Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:1) None of the NATO countries have sent even one platoon of soldiers to Ukraine because all the governments are avoiding Russia for unstated reasons. Reasons could be fear, could be their army's lack of readiness, or could be election politics. If NATO allowed Ukraine to join today, all the countries have agreed to fight Russia if a NATO nation is attacked. Avoiding the fight while faking bravery/empathy is the first reason NATO has not invited Ukraine to join.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No shit. Not the point, retard.
That article you posted was 100% against your wishes for NATO and Ukraine, yet you posted it anyway because you are stupid.
Yes. That's VERY smart, because Fuck Ukraine.
Quote:
2) If NATO even offers an invitation to Ukraine for some unspecified date in the misty future, Russia will instantly increase its murder rate of Ukrainians in order to kill the maximum number before Ukraine joins. Not getting Ukrainians murdered is the second reason NATO has not yet invited Ukraine to join.
No shit.
Quote:
Because of both 1) and 2) Ukraine's entrance to NATO won't be announced until either after Russia can't retaliate against Ukraine or NATO nations get braver or some key elections have passed in member nations.
Or until Russia destroys Ukraine.
Ukraine should NEVER be invited into NATO. NATO shouldn't even exist anymore in the first place. The mere existence of NATO is what is getting Ukrainians killed.
And Putin knows all of this too. You think he's stupid? Even if NATO said flat out that it will never invite Ukraine to join, nobody is going to believe that shit.
And back to the point... You posted a story that contradicts what you want, thinking it was saying what you wanted it to say because you are a very stupid person.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more
By LORI HINNANT, HANNA ARHIROVA and VASILISA STEPANENKO
Published 11:24 PM CDT, July 12, 2023
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — The Ukrainian civilians woke long before dawn in the bitter cold, lined up for the single toilet and were loaded at gunpoint into the livestock trailer. They spent the next 12 hours or more digging trenches on the front lines for Russian soldiers.
Many were forced to wear overlarge Russian military uniforms that could make them a target, and a former city administrator trudged around in boots five sizes too big. By the end of the day, their hands curled into icy claws.
Nearby, in the occupied region of Zaporizhzhia, other Ukrainian civilians dug mass graves into the frozen ground for fellow prisoners who had not survived. One man who refused to dig was shot on the spot — yet another body for the grave.
Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are being detained across Russia and the Ukrainian territories it occupies, in centers ranging from brand-new wings in Russian prisons to clammy basements. Most have no status under Russian law.
And Russia is planning to hold possibly thousands more. A Russian government document obtained by The Associated Press dating to January outlined plans to create 25 new prison colonies and six other detention centers in occupied Ukraine by 2026.
In addition, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree in May allowing Russia to send people from territories with martial law, which includes all of occupied Ukraine, to those without, such as Russia. This makes it easier to deport Ukrainians who resist Russian occupation deep into Russia indefinitely, which has happened in multiple cases documented by the AP.
Many civilians are picked up for alleged transgressions as minor as speaking Ukrainian or simply being a young man in an occupied region, and are often held without charge. Others are charged as terrorists, combatants, or people who “resist the special military operation.” Hundreds are used for slave labor by Russia’s military, for digging trenches and other fortifications, as well as mass graves.
Torture is routine, including repeated electrical shocks, beatings that crack skulls and fracture ribs, and simulated suffocation. Many former prisoners told the AP they witnessed deaths. A United Nations report from late June documented 77 summary executions of civilian captives and the death of one man due to torture.
Russia does not acknowledge holding civilians at all, let alone its reasons for doing so. But the prisoners serve as future bargaining chips in exchanges for Russian soldiers, and the U.N. has said there is evidence of civilians being used as human shields near the front lines.
The AP spoke with dozens of people, including 20 former detainees, along with ex-prisoners of war, the families of more than a dozen civilians in detention, two Ukrainian intelligence officials and a government negotiator. Their accounts, as well as satellite imagery, social media, government documents and copies of letters delivered by the Red Cross, confirm a widescale Russian system of detention and abuse of civilians that stands in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Much more at https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-prisons-civilians-torture-de
tainees-88b4abf2efbf383272eed9378be13c72
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:The story contradicts nothing I believe. Nothing. But you get confused by your weird-ass upside-down Trumptard belief system. By the way, all the Trumptards I know have a very loose grasp of reality, despite the silly fools thinking they grip reality firmly with both hands. They are butterfingers who keep dropping what they think they control.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And back to the point... You posted a story that contradicts what you want, thinking it was saying what you wanted it to say because you are a very stupid person.
Zelensky threw a fit upon learning that the Western leaders would not set a timetable for his country’s ascension to NATO membership. But really, this was never in the cards. The many reasons** why had been explained to him repeatedly. In any case, Zelensky quickly dropped his sour mood and thanked the NATO members for their stalwart support.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
** Before leaving for Europe, Biden laid out some, though far from all, of the reasons why now is not the time for Ukraine to join NATO or even for NATO to set a schedule. First, by the rules of the alliance, a nation can’t join unless its borders are secure (the members need to know exactly what they’re committing to defend, after all), and Ukraine’s borders are very much in flux. Second, nations must meet certain standards of anti-corruption, which Ukraine doesn’t quite, as yet.
