True Left

The popular impression I get from Ukrainians is that those who dislike Russians nevertheless tend to be Eurocentrists, but merely exclude Russia from their Eurocentrism (but of course include Ukraine).

Ukrainian pop culture contradicts your impression to some extent, as it noticeably draws on non-Western influence:

Spoiler (hover to show)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fLtqC2BqFo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG5mjelR0NY

The first video strikes me as significant in particular, as the city against which it is set effectively merges Japanese-style architecture and post-independence Ukrainian architecture. Ukrainians seem to be identifying as non-Westerners at least aesthetically.

Other supposed Eurocentrisms (such as the obsessive flaunting of "European" in Ukrainian politics, see "Euromaidan" etc.) can be chalked up to geopolitics. Integration with EU/NATO is the only way Ukraine can secure protection against Russia's nuclear stockpile after they had themself tricked (partly by the same states they are now forced to ally with!) into giving up their own stockpile.

Historically, Ukraine has looked to the Muslim world for allies:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/enemies/hungary-v4/msg5411/?topicseen#msg5411

«державна політика України — це політика Чорного моря, де Україна перетинається з мусульманством, і іншого шляху немає». Таким чином Україна стає «природним союзником мусульманства [...]».

"The state policy of Ukraine is a Black Sea-centered policy, where Ukraine and the Muslim world meet, a political path to which there are no alternatives." Accordingly, Ukraine will become "a natural ally of the Muslim world [...]"

In the long run, this would have implied that the Ukrainian People's Republic would have eventually also felt compelled to side with at least the Muslim colonies of the non-Russian colonial powers.

Then there is this:

https://ukraineworld.org/articles/ukraine-explained/indigenous-peoples-ukraine-you-may-have-never-heard-about

The indigenous peoples are Ukrainians (77.8%), Crimean Tatars (0.5%), Karaites (>0.1%), Krymchaks (>0.1%) — the last three originated in the Crimean peninsula, and Gagauzes (0.1%) originated in Odesa Region.

Doesn't it contradict the notion of Ukrainian Eurocentrism that the non-"white", non-western Crimean Tatars are deemed an "indigenous people" of Ukraine, whereas a number of "white", western minorities apart from the Russians, such as Poles, Hungarians, Romanians etc. are not?

but it will be harder to argue that Ukrainian refugees currently in EU countries also belong to the pro-Russian fraction.

They might not be particularly pro-Russian, but what makes you think they feel themselves particularly Ukrainian either? Ukraine technically has the draft for females:

https://thepressunited.com/updates/ukraine-to-draft-more-women/

Women in a range of professions, up to 60 years old, will have to register for the draft.

Ukraine has dramatically expanded the number of women potentially eligible for military service, adding them to the pool of people who could be called up in the event of war.

The country’s Ministry of Defense announced the news on Wednesday, publishing a list of hundreds of professions whose female members will no longer be exempt from registering for the draft. The list includes a wide range of jobs, such as accountants, librarians, secretaries, journalists, lawyers, pharmacists, and veterinarians.

The new rule will apply to women working in these fields who pass medical qualifications and are between the ages of 18 and 60. Men in Ukraine are already required to register for conscription at 18.

It isn't currently enforced, but it might be in the future. Can you figure out why so many females are eager to flee right now? Can you figure out what this says about their attitude to Ukraine?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/karenism-(a-k-a-ethnic-profiling-by-civilians)/msg12197/#msg12197

Bernadette Devlin appears to be complaining about similar attitudes among the Irish diaspora in America as well in this image macro recently posted by @Zea_mays:

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To be fair, I can't produce a Ukrainian Bernadette Devlin as of yet, so there we go. I can come up with Vasyl Maksymenko though:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/refugees-welcome/?message=12375

That depends. For sure, many Ukrainians are Russian-passing, however, Ukrainians are commonly stereotyped as being visibly darker than the Russians, so other Ukrainians may not be.

Mining that angle a little: I researched some "All-Russian family"-propaganda. This is what I came up with:

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(Ukraine is on the left)



(Ukraine is on the left)

The characters meant to represent Ukraine consistently stick out in terms of appearance, even when the characters meant to depict Belarus do not. So Russians definitely at least think they can physically distinguish Russians and Belarusians on the one hand and Ukrainians on the other hand.

How could Ukrainians be validly considered to have been colonized if, as you yourself claim here, Russians viewed them as just another group of Russians (at least enough to see them as demographic reinforcements rather than demographic threats*)?

I expressed myself awkwardly. Have you ever compared the Ukrainian settlement patterns on the map you provided in your original post with Russian settlement patterns?



The Ukrainians are almost exclusively settled along the border of the Russian-occupied territories with non-Russian-occupied territories, whereas the Russians tend to settle deeper into the heartland.

