Putin’s endgame
As soon as it became clear that the Ukraine war wasn’t going to end with a very quick Ukraine capitulation and Russian victory, I started to wonder how it was going to end. It seemed to me early on that without a face-saving out option, Putin was stuck in the need to continue and perhaps even to escalate to a nuclear option (a real nuclear option, not the metaphoric one in our Senate).
And in my opinion those who suggest Zelenskyy and Ukraine never should have fought for their autonomy in the first place have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty. But their fighting does mean that Putin might feel shamed by how the Russians are doing, and that could be dangerous for the world.
I agree with this quote from George Friedman:
This means that Putin’s war plan is shattered. The resistance has been effective and his troops need a relief he cannot provide. Putin will feint in other directions – perhaps in the Baltics or Moldova – but he lacks the force to fight on another front. He can’t sustain this war easily, especially in the face of NATO soldiers who have so far stayed out of the fray.
Even so, I cannot predict what a leader will do in the end. But for now, it’s clear to me that Putin will cling to power and blame everyone around him. But every day the war goes on, Putin gets weaker. Ukraine should not be able to resist, NATO should not be united, American economic warfare should not be so powerful. Putin is growing more desperate. He has mumbled about nuclear weapons, the sign of utmost desperation. But he knows he and anyone he may love will die in a nuclear exchange. Even if he is prepared to commit suicide rather than capitulate, he knows that the order to launch must go through several hands, and each of those hands knows that the counterstrike will kill their loved ones. Therein lies the weakness of nuclear war: Retaliating is one thing, initiating another. Putin trusts few people, and he doesn’t know how reliable anyone would be in this situation – nor what the Americans might do if they saw preparation for a Russian launch.
If Putin gives up his position, he is compromised, and perhaps lost. The buzzards are circling. So he must continue to fight until he is forced out and someone else not responsible for the disaster takes over and blames it all on Putin. I think that this can’t end until Putin is pulled from the game.
Obviously, I am moving here away from geopolitical analysis into the political. The former tries to minimize individual influence while the latter emphasizes it. That gives my forecast an inevitable imprecision. But given the situation on the ground, and given Russian internal dynamics, it does seem that all the forces coming to bear on Putin dictate a certain direction. The war will end, but the war is evolving in a way that creates unique pressures on the Russian political system, and, because of the nature of the system, that pressure pivots on Putin.
This is not the only outcome. Ukraine might collapse. Russia might collapse. The Russian army may devise a strategy to win the war. A settlement that is respected might be reached. All of these are possible, but I don’t see much movement in any of these directions. A political end is what I would bet on, with the Russians taking the short end of the stick. I wouldn’t have thought this on the first day of the war, but I think this is likely the shape of the last day.
This analysis from Donald Sensing is somewhat similar:
These massacres and casualty levels (on both sides) now mean that a negotiated peace is off the table. For Putin to make such an agreement would be seen by the senior military and civilian Russian leadership as an admission of Putin’s personal failure. And Putin would have to realize that making such a peace would be professionally and possibly personally lethal for him. Russians know good and well that the Czar/General Secretary/President is never the one who fails the country, ever. If Putin accepted a negotiated peace, everyone else within the senior reaches of government and the military would know that the scapegoating purges would come quickly. And Putin knows that they would know that. Who would act decisively first – Putin and his inner, purge-immune circle, or the intended victims?
As for Zelensky, to negotiate a peace with invaders who have mass murdered his people on repeated occasions would also be an admission of failure. Unlike Russia, he would likely remain in office until the end of his term, and even if he was forced out, his exit would have the façade not of disgrace, but of an exhausted hero of world significance, to whom the nation owes its everlasting gratitude.
Until a point, that is, And that point is if the war simply drags on. Putin cannot relent. Ukraine now must win. Before now, all Ukraine had to do was not lose, but that is no longer good enough. Now it must eject Russia from the country, and not slowly. But Putin cannot allow his army to be so defeated.
No one had any real hope for the negotiations occasionally held in Belarus, anyway. After the Bucha massacre, “Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Ukraine’s peace negotiators and aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the tone of peace talks had forever changed because of Bucha…”…
The Ukraine war has now transitioned into a proxy war between Russia and the Euro-American alliance. Ukraine is tragically caught in the middle. The very difficult and very uncertain task before Europe and the United States now is to manage the war to keep it inside Ukraine. (But remember the caution attributed to Bismarck that starting a war is like entering a dark room, blindfolded, to look for a black cat that is not even there.)
Sensing thinks that with the atrocities in Bucha and the mass attack at the Kramatorsk train station, the Ukraine war “has transitioned to a new, much larger stage.” I don’t see this as a transition. As I said, from the start I didn’t see any way that negotiations were possible or that surrender by either side was possible unless one side scored an unequivocal victory. That’s one of the frightening things about this war: that a nation with enormous numbers of nuclear arms is led by a ruthless and brutal man who cannot countenance a military defeat and who has also tried very hard to protect himself from those who would either do him in or unseat him in a coup.
“And in my opinion those who suggest Zelenskyy and Ukraine never should have fought for their autonomy in the first place have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty.” neo
Who here has ever suggested that Ukraine should not have fought for their autonomy?
If only those Ukrainians had realized they were just dupes of the WEF / Davos / NATO and ousted the puppets of the WEF / Davos / NATO in the Ukrainuan government this little misunderstanding would have never occurred. And if they had liquidated those Nazi elements in Ukraine Vlad would not have had to do it himself. Those foolish, weak, and unprincipled Ukrainians! Damn, RT and Pravda have hacked my phone. (sarc) 🙂
In my opinion, this is a proxy war between Russia and the United States, or at least the Biden regime. Russia has been obsessed with NATO since Putin became the leader. The US has been pushing NATO on Ukraine for years. Some was because of corruption. US politicians like Biden and Romney have been using Ukraine as an ATM. The “Maiden” revolution was organized by Obama’s CIA along with Nuland and other Obama staffers. Putin did nothing while Trump kept our economy roaring and oil was at $30 a barrel. Biden’s agenda opened the door wide.
The incredible danger we are in, with a senile president and a staff that looks like a bunch of teenagers, is overwhelming.
Geoffrey Britain:
I did not say I was referring to people here, and I was not. I was certainly not referring to you, either. I’m referring mostly to people on the news that I’ve heard and some pundits I’ve read.
Clear-eyed analyses I find hard to disagree with. Scary and uncharted times, not good that the office of the US presidency is temporarily vacant. Not unoccupied, I said vacant. Like a blank stare.
Some analysis I’ve seen is now that Russia has given up on Kiev, they are going regroup to concentrate on the Dombass region, Black Sea ports and the natural gas field in the eastern sector.
It’s the west’s fault for pushing NATO, on all of Eastern Europe. NATO, notorious for being an armed force in theory, less in being, due to chronic unserious comittment since the USSR fell. Well now NATO and Europe see that Vlad is a dangerous neighbor. Good move Vlad.
As regards Vlad and the Brandon junta; have you noticed that Roosia looks to make billions from the Brandon – Iran nuke agreement (sanctions don’t apply). That Brandon is corrupt and incompetent doesn’t help dissuading Vlad’s misbehaviour.
neo,
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. I haven’t read or heard of anyone advancing the notion that Ukrainans haven’t a right to resist an invasion of thier country but I agree that to be incompatible with claiming to support liberty.
physicsguy:
I’d seen that too. Supposedly Ukraine has some significant natural gas fields in the east. Can’t have other suppliers of natural gas to Europe, wouldn’t be prudent (or, be Putin).
Repost:
https://ricochet.com/1214468/finnish-intelligence-officer-explains-the-russian-mindset/
FWIW,
“Lies for War”
“If news organizations are eagerly promoting lies about a war, then what can the rest of us believe? What can we know is true?” https://politicrossing.com/lies-for-war/
“Facing Unpleasant Facts: What You aren’t Supposed To Say about the War In Ukraine”
“The “Revolution of Dignity” Was a US-Backed Coup”
“There Is a Significant Neo-Nazi Problem in Ukraine”
“The Russians Always Objected to NATO Expansion into Ukraine”
“Biden Could Have Prevented the War”
https://creativedestructionmedia.com/analysis/2022/03/19/facing-unpleasant-facts-what-you-arent-supposed-to-say-about-the-war-in-ukraine/
“Time Lapse Map Of Ukraine Invasion Shows Russia Really After Donbass And Land Bridge To Crimea”
https://tsarizm.com/news/eastern-europe/2022/04/08/time-lapse-map-of-ukraine-invasion-shows-russia-really-after-donbass-and-land-bridge-to-crimea/
“Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World”, US Department of State, 1961.
“the document envisages a world in which a “UN Peace Force” would achieve military ascendancy over all formerly sovereign countries, private ownership of weapons would be prohibited, and the UN would have the power to compel all countries to submit to its rule.”
The above is a formula for global tyranny.
“…This program, which would certainly bring about the peace and tranquility of global despotism, has never been renounced or modified by American and international foreign-policy elites”
[my emphasis]
The Russians might take a page out of the U.S. WW2 playbook:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan#Firebombing_attacks
Putin in Ukraine appears to be a case of flies conquering the flypaper, as John Steinbeck said.
“Appears”. Because everything I’ve been reading about what Putin was trying to accomplish when, and how it hasn’t been working how he planned it, has come from Western sources.
But let’s assume it’s true. If it is, he’s stuck in Ukraine for a long time while his European neighbors rearm and look for new sources of energy. He’s trashed his own military and shown himself to be a paper tiger. While he can certainly bluster about nukes and he can certainly keep anyone from intervening in Ukraine, you can’t conquer people with threats alone.
At some point his bluff will be called. And either he folds, or doesn’t–but then how well do his nukes even work? (We all know they have a shelf life, right, and need lots of maintenance, and the ones from the 80s and 90s might not be in very good condition?)
Honestly I think that while it will get very bad for Ukraine, I don’t think the rest of the world has that much to fear from Putin.
Well it looks like Vlad, ex-KGB, is about as competent as some in our “intelligence” community. He may have effectively brought Ukraine into NATO. As if a pretext was the issue to begin with, it now is a reality?
Smooth move Vlad:
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/04/09/ukraine-has-joined-nato-whether-russia-likes-it-or-not-and-more-are-yet-to-follow-n547867
Citing a 1961 State Dept. document, even in bold, is weak IMO.
If you never have read Diplomad 2.0 today would be a good start
https://thediplomad.blogspot.com/
I read Diplomad every day, right after Neo!
Barry Meislin, that lecture (as translated) by the Finnish Intelligence Officer is very interesting.
@Geoffrey Britain
Maybe not in as many words, but that’s why context and the ability to read between the lines helps.
If someone tries to claim that Ukraine fielding an offer to EVENTUALLY join NATO is not merely a “provocation” but a violation of the supposedly-binding Astana Agreement (something that in fact flatly states such a thing is an “inherent right” of a sovereign nation – and this by definition a part of its autonomy).
If someone claims that the removal of a corrupt and authoritarian President by a Rada largely dominated by his party and its assorted coalitions due to incapacity (over contempt towards his own Rada and constitutional duty to answer before it) is a “coup”…
If one waxes poetic about how we are supposed to be considerate of Russia’s security while paying short shrift to the security of nations bordering Russia…
If one rhetorically downplays the rights of Ukraine to maintain its rights in the Donbas by arms by trying to claim that said region would unquestionably vote to secede but that Ukraine was continuing to fight because of the Donbas having its “only part” (the port was in reality on the other side of the country)..
Then yes, the evidence starts to build that one really does not advocate for Ukraine fighting for its autonomy.
Now let’s go through the sources:
This is relatively inoffensive as far as it goes, but it’s still weaksauce because it jumps to assert lying. Which is something I find it hard to be too bothered with given Biden and his junta, but the fact remains is that intelligence is not just about what you know, but how you know what you know and how you can provide it.
There’s a pretty jarring absence of that here.
You know it’s fucking bad when the lying starts inside of the first sentence, with the tried and true horse hit about being “lied into war in Iraq in 2003” in spite of every single one of the broad accusations made on the Authorization of the Use of Force being proven correct, including the WMD.
Firstly: as someone who has studied coups such as the Ten Tragic Days in Mexico and the Communist Coup in Czechoslovakia, I can personally confirm that this is full of crap.
Secondly: blathering about Muh Nuland phone call does not explain jackshit about how Yanukovych was called to account for the Rada and why he chose to go on the lam as a result, leading to his removal from office by the – to use terms routinely used to refer to Yanukovych and aspiring dictators like Allende- “Democratically and duly elected” Verkovna Rada.
It’s also worth noting how many statements in the Nuland phone call simply did not pan out.
And here we get to one of the memes I find most annoying but which is so prevalent.
Because Akshually, Ukraine does not really have a “significant Neo-Nazi problem.” Indeed, Ukraine has REMARKABLY little in the way of Neo-Nazis compared to almost any nation you could name, for reasons I will get to shortly.
Does this go against all the hot takes you’ve heard from left, right, and center, pro-Putin, pro-Zelenskyy, or neutral, West and East, by liars and truth tellers alike? Well there’s a reason for that
What Ukraine DOES have is a significant Neo-FASCIST Problem.
