[mopsi]

  > By the way, nowhere I see a report on the very recent ukranian attack on the school in Starobelsk which left 10 (known for now) adolescents killed. 

It's everywhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y74lwx395o

BBC and others add a bit that you left out: that it was one of three pilot schools of Rubicon, the most capable Russian drone unit. In the same night, Ukraine also demolished the FSB HQ of counterintelligence for the entire occupied Ukraine. Very painful hits. This explains the unusual hysteria and impotent rage in Russian media today, even Putin himself is whining on the telly about the strike, a rare sight.

[letssaythat]

Oh, and regarding "everywhere", I think you exagerate a bit..

[letssaythat]

According to you and Ukraine. And even if it was true (the west had been lying, or distorting facts, about so many other things), you just legitimized a terrorist attack on a school. I can only imagine the outrage had someone done this to one of your or Ukraine schools, even if they were tied to the army.

[mopsi]

1600+ schools have been damaged in Ukraine and several hundred have been completely destroyed. Outrage? This is not even news anymore. People, too, die every day under Russian attacks. Hundreds of thousands are permanently disabled or dead. This is the normalcy that Russia has created. The whole country of 140 million people is too afraid or indifferent to stage even a single large protest over it.

I found the panicked reactions of Moscow's inhabitants amusing when a few Ukrainian drones recently hit the oil plants in the suburbs of Moscow. For years, Putin's propaganda machine had convinced them that the war is "somethere there, far away." They were genuinely confused why the things around them were going up in flames: "Why are we being bombed?! The war is in Ukraine!"

It reminded me the words of Arthur Harris, the chief of Britain's Bomber Command: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

[letssaythat]

And how many schools you (because it is yours damn starlink and other satellites, whether you admit it ir not) destroyed in Donbass and Russia? And do you say that Russia deliberately targeted children? In a big difference with Ukraine, there is no nationalistic propaganda in Russia, though you take great care not to notice that. As you don't and didn't notice the normalization of calls to "massacre Russians" in prewar and todays Ukraine (by nationalists, there are millions of people there not daring to speak).

But here the point is that this was a *deliberate* attack on a school, with the scope being quite obviously to provoke a reprisal - and then you first speak about what the Russian reprisal did, and only then, if at all, you mention Starobelsk. Do you really think that after all these years the people don't understand how the "free world" operates?

[mopsi]

There's a way to end it all in a single phone call. Putin picks up a phone, calls Belousov and orders the withdrawal from Ukraine.

[letssaythat]

I fail to see how this will end the persecution of the Russian people in Donbass, Ukraine and the west in general (censoring comments on western forums is just one of its more innocent aspects). And in Izyum and Kupyansk, when the ukranian forces reentered, they executed Russian people living there thought not to be loyal, of which of course you heard nothing, but I did (and not only there).

[mopsi]

I fail to see how absorption into Russian Federation would do anything other than significantly worsen the human rights situation in Donbas, given that freedom rankings place Russia near North Korea, Somalia and Iran.