The Russian invasion of Ukraine (3 Viewers)

[pete]

Ukraine war: Soldier tells BBC of front-line 'hell'

A Ukrainian soldier on the east side of the Dnipro river tells the BBC about life on the front line.

www.bbc.com

 

[pete]

Irishman killed fighting in Ukraine, Department of Foreign Affairs confirms

Man, believed to be from Dublin but who had been living in the US, is the latest Irish citizen to die fighting alongside Ukrainian colleagues

www.irishtimes.com

 

[JohnnyRaz]

I can see Mattie McGrath or the Healy Raes chucking grenades if they got the chance

Ukrainian councillor throws grenades at meeting

A Ukrainian village councillor threw hand grenades at colleagues at a meeting, wounding 26 people, national police have said.

www.rte.ie

 

[Deadmanposting]

Cracking read on Putin's right hand man Patrushev and how he killed Prigozhin and everyone else on that plane

Total mafia stuff

WSJ News Exclusive | How Putin’s Right-Hand Man Took Out Prigozhin

Nikolai Patrushev, a top ally of the Russian leader for decades, put in motion the assassination of the mutinous chief of the Wagner mercenary group.

www.wsj.com

 

[Cormcolash]

I'll have you know that plane fell out of that window all by itself

 

[pete]

How pro-Russian 'yacht' propaganda influenced US debate over Ukraine aid

A false rumour spread by a dubious AI-powered website caught the attention of leading politicians.

www.bbc.com

 

[nuke terrorist]

How pro-Russian 'yacht' propaganda influenced US debate over Ukraine aid

A false rumour spread by a dubious AI-powered website caught the attention of leading politicians.

www.bbc.com

Any stories like this always need to be fact checked.
The Kremlin has a long history of '1984' style misinformation and lies.

 

[pete]

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[Deadmanposting]

I want to be happy about this, but the thing is Putin doesn't care about ships getting blown up
Especially as he's holding/gaining in the east of Ukraine

The Americans are about to give up on Zelensky and Europe can only give him money. It's looking bad.


Aside
Putin is signaling he wants to ceasefire, i.e. give him what he's stolen.
Bad idea long term; Putin regards it as victory, and in another few years he's invading another European country on whatever pretext you like.
Any former Soviet Bloc country should be very nervous about this. Putin wants to reestablish an empire, and he likes settling scores.

What if Russia wins?

A counterfactual view of the conflict in Ukraine

www.ft.com

The west is toying with the idea of letting Vladimir Putin have Ukraine. Newly committed western aid to the country dropped nearly 90 per cent from a year earlier, even before the US and EU failed this month to approve more funds, calculates the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Voters, egged on by the pro-Putinist far right, are getting bored with Ukraine’s war. The west, after an 18-month hiatus, is resuming its 15-year appeasement of Putin’s aggression. “If Russia wins” is an increasingly plausible scenario. Here’s what that might look like:

1. Russia exacts terrible victor’s justice on Ukrainians. This isn’t speculation. It’s precisely what the Russians have already done in Ukraine: mass executions, castrations, rapes, torture and abductions of children. Remember Russia’s pre-invasion lists of Ukrainian public figures to be “removed”. Guerrilla attacks by Ukrainian partisans would trigger more Russian reprisals. Millions more Ukrainians would flee west, this time permanently. Remember that the arrival of 1.3mn refugees in 2015 turbocharged Europe’s far right.

2. A free state might survive in western Ukraine, writes former British diplomat Peter Ricketts.
It might even join the EU. Putin doesn’t seem very bothered about the region. But it could expect repeated Russian attacks, no matter what “treaties” were signed. Russia constantly violated the post-2014 Minsk Agreements, too. A rolling Russian advance would take territory when it could.

3. Putin would control close to a quarter of the world’s wheat exports. He has already been upgrading from gas as a weapon to food as a weapon.

4. Putin’s success would encourage countries interested in invading a neighbour: China, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and, indeed, Russia. Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Every time the Russians think that they have ‘won’ in a conflict under Putin — Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, Syria 2015 — they learn something about us . . . become overconfident in their abilities and in a few years they try bigger and bolder operations.” The likely creation of a Ukrainian army in exile running sorties from European countries would further incentivise Russian attacks on those places. Putin has already built a war economy. His army has updated its methods by decades in less than two years. His population has shown it will tolerate even a big war. Why not keep taking bites out of neighbouring states? Putin’s cheerleader Viktor Orbán ought to reflect that Hungary borders Ukraine.

