Russia Invades Ukraine 2022

[Josh]

Neto,

People who can speak Ukrainian can, generally speaking, speak and understand Russian. The Russian Mennonites tended not to know either language, although I would argue Ukrainian and Russian are dialects of the same language.

[Bootstrap]

Here's what Lenin thought 100 years ago:

It is therefore self-evident and generally recognised that only the Ukrainian workers and peasants themselves can and will decide at their All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets whether the Ukraine shall amalgamate with Russia, or whether she shall remain a separate and independent republic, and, in the latter case, what federal ties shall be established between that republic and Russia.

Note the word "remain". At that time, Ukraine was a "separate and independent republic".

And guess what they chose? Look at maps if there's still any confusion about whether Ukraine is a country. Maps of the USSR will do just fine.

[temporal1]

“Russia to 'drastically reduce' assault, Kyiv sets condition for 'neutral status' | World News”



mainstream U.S. media is reporting, with skeptical and hawkish tenor (biden enjoys).

.. praying for resolution, it can’t come too quickly.

[Josh]

Here's what Lenin thought 100 years ago:

It is therefore self-evident and generally recognised that only the Ukrainian workers and peasants themselves can and will decide at their All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets whether the Ukraine shall amalgamate with Russia, or whether she shall remain a separate and independent republic, and, in the latter case, what federal ties shall be established between that republic and Russia.

Note the word "remain". At that time, Ukraine was a "separate and independent republic".

And guess what they chose? Look at maps if there's still any confusion about whether Ukraine is a country. Maps of the USSR will do just fine.

The USSR was a unitary country. The various socialist republics had virtually no autonomy, probably less than U.S. states have.

[temporal1]

The USSR was a unitary country. The various socialist republics had virtually no autonomy, probably less than U.S. states have.

The U.S./Left-West didn’t take the step from USSR to the Federation of Russia, so, going further back is interesting history, but doesn’t seem pertinent to the immediate crisis.

2018 / Cato / “ Russia Is Not the Soviet Union”
The bottom line is that Russia is a conventional, somewhat conservative, power,
whereas the Soviet Union was a messianic, totalitarian power.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/russia-not-soviet-union

Fair Fighting
For a period, “fair fighting” was encouraged to help people find resolution - to deescalate, not inflame.

“Stockpiling” complaints is a destructive habit that gets people into downward spirals.

“Fighting Fair to Resolve Conflict”
https://cmhc.utexas.edu/fightingfair.html

In recent years, not much talk of diplomacy or fair fighting. Really, since obama, who regularly said, “It’s my way or the highway.”
And proceeded to act on it to the greatest extent he found possible throughout U.S. and international gov.

i think of obama, because his presentation style, his marketing, was that of being reasonable, measured, considered.
i was fooled. i expected diplomacy. i’m not sure that word was spoken for 8 years. now the 3rd term!

[Ken]

Here's what Lenin thought 100 years ago:

It is therefore self-evident and generally recognised that only the Ukrainian workers and peasants themselves can and will decide at their All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets whether the Ukraine shall amalgamate with Russia, or whether she shall remain a separate and independent republic, and, in the latter case, what federal ties shall be established between that republic and Russia.

Note the word "remain". At that time, Ukraine was a "separate and independent republic".

And guess what they chose? Look at maps if there's still any confusion about whether Ukraine is a country. Maps of the USSR will do just fine.

The USSR was a unitary country. The various socialist republics had virtually no autonomy, probably less than U.S. states have.

The USSR was a one-party state but it was governed by a politburo that contained representatives from across all the different republics. And they actually did have robust debates over many policy issues and consequential votes. So Ukraine had votes as did Lithuania and Kazakhstan.

The Russian Federation of today is largely a dictatorial autocracy centered on one person, Putin. Yes they still have a Duma but it largely rubber-stamps decisions by Putin and does not debate consequential issues such as declarations of war or annexations of territory in the way that the politburo would have in the USSR, or the US Congress does today.

Neither the USSR nor the current Russian Federation are democratic in any meaningful way. But they were organized quite differently. The USSR around socialist ideology and the Russian Federation around Russian ethno-nationalism.

[Neto]

Neto,

People who can speak Ukrainian can, generally speaking, speak and understand Russian. The Russian Mennonites tended not to know either language, although I would argue Ukrainian and Russian are dialects of the same language.

I have read first-hand remarks by Dutch Mennonites, and a distinction is often made between their relative fluency in the two speech forms. (I would generally use this term instead of 'languages' or 'dialects' to avoid disputes like this.)

