this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2022
4 points (55.6% liked)
World News
32163 readers
1070 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, Russia has troops inside the power plant, and they are apparently holding workers at gunpoint so they keep producing electricity. Ukraine, as expected, has decided not to attack those Russian troops and endanger the rest of us in the world, while stupid Russians are shelling their own positions and halting the production that they themselves are attempting to keep going. They are probably not stopping even when the prospect of a nuclear catastrophe is pushing international forces to act, as Mr Zelenskyy has many times requested, probably eventually expelling Russian forces from the area. As stupid as they are, they don't realize that the attacks they are performing only benefit the military interests of Ukraine, and not their own... Thankfully, that Chinese official has stated that "all parties [...] exercise maximum restraint”, and by "all parties" we should of course understand they're referring specifically to Russia, just like the article states in its title, as they are clearly the ones performing the attacks.
Edit: /s, for the sake of fuck
Russia should withdraw its military from the power plant. Using it as cover for their soldiers and ammunition is cowardly and a huge safety risk for the civilian population.
As for the comments on here talking about western MSM bias - give me a break. There is one aggressor here, a crazy russian authoritarian regime and army attacking a democratic country under some very ridiculous pretenses. Not to mention the disgusting way they have targeted the civilians.
The power plant is right on the frontline. It's behind the Dnieper river, and the opposite side of it is under Ukrainian control, but Russia cannot and must not abandon the power plant unless Ukraine agrees to stop shelling it. Although considering Ukraine has been breaking the Minsk agreements for 8 years I don't think their word and signature is worth very much.
If they left the plant, they would leave it defenceless for Ukraine to either shell it or move into it. This is a war, a military occupation. There is no reason they would not secure the plant like any other installation considering at the moment it is right on the frontline, not 100km behind it.
There still needs to be people working in this plant -- it provides energy to Ukraine and Russia has not shut the plant down (doing that would kill people due to lack of electricity access). The engineers and other employees working in this plant are Ukrainian and considering what they've been saying to media, Russia has good reason to believe they cannot leave them to their own devices.
Whether Russia is using the plant as a military base is something different entirely. I have not seen any credible evidence they are actually using it to protect their troops, just hearsay.
Only thing that would save the civilians and a nuclear disaster would be to declare the plant and a buffer zone around it "sacred ground" and no military incident can take place there. But again, considering Ukraine has been shelling their own plant with their own workers in it providing electricity to their own people, I doubt such an agreement would last long.
Russia is not in a position where it can do that. If Russia pulls out of it Ukraine will move into it and do exactly that. The plant will become a base that can not be attacked. It's an unrealistic position. Given that Ukraine positions all of its military underneath and around civilian buildings while using schools and hospitals as bases there's really no question that they would also do it with the plant.
Not really true on the whole. There have probably been some instances of this but it's extremely obvious that Russia has been light-handed in this war compared to the American invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan or what happened to Libya. It's just disingenuous to claim.
Yeah it's not as bad as Iraq yet, but it is senseless and needs to stop. Iraq is a pretty low bar with >100k civilians dead. And they are targeting civilians' hitting mall, train stations, and even normal workplaces. All of these hundreds of km from the front. Im not even talking about the crap they do at the front or in occupied areas.
Yeah but the point is like, when the west has invaded anything they've gone in FULL POWER. They wipe everything out, the destroy all power infrastructure, they shut down the ability of entire cities to function, they utterly and totally cripple the opponent regardless of civilians.
Russia on the other hand has not done that remotely at all. Kyiv has a functioning economy, so does the rest of Ukraine not currently directly on the front line of artillery fire. They have occupied the power plant but they're running it and continuing to supply western Ukraine (controlled by the Ukrainian gov still) with electricity.
Obviously this might change in the future (plenty of room for them to escalate if they want to) but anyone making these claims about civilian targeting has either no idea how the west conducts itself when it does an invasion or is genuinely lying for alternative agendas. Yes it can always be better, but they're 100% being gentle.
