galicia is Latin for "land of the Celts" and was used as a term for difficult to control borderlands inhabited by ethnically distinct peoples in European state formation; at least for some of them, old habits die hard.

As far as I can see, it’s not Galician nationalists wanting their own Central European country that Putin objects to. It’s rather them wanting to control the entire territory of the former Soviet Ukraine, including the Crimea.

To an outsider it's probably hard to tell the difference.

The best explanation I've seen is that Putin wants Ukraine to be like Bavaria. They are free to yodel and walk around in leather pants and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves, but they are still an integral part of the German nation and the German state. While Ukrainians want to be like the Netherlands. Who mention the German blood of their ruler in the anthem, used to be in the HRE, but are free to polder and walk around in wooden clogs and speak their unintelligible dialect among themselves in their own country.

Austria might even be closer to Germany than the Netherlands.

I am the first to admit that borders are accidents of history. There is no good principled reason why Austria should be its own thing but Bavaria should be part of Germany. The status quo is sacred merely as a Schelling point. If people want to move borders through democratic means, such as the Scottish movement to leave the UK, that is fine. But after two big industrialized wars, the world has largely realized that moving borders through military action is not worth the effort any more. Eventually, such actions became seen as defection from the club of civilized countries.

For Europe, "stick to the borders however stupid and unfair they are" has been a marked improvement over the ancient, previous method of resolving land disputes, "bash your neighbors heads in every 50 years to see who gets to own the disputed territories".

, wants to suppress the Ukrainian language, indoctrinate their children into Russian culture with its own historical narratives

Unlike the western globalists who would never ever do something to dismantle a country's ethnic and cultural heritage...

If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture Macron and Keir Starmer are their worst nightmare.

Wrong. If they want ethnic Ukrainian culture, Russia is their worst nightmare. On account of actually having an explicit policy to destroy them as an ethnicity and fold them into Russia, as opposed to whatever it is you're insinuating Macron and Keir Starmer are doing.

Not even close.

While London is 50+% non British? Ukrainian culture will be as deconstructed as western culture and replaced by bland American consumerism while their population will be replaced by Bangladeshis extracting resources owned by western financial institutes. Ukraine's demographics rival South Korea's as the most catastrophic on Earth while they are allying with people who want mass migration with incredible fervor.

Don't think the Black rock owned plantation is going to have an HR department that cares about traditional Ukrainian culture or that the Nigerians working there have any interest in it.

Why would any Ukrainian who cares about his ethnicity care about that, when Russia promises to actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers as soon as it's done?

It's clearly been too long since you've had an actual existential war if your concept of being replaced is limited to "London is less than 50% British". Try zero percent. Ethnicity null can't take up any percentage of the former country, after all.

actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers

I think this almost never works, it just induces resentment. Spanish culture stayed strong despite centuries of Islamic occupation (the staying-power of bullfighting has a lot to do with the Muslims repeatedly trying to ban it), the Irish are still Irish, and Ukraine went straight back to being Ukraine once the USSR was over. If anything foreign occupation seems to solidify native culture, below a certain level. (That is not to say that being occupied is fun or easy, especially by Russians).

What does seem to cause long-term culture change is demographic change. On an obvious level, America and South America changed almost completely once the Europeans moved in, as did the English when the Normans moved in. I don't really have great examples because mass migration is still quite new, but it seems relevant to me that the statues of Robert E. Lee in the South didn't disappear after Civil Rights but only disappeared when the locals became outnumbered by incomers with no connection to the history. There's just something about 50%+ of your capital city and even increasingly your politicians having no connection with your history at all (or negative ones) that's hard to describe. I look out of the window and nobody looks like me. I can't understand what they're saying. If the Nazis had succeeded and tried to wipe out our culture I think we'd still consider ourselves English, but this is different.

Ukraine was Russia for centuries, it was still Ukrainian. Ukraine now has collapsing demographics and will end up being completely replaced.Their culture will be some washed out American culture and their population will be Pakistani workers extracting resources for black rock. There is no force that is more culturally corrosive than western liberalism.

Ukraine wasn't even a part of Russia. There are parts of Russia with strong cultures. Ukraine would easily have remained Ukrainian.

