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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

I await the Russian trolls to tell us that this is all Western propaganda.

Please don't take HN threads further into hellish flamewar. This is the last thing we need here, and with comments like this one, what chance is there to avoid it?

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The propaganda is a rescue operation not no invasion at all: I've already seen "Russian operation to protect people from Kiev regime" headline on an Indian news site.

The narrative is already pivoting to "NATO made them do this".

That's been the narrative since the beginning, except for the big long stretch of Putin’s recent speech where he blamed the problem on the USSR, and Lenin and Stalin specifically, for existence of Ukraine as a modern polity occupying land that, in Putin’s view, is rightfully Russian.

Right, it’s the denazification of a country with the Jewish president.

Fuck Russia :(

Not the whole country, just the President. Remember, the Russian people generally do not want any wars, they are not very prosperous and happy.

No. The Russian people are accountable.

But somehow the US citizens are never accountable for their illegal wars. The hypocrisy is astounding.

It’s Russia invading an independent country right now, not USA. Don’t change the subject.

Not just the president, there’s a whole elitist gang around him. Once he’s out, things might get even worse

You don’t understand, they are “nazi” because they are nationalists and support their country. So Russian nazis are going to attack Ukrainian nazis do “denazificate” them.

Azov battalion is full-on white nationalist neo nazi and they’re a large and legitimate player in this war. And they’ve been wiped off the map tonight. I guess it depends on your definition of a made up word but I’d certainly call it denazification.

I don't know what the Azov battalion is, but I don't think shelling Kiev has much to do with them.

Edit: They're a far-right/neo-Nazi group in the Donbas, apparently.

Yea, the US weapons going to the Azov Battalion are certainly not undermining that case.

Can you say what you mean for those of us not familiar with the Azov Battalion?

NATO (the US) is funding Nazi nationalists that wear swastika tattoos and think Bandera was good. They are doing this because Ukrainians don't want a civil war, so it's hard to find people to fight and die. Therefore, we pick the moderate rebels as we are so fond of doing.

I just learned about the Azov battalion about 15 minutes ago, but I can't find any sources online that indicate them having more than a few hundred volunteers.

The US has a knack of dumping weapons on countries and having those weapons eventually end up in the hands of reactionaries, but I think at present those reactionaries make up a vanishingly small fraction of the weapons recipients.

Azov was folded into the military proper as a precondition of securing western military aid, as the Ukrainian government needed to be able to show proper chain of command to get help and Azov wanted the shells, so they came to an agreement to integrate.

But these hardcore Azov guys are anarchists by nature and a lot of them hate the Ukrainian government as much as they hate the separatists, so they still act independently without having to answer to the government. Some did eventually just merge into the military.

Putting a number on the size today of Azov is difficult because of how the two melded together. Some people joined Azov because they just wanted to help fight and didn’t care about the neo nazi stuff. Some are true believers. But one thing for certain is that it’s not some fringe group that exists on Wikipedia only.

Edit: watch this: https://youtu.be/wMMXuKB0BoY

I watched the video in its entirety.

> Putting a number on the size today of Azov is difficult because of how the two melded together. Some people joined Azov because they just wanted to help fight and didn’t care about the neo nazi stuff. Some are true believers. But one thing for certain is that it’s not some fringe group that exists on Wikipedia only.

This might be true, but it's not evidenced by the video. The video documents two independent groups, one of whom (the first) look like they might belong to Azov. I counted 7 people at the most.

OTOH, it's clear (from the end of the video) that there are protests in Kiev itself with reactionary (or at least hypernationalist) themes. It's not clear to me where the line is on those, probably because I'm not Ukrainian. But those protestors are in the capital.

In sum, it's not clear to me that we should discount NATO's current arms distribution because one of two groups in a video from 2019 has far-right members, members who cut a deal with the overarching military chain of command to secure arms for the broader military.

I can't claim to be intimately familiar with Ukraine, but based on the US's history of funding the most violent psychopaths imaginable, I really doubt it's an accident.

I will also note that in the past, several elements of NATO's high command were former Nazi generals, so I really doubt there's a ton of angst about it internally.

Absent any evidence that NATO arms were specifically directed towards neo-Nazi groups (and not just groups affiliated with Ukraine's national police, which Azov unfortunately seems to be), I think there's nothing to support anything except it being an accident.

And again, this is from someone who exercises extraordinary skepticism in the context of US international action.

I linked a video above where you can see neo nazi militia members firing nato rounds in 2019.

This post already got marked as flagged/dead ten minutes ago. I'm glad HN has the option to "vouch" for posts.

The first post I saw that mentioned it disappeared off the first 4 pages at least a few min after I saw it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449794

To be fair, it is slightly off topic. I hope we get more articles on the war which go in depth about the tactics, operations, etc.

Do not forget the "useful idiots' who will whitewash anything the enemies of the west do just because they align with their ideology better than the free world does.

My response to that is the same as it has historically been. We don't need a wall to keep our people in. If you wish to go to North Korea, you are free to do so.

Fair warning though, it doesn't work the same way in reverse.

They're already here in this thread.

I think HN's moderation policy of not accusing accounts of being paid trolls and sock puppets is maybe failing today, here.

Putin has been growing and funding his online and offline armies well, while the West has been sleeping at the wheel for years.

Yep, just a week ago they were in "ridicule west for saying that the attack is cominh". Biden was right all the time.

I didn’t follow this civil war for 7 years for someone to tell me I’m not entitled to an opinion on who is the real aggressor here.

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