Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary leader whose plane crashed weeks after he led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership – shows what happens when people make deals with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

As Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves into a fourth month, with only modest gains to show so far, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he rejected suggestions it was time to negotiate peace with the Kremlin.

“When you want to have a compromise or a dialogue with somebody, you cannot do it with a liar,” Volodymyr Zelensky said.

  • WuTang @lemmy.ninja
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    1 year ago

    yeah sure, he will surrender to a comedian who didn’t even go through compulsory military service. Hallo, this guy played piano with his dick on TV.

    what a shame, real people are dying and this zelensdick plays the victim in his castle.

    • can@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Or you know, Russia could just have not attacked in the first place.

      Putin is the laughingstock of the world.

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            In reality? Fortunate. Nobody should morally agree with Anglo hegemon until USA, UK, Ukraine and Israel are fully isolated away.

              • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Because Ukraine did not let Donbass residents be for 8 years since 2014, genociding over 14,000 of them, banning Russian language, cutting off their water, food and electricity supplies and what not constantly. Patrick Lancaster has recorded this shit on YouTube for years, with a vlog frequency of almost daily.

                Western media, if you look at their coverage of Ukraine, had the “neo Nazi” moniker slapped everywhere until a few months before the whole conflict started. Donbass people of eastern Ukraine are largely ethnic Russians, and DPR and LPR declared independence and asked for sovereignty as well. Moreover, there were a lot of biochemical factories at the shared border, creating a threat for Russia.

                • can@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  Do you have a source for the genocide claim? I’m not watching years worth of blogs.

                  • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    Pro-Russian source TASS ( https://tass.com/world/1289095) from 2021 citing Ukrainian Foreign Minister’s statement:

                    PRAGUE, May 13. /TASS/. The conflict in Donbass has claimed about 14,000 lives, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said during his working visit to Slovakia.

                    “To date, about 14,000 people have been killed in Donbass. This number includes [Ukrainian armed forces] servicemen and civilian casualties. We regularly update this data,” he said. Kuleba’s speech has been posted on the Slovak Foreign Ministry’s website.

                    Pro-Ukrainian source detailing the death count, with an ample amount of Russia bashing. https://bitterwinter.org/donbass-did-ukraine-kill-14000-pro-russians/

                    On January 27, 2022, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released its most recent estimate of the victims of the Donbass conflict from 2014 to December 31, 2021. The famous figure of 14,000 casualties, often quoted by pro-Russian comments, comes from this document. In fact, the U.N. estimate is between 14,200 and 14,400 victims.

                    By no means were these victims all “killed by the Ukrainians.” According to the U.N., 10,900 victims were soldiers, of which 4,400 were Ukrainians and 6,500 pro-Russian combatants of or on behalf of the separatist pseudo-republics. Civilian victims were between 3,400 and 3,500. The latter were in turn not all victims of attacks and of drones and rockets launched by Ukraine against the pseudo-republics. In fact, a part died in the portions of the oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk that remained under Ukrainian control during attacks by separatists.

                    The genocide part is labelled upon the deaths that happened due to Ukraine’s aggression against Donbass residents and the constant border conflicts. Part of the genocide is cultural as well, with the ban on Russian language, among other elements.

    • mashbooq@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Which is why he put in a military expert as commander in chief, even though he’s legally entitled to that position. Almost like he knows how to delegate like a leader

    • fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      aww are you scared of the big bad comedy man? perhaps you needn’t be if russia just skedaddled back whence they came from

    • heeplr@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      this guy played piano with his dick on TV

      Maybe it’s probably not necessary to kickass the “world’s #2 strongest army” but knowing how to use your dick certainly doesn’t hurt obviously.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I, for one, think it’s pretty fucking hilarious and incredible that the “world’s second best army” is getting curbstomped by a country led by a guy who played piano with his dick on TV.

        • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          You might need to check your sources about how the war is going… Russia hasn’t committed its full army to this war.

          • BigNote@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            This doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It’s not the case that Russia is somehow holding back and has huge additional reserves and resources that it can throw at the conflict. The Russian military isn’t about to collapse or anything, but it’s not doing great either and has largely been exposed as far weaker than was previously supposed.

            • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yes I agree, particularly in the fact that the corruption and facade that was the Russian military reporting structure made it seem to Russian leadership that they were more powerful than they thought. This is the problem with having so many yes men surrounding an authoritarian leader.

              However as we’re hitting the two year mark on the war soon, the Russian military has likely become more competent and less corrupt than before with the increased attention.

              • BigNote@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                That’s a fair take and may well be accurate. I am no expert and accordingly don’t have a strong opinion either way, and that’s leaving aside the rather obvious point that most/many of our so-called “experts” keep getting it wrong in the first place.

                Remember when Kyiv was going to fall in a matter of days, then that got adjusted into a matter of weeks and then months and now here we are a year and a half later?

                The loud and clear lesson from that is that the so-called experts often don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

          • goat@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            not that I don’t believe you, but do you have sources yourself? Lotta propaganda flying everywhere

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Russia can’t commit its full army to the war, for quite a few reasons. One of which is that it’s “full army” has been decisively proven to be WAY more of a paper tiger than anybody would have guessed.

            The scale and duration of this war are orders of magnitude are far larger than anyone in Russia was planning for in January of 2022. They discovered that their battalions were rife with ghost soldiers so the officers could scoop up their pay. They discovered their modern tank stockpiles were not only unmaintained, but also often scavenged for parts to either repair other vehicles or simply sell on the black market. They discovered that, incredibly, their Air Force was unable to fully suppress a force that (on paper) was a mere fraction of their size and supposed capability.

            This is scratching the surface. This shit goes way deeper, and it involves their whole military industrial complex, as well as pretty much all seriously profitable ventures in Russia. If money is made at any serious scale, someone’s going to put together a scheme to take a cut of it. That’s how the country works. And it’s biting them in the ass right now.

            • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yup I agree. But much like the Ukrainians were able to mobilize, Russia is doing the same. The paper tiger isn’t all paper though, they really do have 5 times the population as Ukraine.

    • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      So, you’re saying Putin can’t back down because he would look like a fool, but somehow people dying is fault of Zelenskyy for not being at the front, just like Putin?

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Lmao cope harder, tankie. Russia went from the “second best army in the world” to the 3rd best army operating openly in the Ukraine AO. Russia has proven themselves to be a joke, militarily - they went from being considered a superpower to being a peer-power of Ukraine. That’s a fucking HUGE step down in geopolitical clout and military credibility.

      • WuTang @lemmy.ninja
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know what to think, are you sad there’s few dead toll on UA side. Russia especially proved they were not in clean-slate mode. Do you really think they wouldn’t use aviation if they wanted “more”, really?

        Between, UA is supplied by our governments (and certainly on the intel side too), so it is not just “UA” against RU, idiot!