Macron is to make a speech on Thursday related to Ukraine. Could be one to watch.
He was the middle man for supplying russian gas into EU for a longtime and got very rich. Buying up newspapers and have them pump out pro russian scutter would fall right under his remit too. Majority owner of West Ham too jesus.
All Putin's oligarch friends have private armies.
Even the space agency that works with NASA has their own private militia.
Article above is about the Spartak ultras and their associations with Espanola.
It's not all bad news on that front though.
Putin's heroes.
I'll accuse you of banging the "send the Ukrainian men to war" drum. Quit it. It's been done to death. It's not happening. No country is going to send people who left seeking asylum and to get away from war to go back.
Russian peace.
Russians are panicky
What's needed are big strikes in Moscow and Petersburg, preferably in visible areas on key infrastructure. I don't think we'll see it, those cities are presumably too well protected nowadays
Update on the incursion into Russia today
Roman Starovoit, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region, which is on the border with Ukraine, said earlier Tuesday that a “sabotage and reconnaissance group” had tried to break into the Kursk region but failed.
Earlier, Russia’s defense ministry said seven regions were targeted by a wave of Ukrainian drones overnight, with attacks carried out against the Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, Leningrad, Moscow, Oryol and Tula regions.
BUT seems they are still alive and kicking
And why exactly are you so invested in opposing this logical and just idea?? What I express is a common view among the ordinary people I meet, they scratch their heads and puzzle why we have war refugees who clearly would be capable of assisting their state in it's time of great need.
We've just had two referendums where we were assured left, right & centre that the 'right' thing to do was vote Yes. But yet curiously the great unwashed Irish public profoundly disagreed and thrashed the proposals.
Ditto here methinks.
Breaking ..
It's not legal to remove people in this situation and send them to a war zone. The ordinary people you meet need to understand this. All the wishing in the world won't change it. You've been told this multiple times. Tell your friends so you can stop having the same conversation over and over
The Putin/Russia cancer engulfs the whole world it seems
Some stretch of credulity to try and link a hamfisted referendum, with wording so bad the AG had to speak up, and the user's resting anti-migrant rhetoric and potentially theoretical voxpop. The projection drawn in the outcome of this referendum, on this site, has been unreal. Some folk really, really want it to mean something.
Do you have erotic dreams about unvetted military aged males by any chance? 😏
Russia are supposed to have an economy smaller than that of Italy's, yet they apparently have the money to not only fund a war in Ukraine, but also to send agents out all over the world and fund every dissident political group in the West. Which is it? Are they strong or are they weak?
As Adam Curtis pointed out long ago, Putin's masterstroke was to fund political groups of various kinds and then make it known that this is what he was doing with the result being that you're always guessing at what he's behind. A sort of a political panopticon.
This article doesn't go into much specifics and reads like it's designed to further drive that same paranoia and discord. What exactly are these terrorists doing? Are they planting bombs? Are they sabotaging things?
It's not as if Russia would have to send terrorists in order to destabilise America or the Americas, anyway. They were doing a pretty good job of shít-stirring on social media as it was.
I'm not saying that Russia isn't sending agents across the American border, but even the mere suggestion of it is greatly effective.
It helps when you don't bother spending any money on keeping your citizens alive.
Yip .. re @Podge_irl comment "It helps when you don't bother spending any money on keeping your citizens alive."
Booooom of the month so far I would say?
Oh, that's going to leave a mark...
Awful
In a similar vein albeit from the opposite view point you'll be all for such news since it aligns with your viewpoint which as we all know is absolutely the most correct take on the war. Even bringing you to ignore the funding behind such publications.
Looks like it's over for Putin. Thousands of rebel Russian soldiers have taken several Russian towns. The Putin regime couldn't stop them on their home soil. When France enters the war the invasion force of Putler will surely fall to superior NATO tech. F16s on the way boys
You seems to be very keen on fighting. How about you leave one of those poor ukrainians in your house and go instead of him? They ran away precisely because they do not want to fight. You seems to have the right spirit for it so lead by example.
If you are of an opinion that they should be deported to go back to war then perhaps you may want to apply the same to other immigrants who ran away from war in their own countries. Pretty pathetic idea of rounding up people and sending them to war - it certainly say a lot about your own character.
If you mean recent incursion then numbers of soldiers involved were in hundreds half of whom sere eliminated while still on staging area in Ukraine. Rest of them barely made it across border. Very few managed to get back.
As for the France I recomend you to see recent interview where Stoltenberg said for Reuters that he advised Macron to consult on important issues with members of the Alliance.
F16's may or may not come and even if they come nobody knows in what numbers and which airports will be used as they cant use most of Ukrainian airports anyway. During the course of this war there were so many hopes and gamechangers which did not change game much like old soviet tech from ex Warsaw pact countires, Mig's, Gepards, Bradleys, Challengers, Himars, Patriots, ATACMS, Storm Shadows, Abrams, F16's... All of them too little and too late to mean anything other than some excitement and patting on the back to look good for a while in the media. Meanwhile more and more people are dead every day. This war should finish like yesterday.
Yeah that's why I posted that guardian article yesterday full of positive developments for Ukraine. Why are people like you so fanatical and blinkered that everything has to be black and white?
