The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
Why do posters from Hexbear defend Russia so much? They’re not communist. If anything, they’re right wing.
Putin has a government allied with Russian business oligarchs and the support of the Russian Orthodox Church. He promotes the military as heroes. He cultivates a cult of personality. He personally controls billions of dollars. That’s textbook Fascism.
I swear someone could claim like “Russia is controlled by an army of demons” and if someone from Hexbear was like “actually that is not true you should stick to the realm of fact in your criticisms of Russia” posters you’d still get like “WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING RUSSIA? DONT YOU KNOW RUSSIA ISNT COMMUNIST”.
If it was only that it wouldn’t be an issue, but many comments here are pushing Putin’s propaganda by trying to legitimate manipulated referendums and cherry-picking colateral damages of Ukrainian self-defense or Ukrainian extremists to try to inverse the burden of guilt. I don’t know if they actually support Putin or if they are just blinded by their hate of the West, but the end result is that they do help carry Putin’s propaganda and its fascist oligarc dictatorship.
Nowhere do I voice support for Russia. It’s that any nuance with regard to the Ukraine conflict is seen as ‘defending russia’, which you’ve just proven, again.
Edit: nvm, you’re that asshole that used the Sartre quote about anti-semitism to justify your anti-communism. You don’t want to learn. Almost as if you’re a bot
Pointing out blatant untruths, being anti-war and wanting accurate reporting rather that copium meant to inspire more people to thrown themselves to a pointless death is checks notes russian propaganda?
You would’ve supported the invasion of Iraq
So if you’re anti-war, why do you support Russia who started the war and has shown they are adamantly pro-war?
We believe the war was started by a quagmire of situations going back as far as 1991, including things like the 2014 NATO-backed coup of Ukraine and the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. This war wasn’t some random unprovoked territory grab dictated by Putin, it’s the resolution of western interference in the region for decades. Ukraine had been shelling Donbas and Luhansk for years. NATO brought this war upon themselves, basically. Instigating and prodding at the situation for years.
Also, Russia and Ukraine, near the start of the war, floated the possibility of a ceasefire and NATO pressured them out of it. The USA saw the possibility of a proxy war and started drooling.
We don’t support Russia so much as we see them as one unfortunate reality fighting another unfortunate reality. The war’s true culprit is capitalism, and as a leftist the only conclusion you should reach is wars like this are senseless and they should immediately stop. And the only way I see this war to stop is if Ukraine immediately surrenders and loses territory, otherwise we’d just be back in 2014 all over again and the situation would repeat. I can vaguely see how that could be construed as pro-Russia, but it’s more that I believe diplomacy with Russia is strained, Russia is volatile, and nothing is gained from open warfare with them. Everyone needs to stop fighting, whatever that takes, because the only winners in wars like this are wealthy capitalists, the rest of us lose.
“here look at this”
"two days later russia started the war ! Can you belive it , i consume imperial core media ! "
Because I truly believe that war is horrible the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in this war is a human tragedy, working people all over the world have to deal with the fallout of this war with rising energy costs and higher foodprices which certainly also caused the deaths of people, meanwhile this war is used in many western countries to push extreme austerity which will lessen the quality of life at best.
This war and all wars are a human tragedy, and at the start of it I certainly wasn’t in Russias corner and I’m still not but I have lost all sympathy for Ukraine and the West because not only have there been many off ramps for Ukraine to end this conflict but western politicians have contributed to this misery. They’ve contributed to the deaths of so many lives. People like Boris Johnson that sabotaged the peace talks, Biden that keeps on sending more and more weapon over there so more and more people can die. I’ve since stopped looking at how much money they’ve given but around spring it was 100bn USD which would’ve been enough to combat world hunger for 3 years. Ukranian officials like yes Zelensky who is a clown that personally doesn’t suffer from this and uses it to push his own persona and does a cool photoshoot in his sick operator outfit.
Ukraine has not approached the negotiating table in any serious manner because they insist on demanding everything back including Crimea, which just won’t happen especially not in this position, so the ukranian leadership is happy to get some money from the west so they order people like you and me to walk into artillery fire or into landmines not for any reason because there haven’t been any real gains but just because that’s how the money is flowing in.
