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Comment by paulcarroty | Hacker News Reader

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/03/09/mariupol-materni...

After watching this bombarded hospital I wish them to burn in hell. They deserve much stronger sanctions than North Korea.

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It's horrible, and I bet all well informed Russians will agree that it is. Who are "they"? I think it is mostly up to a small group of people. I feel it is important to not forget that, and not get lost in hatred and revenge. Which is easy to say from far away from the front, I know.

“Well informed” is doing a lot of work there. The Russian equivalent of the American Republican is cheering this on, regardless of what information they have access to.

Because Americans are either Republicans or Democrats? Because you can't both think that the government should perhaps not have a monopoly on weapons AND be pro-choice? And you can't both condemn the war and then argue that Gorbachov was promised that the NATO would not expand and it is a factor in this war? What are you saying here?

We are humans and our opinions and ideas fall on continuums in many dimensions. Lets keep talking, to anyone, with respect.

If someone’s a Republican now they’re just nuts. Nothing to do with actual policy preferences anymore, just fake stuff. That’s what I’m referring to.

I have no words for this. It sounds to me like you have just lost it. Either that or your entire country lost it.

For god's sake, call anyone that voted republican (why do you even call them "a republican"? Maybe they just didn't like Hillary back when?!) and talk to them with an open mind and be kind. I think that would be the best thing to do for your country right now.

While I appreciate how crazy our country looks from outside, it's not that different from other English-speaking countries right now. There's a set of people whose perception of the world has become completely detached from reality. The vast majority of those people identify with the Republican party.

I fully agree with cautioning people not to get consumed with hate/revenge or to project Putin/supporters' faults on all Russians, but it's quite a bit more complicated even among the folks who "agree that the war is horrible" will, over the course of a few exchanges, begin arguing that western aggression/expansionism forced Putin's hand and he's really just defending Russian sovereignty. Or else they "agree that the war is horrible" but then fixate on how bad the sanctions are and how the west is so awful for imposing those sanctions. So it definitely feels like a lot of the Russians who "agree that the war is horrible" don't really mean it, or at least implicitly think the Ukrainians have it good compared to the sanctioned Russians. Of course, there are Russians who sincerely think the war is horrible--they're out protesting bravely (criticizing the war is punishable by 15 years in prison per a new "misinformation" law); however, few of the Russians I've talked to who "oppose the war" have anything good to say about these protesters.

It is of course true that the "average Russian" is not shelling Mariupol, is not an oligarch, and may not even have voted for Putin. Voting and support numbers showing broad support for Putin, if accurate and genuine, should be seen in the context of Russian propaganda.

And yet... this is the first time that Russians experience the anguish they have caused to Central and Eastern Europe over the past 80 years. USSR caused untold misery, to Russians too, but to its non-Russian subjects mostly. Economies were exploited, lives and bones were broken, culture subdued. Attempts to leave USSR be peaceful means were violently quashed, such as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, and lots of smaller events along the way. Pro-USSR sentiment in Russia remains strong, as was support for annexation of Crimea.

At some point, "ordinary Russians" need to understand that the "Russian empire" machine they support, by sentiment if not democratic votes, brings misery and destruction to all who stand in its way.

In my experience, this sentiment is also not limited to "domestic-only" Russians, who perhaps lack access to "different bias" sources of information. I knew a number of highly educated and intelligent Russians living in the West, who still drank the kool aid.

I'm not saying, it's their turn to suffer, but for this reason I'm struggling to muster depths of sympathy.

> It's horrible, and I bet all well informed Russians will agree that it is.

One of the heavy pregnant woman photographed there has her instagram full of hundreds of Russians calling her a crisis actor, wishing her and her (yet unborn) child death and being raped. [0]

That's also the position of Russia MFA [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/ComeGentleNight/status/15019005935977185...

[1] https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/150192182043753676...

My colleague with family in the region has said that the hospitals are evacuated and being used for logistics. Which might explain why they would be targeted.

