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[Random_Dragon]

There's also the question of whether Putin would even settle for glomming onto the separatist territories,. He set out making it very clear that his goal was to topple the Ukrainian government and install a puppet regime at best, in practice probably annex Ukraine outright if he could get away with it.

Not to mention that, as noted before, even such limited concessions would set a dangerous precedent for the future. It'll effectively demonstrate that nuclear-equipped countries can do whatever they please to weaker countries with no fear of any meaningful retaliation from NATO or the UN. It'd also demonstrate that the only non-WWIII method available to curb such impulses still wouldn't be enough to stop a warmongerer, should they manage to get anything out of Ukraine despite the sanctions.

Us Americans already helped nudge things toward setting this precedent with our misadventure in Iraq, but that at least had the benefit of the international community doing little more than grumbling about it (and it being Iraq perhaps also made it more palatable to the world at large, given at least we were stuck cleaning up after a dictator even if for the most ass-backwards reasons possible).

Now we're going to see what happens when someone pulls this same sort of stunt on a country that actually has a functional democracy, by a country that has far less support and a whole lot more countries going past grumbling and into enacting sanctions.

[Il Palazzo]

There's also the question of whether Putin would even settle for glomming onto the separatist territories,. He set out making it very clear that his goal was to topple the Ukrainian government and install a puppet regime at best, in practice probably annex Ukraine outright if he could get away with it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60785754

[martinuzz]

Burger King is trying to withdraw it's activities from Russia, but their Russian franchise holder refuses to close the 800 restaurants.

[Random_Dragon]

There's also the question of whether Putin would even settle for glomming onto the separatist territories,. He set out making it very clear that his goal was to topple the Ukrainian government and install a puppet regime at best, in practice probably annex Ukraine outright if he could get away with it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60785754

Ukraine would have to undergo a disarmament process to ensure it wasn't a threat to Russia. There would have to be protection for the Russian language in Ukraine. And there is something called de-Nazification.

So basically the first and third parts of that are going to boil down to puppet regime, like I said.

[martinuzz]

I suppose Zelenski could agree with the denazification and proceed to bomb Luhanks, Donetsk and Crimea, where the nazis live.

[delphonso]

I suppose Zelenski could agree with the denazification and proceed to bomb Luhanks, Donetsk and Crimea, where the nazis live.

It is more nuanced than this. There is a nazi problem in Ukraine, as there is in the US and likely your own.country, martinuzz. Putin's claim to denazification is pure bullshit, but should Ukraine survive this, they will certainly have to deal with the nazis that are already there, and who will certainly flourish in a post war state.

[martinuzz]

Yeah sorry that was sarcasm I forgot the /s thinking it was obvious enough.

The sad thing is, from all other European countries, Ukraine scored pretty low on how many extreme right supporters are in their country. France and the Netherlands, indeed, just to name two examples have a larger populist right voter base (Le Pen, Wilders, Thierry Baudet). Not to call all of those nazis though, but yeah. The amount of extreme right in Ukraine also went down quite a bit after Luhanks and Donetsk became seperatist states, they accounted for a big percentage of the total extreme right in Ukraine.

Then again, we might have significant extreme right movements in Europe, but we generally don't do nazi stuff like beat up black people or gays, while the police stands, points, and laughs, like how it is in Russia. Nor do we censor media or send protestors or political opponents to a penal camp in Siberia.

You're somewhat right though when you fear that if Ukraine survives, it will have to be careful not to let sovereign nationalism turn into something nasty.
Then again, when we were liberated from the German occupation, we didn't turn into ultra-nationalist states either. If anything, it turned us into pacifists.

[MaxTheFox]

Could we describe Siberia as more of a Northern Ireland situation, except (and this is a big 'except'!) without any obvious Republican communities, just (at least vocally) the "More British than most of the rest of the British" Unionists? Or a form of Cornwall, but dialled down and with less opportunities for attracting surfers.

Basically this TBH. I was struggling to find a good analogy.

Ukraine has some Nazis but so does every European country. Including Russia, unfortunately... how absolutely idiotic do you have to be to be a Neo-Nazi Slav?

