I don’t think anyone on Hexbear has any right to request that someone not be “overly antagonistic” when they speak to them. For obvious reasons. The whole framing reeks of privilege and dishonesty, of creating rules for other people without any pretense that you’re planning to follow them yourself.

My suggestion was more from the direction of if you hope to be getting something from the conversation other than generating adrenaline, (I know I’m not always the best example of this) maybe you shouldn’t be so antagonistic. The path you took resulting in a few back and forths, then you obliquely accused someone of being Russian and got banned. I don’t think that trying to tie that in to a broader echo chamber narrative tracks from that either. The internet is full of places where people seek out others with similar politics, it seems like a simpler explanation for their ideological uniformity.

From what I could tell it was only two top level comments in 4 hours from hexbear, Sasuke’s comment was entirely innocuous when it comes to the Ukraine war and you replied to it by soapboxing about hexbear broadly. I don’t think that type of reaction really serves your own goals, it just makes you look like you’re overreacting out of nowhere.

I have no idea if that person actually thinks that Putin will honor a cease-fire, whether randomly unilaterally announced or not. It is clear to me that he will not. Actually, you seemed to acknowledge that they know he won’t (saying that all of these cease-fires tend to fall apart and not be honored). There are plenty of cease-fires that get honored, definitely plenty that aren’t broken on a huge scale right away on purpose.

I don’t think any of us can really know what’s in Putins head, there’s tons of other factors besides that which also will contribute to if a ceasefire holds. ie, how much control do both armies have over the individuals, are there miscommunications, do people continue to restrain themselves in spite of the violations, etc, them I don’t think it’s all down to one person if the ceasefire succeeds or fails.

And, someone on Lemmy saying the answer to that all is to stop arming Ukraine so they can’t fight back anymore. I think it’s disgusting, and I don’t think I’m required to be nice when explaining why.

I’ve also known many people from Ukraine over the years, you will forgive me if I don’t give too many personal details, I don’t think me supplying my own anecdotes would help anyways. You seem to feel very strongly about your position and don’t seem very curious about why people might disagree.

There are two narratives about shelling in Donbas:

That Ukraine’s Nazi government was randomly shelling civilians in Donbas and Russia tried their best through good means to put a stop to it, and eventually, they had no choice but to invade.

That Moscow funded separatists to start a mini-civil-war in Donbas and then blamed the resulting death on an imaginary Nazi government in Kyiv.

I’m inclined to say somewhere in between, take for example the Donbass self defense forces, some of those were definitely Russian military and some of those were absolutely locals. Either way, they could not have survived without Russian military aid. However to say people are ‘moscow funded’ the equivalent is also true- the Ukraine government is US funded. Ukraines media is US funded.

Uncritically saying that Moscow’s narrative is definitely true is jingoistic. And actually, dealing with people who disagree by simply shouting them down in a pack is more or less a key component of jingoism to me.

I would say that if someone who’s Russian was behaving in support of Russia the way I’ve seen a lot of pro-Ukraine lemmy users behave I would probably be more inclined to call it as jingoistic. Not to be edgy or anything, but I’ve been in my share of Russian telegram groups, I’ve been to family gatherings, I have run into my share of Russian jingoism. As near as I can tell the person you were responding to (Nakoiochi) is a US anarchist. They weren’t calling them Khokols or Ukrops, pigs or gloating, they just mocked Trumps promises to fix this in 24hr because there is a standing offer that he could accept- unless he just has no control over the situation. (likely)

Either way a core component of jingoism is nationalism, and it feels weird to be accusing people of being nationalist for a different country, when they’re an anarchist, just because you don’t like their understanding of world events. I don’t think people who are saying something that happens to be in agreement with the position of a particular nation are then necessarily nationalist as a result, especially if they’re not even from there and in fact live in the geopolitical enemy.

If someone is ethnically Russian in eastern Ukraine, and they’re unhappy with the Kyiv government, there are means to deal with that other than starting a civil war.

In my previous response I asked twice about your position on self-determination, that wasn’t me being flippant, but more trying to get at a core contradiction in the way separatist regions looking for self-determination have been treated. When it was Kosovo it was acceptable to allow for separatists to break away, do you think that it would have made the situation better for Russia to start dumping weapons on Serbia in that situation to help them counter the ‘invasion’ from Albania? It’s a hypothetical and not really logistically feasible, but my point is more that this situation went from bad to worse because fuel has only been continually added to this fire rather than de-escalation.

Re: Odessa Trade union

The article I linked did include large sections from the reporting along with the broader context. There’s details which are actively disputed; the point is not the grisly details which are always ripe for propaganda embellishment, but rather the points as laid out in the report. The picture painted is of a government which actively made the situation worse, and enabled those very Russian propaganda campaigns by their own complicity in the massacre and the subsequent investigation.

Quoting the report: (directly)

spoiler

As regards the adequacy of the investigation, the Court considered that the investigating authorities had not made enough effort to properly secure, collect and assess all the evidence. For instance, instead of putting in place a police perimeter to secure the affected areas of the city centre, the first thing local authorities had done after the events was to send cleaning and maintenance services to those areas. The earliest on-site inspection there had been carried out only almost two weeks later and had produced no meaningful results. Likewise, the Trade Union Building had remained freely accessible to the public for 17 days after the events.

The Court found that, considering the scale of violence and its death toll, the involvement of supporters of two opposing political camps in the context of considerable social and political tensions, and the threat of an overall destabilisation of the situation, the authorities should have done everything in their power to ensure transparency and meaningful public scrutiny of the investigations. Instead, there had been no effective communication policy in place, with the result that some of the information provided had been difficult to understand, inconsistent, and had been provided with insufficient regularity. The Court noted that distortion of the events in Odesa had eventually become a tool of Russian propaganda in respect of the war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine since February 2022. Enhanced transparency in the related investigative work by the Ukrainian authorities might have helped to prevent or counteract that propaganda effectively.

The issue is it’s hard to dismiss calling the Ukrainian government ‘Nazi’ when there’s been this level of collaboration between right wing (in some cases openly nazi) gangs doing political terrorism to people. Those gangs are now a part of the military, as long as their military tolerates people running around with a black sun or whatever nazi paraphernalia it’s just going to get photographed and circulated on Russian social media, feeding into that same propaganda campaign you yourself expressed an interest in combating.