Some interesting estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters that participated in the Donbass War from 2014-2019 from a report [PDF] by the Soufan Center. (h/t Kholmogorov)
The claim that 13,372 foreigners fought for the LDNR sounds like a lot, considering that the NAF numbers ~40k troops and that not more than 10% of them were ever Russian citizens even in the early days. But considering this refers to the numbers that have ever participated in the conflict, i.e. that have since been rotated out, then it’s quite plausible.
Many more foreigners fought for the LDNR than in Ukraine’s volunteer battalions. However, the ratio diminished to 1:1.5 when excluding Russians, and would probably drop to parity if all ethnic Russians were to be excluded.
One can subdivide countries into the following bins (major contributors that provided >50 fighters in total are bolded):
Strongly Russophile: Russia; France, Germany, Spain; Central Asia, Armenia, Moldova; Bulgaria, Czechia, Greece, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia; Latin America.
Russophile: Belarus.
50/50: Australia, Israel, United States; Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania); Finland, Poland.
Russophobe: Austria, Canada, Italy, United Kingdom.
Strongly Russophobe: Scandis (Denmark, Norway, Sweden); Azerbaijan, Georgia; Albania, Croatia, Romania; Turkey.
This seems like a pretty good proxy of national geopolitical attitudes towards Russia in general, and amongst their nationalists in specific, e.g. see how neatly Serbia/Croatia and Armenia/Azerbaijan recreate their own wars. However, the Far Left has also taken an active part in the fighting, almost invariably on the side of the NAF – if with overall lesser enthusiasm than nationalists on either side (Rojava is the true mecca for anarchist types).
Other observations:
- A surprising number of countries are strongly loaded in one direction or another. I suspect that this is on account of networks effects, e.g. an influential member in a nationalist organization in one country announces he is setting out to join Azov and/or NAF, and a bunch of people follow him, with said national organization perhaps providing some funding, contacts, etc.; otherwise, potential participants are limited to a trickle of individual volunteers.
- 20% of Russians participants fought for Ukraine. These were overwhelmingly the Neo-Nazi and White Nationalist component of Russian nationalists, as well as Chechens and Georgians. Their fates have tended to be quite sad, having generally been tossed aside by the Ukraine (e.g. had problems getting residency permits) with return to a Russian jail not particularly attractive either.
- The amount of Belorussian zmagars who supported their svidomy brothers is faintly concerning. That said, I assume those sorts of people are just naturally more passionary. For instance, well less than 20% of Russians support the Ukraine in the Donbass conflict.
- The Balts should be close to 100% anti-Russian (some Latvians even fought in Chechnya). However, the ~20% of their population that is Russian would have fought for the Donbass. Hence 50/50, which I suspect neatly divided by national lines. There is also the colorful and intensely memetic Russian-Ugandan Benes Ayo, a National Bolshevik from Latvia who has fought in the NAF.
- I imagine that almost everyone from Central Asia would have been ethnic Russians, though I recall seeing the token Kyrgyz and Uzbek (they were invariably on the LDNR side).
- As I expected, the United States is neatly divided; perhaps the two most famous American fighters are Mark Gregory Paslawsky (Donbas Battalion, KIA in 2014) and the memey “cowboy” Texas (NAF). Also expected is that the Scandinavians are overwhelmingly anti-Russian, around 50 of them having fought for the Ukraine and just two Norwegians for the Donbass. Curiously, though, Finland is 50/50.
- The 1:10 ratio in Germany is surely largely explained by Russian Volga Germans.
- Italy and Austria are surprisingly pro-Ukrainian, which beliefs their geopolitical orientation (relative to the rest of Western Europe). The Neo-Nazi cell with air-to-air missiles apprehended in an Italian police raid had fought for the Ukraine, contra initial Western MSM reports. These are also countries where nationalist movements were strongly infiltrated by the CIA (see Operation Gladio), which might also help explain things. Another possibility is that many of the Italians are naturalized Ukrainians – there are more of them in Italy than in any other West European country bar Germany, which only beats out by a thin margin.
- The Spaniards and Latin Americans are as monolithically pro-Russian as the Scandinavians are pro-Ukrainian. Legacy of dashing role models like Che Guevara for local leftists? The most famous participant here is the Brazilian Rafael Lusvarghi, who acquired fame by charging into battle without protective equipment. He later returned to the Ukraine as a civilian, to be predictably arrested and imprisoned.
- France is strongly pro-Russian, which I suppose largely reflects the views of French identitarians, who are implicitly anti-Atlanticist.
- While Poland’s 50/50 split might be surprising to some, why should it be? While Poles are happy to express support for the Euromaidan – the Ukraine serving as a buffer between them and Russia is very much in their interests – they are not going to be out there spilling their own blood for Banderites, at least out of their free will.
PS. Twitter user writes that he knows at least three Azeris who fought for the DNR. So, word of caution that these estimates are far from completely waterproof.
- They’ve also done estimates for Syria.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
For somebody who pretends to be rather objective, I find it hilarious that you resort to such unwarranted stereotypes, Anatoly. Since you appear to be so good at handling statistics, would you dare provide any that clarify just how many “Banderites” there are in Ukraine that support an independent Ukraine vs how many are not? Do you consider your good buddy AP a “Banderite” too because he supports an independent Ukrainian state? You’re beginning to sound like Saker, whom everybody seems to ridicule for his “Banderite/Nazi” spiel. 🙁
What do you think is the approval rate of Bandera in Ukraine’s volunteer battalions?
What do you think is the approval rate of Bandera amongst Polish nationalists?
At one point the Americans had committee on un-American activities. I think we need a similar – committee on un-Slavic (read Russian) activities. The committee’s task will be to deal with Slavs who are acting un-Slavic. According to Anatoly’s list, only one country will qualify to be a target (except Ukraine) of this committee – Croatia. Luckily, as we all know, Croats are not Slavs, their ethnicity is catholic, so pretty much it looks like the committee will have to be disbanded as soon as it is formed.
Kiev-controlled Ukraine served as a destination for would-be murderers seeking impunity for years. However, inviting foreign scum will help it about as much as it helped ISIS. Maybe even less: some foreign and domestic ISIS bandits had ideology beyond raping and looting, Ukrainian bandits in Donbass do not. “True believer” Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away from the front in Ukraine itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they can be maimed or killed.
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an adventure, on the battlefield and in bed.
How much potato juice does one need to drink to become a Russian Nazi
What do you think the approval rating of Bandera is among the general Ukrainian population that is against Russian meddling into Ukrainian affairs and that approves of the defensive posture of the volunteer batallions? Also, the volunteer batallions are a minor subset of the overall defense of this area, yet you’re still fixated on images taken from 2014?…
If you go by quintessence of Nazi ideology “my tribe is better than your tribe”, every nation has its Nazis, including Russia. To its credit, tribal nationalists never got more than ~7% electoral support in Russia. After Ukrainian experience showed that any country can be quickly ruined by primeval tribal nationalism, their support in Russia dropped to below 2%. But it still isn’t zero. Then again, ~1% of any population are schizophrenics, 2-3% are gays/lesbians, etc., so single digit representation of any kind of deviation is not threatening country’s survival.
I asked the questions first, but I’ll be generous and explain this to you on the fingers.
I’m not sure if 14 fighters is a big enough sample size to justify lumping Canada into the dreaded “Russophobe” category. But the 10 pro-Ukrainians to 4 pro-Russians ratio closely mirrors that of self-declared ethnic Ukrainians (1,359,655) to Russians (622,445) in Canada.
Though many, possibly even a majority of those “Russians” are actually Jews. The Ukrainian lobby has been disturbingly powerful in Canada for a long time (multiculturalism was their bright idea), while the Russian lobby is seemingly invisible.
There are signs and symbols of Ukrainian nationalism everywhere (banks, festivals, flags, bumper stickers etc), while similar Russian symbols are basically non-existent. The Uke to Russkie ratio may be only 10-4, but it feels more like 10-1, or even 100-1.
I expected more Russians from the Baltics. Apparently, they and Serbs were early arrivals in Girkin’s group. Perhaps the ethnic Russians were counted as Russian?
Quite a few White Russians emigrated to France. The Whites were well supported by ethnic Russians in the Donbass during the Civil War.
Many Irish Nationalist commentators supported Russia (enemy’s enemy) but the table shows Ireland Pro Ukraine (anti-imperialist a stronger driver?). The Russian settlers in the Donbass are such an obvious parallel to the Orangemen.
Who in the world are those “Russians”, who fought on the side of Ukrainian regime? Where did they come from and what motivated them? I can see how a couple dozen of crazies might do something like this, but 3000??
Also, where are the Western white nationalists? I had the impression that “Azov” was full of them. One of them went on to become a famous terrorist.
http://ren.tv/novosti/2019-03-15/novozelandskiy-terrorist-v-manifeste-zayavlyal-chto-byl-na-ukraine
Chechens would be the obvious answer. I recall reading there were 2x as many Chechens fighting for Ukrainians than for Russians.
Svidomy Ukrainians in Russia.
And, as mentioned, Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists (~60%-70% on Ukraine’s side, at least initially). The other brands of Russian nationalists were overwhelmingly pro-Russian.
Got it!
However, I don’t quite understand point #5. Where do Poles supposedly have have 10 x the populaton of Germans?
If it’s not too much of a bother (I’ve tried enlish languae google searches, to no avail) could you provide any links that cover the popularity of Bandera amongst the general Ukrainian population? Thanks.
Mean to write Georgians.
First result for “опрос украинцы бандера”: https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2018/11/20/7198776/
https://img.pravda.com/images/doc/c/8/c8e2620-1.jpg
Surprised Gorbachev who is responsible for collapse of le ebil Soviet Empire is rated worse than Bandera. Likewise on Simon Petliura, who’s history was fairly innocent and the worst thing he can be accused of is toppling the absolute madlad Skoropadski.
More foreign “scum” on Donbas side than Ukrainian side. As one would expect. It’s not all bad however, Donbas should be kept apart from Ukraine.
Ukrainian-American Paslawsky fought and died in the war.
https://www.rferl.org/a/mark-paslawsky/26541831.html
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the only American known to have fought alongside Ukrainian forces against pro-Russian separatists has been killed in eastern Ukraine.
Mark Gregory Paslawsky, 55, died while fighting with the volunteer Donbas Battalion.
Paslawsky, who fought under the nom de guerre “Franko,” was killed on August 19 during fighting in the town of Ilovaysk, near the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, according to a Facebook post by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko.
Paslawsky was born in 1959 in New York and grew up in a tight-knit Ukrainian-American family in New Jersey. He moved to Ukraine around two decades ago and informed his family earlier this year that he planned to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army, according to his brother, Nestor Paslawsky.
::::::::::::::
The American fighting for Donbas, “Cowb0y”, meanwhile was some sort of petty criminal in the USA. Like Motorola in Russia, of course.
One out of how many millions? Even Georgian participation is much higher on the per capita basis. LOL.
Just out of curiosity: Anton Herashchenko is that fatter-than-a-pig guy with five chins? The founder of the “Mirotvorets” site?
Well the Serbs played a major role in the defence of the territory that is today the Donbas (not particularly well known among modern Russians). So Serbian nationalists have an extra cause in regards to the Donbas
Slavo-Serbia or Slaveno-Serbia, was a territory of Imperial Russia between 1753-64. It was located by the right bank of the Donets River between the Bakhmutka River (Бахмут) and Luhan (Лугань) rivers. This area today constitutes the territories of present-day Luhansk Oblast and Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. The administrative centre of Slavo-Serbia was Bakhmut (Bahmut).
