Re: Presumbly the UK has similar plans
I give up. I'm just trying to explain to you that as someone who has Russian family, and that Russian family has Ukrainian family in eastern Ukraine (who are ethnic Russians), the way you are painting things is not at all what they have experienced over the past 15 years or what I have experienced when talking to them.
They tell me that Russian speakers were not being targeted in the their everyday lives pre-2014, when Russia used political instability to launch a land-grab and create a buffer zone (obviously I can't speak for all Russian speakers, but I'm just sharing the stories they have told me). I have no reason to question them because they are Russian speaking Ukrainians who live in eastern Ukraine. Yes there are nationalist idiots, but every country has those and it was no worse in Ukraine than elsewhere, but from what they tell me, their day to day lived life was not what you are making it out to be (not until Putin stoked the hatred anyway). You are painting Ukraine as a country that has been involved in state sanctioned ethnic cleansing for years, which is simply untrue if you actually asked the people who are the supposed targets. Yes things are nuanced, even pre-2014, but you seem to be countering a perceived lack of balanced reporting with a total lack of balance in the opposite direction.
I have also shown poll data that was taken in 2015 that said that Russian speakers in the areas in which you claim they area being suppressed still did not consider themselves targeted, even after 2014. I'm sure that will change now after the invasion, but I don't think that can be blamed on the Ukrainian people. The fact is that even post 2014, the vast majority of people in the east of Ukraine did not support Russian interference in the Donbas and Russian speakers did not feel in any way 'under pressure or threat'. This is what they themselves have said. This fits exactly with what my extended family is telling me. The people on the streets didn't want this, even the ethnic Russians. It's purely a very small, mainly politically motivated group, who are interested in personal power more than what's good for the region. So all your whataboutism misses the actual point, which is that the people in the east did not want this, pre or post 2014. Putin used a tiny minority of support to justify an invasion that was useful for him, not the people of eastern Ukraine.
If you want to see where Putin gets lots of his ideological ideas, look up the 1997 book 'Foundations of Geopolitics' by Aleksandr Dugin. The guy is known as Putin's Rasputin and has been in the ear of Putin for many, many years. The ideas in the book read like a laundry list of what Russia has been up to over the last 10 years.
Yes the current reporting may be substantially one sided, although in the UK it's certainly been reported that Ukrainian soldiers have shot unarmed Russian soldiers and yes, there have been calls for war crime investigations into those reports. I don't know where you are, but it's certainly not 100% one sided here in the UK. However, taking the extreme opposite view doesn't make it any better. You just sound like you're parroting the blatantly absurd talking points Putin used to justify invasion.
And please, stop trying to make the term 'ethnic' into some sort of nationalistic slur. It's an academic term that is used to describe the make up of a population. It's even a term that is mandated in the the UK Government's style guide when writing about populations. It is used instead of the word 'race', which is considered to have the connotations you are levelling against the term 'ethnic'.
Anyway, I'm out, believe what you like. I'll believe what I'm being told by my extended family who have lived in eastern Ukraine and Russia all their lives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
