Russia Invades Ukraine 2022

[mike]

It appears like Russia is withdrawing its troops from the Kyiv area and the west and choosing to focus on taking over the eastern areas. Militarily it seems like a shift in strategy. Images are coming out from the areas the Russians are abandoning, and it isn't pretty.

[Dan Z]

It appears like Russia is withdrawing its troops from the Kyiv area and the west and choosing to focus on taking over the eastern areas. Militarily it seems like a shift in strategy. Images are coming out from the areas the Russians are abandoning, and it isn't pretty.

They get a land buffer and tremendous natural resources if they split the country and annex eastern Ukraine as they did in Crimea eight years ago. It is likely a much more achievable goal, especially since they failed in their initial play to take Kyiv and replace the Ukrainian Government with a puppet. This way Putin gets a "win" at home, and leaves the rest of Ukraine traumatized and weakened for years to come.

[Szdfan]

Repeatedly Harley said that Russians have no voice. Were Russian Christians spiritually courageous enough to speak out against war, I assume they would not fare so well. But it is wonderful that their church structure seems healthy

I think this is a good point. A couple of thoughts:

1. I think it's possible to be a faithful Christian in a repressive state without "speaking out," especially if speaking out is not an option or carries with it significant consequences.
2. In Russia, I think just being a non-Orthodox Protestant is in itself a form of resistance, since the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are so closely aligned to each other.
3. Resistance to the state does not mean automatically agreement with the West. The East German Protestant Church in the 1980's was one of the few spaces of resistance to the GDR. While they eventually contributed to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that wasn't their intention -- they were looking for reform, not revolution. Similarly, while many Russian protestants are quietly resisting the Russian Orthodox-State marriage, many of them don't agree with Western liberal cultural values. A 2018 article in Christianity Today points out that most Russian Protestants voted for Putin, because they really didn't have any other valid choices. This is despite the fact that Protestant pastors have been arrested and/or harassed because evangelism is banned in Russia.
4. It's striking that a number of posters here who believe that mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing are the height of religious oppression and persecution are also apparently supportive of an autocratic, repressive regime because they believe it upholds and supports their values. For some reason, they ignore all the ways that the Russian state oppresses and represses Russian non-Orthodox Christians.

[Josh]

It's striking that a number of posters here who believe that mask and vaccine mandates and social distancing are the height of religious oppression and persecution are also apparently supportive of an autocratic, repressive regime because they believe it upholds and supports their values. For some reason, they ignore all the ways that the Russian state oppresses and represses Russian non-Orthodox Christians.

As I understand it, mask and vaccine mandates in Russia were far worse than you would find them in America over the last 2 years, and I don't think this was good at all. But I wouldn't agree with the characterisation of Russia as "autocratic, repressive" unless you're going to apply that label to America too (some of you were very willing to do so when Trump was President, but seem reluctant to do so now).

I don't think anyone here is "supportive of an autocratic, repressive regime" or has endorsed the United Russia Party. Some of us simply feel we should speak out against the default Western position. For some reason, that gets misinterpreted as being United Russia stooges. It is frankly ridiculous how everything must be reduced to two opposing sides.

[mike]

[temporal1]

It appears like Russia is withdrawing its troops from the Kyiv area and the west and choosing to focus on taking over the eastern areas. Militarily it seems like a shift in strategy. Images are coming out from the areas the Russians are abandoning, and it isn't pretty.

It appears what you are finding ^^^ aligns with this 5 min. Gravitas report, back on Page 129:
Every report will have bias, if not blatant propaganda. Accomplished through framing.

(9 hours ago)

Gravitas: Donbas rebel republics to join Russia?

The latest round of talks between Ukraine and Russia has raised hopes for a peace deal.
Will Zelensky's concessions be enough to end the war? What will determine Putin's response?
Palki Sharma tells you.

i wish there were a transcript.
paraphrasing:
this describes Ukraine’s problem with the U.S., saying “biden doesn’t care if the war continues.”
U.S. rep Blinken, Sec of State (begrudgingly) says the U.S. will respect Ukraine’s decisions in negotiations. i hope that sticks.

it grieves me to wonder if bloodshed could have been avoided, there are indications it could have been, in two ways:
1) diplomacy before invasion; 2) the U.S./West not immediately jumping in, giving Ukraine+Russia time+space to negotiate without high escalation.

this will never be known.

now, the question is, how stupid can the U.S. be from this point? there is room for more errors.
this is NOT a done deal.

