I was arguing with someone in the V**shite subreddit because I’m a masochist. That was the first time I’d ever heard the term “little green men.” Apparently, not knowing who these guys are disqualifies me from having an opinion on Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, so I’m trying to learn. Who are these people? Did they do something awful and genocidal that I’m not aware of? Or is this person just talking out of their ass?
In my research, I encountered more of Stalin’s infamous deportations, namely that of the Crimean Tartars to the Central Asian SSRs. It seems downright ghoulish to me that he would do that, especially given the death and suffering it caused. Is anyone familiar with the rationale behind these deportations? Is it not as bad as it seems, or is this a black mark on his record? If it’s a black mark, how do we make sense of that while still upholding Stalin’s legacy?
And of course, whenever Russia comes up, the radlibs and the anarchists all flock together to insist that Russia is a colonizing, imperialist power. I’m aware that imperialism is something pretty specific, and not something that Russia can be rightfully accused of. Even so, I have to admit that I’m not fresh on what DOES count as imperialism. Will someone elucidate this for me?
Thanks in advance.
IIRC the little green men were soldiers in unmarked uniforms who occupied Crimea and the Donbass. The Russian government sent them, but they lie about their involvement. They were used to create the illusion of popular resistance against the Ukrainian government to help manufacture consent for the annexation.
It’s the liberal “no u” when anti-imperialists bring up the Maidan coup, since the little green men are rarely, if ever, acknowledged by anti-imperialists in the same way libs refuse to acknowledge the coup.
I see. That explains why I had never heard the term before. I was fourteen or fifteen when the annexation of Crimea occurred, so I certainly wasn’t paying attention. It makes sense why people here don’t talk about them. It really undermines this idea that people in these oblasts are welcoming the Russian liberators.
So is that just not true? Is there anything that actually supports the idea that people in Crimea and the Donbass want to reaffix to Russia? The elections were a landslide, and I doubt they were faked, but maybe they were? Were these just paramilitaries send to support existing rebels? This is kind of big news to me.
The “little green men” are a myth born out of propaganda lies of the western and pro-Maidan media. There is literally no evidence for this. What there is evidence for is massive defections from the Ukrainian military and police to the side of the rebels in Donbass at that time, as well as lots of regular people in Eastern Ukraine picking up weapons and joining the militias to defend their home towns from the fascists. There were a few volunteers who came over from Russia but they were an insignificant minority.
As for Crimea, Russia didn’t need to send anyone over there covertly, not only did they already have a military base in Crimea that they had been leasing from Ukraine ever since its independence, but Crimea was always an autonomous region of Ukraine with its own parliament and constitution, and it was its own local authorities who organized the referendum. Polls in Crimea have always showed a much greater affinity for Russia than for Ukraine among the population there, Russia didn’t need to manipulate anything.
So whenever you hear that expression know that the person using it is invoking a literal conspiracy theory.
In fact Russia at the time did just about whatever it could to sabotage the Donbass rebels, they attempted to stop people from Russia going to volunteer to help the Donbass rebels and even pressured the DPR forces into retreating from numerous cities that they had already managed to take over like Mariupol.
This resulted in violent reprisals by forces of the Kiev regime in these places. Nazis like the Azov battalion came from Western Ukraine, murdered, raped and tortured with impunity any real or suspected rebel collaborationists, and anyone who had supported the idea of referendums for autonomy in the regions that rejected the Maidan coup.
Moscow forced the Donbass republics into the Minsk agreements after they had just inflicted a crushing defeat on the Maidan regime at Debaltsevo, which robbed the rebels of all momentum and gave Kiev the time to be re-armed and trained by the West, to reform and expand their army integrating highly ideological Nazi units in such a way as to ensure that there would be no more defections like in 2014/15.
Why would Russia simultaneously engage in these alleged covert activities while everything else that they did undermined the same cause that they supposedly were instigating or fabricating?
The reality is the Russian government was very reluctant for a very long time about the idea of further secessions from Ukraine after Crimea, and you will hear this from lots of people in the Donbass who felt left abandoned by Russia and were waiting for eight years for some real help. And even that likely took a lot of political pressuring of the timid liberals in the Kremlin from the likes of Russia’s communists and other supporters of the Donbass.
The entire theory of the “little green men” makes no sense and directly contradicts the available evidence and the testimonies of the locals.
If you google “public opinion survey residents of the autonomous republic of crimea” you can find a survey made by US in 2013. There is one for Ukraine as well. The surveys tells atleast how ethnically Russian Crimea is and how divided rest of Ukraine is between the west and Russia.
I’m not sure beyond what I said in the previous comment. The results I found looking for it were lib publications. I haven’t seen it addressed in anti NATO stuff I’ve read in the same way the coup and shellings of the Donbass were.
Because it was a meme that was plastered around every liberal western media publication at the time. It was very clear that there was a concerted and co-ordinated campaign to spread this myth in order to delegitimize the anti-Maidan rebellions. But it had just about as much credibility as the “ghost of Kiev” meme.
I remember a number of other such stories from 2014 that were picked up by the media in the west - especially in Europe, you couldn’t escape this shit - it was everywhere, but they have since been sort of dropped or pushed out of the public consciousness because they turned out to not stand up to scrutiny.
The only people still parroting these ridiculous things are people who have been extremely deeply immersed in pro-Maidan propaganda. That’s how you can tell someone is not just a person who jumped on a popular bandwagon last year, but a hardcore cultist with deep Russophobia and liberal brainworms.
They are Europe’s equivalent to the kind of people who still to this day go on about Russiagate in the US.