Putin annexes four Ukrainian oblasts
I’m only surprised that Putin didn’t do this earlier:
Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally accomplished what has been telegraphed for a few weeks, the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts (provinces). Before a crowd of what passes for dignitaries in Russia, Putin announced that Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson were a part of Russia in perpetuity and not subject to negotiation.
Two of the oblasts, Luhansk and Donetsk, have been under partial Russian occupation since 2014 and were recognized as independent states by Putin in February (see Putin Gives a Bonkers Speech on Ukraine, Drops the Last Puzzle Piece in Place for War). Zaporizhzhia and Kherson were overrun during the Russian invasion that started on February 24. Putin recognized their independence yesterday.
The annexation was preceded by a pro forma “referendum” that produced a 95+% vote for joining Russia…
It marks a point where a negotiated peace is no longer possible unless another Russian stooge becomes president of Ukraine or Putin is removed from office.
But ever since Putin invaded Ukraine and the Ukrainians resisted with some success, I think it’s been apparent that a negotiated peace was impossible. Perhaps this latest move makes it even more impossible, but impossible is already impossible.
There’s also a lot of speculation that this annexation means Putin will use it to justify the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in Ukraine; now he will say it’s necessary as a defense of Russian territory. But Putin’s been threatening to use nuclear weapons ever since the start of the war, and has found various supposed justifications already. No one will suddenly buy this newsest justification for nuclear weapons’ use who didn’t already buy the previous ones. Actually, to a large extant I think it was always the case that Putin will do what Putin will do – including perhaps the use of nuclear weapons if Putin thinks such an act necessary or justified.
As for the plebiscite, as commenter “Turtler” writes (more at the link):
Firstly, [the plebiscite] was nakedly illegitimate due to being conducted during a time of war, under occupation by a foreign force…
And this is before I get into the utter lack of accountability and transparency, which in many ways make clearcut cases of fraud in places like Baltimore seem quaint.
Secondly: it is also telling that Zelenskyy actually offered a plebiscite for the Donbas to be conducted as a means toward ending the war. Which indeed led to a fair amount of complaining from Ukrainian hawks, as you can see here in this English language Ukraine-focused Soros front.
But this was contingent on a mutual demilitarization of the Donbas and internationally observed votes.
Which the Kremlin never deigned to respond to. Precisely because it was not interested in an honest poll of who wanted to stay in Ukraine and who wanted to join the Rodina.
Also, the following may be a significant element of Putin’s motive for the annexation:
In the near term, Putin has opened a new manpower reserve. As the theater of operations is now, at least in Russian “law,” within Russia, the conscripts who were blocked from taking part in the “Special Military Operation” are now available for service in Ukraine. The men of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are subject to mobilization, and the Russians sent that message today by killing a large number of civilians attempting to flee from Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia to Ukraine in a clearly designated humanitarian convoy.
I see this as face-saving damage control. He has to get something out of this, but this is absolutely not what he wanted. Even if he’s successful in this annexation, imagine what the Ukraine that is left will look like. Entirely unified in their anti-Russian opinion, and fiercely pro-western. All right on his new border.
Seems that Russia has been down this bloody path before.
From Wikipedia (with edits by me)
‘The Wild Field … is a historical term used in the Eastern European documents of the 16th to 18th centuries to refer to the Pontic steppe in the territory of present-day Eastern and Southern Ukraine and Southern Russia, north of the Black Sea and Azov Sea. …
For centuries, the region was only sparsely populated by various nomadic groups such as Scythians, Alans, Huns, Bulgars, Pechenegs, Kipchaks, Turco-Mongols, Tatars and Nogais. After the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus’, the territory was ruled by the Golden Horde until the Battle of Blue Waters (1362), which allowed Algirdas to claim it for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. As a result of the Battle of the Vorskla River in 1399, his successor Vytautas lost the territory to Temür Qutlugh, the khan of the Golden Horde. In 1441, the western section of the Wild Fields, Yedisan, came to be dominated by the Crimean Khanate, a political entity controlled by the expanding Ottoman Empire from the 16th century onward. The Wild Fields were also partly inhabited by the Zaporizhian Cossacks, as reflected in works of the Polish theologian and Catholic bishop of Kyiv Józef Wereszczy?ski, who settled there under the condition that they would fight off expansion by the Nogai Horde.
