The said meme, which I also I hear way too often hear, is that Ukraine has been shelling civilians in the occupied areas "for years" (variant: "for 8 years"), which is incredibly annoying, because so many people who don't know anything about this war and haven't been watching it just go and believe such a blatant lie for some reason. I first wrote as a reply but I thought I should actually make it a post so here it is in a much longer form.
It's directed to the naive and guilible who just believed it without checking for what is the reality.
So, look at just any video here: https://youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Donetsk+military+parade Most of uploaders are explicitly pro-Russian, so you can't possibly think anything here is somehow not real.
It's the many videos of various military parades held by Russian forces in Donetsk city over all these years. It's military parades, but they're also attended by crowds of specifically pro-Russia civilians - and even by all the "separatist" leaders (military and otherwise). You seem to think they would surely go and shell then, right?
(Or, for example, you may check the funerals of slain Russian commanders with large processions in the streets, practically also military parades with lots of civilians and the leaders.)
Well, you see, Ukrainian forces have held the suburbs like Piski and Avdiivka a few kilometers away (the area of Piski being especially just across Donetsk Airport), all that time. In fact, they still do!
This is the current (17 August 2022) frontlines in the Donetsk regions and you can see the distance between Donetsk city and the cities just west of it: https://www.criticalthreats.org/wp-content/uploads/Donetsk-Battle-Map-Draft-August-172022.png As I said, basically nothing there has changed since January 2015. This date was the fall of Donetsk Airport after over half year of non-stop Russian attack, and it was left completely devastated (just totally smashed), as were the immediately adjoing areas to the east (a few apartment blocks from which the Russians were firing, a monastery that was also a Russian firing position, also a looted supermarket, a large area of car garages, and an overpass bridge that collapsed on tanks). But not the city beyond the actual battle area, even as the Russian claim as always was that they need to attack the airport, even after the Minsk ceasefire, because Ukraine is "shelling the city" from it and yet you won't see destroyed/abandoned artillery pieces in the videos of the aftermath (you will see a lot of trucks and armored vehicles from the fighting and from Ukrainian supply/reinforcement/evacuation runs) because it was also only a blatant lie. It's their standard lie, used just always, and currently used for the attack on the city of Avdiivka that is now going on for over half year too (and you can Avdiivka has suffered extensive damage from Russian shelling, and is a ghost city having been evacuated).
Now, after you watched any number of any videos from all of these Donetsk parades, ask yourself the following questions:
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Could you even imagine a more juicy target than any of these parades that if someone wanted to hit just any remotely civilian target (along with massed military forces in the open, and even the most high-value individuals) on purpose?
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So why are they never being shelled?
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Why are they not at all even afraid of being shelled? Or therwise attacked, such as hit with a ballistic missile, or any sort of drone for that matter, or even placed explosives or whatever really. (For example the famous Russian fommander Motorola was in fact killed by such placed explosives, but in the way only he and his bodyguard were harmed - they bombed them in an elevator of his base, and his comrade Givi was also surgically eliminated with a rocket flamethrower fired right into his office window when he was alone. Even when they killed one of the heads of the two "people's republics" they only blew up the military cafe he was in with his bodyguards, the cafe was named "Separ" for "Separatist" and was closed from the normal people.)
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And why none of the buildings (cars, streets, trees) ever bear any damage from shelling on any other date?
If you need a visual reference, this is how a city in Ukraine (Mariupol) looks like after just few weeks (not "years") of shelling: https://youtu.be/MDVLmOVDaOY
You can also compare with the life in Kharkiv or in the capital itself while within Russian artillery range. With the population sheltering in the metro down below, instead of holding parades and other public events.
And further check out effects of prolonged (weeks or months long) shelling by a Soviet style (like Ukraine's was until 2022) military force in the videos of Grozny and other locations in Chechnya under and after Russian sieges.
All of this should be extremely obvious, but as I said people are just being ignorant and irrational, to say it mildly. (u/AntonioOfVenice is a special victim, because usually he's not retarded.)
I can also show you further videos for every claim I made, if you want some evidence. And I mean Russia's own videos, usually (like let's say of the already mentioned Motorola personally firing from these apartment blocks on the airport, and later the large public funeral of him in central Donetsk, which was not disturbed by Ukraine in any way as always and you can see just no traces of any imaginary "shelling" anywhere on the streets also as always).
