The Russian invasion of Ukraine (6 Viewers)

So give him what he wants?
Fuck that.
Putin is always gonna do his worst no matter what.
We saw that in Syria. Barrel bombing cities. We saw it in Grozny.
He's a bit more than a bully. He wipes out civilian population centres as a foundation of his strategies.
The reason you don't give a bully what he wants isn't that's it's unpalatable, it's that it rewards the behaviour and emboldens them.

If the Ukrainians are willing to keep fighting this guy then we give them every weapon - all the HIMARS - and all the intelligence we can.
Hand-wringing in the west is something he's counting on. He views it as a weakness.

Keep wrecking his tanks, keep blowing up his ammunition depots and command centres, and keep killing Russian soldiers. That's the only language he understands. That's his negotiation.

Two years from now it's Finland. Or you name it.
or keep doing nothing so this murderous thug does it again and again
Giving him a pass is what happened in Georgia, in Chechnya, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Crimea. Giving him a pass while he bombed city after city, and killing countless civilians.
Giving him a pass when he murders people in London and in Berlin.
All he got was "Thanks for the cheap oil, Vlad."
It's what got us here. With his soldiers pillaging and raping their way through a peaceful country.
If only we were nicer to him though?
We should definitely keep trying that.

This isn't anyone's war but Putin's and it's anything but noble.
Nobody else wanted this war. Few even believed it was likely.
He alone wanted a war. He's got one. He should be made pay a price for it.

Keep talking about barrels tho.
Fucking barrels indeed.
just how is Ukraine going to win the war? - lots of details please.
if could be done and save lives and destruction I would support it. Ukraine would need to invade and defeat Russia. even getting the invaders back to the border wouldn't stop Putin attacking anywhere else.
the likely result would be a prelonged proxy war that could escalate into a much bigger conflict.

for comparision -
China has poor relations with most of its neighbours and many of its minority groups for generations. but outside their region their influence is still limited as it stands. until about 6 or 7 years ago China didn't even have an aircraft carrier.

the Americans and NATO actions destroyed Iraq and Libya, they invaded numerous other countries and embargoed Cuba which is no threat. they sold weapons to many including Saudi to kill Yemenis.
the US broke a nuclear treaty with Iran and supported Israel's human rights abuses and invasion of the West Bank for decades. the US broke international law on kidnapping and torture. the US even invaded Grenada to boost Reagan's approval rating.
and after all that they suffered no real consequences for their actions from the international community.
- big bullies get away with things all the time.
 
just how is Ukraine going to win the war?
I have no idea how this war ends, no one does.
But the Ukrainians want to keep fighting and it's the right thing to do.

They are getting some of the help they have requested and they are hurting Russian efforts - killing soldiers, destroying command posts, arms depots.
And we know they're hurting Russia, because Russia is back to bombing civilians in an effort to sap the Ukrainian will to fight.
You hit an arms depot, they bomb a shopping centre.
So what Ukraine is doing is hurting them.
I don't need a strategy for Ukraine to win to know that the right thing to do is keep fighting.

I don't see a way for the Uyghurs to stop having their culture and society destroyed by China, but I know it's a grave wrong that it's happening.
Same with the Americans and every illegal invasion and coup they've fomented and dictator they've propped up.
Same with the Palestinians getting driven into the ground by israel. Should they give up too?
Same with the Brits and a list too long to put here.
Same with any conflict where the injustice is self-evident.
You have to call what's wrong, wrong.
And we don't get to tell people to stop fighting for their country on the basis that the bad guys always win in the end.

If all you guys that watch/read RT and Sputnik are now saying that Ukraine should surrender and plead for peace, then it means Russia is hurting. Good.
If it's gonna be talks, then the best way for Ukraine to have leverage in any negotiation is to keep making RUssia pay as high a price as possible for this fucking horrific, wanton destruction of a peaceful country.

The idea that because other countries have gotten away with crimes in the past, doesn't give Putin a pass now.
And he's not a bully, he's war criminal actively destroying a peaceful country because he wants it for himself.
 
'ireland is about as well armed as a bunch of over-enthusiatic american civil war re-enactors' didn't cut it?
It was close enough to this as to be terrifying:

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I made a jokey reference to Futurama and they didn't get it, because that's hippie shit or something.
 
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I have no idea how this war ends, no one does.
But the Ukrainians want to keep fighting and it's the right thing to do.

They are getting some of the help they have requested and they are hurting Russian efforts - killing soldiers, destroying command posts, arms depots.
And we know they're hurting Russia, because Russia is back to bombing civilians in an effort to sap the Ukrainian will to fight.
You hit an arms depot, they bomb a shopping centre.
So what Ukraine is doing is hurting them.
I don't need a strategy for Ukraine to win to know that the right thing to do is keep fighting.

