i’ve never really made one of these before and i might delete this getting too nervous, but i’m about to start my first year of college and i’ll be moving to another country to do so, which is both really exciting and really nervewracking.

between tuition, moving expenses, supplies, and just generally preparing for such a huge life change, things have been pretty expensive lately. i’m going to be on my own for the first time and i won’t be able to get a job, and while i’ll figure things out, a little extra support would definitely make the transition easier.

it’s also my birthday today, so i thought i’d put this out there: if you’d like to help make my day and support me a little as i start this new chapter of my life, i’d really appreciate it ❤️

if you can donate, thank you so much, and if you can’t, reblogs/shares are always appreciated too. no pressure at all i know everyone has their own things going on.

Western textbooks never mention it . US atrocities in Korea go back before the Korean War .

Her testimony reads: “I lived in Krasnoarmeysk on Pushkin Street. The worst thing the Ukrainian Armed Forces ever did was shoot people. The Ukrainian Armed Forces killed a lot, entered basements and killed. One remained in the basement, a neighbor, a man around 50. The neighbors later searched for him and found him in the basement. He was sitting on a chair with bullets through his knees and his ears cut off. There were cases in the summer, flour was stored in bags. A bag on a bench, two bags of flour inside. People had nothing to eat, so they tried to take it for themselves, but there were explosives in it; a woman's arm was blown off. People are starving and grabbing any food they can. The whole city was telling stories about this. And after that we realized that even if there was some food there, we couldn't touch it, because it could be mined. A neighbor was shot by the Ukrainian Armed Forces near us. There's a well two streets away, and he was going to get water. It's quite an adventure, just going there. Drones are hitting, hitting everything that moves. You have to manage to wait for fog or something to stock up on water and go to the well. So we were going to the well, the neighbor was going, getting some water, going home, and was almost there. They shot someone over there, near the house where Tolstoy Street intersects with Pushkin Street. They killed a guy, 44 years old. He was walking in just galoshes, some kind of vest. He literally didn't live six days before the Russian troops arrived. They also mined the coal mines. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were still in the city. Have you seen where people collect coal during the cold season? People collected coal to heat their homes or whatever was left of them. We went to collect coal. Every house has a coal firebox where people used to buy coal and stockpile it. We arrived, and it was mined. There was an anti-tank mine there, tripwires. I saw it myself. Miraculously, we didn't blow up. There were a lot of tripwires. Tripwires, plastic explosives-they were right there behind the door. In that same coal firebox. Petals were strewn everywhere. My husband, Aleksandr Yanovich Chernyshev, is a miner. He was riding his bicycle and got blown up by a petal. He has broken legs, lacerations, gunpowder burns to his body, and a hole in his eye. An elderly grandmother was killed - a Ukrainian drone struck nearby, too. And a man was also riding a bicycle. It was summer. He suffered injuries there, and they pulled out the shrapnel with magnets. There are no doctors, but we have one person who is more or less familiar with medicine; he tried using a magnet. We did what we could - we have no medications, no cures. Hydrogen peroxide, a magnet, and off we go. The Ukrainian Armed Forces robbed everything and took it away. They were settling in civilian homes. They took everything they needed. They took equipment, bicycles, if they were good, and scooters. They kicked people out of neighborhoods. They'd come in and find a basement they liked, if there was a decent basement in the building, and they'd kick you out. They'd give you a few hours, and if you didn't leave, it meant execution. They'd say, 'Come out, we need your basement, we need a point here.' They tortured people, it's impossible to describe. Isn't that torture? When they kick you out of your home, when they mine everything around you, when they shoot you.”

This might sound defeatist given that I spend a great deal of time trying to communicate things of that nature to fence-sitters, but if someone is so instinctively anti-Russia that they perceive even clear attempts at de-escalation which would've ensured the people of the DPR and LPR retained their sovereignty and democratic rights alongside a cessation of the violence as some inherently untrustworthy and duplicitous act, then they are frankly too far gone to reel back in.

