Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Klitschko brothers say Ukraine will not surrender as Russia continues invasion



Ukrainians have nowhere to retreat and will defend their homeland from Russian invaders, Kyiv mayor and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko said from the capital city on Thursday.
Flanked by his heavyweight boxing star brother Wladimir, Vitali Klitschko spoke via Skype as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second week. Moscow was shelling several Ukrainian cities as its main assault force remained at a halt north of Kyiv.

“Thousands, already tens of thousands are killed in this war against Ukraine. And this number will unfortunately only grow,” Vitali said from a shelter he is working from in Kyiv.
“We are not going to surrender. We have nowhere to retreat.”
He said about a half of the city’s 3 million people had left and that authorities had also evacuated many orphans to Poland and Germany.
“The situation is tense, people are worried,” he said, adding projectiles were constantly “hitting residential blocks or important infrastructure sites.”
“The city needs peace and peaceful skies … Kyiv residents have been in their basements nonstop for a week now because of air raid alarms going off all the time.”
With empty streets, some food shortages and pharmacies closed, Kyiv was still faring better than Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv, which was heavily shelled by Russia, or the southern port of Mariupol, which was encircled and left without power or water.
Vitali Klitschko said Russia was trying to surround Kyiv as well and called on Russians to challenge president Vladimir Putin.
“You are an instrument at the hands of one man with one ambition — to resurrect the Soviet Union … For ambitions of one man, we are paying a very high price.”
Putin said his “special military operation” was meant to protect Russians persecuted in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that now wants to join NATO and the European Union.
The boxing brothers, whose mother is ethnically Russian, said Ukraine was always home to Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and other religions and ethnicities.
“It’s senseless. There is no reason to attack Ukraine,” Wladimir Kitschko said, describing footage of damage in the city of Kharkiv as weighing heavily on people’s minds.
“It’s complete madness … What is happening is terror. It’s happening in 2022. It’s something one’s mind doesn’t comprehend.”
The mayor’s younger brother said he spent the last week helping to move food and medicine around the city.
“You don’t know if you’re going to make it through the day tomorrow. Those nights, hearing explosions all night long and shooting in the street, that does make you feel worried.”
He called for the severing of all international business ties with Russia now and the imposition of more sanctions after Europe, the United States and other countries cut links with Russian banks and businesses in retaliation for the invasion.
“We’re really counting hours here,” Wladimir Kitschko said. “We have no time. We need to act now, we need to stop this madness. All the money that Russia is getting is being used to buy lethal weapons that are killing Ukrainians.”
He also lauded the sports community for coming together to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes following the invasion.
Belarus has been a key staging area for Russia.
“I’m proud of the world’s unity and seeing sporting communities standing together — the International Olympic Committee (remember HtG asked that they be thrown out for the rest of the Olympics) , boxing federations, UEFA, FIFA, Formula One,” Wladimir Klitschko told Sky sports.
“Ban Russian teams from participating. I have nothing against the athletes but they are presenting the regime and in some way the connection with this war,” Klitschko said.
“It’s never enough until the war is going to be stopped but it’s important to show the world is not okay with this war, that the sporting world is not okay with it.
Oleksandr Usyk, the WBA, WBO, IBF and IBO champion is also fighting the battle for the future of his nation, having joined the territorial defense battalion in Kyiv.
Former tennis player Sergiy Stakhovsky has also enlisted in Ukraine’s reserve army.
“It’s a very challenging time in the lives of Ukrainians, I was never thinking I’m going to face the war,” Wladimir Klitschko said.
“You see and hear the explosions, the rockets, the destroyed vehicles, buildings — it’s absolutely terrifying what the war can do. I’m proud of the Ukrainian nation. Everyone stands for each other. I have never been as proud to be Ukrainian as now.”

Klitschko brothers say Ukraine will not surrender as Russia continues invasion | The Japan Times

I have never been as proud to be Ukrainian as now.

The hatred towards the Nazi regime in Moscow will leave big scars. Putin the war criminal has already lost this war.
Europe will never be the same and Russains can not be trusted, as I have posted here so many times before.