Third, and most crucial: If Ukraine were to join now, then the other NATO countries would be committed, under Article 5 (an attack on one member must be treated as an attack on all) to send their troops and weapons to fight against Russia directly — in other words, to start World War III — and that’s something that Biden and the other leaders say they don’t want to do. As for setting a timetable, this would be at least imprudent. No one knows how this war will end, but there will probably be some sort of diplomatic settlement, and Ukraine’s status in or out of NATO may be a part, perhaps as a bargaining chip. (For instance, if the war goes badly, Kyiv may let Russia keep a sliver of Donbas territory in exchange for Ukrainian membership in NATO, or it may allow no Russian gains in exchange for some security arrangement that doesn’t involve NATO.) In any case, it is not in Ukraine’s interest to lock membership in now.
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Putin wanted to disarm Ukraine. What's happening instead is Ukraine and NATO are disarming Russia. Too funny...
T 
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11 July 2023
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2023/07/realists-get
-wrong-ukraine-counteroffensive-russia
What realists get wrong about Ukraine’s counteroffensive
Critics such as John Mearsheimer are wrong to present the war as a simple artillery duel.
By Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London.
“Strategy is the art of making war upon the map.”
– Antoine-Henri Jomini
The Russo-Ukrainian War is all about territory. Russia wants to complete its occupation of the oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson; Ukraine seeks to liberate all occupied territories, including Crimea. This is what the game theorists call a “zero-sum game” – what one wins the others must lose. This feature of the war explains why a negotiated outcome is so difficult to achieve, why the current battles matter so much, and why those commenting on the war spend so much time staring at maps.
Another feature of the war is that the territory being vigorously defended is hard to take. The land that Russian forces are currently defending was mostly taken in the first month of the war. Since then, they have ceded much more than they have taken. The Russians have put enormous effort and resources into their offensives since April 2022, yet what has been gained, despite the enormously high cost, has been limited – especially since they have reduced the occupied cities to rubble in the process. This was the case with their most recent offensive, lasting from January to June, during which they wrecked the eastern towns of Soledar and Bakhmut. But largely failed elsewhere.
Ukrainian offensives have been more successful when facing Russian forces thinly spread and struggling with logistical and command difficulties; they have found it tougher advancing against well-prepared Russian defences. This is why there is so much anxiety surrounding the Ukrainian offensive, which has been underway for just over a month.
Ukrainians insist it is not yet in its highest gear because they have yet to commit the bulk of their fresher, better-equipped and more mobile forces. That is because before they reach a breakthrough phase – when they start retrieving territory at speed – they must first go through an attritional phase to degrade the Russian defenders’ capacity for resistance.
Though Ukrainian commanders may have hoped the influx of Western infantry vehicles and tanks would have made an early push through Russian lines possible, as Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman noted in March it was always unlikely that combat power alone would be sufficient to avoid this attritional phase.
A comparable operation planned by the Americans would use their air superiority to create a “permissive environment”. The enemy would be left so battered by days of air strikes that they would be unable to cope once the army moved against them. The retired Australian general and strategist Mick Ryan has reminded us that the 1991 Gulf War began with a 42-day air campaign, involving more than 100,000 sorties, before ground operations commenced. And in the 2003 invasion of Iraq 1,800 combat and support aircraft were used.
Ukraine does not enjoy any air advantage. Before this war is over it may get American F-16 fighter jets, but not in time for the current offensive. It therefore needs a different strategy to the one that would come most naturally to the Pentagon.
A difficult start
The extent of the challenge became apparent on 8 June when Ukrainian forces made an early assault close to Mala Tokmachka on the Zaporizhzhia front, in the south-east of the country. It got caught by the density of the minefield it was trying to breach, leading to the loss of a number of vehicles. Images of the destruction, including Bradley fighting vehicles, were soon being widely circulated by pro-Russian bloggers, celebrating the failure of the Ukrainian offensive almost as soon as it started. On 13 June, Vladimir Putin, not normally one to comment in detail on operations, felt confident enough to
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one way to tell how the war is going is to look at the results of the NATO meeting in vilnius. If NATO thought they could tough out the war long-term, or if there was a reasonable chance of success in the near future, they would have committed a lot more to ukraine.
instead, as far as i can tell, NATO blinked. instead of actual security guarantees what they isssued was; as much as it takes whatever we have leftover for as long as it takes as long as it lasts.
there are, apparently, realists in NATO who don't want to engage directly with russia.
there is also, according to a very long-winded video by mercouris, a split between the DNC and the biden* administration. according to [some anonymous sources] the DNC wants a major reshuffle in the biden* foreign policy cadre currently driving the bus, with nuland and blinken (and maybe sullivan) out and realists like wendy sherman and burns given more say. once that's done, they hope to negotiate with russia before elections next year
IMHO the sticky wicket is biden* himself. he's apparently got a terrible temper, and his mental capacity is diminished, so what we might have is a dangerously irascible dodderer whose finger is on the button. he might flare up and decide to fight russia directly with the idea of dragging the rest of NATO into the fray.
