- Ukraine says it has liberated four villages in the south-east, calling these the first settlements won back from Russia since Kyiv’s counter-offensive began
- On Monday morning, officials reported that “the national flag is once again waving” over Storozhove, in the Donetsk region
- A day earlier, footage showed Ukrainian troops celebrating in Blahodatne and Neskuchne - and a minister said nearby Makarivka was also taken
- The settlements are relatively small - and Moscow is yet to confirm any retreat
- The Institute for the Study of War backs up Kyiv’s claims, saying Ukraine captured “multiple settlements” along the frontline over the weekend
- On Saturday, President Zelensky acknowledged that the long-awaited counter-offensive was under way
Context is important. The people in Ukraine who started making that a thing again now were, for the most part, all direct descendants of the Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, who are now erecting statues to their Nazi father/grandfathers.
I wish this war hadn’t started. The Russians were wrong for invading, but the amount of white-washing of literal Nazis because the Ukrainians are reframing their national identity away from the USSR and Russia is absolute dogshit. The people who used that saying were bad. The people trying to make it a thing now are directly related to those bad people, and don’t want them thought of as bad anymore.
All of the justifications people are using now are the same justifications used by assholes promoting the lost cause myth about the civil war.
That’s the same sort of twisted interpretation of history that I see out of Republicans in the US. The Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery and the south, so they’re practically all slavers today! Black people just laugh at them and continue voting Democrat in droves.
Bad analogy. Better one would be if the Democratic party started to put up statues to Jefferson Davis because the Democratic Party members who were children/grandchildren of Jefferson Davis wanted to re-rehabilitate the image of Jefferson Davis.
I promise you that if the Democratic party started trying to retroactively white wash the confederacy, or specific subsets of the confederacy, in the same exact way the Ukrainians are, that the people that were oppressed by the Democratic Party would no longer vote for them.
I wouldn’t extend the Confederacy analogy that far. Ukrainian nationalists were in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend situation during WW2, right up until the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned some of them. In contrast, the American Civil War had a singular motive: slavery. WW2 was much more complex, with alliances of convenience between parties that would otherwise be opposed to each other.
Arguably the biggest alliance of convenience was the Allies. The US supplied massive amounts of armaments even before officially entering the war through the “Lend Lease Act”. It then continued to be an official ally to the Soviet Union. But almost immediately after Germany and Japan fell, the underlying hostility between the two powers was restored in the form of the Cold War. All that is to say, judging people simply by alliances made during WW2 is a shallow judgement.