The West fights back against Putin the disruptor

Successive US presidents have struggled to get the measure of Vladimir Putin but now that Brussels and Berlin have joined the fray with such resolve, it's a different story, writes Nick Bryant.

It is often tempting to look upon Vladimir Putin as the millennium bug in a human and deadly form.

The Russian president rose to power on 31 December 1999, as the world held its breath that computers would go into meltdown when the clock struck midnight, unable to process the change from 1999 to 2000.

In the 20 years since, Putin has been trying to engineer a different kind of global system malfunction, the destruction of the liberal international order. The former KGB spymaster wanted to turn back the clock: to revive Russia's tsarist greatness and to restore the might and menace of the Soviet Union prior to its break-up in 1991.

This Russian revanchist has become the most disruptive international leader of the 21st Century, the mastermind behind so much misery from Chechnya to Crimea, from Syria to the cathedral city of Salisbury. He has sought - successfully at times - to redraw the map of Europe.

He has tried - successfully at times - to immobilise the United Nations. He has been determined - successfully at times - to weaken America, and hasten its division and decline.

Follow the latest updates from inside Ukraine

Putin came to power at a moment of western hubris. The United States was the sole superpower in a unipolar world. Francis Fukuyama's End of History thesis, proclaiming the triumph of liberal democracy, was widely accepted.

Some economists even peddled the theory that recessions would be no more, partly because of the productivity gains of the new digital economy. It was also thought that globalisation, and the interdependence it wrought, would stop major economic powers fighting wars. The same utopianism attached itself to the internet, which was seen overwhelmingly as a force for global good.
An honour guard greets Air Force One on the Moscow tarmac in 2002Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
An honour guard greets Air Force One on the Moscow tarmac in 2002

In the early days especially, the same misplaced optimism and wishful thinking coloured the west's approach to Putin - a figure, it is now obvious, who was trying to buck history and thwart democratisation, however many lives were lost in the process.

Successive US presidents have played into his hands. Bill Clinton, the occupant of the White House when Putin came to power, handed this ultra-nationalist a popular grievance by pushing for the expansion of Nato right up to Russia's borders. As George F Kennan, the famed architect of America's Cold War strategy of containment, warned at the time: "Expanding Nato would be the most fateful error of America policy in the entire post-Cold War era."

Why Biden won't send troops to Ukraine

George W Bush completely misjudged his Russian counterpart. "I looked the man in the eye," Bush famously said after their first meeting in Slovenia in 2001. "I found him very straightforward and trustworthy… I was able to get a sense of his soul." Bush mistakenly thought he could mount a charm offensive with Putin, and gently cajole him further down the democratic path.

But even though Bush visited Russia more than any other country - including, as a personal favour, two trips in 2002 to Putin's home city, St Petersburg - the Russian leader was already displaying dangerously despotic tendencies.

In 2008, Bush's final year as president, Putin invaded Georgia - what he called a "peace enforcement operation". The Kremlin argued then - and has continued to argue ever since - that it was hypocritical for Washington to complain about this violation of international law after Bush had invaded Iraq.
George Bush hosted Vladimir Putin at his Texas ranchImage source, Getty Images
Image caption,
George Bush hosted Vladimir Putin at his Texas ranch...
T-shirt saying 'The Russians are coming'Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
...which caused some excitement locally

Barack Obama sought to reframe US-Russian relations. His first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, even handed her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov a mock reset button (which was mistakenly labelled with the Russian word for "overloaded"). But Putin knew that America, after its long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, no longer wanted to police the world.

When Obama refused in 2013 to enforce his red-line warning against Bashar al-Assad when the Syrian dictator used chemical weapons against his own people, Putin saw a green light. By helping Assad carry out his murderous war, he extended Moscow's sphere of influence in the Middle East when the United States wanted to extract itself from the region. The following year, he annexed Crimea, and established a foothold in eastern Ukraine.

Despite being told by Obama to "cut it out," Putin even sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the hope that Hillary Clinton, a long-time nemesis, would be defeated and that Donald Trump, a long-time fan boy, would win.

