Hello all MCYT fandoms
Hello all MCYT fandoms, we, the Ukrainian community, wanted to address recent situations and gather all our opinions on that matter. However, firstly we wanted to speak and educate people who may not know about russia’s actions in Ukraine, so that you could understand where our points are appearing from:
Proof that what russians are committing in Ukraine is not just war, but a genocide.
Genocide convention article 2: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/genocide-conv-1948/article-2
"Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
(a),(b),(c) Destructions of cities: Toretsk, Marinka, Vuhledar, Rubizhne, Bakhmut, Mariupol, Chasiv Yar, Kostyantynivka, Avdiivka, Soledar.
Those cities have been wiped out and bombed with missiles to ruins by russians, and within those cities, russians killed thousands of Ukrainians:
(a),(b),(c) Mariupol theater war crime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol_theatre
Text written with chalk means “children”. It was written before the theater was bombed.
(a),(b),(c) War crimes in Mariupol:
1st link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLcTqsARKSY
2nd link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q05wJtU6uEs
(a),(b),(c) Bucha Massacre:
1st link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre
2nd link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6R2fElAsxU&t=46s
3d link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hElJJU29eH0&t=25s
(e) Illegal deportation of Ukrainian children from Ukraine to russia:
(b),(c) Torture of Ukrainian Soldiers in russian Concentration camps:
1st link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_torture_chambers_in_Ukraine
2nd link: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/12/11/russias-systematic-torture-of-ukrainian-pows
3d link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkxNOX99DDc&t=114s
4th link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH1g2S21Ze8
5th link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wscp2nzTNF4&t=118s
(b),(c) Rape of Ukrainian women perpetrared by russian soldiers:
1st link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
3d link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKDjO6eyhYo&t=362s
4th link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpQVZtt4-g
5th link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvt1EU7i7ok
(b),(c) Torture and Murder of Ukrainian Journalist Viktoria Roshchyna:
1st link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdqbJtSAq2Q
2nd link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xhaNePtNfE&t=438s
(a),(b),(c),(d) Shelling of Maternity and Childrens hospitals. Murdering children:
1st link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60734706
2nd link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60675599
4th link: https://x.com/sternenko/status/2041034093312213223
5th link: https://x.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1856316847420813534
6th link: https://x.com/VictorKvert2008/status/2040852839056982414
Eco-genocide perpetrated by russians in Ukraine:
1st link: https://frontliner.ua/en/russias-war-devastating-ukraine-nature/
This is just a glimpse of what russians are committing in Ukraine and what they are doing to Ukrainians. These are only some of the cases, not having included the occupation of Crimea (back in 2013), Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Kherson and Zaporizhian territories. This document does not even include shelling of paramedics and countless violations of Green Corridors and truces, including the ceasefire during Orthodox Easter on 12.04. This does not include Ukrainain language being prohibited 134 times, does not even include a genocide on Crimean Tatars and many other war crimes russia has been committing for years, if we were to include all of them in this doc it would have been tens of hundreds pages long. This is just a bit of context to what Ukrainians had been dealing with and still have to deal with for centuries.
After that, back to the situation on X (formerly known as Twitter) that went like this: For months we tried to reach the non-Ukrainian community, SpideyArmy_ included, to address the issue with her going to russia in the time of full scale war(genocide) ongoing, including taking pictures with main government buildings. There was no result and our voices stayed silent until 11.04 when TheFlightSMP released their new members. Among them was SpideyArmy_ herself. First what happened was that SMP blocked the Ukrainian user for a quote retweet to the post: “Fuck that shit omg…”. And after that many Ukrainian users became angry that their voices once again are being silenced for basically no reason at all. Then the document about SpideyArmy_ was again brought up with help of the non-Ukrainian part of the fandom and all the info spread like wildfire.
