Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 280 of 1104
Fuck Ukraine. May it fall into rubble and be a concrete barrier between Russia and NATO.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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“A better future for Ukraine and Europe is possible,” writes the historian Timothy Garton Ash. “It’s worth emphasizing the scale of this historic opportunity. Anchoring Ukraine … firmly in the geopolitical West would mean the effective end of the Russian empire. As a result, for the first time in European history, we would have a fully postimperial Europe.”
Ash writes: Tetiana, a young activist I met in Lviv last December, works part-time as a tattooist. People often ask for tattoos of the Ukrainian flag or the country’s trident symbol, she told me, but one of the most popular since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago is the word volya, which means both “will,” as in willpower, and “freedom.” It captures the essence of what I saw in Ukraine—and of what Ukraine is reminding the world.
“The secret of happiness is liberty,” Thucydides has Pericles say in a funeral oration in ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, “and the secret of liberty is courage.” The courage to live and die for freedom is most obviously apparent in the men and women of the Ukrainian armed forces.
More at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/23/ukraine-in-our-future-timo
thy-garton-ash/
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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The end stage of McFaul's twitch is giving nukes to Ukraine. McFaul doesn't understand that none of our conventional weapons are superior in number or capability to Russia's. As Obama pointed out, Russia has "escalatory dominance". That leaves only one option.
And neocons are rabid enuf to go there.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The end stage of McFaul's twitch is giving nukes to Ukraine. McFaul doesn't understand that none of our conventional weapons are superior in number or capability to Russia's. As Obama pointed out, Russia has "escalatory dominance". That leaves only one option.
And neocons are rabid enuf to go there.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
No. There's that option, and there's another option.
The US and NATO countries can just keep giving weapons and tanks and our tax dollars to Ukraine until every last Ukrainian dies for NATO's proxy war while idiots like Ted wave digital Ukrainian flags online and cheerlead their deaths.
Either Russia wins, or we all lose.
Because the 3rd option, which is minding our own fucking business and disbanding NATO isn't an option at all. At least not with the cunts we've got running the show right now.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Silent Gestures RUSSIA
Muscovites recently have been laying wreaths of flowers, stuffed animals, photographs and other mementos at the feet of a statue dedicated to the early 20th century Ukrainian writer, Lesya Ukrainka. The makeshift memorial, appearing after a Russian missile hit a residential building in Dnipro in Ukraine just over a week ago, killing 46 people and injuring 80 others, is a subtle sign of discontent over Russia’s bloody, humiliating standstill war in Ukraine, the New York Times wrote.
“In contemporary Russia, under these conditions, it is a battle – a silent battle,” a Russian chemist who contributed to the memorial told the newspaper, alluding to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal crackdown on free expression and dissent over the military’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine.
With the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leaders have prospered personally under Putin’s watch, as the Australian Broadcasting Company reported, Putin still maintains a solid grip on the media and other institutions that claim to reflect public sentiment and civil society.
Prominent opposition activist Aleksei Navalny has been imprisoned for the past two years, Amnesty International wrote. Russian authorities routinely shut down organizations that promote anti-war sentiments or refuse to bow to government censors, Human Rights Watch said. Putin has especially cracked down on other spaces of resistance to his conservative vision for Russian society, like the LGBTQ community, added the BBC.
Still, the Russian army’s failures in Ukraine have clearly undermined Putin’s power, Military.com countered. The Kremlin’s current regime is creaking under the stress, it said. Army generals are at odds with the Wagner Group, the Russian military contracting force that has fielded some of the toughest fighters against the Ukrainian army, for example, indicating that members of Putin’s team are pointing fingers at each other.
The increasingly outlandish statements of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are another sign of the chaos in Putin’s camp. At his recent annual press conference, Lavrov, who has served in his position at the pinnacle of the Russian political elite since 2004, said the US and Europe were pursuing a “final solution” to the “Russian question,” comparing Russia’s current diplomatic and economic isolation to the Holocaust.
“Just as Napoleon mobilized practically all of Europe against the Russian Empire, just as Hitler mobilized and captured … the majority of European countries and sent them against the Soviet Union, now the United States has organized a coalition,” Lavrov said, according to the Times of Israel.
And while Putin still seemingly has the loyalty of the elite and voters, cracks have appeared. Polls showed his popularity dipping, especially after imposing a partial draft last year. Meanwhile, he appeared to take swipes at elites who are less than supportive of the war effort, Newsweek reported.
