Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear
Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.
By Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. | November 16, 2023, 4:39 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/ukraine-russia-war-us-congress-ai
d-weapons/
Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.
Now, some of these successes could be reversed because of waning U.S. support. The false claim of a battlefield stalemate has brought about a new narrative that Americans should stop helping Ukraine because it cannot win. Alarmingly, the U.S. House of Representatives has delayed voting on the Biden administration’s request for supplemental military aid. Without new assistance from the United States, Ukraine will soon run out of arms, ammunition, and funds to fight effectively against the occupying Russian forces. Most urgently, the Ukrainian government needs air defense systems to protect its people and civilian infrastructure against Russian missiles and Iranian drones this winter. And Ukraine also needs additional weapons to defend and extend last year’s gains.
Putin clearly understands Ukraine’s precarious position in the U.S. Congress. Recently, he boasted that Ukraine would last only a week if the United States stopped providing military assistance. Putin is wrong: The Ukrainians have made it abundantly clear that they will continue to fight. Recall how, in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainians across the country prepared Molotov cocktails to defend against the Russian invaders. Putin’s statement, however, once again proves that he is not seeking to negotiate. Instead, he is waiting for the United States to quit on its Ukrainian partners so he can launch a new offensive to seize more of Ukraine and destroy its democracy. Without U.S. assistance, more Ukrainians will certainly die, and Ukraine may well lose more territory.
By delaying further assistance to Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his supporters are acting against the United States’ own interests. Congress should approve new aid to Ukraine as fast as possible—not as a gesture of charity for Ukraine but as a hard-nosed and clear-headed investment in U.S. security objectives.
The moral argument for supporting Ukraine is clear. Despite the United States’ numerous past mistakes and current flaws, I still believe that it should be a force for good in the world. Russia’s war of colonial conquest is immoral and wrong. We cannot allow the world to return to a state of anarchy, where powerful countries can change borders at will. We cannot stand by as civilians are slaughtered, prisoners tortured, people raped, and children kidnapped. Withdrawing military assistance to Kyiv will not end the war but rather prolong it, leading to more deaths on both sides. The war in Ukraine is a democracy defending itself against a dictatorship. It is simply wrong to let an autocrat invade, occupy, annex, and destroy a country with a political system that Americans and so many others around the world deeply believe in. Global public opinion polls show that a majority of the world’s people prefer democracy to other forms of government. Unlike some other wars, there can be no confusion about right and wrong in this confli
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Fuck Ukraine.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Russia is such a successful country compared to the EU.
Russia's Desperate Scramble To Stave Off Demographic Catastrophe
Nov 20, 2023 at 5:48 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-population-demographic-catastrophe-abo
rtions-children-1845110
Valery Seleznyov, a member of the Russian State Duma, last week proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive.
"Russia really does have a demographic problem," the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, said on November 12 as he called for a nationwide ban on "encouraging women to have abortions."
"It's a vast country, but there are not enough people. Not even mentioning the economy...We really need more people, this is obvious, everyone admits it," he said.
During a meeting with members of his Civic Chamber on November 3, Putin said Russia has an acute abortion problem.
In recent months, private clinics in Russian regions—including in the Chelyabinsk region in the Ural mountains and in Tatarstan in central Russia—have stopped offering abortions, according to authorities. The move is also being considered in Russia's Kaliningrad region.
Authorities have also started to restrict access to abortion pills and emergency contraception amid a surge in demand that followed the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In 2022, sales of abortion pills were up 60 percent, according to Nikolay Bespalov, development director of the RNC Pharma analytical company, the Associated Press reported.
Russia for decades has been experiencing a population decline, and this appears to have worsened amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with high casualty rates and men fleeing the country to avoid being conscripted to fight.
As of January 1, 2023, 146.45 million people were estimated to be residing on the Russian territory, marking a decrease of approximately 530,000 from the previous year, according to Statista.
It is estimated that Russia's population will fall to about 132 million in the next two decades. The United Nations has predicted that in a worst-case scenario, by the start of the next century, Russia's population could almost halve to 83 million.
Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry via email for comment.
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:
Originally posted by second:
The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear
Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.
By Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. | November 16, 2023, 4:39 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/ukraine-russia-war-us-congress-ai
d-weapons/
Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.
Blah blah blah...
Even the headline is wrong. We have NO interest in Ukraine, critical or otherwise. And every sentence after that is a lie.
That's one thing I appreciate about fff.net: I can get a dose of crazy propaganda all in one place, instead of having to hunt for it all over the net.
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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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Demographics of the EU:
Birth rate
9.5 births per 1,000 (2020 est.)[2]
Death rate
10.7 deaths per 1,000 (2021 est.)[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
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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:Signym, I am assuming you don't realize that Europe is grotesquely over-populated (denser than India) while Russia is ridiculously underpopulated (and getting more underpopulated each time a Ukrainian kills another worthless Rusky ):
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Demographics of the EU:
Birth rate
9.5 births per 1,000 (2020 est.)[2]
Death rate
10.7 deaths per 1,000 (2021 est.)[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
Russian population density, people per square km, 9
European Population density, people per square km, 2021 - Country rankings: The average for 2021 based on 47 countries was 599 people per square km.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/population_density/Europe/
If you compare economies, Russia is the size of Canada, a country that can well afford to build more nukes than Russia or North Korea but Canada is not so stupid as to actually do it. And certainly, Canada is not stupid enough to threaten the world with a nuclear holocaust, something Russia and North Korea do every day because those stupid leaders think it is smart to make threats and call out red lines that must not be crossed or else nuclear holocaust.
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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WTH does poppulation density have to do with anything? That just means there are more than enuf resources for everyone.
