Ukraine war mega thread

[harrybarracuda]

Good to hear TD’s bellend has an insight into the mind of Putin, prefixed with “truth” so it must be fact.

Did Sleepy Joe even know where he was?

Ooh look, a trumpanzee.

[sabang]

^^ So why didn't scary Joe just fly into Kiev International Airport on AF1?

because he's fucking scared innit.

[Iceman123]

Ooh look, a trumpanzee.

Only in your binary world Harry. Did you never consider the last and current US presidents may both have been useless.

[harrybarracuda]

Only in your binary world Harry. Did you never consider the last and current US presidents may both have been useless.

Only a fuckwit would use one of baldy orange cunto's stupid nicknames and then try and claim he's not a trumpanzee.

Try not to be such a douche.

[harrybarracuda]

^^ So why didn't scary Joe just fly into Kiev International Airport on AF1?

Oh FFS is that the best you can come up with?

[sabang]

At least Joe serves to remind the world that maybe Trump wasn't that bad after all. I say that grudgingly.

[baldrick]

But the sacred texts are also being questioned.

religious extremism has no place in the modern world

[OhOh]

[panama hat]

Biden’s visit to kiev was coordinated with moscow

“We did notify the Russians

So, now you're too thick to understand basic English

[bsnub]

If that’s true, why did he have to take a secretive ten hour train ride and not come in flying the flag on Air Force 1?

Why do all you vatnik retards have to constantly prove your stupidity? They told the ruzzians that they were coming and then took a train ride. Seems to me that any "thinking" person would rationalize that they made themselves into a big target ripe for the taking. They dared the ruzzians to do something, and there was no response. The mighty ruzzian air farce wanted nothing to do with all the F-22s and F-35s that the US was flying over Ukraine the entire time Biden was in country.

You fucking bozo's never cease to amaze with your propagandized stupidity.

[sabang]

The Grand Illusions of the leaders of Western Democracies are crashing to defeat in Ukraine.

La Grande Illusion was the 1937 Renoir film that showed the tragic mistakes of the aristocrats of the European empires in World War I. In turn, it referred to a 1910 British tract, The Great Illusion that claimed war was irrational and impossible in civilised Europe because it went against the interests of the British Imperial Liberal Rules Based Order.

The looming defeat of Ukraine, NATO and the USA by Russia is exposing similar tragic mistakes and grand illusions.

But how can I say ‘looming defeat’ in Ukraine? Any reader of the mainstream news in Australia would scoff at this judgement as we approach the anniversary of the invasion. But I have been commenting on this war on The Burning Archive podcast since before the February 2022 conflict.

Russia is clearly winning the war. It is defeating not only Ukraine, but NATO and the USA. It is winning the war militarily. It has overwhelming artillery dominance and is about to take Bakhmut. Russia has withstood the economic war, the ‘sanctions from hell’ that would ‘turn the rouble into rubble’.’ It exposed the American illusion that Russia is a ‘gas station pretending to be a country’. Russia and its strategic partner China are winning diplomatically. Putin has defied the Western illusion that Joe Biden could assemble a WWII-style ‘United Nations of Democracies’ to isolate Russia. The world’s largest democracy, India, firmly and politely said, ‘No, the world is more complicated and multipolar than that.’

Even in the information war, the West has advanced ahead of its supply lines. Despite apparent American dominance and unprecedented restrictions on the ‘open society’ of the West, such as the removal of many Russian media channels, Russia is slowly turning the West’s information war blitzkrieg to its advantage. It simply exposes the truth.

Ukraine is no democracy. Ukraine really does have a problem with extreme ethno-nationalist ideologies. Ukraine is press-ganging its citizens to die quickly in Donbass in order to prop up American news coverage of the war. Ukraine really has shelled and killed thousands of civilians since 2014. America, as Seymour Hersh reported and the ABC has yet to report, blew up the Nordstream pipelines. And America did so, according to Hersh’s sources, in a covert operation that bypassed Congress and harmed its own NATO ally. Thanks to the independent media, the truth will survive the blast.

Yet the public perception is Ukraine is winning, and can do no wrong. We must ‘stand with’ Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’. Recently, the Australian Parliament staged a photo of unity of MP’s standing with the Ukrainian flag. The public perception is fed with constant propaganda, such as the Bear Grills ‘interview’ with Zelensky. When the really bad news rolls in, after the fall of Bakhmut and the grinding offensive of the Russian army, the shock to public opinion may be as consequential for world order as the failures of World War I, or indeed the falls of both Singapore and Kabul.