This video being described as “difficult to watch” seems a lot like propaganda.

I don’t know what the truth is, but I know it’s not black and white.

That the Russians invaded Ukraine and not the other way 'round is pretty much black and white though.

yes. That's the nature of war. Just like general disinformation and the campaign to support the poor Ukrainians roasting devious Russian in their tanks (while taking 0 losses of course!) and painting the heroic image of a people waging urban warfare defending (read: destroying beyond recognition) their country to the last drop of blood.

Some further reading:

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1498490752065757184

https://yasha.substack.com/p/insurgency

Putin is evil (and a child of the end of history). And yet, fighting fire with fire in heated, nationalistic conflicts has never been a recipe for improvement.

The truth is Putin's troops invaded Ukraine and are killing innocent people every hour. And it's obvious that each day of this aggression will make this number higher and higher.

Honestly, everyone in Ukraine has a right to be anywhere in Ukraine. If they do logistics in a hospital it doesn’t give Russia the right to bomb it - because Russia’s invasion isn’t in any way justifiable or legal.

So, putting up barricades behind a schoolbus is ok as well?

Yes, absolutely. If the invaders don’t want to shoot a schoolbus, all they have to do is go back home.

Same thing happened in Gaza - Israel blamed Hamas of course:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-israeli-strike-damaged-g...

Western news has been notoriously racist when it comes to middle-east crisis vs Ukraine coverage.

Not sure if it's limited to certain news outlets, but that's the overall feeling I'm getting.

Maybe to some degree. A lot of it is that in most conflicts both sides have some credible arguments, I disagree with the degree of responses and general treatment of WB and Gaza, but Israel usually claims with some degree of truth to be responding to attacks during their incursions and bombings, while noone believes Russia had a valid reason to invade Ukraine.

Half of Russia feels the same way about their country that you do about Israel.

I'm talking about outside of Russia/Israel. And I personally do not see Israel positively wrt Palestine, but find their pretexts a lot more credible than Putin's so I understand why there's a lot more unanimity in Western press about Ukraine

>My colleague with family in the region

Just say he is Russian instead.

>Which might explain why they would be targeted.

Why is it hard to believe that Russians would intentionally target Ukrainian hospitals? Have you seen what the Russian media and social media say about Ukrainians?

Russia literally bombed and killed 47 civilians waiting for food last week.

>but I know it’s not black and white

Russia started an irredentist invasion of an independent democratic country.

How is that not black and white?

> After watching this bombarded hospital I wish them to burn in hell. They deserve much stronger sanctions than North Korea.

It should be noted that sanctions have done nothing to change the behavior of North Korea's leadership to be more palatable to the West. I bet it'll be the same with Russia.

I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.

> I don't think anyone in public has enough information to state this. We don't know what NK we'd have to deal with had those sanctions not been in place.

But we do know that it is currently an extremely totalitarian country that developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs while under sanctions, and it continues to have a gun pointed at the head of South Korea (e.g. enough dug in artillery to level Seoul a couple times over).

Sanctions affect dictatorships and oligarchies differently.

NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.

The sanctions are working. Russians are going back in time and soon will be standing in line for bread.

Chelsea a large premier league team owned by an oligarch has been frozen and he can't sell like he wanted to.

Nikkita Mazepin has been removed from F1 and sanctioned along with his oligarch father and no longer can travel in EU.

Aeroflot(russian airline) grounded its planes because they will get seized and cannot enter EU/US air space.

Other oligarchs are moving their expensive yachts because those are getting seized. Their other assets such as properties and bank accounts are being frozen all over the world and they a lot real estate in the UK. This definitely hurts.

The list goes on and on.

Everyone agrees sanctions will make Russia poorer. What is less clear, and none of your examples show, is if it will change Russia's geopolitical actions.

> NK is not Russia. Russia knows what western brands and luxuries are. There have been lines in Russia to McDonalds, Victoria's Secret and other stores.

