The sanctions are for the most part per the request of the Ukrainian government.
If Catalonia becomes a separatist state tomorrow and Spain and its allies sanction it everyone in it will be under sanctions regardless of who or what they support.
This is what happens when your sanctions are geographical in nature.
No one has the capability to validate if a person in Crimea is a Russian supporter or not.
The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.
If anyone ever dared to assert that I support US war mongering just because I live the US..... lord
It's not the same, the majority of the population are ethnic Russians, a large number of them actively support what Russia did.
There was a referendum, and countless polls, it doesn't excuse the annexation but reality isn't black and white.
You need to be intentionally misleading to not acknowledge the fact the Russian presence in Crimea and in fact their actions are supported by a sufficiently large part of the Crimean population to make this situation very problematic.
This isn't Russia occupying Belgium, the geopolitics behind this situation don't make anyone look good.
Hence why I gave the example of Catalonia not only it's a good western analogy but it appears that Crimea has more pro-Russian support than what the separatist movements in Spain or other places in Europe like Italy have.
However our current legal system does not allow individuals to simply say "i don't want to be part of your legal system any more" hence why these referendums are essentially illegal. And while we do need to face reality sometimes and make exceptions these have to be exception otherwise the "sovereign citizens" movement would actually become a reality since you can't simply put a cap on how many people want to break away from the existing legal system you enforce on them.
I'm not saying "get out if you're not all in", I'm not trying to be dismissive. But your citizenship and temperament are accidents of your birth, and you have the power to rectify the former.
This is an incredibly naive/somewhat condescending statement, considering that it is far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people.
... how about we agree that I personally did not want the government to use my tax money to bomb civilians in Eurasia and I desperately would like to find a way to prevent those weapons from being launched.
But I think we would have to replace something like 70% of our elected representatives to force that to happen
Can we also agree that zero civilian casualties during war is at least adjacent to impossible?
Can we also agree that a country unwilling to protect its people and interests with military action would be a much less secure country than the ones we have today? Indeed, that the threat of rapid, devastating response is the key reason why we are as close to world peace as we are today and have been for decades?
The only path to citizenship that's open to anybody is naturalization, and that requires you to already be a legal (often permanent) resident. While there are a few countries where you become eligible after two or three years - notably Canada - many require five, ten or even fifteen years. So before you even start the process, you have to deal with immigrating to your country of choice from your current country of citizenship/residence. And while that's not exactly the cheapest of undertakings[0], the real problem is that your application first of all generally needs to be sponsored by someone (typically strictly a relative or employer, so good luck if you don't have family in the country in question or don't work in a field that tends to hire across borders) and secondly is most often quite literally at the mercy of bored officials behind glass walls who have the power to deny you on a whim and owe you no explanation.
If by some convening of application strength and sheer luck you do get a residence permit, you then get to have your freedom of movement curtailed for however many years[1] during which simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time can set you back to square zero[2] and you still get slapped by the effect of sanctions like these, as you're still a citizen of whatever country you came from. Or you could also just make some exorbitant "investment" (often hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth) and effectively straight-up buy citizenship.
So yeah, the vast majority of people are rather powerless to do anything about their citizenship, especially when they don't have passports that let them travel anywhere on a whim (as tends to be the case for people in the sort of countries that one would want to escape citizenship of lol).
0: The cost of a passport, visa, plane ticket and rent deposit is easily $2000 plus depending on the part of the world (a friend of mine recently spent close to $4000 out of pocket relocating to Germany).
1: It's not enough to simply hold residency - there are often requirements for how much time you must have spent in the country in order to be eligible for naturalization, and leaving the country for an extended period of time will often itself jeopardise one's residency status.
2: In the US, for example, various misdemeanours - for instance drug possession - are grounds for deportation, after which you might as well forget about legally entering the country to talk of becoming a permanent resident again.
Sanctions were pushed by the US for the most part.
> The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.
The idea is to flex power for the enemy government and other countries, nobody cares about the people. People are definitely not going to be happy about the west after that and even less likely to participate in organized rebellion against the government, as all sides are bad now.
Nothing is stopping this person from sending email patches like they do in the Linux kernel project. No sanctions are involved in this person hosting a Git installation in Crimea that the rest of the world can access.