Now that might sound like I contradicted what I just wrote above, IF you do not understand the history. Or the concept of “Anti-Nazi Fascists.”
Because as much as pop culture and people who throw the term out think, Fascism did not originate with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. This sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many people forget it, and how many more know it on some level but instinctively assume Fascism was one big hug fest that got all together around Hitler.
That wasn’t true. And in hindsight it really shouldn’t be surprising that adherents of an ideology obsessed with national collectives and the struggle for existence would clash if their interests butted heads.
No surprise that that was the case here. The “Austrofascists” of the Christian Social(ist) Party were fiercely independent and dedicated to their idea of an independent totalitarian, Austrian dystopia aligned with Mussolini’s Italy. They were also Hitler’s targets for his first foreign annexation, culminating in an attempted coup in 1934 that murdered Austria’s dictator but fizzled out, following by multiple years of a low level terrorist bombings before Mussolini’s withdrawal of protection led to the Anschluss.
Likewise, Poland (itself an authoritarian and prejudicial ethnonationalist dictatorship) had its own domestic fascists who argued that the “Sanitation” regime was not hardcore ENOUGH (and other issues like the regime being founded by the old rival of their own spiritual liege Dmowski). However when the Nazis and Soviets invaded to carve up the country the Nazis intended to erase Poland and the Polish people from existence and that did not change because of some kind of mythical Fascist Unity. Which is why most of Poland’s Fascists decided to form their own resistance organization separate from the Polish government’s Home Army. It was called the Military Organization Lizard Union, which went on to fight both the Nazis and Soviets until it was finally crushed.
Now to their discredit, Ukrainian Fascists- represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists/OUN and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army:UPA- by and large were not anti-Nazi by CHOiCE. While the organization was split among different leaders like Stephan Bandera and Andriy Melnyk in terms of who they admired more (Mussolini for Melnyk, Hitler for Bandera) and other issues like patronage, all agreed that Hitler was preferable to either Poland or the Soviets. Which is why they reached out and cooperated rather extensively with the Nazis through the 1930s, and indeed helped prepare the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941 by offering local knowledge, infiltrators, and guides. And when it happened, Bandera took control over the now-conquered city of Lviv/Lwow and declared the independence of a Fascist Ukrainian State in alliance with the Nazis.
The problem is that the Nazis had no interest in the independence of a Ukrainian State, no matter how Fascist, anti-Communist, or anti-Jewish it might be. They wanted Ukraine to be a thoroughly crushed slave plantation providing settlement for Germans and food back to the Reich. Hence the future overseer of RK Ukraine, Erich Koch, making the statement that “If I meet a Ukrainian worthy of being seated at my table, I must have him shot.”
So the Nazis quickly moved to arrest Bandera and as much of his leadership as possible before issuing orders to forcibly disband the OUN/UPA organizations. This hurt the organizations badly but did not destroy them, and indeed pushed them to fight both the Nazis and Soviets, as well as the Polish Home Army.
The Nazi policy towards their former tools was summarized handily by this thing admitted into evidence at Nurnburg: “All active participants in the Bandera movement must be immediately arrested and liquidated quietly after thorough questioning…”
But the OUN/UPA proved fanatically hard to eliminate, and continued fighting throughout the war and for nearly a decade after it, committing bone chilling atrocities, expanded to try and get more members (including a few Jews in spite of the organization’s previously violent track record on Jews, to the point where in the order demanding a stop to attacks on Jews it was rationalizes that there were so few of them left it was not an issue)and having its fair share of defeats and victories before the Soviet NKVD and other Combloc intelligence services crushed it.
All of the Ukrainian bad organizations you’ve heard of- Right Sector, Svoboda, Azov, etc- claim to be heirs of Bandera and the UPA/OUN. And they HAVE NEVER forgiven Hitler or his modern day successors for betraying their senpai back in 1941 and trying to destroy their entire nation, hence why they actually quarrel quite a lot with Neo-Nazis.
Now, don’t get me wrong. These are still AWFUL, EVIL people supporting an awful, evil ideology, guilty of plenty of atrocities in their own right. And as I said before, their resistance to the Nazis was motivated not due to some opposition to collaborating with them, but because Hitler backstabbed them.
But it does mean it’s really lazy and inaccurate to refer to them as “Neo-Nazis.” Above all, it hurts understanding of the nature of these beasts and how to counter them.
Now, if you ACTUALLY want an example of a country with a rampant Neo-Nazi problem, look next door.
A lot of people knew that Russia has a serious Neo-Nazi problem, and indeed that Putin’s pet “PMC” attack dog the Wagner Group is chock full of them and run by Utkin, a goon with SS lightning bolts tattooed to their skin. But what I legitimately did not know is that the supposedly moderate Medvedev who is the closest think Putin has to a second in command is ALSO a Neo-Nazi. Indeed, I only learned that rather recently from a friend.
Time stamped for your convenience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4uMLG1JWMM&t=271s
(No, I do NOT in fact know why Neo-Nazism is so much more popular in Russia than it is in Ukraine in spite of the Nazis actually viewing Botha s subhuman and wishing to see them enslaved or wiped out.)
So yes, Azov etc al. Are bad bad people and there are far more Neo-Fascists in Ukraine than anybody should be comfortable with, and their objections to Nazism and Neo-Nazism are more of an issue with who is crushing who and national identity than anything we’d identify as a moral consideration. But that doesn’t make them Neo-Nazis like Utkin and Medvedev are.
I’ve already beaten the tar out of this thing a hundred ways to Sunday on previous threads so I will not reiterate it here. If the Russians had “always objected to NATO Expansion into Ukraine” then they should not have signed the Astana Agreement. That’s what we call a mixed message.
Moreover, objecting to something does not justify a war.
I despise having to defend Biden and his puppeteers even tangentially, but the fact that this article claims he could have stopped it even in January 2022 shows the dishonesty and falseness of this claim. The war started in 2014, this was just an escalation. And in any case, who could have stopped it is less important than who could have started it.
There is only one man who could have started it, and their name is Vladimir Putin. Biden and the left’s conduct has been vile and contemptible, such as the “limited incursion” quote, but that does not transfer responsibility any more than Acheson’s slip of the tongue caused the Korean War (in no small part because war was already ongoing prior to the quote in the form of low level communist infiltration.)
This is daft on multiple levels, first of which being that securing a land bridge between the occupied Donbas and Crimea would be a natural step for not only a victorious peace/ceasefire but also military operations such as flanking the Dnieper line to make another strike at Kyiv.
Moreover, the fact that the Kremlin felt comfortable trying to secure staging grounds for what was presumably a decapitation strike on Kyiv and iterating war aims such as the “Denazificarion” and “Demilitarization” of Ukraine- heavily devastating that autonomy and independence- indicates that the Kremlin’s ambitions were at least stated to be far more reaching.
And the last document is functionally irrelevant for the subject under discussion, particularly the proximate causes and conduct of the war.
Skip,
Thank you for bringing my attention to The Diplomad 2.0. I was unaware of his blog.
Ditto Skip I had stopped reading Diplomad about two years ago when he posted very sparsely. He is a wealth of insight. I particularly liked the post you pasted. I agree with a lot of what he says. I have discounted any western analysis and mainly go with foreign sources. Times of India blog post are to me pretty astute. Also the Duran on You Tube are worth listening to.
Time will tell us what is going on in this Fog of War
Great Britain’s PM went to Kyiv and will be sending additional weapons possibly including Harpoon anti-ship missiles:
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/04/09/boris-johnson-pays-surprise-visit-to-kiev-and-volodymyr-zelensky-as-the-world-wonders-where-is-joe-biden-n548029
Poor Vlad. Who forced him to dance with the Tar Baby?
We should know what is going on by May 9, 2022 IIRC.
Turtler,
Geesh, write a book already. News flash! Innuendo and verbiage does not equal substantive rebuttal.
I have repeatedly stated that Putin is a brutal dictator, nor have I disputed that he has invaded the Ukraine. I have and do dispute that his action is primarily driven by a desire for territorial expansion.
“If someone tries to claim that Ukraine fielding an offer to EVENTUALLY join NATO is not merely a “provocation” but a violation of the supposedly-binding Astana Agreement (something that in fact flatly states such a thing is an “inherent right” of a sovereign nation – and this by definition a part of its autonomy).”
Eventually? Twice NATO officially announced it will happen. We’ve covered this ground already, we disagree as to how the Astana Agreement is to be interpreted. You continue to imply dishonesty upon my part in my interpretation of it. Whereas I have not returned the favor, which speaks volumes about tolerating disagreement. News flash! Disagreement does not equate to dishonest support for totalitarian dictators.
“If someone claims that the removal of a corrupt and authoritarian President by a Rada largely dominated by his party and its assorted coalitions due to incapacity (over contempt towards his own Rada and constitutional duty to answer before it) is a “coup”…”
Nueland’s call to our then current US Ambassador revealed it to be a US backed coup.
“If one waxes poetic about how we are supposed to be considerate of Russia’s security while paying short shrift to the security of nations bordering Russia…”
I’ve never suggested that we should be “considerate of Russia’s security”. I have suggested that it is in our interest to understand how Russia views their strategic security. In this case, a failure to do substantially increases the chance for nuclear war.
Other than om’s derisive mockery and the simple dismissal that the West’s political leadership are the ‘good guys’… both without substantive rebuttal… no one here has credibly disputed that NATO having the capability to launch nuclear cruise missiles just 13 minutes flight time from the Kremlin is a legitimate strategic security concern for Russia.
And I’ve repeatedly pointed out that it doesn’t matter whether its unfounded paranoia on the Russian’s part because that degree of potential vulnerability is simply intolerable for any nation to willingly accept.
“If one rhetorically downplays the rights of Ukraine to maintain its rights in the Donbas by arms by trying to claim that said region would unquestionably vote to secede…”
The Donbas region is strongly Russian speaking majoritarian. It strains credulity to imply that there is any question whether that region would NOT unquestionably vote to secede. Western Ukraine hasn’t the right to impose territorial claims upon a region that would vote for secession, if allowed to vote in a referendum.
As for your arguments with the articles I linked to, take up your argument with them. We disagree, get over it.
Seems to me that the discussion has to do with what might be called Russians with at least some identity with Russia as a nation, history, organized state, culture.
Is it possible that there is a class we could call oligarchs with no loyalty to, connection with Russia as a concept, and are all about money and nothing else?
Probably. How much influence do they have? Is their desired end state different from that of the Russians? How? Do they lose with any of more likely end states sought by the Russians,given that the anticipated victory is not likely?
While one would (would have) think a competently-run Russia would know about and harshly end a private security force owned by an oligarch….
@Skip indeed, a classic and one I largely agree with.
That said, one point:
It’s rarely a good thing but also not surprising due to the nature of propaganda. It is the agenda of one side (and it’s supporters) to massage the facts or claims about facts as far as they can, and for the other to do it their way. And as a WWI aficionado, the fact remains that the majority of the reports on the Rape of Belgium were accurate and many were actually understated due to various steps like German attempts to crush evidence.
Which is a far cry to the absolute horseshit the Germans put forth in things like their 1914 White Book to justify the case.
By all means be suspicious of the narrative- all narratives- because they are being manipulated for a purpose. But propaganda isn’t inherently false, so critically assess the data and don’t discard it MERELY because it seems too convenient.
Even in current year with the MSM.
And conversely, even if it comes from the Kremlin or it’s supporters.
Geoffrey when someone addresses your arguments point by point don’t complain.
The dead horse of “Russian speaking” deserves mockery, but you persist in dragging it about. IIRC soveriegn nations usually have some authority to decide how to address internal and external efforts to dismember it. That applies to Roosia (exaggerated) but doesn’t apply to Ukraine (actual, see Donbas) because you say so? Curious. And you claim to be impartial?
Glad to hear you have noted who invaded whom. A start.
At Bari Weiss’s substack newsletter, “Common Sense,” Lahav Harkov has written a post about Ukrainian President Zelensky’s claim that, after the war is over, Ukraine would be like a big Israel. Of course, this wouldn’t be Putin’s end game, but it could be the outcome of his invasion.
Here’s a link to Harkov’s post: https://tinyurl.com/47v325wv
Here’s a sample paragraph:
“[Zelensky] meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.”
Geoffrey:
How is one to “take up an argument” with the author of a US State Department citation from 1961? The Geoffrey time machine?
Please explain how that is supposed to work in this real world. You might also flesh out context and applicability of this wondrous wisdom. We will wait for you to deal with what you cited. It’s on you.
Cornflour:
That’s very interesting.
An article that agrees with the thesis of the original post.
1) both sides are in a hard-to-escape box
2) wars that continue on cause increasing amounts of destruction and brutality
3) wars that continue leave open the possibility of spread and escalation
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2022/04/we-now-have-paired-box-canyon-war.html
“Each month, the opportunity for an expanded war by accident or intention grows. Soon, the Ukrainian mud season will end, the soil will firm up and summer – the season of maneuver – will be upon us.
