Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 254 of 1104
Quote:Signym, what you are trying to do will only work when the people are in the same room. Here is a long article where important people have just such a heart-to-heart talk with a journalist:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
EDITED TO ADD: I've always tried to take a realistic view of us. If I see danger, I voice my concerns. My POV may be different than many, but I've ALWAYS been about America's -our- interests, as best I see them. Finding out what those are means close questioning and sharp insight. It's beyond the scope of any individual. I was really hoping to get into deep discussions about what people think and feel,and why, hoping to understand their POV. I was hoping that others would delve into my ideas and question - not my motives (which are genuinely patriotic) or my nationality (American, I assure you) but my assumptions, my logic, even my facts. Having people pare away at my own thoughts makes me a better thinker
But it seems few people want to pursue that.
Off my soap box now, I've got real-world stuff to doand real-world responsibilities.
The price of weapons assistance: Ukraine pays in blood to convince Western allies
Ukraine has been at war for almost ten months, but several large European states have been dragging their feet over aid. Is Ukraine not Europe? Or is Europe itself no longer Europe? Eesti Ekspress interviewed dozens of diplomats, high-level officials, and anonymous sources in Kyiv, Berlin, Warsaw, and Tallinn to find answers.
„No other country has undergone two revolutions for European values in the last few decades and is currently at war in their name,“ says Ihor Zhovka, Zelensky’s chief foreign advisor.
No other country holds greater conviction in European values when describing and defending them. Nevertheless, many European countries’ reactions to their cries for help at the beginning of the war were „ambiguous“, says Zhovka. Why? He chooses his words carefully.
„They lack the courage to make brave decisions.“
I’m sitting underground with Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba. We’ve settled in amidst the green pipes and empty metal shelves of a basement-level boiler room, as drones are once again flying overhead. I ask whether Bohdan, Viktoria, and their unborn child would still be alive if Germany, France, and other countries had supplied air defense systems earlier.
„Certainly,“ Kuleba answers without a beat. „We’ve been asking for them since day one of the war.“
Why weren’t they delivered?
„I suppose they hoped the situation would change and there’d be no need to provide anything,“ Kuleba sighs. „Sure, it cost us the blood of our people, but I guess that’s the way humankind works.“
That being said, things have improved over the last few months.
„I can’t speak for everybody, but the dynamics are much better than before,“ says Zhovka. Germans sources confirm: Westerners were getting bored when nothing „exciting“ happened on the front in summer, but the Harkiv counterattack changed all that, luckily. Which is nice, of course. Still, it means Europe didn’t start helping Ukraine simply because it is a part of Europe – a region that was once the stronghold of humanism and solidarity. Europe had to be convinced. With blood.
Kuleba doesn’t overdramatize. He remains calm and thinks there’s nothing surprising about allies being unwilling to supply weapons to a side that was possibly facing imminent defeat.
Borscht is similarly one of the reasons why Europe delayed military aid for so long: generally, apart from the soup, next to nothing was known about Ukrainians. And, in fact, most believed the Ukrainian national dish was actually Russian, just like Ukraine itself.
„If anyone had said on February 24th that Ukraine could win this war, they’d have been a genius,“ says Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of Ukraine’s largest English-language outlet The Kyiv Independent. „Or at least a great statesman.“
„Lots of Western journalists visit nowadays,“ Rudenko tells me at another one of Kyiv’s amazin
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‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’
Boris Dralyuk, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, interviewed by Klaus Stimeder:
Q: Mr. Dralyuk, we are going into the tenth month of Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. What is your take on the situation?
I am no military strategist, but my sense is that the Russian Army’s chances of defeating the Ukrainian Army on the battlefield are nil. Thanks to its allies, the Ukrainian Army is better trained, more experienced, and far better supplied. Also, we must remember that the war, in which many Ukrainians but relatively few Russian nationals have fought, has been going on since 2014. The Russian Army – like everything in Russia – has been allowed to rot due to the corruption that pervades every Russian institution. Much of the money assigned to defense has lined the pockets of Putin’s cronies, and of those cronies’ cronies, and so on. The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them.