That’s exactly 100% more than those Ukrainians from the States or Canada that volunteered to fight for your Sovok wet dream! 🙂
Vivid proof of utter madness of “White Nationalists”
Not mutually exclusive. If you feel that you’re leading a meaningless life and you are looking for adventure, something radically different from a cubicle job or whatever, might as well do something like join a war where you get to defend innocent people.
As always, Sweden Yes.
Were you in a coma these last 30 years?
Ask your handlers to update your manual. I know the Cold War purportedly ended, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to keep 30 year old documentation on hand.
Don’t be an idiot.
The “Russian settlers” were colonizing an empty land that was previously ethnically cleansed by the Turks.
(Though of course the so-called “Irish” are the most cucked nation in the world, stands to reason they’d support the AIDS-infected man of Europe.)
Considering ex ISIS fighters are often left to go free and claim benefits it was interesting to see the fate of the fella who went to the Donbass and didn’t even fight.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/british-man-pro-russian-forces-ukraine-jailed-terrorism-benjamin-stimson-a7842521.html
Five years and four months.
So was South Africa but didn’t stop there being close ties between loyalists and the apartheid government, a few Ulstermen were in the the government and there was the shared settler Calvinist outlook. The IRA had quite close links to Croats, don’t know if loyalists had the same with Serbs. MP Ian Paisley junior is somewhat of a Russophile.
This is all true, but all those people are completely and utterly assimilated into Ukrainians / Russians and have been for much longer than living memory. Most people in Serbia (except history nerds etc) have no idea about this history. A much more plausible explanation for Serbs going to fight in the Donbass would make some reference to Russian (and also Greek btw) volunteer units fighting with the Serbs in the 1990s and contacts established during that time.
Yes. A variety of foreign settlements were planted there. Greeks and Germans too.
Mazepa is way up there and he joined the early 17th century Swedish invasion of Russia that ended with the defeat at Poltava. That effectively ended Sweden as a great power. Seems like Ukrainians have a thing for worshipping losers allied with anyone west of them, so there is some hope for Porky’s eventual rehabilitation.
Carl Bildt’s ancestors were there in high stockings among the vanquished at Poltava – the Bildts never forgave the humiliation, those Swedes can be sneaky. That explains the persistent anti-Russian attitudes among the Nordics. Swedes also tend to be simple-minded, nobody swallows the current globo-homo propaganda as eagerly or looks for Russian submarines hiding behind every whale.
By and large Austria and Croatia are the only surprises – here, the history of the last century is a bit … complicated.
“Altösterreicher” is a popular euphemism for “Galician Jew” i.e. the current Kiew regime.
The Croats are more probably channeling their recent hatred for the Serbs. [Not really] funny what the separation of East and West Rome is still doing to a people.
They are in Donbas for the killing and the whoring.
This never gets old.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/2015-pisa-mean-scores-in-perspective/
PISA mean scores
Switzerland 506
Sweden 496
Hispanic Americans 465
Slovakia 463
I identify as a White Supremacist. But a Russian Nazi who goes to fight for Ukrainian regime severs his links with his home country for uncertain (and miserable) future in the Ukraine.
This is dumber than joining ISIS. ISIS militants got to own sex slaves. Those Russian Nazis are just nuts. And there were supposedly hundreds of them!
As always you are very shallow. Do you actually think that ‘simple-mindness’ can be tested by math or IQ tests? It is a different concept – Swedes are gullible, a bit naive, lack experience and are easy to fool (see their recent ‘migrant-mania’ disaster). In other words, simpletons who others often take advantage of. Who in the world seriously believes in submarine whales or thinks that Somalis are just what is needed to have a booming high-tech economy?
The squatty chicana girls that you have been pushing on us can’t compete in any real sesne, check this out:
Always wrong.
Donbas is HIV capital of Europe:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Registered_HIV_prevalence_in_Ukraine.jpg/1280px-Registered_HIV_prevalence_in_Ukraine.jpg
Russian pattern:
https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/main/images/Russia%20AIDS-HIV%20rates%20011116_0.jpg
Ukraine’s figures appear lower only because the data are 10 years older.
In 2015, nearly 1% of pregnant women in Donbas had HIV. Donbas refugees also bring HIV with them; fortunately other Ukrainians tend to avoid mixing with them, which limits infection. This study of the genetics of HIV in Ukraine shows that throughout the country it comes from Donbas, which is where 24% of Ukraine’s HIV cases are. An interesting study:
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/01/09/1701447115.full.pdf
17% of Donetsk prostitutes have HIV. Those foreign volunteers should be careful!
PISA isn’t a only a “math” test.
If you weren’t a simple-minded Slovak you’d know that 🙂
Translation: they may be a lot smarter than Slovaks but they are also more honest and not accustomed to trickery, so they can be tricked.
In your world, are gypsies even less simple-minded than Slovaks?
Do you think this is something to be proud of? That Soviets taught you to lie through life and that as a liar you are more savvy about lies than are those Swedes, even though they are smarter than you?
But here we have a problem – as we see here, when to comes to history, current events, you are as naive as those Swedes are about migrants. They believed Somalis will become Swedes (this is now changing). You believe Sovoks were better to Balts than Hungarians were to Slovaks, that Soviet occupation was a good thing, etc.
The video is nice, however.
Jews were wiped out in Galicia. Ukraine’s Jews are from central and southern Ukraine.
Tell your handlers to update your playbook.
“Sick man of Europe” doesn’t mean a literal health problem, okay?
Props on a quick response, but your algorithms really do need to be updated with context information, okay?
You’re right. I went bck to the manual and found this new direction that has apparently overtaken the old sovok orientation. It’s called “Putinism” and its practitioners are called “Putniks”. Does it sound familiar:
Isn’t this what you recite three times daily as you bow down in the direction of the Kremlin? One such practitioner, I’ve read, sits under an icon of Putin and recites it daily (also three times). Apparently, it’s too hard for him to figure out what direction the Kremlin is in. 🙂
We are not the ones tricking them. To be ‘simple-minded’ means exactly what I described Swedes are like today – of course not all, but way too many among them. What you know about Magyars and Balts is way off – but it is also off the topic, as always your ignorance is so profound it is almost charming. Must be the well-mixed Habsburg blood, they were known for being really sharp cookies :).
As of September we are legally not allowed to use the term you used for our lovely Roma people – so I will refrain from addressing it. Suffice to say, it is a sad development. We are on our way to reach Sweden, and not in the areas we would like to.
I am glad you liked the video, see we can agree on some things.
Always glad to help.
Pass a message to your handlers, please:
Don’t recycle your propaganda bullet points between countries. This bit “apparently unaware of massive, endemic corruption in his country for 20 years” doesn’t apply in Russia’s case. Hire an inter or something to go over your copy, please.
(Your message of “OMG corruption and oligarchs and stuff!” doesn’t jive with your other propaganda bit about “OMG such industrious leaders of business and media cruelly thrown in jail to be eaten by Putindogs!”)
The Ukrainian map seems only to show that endemic syphilis provides a certain immunity (lower infection risk due to yuck?).
Don’t make me laugh so hard, it’s still early in the morning where I’m at. Corruption is the only thing that Russia seems to excel at in the world, and that’s saying a lot. The only difference between the sovoks and the putniks, is that the former always whitewash the sins of Stalin and you putniks do so for Putler:
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-corruption-raiders-rule-law-trump-putin-1445535
Wasn’t Putler implicated in the Panama papers fiasco too? You don’t hear much about that one anymore. Well, I guess that’ okay, there always seems to be a new large case of corruption with Putler’s name somehow linked to it all…Cousin Igor, eh…wasn’t it a “good friend” who played the violin in the last caper? Putler has so many relatives and friends. 🙂
For reasons that are beyond my understanding, Russophobes include pretty much all of Russia’s neighbors who are not speaking Russian at home. In contrast, almost all the Russophiles are at the damn antipodes.
The fact is Russia is the only country on the planet expanding during the last decade. Every other global power knows that it’s more effective to get useful idiots do your job, controlling the other “countries” as if they were under true occupation.
No German would admit that “country” is a colony, despite being little more than “a battlefield and three divisions” for Obama or Trump, and their voters. HKers and Taiwanese are some of the stupid people on Earth, fighting their cousins for the sake of remote colonial powers. Even Indians have their bootlickers in Bangladesh, despite any sane person ROTFLing at the thought that you have something to learn from India, or that Indians think of foreigners as humans.
You may claim soft power failed during the Soviet era. But wasn’t Soviet Russia expanding as well?
This is factually incorrect according to the list given by Karlin in this post.
Finland 20 for Donbass 15 for Ukraine,
Estonia 15 for Donbass 10 for Ukraine,
Moldova 70 for Donbass 15 for Ukraine,
Poland (!) 15 for Donbass 10 for Ukraine,
Kazakhstan 30 for Donbass 0 for Ukraine, etc.
I honestly doubt that this list gives reliable information, but if we proceed from the list – Russia (with a few exceptions) is surrounded by Russophiles.
Is that the way it works? And here I thought that the volunteers for the NSR’s* were comprised of alcoholics, unemployables, soldiers of fortune and various other adventuring rambo types? To base faborable opinions of Russia’s neighboring countries on a poll like this is the height of folly. I’m getting so many laughs this morning from reading this blog, that I think it should be renamed “The RushOnion Reaction”. 🙂
*New Soviet Republic
I strongly suspect these Irish fighters are immigrants. We’ve lots of Poles and Balts in Ireland. Sorry to say the only right wing nationalist groups of any description here are Polish exiles.
Another datapoint is the results of the Ukrainian TV show Velyki Ukraïntsi, which ran in 2008. It was a spin-off of the BBC hit 100 Greatest Britons and had Savik Shuster, a popular talk-show host, travel around Ukraine and ask people to name the greatest Ukrainians in history. In the final round, viewers could pick from among 10 candidates, and Bandera won 16% of the vote, placing him third after Yaroslav the Wise and — rather amazingly — Nikolai Amosov, an ethnic Russian from the Vologda region.
(The oddities go on in the full list. I can see how some Soviet nostalgists would carry Lenin all the way to place 23, but to vote Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Yanukovich in there is just straight perverse.)
This protoplasma is still a scumbag…….but he has lost plenty of weight. No suprise there-if you are going to be writing BS on social media as he does- then it helps if you don’t look like Jabba the Hut.
The funniest thing is that whilst they try to move towards the EU and away from Russia all these guys- Poroshenko, Kolomoisky,Avakov,Gerashchenko,Zelensky, klimkin etc……all these freaks play into the worst prejudices westerners have of Russians- causing them to view these guys as Russians, of the worst type!
If RT’s Bryan MacDonald is right, Mark Paslawsky was a nephew of Mykola Lebed, about whom Wikipedia says, among other things:
That last reference to his being a “sadist” and “collaborator,” by the way, is New York Times, so this is pretty much the American establishment view.
This needn’t by itself suggest that Paslawsky was a 1488er, but it forces us, I think, to view in a different light the claim by one of his co-workers that “He really hated the Russians. We all hate the Russians.”
They have arrested quite a few russians in the Baltics on suspicion of either preparing to fight, or actually fighting there
That’s what I’m talking about. The sides’ recruitment outlooks were all different.
