YDB – An open-source Distributed SQL Database | Hacker News Reader

YDB – An open-source Distributed SQL Database

ydb.tech

403 pointsdiimdeep318 comments

Interesting, the separate compute and storage tiers is another system going that direction which I think is becoming almost the standard at this point, especially for "cloud-native" things designed to run on k8s. From what I can tell (it isn't very explicit on this point) they are avoiding a distributed consensus at the storage layer and instead relying on a single writer/multiple reader model with the single writer being enforced by assignment of the tablets in the compute tier, with the tablet being responsible for writing to multiple storage nodes for durability? (But I might be wrong)

Assuming yes this approach, I think, is under utilized and is pretty similar to how Apache Pulsar works (my day job),but I am not sure how many distributed RDBMS have tried it out, will be cool to see how it evolves! It isn't clear how they ensure the assignment of a tablet to only a single compute node, but I think that is an easier problem relative to distributed consensus at the storage tier.

Assigning leaders is trivial with something like zookeeper. But in this case it appears that the leader metadata is stored in a table of the database itself, which raises questions of operability if those tablets are unavailable.

YDB doesn't use Zookeeper. The system is built of tablets, every tablet implements distributed consensus algorithm. There are different types of tablets in the system, say SchemeShard is tablet that stores metadata, table schema for instance. DataShard stores table partition data.

Which consensus algorithm? I don't see raft in the codebase

We have consensus protocol over shared log. Some details you can find in a power point presentation at this page https://2019.hydraconf.com/2019/talks/muxomfgqembsb3st7i3ci/

Each tablet gather a quorum of answers from members of so called BlobStorage group. BlobStorage group is a number of so called VDisks (virtual disk), all VDisks run on different nodes (even on different fail domain like racks, AZs). VDisk stores its data on physical device, i.e. PDisk.

From my past experience, Datomic uses the same approach, ie, multiple reader nodes and a single transact node. However, it's much more locked in with AWS, as it uses Dynamo and S3 for backing (maybe others as well?).

Although the doc talks about their own SQL dialect "YQL", it seems to be supporting PG SQL as a compatible layer.

https://github.com/ydb-platform/ydb/tree/main/ydb/library/yq...

It's fascinating to see the PG's prevalence as the de-fact SQL standard.

imo having had to deal with oracle sql, teradata sql, mssql and mysql, postgres as a dialect is such a sane and consistent experience.

Also the ecosystem... The official docs basically solve your problems without much fuss, you don't have to rely on horrible vendor-specific forums.

> The official docs basically solve your problems without much fuss, you don't have to rely on horrible vendor-specific forums.

tdodbc also comes with examples that are so far beyond the scope of a normal persons usecase, they honestly just feel like some greybeard doing the equivalent of a 10 minute long Tony Hawk combo. It's just such a pain in the butt to use, we had to fight teradata all the way till very recently.

While you have a good point, I need to say that traditional databases and distributed databases differ in some points. For instance in YDB you can connect to any node of a database, it means that you need some kind of balancing (server side or client side). I'm not talking about SQL dialect right now, but rather how you connect to database and how you handle connection losses or node overloads. YDB SDKs have client side balancing feature to distribute load evenly across database nodes.

Postgres support is in progress actually.

it would be nice especially for using an IDE like Datagrip to manage and explore the YDB db

It seems they are doing the same thing they did with ClickHouse in the OLAP space but this time in the OLTP space.

Yes, you can think this way. But I need to add, that YDB is also a platform for developing distributed systems that store data. YDB provides a scalable and replicated storage with low latency, a conception of a tablet (that is also used in many systems) that implements distributed consensus. These building blocks are used for persistent queue implementation, block store, KV-tablets. These blocks are hard to develop and they are very good when you need to build something new or optimal for a specific problem. OLTP is an example of such a problem. But yes, we were building YDB to support OLTP workload initially.

Very cool.

Currently seems to support a number of languages: https://ydb.tech/en/docs/reference/ydb-sdk/install

  - Python
  - Go
  - .NET
  - Java
  - PHP

Has some example code here: https://ydb.tech/en/docs/getting_started/sdk

I found a lot of mentions of "Postgresql" in repository: https://github.com/ydb-platform/ydb/search?q=postgresql

Is it build on top of PG ?

I'd almost guess so. Yandex is one of the largest production users of pg.

YDB is developed from ground up. We think about postgres compatibility layer, that's why you see 'postgres' in source code.

it seems not. they have compatibility for querying external PG dbs (YQL query engine), I thing that's the reason for that.

It looks [0] like they use PostgreSQL's parser library under the hood which is cool.

[0] https://github.com/ydb-platform/ydb/tree/main/ydb/library/yq...

here is a table that compares YDB to postgress

https://db-engines.com/en/system/PostgreSQL%3BYandex+Databas...

I think they wanted to have a DB that is better tuned to distributed systems. Still don't know, why they do an SQL like query language called YQL (what would that mean in practical terms? Could a common ORM framework like JPA deal with the YQL query language ?)

As far as I understand, YDB is different enough from regular RDBMS's that they don't provide an ODBC/JDBC/ADO.Net driver.

If that comparison table is right about "no foreign keys," that's a showstopper for me. :(

Back to looking at Couchbase, Yugabase, or Citus for my distributed SQL.

that's very common in distributed databases. even traditional databases, it's very common to not have FKs on large tables, and just handle it in software. indexing billions or more of rows is non-trivial.

didn't notice that. Wow that's pretty basic...

I guess its depends, for many use cases, it can be managed at application level. I've parted ways with FK for a long time since it created more hassles than it solved esp when it comes to sharding and replications.

You can always handle it at the application level.

The trick is that it's better to have the extra guard rails. And all of Couchbase, Yugabase, and Citus support foreign keys even with sharding and replication, so that's not an issue when the DB supports it.

I said Couchbase above but meant CockroachDB. Brain fart, but can't edit the message now. :|

Try looking at cockroachDB, the only thing holding me back on that is the absence of triggers.

It was a brain fart: Meant to say CockroachDB instead of CouchBase. Oops.

So yeah, it's on my short list. :) I've used triggers in one project recently, but that was literally the first time in five years so it's not as much of a must-have for me.

Foreign keys come at a cost, especially in distributed database. It's just a fact. If you can avoid them, it's great.

The table is a bit outdated, we are going to fix it. To be honest, YQL is a very popular language in our company, it is successfully used for more than 7 years, but I agree that outside people want to see more standard SQL dialect.

I would love to see it undergo a Jepsen treatment and a teardown by Andy Pavlo.

They do mention Andy Pavlo in this publication by the way: https://habr.com/ru/company/yandex/blog/660271/ saying that YDB was inspired by his and Michael Stonebraker's NewSQL ideas.

I noticed under the limits section of the documentation that a query result can have no more then 1000 rows. Anything more is truncated. I am surprised to see such a low limit. Maybe I misread something?

That's something similar to DynamoDB and CosmosDB. I believe the workaround is to have paging on client side to fetch all results.

It is correct, there is a limitation for queries executed via ExecuteDataQuery method

To retrieve more than 10 000 rows Scan Queries could be used -- more details in documentation https://ydb.tech/en/docs/concepts/scan_query

What's the core ordering mechanism behind the serializability for arbitrary distributed transactions? This would be something like TrueTime in Spanner or FoundationDB's GRV/commit proxies.

The core tx ordering mechanism is inspired by Calvin deterministic transactions mechanism. We have some differences, like we have a distributed tx coordinator that allow us to scale number of transactions in flight.

I couldn't find anything about the wire protocol being compatible with MySQL or PostgreSQL and it seems to need a specific SDK. This will limit adoption considerably.

Yeah, seems like their SDK are required https://ydb.tech/en/docs/reference/ydb-sdk/

The wire protocol is grpc https://github.com/ydb-platform/ydb-go-sdk/blob/98938c92a9ff...

That's right, wire protocol is grpc. SQL dialect is called YQL. YDB doesn't have MySQL or Postgres compatibility, but we think about it.

Anyone know a difference between Yugabyte and YDB? Both seem to be in the OLTP space.

I actually thought Yugabyte renamed itself YDB. :(

They are totally different systems. Just they have a first letter 'Y'.

Are there any notable differences or benchmarks between YDB vs CockroachDB, Spanner, or Yugabyte?

We have benchmarks in our roadmap, we understand there are required.

Are YDB and Clickhouse developed by the same developers at Yandex? Or, at least, do they have the same performance-oriented mindset?

Asking because I pretty much like Clickhouse.

The teams are approaches are different, but I need to say that internal clients are the same. Yandex is doing great things and it needs great tools.

Very impressive project!

I don't see any plans for support of Windows Server. Do you know of any plans for it? Since it still has about 75% of the on-prem server market

Thanks for pointing this out. I think it's possible, most of the code is cross platform, we used to build YDB on Windows, so it should not be a problem. I suppose we need to improve a layer that works with storage devices to make it effective, for now it should be very naive implementation.

How much of a stretch it is to say that YDB is a competitor to NDB Cluster?

How is it compared to ClickHouse?

ClickHouse is OLAP (analytics), this one is OLTP (transactional)

Hence the focus on multi-AZ. This makes completely sense for transactional.

I believe that something like AZure CosmosDB, AWS Aurora/DynamoDB but open-sourced, which is great.

or cockroachdb and spanner ?

Yes, YDB plays in this category.

I think YDB's architecture is more like TiDB

YDB can work in a single AZ and such setups exist. Most of our users want to handle AZ downtime, so it's a major case.

Seems to stake out some unclaimed territory in between bigtable and vitess, which is cool because I dislike the design of vitess and you can’t download bigtable. Very interested to try this.

A bit off topic but what are all those devs at Yandex doing right now?

From what I have gathered the atmosphere in Yandex is loaded and complex. Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war but a lot of people in the company are conflicted about it.

How does it benefit from the war? I had the impression that they were caught in a pretty bad situation due to their outstanding debts and their suspension from nasdaq so that's very surprising!

Probably cause all of the other cloud providers are limiting operations in Russia

I believe cloud revenue in Yandex structure is quite low and main business in search/ads

It is not about revenue. They are basically state corporation.

Search/ads and ride/delivery services. As you may know Yandex has very advanced SDC system which was used(SDC robots) by Grubhub in Arizona University. They have delivery services in London/Paris and taxi services in Insrael and couple European countries.