I wonder whether these people have seen a western war. Whether they truly believe what they're saying or not. If they truly believe what they are saying then the next invasion the west conducts is going to look like a horror show 100x worse to them. But I'm pretty sure many are saying this kind of thing knowing full well it's not the truth.
Yes and we have video of ukrainian military in a lot of them. It's impossible to verify particularly well what strikes occurred for what reasons though at this point in time, we simply do not know what was being stored in these locations that Russia believed was worth striking. The argument that they were just yolo blasting a civilian location for absolutely no reason with a missile costing 60million dollars needs a bit of critique though.
RF should withdraw from ALL of the Ukraine, not just this power plant.
There is no way that will happen after Ukraine has kept refusing negotiations and the imperial core jumped on the occasion to ban Russia from everything, from their participation in transnational gov panels to cat shows of all things.
Russia has committed too much in this war, and there is too much in play here, to just say "nevermind guys, we'll just be going home now lol". Don't be an idealist.
First of all, it was Russia that rejected any negotiations from the beginning. You can clearly hear it in the tapes between Macron and Putin - Zelensky asked Macron to tall to Putin about negotiations. He just wanted to innvade and annex neighboring country and didn't want to negotiate.
Another thing is that there's no negotiations with invader now, when we see that RF is slowly loosing and tries to take powerplants etc. as hostages only to harass everybody, not just Ukraine. And if Ukraine doesn't wan to negotiate now I understand their stance.
I agree with you, Russia has committed too much to just fall back. But hopefully, the aggresor will be driven out soon.
This wouldn't make any sense if it was true. It's not true, because Russia sent negotiators in the very beginning of the war (one week in), and Ukraine refused to show up. Then Ukraine came back with outrageous demands (like taking territory that's part of Russia). Negotiations are a normal part of warfare, where both parties try to end a costly, difficult invasion and get away with as much as they can. That's why they're called negotiations and not demands.
Zelensky saying he will only negotiate when "Russian forces have been pushed back to their Feb. 24 positions" shows he is not serious about negotiating. He obviously isn't, because he doesn't actually control his country -- he's just a puppet to the fascists, who themselves hope for NATO clemency. There's a video of him from before the war trying to get his own soldiers to stop shelling Donbass and they just outright refuse in his face.
It doesn't make any sense that Russia wouldn't negotiate because the goal of war is to get the enemy to execute your will. Why would Russia not send negotiators to get what they want in the beginning of the war, thus avoiding a costly invasion?
What is the goal then, Russia will not negotiate anything and just... rampage through the Ukrainian countryside until the Zelensky gov tells Putin "okay, this is all yours now"? Of course there has to be negotiations even to annex a country.
An annexation is on the table at this point. At least we don't disagree on that. It's on the table because like I said, too much has been committed here to just pull out, even if the original aims were to liberate the Donbass and compel Ukraine to respect the Minsk 2 Agreements. Russia has been excluded from international markets, which I believe to be an act by NATO to evolve the war to a higher stage and put annexation on the table.
That's not possible either, you would be condemning the people of eastern ukraine to mass repression and possibly an extermination event. You have to keep in mind that this war began 8 years before Russia stepped in, Ukraine was fighting the people of Luhansk and Donetsk. That doesn't stop if Russia pulls out and Ukraine will them all. Do you support that?
This is the guy who commented on Russians getting called "orcs" like this:
> Don’t insult Orcs, please.
So yeah he probably does support ethnically cleansing these regions of the "orcs" then. The ethnically Russian previously Ukrainian populations of Donetsk and Luhansk.
This is the problem we face with getting this war to stop. It is impossible now for Russia to step out of these regions without triggering a massacre.
Ukraine was fighting undercover Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk since 8 years.
No this is just totally untrue. There was definitely some support given but the bulk of the secessionists were the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.
You have fallen for the trick that the Ukrainian government often pulls by calling ALL the people of Donetsk and Luhansk Russians. They no longer call them Ukrainians. And that's the problem, they have firmly stated their intention to kill all of them, they do not consider them Ukrainian anymore and taking back the land means cleansing it of the Russian ethnicity population.