You really need to either man up and show exactly which argument in my replies to af_newbie comment about physically eliminating collaborators is a "straw man" argument, or just quietly stop using long words you don't know the meaning of.
Your concern-trolling about people using rubles and about children is an example of such strawmanning (no one suggested killing children or people using rubles) and I did mention that in my post... perhaps try some reading before going all blue.
Now concern-trolling? Are you just throwing out big words in hopes that at least one of them sticks?
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Edit: From my own curiosity
The pay of Wagner private military contractors (PMCs), who are usually aged between 35 and 55, is estimated to be between 80,000 ($1087) and 250,000 ($3397) Russian rubles a month. One source also stated the pay was as high as 300,000 ($4077).
https://special-ops.org/wagner-group-notorious-private-military-company/At average of $2k/month for 6months that's $12k per contractor. So just that money from EU and US $1,98B, would get Wagner 165.000 contractors for 6months.
I do kind of wonder how fast Wagner, or any other PMC really, could ramp up (and maintain something close to their 'normal' effectiveness.) I've heard that they get some of their personnel from prison, but I have to believe that the pool of suitable candidates from that demographic would be exhausted pretty quickly.
Another random thing I never got around to mentioning is that a few weeks or a month ago or something, the CEO of Wagner is said to have been nearly killed in an attack that is said to have been the work of the British SAF. The interesting thing about this is that I doubt that very many of the Wagner people are very nice and forgiving, and that would certainly include the CEO. Wagner is, as best I can tell, a private for-profit business entity. It would be quite believable that misfortune which befell Great Brittan, or more generally the interests of the crown, in the form of an attack it could be simply revenge on the part of a privateer and had nothing to do with the Kremlin proper.
So do the Putin fan boys consider the Wagner group the good kind of Nazis? How do you rationalize invading Ukraine bc "Nazis" while funding Nazis to fight for you.
Similar dissonance as the hate for Hitler while worshipping Stalin.
Your childish name calling are quiet hilarious. I'm not a fan of any PMCs but that Pandora's box was mainly opened with
Blackwater, world let it slide, so now it became a new norm, to a point where you have to rely on them if you want to have a chance in any modern military conflict. Like has been covered here many times before, unfortunately Nazi's are everywhere, and it's a problem, question is are they hiding and ostracized, or embraced and are allowed to openly show Nazi insignia and do their Nazi torch parades.
I'm not a fan of Stalin and i don't subscribe to the idea that end justifies the means, but even attempting to equate the suffering of all races/ethnicities for some idea of a greater good (reforms, collectivization etc...) of Stalin (and to a greater degree Mao) to Hitler's idea of master race and systematic genocide and extermination of people based solely on their race, ethnicity, or beliefs is just abhorrent. What you're trying to pull here is called an
Association fallacy a cheap propaganda trick that would only work on the dumbest of people, and fully discredits you.
Hitler is bad. Stalin is bad. Thus Stalin = Hitler No fallacy. He meant to say that most Russians revere the Soviet Union and its leaders despite the fact that the Soviet leaders were genocidal maniacs, including the current one.
How can you support the prison of nations, the Soviet Union, or its current reincarnation, the 'Russian' Federation is beyond me.
The 'Russian Federation', is not exactly Russian, and it is not a federation. More like a Russian empire where non-Slavic 'Russians'
are second-class citizens, their populations are systematically destroyed and Russified.
Take down Stalin/Soviet monuments across Russia, then we'll talk. Until then, иди нa xyй co cвoeй PФ.
Your dim-witted reply (however unintentional) brings up a great point, people are quick to call for Putin to step down, be removed, assassinated etc... and they just seem to assume through their ignorance, and are fed by propaganda that the alternative would be some green liberal non-existent party. But as you pointed out yourself there are still a ton of Russians that still revere the Soviet Union, and besides some puppet parties, the next real alternative is a
communist party. No one ever mentions how Putin is the centrist as the alternative might very well be a communist party. Who wins then??
Population of LPR and DPR is around 4mil, Kherson is 1mil, Zaporizhzhia 1,5mil, Crimea is at 2.5mil for a total of around 9mil, when someone calls for mass murders with obscure criteria, why are you not even interested in clearing up how many people exactly they calling to physically eliminate? Is this not a concern to you?
If definition of collaboration is so obvious to you where you feel the need to interject when someone tries to clear it up and asks follow up questions, mind explaining it to the Kyiv-based regional center for Human Rights?
I'm concerned about many bad things happening to the millions of people, but collaboration being a voluntary action puts it near the bottom of the list. However no matter how you prioritize your concerns regarding this war, there is one thing and one thing only that's causing all this trouble and it needs to end in order for all these issues to be resolved. It's the Russian invasion.
That's why your concern is not genuine. You just keep looking for new ways - including made-up / straw man / otherwise fallacious "arguments" - to blame Ukrainians for defending their country. Putin is killing Dobas residents by the thousands, you're "concerned" about someone's definition of
collaborator. If you were otherwise calling for an immediate end of the occupation AND were concerned about the fate of collaborators then perhaps I could give you the benefit of the doubt. But as it stands now, it's just deflection/trolling/etc. Using well-known Kremlin propaganda tropes is a dead giveaway.
You do realize that it's possible to defend a country without calling for mass murders of all collaborators (in a country without capital punishment) right? In fact, thankfully, I don't see anyone besides af_newbie calling for that.
And that's where we fundamentally disagree, i see this conflict as a done deal, so I'm concerning myself with what comes after it, and I'm not seeing many good options. Majority of scenarios push Russia and China uncomfortably close together. I am not a fan of China or communism in it's current implementation. This would be a terrible outcome for everyone in the free world, so I'm dumbfounded why US tried to snatch UA out of RU sphere of influence with soft power and their freedom cookies. The outcome for EU is pretty gloom, and it's hard to believe that it's coincidental