alt Hacker NewsThat's not really accurate.
Russia's pretexts were largely true.
Ukraine did ban Russian language schools. That's technically a human rights violation. Native language education has been considered a human right since the late 1800s.
It's a common violation. Belarus did the same thing for Polish, Poland for German. Etc. Lots of Muricans want Murica to be an English-language Christian nation too, and laws sometimes reflect that. Certainly Murican education standards favor English speakers.
Euromaidan was a bit anti-rule-of-law.
Many Russian minority groups were mistreated in Ukraine.
All of that is true.
None of it merits an invasion.
Best propaganda is usually all true but selective of facts. In any group of more than a million people, some will do something bad. There are instances of Poles assaulting Ukrainian refugees, and vice-versa. It sounds bad, but with over a million refugees, it's statistically impossible for it to not happen. It makes for good propaganda for Russia too; both sides are starting to be riled up.
Good propaganda has elements of truth. Even if you read Hitler, you'll see a mixture of truth and fiction. The verifiable facts lend credence to the fabricated ones.
The dumb thing is Ukraine has doubled down on all of that since the invasion. The right thing to do would be to:
1) Open up a Russian-language elementary school
2) Don't mention Bandera, or better yet, apologize to Poland and open a park recognizing Polish victims or something similarly symbolic.
That's the right thing to do, and with that, the credibility of the propaganda simply disintegrates. If you're ever falsely accused, the trick is to do the exact opposite.
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What you've listed here is not what russia lists as a reason for attacking Ukraine. And even if it was, it's still really shitty pretext.
As with many conflicts this one goes back a long way. Ukraine gave up its nukes to Russia in exchange for a non aggression pact that the invasion broke.
Also bad for the world. The lesson, as with Iran and Iraq, is: you’d better have nukes and never give them up. This is the opposite of the lesson we want if we want to contain proliferation.
The global taboo on use remains. If someone breaks that and gets away with it we are into civilization ending danger territory.
1) there are plenty of russian schools in russia
2) Poland is not your concern, Vasily
You are right that the Russians have been frequently somewhat mistreated in the former Soviet Republics where they have become minorities.
However, this is an extraordinarily hypocritical claim, because this has followed a time when for various durations, between a half of century and two centuries the Russians have mistreated the minorities of those places in a much more ferocious way, inclusively by robbing them, murdering them or sending them to forced labor in Siberia.
In Ukraine, there are many places with Russian colonists who have been installed after WWII in the houses that before the war belonged to various other nationalities, which were then killed or dispersed to Siberia by the Russians.
Yes, Russians have been mistreated after the separation of the Soviet Republics, but this is much, much less than what their fathers have done around WWII and before it, and many of them have still inherited what their fathers have stolen from the other nationalities.
Had the Russians treated better the others when they had the power, they would have not been so hated, so they would have been much more likely to be treated correctly.