Ukraine totally could negotiate a peace it would be incredibly easy because Putin seems eager to want to negotiate but what Ukraine wants isn’t a restoration of the border situation before the war they want Crimea as well, they are not serious about peace and everyone knows it, Ukraine will never surrender and so the only thing that can stop this senseless war is when the endless amount of money flowing into Ukraine stops or when the people of Ukraine have had enough of their bloodthirsty corrupt leadership and overthrow them.
Edit: Also sorry but quite a few people from other instances literally say fascist shit that reminds me of rhetoric that was used during the conflicts in Yugoslavia and we all know how that turned out, calling russian ethnicities in Ukraine ‘occupiers’ is surely not going to lead to violence towards that group.
because not only have there been many off ramps for Ukraine to end this conflict
How many of those involve not giving in to the aggressor?
Is this one of these “pacifism is when I kick you and you don’t defend yourself” bits?
the moral purity of ''not giving in to the aggressor" doesn’t make anybody less dead.
Ukraine has lost. They are not getting their separatist regions back.
Their choices are to keep fighting, which will not change this outcome, or negotiate an end to the war so they can stop dying and start rebuilding. Their negotiating position will only weaken as the war continues absent some one-in-a-million stroke of luck.
This isn’t “I kick you and you don’t defend yourself.” It’s “I kick you, you defend yourself, lose, and choose to either walk away or keep getting beaten up.” And that’s not even digging into the actual causes of the war, which are nowhere near as clear cut as Russia one day waking up and deciding to attack out of the blue.
Minsk I a treaty they’ve signed that was about greater autonomy for the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts like them being allowed to speak russian a treaty that was very quickly broken.
Minsk II a treaty that did the same thing which again was broken.
and these are the off ramps before the war during the war you had the peace talks when the russian army was outside of Kiev whose content is dubious because so far only the russians said what it was about
and more importantly every peace talk after that Ukraines position was a restoration of the 2014 borders aka they want Crimea back which sorry is just not reasonable, hell for a lot of those peace talks russia wasn’t even invited it was a bunch of countries like Germany, UK and Ukraine but not you know the country currently participating in this war.
This is one of those bits where I say that a country isn’t about some piece of land but the people in it which guess what the ukrainian government is feeding into gigantic blender.
I DON’T CARE ABOUT SOME IMAGINARY LINES.
If Cuba decided to ‘restore its borders’ aka if it attacked the US base on Guantanamo Bay and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Cubans throwing them against the US army blender I would call for the Cuban people to rise up against its government because it doesn’t care about its people and I hope you would too, if Mexico decided to take back California I’d have that same stance. It’s called being anti-war, something I’m sure you’ll now quote how “actually your stance isn’t anti-war my which calls for sending billions of military equipment is actually anti-war”
My guess is that you don’t know what war is like or have never interacted with anyone that had to flee a war, you really have two options here you can go outside and talk to any ukrainian woman that fled because of the war, tell them to their face that they are giving in to the aggressor when they say how angry they are at the ukrainian government because they don’t know where their husband or their two brothers are. You know what I’ll make it easier for you find any person in real life that has had to flee a conflict and how they feel about ‘giving in to the aggressor’. Or if you feel you don’t need to do that go join up the ukranian army do your part to fight the aggressor I mean it’s only war right, you’ve seen some TikToks with war footage and some phonk music accompaning it, war is absolutely poggers I’m sure you’d have a blast fighting some russian orks.
If the Kiev coup regime was concerned about aggression, they could have simply not done eight years of ethnic cleansing in the Donbas and ignored a ceasefire🤷♂️
the first 2 , they just involved West Ukraine giving in towards accepting 30 % of your citizens to have Human and Democratic rights as well … (please read up on Minsk 1 & 2 )
How many of those involve not giving in to the aggressor?
How can it be hammered in to your skull that this is not a story book where good guys win by virtue of their righteousness?