The problem isn't politics. The problem is that programmer culture currently conflates "access to Github" (which is a service run at the whims of an American defense contractor) with "free or open-source software" (which is a spectrum of opinions about copyright law). They are not related concepts, no matter what Github's marketing team has convinced the world.
I therefore agree with the view that 'free software' is a social movement, while 'open source' is a development methodology.
OSS is full of commercial interests well beyond hobby interests. Joel Spolsky pointed that out in https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ :
> I noticed something interesting about open source software, which is this: most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it’s a good business strategy for them, not because they suddenly stopped believing in capitalism and fell in love with freedom-as-in-speech.
The free software movement is itself political - as are all social movements. For example, the emphasis on end-user freedoms related to copyright protection conflict with the emphasis on worker rights embodied in the Anti 996 License.
This isn't a free speech issue. It's not even a corporate free speech issue. This is commercial activity.
Whether this is good policy or not, is another matter but it isn't a free speech matter.
Seeing free/open source software in the same light ideologically is not that much of a leap. There is precedent.
GitHub is a subsidiary of Microsoft, a US company with lucrative interests in the US government. While this does indeed stifle OSS activity for people in Crimea it isn't really about OSS.
These sanctions tend not to be universal and some services can continue to be provided, however the price of violating said sanctions can be very severe.
I don’t know how many people who work at Github or PayPal especially senior management are willing to risk fines not to mention jail time for something as simple as some Russian officer buying a DVD on the internet while being stationed in Crimea or a local IT guy from the current pro-Russian government making a pull request.
Then don't use github. I don't. It's completely toxic.
Isn't it evil?
I mean, if you don't believe the results of referendum and subsequent Gallop's poll, than sanctions are intentionally hurting people who are victims of Russian occupation. And if you do believe that overwhelming majority of Crimean people support reunification with Russia, the sanctions punish Crimeans for exercising their right of self-determination and reek of double standards. I don't remember any sanctions on Chechen republic after it separated from Russia, for example.
The double standards are all explained by geopolitical maneuvering. Western powers pulled Kiev into their orbit and threatened to use that influence to harm Russia's economic and military capabilities.
The tl;dr is that Russia needs access to warm water ports. They were happy to lease a port from the Ukraine until rumors began spreading in Kiev that Russia's lease would be ended.[1][2] Because the Russian economy and military couldn't afford to lose access to a naval base with a warm water port they decided to take drastic action.
Another odd footnote about this situation is that Crimea was given as a "symbolic" gift to the Ukraine while the USSR was still strong.[3] It's not like it's some ancient sacred Ukranian land. It's just very valuable for trade and military purposes.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/na...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea#Compli...
> A separatist candidate who wants Crimea to leave Ukraine and integrate with Russia won more than 70 percent of the vote today in run-off presidential elections, preliminary results showed. His victory sets the stage for a direct confrontation between Ukraine and Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that is dominated by ethnic Russians.
Russia took Crimea illegally by force, but people of Crimea are hardly victims. Ultimately, the goal of sanctions is to signal that the US is not accepting Crimea as part of Russia. To allow US companies to operate in Crimea would legitimize the annexation. (And as far as the people go - I don't think anyone cares for the people, particularly.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/31/world/separatist-winning-...
They obviously don't "punish the Russian government" when they prevent the people living in Crimea contributing to the open source project.
In general, this thread demonstrates that here there's very little understanding about the mass psychology of Russians, and, really, any nation other than Americans. No one in Crimea is going to rebel against the Russian government because of the U.S. sanctions against them exclusively. A policy like this only validates the Russian government's narrative of the U.S. going after Russia as such. If the U.S. government wanted to seek allies in Crimeans, they could perhaps focus on sanctioning Moscovian oligarchs. Well, except they won't, because Russian oligarchs that lose leverage in the Kremlin later make for good dissidents to be used by the U.S. as an ideological tool against Russia. And the oligarchic system is keeping Russia from modernizing, which is also in the U.S. interest.
I disagree with you, Russia has clear intent to move/restore navy projects in Crimea: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/russian-navy-resu... US government doesn't specifically target github, but all commercial activities in Crimea.