So Ukrainians are now mowing down, at great expense and great psychological cost, untrained Russians, including, in the case of Wagner PMC, prisoners. These prisoners are essentially slaves of the Putin regime. What motivation do these Russian men have to fight? The promise of a reduced sentence? Fear of execution with a sledgehammer? Maybe a washing machine? While Ukrainians are defending their homeland, their children, their future. Ukrainian men and women are also dying on the front lines, but the number of Russians killed is staggering. All this is very much in the Russian tradition. There is nothing cheaper in Russia than human life. So what is the Russian Army doing instead of fighting with a modicum of honor and intelligence? Attacking civilians. Also a failing strategy. And also very much in the Russian tradition.
Q: You were born and raised in Soviet Ukraine but emigrated with your parents to the US in the early 1990s. What does the perception of the war in the US look like to you?
I am happy to say that I see near-universal support for Ukraine among the US populace. I have witnessed it in California, Florida, and Oklahoma. There are Ukrainian colors everywhere. There are, of course, isolationist voices on the right and the left and useful idiots with big platforms, but I do not see them having much influence on the state’s policies or on the minds of average Americans. Nothing is entirely black and white, but this is as close as we have come to a clear-cut case of good vs. evil.
Q: A considerable part of your body of work is translating the works of Russian authors, and non-Russian writers who write, or at least used to write, in Russian. According to the latest surveys, an ever-increasing number of Ukrainians are now rejecting the Russian language. Even in places such as your native city Odesa, where Russian has been the lingua franca for centuries, this change has become palpable in everyday life. What do you think about that?
I think it is inevitable. It is the price that the Russian language and Russian high culture must pay for the violence done by the Russian state and the Russian people. Russian high culture is not uniformly and unambiguously in defense of imperialism. Still, it has long served to cloak the extreme violence and inhumanity that characterizes Russian society and Russia's actions around the world. The true Russian tradition, say far too many well-intentioned people like Pope Francis, is that of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. They then turn a blind eye to the violence perpetrated by successive Russian and Soviet tyrants, the mentality of the vast majority of Russian people, and the atrocious conditions of life in the country. Or they may admit that it is precisely due to the great suffering of the Russian people – and those around them – that we have Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. To a significant extent, that is true.
Representatives of Russian high culture responded in myriad ways to that suffering. Many of them, like Pushkin and To
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’
The exact same could be said of Ukraine, yanno... if we weren't spending hundreds of billions giving them weapons as they march to their deaths.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Russia starved 4 million Ukrainians to death and will do it again in the 21st Century if Russia wins. That is why Ukrainians are fighting Russians. There is nothing more than that driving this war.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’
The exact same could be said of Ukraine, yanno... if we weren't spending hundreds of billions giving them weapons as they march to their deaths.
Read about the genocide of Ukrainians at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Just in case you think Ukrainians are the only people Russians kill over political differences, Russia killed 62 million Soviet citizens during the 20th century. There is a nice little book that breaks the killing down year by year. For some reason the Russians always find a new excuse to kill their political adversaries:
R.J. Rummel, Lethal Politics - Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (Published 1990) I am pretty sure you won't read the book, although it is free. Here are the chapters:
Chapters
1 61,911,000 Victims: Utopianism Empowered, 1917-1987 page 1
2 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period, 1917-1922 page 33
3 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928 page 61
4 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period, 1929-1935 page 81
5 4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1936-1938 page 109
6 5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939-June 1941 page 127
7 13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period, June 1941-1945 page 151
8 15,613,000 Victims: Postwar and Stalin’s Twilight Period, 1945-1953 page 191
9 6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period, 1954-1987 page 217
While there are estimates of the number of people killed by Soviet authorities during particular episodes or campaigns, until now, no one has tried to calculate the complete human toll of Soviet genocides and mass murders since the revolution of 1917. Here, R. J. Rummel lists and analyzes hundreds of published estimates, presenting them in the historical context in which they occurred. His shocking conclusion is that conservatively calculated, 61,911,000 people were systematically killed by the Communist regime from 1917 to 1987.
Buy the book at https://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Politics-Soviet-Genocide-Murder/dp/15600
08873/
Or download all R.J. Rummel books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.page/search.php?req=R.J.+Rummel
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:Quote:Russia starved 4 million Ukrainians to death and will do it again in the 21st Century if Russia wins. That is why Ukrainians are fighting Russians. There is nothing more than that driving this war.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’
The exact same could be said of Ukraine, yanno... if we weren't spending hundreds of billions giving them weapons as they march to their deaths.