As I've said elsewhere here on MN, the determining factors for determining the relationship between two speech forms that are members of the same language family are very much in dispute by linguists. Percentages of mutual intelligibility easily get confused with mult-lingualism, and in a case like this, where one group has been forced to use the speech form of their oppressors over a period of many generations, there are also all sorts of cultural issues that come into play as well. Even assuming that the percentage of likeness could be accurately determined, the percentage required to be dialects of the same language as opposed to two separate related languages is not even agreed on by top linguists. (Much like the population to be classified as an endangered language - some say 100, others say it is 1,000 or more. The thing is that there are many other factors involved in this determination as well. For instance, there were only 59 members of the Banawa tribe when we started work there with them. Now, over 35 years later, they are just somewhere past 100. But a language viability study done by a Dr of linguistics placed them considerably higher in expected survival viability than some other tribes of much higher population. This was both in the sense of cultural survival/viability, and in linguistic survival/viability.)

Maybe it wasn't here that I made this statement in respect to Ukrainian - Russian, because I know for certain that I did participate in a FaceBook discussion, one in which the linguist Dr. Dan Everett was also involved. There was/is also this same type of dispute regarding the Banawa language. When another participant challenged what I said in respect to Ukrainian & Russian having split into separate languages approximately 1500 years ago, he backed me up, referring to an on-line source which I was unfortunately unable to access. (I have seen this statement made in an on-line history site - I didn't make it up myself. If it's incorrect, someone else did. ) Anyway, unless you have yourself done historical language reconstruction of "Proto-Slavic" (or what ever the correct name is), or can point to linguistic studies by some reputable linguist(s), I will hold to the opinion that they are separate languages. Generally when claims are made either way there is some politics involved, as there almost certainly is in this case. But I don't think it is primarily recent politics. It goes way beyond that, and even if it could be proven linguistically that the two speech forms are only different dialects, it will not change the attitudes "on the ground" for either group. So it really doesn't matter - the important thing is that they view themselves as separate peoples, and again, it didn't just start in these last decades. Ukraine didn't want to be a part of the USSR 100 years + back, and they do not want to be a part of the Russian Federation, either. The fact that the Russians also do not regard the Ukrainians as their own people is evidenced by the fact that Stalin purposefully decimated the Ukrainian population back in the 1930's.)

[Neto]

The USSR was a unitary country. The various socialist republics had virtually no autonomy, probably less than U.S. states have.

The U.S./Left-West didn’t take the step from USSR to the Federation of Russia, so, going further back is interesting history, but doesn’t seem pertinent to the immediate crisis.

I have argued along the same lines, but President Putin doesn't see it that way. He talks about the 1,000 year history of Russia. (By the way, Kyvian history goes back hundreds of years farther.)

[Szdfan]

Anyway, unless you have yourself done historical language reconstruction of "Proto-Slavic" (or what ever the correct name is), or can point to linguistic studies by some reputable linguist(s), I will hold to the opinion that they are separate languages. Generally when claims are made either way there is some politics involved, as there almost certainly is in this case. But I don't think it is primarily recent politics. It goes way beyond that, and even if it could be proven linguistically that the two speech forms are only different dialects, it will not change the attitudes "on the ground" for either group. So it really doesn't matter - the important thing is that they view themselves as separate peoples, and again, it didn't just start in these last decades. Ukraine didn't want to be a part of the USSR 100 years + back, and they do not want to be a part of the Russian Federation, either. The fact that the Russians also do not regard the Ukrainians as their own people is evidenced by the fact that Stalin purposefully decimated the Ukrainian population back in the 1930's.)

Yes, Ukrainian and Russian are both Slavic languages, but Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian. One comparison I saw compared the differences between Russian and English with Spanish and Portuguese.

Because Ukraine was part of the USSR, most Ukrainians speak at least some Russian, but most Russians do not speak Ukrainian. It's clear from the Ukrainian reaction to the Russian invasion that many Ukrainians don't want to be a part of Russia.

There's also a long history of Ukrainian cultural resistance to Russian domination. I posted an article earlier about the history of Ukrainian literature and the way it attempted to resist Russian dominance and carve out a "national literature." This includes the writer Nikolai Gogol, who was writing in the 1830s.

[Szdfan]

The USSR was a unitary country. The various socialist republics had virtually no autonomy, probably less than U.S. states have.

The U.S./Left-West didn’t take the step from USSR to the Federation of Russia, so, going further back is interesting history, but doesn’t seem pertinent to the immediate crisis.

I have argued along the same lines, but President Putin doesn't see it that way. He talks about the 1,000 year history of Russia. (By the way, Kyvian history goes back hundreds of years farther.)

I think history is very pertinent to the immediate crisis in regards to both Russian and Ukrainian motivation in this conflict.