Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 60 of 1104
A much better summary on Rumble
https://sp.rmbl.ws/s8/2/O/l/L/n/OlLne.caa.mp4
This Military Summary channel also exists on YouTube
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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How Ukraine’s Greatest Novelist Is Fighting for His Country
Andrey Kurkov has spent his life writing about realities so absurd they defy satire. It was perfect preparation for this moment.
On the morning of Feb. 25, the day after Russian bombs began falling on his country, Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine’s most famous living writer, received a phone call at his home near Independence Square in central Kyiv. The call was from an old friend, a businessman with close ties to the government, who had just got hold of some privileged information: Kurkov, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, was on a list of “pro-Ukrainian activists” drawn up by the Kremlin, whose forces could seize the capital in a matter of days. He needed to get out.
As it happened, Kurkov was working on a novel about an earlier Russian invasion, the so-called Soviet-Ukrainian war of 1917-21, in which Ukrainian nationalists, aided by various Western powers, established an independent republic for the first time in their history — only to see it swiftly absorbed into the new Communist imperium rising in the east. The novel, the third in a series of books about this turbulent period, was inspired by a cache of secret-police files, which the daughter of a former K.G.B. officer bequeathed to Kurkov several years earlier. The documents evoked, in granular detail, the terror of life under Russian occupation, as well as its piquant absurdities. Kurkov, a sly satirist in the tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov, was especially delighted to learn about a Russian Underwear Tax, whereby each Ukrainian family was required to donate three pairs of undergarments to the ill-equipped Red Army. The same went for a Russian Furniture Tax, which stipulated that Ukrainian households could possess only as many chairs as there were household members, plus one for guests; the rest were requisitioned.
Kurkov dedicated himself to chronicling and contextualizing the war for foreign audiences, a task he has performed with prodigious zeal. Hardly a day goes by now without a new article, radio broadcast, television appearance or public lecture.
“I think everybody should do what he can do best for the country,” Kurkov said recently. “The snipers should kill the enemy. The singers should sing for the soldiers and the refugees. What I can do is write and tell things, and that is what I am doing.”
“Arrested, taken to Russia, put in prison,” Kurkov said nonchalantly, as though describing his plans for the weekend, when I asked him, in late March, what he thought would happen if the enemy got its hands on him. As he was quick to emphasize, his situation was hardly unique; in fact, it was the norm. In Russian-occupied territory in the east, the military was systematically detaining journalists and intellectuals, a number of whom have not been heard from since.
The knowledge he had come to impart was that Ukraine and Russia, for all their tragically intertwined history, were two distinct nations with two distinct mentalities — one anarchic and free-spirited, the other pliant and long-suffering. In the past 20 years alone, while Putin has been stifling dissent and consolidating his autocracy in Moscow, Kyiv has experienced a pair of bottom-up revolutions, in 2004 and 2014, each of them inspired by the wish to cast off Russian influence and forge closer ties to Europe.
“I think people have become much more fragile,” Kurkov said, sounding not unlike Solzhenitsyn, who in a notorious commencement address at Harvard in 1978 argued that the West’s material abundance had brought about a corresponding “decline in courage.” Kurkov felt that something similar had happened in today’s Russia, where living standards have drastically improved since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic turmoil of the 1990s. Under Communism, he suggested, rather provocatively, the choice between the privations of a “free” existence and those of the Gulag may have seemed less stark. “Now you can have either quality of life or prison,” he said. “So they go for quality of life.”
The Soviet Union
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Former NATO general says Putin has 9-month window to win war
Ukraine has fought valiantly and driven the Russians back from the northern cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv in recent weeks, but its counteroffensive has not been sustained because Ukrainian forces need time to assimilate Western military equipment, a retired NATO commander said.
“Tanks and armoured vehicles need an initial stage of personal training and team training for the driver, gunner, reloader and commander,” said Lt-Gen Konstantinos Loukopoulos, who has taught tank warfare at military academies in Kyiv and Moscow.
“They need tactical training, including test firing and exercises, which cannot be done in a few weeks. The training cycle is at least six months, and that doesn’t change in wartime,” he said.
“After [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s illusions about winning the war in 96 hours, the illusions began on the Western side,” he added.
The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany and the Czech Republic are among those who have pledged various types of armour and artillery, and that complicates matters, Loukopoulos said.
For instance, out of 90 howitzer M777 artillery pieces sent by the US to Ukraine, about 18 have been absorbed, he said, adding that it is unknown how many of the 12 or 14 César self-propelled howitzers sent by France are in use.