At the time of collapse of Communism in Poland, the large majority of poles were either ambivalent or pro-communist….upto their arrival in the EU , for most of the time their government was centre-left, atlanticist but definitely not anti-Russian.
Of course most of the people earning decently in the EU have been able to do it because of some advantage the Communist system gave them for their chosen proffesion
I agree, the numbers are mostly too small and the categories (=countries) are not well defined because they don’t account for the ethnic origin. There is also the timing issue – over what period of time and for how long. As anecdotal information it is interesting.
It is practically and psychologically easier to join the rebel side as an outsider, it fits the mentality of people who crave fighting better. That explains the Latin Americans.
Russia is surrounded by countries where governments are more anti-Russian than the population. That holds true in almost all of them and is a combination of liberal elites aversion to anything Russian and the opportunism of ambitious people who understand that West is where the money and careers are made. Under the Soviets it was roughly the opposite because the underlying dynamic was in reverse.
We don’t make the world around us, we mostly just reflect it. When the world changes, we adapt and change with it.
The EU is not yet a country but it is also an expanding power. Indeed Russia lost the Ukraine to the EU. Russia’s antics shored up support for the EU in Georgia, Moldova and Belarus too.
Once the pay rate exceeded $300 roubles a month plus living costs the quality of the recruits improved.
I suppose I have to defend my homeland here, hehe. What you get wrong is that Poltava, ever since 1988, when the historian and former secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund published a popular book by that same name, is seen by Swedes not as a catastrophic defeat, but as a welcome end to Sweden’s era as a great power. It’s not for nothing that the following one — from 1718 to 1772 — is named the Age of Liberty.
As I understand it, without having read very many older history books — maybe Thulean Friend can chip in — this is rather a recent idea, but it matters in that you can be sure that everyone of Bildt’s generation takes it as gospel. This is certainly the take I meet when discussing the topic with boomers.
Swedish anti-Russianism, then, is not about our distant past, but something more recent. To my mind, it’s mostly the result of overidentification with social liberalism and the postwar world order along with what Swedes call “historylessness” — a flippant, unread view of the nation’s past that leaves us wide open to any new fads coming our way. These things now happen to go against Russia’s official line, so anti-Russianism it is.
Simple-minded in the sense of lacking common sense, yes, to be sure. My standard argument is that our mental illness is a potent mix of naivete, conformity and self-satisfaction.
We really don’t know. Some may see it that way, others may pretend, others don’t know, and there are some who are bitter about it without consciously knowing what is triggering their bitterness towards Russia. As with all motivations we are in the realm of unknown. You can’t ask people, because people lie, or answer what they think is proper.
I was also talking about Carl Bildt who is neither ‘historyless’ nor strikes me as someone consumed by liberal manias. People like him form the official opinion, the rest follows.
The Swedish (and other Nordic) dislike for Russia is an anomaly that conflicts with many of their other characteristics. Some of the Swedish behavior, e.g. the ‘hunt for submarines‘ is truly bizarre and hard to understand in a rational country. I recall last time I was in Sweden a nice girl told me ‘the Russians don’t like us for some reason, so we have to be careful” (my identity had no role in this). A strange thing to say, a mix of fear and propaganda. Also, the idea that Russians would even have an opinion about Sweden is far-fetched, if anything they admire Sweden – it is after all rich and neutral.
The identification of Russia with illiberal attitudes plays a role, but Swedes worship many of the most illiberal nations in the world – so that doesn’t add up. Russia is more traditional, but on a liberalism scale I find it too liberal. Even Western media largely dropped the ‘LGBT’, Pussy Riot circus – it was embarrassing because it was detached from reality. Unless Swedes are behind the curve on this one, that would also seem more like a symptom than a reason for disliking Russia.
So I am back to Poltava in a symbolic sense that Swedes simply dislike big things, and Russia is oversized.
You said it better than I did. That’s what I was trying to get to.
AnonFromTN’s argument, that the government drew more opportunistic and sociopathic foreign volunteers than the LDNR, seems to me solid. Was there even a single EU member state where association with the LDNR wasn’t met with stiff penalty?
In Sweden, certainly, the natural outlet for sociopaths would have been the anti-Russian forces. We have a cause célèbre of this in Jackie Arklöv, the neo-Nazi mulatto who joined the Croatian side in the Yugoslav Wars and ended up executing a cop point-blank during one of Sweden’s most notorious bank robberies. There was also at least one well-known Swede, another neo-Nazi, who bragged online about killing Russians in the Donbass.
Your second argument is just plain odd. Why would foreigners go the trouble of signing up with the separatists just to sleep with hookers? And why in Eastern Ukraine? They are every bit as cheap and plentiful in other parts of Ukraine, and indeed most of Europe.
Missing from your argument is also that these kinds of wars always draw idealists. Just as communists joined the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and jihadists joined the mujahideen in the Soviet–Afghan War, so pro-Russians joined the separatists in the War in Donbass.
You might have missed the part with “speak Russian at home”, or you may need to read up on the post-WWII demographics of Moldova or Estonia. A similar (((infestation))) is found in North Kazakhstan.
I think you underestimate Swedish people’s degree of conformity. Scary as it may sound, the norm is still that when a new narrative comes along, it becomes the accepted truth. And not just accepted in the sense of people paying lip-service to it, although there is that, but actually accepted as the truth. Bildt was 39 when Poltava came out, so there is no doubt in mind that it, and the new line of history it presented, made a lasting impression on his views on Sweden’s place in eastern Europe.
Where I think you may be right is that a lesson modern Swedes might draw from Poltava and what came after is that empires are bad and small nation-states good. This would be something like the mental process that the English have gone through since 1945. “We lost the empire, but it wasn’t really any good to begin with, and anyway empires are bad.” This would obviously color their view of post-Soviet Russia.
The submarine hunts were always a farce, yes, and it’s true that many Swedes have a paranoid relationship with Russians. But then, people are always easily led, and the official Swedish picture of Russia is so bleak and so uniform that you pretty much have to be a contrarian or an immigrant (e.g. Syrian or Iranian) to break out of the conditioning.
I don’t think this is true. Sweden was one of few countries to take a stand against Saudi Arabia before the Khashoggi murder sharpened Western criticism, and we have always been very vocal in our opposition to people like Berlusconi, Orban and Salvini. What countries exactly are you thinking of? You might name the United States, of course, and I would agree up to a point, hehe, but that argument takes some heavy philosophizing …
This blog already addressed this myth, Ukraine was lost to the EU long before maidan. Faggotry runs deep in that state
During the Cold War, pro-Ustashe Croats and pro-Bandera Ukrainians found common cause that likely led to a good number of them seeing the Russians and Serbs as oppressors.
The pro-Bandera Captive Nations Committee included positive references to Pavelic but not Mihailovich, while bashing the Russian Civil War era Whites.
Looks like Paslawsky inherited his uncle’s traits.
From an obit that is sympathetic to him: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j544vy/the-only-american-fighting-for-ukraine-dies-in-battle
Donbas has a reputation as having the easiest women in Eastern Europe.
A Russian volunteer battalion was led by a guy who literally filmed himself beheading a live puppy (here is just a photo afterward, but I’ll put the More tag on it):
More about this gang from Peter:
http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1476975539
https://pp.vk.me/8nPNWU0AH_OE52axagfXKnQY08V7eBTV20zlfw/-rESyiZ3BhE.jpg
Refusing a cigarette is hardly in the same league as what Bandera’s people were doing…
Expanding and collapsing at the same time. LOL
Losing the UK is going to sting if they can only pick up those looking to get on the dole.
But this is just as well, because the EU is too culturally diverse. It will turn into a civil war eventually if it is not stopped now.
And eastern Ukraine as well, especially Kharkiv.
You previously said that, in per capita terms, Banderism was about half as bad as Stalinism. However, shouldn’t we take the length of their rule/dominant position into consideration as well? Stalin was in power for 24 years whereas Bandera only got to do his thing for something like 3-4 years. Thus, on a per capita level per year, Banderism should be worse (as in, deadlier) than Stalinism is. Not that this exonerates Stalinism by any measure, of course.
Not necessarily. After the Poles and Jews were murdered or fled, Bandera’s people were done. That is, if they ruled for another 24 years their death toll would not have changed much.
That might be a fair point, but at the same time, if there would have hypothetically been much more Poles and Jews in Galicia and Volhynia, then the Banderists would have killed them as well, no? In other words, the Banderists would have been prepared to kill more if there would have been more of the “wrong type” of people, no?
Sure, and if hypothetically there had been more kulaks, or Stalin had the means to deport more peoples, or USSR had annexed more territory in 1920, etc. he would have killed more people also.
Plus what is the point of joining the Ukrainians in a fight against their co-ethnics in Donbas anyway?
Do they regard Ukrainians as racially superior to themselves? On what basis? Never managed to get their POV.
They basically agree with AP’s propaganda point* that Russia is a multicultural Eurasianist hellhole, hate Putin for it, want to “liberate” Russians by dissipating the evil Russian Federation.
Many of them viewed Maidanist Ukraine as a beacon of white nationalism in the early days.
Not all of them, and some of the Neo-Nazis did fight for Russia, such as the Rusich people (their leader is admittedly a degenerate as AP has pointed out).
My estimate is that in 2014, they were 60% pro Ukraine, 40% pro Russia; now those ratios have flipped.
Touche.
And Ukraine actually has the military capacity to pull this off? Of course not! So, why bother?
This is also factually incorrect, judjing by the list
Finland 20 for Donbass 15 for Ukraine,
Poland 15 for Donbass 10 for Ukraine,
Czech Republic 30 for Donbass 5 for Ukraine,
Hungary 2 for Donbass 0 for Ukraine,
Armenia 20 for Donbass 0 for Ukraine
etc
REMOVE SWEA
SWEA FEARS THE RUS
BTW, which groups other than Jews and Poles fared better under Stalin than under Bandera?
Actually it’s probably true for Finland. Finnish government estimate has a bit under 100k native Russian speakers as Finnish citizens which is about a third of what Estonia has. There was no Russian immigration before the USSR collapse and a huge burst of migrants after that so the children of the big wave of Russian migrants in the 1990s are now young fighting age men and they’re a much higher proportion of Russians here.
I’m too busy to do detailed digging, actually I should be resisting any internet debates, but anecdotally from the people that our media interviews it seems like everyone from Finland who went to join the Azov guys is an ethnic Swede with Nazi-type views. Ethnic Finns are much less likely to be interested when most neo-Nazi underground movements are run by Swedes with a central focus on Greater Sweden ideology or at least some sort of pan-Germanism (yuck).
Finnish media did dig up a few ethnic Finns fighting for Donbass but their opinions make it rather questionable whether fighting in Donbass qualifies someone as russophile. They all seem to come from the tiny racial Eurasianist scene in Finland so they agree with the opinion of some Russian nationalists that Putin is running an orientializing neo-Bolshevik regime that will destroy the white race with its pro-Mongoloid policies but the difference is that they love the idea. Luckily for much of the crowd of this blog there are not that many of them so Great Russian chauvinists are not close to getting GULAGed.
Ethnic Russians and Galician Russophiles, I suppose. After an initial wave of Soviet persecution the local Russophiles who had managed to avoid arrest, execution or deportation often had very good careers under the Soviets. This would not have been the case under a Banderist state.
