The Situation in the Ukraine. #19

Karl Haushofer wrote:Crimea is significant because it gives Russia a great defensive terrain against attacks from the sea, and it's shore may contain some gas reserves.

And Crimea was not any "trap" for Russia and Russia did the correct thing there. Ukrainians would have turned against Russia anyway.  The West absolutely did not want Russia to take Crimea. It was supposed to remain in Ukraine.

But yes, other than Crimea the Russian gains are not that great concerning Donbass. The rebel-held territory is a tiny piece of land, not even half of the whole Donbass territory. The rebels should at some point take Mariupol and Sloviansk but it is not likely to happen in years since Russia cannot afford to support them enough.

flamming_python wrote:Who the hell cares if Ukrainians are against Russia?
Who are they?
What is the importance of this country, its economy or anything else? It's a basket-case

You could just as well tell me that the US turned all Ugandans against Russia - it would be of about equal irrelevance to the Ukraine.

Remarkably, the roots of the "Holodomor" ("deliberate starvation") myth lie in the longstanding Cold War standoff between Soviet Russia and the West. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, infamous Nazi collaborators — members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their paramilitary UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) units — fled into Western Europe and the United States, escaping punishment for their hideous crimes, including ruthless terror against peaceful Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians.

In 1949 the CIA and the US State Department sponsored the OUN-UPA leaders' immigration to the United States, planning to use them as subversion groups and intelligence agents in the Cold War against the Soviet Russia.

One of them, Mykola Lebed was characterized as "a well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans" by the CIA, according to Swedish-American historian Dr. Per Anders Rudling in his book "The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths." However, this fact did not prevented the CIA from recruiting the former Nazi collaborator.

"Mykola Lebed [who was responsible for the murder of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia] lived in Queens, New York, until the 1990s, totally supported by the CIA or State Department," the US expert in Soviet history Professor Grover Carr Furr of Montclair State University, narrated in an interview with Sputnik in May, 2015.

The CIA believed that Ukrainian nationalism could be used as an efficient cold war weapon.

While the Ukrainian nationalists provided Washington with valuable information about its Cold War rivals, the CIA in return was placing the nationalist veterans into positions of influence and authority, helping them to create semi-academic institutions or academic positions in existing universities.

By using these formal and informal academic networks, the Ukrainian nationalists had been disseminating anti-Russian propaganda, creating myths and re-writing history at the same time whitewashing the wartime crimes of OUN-UPA.

One of these myths was "Holodomor" that claimed that the USSR and its leader Joseph Stalin deliberately starved to death from three to seven million Ukrainians.

"In 1987 the film "Harvest of Despair" was made. It was the beginning of the 'Holodomor' movement. The film was entirely funded by Ukrainian nationalists, mainly in Canada. A Canadian scholar, Douglas Tottle, exposed the fact that the film took photographs from the 1921-22 'Volga famine' and used them to illustrate the 1932-33 famine. Tottle later wrote a book, 'Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard,' about the phony 'Holodomor' issue," Professor Furr elaborated.

After the collapse of the USSR, the Ukrainian diaspora played a substantial role in shaping the ideology of the new Ukrainian state. "Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora," Dr. Rudling underscored.

However, it was under Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko (who gained his power after the Western-sponsored Maidan uprising of 2004, also known as the Orange Revolution) when the anti-Russian myth making caught its second wind in Ukraine. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of "memory management" and "myth making" were established in the country.

Both Russian and Western historians have questioned the "Holodomor" concept as well as evidently exaggerated number of victims of the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine.

American historian Professor Mark B. Tauger, West Virginia University, carried out thorough research on the famine of 1932-33 in the USSR, and came to the conclusion that the disaster was due to environmental circumstances and was evidently not related to the Soviet policy in the region.

"Popular media and most historians for decades have described the great famine that struck most of the USSR in the early 1930s as "man-made," very often a "genocide" that Stalin perpetrated intentionally against Ukrainians and sometimes other national groups to destroy them as nations… This perspective, however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster. A small but growing literature relying on new archival documents and a critical approach to other sources has shown the flaws in the "genocide" or "intentionalist" interpretation of the famine and has developed an alternative interpretation," Tauger wrote in his research work "Review of R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933."

Tauger stressed that climatic conditions played the main role in the famine of 1932-33.