Perhaps the American and allied leaderships believed their own propaganda that they could win any war when they provoked this war by trying to take Russia’s Queen on Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard. But at least now some ‘realists’ are speaking up, if covertly in the corridors of Washington. The Rand Corporation paper on ‘Avoiding a Long War’ warns that inflated optimism about success in the war will extend the war, and that the war is not in the interests of the USA. It politely rebukes Secretary of State Blinken as ‘too narrowly focused on one dimension of the war’s trajectory.’

Overconfidence about success in war provokes war, makes for long wars, and springs from the grand illusions of national elites. Geoffrey Blainey made the point in 1973 in Causes of War, and the Rand Corporation report and the ‘realist’ faction in America cite him today.

Of course, many critics (including my modest podcast) have exposed these illusions since February 2022. Jeffrey Sachs. John Mearsheimer. Paul Keating. Tony Kevin. Geoffrey Roberts. Seymour Hersh. Many, many more who are shamefully attacked as ‘Russian propagandists’.

Truth will disperse the illusion. It may take weeks. It may take months or years. But, at some stage, there will be a reckoning. The end of World War I was not good for the deluded European imperial elites. The end of the war in Ukraine will not be good for the imperial American elites. They have spent too long spinning the virtual realities of manipulated news – ‘America makes its own reality’ – to deal with the realities of a changed multipolar world.

They have been exposed as incompetent in waging war with a peer, in fielding diplomacy with independent nations, in framing economies that serve people not bubbles, and, finally, in telling their own people the honest truth. Tragically, the grand illusions of this leadership elite will outlive the conscripted soldiers of Ukraine, that dispensable nation that betrayed itself in search of American glory.

The West’s grand Illusions in Ukraine - Pearls and Irritations

[Norton]

Putin's Speech to Russian Parliament

I have heard some doozer's in my time but this tops them all ��

[bsnub]

I say that grudgingly.

That's because you are a fucking moron.

[bsnub]

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, ordered the invasion of Ukraine, unleashing the full force of his military on an unthreatening neighbor, and the full force of his propagandists on his own population. He had little doubt about his prospects. For years, he had been regarded in the world press as a singularly cunning strategist; at the same time, he methodically crushed civil society in his country and sidelined any dissenting voices in the Kremlin.So who was going to stop him on the road to Kyiv? Hadn’t Donald Trump, during his Presidency, exposed and deepened the fissures in the NATO alliance? Under Joe Biden, the United States seemed finished with foreign adventures—humiliated by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and distracted by its internal divisions. And what of Ukraine itself? It was a pseudo-nation, hopelessly corrupt and led by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former sitcom actor with an approval rating south of thirty per cent. Putin’s serene presumption was that, within a week, his forces would overrun Kyiv, arrest Zelensky and his advisers, and install a cast of collaborators. Putin was counting on historians to celebrate his rightful restoration of Imperial Russia.

A year later, the ramifications of his delusions are enormous and bloody. We do not know the precise number of dead and wounded, though it is certainly more than a quarter of a million. Unmoved by the losses on his own side, much less on Ukraine’s, Putin has sent his minions to the provinces to scoop up more human material for the meat grinder of his war. And what of his strategic mastery? For years, the Kremlin leadership advertised the modernization of its post-Soviet military, the sophistication of its “asymmetric” fighting doctrine. But every credible analyst of the invasion has been stunned by the scale of Putin’s folly—the miserable planning and poor intelligence, the lack of training and logistics, the lawlessness of his officer corps. His strategy, it turned out, was of the most primitive and criminal variety: the deliberate targeting of civilian structures—schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, power plants, bridges. In Bucha, Kherson, Izyum, and elsewhere, Russian forces and mercenaries have carried out acts of torture, which have been well documented by journalists and human-rights organizations.

In a year’s time, what has Putin achieved? To set the stage for this full-scale invasion—it should be recalled that the first act of aggression came in 2014, when Russian soldiers took Crimea and infiltrated the Donbas––he issued a long, historically perverse manifesto that asserted what he had been telling foreign leaders for years: that there is no such thing as Ukrainian nationhood. But by invading Ukraine, and doing so with such brutality, he has unified Ukrainians in their hatred of Russia and in their resolve to create a future as a free, independent, and European nation.

Russian propagandists (much like the propagandists of the G.O.P.) refer to President Biden as a doddering hack, incapable of making it through a coherent sentence, let alone putting up an effective resistance to the Russian armed forces. Yet, in the past year, Biden has conducted a foreign policy of competence and moral clarity, skillfully balancing strength, diplomacy, and restraint. After having publicly predicted Putin’s intention to invade, Biden won congressional support to send nearly thirty billion dollars in assistance to Ukraine, supplying its armed forces with crucial air-defense systems, mobile multiple-rocket launchers, and, most recently, M1 Abrams tanks. Biden has recognized and advertised the immense stakes of the conflict, but he has taken pains not to provoke a direct conflict with Russia. The Europeans have acted with similar determination. The opposition in Congress to supporting the Ukrainian cause has so far been limited mainly to the right wing of the Republican Party, with an assist from its attendant media outlets.

