As much as I'd love to see Luka hung from a lamppost beside Putin when this is all over, I've been hoping all along that he survives until that moment.
So far Putin has not managed to convince Lukashenko to roll his troops across the Northern Ukraine border. A newly planted puppet could disrupt that stability. Even if the Belarussian public don't have the stomach for invading Ukraine I'd really rather that hornet nest not kicked just yet. One fight at a time.
And without pay, either apparently. Now Putin is really touching on a raw nerve. Mobilization is one thing, but slave labour will hit everyone who is working, and that may well be a step too far.
I wonder what sort of a shallow life one lives that they constantly need petty little wins on an Internet forum to make themselves feel better?
Another question, who are these people on here? I have seem people discuss it alright and surely that is relevant considering the history of poisoning from Russia.
I wonder where the people on here claiming lushashenko wasn't poisoned have gone 🤣🤣🤣
Seems d1ckhead is okay. Pity.
Crimea is not Russian. It was invaded and ethnically cleansed-
In 1783, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea after an earlier war with Turkey. Crimea's strategic position led to the 1854 Crimean War and many short lived regimes following the 1917 Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks secured Crimea, it became an autonomous soviet republic within Russia. During World War II, Crimea was downgraded to an oblast. In 1944, Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed and deported under the orders of Joseph Stalin, in what has been described as a cultural genocide. The USSR transferred Crimea to Ukraine on the 300th anniversary of the Pereyaslav Treaty in 1954.
Crimea - Wikipedia
Laughable. This is Russian propaganda at its most blatent. The blog is a series of pseudo-intellectual nonsense articles praising Putin and the efforts of the Russian army. They're full of lies and bizarre predictions disconnected from reality. For instance here are some of his/her predictions from earlier this year:
You post this shite and you expect someone to debate it?
Are you the author of these articles?
If you're not the author, then why not post the original article from the New Yorker rather than some putinbot's biased interpretation of it?
That's a great piece, thanks for sharing.
Relevant.
Can you please explain how Putin's Russia can outproduce the West?
Really interested in how you came to this conclusion.
In your example of truth you have referenced a blogger who has cherry-picked reductionist information from dubious sources. A cursory look at any of their blogs reveals their partisan views immediately:
"None of the tricks worked. All the endless distractions, diversions, deflections, and myriad attempts to pry our eyes from the inevitable, massive humiliation for NATO forces in Bakhmut—or is it Artemovsk now?—using every tool in their possession, from diversionary strikes on civilians on Russian border towns, to outright political assassination to steal headlines and steer public attention: none of it worked.
Bakhmut today has fallen on the exact one year anniversary of the fall of Mariupol on May 20th, 2022. And not surprisingly, the posture adopted by the UA supporters is the same exact energy as before: cringe, cope, excuse-making. “Bakhmut’s mission is accomplished,” they say, swallowing sobs.
Probably not the best way to make a point about propaganda.
And in the first four months of this year, the entire budget has been spent, so reserves are being eaten up at a high rate, and gas/oil profits are way down. So while the economy is moving along, its only because its buoyed up by the military spending. It's like the dog eating its tail, and sooner or later, that particular economics plan, falls asunder. It seems like Putin's army is not the only paper tiger, the economy is pretty much the same. There's a lot of negative points converging on Russia at the moment, and not all of them from the Ukraine direction.
Russia today is not the Soviet Union. It doesn't have the population, brute force, resources or huge forces. Russia is spent.
Some difficult and uncomfortable truths in here. Much like the Russians, we are also under a certain amount of polished narratives in the west, or dare I say it, "propaganda". Russia has a history taking massive casualties and being incompetent at the beginning of wars only to adapt and return with huge force. I really hope Ukraine gets to take back all its territory but I fear that Putin and co will outlast, outman and out produce both Ukraine and the west, with enough time.
What the rest of the world thinks will not affect Ukrainian thinking. Feb 2022 when they had little or no support at all, they took on Russia with the supposedly 2nd best army in the world. And not only took them on, but pushed them way back to a fraction of the territory they had held. They, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, Poland etc. know full well what the Russians are like and have no intention to be controlled by the by them again, ever. And they wont either, because they are prepared to die rather than submit. But that's a price Putin is unable to pay, because the Russian death toll extracted by the Ukrainians will be so high, that it will bring down the Kremlin and the Russian Federation.
You mean any deal will be much worse now, but for Putin. And rightly so that murderous invader Putin has to be put out of business once and for all, and Russia reformed.
Putin has never, and I mean never, held a free fair and democratic election or referendum. The results are always organized and known in advance. Crimea is and will remain a part of Ukraine.
+1
Like most people, I hate the idea of war, conflict and terrible violent death. But there times, when it is necessary to fight. We live in a Western Europe where democracy and peace are the norm. If people hadn’t been willing to take up arms against the dictatorships that threatened to enslave and harden the continent into racial hysteria, we would not have any of this. We probably wouldn’t even be able to chat openly about this kind of thing, like we are doing now.
If we truly love and believe in our freedoms, we must willing to fight any facist state who wishes to take them away. This is unfortunatly the price of those freedoms, and it is what Ukraine must do. This is what Ukraine are doing now, and for our own sakes, we must help them.
This act again. Did Bucha make you "sad" as well? Because that's what life looks like under Russian occupation, systematic murders, rapes, disappearances, totalitarian rule by the occupier, cultural and national identity erased, children being forced to speak only Russian, perpetual occupation.
The Ukrainians are more aware of this than any of us.