5. A discredited Nato would face its biggest test. Nato and the EU are possibly the strongest remaining multinational alliances in a nationalistic world. Putin seeks to prove they won’t hold. If he attacked the Baltics, Nato would probably send troops. But for how long? Once a few hundred western soldiers came back dead, far-right parties would demand “peace”, meaning unenforceable peace treaties with Putin. Western countries could retreat, saying they had met their obligation under the Nato treaty’s Article 5 to fight for an ally. Nobody would want to escalate to nuclear war.
Article 5 isn’t sacrosanct. Other international agreements — from the UN’s Convention against Torture to the EU’s rules on budget deficits — are routinely breached with impunity. Russia’s army in Ukraine, Hamas and Israel’s army in Gaza have all recently violated international law on camera. In any case, two pillars of the so-called “international community” — the British government and a prospective Trump Administration — seem to be done with international treaties. Donald Trump has said (according to his former national security adviser John Bolton), “I don’t give a shit about Nato”, and, as president, often threatened to leave it.
Americans and western Europeans feel immune: Putin isn’t coming for them. No wonder some eastern European officials have begun musing about attacking Russia first, instead of just sitting around waiting for it to attack them. A more likely scenario: many European countries spend fortunes on defence, reintroduce conscription and invest in nukes, while also letting Putin bully them. Ditching Ukraine would be a choice. There is an alternative. Russia has a low-tech economy about the size of Canada’s. The Europeans could help Ukraine withstand Putin even if Trump pulled out. We’d have to build up our arms industries fast, but the effort required of us would be tiny compared with Russia’s. We’d also need to replace American aid to Ukraine — €71.4bn in the war’s first 21 months, according to the Kiel Institute, or €40.8bn on an annualised basis. That’s €70 a year per European citizen of Nato. We could find that if we wanted.

 

[flashback]

I'd be surprised if the US gives up on Ukraine.

Ukraine is all the birthday and christmas presents at once for the US. It's almost free, it costs America zero troops, it fuels the US military industrial complex for the next generation or more, it's running dream weapons test scenarios while flushing out all the old stock of US arms (to make way for new stuff), and it's seriously hurting Russian military.

I get there's a lot of shite talking going on in the US, but this is the arms industry we're fucking with here. Paymasters are paymasters.

That's just from the perspective of US arms manufacturers.

From a political perspective I'd have thought an imaginary hobbled boogeyman is preferable to an actual boogeyman running around snaffling bits of Europe off every few years. The US is better off bleeding them, with a chaotic on the ropes Russia, than one that's rebuilding post war under Putin.

 

[seanc]

Thanks for breaking the paywall there, but it was a depressing read.

Here's a thing I don't get really: doesn't judo knob realise that he can't actually take it with him? At some point, fairly soon, he'll be old or dead. And then what?

 

[flashback]

Thanks for breaking the paywall there, but it was a depressing read.

Here's a thing I don't get really: doesn't judo knob realise that he can't actually take it with him? At some point, fairly soon, he'll be old or dead. And then what?

Mythical legacy.

If he gets Ukraine, and a couple of other bits and pieces, he becomes an all time great Russian leader, undoing some of the damage Gorbachev did, reuniting the Empire, restoring Russia to greatness.

That's the gameplan you'd guess. Build the empire, until his death.

 

[seanc]

It's some cold hearted bullshit.
I guess I don't understand, and that is why I am not a successful human.

You'd think someone would just give him a slap and say cop on. Or a hug and a chat.

But what happens after he's gone?

 

[Deadmanposting]

Thanks for breaking the paywall there, but it was a depressing read.

Here's a thing I don't get really: doesn't judo knob realise that he can't actually take it with him? At some point, fairly soon, he'll be old or dead. And then what?

I hacked it illegally. I figure they can take the hit

Like the other lad said, legacy, I think.

But also, no one thinks they're gonna die, really.
Especially for these gangsters, the only cure for their aggression is embalming fluid.

 

[seanc]

Strange thing this plane business. I've only heard BBCs reporting, but even that's conflicting itself.

 

[Deadmanposting]

Strange thing this plane business. I've only heard BBCs reporting, but even that's conflicting itself.

Looks bad
You can never tell in an information war, but Russia being eager to run to the UN with this, I'd say all those lads are dead. Reading between the lines like.
Ukraine either did something dumb or got suckered, but who knows?
Would Russia sacrifice a handful of its own and a plane to achieve an objective? We could ask Progozhin that.

 

[ann post]

The Russians love yeeting planes out of existence and then being dicks about it in all fairness

 

[nuke terrorist]

Looks bad
You can never tell in an information war, but Russia being eager to run to the UN with this, I'd say all those lads are dead. Reading between the lines like.
Ukraine either did something dumb or got suckered, but who knows?
Would Russia sacrifice a handful of its own and a plane to achieve an objective? We could ask Progozhin that.

View attachment 18086

Lavrov: ''Ukrainian prisioners of war'' thought it was a ''special military operation''.
And ''terrorist attack'' ?? - this is wartime.
These disasters happen in every war. The Russian controlled Doentsk market being bombed at the weekend w/ 25 dead was another.

It suits Russia their plane got shot down. To go crying to the UN after what Russia has done for years is remarkably typical hypocrisy.
I am sure they'll fly Ukranian prisioners regularly from now on.
Also the Kremlin seems to think this gives their 1984 Big Brother lies a boost.

Ukraine has been reasonably honest about what happened.
Unfortunately there seems to be no prospect of negoiations in the current stalemate so what can the Ukranians do except defend themselves.

 

[pete]

Amazing coincidence that when a transport plane is shot down it happens to be the one with Ukrainian POWs on board.

 

[nuke terrorist]

Amazing coincidence that when a transport plane is shot down it happens to be the one with Ukrainian POWs on board.

Yeah - according to the Kremlin their allies in Donbas had nothing to do with the 2014 disaster either

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org