By design, or just plain stumble, everyone should come to terms with the fact that the opportunity for a short war or negotiated peace that everyone can live with but not be happy with may have passed us by.”
Who here has ever suggested that Ukraine should not have fought for their autonomy?
Granted no one here, but The Federalist, an institution I admire, implied just that and I linked to it. They said the best thing was for Ukraine to surrender and get the best terms they could get.
It’s late, I’m tired and I’ve had a free drinks, otherwise I’d find it and re-post. But I’m going to bed. If anyone wants to challenge I’ll be back in the morning.
Wow does that post speak for itself – good night.
Well I read some to John Daniel Davidson’s posts in the Federalist (since February 25th anyway) about Ukraine, and it looks like that is where Geoffrey gets his material. Not impressive, but it pays his student loans.
Regarding the US role in this mess of a war, if you have the “leader” of the free world using the Ukraine situation and talking it up, I expect that said leader to have done some ground work so the words said would have some weight.
They did not, as we all can see today. There is not organized NATO or US policy or effort.
Sorry, if one talks about a situation that can become a bigger problem, I have reason to expect some effort in resolving or keeping the situation from sprialling into a bigger problem.
The Russian forces are slowly, steadily taking over eastern Ukraine, the result is inevitable, but all I see and hear are “they’re losing”, “they’re incompetent” and so on. It doesn’t match reality. I read these fantasy analyses by bloggers I like, but who have no military experience or insight, eating up one-sided western propaganda.
So, I’m sorry, but Ukraine is getting their asses handed to them. They’ll lose the whole eastern side of the county. All this wishful thinking and arms-shipping is just getting more Ukrainians killed so you can go feeling better about yourself. And Eastern Ukrainian life under Russian rule won’t be a whole lot different than under Ukrainian rule.
Here in America I’m against gay marriage, teaching sex to six year olds, and affirmative action, but if I say so I will lose my job. Maybe get banned by my bank. Or like in Canada, maybe I’ll get my assets confiscated if I peacefully protest. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs – and are still losing them – for refusing an injection of a chemical into their bodies. Fight for freedom like we have in the West! We are sooooo free!!!
Anyway it’s like no one learns, it’s the same thing all over again. The end result of Vietnam didn’t change with 50,000 American deaths. The end result of Afghanistan after 20 years, tons armaments, thousands of Americans dead and maimed didn’t change anything. You’re just sending Ukrainians to die needlessly for an inevitable result, and when it happens I’ll be here to point it out. Why do you think it’s different this time? Name one – just one time – American arms intervention did anything other than getting more people killed. Short of full mobilization we can do nothing.
In the end Americans are just is getting tens of thousands of more people killed in the name of a “freedom” they won’t even fight for in their own country.
Interestingly, there would appear to be a kind of “synergy” between Putin and “Biden”.
Putin: “I will do whatever I want in Ukraine and there isn’t a damn thing YOU can do about it.”
“Biden”: “‘I’ will do whatever I want in the USA and there isn’t a damn thing YOU can do about it.”
Trudeau is basically saying the same thing, but who cares about Trudeau…(even if one should)?
whatever:
“You” are just sending Ukrainians to die? Who is the “you” whatever? Is Vlad just sending Russians to die?
And whatever, did Vlad withdraw from Kyiv because it was just a feint? Or whatever. It ain’t over yet.
whatever. Sounds like a bot.
“Ukraine should not be able to resist, NATO should not be united, American economic warfare should not be so powerful. “
Honestly, THIS thinking concerns me more than anything Putin does.
The idea Ukraine couldn’t resist Russia is based entirely on an assumption, which was completely shared and accepted by the U.S. intelligence community, that the Ukrainian army wouldn’t fight. That we were wrong about that is just as worrisome or more so than Putin being wrong about that.
Who thought NATO wouldn’t be united on this? There was an extended run up to this crisis and I don’t recall much fretting about Germany cutting a deal with Russia or anything like that.
By what standard is America’s “economic warfare” against Russia “so powerful?” It actually seems to have accomplished jackall as far as ending the invasion while potentially setting in motion a series of reactions that could have serious long term consequences for the U.S. and the West.
We’ve really got to stop this obsession with trying to cram reality into a convenient narrative.
Mike
There are, as the Big Lebowski would say, lots of ins and outs and what have you’d going on. Somewhere there is an Art of War quote to leave adversary a golden bridge out. Not only has Putin not left his adversary no good way out, I’m not sure he has left himself one. Before starting a war, having a success metric is a Good Idea. (Side note…this is why our Wars on Poverty and Drugs have failed, among other things.)
Unfortunately, the theory of New World Order, World Economic Forum, Davos crowd, and Klaus Schwab are equally at fault…no golden bridge for retreat for Putin or for themselves. Of the two, to me, the New World Order business seem scarier.
Myself, I have given up meat for Lent. With the direction of the economy, I’m on the right track.
@Geoffrey Britain
Oh, I’ve considered it. However my job has hindered it.
Newsflash: All that is is innuendo that my reply is not a substantive rebuttal.
And for what it’s worth, I completely agree. However, I trust those who have actually read my comments (including Neo) to be able to judge that I have made a much more substantive analysis than you and most of the sources have.
Moreover, a TRULY substantive rebuttal analyzing the “sources” line by line to weed through what fits, what doesn’t, and so forth would take a long time at the moment. Too long even for my own famously longwinded and anal-retentive nature.
(PS: that problem is the heart of the Gish Gallop Strategy, that of throwing out a bunch of arguments or “sources” in the hopes of overawing and inundating your opponent).
Moreover, it’s not necessary. It is the burden of the sources to prove they are worth taking seriously. So I simply took a cursory look over your sources and your summaries of them, spotted a bunch of fallacies, falsehoods, and other stuff, and punched holes in them to prove them wrong.
I trust the readers of this blog to be able to assess the sources, and particularly if the sources used demonstrate the problems I showed on a fairly cursory examination what that means for their overall validity.
Which is unknown and unknowable, though we can certainly make reasonable guesstimates such as his terms that there be no peace without recognition of Russian control over Crimea and that a “plebiscite” (doubtless conducted with the Russian military in residence) be allowed for the Donbas.
But in any case, it is frankly irrelevant. We can debate whether or not Putin’s actions are “primarily” or “secondarily” motivated by territorial expansion, fear of NATO, fear of EU Association Agreements (which I remind you was the proximate cause of the 2014 invasion), domestic PR, or his horoscope.
What is important in the confines of this discussion is that
A: They are partially motivated by territorial expansion.
B: In ANY event, said actions are unjustified and unjustifiable.
Yes we did. Or more specifically, you made allegations, I covered this ground, and you failed to make any kind of coherent reply.
In any case, yes, EVENTUALLY.
I suggest you research the actual process by which nations join NATO, which is nothing if not a long and arduous process even for nations that start out meeting most of the requirements, which Ukraine most certainly did not, and which had a national consensus behind joining, which again Ukraine did not at the time of the Russian invasion. An even that I might add has only pushed the prospect of that further.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/242-roadmaps-to-nato-accession-preparing-for-membership
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/02/18/how-do-you-join-nato-and-how-close-is-ukraine-to-becoming-a-member
We also apparently disagree about where the hell Odessa is in the country, but that does not mean that the agreement is a valid one. It’s simply a case of you being wrong., and I will not humor or pretend otherwise.
At this point, the point at which implying dishonesty was relevant is FAR in the dust. What’s important now is that I am EXPLICITLY ACCUSING YOU of grotesque ignorance and incompetence at apparently not understanding the meaning of the term “inherent right” as it was used in the agreement to discuss national alliance policy (or lack thereof).
Whether or not said ignorance is unintentional or intentional, the product of malice or stupidity, is far past my concerns at this point. The effect remains the same.
Oh and secondly: “tolerate disagreement”? Nice kafkatrapping nonsense.
Shame it doesn’t work.
I have happily tolerated your disagreement, but that does not mean I have to tolerate it HAPPILY.
Moreover, “tolerance of disagreement” is far from the highest virtue in a debate or discussion aimed at trying to establish the truth, nor should we presume that tolerating opposing viewpoints amounts to accepting the idea all such viewpoints are equally valid.
They are not.
In this case, your “interpretation” of Astana downplaying and negating the importance of the “inherent right” passage is just as objectively, provably wrong as your “interpretation” that Odessa is in the Donbas, is Ukraine’s only port, and the reason Zelenskyy is continuing to fight.
I have no reason to pretend otherwise.
Moreover, I’ll note that before I started taking aim at your misuse of Astana and other sources you showed no such regard or concern for “interpretations” that differed from your own, flatout asserting that Astana banned NATO expansion (which it does not) and that the West violated it.
So please do us both a favor and drop the persecuted dissident posturing, it’s not true and kind of annoying to deal with.
Moreover, a reason why you haven’t been able to accuse me of dishonesty probably stems from the fact that you Can’t hope to do so COMPETENTLY or Convincingly.
I am far from perfect or correct in everything, but I do make a point of putting a lot of effort into my posts and being often-times painfully granular in my responses, complete with copy/pastes of both the person I am replying to and relevant documents. If someone wishes to lob a charge of dishonesty against me, I INVITE THEM TO TRY so that we can assess the charge as it’s made to the best of the abilities the accuser can muster.
Because I am confident of my ability to field such a charge and address it rather fully.
I do not think people trying to claim that the genesis of the Iraq War was “lies” more than a decade and a half later (and years after a bunch of my friends wound up asking the VA after their hardship helping to dispose of Saddam’s remaining WMD) and who does not understand the terminology of “Neo-Nazi” or where Odessa isn’t can say the same.
News flash! Disagreement does not equate to dishonest support for totalitarian dictators.
Correct, disagreement does not.
However, torturing the rather plain meaning of FACTS such as the text of the Astana Accord in order to denigrate and deny the relevance of things such as the “inherent right” section? That’s at best a case of disagreement that cannot be honestly sustained for the reasons I’ve mentioned. Whether or not it is motivated by support for a dictator, pride at one’s own interpretation or opposition to being shown up, the simple opposition to being shown up on an internet debate, or something else is of no real consequence.
Then why did so much in the Nuland phone call not come to pass?
And how did Nuland manage to force the plurality of Regionnaire Rada representatives to either accept or not resist first the call to Yanukovych to answer for his actions before them, and then to accept or not resist the motion to strip him of his office when he fled the country?
That’s the problem with the obsession with the Nuland phone call: It offers no explanation for that.
Which brings us back to the point that you have substantially failed to understand how Russia views their strategic security, as shown by the muted reaction it had to previous NATO offers for Ukraine to join like in 2010 in contrast to their murderously harsh reaction to Euromaidan and then Yanukovych’s removal by his Rada in response to it.
As well as the fact that while claiming to present the “Russian lawyer’s” case on here, you have advanced a claim far more extreme than even the “Russian lawyers” have, as I pointed out by the proper understanding of Astana and the Helsinki Final Accord and buoyed by the fact that the Kremlin has not complained about NATO offers to Ukraine as a violation of those, coupled with the fact that it felt the need to lie about its invasion in 2014.
Agreed, which is why om has acquired what seems to be a negative reputation on that here, and why I have considered putting in my boot to deal with him.
Because it is. Which is one reason the Kremlin was willing to sign the Budapest Memorandums in order to deal with such a Danger Close threat from either NATO or some independent actor in Ukraine.
An agreement, I might add, that they have thoroughly violated.
Which brings us back to the point that Russia’s legitimate strategic security concerns have limits and must be balanced against that of others, something the Kremlin has refused to do in spite of supposedly written agreements pledging to do so. In which case, why on Earth should other nations- and PARTICULARLY nations under active attack by it- respect or seek to uphold “Russia’s legitimate strategic security concerns” beyond a bare minimum required for vaguely peaceful co-existence? And possibly not even that if the Russian regime seems so bent at violently insisting on policies that degrade the independence of other nations.
Especially since- as I’ve pointed out ad infinitum- the Kremlin’s immediate actions in 2014 were not motivated by the threat of imminent NATO nuclear or biological weapons being based 13 minutes flight from the Kremlin. That possibility was years into the future even if the Kremlin did literally nothing (which it obviously did not).
And as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, that claim is full of shit since nations such as Finland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have lived with that degree of potential vulnerability THEIR ENTIRE POST-SOVIET HISTORIES.
And YET you have never addressed that fact or how peaceful diplomatic relations involve coming to agreements (agreements like-say- Helsinki, Astana, Budapest, etc) to live with each others’ vulnerabilities peacefully. A case that the Kremlin seems utterly unwilling to do, which makes some degree of crude sense but also opens it up to not only the consequences of such an attitude but also the threats and vulnerabilities that come from that.
Strains the credulity of who?!?! Someone so ignorant about the history and conditions on the ground they think ODESSA is in the Donbas?
