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Thread: Ukraine

  1. #7851
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    Quote Originally Posted by Toadman View Post
    Next time you complain about your commute thinking it can't get any worse...

    https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/com...ile_artillery/
    OMG why would someone stop and get out? Keep driving!!!!!!!!!!!
    Quote Originally Posted by blurred
    skiing is hiking all day so that you can ski on shitty gear for 5 minutes.

  2. #7852
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    Dr Kissinger said the war must not be allowed to drag on for much longer, and came close to calling on the West to bully Ukraine into accepting negotiations on terms that fall very far short of its current war aims.
    Henry can go fuck himself. It is up to the UKR to make these decisions. They will never get Russia to "surrender". They may take down Putin and eventually Russia will leave.
    I have been in this State for 30 years and I am willing to admit that I am part of the problem.

    "Happiest years of my life were earning < $8.00 and hour, collecting unemployment every spring and fall, no car, no debt and no responsibilities. 1984-1990 Park City UT"

  3. #7853
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    Quote Originally Posted by Summit View Post
    OMG why would someone stop and get out? Keep driving!!!!!!!!!!!
    It's like pulling over at Yellowstone to get a photo of a geyser going off. The sound of those artillery rounds going over head is surreal. Next time someone honks at me, I won't get so agitated. But if I hear that sound of artillery rounds inbound, I might. Easy to see how soldiers coming back from combat have PTSD.
    "We don't beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully." - Randy Pausch

  4. #7854
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    Quote Originally Posted by Toadman View Post
    Russia never met a negotiated settlement that they didn't eventually break.
    Even worse.

    So how does it end?


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  5. #7855
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cono Este View Post
    Even worse.

    So how does it end?
    With a strip of scorched earth between the artillery pieces and no one approaching the border from either side. Land mines, loitering UAV's, barrage balloons and randomly located missiles sitting close behind and along all the beaches. The morons in Russia still think they're the greater because they really, really sat out Korea.
    A woman came up to me and said "I'd like to poison your mind
    with wrong ideas that appeal to you, though I am not unkind."

  6. #7856
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    That’s kinda how 2014 ended and Ukraine doesn’t seem willing to live with that because Putin didn’t learn and neither did the West then

    the scale of Russian materiale losses is insane

  7. #7857
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    I'm hoping for a public uprising, balcony hanging of all oligarchs + Putin and his inner circle, and annexation by Lithuania.

  8. #7858
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    I don’t think it really ends until Putin is dead.

    Sometimes you have to buy time.




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  9. #7859
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bunion 2020 View Post
    Henry can go fuck himself.
    His ongoing existence is testament to "good things happen to bad people". Why is that evil relic still alive?

  10. #7860
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    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.



    Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk

  11. #7861
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    Yeah, it's all on us. Wait.

  12. #7862
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    Quote Originally Posted by rod9301 View Post
    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.
    You mean like arming the fuck outta Ukraine? Seems to kinda be working, actually.
    Forum Cross Pollinator, gratuitously strident

  13. #7863
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    Quote Originally Posted by rod9301 View Post
    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.



    Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk

    IT'S BRANDON'S FAULT!1!!

    “Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” Mr. Bondarev said in an email to colleagues on Monday morning. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”
    j'ai des grands instants de lucididididididididi

  14. #7864
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    Quote Originally Posted by ex-powderbroker View Post
    IT'S BRANDON'S FAULT!1!!

    “Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” Mr. Bondarev said in an email to colleagues on Monday morning. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”
    That seems like more than one thing. At least three things. Maybe more.

  15. #7865
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    Quote Originally Posted by rod9301 View Post
    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.



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    I don’t understand how anyone cannot be an advocate for peace talks. If anything, it buys time to strengthen Ukraine. Lines in the Donbas were held for 8 yrs and no one gave a shit. Another 8 yrs and that fuck will be dead or gone.




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  16. #7866
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cono Este View Post
    I don’t think it really ends until Putin is dead.
    This has been my take from the beginning.
    I ski 135 degree chutes switch to the road.

