“Russia is already beginning to talk constructively,” Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said in a video online. “I think that we will achieve some results literally in a matter of days.”

But I thought...

Putin cannot be trusted, for one. A deal is nothing to him — Olivier5

...and...

Nothing works — Christoffer

...and...

Putin will never compromise. You can’t negotiate with terrorism. — Wayfarer

So I assume you're all dead set against this so called 'peace deal'?

I assume you're all dead set against this so called 'peace deal'? — Isaac

Nope. Sometimes a leader needs to make painful choices.

Nope. — Olivier5

So when I asked, and you replied...

Why do you think the Ukrainians should keep fighting and not accept the deal? — Isaac


Because Putin cannot be trusted... — Olivier5

You meant what...?

Thank you. I'll bookmark it and listen later :cool:
It might give some hopeful perspective to all of this...
But doesn't it kinda show what I mean?
It's a never-ending cycle. And we are never truly at peace, are we?

When you think that humanity has progressed...
... positives can be wiped away with the stroke of a pen. Or worse.

Bonne Chance! :sparkle:

It's a never-ending cycle. And we are never truly at peace, are we? — Amity

That is true, sadly. Thanks for the usual wise words.

I meant that Russia attacked Ukraine in spite of having signed numerous deal with her in the past, so any peace deal they sign on now is worth just as much as their previous promises ie little. They cannot be trusted to upheld their end of the bargain for very long, so a peace deal now would offer only a temporary -- if welcome -- respite to Ukraine.

The Ukrainians know that better than anyone and I expect them to ask for some guarantee. I'm not in the secret of those negotiations... Let's see what happens.

a peace deal now would offer only a temporary -- if welcome -- respite to Ukraine. — Olivier5

I see. So you've been arguing against my view that Ukraine should accept a deal, for the last eight pages...what? By accident? Was your account hacked by a rabid warmonger? I hate it when that happens.

:up:
I'm told that ''Right back at ya!" in French is "Retour à vous!"
C'est vrais?

Might come in useful if ever I need to wear a negotiator's hat :wink:

So you've been arguing against my view that Ukraine should accept a deal, for the last eight pages...what? By accident? Was your account hacked by a rabid warmonger? I hate it when that happens. — Isaac

Maybe your own mind was hacked by a rabid warmonger? Because I did not argue that Ukraine should never sign any deal. I argued that they might have good, rational reasons not to sign what the Russian side proposed. For instance, they might wish to negotiate a better deal. And to do so, they might wish to wait a little for the sanctions to bite, especially since the military situation appears to have stabilized.

Heu... non, on dirait plutôt : "À toi aussi" ou "pareillement", ou (closer perhaps) "je te renvoie/retourne le compliment"... :nerd:

I believed Putin would not invade. I was wrong. — FreeEmotion

For me war totally obvious with the television speech that Putin made on the 22nd of February, two days before the invasion. This was never a dress rehearsal, a training exercise to get the US to talk. And I had agreed with the historian Nial Ferguson's comment from January that the probability of war was 50/50, which is a really high probability. For example @Amity understood well the reality before the attack commenced. Others too.

Some insisted that everything was an American propaganda scare tactic, that all this has happened because of the US, well, they are still quite active. Just to refer one who before the invasion was launched, wrote about his intentions: "Just disrupting the rosy media-friendly picture of the poor underdog Ukrainians being set upon by nasty thugish Russia."

I argued that they might have good, rational reasons not to sign — Olivier5

I see. And those reasons have gone away now? Just as the media start reporting on peace talks. What a coincidence.

It's funny, but to someone who didn't know what an independent-minded and diligent thinker you really were, it might look a little like you were just polemically regurgitating whatever fervour happened to have gripped the popular media that day, changing your mind like a weathervane... But of course, we know better.

According to rumors on the street, a couple Ukrainian mayors have already been napped and replaced by Russian puppets. — jorndoe

There have been plans to create more Donetsk / Luhansk type puppet states. Which will now be even more grotesque Stalinist theatre as when the People's Republics were formed in 2014 because of the footage of Ukrainians openly demonstrating against the Russians in the occupied cities.

I'm sure Putin has Victor Yanukovich somewhere ready to be implemented as President of Ukraine if he wants to follow the Stalinist playbook.

On 2 March, Ukrayinska Pravda reported that Ukrainian intelligence sources believed that Yanukovych was currently in Minsk, Belarus and that it was Russia's intention to declare Yanukovych as President of Ukraine in the event of Russian forces gaining control of Kyiv.

Other possible puppets do exist. The Terijoki Government or the Finnish Democratic Republic was such a huge success... for four months!

And those reasons have gone away now? — Isaac

They are negotiating now, therefore the Ukrainians still reject the Russian proposal, as of date. And nobody even knows precisely what points they are negotiating so I am afraid your questions will have to remain without answers for now.