Also, Poles probably fared about as badly under Stalin as under Bandera. Stalin wiped out 100,000+ of them in the 1930s (in the USSR) and finished the job that the Banderists started by mass deporting most of the survivors out of western Ukrainian lands.
My experience is that it fully depends on whether that narrative fits into people’s already existing worldview. It is the media’s role all over the world to provide the accepted narratives – the key 100-120 IQ demographic uses it as instructions on what they should think. They are smart enough to run institutions, but lack critical thinking skills or curiosity. They are good at following instructions.
Sweden is way too conformist, I agree, there is an unwillingness to stand out. That has opened it up for very straight-forward indoctrination by the liberal elites. But at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter why things happen, why Swedes act the way they do, what matters is what happens and what Sweden’s attitudes are. Consequence management is an under-appreciated dynamic.
They all fit the mould of what is allowed – or prescribed – to critisize. But Sweden has ideologically no problem with illiberal thinking if it comes with some colour – I meant the Third World Swedish obsession and unwillingness to critisize anyone coming from that part of the world. E.g. Uganda has a death penalty for LGBT types, I doubt that would ever be seen as a policy-forming factor in Sweden.
Croatia is not “Russophobe”, rather it is Ukrainophile which is quite a bit different. Also any volunteers for combat would have been from a very specific far right ideological milieu which isn’t necessarily that representative of the country as a whole.
There is also still a considerabe latent pan-Slavist feeling on the other side of the spectrum but individuals of that sentiment would have been dissuaded from signing up for DPR/LPR on the account it is a brother-killing war.
On the other hand Serbian “Slavophiles” do not have such reservations as they aren’t so much pro-Slav as they are pro-Russian.
Sour grapes, etc.
So at the end of the day, the “pacifiers” are the ones that got pacified. Notwithstanding that these settlings of old accounts in Western Ukraine is still a constant source of friction between Poles and Ukrainians to this day, looking at the whole picture, do you think that the goal of the nationalists was a good one, in that direct Polish agitation has ceased and Ukrainians in these areas can now work out there own fate unhindered without any Polish agitation? Isn’t this what actually may be going on in the rest of Ukraine with its Russian population too? The most Russified parts have already been amputated, something that you seem to be in full favor of supporting?
It was a long process to be sure.
“Five years and four months”
That’s disgraceful.
Our UK taxes go towards funding real terrorists in Syria and Libya, our armed forces train them, we send them weapons. Yet Cameron’s not in jail and neither are any civil servants, soldiers or MPs.
I find this hard to believe. The consensus among friends of mine who visit Poland and Ukraine many times a year is that Ukrainians are far more chaste than Poles, who are in turn far more chaste than Swedes. As a rule, Ukrainian ladies never put out before the third date. In Sweden, they prefer to put out before the first date.
I also question your take on the HIV map you posted earlier in this thread. You are the doctor here, so I bow to you expertise, but I read somewhere that for a man having vaginal congress with an HIV-positive woman with an active virus, the risk of catching HIV was about 1 in 700. This risk rises quite a bit if you are into buggery, but still, the data seems to suggest that HIV is basically confined to gays*, hookers, and junkies. That is to say, your map shows the share of gays (rare in Ukraine), hookers (can’t be that many of them), or junkies (very likely).
That’s a Dirlewanger in the making, no doubt (a history of torturing animals is among the surest signs of sociopathy), but I was thinking only of foreigners.
I figured this guy a while back. He makes up fantasies in his head and then makes statements based on his fantasies and not reality.
Can anyone fact check this? This is pure fantasy. Even if there is evidence for this statement how much can this possibly be different from Western Ukranian Master Race regions? Yeah as a sex tourist I will go to a war zone to save a hundred rubles. Said no one.
Yes, I agree. My argument assumed that the foundation is already there. Mr. Scientism — whom I quote way too much, but he is truly great — argues that the Liberal Empire gets around the bad optics of “top-down management” by employing something he names “pre-propaganda”:
https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/1173360712439259136
https://twitter.com/mr_scientism/status/1172983295858106371
Aha, I misunderstood you. This I agree with, of course. It’s basically a mix of “soft bigotry of low expectations” and, in the case of immigrant Swedes who voice concerns about mass immigration (e.g. Tino Sanandaji or Hanif Bali), a peculiar modern form of class anxiety that the Swedish writer Nathan Shachar puts this way:
They used to annoyingly spam recruitment propaganda in the comments on some communities about the White movement and related topics I followed on VK back in the day. Typically went something like: join Slavic brothers in the fight against red puppets of Chekist-gangster Putin/hated Yid-Mason regime, etc.
Donbas is not Ukraine.
HIV in Ukraine now comes form sex more often than from needles. In Donbas it has achieved sub-Saharan African levels (not the worst, mind you).
However HIV is not the only sign here.
I found a comparison of Lviv to Luhansk on various problems.
Luhansk has 2.5 times higher rates of syphillis and gonorrhea than Lviv. And twice the rate of out-of-wedlock births. These all point to more whoring around in Donbas.
You are incapable of “figuring” anything. You can’t even figure basic details about the city where you claim to live.
Projection.
You don’t like facts, but facts are that this region has highest HIV, syphilis, etc. rates in Ukraine.
The Exile was written by American whore-consuming degenerate expats in Moscow. Their expert observation:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7573
“Lola, my whore, came from Severodonetsk, a toxic dump in the Lugansk oblast, the Russified east of Ukraine.I rented her late on Sunday, November 28th — the same day that the Ukrainian governors of several pro-Yanukovich regions were holding a congress in Severodonetsk, threatening to create a breakaway southeastern Ukrainian republic if the “orange” revolution in Kiev succeeded. It was one of those coincidences that writers invent to give a sordid story some relevance — but invention in this case isn’t necessary. We’re talking about whores here, folks. Any john in Moscow knows that Yanukovich country, the pro-Russian southeast of Ukraine, is the snapper-basket of Europe, the white world’s most fertile breeding ground for whores, the Golden Triangle of prostitution production.”
Their anecdotal evidence tracks with epidemiological evidence:
Before the war, Luhansk had 2.5 times higher rates of syphillis and gonorrhea than Lviv. And twice the rate of out-of-wedlock births.
There was no justification for the mass murder of civilians by Bandera’s followers or by anyone else.. Even if the end result has been less friction between the two nations.
Expelling Donbas from Ukraine has been accomplished without mass murder (sorry anti-Ukrainian propagandists, collateral damage due to rebels basing themselves in civilian areas is not mass murder). Mass murder of these people in Ukraine would be inexcusable too.
Though, speaking of animal torturing degenerates, look what I found about the national hero (of West Ukrainians) at the blog of Mr. Hack’s Bane:
https://insomniacresurrected.com/2019/09/25/stepan-bandera-suffocated-cats/
https://insomniacresurrectedcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/img_4588.jpg
Looks like Milchakov had “worthy” predecessors!
@AP
Yeah I am going to pass on a rusophobe book and anything it says there.
I will also turn to measles outbreak as something that directly contradicts your narrative about how West Ukraine is the master race.
Exile is behind a pay wall and what’s the anecdote to do with anything?
I readily believe that both the Russian and Ukranian parts of Ukraine are dumps however.
Let’s use proper terms. There was no expelling. If you want to expel a region you don’t try to conquer it and beg for it beg for 5 years.
It’s not direct proof (as in the case of Milchakov) but if true he is indeed degenerate filth. Although he’s a bad person regardless.
That having been said, Milchakov was encouraging mass murder of animals and viewed doing so as routine, while Bandera’s alleged act was some sort of one-off “test”, like Raskolinov’s murder of the old woman.
Not Russophobe but good you confirmed yet again that you can’t handle facts and prefer fantasy.
We were discussing whores, measles has nothing to do with that.
Figure it out.
True from that perspective. But Ukraine’s policies played a role in expulsion, as did Russia. “Violent separation” would have been a better term.
*Raskolnikov.
The book may say more about the Bandera fan that wrote it than about Bandera. Though even the author wrote “if.”
Buzyna was known for lying, so his claims don’t mean much.
Actually, the source of scorn and sumptuous ridicule for me. For you, on the other hand, he seems to be the source of your great reverence and inspiration. 🙁
Completely agreed. Also, interestingly enough, Ukraine might have been better served keeping its Poles since it would have meant a more pro-European electorate in Ukraine. This doesn’t really matter that much now, but it did matter a lot in the first couple of decades after Ukrainian independence was achieved.
Does not matter. You tried to prove east is more whorish by bring up STDs. That also is far from direct evidence. But we know your western Ukrainian hillbillies don’t vaccinate their kids. What else they don’t do? Raise them properly?
If “not loose” means commitment-free sex after three dates, we are in trouble.
Careful, AP. Many Russophiles hold Buzyna in high esteem and consider his opinions as sancrosanct. As a die-hard Triunist, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Karlin himself doesn’t worship at his altar. His co-blogging friend from Bohemia’s spiel is often just a regurgetation of Busyna’s virulent Ukrainaphobia.
You degenerates murdered him for a reason. It wasn’t because he was a feckless liar.
Careful. You’re ascribing things to me that I’ve never advocated. Although I found a lot of his views biased and unreliable, I would never advocate for his inglorious and tragic end. You’d agree with me though, I think, that he was not very wise in promoting his Ukrainaphobic views on TV and in public during 2014, the height of Maidan activism in Kyiv?
Interesting observations. Not sure I agree. One element is missing: delivery to those “key” what they really expect/want in life. The AUTHORITY is the authority as long as it does that. As soon as it can’t/won’t do it anymore it stops being the authority.
The Soviet Union/Eastern Block: as long as those people were getting from the Party/System what they needed they accepted the authority of the Party.
As for West: the Authority will keep being the authority as long as it delivers those “key” people what they want: a decent middle-class life with the possibility of improvement.
Now, how long that’s going to work, nobody knows. Yes, we’ve been expecting the crash of the system for quite some time and it’s just about to happen. Next month….since 90’s….
Can’t wait….
If you have to qualify your statements with shitting on his self preservation instinct you do support what happened to him you just lying when you say the opposite. I have no problem with the fact that a nazi regime murdered him, it simply confirms that it is a nazi regime. If they were not nazi’s they would have protected him or killed/arrested those responsible.
edit: Perhaps I am bit a unfair to you and AP lately I already forgot half the shit you guys claimed.
If you think STDs and out of wedlock births (whose rates are all 2-3 times higher in the East than the West of Ukraine) have no relationship to whorish behaviors I can’t help you.
But we already know you don’t like facts and prefer your fantasy world.
Low crime rates, high marriage rates, low STD rates etc. in the West tell us otherwise.
But we already know you don’t like facts and prefer your fantasy world.
If those numbers are correct then yes hats off to the west. Only in comparison ofcourse because you still have to account for what this means in absolute terms. Also comparing Luganks to Lvov is in question. I don’t know the area but population size is not the only comparison that needs to be made. Donetsk was a well off city so that should have been made for comparison. I am assuming Lvov is best what the west can offer.
Reasons I mentioned above makes your statistics meaningless even if they are somewhat related to sexual promiscuity.
