So Ukraine has turned into a shit show with on the one hand Russia and on the other hand the US and EU. It is clear that Ukraine is merely a pawn in their chess game. This is clear to me.
I try to make it clear to my surroundings too but one question keeps coming back to me whenever it comes to peace talks: what about what Ukrainians want? Should they accept a split in their country with Russia seizing captured land?
I noticed that I do not have a clear answer to this and I wanted to see some input from you guys. Peace talks should imo be the goal as it would be the end to a bloody conflict and it would further (even if slightly) reduce risk for a bigger war. But it is also clear that Ukraine is just a pawn in those peace talks and everything will be decided between the US and Russia. Is it realistic to acknowledge Ukrainian interest in this? And if so, to what extent can leftist support said interests?
Thank you in advance for your answers. It might make it easier for me to go against the warmongering that has been going on lately, and to prevent people close to me from falling for it.
i would ask what about the self determination of the people of donbas? the minsk treaties have been made specifically to increase autonomy of the eastern regions of ukraine, but instead of doing that the kiev government just shelled them for almost a decade. they local governments of donetsk and lugansk have asked multiple times for russian aid, which putin dragged out to 2022.
also for the future, don’t view ukranians as one homogeneous group. “what are ukranian interests” is not a question that has one answer. first there is a class divide, then there is a east-west regional divide etc. its not good analysis to just lump everyone in one pot, especially as a west european.
It’s more like a three-way divide: West vs Centre&North vs East&South. Western Ukraine is firmly Banderist. East and South are firmly pro-Russian. The rest is somewhere in the middle, though they have been getting forcibly dragged into the Banderite camp through an enormous amount of indoctrination and propaganda over the past decades, much of it funded by the West and by corrupt oligarchs who stood to gain from this.
This is also reflected in the language. The reality is that there isn’t just Ukrainian on the one side vs Russian on the other. For most of Ukraine’s history much of “middle” Ukraine (Malorossiya) spoke a mixed dialect, closer to Russian than to the Ukrainian spoken in the West but distinct from the real Russian spoken in the east. Add to that a sizeable minority even in these middle parts that natively just spoke Russian and the fact that Russian was the lingua franca in which everyone understood each other, and you quickly see why the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to force western Ukrainian language on the entirety of Ukraine was inevitably going to lead to disaster.
Because this “Ukrainian nationalism” is actually the opposite of self-determination - it’s a project of cultural erasure that was forcibly imposed, an attempt by a small fanatical minority to artificially homogenize a diverse population and create a “national identity” on the basis of ethnic hatred. Sooner or later a project like this that is purely defined in terms of what it isn’t rather than what it is was bound to implode on itself.
I don’t agree at all that Ukrainian nationalism is the opposite of self-determination. The actual Ukrainian self-determination supporters begged for Russia’s help.
I totally understand that alot of Ukrainians are/were violent, dangerous, white supremacist NATO-bootlicking, evil nutjobs. But it’s important to remember that Ukraine has been systematically psychologically collectively been abused and gaslit by decades of Nazi-Aligned Terrorist Organization propaganda.
I don’t think (I’m not saying that you think this, I’m just elaborating) that you can blame Ukrainians completely for the crimes of their government, even though there is alot of truth in that.
And unlike Israel, Ukraine has millennia, or at least multiple centuries, of history before it was part of Russia. Even though yes, Ukraine was often considered to be Russian territory.
I think that Ukraine has a right to exist, unlike Isn’treal, and I don’t view Ukraine as an inherently settler-colonialist project, and there is a very real different, albeit similar in alot of aspects, than from Russian culture.
I won’t shed any particularly heavy tears of if Ukraine ceases altogether to exist, but I really don’t think that the high-jacking and colonialist appropriation of actual Ukrainian nationalism should justify the claim that Ukraine is inherently as artificial as Israel.
Just to clarify, i put “Ukrainian nationalism” in quotation marks because i don’t believe that it is that which it claims to be, not in the broader sense of the national interest and self-determination of the whole of Ukraine. It is a strictly Galician supremacist ideology that is rooted in ethnic hate not just for Russians, Poles, Jews, but also and nowadays mostly directed at other Ukrainians who are considered the “wrong kind” of Ukrainians.
It cannot possibly represent self-determination when it historically prostrated itself before Nazi Germany, the genociders of slavs, and now before the Western imperialists whose only interest in Ukraine is to plunder, subjugate it and use it as a battering ram against Russia. Ukraine itself is not artificial, but the ethnically and linguistically homogenous Ukraine whose sole national essence is being antithesis of Russia, which is how the Ukrainian project is envisioned by this “Ukrainian nationalism”, is artificial and ahistorical.
I am very much not blaming all Ukrainians for the crimes of this ideology and this regime, in fact as i have just stated, i think Ukrainians are the primary victims of this ideology and regime which in collusion with western imperialist powers has stolen their self-determination from them.
You have very fair points, and I’m 99 percent sure that you didn’t mean what you said literally, but more so the overall sentiment, and I figured this was moreso what you meant.
I mostly agree.
I would like to see the Ukrainian SSR come back, but alot of things would have to change first.
I just think of it as Greater Ruthenia
i completely agree. thanks for expanding on my comment