For example, a few months ago the Canadian conservative party made a political ad talking about fighter jets conducting a training mission to defend Canada...
If Russia isn't bluffing about the Su-75 (fat chance), then supposedly they've got a design that can suit the task. But nothing is in operational service yet, so it's all one big nothingburger until then.
So. Can we put the idea to bed about bad Putin, poor Russians ? This is a marketing video aimed at parents enrolling their kids. That they want you to see this tells a hell of a lot about societal values.
Go look up some of the surviving Hitler jugend footage, or the militaristic scouts clubs in later East-Germany. Isn't it getting a little too close for comfort ?
It’s a matter of poor brainwashed people. So, yes — it is the people of Russia’s fault, but not everyone has access to sensible information. And any given individual, quite rationally, doesn’t want to risk their life to make a pointless stand.
Also, I guess many find it hard to believe their beloved country could really be so corrupt and perpetrate such evil. And that’s understandable.
Letting yourself buy into the regime narratives takes, at the very least, complicity. The people in Russia know the state narrative is unreliable. They know there exist other narratives out there. They choose not to seek them out. It's wilful oblivion.
Being $bad because of $ideology is no excuse for being $bad. That causal vector can be amazingly helpful for forgiveness at a later point in time, but forgiveness cannot start before being $bad stops. Preemptive forgiveness is a terrible idea.
Government propaganda tells you very little about the society as a whole, especially in authoritarian countries. That said ordinary Muscovites seem to have no qualms about running an imperialist state that concentrates wealth from ethnic minorities into only two regions. Corruption is widely accepted, and self-promoting lies are tolerated as just vranyo. Alcoholism is a massive problem. There’s a pretty high tolerance for violence, since Russia’s casualties in this war dwarf the numbers Americans saw in Vietnam. Plus, the safety regulations are atrocious; important people keep falling out of windows.
I think it’s safe to say Russian values are at at the heart of their social problems.
Just as individualising Putin 'evil' (for a lack of a better word) is dumb, and you are right to call it out, pushing it on something such as 'values' isn't great either. The material conditions that enable Russian society to be this violent (and this isn't a new thing btw, it's hundreds of years old) are complex, and imho 'values' have pretty much nothing to do with it.
No, but you can find millions of Russian children being taught that Ukrainians do not exist, and that they are all really Russians, because Vladimir was baptized Orthodox in 980. It’s basically as crazy as saying Canadians don’t exist and are actually a U.S. state.
The Azov Batallion was never in the mainstream of Ukrainian culture, but they have been lionized for their defense of Azovstal. Kind of the Johnny Depp of Ukraine — did some really cool stuff but if you look too close goddamn is it problematic.
And who is building monuments[0] honoring Bandera[1] and names streets[2] after him all over Ukraine?
Local governments and various advocacy groups, with no support at the federal level. Meanwhile, a solid component of mainstream Russian society also continues to honor (and more broadly legitimize/normalize) a certain dead fascist icon:
A surprisingly large number of Russians even believe that Stalin had mystical powers. As recently as 2003, about 750,000 people voted for a party that aimed to continue what it said was Stalin's attempt to battle the ancient Egyptian priesthood of Ra, which supposedly runs the world from its base in Switzerland.
In classrooms across Russia, students are taught out of a modern textbook which represents Stalin as simply an efficient leader who had the unfortunate responsibility to resort to extreme measures to protect Russia and ensure its leadership role on a global scale.[57] A poll in 2019 found that 70% of Russians believed that Stalin had a positive impact on Russian history, while 51% of people in Russia viewed Stalin with a positive attitude.[58]
Or maybe people brainwashed by western propaganda don't like cognitive dissonance caused by contradicting facts and deal with it by flagging these facts.
No, it's not clear, what he was "dismissed" for, he wasn't publicly condemned by the Ukrainian president. And "dismissed" means he was made Deputy Foreign Minister and half a year later assigned to the position of the ambassador to Brazil. In fact, in the news reports the Bandera remarks weren't mentioned at all or at best mentioned after the words "also coincided".
"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that he had dismissed several of Kyiv's senior envoys abroad, including the country's outspoken ambassador to Germany.
Zelenskiy announced the sacking of Ukraine's ambassadors to Germany, India, the Czech Republic, Norway and Hungary and said new candidates were being readied for the positions.
"This rotation is a normal part of diplomatic practice," he said in a statement.
The 46-year-old regularly engages in outspoken social media exchanges and has branded politicians and intellectuals who oppose arming Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion as appeasers.
He once accused German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of behaving like an "offended liver sausage" when Scholz did not immediately accept an invitation by Zelenskiy to visit Kyiv." [0]
"Melnyk was critical of President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, accusing him of having too many close Russian connections. He also became embroiled in a dispute with Chancellor Olaf Scholz after Steinmeier was told he was not wanted on a visit to Kyiv earlier in the war. When Scholz called Ukraine's snub of the German president unfortunate, Melnyk used a German idiom to imply that he was feigning insult and was overreacting to the situation.
Melnyk had defended himself in the past, when charged with being undiplomatic in his tone, by saying the time for unflinchingly deferential diplomacy had passed for a Ukraine fighting a defensive war for its survival as a state.
His departure from Berlin also coincided quite closely with comments of his defending wartime nationalist Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera, who still divides opinion in Ukraine and abroad. " [1]
And how many children did you count in that video - out of a country of 40 million?
The infinitely bigger point you're leaving out is that those camps were run by a private association, not the government of Ukraine.
To the extent the Azov "movement" still exists, it has decidedly marginal status in Ukraine both socially and politically. If anything it (and what's left of other far-right groups since their electoral collapse several years ago) are pain in the neck to the Zelenskyy government, which considers them to be "a danger to democracy":
It was a startling statement by anyone’s standards. Speaking to the Financial Times at the start of October, Ukrainian deputy Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, said that ultranationalist elements within the war-torn country posed a very real threat to the government – and one that could one day stand in the way of any attempt to negotiate an end to years of brutal fighting.
“There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian society that will call any negotiation capitulation,” he said. “The far right in Ukraine is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy.”
Happens every year on every side of multifaceted aisle.
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