Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 577 of 1104
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND doesn't obsess over what Putin says, or what Trump says, or what "Trumptards" say or do.
He obsesses over his DELUSIONS, polishing those turds to a brilliant shine.
He obsesses over me too.
I still think the dude is madly in love with me.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Signym, I don't know how this war ends, but somehow you know for certain that Russia wins. How do you know? Could it be Putin's talking points that convinced you? But he is not an orator. More an indefatigable blabbermouth. But so is Trump. And yet both Putin and Trump can emotionally manipulate a subspecies of homo sapiens called Trumptards in America and Putin's people in Russia who know in their hearts that Trump will win in America and Putin will win in Ukraine.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND doesn't obsess over what Putin says, or what Trump says, or what "Trumptards" say or do.
He obsesses over his DELUSIONS, polishing those turds to a brilliant shine.
Hey, SECOND, how did you get Ukraine so wrong? Russia is winning. Ukraine will be destroyed and NATO will be reduced to fomenting terrorist actions in Russia, just like we armed and funded terrorists in Syria, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Libya ... El Salvador (except there we called them "death squads")... we have been reduced to destroying nations like Yugoslavia and Iraq because we don't have the capacity to protect and build.
And you, SECOND, are an epitome of that hate and destruction. That's all you know, and that's all you advocate, 24/7/365.
How about putting some "real world" into that brain of yours? Yanno, stop obsessively posting hate, emerge from your dark inner world and get out in the sunshine once in a while? Do something useful for a change?
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 President Vladimir Putin attempted to use an interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson published on February 8 to present to a wider Western audience a long-standing Kremlin information operation that falsely asserts that Russia is interested in a negotiated end to its war in Ukraine. https://tuckercarlson.com/the-vladimir-putin-interview/
Putin illustrated throughout the interview that Russia has no interest in meaningful or legitimate negotiations, however, and that Putin still seeks to destroy Ukraine as a state. Putin also displayed his overarching hostility towards the West and falsely accused the West of forcing Russia to attack Ukraine. Putin repeatedly stressed that Russia is open to negotiations in order to falsely frame Russia as a reasonable actor and “Western ruling elites” as the main obstruction to a negotiation.[2] Putin also repeatedly reiterated a Russian information operation alleging that Western officials coerced Ukraine to reject an agreement favorable to Russia during negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul in March 2022.[3] Western leaders, in fact, offered to help President Volodymyr Zelensky escape Kyiv in the days immediately following the invasion, and Zelensky responded that he needed “ammunition, not a ride.”[4]
The Kremlin routinely frames the West as the only meaningful negotiating party in Ukraine as part of its effort to gain Western acceptance of its premise that Ukraine has no independent agency in order to secure concessions from the West on Ukraine’s behalf that undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and destroy Ukraine’s territorial integrity.[5] The Kremlin has periodically intensified this information operation feigning interest in negotiations to seize on actual Western interest in a negotiated settlement to undermine Western support for Ukraine and degrade Western efforts to send more security assistance to Ukraine.[6] Putin and the Kremlin have intensified rhetoric in recent weeks indicating that Russia continues to pursue maximalist objectives in Ukraine that ISW assesses would amount to full Ukrainian and Western capitulation.[7] ISW continues to assess that Putin’s negotiating position has not changed: He still seeks the destruction of Ukraine and seeks to use an armistice to set favorable condition for the Russian military to launch a subsequent more successful war against Ukraine.
Putin also attempted to use the interview to absurdly reframe Russia as the wronged party and not the initiator of Russia’s unprovoked war of conquest against Ukraine. Putin falsely claimed that Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” started the war in Ukraine in 2014 and that Russia’s full-scale invasion is an attempt to bring that war to an end.[8] Putin repeated tired Russian rhetoric presenting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Donbas in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a defensive campaign aimed at protecting Russian people and the Russia nation. This ongoing information operation is meant to obfuscate the obvious fact that Russia launched a war of aggression against its neighbor in 2022 in order to confuse Western memories of what actually happened. Putin’s revisionism also aims to bolster long-standing Kremlin narratives justifying his maximalist goals in Ukraine.