There isn't any "dispute" here, Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine, and hasn't deviated from that, bombing and attacking the country 24/7 since February 2022. The only choice forced on Ukraine was to capitulate or defend themselves. They've decided to defend themselves and grind down Putin's war machine. They are the ones bleeding and dying, that's their decision. Since April 2022 they've driven the Russians back and regained a significant portion of their country from the invaders, as well as severely depleting the Russian military's ability to take territory.
The Russians are tentatively maintaining a hold on a smaller percentage of the land they originally grabbed illegally and are having to expend a lot of what is left of their GDP, Soviet era stocks and what remains of their collective moral just to maintain that. It is yet to be seen if they can withstand another serious assault on the frontline and have focused all of their hopes & blood on a small rail-hub town that took them the guts of a year to slowly and painfully take.
All while Ukraine has been progressively upgraded to a NATO standard and pretty much guaranteed a future within European logistics mechanisms. Russia cannot maintain this, and their outlook gets worse the longer this goes on. Russia come to any negotiation, even now, from a point of weakness. They must find out what the price would be to be let back in from the cold and into the international community. Minimum price should be the full withdrawal beyond the 2014 borders. Ukraine & the West can afford to wait until Russia this concept into their heads….but they cannot.
This is complete nonsense. You keep repeating this canard about Boris Johnson without foundation.
There was no tangible peace deal.
What happened was that Boris Johnson said Russia can't be trusted to abide by any deal based on past record. Also given the security assurances of Budapest failed, he was doubtful of a security framework outside NATO.
Zelensky and his advisors shared that concern and further, had no mandate to give up Donbas etc
So can you explain why this was a tangible peace deal, why it wouldn't have been a Budapest mark 2, and why you keep denying Ukraine agency in making the decision?
This article is a good summary about the realities and some of the myths that have grown up around it. To suggest there was a tangible peace deal somehow nixed by Boris Johnson is a gross misrepresentation, if not outright disinformation.
Britain’s prime minister hadn’t come to Kyiv to order a termination of the peace deal; this was advice at best, and as such, his scepticism about Russia’s trustworthiness wasn’t unique. There were strong concerns within Zelensky’s closest entourage that the Kremlin wouldn’t stick to an agreement for any longer than it suited its interests. The risks of signing the Istanbul agreement were high for Ukraine: key provisions, to do with the status of Donbas and Crimea, couldn’t be agreed until a later meeting between the presidents of the two states. Zelensky and his negotiators’ most important worry about the Istanbul agreement was, Romaniuk said, that “Ukrainian society might not accept such a deal”... With Ukrainian officials and commentators speaking out against the deal at the time, Zelensky must have understood that he had no mandate for territorial concessions to Russia.
https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article7852
Yeah Kremlin types love the idea of negotiations before a counter offensive gets underway.
You can only have strength in negotiations if negotiations occur, and Ukrainians aren't negotiating because Russia can't be negotiated with, hence no strength whatsoever.
What about the 1991 vote of the majority in Crimea to join an independent Ukraine, seems you take as much notice of the Ukrainians voting preferences as Putin does.
Actually Russia holds a hell of a lot of Ukrainian territory so holds a lot of strength for negotiations.
Yes, another massive terror attack overnight. Scumbags. Shows again: there will never be peace as long as the Putin regime is in place. These terror attacks will go on and on. The only hope is regime change/revolution/assassination
The Russians might be inclined to just throw bodies at that kind of a fight, but it seems that the AFU are better armed & trained for this kind of thing. Crimea is historically a difficult place to invade, but Ukraine have a shot at taking it if they’re smart about how they fight.
If they can fight their way to the Azov Sea and disable the Kerch bridge, then all bets are off. The Russians would seriously need to up their logistics to keep the peninsula stocked for a fight, especially if that bridge is gone. Airfields and ports can be disabled, robbing them of resupply, troop rotation or escape. I don’t have much faith in the resolve of a trapped Russian garrison on that peninsula. Some might choose to die for Putin or Mother Russia, but when it comes to it I think they’d surrender.
But all of that depends on a successful summer offiensive that retakes the southern coast and eleminates the land-bridge between Donbass and Crimea.
If only the Ukranians had the German army from WW2. As then they'll just throw bodies at it.
It feels like Russia has an endless supply of drones from Iran.
A lot of it is psychological when this thing started a lot of people thought Russia would be on the Polish border is a week.
a year in Russia has expended significant resources to get moderate gains. That said they still have a huge numbers advantage on the Ukraine. Posturing on a counter offensive is like saying you’ve thrown a lot at us now we are hitting back. A bit like Ali’s rope a dope strategy except Ukraine doesn’t really need to do it. The border incursions force Russia to think about spreading resources to a defensive mode which further reduces the offensive momentum.
it also makes Russia think about how much offensive momentum they can generate if the Ukraines is introducing a whole new weaponry with trained crews.
in fairness Sun Tzu came up with this fifteen hundred years ago “first have to make yourself look strong, then look for your opponent to make a mistake and then attack.”
The midget man Putins has made so many mistakes already. 100s of thousands of Russians who have left are surely channeling to family back home the truth about how he thinks about the lives of ordinary Russians and also how’s Russias reputation such as it was is now at a historical low. Add in the fact Russia has spent its 2023 budget already which puts Putin’s on a more time sensitive challenge than people would have thought. Also falling gas and oil revenues etc and the cumulative impact of sanctions.
Given Putin spent years crafting this plan it’s been a pretty awful one given his strength in numbers. It’s a sad sad indictment of the Russian people’s spineless cowardice that they can’t remove him. A 70 year old midget so insecure he has to wear high heels and hides in bunkers, is sending the country to the ha’ penny place and they just accept it.
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