However like the original poster I was unaware of the background to that French newspaper and realise it should be taken with a large pinch of salt
When Prigozhin began the March on Moscow there were also lots of premature "it's over for Putin" cries. When will people ever learn to be patient and see how things play out
Another one hit this morning, their defences failed.
its funny thinking about how bad the western media was in reporting this war when you think back on it, the Russians running out of missiles any day now, no tires on their trucks, their army were down to wearing flipflops and dependent on washing machine parts. Were they believing their own BS or cynically reporting it?
General Milley gave a good speech towards the end of 2022 where he thought Ukraine should negotiate with Russia on the back of Ukraine having wins on the battlefield , he thought it was their high point and they would be negotiating from a position of strength
Now onwards, Ukraine is gradually getting weaker and so is their negotiating position. Will it be left to Trump in 2025 to call it?
David Sacks gives a decent summary of it so far in this tweet. It certainly hasnt gone "as expected"
"BIDEN’S BIG BACKFIRE
Last week I gave a talk at the American Moment conference in D.C. in which I compared Biden’s claims at the beginning of the Ukraine War to how it has actually turned out.
I explained how Biden’s policy has backfired in 4 key areas:
1) ECONOMIC
At the beginning of the war, Biden claimed that sanctions would “crush” the Russian economy, forcing Russia out of the war and perhaps even precipitating regime change.
In fact, the dislocation to Russia’s economy was short-lived. By 2023, the Russian economy was outperforming the G7. Meanwhile, the real victim of sanctions was Europe, especially the German economy, which relied on cheap Russian gas to power its exports. As a result, the war is destabilizing governments throughout Europe — just not Putin’s.
Instead of hurting the Russian economy, Biden’s economic war has hurt our European allies. This is the first big backfire.
2) MILITARY
At the outset of the war, the Biden administration declared that its objective was to “weaken” Russia militarily so it couldn’t wage regional war again.
The media breathlessly amplified claims of Russian weakness and impending collapse, only to discover the reality of massive Russian industrial war production. Russian factories and forges are now ramped up and producing more artillery shells, drones, tanks, and other weapons of war.
In fact, it’s the West that can’t keep up, with its atrophied defense industrial base. America’s own stockpiles, most notably of artillery shells and air defense, have been depleted much faster than war planners anticipated.
The size of the Russian military has grown too, thanks to large numbers of enlistments and a casualty rate that’s decreasing over time. The Russian army has become more battle-tested and battle-hardened, learning how to defeat western weapons.
Biden’s proxy war was supposed to weaken Russia’s military but instead has made it stronger and more formidable, while depleting America’s own stockpiles. This is the second big backfire.
3) DIPLOMATIC / GEOPOLITICAL
At the outset, Biden claimed that the war would show Western unity, resolve and leadership while isolating Putin.
In fact, the rest of the world has not come along for the ride. The BRICS countries and much of the Global South reject the U.S. view of the war and refuse to sanction or condemn Russia. On a recent visit to the Middle East, Putin was greeted like a conquering hero in UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Sanctions have only made BRICS more popular; it has added 5 new members, with a long wait list of countries seeking to join. These countries see BRICS as a defender of their economic sovereignty and a potential shield against a trigger-happy U.S. sanctions regime.
Even liberal interventionists are now starting to notice. Fiona Hill declared that Pax Americana is over. And EU foreign minister Josep Borrell declared that the era of Western dominance has definitively ended.
Rather than strengthening U.S. global leadership, the war has catalyzed resistance to it. This is Biden’s third big backfire.
4) HUMANITARIAN
At the outset of the war, Biden claimed that his policy would “aid the Ukrainian people” and “help ease their suffering.”
But Ukraine has suffered a vast number of casualties, and its population has further declined greatly as a result of refugees (mainly women and children) fleeing the country. According to UN/World Bank, the population of Ukraine-controlled territory has decreased from 44 million to 28 million. Over 10 million of the remainder are reported to be pensioners. This is a recipe for demographic collapse.
So instead of helping Ukraine, Biden’s proxy war policy has likely doomed it. This is backfire number four. "
Biden's proxy war... sorry what? Biden didn't start this war. Why isn't is described as Putin's war? Demonstration of definite bias there.
Russia's economy is cannibalizing itself to fund the war, to talk of it as outperforming the G7 is economic illiteracy or a deliberate attempt at deception.
If that's the view of David Sacks, then he is a sack of BS.
Negotiate in 2022? And what happens then?
Unless Ukraine is in NATO, or there are Western troops stationed in Ukraine as a security treaty, then what was to stop Russia coming back if they sensed weakness? It came back after a peace treaty in Chechnya, it broke multiple past agreements with Ukraine.
Would Putin have agreed to such NATO alliance with Ukraine in 2022 and honoured it into 2024 in those circumstances?
So Ukraine fights on.
For context, this is one of those Users who bravely thinks Ukraine just give up the territory lost - for "peace" of course - land that's the equivalent of Ireland ceding the entirety of Connacht. It's a stealth way to introduce the whole "Ukraine are just pawns and not really fighting this war" intellectually dishonest angle.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://we.vanillicon.com/v2/e050b53be62f0ae2404c620976170938.svg)