Putin continued attempts to justify Russia’s invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 as responses to Ukraine’s and the West’s actions in order to defend his long-standing calls for regime change in Kyiv and Ukraine’s “demilitarization,” “denazification,” and “neutrality.” Putin falsely claimed that a US-backed “coup” in Ukraine in 2014 forced Russia to invade Crimea and begin military operations in Donbas in 2014.[9] Putin falsely claimed that Ukraine initiated a military operation in the Donbas starting in 2014 and that Ukraine failed to implement the Minsk Agreements establishing the armistice that Putin broke in February 2022. Putin accused NATO of exploiting Ukraine in order to build military bases in Ukraine under the guise of training the Ukrainian military. There
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Ukraine risks critical shortage of western ammunition, officials warn
Congressional delays create a ‘hole in the hose’ of supplies needed on the battlefield
By Henry Foy in Brussels, Felicia Schwartz in Washington and Christopher Miller in Kyiv | Feb 8, 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/6594e548-8b2e-4c95-a589-7d9e358062d2
Ukraine faces a critical gap in western artillery ammunition needed to withstand Russian attacks, officials have warned, as US assistance runs out and Europe fails to hit its own targets for increased arms production.
Kyiv has already been struggling to hold back Russia’s troops along a 1,500km active frontline, with Ukrainian forces rationing stockpiles and firing only about a third of the number of rounds they need each day to maintain their position.
Further aggravating their situation is the failure in Washington to pass $60bn in military and financial aid, which means most American shipments are at an effective pause, while a promised European ramp-up of production has not been fast enough, according to US and European officials.
The congressional delay risked creating an “airbubble” or “gap in the hose” of supplies to Kyiv, said a senior US military official.
The US Senate on Thursday voted to move forward with more debate over a new bill to send $60bn in additional funds to Ukraine, giving some hope of a last-gasp breakthrough to secure more lethal aid, but Congress’s backing remains far from certain.
Western officials have warned that the coming months will stretch Ukraine’s ability to fight with fewer resources, with Russia already exploiting the resource advantage to make gains in key locations such as around the strategic town of Avdiivka.
“This is really as grave as we have been portraying it,” a US defence official said, noting that the US had run out of money to fund new weapons contracts for Ukraine or funds that would allow the Pentagon to take inventory from its stockpiles and replenish those stocks.
“My take is that this is a very grim scenario,” the defence official said, adding that the Pentagon was particularly concerned about maintaining Ukrainians’ air defence systems and ammunition supplies.
National security adviser of the United States Jake Sullivan said there was ‘no alternative’ to the scale of resources that the US could offer.
“It is a desperate situation on the front lines for the Ukrainians, far worse than they are letting on,” said a senior Nato diplomat.
Nearly two years since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Moscow’s superior ammunition and manpower has forced Ukraine to adopt a strategy of “active defence” this year, after a much-vaunted counteroffensive in 2023 failed to make a significant breakthrough.
The risk of a gap in military assistance was “the main concern” for the first half of this year, a senior European diplomat said, warning that even holding on to current positions would be hard for Ukrainians to achieve.
“It will not be easy for the Europeans to substitute for the US. That’s not entirely realistic,” said one senior European diplomat. “Can [the EU] be enough if the US changes course of its direction? I’m not sure.”
President Joe Biden acknowledged the problem this week, saying the US was the “essential nation”. His national security adviser Jake Sullivan added on Wednesday that there was “no alternative” to the scale of resources that the US could offer — if Congress authorises more spending on Ukraine aid.
The European diplomat expressed concerns when “discussing the tactical situation” with Ukrainian commanders who were aware “they will suffer?.?.?.?and it will be very hard for them to make advances”.
The EU had pledged to send 1mn 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine in the 12 months to March, but has admitted that it will fail to hit that target. Officials now say that they will reach a new target of expanding its 155mm production capacity to 1.4mn shells by the end of 2024.
“The old truism still holds true — the side with the most ammunition to fight usu
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European Lawmakers Issue Dire Warnings Over Stalled Ukraine Aid Package
“If you don’t want another Pearl Harbor, you better listen to us,” cautioned one Lithuanian politician.
By Amy Mackinnon | Feb 8, 2024
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/02/08/europe-ukraine-aid-package-warnin
g-war-russia/
European lawmakers are issuing increasingly bleak warnings about the future of the war in Ukraine and the continent’s security as a $60 billion U.S. aid package for Kyiv continues to languish on Capitol Hill and the war is set to enter its third year later this month.