This is geopolitics. An empire wants to conquer an outlying resource rich region it has not been able to bring under it’s control. It has provoked a small outlying nation to act as a proxy to weaken it’s enemy. Ukraine isn’t making decisions. They’re just ammunition in someone else’s war and the best thing for them would be to mutiny against Kiev and end the slaughter. Status quo antebellum is not on the menu.
Everything you say about Russia is true, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a proxy war where US is trying to weaken Russia. You can just be against a senseless war that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying lives of millions more. Anybody who is even minimally engaging with reality can see that this war will only end one way. What the west is doing is prolonging it without changing the outcome. People of Ukraine are being cynically thrown into a meat grinder so that US can score a win in a geopolitical chess game with Russia.
For Ukrainians it’s not the case they’re being forced or deceived into fighting, it is a war of national survival! It is a war against an aggressor seeking to at the very least oppress Ukrainian national identity if not destroy it entirely as a political and social force.
Russia is not interested in conquering Ukraine. They’re interested in goals like keeping Ukraine out of NATO, maintaining access to the Black Sea, and not having ethnic Russians who don’t wish to be a part of Ukraine killed on their borders.
Ahh, the rare sane hexbear user I still have hopes for you lot you’re definitely not as bad as lemmygrad.
However, let me add something:
It is impossible to conceive of peace until there is a mutually hurting stalemate between the two sides in which neither believe they can win
You leave out the scenario of Russians getting kicked out of the country. Which is going to lead to Putin being sent to his Dacha, and if not and he somehow clings on Ukraine having all its territory opens NATO membership which means that the Russian general staff is going to shit bricks and rather putsch than attack.
What do you think happens if Zelensky signs a peace deal that gives up land? He, a Russian-speaking Jew who used to be on Russian TV and regularly went to the country. He would be deemed a Russian traitorous Jew and would be overthrown and possibly killed by the nationalist and far-right elements within the Ukrainian Army
He a) wouldn’t do that and b) since when is Ukraine antisemitic you’re confusing it with… pretty much all other countries in that area and c) you don’t need to invoke far-right fucks (who are a tiny minority btw) the rest of the country would, well, send him to a Dacha.
And ever if: At that point we’d be in the situation many predicted in the first days of the invasion: Fall of the government, but Ukrainians then fighting a partisan war. And Ukraine right now is just in way too good a position to switch to that.
All in all, the way forward to quick peace is clear: Help Ukraine win this thing. It’s both the best option from a direct humanitarian POV by cutting the war short, as well as the best option for wider humanity and the future: Not allowing states intending to conquer to get away with such behaviour. Discouraging wars of aggression is important by itself and one of the reasons why Ukrainians fight so hard, they see the universalism in their own national struggle it just all aligns so well.
The reality is that Ukraine lost its sovereignty when the legitimate and democratically elected government was overthrown in a coup. That’s when the war started between the regime in western Ukraine backed by the west and the east. Western media actually reported on this as well
- CNN coverage of Donbas in 2014 https://twitter.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
- HRW report https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
- Donbas documentary 2016 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs
I agree that at this point Ukraine is basically fucked. There was a possibility to make a deal back in March last year, but US and UK decided to sabotage it. Now, Russia will likely go all the way and there’s not going to be an Ukraine left when this war ends.
The part complaining about a lack of Russian state-controlled news media?
That’s not what he meant and you know it. He’s making light of an obvious double standard regarding the standing in which we hold two sources with obvious national biases.
Because you have the reading comprehension of a grade schooler and are apparently incapable of handling such complexities as “Just because they’re winning doesn’t mean we support them” and “everybody in this conflict is an asshole except the non-Nazis soldiers being slaughtered so defense contractors can put in new pools in Arlington”.
This isn’t some law of attraction thing. Admitting that Ukraine is at best stalemated isn’t going to cause them to magically lose.
There’s a lot of layers to this. Among them the problem that yanks and other westerners with an exceptionalist world outlook have been convinced that only the good guys win, and that to win means to be the good guy no matter how abhorrent they are. So to accept that Russia is winning or, at least, that Ukraine can’t win, means accepting that Russia is in fact the good guy. Which is clearly nonsense, but then neither you nor I are making the claim.
