re: The Official Thread: Russia invades Ukraine

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In using Ukraine to bleed Russia, the US has showcased its contempt for everything in Ukraine that it claims to defend, namely its democracy and security. By treating Ukraine as a depot for US weapons, the US has joined Ukrainian fascists in sabotaging the 2015 Minsk accords that could have put an end to the civil war triggered by a US-backed coup the year prior. Minsk called for granting Ukraine's Russian-speaking population in the eastern Donbas limited autonomy and respect for their language. This prospect was a non-starter for the far-right nationalists and Nazis empowered by the 2014 US-backed Maidan coup.

"The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists," two specialists with prominent Western think tanks wrote in Foreign Policy in March 2014, one month after the coup.

The fascists have blocked peace in the Donbas at every turn. When the Ukrainian government voted on a "special law" advancing the Minsk accords in August 2015, the Svoboda party and other far-right groups led violent clashes that killed three Ukrainian soldiers and left dozens wounded. Then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who had signed Minsk at a time when President Obama was resisting heavy bipartisan pressure to arm Ukraine, got the message and refused to uphold Ukraine's end of the bargain.

In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was "not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings," and was "prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives."

But Ukraine's powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

"No, he would lose his life," Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky's inaugural speech. "He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk - if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War."

Along with the threats to his life, Zelensky experienced direct obstacles to his peace mandate on multiple fronts.

When Zelensky travelled to the Donbas in October 2019 to promote elections for the rebel-held areas, he was confronted by angry members of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion rallying under the slogan of "No to Capitulation." In one exchange caught on video, Zelensky sparred with an Azov member over the president's calls for a military drawdown. "I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons," Zelensky pleaded.

But Zelensky met continued defiance. The same far-right forces set up an armed checkpoint to delay a Ukrainian military pullback. Thousands of far-right and nationalist protesters, cheered by the liberal intelligentsia and carrying flares as torches, also marched in Kiev.

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