In future we will add a disclaimer:

CONTENT WARNING THE FOLLOWING REPLY REQUIRES THAT YOU CONSIDER YOUR ASSUMPTIONS AND THINK CRITICALLY

Is that a reasonable compromise?

This way you can maintain your thought free information bubble and we can still point out the ways in which mainstream propaganda shapes your world view, and you can just comfortably ignore it.

The crisis is over

That’s the thing. It isn’t.

It is though. You can look at so many measures from perception of democracy among the citizens, the degree to which power is devolved to the local level most answerable to the community, and the turnover of elected officials being far higher than western democracies which usually feature politicians with what amounts to lifelong tenure.

People actually think China is still run the way it was back in the 1960s because their world view is formed from memes. It’s a democracy and a more vibrant one than what we usually see in the west.

But someone will reply to this with a meme about social credit without realizing they don’t earn Reddit gold here.

What are you talking about? The Cuban missile crisis was resolved by the missiles being removed and the soviet military presence ended in Cuba.

You’re factually wrong when you seem to say the soviet missiles are still there. They were removed.

The US’s security interests demanded they were removed from the nearby Cuba, and US missiles that threatened the USSR were removed from Turkey.

Peace was achieved by withdrawing the military threat from each others borders.

Likewise peace in Ukraine can only be achieved if Russia doesn’t feel threatened by a NATO presence there.

It’s easy to understand.

Democracy is when The People Decide if trans people should exist but the tax rate policy is written by the rich

Serbia, Libya, and Afghanistan were all defensive operations.

unless their right of internal self determination is compromised

Oh wait what’s that?

Lmao that’s what happened after the Ukrainian nationalists starting arming Nazi militias and banned their political parties you clown.

Banning their political parties and denying them the right to use their own language or practice their own religion or have their own political representation is called denying them their right to internal self determination.

The one where they voted to secede and the multiple elections over the past decade where they voted for political parties that were then banned by the Ukrainian government which is now also refusing to hold constitutionally mandated elections for fear of how they’d vote again.

You didn’t answer my question:

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine?

Why does “they voted for it repeatedly for a decade” not compute for you?

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine? Because they don’t, not after a decade of being brutalized by far right militias and seeing their cities shelled by the Ukrainian military and being denied the right to speak their language or practice their religion.

When you talk about “Russian backed separatists” you realize those separatists live there don’t you? You know what the word separatist means right?

Ukraine is using military force to deny them their right to self determination and the only reason you want to call the referendum illegitimate is because the people who live there chose the wrong answer.

You don’t value their views at all. They don’t matter to you. Which makes your position immoral and bloodthirsty.

“That referendum and those elections don’t count because the USA said no” truly the voice of democracy and freedom.

I guess it was Putin that forced Zelenskyy to ban the political opposition? Because the damn Putin bots kept voting wrong.

The key issue for me is the right of a people to self determination.

The people who live in the eastern parts of Ukraine are overwhelming Russian speaking and identify as ethnically Russian. They voted three times in various ways for some form of preserving their cultural rights, only to have their expression of Democratic will met with violent militias, shelling, and other violence, and then finally voted once again to secede from Ukraine, largely motivated by the extreme hostility from right wing Ukrainian nationalists who were banning the use of Russian, imposing assimilationist education policies, banning political parties that represented the people there, and even banning the free exercise of religion if that religious practice looked to the Russian Orthodox Church for leadership.

The principle of the self determination of a people to choose their own government demands respect and Ukraine has no right to impose their will on a population that doesn’t want it.

You should look at what the people who actually live there, in the east not just those in Kyiv, have been saying for a decade. They don’t want to be part of Ukraine anymore and it’s because of the extreme violence Ukraine has inflicted upon them since 2014.

Which European country isn’t pursuing neoliberal economics?