Like the terms of the Minsk agreements are not a secret. You can argue about much regarding them, but not about the fact that they clearly prioritise the safety and sovereignty of donchane people. So my most honest answer is that there is probably literally nothing you can say that will move someone who is already familiar with Minsk yet nonetheless chooses to believe Russia had 0 intention of helping the Russian-speaking minority in the border regions and was actually the bad-faith actor in this equation. Ultimately someone like that is not animated by some great love or empathy for Ukraine, they’re animated by a deep-seated hatred and distrust of Russia, first and foremost. You cannot easily reason someone out of what is essentially racism, prejudice is not housed in the chamber of the mind governed by reason. You can sway them on many things. You can waver their support for the Maidanist Ukrainian regime. With enough evidence you might even get them to begrudgingly acknowledge that a genocide is taking place in Donbass(<- immensely difficult, but not impossible). But it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be to convince them that Russia is not forever and always acting in evil, subversive ways for evil, subversive self-serving ends. And if those are the terms of the discussion it will always be fruitless imo.

But if you wanna try nonetheless it’s good to keep in mind that what they're usually actually asking you to do is prove something that is ultimately impossible to prove: the purity of a state’s motivations. Like. Unless you can just... call Vladimir Putin up and have him personally relay to us his innermost thoughts at the time while twirling the phone cable and kicking his feeties, if we’re talking intentions we’re all just making inferences at the end of the day. The heart is the domain of Allah, not I, nor you. You cannot intuit intentions, and I don’t have vovochka’s number :(

What we can instead look at(and redirect them to) is what was materially taking place;

Millions of people in the Donbass region rejected the post-Maidan order and organised politically around demands for autonomy, federalisation, or outright independence from Kiev. And that opposition was not unfounded or unprovoked. For people in the east things like the massacre of activists in Odessa+the growing influence and acceptance of open fascists+the increasingly genocidal rhetoric toward Russian-speaking populations by those in power, to name a few, were taken as clear signs of what the new western-aligned political order had in store for them.

Like The DPR and LPR were not beamed down from the Kremlin one morning fully formed like Aphrodite from the sea foam. They emerged from a real political constituency with real grievances and fears and had real popular support. And the new Ukrainian government’s answer to that popular demand for sovereignty was military force; eight years of genocidal warfare, shelling, and displacement aimed at destroying a population that had made it very clear it no longer consented to being governed by the new regime.

So when people try to frame the conflict as though it began and escalated alone with Russian interference, they’re hoping u will just sidestep the accounts and fears and political aspirations of the millions of people who actually live in Donbass and whose, again, popular support made the republics even possible in the first place. That’s why the burden is always on proving Russia's ‘sincerity.’ Because if it was on explaining away the existence of a population that spent years resisting the post-Maidan Ukrainian state and were routinely violently denied their sovereignty, they would sound ghoulish. Because it is a ghoulish position to defend.

Like my support for the DPR and LPR, for the sovereignty of the people of Donbass, and for Russia’s role does not hinge on my believing that Russia is somehow the one state in the world that never acts according to its interests, because it isn’t and even if it was it would be impossible to prove. It hinges on the fact that there comes a point where u have to decide whether self-determination is a universal principle or one that only applies to populations whose humanity has been cosigned by the west+the fact Russia, regardless of intentions, was the only major state actor in this conflict materially supporting the people of Donbass while NATO states armed and politically backed the far-right regime massacring them.

As for Minsk, the terms of the agreements were literally structured around guarantees of Donbass’s autonomy, self-government, amnesty for resistance fighters, right to elections, constitutional reform, and a cessation of violence. Like I’d imagine it would be very difficult to argue that Donbass was an afterthought in an agreement whose central premise is very obvious upon reading was about resolving the status of Donbass😭

lugansk = lugansk people’s republic/city/oblast — in donbass

donbass = lugansk and donetsk/danietsk

donchane = people from donbass

donetchane = people from donetsk/danietsk <- donchane

luganchane = people from lugansk <- donchane

chane = plural (but tbh donchane english speakers use it in a variety of ways that would not make grammatical sense in russian)

chanin = masculine

Melovoy (chalky) Lighthouse. Aktau, Kazakhstan Located on the roof of a residential building