Russia and Ukraine: Grassroots Resistance to Putin’s Invasion | Hacker News Reader

Russia and Ukraine: Grassroots Resistance to Putin’s Invasion

crimethinc.com

33 pointssoutherntofu12 comments

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Peaceful protesters are being arrested in St Petersbug just now.

Here are two webcam live feeds of the area:

https://www.webcamtaxi.com/en/russia/saint-petersburg/bolsho...

https://webcamera24.com/camera/russia/great-gostiny-dvor/

On the news they showed police forces dragging protesters one by one into vans.

You can imagine how much braver those people are than Americans. Who here would protest if you could get dragged into a van and possibly disappear, be tortured or worse?

Possibly only detained and intimidated for a while to send a message and discourage other protesters; torture or death would transform each peaceful protester in an angry Russian family of 3 or more, and Putin is already slowly digging his grave by killing civilians in Ukraine.

You mean who would take part in Occupy, Black lives Matter, antifascist, or NoDAPL protest? I'm not saying the risks are equal (electricity torture by Russian services is no joke) but it's fair to point out that popular protesters in the USA also get beaten/mutilated/detained/eliminated by State forces and this is not exactly a new problem (see also: CoIntelPro, Mummia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Fred Hampton, etc etc).

Meanwhile we won't impose oil/gas restrictions and the price of oil soars which Russia can use to fund the war. You want good grassroots resistance? Kneecap the government's source of revenue.

We need to push on the Saudis to increase production and start dumping our strategic reserves to collapse the price of oil. While I hate the shale/fracking in North Dakota and its pipelines, we should have subsidized a base level of production so we could open the floodgates as a strategic weapon. As I understand it those wells were capped and they can't be easily started up.

The need to heavily incent EV / PHEV is even more apparent. Oil enables dictators, and that destabilizes the world and our security. It's not just global warming, it's good old fashioned international conflict security.

I understand your point, but i disagree with the conclusion. If anything, this shows that we need to use less energy overall and invest in durable infrastructure/lifestyles. There's no magical energy source that's going to make you fully self-sufficient (as a territory) without fucking up your local environment.

We have such an abundance of energy and it's wasted on such bullshit, it's incredible. And by this i don't just mean people who buy IoT or take the plane, i do mean that most of the waste comes from our industrial system favoring private competition and planned obsolescence instead of resource efficiency and a repair economy.

The protests last couple of days feel way scarier than a year before, this time I pussied out going to Gostiny Dvor and decided to put some stickers on instead, as did other people - you can find one every several hundred meters in SpB.

I really wish Russia would become a peaceful, democratic, economic powerhouse. Russians and east europeans deserve this. I fail to understand why Russians have suffered for so long at the hands of despots and now interlopers with nukes. There must be a better way.

> There must be a better way.

There was a better way, in the history of Russia/Ukraine. After the popular uprising of early 1917, the self-organized communities (the soviets) started to reshape the country, even forming actual Communes (such as in Cronstadt Russia and Huliaipole Ukraine) in the spirit of libertarian socialist revolution of the Paris Commune, which also sparked at the height of war (1917 was the peak of WWI, while 1871 was the peak of France/Prussian war).

The problems started when Lenin returned from exile and organized a coup d'État against decentralized power (the soviets) as well as the remnants of Nation State power and applied his tyrannical doctrine of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", slowly rebuilding the State apparatus and secret services in the name of fighting the immediate threat (local monarchists and german invaders).

If you're curious about that period, i strongly recommend to read Emma Goldman. She has very detailed recollections and anecdata from that time, both in her autobiography and in her publications (such as Trotsky protests too much, or There is no communism in Russia).

Some news of anti-war protests/actions internationally, as well as a statement by “Food Not Bombs” Moscow and an interview with anarchist “Committee of Resistance” in Kyev.

There's a heavy anarchist bias in there, but it shows that the narrative of choosing a side between NATO and Putin has no reason to be, which is why i think it'll be of interest to fellow HNers.

> but it shows that the narrative of choosing a side between NATO and Putin has no reason to be

…Other than the fact that Putin invaded and is now threatening to hit the big red button, surely.

> …Other than the fact that Putin invaded and is now threatening to hit the big red button, surely.

True, which places Putin in the big family of genocidal assholes we're familiar with, alongside France/USA/China/Turkey... I don't see how this changes anything.

My thoughts are with the people on both sides of the border who suffer with these conflict, and with the anarchist organizations who suffer from political repressions both in Ukraine and in Russia. I strongly condemn Putin's actions, but that does not mean i'm going to cheer on NATO.

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