chopstick said:
iggyhiggy said: So, it seems to me that you either - are misrepresenting something, not showing much interest in truth or - didn't care to look deeper in the data and sources, showing quite a bit of ignorance and superficiality - have other (maybe reliable?) sources, but you didn't bother to show them, showing little care for other people accessibility to (what you consider to be) the truth.
Back to your sheeps metaphore, in my eyes you either seem to be in one of the two herds, more than searching truth; but sometimes i have this feeling that you are actively spreading lies from one of the sides (as seems being done from both sides).
This is your perception of my beliefs. That's fine, you can perceive it any way you like.
Sure, I'm not unbiased. I took the side of DPR/LPR 8 years ago and have been rooting for them ever since. Back in 2014, some will remember there was a thread on the Ukraine war here at that time. This thread reached over a hundred pages. My views have not changed since then, the people of Donbass were victims to an illegitimate regime that hated them back then and the same is true to this day.
The idea that the total number of all deaths from the Ukraine war between 2014-2022 is only 14,000 is ridiculous, and anybody who paid attention back then would know it. Back in 2014 there were individual battles where over 1,000 combatants were killed on both sides, such as the fight for Debaltsevo in early 2015. On top of that, Ukraine has unleashed tens of thousands of shells on heavily populated areas, deliberately targeting civilians time and time again. It may be true that nobody has exact numbers, but if you ask me, the figure of 14,000 dead civilians and another 10-20 thousand combatants on both sides is roughly accurate given the *information* we have regarding the scale of some of the battles fought in 2014-2015. And there were many, many more battles than just Debaltsevo. ~800 Ukrainian soldiers died in the Ilovaisk cauldron alone, and that wasn't the only such cauldron either.
I couldn't tell you how many times I read reports where in 2014 the Ukrainian army swept through some village on the front-line and massacred all of the inhabitants without a second thought, shooting people dead in their living rooms through the window.
And I couldn't tell you how many times the Ukrainians took massive losses in battle after battle only to pretend they only lost a few people, denying the families of their dead any kind of benefits, simply counting them as missing. They do the same today, even as they lose hundreds of men daily, they continue to put up this propagandized narrative that the Russians are losing in every direction.
Yes, I don't like the regime in Ukraine that is responsible for all of this destruction and whom is responsible for the mass killings of their own citizens. Yes, it shocks me that so many people would side with them (primarily because they don't dig deeper.) This frustration comes out in the form of anger at times. At any rate, I intend to stick to my position. You can continue to perceive it however you like.
Sure, i'll feel free to have any perception. You dont need to authorize me. Here is a quote from you in the old donbass thread: "It's a constant disinfo war between Russia and the USA. Tons of totally false news and propaganda is being slung everywhere, so it is good IMO not to let one side dominate the thread." I think it applies here maybe even more. I took a look there, I couldn' find reliable sources about casualties estimate, would you care please to point them? the thread is very long and i may have missed them. But again, where do the numbers come from? did you figure out or are they based on ground events?
Just for you to know, I don't have any problem with biases per se; i have problems with the lack of capability to QUESTION sources. A few years ago (2017 iirc) i had a talk with an acquaintance who went there in Donbass to volunteer for DPR. He's a comrade from a collective, he belief in the idea of a Peoples Republic. He is a really good person who also tried to go to fight in Siria with Kurds but didn't manage to. His report about his experience in Donbass was a big disappointment: his expectation was to find something like International Brigade that fought fascists in Spain in 1936. He found instead fascists from all Europe and Russian mercenaries, and described DPR as 'Fascism with Soviet Imagery' (I have to say that he calls fascist any nationalist, don't know if this was the case). His fault had been (in his opinion, but i agree) that not trusting liberal western media led him to trust any media that countered them. On a side note, I recognize that the Donbass operation was carried mostly by Ukrainian Neo-nazi. But ther were Nazi (both crypto and declared)on the 'Russian side too', that was a Nazi vs Nazi thing; Russia backed it not to protect Russian in UA territory, it's part of an expansion strategy. You can see in some videos you posted the Novorossiya flag, wich is pretty much a signature of the Putins idea of a new Russian Empire (more than a new USSR). Also, I partially agree (i already wrote it somewhere) that the narrative of Russian losing this war is, for now, dealing a wish as a fact; but I think that Russians didn't expect this resistance, so i belive they are actually having a harder time than they thought.
Edited by iggyhiggy (04/05/22 10:38 AM)
|