Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
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Quote:The United States State Department suspects between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, have been detained and transferred to Russia, often to isolated regions.
Originally posted by SignyM:
Pity . . .
“Moscow’s actions appear pre-meditated and draw immediate historical comparisons to Russian ‘filtration’ operations in Chechnya and other areas. President Putin’s ‘filtration’ operations are separating families, confiscating Ukrainian passports, and issuing Russian passports in an apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote in the statement. Reports also show Russia is deliberately separating children from their families and putting children up for adoption.
https://www.vox.com/2022/7/31/23286026/the-attack-on-a-prison-holding-
ukraine-pows-explained-russia
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Bullshit.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Quote:The contrast between ordinary Ukrainians grabbing a gun, rushing to the front to risk their lives as they fight for their country, and Americans moaning about the price of filling up their Ford F150s is unsettling. The lack of imagination that some Americans have when it comes to a very dangerous moment on the European continent and the lack of commitment to make small sacrifices to help keep the Russians from invading the rest of Europe defines petulance.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Bullshit.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shelling targeted grain businessman
The mayor of the major Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, Vitaliy Kim, said shelling killed one of Ukraine’s wealthiest men, Oleksiy Vadatursky, and his wife, Raisa. Vadatursky headed a grain production and export business.
Another presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said Vadatursky was specifically targeted.
It “was not an accident, but a well-thought-out and organized premeditated murder. Vadatursky was one of the largest farmers in the country, a key person in the region and a major employer,” he said.
Vadatursky’s agribusiness, Nibulon, includes a fleet of ships for sending grain abroad.
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/houston-chronicle/20220801/28239410820
4907
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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NATO sure sucks, huh?
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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Russia plans to hold elections in the occupied Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and others as early as September, paving the way for Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex those regions in the same way he did in 2014 when he seized Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula.
Of course, Russian officials deny they covet these territories. “The determination of the future destiny of those people is in their hands,” a Kremlin spokesman told Bloomberg. “If they are going to make any referendums, it will be their decision.”
But Putin is clearly planning on annexing territories that Ukrainians have failed to reconquer since Russia invaded the country in late February.
Before the war caused millions across the country to leave their homes, more than 2.5 million people lived in the regions. Russian hardliners don’t view their Ukrainian citizenship as legitimate. “The so-called ‘party of war’ believes that Russia should annex these territories,” that they are “part of Russia historically and so must be returned,” said Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya in an interview with the Washington Post. “For them, it’s inevitable.”
Russia is already using a mix of “terror, state propaganda, handouts and promises to rebuild destroyed areas” to drum up loyalty, she added, while detaining or killing local politicians, activists and journalists who might resist their efforts.
Such a move as elections would potentially bolster Putin’s revanchist claims on Ukrainian soil even as the Russian military fails to achieve a decisive victory and continues to lose significant personnel and equipment, wrote Agence France-Presse, a testament to Ukrainian resolve, Western military support, and poor Russian planning and execution.
It would also likely make it much harder for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to any peace deal in the future, added Axios, as Russia would insist that the conquered land was Russian sovereign territory. Conversely, if Putin annexed the regions and then lost them to a Ukrainian counteroffensive, he could suffer a stinging embarrassment.
Diplomats in Syria, a Russian ally, recently said they would recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, effectively saying they have the freedom to join the Russian Federation if they so choose, the Associated Press reported. In 2015 Russia first interceded with military assistance to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad quash rebels in the Syrian Civil War.
The president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, despite being another Russian ally, refused to recognize Luhansk and Donetsk as “People’s Republics,” however, because he said they were “quasi-states” on Ukrainian occupied territory, noted Ukrainska Pravda via Yahoo! News.
After all, Kazakhstan is another former Soviet republic that Putin might set his eyes on one day.
https://www.dailychatter.com/2022/08/01/the-revanchists-folly/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Putin's rule is weakening
So what comes next?
Timothy Snyder, Jul 30
It seems to me, from a distance, that Putin's rule is weakening. We now regularly hear from people aside from Putin (for example former prime minister and president Dmitry Medvedev) about the meaning of the war, the catastrophic consequences that await Ukraine and the West, and so forth. This is interesting, because it seems like a sign that Putin is losing control.