We seem to talk past each other here. When you wrote, “They [the international volunteers on the separatist side] are in Donbas for the killing and the whoring,” I took “whoring” to mean “use the services of prostitutes” — the only dictionary definition that makes sense for a male subject — but you seem to take it to mean “sleep around with sluts.” As it happens, I find both these arguments risible, but let’s stick with your definition and look at what you wrote next:
As said, we are now talking about promiscuous women rather than actual prostitutes, and I made the points (1) that Swedish women — anecdotally, but with large samples from all three countries — are vastly more promiscuous than their Ukrainian sisters, with Polish women somewhere in between, and (2), that HIV is a poor proxy for promiscuity, or at any rate differences in promiscuity across regions. To this, you answered that “Donbas is not Ukraine,” which I take to mean that promiscuity is more rampant in Donbass than elsewhere in Ukraine, and that
What we have to go on, then, is hearsay, the commonness of some STDs, and the rate of out-of-wedlock births. This last datapoint is clearly not a good proxy — you get pregnant by having a partner, not by sleeping around — and the relative commonness of STDs is rather weak evidence given that your baseline is a religious peasant region that one would expect to have far less promiscuity than the European norm (even looking only at Ukraine, how would Donbass stand up against regions like Kherson or Zaporozhye?).
This is not to say that Donbass doesn’t have somewhat higher levels of promiscuity than the rest of the country, I would suspect it does, but in basically calling the women of Donbass whores, you are making an exceptional claim, which, as the saying goes, then needs exceptional evidence. Until more data comes along, I will file this under “Svidomy folklore.”
You convenienty leave out the many shellings of central Donetsk. Off the top of my head, I remember some sunbathing girls getting maimed, a trolley full of passengers getting blown to pieces, and at least one central school getting shelled during class hours, killing several children. These are but some examples out of many. The evidence is that sociopaths in the government ranks have simply enjoyed killing civilians at random, just as in Sarajevo during the Balkan War.
This is where you Ukrainian speakers can do some community service. Just do a quick search in Ukrainian for “Bandera + strangle + cat” and see what comes up. Better than dismissing Buzyna with a slur.
We are in trouble. 🙂
Yes, he doesn’t go into how that authority might be eroded and replaced. But he often stresses how enormously stable the liberal world order is and that a rising China is pretty much our only hope by now. As in this recent thread of tweets:
(Sorry for OT. This is the last quote, promise.)
And you conveniently have left out that the Donbas rebels are based in civilian areas and frequently fire out of those areas, provoking return fire.
Although it is likely that individuals have committed war crimes by firing randomly or without purpose (and they should be prosecuted, though they won’t be), this clearly is not a systemic issue; otherwise we would have a death toll comparable to the one in Chechnya or Syria.
It’s not a slur but a fact. I read one of his articles and it contained lies. I doubt it was just bad luck and this was the only one where he lied.
Donbas has both and there is overlap (i.e.,, women who will sleep with an ugly obnoxious guy right away because he’s from the USA and has money)..
I come back to this comment by Akuleyev:
“The Western Ukrainians are like Poles. Even despite decades of outright Soviet neglect and outright antagonism the level of culture in a place like Lwow (Lviv) far outstrips anything in Donetsk. I’ve spent significant time in both cities. Lwow felt like a Western city occupied by a foreign power. The people are fantastic, in a true conservative sense. They value their history, their land, their crafts, and they are a self-sufficient people. Donetsk is completely Soviet – deracinated, crappy industries, corrupt and crime ridden, and full of people who would emigrate to the West in a heart beat if they could. Even before the fighting Donetsk was a basket case like every other Russian and East Ukrainian city. If you want to get laid, go to Donetsk. The women have no morals, prostituting yourself is just what women do. In Lwow people still get married and value families. That alone explains why so many in the “manosphere” side with East Ukraine. ”
1.. Hearsay from multiple people.
2. Prevalence of diseases connected with sleeping around. You think that people with few sexual partners aren’t less likely to get STDs?
3. You get pregnant by random baby daddies (out of wedlock births) by sleeping around.
So rather solid evidence.
Lviv has about twice the population of Luhask.
But I’d guess in rural western areas promiscuity is even more rare than in Lviv.
Here is HIV rate by oblast:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4174506/
Scroll down to Table 1:
By heterosexual incidence, 10 times higher rate in Donetsk vs. Lviv. 3 times higher rate in Luhansk.
Nearly 4 times higher rate in Donetsk than in Ukraine’s largest city, Kiev!
International organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights are not know for “anti Ukrainian propagandist” activities at all. But they have all concluded that killing thousands of (its own) civilians through indiscriminate shelling of civilians areas in Donbas was immoral and could amount to war crimes.
Not that anyone sufficiently informed through contrasting information on the internet needed these organizations’ verdicts to form an opinion on how Ukrainians are conducting their so-called “anti-terrorist” operation but still.
First hand accounts of Kiev regime side hitting areas where the terrorists aren’t present.
As I wrote, there was some incidents of actual war crimes, but this was not systemic in nature (as evidenced by low civilian death toll), and in cases where rebels fired from civilian areas or were based in them (in other words, using civilians as shields) they are the criminals.
Funny and typical how you have no complaints about this stuff:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/02/02/human-shields-in-donetsk-launching-grads-near-a-residential-area/
Civilian Shields in Donetsk: Launching Grads near a Residential Area
February 2, 2017By Bellingcat Investigation Team
Translations: Русский
Summary
The available evidence clearly documents that on 31 January 2017, multiple attacks with MLR systems were launched in proximity of the hypermarket Auchan in Donetsk. The location deep inside the so-called “DNR” and the firing directing pointing toward Avdiivka clearly document the responsible side for these particular attacks. One launch site is around 200 meters east of the hypermarket, and in fewer than 500 meters from a school and residential area. The second launch site is in proximity of the bypass and around 600 meters from an industrial area and 1000 meters from a residential area. Some of the attacks occured during the day while the nearby bypass was also used by civilians.
Given the proximity of both launch sites to civilian infrastructure in the area, a potential Ukrainian counter attack to surpress and respond to the rocket fire would have automatically risked civilian lives in the area. The cross-country mobility of the likely used MLR system, BM-21 Grad, would have allowed alternative launch sites. However, the repeated usage of the launch site 200 meters east of the hypermarket Auchan strongly suggest that the selection of this area happened on purpose, deliberately risking the lives of the civilians in the area.
Details:
This report was written in collaboration with the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT).
The title of this report was modified following feedback regarding the term human shield. The use of Grads in this area of Donetsk endangers civilian lives, but is not intended to meet the legal definition of human shields. The legal term ‘endangering protected persons’ (civilians in this case) is most probably more suitable for this situation.
On 31 January 2017, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded the up to now highest number of explosions in the war in Eastern Ukraine. The current hotspot of the fighting, which has led to numerous civilian and military casualties, is the area between Adviivka, controlled by Ukraine, and Yasynuvata, controlled by the so-called “DNR” (Donetsk People’s Republic). The current events mark a new peak in the fighting in this warming winter (1 / 2). The press center of the Ukrainian “Anti-Terrorist Operation” reported that at least 100 Grad rockets were fired by combined Russian-separatists forces in the Donetsk sector on January 31. As this report will demonstrate, recently uploaded videos show least half of these rocket launches, which have been geolocated to a residential sector in eastern Donetsk. Recent satellite imagery and witness accounts confirm the geolocation, revealing the firing locations for Russian-separatist Grad launches.
Grads near Auchan
Social media accounts from a local pro-Ukrainian VK.com group in Donetsk monitoring outgoing and incoming shelling (see here, and here) suggest that combined Russian-separatists forces have been constantly firing Grads from the separatist-controlled Donetsk bypass highway near Auchan hypermarket:
“10 mins ago 4 Grads fire three packages each from the bypass road and bailed out… BITCHES!!!”
“Grad firing from bypass near Auchan” (source)
The same is reported by a popular pro-Ukrainian blogger, who likely uses a similar group as a source:
“11:15 Grads fired off their salvos from the bypass near Auchan and were off immediately”
As often is the case with shelling, social-media users reported incoming fire from government-controlled Avdiivka, including Grad MLRS, roughly at the same time as outgoing Grad fire was reported from Donetsk:
4:16 Grads again, near the church, loud and scary!!!
11:10 Chaotic impacts on Turgeneva, like in 2015
14:54 Grads fired from Donetsk as soon as the repair brigades went out, those bitches!
Furthermore, a pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter describes hearing Grads (archived) while at a mourning service for killed Vostok commander Ivan “Grek” Balakai on January 31 (see DRFLab report on the circumstances of his death). Later, a friend of the reporter confirmed to her that Grads were constantly firing the night before (January 30) and are based near the Auchan hypermarket. A video from the ceremony posted on the VK community of the Vostok battalion where the deceased commander used to serve confirms that the church is located in the residential area south of the hypermarket (47.989551 37.911307).
These reports are noteworthy because the stated location near the Hypermarket Auchan (47.996948 37.910538) suggests outgoing fire near a residential area. The Donetsk Bypass and an oncological hospital (47.997286 37.901797) are also in the general area.
Additionally, the church referenced by the Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter is in the same area, marked by yellow in the map below. A comparison of a video produced showing the church service for “Grek” and Yandex Panorama (street view) imagery shows that they are the same church, located near the residential area where Grads were fired.
Rockets on video
Beside these reports, six videos were uploaded showing the usage of Multi-Launch-Rocket-Systems (MLRS) near Donetsk on 31 January 2017 and 1 February 2017. Two videos show launches at night and were published on 31 January 2017. Three videos published on 31 January 2017 show launches during the day, and another video showing a launch during the day was published on 1 February 2017. All six videos could be geolocated to the area near of the Auchan hypermarket (video 1+2 / 3+4 /6).
Five of the videos point to a launch site a bit east of the hypermarket, and video 5 points to a launch site east of the residential block from which the video was filmed. A detailed analysis of the videos reveals that video 1 and 2 – the two videos showing the night Grad launch – quite likely show the same attack. In both videos, a van is visible on the road. In total, at least 15 launched rockets are visible in videos, while around 20 launches are audible.
Video 3 and 4 were filmed from approximately the same area of the quarters south of the hypermarket. In both videos, we observe civilan cars driving on a visible bypass. The rocket launch also occurs in approximately the same area. However, both videos most likely do not show the same scene. In video 4, sirens are audible after the launch, while nothing similar is audible in video 3. Also, the dust cloud resulting from the launch has a different form at the moment the last rocket is launched in both videos. Twenty-eight rockets are fired in video 3. At the beginning of this video, a salvo of 8 rockets is launched, and after a brief pause, another salvo encompassing 20 rockets is observed. Given the almost parallel launch of two rockets each in the second salvo, two launchers are likely. Video 4 shows at least 8 launched rockets.
Excellent source.
Russians should look up to central and west Ukrainian towns and cities, copy their prosperity and affluence.
Akuleyev is one those late sovok self-hating emigrants who still lives in the 1990s.
He seems to be an expat native of New England who has done a lot of business in eastern Europe.
“Basket case” probably wasn’t referring primarily to affluence, but social problems (crime, immorality, etc.). Donbas is much, much worse than Russia when it comes to these, but Russia itself is worse than Western Ukraine.
Generally speaking, For western Ukrainians Donbas serves as a proxy for Russia, in order to make Russia look unrealistically worse than it is in their eyes (if Donbas is this bad, imagine how bad the real Russia must be). Russians seem to use Eastern Ukraine the same way.
The statements you are making is nonsense. If the statistics to be believed yes west has lower incidence of HIV. However your own article talks about main transfer vector is drug use. Second just looking at population density most population is in the East and Center with the biggest cities concentrating there. Big cities have higher concentration of drug use and promiscuous activity. So the spread of HIV would be from there. So that is how you get the map in your link. Could I be wrong? Yes. By the extension you cherry picking data could also be wrong.
