Ukraine war mega thread

[bsnub]

Some oil exports from ME to China to be priced in Yuan

It is specifically Saudi Arabia, and it is not something that I am at all concerned about. The Saudis have a security agreement with the US and they buy almost all of their Military equipment from the US, who also maintain and service it. This "experiment" with China will end.

[OhOh]

Why wasn't it a provocation when Latvia and Estonia joined NATO back in 2004?

Did Russia, at the time in 2004, have the same abilities to defend itself?

[sabang]

It got Gaddafi killed, and Libya decimated. I doubt the US Treasury is as sanguine as you about it.

[David48atTD]

Did Russia, at the time, have the same abilities to defend its self in 2004?

Lot's of Russian nukes back then.

Lot's of Russian nukes around today

[sabang]

Several wise old heads were warning about the dangers of reckless Nato expansion, even back then. Took a while, but they were proven right.

[bsnub]

More tin foiled tomfoolery. Gaddafi got killed by his own people because he was a scumbag dictator. A fate that I hope is soon found by your god, Putin.

[bsnub]

Did Russia, at the time in 2004, have the same abilities to defend its self?

Are you claiming that its nuclear arsenal was not working for some reason in 2004? More utter idiocy from the Three Stooges.

Took a while, but they were proven right.

Bullshit. Putin is not the same person he was in 2004 and the reasons for invading Ukraine are all lies. There was no provocation, just pushing utter nonsense as usual.

[sabang]

For Thinking people (not you snubby)-

Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to war. Those warnings were ignored | Ted Galen Carpenter | The Guardian

Experts have warned for decades that NATO expansion will result in a military conflict: Why didn’t anybody pay attention to them? – GLOBAL MILITARY NEWS

[harrybarracuda]

Several wise old heads were warning about the dangers of reckless Nato expansion, even back then. Took a while, but they were proven right.

They were not proven right by a dictator who has invaded three countries and might try a fourth.

E.g. if Poland wasn't in NATO he'd probably have his eyes on that.

So they weren't that fucking wise at all, and you certainly aren't.

[harrybarracuda]

For Thinking people (not you snubby)-

Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to war. Those warnings were ignored | Ted Galen Carpenter | The Guardian

Experts have warned for decades that NATO expansion will result in a military conflict: Why didn’t anybody pay attention to them? – GLOBAL MILITARY NEWS

NATO has nothing to do with Putin invading his neighbours, that's just a fucking fairy tale for gullible wankers like yourself.

[bsnub]

For Thinking people (not you snubby)-

Let's be real you are a buffoon and a pariah on this forum, you lack all credibility and are intellectually bankrupt.

NATO has nothing to do with Putin invading his neighbours, that's just a fucking fairy tale for gullible wankers like yourself.

Indeed, this is what all true thinkers understand.

[OhOh]

Lot's of Russian nukes back then.

Are you claiming that its nuclear arsenal was not working for some reason in 2004?

My apologies, I should have added, "without the use of its nuclear arsenal".

In addition.

They share borders with Russia just the same as Ukraine and regularly host US troops. How can you honestly apply a different metric to Ukraine, for some reason? The argument just does not hold water.

Both countries are hosting thousands of NATO forces as we speak, which is more than Ukraine could ever claim yet no "provocation" in those nations

Why wasn't it a provocation when Latvia and Estonia joined NATO back in 2004? They share borders with Russia just the same as Ukraine and regularly host US troops.

Both countries are hosting thousands of NATO forces as we speak,

What NATO infrastructures, weapons, troops were in the Baltic States in 2004, 20010, 20015, 2020 and 2021? Did it grow at all?

You mention the "regularly host US troops" which suggests few troops and possibly military materials.

You also suggest the "hosting thousands of NATO forces as we speak", is a new deployment.

To wrap up:

Your statement: "How can you honestly apply a different metric to Ukraine, for some reason? The argument just does not hold water.

The apparent, staring you in the face, "reason" is:

1. The Baltic countries joined in 2004, you provide no details of permanent weapons, foreign troops, or storage of them, but presented no threat to Russia.

2. You suggest now, 2022, they are a threat.

I suggest the "threat" from them was judged to be minimal by Russia until 2022. The land bridge, the air route and the sea route. All routes easily defended.

I also believe that NATO had plans published to send "reinforcements" in the event that they became concerned with their ability to defend the Baltic countries. There is the Suwalki gap between Belarus and Kaliningrad which connects Poland and Lithuania.

Now, after dismissing Russian security concerns in December, some reinforcements have been sent. Purely cosmetic moves, but a NATO chapter 5 tripwire to be utilised by NATO

I conclude your argument is facetious.

[kingwilly]

Did Russia, at the time in 2004, have the same abilities to defend itself?

Russia is not defending itself, you complete fuking moron.

ut the truth of the matter is that I am the bigger idiot here

yes, you are the bigger idiot. Putin's invasion is beyond reproach - how fuckign hard is that to understand?

[bsnub]

What NATO infrastructures, weapons, troops were in the Baltic States in 2004, 20010, 20015, 2020 and 2021? Did it grow at all?

You are an utter imbecile. I am not doing your homework you blinkered fool.

[sabang]

So all the boneheads got is childish, petulant little insults. Says it all really. Argue it out with these folk:-


Strategic Thinkers Who Warned for NATO Expansion | Astute News


^ George Keenan/ Henry Kissinger/ John Mearsheimer/ Jack Matlock/ William Perry/ Noam Chomsky/ Jeffrey Sachs


Can think of a few more, such as Pat Buchanan & the PaleoConservatives, and the 'Realist' School of foreign relations. That's just the names even you should have heard of.

Anyway have a lovely war.

[misskit]

Known for 9/11 prediction, blind psychic Baba Vanga said Vladimir Putin would become 'Lord of the World'

A blind psychic, Baba Vanga, predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would become 'Lord of the World'.


If you are wondering, why is it crucial? The right answer is that Vanga, in the past, had made many correct predictions.

She foresaw Russian war in Ukraine, 9/11, etc. Vanga also 'saw' natural disasters and warned the world about the conflicts before their occurrence.

Vanga died at the age of 85 and was known as 'Nostradamus of the Balkans'. In the latest development, it seems to have been suggested that she predicted Vladimir Putin and Russia will one day dominate the world.


“All will thaw, as if ice, only one remain untouched - Vladimir’s glory, glory of Russia. Too much, it is brought in a victim. Nobody can stop Russia. All will be removed by her from the way and not only will be kept, but also becomes the lord of the world,” Vanga in a meeting with writer Valentin Sidorov, said in 1979, BirminghamLive reported.


Vanga had predicted glorious future for Russia once more, the Daily Post reported.

Russia will be the world’s only superpower, as per the clairvoyant.


Baba Vanga, who was born as Vangelia Gushterova, was blinded after getting caught up in a freak tornado in her childhood.


It was believed that she had the ability to foresee the future. She reportedly made hundreds of predictions in 50-year-long career.

Known for 9/11 prediction, blind psychic Baba Vanga said Vladimir Putin would become 'Lord of the World' , World News | wionews.com

[Switch]

So all the boneheads got is childish, petulant little insults. Says it all really. Argue it out with these folk:-

Strategic Thinkers Who Warned for NATO Expansion | Astute News


^ George Keenan/ Henry Kissinger/ John Mearsheimer/ Jack Matlock/ William Perry/ Noam Chomsky/ Jeffrey Sachs


Can think of a few more, such as Pat Buchanan & the PaleoConservatives, and the 'Realist' School of foreign relations. That's just the names even you should have heard of.

Anyway have a lovely war.

Indeed anyone who supports your narrative. It’s called confirmation bias.
The countries that formed the Warsaw Pact had no choice in the matter. They were obliged, by force if necessary, to provide a shield around Russia for the protection of the USSR.

As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, they were only too happy to join NATO voluntarily in order to provide their citizens with the defensive protection of NATO, instead of remaining a vassal state for the protection of Russia.

Most of you are not old enough to remember the horror perpetrated by the Soviet Union, or the price for such disobedience in the face of those horrors. It is to be hoped that the world never witnesses such political flagellation again. Oh wait, some clown invaded the Ukraine for that very reason.

I can’t get my breath due to the moronic support for an evil tyrant who has the desire to return to the days of the Soviet Union.

Some people seem to think that the world should bend over and allow Putin to fuck them over, AGAIN. NO. Those days have been rightly consigned to history, and Putin must never be allowed to resurrect them again.

[misskit]

Zelensky's Ukraine is real. Putin's doesn't exist

"If things had turned out the way my mother wanted, I would have been a violinist," Volodymyr Zelensky said in a standup routine on his late-night variety show, "Kvartal-95." "That's right, as a good Jewish boy, I played the violin as a kid." That Zelensky is a good Jewish boy presents a problem for Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly accused Ukraine of fascism and even anti-Semitism.

Putin's language of "fascism," "nationalism" and "Nazism" revives Soviet-era shibboleths that suggest an ideology of protecting ethnic minorities, including Jews, from dangerous forms of ethno-nationalism. And yet Russia is now attacking a Ukraine that has one of the lowest rates of anti-Semitism in Europe (according to recent Pew studies), a diverse public sphere and a Jewish president.

The inconsistency between Putin's accusations and Zelensky's Jewishness has helped to clarify the deeply problematic premise for the current invasion of Ukraine: Russia claims it is attempting to "de-Nazify" a country that has, over the past decade, become not more ethno-nationalist, but less so. In the process, Moscow has exposed its own right-wing nationalist agenda, and its distance from the antifascism and even anti-colonialism it may have represented at various points during the Soviet period.


Putin's use of the term "nationalism" evokes a familiar Soviet accusation in which acts of self-determination threaten the power and centrality of Moscow. But what the Kremlin's narrative has attempted to deny is the fact that many Ukrainians have outgrown a dated understanding of identity, which relies on a monolithic ethnic understanding of a single Ukrainian people sharing a language, history and religious traditions.

Ukrainians have moved increasingly toward a civic understanding of Ukrainian identity, centered on citizenship as opposed to parentage. Zelensky's rise to the presidency, as a Russian-speaking secular Jew, is living proof of this shift toward a pluralistic Ukrainian identity. The fact that an ethnic Jew is now expertly commanding a war from besieged Kyiv has struck some outside Ukraine as ironic, for the history of ethnic relations in Ukraine includes terrible episodes of anti-Jewish pogroms. But Jews have long played positive roles in Ukraine.

Moreover, Zelensky's landslide victory in 2019 came at a time of open conversation in Ukrainian society about its diversity and the righting of past wrongs. Over the past several years, new Ukrainian art and literature has explored themes of the Holocaust and the multiple displacements of the Tatars; the government has moved to protect indigenous cultures and the cabinet of ministers has discussed the legalization of same sex civil partnership.

Zelensky himself has not only embodied Ukraine's poise under pressure (he is, after all, the entertainer who won Ukraine's "Dancing with the Stars" and dubbed the voice of Paddington Bear in Ukrainian), but has also reminded the world that Ukraine, far from being full of Nazis as Putin claims it is, has become more welcoming of religious minorities and more unified across geographical and linguistic divides than it was a decade ago.


When Russian tanks crossed the border in February, purportedly to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Zelensky addressed the people of Russia in their common native language: "The Ukrainian people are already free." On March 1, following multiple missile strikes, including a deadly missile strike near the Holocaust killing ground of Babyn Yar, Zelensky posted a Ukrainian language video-address to his Facebook page, accompanied by a translation into Hebrew.


The shift in Ukrainian identity


The Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Kulyk dates the shift from basing Ukrainian identity on citizenship rather than blood lineage to the Maidan protests of 2013-14 and the Russian military intervention in Crimea, observing that these events "brought about a perceptible change in ethno-national identities, as many people felt both stronger attachment to Ukraine and stronger alienation from Russia."


This civic understanding of Ukrainian identity represents an important evolution from Soviet definitions of ethno-national groups. The Soviet Union may have laid ideological claim to Marxist internationalism and anti-colonialism, but in fact, Soviet policy often drove a wedge between members of different ethnic groups.

Soviet Ukrainians, Jews and Russians were viewed as belonging to separate ethnic categories, and these identities were inscribed in their passports. As a result, ethno-national difference remained an important paradigm for many Ukrainians in the years immediately following independence in 1991.


Former President Viktor Yushchenko bestowed the title of "Hero of Ukraine" on the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who collaborated in the 1940s with the Nazis to fight against the Soviet state. While some appreciated the acknowledgment of the historical struggle against Moscow, many criticized the posthumous embrace of Bandera as a fatal political miscalculation.


Even Petro Poroshenko, who led Ukraine during the difficult years after the 2013-2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity," ran for reelection on a platform of "Army, language, faith." That a Russian-speaking secular Jew from the industrial east defeated the incumbent Poroshenko in 2019 suggests that a majority of Ukrainians wanted a more unifying narrative. Zelensky, who spoke out against Putin's invasion and in defense of Russian-language culture in 2014, was a vote against both Ukrainian ethno-nationalism and Russian neo-imperial nationalism.


New artistic and political efforts


The civic energy that flowed out of the Maidan protests has also led to new artistic and political efforts to acknowledge Ukraine's multiple languages and religions, as well as individual group's past traumas. Non-Jewish Ukrainians have embraced Jewish history as part of the Ukrainian story.
The Lviv-based poet Marianna Kiyanovska published a haunting book about the massacre in Babyn Yar in 2017. In 2021 the filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa released a controversial film about Babyn Yar that provocatively presented the Nazi massacre of Jews in Kyiv alongside the fringe Ukrainian nationalist movement in the Western city of Lviv.

Although the film provoked much criticism for having potentially gone too far in connecting Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism, the fact that a film critical of Ukrainian nationalism was screened and discussed speaks to the general openness in Ukraine to engaging in difficult conversations about history.


The Tatar singer El'vira Sarykhalil has collaborated with the Ukrainian hip-hop group TNMK to raise awareness about the displaced Crimean Tatar community. Mustafa Nayyem, an Afghan-Ukrainian journalist, was one of the first organizers of the Maidan, and later became deputy minister of Infrastructure.

Russian-language literature has long thrived in Ukraine; even as the war in Donbas broke out in 2014, novelists like Andrei Kurkov, and poets like Iya Kiva and Boris Khersonsky wrote strong literary indictments of Russia's occupation of Crimea and military involvement in Donbas in Russian.


On July 1, 2021, Parliament passed Zelensky's bill "On the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine," which granted special protection to the cultural heritage and language of Crimean Tatars, as well as two Crimean Turkic Judaic groups -- the Krymchaks and Karaites. These discussions of multiethnicity aren't easy or perfect. But a collective effort to acknowledge Ukraine's multiple histories has helped to define a pluralist vision for Ukrainian society.



Putin has mis-fired

As Ukrainians of different backgrounds have embraced a civic understanding of their identity, Kremlin representatives have doubled down on ethno-national categories to describe Ukraine, and Zelensky himself. Zelensky's "Indigenous Peoples" bill incensed Putin, who compared it to Hitler's race laws for its exclusion of special protections of the language and culture of native Russian speakers. Notably, the bill, which was aligned with the United Nation's declaration on indigenous peoples, omits groups whose identity is reflected by an existing state, including Ukrainians.


"What about people with mixed blood?" Putin asked on Russian television after the bill was introduced. "Zelensky himself is an ethnic Jew, he may have mixed blood." Putin's preposterous confusion of indigenous cultural preservation with race laws is part of the larger (and equally inconsistent) narrative that he has cultivated to equate Ukrainian government to Nazism and Russian speakers with Nazi victims.

In a long article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, the heirs of ancient Rus', with a shared language and religion. Putin declares that Ukraine is a Soviet construct, and that, by rejecting Russia, Ukrainians are "attempting to create an ethnically pure state." He compares Ukraine's anti-Russian sentiment to a "weapon of mass destruction." The document, read in hindsight, was a declaration of war.

If such ideological rhetoric can be a weapon, Putin has mis-fired. In Putin's July 12 article he wrote, "Our relationship is passed down from generation to generation. It is in the hearts, in the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families."


Few in the world can take this draconian insistence on the importance of "blood ties" seriously after Russia's bombing of Ukrainian hospitals, university buildings and theaters, wreaking particular violence on the largely Russophone cities of Kharkiv, Mykolaev and Mariupol. Ukrainians' unity in defending their country and protesting the invasion has been inspiring.



Ukrainians have chosen an uncertain future

But in addition to the horrific human toll, Ukraine's embrace of a diverse civic identity may be at stake as the war progresses. If Putin succeeds in reinventing Ukraine in his own image, Ukrainian public discourse, which has become more nuanced and open over the past decade, could regress into the kind of nationalist rhetoric it has managed to resist throughout the Donbas war.


The invasion and the military buildup that preceded it has, understandably, aroused strong anti-Russian sentiment among Ukrainians. This has already created some rifts within the Ukrainian cultural sphere. In January, the government passed a law making Ukrainian the official language in public settings.


Although this law does not restrict belletristic literature in Russian, the Russian-language novelist Andrei Kurkov wrote to me that the "Russian language is almost officially in Ukraine now 'the language of the enemy.'" Some Russian language writers have shared on social media their intention of shifting to Ukrainian. Kurkov elaborated, "I will use my Russian for my novels but non-fiction I write now mostly in Ukrainian."

In March 2022, Sergei Loznitsa, who sparked controversy with his film about Babyn Yar, was dismissed from the National Film Academy for his support of screening films by those Russian filmmakers who spoke out against Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky, for his part, has continued to call attention to the tolerance and open mindedness of Ukraine, in contrast to Russia, promising Russian soldiers, for example, that if they defect, they will be treated "as people, decently."


Before becoming president, Zelensky created and starred in the TV show, "Servant of the People," about a high school teacher, Holoborodko, who is accidentally elected president of Ukraine. In one poignant episode, Holoborodko hallucinates a conversation with Ivan the Terrible, the 16th century Tsar who, among his many deeds, murdered his son and purged his opposition. "We are Slavs! We are one blood!" The Tsar tells him. Holoborodko disagrees. "You go one way, and we'll go the other. We'll meet again in 300 years."


For the past decade, Ukrainians have chosen an uncertain future over the myth of a past greatness based on blood ties. In doing so, the country has ceased to be legible to Putin and Russians who support him. We must hope that Ukraine can emerge from the current war with renewed optimism about its future as a democratic society, that it will continue to avoid the trappings of nationalism that Russia has tried hard to awaken in it.

Opinion: Zelensky's Ukraine is real. Putin's doesn't exist - CNN

[misskit]

Roman Abramovich & Ukraine negotiators in ‘suspected poisoning’ as ‘skin peeled from faces’ after Russia peace talks

RUSSIAN Oligarch Roman Abramovich has reportedly suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning.


The Chelsea owner fell ill along with Ukrainian peace negotiators, in an attack blamed on hardliners in Moscow who they say want to sabotage their talks designed to end the war.

Symptoms included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands, sources claim.


The billionaire and at least two members of his Ukrainian counterparts fell ill shortly after a meeting in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv earlier this month.


Abramovich has been shuttling back and forth between Moscow and Lviv in western Ukraine since the start of the war.


It isn't known whether the suspected attack was caused by a biological or chemical agent or some sort of electromagnetic-radiation attack.

President Zelensky, who has met with Abramovich in recent weeks, was reportedly unaffected.


The Russian handed Putin a handwritten note from Zelensky just days ago.


It came as Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the UK amid a crackdown on Russian money as the world seeks to strangle Putin's regime.


The 55-year-old billionaire faces ruin as tough new restrictions were slapped on him over his home country's bloody and brutal invasion.

Roman Abramovich & Ukraine negotiators in '''suspected poisoning''' as '''skin peeled from faces''' after Russia peace talks

[Backspin]

Roman Abramovich & Ukraine negotiators in ‘suspected poisoning’ as ‘skin peeled from faces’ after Russia peace talks

RUSSIAN Oligarch Roman Abramovich has reportedly suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning.


The Chelsea owner fell ill along with Ukrainian peace negotiators, in an attack blamed on hardliners in Moscow who they say want to sabotage their talks designed to end the war.

Symptoms included red eyes, constant and painful tearing, and peeling skin on their faces and hands, sources claim.


The billionaire and at least two members of his Ukrainian counterparts fell ill shortly after a meeting in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv earlier this month.

I would personally bet my left nut that if there was a poisoning, it was the CIA or MI6. But it all fits in perfectly with the narrative that has been created.

[David48atTD]

I would personally bet my left nut

On behalf of the Forum, we collective accept

[David48atTD]

Zelensky's Ukraine is real. Putin's doesn't exist

Putin has mis-fired

As Ukrainians of different backgrounds have embraced a civic understanding of their identity, Kremlin representatives have doubled down on ethno-national categories to describe Ukraine, and Zelensky himself. Zelensky's "Indigenous Peoples" bill incensed Putin, who compared it to Hitler's race laws for its exclusion of special protections of the language and culture of native Russian speakers. Notably, the bill, which was aligned with the United Nation's declaration on indigenous peoples, omits groups whose identity is reflected by an existing state, including Ukrainians.


"What about people with mixed blood?" Putin asked on Russian television after the bill was introduced. "Zelensky himself is an ethnic Jew, he may have mixed blood." Putin's preposterous confusion of indigenous cultural preservation with race laws is part of the larger (and equally inconsistent) narrative that he has cultivated to equate Ukrainian government to Nazism and Russian speakers with Nazi victims.

In a long article published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, Putin argued that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, the heirs of ancient Rus', with a shared language and religion.
Putin declares that Ukraine is a Soviet construct, and that, by rejecting Russia, Ukrainians are "attempting to create an ethnically pure state."
He compares Ukraine's anti-Russian sentiment to a "weapon of mass destruction."

The document, read in hindsight, was a declaration of war.

If such ideological rhetoric can be a weapon, Putin has mis-fired. In Putin's July 12 article he wrote, "Our relationship is passed down from generation to generation.
It is in the hearts, in the memory of people living in modern Russia and Ukraine, in the blood ties that unite millions of our families."

Few in the world can take this draconian insistence on the importance of "blood ties" seriously after Russia's bombing of Ukrainian hospitals, university buildings and theaters, wreaking particular violence on the largely Russophone cities of Kharkiv, Mykolaev and Mariupol.

Ukrainians' unity in defending their country and protesting the invasion has been inspiring.

Opinion: Zelensky's Ukraine is real. Putin's doesn't exist - CNN

There is a lot in the article posted by MK, but this, above, stood out.

Worth a read, as is the rest of the post/article.

[bsnub]

I would personally bet my left nut that if there was a poisoning, it was the CIA or MI6.

Well, you are the biggest moron in the history of this forum, so there is no weight behind your words.

[sabang]

Ukrainian Propaganda is Aimed at YOU


Deterrence works. Russia’s nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine just six months after retreating from Afghanistan. So far the unprecedented propaganda effort by the Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed. But the struggle — the one for your mind space — is not over.

To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bull being slung your way. Putin is not insane. He is carrying out a rational political-military strategy in Ukraine, seizing Russian-speaking territory such as Donbas, demilitarizing by force eastern Ukraine, and most of all creating a physical buffer zone between himself and NATO. That zone may end at the Dnieper River with a loop around Odessa, or it may end at the Polish border, depending on how smoothly things go on the ground and on what level of “back away” message Putin wishes to send NATO.

Putin is not making the first moves toward some greater conquest. All the bad takes saying “if we don’t stop Putin now, he’ll invade Moldova/Estonia/Poland/all Europe just like Hitler” ignores the German military in WWII having some 18 million men under arms. The Russian army today has 1.3 million, the best of which are going to be in Ukraine for awhile.

Every war has its “is the juice worth the squeeze” question. Is what you can realistically hope to achieve worth the cost of getting it? For Putin, that means solving his border problem at the cost of maybe a few thousand men and another dollop of weak sanctions. He understood the needs of Europe meant sanctions would never harm sales of the fossil fuels which make up most Russian exports. But nyet to Paypal for you tovarishch! Putin could also look to history and see how decades of sanctions have not changed much in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Putin most importantly also knew NATO would not fight him on the ground for fear of starting a nuclear war. That is exactly what nukes are for, and is the history of the Cold War in a sentence. Having nukes allows a country to do certain things any way it wants because its actions stay below the threshold of risking atomic war. This is why the US could destroy Qaddafi and Saddam (no nukes) and why the US will never attack North Korea (nukes.) Under US pressure, Ukraine in 1994 relinquished the nukes inherited from the former Soviet Union, enabling the invasion here in 2022.

