aguaviva · HackerTrans

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

All good, and I appreciate the correction.

BTW I only chimed in like that because people routinely cite, for example, casualty figures ("Ukraine has 1M+ dead") intended to make the situation look much worse for Ukraine than it actually is (and to apparently suggest that there's a giant conspiracy to keep keep the truth hidden from us). Turns out they're invariably skimming, looking at a random figure they saw (for example an article claiming 1M total casualties included wounded, and on both sides, meaning mostly Russian), and duly misremembering in a specific way that happens to align with the narratives they like.

So this case it turns out I was wrong (but at least in an interpretive way; I didn't think about how the definition of "refugee" is overly specific and doesn't really count the number of people forced to leave the country).

On that note, if you have your own estimate of the current numbers for military / civilian fatalities, that would be of interest also.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Dobre, at least 10 million (or about a quarter) seems like a more reasonable figure then.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

About a third of Ukrainians are currently outside Ukraine due to war.

More like about 15 percent as of Feb 2024, per the UNHCR.

https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/ukraine/

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

This was a coup funded by the US and the oligarchs.

I guess that's what you thought you saw. But since you've made a point of fabricating other plainly untenable information (e.g. "Over a million dead") and attempting to present it as fact -- it's a foregone conclusion that your narrative of the events of 2014 will be equally Swiss-cheesed with falsehoods and fabrications as well.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Except there was no coup, nor any subsequent actions which provoked such a response.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

And who accept the physical risk of doing so, in order for people like Palmer can profit handsomely from it, without having to take on any of that risk themselves.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostly_Other_People_Do_the_Kil...

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Even the Ukraine war started with violence back in 2014.

Right - violent invasions of Ukrainian territory by Russia.

Russia was pushed into war by Obama and Biden

This just is a repeat of what you said earlier. But in short -- in no way was Russia's regime "pushed" into doing what it did in 2014. The move was entirely optional for Putin. He did what he did because he thought he could obtain a certain advantage on the playing field, and because he thought he could get away with it.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Russia's regime pushed itself into war mode.

As for China - no one can push China into anything.

The only way to avoid conflict is diplomacy

This is unfortunately false. As indicated by all of known human history.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Russia is not a colonial power though.

But indeed it was, and this is an extremely basic fact of its history. It wasn't run on exactly the same model as the overseas empires of the Western European states, but its modus operandi absolutely fits the definition of a "colonial empire" per the definition in Wikipedia:

   A colonial empire is a collective of territories (often called colonies), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.

The empire and later the USSR conquered a lot of land, but that was contiguous.

This idea that conquest can't be called a "colony" (or that territorial contiguity has anything to do with the definition of the term) is just silly. As if the American States didn't promptly set out to settle and colonize the West after 1789 (because these places were contiguous to it), or Germany didn't very explicitly set out to colonize Poland in 1939, and so on.

aguaviva

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The conflicts and influence wars between Russia and colonialist powers in Africa is well-known and has been happening for a while.

That the conflicts are well-known and have been happening for a while is quite true of course.

But this bizarre framing of these conflicts as "between Russia and colonialist powers" (as if Russia was not also a colonial power, or its influence games in Africa were any different from those of the Western powers) is just propaganda, and rather trite propaganda at that.

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