As for the Russia I found news(in Russian) that McDonalds was huge part of orders in delivery service. Ads system fully broken because of Google suspension. Without concurents average prices will rise exponentially. Small business will not be able to buy ads and will closed in near feature.

I don't know if it's much of a benefit, but as an outsider, I assume Yandex will essentially pick up the entirety of the Russian market for search, maps, and other tools if US services are blocked or frowned upon?

Search and maps was already theirs. However they got chance to expand in Yandex Phone space (replacing iPhones/Androids) and perhaps in desktop OS space (replacing Chromebooks and maybe Windows).

Advertising, for example, is a significant revenue stream for Yandex and the advertising market has lost a lot of businesses, so it's possible that the entire Russian ad market is now worth less than whatever the Yandex' share was back in February.

They are basically "google of Russia" - main search engine, browser, etc. Waiting till Russia cuts off YouTube and the rest.

They basically adopt western open-source for Russian government (review and such). Their browser is Chromium, machine learning is Tensor Flow, etc. They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks).

> They also work in cybersecurity for Russian government (including conducting attacks)

Is there a source for that?

What. They are absolutely not a "huge beneficiary from the war".

The value of the company has plummeted and the only reason it isn't nearly worthless is because the stock can't be traded anymore.

Yandex is traded on the MOEX. It's priced around 1800 roubles/share, down from a pre-war high of around 6k and pre-COVID levels of around 3k.

Beaten down, but not "nearly worthless", and it is traded. (Not on the NASDAQ though.)

Oh I guess I didn't realize that Russia re-opened their stock exchange. Does anybody actually trade on it?

Also

> 1800 roubles/share

This is nearly worthless

The ban on selling shares by foreigners is probably still in place. So the price might be somewhat overestimated.

Russians trade on it. Maybe they do have an overly rosy view of the company's fortunes, I dunno -- I don't know much about their business, how sensitive it is to the conflict and sanctions.

The stock price movement is easier to reason about, I guess. By that metric they've had a worse year than Salesforce, Netflix, Uber, Google. I'd agree that the conflict isn't good for them, but "worthless" is a bit strong for my palate.

> Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war

This is not true. On the contrary, Yandex's business has suffered greatly. You can see it for yourself here https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/yndx

The company's employees are almost universally opposed to the war, but opinions about exactly how it should be stopped are, indeed, conflicted.

Let me clarify this: Yandex would clearly do better without the war but unlike many other companies it will come out ahead as it can pick up a lot of business through "import substitution".

Benefiting from something doesn't mean you won't suffer losses anyway. At this point which Russian company isn't performing negatively different since the day of the invasion?

some continue working, many relocated to EU (Yandex is based in Netherlands)

others have taken offers from foreign companies

Yandex had like 3 different managers since the beginning of the war, because as it turns out a manager position at Yandex guarantees you a spot on a sanctions list

https://yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2022/...

Maybe this will drive more interest in DAO development.

What's funny is the Russian ultranationalists think tank people have been talking for some time about how they need a sovereign internet like China and how all the pro-west liberals were exerting too much influence on tech policy in the country to do that project. However, because of the war, the pro-west liberals all immigrated so now all the tech people left are patriots and they can really get started on that project.

It's not just internet management that's affected. Currencies, semiconductors, energy — everything is affected in a similar way. Sanctions are a two-way street, they can have unintended long-term consequences (or maybe just consequences that nobody cares to think about) that are not necessarily negative to the target country and not necessarily positive to the imposing country.

Political views might be a factor but emigration is primarily limited by logistical challenges. You are assuming people can just leave everything and everyone behind and just fly into the unknown. Well, many do (and I didn't... yet), but without an EU visa, a new job, and/or a stash of money people often arrange to continue working for Russian IT employers remotely.

Working and building awesome things.

Writing open source databases, apparently.

To those condemning Yandex for the war in Ukraine, please keep in mind that they're a Russian company forced to comply with their country laws, as every other company out there. Until we know for sure that their management is really aligned with their government agenda, whatever they say, or don't say, now has zero credibility because it could be extorted from above. During the 2nd gulf war against Iraq, when the death toll began to rise, the US government forbade the reporting of military personnel coffins returning from the war zone, and news sources complied, including those against the war; this happens everywhere every time. What doesn't happen everywhere and every time is a rogue nation attacking their neighbors and killing civilians using laughable pretexts while the real goal is to take control of a very resourceful and industrialized area (Donbas) to be used to help the already poor Russian economy. The enemy is the Russian government and the rich oligarchy behind it, not Russian people that could be either lied and manipulated by ruthless politicians (been there, done that; does Covid19 ring a bell?) or merely intimidated.

True, but on the other hand, people outside of Russia can decide for themselves how to react to and treat companies from unfriendly countries.

You mention oligarchs - how can it be ruled out that Yandex is directly or indirectly, fully or partly owned, and even directed, by them?

> people outside of Russia can decide for themselves how to react to and treat companies from unfriendly countries.

Since 2019 Yandex and the FSB (Federal Security Bureau of Russia, ex-KGB) had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.[0]

Learn more about Russian war crimes & ongoing invasion of Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukrai...

N.B. I'm Ukrainian living in Ukraine. Here is my statement for HN:[1]

+ Verified Ways to Help Ukraine: https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/02/27/verified-ways-to-help...

+ My Patreon: https://patreon.com/app4soft [ Please, DONATE me just right now ]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex#Security

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395897

How can I help specifically the people of the Donbas?

Now ? I think it's too late, your question sounds bizarre, Russia is indeed helping them. But I guess there are quite a few pro-separatists NGOs out there. Not the ones aligned with Kiev though, so they are leaning pro-Russia.

I also saw some news that Russia send them supplies. I feel they are the most oppressed people in this conflict.

Well the CEO of Yandex resigned in protest and fled to Israel.

I have no dog in this hunt, but I just looked this up, and there's no indication he 'resigned in protest'. Their company news site says that he resigned after being sanctioned by the EU.[0] It appears heavily implied that he was forced to resign as a result of the sanctions – either directly (I'm not familiar with how EU sanctions work) or in that it made his position untenable.

[0] https://yandex.com/company/press_center/press_releases/2022/...

Edit: This report appears to bear out that the sanctions forced him to resign pretty-much-directly, as the company does business in Europe, and the sanctions prevent him from doing business in Europe: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/yandex-deputy-ceo...

I was talking about the CEO Elena Bunina, not deputy CEO - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/yandex-ceo-rel...

Ah, fair enough, I’m sorry - for some reason only the deputy CEO’s firing came up when I searched about the CEO, so I assumed that was what you had meant. My bad. Please disregard my comment!

No support to the fact that she resigned in protest. Please don't spread this whitewashing of Yandex. Many Russian executives stepped down so not to be hit by sanctions. She was already scheduled to be replaced by Khudaverdyan and then invasion started.

"On Sunday, an independent Russian media outlet called The Bell, which focuses on high-tech and startups, posted a screen capture of a message Bunina allegedly posted on an internal company forum. According to the post, whose veracity could not be verified, Bunina wrote: “I will not return: I cannot work in a country that is at war with its neighbors.”" - from Haaretz

yeah, unlike others, they can’t just leave Russia for good

essentially they’re being held hostage, either they comply or the government will “nationalize” them and appoint managers who will

If you have an open mind and a big heart you will start to find that most people have become ideologues, and will find these conditions acceptable. “Well they supported the thing I didn’t on Facebook, death time.”

I’m shocked at the level of callousness some are displaying.

The Russian people and the Russian government are largely in agreement and the oligarchs are out of power. If you can bet on one thing it is that oligarchs like international business and do not like wars and having their yachts seized. That was the Russia of the 90s.

I've got family and friends in Russia, most of them highly educated and with access to international news and all. War support is pretty strong through all social strata. (also backed by independent pollsters like levada, if you want to look at data).

> also backed by independent pollsters like levada

Do they publish how many of respondents refused to talk? I saw information that majority of people refuse to answer questions about war. So it might be that the results are based mostly on opinions of people who agree to talk.

Levada does, yes. They compare response/refusal/coop rates now and before the war and find it to be largely unchanged.

https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/sites/default/files/2022-0...

But the composition might have changed.

Now anti-Putin people are more likely to refuse to participate in a poll out of fear while pro-Putin people are mobilized by mass media and eager to voice their support.

> Do they publish how many of respondents refused to talk? I saw information that majority of people refuse to answer questions about war.

I believe an ordinary person against the war yet unwilling to get jailed for this opinion won't just refuse to talk, they would say they totally support their government although they actually totally hate it and wish it to collapse ASAP and the top officials to die in torment.

Imagine you traveled to China or DPRK and some weird local emerged to ask how do you like the policies of their "great leader"? Would you take the risk of being sincere? I bet most people would say "fantastic!" and hurry away.

Whenever me or people I know were contacted by a person claiming to be a pollster, including Levada, we just hang up.

Nobody risks a chance of being "tested" by FSB or "anti-extremist" operative. The risk is huge from being put on control to personal harrassment by unmarked men spray painting "Z" and "traitor" on your door.

The only people who actually take a chance are those who say "we support special operation" anyway.

“Independent pollsters”, my ass. According to their polls, Navalny support was 0-1% while so many people was arrested during demonstrations in his support in Moscow that thousands were put into immigrant detention center instead of regular jails.

Also, people are scared they will get fired from their government jobs or worse if they voice opposition.

You do realize Moscow is a multimillion city so the 10k demonstration is nothing.

Also urban liberals aren’t representative of the country as a whole

nailed it. That's a bias I'm surprised very few people are able to grasp in the Internets, the same urban liberals ( from any country really ) or higher class tend to favor Western social networks, or be simply pro-Western, thus completely biaising the " I'm [Insert your nationality here] .. blablabla " It's especially rampant on Global South or emerging countries, while the richer people can actually afford slacking on Reddit responding to a mostly Anglophone audience.

You do realize only a fraction of demonstration was arrested, and that for every person who risked getting beaten up and arrested there are many of his friends and relatives who support his views

That's why we have polls and statistics, instead of relying on the "most vocal" and supposedly "most courageous" people that "brave" the streets to protest. I personally don't buy it.

Any political poll conducted on an authoritarian state will not be trustworthy either. It's like going to a black neighborhood on the US and doing a poll on marijuana use. Many people will not admit to illegal activity. This is something an statistics professor will say in any basic introductory course.

Again, there are no independent institutions or media left who could conduct polls and statistics.

