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Comment by letssaythat | Hacker News Reader

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Invading a country is an act of aggression. Choosing to not align self and/or protect self from a menacing neighbor is an act of self-defence.

To say that the Ukraine-Russia war is not a war against Ukraine and its people is incredibly insulting. The belt of countries Russia has been serially invading since the collapse of USSR, not to mention the acts of USSR, are crimes against proper nations and peoples who have the right to self-determination and safety.

You think that your neighbors, "the West", US are your problem? Maybe your real problem is the den of thieves you call your gorvernment? What will happen to your communities after this war? They gambled your society on a 3-day war, and you're the loser, no matter how the war ends.

Russia invaded a country right on its borders, and which wss for years posing greater and grester very real threat to its security (remember the arms shipments of one Boris Johnson? I do), very much unlike your "national security concerns" which for some reason cause you to attack cpuntries on the other side of the globe, posing no real threat to your country.

"Incredibly insulting" - sorry, but this is an incredibly ignorant thing to say. Millions of people in Ukraine identify themselves even now with the Russian people, but cannot say anything against glorifying ww2 collaborationists and classifying Russians as undermensches, all with tacit encouragement by the west.

As to "the belt of countries Russia invaded".. which ones? Georgia which itself admitted that it itself started the war? Or Abhazia? Do you even understand the absurdity of this, compared for example to what the US does? The scale, do you understand the scale? (I of course don't mean the scale of publications in the western media, maybe this confuses you..)

And my biggest problem is not the Russian government, it is people in the west who gave license to humiliate, hunt, persecute on their social media (remember the permission for "hate speech" against Russians on facebooks etc?) and eventually kill Russian people. If they dare not to bow and renounce their culture, faith, identity as you are required to do in Ukraine and not only there.

As for "loser"..? You think the jews in ww2 cared to be condidered as "losers"? Well, this is more or less how the Russians feel, whether you think it is "Russian propaganda" or not

  > By the way, nowhere I see a report on the very recent ukranian attack on the school in Starobelsk which left 10 (known for now) adolescents killed.

It's everywhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y74lwx395o

BBC and others add a bit that you left out: that it was one of three pilot schools of Rubicon, the most capable Russian drone unit. In the same night, Ukraine also demolished the FSB HQ of counterintelligence for the entire occupied Ukraine. Very painful hits. This explains the unusual hysteria and impotent rage in Russian media today, even Putin himself is whining on the telly about the strike, a rare sight.

Oh, and regarding "everywhere", I think you exagerate a bit..

According to you and Ukraine. And even if it was true (the west had been lying, or distorting facts, about so many other things), you just legitimized a terrorist attack on a school. I can only imagine the outrage had someone done this to one of your or Ukraine schools, even if they were tied to the army.

1600+ schools have been damaged in Ukraine and several hundred have been completely destroyed. Outrage? This is not even news anymore. People, too, die every day under Russian attacks. Hundreds of thousands are permanently disabled or dead. This is the normalcy that Russia has created. The whole country of 140 million people is too afraid or indifferent to stage even a single large protest over it.

I found the panicked reactions of Moscow's inhabitants amusing when a few Ukrainian drones recently hit the oil plants in the suburbs of Moscow. For years, Putin's propaganda machine had convinced them that the war is "somethere there, far away." They were genuinely confused why the things around them were going up in flames: "Why are we being bombed?! The war is in Ukraine!"

It reminded me the words of Arthur Harris, the chief of Britain's Bomber Command: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

And how many schools you (because it is yours damn starlink and other satellites, whether you admit it ir not) destroyed in Donbass and Russia? And do you say that Russia deliberately targeted children? In a big difference with Ukraine, there is no nationalistic propaganda in Russia, though you take great care not to notice that. As you don't and didn't notice the normalization of calls to "massacre Russians" in prewar and todays Ukraine (by nationalists, there are millions of people there not daring to speak).

But here the point is that this was a *deliberate* attack on a school, with the scope being quite obviously to provoke a reprisal - and then you first speak about what the Russian reprisal did, and only then, if at all, you mention Starobelsk. Do you really think that after all these years the people don't understand how the "free world" operates?

There's a way to end it all in a single phone call. Putin picks up a phone, calls Belousov and orders the withdrawal from Ukraine.

I fail to see how this will end the persecution of the Russian people in Donbass, Ukraine and the west in general (censoring comments on western forums is just one of its more innocent aspects). And in Izyum and Kupyansk, when the ukranian forces reentered, they executed Russian people living there thought not to be loyal, of which of course you heard nothing, but I did (and not only there).

I fail to see how absorption into Russian Federation would do anything other than significantly worsen the human rights situation in Donbas, given that freedom rankings place Russia near North Korea, Somalia and Iran.

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