Comments by "Emir" (@irongron) on "Andrey Buzarov - Why did Russia Start it's Full-scale War in 2022, and what did it Hope to Achieve?" video.
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I'm not Ukrainian but have been a permanent resident since just before the first war in 2014, and I can attest to what Mr Buzarov said about Donetsk City not being neglected or run down. In fact it seemed like a quite impressive modern city to me when I first moved here a decade ago almost. My wife lived in Makiivka, which is like a smaller satellite city that is more or less integrated into Donetsk City due to urban growth and even Makiivka was not that bad, mr wifes neighbourhood was probably one of the more run-down quarters of Makiivka and it was not horrible, the back roads had some potholes but the main road where her flat was, Bogdan Khmelnitsky street, was very good. That flat has been lost since 2014 in the so called DNR now. I bought a new flat to replace it in Pokrovsk a few years later and now we had to leave that one too, mostly because the University she works for moved to a a very safe part of NW Ukraine, whereas Pokrovsk is semi-dangerous to dangerous currently. the city we are in now in NW Ukraine has only been bombed twice in the time we've been here, (over a year) so I would call it almost-safe, I would rather live here than Chicago USA for instance!
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@pipe_currency Indeed Brian, if you look at the big picture, which you would be ware of due to your stint here paralleling mine, the areas of infrastructure that were the responsibility of the government were. not that bad, i.e. the aforementioned roads, airports and train stations etc. If there was any neglect, it would have been maybe the privately owned (by the oligarchs) things like the mines, where they extracted as much obscene profits as they could, keeping in mind, all assets sold off quickly to the "nomenklatura" to break the Soviet system post 1990/91 and of course back then all the orders came from Moscow, whether it was Gorbachev or drunk Yeltsin, before the official dissolution in December 1991 with Gorbachev's resignation.
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@boblacks945 Honestly, never, in fact my wife and I and about 30 of her colleagues from her university in Donbas (where everyone spoke Russian) are refugee's in NW Ukraine and most of us still use Russian although everyone is trying to change. We have never been accosted or abused in that time here in Western Ukraine. The thing that some of the "traitors" in the east in Donbas made a big deal of was that you had to use Ukrainian when filling out government paperwork sometime post 2014, which is fair enough, ironically they'd help you to filll out this paperwork in Ukrainian whilst conversing Russian with you! This was the case I experienced when finalising my permanent residency paperwork which was completed in 2015 after a year and a bit. In fact by a co-incidence, only today Youtuber Jake Broe, a true friend of Ukraine, made a presentation where he featured the Japanese man who moved to Kharkiv to open a cafe serving 1,000 free meals to Ukrainians every day. If you go to the 29 min mark and watch from there you'll see it, the comment I made there explains the rest - "In that first "feel good" clip you can hear a lady quite clearly thank Mr Tsuchiko in Russian, (Spasibo Balshoe = Thank you very much) demonstrating that speaking Russian does not mean "is Russian", just like speaking English does not mean "is an Englander". English and Russian are simply both languages of Empire and conquest that's all. English being former in that sense, Russian, current."
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@j.k.1239 The same can be said of people speaking Ukrainian during 2014 onwards when Igor Girkin and his provacatuers agitated, you'd get the s**t beat out of you by an angry crowd if you even tried to utter anything in Ukrainian, Look I know some people, especially those who suffered directly Russian cruelty or lost someone, might be like that, it's never happened to any of us in West Ukraine as refugee's/IDP's. We still speak Russian amongst ourselves at restuarants or together but use Urkainian to speak to the waiters, in another situation like at a "magazin" (shop). We've never been hassled. Look back in 2014 even up untill this re-invasion the rule was, if you went to a restuarant, and you spoke Russian OR Ukrainian, the waiters would match whatever language you spoke. I think whoever was aksing that up there meant from that entire period 2014 onwards. I'd like to see those videos as a bunch could be staged, like the staged fake video of "Ukrainian soldiers" accosting a woman they pulled up in a car for speaking Russian, it turned out that was DNR guys staging a fake video to make us look bad here in Urkaine.
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