I’m going to be honest with you, you aren’t going to find a lot of sympathy for Ukraine here. Civilians perhaps because civilians always suffer under war, but not for the country and especially not the government. If you are here expecting us to be sympathetic to Ukraine you will not last long. What is happening in Ukraine is unfortunate but it is a natural result of NATO brinkmanship and constant encroachment of Russian red lines since the fall of the USSR.

i’m an american, so I place the blame on America for prolonging and instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the first place. It was the USA that instigated and guided the 2014 coup in Ukraine, then encouraged Ukraine to ignore the Minsk agreements, and now continues to encourage rejections of ceasefires or de-escalation. The entire war didn’t simply pop up out of nowhere. The Russian state didn’t simply wake up one day desiring land and then pick a target at random.

Rather, the entire conflict is the culmination of decades of American and western meddling.

I’ve also known Russian-speaking people in the Donbas, but they were more associated with the separatists, so I haven’t heard from them in a long time. They were probably shelled to death by Ukraine sometime between 2015 and 2022.

1. I have visited Russian-speaking families in Donbas. Nobody seemed to de-Russify them that I noticed.

Ukraine federally required the use of Ukrainian across several domains, including education, publication, hospitals, and political parties, excluding Russian. It additionally excluded those who could not speak Ukrainian sufficiently from public office despite not providing education programs to establish universal knowledge of Ukrainian. This was an action taken deliberately against ethnic Russians (and some others), as some other ethnic minority languages were regionally protected. In numerous public speeches, analyses, etc, it was commonly understood that this was an attempt to remove Russian from the public sphere. For the duration of this period, Ukrainian was itself regularly spoken only by a minority of citizens of Ukraine at home or at work.

Since 2022, the crackdowns have only gotten more severe, even banning things being named in Russian.

Would you have noticed this during your visit?

Maybe there was something about government-funded public schools being converted to Ukrainian-language curriculum or something like that, I dunno exactly.

Yes, that’s one of the ways of erasing culture. For example, the Irish language has been revived only through incredible effort due to its suppression by the British and many indigenous American languages are lost or nearly lost due to schooling systems that banned their use.

It is telling that bans occurred before actually educating the public in a so-called official national language.

Maybe public servants refusing to speak in Russian or something (in which case, learn to be bilingual in the language of the country you’re living in, or pay for a translator).

What you have just said here is chauvinist and wrong-headed. Ukraine is a multilingual country with wide regional variation where some languages are dominant where others aren’t. If you want a universal national language to facilitate national communication, you can implement education programs that still maintain regional ethnic culture and identities and education programs. Looking down on those that haven’t opted to adapt to the plurality language of another region is not okay.

For sure I didn’t hear anything about banning private use of any language.

Public sphere bans have a massive impact on private sphere use. Given the form of the bans, it would be reasonable to expect yet more Russophobic escalations - and Kyiv has consistently done so.

2. That “less inhumane” war cost the lives of 5 civilians I knew personally. Shelled to death while going about their civilian things.

A common experience for someone living in Donetsk city, shelled for nearly a decade by far UA sanctioned right forces. I am sorry your friends were killed just as I am sorry for those shelled in Donetsk. Civilians are the primary casualty of UA’s war against Donbas and Russia’s war against Ukraine.

If you would like to understand the true horrors that are visitable by such a military power, I would recommend reviewing the living conditions in Iraq from 1989 to 2007. Two invasions and an interceding sanctions regime. In the first invasion, Western forces destroyed the vast majority of essential civilian infrastructure. In the sanctions period, Iraq lacked for electricity, food, medicine, doctors, forced to buy expensive food aid with oil. Millions died, mostly children. In the second invasion, the pattern repeated, with what little had been rebuilt immediately targeted with “shock and awe” (terrorism) and then a long-term occupation with widespread extrajudicial killings.

Ukraine still has electricity and clean running water and healthcare. Think of what it would mean for the population for those to simply be gone. Think of what it would mean to see masses those around you dying of treatable diseases caused by malnutrition and contaminated water.

It is not coincidental that these are the conditions faced by Gazans, also under the thumb of a Western-backed occupation. An actual genocide. Most of the deaths are children.

Please do not use that term so casually unless you are ready to defend its use.

In this conflict, I don’t know who’s right, but war is wrong.

The most common sentiment among communists looks at this from a few different angles.

The first is that the common civilians are who suffer here, caught between a struggle between the Russian Federation and NATO powers led by the US. Most people in Ukraine just want to live their lives, they are not ideologically committed to a geopolitical project. Yet they are killed by bombs/shelling/missiles, alienated by ethnically discriminatory policies, forced into the military to be cannon fodder. Communists, generally, oppose this and want the war to end for the sake of the people.

There is also a larger geopolitical angle where we analyze the material interests and actions of states and how they relate to their economic realities. Communists, while of course seeing Russia as a capitalist state, also see Western powers as being those doing the most to escalate and make the situation unbearable for the RF until they saw this war as the most viable option. None of these NATO countries would ever accept these things happening on their borders. They have invaded countries for less several times. It is not like the RF does not bear responsibility for literally invading a country, but you won’t understand the impetus nor the continuation of the war without seeing Kyiv as a proxy for Western interests and with those interests constantly escalating. Those interests are also why the war is ongoing. They don’t want a peace deal, they have actively disrupted the chance for peace talks several times. The common theme is a desire to use Ukraine to hurt Russia and isolate it from EU countries (making them more US-dependent) no matter how many Ukrainians (or Russians, or Germans, etc) it harms.

Another geopolitical angle that communists take is to understand the US-led global capitalist hegemony as the primary enemy. Russia is responding to its exclusion from the imperialist side of this order (the US et al have pushed it towards immortalized status) and this conflict is emerging as maximum pressure from the West via Ukraine and Russia’s invasion. Overall, this war is also a metric by which to evaluate and understand the imperialist bloc’s power, particularly its financial weapons (e.g. kicking the RF off SWIFT), and hoping to see them fail or at least be far weaker than expected. Our larger projects for liberation are also targets of these weapons. In addition, any economic partner that is targeted by the US but can still facilitate a global south trading block is good for the wider project of undermining US imperialism.

Finally, Ukraine has a Nazi problem and liberal media outlets try to lie about it despite covering it nonstop up until 2022. The shock troops, the ideologically committed, for UA, are largely Nazis. This is why it is damned hard for the press to get pictures of soldiers without Nazi patches or tattoos. That and Azov/Azov-associated groups have an inordinate influence over what gets out, they basically run their own whole outfit on that front. Communists are, historically and now, the only group that actually opposes Nazis in the necessary terms and means.