  17. #7867
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    Quote Originally Posted by rod9301 View Post
    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.



    Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk
    Why? How?
    Putin is hell bent on destroying Ukraine for no other reason than his own ego. Any treaty or agreement will be broken whenever is convenient for him. It's not like he doesn't know how to reach out. Any blame put upon the west for not pursuing peace is a pure Russian perspective. Will more people die unnecessarily? Sure, but that being avoided is up to Putin. I don't exactly like Ukraine's chances if a peace is put in, as Putin will immediately put assassins in play so he can sock puppet Ukraine. Like he's already tried before.

    Let them break themselves upon the rocks. The only group to blame at any point for the war continuing is Putin and Russia. They can go home at any time.

  18. #7868
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    No one really understands why he started this war. First, they talked about the expansion of Nato to the east, and that Ukraine's entry into Nato is a direct provocation, and this special operation is the result of containment, then they changed the thesis to the fight against Nazism in Ukraine and for the alleged repression of the Russian-speaking population (remember how they liberated and wanted to liberate the Russian-speaking cities, such as Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Kherson, where according to intelligence there are more than 20 thousand killed civilians, and this is only an approximate calculation and only in Mariupol, which was razed to the ground), which is not there, but the goal was to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, which has already stopped being mentioned. Then they started talking about the development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons on the territory of Ukraine, which they need to eliminate. Russian TV channels even claimed that Ukrainian scientists created a virus that kills only Russians, without taking into account the fact that most Ukrainians have Russian roots and also have many relatives in Russia. After the Russian army faced a very strong Ukrainian defense, and later defeat, in the north and northwest, they again changed their goal to liberate the unrecognized DNR and LNR, territories that belong to Ukraine and where the conflict was unleashed in 2014 by Igor Ivanovich Strelkov (a former FSB officer), As well as fighting national battalions like "Azov" (who defended Mariupol for almost three months, and were recently taken prisoner, and some Russian politicians suggest that they be publicly executed on Russian territory) without considering the fact that Russians are being fought for by the same neo-Nazis like the "Imperial Legion or the Rusich battalion".

  19. #7869
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    He made his move 8 yrs ago when he lost his puppet president. He only saw Ukraine becoming cozier with the west and grabbed what is strategically important to Russia, access to the Black Sea. If the airliner was not shot down he would have accomplished all of it but he had to pause for obvious reasons.

    Then the Ukrainian army was trained up and armed with better weapons and now he’s fucked.


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  20. #7870
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    FWIW, in 2016 Garry Kasparov described Kissinger's long history of trying to profit from brokering a deal for his pal Putin. Most recently acting as an intermediary with Trump & Kushner. He tried to push a similar deal on George HW Bush during the final days of the Reagan administration.

    "Kissinger says that the US and Russia must “move beyond the grievances” to move ahead. That would mean putting aside the grievances of the Georgians and Ukrainians under Russian military assault, the grievances of the families and friends of Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, and the many others who have been murdered for opposing Putin, the grievances of the families of the 298 people on flight MH17, blown out of the sky by a Russian missile fired by Putin’s invasion force in Ukraine, the grievances of the many thousands of Syrian civilians targeted by Russian bombardment. The list could go on and, as long as Putin is in power and enabled by good friends like Henry Kissinger, the list will no doubt get longer."




    Estonian PM Kaja Kallas explains with astonishing clarity how Russians use appeasement to achieve their agenda:

    Well worth 45 seconds of your time: https://twitter.com/overdryven/statu...16446307635200
    Last edited by MultiVerse; 05-24-2022 at 03:56 PM.

  21. #7871
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    We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.

    Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of numerous books, among them “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” and “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.”


    Fascism was never defeated as an idea.
    As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.


    We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
    Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.


    It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of fascist war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.


    The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian dominion. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.


    Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as fascist because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist. But that usage did not help to define what fascism is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to fascism, however, was inconsistent.
    Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated fascists as just one more form of capitalist enemy. Communist parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the Nazis, German communists and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European communist parties form coalitions to block fascists.
    That didn’t last long. In 1939, the Soviet Union joined Nazi Germany as a de facto ally, and the two powers invaded Poland together. Nazi speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and Nazi officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations. But Russians today do not speak of this fact, since memory laws make it a crime to do so. World War II is an element of Mr. Putin’s historical myth of Russian innocence and lost greatness — Russia must enjoy a monopoly on victimhood and on victory. The basic fact that Stalin enabled World War II by allying with Hitler must be unsayable and unthinkable.
    Stalin’s flexibility about fascism is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, fascism was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. Communists were purged as fascists in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the fascists. And “anti-fascism” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with Nazi Germany.




    Soviet anti-fascism, in other words, was a politics of us and them. That is no answer to fascism. After all, fascist politics begins, as the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy. Because Soviet anti-fascism just meant defining an enemy, it offered fascism a backdoor through which to return to Russia.
    In the Russia of the 21st century, “anti-fascism” simply became the right of a Russian leader to define national enemies. Actual Russian fascists, such as Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov, were given time in mass media. And Mr. Putin himself has drawn on the work of the interwar Russian fascist Ivan Ilyin. For the president, a “fascist” or a “Nazi” is simply someone who opposes him or his plan to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainians are “Nazis” because they do not accept that they are Russians and resist.



    A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.
    Because Mr. Putin speaks of fascists as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be fascist. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “Nazi” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can kill. Hate speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a fascist war of destruction.


    Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”

    We understand more about fascism than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize fascism, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.

    As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.


    Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/o...ine-putin.html

  22. #7872
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    From an interview with Jonathan Swan, Zelensky shared his thoughts on negotiations:

    https://www.axios.com/2022/05/23/zel...-jonathan-swan

  23. #7873
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    Quote Originally Posted by rod9301 View Post
    You may not like Kissinger, but he's right

    The west needs to do a lot more to facilitate peace talks.



    Sent from my moto g 5G using Tapatalk
    I saw a post on this line of thought. It goes something like this; a robber comes into your home, rapes your wife and daughter and then tortures them and kills them in front of you. The robber then goes through your has wrecking things. Beats you up and then steals your belongings. Your neighbors then say that you should come to some agreement to let the robber/rapist/murderer stay and use your house as he wishes, along with your car. No punishment for the invader. It's actually you that gets punished. You bury your wife and daughter in the backyard, and then go to work and then hand over a portion of your salary to keep the invader from doing any more damage. Then your new house guests goes next door and does the same thing to your neighbor...
    "We don't beat the reaper by living longer, we beat the reaper by living well and living fully." - Randy Pausch

  24. #7874
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    Quote Originally Posted by Toadman View Post
    I saw a post on this line of thought. It goes something like this; a robber comes into your home, rapes your wife and daughter and then tortures them and kills them in front of you. The robber then goes through your has wrecking things. Beats you up and then steals your belongings. Your neighbors then say that you should come to some agreement to let the robber/rapist/murderer stay and use your house as he wishes, along with your car. No punishment for the invader. It's actually you that gets punished. You bury your wife and daughter in the backyard, and then go to work and then hand over a portion of your salary to keep the invader from doing any more damage. Then your new house guests goes next door and does the same thing to your neighbor...
    I think that analogy is apt, but you need to also consider what the other feasible outcomes are.

    For example, if you can have that guy arrested with no further destruction/cost, that’s obviously the best outcome.

    But if the choice is move out and let the guy live in your house, on the one hand, or fight and half the town will end up dead and destroyed, on the other, moving out now could be the best choice, from a purely rational perspective.

    Right now, Ukraine is pushing RU back, and thinks they have a good chance of ‘winning’ the war, so not much in the mood to negotiate (and also don’t trust RU to adhere to a negotiated settlement). That calculation could change if there’s a stalemate, or if something changes within RU itself.

  25. #7875
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    Ukraine is getting pushed back in the Donbas right now, but making small advances elsewhere.

    Peace talks without a desire for peace are pointless.

    Russia’s digging T-62 tanks out of storage and sending them to the front to become scrap metal.

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