On the one hand, the Ukrainians are to act as a barrier against possible military threats, buying the Russians time to prepare their defense and minimizing their own losses.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian settlement area to my knowledge corresponds to the most arable soil in the Russian-occupied territories. In other words, the Ukrainians are supposed to feed the Russians while the Russians get to exploit the resources in the heartland.

This is what I meant by "demographic reinforcements". They are not supposed to bolster Russian demographics by settling to reproduce themselves, but by keeping the Russians able to reproduce through their labor etc.

a Russia that would like to integrate them.

If they want to integrate them, why call them "Little Russians" and themselves "Great Russians"? Why aren't they all simply "Russians"? You could argue that this is because the "Great Russians" settle a larger territory and are more numerous than the Ukrainians are. Fair enough, but the Belarusians ("White Russians") are also a part of the "All-Russian family" and they are even less numerous and live on an even smaller territory than the Ukrainians!

Actually, the Belarusians should be referred to as "Little Russians" on these grounds. Instead, they get qualified by geography. 'White' according to old Slavic custom means 'western' (as in the geographic direction), so the Belarusians are technically called "Western Russians" as per the "All-Russian" vocabulary... which doesn't make any **** sense either, as the Ukrainian western border actually lies even farther to the west than the Belarusian western border (compare the map above)!

So why are they called "Little Russians" and not at least "Southern Russians" or something like that? Because they are subordinate to the "Great Russians" (and arguably the "Western Russians" too, whose name may not suggest parity with the "Great Russians", but at least superiority over the "Little Russians" by virtue of not being "little" themselves).

So no, the fact that they are called "Little Russians" does not indicate a will to integrate them, as they aren't actually seen as the same as the "Great Russians" or even the Belarusians.

We covered this here:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/diplomatic-decolonization/msg12539/#msg12539

Against the backdrop of what I have written above: recruiting settlers from Ukraine makes sense from a Russian point of view, as they are similar enough to the Russian colonizers (in terms of religion, language group etc.) to be expected to side with them over the "Inorodtsy" as they would have struck the Russians as being fairly unaware of their own colonization at the time (Ukrainian nationalism was still pretty far from mainstream in the 1880s), but expendable enough to be used as a barrier against military threats as well as an exploitable workforce to feed the Russian colonizers.

I read it to mean that they were being offered free tickets by Green Ukraine planners in Ukraine to travel to Outer Machuria, rather than being reimbursed after arriving.

What makes you think any supposed planners in Ukraine were specifically planning a Ukrainian state (ethnostate or not) in the first place? I read the settlement policy as a Russian attempt to demographically reinforce the Russian and Cossack colonizers that eventually backfired when the supposedly "Little Russian" (the official Russian term for Ukrainians back then) flag bearers of the Russian colonial empire assumed to be docile subjects started to embrace Ukrainianness instead, became aware of their own colonization and turned on the Russians.

But did the Ukrainians have the intent of returning the territory to it's original owners?

Their leader Yuri Hlushko-Mova might have at least had the intention to give Outer Manchuria to Japan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Hlushko-Mova

Accused of anti-Soviet activities and "designs to split Far East from Russia and give it to Japan", Hlushko was sentenced in Chita in 1924 to 5 years imprisonment.

Based on his phenotype (except the terrible hairline of course), I am willing to believe the charge:

Spoiler (hover to show)

Why only for settlers from Ukraine? If the goal was purely to attract labour to reinforce the new state against potential Russian re-invasion, settlers from Russia's other enemies (especially China and Japan) should be just as welcome? Indeed, if as you claim Green Ukraine did not care about the ethnicity of settlers, doesn't Ukraine seem a rather distant location from which to selectively attract settlers?

The settlement policy dates from 1882. According to Wikipedia, "Green Ukraine" didn't try to secede until 1920, so the "Green Ukrainians" couldn't have been the ones enacting this policy. Heck, if I understood the article in question correctly, there weren't any Ukrainians in Outer Manchuria at all before 1882, who could have theoretically enacted such a policy even with the projected future goal of establishing a "Green Ukrainian" ethnostate. It was thus necessarily a Russian policy, so it clearly can't have been Ukrainian ethnonepotism. Accordingly, you will have to ask the Russians for the true underlying reason.

As does Zelensky

No surprise here. Last summer, he caused major outrage by submitting a bill on changing Ukraine's iconic "Tryzub" (trident) coat of arms into an overly complex abomination (images below the quoted text):

https://www.istpravda.com.ua/columns/2021/07/13/159831/

[English translation of the most important passages from the Ukrainian original - Dazhbog]

Despite its ancient origins, the Tryzub easily fits in with the minimalist aesthetic of the 21st century, can easily be copied and is highly recognizable.