There are a lot more that can be said but I am not wasting my time on this. I wasted enough skimming the data.
So again as I said you simply make shit up. All that ubermensch Austrian blood is wasted on you. 😛
https://sharij.net/160017
Zelenski 70% support.
Poroshenko 80% anti support.
Svidomi crying in the corner.
One of the oldest tricks in CIA playbook: find people who believe that they are better than those that they want to undermine – support them. Ukrainians think that they are better than the Russians. Proof? US supports them. Oh yeah, and plus their cities are tidier (supposedly).
Never mind the overall picture, that the Russian culture just dwarfs that of Ukraine.
It’s nothing new. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croats claimed that they are more “civilized’ by the Serbs. One of the most ridiculous “proofs” that they used for their assertion was that their backyards are tidier than those of the Serbs. What does that prove? Well, I guess that the Croats a better gardeners than the Serbs. I guess it’s only normal when you spend centuries by being constant gardeners on the estates of the Austro-Hungarians.
I guess what I am trying to say is that it matters not only if you are more “cultured” than your opposition, it matters how you acquired your culture. The Serbs and the Russians didn’t acquired their culture by being servants to the Austro-Hungarians, like the Croats and the Ukrainians (the western part) were.
The other trait that both Croats and Ukrainians share is that is beneath their “dignity” to be ruled by other Slavs. Their rulers can only be from the more “advanced” west. They are too stupid to realize how humiliating this attitude is to them as Slavs. Maybe I am totally different than everybody, but if my country is to be ruled by foreign power – I prefer if that foreign power was Slavic (as long as they are not catholic, because I can’t stand those people).
I still prefer my country to be independent, but if it has to be ruled by foreigners, I prefer them to be Slavs. It is less humiliating. But that’s something that neither the Croats nor the Ukrainians can understand. No one can look so down upon you, as someone who has no cultural or genetic ties to you. No Russian, or Serb can look so further down on any fellow Slavs – if they were in position to rule over land of other Slavs – like some obnoxious arrogant westerner who believes that he is better than ANY Slavs. Chew on that one for a while.
Why continue to write this?
Before the war, Donetsk was the second richest city in Ukraine, and it looks better than most cities in either Ukraine or Russia.
This was a city with high attractiveness to investors, competitive economy (by Ukraine standards), large educated and middle class population, attractive and well-designed avenues. In all ways – it looked more civilized than average for the region.
This seems a very Balkan way of thinking, where historically very small countries necessarily have to attract larger powers to protect them.
In Ukraine, they did not consider exactly that the alternative of rejecting Eurasian Economic Union, was to be ruled by America and NATO.
Ukraine is Europe’s second largest country, and by population over 40 million people (6th largest population in Europe, behind to Spain, but ahead of Poland)
The fact such a large country, is in such a weak and impotent situation as it is today, is absurd and sad, although the reason is a bit trivial – because of their third world level economy and low level of state capacity.
If the economic situation would eventually develop, and they develop some kind of European level of state capacity (we are projecting a long way into the future of course) – why should they in theory be less independent than Spain?
We already explained this HIV topic.
HIV rate doesn’t indicate anything about “civilization level” or even “morality level” in an area (except very indirectly as a measure of government competence and investment in healthcare).
E.g. Netherlands and Amsterdam has one of the lowest HIV rates in the world.
–
Areas with high HIV – it is in inverse correlation to government competence, medical care and management of epidemics.
In the post Soviet Union space today, precisely, there is a common (regardless of country) incompetence of government, and poor understanding of how to manage disease epidemics. This is why the HIV rate is so extremely high all over the region (although particularly near to opium routes).
This is not indication of the quality of the city, or morality of the population – except in a very indirect way (as general correlate of the development level of the country’s medical policy).
Superb comment, all of it. I was especially happy to see you put into words something that has been bothering me for a while:
Yes, indeed. Couldn’t agree more. I think for Western Russophiles, half the pull of the place is that it’s not just a watered-down take on our civilization, but its own proud and unique thing.
That wasn’t exactly the moral of the story.
The moral of the story was that to be ruled by foreigners is no glory,
but there is even less glory if the rulers to be – are completely foreign,
as opposed to if they are fellow Slavs, which would make it less boring.
Sweden is pretty impressive place culturally too. I’ve been there couple of times. I think it’s probably one of the most civilized places in Europe. It’s too bad that you couldn’t protect your culture better and had to follow the example of the ones who care about nothing else but money.
I know but it’s absurd and unnatural, that still Ukraine is a giant baby, which needs other countries to protect or rule it, almost 30 years since it was provided independence.
Ukraine has the same population today as the UK had in 1905, when UK has controlled half of the world.
Considering its size, location and population, Ukraine’s only model should be to become a normal country, which can manage its own life without external interference.
I read this, but I’m not sure it matches reality.
Poles – the most Slavs of Slavs – hate so much even being in a Warsaw Pact.
–
On the other hand, non-Slavic nationalities like Yakuts have a lot of persecution and bullying in both the Russian Empire and USSR, and yet today they are happy to be in Russia and can dance like a gopnik.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BimrDy0F2vx/
Sure, but it also includes sexual transmission separately. And here we see Donbas being much worse (it’s worse in terms of drug use also, of course).
Kiev is Ukraine’s largest city. It’s population is nearly 3 million. Don3tsk’s population was nearly 1 million in 2012.
Yet Donetsk had 4 times the per capita rate of HIV than Kiev!
Lviv had about 800,000 people. Donetsk had 10 times higher rate than Lviv!
Luhansk is about half the size of Lviv. Yet it had a 3 times higher rate of HIV!
These are facts but you are afraid of facts.
So the only one making shit up is you, as usual. Biggest city in the country has a lower HIV rate than far smaller cities in Donbas.
This only proves that many Svidomy support Zelensky.
Poroshenko and highly optimistic/deluded Russians claim what you imply.
It looked like nothing special:
It was rich in the way that some places in Africa with a lot of oil are rich. Most of the wealth ended up in Cyprus. The money meant that there were a few new fancy buildings like the soccer stadium but overall..nothing.
In Kiev in 2005 people put signs in the perekhods underneath the streets – please do not piss here, this is not Donetsk.
Focus within the same country.
Within one country, Ukraine – government competence or healthcare level isn’t better in the West than in the East (recall the measles epidemic is in the West). Yet, within this same country with the same healthcare system – Donetsk has 10 times higher HIV rate than Lviv. Luhansk (1/2 the size of Lviv ) has 3 times higher HIV rate than Lviv.
Now look at some rural backward place in western Ukraine like Zakarpattya. It has practically no HIV at all. You think it has a better healthcare system than Donetsk or Lviv?
If people don’t sleep around these things have no influence on HIV rate. It only helps those who do.
So this explains why HIV rate in Donetsk is higher than in Amsterdam. But it does not explain why HIV rate in Donetsk is higher than in Lviv.
:::::::::::
Also Donbas has high rates of syphilis, and out of wedlock births.
No need to have someone in Kiev find the book, it is online:
http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/978-617-538-377-3/978-617-538-377-3.pdf
Pg. 18.
Claim comes from a Soviet journalist who allegedly heard it from someone who knew Bandera.
Naturally claims by Soviet journalists about someone like Bandera are going to be positive and will never include lies.
The book was written by a Bandera fangirl who says if it happened it was a moral test of strength and not sadism. While this excuse is bullshit, doubt about the veracity of this story is not.
::::::::::
By presenting this claim as the truth, Buzyna was being dishonest again, and Insomniac Resurrected has demonstrated his gullibility again.
I found the book online:
http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/978-617-538-377-3/978-617-538-377-3.pdf
Pg. 18.
Claim comes from a Soviet journalist who allegedly heard it from someone who knew Bandera.
Naturally claims by Soviet journalists about someone like Bandera are going to be positive and will never include lies.
The book was written by a Bandera fangirl who says if it happened it was a moral test of strength and not sadism. While this excuse is bullshit, doubt about the veracity of this story is not.
::::::::::
By presenting this claim as the truth, Buzyna was being dishonest again, and Insomniac Resurrected has demonstrated his gullibility again.
It’s better to acquire one’s culture from the Ottoman Turks whom one has served for 500 years, then from the Austrians. Explains why Serbia and Macedonia are much more cultured than Croatia and Slovenia.
Russia also cannibalises itself through corruption, to a much larger extent than Hajnal countries do.
Croatia and Slovenia were so cultured that they waited for the backward Serbia to liberate them from Austro-Hungary. Same with you, Ukros, Polaks and what have you, you are so cultured that violence is too barbaric for you, you left that part to Russia to liberate your stupid a**es from Austro-Hungary, Germany or whomever you were soaking western culture from in a bend over position.
This Anglo project (Serbs were stupid tools, it seems) was not a liberation. What Croats did to Serbs afterwards indicates this.
I don’t think you understand the history of the conflict in former Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats. Yugoslavia as an idea was Croatian – probably because they knew that they are not capable of liberating themselves.
Serbs had no business joining Yugoslavia, because of the former 6 republics, only the Serbs (actually Montenegro too, but since they are Serbs too, it doesn’t count) had independent state prior to Yugoslavia.
The Croats big beef with the Serbs, once Yugoslavia was created, was that they should have bigger say in the Yugoslavian affairs, because their culture is supposedly superior to that of the Serbs. The Serbs simply told them to F-off, because it was their military power that put Yugoslavia together – inferior culture or not.
I think it’s similar to your beef with the Russians, you think that you have a superior culture, which is neither here nor there, but the fact is that without Russian military power, not only you wouldn’t exist as a country, you wouldn’t exist as people either. So stop bitching about it, or I am going to report you to the committee for un-Slavic activities (me).
Nice digging!
Yes, this does make the story far less likely than if it were born in pro-Bandera circles, but we should not dismiss it outright. Soviet sources certainly must be viewed with extreme suspicion (as I pointed out when we discussed that Soviet-era map of “similarities between languages” that both you and Anatoly have posted), but was the journalist a hack taking orders from the KGB or a truthseeker during the Glasnost? I feel the answer makes some difference.
Still, for now, we should give Bandera — awful as he might have been — the benefit of the doubt.
This is being way too hard on Buzyna. Popular history books are often littered with proven inaccuracies — Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, to pick but one recent example, was savaged by Swedish historians for relating long-since debunked anecdotes — so for Buzyna to relate information from a dubious source as fact is in no way enough to call him dishonest or a liar. Sloppy? Yes, but this is something other than telling falsehoods.
If you took a sober, non-partisan look at these figures of yours, you would see that these are the figures you should be looking at.
Do you not see the implication of the HIV rate being staggeringly higher in Donetsk than in Lugansk, right next door? This suggests that HIV rates are highly localized phenomena, just like any epidemic. Even more, a thrice higher HIV rate in Lugansk than in Lviv might not be that exceptional if the absolute figure in Lviv is very low. (The lower the baseline, the more striking the deviations look — 3 is 300% higher than 1.)
Sorry, no idea what this is supposed to mean in the context of what we are discussing. But you are Norwegian, right? How do you feel about this discussion and Norway’s place in it? To be honest, I have never understood Norwegian nationalism. To my mind, Scandinavia would be better off in every way (higher-level culture, sports, science, name-recognition, clout, etc.) had only Scandinavism succeeded back in the 19th century. (Sweden is most to blame for that failure, I know, but still, I think it was a shame.)