All "polls and statistics" you see are basically fabricated by the government, either directly, or by induced fear.

If you're going to make up numbers, why not make up a majority? Be more ambitious.

10k is absolutely something in an authoritarian country when there is no free speech at all or freedom of assembly. And serious repercussions for those seen as against Putin.

10k is the number of people who were ready to be beaten, detained, tortured, have huge fines and later have their families harrassed.

You cannot claim that the only people who are against Putin are those who took part in illegal protests that are punished with hefty fines and arrests. Not everyone is that brave.

While Putin might have high rating in the polls, his party United Russia could win only 50% of seats in Moscow Parliament in 2019 (after most popular independent candidates were not allowed to be in the ballot). Furthermore, members of United Russia nominated as independent candidates to hide their party affiliation. If you believe that only ten thousands people are against the government then how can you explain this?

Another example is that Navalny was denied to register a political party for many years. If he has only 1% or 2% of supporters, as propaganda claims, why deny registering a party? Let him take part in election and get his deserved 1% with a disgrace (by the way, in 2013 Moscow Mayor election he got 27% of votes and obviously that was the last election he was allowed to take part in).

So from the above facts I can conclude that Putin's support is not absolute. There are reasons why he doesn't allow to hold fair elections, why protests are not allowed, why all major mass media are controlled by the government and Internet is censored. You don't need this with true 80% voter support.

I've heard from my parents they would get fired from their non-government jobs too, if anti-war slogans were found on their social media. They also called me repeatedly asking not to participate in rallies, or they would "die of a heart attack". I used to organize those a few years back, and it sort of didn't end well.

Less than 10% of Russians live in Moscow, which is by far Russia's most liberal and Westernized city. The uncomfortable fact which progressives around the world seem to be having trouble with is that on average, most Russians absolutely do support the war and do see my family's home-country, Ukraine, as being a rightful part of Russia.

It probably won't change your mind, but here is a pretty transparent poll on a mix of Russians at a train station in Moscow (to capture some from outside the metropolises). The multi hour poll is a continuous video to show lack of selection bias (parts with no speech are fast forwarded) https://youtu.be/eNwe24PlPTQ

About half the Russians don't support the war. I hope the conflict ends soon.

Lack of selection bias would be selecting according to demography distribution. Looks like this sample has young people way overrepresented, by clikcing through a video. And young people support the war slightly less.

Stop dreaming, support is strong. Washington Post via Levada reports an enormous 80-percent approval rating.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/03/26...

Can you do me/us a favour and explain why they support the war?

Genuinely interested. For the record, I'm vehemently against, so I'd like to understand how on earth another conclusion can be arrived at.

Thanks,

Very often they say things like this: “War is certainly bad and unfair, but we have to go all the way once we have started it”. Or, “the war is unfair, but I can't be against my own country”.

There are no war supporters among people I know though, everyone has their own bubble.

This is the most widespread position. On the hardline side there are variations of "you want gay parades?", "Ukrainians hate Russians and are Nazis", "[blacks, but usually the n-word] are fighting for Ukranians", "NATO is trying to destroy us and we must protect ourselves".

1. Because they think that Ukrainian government are US puppets and their main task is to destabilize Russia and hopefully destroy it some day.

2. Because they think that Ukrainian government relies on nazis and supports nazis. I understand that west does not really care about nazis, but for Russians it's a particularly hard topic, because almost every family in Russia lost one or more men in WW2.

3. They think that Ukrainian population is brain washed to foster hate against Russia and Russians. It's dangerous to have such a country on your border.

4. They don't really think that most Ukrainians are separate nation. They consider them generally Russians which were separated by historical accidents. And they want to unite with them.

Their beliefs based on the facts which are hard to dispute:

1) Right Sector - Ukrainian nationalist neo-nazi political party in Ukrainian parliamentary

2) Azov Detachment - neo-Nazi unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, who participated in wars in Donbass

3) Lots of streets are named after Stepan Bandera, for example Stepan Bandera Avenue in Kyiv, who was a leader of Ukrainian ultranationalists and cooperated with Nazi Germany in 1941 against USSR

1) That's a very easy one to dispute - Right Sector has 0 seats in parliament now. Nationalists were losing support consistently in Ukraine.

2) Azov battalion - indeed had been formed with a few neo-Nazis, when Ukraine was literally is complete disarray. However it's very much an overblown issue. The irony is that the people they were fighting against were Russian neo-Nazis - Rusich battalion is neo-Nazi.

2a) Ukraine actually held accountable another neo-nazi battalion for their war crimes. And Russian propaganda is calling anyone "Azov battalion".

3) Yes, there's a few anti-soviet activists that are branded as Nazis. But to point to Bandera, that spent most of the war in a concentration camp(1941-43?), is a little ignorant. There's a however - these memorials to Bandera have not had any affect on Nazi support in today's Ukraine.

Please keep up with the Kremlin dis-info, even the Russians are now admitting they overcooked the whole "all Azov are Nazi's" lies.

You mentioned that you live in Kyiv, so you probably know about "Stepana Bandery Avenue".

All other information I took from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_Sector "Right Sector's political ideology has been described as right-wing, hardline right-wing nationalist, neo-fascist, or neo-Nazi..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion The Azov Battalion has been described as a far-right militia, with connections to neo-Nazism and members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia, and expressing neo-Nazi views. The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel, a German heraldic charge inspired by historic wolf traps adopted by the Nazi Party and by WW2 German military units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian politician, Nazi collaborator and theorist of the militant wing of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and a leader and ideologist of Ukrainian ultranationalists known for his involvement in terrorist activities.

From your link:

Azov has 900 members. Seven years ago, it was estimated 10 - 20 % are "Nazi's". If true, this is 90 - 180 "Nazi's" in a population of about 40 million. I thank you for pointing this out, and showing everyone that the justification of rape, murder, and execution of Ukrainian women and children is based on Kremlin propaganda.

The current actions of the Russians in Ukraine show and prove that Russia has a much bigger problem with Nazi-esque behaviours.

I think that there could be many reasons why Russians support a special operation.

In glorious Soviet times Russians ruled 16 countries (including Ukraine) that were parts of USSR, had puppet governments in Eastern Europe and friendly governments in Middle Asia and Africa (and by the way Russian Empire was even larger and included territories of modern Poland and Finland). Traitor Gorbachev surrended Eastern Germany and East European countries to America, and traitor Yeltsin (first President of Russia) helped to disintegrate USSR. Many ex-USSR countries were lured into NATO and turned against Russia. Due to Yeltsin following malignant American advices, Russian economy has collapsed, crime rate has raised, and oligarchs have stolen valuable assets, leaving people in poverty.

America also defeated many former Russian allies, like Yugoslavia. Then America refused to stop NATO expansion to the East.

So some people might want a revanche. They want Russia to be strong, victorous and glorious and not a third-world country surrounded by American bases preparing to make a final blow. And if that is not possible, at least they want to stop NATO from expanding to the East.

Also, in Ukraine there are Russian people and some believe that they are treated there unfairly. For example, they are not taught Russian language at school, there is no Russian television and so on. Obviously, Russia must protect them.

Also, propaganda doesn't call it a "war". It is actually illegal to call it a war. It is a "special military operation" for liberation of Ukranian people from Nazis and American influence. As Putin stated, Russia doesn't plan to occupy Ukranian territories.

Russia had no choice and no other means to prevent a big war planned by the West, propaganda says.

So there might be people who believe propaganda. If they have no other sources of information, what should they think?

Also, here are some quotes from a pro-government news agency TASS. Hope they give an idea how propaganda portrays the situation around Ukraine:

> the majority of Russian respondents - 88% - agreed that there are nazist organizations in Ukraine that are a threat to Russia ... 70% of respondents stated that Unkrainian government supports such nazist organizations ... According to the results of the poll, most respondents expect that special military operation will end with a trial of Ukranian nazis for commited crimes. [1]

> Medinsky (presidential aide) : The crimes commited by Ukranian government against Russian people in Ukraine became a challenge for Russia ... Russia has to protect peaceful civilians, its compatriots, who were assaulted, killed, threatened... [2]

> Russian senator Ekaterina Altabaeva: one cannot exclude Russia from world politics, and current special operation for denazification of thе country and protection of Russian-speaking citizens affirms a fateful role that Russia has always played in the world history ... at the end of 18th century not a single gun in Europe was allowed to fire without Russia's permission... [3]

And here is quote from other news agency:

> Military operation in Donbass is not a beginning of a war, but an attempt to prevent a global war, said spokeswoman of Ministry of Foreign Affairs ... also, it is an ending of the war that has been continuing for 8 years. [4]

So if someone wants to understand what an average Russian sees in the news or in social networks or on the Yandex frontpage, try reading sites like TASS or Interfax Russia, or 1tv.

[1] https://tass.ru/obschestvo/14412735

[2] https://tass.ru/politika/14414033

[3] https://tass.ru/politika/14412115

[4] https://www.interfax.ru/russia/824241

Russian imperialism and revanchism - very simple answer.

>War support is pretty strong through all social strata. (also backed by independent pollsters like levada)

Well, when Levada's polls showed overwhelming support for the annexation among Crimeans (and even growing support from Crimean Tatars) everybody was telling that Russian polls are rigged by Russian government and Crimeans were afraid to voice their true opinions. Now you are ready to believe all Russian polls if they help you demonize ordinary Russians.

A poll using so called 'differential privacy' approach gives about 55% support for the war [0] and that's something considering that all tv channels and lots of government-sponsored internet news sites are spewing government propaganda and all independent media are terminated and blocked on the internet. That's about as much as the share of Americans supporting the second Iraq war while having access to the free media. [1]

Personally, I immediately decline to participate in polls despite being approached twice in the last week. Before the war I was happy to tell them that I don't trust Putin, the government, the parliament and everyone else.

Among young or middle-aged educated Russians the support for the war is much lower. Among all my acquaintances only two supported the war when it started.

[0] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2022/04/06/do-russians-te...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...

“The respondents on the platform are not a perfect mirror image of Russian society, of course. They tend to be younger, more urban, and better educated (Table 1).”

So mostly people who did not live the USSR…

>Now you are ready to believe all Russian polls if they help you demonize ordinary Russians.

I think you read intent into my post that isn't there. I don't demonize Russians now, didn't demonize them in 2014 and I very much did believe polls in 2014 because if you had any idea about Russia or Crimea you knew that the annexation would be celebrated and rally support and an intense amount of national pride.

