Comrades: For the last week, I have been forwarding the war maps from RIAFA (with some commentary / summary of the days news as presented by ASBMil and Intel Slava, accounting for bias) to my company’s internal Whatsapp channel. I’m not doing it out of any effort for conversion, just to balance the info they might be getting a little bit. Today it finally drummed up a little bit of interest due to the Ukrainian Rada tweet comparing Kharkiv with Hamburg. After explaining how stupidly mask off that tweet was, I jokingly proposed to have a session to explain the origins of the war and why it wasn’t as black and white as it would seem if you only consume MSM. To my surprise, a few co workers jumped enthusiastically at the idea. I set a quorum of at least 10 people and warned them that this was going to go at least 1 hour of hard history, but I have gathered 8 people interested in less than 2 hours. I fear that I’m going to actually have to do this, or at least present them with a document outlining the mechanisms of NATO expansion, the geopolitical reasons of the Russian invasion, and all the nitty gritty that is conveniently left out of the Western coverage (I live in Latin America). To this effect, I would need some cooperation in selecting which topics do you think must not be left out (I’m considering the period from 1991 to the present, to start with NATO expansion up until the war in the Donbas and the current situation); what sources can I provide that could be amenable to libs or left-of-center apolitical people (but hard communist sources are welcomed too!); debunked hoaxes of Ukranian propaganda, as well as hard confirmation of neo NAzi organizations other than Azov, etc. In short, anything that can help me substantiate this presentation. Can you help me, comrades?
I think it’s very important to cover the “nationhood” of Ukraine.
This issue gets almost no coverage anywhere, but if you look into history you realize that Ukraine is not a “nation” in a way that, say, France or Italy or Spain or even Germany are.
Ukraine is a frankenstein of territories, assembled into single entity as part of USSR under Ukrainian SSR for administrative management. The very fact that this hodge-podge “state” exists is because of a stroke of Yeltsin’s pen. It’s borders are not drawn with blood, sweat and tears the same way as other EU countries is.
In a sense, Ukraine is closer to modern day Iraq or Nigeria or any of the other poor african “countries” whose borders were drawn with a fucking ruler with no regard to actual people living on the ground.
The infamous Dulles in his report on USSR called Ukraine “as inseparable part of the country as a Great Lakes region is to USA”.
As a Donbass native, I can speak for overwhelming majority of people there — this is not an invasion for us. It’s a homecoming long overdue.
I would also advise a bit of emotional note at some point. Something from western sources like Laura Bonnele’s movie “Donbass”, Graham Philips’ channel (he does war reports from DNR side), or even the fresh Maryana Naumova’s response to Arnold Schwarzenegger.