Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

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Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 08:00
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Saturday, June 15, 2024 7:39 AM

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

Taiwan is one-upping Ukraine's navy to defeat a Chinese invasion

By Michael Peck | Jun 15, 2024, 4:00 AM CDT

https://www.businessinsider.com/taiwan-is-one-upping-ukraines-navy-to-
defeat-a-chinese-invasion-2024-6

Both Taiwan and America are looking to what has become the gold standard in naval drone warfare: Ukraine's campaign in the Black Sea. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned by Russia's navy, and with a long coastline to defend, Ukraine could have been bled white trying to defend against Russian amphibious invasions and coastal bombardment.

Instead, Russia's Black Sea Fleet has retreated from Ukrainian waters. In part this is because of land-based anti-ship missiles such as the Neptune, which sank the cruiser and Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva in 2022. But mostly it's because of robot boats that have relentlessly stalked Russian warships on the sea and even in port. In November 2023, for example, Ukrainian Magura sea drones sank or damaged two Russian landing craft and a missile corvette docked in Crimean ports and shipyards.

(If Ukraine's drone ships were built in America, Biden would forbid Ukraine from using the drones against Russian ships in water beyond 12 nautical miles offshore. Why? Because Biden, the old fool, imagines crossing Putin's Red Lines will mean WW3.

"The territorial sea of Ukraine includes the coastal marine waters having a width of 12 nautical miles measured from the line of minimum low tide both on the mainland and on islands belonging to Ukraine, or from the straight baselines joining the corresponding points."
https://www.un.org/depts/los/LEGISLATIONANDTREATIES/PDFFILES/UKR_1991_
Statute.pdf )

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

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Sunday, June 16, 2024 6:30 AM

SECOND

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

Massacres and Misery — The Policy of Russian Military Savagery

Russian military brutality and misbehavior are not accidental; they are Kremlin-approved, just as in Stalin’s time and beyond.

By Michael C. DiCianna | March 26, 2024

https://cepa.org/article/massacres-and-misery-the-policy-of-russian-mi
litary-savagery/

The West has the luxury of considering Ukraine’s future as an intellectual exercise; after all, there won’t be Russian tanks in Frankfurt or Chicago.

For Ukraine, it’s a very different issue, one that has been clear throughout the 25 months of Russia’s all-out war of aggression. That the war raises not just the prospect of military defeat, but of what follows — a brutality that often degenerates into outright bestiality.

The fall of Adviika in February showed the risks Ukraine faces this year if Western support is delayed even further. As the Russians pushed forward, they were as unapologetic and cruel as before. Reports of Russian soldiers executing wounded Ukrainian prisoners followed the retreat. Telegram channels showed victorious Russians looting the destroyed city for household appliances. Civilians who stayed behind face the terror of Russian occupation.

These are not one-off events. Last year, Tymofiy Shadura, an unarmed soldier of Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized Brigade, was filmed by Russian soldiers saying “Long live Ukraine,” his last words before he was murdered at close range with semi-automatic weapons fire.

The Ukrainian liberation of Bucha in April 2022 exposed the facts of the Russian invasion and occupation. More than 400 Ukrainian civilians were left dead in the streets, many showing signs of summary execution. Torture chambers were found in residential basements. Girls as young as 14 were forced into sexual slavery by Russian occupiers.

Casual consumers of news may consider this an aberration, possibly caused by unit dysfunction, as has happened in other wars — the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for example, or the massacres in some of the 20th-century European wars of colonial retreat.

But this is not the case with Russia. The bloodshed is based on something much more profound — a state-sanctioned policy and even encouragement of brutality. And its roots can be traced back centuries. As the programmers say, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Brutality, destruction, and looting are vital elements of Russian military doctrine. They’ve existed as a pillar of Russian military doctrine for almost two centuries. Policymakers should take note that revanchist powers do not play by Western rules; they disdain not only the taboo against wars of aggression but also the rules by which wars are fought.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a strategic continuation of the Russification efforts begun with the conquest of the Caucasus in the first half of the 19th century. Intentional and casual cruelty by the Russian military has been the spearhead tactic for such campaigns. To see this trend in history is not just a morbid lesson in crimes against humanity, but crucial to understanding what it means to tolerate Russian militarism.