In any case, as the pet “Neo-Nazi”/Neo-Fascist Ukrainian Monsters/Russian Propaganda Whipping Boys Azov Battalion demonstrate with their proportion of Russophone and/or ethnic Russian membership, linguistics are hardly a 1:1 guide of how political affiliation or loyalties break down, as even the generally pro-Kremlin Qatari Propaganda Rag AJ acknowledged.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/9/25/ukraines-other-russians
As for that matter does the collapse of the “Novorossiya” project back in 2014-2015.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/novorossiya-falls-from-putins-vocabulary-as-ukraine-crisis-drags-1432936655
Donbas probably has the highest proportion of those that would support separatism and/or annexation by the Russian regime, but that’s hardly something that can be taken for granted in the context of the evidence I presented prior, and a foreign military occupation making it devilishly hard to get accurate info.
As a side note, I’m actually not that opposed to the idea of Crimea and/or part or whole of the Donbas seceding from Ukraine to either join Russia or be independent ON PRINCIPLE.
The problem of course comes from the gulf between abstract principle and how this actually was carried out.
Budapest 1994 and Astana, among others, outline OBVIOUSLY AND CLEARLY that Russia has no right to impose territorial claims over ANY Ukrainian region, whether or not it “would vote for secession.” Indeed, “Western” Ukraine has far more legal and moral right to reassert government authority over those regions than the Russian military has to be there at all.
Particularly given how the presence of an invading, occupying military answering to an authoritarian state for the past decade would obviously taint and undermine the results of such a referendum, even IF it were conducted more honestly than the (rather incompetently) rigged Crimean one.
And again, don’t believe me on those regards, take a gander at Budapest, Astana, or UN Law.
Firstly: They’re not here. Nor did they decide to add these articles to the discussion here. You did. Ergo you apparently found such offerings to be of worth discussing here, so it is fair to address critiques and analysis of them to you.
Secondly: I have little reason, time, or interest in seeking to engage directly with the likes of the “Creative Destruction/CD Team”, who have continued to peddle horseshit such as the idea that the invasion of Iraq was motivated by “lies”, and who demonstrate considered ignorance in basic definitions like what “Neo-Nazism” is.
As someone who has more than a few Kurdish friends, I have come to regard things like the “Saddam didn’t have WMD”, “Saddam didn’t aid Al-Qaeda”, “No Blood for Oil” nonsense as not merely nonsense of typically (though not exclusively) leftist persuasion, but evil bullshit on par with Holocaust Denial and attempts to whitewash Lenin.
I will deal with such people on occasion when they are of immediate concern, but this is not the case here.
Thirdly: While I have issues with om and their rather slippery and sniping way of responding, their rebuttal about how I am supposed to engage with the authors of the 1961 paper is quite cogent.
In any case, I neither want nor need to engage directly with such authors in order to take issue with their work or your citation of it here, particularly on grounds where it is provably wrong.
You seem to misunderstand. I understand that, and I am more than over it.
The issue is, I am not inclined to pretend our disagreement is on equal grounds in regards to such things as the writing of Astana, the location of Odessa, or the problems with uncritically citing liars who are willing to trot out old far-left bullshit that we’re supposed to believe the Iraq war was based on “lies.”
I see no reason to pretend otherwise or to give false equivalence to views and stances that are manifestly unequal in merit, and I have explained my reasons for this laboriously multiple times.
And if your knowledge of the relevant facts is so weak you cannot understand why it does not “strain credulity” to imagine that Russophone majority regions in Ukraine might NOT vote for secession if allowed to in a free referendum untainted by military occupation from one side or another, where the hell Odessa is, and why the Nuland phone call is not evidence that it was a “coup”, then you’d probably be better off quitting while you’re behind and getting over yourself.
Because I understand the situation regarding our disagreements quite well, have “gotten over it”, and see no reason to change my stance or conduct.
@Milwaukee Well said on the whole, particularly the reference to a “Golden Bridge” and how scary this has gotten between Putin’s lunacy and the Davoise types. To say nothing of whatever the heck the CCP is doing.
I get the feeling Putin is trying to build himself a Golden Bridge by conquering the Donbas and parts of the South, to force a land link and security over the water to Crimea (at least as much as can be established) so he can try and bow out while claiming to have won. I guess we’ll have to see how that pans out.
In any case, terrifying times.
Might be helpful (though it’s not all current).
Caveat emptor…:
“Why Russia is losing this war?…”—
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1511528319656755205
“Let’s discuss Putin speech…”—https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497306746330697738.html
@MBunge Largely agreed here, for whatever our other differences.
Agreed there.
Agreed indeed, especially since it raises the question of what else they’ve gotten wrong. I’m sure we all know of a few possibilities, like the status of the CCP’s military, the status of Russian nukes and the Iranian Nuclear Program, and so on.
What jars me more is if the assumption that the Ukrainian military would not fight. As I’ve made a point of stating, this war didn’t start on Feb 24th 2022, it started in 2014 and just escalated after the quick surgical coups in Crimea and the Donbas followed by years of grueling semi-positional warfare in the latter. I predicted that Ukraine would lose the war (which it still might), but never that its military flat out Wouldn’t Fight. Maybe that such fighting would be of short-to-medium duration, that it would be less uniform than ideal due to defections or desertions, etc, but not that it would cease altogether or be like the troops in Crimea in 2014, who were peaceably minding their posts when Spetznaz stormed them by surprise and left them confused.
That sort of fundamental miscalculation can’t merely be explained by the sort of “worst case scenario” focuses that are the norm in intel and military communities.
I’ll field this, and the fear of NATO unity is a lot more credible than the idea that the Ukrainian military would flat out not fight after nearly a decade of fighting false-flagged Russian troops and their separatist aux troops in the Donbas. In particular, Germany and France spent years after the 2014 invasion continuing to court Russia, doing crucial things like the Nordstream expansion projects, much to the anger of the NATO members in the far East like the Baltics and Poland. Indeed it wasn’t until just about now in the wake of the more open, escalated invasion that the Germans got shamed enough to put the new maritime pipeline projects with Russia on hold.
And to be honest NATO is still divided, albeit on less severe levels. Orban in particular won re-election in part by reasonably pointing out how the UKRAINEUKRAINEUKRAINE/RUSSIARUSSIARUSSIA drumbeat might drag NATO into war, but now some of his other moves have led him into conflict with his typical Ally, Duda and Poland.
It just hasn’t had such an acute cleavage as we might’ve expected, with even rivals like Greece and Turkey largely condemning Putin.
True, but it is worth noting that a lot of the sanctions have only been in place for about a month and a half, and others before it were more surgical or inconsistently applied. We generally talk in terms of months if not years for sanctions to really bite in a lot of cases (as old school South Africans and Rhodesians can attest). That doesn’t mean they’ll be effective, but we’ll see.
Agreed.
@whatever Dear God, so much wrong here….
More or less true, and rather unsurprising due to the nature of the war as relatively new and the focus going there.
I’m sorry, but according to who?
I am hesitant to jump on “inevitable” trains at the best of times, even when they support my case- indeed, I still argue that there was a chance (however rather small) that the Axis could have won WWII.
This is likewise here. The Kremlin has lost many of its most important assets, not just in terms of troops and equipment but in things like surprise and deniability. The road ahead will be harder and bloodier for it.
Well, they CERTAINLY are incompetent to a large degree, as Hostomel and the inadequate preparation shows. Ditto the terrible OPSEC involved as a whole.
In any case, this has greatly tarnished the reputation of the Russian military and state and made it worse.
Well, I’ve also read just as much fantasy coming from those eating up Kremlin propaganda or making claims that the result is “inevitable”, apparently in spite of not understanding the history or assets of either country in spite of what is public knowledge.
Welcome to the fog of war.
According to what metric?
They managed to heavily parry attacks aimed at Kyiv and inflicted major losses on what was either a large and rather incompetently carried out “feint” (if you believe the Kremlin’s narrative) or an attempted decapitation strike on Kyiv (which is the consensus opinion and I think backed up by the evidence). They’ve also been able to keep the Russian advance to slow and costly paces on most fronts (with the South being the main exception, relatively speaking). Indeed, most estimates I have seen from all sides- including leaked Russian ones- indicate the Russian military and its supporters have suffered casualties in the month plus of pitched combat that are comparable to the losses suffered during the Soviet War in Afghanistan and well above those suffered by the Chechen and Dagestani Wars.
That’s hardly indicative of Ukraine “getting their asses handed to them.” ESPECIALLY given the scale of the fighting and the country as a whole, particularly in these early weeks of the war which SHOULD be when the Russian military would be at its best.
Define “the whole Eastern side of the country.”
And in any case, I still remember 2014 when the Russian regime was openly posturing about a “Novorossiya” to be formed out of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, following the areas with the highest concentrations of Russophones. THAT fell apart in rather spectacular fashion as Ukrainian resistance steeled itself through 2014-2015 and was quietly shelved. The Kremlin’s been making some moves towards trying to regurgitate it with things such as the attempts to establish another “separatist republic” in Kherson, but it still underlines that this is far from a set or “inevitable” thing and-pace Geoffrey Britain- the Kremlin SERIOUSLY overestimated their ability to secure support from Russophone and/or Ethnic Russian Ukrainian nationals.
You really haven’t read Dugin, have you?
Firstly: Contra the “getting more Ukrainians killed”, it was established rather long ago that the worst killing does not happen in combat between two armed factions, but in bloodshed by an armed faction against unarmed or barely armed civilians. RJ Rummel’s Democide is still one of the best overviews of this, and it also holds true even during war time, with civilian casualties through history typically equaling or exceeding military ones due to things like an armed force going about pillaging the countryside (or worse, engaging in deliberate campaigns of terror or extermination).
And given the Russian state’s historical track record and even its modern ones in fights like the Chechen and Georgian Wars (complete with its endorsement of ethnic cleansing), it should not surprise many people that so many Ukrainians are prepared to fight.
Secondly: This is above all about the political rights and sovereignty of UKRAINE, or at least it SHOULD be, realpolitik aside. So who am I to object to Ukrainians being willing to fight and die knowingly? That’s certainly more than most Russian conscripts could say when they were sent in at the time.
Yeah, well this might shock you but that’s STILL more freedom than you’re going to have in Putin’s Russia. I know, I worked there. And it’s certainly more freedom than “suspect” minorities like Ukrainians or Georgians or Crimean Tatars have had under the “peacekeeping” of Russian forces or the “separatist Republics.”
Moreover, why would I want to give the Left the prospect of an even more powerful Russian Boogeyman to use to justify their erosion of our freedoms further? Hell, the Left and MSM have even been forced to pay lip service to the value of armed citizen-militias in resisting invasion by a conventional military!! Do you realize how useful that is- or SHOULD Be- for us?
And in any case, the Ukrainians certainly have ABUNDANT reason to prefer taking their chances with the West than with the Kremlin’s Russia, in part due to the contempt only familiarity can bring and also due to modern Russia being objectively worse even in comparison to the Biden Junta and Trudeau and co by most indicators.
Dear God, you want to lecture US About how “it’s like no one learns” while torturously citing a handful of cases and ignoring the rest, all while preaching the gospel of “inevitability”?
How about we talk about the dress rehersal for Vietnam: Korea. You know, Korea, the other Asian war where a totalitarian Communist Northern regime with the support of the USSR, PRC, and other COMBLOC regimes invaded its Southern, pro-Western Banana Republic neighbor preaching the gospel of national unification?
Why do you not hold that up as an example of futility at trying to stave off the “inevitable” at the cost, especially since it was FAR costlier than Afghanistan and comparably costly to Vietnam in spite of being much briefer?
Oh wait. Because it WASN’T futile. The North Korean invasion was ultimately smashed and the Allies counter-invaded, forcing direct intervention by the Communist Chinese and an escalation by the Soviets that drove the Allies back, only for them to rebound and retake more territory than they lost. Which is why South Korea today is a democratic capitalist republic and the North is a totalitarian socialist/post-socialist hell state.
Likewise Iraq, which in spite of being MONUMENTALLY mishandled and in some ways having the country be given over to Iran saw the downfall of Saddam’s regime, the breaking of the Sunni attempted comeback in the form of IS, and so forth?
You don’t need to convince many people here that US aid is often grotesquely misused and squandered to little good effect or even a net negative. But that’s not what you are arguing. You are peddling the “Inevitable” canard, which is not only a hefty thing to try and prove but fairly easy to counterbalance.
Also RE: “inevitability” and Vietnam, as a wargamer and historian I am endlessly infuriated by the degree to which the wider world has largely uncritically accepted Communist talking points and pseudo-historiography about the Indochinese Wars from the “hoax” of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to the idea that the South was merely some kind of illegitimate pretender and the North was the “true” national government.
Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War, Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, and (For the often-ignored backdrop of WWII and First Indochina) Dr. William Wadell’s “In the Year of the Tiger: The War for Cochinchina, 1945-1951” are useful curatives to these, showing how contrary to your claims the outcome was not “inevitable” and was indeed changed and influenced by Western involvement and efforts. Often for the better. In particular the French victory over the Communists in the South was so complete it laid the foundations for the Republic of Southern Vietnam, which would endure for a quarter of a century (including nearly half a decade of marginal Western support).
Let me count the ways…..
