Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 587 of 1104
Quote:I'm guessing you never imagined that not everyone in Russia would be an assassin for Putin. When poisoned Navalny arrives at a Russian hospital, the doctors don't know that they should let him die since the doctors were not paid by Putin. But in prison, Putin is paying the doctors to let Navalny die.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Nearly everything Applebaum writes is a joke. Or a lie.
Or sometimes both.
Yes, it's true that Navalny died in prison.
Governments should take better care of politically sensitive prisoners. Look at Gonzalo Lira. Or Jeffrey Epstein. Or Julian Assange.Quote:
Weeks After US Journalist Dies In Ukrainian Custody, Biden Uses Navalny's Death To Push For More Russian War Funding
But Navalny was not poisoned in Russia. When he collapsed, the Russian hospital that treated him not only sent him for treatment to Germany, they sent original blood samples with him.
And Navalny was no folk hero. He couldn't scrape enough support together to get a representative in the Duma. And that "Putin palace" story? I think it was just a real estate development gone sour.
Applebaum specializes in evidence-free accusations.
Signym, it is very easy to tell you never looked at Putin's Palace. Instead, you wrote fiction.
You should write Firefly fan fiction. Already you are writing Putin-approved fiction. Branch out into other areas.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Germany and France both signed bilateral security agreements with Ukraine on February 16. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a long-term bilateral security agreement with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on February 16 providing for bilateral cooperation in the military, political, financial, and humanitarian spheres until 2034.[13] The agreement also states that Germany will provide over €7 billion ($7.5 billion) in military aid to Ukraine in 2024, including a €1.1 billion ($1 billion) aid package that is currently being prepared and will include 36 howitzers, 120 thousand artillery shells (including 50,000 155mm artillery rounds), two Skynex air defense systems, missiles for the IRIS-T air-to-air missile system, 66 armored personnel carriers (APCs), several mine-clearing vehicles, and various reconnaissance drone models.[14] Zelensky also met with German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to discuss the launch of joint weapons production.[15] Zelensky later met with French President Emmanuel Macron to sign a bilateral security agreement and reported that France will provide Ukraine €3 billion ($3.2 billion) in military assistance over the course of 2024.[16]
NATO officials are increasingly warning that Russia poses a significant threat to NATO’s security. The Financial Times (FT) reported on February 16 that recent new assessments of Russia’s military capabilities and potential threats to NATO states have led Western leaders to recognize Russia’s continued military potential and to increase defense investment.[17]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-16-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Can Ukraine Still Win?
As Congress continues to delay aid and Volodymyr Zelensky replaces his top commander, military experts debate the possible outcomes.
By Keith Gessen | February 15, 2024
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/can-ukraine-still-win
Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.
The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?
There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”
Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Stephen+Biddle+Military
“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”
Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unse
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The Kremlin claims it was at war with the United States.
By Anna Nemtsova | Updated Feb. 17, 2024, 3:37AM EST
https://www.thedailybeast.com/despair-in-russia-as-putin-spirals-out-o
f-control
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman informed Russians this week that the “special military operation” that Putin launched in Ukraine in February 2022 was set to go on much longer because it is now “a war against the collective West.”
That’s right: a war.
It was remarkable to hear that word from Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Journalists were explicitly banned from using it and thousands of Russians have been detained, fined and imprisoned for using the word.
“Moscow deputy Aleksey Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison for saying ‘war,’” Sergey Davidis, head of the Political Prisoners Support group, told The Daily Beast. He said over 20,000 Russians have now been detained and punished for protesting against the war. “That includes 131 Russians who have been sentenced to long prison terms in punishment for peaceful or for more radical anti-war actions,” he said. “I don’t think punishments against the war will now be milder after the Kremlin openly says ‘war.’ Putin will be next to declare it.”
By “collective West” the Kremlin traditionally means 31 NATO countries and the 28 nations of the European Union. “This is a war when the countries of the collective West, led by the United States are directly involved in the conflict,” Peskov said.
