Ukraine war mega thread

[bsnub]

Shouldn't all this bickering be kept to SoCal's "war 101 for children" thread?

You are a little late eh Toots? This thread went off the rails pages ago.

[Norton]

Whenever you find yourself in the staunch majority, its time to pause and reflect- Mark Twain.

70% of Russians believe Vlad's war is good. 15% of Americans believe Trump won the election.
Time to pause and reflect?

[NamPikToot]

Ohh sorry i've not been keeping up, as you were.

[bsnub]

70% of Russians believe Vlad's war is good. 15% of Americans believe Trump won the election.
Time to pause and reflect?

[OhOh]

Ukraine War Will Bring NATO to New All-Time Low When Biden Arrives at Brussels Meeting

Martin Jay

March 19, 202

In terms of PR and its own identity, the failure to support Ukraine will reverberate for decades to come, Martin Jay writes.

"Far from NATO being emboldened and “united”, despite the military drills in backwaters like Norway which mainstream media dutifully accept being spoon fed, the organisation itself is likely to become even more ineffective, weak and poorly managed than ever before once the Ukraine crisis is over.

That doesn’t mean it might not expand. There are one or two candidates which are mulling such a move like Finland. But in terms of its clout on the world stage, the Ukraine crisis has shown that the powerful nations behind NATO are quite happy with it being a somnolent power which has the resources which it is unlikely ever to use in a standoff with Russia.

The danger of being weak, which is clear to see with the Ukraine situation where NATO hasn’t the courage to threaten Putin with a nuclear or even conventional war, is that people remember it for a very long time and in terms of PR and its own identity, the failure to support Ukraine will reverberate for decades to come.

While Finland might ponder the pros and cons of joining NATO, others, like Balkan countries may well be thinking that it is better to reap the cash benefits and corruption possibilities for EU membership while playing a cool hand with Moscow and staying out of NATO. Many will just ask “what is the point?”.

In the end, it wasn’t NATO which helped Ukraine but individual member states like the UK, France and Germany with effective military hardware without sending troops on the ground. And so in joining NATO, new members in the Balkans immediately draw the wrath of Moscow as they paint a cross on their backs as their countries become a playground for world powers to flex their muscles.

NATO has lost, rather than gained, so much credibility as all that those in the West whose countries make up the ‘big guns’ can remember is its buffoonish chief waving his arms around at press conferences and talking.

And talking.

But actions speak so much louder than words. And no one knows that more than Zelensky who has been watching Joe Biden meddle with Ukrainian politics since 2014 where he was part of a plot to install Poroshenko into power, a leader who, despite being a western ideologue, was ousted essentially for corruption and mismanagement on a grand scale. Biden in 2015 talked the talk then, when Poroshenko was elected, and he talks the talk today. No fly zone from either NATO or the U.S. will be his position when he takes the podium in Brussels at a special meeting in the Belgian capital.

The theme of meddling in the domestic politics of countries that are politically finding their own feet after the fall of communism, by backing so-called “revolutions” but then failing to support their friends when the blood starts to flow is really what Biden is all about. And this is really NATO’s problem as well as the EU’s as the implications will be felt even more so by Europeans than Americans. NATO members might well harangue Biden at the meeting to consider a partial no fly zone, but even on a practical level, it’s hard to imagine Pentagon advisors going with it as Ukraine is so huge that it would be hard to implement. Furthermore, how would a no fly zone work against Russian aircraft which stay in Russian airspace and deliver their arsenal from afar?

It’s not hard to work out what is the core of the reasons why Ukraine is at war. Biden is weak and Putin strong, although by the same token we shouldn’t pander to the Trump camp’s lame allusion that things would have been different if The Donald was in the White House. Trump proved to be also quite yellow when it came to going to war with Iran when Tehran provoked a war by a drone strike in the summer of 2019. American presidents, regardless of political colours, have lost their courage for going the extra mile in enforcing U.S. foreign policy around the world and faced with a no-nonsense Russian leader like Putin become pathetic. How could NATO, led by the U.S., ever be effective if American leaders only constantly polish and admire their factory greased still-in-the-wrapper weaponry, confident that it will never be used to uphold the core principles of the treaty’s Article 5?

Countries like Poland, Romania and Slovakia are left wondering if NATO would have the courage to fight in those territories in the event of a Russian conflict. No one is interested in looking at the bigger picture and holding the West to account for lying to Russia since the early 90s about halting expansion or America’s dangerous meddling in regional politics. Or corruption.

How, after all, does a former comic who becomes president on an anti-corruption ticket, end up with share options worth 600 million dollars?"