* Union support for Mexican Republicans, 1860-1867
* Mexican Revolution support to the Constitutionalist Government, 1914-192(?) (Ever hear of the Battle of Celaya?).
* WWI 1914-1917
* Support for Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. against Bolshevik invasion and German remnants, 1918-1922 (or thereabouts).
* WWII 1939-1941
* US support for the Greeks in Greece, 1945-1949
* US support for the French in Indochina, 1945-1954
* US support of the South Korean Government, 1945-1950 (which thoroughly destroyed Kim’s attempts to spark a “revolution from below” using Communist infiltrators and forced him to “go loud” with an open invasion).
* US support for the Colombian Government in the Drug War and Farc, 1970s-now.
Shall I go on?
This is so nonsensical and obviously wrong as to be unworthy of reference. Unless you think the pile of confirmed Russian equipment losses (much of it their most modern equipment in line use) is “nothing” or the withdrawal from North of Kyiv in the state it was nothing.
The fact is, this is set to be Afghanistan-meets-Chechnya on Crack Cocaine, and we’ve already seen how Russia struggles in those kinds of circumstances and has there. That doesn’t mean the Ukrainians will WIN, but it does mean the result is anything but “inevitable.”
I think the Ukrainians can decide whether or not to get killed themselves. Moreover, I fail to see how supporting the Ukrainian government will be more likely to HURT our struggle for freedom at home than it will be to help it, even factoring in the usual arguments about Zelenskyy’s Green Posturing and Globalist connections. It’ll be much harder to justify COVIDiocy with this, and we can continue bashing the examples of the Ukrainian Territorials over the heads of those trying to claim the Second Amendment is obsolete.
And in any case, even if I ignored how nasty Putin and his regime are in their own right, I have NO reason to give the Left the excuse to make them more formidable scares that can be used to criticize and repress us.
Oops, that second link (@5.55 a.m.) should be:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1497306746330697738
(i.e., without the .html suffix)
“….The idea Ukraine couldn’t resist Russia is based entirely on an assumption…”
I think it’s more sinister than that:
“Biden”—by offering Zelensky an “escape route” out of Kyiv—twice! and perhaps even insisting that he use it?—intended to “decapitate” any Ukrainian government-led resistance from the get-go (and again ten or so days later) under the guise of “altruism” or to be a bit kinder (to “Biden”), “prudent policy”.
(Now why might “Biden” do that?… Some might say because “he”‘s a nice, decent guy, whose sole aim was to “save” Zelensky, the missus and the two kids…. Others might say, um, to save the Ukraine government from being squashed…. Still others might say, um, sure….)
“…since it raises the question of what else [the intelligence community has] gotten wrong.
Lee Smith (and others) firmly believe (and explain why) the US “intelligence community” is entirely compromised.
One more recent indication of this is the stance taken by that community to—even now—proudly defend their unanimous, and knowingly mendacious, delegitimization of the Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020. This would mean, necessarily, that they approved then and approve now of the censoring of any and all news of that laptop proliferating more widely, the purpose being to, in their view, help Joe Biden win. (Ironically, little did they know that he would have won without their assistance….)
Now one would understand that the nature of the intelligence community is deceit and concealment—but when it decides to throw its support (and machinations) behind a single political party; when it decides that this support justifies subverting the law of the land, then we’re in totally different territory, in a whole ‘nuther ball-game.
The day Ukraine starts shooting down Russian aircraft over Russia within 100 klicks of Ukrainian territory is the day things will change. Rapidly.
To quote former USMC Commandant Gen. Robert H. Barrow, “amateurs talk about tactics but professionals study logistics.”
A lot depends on who gets to the scene of the battle “the firstest with the mostest”
The Ukrainian leadership is saying that they need donated weapons immediately, “right now.”
I happened upon a couple of analyses which focused on logistics, and pointed out that the Russians were withdrawing many of their forces from the West around Kyiv, and back into Russia, where they would have to be re-outfitted and re-organized, then–not subject to attack–transported through the Russian railway system to circle down to where they could reenter the Eastern/Southeastern Ukraine—roughly a trip of around 600 miles.
Whereas, any weapons and weapon systems, tanks, APCs, anti-ship weapons, etc. that were to be sent to the Ukrainians by other countries would have to be transported—under threat of attack by the Russians–from the West of the Ukraine and across the country down to the Southeast, where the Russians would be sending their newly regrouped forces—a trip of about 1,200 miles.
@mackykam > The day Ukraine starts shooting down Russian aircraft over Russia within 100 klicks of Ukrainian territory is the day things will change. Rapidly.
Which is a major incentive for the Ukrainians to not do so at least for the foreseeable future. As ugly as it is, a slow, grinding, costly quasi-war with attrition plays to their strengths and Putin’s weaknesses, especially given the insistence that this is not a “war” and thus will not do things like expand conscription or officially deploy conscripted soldiers into the theater.
P.S.–
Some time ago I stumbled across two young Russian vloggers on Youtube—the young man—I’d say college age or a little older, and living in St. Petersburg, and the young woman, say, in her late 20s early 30s, also apparently living in a major city, and both pretty open in their comments.
Since the start of Russia’s war on the Ukraine their tone has changed.
The young man now saying that a lot of his friends have already left Russia, and that he would stay as long as he “felt safe physically.”
He also pointed out the two different worlds that people in Russia inhabited.
Those in the large cities with VPNs and access to Western media saw one world vs. those in the rural countryside, who got all of their news form Russian media, mostly TV, and saw another.
Most recently the women, usually putting the best face on Russia and proud of her country, pointing out that new laws were being issued almost daily, one she read saying that criticizing the Russian army could be considered treasonous with a penalty of 20 years. I felt that now she was much more careful about how she chose her words.
@Snow on Pine
This is true, but it also I think can be overstated; logistics can only compensate for tactics and strategy to a large degree, but cannot entirely substitute for them.
But still, logistics is what ultimately sustains wars and allows them to be won, or not.
Certainly, though it can be hard to gauge how urgently they need them and there is often an urge to over-demand for a bunch of reasons, especially for kit given for free or at a discount.
This is true as far as it goes, but I do not think it goes particularly far. For starters, it overlooks the indications we have that Russian logistics are struggling BADLY. Indeed one of the reasons for the decision to pull back from the Northwest around Kyiv was due to the Russian military’s logistical problems and inability to project power or security outside of narrow roads, leading to the infamous dozens of miles long traffic jams (which were most notable in the Northwest but hardly limited there).
Moreover, the Ukrainians have the advantage to some degree of interior lines and the existing infrastructure in country to help dispatch the arms, as well as well-worn supply lines to the Donbas War Front (which in turn might become a liability if the Russians can consolidate and break through the Southern Flank to come down in the rear area).
In the meantime, Russian logistics on the rail lines have been showing quite a lot of creaking and suffering, but their wheeled transport has been suffering even worse, hence the large scale recourse to inferior civilian vehicles that have been commandeered. And that assumes they can keep them supplied.
So the big problem for both sides will be covering the “Middle Mile” while limiting congestion in the “First Mile.”
It’s going to be hard for both sides and potentially especially for Ukraine, but the logistics is significantly more even than a raw calculation of mileage would indicate.
This is true indeed, though I do think the world between the cities and rural European Russia (in contrast to Siberia and some extremities) is probably less than one might think, especially given the prevalence of cell phones and VPN, as well as the long-hallowed tradition of commuting to the cities by rural dwellers to get goods the urbanites have and trade agriculture.
Moreover, there’s also the grapevine. Rural folks get conscripted too, and historically the Russian conscription system has been viewed as a bane or plague, and that’s particularly true now. Hence Putin’s assurances that no conscripts would be deployed to the “Special Military Operation” and his (feigned?) shock and the scandal at some being sent.
Regimes completely confident of their standing don’t tend to outlaw military criticism entirely as treason, especially given the long and well practiced soldierly habit of B*tching and whinging.
I guess we’ll see how it goes.
As I said here before, perhaps we will see a situation similar to what happened in the Spanish Civil War in the mid to late 1930s developing, and a lot of foreign volunteers will come to bolster the smaller Ukrainian forces.
Spent a week dog sitting for a nine-month old lab pup weighing eighty pounds, muscled like a bull and with an IQ north of 150. Consequently, I am exhausted and out of sorts. During one of my instant’s half-sleep, I had the following picture of what’s going on.
Vlad is sitting at his quarter-mile long conference table. At the other end is an agglomeration of diplomats, legal scholars, and historians. After listening to them for an eternity, Vlad concludes:
1. I am allowed to do this due to the history. Good.
2. I am constrained to do this by the history. Good.
3. I am going to do what the hell I want. My albatross around my neck is the Russian motor pool. The other guys are going to served this dog’s breakfast and will–you should excuse the mixed metaphors–squid ink themselves into a Moebius strip of infinite length so as to tie themselves up in knots. That’s ‘way worse than a Russian motor pool. And screw the history. Let them worry about it.
So the Poles didn’t really attack the radio station Gliwicz? They would have. See this op ed by a TA from the university of Prague dissing the station. Not in Poland? No matter, Slavs are Slavs and it’s an artificial border anyway. And since they would have….
cont’d–I’ve seen the occasional story about such foreign “volunteers,” but I have no sense about how many of them there are, or if there will be so many volunteers that they can add significantly to the Ukrainian’s fighting capabilities.
I strongly recommend a long essay (4-part series) written by someone who grew up in Russia but now lives in Colorado, where he works as an investment manager. Registration required, but worth it; plus, Vitaliy’s emails are always interesting.
https://contrarianedge.com/
It seems to me that the “crossing the Rubicon” moment for those countries opposing the Russian invasion of the Ukraine may well be if and when some nation (is allowed to–see Poland) sends the offensive aircraft–that the Ukrainians have been begging for–to them.
Nueland’s call to our then current US Ambassador revealed it to be a US backed coup.
Destabilization campaigns have been the ‘weapon of choice’ at least as far back as the Iranian coup in 1953. (actually the French were quite happy for the colonists in the ‘New World’ to divert British military resources away from France and helped with destabilizing the Colonies)
The idea that destabilization campaigns were invented by the CIA or that the CIA is the only intelligence agency in the world to engage in destabilization is ludicrous. It’s a game anyone with two nickels to rub together can play.
The reality is that they are only effective in poorly governed countries.
They are quite simple to orchestrate. Every country has cultural fissures and one simply assists in providing an amplifier to those fissures. The sums of money involved are trivial and almost impossible to trace.
Was the Vietnam war lost on the battlefield or did the addressing the ‘civil unrest’ at home become more important to American political leadership then victory in Vietnam? Did the Soviets help fan the flames of civil unrest in the US?
Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson Riots, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police..all of them caused by existing cultural fissures.
Police brutality has been a problem everywhere since the concept of police has been invented. Same goes for income inequality. The US being the worlds biggest, most successful multi-cultural society also means we always have some level of race/cultural fissure.
Who was providing the amplifier for problems that have always existed and our political leadership has always less then perfectly attempted to address?
The 2020 US elections were a $14 billion dollar ‘information/disinformation’ operation.
If your regime can be overthrown with an ‘information/disinformation’ operation costing less then $10 million dollars you need to rethink your governance strategy. (A 30 second Superbowl ad costs $6.5 million)
Frankly the propaganda’s too thick and 24/7 for one to tell the bad guys from the badder guys. “…atrocities in Bucha and the mass attack at the Kramatorsk train station,…”, fact or propaganda? DamnedifIknow and if you buy the whole cloth at this stage…
“…less then $10 million…”
Are you quite sure that’s the correct amount?
What about the Zuck Bucks (along with questionable “donations” from non-Zuck sources)?
In the following article by Mollie Hemingway (from Oct. 2021), there are sums far higher than that floating around (and that’s just Zuckerman—in fact I’m not even sure how anyone could possibly know how much money was being thrown at that election to achieve the desired outcome):
“Facts about Zuck Bucks: How he helped swing the electorate in 2020”—
https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/how-mark-zuckerberg-helped-swing-the-electorate-in-the-2020-election/
“…to achieve the desired outcome…” (cont.)—Key grafs:
“…Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a percentage point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuck Bucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that were funded by Zuck Bucks moved, on average, 2.3 percentage points more Democratic.
“…Democratic counties in Pennsylvania also were targeted for Zuck Buck infusions. The Capital Research Center determined that Biden won eight of the 10 highest-funded CTCL counties in the state, which together received $21,047,163, or more than 95 percent of all grants statewide….”
Richard Aubrey:
Did he teach you any new tricks? Was it like trying to corral a runaway monster truck driven by a 6-year old? 🙂
Glad you survived! 🙂
Jiminalaska–Actually distinguishing “the bad guys from the badder guys” seems pretty simple to me.
Which nation crossed the Ukrainian border with military forces and invaded the Ukraine–Russia.
Whose nation was invaded with no real “casus belli” to justify that invasion–the Ukraine.
Been reading Diplomad a few years, end last year to just a couple months ago had personal things to sort out and didn’t post a word. Lucky for us he came back and has been on fire.
Continued…
To be sure, one—possible? probable?—conclusion is that it was FAR, FAR MORE than just an “‘information/disinformation’ operation”.