> Well, except they won't
This is not correct, current sanctions target specific list of people and major companies in financial, military and oil industries. The goal of sanctions is to weaken Russia's economy in specific sectors.
And the only "commercial activity" in this case is if GitHub earns some advertising money from the data collection about its user from Crimea.
> The goal of sanctions is to weaken Russia's economy in specific sectors.
And Crimea is not Russia. It's a region which voted to separate itself from the bigger state, just like Kosovo, votes of which were even militarily supported by the U.S. And if the U.S. equates Crimea with Russia... it's as wrong as equating Kosovo with Albania.
And Crimea users can use github as a tool in their commercial endeavors, and military and government applications.
> just like Kosovo, votes of which were even militarily supported by the U.S.
You make things up, Kosovo voted 10 years after US operation, when was under observation of UN peacekeepers which were located there by UN security council resolution (Russia voted for that too).
At the moment of the US "operation" (honestly, war) those who had direct military support were some paramilitary troops attempting to escalate the conflict to the level to be taken seriously (specifically by the US) with the agenda of changing the established existing borders.
The war itself was against all UN decisions, it was unilaterally started by the US and NATO. The US fought for the right to enter Kosovo (and make its military bases there) and it won that as the result of its war, not from the UN.
The country from which those on Kosovo voted "out" was already economically destroyed by the actions of the U.S. -- the equivalent would be if Russia managed to not only control Crimea for a decade but also economically destroy Ukraine for two decades and then let the people vote if they want to stay in such Ukraine.
What do I "make up"? And how is that "better" from inhabitants of Crimea wanting to separate from Ukraine, where the political regime just illegally changed before that, exactly in the direction of suppressing politically all ethnic Russians in Ukraine? The inhabitants in Crimea and other parts of Ukraine could surely point to Kosovo as a precedent which gives them right to separate (and even get the military support for that). And contrary to the US in Kosovo, Russia already had a big military base on Crimea.
The facts are:
- US had 0 intention to join Kosovo as 51th state, and election were performed under observation of UN peacekeepers which were there per UN resolution
- Russia invaded Crimea using regular army, and within two weeks merged territory in violation of UN statute
> where the political regime just illegally changed before that, exactly in the direction of suppressing politically all ethnic Russians in Ukraine
I disagree with your assessment. Ukraine is a mess, old pro-Russia president and his party illegally changed constitution, which caused chain of events.
Who ever claimed that?
> Russia invaded Crimea using regular army
No. The Russian military base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevastopol_Naval_Base was always there, and especially it was there as a Russian base since the breakup of Ukraine from USSR, so already for a decade and a half before 2014. Moreover, even before 2014 Crimea was an Autonomous Republic in Ukraine, since 1991.
Compared to that, Kosovo was not even a republic, but an "autonomous area" in the Republic of Serbia before the U.S. war, and there was surely zero U.S. military bases there before. Which says something, seeing:
https://i2.wp.com/www.ukprogressive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads... ( found on: https://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/pentagon-keeps-building-over... ) All these also aren't the "fifty first state."
You can see it on several levels:
- People in power are interested to hold the power as long as they can, and that's why they suppress separatists movements
- Countries which allows such separations become weaker and don't survive, because separation is manipulatable process, and damage country's economy and power
- concept of ethics is very driven by government: they tell people that it is their land, and nobody can take it from them
However look and HK and China. I definetely agree for HK to be independent after a referendum.
Because Ukraine is pro-west and Crimea is pro-Russia. West good, Russia bad. Sanctions are black and white. The political situation is less-so:
The Crimea voted in a (illegal) referendum to rejoin Russia after a coup in Ukraine (also illegal, obviously) had replaced the elected but somewhat pro-Russian president with an unelected pro-European government.
While this revolution was popular with the west (funny how we support coups that overthrow elected governments when they go our way), it was unpopular in the south of Ukraine, which is mostly ethically Russian (the previous ethnic population having all been ‘relocated’).
Nobody asked population of Crimea anything. Nobody asks a sheep is it agree to be shaved.