Usually the news coverage of such pronouncements focuses on their content. When Medvedev tells us that the war is Poland's fault, or that Ukraine is a Jewish conspiracy, or that this or that action will lead to dreadful consequences, we pay attention. He is playing to a news cycle organized around fear. But the deeper story, I think, is that he and other people aside from Putin now feel authorized to make such colorful proclamations. Before the war there was less of this.
The doom propaganda serves a couple of purposes. On the surface, it shows (or rather seems to show) loyalty to Putin. At a time when Russia is losing the war, the best hope is to convince the West that Russia is somehow unstoppable -- which it isn't. Russia has had to pull back, just in this war, from a great deal of Ukrainian territory. Its forces in the south are in an unenviable situation right now. Russian history, like American history, is littered with defeat in war.
At the same time, the doom propaganda is rhetorical preparation for a power struggle after Putin falls. If Russia loses the war, the people saying radical things now will have protected themselves. For my part, I tend to see the drastic proclamations as evidence that important Russians (Medvedev, also Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov) understand that Russia can lose wars, and is losing this one.
I am not convinced that Medvedev, who for years was seen as the liberal alternative to Putin, believes the anti-Ukrainian, antisemitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Western hate speech he publishes on his Telegram channel. He is creating a profile that might be useful after Putin (just as his technocrat profile was once useful to Putin). Lavrov’s bluster has a similar feel. He doesn’t want to left out of the chorus of celebration of atrocity, but he can’t be bothered to make sense. His recent claim that Russia must annex any territory from which any weapon could reach Russia implies that Russia must keep expanding until it controls the entire surface of the earth.
Another interesting example is Ramzan Kadyrov, who has run Chechnya as his own personal satrapy since he helped Putin win the Second Chechen War. Kadyrov commands a kind of personal armed guard that appears alongside the Russian army in its foreign wars.
In Ukraine, Kadyrov has spoken of the need to take Kyiv, and then has seemed hesitant to risk his men for the less prestigious goals available to the Russian offensive at the moment. According the Russian statistics, Chechen casualties are among the lowest of all the regions, which would be odd, given the presence in Ukraine of a specifically Chechen force. From the perspective of Kadyrov's own interests, though, this would makes sense. His men have to be present in Ukraine, because for now he must seem loyal. But for him it is more important that they be available for a future power struggle in a post-Putin Russia.
It does seem that his mind is now on the future. Kadyrov now proposes that Russia locate air defense systems in Chechnya. His justification is that Ukraine might attack Chechnya, which is not at all credible. He has also announced that a new battalion raised in Chechnya to fight in Ukraine will instead remain in Chechnya. It sounds more like he is preparing for a post-Putin Russia in which Chechnya would claim independence.
Another sign of weakness for Putin is the army itself. The argument over whether Russia is winning or losing can be made in military terms. But the army itself is a source of Putin's political strength. The claim of its eternal invincibility i
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It could be many decades before it is known how many people the Russians murder in Ukraine. For an example from history:
An Unusual Early Life
I was born on July 5, 1928 in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and was very fortunate to have been born into a prominent Latvian family. My father was the Chief of Staff of the Latvian army, and my early childhood was secure, pleasant, and interesting. I attended the excellent French Lycee there, expecting to follow my father into a military career. I am surprised how much motivation and insight they gave besides teaching the basic subject matters.
That good life unfortunately changed when I was about 12 years old. The Soviets occupied Latvia, and in the winter of 1940 my father was arrested. We did not know for years what happened to him. Only after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and their archives were opened did we find out that my father has been taken to Moscow, tried, convicted, and executed. The Soviet occupation really was very, very brutal.
When Riga fell to the Soviets in 1944, we left by ship and moved to the university town of Marburg an der Lahn in Germany, and I enrolled in a German high school. But this was 1944 and there wasn't much of a school year; every time allied bombers approached there were air raid alerts, and everybody had to proceed to air raid shelters. By 1945 everybody knew the war was lost, and German soldiers surrendered en masse in a disciplined manner.
When the war was over I attended Latvian high schools, first in the English occupation zone, then in the American zone. Travel was very difficult. There were bombed-out bridges where trains had passed over valleys; trains now stopped on one side and you carried your luggage down the valley and up the other side where another train was supposed to be waiting.
More at https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/4/184690-an-interview-with-juris-h
artmanis/fulltext
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Lies, lies.
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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
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