Liar.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:You and the Russians have a denial problem. Whatever happens, you and they deny it happened. But the Ukrainians don't have a problem remembering what happened. Ukrainians are hammering history into Russian heads and this history lesson hurts. You and the Russians are such recalcitrant pupils that the hammering must go on and on until you either change or die.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Liar.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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In a rare admission, Russia on Monday said 63 servicemen were killed when a temporary deployment point was struck in Makiivka in a part of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.
Ukraine has taken responsibility for the strike and says the toll is much higher.
Russian military correspondents, who have gained influence in recent months, said hundreds could have been killed and accused Russia's top commanders of not learning from past mistakes.
There have also been reports that the servicemen were quartered next to a munitions depot that exploded in the strike and that some had been able to use their Russian mobile phones -- giving away their location to Ukrainian forces.
"What conclusions will be drawn? Who will be punished?" Mikhail Matveyev, a member of the Russian parliament representing Samara, wrote on social media.
The Telegram account Rybar, which has around a million followers, said it was "criminally naive" for the army to store ammunition next to sleeping quarters.
Putin has yet to react to the Makiivka strike, which comes during a holiday season before Orthodox Christmas which many Russians spend with their families.
Call for revenge
At the gathering in Samara, Kolotovkina, the wife of a general, said she had asked her husband to "avenge" the victims.
"We will crush the enemy together. We are left with no choice," she told mourners.
More at https://www.rfi.fr/en/international-news/20230103-grief-and-anger-in-r
ussia-over-soldiers-killed-by-ukraine-strike
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 SIGNYM:
I'm not supporting Russia btw.
You owe me a new iPhone, Boris! Great way to close out 2022!
btw, after almost a year the first post in this thread... prescient...
"What an evil selfish prick Putin is. Does anyone but him benefit from this? And now? After 2 years of covid crap? Kill thousands and crash the world economy so he can redraw a MAP?!?? What fcking dinosaur. I look forward to watching this blow up in his face."
I impress myself sometimes.
Each day that passes Putin shows how to bungle and completely fck up a "special operation." And - Bonus - each day he makes Russia look even worse. It will go down as the biggest disaster/screwup ever. What a human turd.
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Quote:
Originally posted by K2PO:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
OMFG. You really believe that funding oligarchs and EU/MIC apparatchiks is "strengthening democracy"?
Always LOL at pro-Russians criticising Ukraine for being an oligarchy. Just LOL - you get why that's hilarious, don't you?
Understand Sig, Zelensky doesn't have to be a saint to be a hero. Ukraine doesn't have to be a perfect democracy to be a nation of heroes. It just has to be on the right side, resisting a imperialist invader that is much worse in every respect. Oligarchy. Corruption. Authoritarianism. Propaganda. Invading other countries. War crimes.
Take another look at the country you're supporting.Quote:
And by saying that this has been about destroying Russia all along,
I've said for years that Russia is a malign actor that is bad for global peace and freedom. Now Western society has come around to agreeing with me. Part of the reason why - Ukraine's heroic defence. Not just defence, but pushing Russia back and reclaiming their land and exposing Russia's war crimes, like in Bucha, to the world.
So yes, Ukraine has heroically defied Russia since 2014, exposed Putin to the world for what he is, cut the Russian army down to size, strengthened NATO and bought time for the West to re-arm while Russia's army is mired in Ukraine.
We owe Ukraine much more than the relatively small amount of money and weapons we've given them.
Man! My sock puppet is cleaning house. Go, go, go!
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You and the Russians have a denial problem. Whatever happens, you and they deny it happened. But the Ukrainians don't have a problem remembering what happened. Ukrainians are hammering history into Russian heads and this history lesson hurts. You and the Russians are such recalcitrant pupils that the hammering must go on and on until you either change or die.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Liar.
You first, Mudblood.
The problem for you now is that there's nothing you can ever do to change what ails you.
Don't do anything strenuous, for oh... I dunno... The rest of your short life.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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