Paradoxically, supporters of the "Holodomor" myth remain silent about the fact that Russia (including the territory of modern Ukraine) had suffered from periodic devastating famines since the end of 19th century, long before Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. They also ignore the fact that there were serious famines in 1920-21, 1924, 1927 and 1928.

Interestingly enough, official Soviet Ukrainian primary sources show that the 1928-29 famine, caused by natural disaster, mainly draught, was very serious, and Ukraine received more aid from the Soviet government, than it sent to other parts of the USSR. This obviously disproves the false theory of the Ukrainian nationalists' "malicious" conspiracy against Ukrainian peasants in the Soviet Union, noted Grover Furr in his book "Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation Against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands Is False."

In response to historians who suggest that the Ukrainian peasants starved and suffered especially because of Collectivization — Stalin's policy of the early 1930s aimed at consolidating individual lands into collective farms — Tauger emphasized:

"These studies minimize or ignore the actual harvest data, the environmental factors that caused low harvests, the repeated recovery from the famine and crop failures, the large harvests of the 1930s, the mechanization of Soviet farms in these years, Soviet population growth, and the long-term increases in food production and consumption over the Soviet period" ("Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-1939).

According to the scholar, although the Stalin regime implemented collectivization "coercively," the policy "brought substantial modernization to traditional agriculture in the Soviet Union, and laid the basis for relatively high food production and consumption by the 1970s and 1980s" ("Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization, 1930-1939").

Remarkably, the famine of 1932-33 was the last famine that struck the Soviet Union with the exception for the famine of 1946-47 the country suffered from after the Second World War.

Although the "Holodomor" myth was never based upon credible evidence and there are enough authentic sources to prove that it is a hoax, it is simply taken for granted. Unsurprisingly, Washington  supports the myth as a part of its recent Cold War-style anti-Russian campaign. Alas, even repeated a thousand times a lie will never become the truth.

sepheronx wrote:Your getting some of your facts wrong. Border has f all to do with it. See Israel or Iran as an example. Surrounded by hostile nations yet thrives.

That said, Azerbaijan has pretty damn good relations with Russia even though Russia supports Armenia. Uzbekistan already has poorer relations with Russia over Tajikistan and Tajikistan has so so relations with Russia, because of Kyrgyzstan.

Belarus is a whole different country and even if they attempted a Maiden there, it wouldnt work. Because simply put, Belarus isnt a thriving thieves den, populated by various ethnic clans all wanting power and fist fighting all day long in their parliment building.

A country like Ukraine has been a problem for both Russia and Poland for centuries. In this case, you are seeing both people and regions standing up to Kiev, while others are cowering due to the heavy handedness of the SBU. But that heavyhandedness cannot last forever.

Like Python said, it was a black hole. For two decades after ussr, they paid tens of billions to that country for nearly squat in return. They stunted their own industry to prop up Ukrainian to help their economy and try to get them on their good side. Since the money scheme was going down the drain thanks to oligarches in Ukraine and Russia, the oligarches and the people who blindly follow them think there is a free ride in EU.

Yeah, it would definately suck to have nato bases in Ukraine. But with donetsk and lughansk in Ukraine, would prevent most of that. But in meantime, Russia has to prepare itself and is doing so accordingly. Not for war,  but for prolong confrontation, in mostly economics. The other thing this conflict has done was help Russia weed out their 5th coloumists as they are just giving themselves away.

sepheronx wrote:Thats it. You are purely flame baiting. I am requesting for Mod intervention as you are your idiot finnish alter ego.

sepheronx wrote:

Flagship Victory wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Thats it. You are purely flame baiting. I am requesting for Mod intervention as you are your idiot finnish alter ego.

You don't dare to fight Maidan in Donbas. That makes you a coward. I'm Canadian. I'm not going to fight your Slavic battles. You should ask your leader Putin why he is watching this war as entertainment.  

You are an idiot. Plain and simple. All you are doing is making up titles to li.ks (yes, I read the rt link you posted, said nothing about Putin telling anyone they need to take the bombings), as well, you are clearly just making up shit overall. Wanna talk about cowardice? Lets talk about you and your alter ego Finn. You guys seem to be bitching and moaning about Putin. Why not go to Russia and face him direcrly? Or are you too chicken shit?

Pathetic. You make Canadians look retarded.

sepheronx wrote:Then go put your money where your mouth is. Already reported you so let the mods deal with this.