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> with the inevitable consequence being the death of a lot of Ukrainians in the process.

With the inevitable consequence being many Ukrainian lives being saved.

Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?



> Do you somehow think that less Ukrainians would die without our support?

1000% yes. Without our support the war would have been over, even with Russian incompetence, in a few weeks.

Best estimates place the number of dead in the 100's of thousands, that would have been in the thousands.


How can people look at the human rights catastrophe in occupied territory and be delusional enough to think everything would have been fine had Russia "won". It's crazy.


Crimea would be a counterexample, where the annexation was basically bloodless


Apart from all the dissidents being tortured in basements. But sure, it happened quickly enough that most people ran to ground quickly.


How many of them ended up as Cannon fodder in Ukraine?


By 2015 1 million people had fled the occupied territory and taken refuge in Russia.


The key thing to successfully take refuge in Russia is to be mentally Russian. Ukraine has plenty of such people, at least because 20% of population are ethnical Russians who migrated here at different times in our history. For somebody like me, whose Russian skills are on lower intermediate side, posting comments like this in social networks occupation is effectively a death sentence, there's no way around that.

As an example my friend barely left Russian checkpoint alive after they took his phone for check-up. They were beating him for hours, because they found picture where he stands near the Ukrainian flag. Twist: he was 17 at that time, would he be a bit older, I don't know what would happen. And this is just one example among countless. You can see what happened in Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, etc. You can learn what happened during the Soviet period after we briefly regained independence. Our population shrinked by double digit percentage pre WWII.

Average homo sovieticus with no sense of identity will be sort of okay, that's true. But Russia probably will use the men for the next war similar to what they did with people occupied in 2014.


The Russians invaded with exterminations lists.

People in occupied territories are not safe from the Russians. Rather they became cannon fodder.

Surrender was and is probably not an option for Ukraine. Without Western support, what might an industrialized nation do if cornered with no options -- I don't want to know.

Regardless, if Ukraine wants to fight for freedom, you really think we shouldn't enable them? Or is freedom of no value to you?




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