The Wild Fields were traversed by the Muravsky Trail and Izyumsky Trail, important warpaths used by the Crimean Tatars to invade and pillage the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The Crimean-Nogai Raids, a long period of raids and fighting between the Crimean Tatars and Nogai Horde on one side and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Moscow on the other side, caused considerable devastation and depopulation in the area before the rise of the Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks…
“What made the “wild field” so forbidding were the Tatars. Year after year, their swift raiding parties swept down on the towns and villages to pillage, kill the old and frail, and drive away thousands of captives to be sold as slaves in the Crimean port of Kaffa, a city often referred to by Russians as “the vampire that drinks the blood of Rus’…For example, from 1450 to 1586, eighty-six raids were recorded, and from 1600 to 1647, seventy. … —?Orest Subtelny”
By the 17th century, the east part of the Wild Fields had been settled by runaway peasants and serfs who made up the core of the Cossackdom. During the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Uprising the north part of this area was settled by Cossacks from the Dnieper basin and came to be known as Sloboda Ukraine. After a series of Russo-Turkish wars waged by Catherine the Great, the area formerly controlled by the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 1780s. The Russian Empire built many of the cities in the Wild Fields, including Odessa [1794], Sevastopol [1783], Yekaterinoslav [1776], and Nikolayev [1789]. Most of Kyiv was also built during this time. The area was filled with Russian and Ukrainian settlers and the name “Wild Fields” became outdated; it was instead referred as New Russia (Novorossiya). According to the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine, “The population consisted of military colonists from hussar and lancer regiments, Ukrainian and Russian peasants, Cossacks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and other foreigners who received land subsidies for settling in the area.”’
I think Lukhansk is the only one of the four completely occupied by Russia.
Jokers wild….
“Biden Administration’s Gift to Russia: Iran Nuke Deal”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18945/biden-russia-iran-nuke-deal
Biden-Putin nexus, number…
…do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.
Bravo!
@Banned Lizard
Worth starting a war of aggression and losing a few dozen thousands of soldiers, ain’t it?
Putin knows how to troll idiots in the West.
Vlad’s fanboys are an interesting lot.
This is actually deeply concerning.
It may be that Russia’s “partial mobilization” is not so “partial” at all. There are reports that the actual target of the mobilization order is either 1 or 1.2 million men. There are also reports that Belarus is going to house & equip 100,000 Russian soldiers along the border with Ukraine and add another 120,000 men of their own. This being on top of the absurd “referendum”, the annexation, and the nuclear threats.
Not being satisfied with losing 50,000 men, half of his operational main battle tanks and armored personnel carriers, one third of his operational artillery launchers, three quarters of his cruise and short-range ballistic missiles, and one quarter of his operational large capital ships, it seems ol’ Vlad is, to use a poker term, going “all in.”
Once mobilization is complete, the Russian army will finally be large enough to take and hold all of Ukraine. Whether it will be competent enough still remains to be seen.
I imagine all the multiple parents (numbers one to whatever) are sporting Ukraine (plus rainbow & trans) flags on their social media accounts.
Cute
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/us-is-overreaching-in-ukraine
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/09/30/analysts-u-s-weapons-stockpiles-dangerously-low-levels-as-dod-sends-weapons-ukraine/
mkent:
See Perun
Russian Mobilisation – what does it mean for the war in Ukraine? 10/1/2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXnQNU8ANo
Before you let your fears run away with you. How many Russians have to die before Vlad is out?
Do you assume Ukraine and the west wil just sit around while the Roosian Federation of Vlad warms up all the cannon fodder? Or that Belarus will stay a vassal to Roosia?
For a Ukrainian spin on the Ukrainian/Vladian war
Denys Davydov (Ukrainian commercial airline pilot (formerly))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTmN0ePw7wg
or
Jake Broe
Russia Has NO PLAN For Their Soldiers After Mobilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gQAymJvsTU
Time will tell, although it doesn’t look like Vlad is winning.
But I’ve been told by reputable analysts that “Roosia gets what Roosia wants.”