55% and comparisons to Iraq seem about right, but that war had authentic support for many years, had entire schools of foreign policy backing it, and hawks exist along the entire spectrum, from coastal intellectuals to flyover country.

you actually did have the same discussions back then. "It's the deep state and MI-complex running everything, all Americans hate war!". Like, no lol. liberal twenty-something college students did, many others were on board.

Okay, thank you.

It's not that simple. Yandex has a frontpage that is viewed by tens of millions of users daily and is equivalent to TV. And Yandex since long ago has been intentionally filtering news that are shown there, for example, keeping silent about anti-Putin protests etc. So Yandex has been helping to spread propaganda for many years.

Please don't portray Yandex as a victim of strict martial laws (although oficially there is no war, only a "special operation". Calling it a war is an offence).

Since you say it’s “not that simple”, do you truly believe it’s out of the reach of the Russian govt. to punish this company or the members of it for stepping out of line? They’re a large company in tech but how about their resources for personnel security, or what if they’ve been ordered to do so legally?

Let’s go beyond that. Let’s say that Yandex has been spreading propaganda on purpose for multiple years. That’s every other search engine too. Especially Google! If Russia or China wins a conflict, or begins one economically, do the employees of Google deserve to be punished for their work during this time? When you use logic and apply the same logic to the situation in reverse, it’s quite apparent that you have a bias, and that bias isn’t serving you well.

> That’s every other search engine too.

Please leave your "look at the West" whataboutism out of it. In the end it's your problem how you solve it.

We in Russia had our media crushed, filtered by Yandex and most journalists fled the country or were murdered.

Your whataboutism is just trying to diminish our struggle.

Can you address my points instead of trying to assign some sort of ideological slant to them? Not only is it much stronger for your argument but it’s more honest discourse.

Nothing you have said in your post is unique to the geography, at all. If that makes you feel less special, good; there is nothing special about being from one geographical location or another, and nothing special about a murder in Africa vs. a murder in South America.

Murder is murder, you don’t have a worse kind. If there is something to discuss, it’s not from an angle of ideological context-macht.

You just try to downplay struggle of oppressed people in non-West countries for some reason by saying "welp it happens everywhere nothing special". It's so puzzling why Americans do it all the time.

No, I’m not placing any special status on your suffering vs. mine. I’m puzzled why you think I should think you’re special?

I'm puzzled why we should always talk about America, your government, your policies, social media and search engines? People in the third world want oppression off their backs and if you think you don't have democracy, well too bad, we still want it.

Who is forcing you to? Again, you are not special.

Yandex could simply not display any news at their frontpage instead of displaying propaganda. I doubt that there would be any consequences for it. After all, it is a search engine and not a news agency.

You are wrong, unfortunately. https://www-moscowtimes-ru.translate.goog/2022/04/19/vlasti-...

> The enemy is the Russian government and the rich oligarchy behind it, not Russian people

I think we're all getting real tired of this line. This is, what, the 3rd time that place has collapsed in the last 100 years? This is a pattern. And I think it's time to start holding the Russian people accountable for it.

The Eternal Russian?

Similar thinking was part of WW2 propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb2YenLG_rQ (Fun fact: script written by Dr. Seuss.)

Sure, hold accountable people that didn't choose where were they born and obviously weren't alive to witness the pattern you're trying to state right now.

No, Nuremberg is a legit framework for this.

Should we perhaps put similar disclaimer in front of every other link? There is some other big coubtry that starts new war every decade...

And "Russian people that could be either lied and manipulated" is very condescending.

They're all of the above plus brainwashed and with a very common revanchism sentiment.

Basically it's not hard to sell Nazis in Ukraine and "brotherly nation, that needs our help" narrative in Russia. The foundations are there, you just have to tap into them.

I literally was brought up on the idea that Ukraine is just the "border", not a real place. Kyiv is just another Russian city... and Ukrainians are just "polonized Russians". At 14 I was literally going to forums and argued against anyone claiming Ukrainian identity being separate.

Thankfully I grew out of that imperialist crap.

Every organization that's willingly complied with a government committing crimes against humanity(including US government) shares responsibility for those crimes, and longer you do that more responsible you are.

Yandex has created a news aggregation service that worked flawlessly and has been most internet users news site go to in 2011, but after massive protests yandex was "forced" to turn that service into a blatant propaganda machine. And yet Yandex decided to fully support Russian government and keep being russian, focus their attention on different kinds of russian market, and almost didn't try to expand on foreign markets(that would free them from government grip)

We're all subject to propaganda from vested interests --sometimes that propaganda aligns with our values, other times not. But all these services provide propaganda --not in the advertising sense, but in the psychological manipulative sense.

Honestly don't care about "it's all propaganda" rhethoric. Yandex abused its dominant market position and silenced our protests and filtered sources alternative to Kremlin. Yandex News is the largest Russian media by a mile. They've done all the could (including firing editors who were out of line) to make it align with Kremlin.

This same applies to all major tech companies. If you stray form the narrative, they abuse their dominant position to silence opposition.

Now, of course, being a democracy and not being run aby a single party, we don't send people off to "work camps", but people losing their jobs for off-handed comments is not unusual. Oh, you made a joke that was acceptable 10 years ago and now it's not seen as okay? Go repent, sinner!

Also, because there is an active war, in your case, the repercussions are amplified, but we'd likely see similar things if we were in an active war instead and only received opinions would be allowed. Even as it is, if someone inexplicably swallows Russian propaganda and critiques the other side, these people get sent to their online purgatory.

Man, you're comparing American "cancel culture" to actual torture and murder of opposition and journalists, kidnapping, beatings by unmarked men, spray paintings "Z" and "traitor" on the walls, prosecution of relatives?

You are just rich Westerners who love to downplay our struggle just to make yourselves victims.

How did it all start?

I'm not equivocating them --what is happening there is monstrous, as is what's happening to a lesser degree in China and other places, and we are no way there. But the setting of narrative is the same. They are using narrative to achieve different goals. However, the tool is propaganda exerted by undemocratic institutions.

I think we agree it's a dangerous tool that can be leveraged to do bad things. They are being used for bad things in Russia, we're not leveraging this tool for this purpose --but that does not prevent it from being used in the future for a bad purpose.

One of the catalysts were probably 1999 bombings of apartment buildings[1] that were very suspicious (including one where FSB were actually caught planting hexogen by a local militia) and led to dramatic rise of Putin.

Along with crackdown on media it created a narrative where you have a strata that must have their rights removed and be hated by society. First it were "terrorists" and then to a different degree "opposition", "journalists", "LGBT", foreigners and Ukrainians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings

by this standard pretty much all americans are war criminals. get off your high horse

Germany paid reparations for many years, so no, it's an actual pathway that can be implemented by a framework similar to Nuremberg.

Please keep your personal politics off hacker news. Your one sided opinion mirrors the western propaganda position and i can literally turn everywhere to hear it.

I have followed this entire debacle since the US did its coup in Ukraine in 2014 and actually understand things like the broken Minsk agreement and the 14k Donbas civilians that have been slaughtered by Azov battalion since 2014. The assertion that Russia is doing this to capture land to enrich itself is pure fiction. This is the Russian cuban missle crisis. I don’t agree with Russia invading Ukraine but on the other I understand it. The fault on this lies with the US and NATO and their creeping desire to place nukes closer and closer to Russia. The US’s illegal bio weapons labs in the country are also a big problem.

>14k Donbas civilians that have been slaughtered by Azov battalion since 2014.

It seems you didn't read the datas very well, it's ~14k in total in Donbas from both sides, not only civilians. And surely not by Azov.

According to the OSCE, the majority of ceasefire violations occurred against the separatist-controlled areas, which also contain the vast majority of the civilian population.

Citation needed.

You should also clarify what is "ceasefire violation against the separatist-controlled area", because that doesn't sound like OSCE SMM terminology.

If you read SMM reports, they classify location of violations, and type. So if violation is in non government controlled territory, it can be anything from training, outgoing explosions, impact explosions, ...

So you can have a ceasefire violation in NGCA that is a shell impact there, or fire from there, or just training. Most violations are undeteremined.

Of course it's not possible to determine the source with absolute certainty, but most of the violations had been recorded east of the demarcation line, for instance in this report:

https://www.osce.org/files/2022-02-20-21%20Daily%20Report_EN...

The UN has reported that 81.4% of civilian casualties occurred in territory controlled by the Donbas republics:

https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Conflict-...

Is the reasonable conclusion that these deaths resulted from training and outgoing explosions?

Why don't you keep your politics off lol. The vast majority disagrees with you. If you think you're enlightened, good for you.

The fact russian propaganda is not using this comparison with cuban crisis means they're absolutely incompetent. It's so obvious and pushes the reader to go beyond the "goodies and baddies" understanding

RF is not the USSR, and Russian domestic audiences don't need a distant historical analogy to understand what is going on.

For external consumption, I mean

How would Moscow get that messaging to foreign, say American, audiences?

Good question. That's probably the point of the blanket ban on RT

The Russian company forced to comply with Russia part says it all. They are aiding regime, don't see them prioritizing real results over propaganda in serps. And who owns yandex yet another rich guy with ties from government. At the moment tbh everything from Russia is a poison pill including open source software.

>The Russian company forced to comply with Russia part says it all.

How is this less true from US companies forced to comply with the US govt?

> everything from Russia is a poison pill including open source software.

based on what?

> To those condemning Yandex for the war in Ukraine

Think about western oil companies and several wars in the middle east. Those companies actually lobbied for conflict in some cases.

> the US government forbade the reporting of military personnel coffins returning from the war zone, and news sources complied

And there a democracy died. (again)

> What doesn't happen everywhere and every time is a rogue nation attacking their neighbors and killing civilians using laughable pretexts while the real goal is to take control of a very resourceful and industrialized area (Donbas) to be used to help the already poor Russian economy.

This is one side of the story. The Ukrainian side. There is another side to that, in which the pro-Russian part of the Ukrainian population was silenced. Before Maidan 2014 the biggest party was pro-Russian (30%) and after Maidan they were forbidden to exist. The people of the Donbas have been terrorized by Ukrainian military. Ukrainians who have nazi training camps for children (there is a whole documentary about them from The Guardian on YT).

> The enemy is the Russian government and the rich oligarchy behind it

Same with the Iraq wars, Libya, Vietnam, Afganistan and the US. Let call out all oppressors.