The whole debate is about which side people chose to support, remember? You wanted to know my reasons for supporting Ukraine. Well now you know. They are the aggressed, therefore I root for them. Zelensky was elected, therefore he is their legitimate leader.

But that's just me. Which side did you chose to support, and why?

Come on, tell us! I'm sure you're a hero in your own mind, battling strawmen left right and center!

And I really, really hope Zelensky survives. I expect the worst but I will definitely shed a lot of tears if those bastards take him out. — Wayfarer

I do also. And I hope that the Ukrainian casualties stay low, because there's a chance that they could be truly hideous. Yet that's the price to pay for independence and surely if there was any doubt of an Ukrainian identity when the Soviet Union collapsed, it is forged in steel right now, every day...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1503024136523767814

You wanted to know my reasons for supporting Ukraine. — Olivier5

We've been through this. You can't support 'Ukraine' in a discussion about strategy because 'Ukraine' is not an amorphous mass all agreeing with a single approach. You supported some of the people in Ukraine and opposed others. Some people in Ukraine even supported the Russian invasion, you opposed those Ukrainians, right?

What you supported was an approach, a particular strategy, the one chosen by the elected leader. We've also already been through the silliness of the notion that you supported his chosen strategy simply because he was the chosen leader (it's not, in itself, sufficient ground). So it remains that you had reasons outside of his mandate, to support his strategy.

Well now you know. They are the aggressed, therefore I root for them. — Olivier5

We've been through this as well. All Ukrainians are the aggressed. The ones who support Zelensky and the ones who oppose him. The ones who are prepared to lay down their life for their nation and the ones who've just had enough and would accept the Russian terms. Both are the aggressed. You chose one.

Which side did you chose and why? — Olivier5

I choose the side of those who'd rather avoid all the bloodshed and horror of war than act out their Star Wars fantasies with a population of innocent civilians to boost arms sales.

Both are the aggressed. You chose one. — Isaac

I do think that the legitimate leadership of the Ukrainian people deserves support right now. If you want to support someone else, by all means do so! But your protestations that you don't understand my stance cannot be sincere. You ought to understand that I naturally and normally support the right, and in fact the duty, of legitimate leaders of an attacked nation to defend the nation and themselves. There is nothing hard to understand there, and nothing even remotely polemical.

You don't understand because you don't want to. IOW you are pretending. Manufacturing dissent.

I choose the side of those who'd rather avoid all the bloodshed and horror of war than act out their Star Wars fantasies with a population of innocent civilians. — Isaac

Do they have a name? A leader? A phone number perhaps?

Which REAL, identifiable side do you support?

You ought to understand that I naturally and normally support the right, and in fact the duty, of legitimate leaders of an attacked nation to defend the nation and themselves. — Olivier5

There are multiple ways a leader could defend their nation. Arming everyone and fighting to the last man in defiance of any offer from your aggressor is not the only one.

Which REAL, identifiable side do you support? — Olivier5

It's not a fucking football match. I support strategies that I think will be best for ordinary people. I don't follow 'leaders', I don't pick sides as if picking out which suit to wear, I don't require a social media movement to validate my assessment.

I choose the side of those who'd rather avoid all the bloodshed and horror of war than act out their Star Wars fantasies with a population of innocent civilians. — Isaac

Do they have a name? A leader? A phone number perhaps?

Which REAL, identifiable side do you support? — Olivier5

Isn't it obvious? There's no side he is willing to take. He'll invent this "innocent people" group, who are totally separate of the actions. I think those 2,5 million Ukrainians or those Russians fleeing Russia because of the developments in the country do have opinions about which side is at fault and which isn't.

Because there is an aggressor fighting a war of conquest and there is a defender, that is supported by the US, @Isaac will surely not pick either of them. Because @Isaac doesn't want to give any credibility to the US as being here in the role of being a "Knight in white shining armour", hence he cannot back up the Ukrainians.

Oh the horror of supporting here the Ukrainians fighting Putin! As if one then couldn't be critical of US actions in let's say in Yemen and the Middle East.

cannot back up the Ukrainians. — ssu

I've just been through this with @Olivier5. How can support for a particular strategy be support for 'The Ukrainians'?

'The Ukrainians' are not a homogeneous group all single-mindedly in favour of one approach.

The deification of Zelensky is kind of horrifying to watch. He seems like a chill dude, doing well, under tremendous pressure. But the immense libidinal enjoyment that people seem to get out of treating him like a celebrity speaks to how utterly broken our ability to engage with the world is. Liberals get off on having a Zelensky-like figure available for intellectual reification - it plays right into their Harry Potter fantasies of individual heroes moving the world. He fills a void already cut out in their imaginations. This is, needless to say, not a critique of Zelensky, but of the really fuck-up way he continues to be portrayed.