...

Any attempt to "improve" the Tryzub by adding depictions of people, animals, plants and other subjects and declare it the "Great Coat of Arms of Ukraine" is frankly tasteless and absurd.

In addition, Ukraine is neither an empire nor a federation [i.e. not Russia - Dazhbog] and doesn't need to replace the historical and true CoA with a made-up "big" one.

The idea of a "Great CoA" was included in the constitution on the insistence of the communists, who deliberately sought to diminish the importance of the true CoA of Ukraine, the Tryzub.

...

This is about the direct threat of eliminating the Tryzub, humiliating our national symbols and self-degrading the Ukrainian state.

...

The Tryzub is the living symbol of our state tradition and national unity: the sign of the princes of the Kyivan Rus [the medieval polity from which Ukraine derives their state tradition - Dazhbog], the CoA of the Ukrainian People's Republic, a symbol of the Ukrainian independence struggle and the CoA of modern Ukraine.

Judge for yourself!

Tryzub:

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"Great CoA":

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Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that he would aesthetically side with Russia again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_Cathedral,_Kharkiv

The cathedral is the only building in Kharkov visited by almost all Russian Emperors starting with Catherine the Great.

...

On May 14, 1771, a cornerstone for the new cathedral was laid. The design of the future building was inspired by the St Clement's Church in Moscow. In Spring 1778 the altar was consecrated in honor of Our Lady of Kazan, though the construction wasn’t completed yet. On September 27, 1780, it was reconsecrated in honor of Dormition. The ceremony was attended by the general Pyotr Rumyantsev.

...

According to Filaret Gumilevsky, the free-standing Alexander Bell Tower was built in the aftermath of Napoleon's expulsion from Russia "to express the people's gratitude to Alexander I".

...

The cathedral was restored in the late 1970s and reverted to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church [...of the Moscow Patriarchate, i.e. the local branch of the Russian Orthodox Church - Dazhbog] in 2006.

If Zelensky (Jew) is already unreliable in terms of his politics, in an aesthetic sense he is a straight up Russian agent!

Also, Israel was directed against Britain, not against Palestine.

The thing is that Israel turned on Britain because to my knowledge, they went the extra mile in terms of ignobility, perpetrating colonial violence on a scale even the British didn't endorse. Was that the case with Green Ukraine as well?

Voluntarily refraining from reproducing would be enough.

Keep in mind that I was talking about the time Green Ukraine actually tried to secede, when neither China (nor Japan as another local anti-colonial power) seemed to be interested in seizing it (to my knowledge; I might be mistaken of course). If you would have preferred the local Ukrainians to voluntarily go extinct at that time, would you then have preferred Russian colonial rule to continue instead?

If not, then they complicit in colonialism as much as anyone else.

To be clear, I'm not trying to deny or downplay the Green Ukrainians' complicity. I'm just interested in knowing whether 90sRF would have preferred Russian colonial rule to continue instead.

If hypothetically China were to reclaim Outer Manchuria, there will doubtless be Chinese Eurocentrists eager to reproduce with the present-day Russians there. This can hopefully be countered with enough anti-Russian propaganda, but if the Chinese Eurocentrists (whom for the sake of argument anti-Russian propaganda has convinced to not reproduce with a Russian) then encounter present-day Russians who say, "My ancestors were Ukrainian!", that could be all it takes to make the Chinese Eurocentrists decide to reproduce with them after all. We must prepare to counter this also.

Fair enough.

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/re-duginism-1134/msg11555/#msg11555 etc. [Evacuation of non-"whites" from Ukraine - Dazhbog]

The relevant question when deciding whether a particular policy is racist is whether it benefits the in-group, in this case "whites". Therefore, the policies in question must have been aimed at scoring a demographic advantage for "whites" in one way or another.

You could argue that the underlying intention was to get the "white" refugees to safety as regards the dangers posed by the Russian invasion at the expense of the non-"white" refugees, however, being safe from the dangers posed by the Russian invasion specifically is in the long run not actually decisive in and of itself when it comes to demographics.

As we have seen, upon evacuating Ukraine, a lot of the non-"white" refugees actually repatriated to their (already majority non-"white") countries of origin (group 1), meaning that for the time being, they aren't contributing to the de-whitening of majority "white" countries. Sure, you could argue that at least they are still alive and might thus be able to once more migrate to a majority "white" country. This however exposes them to increasingly racist migration policies, so it's anyone's guess whether they ever make it to a majority "white" country again. Add to that the fact that even in relatively stable and prosperous states, they are still disproportionally endangered by the effects of climate change, which tend to hit majority non-"white" countries more severly than majority "white" ones, so it's actually anyone's guess whether they even survive long enough to migrate at all! In other words, evacuating this group of non-"white" refugees has effectively neutralized them from a demographic point of view.

