What is Putin's end game?

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 02:35
VIEWED: 15018
PAGE 28 of 31

FIRST PAGE PREV PAGE 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE

SIGNYM

Tuesday, April 26, 2022 11:33 PM

You guys seem to have an infinite capacity to absorb swill.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THG

Tuesday, April 26, 2022 11:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:

You guys seem to have an infinite capacity to absorb swill.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Says comrade fecal matter. You being the lowest of the low is recorded here in these threads shit head. And that can't be changed.

T

CAPTAINCRUNCH

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 12:18 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Yeah, like the Russians did that.

Bullshit.

They've done much, much worse. Face it, SIGTOOL, you're defending a mass murderer, mass rapist, mass mutilator. Of men and women AND young girls and boys. But, their "just Ukies" right? Hell isn't hot enough for that fcker.

https://time.com/6168330/rape-war-crime-russia-ukraine/

Ukrainians Are Speaking Up About Rape as a War Crime to Ensure the World Holds Russia Accountable

"Rape as a weapon of war may date to the dawn of conflict. But in Ukraine, female lawmakers are waging a campaign to turn sexual violence by Russian soldiers against the invaders.

“No one thought that such cruelties and atrocities could happen in the middle of Europe,” says Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian Member of Parliament who in March traveled from Kyiv to London, where she and three other female lawmakers urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to stop U.K. trade with Russia on the grounds that it was funding the rape of their countrywomen. A few weeks later, they took their message to Paris, raising the same issue with President Emmanuel Macron. On April 21, they will head to Brussels, seat of the European Union.

“It’s important that people do not avert their eyes from this crime,” says Vasylenko.

When Russian troops retreated from areas around Kyiv on April 1, official reports of sexual violence, which had trickled in during the five weeks after the invasion, suddenly took the shape of a systemic, coordinated campaign of sexual violence. Women and girls were the main target, but victims spanned old and young, male and female.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova said that 25 teenage girls were kept in a basement in Bucha and gang-raped; nine of them are now pregnant. Elderly women spoke on camera about being raped by Russian soldiers. The bodies of children were found naked with their hands tied behind their backs, their genitals mutilated. Those victims included both girls and boys, and Ukrainian men and boys have been sexually assaulted in other incidents. A group of Ukrainian women POWs had their heads shaved in Russian captivity, where they were also stripped naked and forced to squat.

Human rights monitors say the number of additional cases extend into the scores, stoking fears for Ukrainians both still under Russian control or facing the prospect of becoming so, as Moscow launches a massive assault in the country’s east.

“These sex crimes…are a weapon of war in order to humiliate, subjugate, terrorize and force people to flee the territory,” says Marta Havryshko, Research Associate in contemporary history at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies and a URIS Fellow at Basel University. “Russian soldiers are trying to send a signal to the whole community: we are the winners, you are weak, we will destroy you, so you better give up your struggle for independence.”

The Ukrainian campaign reflects the evolution of outrage. Rape was first recognized as a war crime in 1919, but many wars and decades passed before the first prosecution of rape as a war crime took place, against a Rwandan politician in 1998. The U.N.’s first prosecution was for the Former Yugoslavia, when Serbian forces maintained “rape camps” as what judges deemed “an instrument of terror.”

In Kyiv, the current effort for justice shows not only advances by women—Ukraine currently has the largest number of female lawmakers in its history, several of whom are raising awareness about wartime rape—but also of the rising awareness that robs sexual violence of the stigma its perpetrators intend. As the lawmakers press the case for prosecution in the capitals of Europe, viral posts on Ukrainian social media—from a gynecologist, a lawyer, even a popular TV host—implore fellow Ukrainian women to come forward with evidence of sexual violence committed by Russian troops.

Technology also helps. A war broadcast 24/7 over social media feeds not only hastens the documentation of other war crimes; it al

SECOND

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 12:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Yeah, like the Russians did that.

Bullshit.

As these crimes were carried out, in full view of the world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own people.

As in the past, the use of jargon helped.

1. This was not an invasion; it was a “special military operation.”

2. This was not a mass murder of Ukrainians; it was “protection” for the inhabitants of the eastern-Ukrainian territories.

