That doesn't explain why Russians have been occupying land in Ukraine for all that time. When an imperialist state conquers territory, it occupies the land in order to legitimize its claim it.

They are there, because Ukraine has been a vassal state to Russia, with its people treated as second-class citizens, for centuries. During that time, they have oscillated back and forth in status from rebellion to re-conquered, many times. This is just the latest wave of Russian oppression intended to crush dissent and re-establish Russian dominance over Ukraine through the russification of Ukrainian culture, language and identity. Wash, rinse, repeat.

All that says, is that you are this close to admitting that Ukraine has been an occupied territory for centuries. Except you are using that fact as a justification for continued occupation, and not a reason for Russia to stop their colonial objectives.

Hamas are the product of the Israeli regime. if there was no apartheid there would be no Hamas. also they're nowhere near as bad as the IOF.

Colonialism is when a country I don't like does a thing I don't like somewhere else. Imperialism is when any country attacks any other.

There, who needs books when it's that simple, tankies?

@dessalines And yet they still fight Putin. Go figure.

Colonialism is when two countries have a war

That's not what it says. Your refusal to engage with evidence has you pretending you found a gotcha because you assume anything that disagrees with you has to be based on a flawed premise.

You're literally ignoring the facts he presented (maidan was a coup, Donbas collectively decided to secede in a referendum). The people of the Donbas were resisting an attempted genocide as much as Gazans, you can listen to Poroshenko's statements about bombing their hospitals, having their women and children hiding in basements, you can see the indiscriminate shelling of civilian centers. Both of them were propped up by your government (the lapdog of the only empire on earth rn), and by you personally, from your stupid refusal to acknowledge actual imperialism and pretending the enemies of the State Department must be the enemies of all of us everywhere.

I get that. But comparing them idf depends on who you are.

Bruh

Really telling on yourselves that yet another liberation movement reclaiming land that was stolen and an occupied and exploited to enrich empire is framed as the ultimate evil.

Fucking gringos.

Actually, that first guy never lived there. That first guy isn't even a real person. That second guy's grandparents were in another war on a different continent, so they're actually just small beans feeling a lot of trauma right now. It is incredibly racist to suggest Second Guy did anything wrong, and if we catch you saying as much then we'll arrest you and deport you to a prison camp where you'll be enslaved for the enrichment of some pro-Second Guy aristocrats.

Not two comments ago you were saying the soviets accelerated the Tsarist policies of forced russification. Either you know fuck all about Tsarist Russia and it's pogroms (and thus you're doing genocide apologia) or you don't know shit about the Soviet Union. Either way you should stop commenting on it and replying like you're aware of everything and that's just the thing you meant.

Unless, of course, disinfo is the point.

No no no! You're not allowed to talk about the US laying claim to huge swaths of the Ukrainian interior in exchange for another round of weapons imports. My libertarian friends told me that this is fine because the US is getting the land through contracts, which are totally bloodless and not in any way an infringement on the rights of the Ukrainian native peoples.

The above comic only applies to folks on the Eastern side of the big line. Westerners would never exploit the precarious position of Ukrainian nationalists to rob them, press-gang them into front-line combat rolls, and then snatch up all the vacant real estate once the smoke clears.

That's... A claim, not a source. A printed claim is still a claim ffs.

it’s about settler colonialism, something Russia doesn’t do

Okay, tap the breaks dude.

I'll spot you that Ukraine/Russia is the latest in a long line of proxy wars between Eastern and Western oligarchs. And I'll happily concede that Ukrainians are being swindled by their NATO "allies" while they're forced to play punching bag in order to exhaust its historical enemy. I'll even through in a "Maidan was a color revolution and liberal Ukrainians got royally played".

But the idea that Russians aren't above a little expansionism and exploitation is just... my god, man. Literally centuries of history to the contrary.

You're making the claims, you get the source. It's really not that hard.

You don't have a source? It's ok. Don't make claims, only repeat things you checked the source for.

No investigation, no right to speak.

In the Donbas? Half of them speak Russian natively, you dunce. About another fifth are natively bilingual.

I mean, you could throw in the conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia, the Indian encroachment into Kashmir, the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe even the 200 year old campaign to re-enslave Haiti.

Gaza's just the latest in a long line of atrocities.

The name Los Angeles is Spanish. Because Spanish speakers have been there longer than English speakers. If the Spanish speakers don’t like the president of the United States, does that mean it’s perfectly acceptable for the Mexican government to provide Spanish speaking protesters in LA with artillery systems and missile batteries?

glances at the current government of the United States

glances at the current government of Mexico

I'm raising my little Casa Bonita style Mexican flag to signal that I approve.

the Russian state’s approach has basically been in every single way wrong.

This is the nut of it and the thing a lot of folks seem to struggle with. The NATO fuckery in Ukraine notwithstanding, Putin thought he could raise the stakes in Ukraine through a full scale invasion. He was absolutely wrong to do so. He fucked things harder than a thousand pogroms in the Donbas could have done.

The Russian ethnic minority and it’s treatment is a domestic issue.

Okay, no. That's not how internationalism works. You don't look across the border at an atrocity, shrug, and say "Not my problem."

The Russian response could have been to open their own borders, build up relief on their end, and give Donbas residents a safe place to run and hide. But "sorry fuckers, should have been a Russian born in Russia" is as meat-headed as the folks who wanted to charge into Ukraine guns blazing.

In simple words, in colonialism a country invades another country in the aim of taking its resources or exploiting and descriminating against its population or in the case of settler colonialism wiping them out and replacing them, what Russia has done is use military power to invade an area not controlled by it to change their ruling class, they want to make the population have a Russian citizenship and for the land to be under the map of Russia.

A citizen of an eastern Oblast of Ukraine after Russia takes over will still be the same as he was earlier, just now with a Russian citizenship. Just like how people in Crimea were Ukrainian citizens before 2014, but after they became Russian citizens, and Crimea is treated as a part of Russia (although not recognized by a lot of countries).

A Palestinian citizen after the colonialism of Palestine now lives either abroad or in a concentration camp or is dead.

Completely different situations