“The Kremlin is deeply disappointed in Washington being unwilling to negotiate a deal for Ukraine without Ukraine’s participation. Nobody wants to sit down with Putin for the dream negotiations; Yalta-2,” Insider’s editor-in-chief Timur Olevsky told The Daily Beast. Putin is obsessed with the idea of revisiting the height of Soviet influence at the 1945, post-WWII peace talks. “Somebody flicked him on the nose, it looks like, so the Kremlin finally marks the failure of all their efforts to negotiate with the West.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
The fury of the Russians in Ukraine
The resentment caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union continues to provide the fuel for Vladimir Putin’s imperial project
By José Andrés Rojo | Feb 16, 2024 - 12:46CET
https://english.elpais.com/opinion/2024-02-16/the-fury-of-the-russians
-in-ukraine.html
It is almost exactly two years since Vladimir Putin’s forces attempted in February 2022 to reach Kyiv to install a puppet government that would obey the Kremlin’s designs, expanding the war that began in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 to the rest of the country. It was something you could have seen coming, had you taken seriously the bluster of some of the protagonists of what was happening in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. “Give me two years and in Ukraine, no one will say they are Ukrainian,” the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Aleksandr Zakharchenko, told Pilar Bonet in March 2017, during a long conversation which recounts in her book Náufragos del imperio (Castaways of the Empire).
Zakharchenko, who spoke of himself as a hero with “burning, angry eyes,” and who was killed in a bomb attack on August 31, 2018, explained to Bonet that Russians have much more in common with the Mongols than with the Swedes: “Russia is a country of victors who have learned to survive. We survive everywhere; we may starve for a whole week, be wounded and covered in mud, but, crawling and ragged, we will defend our land.” “The war is already a reality,” he added. “All of Ukraine must be transformed into the DPR. When we succeed, a flood of hundreds of thousands of armed Ukrainians will rush into Europe, and they will not be refugees like those from Libya or Syria, but people with combat experience, well-trained and well-equipped.”
Náufragos del imperio is full of stories of people suffering the horror of the Russian invasion and is constructed from the unpublished workbooks, travel diaries, and materials that Bonet has been collecting since then. “Those who want to go to Sakhalin, to the right. Those who want to go to Vladivostok, to the left,” shouted the employees of the civil protection service of Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, in the face of the avalanche of refugees arriving from Donbas in August 2014. They had to decide, in an instant, between two places to start anew. Lives broken, massacred, and forcibly pushed into exile. With Putin’s invasion in 2022, things got even worse.
Zakharchenko admitted to Bonet during their first meeting in 2014 that he was “proud to feel Ukrainian.” Three years later, he had become a Russian, enthusiastic about Putin’s project. Bonet looks back to the collapse of the Soviet Union when there was a “brutal shift from a planned, centralized economy to a capitalist economy.” Privatizations were an opportunity for the old order to modernize, but they were “ruthless.” “Solidly established industries were turned into rubble and scrap metal; workers who thought they had stable jobs were left on the street, and highly qualified specialists had to retrain as shopkeepers or cab drivers.” The fury left by that fall is still intact. Putin exploits it and is confident of prolonging the war in Ukraine until he can win it. That is where we are.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Syrsky orders troops to abandon Avdiivka.
Many soldiers are trapped, with no good way out. It's not an organized withdrawal, it's a rout.
-----------
"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
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
• Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed that Russian forces have established “full control” over Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast as Russian forces continued to advance in the settlement on February 17, and Ukrainian forces have likely withdrawn from Avdiivka.
• Russian sources largely characterized the Ukrainian withdrawal as disorganized and costly and claimed that Russian forces managed to encircle large Ukrainian groups in Avdiivka, but ISW has observed no evidence supporting these Russian claims.
• Russian forces appear to have temporarily established limited and localized air superiority and were able to provide ground troops with close air support during the final days of their offensive operation to capture Avdiivka, likely the first time that Russian forces have done so in Ukraine.
• Delays in Western security assistance may lead to further significant constraints on Ukrainian air defenses that could allow Russian forces to replicate the close air support that facilitated Russian advances in Avdiivka at scale in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian forces reportedly shot down three Russian fighter aircraft — two Su-34s and one Su-35 — over Donetsk Oblast on February 17, likely having committed scarce air defense assets to help cover the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Avdiivka.