Ukraine War Will Bring NATO to New All-Time Low When Biden Arrives at Brussels Meeting — Strategic Culture

[bsnub]

Strategic Culture

The Strategic Culture Foundation is a Russian think tank that primarily publishes an online current affairs magazine of the same name. It is regarded as an arm of Russian state interests by the United States government.^[1]

According to a 2020 United States Department of State report, the Strategic Culture Foundation is directed by Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, and is closely affiliated with Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.^[1]

It has been characterized as a conservative, pro-Russian propaganda website by U.S. media.^[2][3]

Strategic Culture Foundation has a pattern of sharing articles with other Russia-controlled outlets such as Global Research, New Eastern Outlook, and SouthFront.^[4]
The Washington Post reported in September 2020 that Facebook had banned a Russian disinformation network operated by the Strategic Culture Foundation -- a network that “helped spread conspiracy theories aimed at English-speaking audiences, including by fueling false rumors that the coronavirus was produced as a bioweapon and that a potential vaccine would include tracking technology.”^[5] The Post’s report stated that the Strategic Culture Foundation “also spread false information that Bill Gates, the tech executive and philanthropist, was leading efforts to create a vaccine with surveillance capabilities.” The Post’s report called the Strategic Culture Foundation “a phony think tank”.

In April 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on the Strategic Culture Foundation because of their efforts to influence US elections.^[6][7]

OhDoh

[panama hat]

Ukraine War Will Bring NATO to New All-Time Low When Biden Arrives at Brussels Meeting

Except that NATO is now more unified than ever, fuckwit.

Good call, that will keep the c u n t googling for hours.

He's already jumped to his next idiocy - it's his hallmark. Post crap, get called on it . . . go on to the next piece of crap. Like Trump, he just lies so much that his lies are faster than fact-checkers can fact-check. Same goes for the other two dimwits.

[bsnub]

Except that NATO is now more unified than ever, fuckwit.

It is just a Russian controlled propaganda organization. Typical garbage from the Three Stooges.

[Cujo]

Ukraine War Will Bring NATO to New All-Time Low When Biden Arrives at Brussels Meeting

Blah blah propoganda blah blah...

Just because someone wrote it doesn't make it so or meaningful. It's just some randoms witterings.

[HermantheGerman]

As a result, companies like McDonald's and Starbucks that have left Russia to protest its invasion of Ukraine can do little when Russian businesses steal their trademarks.

True! But Russians can do little to match these trademarks. Made in Russia is just purely shit in quality, taste etc. No need to worry.
Ask any Russian

[HermantheGerman]

Supply chain expert on grain amid Russia-Ukraine war: 'I doubt' that could be replaced
The countries that are most dependent on Russian and Ukrainian wheat include Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Iran, while other nations like Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan also heavily rely on wheat imports from that region.

Ohh dear, Russian tourists going to Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia won't have any bread to stuff in their oversized lunch bags

Maybe China can help out with a bowl of rice.

[misskit]

Putin 'panicking' over revolution in Moscow as he battles to control Ukraine, PM says

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because he is terrified of a pro-democracy revolution in Moscow, Boris Johnson has said.


The Prime Minister said Mr Putin was in a "total panic" about the prospect of a popular uprising in his own country if freedom was allowed to flourish in Kyiv.


The Tory leader claimed the war was a "turning point for the world", forcing countries to stand up to Russia rather than "making accommodations with tyranny".


Failure to support Ukraine now would result in a "new age of intimidation across eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea".


In a speech at the Conservative Party spring conference in Blackpool, Mr Johnson said Mr Putin's actions were not the result of concern about Nato - "he didn't really believe that Ukraine was going to join Nato any time soon" - or the prospect of Western missiles being based there.

MORE Putin 'panicking' over revolution in Moscow as he battles to control Ukraine, PM says - Mirror Online

[sabang]

This quite legendary bloke (GIYF if you don't already know) is pulling no punches-


Pearl Harbor My Eye!

by David Stockman Posted onMarch 19, 2022

We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is just fricking outrageous. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous retort to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate: We knew the United States of America and Ukraine isn’t any United States.


To the contrary, it is a cesspool of corruption, mal-governance and rank stupidity on the foreign policy front. For crying out loud, its situation is comparable to the drug cartels taking over Mexico, demanding the return of the Gadsden Purchase and then seeking to join a Russian-led anti-American treaty organization.

That is to say, Ukraine brought the Russian attack on itself by poking the bear in its eyes repeatedly since the 2014 coup. Yet now its leader has the gall to petition the US Congress to start WWII via standing-up a No Fly Zone in lieu of the obvious solution: Namely, Zelensky should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace on the following basis:

• Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and always has been since it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783;
• Permit the separation of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine because the overwhelmingly Russian speaking populations there has been part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years and do not wish to be ruled by the anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs who control Kiev;
• Amend the constitution of the rump state of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance, while reducing its military to a domestic law enforcement agency.

Those terms may seem harsh, but it’s the only alternative to the complete destruction of Ukraine and an eventual Russian win anyway. The fact is, the NATO cavalry simply ain’t coming no matter how many standing ovations are stumped up by the armchair warriors of the US Congress.


That’s because even the bully boys of Washington and Brussels aren’t ready to trigger WWIII over the broken remnants of a country that never had been a country historically until Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev made it an administrative district of the Soviet Empire – the latter being a stain on mankind that thankfully disappeared into the dustbin of history 31 years ago.


