If you didn’t want to help Ukraine maybe you shouldn’t have been part of the group of countries (with Russia and the UK) who made Ukraine give up its nukes in exchange of protection (Budapest memorandum) in the first place. Has it never occurred to people like you that when your country inserts itself everywhere that doesn’t only come with benefits but also responsibilities?

Finland has never (and I do mean never, including Marshall Aid) gotten a single penny from the US and we’re not asking for money or even equipment, just partnership.

By the way most Europeans are really grateful to Joe Biden, his government and the gracious people of the US (unlike you) who want to help when asked.

You can learn it. It's like people think audiobooks are an "easy" way to consume books, but really understanding what I'm listening to has always been more difficult for me than reading.

Digesting what you listen to is a really good skill to have though. I certainly wish I had had it at uni! However I only got into audiobooks last year, autobiographies and non-fiction were the way for me. Fictional novels I still struggle with unless it's something fairly simple (like more conventional whodunnits) with short chapters.

Maybe try something like I'm Glad My Mum Died it's probably the most engaging audiobook I've ever listened to. Read by the author no less and the chapters are super short (a few minutes.)

I haven’t read it or any Colleen Hoover book (and I’m not going to) but for movie/TV deals a good storyline is much more important than good writing. Screenplays are very different from literature anyways, so they can just re-write stuff like shitty dialogue haha.

I love audiobooks but I can’t get into ebooks. I have started like 20 ebooks on my app (Storytel) but I haven’t made it past 20 pages. My city library is wonderful though so I don’t mind, I just use the app for audiobooks and get physical books from the library. I’m in front of a screen so much anyways.

I do know e-readers are supposedly much better than the apps, but I don’t want a Kindle and if I get a Storytel reader I’ll never have any use for it if I change apps at some point. I already had to downgrade from limitless to 100 hours per month cause they hiked up the prices so much (Storytel unlimited in my country is 22€ per month. Why are book apps so much more expensive than streaming? Netflix is 8€, Spotify Premium like 10€.)

I’ve been wanting to read literature from Botswana, it’s got a pretty interesting recent history as far as good leadership, social policies and economic growth go. But all my library has is Alexander McCall Smith, plus a few nature books, nothing by authors actually from Botswana.

Oh cool, where in Karelia are you planning to go? My grandma is from Petrozavodsk and my grandpa is from Koivisto (Primorsk) (they evacuated during WWII). I always wanted to visit there, unfortunately I never got around to it and now travelling to Russia is out of the question. Koivisto especially sounds so pretty to me and there are these big islands on its shore, I’m from a coastal town myself (Turku, which lost its own oldest buildings in a massive fire in the 1800s so my sympathies for Toshkent for the earthquake) so archipelagos always call to me.

I googled and Samarkand looks absolutely stunning, wow! Thanks for the description, those blue buildings especially are so beautiful. There’s no architecture like that here in Finland.

And yes, the book was definitely from dark times.

Likewise!

As for sources about things on Ingrians, it’s a bit difficult. I don’t know anything in English, all I know is based on Finnish articles, books, one TV documentary and some stuff my grandma told me. Maybe there is something in Russian but I don’t speak it so I wouldn’t know where to start looking.

I’ve never been to Uzbekistan, but it sounds lovely. I just read a book last week that took place partly in Tashkent (is Tashkent or Toshkent the right name? In Finnish it’s Taškent but don’t know if that comes through Russian.) Incidentally it’s about this same subject as the writer is a Russian-Finnish author (Anna Soudakova) whose grandfather was displaced to Uzbekistan from the Leningrad region in the 1930s when his parents were executed as “enemies of the people” and she wrote the book based on his life. I don’t think the grandfather was Ingrian though, as far as I’ve understood one of his parents was a Finnish migrant to Canada, from where they moved to the USSR.

Sometimes it's easy to assume people on places like Reddit are Americans or Brits or something like that, just going by probability haha. No offense taken on my part, sorry for being snappy as well.

But thank you for telling me, I in turn don't know much about Korean people in the USSR, besides having seen mentioned that they existed. I'll definitely look more into their history! Izhorians and Ingrians are slightly different people, though Izhorians also lived in Ingria (Leningrad oblast now) even before Ingrian Finns migrated there.

I'm not Russian. There are a sizable Tatar minority in my country (Finland) but you're right, many people don't know the difference between Crimean Tatars and other tatars.

My grandmother is Ingrian, her people too were targeted by Stalin's forced deportations so I have done some personal research on this issue. Not to victimise myself cause for Russia's neighbors Finns have had it better than many on the past century or to say I'm some expert but I'm not completely ignorant. But as I said I wasn't arguing about what the reason Kremlin gave for the deportations was.

You'd like to believe that everyone is that ignorant, I'm sure.

But yeah let's you and I stop bothering with this discussion here.

If you’re not here for “moral standards” then you’re answering to the wrong person. The poster I replied to and was questioning used terms “humane” and “deserved”, those are inherently terms that comment on the morality of the action, not what its “legal” or otherwise claimed “justification” was.

Okay, so after the Russian invasion of Ukraine is over we can deport the entirety of Moscow and St. Petersburg’s populations to the Antarctica as collective punishment and even Russians will think that’s “humane”? Or is collective responsibility something that applies to everyone but Russians?

Of course the ethnic cleansings (speaking more broadly than just Crimean Tatars) started years before WWII. You can Google “great purge” for more information. Many of the deported were kulaks then but “enemy ethnicities” especially Poles but also other people from countries surrounding the USSR both in Europe and Asia, were targeted as well.

Punishment, for what? For existing? Why does anyone let alone an entire group of people “deserve” to be punished for that?

Sure. And the regions with ethnic minorities have some of the richest natural resources on the planet but the people are poor because the Russian federal government channels all the money into places like Moscow.

So how would you describe displacing entire ethnicities or groups of people just because they belong to a certain ethnicity, forcibly deporting them to different regions with many dying on the way, if not ethnic cleansing? What in my statement was incorrect?

This is so ignorant.

Look up The Great Purge, happened before WWII. Look up the deportations of Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, Chechens after the war. Smaller groups of people as well like Ingrian Finns, Volga Germans. How they tried to banish all their Jews into the “Jewish Autonomous Oblast” in the Far-East.

Look up gulags and how people ended up in them (spoiler: it wasn’t just the kulaks or “political enemies” as if that made it better). Look up forced deportations in cattle carriages and how people fared in them.

I can’t believe it, as it’s my least favourite of the entire series and definitely not among my favourite books, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is highest rated at 4,62.

Lowest is Häräntappoase by Anna-Leena Härkönen at 3,14 which is also surprising because it’s a pretty popular book here in Finland. I’ve certainly read and shelved worse ones… Also the worst English-language one is my favourite Nick Hornby book, How To Be Good. It’s been like 15+ years since I read it though.

My country paid 10 billion to the US for F-35s alone recently, you do understand that you’re getting money for that military tech? Yes the US military industry is big, but that is how the market works. I also use an Apple smartphone. 🤷🏻‍♀️

That doesn’t mean Europe isn’t too reliant on the US, cause we are, but us small countries are often punching well above our weight compared to the bigger European countries.

Anyways, the US is still the only Nato country to have ever invoked Article 5. So I guess your allies aren’t completely useless to you

Many "small European countries" have conscription. Every fifth person in my country (that has generous welfare policies) is in the army reserves and has completed at least 6 months of military service. It's just a different way to contribute.

The US has the money but most of its citizens don't have to go to the army.