It’s worthwhile to read the English translation of Putin’s speech. It’s not just the Ukraine, he is contemptuous of Western rule at the present moment, and is seeing an opportunity while the Western Imbecile deifies windmills and racial identity, and sterilize its children.
No big surprise here.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-act-un-friday-russias-proclaimed-annexations-ukraine-blinken-2022-09-30/
…as did Gabon, India and Brazil.
Anti-globalism is now going mainstream, and as it does people are going to start looking for answers. Why have our economic conditions been so degraded? Why are we facing a stagflationary crisis? Why are prices on everything continuing to climb? Why did we almost lose all of our civil liberties in the name of fighting a virus with a tiny 0.23% official median Infection Fatality Rate? Why are pointless carbon controls being instituted in the middle of a supply chain crisis? Why are politicians and banks making everything so much worse?
The public outcry for a reckoning is growing and it’s the heads of globalists that will end up on the chopping block. All roads to destruction lead back to them and the policies they have forced upon the populace.
I believe “globalists” refers generally to corporate fascists – woke corporate interests pressuring governments in the direction of increasingly authoritarian policies. By the way, which side of the Ukraine conflict are globalists and the woke mainstream media lined up on?
I read Putin’s speech and imagined reading it as not a citizen of America. Hmmm. The portion Banned Lizard shared. And this:
“But people cannot be fed with printed dollars and euros. It is impossible to feed with these pieces of paper, and it is impossible to heat a home with the virtual, inflated capitalization of Western social networks. All this is important, what I’m talking about, but what was just said is no less important: you can’t feed anyone with paper money – you need food, and you won’t warm anyone with these inflated capitalizations – you need energy.
Therefore, politicians in the same Europe have to convince their fellow citizens to eat less, wash less often, and dress warmer at home. And those who begin to ask fair questions “actually, why is that so?” – are immediately declared enemies, extremists and radicals. They switch arrows to Russia, they say: here, they say, who is the source of all your troubles. They lie again.”
Didn’t President Biden shut down the pipeline in our own country, out the gate? As a citizen, the last 10 years of civil degeneration have me looking at our country in a completely different light. What has transpired beginning with blaming Russia for a Trump presidency has altered my perception. My own experience both during and now post COVID-19 totalitarian policies has me in a completely different place with regards to our government. My husband, a licensed architect and general contractor cannot go to the Los Angeles Building and Safety to pull a permit without a vaccine passport or taking a test. Same goes for the Los Angeles DWP. And I can go on and on. But during this time of upheaval, the gamechanger for me was reading Stephen Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief. Post WWII our country via the CIA unbeknownst to the tax-paying citizens took a decidedly evil turn in building on the Unit 731 and Joseph Mengele horrors. Any wonder we end up divorced from decency such that not being satisfied with slaughter in the womb we are now actively seeking to destroy the minds and bodies of children that have survived the womb? Sadly President Eisenhower’s prescient warnings went ignored. I’m not a Putin apologist, but because it directly affects me and everyone I care about most, I have more disdain for a President Biden and his comrades who embrace and promote the madness that is destroying us from within.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/10/01/mollie_hemingway_biden_keeps_escalating_war_with_russia_we_have_our_own_problems_and_need_statesmen_to_end_this.html
Once mobilization is complete, the Russian army will finally be large enough to take and hold all of Ukraine. Whether it will be competent enough still remains to be seen.
A lapsed Army veteran of my acquaintance (and Civil War buff) has offered it will require two years for Russia to equip and train an army of a size sufficient to take and hold the Ukraine. You can see how capable they’ve been over the last twenty at getting that job done.
Biden in February: “If Russia Invades, We Will Bring an End to Nord Stream 2″
That same month, Tucker Carlson delivered this prescient insight:
Americans have been trained to hate Putin, and will suffer because of it
For now, Europeans even more so.
“A lapsed Army veteran of my acquaintance (and Civil War buff) has offered it will require two years for Russia to equip and train an army of a size sufficient to take and hold the Ukraine. You can see how capable they’ve been over the last twenty at getting that job done.”