The parts of Russia with strong cultures have not been painted as literal inheritors of the German Nazi cause who must be annihilated as a state and entity. Also, the parts of Russia with the strongest non-Russian cultures are, you have guessed it, Muslim. Not "Slav convert" Muslim, but Central Asian Muslim.

I am telling you once again since you do not even address it - Russia is not some sort of based trad anti-White Replacement haven. All the trends that make people crow about "replacement" are there at only slightly weaker, combined with the kind of government ideology that is really not promising for newly-subjugated Enemies of the Glorious Fatherland.

Ukraine now has collapsing demographics and will end up being completely replaced

This is of course also true of Russia, the two nations have similar TFRs.

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It was a part of a premodern Russian empire withotu anywhere close to the amount of state capacity (or general ideological development related to modernity) to attempt assimilation, or basically any form of governance beyond letting local atamans and village chiefs continue to do as they've always done. Things are obviously quite different on that front now.

It bears repeating that Western Ukraine(Galicia) is culturally distinct and wants to be a central European country like Poland

Weren't many of these areas historically, uh -- Poland?

Give those parts back to the Poles, Crimea + Donbas etc. back to the Russians, and what's really left?

There's no such thing as "historically Poland" and these areas had been everything. These lands were conquered and re-conquered by a variety of states, which bore variety of names, many of them sounding like modern states (e.g. Grand Duchy of Lithuania) but being very different from them. Taking a random moment out of 1000 years of chaotic warfare and conquest, fixating on it as "historical" and claiming that's the "true" state of things is just nonsense. Russian official propaganda does it all the time - if any particular piece of land had been conquered by Russians even for a day over the centuries, it's "historically Russian land", from the time of Creation till the end of the Universe. Of course, if you believe silly stuff like that you may as well start doing land acknowledgments and move back to Africa since that's where "historically" humans lived.

That's kind of the point though -- I know people who's family came from those areas pre-WWI; I think it was an Austrian possession at the time, but they were Polish people who called themselves as such. Later it was Poland again, then USSR, now Ukraine. But the people there were still Poles or Ukrainian as the case may be; it's not as though they were confused as to which depending on which army had conquered the place recently. (we had plenty of Ukrainian emigrees as well; they called themselves according to their history, not what part of the area they had been living in)

So if (some of) the people of Galicia consider themselves still Polish, they are probably right.

Due to all that long and messy history, no border is ever able to express the complexity - you'll always have people that think they are Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Hutsul, Romanian, Ruthenian, Czech, and a dozen of other options leaving next to each other. Sure, in some place people would say "we are Polish and we're living here since year X" and over the hill over there people would say "we are Ukrainian and we're living here since year Y". It's always easy to find some substantiation of some politician's grand "historic" claims - but it's also as easy to find a diametrically opposed evidence which the politician conveniently ignored.

All true -- thus "might makes right" is usually how these disputes are eventually resolved. If Poland wants Galicia back, they would have to come and take it. If Russia doesn't get there first, I suppose.

My grandmother was born in Przemiwółki, a small village near the Polish city of Lwów, which you probably know as Lviv. My grandfather was born a bit more to the west, in Żółkiew (Zhovkva). There's a family story about how his father and father's brother became estranged for life after the modern nationalities started to crystalize and one chose to be Polish, and the other an Ukrainian - Tolkien's story of Elrond and Elros comes to mind.

Anyways, the known Poles living in those regions faced a simple choice as WWII was drawing to a close - flee, or die at the hands of UPA. There might be some octo- and nonagenarians left who consider themselves Polish deep in their hearts because of the stories one of their parents told them, but that's basically the end of it.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?

Let's first imagine the wild success of the SMO. That is, Russian tanks drive all the way to the center of Kiev in 2022, Zelensky escapes in a dress, Poland props up LNR and VNR. That's where ideologically motivated SBU and military officers escape to along with hardcore nationalists, everyone else shrugs and goes on with their lives.

Well, in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia. Not a perfect one, of course, but Russia is a very top-down country where the very bottom of the pyramid is adept at avoiding the attention of the rest of it. Ukraine has a very different ethos of resisting the top layers, and the 2014 revolution legitimized this resistance. Poroshenko's reforms made municipal governments responsible for a much larger chunk of the taxes, further reinforcing the idea that people were in charge of their lives, and this change worked.

