Zelenskiy: "There is updated intelligence indicating that Russia is ​preparing a massive attack on Ukraine"

[u/Raj_Valiant3011]

https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraines-zelenskiy-says-intelligence-shows-russia-is-preparing-massive-attack-2026-10-06/

[u/warpigeon4L]

Isn’t it also a war crime to target civilian energy infrastructure

[u/wafflezgate → u/warpigeon4L]

Who is going to hold them accountable for it? War crimes are just words of no one can hold someone accountable for them and punish them accordingly. This war has been littered with crimes of all sorts.

[u/WindowTricky6645 → u/[deleted]]

It's not meaningless to identify violations of international law. For one thing, it reinforces the norms that these things matter. It's just like there's a social value in calling a killing a murder even if the culprit is never brought to justice. And I agree it's unlikely that there will be immediate consequences in the vein of, say, the nuremberg trials, that doesn't mean there will never be accountability. (Unfortunately, I think years of western indulgence of Russia's crimes has emboldened them tremendously. I refer to various invasions or annexations of other borfering states as well as murders, terrorist actions in other sovereign countries, interference in elections (ahem!). The west's fear of nuclear attacks and its general unwillingness to act in a principled way to enforce the post-war norms just kicked the can down the road and ensured that when they finally went too far, it'd be a much bigger problem - though this is the classic stalinist salami-slice strategy repackaged for the 21st century.) For instance, the ICTY just wrapped up in 2017 or so, about 20-25 years since the end of the conflict. There's the ICC, but there's also national jurisdiction over international crimes, both explicitly under various treaties/conventions and through customary international law, which means even if the right wing trend does succeed in completely defanging institutions like the ICC, individual countries can still prosecute Russians for war crimes. (Certain Americans don't travel to certain countries for exactly this reason.)

I don't want to give up hope for civilization, despite the fact that for all our national fetishizing of words like freedom, the truest motivator since the Reagan years has been money.

[u/TheBigCore → u/WindowTricky6645]

the truest motivator since the Reagan years has been money.

The truest motivator since the dawn of civilization has been money.

[u/WindowTricky6645 → u/TheBigCore]

It's certainly never been insignificant, but no, the country shifted in the 80s toward a much starker worship of wealth. The generations that survived the depression and ww2 had an understanding of the need for social cooperation that the rightwing revolution of the 80s and since has largely kiled off. That's when conservative and Republican became synonymous.

Before the Nixon years, you had honest-to-god liberal Republicans. They were marginalized during the Nixon years as Nixon embraced the "Southern Strategy" and courted religious conservatives and tapped into racist resentment. So, someone like John Lindsay, a much-loved mayor of NYC and liberal Republican became anathema to the GOP when in 68 he was a serious contender for the VP slot (crooked-ass Agnew was certainly a more on-brand partner for Tricky Dick).

I'd agree that the GOP was always the party of wealthy interests, but wealth wasn't the only thing that motivated their policies. There was always substantial chunk of the party that was socially progressive (Theodore Roosevelt is probably the only time since Lincoln that one was actually elected President, I grant you). But after 1980, the concept of a liberal republican was practically extinct.