From the “Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up” Department:
“Russian Troops Took Highly Radioactive ‘Souvenirs’ Looted From Chernobyl, Ukraine Says”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/04/10/russian-troops-took-highly-radioactive-souvenirs-looted-from-chernobyl-ukraine-says/
(Anyone wanna venture to guess how long it’ll take before Putin accuses his “Godless” enemies of attacking Holy Russia with very, very “subtle” nuclear weapons…?)
Yes, Diplomad went quiet for months and I feared for his welfare. Glad to see him back.
Barry Meislin:
The USSR abandoned nuclear sources in former satellite nations, the Baltics, Georgia, and the ‘stans (?) when Vlad’s great tragedy occurred. So stealing sources to be abandoned later wouldn’t be surprising, or some grunt stealing something to be sold later …. Who knows.
The YouTube channel Plainly Difficult has covered (lead, concrete, dirt?) some of these lost/orphaned source incidents.
om. A six-year old wouldn’t be rubbing my nose in his abilities.
The Donbas region is strongly Russian speaking majoritarian.
Again, self-identified Great Russians in the Donetsk and Lukhansk regions accounted for 38% of the population in 2012. Political parties favoring a Russophile foreign policy compete well in these regions. Keep in mind, the share of the population at larger favoring merger with Russia amounts to about 1/4 of those who favor a Russophile orientation in foreign affairs.
The Russians are not going to give up – no way – it is not the Russian way.
They may be forced to modify their objectives and settle for something less than they had hoped to achieve, but they will not just up and leave Ukraine.
A possible scenario would be a “solution” analogous to the Korean conflict in which no peace treaty was ever signed and each side has their military staring at each other across the DMZ. This had been going on now for about 65 years.
The ONLY way Russia will just leave Ukraine is if Putin is taken out; the Russians have a very long history of eliminating anybody when they are no longer useful.
As for hardships the Russian people may face due to sanctions (which will not work; the Russians, with the help of their pals – China, Iran, India, for starters – will find work-arounds), the Russian govt. will not care. The rulers of Russia have a 1000 year history of F’g over their own people and this time it will not be any different.
Meanwhile, Russia keeps raking in foreign revenue via their sale of oil and gas to Europe.
Finland is now making more noise about joining NATO.
For all those commentators here on Neo’s site that claim Ukraine DESERVED to be invaded due to the westward expansion of NATO, I await reading about how Finland will deserve Putin’s “Ukraine treatment.”
JohnTyler:
I can’t speak for or about Neo’s commenters but there will certainly be some elsewhere.
However, presuming the reports are close to true and, in the event of taking Ukraine, the Russians lose twenty percent of their combat effectiveness. Okay. So Finland says….we can take the same amount, which is a higher percentage of the remaining combat power. So, call it twenty-five percent. The Russians can–now–make those calculations since the yes-men’s insistence of general wonderfulness is at least temporarily in abeyance.
Do the Russians want to be down by half? Who knows? The Baltics could cost them some. Sweden apparently has a lot of good stuff, or apparently its stuff, how much they have of it, is good. Not going cheap.
My presumed calculations include only those items and troops who actually show up for the war, not the unknown but probably fairly large amount of combat power which, if it ever existed, was a paper tiger shortly thereafter. Like the armored unit which, when called up, had only ten percent of its vehicles actually fit for purpose. Commander killed himself, probably before being forced to give up his Swiss bank account number.
the Russians have a very long history of eliminating anybody when they are no longer useful.
Over the last 400 years, five Russian rulers have been deposed. Three of them ruled for < 13 months. A fourth lived out his last six years as a pensioner in Moscow.
A possible scenario would be a “solution” analogous to the Korean conflict in which no peace treaty was ever signed and each side has their military staring at each other across the DMZ. This had been going on now for about 65 years.
I’m with @John Tyler. This eventually grinds down to a static cease-fire with a DMZ between the two sides and Russia occupying the southeast. Crimea’s annexation is recognized by half the world and the two “independent” republics continue to govern themselves under Russian suzerainty.
Situation Report Ukraine War on today’s Midrats podcast at “CRD Salamander”
https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2022/04/russian-military-sitrep-with-dr-dmitry.html?m=1
Live at 15:00 PST podcast typically available for download by about 17:00 PST.
I haven’t been following the war closely, but for those who do did the train station missile turn out to be Ukrainian armament?
Or is it still disputed?
Jeffrey Kaye
@jeff_kaye
I don’t know why Ukraine seemingly bombed Kramatorsk station. Could have been accident. Maybe deliberate. But evidence is so convincing (serial number, missile type, booster position), it shames MSM, throws Ukraine/Western accounts into disrepute. Expect a limited hangout to come
Stephen McIntyre @ClimateAudit
Replying to @ClimateAudit
serial number of Kramatorsk missile ?91579 has been located in one of the photos and firmly linked to Ukraine inventory. See twitter.com/MaxvanderWerff… Attribution of Kramatorsk missile to Zelensky regime now appears to be conclusive.
twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/1512805198527401988
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeff_kaye/status/1513231544537661440
Could have been they don’t know either. Fog of war.
It is known who has invaded whom. Fog of war not so foggy about one essential fact.
I’ll point out that Russia’s quick denials of the atrocities its troops committed amounts to denying something they couldn’t know was false.
Either Russian leadership knows its troops are murdering civilians, or it doesn’t know one way or another without an investigation. But there hasn’t been time for investigation. So Russia had no basis to deny culpability.
Don:
I agree.
But, there is no such thing as a civilian Nazi, ask Antifa, or Vlad, so no denial is necessary. You just have to walk in those shoes. (sarc).
The “endgame”? There is no Fat Lady; she’ll never sing.
My guess is that Russia continues to fight over Mariupol, while also destroying more of the stuff on the Ukrainian side of Donbas the (Donetsk & Luhansk), and take control of the Sea of Azov, killing all who disagree.
Calling them Nazis, and their killing will be called de-nazification.
There will be some line the Russians will offer for a peace, or an armistice.
Zelenskyy won’t accept, at first. But then the Russians will dig in, and we’ll see new modern WW I retrograde trench warfare with drones.
Until the “final” agreement, Zelenskyy will be calling for more aid, and continued fighting, for ALL of Ukraine. But I don’t see him getting Crimea nor Donbas back, unless Putin gives it back for some reason; like he’s bribed, or killed (then it’s his successor, totally unknown now, who might give it back).
Diplomad agrees with one of my big reasons for Putin’s attack, a weaker USA:
“But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward”
It’s unlikely that Putin takes any offramp without gaining some land, and very very unlikely that Russia doesn’t keep Crimea and the main Russian naval base at Sevastopol.
A year of continued low scale fighting, without agreement, seems just as likely.
Either side just losing seems less likely – so neither side will “win”. Ukraine is offering to use its fighting bodies in this Russia vs “West”, and NATO & US would be dumb not to arm those bodies so as to use them more effectively.
Ukraine always has a choice – surrender. Lose.
I’m glad they’re fighting so well – wish Obama & Biden had given them more weapons back in 2014 when Russia invaded then.
A note on sanctions: honest, peaceful trade is win-win, for both sides.
Sanctions are thus lose-lose, obviously, for both sides.
Historically, sanctions don’t work to get fast regime change.
But they do make those who were winning with the trading, lose instead.
World sanctions while the EU buys Russian gas is:
a) sick joke;
b) realistic big step, economically costly, but not quite politically suicidal.
I like the idea of world sanctions against invaders, such that neither China nor Russia nor Iran nor Iraq invade their neighbors.
I fear a world where the elites have so much financial power and are able to use it against those who oppose grooming kids.
(My fav Led Zeppelin song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4KLOm7pO0
“It was an April morning…”
sort of guitar & drum counterpoint)
om,
Sarc noted, but I’ll seriously respond by saying I don’t believe there are any real nazis walking around. There are some weirdos who do dress up roll playing, sure, and there are also similar types to nazis.
As an example of “similar”, I’d say that we could consider China to be a form of nationalist socialism–in the literal sense of the words, not that they are the same as nazis. The real nazis were a specific thing, and now a thing of the past. But authoritarian nationalists with socialist or mixed economies are not uncommon. PRC, Russia, the former USSR, Cuba, North Korea and others are basically that.
Also, if you want videos with serious discussion of WW2 history as well as what the nazis, fascists, and communists really were, find TIKhistory on youtube.
One of his recent videos shows that Hitler was a member of a communist group in 1919. TIK is a great source for information showing that the real nazis were socialists and leftists.
Don:
I agree with both your points, to clarify, my sarcasm wasn’t directed at you.
I’ve seen many of TIK’s videos on YouTube and he got a lot of hysterical reactions when he clearly and in great detail pointed out that Hitler and the Nazis were socialists. An actual historian, not a BS artist.
Talk about denial by the left and truths that must not be allowed to be seen, spoken, or thought.
And of course Can Do! is playing out in Shanghai:
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/04/10/ongoing-covid-dystopian-madness-in-shanghai-now-endangering-us-marines-at-consulate-n548508
High speed rail, drones, and disaster. China (Xi) is asshole?
To me, several outcomes have become clear.
It is clear now that a madman invading neighboring countries is not just for the developing world. Former non-NATO countries are now realizing that in order to avoid be overrun by a madman they will need to join NATO. Putin has done more for NATO unity than NATO could have accomplished itself by proving that NATO is still relevant; and NATO unity/strength is needed more than ever.
Russia, itself, might be able to withstand the “sanctions” which seem more for show rather than any real measure to stop Putin. But, there is also something else going on; unlike the former USSR, today’s Russian citizens can leave. The result might be a rather large brain drain on Russia with those showing the most promise for building a better Russia leaving for greener, safer, saner pastures in neighboring countries and elsewhere. This is something Russia will not be able to handle well.
Will this invasion/war show the idiot American voters that voting for someone who talks all the left wing political talking points is not enough for someone to be a decent leader? Seriously, the Democrats and the MSM are yakking non-stop about the “historic” appointment of a black woman to the US Supreme Court as if that is the only news that is “historic” – Ukraine burning with millions fleeing into neighboring Poland and other countries is truly historic.
Actions and words have consequences: Biden pulling the US out of Central Asia by abandoning Bagram air base in the middle of the night was not just stupid in its own right; but, it showed the US as being weak and not being committed to the safety of other countries. IMO, that stupid action, more than anything else others claim (e.g., “pushing” Ukraine to join NATO) sent a clear signal to Putin (and to the PRC greedily eyeing Taiwan) that he can do whatever he wants with only mild protests from the West. Many on the left, and many Europeans have been calling on a world without “Americans pushing they way into everything” – well, Biden’s lack of leadership is showing what the world will become without US or Western leadership. Ha! I hope I got that wrong – Boris Johnson showed what a Western leader can do – his walk through downtown Kiev was priceless support for Ukraine and for liberty.
And speaking of support, I am just left speechless at the generosity of the Polish people and other Europeans. Estimates are that over 2 million refugees have fled to Poland. Yet, there are no massive refugee camps holding thousands and thousands in poor and unsanitary conditions. While there are group settings for many refugees, many have been taken into private homes throughout Poland and across Europe. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been enrolled in Polish schools. I’ve watched some YouTube videos from Irish TV showing how refugees are settling in Ireland. For Pete’s sake! Ireland! Nearly 2,000 miles from Ukraine and the Irish are taking refugees in; even though the numbers are small it is still support.
Ukrainians, collectively, will hate Russians for a generation or more. Will we see a “cleansing” of Russian speakers from Ukraine? Part of me says I don’t think so as there are too many (including Zelenskyy) who, although they speak Russian as their first language, consider themselves to be Ukrainian. But another part of me says that the horror inflicted on civilians is too great for there not to be some sort of revenge; even if that revenge is misguided by what language someone speaks. I hope that the sentiment I heard in a recent You Tube video wins though: Born In Russia, Two Brothers Died Defending Ukraine (“It doesn’t matter that they were born in Russia – they fought for Ukraine – they were real Ukrainians”).
When the USSR dissolved many spoke of a “new world order” or the “end of history” – one idiot even ignorantly quipped in a Presidential debate: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Well, it is clear that a new world order is here – and on this I totally agree with you Neo: “That’s one of the frightening things about this war: that a nation with enormous numbers of nuclear arms is led by a ruthless and brutal man who cannot countenance a military defeat and who has also tried very hard to protect himself from those who would either do him in or unseat him in a coup.” It is very frightening indeed. Which is why I believe the US and NATO MUST step up.
Unlike others I do believe we are already at war with Russia, we just don’t realize it yet.
Perhaps a bit off topic but I wanted to share an interesting comment on Niki Proshin’s latest YouTube video. Niki lives in St. Petersburg and recently has been showing life under all the sanctions.
This is a comment from Za:
“Hello! I am from Latvia and I want to share some thoughts about this . . .
Many people claim that this is not Russia’s whar. It is Putin’s war. But what people from countries that do not have large Russian communities (or people that just do not understand Russian and do not have connection with Russian community in that country) do not realize is that you would not believe how unbelievably many people (Russians) actually support this.
