i am not calling on you to call it genocide, and it’s a very serious accusation that shouldn’t get thrown around lightly. in this case, atrocities in mariupol are suspected to be worse than those in kyiv by shear size of military involvement and longer timeframe. there are also satellite pictures of what looks like new graves, similar to what was found in northern ukraine.
we would definitely need to see more confirmations. UN count includes journalists going through Kiyv/Chernihiv region, while Mariupol is obviously off limits. if you think UN undercount is one order of magnitude off (10x), then mariupol accounting for half of the casualties isn’t dubious. mariupol took the worst of the fighting.
the morbid thing about that is that acts of genocide will be are talked about for decades, sometimes taking longer than century to call it that. but the mere suspicion of genocide probably means UN/Red Cross/HRW have to get involved with at least an observer mission.
it’s all a matter of degrees. gorbachev does stand accused of violent suppression of protests in late 80s. his complicity in 91 putsch hasn’t been vetted out either.
Sofia Sapega, a Russian law student arrested with her Belarusian dissident boyfriend last year when Belarus forced a Ryanair airliner to land, was sentenced Friday to six years in prison for inciting social hatred, Russian state news agency TASS reports.
“The court finds Sapega guilty on charges of ‘deliberate acts aimed at inciting social enmity and discord on the basis of social affiliation committed by a group of persons, which had grave consequences,’” said the verdict issued at Grodnensky District Court in Belarus.
Last May, Belarusian authorities took the extraordinary measure of diverting to Minsk a Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece heading to Vilnius, Lithuania, claiming there was a bomb threat.
Really not hard to figure out why Ukrainians don’t want to live under a regime like this.
They’ve lost 1/3 or more of their original fighting force, and we can expect the average replacement, whether man or machine, to be less capable than what it/he is replacing, at least for the next year or so, so that Russia can figure out how to train new recruits and how to manufacture new arms under sanctions. That allegedly overwhelming force was their overall advantage. All other advantages go to the defense: morale, knowledge of the terrain, equipment support from allies, artillery range, etc.
I really think we’re going to see the writing on the wall in 2-4 weeks, not the months or years it’d tack for doctrinal overhauls to show returns. The Russians think they can encircle and then capture or kill the most potent part of Ukraine’s army that’s in the Lyman area using their forces around Izyum. If they succeed, Ukraine might stand little chance of retaking any further lost territory, and might concede Donetsk Oblast also. Meanwhile, Ukraine thinks they can cut off the supply lines to those forces from the north, which would isolate something like 1/3 of Russia’s remaining forces. If they succeed, Russia might not have enough forces left to even hold Luhansk Oblast.
I’ve been rethinking Putin’s motivations wrt oil/gas. At first I thought this was secondary to empire/villainy but I’m coming around to oil/gas being more important after reading a random twitter thread. Putin’s also showed he can be restrained when required, so he’s still at least a semi-functional psychopath.
The new idea I saw was not about how much he coveted Ukraine’s oil/gas, but rather the threat Ukraine posed to his existing empire, power, and money. Unmolested, Ukraine could develop its reserves and be a competing supplier to Europe. It could shut down the pipelines that cross it from Russia. Nord Stream is an alternative route but Ukraine could also undercut Russia’s prices. Such a situation would be a threat to Putin because his military is funded by oil and gas money. And worst of all, if Ukraine joined NATO, there’d be nothing Putin could do about it. Having his ambition thwarted, not an invasion, is the NATO threat.
So, especially since he thought it would be easy and he’d gotten away with similar shit in the past, he decided to put Ukraine in its place. Which is not to say that he doesn’t believe the stuff about Ukraine not being a real country and that he is destined to be the next Peter the Great or Stalin. It’s just a little clearer how the pieces fit together.
I think this means he could be satisfied with his gains in southern and eastern Ukraine, even without having taken much of the territory containing Ukraine’s unexploited reserves because it will be tough for Ukraine to develop them while under constant threat of renewed attack. If I understand the requirements to join NATO, this also means he keeps that from happening. So even if he didn’t get his preferred outcome, he has at least accomplished that much. That win comes at a huge cost, ofc. From the outside it still looks like he fucked himself. Only Putin knows what he thinks.