Maybe in February 2022 the average Ukrainian could've calculated the QALY drop caused by a prolonged armed resistance and decided to give up, but vibes beat math, and the vibes said, "we're finally doing some cool nation building and we'll lose all this if we don't resist".

in 2022 Ukraine was a better country to live in than Russia

Before the invasion Ukraine's GDP per capita was 2-3 times lower than Russia's. Obviously now it's even worse. "Nation-building" aside, is there any particular reason I should believe it's better to be Ukrainian than Russian?

All I see is one corrupt oligarchy feeding its population into a meat grinder to avoid having their power taken away by another corrupt oligarchy.

Russia has South Africa and Mexico tier income inequality with a mostly state controlled economy. I somehow doubt the average Russian was doing better than the average Ukrainian.

I'm not an economist, but Ukraine's Gini Index is 74.4 (as of 2020) and Russia's is 64.5. That's not a huge difference. Is that really enough to overwhelm the difference of Russia having a GDP per capita that is literally double or triple Ukraine's?

The numbers are as Sunshine says. Better in PPP, worse by exchange rates.

Setting aside the possibility of skew, since I had a surprisingly hard time finding median data…Is this the right question?

Maybe I’d prefer being a Russian to being a Ukrainian. But I think I’d prefer either to being a former-Ukrainian. Even if Russia wasn’t at all interested in cleansing language or religion, would Russian wealth somehow trickle down? There’s not much reason to think former-Ukrainians would see any benefits under Russian colonization.

All else being equal I assume that both countries are equally exploitative towards their people. Ergo, all else being equal, the population of the richer country will be richer and the population of the poorer country will be poorer.

I would expect Russian elites to siphon more from annexed Ukrainians than from their own lower class.

I don't think Ukrainians, outside of the max. 3% or so actual nazis (effective as they may be as a fighting force), care for "surviving as a people". The only thing they are fighting, and willingly taking a 50% chance to die, for is the hope of "becoming part of the West", either by uplift like Poland or Estonia, or by emigration once the borders open. Generally, it may be hard for a Westerner who spends all day every day seething about the state of their country to understand just to what extent post-Soviet people, especially relatively poor ones, idolize life in the West. (Maybe take in this prophetic music video for vibes.)

My experience with actual Ukrainians(and this is a biased sample but it is mostly the equivalent of normies, not actual Nazis) is that they do care about surviving as a people, and that that people is, to their mind at least, very different from Russia. Whether there's actually much of a difference or not probably depends on where exactly in Ukraine; Galicia at least is a lot more central European and less east Slavic in comparison.

In what context did you encounter those Ukrainians? Those who have made it all the way to America don't really count, since they have already safely made it to the West and probably are more subject to American memes (which would have you proudly wear the culture of distant ancestors like an Aztec warrior wears a jaguar skin).

(I don't deeply know any Western Ukrainians, but have talked to some of the refugees who are all over Europe now and overheard the conversations of many more. Of course having fled does bias the sample, too.)

Mostly UGCC members, but American residents who speak Ukrainian(not Russian or Surshik) at home. I'll be the first to admit this is a biased pool towards anti-Russian hardcore nationalists, but I also remember them liking Assad for middle-eastern Christian reasons, which points to less influence on their views by the US media and state department.

What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia? I mean I understand the process of being conquered is violent and deadly, but post surrender, what are they afraid of?

4 years ago they probably didn't had too much to be afraid of. Right now ...

Compare the state of the Russian POW that Ukrainians return with the Ukrainian that Russia returns. A full blown conquest has a good chance to devolve Ukraine into the biggest concentration camp on earth.

Thankfully Putin doesn't seem too keen on that. Mostly because oppression is expensive. And economic sanctions on Russia do hurt. So Europe can actually negotiate a peace that is not terrible.

I am not sure if you can comprehend how cruel and ruthless us eastern europeans can be.

In a word, The Holodomor.

Now, don't worry, I'm not some Ukraine agent apologist here. I'm just trying to directly answer the question of "What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?" You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. The Ukrainians aren't thinking about the future, they're constantly enraged by the past. The "Politics of Resentment" isn't an invention of 21st American politics - it's the de facto arrangement of most human conflict. To many in Ukraine, allowing a Russian takeover is the equivalent of letting all of the people who killed all of your family members move in to your house. It's pretty easy to get fatalist and irrational to prevent that. "I would rather die than ...." Yeah, well.

