Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
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There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine
The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West
By Dmytro Kuleba | December 14, 2023
It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As another winter of war arrives, voices skeptical of the country’s prospects are growing louder — not in diplomatic meetings or military planning sessions, but rather in news reports and in expert commentary. Most do not openly argue that Ukraine should simply give up its fight, but the pessimism, buttressed by supposedly pragmatic arguments, carries clear strategic implications that are both dangerous and wrong.
These skeptics suggest that the current situation on the battlefield will not change and that, given Russia’s vastly greater resources, the Ukrainians will be unable to retake more of their territory. They argue that international support for Ukraine is eroding and will plummet sharply in the coming months. They invoke “war fatigue” and the supposedly bleak prospects of our forces.
The skeptics are correct that our recent counteroffensive did not achieve the lightning-fast liberation of occupied land, as the Ukrainian military managed in the fall of 2022 in the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. Observers, including some in Ukraine, anticipated similar results over the past several months, and when immediate success did not materialize, many succumbed to doom and gloom. But pessimism is unwarranted, and it would be a mistake to let defeatism shape our policy decisions going forward. Instead, policymakers in Washington and other capitals should keep the big picture in mind and stay on track. A Ukrainian victory will require strategic endurance and vision — as with our recent counteroffensive, the liberation of every square meter of territory requires enormous sacrifice by our soldiers — but there is no question that victory is attainable.
Over nearly two years of brutal war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has upped the ante to the point that half-solutions are impossible. Any outcome besides a clear defeat of Russia in Ukraine would have troubling implications, and not just for my country — it would cause a global disarray that would ultimately threaten the United States and its allies as well. Authoritarian leaders and aggressors around the world are keeping a close watch on the results of Putin’s military adventure. His success, even if partial, would inspire them to follow in his footsteps. His defeat will make clear the folly of trying.
STAGES OF VICTORY
Wars of this scale are fought in stages. Some of those stages may be more successful than others. What matters is the end result. In Ukraine, that means both fully restoring our territorial integrity and bringing those responsible for international crimes to justice — goals that are both clear and feasible. Meeting those objectives would ensure not only a just and lasting peace in Ukraine but also that other malicious forces around the world are not left with the impression that mimicking Putin will ultimately pay off.
The current phase of the war is not easy for Ukraine or for our partners. Everyone wants quick, Hollywood-style breakthroughs on the battlefield that will bring a quick collapse of Russia’s occupation. Although our objectives will not be reached overnight, continued international support for Ukraine will, over time, ensure that local counteroffensives achieve tangible results on the frontlines, gradually destroying Russian forces and thwarting Putin’s plans for a protracted war.
Some skeptics counter that although such goals are just, they simply aren’t achievable. In fact, our objectives will remain militarily feasible as long as three factors are in place: adequate military aid, including jets, drones, air defense, artillery rounds, and long-range capabilities that allow us to strike deep behind enemy lines; the rapid development of industrial capacity in the United States and Europe as well as in Ukraine, both to cover Ukraine’s military needs and to replenish U.S. and European def
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine
The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West
By Dmytro Kuleba | December 14, 2023
It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And here we are, still talking about the war that nobody cares about.
Sure. Let's send them another $150 Billion, Joe*.
Fuck Ukraine.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:I understand your position since you can't afford to fix your house because wood is outrageously expensive. You can't pay your taxes, either, but fortunately, you don't have any income to tax. Meanwhile, Biden is sending the equivalent of 3% of the Pentagon's budget to Ukraine so that the other 97% isn't another year of complete waste with nothing to show for it.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine
The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West
By Dmytro Kuleba | December 14, 2023
It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And here we are, still talking about the war that nobody cares about.
Sure. Let's send them another $150 Billion, Joe*.
Fuck 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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The Possessed
By Viktor Erofeyev | March 29, 2001 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/03/29/the-possessed/
Rasputin slumbers in the heart of every Russian. But sometimes he doesn’t slumber. If you awaken the Rasputin in yourself, life suddenly overflows its banks: you begin to experience a fierce, incomparable joy from being in a state of outrageousness, dissipation, restlessness, suffering, and desecration. “Violence is the soul’s joy,” Rasputin taught. I may defame him, hate his blissful face; I may dream of putting out those piercing, infernal, heavenly eyes, cutting him into little pieces, drowning him in the acid of obscenities — but he is my man. Blood kin. Rasputin wears the ancient mask of the shaman.
I have no doubt that Rasputin slumbered in the heart of Edvard Radzinsky as well. Radzinsky, a well-known Russian playwright and biographer, awakened him by writing a book about him. He admits that he used to be afraid to write about Rasputin because he didn’t understand him, and here anyone who has tried to consider the subject will sympathize. Moreover, having read his book, which is based on previously unknown documentary testimony, I think that Radzinsky still doesn’t understand him. He doesn’t want to. Because to really understand Rasputin is too frightening. It’s better not to understand him at all. Otherwise you are faced with the great abyss that separates Russia from normal, civilized countries — and what can you do about it? At any rate, the very existence of Rasputin gives some grounds for saying that deep down Russia has nothing in common with the West.
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:I understand your position since you can't afford to fix your house because wood is outrageously expensive.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine
The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West
By Dmytro Kuleba | December 14, 2023
It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And here we are, still talking about the war that nobody cares about.
Sure. Let's send them another $150 Billion, Joe*.
Fuck Ukraine.
Yes. Wood is outrageously expensive because of Bidenflation.
I can afford it. I choose not to pay that much for it. I haven't worked in 4 1/2 years and I've got plenty of money left because I never buy anything on credit and I bide my time and wait for the sale or clearance. That's how I got $2,000 of pre-Bidenflation baseboard and trim to do my entire house for $125.