I don't see a way for the Uyghurs to stop having their culture and society destroyed by China, but I know it's a grave wrong that it's happening.
Same with the Americans and every illegal invasion and coup they've fomented and dictator they've propped up.
Same with the Palestinians getting driven into the ground by israel. Should they give up too?
Same with the Brits and a list too long to put here.
Same with any conflict where the injustice is self-evident.
You have to call what's wrong, wrong.
And we don't get to tell people to stop fighting for their country on the basis that the bad guys always win in the end.

If all you guys that watch/read RT and Sputnik are now saying that Ukraine should surrender and plead for peace, then it means Russia is hurting. Good.
If it's gonna be talks, then the best way for Ukraine to have leverage in any negotiation is to keep making RUssia pay as high a price as possible for this fucking horrific, wanton destruction of a peaceful country.

The idea that because other countries have gotten away with crimes in the past, doesn't give Putin a pass now.
And he's not a bully, he's war criminal actively destroying a peaceful country because he wants it for himself.
If your ideas, no matter how right and noble they are, aren't working you have to try something that will work (praxis). if Ukraine is successful then I'll admit I got it wrong.
they need to have more of a strategy than you have.
NATO are also malevolent war criminals and not part of any peaceful solution.

it's easy for people far away who are not fighting, not being bombed, not refugees or not starving to say fight to the end.
Irish people are flying abroad on holiday when folks elsewhere are running out of fuel and grain or can't get vaccinated.
 
If your ideas, no matter how right and noble they are, aren't working you have to try something that will work (praxis). if Ukraine is successful then I'll admit I got it wrong.
they need to have more of a strategy than you have.
NATO are also malevolent war criminals and not part of any peaceful solution.

it's easy for people far away who are not fighting, not being bombed, not refugees or not starving to say fight to the end.
Irish people are flying abroad on holiday when folks elsewhere are running out of fuel and grain or can't get vaccinated.
who is running out of fuel? Sri Lanka?

what have holidays got to do with people in other countries getting vaccinated, or not, or the grain crisis?
 
who is running out of fuel? Sri Lanka?

what have holidays got to do with people in other countries getting vaccinated, or not, or the grain crisis?
wasting fuel on pleasure holidays now that could be conserved for a world fuel crisis later in the year.
a general comment on privileged people here who don't have to deal with the reality of these problems.
 
wasting fuel on pleasure holidays now that could be conserved for a world fuel crisis later in the year.
a general comment on privileged people here who don't have to deal with the reality of these problems.
ok, so one part of the world lives in misery, we all should. Got it.
 
the most surprising thing about that was those plans didn't already exist.
They did Home

The contingency plans being discussed now are for when the contingency plan fails -

I'm sure YOU ALL remember me pointing out last november that EU was negotiating with putin last november to keep the gas on for winter and we were already in effective energy crisis mode across europe.

 
If your ideas, no matter how right and noble they are, aren't working you have to try something that will work (praxis). if Ukraine is successful then I'll admit I got it wrong.
they need to have more of a strategy than you have.
NATO are also malevolent war criminals and not part of any peaceful solution.

it's easy for people far away who are not fighting, not being bombed, not refugees or not starving to say fight to the end.
Irish people are flying abroad on holiday when folks elsewhere are running out of fuel and grain or can't get vaccinated.
I am not saying they should fight to the end, I am just glad that they are fighting and going toe to toe with these motherfuckers
I think they are doing the right thing. Good for them. And any right-thinking country should pitch in and help.
It's an unimaginable sacrifice what these people are giving for their country.
We should thank our lucky stars we'll never face such choices.

Russia would love them to stop fighting and just keep what they stole and then have a parade.
They can have a parade of fucking body bags for what they've done to Ukraine. The utter cunts.




I think you are personally very likeable and a very welcome presence on Thumped.
But your lens of viewing this - being any way whatsoever sympathetic to Russia and its tyrant - is way off base as far as I'm concerned.
 
If all you guys that watch/read RT and Sputnik are now saying that Ukraine should surrender and plead for peace, then it means Russia is hurting. Good.

ukraine *was already* negotiating peace — not “pleading,” but more like sober realpolitik — back in *march*.

the talks were apparently at a fairly advanced stage back then, and the deal would have been along the lines of the minsk-2 deal, which itself has been the outline of a settlement for years, since 2015.


it was soon after this point that boris suddenly popped up in ukraine. and soon after, various other prominent NATO leaders.


we don’t know what happened during this visit. but it seems possible that boris basically delivered some kind of ultimatum to zelensky. we don’t know what was agreed. we possibly never will. but the result was that the ukrainian side went all-in on NATO plans, NATO weapons, NATO artillery, and plenty more. this was the same moment when the western thinktank people started talking about comprehensively destroying the russian army and basically ruining russia as a society.

ever since then, the ukrainians have been getting absolutely shredded in the donbass, which is a horrific tragedy and a shocking waste of lives and futures. but the NATO-brain people don’t care. they want to fight russia to the last ukrainian.
 