Limited effective air defense systems, dwindling air defense missiles stocks, and continued Russian missile and drone strikes against rear population centers are likely forcing Ukraine to make difficult choices about what areas of the frontline receive air defense coverage.[26] Recurring temporary localized and limited Russian air superiority would likely allow Russian forces to more aggressively pursue operational advances along the frontline. Widespread interrupted air superiority would allow Russian forces to conduct routine large-scale aviation operations and bomb Ukrainian cities beyond the frontline to devastating effect.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-17-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Flogging "the west" for more weapons is pointless because the cupboard is bare: there are no more weapons to spare, and everybody know it except delusional neocons, clueless western politicians, and cokehead Zelensky.
And since there are no more weapons to spare ... aftervall, the USA has plenty of other wars on its docket ... flogging the west for more money will only help Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs and western speculators who were hoping for a big Russia - or, failing that, Ukrainian- payday.
All of those pretenders of hardbitten, realworld analysis completley failed to stumble upon realworld facts, because they were too busy polishing their ideological turds to a high shine.
That includes CAPNCRUNCH, THUGR, and SECOND, and all those propagandists that they posted here. They collectively are as rabid and delusional as Israelis.
-----------
"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
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Signym, you are full of shit. Denmark says bullshit on you and the European cheese-eating surrender monkeys who have plenty of ammo held in reserve but pretend they cannot send it to Ukraine:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Flogging "the west" for more weapons is pointless because the cupboard is bare: there are no more weapons to spare, and everybody know it except delusional neocons, clueless western politicians, and cokehead Zelensky.
And since there are no more weapons to spare ... aftervall, the USA has plenty of other wars on its docket ... flogging the west for more money will only help Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs and western speculators who were hoping for a big Russia - or, failing that, Ukrainian- payday.
All of those pretenders of hardbitten, realworld analysis completley failed to stumble upon realworld facts, because they were too busy polishing their ideological turds to a high shine.
That includes CAPNCRUNCH, THUGR, and SECOND, and all those propagandists that they posted here. They collectively are as rabid and delusional as Israelis.
Denmark to send its 'entire artillery' to Ukraine, the country's prime minister says
By Nathan Rennolds | Feb 18, 2024, 11:32 AM CST
https://www.businessinsider.com/denmark-to-send-all-artillery-ukraine-
pm-russia-war-2024-2
• Denmark is sending all of its artillery to Ukraine, the Danish prime minister has said.
• Mette Frederiksen made the announcement while speaking at the Munich Security Conference.
• It comes as Ukraine faces severe munitions shortages.
Denmark is sending its "entire artillery" to Ukraine, the Danish prime minister has said.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Mette Frederiksen appealed to other European nations to do more to help Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin's invading forces.
"They are asking us for ammunition now. Artillery now. From the Danish side, we decided to donate our entire artillery," she said.
"I'm sorry to say, friends, there are still ammunition in stock in Europe," she continued. "This is not only a question about production, because we have weapons, we have ammunition, we have air defense that we don't have to use ourself at the moment, that we should deliver to Ukraine."
It comes as Ukrainian forces withdrew from the key eastern town of Avdiivka amid severe munitions shortages.
The Danish announcement will come as particularly welcome news in Ukraine as its military has been starved of artillery shells, forcing it to scale back some operations, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told Reuters in December.
"There's a problem with ammunition, especially post-Soviet (shells) - that's 122 mm, 152 mm. And today, these problems exist across the entire front line," he said.
Meanwhile, in more positive news to alleviate the ammo famine, the Czech Republic says it could supply 800,000 shells to the Ukrainian military.
Czech President Petr Pavel said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference on 17 February that it had a stockpile of about half a million 155 mm and 300,000 122 mm shells, which can be on the Ukraine frontline in a few weeks "if funding is found quickly."
Denmark has been a key supporter of Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the Nordic country's military aid commitments increased by 3.5 billion euros, or around $3.8 billion, since November — making it one of the biggest military donors by percentage of GDP, the institute says.
Denmark has pledged 8.4 billion euros, around $9 billion, in military aid.
With a crucial $60 billion US aid package stalled in Congress, European support is becoming ever more important for Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the European Union agreed to a new 50 billion euro, or around $53.9 billion, aid package for Ukraine.
"This locks in steadfast, long-term, predicta
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME