Ukraine has come a long way in fighting their corruption issues (which were in part caused by russian loyalists). I really hope they can kick out Putin quick and then join the EU.
It’s even more corrupt now that it’s ever been. What made you think it was improving?
What is your source for it being more corrupt than it’s ever been before? This directly contradicts the data from Transparency International’s corruption perception poll, which shows that it’s the best it’s ever been, but still bad. There has also been pressure by the EU to reduce corruption as part of the roadway to EU membership. The US has also been apply pressure for going on a decade. Recently, this has resulted in several high profile indictments against high ranking officials.
War tends to make corruption harder to tackle. Everything is so focused on war efforts that a bribe here or there seems trivial in comparison. You also have a tremendous number of displaced people, which make them vulnerable. The resolution of the Russo-Ukrainian War will make corruption much easier to tackle.
The less democracy the more corruption. They are under martial law, their government right now is on pair with a dictatorship. Remember that no male between 18 and 60 can leave the country and if they try to do they would get arrested.
I gotta say, I’ve not been thrilled with how Zelenskyy has dealt with political freedoms in the country. When you claim to be the bulwark of liberal democracy, you better be hewing to those claims very strongly. Banning political parties is impossible to square with that. Conscription though? That I can understand. For Ukraine, this is total war, and it’s not a war of choice like with Russia.
They chose to go to war. They chose to have a civil war against minorities who wanted self-determination to escape the Nazi coup regime that illegally installed a dictator.
Russia did not choose this war and spent years trying to avoid it. Hollande and Merkel have admitted that they lied and were trying to get the war started.
Russia was invading Ukraine before the post-Maiden revolution government had the chance to get its pants on. Russia’s “little green men” were rolling onto Ukrainian soil far before the Kyiv government could possibly have done anything. Russia saw a moment of chaos and took advantage of it.
Wrong.
That’s the corruption perception index. It asks people from the country what their perception is. It’s not at all reliable, especially during war. The reports of massive amounts of money going missing. Arms and munitions being sold, some even showing up in South America. The country is run by a massive fascist crook who’s named in the Panama papers… man if you think it’s come a long way in fighting corruption I don’t know what to tell you.
The resolution of the Russo-Ukrainian War will make corruption much easier to tackle.
Agreed.
Perception trends at least tell us something, especially when a country is compared with itself over time. Ukraine’s has improved remarkably. Yes there are limits to perception polls, but that is one of the few universal metrics.
As for Zelensky, a few things. First, he was in the Pandora Papers, not the Panama Papers. Second, just because someone is in either the Pandora or Panama Papers does not mean that they were engaged in wrongdoing. So for now, I’m withholding judgement on him being a “massive fascist crook”.
Ukraine’s has improved remarkably. Yes there are limits to perception polls
Ukrainians during wartime are reporting that everything’s fine. That’s all you have. On the other hand we have many situations like this:
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US/UK investors with contacts to Zelenskyy’s office offer to buy a company for 1/3 of its value
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owner declines
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cops show up, seize the company
This is like 1990s Russia on steroids.
Zelensky and team stole at least $400 million of US aid – Seymour Hersh
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You’re talking out of your ass and it stinks.
Do you have anything real to add to our conversation?
Go back to Lemmygrad
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Seem like other states fueled the corruption too
It’s surprising seeing so much Ukraine hate in one comments section. Did something major happen that changed public opinion?
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which by some weird thought process becomes a pro-Russian position.
I am a communist and the prevailing attitude in most circles I am in is not an explicitly pro-Russian one, it’s just not explicitly pro-Ukraine either. There is a also an underlying understanding of the reasons why the war started. Just because you don’t support one side does not mean you have to 100% uncritically support the opposing side. The sooner we stop thinking of everything in black/white terms of Team A vs Team B, we will be a lot better off.
Now there are those who have nostalgia for the USSR, which is not the modern Russian Federation, but it’s fairly niche. Usually people understand that modern Russia is not the soviet union. There are the patsocs too, but we don’t really claim them.
I am not the Official Spokesman of Communism, but those are generally the attitudes I have seen in most of my circles.
Fairly niche? Most of the lemmygrad people are outright idolizing every totalitarian ‘marxist’ regime of the past century.