One source close to businessmen from Putin’s “inner circle” told Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet that operates from the Baltics that, “It’s started to dawn on people: We’ve lost the real war.”
More notably, supporters are openly speaking about how the “special operation” has achieved little, noted Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.
Unfortunately, countries become more, not less, unpredictable and dangerous as they near their breaking point.
https://www.dailychatter.com/2023/01/31/silent-gestures/
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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Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Putinism?
by Michael McFaul
Wartime leaders change generals when they’re losing, not winning. On Jan. 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, was to replace Sergei Surovikin, who was appointed just a few months earlier in October, as his new overall commander of Russian military forces in Ukraine. The only reasonable conclusion: Putin understands that Russia is losing in Ukraine.
This shake-up at the top of the military is not the only sign of Putin’s recognition of failure. He canceled his annual end-of-year news conference, evidently reluctant to take questions even from a mostly loyal and controlled press corps. His solitary and subdued appearance at the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin on Orthodox Christmas communicated little confidence.
His propagandists sound depressed. Strikingly, one of them, Sergei Markov, summed up the previous year by stating bluntly, “The USA was the main winner of 2022. Especially Biden.” Newspaper reporter Maksim Yusin recently said on a talk show that Russia’s “special military operation” had achieved none of its original goals. Former Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev lamented in public that Russia does not have a clear end objective, a sound ideology or the resources to win the war against the collective West.
Putin plans to reverse 2022’s Russian losses by launching a spring offensive after drafting several hundred thousand more soldiers. But even with incremental successes, he will never be able to restore the reputation he once enjoyed among his subjects as an all-powerful and all-knowing leader. Putin will not recover from his disastrous war in Ukraine.
First, major Russian victories on the battlefield are unlikely. Russia’s armed forces have neither the capabilities nor the will to capture all four Ukrainian regions that Putin annexed on paper last fall. Successful Ukrainian counteroffensives are more likely, especially if President Volodymyr Zelensky receives the offensive weapons — tanks, longer range missiles and jet fighters — he requested from the United States and NATO. Putin is very unlikely to resurrect his reputation by achieving military glory. Oligarchs in Moscow, communist leaders in Beijing and Russian nationalist bloggers on Telegram all seem to understand this.
Second, Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine triggered the most comprehensive sanctions we’ve seen imposed against a single country, ending two decades of Russian integration into the global economy. This isolation will continue for as long as Putin is in power. Sanctions are sticky. They will begin to unwind only when new leaders who are less aggressive and autocratic come to power. In the meantime, Russians will face economic malaise and stagnation, a fact the economic elite already understands and laments. Tens of thousands of Russia’s best and brightest have left; thousands more are trying to do so. Putin won’t regain respect from Russia’s private business sector.
Third, Putin’s societal support is soft and declining. Public opinion polls show he still enjoys popular support. But these polls in Russia have high refusal rates, which should not be surprising in a country where you can go to jail for 15 years for “public dissemination of deliberate false information about the use of Russian Armed Forces.” The minority responding to these polls supports the regime, but the majority who choose not to respond likely do not. And even these highly flawed polls show little enthusiasm and declining support for the war, and a solid majority ready to support Putin if he ends the invasion. Anxiety about the conflict is growing. And the demographics of his support are clear: The older, more rural, less educated and poorer support Putin in greater numbers than the younger, more urban, more educated, wealthier Russians. Putin is losing the future.
Other indicators look equally grim for Putin. Organic mass movements in support of Russian imperialism have not emerged over the past year, but a
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lol
I can't wait until the Leftists are purged from the mainstream.
We're getting there.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:You are channeling Russia's favorite propagandist and politician: Tucker Carlson and Trump. I would have compared you with Rush Limbaugh, but he is dead because he denied smoking causes cancer. But don't give up smoking, 6ix! Tucker Carlson says tobacco smoke is “the most American of all pleasures … the smell of freedom”.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
I can't wait until the Leftists are purged from the mainstream.
We're getting there.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-gives-indoor-smok
ing-his-heartfelt-endorsement
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:Quote:You are channeling...
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
I can't wait until the Leftists are purged from the mainstream.
We're getting there.
I'm doing no such thing.
I'm absolutely sick and tired of the Leftist Propaganda churned out 24/7 from the Leftist ran media machine.
Just like everybody else in the fucking country is.
We're done with you idiots. Everything you touch turns to shit.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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