Even the Wikipedia on Dugin's older book says, "The book has had a large influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites[1] and it has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military.[1][2]"
The correlation between suggestions in the Fourth Political Theory book align a little too perfectly with recent events:
- Break GB from the EU [2]
- Heightened racial tension in the US [3]
- Annexation of Crimea and Ukraine
- etc.
Hard to ignore how much Russia operates "by the book".
Also in the Wikipedia for FPT I linked earlier, "The book has been cited as an inspiration for Russian policy in events such as the War in Donbass..."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
[1] https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/...
Russian Federation tries to pretend like they are the only right owners of everything, viewing others nations as traitors, who need to be executed for their act of stealing from Mother Russia.
In reality, Russian Empire (AKA Jail of Nations) was disbanded. Each nation had right to create their own country. Actual Russia renamed itself into Ukraine. Russian Federation has same rights on territory of Russian Empire as other nations, but RF uses lies and fakes to pretend like it has more rights than others, then start wars and captures or tries to capture territories, which they newer owned in first place.
Catherine the Great celebrates the victory over Turks in Crimea in 1772.
here is the text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...
Russian empire took Crimea from Ottoman empire in late 1700's.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Say what you will, the US government at least paid out to the victims (although never officially apologized). While Russia denies all involvement to this day and lawsuits are still ongoing.
The Russian government is likewise selective in its interpretation of the Budapest agreement (1994) [1], in which Russia guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity in return for Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons.
Edit: I incorrectly wrote "Bucharest agreement"; fixed it (thanks jotm)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
Interestingly, Spain is somewhat consistent here: they don't recognize Kosovo, because they have their own separatist troubles in Catalonia.
That's the crux of the issue I think. To be consistent you would surely have to support both Chechnya and Crimea having the right to self-determination - or neither having the right to self-determination.
EDIT: So let me ask you - do you support both, or neither?
I do (retrospectively) support the US decision in 1861 to prevent the Confederate states from seceding, despite the expressed will of the white, property-owning part of the local population, so there's that.
Ethnic conflicts aren't soccer matches where you should pick a team to support.
We should instead sanction people associated with Russia’s totalitarian government.
You might also spare some sympathy for those residents of Crimea who did not wish to join the Russian Federation, for example, many Crimean Tatars. Not only have they suffered the loss of access to github, they also have to contend with a campaign of political repression. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_sanctioned_duri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Crimea#Crimean_Tat...
Perhaps you should spare some sympathy for the majority of the Crimean populace who wished to rejoin Russia- I notice you have none.
https://tariganter.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-internati...
So what? They don't do the same to Turkey(Cyprus) or Israel(Golan Heights).
"The Ukraine" referred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian government requests that people stop putting "the" in front of the country's name, but it's difficult to force people to change the way they speak.
This is misinformation. "The Ukraine" precedes the USSR. It comes from the fact that "Ukraine" is derived from "borderland". Hence, "the Ukraine" - "the borderland".
no disrespect, but there is this coming from?!
Being unable to fix roads or economy, they have directed their frustration towards symbolic things, fighting everyone who calls Kiev "Kiev" instead of "Kyiv", renaming streets, etc. Now they have decided that "the Ukraine" is somehow referencing Ukraine as a territory and not a state. God knows where any of this comes from, but any "patriotic" idea gets boosted immediately no matter how stupid.
Source: am Ukrainian.
Renaming streets is also part of decommunisation process, which is common among post-Soviet countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decommunization
Also, calling society "ill" is offensive, and if your goal is to have a meaningful discussion, you'd rather avoid offending your fellow citizens (unless you identify yourself more as Russian, of course).
Source: I'm also Ukrainian
It's an organized effort, part of government propaganda, not an ill society. Society is so healthy, that it didn't trust the government at all and voted all those people out. Really, it doesn't get healthier than that.
who do you think Benya is - not a power hungry oligarch? who is Ze's chief of staff? ahem, Benya's personal lawyer... will you ever see the pattern?
> "That's why the Ukraine suddenly lost its article in the last 20 years, it's a sort of linguistic independence in Europe, it's hugely symbolic."
(Oksana Kyzyma of the Embassy of Ukraine in London is being quoted in the sections of the article that I'm quoting.)
[1] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_re...
[2] https://europa.eu/newsroom/highlights/special-coverage/eu-sa...