3. This was not genocide; it was defense against “genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.”

4. The dehumanization of the Ukrainians was completed in early April, when RIA Novosti, a state-run website, published an article arguing that the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine would require the “liquidation” of the Ukrainian leadership, and even the erasure of the very name of Ukraine, because to be Ukrainian was to be a Nazi:

5. “Ukrainianism is an artificial anti-Russian construct, which does not have any civilizational content of its own, and is a subordinate element of a foreign and alien civilization.”

6. The existential threat was made clear on the eve of the war, when Putin reprised a decade’s worth of propaganda about the perfidious West, using language familiar to Russians: “They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”

The modern Russian propaganda state turned out to be the ideal vehicle both for carrying out mass murder and for hiding it from the public. The gray apparatchiks, FSB operatives, and well-coiffed anchorwomen who organize and conduct the national conversation had for years been preparing their compatriots to feel no pity for Ukraine.

They succeeded. From the first days of the war, it was evident that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine. Other assaults on cities throughout history—Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—took place only after years of terrible conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine began only days into an unprovoked invasion. In the first week of the war, Russian missiles and artillery targeted apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools. As Russians occupied Ukrainian cities and towns, they kidnapped or murdered mayors, local councilors, even a museum director from Melitopol, spraying bullets and terror randomly on everyone else. When the Ukrainian army recaptured Bucha, to the north of Kyiv, it found corpses with their arms tied behind their backs, lying in the road. In the first three weeks of the war alone, Human Rights Watch documented cases of summary execution, rape, and the mass looting of civilian property.

Mariupol, a mostly Russian-speaking city the size of Miami, was subjected to almost total devastation. In a powerful interview in late March, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, noted that in previous European conflicts, occupiers hadn’t destroyed everything, because they themselves needed somewhere to cook, eat, wash; during the Nazi occupation, he said, “movie theaters were operating in France.” But Mariupol was different: “Everything is burned out.” Ninety percent of the buildings were destroyed within just a few weeks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220425173725/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2022/06/ukraine-mass-murder-hate-speech-soviet/629629/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 2:00 AM

--------------------------------------------------

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

SECOND

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 2:36 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
You guys seem to have an infinite capacity to absorb swill.

‘At war with the whole world’: why Putin might be planning a long conflict in Ukraine

Stalling peace talks and new offensive suggest Kremlin could escalate its ‘special operation’ into a ‘war’ against the west

Despite Russia’s failure to break down Ukraine’s defences, heavy casualties and a series of military defeats, the Kremlin has kept up a refrain: the goals of Vladimir Putin’s invasion will be reached in full.

Russia’s territorial targets have appeared to shift depending on the short-term gains Putin feels his troops can achieve on the battlefield. He scaled back an initial plan to seize central areas including the capital, Kyiv, in favour of a new assault focused on the eastern Donbas region.

But Russia’s goals, which the Russian president has made clear include ending Ukrainian statehood, remain unchanged, according to people involved in efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv.

This means, they assessed, that he is prepared for a protracted conflict going much further than the recently outlined target of “liberating” the Donbas. Putin wants to capture all of south-eastern Ukraine to cut the country off from the Black Sea and create a platform for further attacks, they say.

“He’s a tactician . . . a judoka . . . He wants to feint and throw you over his shoulder,” one of the people said, referring to Putin’s love of judo. “He’s not reasonable, he has a distorted picture of the world in his head [ . . . ] and the scenarios have changed. Appetite comes during the meal.”

An influential Moscow-based tycoon said the conflict would go on as long as it took for Putin to sell it as a success domestically. “If you can’t make it look like a victory to the electorate, you can’t save face,” the businessman said.

Russia appears to have learned from some of its military mistakes in the early days of its invasion of Ukraine on February 24. This led to a redeployment of its forces to the Donbas and the appointment of a single field commander.

But Putin’s view of the situation on the ground appears distorted by inaccurate field briefings and state television reports, the people involved in the talks say.

Events are not reported up the chain accurately, said Pavel Luzin, an independent military analyst. This in turn is likely going to hamper Russia’s offensive and force it to pause operations at some point in the next month.