But then the Kiev government since 2014 also needs to be called out for the atrocities on the Donbas.

What's the point of this comment? You don't have to like or support the US or deny its atrocities to observe the atrocities currently being committed in Ukraine.

> Ukrainians who have nazi training camps for children (there is a whole documentary about them from The Guardian on YT).

I think it would behoove you to actually link to this. It's hard to tell from context whether you're claiming that the Ukrainian government is engaging in neo-Nazi education (this would be extraordinary) or whether some neo-Nazis in Ukraine are doing so (this would be upsetting, but not particularly surprising for Eastern Europe in general).

The Guardian video is here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBXmbkwiSw

The paramilitary group which organized the camp was officially integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. One of its members recently joined Zelensky in addressing the Greek parliament: https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/07/greek-azov-fighter-zele...

Openly Ukrainian nazi youth training camp video, by the Guardian (western MSM), in 2017, easy to find on YT. And organizer also has ties to Kiev gov't. Story unfolding... But down voted :)

It's a bit of both really, the far-right extremists helped the Maidan regime change, so the paramilitary made themselves at home inside the governement and in many areas in this country ( remember, that's a large country, divided and diverse ). Now ? I really don't know, but if you happen to see any report before February 2022 you could have your questions answered easily. Without them, the revolution wouldn't be successful. Reports dating back to 2014-2015 clearly show children being educated in a strange manner, when it was kind of allowed to say the complicated truth inside this nation.

> What's the point of this comment?

The west is so quick to condemn Russia, where the west has been warring all over the place with less good reasons to invaded that Russia. Keep in mind that: there are many Russians is Ukra, Russians were marginalized in Ukra especially since 2014, Russia is next to Ukra (unlike the middle east to say the US) so they have reasons to protect their safety, Ukra got Crimea during USSR times from Russia, and Putin made clear demands of what is needed for the war to be over (not part of any block, accept Crimea is Russia, Donbas gains autonomy).

This is a much more understandable invasion to me than Iraq 1+2, Libya, Syria, Afganistan and Vietnam.

> I think it would behoove you to actually link to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBXmbkwiSw

> It's hard to tell from context whether you're claiming that the Ukrainian government is engaging in neo-Nazi education (this would be extraordinary) or whether some neo-Nazis in Ukraine are doing so (this would be upsetting, but not particularly surprising for Eastern Europe in general).

The second. But no crackdown from the central gov't (while it breaks international law) and you see links with the openly nazi Azov battalion everywhere in the training camp.

Correction - what is happening is not an "invasion", it's war. War, plain and simple.

The first step to fixing a problem is naming it. And Russians can't even do that.

Are you calling Ukraine Ukra? I cant tell if you are trying to save bandwidth or sound demeaning to the country and its people.

These so-called safety reasons are Russian propaganda lies as there was 0 reasons for a nuclear-armed Russia to be afraid of Ukrainian military attacking its territories.

Remember, Ukrainian politics have a lifespan of 4 years, so they have to fight to stay in the office. For Russian, their czar is forever, so his illusions of grandeur are lifelong.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine is more understandable than "Iraq 1", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War , which was Iraq invading Kuwait and the US freeing Kuwait from Iraqi invasion, scud missiles, and tanks?

Of course that's more "understandable" to you, because the rest of your history is equally misinformed and backwards.

This is an amazing twisting of facts and rewriting of history. Propaganda at its best.

well that settles it then. thanks for clearing that up

>This is an amazing twisting of facts and rewriting of history.

That basically sums up Russia in 2022. Pure unadulterated fascism borne out of delusions of grandeur and rewriting of history, its own and that of its neighbours.

So tired of this Kremlin propaganda everywhere and Western people actually believing it. We were force fed this bullshit everyday on Russian TV and Yandex News. Please resist it while we in Russia couldn't.

compelling counter-argument

> after Maidan they were forbidden to exist.

not back then, but they banned them in March during the war.

> Kiev government since 2014 also needs to be called out for the atrocities on the Donbas

1. Donbas separatists (backed by Russia + actual Russian forces) started the conflict. 2. Why didn't Russia just clear out Donbas/Luhansk republics instead of the whole of Ukraine?

I hope you live in Russia, it's perfect for you.

> 1. Donbas separatists (backed by Russia + actual Russian forces) started the conflict.

Before or after the pro-Russian political party was forbidden? Let's assume people in Donbas voted that a lot, would seperatism be such a weird thing for them?

2. Why didn't Russia just clear out Donbas/Luhansk republics instead of the whole of Ukraine?

I dont know the Russian military's strategy decisions. But I think we can all agree the focus of this war is on the Donbas. The approach to Kiev seems to have been a diversion. Some expect a major push to Kiev in the coming weeks; some expect the peace deal (the Russian demands been pretty clear from the start) to be signed right before Kiev gets taken.

Again pro Russian party was forbidden when Russia attacked.

Do you think having a potential traitor party during war is good?

Where there many pro German parties during WW2 in countries that it attacked?

Please tell me how was Czeczen separatists treated in Russia? If Russia is so for separations of other nations let their own republics do the same.

> Do you think having a potential traitor party during war is good?

If the biggest party before Maidan (30%) is forbidden as a "traitor party", can it be really called as such? Or was Ukraine before Maidan openly pro-Russian, and was the Kiev regime the traitors?

> Please tell me how was Czeczen separatists treated in Russia?

I cannot agree more. Not always separatists are allowed to separate. Even Spain had a episode of that recently.

Though, the pro-Russian crowd in Ukraine feels somewhat Russian, and Russia is sympathetic to them. If the Czeczens were entically chinese, their faith may also've been different.

I just checked and Party of Regions was never forbidden, many people just left it and joined other parties (e.g. party of the 2014 elected president Poroszenko)

BTW. If your president runs to another country and that country comes back with and army, what do you do? Oh, and before that that same president begs that other country to invade and bring peace. (and prime minister also fleds to that invading country, just before the invasion). Even Party of Regions removed Yanukovych from his members.

For westerners: in Ukraine one could have a special "note" that allowed voting in any "voting office" - this should be used only in special cases when you are not sure where you will be during the voting (normally you are assigned to vote in your home region). As one might guess it was used to do some shenanigans, like a bunch of miners from eastern parts where being driven to many votes with those special notes. No one checked if given person voted once, or ten times. And there were many buses with such people.

And Russia really cares about Russophiles, they made two regions separate from Georgia in 2008, and they did the same in Ukraine in 2014. Coincidentally it was at the time both of those countries started taking a Western turn (speaking about EU and NATO membership).

You can shove your opinion and discussion up your ass. I hope my country goes to war if need be (we were notified back in March before it became apparent Ukraine is more than capable of holding the fascists off lol). Death is preferable to being Russia's bitch. Fuck that country and everything it stands for.

That's russian propaganda.

-> Russian - speaking Ukrainians want to join RF

-> Symmetry in action between Ukraine and Russia (we do bad things, but they do them too)

-> Ukrainians are nazis

These are all theses fabricated by Kremlin.

Having any more nuanced position regarding world affairs than "our guys: good. their guys: bad" is bad guy propaganda.

>>> Ukrainians are nazis

>>These are all theses fabricated by Kremlin.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary-...

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms...

https://geohistory.today/azov-movement-ukraine/

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/24/ukraine-azov... Here's a choice quote from this article: “Ukraine should be for Ukrainians,” Lemko said. “We don’t need the European idea of multicultural extremism here. Ukraine must protect its cultural and ethnic integrity.”

I'm sure Mr Lemko from Canada was actually a double agent planted by Putin... /sarc

I am fully aware of ukrainian nationalists. During II world war and after Ukrainian Insurgent Army has committed genocide on polish civilians killing 50 - 60 thousand.

But you need to distinguish. If refugees are knocking to my door I won't say: "You are Nazis". If Ukraine is defending against invasion, I will advocate for sending weapons. And so on.

>>>But you need to distinguish. If refugees are knocking to my door I won't say: "You are Nazis". If Ukraine is defending against invasion, I will advocate for sending weapons. And so on.

Sure, but there is a big gulf between "Ukrainian Nazis are Kremlin misinformation" and "We recognize some of your people are morally questionable but still desire to arm/equip you in the justified defense of your homeland."

We used to be much more honest with ourselves when we were getting in bed with useful bastards (Werner von Braun running our space program and Eric von Manstein "advising" the post-war Bundeswehr are two of my favorites). Messaging has devolved into a very simplistic good/bad binary model when reality is much more grey.

The funny and somewhat ironic thing is that neo-Nazis (like RNE or Barkashov's movement or Dugin) are thriving in Russia if they collaborate with Kremlin.

They also enjoy widespread financial support by companies associated with Kremlin all over the world especially if they are viable candidates on European elections.

This is the main reason to not take Putin's "Nazi" label seriously. If they support him they are "patriots". If they don't they are Nazi.

>>>This is the main reason to not take Putin's "Nazi" label seriously. If they support him they are "patriots". If they don't they are Nazi.

Very true. The leader of Wagner, Russia's infamous private military contractor, has SS lightning bolts tatooed on his neck. If it weren't for innocent civilians dying, it would easily be a war where we shouldn't care which variety of asshole loses.

https://www.respublica.lt/signs-of-neo-nazi-ideology-amongst...

I dont think anyone is denying that there were fringe nationalist groups in Ukraine, just like nobody can deny that there are fringe nationalist groups in US(Remember "Jews wont replace us" chanting blokes in 2020) or fringe nationalist groups in Russia(See the video of Rogozin, who leads Russia's space agency, participating in Moscow' nationalist meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUItOUKQ-zc ).

A fringe group that has 0 political power does not make "Ukrainian are nazis" any more true than when its spewed by Russian propaganda machine

>>>A fringe group that has 0 political power does not make "Ukrainian are nazis" any more true

Read Bellingcat's coverage of the problem from 2019: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/11/11/ukr...

Azov members have close access to major Ukrainian politicians, including Arsen Avakov, the (now-former) Interior Minister.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/rise-of-azov/

I agree that inviting representatives of right-wing groups to a meeting with Zelensky on veterans affairs is a political mistake.

That does not negate the fact that these right-wing organizations, including "Right Sector" had negligible popular support and won exactly 0 seats in Verhovna Rada.

Again a very poor reason to invade a neighboring country

Azov is not what you think it is.

It is like complaining that a general has access to any Ministry.

None of these actually address the statements above.