You can absolutely boil Ukraine v Russia down to Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe.

My thoughts exactly. It's vexing how every Red Triber on this forum knows exactly how much they hate their enemy and would not submit to them because the enemy has repeatedly let them know how much they hate the red triber and want their legacy erased... yet all that understanding goes out the window when they look at Ukraine vs. Russia.

Except that whatever things Blue Tribe did, they still did not graduate - at least in the US - to actually engineering a nationwide famine that cost millions of lives, with the explicit purpose of subjugating Red Tribe. Shit like that tends to be remembered.

To interpret the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as a) artificially engineered (i.e. done on purpose) b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians c) with genocidal intent, as if this was self-evidently the one and true possible interpretation is a clear case of consensus-building. I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.

Unless, you know, it actually was a) artificially engineered and b) by 'the' Russians against 'the' Ukrainians (more precisely, of course, by Soviets - which weren't all ethnically Russian, of course) and c) with genocidal intent. Given as Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose, for political aims, and their ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes, and their official position had been that any "nationalism" has to be completely eliminated (which they consistently did in all "national republics" - every single nationalist movement had been brutally repressed) - it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, so it's not a big stretch to argue it is a duck.

I'm pretty sure you yourself are aware as well that all three arguments are questionable at best.

You can question it all you like, but as I noted above, there is very good evidence pointing to it. I am not saying questioning this evidence makes you literally Hitler, I am saying if you have equally strong opposite evidence, you are welcome to propose it. Or you are welcome to just say "I just don't believe it, whatever is the evidence", that's always an option. I know one thing - dismissing all that by just saying "oh, it's consensus-building, therefore you are wrong" is not an argument.

Frankly I find these claims increasingly baffling. The "Soviets had actually perpetrated other acts of genocide on purpose"? Other acts of genocide? Where? When? Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes". Fair enough, there were cases where this applied. But against entire ethnic groups? Which is what genocide is? Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?

My lived experience of actual Ukrainians is that they believe this narrative of the holodomor, whether or not you do, and discussion of it would be as welcome as bringing securesignals as a +1 to a bar mitzvah.

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Other acts of genocide? Where? When?

How ignorant are you in Soviet history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Meskhetian_Turks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Kalmyks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_deportation and others.

Their "ideology explicitly allowed and endorsed mass murder for political purposes"

Dude, Gulag. Purges. I mean, they didn't exactly hide it.

Also, the elimination of nationalism necessarily entails genocide now?

Not necessarily, but the way Stalin did it - it frequently did. I mean, I understand that if you're completely ignorant of history, you find historical claims "baffling". But maybe you should fill up on that before arguing about it?

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The section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia link certainly doesn't provide strong evidence; it shows strongly contested disagreement. If you're referring to your first paragraph, that seems to boil down to 'the Soviets were open to genocide and didn't like countries with strong national identities, so obviously the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate genocide' which seems pretty circumstantial.

If it were the only evidence, sure. But there's plenty of other evidence to the deliberate character of food confiscation, and to extreme hostility with which Soviets viewed the kulak class. Of course, to properly consider all that evidence, one would need to write a series of books - and there are many books on the subject, of course. I have neither ability nor desire to TLDR them all here, I am just saying this is a well-supported position, and dismissing it with a formula like "oh, that's consensus-building, therefore all that pile of evidence worth nothing" is not proper discussion of the subject.

he section on Discrimination and persecution of Ukrainians in the wikipedia

I checked Wokepedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and it says "Olga Andriewsky writes that scholars are in consensus that the cause of the famine was man-made.[46] The term "man-made" is, however, questioned by historians such as R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, according to whom those who use this term "underestimate the role of ... natural causes",[47] though they agree that the Holodomor was largely a result of Stalin's economic policies.". Now, I have very low opinion about the veracity of any Wokepedia claim on any politically charged subject, and again, seriously evaluating such claims would take much more than I am willing to give, but in short, virtually everybody agrees Stalin did it. Now, imagine - Stalin comes out and says "we will destroy kulaks, if necessary - we will kill them all". Stalin then does things. Kulaks are destroyed, many of them dead. Many other people are dead to. We can establish the causal link between Stalin's actions and the deaths. Now, you tell me that we should seriously consider maybe it all happened on accident? That somehow he only wanted to build communism, and accidentally took all food from them and accidentally they died because they had no food? I don't know, to me it doesn't pass the smell test.