Putin’s failure extends well beyond the battlefield. He has isolated Russia from much of the world, undermining its reputation, its economy, and its prospects. Hundreds of thousands of Russians—often the best and the brightest in tech, academia, and the arts—have left the country. With Putin’s most compelling political opponent, Alexey Navalny, languishing in a prison camp, and independent media outlets shuttered, it may seem that Putin has secured the bovine indifference of all his subjects. And yet there are signs of disaffection: protests, individual acts of defiance reported on Telegram and other social media. One of the top-selling books of the past year in Russia has been George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Not long after the invasion, police in the city of Ivanovo arrested two people who were handing out free copies on the street. Sales are so high, and the implications so obvious, that Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the foreign ministry, felt compelled to reject the notion that the novel resembles Putin’s rule in any way. “In school, we were drilled that Orwell was describing the horrors of totalitarianism,” she said. “This is one of those global fakes.” Instead, the novel “depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end.”

Although the anniversary of Putin’s invasion is a moment to pay solemn tribute to the dead and to celebrate the astonishing resilience of Ukraine, it cannot be one of heedless overconfidence. This is a war that could go on for a very long time. As Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military, writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “The Russian armed forces are not wholly incompetent or incapable of learning.” Her article deftly anatomizes Russia’s failures, but also goes into alarming depth about how the military leadership can call on hundreds of thousands of recruits, and better exploit the resources of a vast country to inflict greater pain on Ukraine. Crucially, Putin seems not to care about casualties in his ranks. Just recently, hundreds of his soldiers were, according to a leading Russian officer, killed “like turkeys at a shooting range” in the town of Vuhledar, in eastern Ukraine. Putin responded laconically to the debacle. His 155th Marine Brigade, he said, was “performing as it should.”

One of the many gifts that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have provided in the past year is the example of their valor and their sanity. In the most heroic terms, they have drawn the line against delusion. Putin told Ukraine that it is not a nation. Ukraine has given its response. As Orwell wrote in his novel, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...putin-achieved

[sabang]

Assiduously working to get every thread he participates in Doghoused, that's our snubski. Perpetually triggered.
Visit Thailand at least once in your life son. Might each you to relax and chill a bit. You might get laid too.

[sabang]

^^ Opinion peace, clearly. What is it doing here?

[bsnub]

The looming defeat of Ukraine, NATO and the USA by Russia is exposing similar tragic mistakes and grand illusions.

Fitting that that steaming turd of BS is in the doghouse.

[sabang]

It's in the Megathread because it is an Opinion piece, not News. Which is where the Opinion piece you so egregiously posted in the News thread will be transferred, if there is a remaining ounce of fair Moderation in this place.

[sabang]

What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

By Jeffrey Sachs
Feb 20, 2023


The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight.

The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding Nato and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $2-trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralysing the banking system.

The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand Nato to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for Nato countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for vice pesident Biden in 2014.

The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The second is that Nato enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into Nato.

The US repeatedly asserts that Nato is a defensive alliance. Yet Nato bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. Nato forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept Nato in Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of Nato; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.

The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over Nato enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

Since then, the war has escalated. According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-Nato country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.

Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.

Jeffrey Sachs


+ posts

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, and most recently, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

https://johnmenadue.com/what-ukraine...ut-proxy-wars/

[sabang]

Mankind's psyche described actually, if we are to believe the author.

[panama hat]

I have heard some doozer's in my time but this tops them all ��

Amazing, isn't it. Particularly idiotic:

We did everything possible to solve the problem by peaceful means. We were patiently negotiating, but a completely different scenario was being prepared behind our backs.”

“The countries of the West were stalling for time, were engaged in chicanery, encouraged neo-Nazis to commit terrorist actions in Donbass. <…> We also remember the efforts of the Kiev regime to obtain nuclear weapons. The U.S. and NATO accelerated the deployment of military bases, secret biolaboratories, preparing enslaved Ukraine for a big war.”

Didn't Ukraine hand back nuclear weapons?

[Norton]

if there is a remaining ounce of fair Moderation in this place.

They would dump it all into a single thread cuz frankly it doesn't matter. Why? Because other than us wee TD bunch are going to rush to a Thai based forum to get the latest news and opinion on a war in the Ukraine.

[bsnub]

Which is where the Opinion piece you so egregiously posted in the News thread will be transferred

Only after you snivelled to the mods, you crybaby.

[sabang]

Not exactly a tall order- News thread is for News.

[panama hat]

Not exactly a tall order- News thread is for News.

That's why your shit ends up here