And, with apologies to our neighbors to the north, their economy is unbalanced: they only produce what the USA wants to import*, and their so-called GDP is overly driven by rampant real estate speculation.
* Their basic production like cement, fabrics, chemcicals etc is low, and they're way light on technology. They couldn't produce a rocket if their lives depended on it, for example and I haven't heard of any advances in material science, have you?
-----------
"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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There Are Only Two Options Left In Ukraine
Nearly two years after the Russian invasion, I traveled the country to pose a fundamental question to the Ukrainians I met: How does this end?
By Matt Gallagher, Published: Nov 20, 2023
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a45805515/ukraine-russian-invasi
on/
A Soul in Bakhmut
Victory is now much more than a word in Ukraine. It’s a conviction, an aim to be willed into existence. Even the bitter fighters, even the most dejected know it’s victory or death. But what it’s costing to get there transcends any quantifiable figure or metric. Numbers lose their meaning quickly, at any rate. Personal stories are the only measures that don’t fade.
And measures in wartime are whole lives.
Valerii Fedorchuk, a Ukrainian soldier who carries himself with both assurance and stirs of sadness, points toward the valley below us, where a row of ruined buildings scars the horizon. Heavy artillery rumbles from that direction, followed by plumes of smoke. Wherever the shells end up landing, it’s not where we stand, in the hills surrounding the Bakhmut front in eastern Ukraine. It’s a bright August afternoon and he’s taken me here to provide a panorama of the battlefield. Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian defenses is underway and moving. It’s going slower than many Western observers predicted or hoped, but it is moving. And every meter of land matters in a war that many of those same observers believed would be over in seventy-two hours last February, with the Kremlin in control of their proud, smaller neighbor.
That didn’t happen, in large part because of people like Fedorchuk. Fifty years-old, barrel-chested with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, his call sign of “Soul” neatly fits his disposition. He strikes me as the kind of father who, in peace time, would be at every one of his kid’s soccer games, encouraging yet not afraid to let the referee know when a foul is missed. He’s not in peace, though. And as an artilleryman with the 3rd Assault Brigade, he’s resolute in what must be done in the weeks, months, perhaps years to come. “Victory will be achieved when we kick the enemy out [of Ukraine] and make them realize we don’t need them, that they should stay where they belong.”
“Bakhmut used to be a beautiful city,” he continues. “Now it is like a cancer, how it looks, how it feels. And like any cancer, we must kill it to save the body. It is the result of the Russian world [coming into it]. Anything the Russian world touches turns to that.”
Outgoing rockets fired closer to our position answer the artillery. This machinery, this industrial violence, sounds with fantastical dissonance in the countryside it emerges from, green trees and yellow hills and indolent blue streams that belong in a painting. Such is life in the Donbas in 2023.
Like so many now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Fedorchuk never thought he’d become a soldier. Once a professional weightlifter, Fedorchuk was coaching college-aged athletes and running a human-rights nonprofit when Russia invaded last year. After some discussion, he and his family decided to leave their home in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, for the relative safety of western Ukraine. Days later, Irpin came under heavy shelling and temporary Russian occupation, leaving up to 300 of their neighbors and friends dead.
He spent the initial months of the war running supplies and aid from the Polish border to frontline villages. As Western attention waned, so did the amount of aid, causing him to wonder what more he could do. So he decided to enlist, in part to represent his family, he says. He has two sons and a younger brother with serious health issues. This matters in Ukrainian society, to have a brother or son or mother or sister in uniform. It matters a lot.
We walk through some reserve trenches dug in case the Russians mount another advance. Fedorchuk stresses they’ll never have to use them, but their presence suggests that someone somewhere has considered otherwise. They are deep and narrow and tight, which help
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I've been reading reports of Ukrainian "anti-retreat forces" for a while. Most recently read a report that Ukraine won't evacuate dead or wounded soldiers from the east (Russian) side of the Dneiper, and if you insist on being evacuated they'll take you back across the river and shoot you. But, that was an expat Russian saying that.
But, for the first time ever, I saw a documented video of Ukrainian shooting at Ukrainians on Military Summary Channel, and the pro-Ukrainian commenter didn't interpret this as "friendly fire" but bc a forward unit refused to advance into Avdiivka and the unit to the rear was firing on them with what looked like tank rounds.
He mentioned Ukrainian anti-retreat forces again today when he was mapping out the front line in Avdiivka.
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One comment that I heard was that soldiers in the front line know how desperate the situation is, but that Kiev has done such a good job gaslighting its own people that those in cities far behind the front lines, like Lvov/Lviv and Kiev think everything's going OK. Especially since dollars and euros are flowing there. Coffee shops are open, and cabarets are booming.
It seems to me that women and university students have mostly been spared conscription. But that, given the uninvolvement of the more sheltered part of Ukie society, the most gung-ho forces and leaders (Azov, Aidar) are agitating for total conscription.
I'm not sure what the WH, Pentagon, and CIA think of that idea. On the one hand, I think the DNC and WH just want Ukraine to go away. OTOH they may still be hanging on to the idea that Ukraine can still pull a victory, or at least a negotiated end (as opposed to a surrender) out of the situation. There still are about 30,000 training outside of Ukraine, 30,000 or so stalwart nationalists/ neo-Nazis, and a fair number of APCs and artillery systems remaining. It's possible that between a conscription drive, trained soldiers coming back home, and nationalists/ neo-Nazis at home, Ukraine can gather enough soldiers for one last throw. The only stumble on that point is even tho they may have weapons they might be lacking munitions.
-----------
"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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lol. Looks like Second is posting full novels here instead of pirated links today, huh?
Fuck Ukraine.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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