You're trying to derail this, by providing links that aren't in direct contradiction to the statements.

Absolutely incredible whataboutism, your restatement of Russian propaganda needs some work though, you should focus more on Azov maybe.

>There is another side to that, in which the pro-Russian part of the Ukrainian population was silenced.

Fiction. Silenced how? They are in parliament, and until recently Russia-sponsored TV propaganda outlets were on the air throughtout Ukraine.

>Before Maidan 2014 the biggest party was pro-Russian (30%) and after Maidan they were forbidden to exist.

More fiction. Party of Regions existed after Yanukovych fled and merged into another pro-Russia outfit in 2016.

>The people of the Donbas have been terrorized by Ukrainian military.

16 civilians died in Donbas in 2021, that's on both sides. 25 died in 2020. It was a very low-scale war and most people were living in peace.

But goodie goodie, Russia has come to liberate them, and is now murdering thousands with indiscriminate bombings, to say nothing of the mass executions, rapes and so on.

>Ukrainians who have nazi training camps for children (there is a whole documentary about them from The Guardian on YT).

This happens everywhere. I personally know someone in Russia who sent their kids to very sketchy pan-Slavic 'rodnover' far-right camps.

>>>>16 civilians died in Donbas in 2021, that's on both sides. 25 died in 2020. It was a very low-scale war and most people were living in peace.

And how many were bombed by their own government 2014-2019? I get the impression they are still pissed about that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ukraine-airstrike-kills-11-dem...

Everyone with an interest in this conflict should be searching on DuckDuckGo with their date range set to 2021 at the latest. Western persectives on Zelensky (-2021), perspectives on the conflict in the east (2014-2016), or the really good stuff is Western experts warning about the risks of NATO expansion (set your date range 2000-2010).

The article itself mentions that both sides blame each other without taking accountability. The story of Donetsk and Luhansk is littered with influence by FSB operatives as well pro-Russian ukrainian politics back in 2014.

The statement above with civilian deaths being in low double digits in 2021 is correct as the conflict has reached the status quo which had a good chance of being resolved politically.

Whatever our stance on the reason behind the conflict in Eastern Ukraine is, we seem to agree that it was pretty bad in 2014-2019 and it has been relatively low-key in 2019(Zelenskiy got elected) and on. Any civilian deaths are terrible, but to put things in perspective: more people Died in car accidents in DNR/LNR then due to the conflict.

So any reasoning of Russia attacking Ukraine, flattening cities, destroying civilian buildings as being caused by a conflict in DNR/LNR is pure Russian propaganda.

"more people Died in car accidents in DNR/LNR then due to the conflict."

Traffic related deaths should not be underestimated, they are more common than people think. In fact, so far more civilians have died in car accidents in Ukraine (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...) than in the conflict (using statistics by the UN https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1115042).

Although I personally don't understand the point of this argument. If "only" 40 people die then it's somehow ok but if 1000 die then military action is suddenly justifiable?

>I get the impression they are still pissed about that.

Well, that makes not a lick of sense. A war took place 8 years ago, mostly died down, people lived in relative peace, and now Russia starts a war of aggression on a whole new scale, rains death from the air, unleashes its troops to commit mass murder, takes thousands of civilian lives because "they are still pissed about that"?

And pissed about what? Its own actions? Russia instigated a war in 2014 by creating a proxy army out of thin air (and funding, arming and manning it with its own soldiers), then just straight up invaded in August of 2014 with its own regular forces. They routinely bombed civilian areas without any regard for the civilians still in them, used civilians as human shields, positioned MRLS launchers inside apartment blocks, etc.

I don't know what happened in the airstrike you brought up, except to say that by July 2014 Ukrainian air force wasn't used much due to Russians bringing in their SAM systems, such as the Buk that shot down MH-17 just two days after this article. Especially in 2014, Ukrainian army was a rag-tag outfit using Soviet-era tactics, and they did occasionally hit civilian areas in situations when a more modern army would be able to avoid it. There were instances where you can say they tactics did not sufficiently account for civilians. There were many more instances where Russia proxies used civilians as shields with success, however, and the Ukrainian military showed restraint.

Either way, at the end of the day the blame for wars of aggression has to lie with the aggressor, not the victim that's defending itself. This was true in 2014, and it's sure as fuck true in 2022.

Not even gonna get into that whole "NATO expansion" clusterfuck. If you think a fascist dictatorship should have veto powers over which defensive alliances its democratic neighbours voluntarily choose to join, there's not much there left to discuss.

> Not even gonna get into that whole "NATO expansion" clusterfuck. If you think a fascist dictatorship should have veto powers over which defensive alliances its democratic neighbours voluntarily choose to join, there's not much there left to discuss.

Russia now a "fascist dictatorship"? Hmm...

What about a western democracy (US) that claims "veto powers over which defensive alliances its" neighour (Cuba) has? But than it is different, right, when it is Nato, and it has scared it's population shitless for "the communists". Then it is allowed to invade... Yeah right.

To me Russia invading Ukraine is like US invading Cuba: you could see it coming from miles ahead. The big bad agressor's "security needs".

While I disagree with the trade blockade, I don't think there's any equivalence here. We don't know what Cuba wants any more than we know what Belarus or North Korea wants. We can approximately equate the country with the people in terms of 'wants' and actions only if the country is actually ran by its people, democratically. Cuba is controlled by a totalitarian regime, and its people cannot decide on which defensive alliances to join because the Cuban government doesn't ask them.

>To me Russia invading Ukraine is like US invading Cuba: you could see it coming from miles ahead. The big bad agressor's "security needs".

Except the US did not invade Cuba, did not bomb thousands of civilians into ashes, did not murder every male citizen of a small town before retreating from it, etc.

Hey, come to think of it, you know who did that last part in Cuba? The Cuban dictatorship. Thousands of political prisoners have been murdered since 1959. I wonder if anyone polled them on which defensive alliance Cuba ought to join before putting a bullet into their head.

You can't say "fiction" to anything just because you don't like it. There is always a another side, always, but you just say "fiction".

I really liked your comment:

>This happens everywhere. I personally know someone in Russia who sent their kids to very sketchy pan-Slavic 'rodnover' far-right camps.

I'm looking forward to you showing where in Russia children were taught to kill Russians and yell "Москаляку на гиляку" (hang up the Russians)

It is not so much the presence of nationalists that is important (as you said "This happens everywhere"), but the attitude of the country towards them (Nazis Germany doesn't happen everywhere).

> You can't say "fiction" to anything just because you don't like it.

No. It's fiction, because it's not true and completely fabricated. I mean... for years I was told by Russian TV that I am persecuted and discriminated in Lithuania - I'm ethnically Russian from Lithuania. Which is complete BS. They told me that Lithuanians were Nazi collaborators and all resistance to Soviet occupation was just Nazis. Which is a blatant lie.

So when I say that nothing that Russian propaganda says is true - I actually mean that not a single word is to be een remotely trusted.

> I'm looking forward to you showing where in Russia children were taught to kill Russians and yell "Москаляку на гиляку" (hang up the Russians)

In Lithuania we had a whole scandal, of a Russian school sending kids to a summer camp in Russia. Where they were trained to use guns and taught that Soviet Union was great and Lithuanians are Nazis.

Also - Москаляку на гиляку - doesn't translate "hang", it's Send the Russian(singular) to the guillotine.

>It is not so much the presence of nationalists that is important (as you said "This happens everywhere"), but the attitude of the country towards them (Nazis Germany doesn't happen everywhere).

The attitude in Ukraine towards Nazism is bad. I mean... Nationalists didn't even get 2% in the last elections, not to mention complete lack of Nazis.

>You can't say "fiction" to anything just because you don't like it. There is always a another side, always, but you just say "fiction".

That is, of course, incorrect, but very telling. Willing victims of Russian propaganda use this line all the time. In fact, very often there is no other side, because facts exist.

>I'm looking forward to you showing where in Russia children were taught to kill Russians and yell "Москаляку на гиляку" (hang up the Russians)

You're (pretend-) surprised that a country suffering from an invasion teaches its children to hate and wish to harm the invaders? If you think that's bad, I got news for you, champ. It is now officially quite legal to put an invading moskalyaka onto that tree branch right now, or take them out in more modern ways. Ukrainians are allowed to fight against the occupying force using any means necessary, and they do. Not only is there nothing wrong with killing an invader who attacks your home and murders your neighbours, it is a noble and just thing to do.

>It is not so much the presence of nationalists that is important (as you said "This happens everywhere"), but the attitude of the country towards them (Nazis Germany doesn't happen everywhere).

Nazi Germany and Zigist Russia indeed doesn't happen everywhere, only in places where the ruling despot becomes a deluded fascist, drunk on his own power and trying to pass his own ignorant mis-understanding of history as reality.

If you are not surprised that "a country teaches its children to hate and wish to harm the invaders" years before the invasion then don't be surprised when the invasion actually happens.

I can't imagine the level of your ignorance about how receptive children are and what monsters will ultimately grow as a result of such training.

what about "Москаляку на гиляку", i'm sorry, but I'm very far from a clear understanding of this kind of statements, while you seem to demonstrate a high level of awareness.

The invasion started in 2014, so not sure what you mean by 'years before the invasion'. And I'm not surprised in the slightest that the invasion actually happened. I have relatives in Russia and I understand how widespread fascism is there among the common people. Putin is quite moderate by comparison.

>I can't imagine the level of your ignorance about how receptive children are and what monsters will ultimately grow as a result of such training.

These children will grow up as people who understand that being willing to kill invaders and aggressors is a prerequisite for freedom.

>what about "Москаляку на гиляку", i'm sorry, but I'm very far from a clear understanding of this kind of statements, while you seem to demonstrate a high level of awareness.

It's an archaic phrase that simply means invaders from Russia ought to be strung up. No one really uses it these days, a much more relevant 21st century equivalent is "пали русню в танчиках". They're rather heavy and burn well, so why strain your back, you know?

Помню как 24 февраля я был в шоке от того, что началась бессмысленная и кровопролитная спецоперация. Зачем? Для чего? Помню, как подписывался под призывами прекратить вторжение, вписался во все петиции, которые нашёл, хотел было на митинги выходить, не спал ночами и смотрел новости. Потом внутри начало всё устаканиваться, в конце концов, я не первый год наблюдал за тем, что происходило на Донбассе.

