Ukrainian Nationalists will say you are spreading Russian propaganda if you question how more weapons and war will solve their very real problems with sovereignty, democracy, and Russia. They will say your sources are Russian fake news without being able to provide a coherent counterargument and without directing you to a more credible source for that information.
They will never be able to correct the information you or I present to them because this information is accepted by both sides! So please, take a look at these anti-Russian, mainstream sources that I have gathered that show more nuance to the ongoing war in Ukraine, from its inception after the violent coup in 2014.
Before you take a look at the sources I used for my video, I recommend you take a look at this BBC segment from 9 years ago called “Why do some Ukrainians want to be part of Russia?”
This video shows that it’s not black-and-white “Russian imperialism” as we’ve been told. This war started with ethnically Russian Ukrainian separatists fighting for independence after their president was violently overthrown in 2014.
Now here is a Washington Post article that shows very clearly that Crimeans overwhelmingly wanted to join Russia in 2014 after the coup.
Six years and $20 billion in Russian investment later, Crimeans are happy with Russian annexation
This article uses data from a US Government funded poll that shows this approval of Russian leadership lasting through 2019. This study was funded with a grant from the US National Science Foundation Political Science Program, which makes sense because the US needed to understand what was really going on at the time.
Here is the episode of Vice’s Russian Roulette series from Ukraine in 2014 that I feature in my video that shows pro-Russian demonstrations. There are really two sides of this conflict, but the west tries to erase the pro-Russian side.
Now, here is the CBC piece covering Ukraine’s ongoing civil war in Donetsk in 2022, immediately before the Russian invasion. By this point, the pro-Russian separatists have control over the region but allowed the CBC journalist to see the situation for herself. She interviews civilians who lost family members and were themselves injured by Ukrainian shelling.
Here is the UN report that details the deaths of the civil war in Ukraine between 2014 and Jan 2022. The report mostly focuses on civilian deaths, and the 14,000+ deaths figure occurs in the final paragraph.
Here is the video of the UNICEF representative responding that UNICEF had no evidence that Russia had been “kidnapping” Ukrainian children.
And here is UNICEF’s response to the reports.
From what I can tell, these territories are Russian now, and Russia can’t leave children, many of them orphaned by this cruel war, in these war zones. This is a truly tragic situation with no “good” or “fair” outcome that will please everybody. And for every claim that Russia is trying to “Russify” these children, Ukraine is doing the same to try to “re-integrate” them into Ukrainian society.
Here is the only Russian source I will give because these are the results of Russian referendums. This is a Wikipedia article because the original source is in Russian, but you can go to that website and translate it yourself.
According to the results released by the Russian Central Election Commission through its sections in the DPR and the LPR, 99.23% (2,116,800 voters) supported the annexation in Donetsk and 98.42% (1,636,302 voters) in Luhansk. The turnouts were 97.51% (2,131,207 voters) and 94.15% (1,662,607 voters), respectively.
Here is the Associated Press article that shows that Zelensky has suspended presidential elections because of the war.
Ukraine’s president rules out holding elections next spring and calls for unity in fighting Russia
Here is the Democracy Now! report on the Ukrainian peace activist whose home was raided by police for being against the war.
Ukraine’s so-called democracy is in shambles. War makes countries more conservative, nationalistic, and less democratic. This is clearly happening in Russia as well, and that is why we need to advocate for compromise and peace negotiations immediately.
Here is the MSNBC article about Ukraine’s very real “Nazi problem.”
Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t
It’s so weird that liberals always have to frame Russia’s motives as the personal motives of Putin himself. It shows their childish, individualist mentality and need for a world with heroes and villains when reality is much more messy.
Now here is the graphic I referenced to show the blatant disregard for sovereignty and democracy that the US has displayed throughout the Cold War. Nothing has changed. They convinced people that they were the good guys in all these conflicts as well.
This source is an archived page from the National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database that shows how many millions of dollars they have dumped into influencing the politics of Ukraine. The NED is directly funded by the US government, and their resource allocation is determined by congress.
The NED removed all evidence of these grants after the Russian invasion, which was a clear admission of guilt.
When Ukrainian Nationalists attack proponents of peace online, their strategies of discrediting you feel like they’re copying the Zionist playbook:
First, they gaslight you and say you are stupid and crazy… but they can’t correct any of the “obviously wrong” information you share.
Second, they use identity politics to get the liberals on board with their nationalist movement. For me, when I call for peace negotiations, they say that I’m a privileged white gay boy from New York City who needs to shut up and listen to the nationalist pro-war Ukrainians about why more bloodshed is productive. This is nonsense because there are people who don’t understand the politics and history of their homeland all over the world, plenty of Ukrainians disagree with each other, and nothing is stopping many of these blank accounts from lying about where they come from. And in Israel’s case, they call you anti-semitic for opposing their genocide of Palestinians.
Third, both the Israelis and Ukranians engage in shifting the narrative to appear like the anti-imperialist side. Israelis claim that “Islamic Imperialists” kicked the Jews out of Israel thousands of years ago, so white European Jews have the right to kick Palestinians out of their homes. Ukrainian Nationalists do the same when they point to Ukraine’s history during the USSR when ethnic Russians moved into the eastern regions of Ukraine. They say that they now have the right to disenfranchise this ethnic minority in their country (by not letting them vote to leave) and even to take back their land through ethnic cleansing. That’s not how democracy and anti-imperialism work.