European lawmakers are issuing increasingly bleak warnings about the future of the war in Ukraine and the continent’s security as a $60 billion U.S. aid package for Kyiv continues to languish on Capitol Hill and the war is set to enter its third year later this month.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Washington has welcomed a steady stream of lawmakers, government ministers, and heads of state from Europe amid transatlantic efforts to coordinate military and humanitarian support for Ukraine. But there has been a palpable ratcheting up in the intensity and urgency of their message.
“You can’t help but wonder what has happened here. We seem to have drifted apart,” said Diljá Mist Einarsdóttir, chair of the Icelandic parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
Einarsdóttir and a delegation of six other chairs of the parliamentary foreign affairs committees of the Baltic and Nordic states spoke with a small group of journalists on Thursday morning as the U.S. Senate voted to advance a stand-alone aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It remains unclear whether the bill will be able to garner enough votes to pass the Senate and House.
A bipartisan effort to combine the aid with an immigration reform package was shot down by Senate Republicans on Wednesday evening after former U.S. President Donald Trump urged his party to reject the legislation.
“Dear Republican Senators of America,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, following the vote. “Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you.”
Dire warnings from European lawmakers come as Ukraine has stalled on the battlefield and Russia is making significant investments in defense spending and production. In the early days of the war, Moscow appeared to be on the back foot as its economy was pummeled with international sanctions and its armed forces struggled through a poorly planned invasion.
But two years on, the Russian economy is projected to grow, albeit marginally, in the coming year fueled by a significant boost in defense spending. One-third of the country’s state budget has been allocated for defense in 2024, and arms manufacturers have been urged to work around the clock.
“If we cannot manage, together with the U.S., to stop Russia in Ukraine, it’s a matter of time if it is a war against NATO in general, and that will be much higher cost,” said Aron Emilsson, chair of the Swedish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.
Emilsson’s Latvian counterpart, Rihards Kols, said he was struck by the lack of urgency in Washington about the war. “I got the notion that the war in Ukraine is something very far away, distant from the U.S.,” said Kols, who noted that by comparison, Latvian public discourse had been dominated by the possibility of a wider war.
Last month, top military officials in Sweden and the United Kingdom warned their populations to prepare for a potential war.
Zygimantas Pavilionis, chair of the Lithuanian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, who has made several trips to Washington since the beginning of the war, said that the reception he and his colleagues get on Capitol Hill is “getting worse with every visit.” Pavilionis, like many lawmakers and officials from the Baltic states, sought to sound the alarm about Russia’s revanchist intentions long before the full-scal
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"The froth and hyperventilation is strong with this one"
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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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There is a simple way to attain peace and stability in Europe: stop trying to destroy Russia. Stop trying to extend NATO to Russia's borders. Stop running regime change operations in Europe. Pledge that Ukraine and Georgia will stay neutral ... and KEEP the agreements this time instead of going back on them at every opportunity.
Withdraw USA missile bases from Poland and Romania. Russia will breathe a huge sigh of relief and tensions will flow away.
Of course, if we remain committed to destroying Russia ... and Iran ... and North Korea .... and committed to provoking a war with China, and killing civilians in Gaza .... well, you reap what you sow.
*****
Oh and BTW ... WE CAN'T SUPPLY WHAT WE DON'T HAVE. We could give all kinds of $$$ to Ukraine, but we gave them all of the shells in store, and our combined western production simply can't keep up. So let the printing presses go "brrrrrrrr..." It would be just one last payday for oligarchs, MIC, speculators, and politicians.
What a joke.
Ukraine should have heeded Kissinger's warning.