[Szdfan]

As Russians pull back from Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers are finding grisly scenes of dead civilians. The Ukrainians are alleging that the Russians executed and fired upon civilians, which is illegal under international law.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/03 ... a-war/lede

As Russian forces pull back from areas around the Ukrainian capital, civilians have emerged from basement shelters to clamor for bread distributed by the Ukrainian soldiers retaking territory. The husks of destroyed tanks clutter roads. Mines and booby traps have been hidden amid the wreckage. Bodies lay uncollected in streets littered with debris.

The dead include civilians, some of whom Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of executing. Footage posted by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and photographs from The New York Times and Agence France-Presse showed the bodies of men in civilian clothes on the streets of Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv. One photo shows three people lying on a roadside beside a pile of wooden pallets, blood darkening the ground beside them, one with white cloth binding his hands.

Russia’s Defense Ministry dismissed the photos in Bucha as “fake.”

Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, said evidence was being collected to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible to account, calling the reports of Russians targeting civilians “abhorrent.” The New York Times has been unable to immediately verify the Ukrainian claims of civilian executions.

[Szdfan]

From Wall Street Journal:

Footage taken by the Ukrainian military shortly after Russian forces abandoned Bucha showed streets littered with bodies of civilians, some of them with their hands tied. Human Rights Watch on Sunday released a report documenting cases of rape and summary executions in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, including Bucha, as well as other crimes.

“Kyiv region. 21st century hell. Bodies of men and women, who were killed with their hands tied,” Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote in a Sunday social-media post with images of shallow graves and executed civilians in Bucha and nearby towns. Bucha’s municipality Saturday put the number of bodies it buried in the mass graves at 280, with more being found amid the wreckage.

The reports drew widespread condemnation from Western governments on Sunday, suggesting the mounting evidence of war crimes perpetrated by Moscow’s troops over the past week could alter the international response to the war. It could put pressure on the West to deliver more-powerful weapons to Ukraine and make it harder for some countries to justify continuing to purchase oil and natural gas from Russia. It could also complicate the peace talks currently under way between Ukraine and Russia.

[temporal1]

If these atrocities are true .. does international law define citizens armed (by Zelensky) to fight, simply as “citizens?”
honest question, i have no idea.

Is there a difference between “unarmed citizen” versus “citizen armed by gov to fight,” i.e. citizen recruited to act as an army?

i understand there are war crimes; a few pages back, Ukraine was accused of torturing+killing handcuffed Russian soldiers.
(“kneecaps” Page 128.)

For those of us who believe all war is criminal, it’s hard to distinguish worldly definitions of, “this killing is ok, this one is not.”
But the world and its governments rely on loads of technical human law. In effort to prevent the worst of it.

- - - - - - -

GaryK:
I'm also convinced that there are ways to stand with the oppressed without getting involved in the calling out of governmental evils.

o. you mean like Jesus?

Jesus can be scary. Can He be trusted??

[Szdfan]

If these atrocities are true .. does international law define citizens armed (by Zelensky) to fight, simply as “citizens?”
honest question, i have no idea.

Is there a difference between “unarmed citizen” versus “citizen armed by gov to fight,” i.e. citizen recruited to act as an army?

These are good questions and I don’t know the answer. I assume armed civilians would be considered combatants, but I’m not sure that’s what we’re talking about here. Some of these killings involve people who were waving white flags or had the Russian word for “children” written on their vehicles. This article from the BBC has footage of a civilian convoy being shot at by Russian troops and a Ukrainian civilian being shot while raising his arms (the footage was captured by a Ukrainian drone and is from a distance).

It’s important that war crimes on both sides get investigated and documented. Sometimes these cases do get prosecuted, like the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs murdered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. Even if prosecution never happens, I think it’s important to understand what happened in order to bear witness for the victims. This is why historians continue to investigate the Holocaust — several years ago there was an archeological dig at the Treblinka camp in Poland to understand better what had happened even though most of the survivors and perpetrators are dead. Murdering and executing people is a way to erase them — to make them disappear — documentation and bearing witness is a way to resist that disappearance.

i understand there are war crimes; a few pages back, Ukraine was accused of torturing+killing handcuffed Russian soldiers.
(“kneecaps” Page 128.)

Right. That’s also terrible.

For those of us who believe all war is criminal, it’s hard to distinguish worldly definitions of, “this killing is ok, this one is not.”
But the world and its governments rely on loads of technical human law. In effort to prevent the worst of it.

I know that the rules and laws of war aren’t perfect and there are too many times when these rules are ignored and perpetrators get away with it. I still would rather live in a world where these rules exist and where there was at least an attempt at morality in warfare. I don’t think the Geneva Conventions make war OK or acceptable, but I also refuse to submit to the cynicism that “might makes right” and that everything and anything in war is allowable or acceptable because human law is imperfect.