***
Meanwhile, Russia will probably break the grain deal, since the west has implemented none of its provisions regarding Russia. (Just like the Minsk Agreement.) Russia bombed not only Snake Island, which is in the conflict- free grain corridor but also Odessa munitions.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:Which NATO countries sent their troops to Ukraine? The answer is NONE. The question was too specific. Maybe there are some other countries not in NATO that sent troops? There is! Belarus and . . . Russia. Every country is a realist, except for Belarus and Russia. Both countries are run poorly because both have rulers for life. Competency decreases the longer a ruler serves. See all of North Korea's Kim family history for examples. Maybe North Korea will be sending troops to Ukraine since Russia established Korea?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
there are, apparently, realists in NATO who don't want to engage directly with russia.
Countries Sending Troops to Ukraine 2023
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-sending-t
roops-to-ukraine
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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(Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
The Kremlin advanced efforts likely aimed at keeping high ranking officers in their positions without needing to obtain special exemptions for retirement age limits. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on July 14 increasing the age limitations for all reservists by five years: personnel with “first class” ranks from 35 to 40 years, “second class” ranks from 40 to 45 years, “third class” ranks from 50 to 55 years, junior officers from 55 to 60 years, and senior officers from 60 to 65 years.[64] The decree stipulates that the age limitations for each category will increase by one year annually from January 2024 to January 2028. The Russian federal government recently adopted a law similarly extending the retirement ages for senior military officers, as ISW has previously reported.[65]
Putin signed a decree authorizing death and injury payments to Russian fortification builders in Ukraine and their families.[66] The decree stipulates that the payments – five million rubles ($55,401) for death and three million rubles ($33,240) for injury – will come from the Russian federal budget and are retroactive for all deaths and injuries since the start of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-july-14-2023
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Putin knows it's over with this one.
T
Strategic Win for NATO: Sweden Joins the Ranks || Peter Zeihan
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A new version of the Gulag system is being reconstructed, especially for Ukrainians. Journalists, war-crimes investigators, and specialized groups such as the Reckoning Project have already documented arrests, murders, prisons, and torture chambers in Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. Slowly, it is becoming clear that these are not just ad-hoc responses to Ukrainian resistance. They are part of a long-term plan: the construction of a sprawling system of camps and punishment colonies — a new Gulag. The Associated Press reported yesterday that it has evidence of at least 40 prison camps in Russia and Belarus, as well as 63 formal and informal prisons in occupied Ukraine, containing perhaps 10,000 Ukrainians.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-prisons-civilians-torture-de
tainees-88b4abf2efbf383272eed9378be13c72 A few are prisoners of war: Gulagu.net, a Russian prison-monitoring group, has evidence of Ukrainian soldiers in Russian prisons who arrive without proper papers or POW status. But most of the Ukrainian prisoners are civilians who have been arrested or abducted in occupied territory.
As in the Gulag during its heyday, slave labor is one purpose of these camps. Some Ukrainians in captivity are being forced to dig trenches and build fortifications for Russian soldiers, and to dig mass graves. The Gulag was also designed to instill terror in the broader population, and the new camp system works that way too. Civilians are imprisoned and tortured for minor offenses—AP cites, as one example, the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle—or sometimes for no reason at all. The Reckoning Project has collected many examples of Russian soldiers becoming paranoid and interrogating ordinary people, many of them volunteers for civic organizations, about their connections to the Ukrainian security services, the CIA, or even George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. The AP describes one civilian captive from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region who was pulled from her cell, driven around town, and told to identify people with pro-Ukrainian sympathies. In 1937–38, during the era of the Great Purges, Soviet secret police were equally paranoid and equally terrified, not only of ordinary people but also of one another. Recent infighting suggests that Russian military forces may reach that stage in occupied Ukraine too.
Like the Soviet Gulag, the new Russian camp network is not temporary, and unless the Ukrainians can take back their territory, it will expand. AP has obtained a Russian document, dated this past January, that describes plans to build 25 new prison colonies and six detention centers in occupied Ukrainian territory by 2026. Like the Soviet Gulag, this system is chaotic and lawless. People have been condemned without trial. Their documents have been lost. Sometimes they are kept for no reason, or released for no reason. Their relatives receive no information about them and cannot find or contact them. Eventually, they may also be forced to the front lines. That is certainly the fate of Russian prisoners in Russia, many of whom are now told to sign mobilization papers, and beaten and tortured if they refuse. As in the old days, it seems as if Russian prison directors have been given quotas, numbers of prisoners they need to supply in order to fulfill some central plan.
The historical echoes can’t be an accident. The KGB once taught new recruits to study the institution’s history, and the Russian security services clearly do the same: They are carrying out repressive policies that “worked” in the Soviet days, that kept people like Bohdan Klymchak and his brother behind bars. But that history also explains Ukraine’s response. Anyone who wonders why the Ukrainians keep fighting, why they keep asking for more weapons, why they become frustrated by slow-moving transatlantic diplomacy, why they seem angry or “unreasonable,” should remember this: The Gulag was supposed to belong to the past. Now it belongs to the present. If Ukrainians don’t want it to be part of their future, they will have to
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