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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:Too late. NATO has already been extended to Russia's border for decades. The sensible Russian move would have been to attack those NATO nations, not Ukraine. But then there is the part about Russia murdering tens of millions of Russians, which makes it absurd that Russia can attain peace and stability. Recall the Soviet Union collapsing. That is not exactly what stable people, sane and sensible, would do to themselves.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
There is a simple way to attain peace and stability in Europe: stop trying to destroy Russia. Stop trying to extend NATO to Russia's borders. Stop running regime change operations in Europe.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm
Map shows Russia's border with NATO
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/map-shows-russias-border-nato-090247
369.html
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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Everything That Was Wrong With Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview
By Fred Kaplan | Feb 09, 2024, 1:51 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/tucker-carlson-putin-inter
view-fact-check-history.html
It is legitimate, in principle, for a journalist to interview a murderous dictator. The uproar over Tucker Carlson’s announcement that he would interview Vladimir Putin was that the session would amount to pure Kremlin propaganda. Carlson, after all, is an admirer of Putin who, in his days as a Fox News host, hoped out loud that Russia would win its war against Ukraine. It was also feared that Putin would spout a stream of lies and that Carlson, who is not a real journalist, much less a historian, would be incapable of pushing back.
In this sense, the two-hour interview, which aired Thursday night on X and Carlson’s website, exceeded all expectations. It is a thoroughly repellent show—for the perniciousness of Putin’s falsehoods, the thoroughness of Carlson’s complicity, and the possible impact it might have at a time when many in Congress are looking for any excuse to cut off further aid to Ukraine’s embattled military.
One bit of good news is that Putin kicked off the big event with a half-hour-long monologue about Russian history, and, amid his holding forth on Yaroslav the Wise, the Ryurik dynasty, and the baptism of Rus (and this was all merely leading up to 1000 A.D.), many viewers likely tuned out and turned it off.
The upshot of Putin’s lecture, it soon became clear, was that Ukraine never existed as a nation, a culture, or an ethnicity separate from Russia; that there was no mention of such a place until 1919, when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine; and, therefore, the assertion of Ukrainian independence, after the breakup of the USSR, was an absurdity and a gesture of ingratitude.
This is total nonsense, as many analysts and historians noted when Putin laid out his thesis in a 5,000-word essay in 2021 called On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Carlson, who sat listening with the expression of a listless undergrad who wondered if he’d stumbled into the wrong seminar, challenged none of it.
The true depths of Putin’s mischief, and Carlson’s collaboration, were plumbed when the discussion turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Putin’s account, the war was brought on by the United States and Ukraine. In 2008, President George W. Bush opened the door to Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which had already taken over many of Russia’s former allies in central and Eastern Europe. In 2014, the CIA engineered a coup in Kyiv, which brought to power “neo-Nazis” who sent soldiers into Donbas province, where many Russian speakers lived, forcing Moscow to come to their aid.
This account had the virtue of being half-true, but the half that was false is crucial. It is true that, at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Bush declared (and pressured the Western allies to agree) that Ukraine and Georgia would become members, but he didn’t lay out a timetable, thus feeding Ukrainians’ false hopes and Putin’s paranoia—the worst of both worlds.
Putin omitted or distorted much context. First, the expansion of NATO, which began under Bush’s father and President Bill Clinton, was encouraged most of all by the small central and Eastern European countries—chiefly Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary—which did not want to be left defenseless in the face of what they saw as Russia’s inevitable revanchism. (Putin repeated to Carlson his claim that Clinton had promised NATO would expand “not one inch” to the east; as historian M.E. Sarotte proves in her book, titled Not One Inch, this is a myth.)
Second, the events of 2014 began when Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, reversed his pledge to seek formal affiliation with the European Union—after Putin offered the country $17 billion if he did so. This backpedaling sparked a mass rebellion on the Maidan, Kyiv’s public square. Yanukovych tried to suppress it with gunfire, but in the end fled to R
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Quote:During negotiations to unite Germany,
Originally posted by second:Quote:Too late. NATO has already been extended to Russia's border for decades. The sensible Russian move would have been to attack those NATO nations, not Ukraine. But then there is the part about Russia murdering tens of millions of Russians, which makes it absurd that Russia can attain peace and stability. Recall the Soviet Union collapsing. That is not exactly what stable people, sane and sensible, would do to themselves.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
There is a simple way to attain peace and stability in Europe: stop trying to destroy Russia. Stop trying to extend NATO to Russia's borders. Stop running regime change operations in Europe.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm
Map shows Russia's border with NATO
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/map-shows-russias-border-nato-090247
369.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Quote:
Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University ( http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nat
o-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
You certainly persist trying to rewrite history, SECOND. But reality is against 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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