We are also one generation into a western society that actually knows a fair bit about guns because of video game pew pew pew.

So it's easy to sell the idea that more pew pew = victory.

UTM's mantra has invariably been that the people who win wars are those who can suffer the most, and the guy reads history from morning to night.
 
I was thinking I saw stuff about a settlement ages ago

yep, it’s amazing how efficiently it was memory-holed

I’m sticking with my soft prediction from a few weeks ago: the russians will win in the donbas (destroying the entire ukrainian army along the way), and there will be some kind of coup against zelensky. just yesterday he fired the head of the ukrainian secret service (his own childhood friend!), and the ukrainian attorney general. not looking good.
 
yep, it’s amazing how efficiently it was memory-holed

I’m sticking with my soft prediction from a few weeks ago: the russians will win in the donbas (destroying the entire ukrainian army along the way), and there will be some kind of coup against zelensky. just yesterday he fired the head of the ukrainian secret service (his own childhood friend!), and the ukrainian attorney general. not looking good.
the question is whether they re-set their sights on Kiev and the west of Ukraine. If they had targeted Donabas to begin with and left it at that, the result would likely be the same and the world would be less a pile of shit than it is.
 
Zelensky sacking and suspending a lot of people in the security services on grounds of treachery and collaboration.

Politics has always been susceptible to this whole "great man" thing but it feels especially so in more recent times, even if you don't like them people like Trump and Boris represent this, also Obama and running on "hope" as a slogan. And that's before you get into the explicitly authoritarian regimes where much of the order hinges on the "greatness" of who is in charge. People can be really self infantilising when it comes to this shit.

People rounded around Zelensky as a figurehead very early on, he played up to this, what the Russians are doing is awful (it is) and he's the embodiment of being against Russia so he must be great.

I've tried to avoid doing this despite being supportive of the idea that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their country from invasion and not invest in him, because I knew very little about the guy before the invasion. But this sort of action brought in to focus how little I knew of this guy before the invasion. Similarly I haven't been that enthusiastic about everyone wanting to rush through EU membership for Ukraine just because it'd piss off Russia.

Or maybe all hose people were collaborators and traitors. I dunno.
 
ukraine *was already* negotiating peace — not “pleading,” but more like sober realpolitik — back in *march*.

the talks were apparently at a fairly advanced stage back then, and the deal would have been along the lines of the minsk-2 deal, which itself has been the outline of a settlement for years, since 2015.


it was soon after this point that boris suddenly popped up in ukraine. and soon after, various other prominent NATO leaders.


we don’t know what happened during this visit. but it seems possible that boris basically delivered some kind of ultimatum to zelensky. we don’t know what was agreed. we possibly never will. but the result was that the ukrainian side went all-in on NATO plans, NATO weapons, NATO artillery, and plenty more. this was the same moment when the western thinktank people started talking about comprehensively destroying the russian army and basically ruining russia as a society.

ever since then, the ukrainians have been getting absolutely shredded in the donbass, which is a horrific tragedy and a shocking waste of lives and futures. but the NATO-brain people don’t care. they want to fight russia to the last ukrainian.
Everything's a shadowy Nato plan
Boris said 'something' nefarious which we can never know what it is
There was hope from a reasonable Russia to find a peaceful solution, because they are clearly such honest dealers in the Kremlin, who always tell teh truth
This is all Nato's war
Poor ol' Russia up against it from the bad guys in the west again

Will you get over yourself, man?
Turn on a television station that isn't RT

The negotiations were not being entered into seriously by Russia
Or that's how Ukraine reported it

Boris indeed
 
the question is whether they re-set their sights on Kiev and the west of Ukraine. If they had targeted Donabas to begin with and left it at that, the result would likely be the same and the world would be less a pile of shit than it is.


Frame it as an incredibly brutal negotiation from Putin's end of things. You never ask for what you'll settle for initially because your opponent will always walk you back from this*. If Putin really only wanted eastern Ukraine he started off by saying he wanted the whole kit and caboodle**.

* Obama has spoken about this as one of his healthcare mistakes recently, he should have from the off gone for something that the republicans would be allergic to but he started off with a version of Mitt Romney plan which he thought they could live with and the republicans started slicing from there.

**This is also sort of an out for both sides here. Ukraine, if it were to give up those regions, could say that they've humiliated Russia by repelling them from their big aim, Ukraine lives (but is smaller) , Russia can spin it as getting what they always wanted anyway.
 

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