Yet without direct US/NATO engagement with the Russian military forces now occupying growing segments of Ukrainian territory the expedient of sending arms – even highly advanced lethal anti-air and anti-tank weapons – is futile. Russia now has total air superiority over Ukraine’s skies, meaning that incoming NATO weapons (and the so-called “foreign legion” fighters, too) will be destroyed long before they can make a difference.


So for god’s sake Washington needs to stop standing on ceremony and leading the hapless Ukrainian government down the primrose path to national destruction. There is no way out of the current catastrophe except for Washington to:

• concede that recruiting Ukraine to join NATO and potentially putting NATO missile bases within one minute’s cruise missile flight time from Moscow was an egregious mistake; and
• that its demonization of Putin as a modern day Hitler on a quest to revive the Soviet Empire is just plain War Party hogwash and is no justification for its sweeping Sanctions War, most especially if Kiev capitulates to Moscow’s terms.

The truth, in fact, is more nearly the opposite. That is, there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot.


The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography. The dialects spoken in the Donbas (brown and yellow areas) are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the old Galician territories of Western Ukraine centered in Lviv (red areas) are heavily influenced by Polish, Slovakian and Rumanian vocabularies.; and the blue areas of the North present dialects heavily influenced by Belarusian.


What is also true is that these segmented populations have never been united under a common polity except by communist arms between 1922 and 1991; then between 1991 and 2014 by tenuous and continuously shifting electoral balances after the Ukrainian administrative entity was arbitrarily disgorged from the old Soviet Union; and finally after the February 2014 coup by dint of a Kiev government based on central and western Ukraine that essentially declared a civil war on Crimea (which seceded) and the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas regions that have tried to do the same.


So again, what’s wrong with partition? At the end of the day, Zelensky stood before Congress and had the gall to demand WWIII in behalf of an abortion of a nation that has virtually no chance of long-term survival in its present form. Yet the knuckleheads from both parties are in such war heat that they vociferously applauded the unctuous rantings of a clown who should have stuck to the comedy business.

Full Article- Pearl Harbor My Eye! - Antiwar.com Original


The excerpt above is followed by a quite in depth history of the Ukraine, or what became Ukraine as we know it now. Always good to have some historical perspective.


Oh, and I agree with pretty much everything he says.

[Norton]

Yet without direct US/NATO engagement with the Russian military forces now occupying growing segments of Ukrainian territory the expedient of sending arms – even highly advanced lethal anti-air and anti-tank weapons – is futile.

Oh, and I agree with pretty much everything he says.

Most, with exception of the above quote, I don't agree with.

[Cujo]

This quite legendary bloke (GIYF if you don't already know) is pulling no punches-


Pearl Harbor My Eye!

by David Stockman Posted onMarch 19, 2022

What an atrocious piece of writing.
Was it a high school essay competition or something?
Quite legendary bloke?Where do you get this crap?

[sabang]

GIYF Cuj. Would the US be willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine norts? I'm of the view not, I think that is the prevalent view- but you know what they say about opinions and assholes.

Where do you get this crap?

Antiwar.com
I get a lot of stuff from there, regular reader.

[Cujo]

NO ONE, least of all anyone of any influence in the U.S. has suggested they would. It seems there's a beat up over this issue.
in fact the've been very clear they want to avoid it if at all possible.

[Norton]

Would the US be willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine norts

Obviously not. Putin bet the farm on it.
The pertinent question is, over what country would the US go to war with Russia?

[sabang]

Any Nato country. "All for One and One for All". But if Putin even tried, I was wrong and he is insane.

[Backspin]

Every imperial power of the day tries it.

"Russia's power can only be undermined by the separation of Ukraine from it...to oppose Ukraine to Russia...just need to find and nurture traitors among the national elite...will hate everything Russian...without realizing it. Everything else is just a matter of time".- Bismarck

[sabang]

If Putin is thinking of a long term occupation of Ukraine, I will wind down the dial one notch and just call him stoopid. Y'know, lessons of Afghanistan (2), Vietnam etc.

Demilitarization, a partial partition (pretty much reflecting the facts on the ground) and ongoing neutrality for Ukraine I can understand. That path offers the best way forward for Ukr and it's people too, imo.

[Troy]

^ Good Lord, things are a little different since Bismark's day.

[baldrick]

pootin and his church think he is chosen by god

[Backspin]

If Putin is thinking of a long term occupation of Ukraine, I will wind down the dial one notch and just call him stoopid. Y'know, lessons of Afghanistan (2), Vietnam etc.

Demilitarization, a partial partition (pretty much reflecting the facts on the ground) and ongoing neutrality for Ukraine I can understand. That path offers the best way forward for Ukr and it's people too, imo.

Those are different though. Would the US be able to pacify Canada ? Probably. That's the comparison. Also Russia pacified Chechnya with a lot of success. And more recently they managed to clean up the worst of Syria.

[baldrick]

here you go backspit - edumacate yourself - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55780606-putin-s-war-in-syria

learn all about iran and putin