I do support the Ukrainian resistance, the militias of the Donbass and the people of Crimea have been resisting since the western-backed Nazis overthrew the government in 2014

The Ukrainian and Israeli governments have a common goal: ethnic cleansing of a helpless captive population. Both governments have agreed to various peace processes over the years mediated by foreign governments, then actively ignored the stipulations of those agreements, and those foreign governments were nowhere to be found when Ukraine/Israel continued the ethnic cleansing.

Ukrainian voted to de-escalate normalize relations both before the Maidan coup and in voting in Zelensky.

Now the Ukrainian state is forcing millions of Ukrainian people to die in order to prevent it’s far-right government from being replaced by a far-right government.

It is the same suicidal nationalism as WW1.

Palestinians are fighting to not be killed under genocide i.e Manifest Destiny for Indigenous Americans, or Slavs and Jewish people under Lebensraum and the Holocaust.

In real terms, what would an unconditional surrender look like for a Palestinian person vs a Ukrainian person if even all of Ukraine was absorbed into Russia?

the palestinian resistance, and indeed the palestinian people, do not want “peace.” what they want, and what they deserve, is liberation, that is, freedom of movement, the right of return, economic security, and real political representation. the “peaceful” occupation of palestine means the destruction of palestinian villages by settlers, IDF patrols and checkpoints, starvation and disease caused by blockades and rationing of food, water, and medicine, and within “Israel,” relegation to second-class citizenship and legal eviction from their homes.

ukrainians want peace. they want a return to being a mostly functional country in which they can live and move freely, an option which has never been offered to palestinians. this will be achieved by ending the war, which will be achieved by diplomacy, not more weapons. the continuation of the war is being forced on the working class by the apathetic governments of both sides and the meddling moneymen of the imperialist west.

There is no Israeli population endemic to Palestinian territories that Palestinians are repressing. There is no polarity in Palestinian society between favoring Israel and favoring other Arab countries. There are no Palestinians who speak Hebrew as a first language, or vote for pro-Israel parties, or have several generations of relatives who are full Israeli citizens.

The situation in Ukraine has all of these. It has a closely overlapping history with Russia that goes back hundreds of years, resulting in many people in Ukraine who have considered themselves more Russian than Ukrainian, who have most of their families on the Russian side of the border, who vote for regional or devolution parties, who speak Russian as a first language.

As we like to say, history didn’t begin in 2022. It includes 2013-14, 1991, 1954, and 1922.

The invasion of Ukraine and the occupation of Palestine are not comparable except for in the vaguest, most remote, and least significant of terms. If you want an analog for Palestine, look at Artsakh.

Ukraine has a right to defend Ukrainians against aggression from Russia, but it does not have the right to take away its ethnically Russian citizens’ rights to self-determination. If you use an argument like “internationally-recognized border”, not only are you decontextualizing and prioritizing a coincidental line in the dirt over social trends, you are denying about 9 million people one of the most basic of political rights.

Compare NATO expansion to Russia’s borders since the USSR collapsed, then tell me again who’s the invading force.

Ukraine and Palestine are not equivalent at all. If you want to make crude analogies, it’s closer to this:

Gaza Strip = Donbass

Hamas and other Palestinian militants = Donbass separatists

Israel = Ukraine (or post-Maiden Ukraine if you want to be more pedantic)

Hezbollah or Iran = Russia

The equivalent of the IDF bombing Gaza is the Ukrainian army shelling the Donbass. If Hezbollah were to invade Israel from the north and be within walking distance from Tel Aviv, that would be the equivalent of Russia invading Ukraine and reaching the outskirts of Kiev. If Iran were to launch missiles at key locations in Israel, that would be the equivalent of Russia launching missiles at key locations in Ukraine.

And this isn’t even considering that Israel is a settler colony, and we should always support the downfall of settler colonies regardless of whether they’re in the right for a particular situation. Neither Ukraine nor Russia are settler colonies. At best, you can argue Crimea is a Russian settler colony because the tsar ethnically cleansed Crimea of Crimean Tatars, but neither Ukraine nor Russia are interested in establishing an independent Crimean Khanate, so it’s just two groups of eastern Slavs fighting over a peninsula that neither group is indigenous to.

