What I have learned: * Russia has already won the Ukraine war * Which NATO
started * A lot of people in the West think that Ukraine should surrender * Also
Ukraine was the world’s main provider of CSAM * Also Ukraine is exploited by the
West but if they can unite with Russia then their economy and everything else
will finally be alright It’s literally like a bizarro world and everyone is over
there agreeing with it. I’m genuinely confused by, who even are these people
(what is the mixture of Russian bots / Russian-aligned ordinary people /
confused Westerners / some other explanation.)
With respect, I don’t think it’s necessarily accurate to classify this conflict as an ethno nationalist war, at least not completely. The Russian motivation for this war can be pretty neatly explained by objectively observable factors like NATO enlargement and encirclement of Russia.
Of course, you could say that one is set dressing for the other, but I personally think that the main goal of the war is to keep NATO out and “saving oppressed Russians” is at best a secondary objective.
Agreed. I think it would be fair to call it revanchist but I don’t think it really checks the boxes for an ethno-nationalist war
You cannot even call it revanchist: the whole point of Minsk was to give Donetsk and Lugansk back to Ukraine, with the explicit condition that they are not allowed to do ethnic cleansing.
The provincial governments would gain semi-autonomous status so that Kyiv cannot simply impose new cultural bans against the regions, and was a direct response to Ukraine’s repealing of Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Language Law that granted Russian and various minority languages the status of regional languages - the very first law repealed on the very same day the fascist coup regime took power in February 2014!
If it had been revanchist, why would Russia want to hand those regions back to Ukraine? It is clear that Putin’s regime cared more about doing business with the EU than taking over Ukrainian territories. NATO’s relentless provocations and Ukrainian fascists’ blatant violation of the Minsk Agreement forced their hands, and it only took them 8 years to realize that fascists had no intention of being reasonable.
That’s why Russia is participating in ethnonationalist war like I said, but I didn’t say Russia started it and I also didn’t say that doing so was not in an effort to resist US imperialism
To be fair I said I’d simplify it as much as possible so obviously some nuance is lost along the way, but just to flesh it out a bit I’ll clarify my thought process in using the terms I chose, because I don’t necessarily disagree with you:
The imperialist expansion of the US via influence in Ukraine forced an imperialist conflict onto Ukraine, which forced a ethnonationalist conflict onto the people of the DPR/LPR, which is where the conflict started. Simultaneously, the expansion of US influence into Ukraine forced Russia’s hand in 2014 in and then again in the SMO. Both of these actions by Russia have been a combination of anti-imperial resistance to the US and revanchism under nationalist leadership. Russia can be engaging in both anti-imperial resistance and ethnonationalist conflict simultaneously.
So to explain the reasoning behind my initial choice of words: they are to demonstrate that each rung on the levels of badness I used, so to speak, can be the result of the next worse level of badness. So in the example I gave, I am essentially trying to say that the US’s imperial expansion after the collapse of the USSR forced imperial conflict on the people of Ukraine, which forced ethnonationalist conflict on the people of the LPR/DPR. Likewise, the same act of imperial expansion has only opened one major route for nationalist Russia to resist US imperial expansion, which is ethnonationalist/revanchist conflict. Russia is engaging in ethnonationalist/revanchist conflict because, geopolitically speaking, it has been railroaded into it as a means to resisting US imperialism.