Теперь же благодаря таким, как ты, я отлично понимаю, что всё сделано правильно, и дальше откладывать было просто нельзя. С вами мир построишь, с мыслями о том, как вы будете москалей вешать и сжигать в танках, ага. Соседей, как ты пишешь, на деревьях вешать, это что в голове надо иметь?

Было, было уже такое, великая германия, арии, очистить землю! Гнали до Берлина.

Your supposed month-long personal journey from being anti-war toward being an enthusiastic supporter of Russian fascism and war crimes is about as believable (and as boring) as your demented fuhrer's history lessons.

It shouldn't have to be spelled out, but of course the best way to ensure "neighbours" don't get burnt inside tanks or strung up on Ukrainian trees is for them to stay the fuck away from Ukrainian trees, and to keep their tanks well clear of Ukraine.

Ah good old "but they lynch African Americans in USA" distraction. Russian TV loves it.

BTW today is day 55 of the war in Ukraine. 55 days it's not about "sides of the story" it is about Russians bombing and killing Ukrainians. And then denying that.

Stop the war. Then we can talk.

Point by point. 1. The same politicians who were in party of regions (Yanukovich party) quickly reorganized into new political parties. So there were “pro-Russian” political parties in Ukrainian politics, who participated in parliament elections in 2014 and in 2019, and in presidential elections in 2014 and 2019. So the point that people in Eastern Ukraine were marginalized politically is a lie.

2. Ukrainian forces in 2014-2015 attacked armed forces of separatists and Russian troops, civilians never were the target. More than a million people left separatist republics for Ukraine, why would they do that if they were terrorized?

3. There are training camps for youth in Ukraine, which are funded by political organizations. They are not “Nazi”, similar things exist in Russia as well - like Yunarmiya for example.

The current situation sucks for Yandex, but we're in a war of economic attrition with Russia.

Full stop.

>to be used to help the already poor Russian economy.

I really would like a citation here.

You want a citation that the Russian economy is poor?

Oh yes please, I mean if it was that obvious I guess you would tell me any metric to push your assessment.

Have at it

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+the+Russian+economy+poor

No I asked a metric or something substancial to back up this claim, here is another one since I can smell British humour here : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+the+earth+flat

I just gave you a full internet worth of sources that says the Russian economy is in the dumps. Find me one that says everything is A-OK. Preferably not from Kremlin News Bureau.

You gave me a duckduckgo link, thinking I was your Old Uncle. Thanks Bob, I know how to search the web. That's problematic for you because there is still no metric you can provide to back up your claim, I don't know it should be trivial to find one no ?

The burden of the proof is on yours, I've never ever stated the Russian economy was "A-OK". I'm equally surprised by your first comment, and the fact you pull this out of nowhere with that much of a confidence.

Yikes. Well, this is pointless.

You know what, I'm so sad, you just came up with a wild claim and you can't prove it with simple words, I wasn't asking you for the moon.

It's actually okay. The sanctions are a joke overhyped by Joe Biden. USD to RUB exchange value is around 81 which is almost pre-war levels. Most banks still use SWIFT just fine. Russians sign up for Visa and MasterCard in Kazakhstan via remote interviews. Kazakhstan also provided backdoor for lots of imports. Retail prices are just a bit higher than before. Restaurants are fully booked in Moscow.

No offense at all, and I know the expectations in Russia were already super low to begin with, but saying the sanctions are a joke because Russia can route it's imports through a 3rd world neighbor does not exactly scream everything is "actually OK". The situation is extremely bad.

It's a notch worse but it has very little noticeable effect on ordinary Russians' lives.

Even middle class people safely return from abroad (Istanbul, Dubai, Yerevan) where they expected to stay while economy crashed but it didn't.

Groceries cost pretty much the same, restaurants work, people don't get fired, you can even fly on a vacation to Turkey.

This is very sad because it seems that nobody will learn a lesson and Russians will watch war they allowed to happen like a thrilling TV show where they are the good guys.

Who has it worse? The country with a functioning workaround for the sanctions or the country whose entire economy is premised upon the continued viability of those sanctions?

Are you suggesting that USA's "entire economy" is premised upon whether the sanctions on Russia work or not? Russia effectively sold itself to China for.. what? The Donbas region? C'mon. This was all a massive miscalculation and the Russian people are going to be paying for it for _generations_.

Yes - the USA's "entire economy" is premised upon the dollar's reserve currency status, which depends on countries needing dollars to trade in vital commodities like oil (which Russia has). The US' seizure of the dollar reserves of Russia, Afghanistan, and others have deeply compromised that status quo. The SWIFT sanctions have also created the conditions for new interbank transfer systems to develop outside of US control which don't depend on the dollar.

Enjoy it while you can, these things hit much harder after a while. Nobody will trust Russia for at least 2 generations, I hope you are ready for the wild ride.

We are not enjoying because lots of people in Russia want the downfall of Putin and his clique. The problem is West is too cowardly. They announced "crippling sanctions" that looked sweet on paper but barely made a dent in the economy and are full of loopholes.

How do you explain the Ruble rebounding to pre-war levels?

Edit: Can’t reply, but every country takes steps to manage its currency’s value. That’s the status quo.

The Rouble is being artificially propped up by the Russian Central Bank. This has been a news story for several weeks.

I hope he just read the same news that stated the Russian economy was more than capable just like Germany. That it had a lot of industries, natural resources, and above all relatively autonomous and so on ... and per Bloomberg own report, a sanction Fortress. I just hope he didn't conveniently skip that.

>What doesn't happen everywhere and every time is a rogue nation attacking their neighbors and killing civilians using laughable pretexts while the real goal is to take control of a very resourceful and industrialized area

I can think of one very powerful country doing exactly that for over half a century. Hope we're all collectively raging against anything coming from that country.

My comment does not imply in pro russianism in any way. They are the aggressors. I hate that I have to write this disclaimer.

The reason you have to write that disclaimer is that you're by definition being a "useful idiot" by repeating the favorite argument of the Russian regime: whataboutism/tu quoque. What the US has done in the past or is doing right now is completely irrelevant when judging Russia's actions in Ukraine.

That's simple whataboutism. What's your point?

Respectfully disagree. Whataboutism is when you try to relativize something by citing an equally bad example from some other side. I'm explicitly not relativizing anything. A whataboutist comment would be "the US does the same [so what Russia is doing is fine", which is the opposite of what I implied: "the US does the same [equally bad thing, we should condemn both]".

The war is an unjustified aggression. It is great that Ukraine has been getting international sympathy and support. It would be great if we all had a similar response in the many other comparable cases that unfortunately happened in the past.

It's an equal deflection from the main point that adds very little to the discussion. You could have equally said "The war is an unjustified aggression BUT the USA has been doing that for a long time too so..." and the message would have been the same. You just phrased it differently.

I feel like nobody can read the actual definition of this term, and how and why it is used in a conversation.

Sure you can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/whataboutism-o...

Good thing all these people were condemning Google when US was invading here, there and elsewhere.

Please take your whataboutism elsewhere.

Pointing hypocrisy in that particular case.

this is not whataboutism, it's actually guilty-by-associationism displayed on both sides. Should we blame children whose elderly parents support the war for taking care of their parents, instead of disowning them? Should we blame employees of Google for allowing employees of Lockheed Martin use Google maps during the Syria invasion? Should we blame employees of Yandex for paying taxes and working for a company which did not cease operations in Russia?

Where do you draw the line of association?

Yandex is owned by one of Putin's pocket oligarchs and all of the management has been replaced by staunch loyalists, long time ago.

This isn't "guilt by association". Yandex is part of the Russian government structure.

I'm sorry that you don't know that.

Would you mind saying what oligarch owns the company? It is a publically traded company. https://ir.yandex/shareholder-structure

Arkady Volozh is a rare case of a (very) rich man in Russia who actually created his wealth by creating a company from scratch. None of the upper management are loyalists which is exhibited by amount of people who left the company since the start of the war, including from top ranks.

Quite a few in top management stay. Not because it's all rosy, but because they have obligations for supporting people working for them and people and business who rely on them. This won't stop the war but will make more lives miserable.

You might say, that supporting Russian people and Russian companies is unethical. As a Russian I disagree. I totally condemn what Russian government is doing but I don't think you understand how Russian society is structured currently if you think that killing non-government business will change anything in governments course. (This saddens me a lot)

Disclaimer: I worked at Yandex till 2018 when I moved to another country. And I still maintain contact with a lot of wonderful people working there.

> Arkady Volozh is a rare case of a (very) rich man in Russia who actually created his wealth by creating a company from scratch

Which excludes him from being a pocket oligarch... how exactly?

I don't know if Arkady is a good or bad person, but I know that he's one of the people dependent on the Putin's government to protect them.

Supporting Russian residents, that are "apolitical" has forever been a bad thing. As someone whose entire family is from Russia and most are still there - it would be weird of me to say that supporting Russia is unethical.

Condemning Yandex, however, is completely ethical... it also has nothing to do with people still working there... though now I will gladly condemn anyone still working for Yandex.

And I stand by my words - management is loyalists. Loyalists can stop being loyalists. They can be pro-Putin pre Feb 24, and I have a few of those in my own family.

> I know that he's one of the people dependent on the Putin's government to protect them.

Would you give examples of this protection? Or the source of your knowledge.

There is a clear definition of "oligarch" in Russia (which does not match the actual meaning of the word in English. See wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarchs). In no way Volozh matches it.

> Condemning Yandex, however, is completely ethical... it also has nothing to do with people still working there... though now I will gladly condemn anyone still working for Yandex.

I see your point. And I disagree with it. I don't think I will be able to convince you that you are wrong in this thread though. But at least I can point out where your facts (about Volozh) are wrong.

idiots use the word whataboutism to deflect their hypocrisy. it's way easier to deflect someone's argument saying things like whataboutism, concern troll or whatever else than it is to address their legitimate argument.

You maybe should check who owns Yandex, before you bring up this "whatabout"

who, Volozh? what are you implying?

I mean honestly no one really bought it up before your comment. No one was condemning anything, there was a single question revolving around the current status of yandex but nothing condemning it (A part from dead comments I guess). Most of the discussion was technical before this entire comment thread

It's been more than a month since the war started, it's become very clear that the war is popular in Russia and pretending that XYZ company could maybe be the sole exception isn't worth considering. Also, the comparison between the Russian government arresting people for holding up blank pieces of paper and the US government asking media to not broadcast coffins is laughable.

