Ukraine war mega thread

[Loy Toy]

^
I think you should look into what lend-lease means.

What's the interest rate and what security did Ukraine put up?

[bsnub]

But you do also appreciate there is a time frame where they want to see something positive happening.

It is questionable whether their support will be so patriotic when another load of cash is dispersed with no real positive result especially with inflation being a growing problem with a possible global recession on the cards.

Positive things have been happening. The Ukrainians have had some stunning victories in the last few months and those will continue, but they will happen on the Ukrainians timetable. Right now the conditions in Ukraine are very muddy and not conducive to warfare, but the ground will freeze over soon and that is when there will be a winter offensive by the Ukrainians.

[pickel]

What's the interest rate and what security did Ukraine put up?

Probably the same as they did for England and Russia when they took advantage of it.

The alternative is much more expensive LT. Putin isn't going to stop his Soviet glory days mission unless he's defeated in Ukraine. The Ukrainians and their neighbors know this. That's why most of them joined NATO.

Inflation was rising and a recession was due even before Russia invaded, so it's a bit of a moot point.

[Loy Toy]

^ Was a lack of heating energy, explosion of petrol prices, the rise in unbelievable inflation rates and the scarcity of basic foods products part of what was due?

Here in Thailand everything has risen in price by almost 30% since this shit fight happened so I can speak for most Thais who are not happy.

[NamPikToot]

You silly pollock, the support for Ukraine boosts GDP, yields a huge commercial dividend, increases employment and raises revenues for both government and corporations.

But, in the end, this is not a fiscal issue, it is about crushing Russian expansionism that threatens Europe, the heartland of global democracy and decent government.

Paying more tax is a nugatory matter and of no consequence.

if i was being uncharitable i'd also say you are all missing the point, its the cheapest war Merca will have with Russia both in terms of money and lives.

[NamPikToot]

Here in Thailand everything has risen in price by almost 30% since this shit fight happened

ah now we get to the crux of your issue

[NamPikToot]

What's the interest rate and what security did Ukraine put up?

Probably the same as they did for England and Russia when they took advantage of it.

here you go

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3025302/biden-signs-lend-lease-act-to-supply-more-security-assistance-to-ukraine/#:~:text=Biden%20Signs%20Lend-Lease%20Act%20to%20Supply%20More%20Security%20Assi stance%20to%20Ukraine,-May%209%2C%202022&text=Today%2C%20President%20Joe% 20Biden%20signed,-Lease%20Act%20of%202022."

[pickel]

^ Was a lack of heating energy, explosion of petrol prices, the rise in unbelievable inflation rates and the scarcity of basic foods products part of what was due?

Here in Thailand everything has risen in price by almost 30% since this shit fight happened so I can speak for most Thais who are not happy.

Anything you think is the result of this war you can send Putin the bill for. Thai taxpayers have paid didly squat to support Ukraine. And I'm pretty sure you haven't paid taxes in Australia for a long time.

[Loy Toy]

ah now we get to the crux of your issue

I have no personal issue with this issue Mal as I am not personally affected but I know a lot of people who are.

In life you normally try to remain sensible and realistic and I cannot see the benefits of sitting on the fence and still investing trillions of dollars towards a very risky investment, (as pickel has enlightened me about being lend lease).

Fucked if I know who has to reposes' the funds invested from a nation that is decimated.

Maybe we can get the Repo Man to chase up Zelensky to make a payment when due.

[NamPikToot]

In life you normally try to remain sensible and realistic and I cannot see the benefits of sitting on the fence and still investing trillions of dollars towards a very risky investment,

see my post #10755

[OhOh]

This current "as long as they want" scenario is ruining us all,

The 16% citizens predominantly.

Asians, Thais and foreigners in Thailand very little, if at all.

Some FX moves, minimal up and downs, but food, diesel, electricity, .... same, same.

Life still following the seasonal rhythms.

[NamPikToot]

The 16%

ok i'll ask, what is this 16% you keep wittering on about?

[harrybarracuda]

ok i'll ask, what is this 16% you keep wittering on about?

Awwwww he's probably been dying for someone to ask him about some shit he got off another forum.

[Loy Toy]

You silly pollock, the support for Ukraine boosts GDP, yields a huge commercial dividend, increases employment and raises revenues for both government and corporations.

Do you have figures on that commercial dividend and increased employment figures or are you just speaking out of your arse again?

But, in the end, this is not a fiscal issue, it is about crushing Russian expansionism that threatens Europe, the heartland of global democracy and decent government.

Paying more tax is a nugatory matter and of no consequence.

When your see your fellow oikes and blue collared workers see their wages not keep up with inflation there will be consequences.

Guaranteed Sausages!

[OhOh]

The war is winnable for Ukraine

Ukraine is lost. Without the 16% it will collapse.

it's lend-lease

Ukraine is bankrupt now. Good luck when the "lenders" want their money.

t won't dry up.

Shipments getting smaller and further into the future every day.

because it will not happen

I refer you to Afghanistan one again.

Most Americans support helping Ukraine. I think I saw a poll that was 75% in support last month

Here some actual, random, published reports, from the past month:

New poll suggests Americans' support for Ukraine is softening as GOP vows to slow the massive aid effort

John Haltiwanger
Nov 29, 2022, 5:00 PM

"

• A new Morning Consult poll shows Ukraine is not a top foreign policy priority for US voters.
• The Ukraine war ranks sixth among Democrats and 10th among Republicans in foreign priorities.
• This comes as House Republicans signal they'll move to slow US aid to Kyiv."

Poll Suggests Americans' Support for Ukraine Is SofteningJust how far are Americans willing to go to protect Ukraine?

by Tara D. Sonenshine, Opinion Contributor - 11/17/22 6:00 PM ET

"As we have seen with Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans have continuously grown disenchanted with direct military interventions in overseas conflicts. Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern over Americans getting involved in regional crises."

Just how far are Americans willing to go to protect Ukraine? | The Hill

But, in the end, this is not a fiscal issue

Inflation is rampant, except in Thailand, Asia, if you've noticed

[OhOh]

what is this 16% you keep wittering on about?

As previously posted:

The % of the world's citizens in, NATO, 5 Eyes, and the two vassals, Japan and South Korea.

[HermantheGerman]

The guy has a Harvard BA, Wharton MBA, served in the US army, and his (apparently wealthy) family owns the Lendman Group. Not your average commie, or 'putin apologist'. But he still calls the US the 'Empire of Lies'.

Growing Desperation in the Empire of Lies – The Stephen Lendman Blog

Thank you once again for your good morning laughs.
Harvard and then 2x years of U.S. Army

I can see what you two idiots have in common

Here are some more good laughs from Sabangman & Lendman


Muhammar Gaddafi's Death is a Fake - An Interview with Stephen Lendman


Guess who is interviewing him??

[OhOh]

November 30, 2022 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Conflict in Ukraine is doomed to escalate

"The meet-up location of NATO foreign ministers on November 29-30— Bucharest — was where ten years ago, former US President George W. Bush persuaded America’s transatlantic partners that Ukraine and Georgia should one day join their military alliance. The foreign ministers duly “reaffirmed” that decision yesterday and left it at that.

However, their statement on the conflict in Ukraine emphatically stated that the NATO “will never recognise” Russia’s incorporation of four Ukrainian regions and underscored the alliance’s resolve to “continue and further step up political and practical support” to Kiev.

The NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg who is the mouthpiece of Washington, warned that despite Ukraine’s bravery and progress on the ground, Russia retains strong military capabilities and a large number of troops, and the alliance will continue to support Kiev for “as long as it takes … we will not back down.”
Such pronouncements betray the absence of any new thinking although developments on the ground are showing that Washington’s best-laid plans are floundering. And there are also growing signs of disunity on Ukraine issue among the US’ European allies and between the latter and the Biden Administration.

The neocons in the Biden team who are the driving force in the Beltway are still full of passionate intensity. The flicker of hope that the moderate opinion voiced in the famous statement by 30 Democratic lawmakers recently was brusquely snuffed out.

Moscow has drawn appropriate conclusions too, as evident in the Russian Foreign Ministry stance that it makes no sense in the prevailing climate of unremitting hostility from Washington to hold the Bilateral Consultative Commission under the Russia-US New START Treaty, which was originally scheduled to take place in Cairo on November 29 – December 6.

Again, nothing much need be expected out of the French President Emmanuel Macron’s meeting with President Biden at the White House tomorrow. Macron still hopes to be the western leader to accept President Putin’s surrender terms and go down in history books, but in reality his credibility is in shatters in Europe and Atlanticist circles in particular, and even within France.

Europe’s number one priority at this juncture, which is a turning point in the conflict in Ukraine, ought to be its strategic autonomy to act in its own interests. But that requires deep thinking as to what is it that Europe wants to be autonomous about, and secondly, the understanding that deep down, a strategic interest cannot be reduced to security interests.

In our new Hobbesian world, a world of competing economic zones, Europe’s first goal should be to achieve strategic economic autonomy. But is that goal attainable anymore when its energy security that gave underpinning to its prosperity and industrial might has been smashed to smithereens in the depths of the Baltic Sea by unseen hands?

Be that as it may, the unfolding events in Ukraine are sure to create a new dynamic. The visible acceleration of the Russian offensive in Bakhmut in the most recent weeks is dramatically shortening the timeline for the capture of the city from several weeks ahead to the next few days at the most. Similar signs are appearing in Maryinka and Ugledar in the Donbass region, too.

If Bakhmut is the lynchpin of the Ukrainian defence line in Donbass, Maryinka is from where Ukrainian forces are bombarding Donetsk city; and, the capture of Ugledar will enable the Russian forces to move toward Zaporozhye city and conclusively ward off any future challenge to the land bridge to Crimea and to the ports in the Azov Sea.

The common thread here is that the ongoing beefing up of the Russian forces deployed in Donbass after the mobilisation of nearly 400,000 soldiers is beginning to show its first results. For once, Russian forces are outnumbering Ukraine’s and Russian fortifications have been significantly strengthened.

The fall of Bakhmut will signal that the Battle of Donbass, which is the Russian special military operation’s leitmotif, is entering its final phase. The Ukrainian defence line in Donbass is crumbling. Russian control of Donbass is at hand in a conceivable future.

What happens next? The Russian objective may be to push the Ukrainian forces further away from the Donbass region and keep the steppes to the east of Dnieper river as a buffer zone. Indeed, the Dnipropetrovsk oblast is also rich in mineral resources, containing large deposits of iron ore, manganese ore, titanium-zirconium ore, uranium, anthracite coal, natural gas and oil and lignite coal and is the major centre of Ukraine’s steel industry, apart from being a region of intensive grain growing, animal husbandry, and dairy industry. Its loss will be a crippling blow to Kiev. In political terms, the narrative of victory in Kiev — that Ukraine is winning the war and is about to capture Crimea, etc. — is becoming unsustainable for much longer.

Meanwhile, Europe too is struggling with its demons — unable to shake off the idea of a price cap on Russian oil that is sure to boomerang and further aggravate Europe’s energy security; need to step up imports of LNG from Russia still, which is far cheaper than from America; Europe not being in a position to respond to the launch of the highly consequential inflation reduction act in the US or migration of European industry to America; EU’s inability to strengthen the international role of the euro for absorbing some of the world’s surplus savings, and so on.

Therefore, at this defining moment faced with an imminent escalation of the conflict in Ukraine in the coming weeks, the neocons in the US are having their way to step up the arms supplies to Ukraine. The neocons invariably win the turf battles in the Beltway, especially under a weak president. If the Republicans step up the investigations on Biden, his dependency on the neocons will only increase during the period ahead.

The regime-change-in-Russia propaganda is not going to wither away even under the emerging stark realities of the emerging ground situation in Ukraine. The neocons’ aim, as the investigative historian Eric Zuesse put it succinctly, is “to destroy Russia so fast that Russia won’t be able to destroy America in retaliation.” The sheer absurdity of the thought is self-evident to everyone but the neocons. So, they are going to argue now that the cardinal mistake the US made in Ukraine was its failure to put boots on the ground in that country in 2015 itself. "

https://www.indianpunchline.com/conf...d-to-escalate/

[HermantheGerman]

The real tragedy is, it could have been so easily avoided.

Ohh not again

When is Canada gonna join Nato?

[bsnub]

The % of the world's citizens in, NATO, 5 Eyes, and the two vassals, Japan and South Korea.

You really are a laughable clown.

[sabang]

.... The trouble with much of what passes for informed analysis on the current state of affairs in Ukraine is that it is clouded by what the Biden administration and its eager servants in the media wish to be true, rather than by what is actually true. That, as a recent Quincy Institute panel on the Global South demonstrated, enormous swathes of the world outside of Europe and the Anglophone North Atlantic do not share the NATO-centric view of Russian aggression seems rarely, if ever, taken into account by Washington’s foreign policy “Blob.” Yet, as the journalist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann once observed, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”Venturing into this contentious territory are three authors who, as Lippmann once did, dissent from the new Cold War orthodoxy. Each of the three books under review helps to illuminate different aspects of the current war and the concomitant crisis in relations between Russia and the West.

A too often overlooked (or ignored) cause of the cycle of endless tragedy which characterizes Ukraine’s post-Cold War trajectory is Ukrainian nationalism. It didn’t have to be this way. At the end of the first Cold War, President George H.W. Bush traveled to Kiev in 1991 and warned that the U.S. would:

…not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

But Bush, who lost his bid for reelection the following year, ended up being ignored. And in the intervening three decades, Ukraine’s domestic politics have been trapped in a seemingly endless and tragic cycle of revolution and recrimination.

In The Tragedy of Ukraine, What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (De Gruyter, 2023), scholar Nicolai N. Petro posits that the cycle owes itself to the “lack of meaningful dialogue between Galicia and Donbass, the cultural heartlands of Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking Ukraine” which “runs through Ukrainian history like a red skein.”

As Petro sees it, “Such a dialog will be possible only if Russophone Ukrainians are embraced as true Ukrainians and not treated as potential traitors within their own country. Ukraine’s ability to break the cycle of tragedy will ultimately depend on this.”

... And so, if Petro provides us with a lens from antiquity with which to view the Ukraine crisis, Hall Gardner’s Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy (Foundation Perspective and Innovation, 2022), provides us with a valuable critique from present-day Europe. Gardner, a professor of international relations at the American University of Paris, believes that the Biden administration’s policy of trying to simultaneously “cooperate” and “constrain” peer rivals, notably Russia and China (a policy that Gardner calls “constrainment”), is misguided. As he points out, “the effort to find common interests with rival states is taking place in a context in which those ‘intersecting interests’ are essentially American-defined priorities and not necessarily major priority for Russia, China or for other rivals and allies.”

The way Gardner sees it, the best way forward for the West is through an equitable partnership between Europe and the United States which must replace Washington’s rule by diktat. Whether the war in Ukraine will hasten or delay such a development is anyone’s guess. But Gardner’s offering is timely given the rift that has opened up between the Biden Administration and its European allies in recent weeks. “The fact is,” an anonymous senior European official told Politico last week, “if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.”

Yet given the chaos and, yes, tragedy now engulfing Ukraine, policymakers across the West might do well to reflect on how we got to this point in the first place. In How The West Brought War To Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022), Dr. Benjamin Abelow, a nuclear arms activist and graduate of Yale Medical School, gives a concise, thorough chronology of U.S. policy toward Russia over the past 30 years.

According to Abelow, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, if seen through the prism of our own demands for a hemispheric sphere of influence via the Monroe Doctrine, is not necessarily the expression of “unbridled expansionism” on the part of “a malevolent Russian leader.” It is instead “a violent and destructive reaction to misguided Western policies.” Abelow succeeds in prompting the reader to question the regnant Western narrative of the conflict and, in so doing, helps point the way towards what a negotiated settlement might look like.

FULL- Writing the Ukraine War history, as it happens - Responsible Statecraft


Good article, albeit not for the boneheads.

[David48atTD]

^ I see the author as 'Responsible Statecraft' and know I don't need to read that crap, based on their previous publications/musings

Ukraine is bankrupt now. Good luck when the "lenders" want their money.

Inflation is rampant, except in Thailand, Asia, if you've noticed

Well, when Ukraine rid the Crimea of the Russian invaders they will recapture their oil and gas rights stolen by Russia.

Should produce some decent coin.

As for Inflation ... Japan is 3.6%, but, in general, I agree, it's rampant.
Is it due to the War?
Partly, but more to due with the money the Central Banks have pumped into their nations economies.

IMHO

[bsnub]

I see the author as 'Responsible Statecraft' and know I don't need to read that crap, based on their previous publications/musings

Crap is right.

[sabang]

^ & ^^

James W. Carden is Washington columnist for Asia Times and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.

I guess you two don't like reading very much, but I certainly would not use that fact to impugn the average TD reader.

[David48atTD]

^ & ^^

I guess you two don't like reading very much, but I certainly would not use that fact to impugn the average TD reader.

Link to your quoted text?