A related common lie is that Ukrainian "shelling" killed 14,000 "civilians". This was the UN estimate of all people who died in 2014-2022 (but mostly 2014-2015), including more than 4,000 Ukrainian troops, and Mr. Motorola (a very goblin-looking manlet fellow from Russia) and all of his deceased comrades were included in this number too (their side's losses were much larger). The actual count of civilians, killed by both sides, was more than 3,000, almost all of them 2014-2015. Among them the 300 mostly Dutch people killed by Russia on one day in 2014, which was by far the worst incident of civilian casualties all these years until the Russian rampages north of Kyiv (but not the Mariupol theater / "CHILDREN" bombing that killed merely dozens and not hundreds as initially feared, the underground nuclear shelter where most people were actually withstood the attack and so only many of those above and in the aid distribution/evacuation center just next to it got killed, also the place was already way less crowded than it used to be due to the mentioned evacuation).
I agree that Assange is a political target, but that doesn't mean the West doesn't have a free press.
Good, Chinese and Russian state media ought to be banned outright in all free countries. Free speech rights belong to the citizens, not to foreign powers trying to push state propaganda.
Nope. I don't believe you actually believe this, either. You're just venting. It's obvious to all what the differences between state controlled media and a free press are. Russia and China don't have a free press. Anyone who gets out of line in those countries gets arrested/disappeared. Meanwhile the free press in the US was free to criticize Trump constantly, and then now is free to criticize Biden. The Hunter Biden story blew up in right wing media even though the left wing media refused to talk about it. Where is the regime control? The Biden Admin certainly doesn't tell Ben Shapiro or Tucker Carlson what they can and can't talk about.
No, they are, at least all the ones from the OSINT accounts I follow on twitter like https://twitter.com/DefMon3 https://twitter.com/JominiW https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical https://twitter.com/COUPSURE
That's what Russians do: constantly lie and use pics and videos that are not what the russians claim them to be.
This was a media meme that was never official. Many sources I read said right from the beginning that there was no actual Ghost, it was just a meme.
It was true. It happened. The UKR side thought the men died, and only later learned that they had been captured when the Russians said so. I fail to see how any part of what was said was a lie. One small aspect - that they didn't die - was fortunately incorrect. It was a reasonable assumption given that the audio clips show they were fired upon.
The Russians have been threatening to blow it up, and have positioned artillery around it and started shelling nearby UKR cities so they can set up a false flag where they blame counterbattery fire for their own demolition.
The West has error checking and open criticism. False stories are called out and debunked by other people in the west very quickly. This does not happen with the Russian side.
That's called defending a city. The UKR side does not position military equipment on top of civilians like Saddam Hussein did putting SAMs on schools. Russia just likes to kill civilians on purpose as part of a terror campaign to break morale.
Good. Ukraine should be de-Russified. Putin used the Russian population as basis to invade. Any ethnic Russians who don't like it can move back to Russia. Every country has a right to force others to assimilate. Just like how all Americans should have to learn english.
Hey, I'm pleasantly surprised. I thought you'd take the Eyepatch McCain position on that. I guess you're not completely a partisan establishment GOP.
All free countries, so no country? Tricksy this dekachin is!
And here anyone who steps out of line gets demonized and sometimes destroyed by law enforcement. Assange. Project Veritas.
However, that was not the point. Your claim was that we have a 'free press'. We clearly don't. Freer than China, maybe, certainly not free in an absolute sense.
LOL! Russian media is also allowed to criticize Navalny. Opponents of the regime will be criticized.
Your weakness is that you view the regime as 'just the state'.
Not that Italian actor you were citing recently?
I find it ironic that you recognize media lies when they are about Republicans, but everything negative about Russia is undisputed truth.
OK, so the 'free media' here lies.
C'mon man. I'm sure you can produce no document showing Russians 'threatening to blow it up'.
Yes, in the West, "errors" (lies) are corrected by people who are marginal. Lies are spread by the massive institutions. NBC claimed that Boston Children's Hospital did not perform castration on minors. Their own website said otherwise. Who holds them accountable? A few marginal characters on Twitter.
They literally put military equipment and soldiers in schools, hospitals, etc. so they can gain maximum propaganda advantage when they are targeted, as is legal under international law.
Genocidal rhetoric.
They moved to your country voluntarily. The Russians are just living where they've always lived. Not their fault it's now under the control of a puppet regime of the GAE.
We both know why that is.