Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Saw this today.

Not good if correct. Russias' leaders are desperate, would sell their souls for help with this invasion (if they had any!). The Soviet weapons/expertise left over from the Cold war is not safe in their hands IMO. It is a source of chaos, and a threat to the safety of the entire world. I doubt that China would be that pleased to see NKs missiles getting upgrades. Their "(unlimited) friend" is a bigger loose cannon than Kim Jong Un.

Again I'd love it to be confirmed correct but I doubt Ukraine have leapt forward to operating near Tokmak overnight. That would mean a near complete collapse of Russian sources in the south. Seems like a stretch.

Probably add another 100k for non-combatants also. That's just crazy.

He doesn't see "grey", he sees the US as the same black/white villain in every scenario and conflict, personifying countries which is the part of the same reductionism that Wallace, Galloway et al use.

He shares a lot of the Kremlin's language and views towards Ukraine, allotting blame on NATO, even using Moscow's phrase "fight Russia to the last Ukrainian".

Just take this:

It's shocking stuff. I protested the Iraq war and followed it on a daily basis. The US didn't "smash Baghdad to pieces", they targeted certain infrastructure, for example energy distribution (which was easier to rebuild and replace) whilst not targeting transformers. I could write a short book on how utterly wrong that comparison is.

Vatnik soup sums up the linguist well:

There are people who think that only people in the west have personal agency. They think that only western nations can be imperialist. If a large nation invades their smaller neighbour, it's bad when a western nation does it but it's just the way things are if the Russians or Chinese do it. It's as if the Chinese or Russians don't have any agency and just coast into invasions, as if they didn't have leaders with expansion on their minds.

Basically, imperialism, genocide and all that can be bad or neutral depending on who is doing it. That's why our national embarrassments who go off on Kremlin funded fact-finding missions think that Ukraine deserve being invaded just because they wanted EU membership and a NATO umbrella that the other Warsaw Pact countries like the Baltics got.

This. Chomsky always stuck in my craw I couldn't put my finger on it, something hidden about him but thankfully the curtains were pulled on the likes of him. Roger Waters another one who was a hero of mine all my life really sickened me with his blind rhetoric.

I met a horrible specimen recently. Middle-aged, Italian. Raving against the NATO, thinking herself very knowledgeable probably as she rejected that anything wrong is happening in Iran, Iran is just a normal country where women enjoy perfect freedom to dress however they like, and NATO is of course evil personified. When challenged on that last one, and told that NATO is needed for European protection, she practically jumped three feet in the air like they do in cartoons: “protection from WHAT??”

To act like that in these times when we are seeing such awful war crimes committed en masse in a European country, is to be willfully blind, obstinate and vile.

My only satisfaction taken from that was that she was intending to go and live in Iran herself for a year. Happy travels. Bicth.

The geopolitics of nations stays the same through time to an astounding degree, I suppose because of the “geo”. The people in the west are further removed from the evils of Eastern imperialisms or expansionisms than eastern Europeans, so they simply can afford to care less, and the contrarians thrive and are free to equivocate anything. I myself am guilty of ignorance of, dunno, the situation in Nagorno-karabakh, but at least I don’t go around pretending that I know the first thing about it, and disgustingly slotting it into some contrarian narrative in my head which carries no resemblance to the factual situation whatsoever.

Rant/

**** Putin, what a stain he will go down in history as.

Some sh!t stirring individual (Lore Malore, whoever the hell that is) has started a petition looking to dismantle NATO, and giving the impression that with NATO gone the World will be full of sweetness and light. I've never seen so much waffle. The first line sets things up, and in my opinion it's complete BS.

"NATO is the military wing of a racist anti-communist hate group who go around the world intimidating democratically elected governments into submission to private capital."

139 signatures at the last count, and it would never get mine.

Petition · Disband NATO · Change.org

???

Malcontents and contrarians is all they are. Every age has a way of dealing with them eg. the witch trials. Not saying we should burn them but i'd probably turn a blind eye if Clare Daly got dunked in a river and Mick Wallace was put in stocks in O' Connell St.

Death toll in Chernihiv up to 6 now including a child.

Seems like there are at least 2 planes damaged / on fire.

https://t.me/mysiagin/25911

Interesting. I seem to recall the understood position was that the Gripen was exactly the right match of capability to maintenance requirement for Ukraine. That is they aren't as fussy as the F16 about landing strips and maintenance so they can be moved around the country and take off from a bog standard roads. So it's not easy to target them.

But there's feck all of them in existence so they just weren't worth the effort. I also read somewhere that only 6 pilots are being approved initially for the F16 which is woefully short. So Ukraine are exploring the gripen to shore up the initial numbers?