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).
Neonazis, and then "Defend ethnic Russians"
If you scroll a few comments you will see that this is one of the reasons many pro-Russia shills use to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
I don't think any western country invaded any other country with the sole intent of take land permanently lately.
That is one thing Russians haven't been able to do successfully in decades.
There are certainly kernels of truth to that. It's not propaganda. The astonishing number of monuments to Nazis and war criminals should be a testimony to that.
The deployment of nuclear weapons in places in Europe?
Fun fact: very early on, there was a pro-Ukraine guy who asserted that the US has 'never' done that. I had to inform him of the Mexican Cession. Good guy. Too bad his mind was infected with the Current Thing.
Does it matter why the West is bombing other countries to shreds? Somehow, it's less bad when you're not trying to annex territory (which would actually be good for those people)? Of course, the US did in Kosovo what Russia did in the People's Republics: unilaterally take the land of another state and give it to a client.
I meant to the rulers here. They have been successful at that. The Russian government is their problem, not mine. Our rulers are our problem.
They say missiles, which is very different from gravity bombs.
The question still remains, no western country has annexed any new country lately.
It will be your problem and my problem the moment they win this war. Because they are democrats x 10.
I don't know anything about that.
OK, but so what? Is it better to bomb Libya to smithereens and throw it into chaos for 11 straight years, because they did not 'annex' it?
Why? What will they do to you or me?
Because Russia did that to Syria, blew it up a dn then annexed other countries. The thing with Libya was localized and did not involve the destruction we see in Ukraine, or in Iraq, which America helped rebuild. Just read the comments of pro-Russia shills when they mention NATO and the reason of the Invasion. You will see more often than not the mention of America placing missiles in Europe.
And Russia will do to you and me the same they are doing to the Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovan, and their own citizens. Banning independent media, internet censorship ramped up to 11, political assassinations, gulagging, and more.
Stop for a moment and think if you would be happy living in Russia. Check if you could even have your independent media channel with no government meddling or be owned by the state.