I’m not going to read through all my comrades’ responses since I pretty much know what they’re gonna say, I just hope no one is attacking you because this is a legitimate question to ask and seems in good faith.

I think it’s more accurate, and might be easier to understand our position, if you think of the Russia-Ukraine war as more of a Russia-US proxy war which, unfortunately, a lot of Ukrainians are now stuck in the middle of. Most folks on hexbear are not pro-Russia, but because in this conflict (and at this point of history) Russia represents multipolarity as opposed to US, western hegemony, many of us have taken up pro-Russia positions to varying degrees.

Another point is that the war could really be said to have begun in 2014, or at least that’s when the lead up to this conflict began. And so from 2014 until now Ukraine has just been a pawn, with western governments using it to erode Russian influence. I think many of us see the us as ultimately hoping to make Russia a us vassal state along with the rest of Europe. So Ukraine has really just become this geopolitical chess piece in a great power war. Of course Russia using the region as a geopolitical pawn to further their interests is also not great, but because Russia in this instance is doing so as part of the drive for greater multipolarity and to chip away at US domination, and really when you get down to it as a defensive measure against US expansion, we tend to take that side.

Although I think saying we take Russia’s side is a bit disingenuous since, when you get through all the Ukrainian Nazi jokes, there is the acknowledgement that a lot of people are now caught in the middle of this great power conflict. However we don’t squarely put the blame on Russia for that, and Russia’s goals - multipolarity, the chipping away of US hegemony - broadly line up with ours, and also countries which we do support, eg. China, Cuba, Venezuela, have taken up this position.

why does the us state department support ukrainian resistance but not palestinian resistance? it’s basically the same answer but inverted

The NATO weapons and money for Ukraine ensures only that more people die and more of the built environment is destroyed, so that it can be rebuilt as shittily as possible with Western loans. This is a win-win for the ruling class of all countries involved, even Russia. Public funds are laundered to weapons manufacturers and the post-war economy of Ukraine will be of course be overseen directly by IMF/World Bank/Wall Street, with permanent austerity imposed on the population and a US business-friendly collaborator government full of assorted beneficiaries of the Western “aide” and propaganda (Azov) who will sell their people and resources out for pennies on the dollar.

Just thinking about it logically, I don’t believe that some border regions of a border region are worth displacing and in many cases completely altering the futures of millions of people. Refugees across Europe, who in some cases won’t integrate well and can be turned in scapegoats (“terrorists”) for future CIA activity.

“support” or lack thereof from the other side of the world is mostly meaningless, except if it can move the needle on US government policy.

I dont want the US to send weapons to ukraine, as US interests there are not in helping ukraine win (it seems unlikely that they really could even with an endless flow of weapons), but in hurting russia via a prolonged quagmire of a war that will continue to kill conscripts, civilians, etc. all along the way and empower fascists. Western interests are the reason there wasn’t a chance at diplomatic peace much earlier in the war

similarly I don’t want the US to send weapons to Israel, where they will be used to ethnically cleanse palestinians and defend their apartheid state from any regional opposition.

Saying that ukraine and palestine are the same is honestly almost offensive in how reductive and inaccurate it is. An oppressed people struggling against settler colonialism and genociders is not the same as two bourgeois states fighting over territory, even if one is bigger.

Also, Hamas became what it is today because of israel’s support, to delegitimize the palestinian cause, whereas neonazis in ukraine are not a russian creation, but empowered in large part by the US in euromaidan

I think that being against the US sending weapons abroad is the bare minimum for someone on the anti-war left

Are Palestinians back by the most powerful miltary in the world?

simplest explanation is that i oppose the american military industrial complex at every stop. wherever they want to make money, i am against it. they are not good people, they just want to make money off of death.

I’ve seen how the US behaved in Iraq, Afghanistan when it came to civilians, and how ‘Israel’ is now. That’s what indiscriminately killing civilians looks like. It’s categorically not how Russia has been conducting itself.

If anything the people who sided with the Russians have been far more on the receiving end of violence towards civilians, and I think that’s why I find it a lot easier to not support the Ukranian government. Those are supposedly ‘its’ civilians yet it’s been shelling them for years, and only stopped because Russians made them stop.