Being a nuclear superpower makes things easier; the US can fight all over Central America and the Middle East, and Russia in the ‘Stans, Crimea, and now Ukraine, and none of that is important enough for the other side to consider using nukes to stop it. It is not like America does not know how to step away from a fight which isn’t ours: Crimea, Chechnya, Rwanda, Hungary ’56, Czechoslovakia ’68, initially Afghanistan ’79, even to a certain extent in Syria 2016. Putin knows that. Biden knows that. NATO knows that. Ukraine, however, is still thinking it can change the game.

Ukraine knew on Day One it didn’t have enough men or weapons to defeat the Russians. Its only hope to remain a unified nation (it is easy to imagine a divided Ukraine, Western Zone and Russian Eastern Zone) is outside help. A no-fly zone, some air strikes to blunt Russian advances. Maybe some of those Polish/NATO pilots planning to ferry F-16s to Ukraine stay to fly them in combat? Something, anything.

That’s why America is being blitzed with Ukrainian propaganda, and your brother-in-law is ready to head to Europe with his never-cleaned hunting rifle. The goal is to change public opinion such that a weak guy like Joe Biden starts to doubt himself.

The goal is get Biden to take that Pentagon meeting laying out options for some limited bombing, or to listen to those analysts saying the US could set up a small no-fly zone on Ukraine’s western edge to facilitate humanitarian aid. Drop in some Special Forces. Something, anything. The goal of the propaganda is to get Biden to sign off on something hopefully small enough that it falls below the threshold of provoking a nuclear response. A risky and delicate tasking. The bad news is Ukrainian propaganda is working. A non-partisan 74 percent of Americans say NATO should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine. And that even as we are just getting started.

A quick propaganda recap. We’ve had the hero phase with the non-existent Ghost of Kiev and the not surrendering but they surrendered brave Ukrainians, alongside the grandmas and supermodels with guns. We’ve had the Russians are going to kill us all phase, with the faux threat of invasion to the west and the faux scare the Russians were going to create a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident by shelling a power plant. We are currently moving into the not verifiable atrocities phase, where “reports” will claim the Russians are killing children and using rape as a weapon. Alongside this is beef cake talk about Zelensky, the likes we haven’t seen since before the cancellations of Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti. The fact-checking mania of the Covid era is in the dustbin of history as American media removes all the filters on pro-Ukrainian content.

The quality of the propaganda is not important (any scrap metal on snowy ground is breaking news of another Russian helo down, even if the metal has “Acme Junk Pile” written on it.) The quantity is important, the attempt to overwhelm American mind space to the point where logic is shoved into the back corner. There is a growing cottage industry of “experts” explaining how to can go to war without going to THAT kind of war. Dissenting voices are few, and are often labeled as “Putin lovers,” with Late Night hurling homophobic slurs at them like high school kids.

It all sounds silly when the effect of propaganda is to convince Americans higher gas prices are the cost of freedom, or booking an AirBnB they’ll never stay at will save Ukraine, or refusing Russian dressing on a salad. But it is deadly serious. There are two battles now playing out over Ukraine. The one on the ground, and the one on your social media seeking to drag America into the mud.

Only six months after the sad ending in Afghanistan, it is stunning to watch America again contemplate going to war for some abstract purpose far removed from our own core interests. And this time it is the risk of a nuclear exchange to remind us of our mistake, not just an inglorious departure from Kabul.

Ukrainian Propaganda is Aimed at YOU | by Peter Van Buren | Mar, 2022 | Medium

Peter van Buren (born 1960) is a former United States Foreign Service employee, and the author of two novels and two non-fiction books about military affairs.

[Switch]

And the board wishes that you would cease and desist with your bedtime stories, designed to scare children. This is reserved for grown ups who understand the difference between your fantasy, and the reality of contemporary life.

The post above is not based on any link to reality, but I’m sure impressionable youngsters like backspin will enjoy being frightened at bedtime, by shameless lies and rhetoric.

It must be difficult to blame an organisation such as NATO which has specific rules of engagement, designed to protect the weak and vulnerable with a defensive alliance.

It worked in the Cold War in Europe, and it will work again here, because the bogeyman is not NATO or Biden. It’s the tyrant who wishes to subjugate all neighboring countries just to construct a comfort blanket of vassal states around his precious Russia. Putin is such a bad, bad boy.