We have A LOT of Russians (~30%) living in my country. In fact, my own grandmother was Russian (she was born in Estonia, though). I see that people who are “ethnically Latvians” mainly support Ukraine, but Russians are much more polarized. Many Russians physically live here, but mentally live in Russia while fully benefitting from the EU. Now they have full rights to throw sh** on us for helping Ukraine while not being the ones who will suffer from sanctions like you- people who actually live in Russia. They will be able to travel and live normal lives. Their only argument is “where have you been 8 years” (they mean Donbas) as if it could justify the horror in Bucha and all of Ukraine. Almost every day we can read that yet another car with a Ukrainian number was demolished. A little russian girl said to a Ukrainian girl on her first day of school “I hope your family dies”. It’s the result of Russian media. The stuff they show there is INSANE. Of course, there are MANY (I’ll repeat- MANY) Russians who do not support this, who are loyal to my country and understand what is right and what is not. But I’d say every day I see every end of the spectrum.
Sorry. I just wanted to say what I see and feel because I am panicking this war will come to my doorstep too, because we have plenty of war supporters. I do not know what I expext Russians to do, they definitely do not need to write “no to war” on their foreheads just because they are Russians and people do not trust them anymore. I also do not expect them to wear latvian national folk costume just to show their love to my country. But I wish people didn’t throw this much sh** on my country AND Ukraine, while benefiting from Latvia and the EU.
I just wish the world was normal.
Again, I am really sorry if this offends you..“
JimNorCal:
There is nothing indicating it was Ukrainian except the tweet you posted by some random “retired psychologist” and a guy who was a mining expert (not war mines; the kind of mines you dig to get stuff out of) and who likes to critique climate scientists. Oh, and of course Russian propaganda says it was the Ukrainians, just as Russian propaganda says everything was the Ukrainians. Next they’ll be saying that the Ukrainians invaded themselves and pretended it was Russia that did it.
Turtler & “whatever” —
Contra the “getting more Ukrainians killed”, it was established rather long ago that the worst killing does not happen in combat between two armed factions, but in bloodshed by an armed faction against unarmed or barely armed civilians.
Remember your Churchill:
“[Y]ou may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
As long as the Ukrainians want to fight for their freedom and sovereignty, I’m in favor of continuing to arm them. Because we know what happens to people who get conquered by the Russians, even those whose national identity the Russians don’t deny exists.
——
Art Deco —
Keep in mind, the share of the population at larger favoring merger with Russia amounts to about 1/4 of those who favor a Russophile orientation in foreign affairs.
From what I’ve been reading, I suspect that’s down to about 1/100th at this point. Kharkiv was the most Russophile city in Ukraine and by all accounts they hate Russia — and Russians — now.
If you flee Russia, are you still “Russian”?
@Art Deco
2012 was a freaking eternity ago in the annals of Eastern European History, and in Ukraine in particular it is firmly in the B.M. And B.I. Categories: Before Maidan and Before Invasion. In 2012 labeling yourself as a “Greater Russian” was still a political act as much as a cultural one, but it indicated favoring engagement with a fraternal country and government that might be a bit prickly with trade deals but which was still at peace with and a major sponsor of that.
After 2014 it became a political act akin to openly declaring your loyalty to the invasion governments.
The Donbas was one of the most heavily Russified and pro-Russian areas of Ukraine, and even before the invasion you still saw significant (if minority) outbreaks of Maidanite activity due to whiplash and bitterness over Yanukovych first promising to negotiate an EU Association Agreement (which in a rust belt like the Donbas had significant interest) and then doing a 180 for token concessions. The invasion polarized things further, and it soon became clear that the Russian troops SERIOUSLY expected there to be more support. Hence the 2014-15 or so “Novorossiya” maps you see floating around here and there.
War has a hell of a war of polarizing politics and I would reckon the Kremlin’s conduct has devastated at least public support for Russia in Ukraine since 2012.
@JimNorCal @Neo
To be honest, I could believe the train station missile was Ukrainian. Though of course that doesn’t exactly reveal the party that fired it, and in this war it’s chaotic enough I could legitimately believe just about ANY scenario put forth. Russian government (using captured missile stocks and platforms if it was found to legitimately be Ukrainian ordinance)? Ukrainian government trying to make a false flag (but then is it actually Ukrainian ordinance, and if it is would the Ukrainian government really want to use Ukrainian ordinance in an attack they are blaming the Russians for rather than captured Russian gear)? Rogue Actors on either the Ukrainian or Russian side acting without orders?
It’s a real mess. So for now the simplest stance I have is to withhold judgements or guesses and wait for more evidence.
@Bryan Lovely
Beautifully well said and I absolutely agree. Indeed, a bit after I posted that I recalled that wonderful speech from Churchill and considered editing it in, but yeah.
In any case, whether from an ideological standpoint, a moral one, or a “realist” one I really do not see much downside to supporting the Ukrainians with armaments.
@Art Deco
I missed this part of your comment so I wish I could still attach it to my previous comment, but alas.
I honestly am wondering where the hell you’re getting your information from.
But I can think of significantly more.
Starting with:
* Nikolaj II: The Big One everyone thinks of, The Last Tsar, Abdicated under demand from his military forming a Provisional Republic before being imprisoned first by them and then imprisoned and murdered by the Bolsheviks.
* Khruschev: Soviet Leader but similar; ousted in an inner-party takeover in 1964
* Regent Sophia Alekseyevna: The prologue to Pyotr the Great of the House of Romanov, seized power in a violent coup in 1682 and held power as puppetmaster over “joint Tsars” Pyotr and Ivan until being ousted in another coup in 1689 and forced to enter a convent under guard, where she remained until she died.
* Tsar Pyotr III: Strange short-lived Prussiaboo who reigned as Tsar for a few months before being deposed and murdered in a coup by his wife the future Katarina the Great.
* Tsar Paul I: Similar story to the above; son and heir of Katarina the Great, ruled for a few months before being secretly murdered and replaced by his son.
* The Infant Tsar Ivan VI and Regent-Duke von Biron of Courland: Russian Answer to the Man in the Iron Mask. Adopted successor to Empress Anna when he was a toddler, to have Biron acting as his regent until he came of age. Deposed in a coup by the future Empress Elizabeth, who had Biron murdered and Ivan locked up in utter isolation with orders to kill him to prevent his escape or anyone learning his identity for the next several years, which eventually happened.
So that’s at least six (maybe seven if you count Biron and Ivan VI separately) within the last 400 years deposed. And I was being very specific in limiting my choices, not counting people who were murdered but not deposed or otherwise had their succession significantly interrupted (Paul I is a borderline case but I counted him since while his son and heir supported it he did not know the plan was assassination). For instance I did not count Aleksandr II, who was assassinated but not really deposed.
I could probably count more if I tried since this was a partial list and one that mostly avoided things like the Late Soviet Gerontocracy, but it should indicate that at a minimum Russian elite/political life is a fair bit more chaotic than you indicate it as.
@JohnTyler
As a history nerd, I have to add in with some caveats. The idea that not giving up is not the Russian Way is something the Russians- and PARTICULARLY the Russian governments- have spent a long time fostering and it has significant basis in truth, but a close scrutiny paints a very different picture.
After all, what were the significant military conflicts Russia has faced since Fourth Generation Warfare got going (excluding those still ongoing like Syria and Ukraine)?
* Georgia 2008
* Second Chechnya/Dagestan
* First Chechnya/Dagestan
* Transnistria
* Afghanistan
And in about two of those five (two of those seven counting Ukraine and Syria) the Russians REALLY DID eventually “give up” and leave. Moreover, they did so without any major turnover in political leadership at the time.
That’s a rather small sample I agree, but it is still a telling one. Moreover, it also holds remarkably true over the centuries, going back to at least the 1500s and the Livonian War (which really should be studied more than it is in light of recent tensions and history) to now.
On the whole, many of the most famous “Never Give Up” conflicts in Russian History were at least largely DEFENSIVE, such as the “Great Patriotic War” part of WWII, the “Patriotic War” of the 1812-1813 Napoleonic Invasion, and so forth. Not all of them and there have been some remarkable achievements in raw grit in foreign lands such as the 1804-1813 war with Persia (nearly a decade of fighting on a shoestring against numerically superior odds, often on the offensive, while the Motherland was busy with other things), But the Russian populace seems to act much like that of others on the whole. They are significantly more willing to fight on the home front than on the offensive, they get tired of wars that demand a lot of them over a protracted period of time, and they clamber for peace.
Moreover, this war in Ukraine is well on track to be far, far bloodier than any Russian conflict in recent history, even Afghanistan. That’s not going to go down well with Russian demography or popular opinion (such as it is).
That was basically the situation on the Donbas prior to a month or so ago, with the higher intensity limited war cooled down into positional war with the Russians and their separatist auxiliaries holding maybe a third of the Donbas Oblasts near the border. Indeed, one reason why the Russian advance
The issue I see with this being a “solution” or “outcome” is that Korea’s a rocky peninsula with no real flanks except the ocean (and even those proved vulnerable enough, not just with the obvious Incheon Landing the Western Allies carried out but also the North Korean attempt to land about 600 troops using a steamer near Pusan/Busan near the start of the invasion in June 26th, which was detected in a fluke and sunk by a Semi-Destroyer in the South Korean Navy). That’s a situation very conductive to positional warfare and static trench lines (and even that was far from impossible to move with enough commitment).
Ukraine’s a much larger and rather diverse country, but it is majority Steppe or Plains, and so much more conductive to mobile operations and less conducive to a static cool down and slogging match like we saw in Korea. In particular the Donbas wound up the way it did because of the rather narrow front to the heavy proportion of troops on it.
On the whole this is terrain that is much much more demanding of a decisive outcome, one way or another. And there’s also territorial limits on some digging in, not just from the vulnerability of such positions on the terrain or from modern warfare but also the shambles the Russians got into when they tried to entrench in Chernobyl’s Red Forest.
None of this means what you describe is impossible of course,
I mostly agree, but I’m not actually sure about that. The Russians- contrary to their often scrupulously cultivated image- have shown themselves to be quite willing to throw their hands up and walk out without undergoing regime change. Even Ivan Groznoi/the Terrible did it in Livonia (itself a conflict with striking similarities, right on down to a puppet “Kingdom of Livonia”), and of course the Russians did it in Afghanistan and First Chechnya without suffering some kind of drastic regime change.
In this case I think the issue is that Putin has staked so much of his credibility and reputation on it that he is unlikely to withdraw, precisely because he has been fighting here in one fashion or another for nearly a decade (in terms of combat ops; maybe longer if you count the influence war in things like Euromaidan and the Orange Revolution).
Sure, but eventually the people can F over the leadership. And I’d be hard pressed to think of another time in Russia’s thousand year history when its manpower and demographics are this precarious. Which in turn gives what people ARE there a much stronger say. Does anybody see any previous Russian leader except maybe Yeltsin being forced into the awkward position of having to explain how they have no idea that they sent Russian conscripts into Ukraine and that this was accidental?
Also: while India is SOMEWHAT warm towards Russia, it has a serious hate on towards China and its friends that is driving it apart from Russia and towards the West.
Agreed, for now. We’ll see how it goes.
Indeed.
@Jim B
It’s possible- and indeed that’s what happened in the Donbas for almost half a decade- but I doubt it is anywhere near likely here. Broad fronts on rolling terrain with lots of mechanized vehicles and aerial are not friendly to entrenched positions, as both Ukrainians and Russians learned in WWI and WWII. That’s a far cry from Korea the rocky, rather narrow peninsula.
Add that to the problems with digging in on some terrain and I think this is a conflict that is going to be a lot more fluid and favoring a decisive outcome, sort of like the Croatian front of the Yugoslav Wars. Stalemate is possible, but I think the simple inability to draw up a DMZ in a compact way undermines it.
(And let us not forget how the DMZ has been violated a bunch of times in living memory, like in the little-remembered Second Korean War.)
@Tom Grey
We’ll see.
Probably, the issue will be on what terms.
I agree Zelenskyy will not accept at first.
Moreover, “modern WWI Retrograde Trench Warfare with Drones” is something this country has already seen during the grueling nearly decade long fighting in the Donbas prior to this February, when the Ukrainians retook basically all but a third to fourth of the Donbas, pushing the Russians up into a wedge on the border that could be tentatively supplied and supported.
The issue I see is that was somewhat unlikely, the product of both the Donbas’s heavy mining and urban areas as well as the narrow front compared to the forces committed to it.
WWI Trench Warfare like we saw there and also see on things like the Eritrean-Ethiopian Border benefit from compact fronts and rough terrain.
Ukraine’s pretty much the exact opposite. Of course it’s a fascinatingly vast and diverse country, but it’s largely dominated by steppes and plains. That’s going to make it far far harder for static warfare to fully take hold or for some kind of “DMZ” to be formed and hold.
Not impossible sure, but I figure this is going to lean more towards open fighting and somewhat more decisive operations.
Even after the “final” agreement. Western support for the ROK didn’t stop at Panmunjom, and for good reason.
