Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[mongers]

Those are oblast names, not city names.

Do you stop reading the rest of the thread as soon as you think you've found a post to criticise?

This always happens, though. Peking into Beijing ...

Malthus I was joking, I think the SKA ending is just the way in Ukrainian that the official region around the city is denoted. 

[viper37]

The naming stuff was changing before the war. Ukraine's been asking foreign media and governments to use Kyiv etc for years - and they generally have. It's more like Mumbai or Kolkata or Derry. All that's changed is wider awareness outside of places with style guides.

I mean a quarter of Kiev/Kyiv are still native Russian speakers. I don't really get why it matters which version we derive for the English word. Speaking Russian doesn't make one any less Ukrainian.

"The organisation intends to internationally assert a Ukrainian identity and help shed international perceptions of linguistic relics of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union by promoting the exclusive use of Ukrainian-language transliterations for Ukrainian place names."

So, here's the why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev

I can sympathize with that.  In predominantly english speaking cities of Quebec, the names were often englicized before the govt stepped in.  Hull.  Aylmer. Huntingdon. Westmount.  Notre-Dame-de-Grâce being "NDG" (english pronounciation) for everything except official communications by the city (they hate it, but they have to go along with it

There's something about asserting your identity from a conqueror that resonates with me.

[DGuller]

Those are oblast names, not city names.

Do you stop reading the rest of the thread as soon as you think you've found a post to criticise?

I do. I stop reading the rest of the thread as soon as I see a post I'm going to reply to in general.  Once I finish the reply, I go back to the post I replied to and continue reading.  How else can you take part in a thread?

[Admiral Yi]

Sometimes when there have been a lot of posts in a thread while I'm away, I'll see a post I want to respond to, formulate my response, take note of the page of the original post, then read the rest of the post before going back and responding.  That way I'm not one of 12 posters pointing out that in fact the world's largest plane got destroyed by Russian shelling.

But to the issue at hand, I don't think monger's objection is really about that.  I think it's about you messerschmitting him on oblast names when he didn't say anything about cities and oblasts.

[Legbiter]

Christo Grozev (Bellingcat Exec Director) on the killed Russian general: https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500959074653024259?t=BWZB_RjvPUU4Pvz9tsaSCw&s=19

If true that's a second Russian general killed in only 10 days or so. They also lost a paratrooper colonel who died on day 2. And it looks like the Ukrainians were very busy blowing up convoys tonight.   

[DGuller]

But to the issue at hand, I don't think monger's objection is really about that.  I think it's about you messerschmitting him on oblast names when he didn't say anything about cities and oblasts.

I thought what he was saying was that Ukrainians are going to do another round of city renaming.  I was pointing out, maybe too tersely, that it wasn't a new set of proposed city names on the map, but rather existing oblast names.

[The Brain]

This always happens, though. Peking into Beijing ...

Isn't that based on which political side you're on? West Taiwan uses pinyin (Beijing), while Taiwan uses Wade-Giles (Peking)?

[Syt]

Former Austrian foreign minister Kneissl (you know, the one where Putin attended her wedding) gave an interview on German TV. She lives in a village in French Provence these days.

She says she had to leave Austria because nobody is willing to work with her because of her closeness to Putin and doing op eds for RT, but that she doesn't regret any of her actions. She considers herself a "political refugee."

She's on the board of Russian oil company Rosneft (it seems she was offered that position after mentioning publicly that she had financial problems). She says she's under immense pressure to resign from the position, but refuses to do so. Also that her "life has already been destroyed."

[Jacob]

This always happens, though. Peking into Beijing ...

Isn't that based on which political side you're on? West Taiwan uses pinyin (Beijing), while Taiwan uses Wade-Giles (Peking)?

As I understand it, Taiwan uses a number of different systems. This includes Wade-Giles, but also Hanyu Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and a couple of other systems IIRC.

[Jacob]

Former Austrian foreign minister Kneissl (you know, the one where Putin attended her wedding) gave an interview on German TV. She lives in a village in French Provence these days.

She says she had to leave Austria because nobody is willing to work with her because of her closeness to Putin and doing op eds for RT, but that she doesn't regret any of her actions. She considers herself a "political refugee."

She's on the board of Russian oil company Rosneft (it seems she was offered that position after mentioning publicly that she had financial problems). She says she's under immense pressure to resign from the position, but refuses to do so. Also that her "life has already been destroyed."

