Political Memes

The official narrative is that Ukrainian government is illegitimate and ruled by Nazis, abd the country needs to be "liberated" from their rule. It doesn't strongly assume destruction of Ukraine the state, but clearly indicates that Russia or its puppets should be in charge.

And even then, there are many stateless nations, and I don't think Ukrainian identity is the one that is easy to erase.

For starters, US press releases should not be your go-to source of factual information. Ever. It's like going to the site of Moscow Kremlin.

Here's a press release from the United Nations still confirming your point of view, but which is way more credible: https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15395.doc.htm

But even it mentions those things mostly through Ukrainian-sided official statements, which include things like "million Crimean kids deported to Moscow since 2014" (sorry, what?), which destroys a lot of trust in the content of the statement.

Still, some children are taken to Russia, this is true, and a lot can be done differently. I support the idea to take kids from orphanages situated in a literal warzone (don't you?), but I don't like the idea of teaching them all things Russian, although it should be noted they are taken from the Donbass region which has always been heavily dominated by Russian, not Ukrainian, culture and language. Those people are and were already closer to Russia than to Ukraine, they have strong ties to Russia, which is why the separatist movements emerged there in the first place after 2014.

Same are the reasons Crimea has got into Russian occupation with absolute majority of locals cheering and welcoming this (this is true, I've been on the ground at the time) - the region is dominated by ethnic Russians, and they never really had strong cultural ties to Ukraine in the first place.

Again, delivering those kids a more balanced picture would absolutely be amazing. But it is not literal conversion from Ukrainian culture to a Russian one.

I knew I'd get some knee-jerk hate here.

In an ideal world, revenge always finds a way, but this time the war can literally drag on till the last Ukrainian soldier, and who will stand to benefit from that?

Without international troops stepping in (which would be a hugely consequential escalation against a nuclear nation), Ukraine just really can't turn the tides of the war, which was clearly demonstrated by failure of the counter-offensive.

My point is, as much as I'd like Putin to respond for everything and borders set back to where they should be and reparations paid, this is not feasible. This is not gonna happen magically. And while people daydream of that outcome, thousands of others - my close ones among them - get killed, again and again, in a stupid stalemate that benefits no one and hurts everybody.

No one was there to stop US when they invaded half the world. No one is there to truly stop Russia. Because superpowers do that, and, as terrible as it is (and my sincere hope goes it can be solved in the future), your sheer determination to crash them and make them stop bullying their neughbors isn't enough.

We need to protect human's lives, we need to stop the bloodshed and negotiate real security guarantees for Ukraine - not from Russia, but from EU & US, so that attacking Ukraine ever again would be a military and political suicide.

Stop your revenge lust and think of actual people, right there, forced to both sides of the frontline. They die. They die for nothing. They don't turn the tides.