“For Ukraine to absorb the weapons from the West and make them operational, form the right units, and train them, it needs eight, nine months. It can’t pull active units from the front to train them,” Loukopoulos said.
That is the timeframe, he believes, within which Putin must win the war on the ground and reach a negotiated settlement.
“Under the present balance of forces, the general trend is in favour of the Russians. Right now nothing can change that,” he said.
“After a few months, with training of reserve units, there could be a Ukrainian strategic counteroffensive that could throw the Russians out.”
Loukopoulos believes this could likely be done by Ukraine seizing Russian territory that it could exchange for its own territory in negotiations.
“Can the Ukrainians create a fact on the ground to counter Russian gains? Right now they cannot,” he said.
“Whether we like it or not, Russia has the political and military initiative. The West is reacting to what Putin is doing.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/26/nato-general-putin-has-8-9-mo
nths-to-win-the-war
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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More fantasies about Ukraine winning the war?
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Quote:The article was by an instructor who has taught tank warfare at military academies in Kyiv and Moscow warning that the "fantastic and miraculous" weapons Ukraine receives will require 9 months for the Ukrainians to learn how to use efficiently. That gives the Russians 9 easier months before the war shifts to harder.
Originally posted by SignyM:
More fantasies about Ukraine winning the war?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
and Originally posted by second:
Former NATO general says Putin has 9-month window to win war
“After a few months, with training of reserve units, there could be a Ukrainian strategic counteroffensive that could throw the Russians out.”
Loukopoulos believes this could likely be done by Ukraine seizing Russian territory that it could exchange for its own territory in negotiations.
“Can the Ukrainians create a fact on the ground to counter Russian gains? Right now they cannot,” he said.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/26/nato-general-putin-has-8-9-mo
nths-to-win-the-war
He's just shilling for more aid for Ukraine by holding out an impossible hope.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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News of the day
Quote:
In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/wapo-stunning-first-admits-catastro
phic-conditions-collapsing-morale-ukraine-forces-front
So, more aid for Ukraine!!!
Quote:
Biden Readies Approval Of Long-Range Rockets To Ukraine - Russia Warns Over "Red Line"
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-prepares-approve-long-range-
rockets-ukraine-russia-warns-over-red-line
Oh look! More aid for Ukraine!!
Quote:
US General Floats Military Options to Help Export Ukrainian Grain
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/us-general-floats-military-optio
ns-help-export-ukrainian-grain
Because Ukraine needs more help! (Despite the fact that Russia is keeping two sea lanes open for cargo ships.)
Anyone notice the narrative shift? Kiev was "winning" until a week ago. Now, it is desperate, and needs our help desperately!
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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What stake do we have in the Russia-Ukraine War?
I would put it this way: This is a war to prevent the realities of the 20th century from becoming our future in the 21st century. Russia today is an Orwellian nightmare, a dictatorship directly descended from the Soviet KGB that takes brutal retribution against its critics and hardly bothers to conceal it, the better to instill fear in others. It commits war crimes with the same moral indifference and the same strategic purpose. It is also an economically backward regime that has moved from communism to kleptocracy, and from left to right, without changing its basic character.
The Ukrainians have every reason to fear being dragged back under Moscow’s deadening control: Putin himself has said Ukraine has no right to exist, and he has put Moldova, the Baltic countries, and other former Soviet states on notice. No wonder the Swedes and Finns, who long preferred official neutrality, now want to join NATO. We too now have to weigh the prospect of being dragged back into a past when our friends feared for their freedom and the specter of nuclear annihilation made us all fear for our lives.
In Russia today, no lie is too fantastic to be fed to the public. In a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak, the “special military operation” in Ukraine is supposedly aimed at “de-Nazifying” the only country other than Israel with a Jewish head of government. (“So what if Zelensky is Jewish,” Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said recently in response to a question. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.”) In its utter contempt for the truth, this kind of institutionalized lying has its parallel in the practiced deceit of Putin’s greatest American admirer, Donald Trump, and the debasement of Republican leaders and right-wing media that parrot Trump’s lies or stand silent, refusing to contradict them.
Resisting the extension of this kind of regime is what the struggle in Ukraine and the struggle at home are both about. In the world today, we are back to basics, the basics of liberal democracy.
More at https://prospect.org/world/what-we-have-at-stake-in-ukraine/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What stake do we have in the Russia-Ukraine War?
As far as I got.
Answer: none.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Nobody cares.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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