My point is that Russia is not partnership as of today, but a society that is predatory toward itself. It is not a proud partnership of people, helping build eachother. Russia does not seem like “a proud and distinct thing” to me.
Many in Norway felt that Sweden threw dictates at Norway, and deliberatly sabotaged Norwegian interests. Memories of the post-Napoleonic founding of the union, was still alive and got strenghtened by disagreements. Unionen kunne kanskje vært mer vellykket hadde unionen blitt slakket etterhvert. Senere hadde det vært interesse i begge landene for en tettere union, kunne man ha det som et framtidsmål.
We should be able to write and speak Scandinavian with eachother, don’t you think?
I agree with you one Scandinavism.
Before you start accusing others of not understanding historical Croat/Serbian dynamics be careful that you understand the relationship of those you’re try to lecture to. You coudn’t be more wrong. It’s Western, specifically US support that is keeping Russia at arms length in not trying to totally subdue Ukraine. The comparison isn’t valid, you’re trying to compare a situation of two more or less separate peoples and one where Ukraine for a long period of time was a subervient colony of Russia. As far as I know, and please correct me if I’m wrong, neither Croatia nor Serbia ever actually controlled the political or cultural fortunes of the other, not so between Russia and Ukraine.
Taking some hearsay from a very dubious source and, based on that, proclaiming that Bandera was a cat-killer is rather dishonest.
Bandera was a jerk regardless of whether or not he killed cats as a child. This story doesn’t change it, but it is further confirmation that Buzyna was dishonest in his tendentious approach to Ukraine. I’ve only been familiar with two of his works, this one and some article of his about Galicia, and in both cases he was dishonest. The latter actually included outright lies.
There is some truth in that. It is more reason to quarantine and blockade the place from Ukraine. However, Luhansk is also a much smaller city than either Lviv or Donetsk. And behavior makes a difference in terms of how vast such a disease can spread. People in Lviv are less likely to be junkies and less likely to sleep around.
Compared to what? Venice or Oxford?
It was better than majority of cities of Ukraine and Russia, etc, which is the point of comparison (not Western Europe).
It was an elegant Soviet city, which had continued to succeed in a post-Soviet era.
It was the second richest city in Ukraine, economically booming, with a large bourgeoisie, above average educated population, etc.
It was ranked highly in economic competitiveness, economic innovation, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160512033731/http://feg.org.ua/uploadfiles/ckfinder/files/reports/2013/FEG_report_2013_body_rus.pdf
One of the main things people were complaining just before the war, was that too many luxury apartment complexes were being constructed and planned in Donetsk and that there were too many luxury restaurants and automobile salons.
So bourgeoisie were expending money locally (even if all luxury products are imported – just as they are in Kiev).
Here read how street signs were all for Gucci, Hugo Boss. Lagerfeld
They had one of the best football teams in Europe.
This was a football team which competes with teams from the most developed Western European cities.
In such ways, it is an indication of an unusually successful city for this region.
Donetsk was a comparatively clean. Clean level, maintenance of roads and sidewalks, good quality of buildings (which were, unusually, not decaying). Everything was higher than average city in Ukraine or Russia.
HIV rate in Ekaterinburg is more than twice as high as the HIV rate in Donetsk.
Ekaterinburg – one of the most successful, cultural, now economically booming city.
HIV rate has no relation to the kind of inferences you make about the quality of a city, or the cultural level of its population.
Perhaps, a higher rate of HIV was recorded in Donetsk, because it was geographically part of the opium route entering into Ukraine? (I don’t know – but it’s a factor for the epidemics in other cities).
Isn’t the Heroin coming from Afghanistan?
I wouldn’t put it past the CIA to try and push it to damage societies of it’s enemies and earn a neat profit in the process, East India Company style
Compared even to places like Vynnytsia. It was a shithole compared to Kharkiv.
It was rich from coal and steel so it had some more expensive buildings.
“Successful” – with African level of HIV, and with massive crime rate, and lowest life expectancy in Ukraine. And a fancy soccer stadium.
Assault rate:
https://i.imgur.com/9EswwPC.png
Life expectancy 2012:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/UkrLifeExpectancy.PNG
Detroit has some fancy expensive buildings and stadiums. It also has some luxury car dealerships.
I guess you can overlook its crime and HIV ratres and claim it is a dynamic successful place.
Bandit city had many bandits. Do you know how many luxury cars one can find in American ghettos?
LOL, your link is to a publication from Donetsk oligarch Akhmetov’s “Фонд «Эффективное управление.”
I would be shocked if the Donbas oligarch wouldn’t claim his home region is the most competitive.
I would take it with a big grain of salt.
Thugs wearing expensive clothes while living in a place with low expectancy, high crime, high HIV.
Sounds like some parts of Africa:
https://i.redd.it/yudgtdspktl11.jpg
Steel and coal can buy stuff like a soccer team.
City looked crappy. Half-deserted, poorly-dressed people, but with new expensive buildings:
Is it? I was posting data from 2005-2012. How was Ekaterinburg back then compared to Donetsk? I doubt it is that bad in Russia.
How about crime and life expectancy? Syphilis?
The similarities between your situation with the Russians and the Croats vs. the Serbs are frightening. You display exactly the same attitude as the Croats vs. Serbs.
For sure, Russia would like you to be part of their state, but Ukrainians see this planned “assimilation” as disappearing into nothingness. It’s not disappearing into nothingness, it’s disappearing into Russianess.
You feel offended by the Russian attitude, but the Russians are offended too, because how can disappearing into Russianess be considered disappearing into nothingness? Russians think that you should be grateful that they are offering you to become Russian, but for you it’s an insult.
Same thing with the Serbs and the Croats. Serbs used to think about the Croats as catholic Serbs. Croats found this terribly offensive. Serbs thought that anyone should be grateful – if offered the chance to be a Serb.
The Serbs even have a saying: “Speak Serbian so the whole world can understand you”. They really crack me up, because they were serious about it. They used to think so highly of themselves and their language – although is spoken by less than 20 million people (in all its incarnations).
It’s weird, I think both you and the Croats have a point, but you shouldn’t necessarily treat the Russian and the Serbian attitude as offensive. I am going to bring these issues to the committee for un-Slavic activities, to see if we can resolve them (just kidding).
Opium comes North from Central Asia/Afghanistan and then at Ekaterinburg it travels in both East and West direction.
Ekaterinburg is probably home of the HIV epidemic. But then West to Omsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, etc . And East to Perm. (There’s an HIV epidemic in all these cities).
So Ekaterinburg already has some 10 times higher prevalence of HIV in the population, than Netherlands.
You cannot say it is America which is responsible for the HIV epidemic.
American and European epidemiologists have published for years about how to contain this epidemic.
But authorities in Russia and Ukraine, do not comply with the recommendations, and the result was predictable.
From little I know, this was on a federal government level primarily.
However, on a local government level, there were people like Roizman which drug chain addicts to the bed – we are talking about idiots who can’t follow the advice of epidemiologists who studied the causes and solutions for HIV epidemics.
Again, for the regional standards (both Ukraine and Russia) – before the war, Donetsk was elegant, clean, well organized and economically successful city.
And with the most local rich people, after Kiev.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120813005732/http://focus.ua/society/241242
And good maintenance of roads, trees, sidewalks and buildings.
Fortunately, both Yandex and Google have photographed the city, from before the war.
Look at ulitsa Artema and tell me how stones are in the wrong place or holes in the road or sidewalk.
It’s a serious and objective report. They explain strengths and weaknesses of the region without any self-promotion.
I cannot read this comment seriously.
You would also call Ekaterinburg Africa, because of Dior shops and high HIV. (I never knew that Africa was distinguished by consumption of luxury products, it seems to be rather a dissimilarity from Africa).
Compared to Venice or Oxford or something. For local standards of Ukraine/Russia, it was above average for the city of this size and historical era of construction.
Lol how I could I write the meaning of the words “West” and “East” the opposite way of the correct translation, but my point is that the longitudinal direction of travel of this epidemic is clear.
You see, the trouble with handing over all Ukrainian matters to your so called “Committe for un-Slavic Activites” is that all of the results are so one dimensional and predictable:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/RIAN_archive_535278_Laying_flowers_and_wreaths_to_Iosif_Stalin%27s_grave_at_Kremlin_wall.jpg/800px-RIAN_archive_535278_Laying_flowers_and_wreaths_to_Iosif_Stalin%27s_grave_at_Kremlin_wall.jpg
See what I mean?
Corruption and rapacity remain problems in the post-Soviet Russian state, it’s true, but this modern state should not be confused with the Russian nation, which has endured for more than a millennium (give or take).
Ja, självklart, men jag tror det är emot reglerna att kommentera på andra språk än engelska och ryska.
(Yes, of course, but I believe it’s against the rules to comment in languages other than English and Russian.)
Oh, I’m sure he was wrong lots of times, but dishonesty and lying take intent, which I don’t see here. And remember that this anecdote might still be true. All we can say for now is that the source is unreliable.
This I don’t doubt, but again, it’s a religious peasant region, which makes it a poor point of comparison. I’m sure people in Des Moines sleep around less than those in New York City, but that’s comparing apples and pears.
Sorry for going on criticizing your data, but there is an important point to make here. What these two maps show, I’m sure, are outcomes of greater levels of alcoholism and drug abuse in Donbass than elsewehere in Ukraine. Bad enough, sure, but my point is that when putting a region against others, you will often have some confounding variable or other (here, greater levels of alcoholism and drug abuse) that makes pretty much all other data from that region look bad. And even with that said, note that the differences in life expectancy are pretty uniform across the country — way below the Western European average.
Odessa has always been the highest rate of HIV in the country you idiot( no surprise considering major port city with millions of tonnes of cargo passing, major beach tourist city in the country attracting plenty of Lvov whores to either visit or migrate there over the years ), followed by Dnepropetrovsk. Neither region of the Donbass has ever been in top position for HIV/AIDS in Ukrops history. Odessa is something like 950-1000 per 100000 people infected
It is primarily an urban disease, risk of it spreading is exponentially higher in urban areas compared to rural areas obviously , so even though Lvov has a urban to rural population ratio of 3:2, and Donetsk and Lugansk are both ratios of about 9:1…….the infection rate in Donbass was only 3/4 times larger than shithole Lvov, despite 9 times larger urban ratio. That pretty much makes Lvov, the city the worst city in repelling HIV in the whole country and the most promiscous! 10, 15 or 20 times less rate would be good for Lvov, 3.5 is a catastrophe
4.Let’s not forget that, objectively the hospitals in the Donbass, kiev and much of the south are far superior in facilities, serve a much higher proportion of people in concentrated areas….and certainly have a far higher proportion of qualified and educated medical professionals………which simply means western ukraine is woefully underdiagnosed
6.As if your argument wasn’t dumb and insidious enough with kiev city not listed, Odessa clearly always high……it gets worse with Khmelnitsky and Cherkassy very high on the list and Volyn not very low either! It’s a problem throughout the country
“nearly 1% of pregnant women in Donbass had HIV”.
LOL- current rate in Ukraine ( at least officially) is over 1% of the population having HIV- your witless drivel is just saying that not only pregnant but by extrapolation,ALL women in Donbass have considerably below national average for the infection you dummy!