“It’s a huge hierarchy, and when some low-ranking analyst . . . writes a report about what’s really happening, it goes through 10 bosses and when it comes out at the top, it says everything is going great. That’s how the system works,” Luzin said.

“They need a break just to work out what they have. They don’t know how many contract soldiers they have left, they don’t know the full extent of their own losses, and they don’t know how much equipment they have left or what state it’s in.”

Assessing that Russia needed to regroup, Ukrainian officials initially thought Putin would look for a way to declare victory by May 9, when he celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory in the second world war with a military parade on Moscow’s Red Square.

But with few military gains secured so far and peace talks faltering, there are signs the Kremlin is preparing for a protracted conflict that it sees as a proxy war with the west. Putin said this month that “the most important thing happening today” was not the “tragic events” in Ukraine, but “breaking the unipolar world system that was created after the collapse of the Soviet Union”.

Rhetoric on state television has changed accordingly. With few triumphs to boast of beyond the capture of the port city of Mariupol — which required all but destroying it — presenters have blamed the lack of progress on the west’s support for Ukraine.

Some of them frequently muse about using nuclear weapons against the west, trumpeting Russia’s recent test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sarmat, and q

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 6:15 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Stalling peace talks and new offensive suggest Kremlin could escalate its ‘special operation’ into a ‘war’ against the west

Nah

--------------------------------------------------

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

SIGNYM

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 6:17 AM

'The west" is already at war with Putin, so ... why not?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 6:23 AM

Quote:
SignyM:
Yeah, like the Russians did that.

Bullshit.

SECOND: As these crimes were carried out, in full view of the world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own people.

UH huh. And Saddam had WMD and Assad gassed how own people.

If this was "in view of the whole world" why didn't someone... OSCE, maybe? They're pro-western enough!... come forward with evidence AT THE TIME? Do an investigation AT THE TIME? Instead of, yanno, fabricating after the fact?

Like I said: You have an infinite capacity to absorb swill.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 7:25 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Quote:
SignyM:
Yeah, like the Russians did that.

Bullshit.

SECOND: As these crimes were carried out, in full view of the world, the Russian state successfully hid this tragedy from its own people.

UH huh. And Saddam had WMD and Assad gassed how own people.

If this was "in view of the whole world" why didn't someone... OSCE, maybe? They're pro-western enough!... come forward with evidence AT THE TIME? Do an investigation AT THE TIME? Instead of, yanno, fabricating after the fact?

Like I said: You have an infinite capacity to absorb swill.

Ukrainians tell a story of the origins of the Ukrainian nation going back to 11th century Kyiv, surviving centuries of oppression by Russia and Poland, and, finally, emerging out of the wreckage of the Soviet Union as a sovereign Ukrainian state in 1991.

For the Russians, the various western and southern provinces now called “Ukraine” were populated by Slavic border people (Ukrainians) who were essentially Russian. They considered this land as a part of the Russian Empire for centuries.

The press has been treating the Ukrainian origin story as “truth” and the Russian one as “lies,” but things are never that simple. Like all origin stories, both are a mixture of historical fact and political imagination.

In recent weeks, the depth and sincerity of the commitment to Western democracy, the repudiation of the Communist past and rejection of the Russian connection has been impressively demonstrated by the Ukrainian government and people.

Russians whose memories go back 30 or 40 years see the Ukrainian situation differently. It is not clear if the younger post-Soviet generation – in particular, young men liable for military conscription – see Ukraine and its current Western orientation in the same way as their elders.

Putin’s past wars and acts of aggression on the international scene (Chechnya, Crimea) raised his popularity at home, but they were successful wars. So far, Russia’s Ukrainian adventure is not looking like a success.

In the case of Crimea (which, as all Russians know, was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 on a whim of Khrushchev), this aggression was essentially bloodless.

Chechnya was bloody, but the victims were not Slavs.

It remains to be seen how the Russian Army and Russians back home will feel about the killing of Ukrainians: Slavic kith and kin.

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-as-a-borderland-a-brief-history-of
-ukraines-place-between-europe-and-russia-178168

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

FIRST PAGE PREV PAGE 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE