First of all, I have no intention of taking or promoting any side here, because I’m not well informed enough about what has happened since 2022… however, before getting burned out of the internet somewhen by the end of the last decade, I used to follow a lot of anarchist collectives. I was on Riseup and Autistici mailing lists, and I remember reading a lot about everything that was happening in Ukraine directly from the anarchists there, the protests being led by openly fascist paramilitary groups like the C14, Svoboda, Tryzub, Pravy Sektor, the SNA that became the Azov Battalion, tons of pictures and videos documenting everything and everyone, even American Blackwater mercenaries operating in the country. These fascist groups clashing with socialists, setting fire to union buildings and shooting people trying to escape, and now it’s hard to even find references to these groups and their actions on the internet, like it was sanitized (not so long ago, I also had trouble finding some materials from antizionist rabbis I had read back in the mid-2000s, I actually just found accusations of them being antisemitic on main search engines, so I really believe there is a lot of fuckery going on to control information)… and I’m afraid if I start talking about Donetsk and Lugansk I might get accused of something, so never mind.
I’m mentioning it because it has been only a few months since I joined Lemmy, and I’ve seen some controversy about accusations of nazis in Ukrainian lines, like it’s tankie propaganda or that Dugin shit… but, uh, back when pro-EU factions took the government, the anarchists had documented the nazis very well… is there a generational gap of information here? How many people were following anarchist press (not the shit you’d find on Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever) back in 2014?
ps: I’m not here to discuss Russia.
edit: fixed some grammar mistakes I noticed, but I’m no native speaker.
This is well known and you can easily find a lot about this online, but the involvement of these right-wing groups got significantly less over the years after 2014, and in the last election they were basically irrelevant. The integration of the Azov militia into the Ukrainian army is more problematic, but even there some people say that this basically neutered them, and after the heavy losses early in the war the remains of the Azov battalion seem indeed largely irrelevant and/or have little to do with what they were in the mid 2010s.
What I am about to say is effectively a power upvote, but this is in direct alignment with what my Ukrainian friend who fought in Ukraine’s civil was has to say about these things. She hates Azov’s integration but in this current moment still finds herself sending money to United24 because even though she once sat on a rooftop with a rifle, she feels that the best way to keep her sister alive is to support the national army that once tried to de-legitimize her resistance and integrated her enemies.
The way she’s put it is that her objection to the far right militia’s was that they were fundamentally bigots and she cannot abide racists. The russian army presents in her home a foreign occupying imperial military which in many ways is bigots, racists, and then more insidiousness on top of all that. I haven’t really talked about her here on lemmy for a long time because it gets exhausting being told she was a CIA asset
Yup. Alas, succumbing to the fallacious “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” ploy. Redraws the lines of division, breaking “class solidarity”, keeping us divided, conquered, and worse.
unsure if i am reading it right, she was saying russian forces were bigger racists so is aiding the lesser racists?
i feel like this sounds incendiary but i really dont mean it to, sorry :(
bigger threats to her community’s safety. she is willing to send aid to people who tolerate the insidious presence of bigotry if it means the people who loath bigotry are still alive tomorrow to fight bigotry