Retired to a little village in Provence doesn't seem like the worst way to have your life "destroyed".

[Syt]

Retired to a little village in Provence doesn't seem like the worst way to have your life "destroyed".

Indeed. Austrian users have jokingly suggested opening charities to support the political refugees in Southern France financially or with supplies.

She was originally an expert for the Middle East. She studied international law (in which she has a doctorate from the École nationale d'administration in Paris), and also law and Arab studies in Vienna. She also had a Fulbright Scholarship for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

She compared Herzl's Zionism to the Nazis' Blood and Soil ideology, and was an outspoken critic of accepting Syrian refugees in 2015, referring to them as testosterone driven young males who came to Europe because their lack of job and housing and therefore inability to find wives at home was emasculating them (which in her reading also triggered the Arab Spring movement - I guess she sees them all as radicalized incels?). She called Jean-Claude Juncker a cynic of power who behaves like a Caesar in Brussels and the Pope ignorant and dangerously naive with regards to the refugee crisis. H.C. Strache spoke very highly of her and saw her as a potential successor and chancellor of Austria.

2 Days before the Russian invasion she called the recognition of the separatists by Russia "a completely normal act" that happened a lot in the 90s when various states split up, and that talk of invvasion was just Western hysteria.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Former Austrian foreign minister Kneissl (you know, the one where Putin attended her wedding) gave an interview on German TV. She lives in a village in French Provence these days.

She says she had to leave Austria because nobody is willing to work with her because of her closeness to Putin and doing op eds for RT, but that she doesn't regret any of her actions. She considers herself a "political refugee."

She's on the board of Russian oil company Rosneft (it seems she was offered that position after mentioning publicly that she had financial problems). She says she's under immense pressure to resign from the position, but refuses to do so. Also that her "life has already been destroyed."

She shouldn't complain: it's not like her hair was shaven off

[Josquius]

I don't get your meaning.
There's lots of differences and similarities.

You complain about Ukraine's exageration in its war against Russia and you liken this propagande to fascism.

I am asking how it is different than all propaganda made in wars in the past.  Not propaganda in the Russian sense, like inventing totally bogus stuff, or killing villager and making it look like it was your ennemy. 

More like this poster, mischaracterizing the ennemy, exagerating the threats just a little bit.  We all know by now that the German Empire of 1914 was no more evil than the British Empire.

America also exagerated the threat posed by the Iraquis during their latest conflict.

I fail to see how what is Ukraine doing right now vastly different thant what was done by other belligerent in the past that would qualify them as "fascy".

Unless you believe that all nationalism is pure evil while imperialism is all good? Ukraine here is somewhat at fault for rejecting the glory of being part of Russia and seeking independence in the early 90s?  Is that what is bothering you here?  I just fail to see what is so disgustingly evil about Ukraine's attitude in this conflict, in the medias or in the battle field.

Exception: the part about forcing Russian pows to face the camera and admit their remorse in invading Ukraine.  That's a bit too much.

Yes. There was a lot of questionable propeganda in WW1 and WW2. This is pretty known and accepted no?

For WW1 in particular it needs forever remembering that the entire war was a pointless disaster of nationalist idiocy on both sides.

In WW2 considering extreme nationalism was the enemy (as it is with Putin) things tended to be a little better on the German front (though pretty horrificly dehumanising vs Japan) with a lot more emphasis put on nazis and Hitler than the existence of Germany.

Nationalism is a cancer and its the problem that gave us this war. Hate begets hate and when you've Ukrainians gloating over dead Russians and cursing the existance of Russia itself that's gold dust to the Putin regime. Best to avoid pushing those narratives and concentrate on those that focus on Ukraine the peaceful democracy defending itself against Putin's resource hungry ultra-nationalist dictatorship and its slave army.

[jimmy olsen]

You guys, especially Dg, buy way too much of Russia might mythology.

Have faith, it's a failed state.

they have numbers on their side.  1% of their army got killed in one week.  So what?  There's 99% left.

10k out of 200k is 5%. And if 10k were killed than another 20k were likely wounded. Doesn't even count the captured.

[Tamas]

I find it extremely unlikely the Russians lost 12k killed. If for nothing else, it is fully in Ukraine's interest to inflate those numbers, and even if it wasn't, it is very unlikely you can gather accurate numbers of this during wartime.