Look at the Ukraine—part of the population identified as Ukrainian, part as Russian, and it lead to a civil war.
Look, this is a live issue. People are dying. People are dying in my hometown. Please don’t just repeat things you may have heard “somewhere,” because there is an information war, and if you repeat lies, you help perpetuate a bad thing by bad people. I think it is better to either say nothing about that conflict, or try to use local sources only if you really want to talk about it.
I’m not trying to say that I know better then someone from the Ukraine, but I’m not just repeating stuff I read “somewhere”: I’ve checked just now and both wikipedia and bbc news, which I would expect to be impartial or partially anti-Russia, say that this is at least partially a civil war.
To clarify, I know there are Russian troops fighting too. I’m also not saying that Russia didn’t engineer the crisis somehow. I’m not saying that the Russian intervention is justified. I’m not saying that the rebels are justified. But if the BBC mentions “Pro-Russian rebels” then it looks like this is a civil war with support from Russia, rather than a pure Russian invasion, unless the BBC is a pro-Russian propaganda tool.
Wikipedia is not reliable for these sorts of things, for what I hope are obvious reasons. BBC is more so, but even Western news editors operate on their own set of incentives that the good folks over in .ru study very carefully.
What I was trying to say wasn’t “I know better than you,” but “if there are big players with a strong incentive + a lot of money and people to paint an incorrect picture of what is happening to you, how would you be able to tell?” See also: “Russia is a democracy.”
One of the interesting things about the Ukraine crisis is that it is a live fire exercise for propaganda and opinion engineering in the internet age.
My opinion, for the record: I am sure there are people originally from eastern Ukraine currently fighting. But the entire thing is basically entirely engineered and ran from Moscow, with Russian military expertise and hardware. Rebel commanding officers are all Russian special ops people. I suppose if you can find a hundred people originally from that part of the world to fight on the rebel side that would be enough to call it a “civil war.”
It is a “civil war” in the sense that Russian-speaking people are killing each other. It is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say. That is not what is happening, what is happening is Russia using “continuation of politics by other means” to reassert its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
A Russian speaking Ukraine that is a part of EU with a growing economy a la Poland would have been enormously bad news for the Russian political establishment. It is a matter of survival for them (note: not for Russia, for them).
[The eastern Ukraine conflict] is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say.
I think that’s wrong, but wrong in an interesting and ultimately informative way!
While diplomats, politicians & journalists at the time did sometimes explain the Yugoslav wars of succession as an outburst of long-standing ethnic tensions, Western scholars regard such tensions as only a minor cause of the wars. (I can dig up a range of quotations to back that up but, as you might be the only person to read this, I won’t bother unless someone asks.)
What did cause the wars? A combination of things: chauvinist nationalisms, struggles between centralist & anti-centralist Yugoslav leaders, economic stagnation, the dwindling credibility of Communism at the end of the 1980s, and yes, deeply rooted ethnic antagonisms to a limited degree. But foremost among the causes was a coalition drawn loosely together by Slobodan Milošević to further Serb nationalism, which included other politicians, intellectuals, militaries, state media, and irredentists in republics adjacent to Serbia.
By manoeuvring actors in the coalition into fighting for them, Milošević and other Serbian politicians helped engineer the wars, first by allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia when Slovenia declared independence, then by arming irredentist Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina and nudging them to secede, generating a pretext to (1) attempt to disarm Croatia and B&H, and (2) send the increasingly Serbified army into Croatia and B&H, all in the guise of peacekeeping.
Why do I delve into all that? Because it actually has an uncanny resemblance to the eastern Ukraine conflict, as I understand it. As in ex-Yugoslavia, people overblow the ethno-linguistic uniformity of the regions involved when seeking to explain the violence. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the leaders of a large republic prop up a rebellion in an adjacent smaller republic. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the fighting seems to involve a mixture of units from a neighbour’s army and small bands of undisciplined irregulars, as opposed to a sweeping war of all against all. As in ex-Yugoslavia, state-controlled media outlets stir the shit and skew their coverage of the conflict.
As best as I can tell as a distant layperson, the eastern Ukrainian conflict indeed isn’t a “‘civil war’ in the sense of ’inherent ethnic tensions explod[ing] into a war in a way we always knew they would” — but neither were the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, and partly for this reason the two conflicts turn out to be surprisingly apposite analogues of each other.
July 2015 edit: changed “sending the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia” to “allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia”; although the Serb-nationalist coalition did not block the army’s entry to Slovenia, it was Ante Marković (the Yugoslav federal prime minister, who was not a member of that coalition and indeed increasingly isolated by it) whoinitiatedthe attempted invasion.