I totally get left ideology and do agree with Marx’ ideology, but I’ve never understood how simping for autocrats fits into that.
When I read that Lemmy had an active communist group I was looking forward to that, but the vehemence of the debate and the apologetic whitewashing of history really turned me off.
So yeah, please a debate that isn’t so black and white is very welcome imho.
Communists are very against fascist Russia. It’s just a small totalitarian-minded group masking as communists here who support Russia or some honeypot/psyop
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I don’t know, they seem pretty capitalist to me
They’re not people, they’re CCP and Kremlin LLM bots.
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Why not? No doubt it’s way easier to set up a bunch of bots accounts here than somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. They don’t even have to worry about looking legit because most of the users here are new accounts.
Yeah I agree with the other guy. Easier to trial run bots on Lemmy then when things are looking “better”*** move them to more mainstream sites.
***Just less shit
This is lemmy.ml, which is full of clueless tankies who confuse modern fascist Russia with the Soviet Union and love to consume Russian and Chinese propaganda. Anything “Western” is automatically bad and evil (those damn Anglos or something) and since Ukraine is backed by NATO, it has to be the bad guy. Take a wild guess at what the “.ml” means.
It’s actually Mali, but they say it stands for Marxist-Leninist
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Public opinion only gets more positive for Ukraine with each of these high level corruption arrests.
Tankies and dumbasses, think it proves their point that Ukraine will continue to be corrupt.
I guess what changed is that you are not on reddit anymore where nations advertise their propaganda. Ukraine government declared martial law, they are basically a dictatorship.
Won’t just be tolerated. It will be widely embraced, just as it has been.
Thanks t shirt guy.
Looks like the Russians have arrived
Nyet
Lol. OK.
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This guy is equally trash than Putin
Idk about that - one has tried to get into EU and fight corruption, the other voted to devour his neighbouring country for increasingly petty reasons.
It’s not petty to respond to threats of nuclear annihilation by a fascist Nazi regime next door. Come on now.
What nuclear capability does Ukraine have currently?
None at all. The threat was that they would join NATO and install nukes.
There was no threat made. Even if Ukraine had entered into NATO, NATO had made no noise about stationing nukes in Ukraine. It could well have kept the status of the Baltic states where they don’t have nukes stationed there. There’s really no strategic value to NATO to do so. That was an excuse made up by the Kremlin.
Here you go. There’s also a video of him demanding pre-emptive nukes be used against Russia.
Zelensky did not ask for pre-emptive nukes against Russia. That was an erroneous English translation. And I said NATO had made no noise about stationing nuclear weapons. For that matter, it’s a bit of a reach to say that Ukraine is requesting that nuclear weapons be stationed on its territory, but rather that it gave up nuclear weapons in return for an agreement that Russia has now breached.
I’d encourage you to expound on this in your original comment, rather than start off with something inflammatory. It doesn’t promote an interesting discussion.
You want me to edit my original comment? I’m not following. Is there something in my comment you take issue with factually?
Really? He’s equally as bad as the guy responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to invading a few neighbouring countries?
Not denying that Ukraine and Zelensky have their fair share of issues but I reckon saying they’re just as bad as Putin is more than a little bit disingenuous.
Like I mentioned in my other comment, I think that both leaders can and should be criticized independently, a comparison between the two is not useful.
Neither leader is socialist, so in my opinion, neither truly has the best interest of their country’s working class at heart. There could be some observation and speculation about how the possible outcomes of the conflict could promote socialist aims, but that is still independent of both guy themselves.
Does it makes a difference if you kill one person or 100? For charts maybe but you are still a murderer even if you kill a bunch. All politicians have blood in their hands, they don’t fight their wars, we do it for them and we get forced to do it. Ukraine is under martial law, males between 18 and 60 can’t leave the country.
When making a comparison, the difference between the two things you’re comparing do in fact matter.
Do you really think that killing in order to defend yourself and others is the exact same thing as killing in support of ideologies such as fascism or imperialism? Iraqis defending themselves against Americans and Georgians defending themselves against Russians is morally identical to killing children because they speak the wrong language, worship the wrong god, or have skin that’s the wrong colour?
And how might that one be?