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I can believe it of the Soviets, but I would certainly like to see some evidence that it’s true.

My recollection is that the ‘famines brought about by collectivisation’ became ‘the Holodomor’ at exactly the same time that Kiev became Kyiv.

Odd. By my recollection, Famine-33 was published in 1991, during the tail-end of the Soviet Union itself. It wasn't exactly subtle that the nature of the famine was artificial or tied to the collectivisation. It's not exactly hard to find academic literature from the cold war either, albeit more from the glastnost period and the de-classification of various historical documents.

I think everyone broadly agreed that the famines were a product of collectivisation, and the difference between callous indifference + culpable stupidity vs. deliberate malice is hard to differentiate at the best of times.

My complaint is more that in the West it seemed to me we switched over from ‘the famines in the USSR were a semi-deliberate result of Soviet malice and mismanagement’ to ‘the Holodomor was a deliberate attempt by the Russians to destroy Ukraine and now they’re at it again’ and this shift seeed to be based on political needs and vibes rather than the production of new evidence.

Like, every country that’s ever been colonised has a story about how the evil oppressor engineered famine to punish them. Britain gets it from the Irish and the Indians, and at least in the latter case I’ve looked into it (I did a post last month) and the case is very dubious. As a result I distrust these maximalist claims being presented as fact without backing evidence.

For example, Famine-33 is a fictional work made 60 years after the events it depicts, based on a novel written by a Ukrainian (Vasyl Barka) who as far as I can tell wasn’t actually there at the time, having gone to work in an art museum in Krasnodar in 1928, four years before the famine.

Again, I’m not asserting anything. I merely note that I distrust very heavy claims (deliberate genocide of Ukrainians) being made at a time of high political tension based on little or no presented evidence. I am quite happy to be shown something more substantial.

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Yeah, that actually makes perfect sense when you put it like that.

A shame there won't be a Ukrainian people in 50 years.

They survived Russian Empire at the peak of its might, and the USSR - twice. And USSR is not known for its gentle approach to conquering people. By Lindy's law, I estimate their chance on surviving Putin as pretty decent.

I'd wager the OP was referring to the future consequences of 50 years of American/Atlanticist/globohomo (and not Russian) hegemony over the Ukrainian people (or at least over the great majority of them). To illustrate what I guess is the same point, I ask you to consider the difference between A and B in the following two cases:

One:

A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by their average propensity to vote for right-wing nativist parties since 1990

B: The effects of US hegemony in Western Germany on the national identity and patriotic sentiments of local Germans, as evidenced by the displayed level of their willingness to preserve themselves as a nation since 1949

Two:

A: The effects of Soviet hegemony in Poland on the Catholicism and patriotic sentiment of the locals

B: The effects of US hegemony on the same in the last 25 or so years

I’d say there’s clear evidence that it’s US and not Soviet hegemony that has the larger detrimental effect on national identity and survival.

It's a bit perverse way of saying things. Sure, if you brutally oppress a population for decades in the service of, say, vegetarianism, and then your vegetarian regime collapses, the people would acquire certain aversion to vegetarianism for a while. And maybe overall eating a more balanced diet would come out as good for them (please, vegetarians, it's just an artificial example!). But concluding from that that to achieve a balanced diet you need to brutally oppress people for decades, and that's actually a good thing because it leads to better diet, is a very perverse way of arguing.

There isn't a singular 'Ukrainian people' now, there's a collection of different 'Ukrainian people'- and one of them(galicians) might have an above replacement fertility rate(although it's probably just below), one of the major undercurrents of the present conflict is Ukraine's attempts at turning its collection of different ethnic groups into a single ethnic group that's mostly galician aping. That's what started the donbas war.

My prediction on their demise is more favorable than on the Western Red Tribe - they've actually got around to fighting.

Russia's native birthrate is largely in the same crater as other European nations, and it also has both Muslim immigration (from its neighbouring -stans as opposed to Middle Eastern, but same difference if you're not into that) and a sizeable resident diaspora. Regarding "surviving as a people" Russia has nothing to offer Ukrainians, especially given that Russia's explicit rhetoric is disintegrating Ukrainians as an ethnicity.

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