Do you really think the Russian government will withdraw from Ukraine because people can't buy McDonald's in Moscow anymore?

China isn't sanctioning Russia. I bet the oligarchs and other elietes will continue to get whatever Western status goods they want through smuggling (just like North Korea!), and the Russia people will have sufficient Chinese-manufactured consumer goods (like everyone everywhere else), just equivalents with different logos.

"The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China? Would that feel claustrophobic for these wealthy Russians? Could they do something about it, throwing their weight to shift some power balance and replace their dictator with another one more in line with the actual interests of the Russian riling class?

> "The world was theirs", they could show off their wealth in Paris, in London, in Florence, in New York, in Athens and Mallorca, in Tel Aviv and Sydney. Do you think they would be happy of having their world "shrink" to just Russia and China?

We'll see, but "being unhappy" is a far cry from deciding to take on some KGB goon who appears to have no compunction against murdering rivals.

I highly doubt there will be regime change in Russia because some politically-connected oligarchs' wives can't flout their Hermes handbags in Paris. That seems far more like a fantasy than a realistic expectation.

I agree. Just saying that it's not that oligarchs will just get their goods from china and nothing will change for them. Whether that's going to have any impact whatsoever is another story.

> and soon will be standing in line for bread

No. Sure, they won't have access to Western technological miracle products like Netflix, Facebook, and PornHub, but they have plenty of grain production, processing, transportation, and baking capacity for as much bread as they want, particularly since they'll be exporting less of their own wheat.

Your examples are very telling. Wow, Russians are being excluded from sportsball, motor racing, sex tourism, and extravagant yachting excursions! Nothing of value was lost.

Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.

Putin meets with oligarchs, the richest people in the country have access and communicate with governments and have the ability to affect policy making.

Placing sanctions on people close to Putin and freezing their soccer team worth billions of dollars definitely has an impact.

Many car manufacturers are pulling out and not selling parts. We live in a globalized society and Russia was a part of it. Putin was betting on oil/natural gas money but that soon will be gone.

> Their actual concerns will be the German, Italian, and Japanese precision machine tools, optics, and PLC/robotics/automation components that their own industry relies on. These are the real worries, not a goddamned soccer club.

And for stuff like that, there's always front companies and smuggling (if they can't find what they need on the market in China). IIRC, that's what they used to do during Soviet times.

Our countries should send an ultimatum: if no agreement have been found by next week, frozen assets will be nationalized. Having Chelsea belong to BoJo would be fun :)

How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.

> How do you know the sanctions on North Korea haven’t changed anything? It’s impossible to know what their behavior would have been in an alternate reality without sanctions.

But it is possible to know that their behavior continues to be extremely unacceptable to the West. So if your goal with sanctions is to stop the invasion of Ukraine and to get Russia to stop threatening its neighbors with similar, it's very likely that sanctions won't work.

IMHO, sanctions are something the West does when it doesn't want to solve a problem but still wants to feel like it's doing something.

I also think sanctions will end up being counterproductive. They'll fail to address the military situation AND geopolitically they'll push Russia into a deeper alliance with China, strengthening the latter.

You've already seen an example of that with Belarus. A few years ago it got sanctioned and its leader was forced to turn to Russia for help. Now it's militarily supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It's not like a lack of sanctions would change their behavior either though, maybe nothing we do will change their behavior. In that case they can do less damage to the rest of the world if they are poor and cut off than if they are rich and able to trade freely.

And there is still a chance sanctions will change their behavior even if in some cases like with NK it hasn't worked.

> It should be noted that sanctions have done nothing to change the behavior of North Korea's leadership to be more palatable to the West.

Sanctions aren't chosen because they are effective at changing behavior, but because they limit capacity if they fail to change behavior. The sanctions on Russia are not “we believe Putin will behave in response to the sanctions” but “we intend to destroy Russia’s economy and thereby limit it's ability to engage in aggression until and unless we are convinced that Putin has made a durable course correction.”