The New York property tycoon made no secret of his admiration for Putin, a sycophantic approach that seems to have further emboldened the Russian president. Much to Moscow's delight, Trump publicly criticised Nato, weakened the US post-war alliance system and became such a polarising figure that he left America more politically divided than at any time since the Civil War.
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More coverage of Ukraine crisis
War in Ukraine: More coverage

LIVE: Latest updates from on the ground
IN KYIV: Locals fear another Grozny or Aleppo
EXPLAINED: Why Putin has invaded Ukraine?
IN DEPTH: Full coverage of the conflict

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Arguably, then, you have to reach back 30 years to find a US leader whose approach to the Kremlin has stood the test of time. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, George Herbert Walker Bush resisted the temptation to rejoice in America's Cold War victory - much to the astonishment of the White House press pack, he refused to travel to Berlin for a victory lap - knowing that it would bolster hardliners in the Politburo and military seeking to oust Mikhail Gorbachev.

That magnanimity in victory helped when it came to bringing about the reunification of Germany, which was arguably Bush's greatest foreign policy success.

Putin is obviously a more formidable adversary, harder to deal with than even Leonid Brezhnev or Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But since the turn of the century no US president has truly had his measure.
Bill Clinton in Pristina, KosovoImage source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Bill Clinton pushed for the expansion of Nato which some said was a mistake

Joe Biden, like George Herbert Walker Bush, is a Cold War warrior, who has dedicated his presidency to defending democracy at home and abroad. Seeking to re-establish America's traditional post-war role as the leader of the free world, he has sought to mobilise the international community, offered military aid to Ukraine and adopted the toughest sanction regime ever targeted against Putin.

As Russian forces amassed at the border, he also shared US intelligence showing that Putin had decided to invade, in ways that sought to disrupt the Kremlin's usual misinformation campaigns and false flag operations.

His State of the Union address became a rallying cry. "Freedom will always triumph over tyranny," he said. And while Biden does not the speak with the clarity or force of a Kennedy or a Reagan, it was nonetheless a significant speech.

What's been striking since the Russian invasion started, however, has been the assertion of forceful presidential leadership from elsewhere. Volodymyr Zelensky has been lauded and lionised, as he has continued this extraordinary personal journey from comedian to Churchillian colossus.

Zelensky: A comedian president rising to the moment

In Brussels, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has been another commanding presence. This former German politician has been a driving force behind the decision, for the first time in EU history, to finance and purchase weapons for a nation under attack, a commitment that includes not just ammunition but fighter jets as well.
Ursula von der LeyenImage source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Ursula von der Leyen

Her compatriot, the new Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz, has also shown more resolve in dealing with Putin than his predecessor Angela Merkel. At warp speed, he has overturned decades of post-Cold War German foreign policy, an approach so often predicated on caution and timidity towards the Russian leader.

Berlin has sent anti-tank and anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine (ending the policy of not sending weapons to active war zones), halted the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline project, withdrawn its opposition to blocking Russia from the SWIFT international payments system, and even committed to spending 2% of its GDP on defence spending.

Putin's war prompts dramatic German U-turn

The biggest assault on a European state since World War Two has stiffened European resolve. But so, too, it seems has the relative weakness of America. Mindful of the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan and possibility of a Trump 2.0 presidency, European leaders seem to have realised that they can no longer lean so heavily on Washington to defend democracy in this hour of maximum peril. Leadership of the free world has, in this crisis, become a common endeavour.

Even since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been calling upon European nations to do more to police its own neighbourhood, something they failed to do when the break-up of the former Yugoslavia sparked the Bosnian war. Historians may well conclude that it took a combination of Putin's aggressiveness, America's fragility, Ukraine's heroic resolve and the fear that Europe's post-war stability is truly on the line to finally make that happen.

It would be naive to be swept away by the romanticism of Zelensky's speeches or to succumb to the dopamine high of watching the seizure of Russian-owned super-yachts unfold on social media. Putin is intensifying the war. But the last week has sent a message to Moscow - and to Beijing as well - that the post-war international order still continues to function, despite the deployment of the Russian war machine to bring about its collapse. Just as history never ended, nor has liberal democracy.

As Joe Biden put it in his State of the Union, during a passage in which rhetoric served also as sober analysis: Putin "thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met a wall of resistance he never imagined".