Because from an outsider perspective he seems to be doing alright and anecdotally a Ukrainian man I know says the people around him like Zelenskyy
Plenty of russian likes putin too, they are victim of propaganda. I’m sure these Ukrainians between 18 and 60 who want to leave the country but they can’t don’t like their government much.
I’ve worked with some of them, and as far as I can tell whilst they don’t like the situation they’re in, they want to kick the shit out if Russians (putting it softly) more than they want to escape.
Turns out invading a country can instill some pretty heavy anger in the populace… Who knew?
I’m not going to take a hard stance here cause I don’t think a side by side comparison with Putin is a useful conversation to have, but I want to point out a couple things that may add some nuance to what you’ve heard before.
- Since 1991, Ukraine has been in an increasingly precarious geopolitical position, with many differences among it’s population and political leadership about how to proceed. One could argue that Zelensky ended up stuck between a rock and a hard place, but at the end of the day his fumbling around and repeated motions towards joining NATO were bad political moves that nearly forced (kinda, maybe not forced idk) Russia’s hand into a military action. Even if going to NATO was definitively the correct choice (weird thing to think, tbh), he managed doing so incredibly poorly.
- Be aware that Ukraine has had a lot of division among the populaton about whether the country should be Western/EU aligned or Russian aligned. There are many historical and cultural reasons for different regions, communities and individuals to have their particular views (like any political stance). Consider that if you spoke with a Ukrainian person somewhere outside of Eastern Europe, and used the English language, they are probably going to have a pro-western, pro-zelensky viewpoint. You probably won’t hear much from Russian speaking Ukrainians who wouldn’t prefer to emigrate to “the West”, and support Ukrainian alignment with Russia.
Having spent SIGNIFICANT time in all parts of ukraine I can safely say they are a varied people. Russian speaking Ukrainians and non Russian speaking I heard numerous pro ussr and pro west ideas. Non of what you said points to zelensky being as bad as or worse than put in. Pretty much everyone likes him regardless of personal political feelings.
Sure, like I said I don’t think it’s really important who is “worse”, it’s not a useful topic of discussion.
I did want to make a couple of counterpoints though
- just cause Zelensky is popular, doesn’t necessarily make him a better leader. If we were to do a comparison (which we shouldn’t!) Putin is also widely popular along Russians. In both cases support for a wartime leader is going to rally, especially in Ukraine.
- you certainly have infinitely more experience in the country than I do (dividing by zero ofc haha), but wouldn’t you have run into some of the same biases coming in as a foreigner (or foreign-born)? I don’t know your itinerary, and I’m not asking you to share, but the who, when and where is gonna make a difference.
- as an example, I was interested in the interviews of the first two people in this video that I saw recently [watch starting at 3:15 till about 20 mins in]: https://youtu.be/drhgjxSJG6M located in the warzone in eastern Ukraine. Both are supportive of the Russian forces and appear to claim that such support in their local area is widespread.
Careful with that YouTube channel. Patrick Lancaster may be American, but everything he’s produced recently is essentially pro-Russian propaganda. Many (most?) of his videos are either misleading or staged.
Can you substantiate that? I’m only tangentially familiar with his work. He’s certainly softer on Russia than other sources, but is he doing more than bringing “balance” to the conversation?
Watching the clip I showed, I could suspect that he may be leaving out other interviews he did where people were more pro-ukrainian, but at the same time, the woman in the video claims that about 80% of the town supports Russia, which would line up with what I previously understood about the politics of their region.
I don’t particularly care that much about the guys personal politics, and I haven’t had that much exposure to them, since my only interest so far has been these two interviews which I personally interpret as primary sources. I would in now way claim that these two people speak for anyone besides themselves, but what they both say is loosely backed up by the data I’ve seen.
Fair question. First, I would not characterize what he does as being softer on Russia to bring balance. Some of his videos have been exposed as just being lies. That casts doubt on the rest, since ultimately you kind of just have to trust him. And before someone pops up to complain about Ukraine, yes Ukraine engages in propaganda as well. I am only cautioning against considering this source as being trustworthy.
I could try to give a rundown of him, but it would look a lot like his Wikipedia article so I will just point you there.
