Not to mention the Ukrainian regime shutting down opposition media and arresting opposition politicians - before the war.
And nobody has mentioned that nasty Ukrainian habit of lionizing actual live Nazi collaborators and naming their military formations after SS units. Or how Ukraine and the United States voted against a Russian-sponsored UN resolution denouncing Nazism.
The past is bad enough (and should never be forgotten) but the present stuff is urgent and horrifying: the torture of POWs, the kidnappings and assassinations, suppressing the teaching of Russian literature in schools. People who find Pushkin or Tolstoy a threat...they are the embodiment of criminal insanity. And the ideology is deranged: claiming that Ukrainians are Scandinavians and that Russians are Slav-Asiatics (as if that is anything to be ashamed of) or that they, Ukrainians, are indigenous and everyone else is some kind of colonist/trespasser.
I expect (hope) that ordinary Ukrainians are simply too frightened to say what they think. The moderates who want coexistence, pragmatism and respect are in danger from the sadists and gangsters. Several generations after WW2 it is amazing that this is still possible in Europe.
The fact that the Kiev regime is busily hunting down and murdering dissenters, without so much as a peep of protest from the West tells us all we need to know.
I lived much of my adult in Ukraine. Plenty of people want the regime gone.
Perfectly true, though IMO the ultimate insult is brainwashing kids in Kharkov and Odessa to hero-worship those who tried to enslave and kill their grandparents and great-grandparents and then send those kids off to die in a war that they simply cannot win. I'll happily let fools argue over history that they do not understand, so long as they leave the rest of us to live.
Not to mention the Ukrainian regime shutting down opposition media and arresting opposition politicians - before the war.
And nobody has mentioned that nasty Ukrainian habit of lionizing actual live Nazi collaborators and naming their military formations after SS units. Or how Ukraine and the United States voted against a Russian-sponsored UN resolution denouncing Nazism.
But Russia are the fascists.
The past is bad enough (and should never be forgotten) but the present stuff is urgent and horrifying: the torture of POWs, the kidnappings and assassinations, suppressing the teaching of Russian literature in schools. People who find Pushkin or Tolstoy a threat...they are the embodiment of criminal insanity. And the ideology is deranged: claiming that Ukrainians are Scandinavians and that Russians are Slav-Asiatics (as if that is anything to be ashamed of) or that they, Ukrainians, are indigenous and everyone else is some kind of colonist/trespasser.
I expect (hope) that ordinary Ukrainians are simply too frightened to say what they think. The moderates who want coexistence, pragmatism and respect are in danger from the sadists and gangsters. Several generations after WW2 it is amazing that this is still possible in Europe.
The fact that the Kiev regime is busily hunting down and murdering dissenters, without so much as a peep of protest from the West tells us all we need to know.
I lived much of my adult in Ukraine. Plenty of people want the regime gone.
Philip: With the ultimate insult being that Kiev was the traditional capital of the Kievan Rus empire. If anyone is Russian it is the Ukrainians.
Perfectly true, though IMO the ultimate insult is brainwashing kids in Kharkov and Odessa to hero-worship those who tried to enslave and kill their grandparents and great-grandparents and then send those kids off to die in a war that they simply cannot win. I'll happily let fools argue over history that they do not understand, so long as they leave the rest of us to live.