Although Zelensky is of course a huge celebrity in the UK already...


Bradfield?


Zelensky?

Surely I'm not the first one to notice?

idk, I'm just saying someone should maybe, maybe maybe look into war-time heroes and how that tends to play out in like, all of history since the beginning of time. Anyone wanna look into the report card on that? Just like, out of curiosity?

Manics not big in Australia?

idk, I'm just saying someone should maybe, maybe maybe look into war-time heroes and how that tends to play out in like, all of history since the beginning of time. — StreetlightX

Well, there's Aragorn... or am I getting actual events and unrealistic fantasy stories mixed up again, there's been a lot of that going around recently.

Manics not big in Australia? — Isaac

Ooooh. Manics is big with me! But I didn't recognize him haha. I just listen to the music.

---

It's like - the Very Media Literate people here will tell you about being Very Careful about Propaganda, and then will also tell you that they will literally cry if something happens to this person who they did not know existed until a month ago.

I just don't even.

Ooooh. Manics is big with me! But I didn't recognize him — StreetlightX

Oh good. I thought I was going mad for a minute there!

Liberals get off on having a Zelensky-like figure available for intellectual reification - it plays right into their Harry Potter fantasies of individual heroes moving the world. He fills a void already cut out in their imaginations. — StreetlightX

This is so true, and also it cements loyalty in this unhealthy way, like there's an active desire, once the hero has been established, not to lose him to the grubbiness of reality so the ever-widening cracks get more and more desperately painted over.

He seems like a chill dude, doing well, under tremendous pressure. — StreetlightX

Not to forget that this is like instead of Churchill (or basically Chamberlain), the British would have voted Charlie Chaplin to head their country in the war against Hitler. Perhaps Chaplin would have succeeded in that role perfectly, he surely was against fascism and Hitler right from the start and likely could have acted in a very serious role.

The victory of Zelenskyy (and his new party) just shows how fed up Ukrainians were in the corruption of it's political system. He has made errors, like not mobilizing the reserve basically only after Putin had launched the invasion. And I think that how his party has turned from supporting pure libertarianism to a more centrist approach shows that they were learning about the realities in the World also.

Now the crucial thing is not to overplay the Ukrainian hand in the negotiations or to give too quickly to Putin.

There are multiple ways a leader could defend their nation. Arming everyone and fighting to the last man in defiance of any offer from your aggressor is not the only one. — Isaac

If you are in the business of nitpicking countries at war, sure.

. I support strategies that I think will be best for ordinary people. I don't follow 'leaders', I don't pick sides as if picking out which suit to wear, I don't require a social media movement to validate my assessment. — Isaac

How does this work in practice? Let us imagine that Le Pen, funded by Putin, wins the French presidential elections in May and decides to invade the UK, with some unclear results to show after two weeks of war apart from a lot of civilians bombed in a few costal cities. French troops are closing in on London but inefficiencies, low morale and the spirited defense of brave UK forces are holding their advance. The French are calling in Islamist mercenaries from North Africa to help. But France is also placed under heavy economic sanctions that will certainly weaken it more and more as time passes. Now, at which point in this scenario do you advise your government to negotiate? And do you mind if the French keep a few cities along the coast which they have managed at great cost to liberate from UK nazism? Curious minds want to know.

For me war totally obvious with the television speech that Putin made on the 22nd of February, two days before the invasion. This was never a dress rehearsal, a training exercise to get the US to talk. And I had agreed with the historian Nial Ferguson's comment from January that the probability of war was 50/50, which is a really high probability. For example Amity understood well the reality before the attack commenced. Others too.

Some insisted that everything was an American propaganda scare tactic, that all this has happened because of the US, well, they are still quite active. Just to refer one who before the invasion was launched, wrote about his intentions: "Just disrupting the rosy media-friendly picture of the poor underdog Ukrainians being set upon by nasty thugish Russia." — ssu

These two do not preclude each other.

What's tiresome on this thread, which is why I'm not really participating anymore, is the inability of some posters to accept any form of criticism of the US and NATO policy for decades contributing to the current situation, which appears to be a consequence of the naive mistake of applying ethics to geopolitical politics. While I agree that preferably every country adheres to international law, and I'm the first to argue they should, the fact of the matter is that it's a mistake to represent international relations as governed by those rules, eg. there's a clear difference between what is done and what ought to be done. Let's not forget renditions, torture, illegal wars etc. that "our" side committed, we don't have a moral high ground.

I don't trust the Western narrative and won't unless it's corroborated by different sources and that generally takes a few months to clear up, considering how often we've been lied to. If I see Russians firing at a flat, then I'm wondering whether they were fired upon from that position and we've just not been shown that. I have no way of knowing but I do know we get maybe 5% of what's actually going on.