Another number went for other EU-countries (group 2). They might end up considerably safer than group 1 as far as war and climate change are concerned, however, their perspective of staying there in the long term is anyone's guess, so there is still a decent likelihood they will end up like group 1 anyway. Add to that that they might still be subject to racial profiling, racist violence and detention, particularly in racist Poland, which they have to cross to go anywhere within the EU. Add to that that gun laws in the EU are rather restrictive, meaning they likely won't have the chance to even defend themselves (and diminish the "white" demographic in the process). All in all, their perspective of negatively impacting "white" demographics upon evacuating Ukraine still isn't particularly good.

Last but not least, a number of non-"white" refugees were citizens of majority "white" countries and Ukraine (group 3). They likely don't face the threat of deportation that group 2 faces, however, all the other problems remain. Their chances of negatively impacting "white" demographics are better than those of the other two groups but still not exactly great.

Had they simply stayed in Ukraine, they would of course have been exposed to the full force of the Russian invasion with a considerable risk of dying. On the other hand, they would have had a rather easy time obtaining weapons and training, enabling them to kill "whites", which already would have enabled them to directly diminish "white" demographics. Add to that that the Ukrainian evacuation policy disproportionally favors "white" females, meaning that the remaining "white" population, which would be dying at a similar rate as the non-"white" population, has a harder time replacing their losses through reproduction, whereas no such gender-based favoritism is evident regarding the non-"white" refugees, meaning they have an easier time replacing their losses through reproduction, which in turn means their population will grow at a faster rate than the "white" population, meaning that at least Ukraine can be successfully de-whitened to some extent.

You could argue then that Ukraine being de-whitened is by far not as important as de-whitening safer, more prosperous and nuclear-armed countries such as France or Britain. Alright, but as the Turkish example demonstrates, having a non-white country immediately adjacent to the EU as a transit point for migrants and refugees already has a huge value in and of itself. Besides, not evacuating immediately, taking up weapons, getting training and combat experience and storming the border by force of arms in the aftermath (ideally killing more "whites" in the process) is still a more promising path towards that end than evacuating immediately.

(It should be noted however that while this eliminates the risks for refugee groups 2 and 3 on their passage to some other country, it won't necessarily prevent group 1 from voluntarily repatriating and becoming demographically useless in the process, so depending on which refugee group is the largest, precautions should be taken to at least discourage them from doing so.)

As should be evident by now, if anything, Ukraine shouldn't be criticized for making it more difficult for non-"whites" to evacuate, but for not outright banning them from evacuating. However, the latter would have made for even worse PR and diplomatic scandals than the path ultimately chosen and would have almost certainly cost Ukraine a huge chunk of the support they desperately need. Ultimately, discouraging Ukrainian non-"whites" from leaving in a subtle manner by making evacuation as difficult and dangerous for them as possible was the sensible way to go, even if it didn't work out in the end.

Regardless of the lackluster result, the policies in question weren't aimed at scoring a demographic advantage for "whites" and consequently weren't racist.

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/re-duginism-1134/msg11901/#msg11901 [Racism in Soviet Ukraine - Dazhbog]

The same Soviet officials who enforced racist policies and condoned the lynch mob mentioned in the article quoted also mercilessly **** down on any display of Ukrainianness around the same time. Today, Ukrainianness is in many regards openly celebrated and Soviet sympathies **** down upon, meaning a dramatic shift in attitudes took place, which also implies certain demographic changes. In other words, post-Soviet Ukrainians aren't necessarily the same as Soviet Ukrainians.

The demographics of the city of Kherson in particular (where the massacre in question took place) changed as well (the share of the Russian and the Jewish population declined, whereas the share of the Ukrainian population increased). In other words, the bloodlines responsible for the massacre aren't necessarily as present today as they were back in 1964. Again, post-Soviet Khersonians aren't necessarily the same as Soviet Khersonians.

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/news/re-duginism-1134/msg11936/#msg11936 [Ukrainian politician Vadym Prystaiko stereotypes non-"whites" as "foreigners" that "stick out in a crowd" and wants to "put them in some other place" - Dazhbog]

Prystaiko is ethnically stereotyping for sure, "putting them in some other place" however is at least open to the interpretation that he would endorse banning non-"whites" from evacuating, which, as argued above, might very well de-whiten Ukraine, making them no longer "foreigners" by his own definition. So there is no reason to assume that he is trying to enforce whiteness, subhuman phenotype notwithstanding.

Let me know in case I forgot the odd point from your list.