Nick Bryant is the author of When America Stopped Being Great: a history of the present. He is the former New York correspondent for the BBC and now lives in Sydney.

Ukraine crisis: The West fights back against Putin the disruptor - BBC News

Looks like some serbian kiss-arse has fucked up their chances of joining the EU.

Pandering to Putin comes back to bite Serbia’s Vučić – POLITICO

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Looks like some serbian kiss-arse has fucked up their chances of joining the EU.

Pandering to Putin comes back to bite Serbia’s Vučić – POLITICO

Time to sanction Serbia now!

Originally Posted by malmomike77

Well he wouldn't poison people in his pet gas project would he, Germany and its ex-chancellor has been so helpful in bank rolling Putin's palace. Yep you lot have led the way, Europe's industrial heartland has been too busy selling military equipment and ancillaries to be able to arm itself and live up to its NATO commitment.

Still, now you've had your wake up call it looks like you'll be busy unpicking Aunties legacy., of course this may upset France's little Napoleon who sees himself as the strong midget of Europe.

Anyway good luck with all, and now the UK has left there will be no dissenting voices when you increase the budget another 30%

Wake up !

Oligarch money is embedded in London. Beware the big talk of a ‘crackdown’ | John Harris | The Guardian


Wouldn't be surprised if the War Criminal paid U.K. politicians for the brexit.
Trump & Farage a couple made in heaven and a dream come true for Russia.

^
You probably view that as a guaranteed win, don't you?

Originally Posted by OhOh

Nuclear Armed Countries - Possible Groupings
Asian
Russia			6,257
China			350
India			160
Pakistan			165
North Korea			45
			6,977
Western
United States (including those illegally moved to other countries, Germany, Turkey ....)			5,550
United Kingdom			225
			5,775
Neutral ?
Israel			90
France			90 180

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_witnuclear_weapons

Not even close and not even vaguely amusing. By which logic do you partner India with sworn enemies, China and Packistan?
France is part NATO. Even though Micron thinks it could be independent.
In addition to those minor issues, The US and UK have systems capable of hidden delivery.

= Massive fail.

India is strictly non-aligned- quite sensibly so.

Putin is a paranoid tyrant who answers to no one. He has buttons also. OMG, that could be dangerous ………

Originally Posted by Switch

Putin is a paranoid tyrant who answers to no one. He has buttons also. OMG, that could be dangerous ………

Especially since he is cooked in Ukraine. If he tried this war against NATO, he would have been obliterated. He exposed his military as completely incompetent, aged and crumbling on its last life.

Those tanks and armored vehicles are coffins.

No surprise the GCC are keeping schtum on this one...

$126 a barrel.

Originally Posted by Switch

The US and UK have systems capable of hidden delivery.

And what is hidden delivery ?

Thanks in advance

Originally Posted by helge

And what is hidden delivery ?

Weapons systems which run into "hidden" sea mountains?

Originally Posted by OhOh

Weapons systems which run into "hidden" sea mountains?

Maybe

Your question mark/grammar punctuation doesn't convince me.


Camouflage painted UPS trucks ?

the scandihooligan twat seems to want to make the three stooges into the four wanketeers.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

the scandihooligan twat seems to want to make the three stooges into the four wanketeers.

And where did that come from ?

Bedtime for you ?

Nope, still have no clue what the fucktard is wittering on about.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Nope, still have no clue what the fucktard is wittering on about.

The Riddler strikes again

Originally Posted by OhOh

Tucked away currently in Thailand I suspect few will target Trat province, not a lot of worthy targets.

I wouldn't be too sure about that

Originally Posted by helge

And what is hidden delivery ?

Thanks in advance

The class of nuclear armed submarines is capable of such stealth that they cannot be tracked to their chosen launch sites. This is the prime reason that such submarines were preferred to aerial delivery systems, used back in the 60s.

Originally Posted by Switch

nuclear armed submarines is capable of such stealth that they cannot be tracked to their chosen launch sites.

Like the one the Russia navy chased away in the Pacific, you mean?

U.S denies it carried out operations in Russian territorial waters

Reuters

February 13, 20225:37 AM GMT

U.S denies it carried out operations in Russian territorial waters | Reuters