Look, this is a live issue. People are dying. People are dying in my hometown. Please don’t just repeat things you may have heard “somewhere,” because there is an information war, and if you repeat lies, you help perpetuate a bad thing by bad people. I think it is better to either say nothing about that conflict, or try to use local sources only if you really want to talk about it.
I’m not trying to say that I know better then someone from the Ukraine, but I’m not just repeating stuff I read “somewhere”: I’ve checked just now and both wikipedia and bbc news, which I would expect to be impartial or partially anti-Russia, say that this is at least partially a civil war.
To clarify, I know there are Russian troops fighting too. I’m also not saying that Russia didn’t engineer the crisis somehow. I’m not saying that the Russian intervention is justified. I’m not saying that the rebels are justified. But if the BBC mentions “Pro-Russian rebels” then it looks like this is a civil war with support from Russia, rather than a pure Russian invasion, unless the BBC is a pro-Russian propaganda tool.
Sorry if I touched a nerve btw.
Wikipedia is not reliable for these sorts of things, for what I hope are obvious reasons. BBC is more so, but even Western news editors operate on their own set of incentives that the good folks over in .ru study very carefully.
What I was trying to say wasn’t “I know better than you,” but “if there are big players with a strong incentive + a lot of money and people to paint an incorrect picture of what is happening to you, how would you be able to tell?” See also: “Russia is a democracy.”
One of the interesting things about the Ukraine crisis is that it is a live fire exercise for propaganda and opinion engineering in the internet age.
My opinion, for the record: I am sure there are people originally from eastern Ukraine currently fighting. But the entire thing is basically entirely engineered and ran from Moscow, with Russian military expertise and hardware. Rebel commanding officers are all Russian special ops people. I suppose if you can find a hundred people originally from that part of the world to fight on the rebel side that would be enough to call it a “civil war.”
It is a “civil war” in the sense that Russian-speaking people are killing each other. It is not a “civil war” in the sense of “inherent ethnic tensions exploded into a war in a way we always knew they would” as would be the case in the former Yugoslavia, say. That is not what is happening, what is happening is Russia using “continuation of politics by other means” to reassert its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
A Russian speaking Ukraine that is a part of EU with a growing economy a la Poland would have been enormously bad news for the Russian political establishment. It is a matter of survival for them (note: not for Russia, for them).
I think that’s wrong, but wrong in an interesting and ultimately informative way!
While diplomats, politicians & journalists at the time did sometimes explain the Yugoslav wars of succession as an outburst of long-standing ethnic tensions, Western scholars regard such tensions as only a minor cause of the wars. (I can dig up a range of quotations to back that up but, as you might be the only person to read this, I won’t bother unless someone asks.)
What did cause the wars? A combination of things: chauvinist nationalisms, struggles between centralist & anti-centralist Yugoslav leaders, economic stagnation, the dwindling credibility of Communism at the end of the 1980s, and yes, deeply rooted ethnic antagonisms to a limited degree. But foremost among the causes was a coalition drawn loosely together by Slobodan Milošević to further Serb nationalism, which included other politicians, intellectuals, militaries, state media, and irredentists in republics adjacent to Serbia.
By manoeuvring actors in the coalition into fighting for them, Milošević and other Serbian politicians helped engineer the wars, first by allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia when Slovenia declared independence, then by arming irredentist Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina and nudging them to secede, generating a pretext to (1) attempt to disarm Croatia and B&H, and (2) send the increasingly Serbified army into Croatia and B&H, all in the guise of peacekeeping.
Why do I delve into all that? Because it actually has an uncanny resemblance to the eastern Ukraine conflict, as I understand it. As in ex-Yugoslavia, people overblow the ethno-linguistic uniformity of the regions involved when seeking to explain the violence. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the leaders of a large republic prop up a rebellion in an adjacent smaller republic. As in ex-Yugoslavia, the fighting seems to involve a mixture of units from a neighbour’s army and small bands of undisciplined irregulars, as opposed to a sweeping war of all against all. As in ex-Yugoslavia, state-controlled media outlets stir the shit and skew their coverage of the conflict.
As best as I can tell as a distant layperson, the eastern Ukrainian conflict indeed isn’t a “‘civil war’ in the sense of ’inherent ethnic tensions explod[ing] into a war in a way we always knew they would” — but neither were the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, and partly for this reason the two conflicts turn out to be surprisingly apposite analogues of each other.
July 2015 edit: changed “sending the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia” to “allowing the Yugoslav People’s Army into Slovenia”; although the Serb-nationalist coalition did not block the army’s entry to Slovenia, it was Ante Marković (the Yugoslav federal prime minister, who was not a member of that coalition and indeed increasingly isolated by it) who initiated the attempted invasion.
Yes, there is.