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He brought his country to war for the US to make a bit of money. He’s a traitor to his people. Not only as a Ukrainian but as a Jewish Nazi collaborator.
So, Ukraine was invaded (twice) by Russia with no provocation… but he brought the war? Seems like Russia brought the war and he’s doing right by the Ukrainian people by defending Ukraine.
And by all means, please list all the ways the he is a Nazi collaborator and traitor to the Ukrainian people, with sources please.
Once on invitation of Crimea to save them from the fascist regime and the second time after 8 years of negotiations to try to avoid war, in the face of an ethnic cleansing of its national allies too. Sure, Russia brought the war. Where do you get your information from? The news?
please list all the ways the he is a Nazi collaborator and traitor to the Ukrainian people, with sources please.
The guy is constantly pictured standing with Nazis.
He literally wears Nazi iconography and is leading a country with an ultranationalism rooted in Nazism. Have you never heard the expression “Slava Ukraine?”
So there is overwhelming evidence of ethnic cleansing? I have yet to see any. In the age of cell phones, there would be so much evidence.
I’m sure there are some people in Russia asking the United States to remove the dictator Putin from power… Yet, the United States didn’t invade Russia. You don’t get to just invade a sovereign country because a very small number of people asking.
That’s your evidence of being the Nazi collaborator flags in the background? Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought with the Nazis trying to free Ukraine from the soviets, as some fought with soviets to free Ukraine from the Nazis. Both were fighting to free Ukraine. Finland joined the Nazis, not because they agreed with the Nazis but to fight against the invading soviets.
Sadly there are many places that have neo-nazis, but they are in the minority. Neo-nazis exist in places hurt by the Nazis greatly, like Poland, France, Britain and even Russia.
Here is Putin standing with a Russia Nazi: https://romea.cz/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fromea.cz%2Fapp%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F02%2Futkin.jpg&w=1200&q=75
And you just attack a slogan that basically says victory to Ukraine from the invaders? Now you’re not even trying
So there is overwhelming evidence of ethnic cleansing? I have yet to see any. In the age of cell phones, there would be so much evidence.
What do you think it looks like? You want a picture of the language laws?
Yet, the United States didn’t invade Russia. You don’t get to just invade a sovereign country because a very small number of people asking.
Yeah that’s why they got Ukraine to threaten them and start a war, to “weaken Russia”.
Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought with the Nazis trying to free Ukraine from the soviets,
Ahistorical Nazi apologism now. Look at yourself. Full mask off.
Sadly there are many places that have neo-nazis, but they are in the minority. Neo-nazis exist in places hurt by the Nazis greatly, like Poland, France, Britain and even Russia.
Again, Have you never heard the expression “Slava Ukraine?” It’s not a minority that’s repeating that.
Here is Putin standing with a Russia Nazi
That’s fake. The guy on the left is not the same guy as the one on the right. This has been debunked. It’s one of only two photos in existence like this. The other is a Russian general getting an award wearing a Ukrainian coat with a totenkopf on it. Wherase there are literally thousands of pictures of Ukrainian Nazis.
You’re finished now Adolf.
Please list some laws.
What was the threat against Russia? Were they going to invaded Russia? Ukraine barely had an army. Ukraine gave up it’s nuclear weapons in the 1990s in exchange for security protections, signed by Russia, Ukraine, Britain and the United States, promised that none of the nations would use force or threats against Ukraine and all would respect its sovereignty and existing borders (Budapest Memorandum). Putin broke that treaty and is trying to create his dollar store version of the Soviet union by invading other countries.
So, explaining historical context is apologizing for Nazis?
Slava Ukraine is said by Ukraine, I never said it wasn’t. But you never explained how that makes them Nazis. If Ukraine was invading other countries, it might have a different meaning but it’s just them defending their country. If their slogan was “heil Hitler” you might have a point.
Wow, thousands of wanna-be neo-Nazis!!! Out of a population of 43 million. So, like .002% of the population!!! You’re right, that’s not a minority!
I say the picture of zelenskyy is fake… If I just say it, it must be true.
Okay, Stalin. So, you just resort to name calling… I can too. Hitler and Stalin were monsters and it’s sad to see that Putin is acting like a mashup of the two of them.
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