In the next few hours TheFlightSMP took accountability for their actions and stated that SpideyArmy_ left their SMP. Over and above we finally got and read the full statement from SpideyArmy_ herself, and our general opinion is:
Even though she apologised for: “sharing pictures from my time in Russia, and am angry with myself for not recognizing how insensitive doing so could be to victims of the war” quote from her document, she mostly talked about her heritage and took the action of expressing her statement only after she was kicked out of the SMP. We don’t say that she couldn’t visit her grandparents, but doing it while the country they're in is massively committing war crimes, rapes, genocides and etc, is just ignorant as a person with a degree. She also didn’t answer for all the things that were mentioned in document, such as: putting a Ukrainian artist as russian (Valentyn Strykalo), she missed the points of people saying to address the imperialistic state of russia as a whole, connecting with all the stolen culture things (https://www.quora.com/What-things-have-Russians-stolen-or-misappropriated-from-other-nations ) and most of all — financially contributing to taxes. There is a video that was made about taxes and how it is affecting the war, so please take a look: https://x.com/i/status/1763894714367885688
For the take on screenshots of her tweet on her alt account from 2022: we appreciate the gesture, and at the start when we needed that simple bare minimum support we got it, but to be honest, at some point it stopped feeling like support and started feeling more like a hunt for pity points. One "sorry for what you're going through, hope you're okay" isn't gonna change the course of events. We, as a whole nation, need constant support and for our voices to be heard and answered. For some people it's even hard to call those events what they are — genocide. So the very least you could do as a content creator is to speak of it as it is, or just talk about it in general. One tweet is not that good of a support, considering the tweet doesn't even express her opinion specifically on russia’s actions, genocide and imperialism.
What's the issue with her speaking russian, trying to implement her language and culture (“vibes” included) into online MCYT spaces? Predominantly — because, again, language represents culture. And people really like excusing russians, getting interested in their culture, and being okay with their art, like “heated rivalry”, which often leads to one glaring issue — being okay with russians generally, and with what they do. It normalizes their action, the genocide they're committing. And why, only because their culture is “so fascinating, so big”! Did you know that Ukrainian was banned 134 times by the russians and was constantly oppressed? Did you know that most of the russian culture isn't theirs at all? Their language is stolen and altered slavic languages combined. The rest of their culture is bits taken out of other cultures.
Proof that russians are appropriating cultures and are using them as a soft-propaganda tool:
https://svidomi.in.ua/en/page/the-obliteration-of-cultural-identity-how-russians-destroy-culture-under-occupation
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-stolen-history-stolen-culture/
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/russian-cultural-special-operation-offensive/
https://uacrisis.org/en/cultural-appropriation-is-served-top-8-dishes-russia-tries-to-claim
https://www.ukrainer.net/en/decolonising-culture/
Also the fact that even as Ukrainians finally got at least some attention, we still are getting blamed for “harassing and stalking” her. Among the main group who organised it, there was no such thing as harassment, it was the “spread the information” campaign, and all the information we gathered was from open resources that she posted herself. To add to that, some people started blaming Ukrainians for not spreading information about people who don’t say anything about the USA and creators from the States, but why are we to blame? We are genocide victims trying to have our voices be heard, and we are getting blamed for not sharing about other countries? In times when we don’t even have electricity or have to spend all night in bomb shelters? Especially considering that yes, we may need to/try to speak up, but our voices are already silenced. It should be your responsibility to talk about what you think should be talked about. You can't blame us for speaking up and finally getting attention, when you yourself never tried to change anything. If you want change, you have to be the change. People are calling us xenophobes for not wanting to tolerate people who have been destroying us, our culture, and our language for centuries, proof of which was listed at the top of the document.
To finish off this discussion — Ukrainian part of MCYT fandoms will remind everyone about ourselves not only this once, we will seek recognition, we will seek understanding about what we are going through right at this moment. And if you will still defend russians in any field — just accept that you are being ignorant. Ukrainians will never conform to the silence that you are forcing on us, we never conformed to it and never will. We will talk, speak up and shout, even if you don’t like it. You cannot just silence minorities because they are saying something that makes you personally uncomfortable with your own imperialism.
Additionally here are official foundations that you can donate to help Ukraine:
Допомога ЗСУ - Рахунок "Повернись живим"
Допомога ЗСУ — донат та підтримка армії | БФ Спільнота Стерненка
HOW TO SUPPORT UKRAINE.