Bearing in mind the point about worse hospital / lower diagnosis competency in the west- the stats NOW show Kiev controlled Lugansk significantly lower than Lvov in HIV! Something like 160 per 100000 in Lvov to 115 in Lugansk
This is the most disturbing and tragicomic point. I was reading through some of open thread 90 or whatever recent one of Karlin today. Hilariously, it seems soon after how I mentioned I was a Civil Engineer, you have blurted out in some obviously insanely jealous response, that you are some qualified medical professional!!!
LOL. I defy any sane person who has read your incompetent posts on this subject to actually think you are a qualified medic!- interchangeing the terms of “AIDS” and “HIV” in an obviously false and confused manner. …..not to mention in your lie about Donbass to defend Galicia whores showing inept confusing about the transmission of the disease ( intravenous drug use vs sex)….makes it absolutely impossible you are a qualified medic. There is simply zero chance a real one would talk about the issue like that. Utterly disturbing, in addition to faking the ability to speak Russian ( hilariously exposed ), that you would know create for yourself the role as a fantasist medic!
Try not to get Uncle Karlin to protect you from your cretinism this time. My points are quite undeniable
That “study” is clear BS – no surprise that even the WHO have nothing to do with it
It was economically successful. It wasn’t cleaner or more elegant than other cities.
The “best” Eastern Ukrainian city was and is Kharkiv. Its residents compared their city favorably to bandit-Donetsk.
Here is Vynnytsia:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/JBWMD7/vinnytsia-ukraine-may-18-2017-view-of-soborna-square-and-former-hotel-JBWMD7.jpg
Is it not as clean or elegant as Donetsk?
Kharkiv:
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DP8PN2/street-in-historical-center-of-kharkiv-ukraine-DP8PN2.jpg
Same thing.
It is very odd to think of Donetsk as “clean” or “elegant” compared to other Ukrainian or Russian cities.
It was fortunate to have coal and steel, Ukraine’s main source of hard currency, so it had more money.
It’s a promotional project of one of Donetsk’s oligarchs. It is expensively-made.
There aren’t many holes in central Zhytomir or Kharkiv etc. sidewalks either.
Compared even to Kharkiv or Vinnytsia (never mind Venice).
Lviv is religious but it isn’t “peasant,” the city has a population of 800,000 people (4 times more than Des Moines). It has twice the population of Luhansk. Being “peasant” would not explain its 3 times lower rate of HIV than Luhansk.
Good point. All this stuff goes together, though. American ghettos have high crime, high rates of STDs, high rates of substance abuse. Overall picture is that of a shithole. Same for Donbas.
There was a 3.5 year difference between Lviv oblast and Donetsk oblast.
Data were from 2012. At that time it was indeed well below Western European averages, but Western Ukraine was about the same as that of the Baltic countries. In 2012, Russia’s life expectancy was 70.1 years.
As an aside, it is pleasant to be in an argument with someone who is honest. Thank you.
He knew that his source was very suspect and treated the info from that source as truthful without providing caveats for readers. This is dishonest and in bad faith. Someone like insomniac resurrected repeating it would not be dishonest, merely gullible. I don’t think Buzyna was gullible.
Vinnitsa has more prerevolutionary architecture, so better for postcards – but it appears to have somewhat worse maintenance and is less clean or tidy overall, than Donetsk was.
It is a very objective report – they criticize as much as they praise.
Donetsk almost doesn’t have prerevolutionary architecture, unlike Vinnitsa or Kharkov.
However, the condition of the Donetsk was maintained better, without any doubt (you can see overall more holes, less tidy and less maintenance in those other cities).
Condition of all three of those cities is/was quite good though. Donetsk was a successful and elegant city.
LOL, Sovok “engineer” can’t do basic math, of course. While adjusting for urban/rural makes a small difference it is not nearly enough.
Total urban population in Lviv oblast is 1.5 million. In Luhansk oblast it is 2 million (though Lviv has about 800,00 people, Luhansk has only about 400,000.). So if indeed HIV is limited to urban areas only as you propose, one would expect Lviv oblast to have 75% HIV rate of Luhansk oblast.
However (Table 1), for 2005-2012:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4174506/
Lviv oblast had only about 33% as many sexually-transmitted HIV cases as did Luhansk oblast.
It had, overall, about 50% of Luhansk oblast’s HIV cases total (in Lviv HIV is transmitted through needles more than through sex, in Luhansk it is the opposite – you know, whoring around).
Donetsk oblast has about 3 times more urban people than does Lviv oblast. But, it’s number of HIV cases transmitted through sex was 12 times higher.
Although I wouldn’t doubt that there are few doctors in the Carpathian mountain villages, you claimed that HIV is an urban phenomenon.
Well, Lviv has more urban doctors per patient than any other oblast:
http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/280701/UkraineHiT.pdf
Lviv’s medical university is ranked higher than the one in Donetsk (also higher than the ones in Odessa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk – but Zaporizhia’s is higher):
https://www.4icu.org/ua/
Overall, the best medical schools are in the country’s west.
Higher life expectancy also is suggestive of better medical care.
Those regions are in central not western Ukraine, and are lower than in Donetsk.
Kiev City is listed here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4174506/
Lower rate than in Donetsk. About 2/3 rate of HIV transmitted by needles and only 1/4 the rate of HIV transmitted by sex as in Donetsk oblast.
Sovok “engineer” doesn’t know that 2015 comes before 2019.
Normally one would expect pregnant women to have a lower rate of HIV than the general population. Not so in your mind, apparently.
Did you see difference in cleanliness? I didn’t.
The point is that if it were objective they would criticize more than they praise.
HDI by oblast. Unfortunately it only goes to 2001:
http://www.miamioh.edu/cas/_files/documents/havighurst/2007/skryzhevska.pdf
Page 10. Donbas went from being first in Ukraine outside Kiev in 1994, to dead last by 2001.
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/ukraine_nhdr_2008_en.pdf
Page 83. Donbas was still dead last in 2005.
(I don’t have more time to spend googling this stuff).
(wikie has HDI by region but not by oblast, so Lviv is mixed together with backward Volyn, Donbas with high HDI Kharkiv)
Low life expectancy, high crime, low HDI, high HIV – picture doesn’t add up to the place being elegant, clean, civilized or successful.
Any stats on where urban, educated Jews chose to live during pre and post-revolutionary times in Vinnitsa vs Donetsk? They usually know where the better places are located?
Percentage of Jews by oblast in 2010:
https://i.imgur.com/epb5Yxi.png
Luhansk was in first place, followed by Dnipropetrovsk. Pretty much none in Galicia, which had once been 10% Jewish, because the native Jews there were utterly wiped out there during World War II, and the post-Soviet colonists (the most famous of whom being the Russian liberal politician Yavlinsky) fled after 1990.
Due to the patronage of Kolomoysky, a lot of Jews from Donbas have settled in Dnipropetrovsk:
https://qz.com/347948/the-ukrainian-city-thats-become-a-haven-for-jews-fleeing-another-european-war/
Looks to me that Vinitska Oblast has less Jews (1.2) living within than Donetska Oblast (1.6)? Still, 1.2 is quite high. Vinitska Oblast is quite well off, it’s the home of a lot of Poroshenko’s cronies, including Groisman, if I’m not mistaken. Nemiroff is either located within or in neighboring Khmelnitsky oblast.
1.6 was Luhansk. Donetsk was 1.0.
Please be kind with AP, he still havent gotten over the fact that disease-ridden, uncivilised, dirty and overall inferior sovoki made his shchyryje ukraintse run away , utterly beaten and disgraced, their NATO overlords having led them to defeat.
And the fact that the whole clown parade exists only because V.V. Putin gave a tacit accord in ’14, as the airmobile brigade that saved the Krym from fascists could in 24h be in Kiev and end the posturing Banderists in a very decisive manner.
I suppose he was tired with paying for the whole mess.
Too many lies to bother countering now ( plus Karlin atrocious ban)…….funny to note the masquerading as a medical professional, when given your comments on HIV /aids it is impossible to think you are one…….is not denied.
Hasn’t the North Caucasus-lite for Ukrops lowest producer of politicians, judges, scientists, performing artists, engineers, sportsmen…..already been fully explained?
Yes I could see it appears better maintained in Donetsk compared to either of those cities (particularly things like quantity of holes in roads/sidewalks). This is on Yandex and Google photos of the city which were filmed in 2012.
(Obviously now, the situation in Donetsk is ruined).
High income, clean/elegant streets, above average education.
Jewish populations in Ukraine will be older, and immobile (not moving between cities according to quality of life differences).
In Donetsk, generally, the old people stay – and most of the young have exited because of the war.
Young people will go often to Kiev, Moscow.
You can see on social media, younger professionals in Kiev who are refugees from Donetsk.
There is a small Jewish private school in Lvov (so they must have some there, at least to sustain a very small school).
AK knows who I am and can confirm.
I want to remain anon so I do not detail by specialty, I only state I have a doctoral degree (MD, DO, PhD or D Pharm) and work in a hospital and private office.
OTOH it is funny that as a sovok civil “engineer” you consistently fail at math.
US has it’s own drug epidemic to be giving advice.
This. He is comparing backward rural area of Ukraine with heavily industrialized high density areas. Also ignoring good stats in other Eastern regions and ignoring how identical central regions look to east.
I personally like rural but as far as comparisons go he is trying to pass his fantasy as reality.
Just a couple of years ago Lvov and Vinitsia were swimming in garbage because they did not have enough money to pay for the services.
Lviv has twice the population of Luhansk.
Only good state for Donbas was money – thanks to export of steel and coal.
Center is worse than west, better than Donbas. Not identical.
You are projecting again.
Political problems between Lviv mayor and Poroshenko. Toronto was also swimming in garbage due to some trouble with unions. The difference is that Lviv managed it well by still removing the garbage from much of the center whereas Toronto:
https://toronto.citynews.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/10/2009/01/940b30e24883b6bb1cab8eb1f149.jpeg
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/A3NPRE/garbage-piles-up-in-city-parks-due-to-collectors-strike-in-toronto-A3NPRE.jpg
The political problem was over the west being poor and not being able to afford to pay for garbage services.
West Ukraine is under developed. Everything you say can be explained by this fact. Besides the fact that you can’t even understand the bs paper you pushing.
I am happy they have less HIV cases. They also stand on their knees like slaves when their heroes come back in caskets.
Central Ukraine does not like your svidomi kind either. Also funny you talk shit about Buzina since he can’t defend him self because Nazis killed him.
https://youtu.be/XFZ8az8aUSI
Sharii’s wife talking here about Poroshenko’s shit propaganda channel. They went to a local protest and tried to pass it off as anti shteinmeyer formula protest. People come up to journo who is running a live segment and call her a liar on live TV. Poroshenko’s channel turns off cameras waits until later in the day and then restarts again trying to pass off the crowd as anti shteinmeyer formula protest.
With these warriors and propagandists I fear there is no future for west Ukraine ubermench.
No the political problem was because Lviv’s mayor refused to support Poroshenko.
You are fantasizing as usual.
Lviv is more highly developed than Luhansk.
I didn’t know that slaves knelt to honor their war dead.
I guess these guys are slaves according to you?
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/03/26/split-second-bravery-soldiers-recount-fallen-comrades-medal-honor-heroism.html
I guess the American guy here is also a slave in your Sovok world?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garystoller/2017/07/17/at-americas-airports-are-fallen-soldiers-getting-the-respect-they-deserve/#608f0bf64167
LOL, more fantasies.