We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
Very good and well thought answers, thank you. I upvoted both, no idea why would someone downvote a well researched comment, especially in the reading group / discussion thread.
I’ll reply to both your comments here to keep it in one place. I’ll need some time to think about what you wrote and go over your sources with a fine comb. Just a couple of questions now, and thank you in advance for the help:
It looks like the only source for amassment of troops is this, are there any other sources, at least a link directly to the Russian ministry of foreign affairs statement it references?
Regardless, amassment of troops can be a show of force and more often than not doesn’t lead to an invasion, for instance Russia has amassed troops and held military exercises along Ukrainian border regularly since 2014.
As for preparatory shelling, your post has no sources at all, it only links this article which is not from OSCE and doesn’t link to OSCE source. Do you have a link directly to OSCE report?
The only source is one unnamed guy saying this. I’d like to know who he is and what the context was cause most likely he was calling to kill separatists, not just ethnic Russians. That’s horrible but no different from what you could hear some people say on Russian TV about separatists within Russia.
That’s not enough to claim Zelensky’s govt was going to ethnically cleanse Donbass.
Yes but in this case there was a clearly stated intent from the Ukrainian side. As early as 2019 Zelensky publicly said that he would go to war to resolve the Donbass situation. I believe this is in one of the links i provided in the comments on the posts i mentioned earlier.
This was something that the Kiev regime, its spokespeople and all the Ukrainian nationalists were constantly talking about. Since they started their so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in 2014 their stated goal was always to militarily subdue the rebels. The term “subhuman” was and is frequently used by them to refer to the ethnic Russians in the Donbass.
The only other option of resolving the situation would have been the Minsk agreements, but by 2021 the Ukrainian side was declaring them dead and was effectively saying they would never abide by them. NATO didn’t spend 8 years training and building up a new army for Ukraine for nothing.
Either way it was not a risk that Russia was prepared to take, due to the reasons i laid out.
You can use Yandex to search for OSCE report Donbass shelling 2022. There have been a number of articles written about this in the alternative media space as well as of course the Russian media that reference this.
This is not just something one guy was saying, this was and is a common talking point in the Ukrainan post-Maidan media and among Ukrainian nationalists. Zelensky himself was saying at one point that anyone who “feels Russian” should leave and go to Russia. This is also linked in one of the comments i made.
All this needs to be understood in the broader context of the anti-Russian laws that were being passed in post-Maidan Ukraine, as well as the atrocities that were being committed against anti-Maidan protestors and pro-Russian activists such as the Odessa Massacre.
I’m sorry i can’t look up the exact links right now, but they should be in one of my comments addressing this issue.
Edit: here is the OSCE report: https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine/512683
And here is a Reuters article saying that shelling was noticeably escalating in Feb 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/osce-reports-surge-number-explosions-east-ukraine-2022-02-19/
(Reuters of course purposely omits and OSCE tries to obfuscate which side the majority of the shelling was coming from; but this can be seen when you look at maps of the registered impacts and how most of them were on the rebel controlled side)
More on who was responsible for the shelling here: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/ukraine-who-is-firing-at-whom-and-who-is-lying-about-it.html
Here an article that lays out the chronology and shows how the shelling was clearly increasing in the lead-up to the SMO: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/04/09/the-united-states-and-ukraine-started-the-war-not-russia/
And here another article laying out the argument why it wasn’t Russia that started the war (the website it was originally published on is reactionary but the article itself is solid): https://archive.org/details/setting-the-record-straight-on-ukraine
Here is a statement by the Russian MOD claiming to have documents showing Kiev was preparing to invade the Donbass republics: https://www.sott.net/article/465263-The-Russian-Ministry-of-Defene-Original-documents-show-Kiev-planned-offensive-operation-against-Donbass-in-March-of-this-year
Here DPR authorities allege that Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered confirmed that the attack was planned and imminent: https://tass.com/defense/1413035
LPR authorities said the same thing: https://sputnikglobe.com/20220315/kiev-was-preparing-full-scale-offensive-against-donbass-in-march-2022--lpr-head-1093898027.html
This preparation was already evident and being talked about months in advance: https://anna-news.info/kiev-is-ready-to-attack-donbass/
Essentially Kiev was planning a “final solution” for the Donbass, using primarily hardcore Nazi punisher units; Russia’s SMO pre-empted them by four days: https://newcoldwar.org/kiev-was-planning-final-solution-operation-in-donbass-russian-ministry/
On the topic of the stated intent of ethnic cleansing: https://www.sott.net/article/292240-Ukraine-government-admits-to-targeting-civilians-in-Donbass-region
This is not just one random person, this is someone associated with the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian military units who clearly says that the task of the Interior Ministry for which they work is to “cleanse” the cities after the military takes them over
The Kiev regime straight up denies the existence of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, which itself can be taken as a statement of intent of ethnic cleansing: https://en.topwar.ru/229905-vice-premer-ukrainy-stefanishina-zajavila-ob-otsutstvii-v-strane-russkogo-nacmenshinstva.html
We are talking about seven million people just in the DPR and LPR who unambiguously identify as Russian and by now have Russian citizenship. What do you suppose would happen to them if Russian forces pulled out and allowed Ukrainian Nazi units to move in who have a history of treating ethnic Russians and “separatists” like this: https://21stcenturywire.com/2014/11/17/natos-nazis-ethnic-cleansing-their-opposition-in-east-ukraine/
This intent was already understood by Ukrainians in 2014, it’s not something Russia came up with after the fact to justify its actions: https://www.globalresearch.ca/ethnic-and-cultural-cleansing-in-ukraine/5387539