I know she said that the Minsk agreements were just to buy time to arm Ukraine, but I think she was lying. Germany obviously wanted to deal with Russia, it wanted the cheap energy and resources Russia offered and its manufacturing base was built upon this clearly beneficial arrangement. There's a reason the US had to blow up Nordstream themselves, because otherwise the Germans would have eventually caved to their own economic interests and started rebuilding relations with Russia.

So I believe the Germans really did go into the Minsk agreements in good faith, but the US and UK were always planning to backstab both Russia and their continental European 'allies'. As for why Merkel then claimed Minsk was a lie - the political climate in Europe at that point had reached a full crescendo of Russophobia, and even the slightest sympathy for the Russian devil was being rooted out inquisition-style, so I think part of it was her trying to avoid having her political legacy tarnished by fanatics accusing her of being "soft" or "naive" about Russia just as she was about to retire.

Putin's almost theatrical response to her claims, putting out a speech where he seemed personally affronted, also makes me think that he didn't really believe it either, but that he knew it was absolute gold in terms of pointing out the perfidiousness and hypocrisy of the west to an audience of the rest of the world.

I also think - and this is going into the realms of psychoanalyzing that we rightfully dismiss, but whatever - that to some extent, having worked with each other for almost twenty years that Merkel and Putin had a kind of grudging respect for each other, and Merkel made these statements both as a way to spite the Atlanticists who ruined her project of 'German economic development using Russian materials' and also as some kind of a parting gift for Putin, because she's far too politically savvy to not know how these things would sound to the rest of the world. But then again, it may have just been her self-servingly falling in line with the prevailing narrative.

Russia and Ukraine have a long and bloody history

No they fucking don't! They have an extremely short history of conflict, this shit kicked off literally just ten years ago!!

In 2014, the US launched a coup against Ukraine to replace the democratically elected government with Nazis (and I don't mean that hyperbolically, I mean actual Hitler-worshipping Nazis) who immediately started persecuting the minority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. After eight fucking years of doing nothing as the Ukrainian Nazis constantly escalated, Putin finally got it through his thick skull that the west was never going to treat them as an equal and launched an incredibly restrained military action to knock the coupists out of the Ukrainian government and protect the now-autonomous Russian-speaking regions.

The result is this:

When a peace deal was about to be signed in April 2022, Boris Johnson personally flew to Kiev and through a combination of lies and threats convinced Zelensky to tear up the deal and continue fighting.

The unfathomable devastation, the destruction of enormous swathes of infrastructure and the catastrophic death toll of Ukrainian men are squarely the fault of the Nazi regime in Kiev and their western - let's not beat around the bush - their US handlers. Ukraine had a peaceful and beneficial relationship with Russia from independence all the way up to the moment the US took direct control of it and suicided it into Russia for their own geopolitical gain.

I think it works, the point of view is you looking at the council of decrepit pale people who are banishing you.

students have been fed propaganda

Yeah, and they spat it back out

Probably caught jet flu from an F-35

People of Columbia Students of Columbia

Because any incident of mass violence is likely to include sexual violence

This is a flatly true statement

Yes, and that's just led me to a sudden realization - the number of r*pes committed by Hamas, and the civilians in their wake, in the few days they were outside the fence must obviously be several orders of magnitude lower than the number committed by the IOF since then.

I remember a hostage testimony from one woman, about how they were treated fairly well by their Hamas captors, and one of them even played arm wrestling with her daughter - but the Hamas soldier had to put a cloth over his hand, because (due to his deeply held religious beliefs, of course) he was not allowed to directly touch a woman outside of marriage. The idea that THOSE guys could have committed more sexual violence in a few days, than the army made up of guys posting things like this:

(CW: implied SV)

running rampant for five months, is obviously ridiculous.

Wow, which region of Russian-speakers is your country's armed forces bombing? Because that's what it takes for Russia to be """threatening""".

However, the g-force from being lifted kills him instantly

Must be that superior Gazan shampoo and conditioner those other hostages were talking about

Luckily, the uranium dust is only a problem if the Ukrainian tanks actually get in sight of the Russians.