[Quarque]

The way I understand this, it goes back to the great purges by Stalin. Those have been so horrific - especially in the Ukraine - that the nazis were sometimes welcomed as liberators. Then the nazis proceeded to murder slavic people, of course. And Stalin didn't forgive the 'betrayal', he murdered even more people as revenge. Those events left scars, resentments, that haven't healed, especially among the older generations. Those are the sentiments that Putin is reviving and exploiting to stay in power.

[EuchreJack]

The War in Ukraine will be remembered as the time that the Nazis in Moscow declared war on Ukraine with the claim that Nazis that weren't them lived there...

Seriously, Putin's a fucking Nazi, so don't buy into his trying to blame Ukraine for that one.

[Strongpoint]

Could we describe Siberia as more of a Northern Ireland situation, except (and this is a big 'except'!) without any obvious Republican communities, just (at least vocally) the "More British than most of the rest of the British" Unionists? Or a form of Cornwall, but dialled down and with less opportunities for attracting surfers.

Basically this TBH. I was struggling to find a good analogy.

Ukraine has some Nazis but so does every European country. Including Russia, unfortunately... how absolutely idiotic do you have to be to be a Neo-Nazi Slav?

Even if we count every voter who voted for far-right parties in the last Ukrainian parliamentary elections  (and far-right is not nearly the same as neo nazi), we are talking about 2.15%.  It is impressively low for a country that has been at low-itensity war for 5 years at the time of the elections. I'd say it is too low... Ukraine would be better if we voted for guys who... you know... proposed to PREPARE FOR THE WAR. There are some bitter irony in the bitter irony that Mariupol that voted for pro-Russian parties and\or parties that advocated for impossible diplomatic solutions suffer the most.



But let's not pretend that we don't know what a "Ukrainian neo-nazi" means in the world of the modern Russian language. Neo-nazi is everyone who believes that Ukrainians and Russians are not one nation\brothers. And every person like this is meant to be genocided aka the huge majority of the population of Ukraine (But I am sure that Putin and other delusional Russian war criminals think that genociding few millions will be enough).

[Lord Shonus]

The infamous Azov Battalion is around 500 people. At least, it was before the war. They've been in the thick of the fighting, which has probably killed several but also gives them a glamour that might well increase recruitment. Their associated neofascist political party has something like one seat in the legislature.

Compare that with France, where Macron was adopting some pretty far-right positions in an effort to keep Le Pen's neofascists from taking the government. His response to this war has put him more securely on top, but that's still a sihn of a much stronger movement than Ukraine has.

There isn't a country on Earth that doesn't have a neofascist movement, and there isn't a military on Earth that doesn't have a strong element of supremacist nazi-wannabes. Ukraine is no different, but they seem on the very low end for both.

[Strongpoint]

BTW, should Ukraine have elections in the foreseeable future, far-righs will get more than 2%. Guess why. Denazification!

The infamous Azov Battalion is around 500 people. 

It is a regiment for a quite some time and current numbers are 1k+.
But Azov is a really-really weird ideological amalgamation and simply labeling them as neo-nazies is a gross oversimplification.

[Lord Shonus]

500 or 5000, they're still tiny in comparison to their equivalents in most countries. I'm not even talking the low-hanging fruit of Y'all Quaeda, but other Eruopeam countries.

[MaxTheFox]

The infamous Azov Battalion is around 500 people. At least, it was before the war. They've been in the thick of the fighting, which has probably killed several but also gives them a glamour that might well increase recruitment. Their associated neofascist political party has something like one seat in the legislature.

Compare that with France, where Macron was adopting some pretty far-right positions in an effort to keep Le Pen's neofascists from taking the government. His response to this war has put him more securely on top, but that's still a sihn of a much stronger movement than Ukraine has.

There isn't a country on Earth that doesn't have a neofascist movement, and there isn't a military on Earth that doesn't have a strong element of supremacist nazi-wannabes. Ukraine is no different, but they seem on the very low end for both.

Indeed, I never said Ukraine had the same amount or more than the rest of Europe.

In general you need to be a brainlet of epic proportions to follow Nazism as a Slav... oh wait, to follow Nazism as any ethnicity or nationality.