I was thinking one year, but yeah. It’s going to take a while. But that’s no reason to be complacent. We should start equipping Ukraine now with the weapons it will take to defeat the enlarged Russian army not just on the eastern and southern fronts but on a re-opened northern front as well. Perhaps prudence would then prevail.
@mkent
Perhaps prudence would then prevail.
Deeper levels of public debt and a continued decline in our standard of living is a certainty. The prudence of that result is debatable.
“Deeper levels of public debt and a continued decline in our standard of living is a certainty. The prudence of that result is debatable.”
To blame our public debt on the war in Ukraine shows a level of innumeracy too great for words.
We are empting our stores of weaponry cutting our energy jugular debauching our currency at hyperspeeds lets keep doing that sarc
Getting in between Moscow and Kiev in this dustup is like getting in between Bolivia and Chile in a war over Arica and Bolivia’s lost access to the sea.
Not our fight.
Getting in between Moscow and Kiev in this dustup is like getting in between Bolivia and Chile in a war over Arica and Bolivia’s lost access to the sea.
No, it isn’t. Bolivia isn’t run by someone seeking to reassemble some South American equivalent of the Soviet Union and isn’t run by people propagating nonsense about Chile being run by Nazis. (The boundary changes in South America since 1885 have been limited to altering possession of trash land where hardly anyone lives).
Tucker Carlson delivered this prescient insight:Americans have been trained to hate Putin, and will suffer because of it
That’s an assertion, not an insight. Russia is perfectly free to be content with the 6 million sq. miles of territory they possessed on 23 February 2022. Their incumbent boss Just.Does.Not.Feel.Like.It.
Not exactly
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2022/10/02/brazil-bolsonaro-vastly-beats-polls-to-clinch-second-round-in-presidential-race/
The real winner is china on all the tables
Deficit spending to poke a bear with a variety of force multipliers at his disposal seems foolish, but this is the ride we are on.
Carry on, Ukrainiacs.
I’ll watch.
Banned has the sads because his squeeze Vlad isn’t doing to well in his great provincial war.
“We are empting our stores of weaponry cutting our energy jugular debauching our currency at hyperspeeds…”
Now just why might “Biden” want to do that…(and then place the blame SQUARELY on Putin)?
Put another way, is Putin also forcing “Biden” to shut down US energy production?
Is he also forcing “Biden” to empty out the strategic oil reserves?
This whole thing’s a scam—just another “Biden” scam, of many—which tells me that “Biden” and Putin, at some level, are in on this TOGETHER.
The role of Russia—with “Biden”‘s blessings—in the IRAN “deal” clinches this, um, “sentiment”/conclusion.
“I scratch your back; you scratch mine…”?
(At the same time, “Biden” has to make it APPEAR as though “he”‘s leading the good fight to help “save” Ukraine…just as though “he” has to make it appear that “he”‘s fighting inflation, which is in any case TRANSITORY, that “he” has Israel’s back, that “he”‘s the friend of the downtrodden and the working man and women, a protector of women, minorities, the family, education; that he’s pursuing justice, that he’s strengthening democracy, that he’s SAVING the Republic from its TRUMP and his UBER-MAGA MINIONS, etc., etc., etc….)
We’re dealing with simply astounding levels perfidy on multiple planes and dimensions.
(Think of it as “Betrayal ‘R Us”…on steroids…)
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/02/pushing-the-envelopes-in-ukraine/
Deficit spending to poke a bear with a variety of force multipliers at his disposal seems foolish, but this is the ride we are on.
Money is fungible. That aside, your bear is facing opponents with force multipliers of their own. Your admonishments about ‘foolishness’ are misdirected.
thats what havemeyer, the weimar finance minister thought, it wasn’t
@David
One of the worst analogies I’ve seen.
Firstly: The US has gotten involved plenty in wars in South America, including arbitrating territorial disputes. In no small part to protect our influence and stability.
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/24945
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20662709
https://www.nytimes.com/1929/05/04/archives/tacnaarica-status-given-for-hoover.html
If a war erupted between Chile and Bolivia over Arica, I’d expect we’d get involved- even if indirectly- in no small part because we midwifed the current status and because it is in the Monroe Zone.
Secondly: Our commitment to Ukraine goes a lot deeper and has for years. See the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and why it might be a bad idea to ditch out.