Any time you blame people for their government, you're implying that you are okay with the same treatment from others. Are you, if you're an American, down with being blamed for the war in Iraq over nonexistent WMDs, or the coups we have instigated around the world? (Substitute your country's wrongdoings as needed.) If so, keep doing what you're doing.

Americans doing plenty of real things to keep their government in check. There is no excuse.

Can you list some?

Can you list some by Russians?

As an answer to the question of why Americans are better than Russians, saying that neither Russians nor Americans are equally bad at restraining their country's aggression isn't good.

You could get closer to an answer by counting the corpses.

Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria. Add to that inhuman treatment of civilians, unhinged army, mass rapes as terror means, bombings, chemical attacks, kidnappings, tortures. Putin wins it easily and we in Russia know this well. And he just started.

Not having one dictator for 20 years, for starters?

I mean... Not really.

The military is widely unquestionably supported in US. Public is not even remotely trying to keep the covert and intelligence agencies in check... Remember how ATF sold AK47 to Mexican cartels?

The issue is willful ignorance on behalf of many americans. To the point that most aren't even aware that US intelligence is spying on allied leaders(Merkel's phone was tapped by US)

It always comes back to whataboutism with you people, doesn't it? As if the previous actions of western countries justifies the top down strategy of ethnic cleansing, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, the torture, rape, and murder of civilians that Russian government is pursuing RIGHT NOW and has pursued in every conflict it's been involved in. This is a deliberate strategy that no western nation uses, there is no comparison to be drawn, and trying to pretend otherwise is defending the indefensible.

Western whataboutism is a really underexplored phenomenon.

Why do they always do diminish struggle of people and nations outside of West?

It's like they're always saying "nah everybody hurts, you're not going through anything special, let's talk about us instead".

Yeah I've never seen whataboutism about whataboutism, you truly are plumbing new depths of war crime denial.

I do not see war crime denial in their post. More like war crime acknowledgement. I think that it is you who is undermining the struggles of people attacked by US interests.

It's not whataboutism; it's "With what measure thou metest, it shall be measured unto thee again." It's the Golden Rule, a basic moral tenet.

> with you people...

Oh?

Its just that we would like for those with very little knowledge of their own governments war crimes to pipe down a little with the...

targeting of civilian infrastructure, the torture, rape, and murder of civilians that Russian government is pursuing RIGHT NOW and has pursued... Narrative.

It comes across as dishonest at best.

Who do you mean by western nations? Which western nation has been at war in the last 50 years? I have a premonition that whatever "western nation" you are talking about is probably not part of the ICC because they do not want to be charged with war crimes...just a wild guess.

So please save your feigned indignation.

Western countries don’t do these things directly (with some notable exceptions like Abu Ghraib). But they will arm, fund, and support proxies knowing they will commit atrocities. Is Saudi Arabia’s brutal US-funded war in Yemen any different morally from what Russia is doing in Ukraine? Is SA’s government any less despotic than Russia’s?

For me personally, this has nothing to do with whataboutism. I just want my country’s actions to reflect its stated principles. Partly because I don’t want my taxes supporting oppression and genocide, and partly because I want us to be seen as credible by the rest of the world when we condemn abuses by Russia, China, or any other country.

We blamed the Germans for nazi Germany, didn’t we?

This seems extremely reductive at best, especially with the benefit of hindsight.

Not just blamed; they were also ruthlessly bombed. The impact was the opposite of what was expected: instead of revolting Germans were even more galvanized in supporting Hitler.

Bombing civilians to foster opposition to the national government was out of arrogant ignorance.

However - it did cripple German production capacity, because people go to factories.

As far as blaming - we blamed a subset of people and put the responsibility of reparations on all German citizens(born and unborn). We made sure that they knew why the war happened and how horrible it was. We went so far, that only last month did Germany get over the pacification.

Yes that is our burden as a democracy.

Americans are - in fact - responsible for a lot.

Like people fleeing the Northern Triangle are absolutely someone that US has a moral obligation to help.

Arguably helping people in Cuba, Venezuela or Taiwan - is less of a moral imperative. Because those issues aren't American responsibility anymore.

The US is still attacking Cuba and Venezuela.

During the 2nd gulf war against Iraq, when the death toll began to rise, the US government forbade the reporting of military personnel coffins returning from the war zone, and news sources complied, including those against the war

This is wildly misleading. It was during the first gulf war, and it wasn't a ban on the reporting of returning coffins, it was a ban on photographers entering the grounds of Dover Air Force Base where the coffins were received.

By reporting I actually meant showing images, sorry my bad. However I'm pretty sure it was during the 2nd gulf war, not the 1st.

By reporting I actually meant showing images

Inaccurate. If they obtained images by some other way, such as leaked from an airman who was there or taken with a long range lens there was nothing barring them from publishing them.

However I'm pretty sure it was during the 2nd gulf war, not the 1st.

Bro you're in front of a computer. If you doubted me it would take you ten seconds to verify that the photographer ban was imposed in 1991.

> Until we know for sure that their management is really aligned with their government agenda, whatever they say, or don't say, now has zero credibility because it could be extorted from above.

Em... We know, actually.

Simply because the current management is assigned to manage Yandex by Kremlin. It's the same case with VKontakte and MailRu. We have Telegram, because Kremlin pushed Durov out of the company.

So before you deflect - maybe ask Russian people that know what was happening in Russia for the last 20 years.

It's wild how Western commenters say "we don't know for sure" when it was all public, they just didn't pay attention.

VKontakte is a great example because was literally a hostile takeover from Durov to Kremlin's oligarch Usmanov. They even accused Durov of "running over a policeman" as a threat to his arrest.

Other Russian media were consolidated as well mainly around Gazprom structures and holdings controlled by Sergey Chemezov, Putin's long time friend from his East Germany work and an ex-KGB general.

The US military never forbade reporting on bodies returning home. My local paper regularly covered the returning of bodies and funerals of service members.

The military didn’t give the press inside access to the process of returning bodies, unless they agreed not to photograph.

The fact that the military wasn’t allowing members of the press access to events that members of the general public were forbidden from is not censorship.

Heck, the press actually were allowed special access, but only on the condition they not photograph.

Freedom of the press is not the same as privileged access for the press.

And the policy began in the first gulf war, but the second.

>The US military never forbade reporting on bodies returning home.

>>U.S. lifts photo ban on military coffins

>>In a reversal of an 18-year-old military policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

https://web.archive.org/web/20220302035710/https://www.nytim...

You claimed the press wasn’t allowed to report on military coffins returning home:

> During the 2nd gulf war against Iraq, when the death toll began to rise, the US government forbade the reporting of military personnel coffins returning from the war zone

This is demonstrably false:

https://la.indymedia.org/news/2008/01/212729.php

You then provided an article that said the US had reversed its policy of “not allowing photographs” of military coffins.

Which is a very different thing from not reporting on them.

The rule against photographs only applied military bases, which already have very strict rules about photography.

Your initial claim was that there reporters were forbidden to report on bodies returning home. You made this claim to draw a parallel with Russian censorship.

The Russians arent merely making access to military bases conditional on not taking photographs - they’re engaging in political censorship.

Again, it’s very, very, very common to restrict photography on military bases, even by members of the press.

>This is demonstrably false:

No it's not, read the article.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220302035710/https://www.nytim...

>>the news media will now be allowed to photograph the flag-draped coffins of America's war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States

And please stop with your cheap "indymedia"

>Which is a very different thing from not reporting on them.

Yes different but not far away from hiding...you know a picture say's more then thousand word's, the pentagon knows that too.

The difference is seeing 30 coffins on the way home, compared to one coffin returning to he's home village.

1 Coffin = Bad, but it is like it is.

30 Coffins on one Flight/Picture...terrible.

> The difference is seeing 30 coffins on the way home, compared to one coffin returning to he's home village.

> 1 Coffin = Bad, but it is like it is.

> 30 Coffins on one Flight/Picture...terrible.

Is that what the Russian government is doing?

Restricting photographs on government facilities to prevent bad optics (while allowing reporters to write, say, publish, and broadcast whatever they want)?

Reporters in Russia are free to publish what they want?

Remember, you brought this up to draw a parallel with what the Russian government is doing.

>Is that what the Russian government is doing?

No that's what the canceled US policy was for...did you still not read the article?

In Russia you can't talk about it because it's a state secret now, means you are not allowed to talk about deaths in the "special" operation.

No sure why you are so blind on one eye but not on the other?

>Remember, you brought this up to draw a parallel with what the Russian government is doing.

I did never said it's the same. But it has the same goal, try to hide the results of war on your own soldiers.

As you can read:

>>Yes different but not far away from hiding...you know a picture say's more then thousand word's, the pentagon knows that too.

I think killing civilians using laughable pretext (weapons of mass destruction anyone?) with the goal of taking over or ensuring control over resources is not particular a Russian thing. Like invading an oil-rich country over the pretext of weapons of mass destruction.

I've met a member of the YDB team at a conference in Moscow, a nice polite guy. I doubt they have any say in the company on the compliance of the company with the Russian law (let alone on Putin's antics), they are engineers, not lawyers or political activists.

In my experience, there's a higher percentage of, say, Navalny supporters among Russian programmers than among the general population. Russia's most popular engineering blog, Habr (kind of like Reddit for engineers), is generally distrusting of the government, comments that openly support the government are usually downvoted. One of the trending topics there is relocation outside of Russia. Hate against Russian programmers, in my opinion, is completely misdirected. The project is open source, using it does not sponsor Putin's war machine. I think collaboration is a better strategy in the long term as opposed to isolation and bullying which can turn the last sane Russians away from the West, playing into Putin's hands. We should judge people by their actions, not by their association with a particular ethnic group.

The Russian government is overwhelmingly supported by Russian people. So apparently Russian people supporting the government is also enemy of this fantasyland that is called Russia. I lost all my hope for a sane Russia.

Is it ethical to recommend Clickhouse? I had done a PoC a long while ago before the war but I am not sure it is ethical to recommend this to enterprises given its origins?

Questions of ethics are interesting...

As a disclaimer, I work at ClickHouse looking after DevRel. I can’t speak for what you find appropriate for your needs. But, I believe our perspective is clear. If you didn’t see it:

https://clickhouse.com/blog/we-stand-with-ukraine/

Thanks. This is really good to know. Enterprise stake holders are a jumpy lot and this will help.

Thanks - I was wondering about Clickhouse and I feel better after having read your post :)

ClickHouse has no longer any ties to Russia.

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