ATGM position of Mariupol defenders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4-zYV_6Tgk

I hope they have evacuated all residents from there. Even if no one left Mariupol through evacuation corridors.

WarGonzo is Russian state propaganda. How do we know those are Ukrainian defenders and not Russians pretending to Ukrainians?

Google Maps perhaps?

Seems like here: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.1186918,37.6934124,333m/data...

US-armed Israel was bombing hospitals and clinics in Gaza last year.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MSF/status/1393868206566223872

Of course Israel said Palestinians they were fighting were nearby, but that is what the Russians are saying too.

I don't remember the maudlin, mawkish melodrama of hospitals and clinics being bombed by a US armed country being such a big deal in the US last year.

Actually Biden's team is in Saudi Arabia right now discussing a deal for Saudi Arabia to export more oil if the US drops its minimal sanctions last year relating to its bloody war in Yemen and disembowlment of a Washington Post reporter in a Turkish embassy.

When people say stuff like this, I'm inclined to make the distinction between the Russian state and the Russian people. Russia isn't a democracy, so its actions don't necessarily represent the will of the Russian people. And indeed, tens of thousands risk imprisonment by protesting the war, and this gives me hope. However, I've been really bummed lurking on r/AskARussian where many Russians perspectives read like, "I don't like Putin and I don't support this war but the sanctions are worse and the evil West forced Putin's hand and actually Putin is a hero and I love him and support the war". Even still, I don't want Russia to be cut off from the rest of the world, but I also want Putin's murderous conquest to be stopped.

No one is better positioned to end this than the Russian people. I don't see how they can be absolved of that responsibility.

This is not entirely accurate. European countries pay billions of dollars for gas directly to the state. If they stopped immediately, the damage would be far greater than anything coming from the ordinary citizens.

The Russian people can stop that trade by just not showing up for work at Gazprom and Rosneft.

I agree, Europe should stop buying Russian gas. But the Russian people are closer to all of this.

I sort of agree with you, but I don't think the judgment by westerners is justified considering how few westerners have contributed in any significant way toward the freedoms we enjoy and how many actively seek to undermine them (campaigns against free speech, due process, egalitarianism/"colorblindness", unfavorable election results, etc). While it's true that Russians are in the best position to fix their government, those who protest or otherwise resist demonstrate a braveness well in excess of anything most living westerners can claim, and I think that should be the posture with which we discuss Russians resisting their government.

EDIT: as a sibling commenter points out, many western countries are still directly financing the war via payments to Russian state fossil fuel companies. How many westerners would be willing to endure a year or more of high prices and economic downturn to resist the Russian invasion (yes, Americans favor boycotting Russian oil now, but (1) will they still after a year of high gas prices and (2) many other western countries are far more dependent on Russian oil than America)?

The Russian people are the only ones that can stop this. It’s their fight, they created their government.

As another commenter points out, the West could stop financing the war by payments to the Russian state in exchange for fossil fuels. But that would be pretty inconvenient for westerners.

Yeah, that's entirely true. I wish I could get our country to stop buying oil. I live near an (electric, hydro powered) subway station so I don't have to own a car!

Remember that the first victim of war is the truth. Putin deserves scorn for starting an unnecessary fight that will inflict unnecessary suffering on millions, but focusing on individual acts is basically meaningless, because they'll be spun to death on both sides.

I’m not sure that it matters how much a country defending itself spins things. If the invaders don’t want spin, they can go back to their (unbombed) homes.

I'm just saying that focusing on this or that "atrocity" is just a way to lose sight of the big picture, which inevitably favours somebody's agenda. We don't want to hype ourselves into WW3, no matter how hard some Ukrainians might want us to; we want to find a way to save lives and ramp this down somehow.

Great points, I totally agree.

I’m a little worried that Russia will decide to lay waste to Ukraine and not stop until they’ve killed the government. :(

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