Crimea will be harder due to Russian naval strength and the geography involved, even besides the population’s rather disproportionate pro-Russian leaning (helpfully strengthened by the Kremlin’s representatives repressing dissent). But the sheer way it juts into the Black Sea and endangers Odessa means the Ukrainians will be much less likely to just let it slide.
The Donbas is a lot harder though, since sizable chunks of it are pro-Ukrainian or at least so much so that they could be retaken and held by relatively modest forces.
Agreed there. Weakness is provocative and this was particularly provocative after Kabul and Bagram and the “limited incursion.”
Agreed, he really cannot afford to. The issue I see is that there’s really no incentive now or in the near-to-intermediate future for Ukraine or any Western government to give him such an off-ramp. Especially after the repeated breakdown of talks.
And ultimately Putin is in a more vulnerable position politically since he has to play occupier on a relative shoestring with the public already worried about the safety of conscripts.
Agreed, and I’d guess that is what we’re in for. Though lord knows I have been wrong before.
Had you asked me a year ago that is what I would’ve thought regarding the Donbas. But I’m not so sure now, if only because of the stakes.
Agreed absolutely there.
@Eva Marie Thanks for sharing, and well said. What a lot of people forget is that there’s a very significant Russian diaspora throughout Eastern Europe, even in NATO countries. And Dear God, has Putin been working on trying to court and weaponize them for a long time. This is particularly evident in the likes of Latvia and Estonia because the demographics weren’t as violently cleaned up by the Soviets as-say- the Polish-Ukrainian one, but they’re still there.
I have found “Geopolitika” to be a useful analysis for this stuff, though of course I am not sure if all of it is true and haven’t studied it THAT closely.
http://www.geopolitika.lt/index.php
I’ll also third the recommendation for TIK. He generally does very good work with his deep dives and is a rather Right-Wing Complement to Timeghost and Real Time History, among others.
He isn’t perfect but he is much much more studious and accountable than most, and while I think he does fall too hard into the “No True Capitalism” and “Everything I don’t like is Socialism” houses compared to my own, he is still FAR better than most analysts of Fascism and National Socialism.
TIK does not speak in “Received English” which is good for a change. 🙂
A bereaved Ukrainian family says and believes their son died for freedom.
A bereaved Russian family says and believes… what?
Will that make a difference in terms of hanging on?
I think TIK is more libertarian than any kind of right wing.
Hell, I’m not sure what right wing really means. In England I suppose it means supporting monarchy. In the US it means supporting the Constitution, which is also what a (classical) liberal would do.
On the claims of the CIA causing the Orange Revolution, maybe they tried to or supported it, but it sure looks like a popular Ukrainian movement.
Critics of the US often point to CIA tricks causing regime change, suggesting the US has near magic abilities to control events even when we have no actual power on the ground. But we have trouble controlling events when we have actual power on the ground.
It seems clear to me the Orange Revolution was a popular Ukranian movement to secure independence which was threatened by Russia.
Vlad looks to de-Nazify the Baltics? And of course protect ethnic Russians in the Baltics from “oppression.” Pretext much?
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/04/11/latvia-becomes-the-newest-target-for-russias-denazification-program-n548675
Put his shoes back on, it’s the first step on the path to understanding of his actions.
Richard Aubrey —
A bereaved Russian family says and believes… what?
Their son died for Holy Mother Russia, of course.
Except that not only is this a particularly bad time for Russia demographically, this is the first time in history that Russians have had easy contact with the West, so I’m not sure how much that cause will stick outside the older generations.
Bryan
In WWII, certainly. Today? I’d like to know more, but I suspect the Russian citizen, info control notwithstanding, can tell the diff.
Turtler —
Re: Crimea
If Ukraine can take back Nova Khakova and shut off the pumping station that sends Dnipro water down the canal to the Crimea, the whole peninsula dries up and becomes mostly uninhabitable.
I’m pretty sure that Ukraine is in “total war” mode. They’ve shown some restraint in not advancing troops past their borders and have only done the occasional long-range strike onto Russian territory, but they consider Crimea to be part of Ukraine.
Richard Aubrey: “ A bereaved Russian family says and believes… what?”
@natashasrussia on TikTok says that Russian propaganda says that Russia is killing nazis. That’s all the state media allows to be said. (It’s illegal, punishable by a long jail sentence – essentially – to say otherwise.)
She says, “Nobody wants their people to be villains. Propaganda knows this and they always play on these feelings to reach their goals. The whole world is against us and if the whole world is against us we stand with the strong one. So people start to identify themselves with the aggressor in hope that they will be saved.”
Please don’t come at me – this isn’t what I believe – I don’t think it’s even what Natasha believes. I’m just quoting Natasha’s explanation of the Russian people who stand with Putin.
@natashasrussia says: Russians don’t even believe their relatives when they tell them, “there is bombing. They (the Russian army) are killing us.” And Russian person answers, “no you’re lying. They’re not bombing you. They are bombing nazis.”
Eva Marie:
Thank you for sharing Natasha’s perspective. The bad old days and ways are back.
My point is that the Bad Old Days may be more leaky than before.
Will there be a diff, if only in degree?
Eva Marie:
On the Russian relatives’ responses – my guess is that perhaps a lot of these people are afraid their communications are being monitored and therefore they have to say something that conforms to the party line.
Don:
There is hardly a coup in the world that the left doesn’t think is engineered by the mighty all-powerful US CIA – except, of course, for the noble revolutions of the left.
As for the right, there are many who ascribe similar powers to the US CIA, only for them it extends to all coups including those of the left.
Richard, I wasn’t aiming that “don’t come after me” comment at you.
If by leaky you mean that more truth is seeping into Russia, I think so. So many young people, especially in the tech sector, have left – many for Israel:
https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-it-workers-brain-drain/31783558.html
(If that’s a repeat link, my apologies – I think I saw it at Instapundit.)
neo,
Those on the right you mention do have a good point to be skeptical of foreign interventions and related activities, given what we have learned about our own government recently.
At this point I wouldn’t want to go to war for any reason, in part because of who’s leading us. But also because of the authoritarian leanings of the establishment left. I think our biggest external threat is the PRC, but our internal threat is greater.
Vlad and NATO, be careful what you wished for ….
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/04/11/nato-strategy-shifts-from-ukraine-must-be-defended-to-russia-must-lose-n548797
Don:
I think they have very good reasons, especially if alternating leftist US governments are determined to throw away any gains made.
Neo,
Yes, that’s a good point. We have trouble maintaining a consistent foreign policy. And it is much worse when you have administrations like Obama’s pushing things like the Iran Deal.
Or recall, W Bush put effort into a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. Obama pulled out of the deal in his first year, without getting any concessions in return, just a unilateral surrender. That struck me as a sellout of our Eastern European friends and a message of submission to Putin. At least Trump reversed Obama’s move.
Kaytn2 was in 2010, but only 94, not 20,000, according to the Poles:
https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/04/11/poland-officially-blames-russian-action-for-2010-plane-crash-that-killed-its-president-and-senior-military-officers-n548910
So Vlad’s recent adventures outside of Kyiv would be Katyn3?
I think Neo needs to watch real analysis like Scott Ritter or The Duran. They’ve reached all the opposite conclusions of the Fake news media and they’ve been borne correct. Bucha was another hoax as were so many other false flags by Ukraine; and Russia will never stop until Ukraine is nuclear and NATO free. Putin doesn’t bluff: when he says he intends to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine – he will. He has the overwhelming support the Russian people and the majority of the world outside the hysteria driven bubble of the West, Canada, and Australia. For the Russians it’s an existential issue that’s brewed for 7 years since Ukraine tore up the Minsk accords and preceded to kill 14,000 Russian civilians. Russian military deaths are more realistically around 1,000-1,500 while Ukraine’s are a staggering 30,000 (half of them from the Azov nazis in Mariupol alone). Putin was prepared for the sanctions and the Russian people are prepared for the long war. Ask the average Russian, as Ritter, Alex Mercouris, and even Gonzalo Lira has done, and you’ll get the uniform answer that they’re braced for the war to last past the summer and into Autumn. Kiev was a feint to tie down Ukrainian forces while they pummeled the southeast and now they’re locked in place since their movement is blocked due to critical shortages of tanks, armored vehicles, and petrol.
Hong:
And I think you need to take off your Russian-colored-glasses.
I think Neo needs to watch real analysis like Scott Ritter or The Duran.
Russia nicked 12 of the Ukraine’s 60 largest cities in 2014. Did your ‘real analysts’ tell you it was going to take Russian troops seven weeks to secure just two of the 48 cities they did not control previously? Or that they’d have to abandon assaults on Odessa, Kiev and Sumy and restrict their operations to just five of the Ukraine’s 24 regions?
Vlad and NATO, be careful what you wished for ….
As long as people down the chain of command refuse to implement orders to use weapons of mass destruction, Russia losing is an unalloyed good. Russia benefits when it concentrates improving the quality of life in Russia. The Baltic states and Taiwan benefit when a big country’s effort to seize more territory comes a’ cropper. When the Baltic states and Taiwan are not under siege, everyone allied with them benefits.
“…everyone allied with them benefits.”
Indeed.
But it raises the question, who are the ones who are “supposed to” benefit in Russia?
Certainly NOT the hoi polloi.
Nope. Those at the TOP of the food chain certainly.
No “pursuit of happiness” there (though all too often, vodka might come close).
Which makes one wonder how “the pursuit of happiness” is faring in the “Land of the Free”(TM) under our political and cultural “betters”, geniuses all (at least at confabulation, prevarication and prestidigitation…while causing everyone else mental, physical and emotional indigestion)…
Come to think of it, the US sounds a lot like Russia, these days…i.e., “Those at the TOP of the food chain”, etc., do seem to be enjoying themselves. Immensely.
Especially when it comes to screwing thy neighbor if such neighbor dare not toe the (Democratic) party line…(pursuit of happiness, indeed….)
Hmmm. “Biden” and Putin?
USA and (former) USSR?
“All the news that’s fit to print” and Pravda?
Coincidence?
Methinks not….
Related:
There are heroes out there—many, in fact, of which many remain unknown and unsung.
Here’s one who found himself “known”:
‘I’m under no illusions,’ says British soldier in Ukraine, after comrades killed”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61058139
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
God bless….
But it raises the question, who are the ones who are “supposed to” benefit in Russia? Certainly NOT the hoi polloi. Nope. Those at the TOP of the food chain certainly.
No clue what you fancy you’re talking about; per the World Bank, Russia’s income distribution is about normal for a European country. About 26% of the country’s personal income flow adheres to the most affluent 10%.
Art. Don’t see the issue.
The only part I would address is, NO, the US should not get anymore involved than we are now, and not one American should get a single scratch in defense of Ukraine, let alone die.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a gigantic majority of Americans agree
Neo says:
“And I think you need to take off your Russian-colored-glasses.”
–You mean inconvenient facts? Remember last month when every corporate media shill was saying the invasion ‘failed?’ That Putin was losing his grip? That the Russian economy would collapse? That Biden ‘won’ more votes than Obama? That covid wasn’t from a Wuhan lab? ….I’ll wait for your apology when you stop taking the hate russia kool aid.
Art Deco says:
“Russia nicked 12 of the Ukraine’s 60 largest cities in 2014. Did your ‘real analysts’ tell you it was going to take Russian troops seven weeks to secure just two of the 48 cities they did not control previously? ”
–Um, Crimea asked to join the Russian federation. So have Donbas and Donetz. None of the ethnic Russians want to live in a country that tries to ban the Russian language or has actual Nazis killing protestors.
–As for ‘seven weeks.’ It seems obvious Russia took a soft approach because they honestly didn’t want to harm the infrastructure and they honestly believed the Ukrainians wouldn’t resist. Russia can bomb the hell out of places as they proved with the NATO base near Lviv.
“Or that they’d have to abandon assaults on Odessa, Kiev and Sumy and restrict their operations to just five of the Ukraine’s 24 regions?”
–They’re called feints. Nobody in the Russian military seriously believed they could ‘take’ Kiev with 40,000 troops. Kiev has 3.5 million people. But they’ve successfully locked Ukrainian forces there instead of helping Mariupol when they had the chance.
From Vlad’s mouth to our ears/eyes. What would we ever do without our new maroon?
“And in my opinion those who suggest Zelenskyy and Ukraine never should have fought for their autonomy in the first place have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty.”
Along those lines, IMHO, those who still think the last presidential election was stolen, without sufficient and solid evidence, have forfeited any right to call themselves defenders or supporters of liberty.
And so on for those who, after seeing who and what Trump is after 4+ years, think he should ever again hold the office of POTUS. Even as “bad” as the Democrats are (and there is plenty to point to here re: a threat to liberty), Trump is 1+ order of magnitude different.
But isn’t there an interesting intersection of people who are anti-Ukraine in such a way, and hold those other opinions too?
Maybe it isn’t about liberty at all?
Maybe they are simply sheeple who repeat the thoughts and words of their “team” – from their favorite media voices – even though they believe they are forming their “thoughts” “independently”.