It will get done. Just not at this price.
Quote:
You can't pay your taxes, either, but fortunately, you don't have any income to tax.
Sure I can. I just wasn't going to pay more than my share and I got them to drop my property taxes by nearly $800 per year, and that will be every year going forward too.
Funny though... They didn't get around to filing the paperwork on time so I had to pay their full amount and I won't be reimbursed until about 2 months before the next bill is due. But the point is I had the money to pay for it.
And you're right. I don't have any income tax.
How was work today, bitch?
Quote:
Meanwhile, Biden is sending the equivalent of 3% of the Pentagon's budget to Ukraine so that the other 97% isn't another year of complete waste with nothing to show for it.
$150 Billion.
I lived on $7,000 this year.
If everybody knew how to use money like I do, 21,428,571 Americans could have paid for everything they needed to live off of that money sent to Ukraine.
Or... I could have lived 21,428,571 years off of that money.
We've had 3 years of nothing to show for anything under the Biden* Administration. Including Ukraine not winning a war that it's never going to win.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Trump can't screw up even if Putin blackmails him, again:
Lawmakers pass bill that makes it all but impossible for Trump to leave NATO | December 14, 2023
Business Insider reports:
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nato-withdraw-congress-defense-b
ill-2023-12
A brief provision in the massive $886 billion bill funding the Pentagon will likely kill former President Donald Trump or any potential future president’s ambitions to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Sens. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, teamed up to muscle their bill — which would require an act of Congress or Senate approval to leave NATO — into what is often deemed a must-pass bill that funds servicemembers and outlines national security priorities. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law. The Senate passed the overall legislation 87 to 13. The House passed it on Friday on a 310-118 vote.
“The Senate’s vote today to pass my bipartisan bill to prevent any U.S. President from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security,” Kaine said in a statement after the Pentagon funding bill passed the Senate. “It also sends a strong message to authoritarians around the world that the free world remains united.”
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:
There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine [thru Crimea]
- Kuleba
The Possessed
By Viktor Erofeyev
Oh eeeeeww!
Nothing stinks as bad as spoiled propaganda.
What are we going to read next (AGAIN)?
Russia's running out of weapons?
80% of their military has been destroyed?
Poorly-trained, badly led unmotivated orcs in (semi) "human wave" attacks?
Russia's economy "in tatters"?
Throw out that stinky fish!
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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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SECOND describes himself as an old rich oil baron, but he posts like a spoiled brat who hasn't done a damn in his life. Living off a his daddy's money in his momma's basement. All fucked up in the head.
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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:
Accepting Defeat In Ukraine
In early November the Economist published an interview and several pieces by the commander in chief of the Ukrainian army, General Zaluzny. As I summarized:
Zaluzny's central thesis is that the war is currently at a stalemate. It has become positional, with no large maneuvers being possible. He compares it to the war in Europe in 1917. There, he says, a change only happened through the introduction of new technologies (i.e. tanks).
...
I for one think that Zaluzny is mistaken. The war is not at a stalemate. Russia has clearly the advantage as it is free to maneuver along the whole frontline and to attack wherever it likes. It does not do so in full force because the current situation allows it to conveniently fulfill the order its commander in chief had given to it - to destroy the military capabilities of Ukraine.
Finally a western mainstream writer has caught up with those facts. Lee Hockstader, the Washington Post's columnist for European affairs, opines:
In Ukraine, the risk isn’t stalemate. It’s defeat.
Hockstader laments the lack of support from the U.S. and Europe for the new demands the Ukraine is making. He states:
Without those infusions of cash, arms and munitions, even the disappointing status quo over the past year, in which Ukraine has not managed to recapture much territory, is unlikely to endure.
Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told a Washington forum last week that the “big risk” is that Kyiv’s troops could “lose this war.”
That message should jolt policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic. The danger, as Ukraine’s top general warned publicly last month, isn’t simply stalemate. It is that Ukrainian forces, running low on equipment, might be compelled to fall back, shorten their defensive lines and abandon territory.
...
It’s essential to think about what Ukraine’s defeat means, because it would be as much a strategic disaster for the United States and its NATO allies as a tableau of terror for Ukraine. Dual cataclysms, equally stark, played out on different timetables.
Well, yes. The West has shot its wad and it proved to be sterile.
MORE AT https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/12/accepting-defeat-in-ukraine.html
#more
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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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Putin doubles down on war in Ukraine. ‘Victory will be ours.’
“There will be peace when we will achieve our goals,” President Vladimir Putin said concerning the Ukraine war. At an end-of-year conference on Dec. 14, the Russian president talked military strategy while reaffirming authority for his reelection campaign.
By Harriet Morris Associated Press | December 14, 2023 | Moscow
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2023/1214/Putin-doubles-down-on
-war-in-Ukraine.-Victory-will-be-ours
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Dec. 14 that there would be no peace in Ukraine until the Kremlin realizes its goals, which remain unchanged after nearly two years of fighting that has sent tensions soaring between Moscow and the West.
Speaking at a year-end news conference that lasted over four hours and offered him an opportunity to reinforce his grip on power, Mr. Putin gave some rare details on what Moscow calls its “special military operation.”
He dismissed the need for a second wave of mobilization of reservists to fight in Ukraine – a move that has been deeply unpopular. He said there are some 617,000 Russian soldiers there, including around 244,000 troops who were called up to fight alongside professional military forces.
“There will be peace when we will achieve our goals,” Mr. Putin said, repeating a frequent Kremlin line. “Victory will be ours.”
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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