The Russian Empire’s ultimate victory in the 101-year-long Russo-Circassian War resulted in a horrendous extermination effort. As much as 97% of the Circassian population was expelled from their homeland, with more than a million killed by the time it ended in 1864.

In The Circassian Genocide, historian Walter Richmond notes how Imperial army commanders rejected any acceptance of the humanity or sovereignty of their enemies, describing them as stateless “bandits” and “mountaineers.” The vocabulary may have changed, but the modern Russian denial of Ukrainian statehood and sweeping referrals to a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv show the same dismissal of any shared humanity. Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Circassian+Genocide

Communist revolt and rule did nothing to moderate Russian imperialism. Atrocities committed by both Reds and Whites during the Civil War have been well-recorded, and the Bolshevik genocide of Ukrainians and Kazakhs during the Stalin era is (now finally) globally acknowledged.

The thuggery of the imperial Russian army, now and in the past, has not limited itself to the empire’s wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing.

The tales of the Red Army’s rampage through Germany at the end of World War II are probably the greatest shadow cast across the allied victory over Nazi Germany. Approximately 600,000 German civilians may have been killed by the Red Army in the final months of the war. Far more infamous, and far too often dismissed, are the mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiers. It is harder to declare a conclusive total, but Western estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million women raped during Soviet occupation, including victims as young as eight years old.

The horrendous actions of the Red Army in World War II have long been explained, and in some historiographies justified, as revenge against a state and a people who had visited such horrors on the Soviet population. Putting aside the flawed moral logic of an eye for an eye in sexual violence, this dismissive narrative has long ignored the horrors the Red Army also visited on liberated female victims of concentration camps — including Soviet citizens and Polish women.

With the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in late 1945, a nightmare of the same sort was visited on Japanese civilians, as well as Chinese and Korean women. At best, the Red Army did not care about the monstrous conduct of its troops. At worst, it was using rape as a weapon of terror and a means of rewarding its soldiers.

Western leaders chose to ignore the means by which Putin crushed Chechen separatism between 1999 and 2009. This should have been sufficient for what Putin might do elsewhere.

Consider how the Russian army reduced Grozny to “the most destroyed city on earth.” Consider how he unleashed Ramzan Kadyrov on the Chechen population. Kadyrov, “a psychopath who personally tortures his political prisoners” according to Russia expert Michael Weiss, has had free range over Chechnya for decades. Experts argued at the onset of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that Kadyrov’s presence was in itself a threat of excessive brutality to come (his men already had an appalling reputation for their thuggish behavior in the occupied villages of Eastern Ukraine.)

The historical record shows that the Kremlin is happy to pay its brutalized soldiers with the blood and bodies of conquered peoples. What else can be expected when recruits are drawn from a society with such high rates of domestic violence, murder, and spousal rape, and where the government has decriminalized violence against women?

Russian recruitment propaganda, when it’s not playing up some idea of the Russian soldier as a hypermasculine demigod, advertises promises like seaside apartments in Odesa, or “beautiful Ukrainian women.” The implication is clear: you can kill Ukrainians, live in their homes, and keep Ukrainian women as domestic slaves. And Russia makes little secret of its behavior — the brutal interrogation of a suspected Tajik terrorist this month, including severing his ear and forcing him to swallow it — was filmed and then reposted by senior Russian propagandists.

The US and the rest of the Western world bear a great deal of responsibility for tolerating Putin’s evils. American policymakers did little to punish or push back Russian military actions in Georgia, Syria, or Ukraine in 2014. Western hesitation has not just weakened global rules about sovereignty and taboos against rewriting borders by force, it has also undermined the international regimes to punish crimes against humanity.

Michael C. DiCianna is a research assistant with the Yorktown Institute. He has worked as a consultant in the US intelligence community for several years, focusing on military affairs in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

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

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Sunday, June 16, 2024 6:42 AM

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

EU Commissioner: EU will match Russia's ammunition production in 2025

By Rachel Amran | June 15, 2024 3:12 AM

https://kyivindependent.com/eu-commissioner-eu-will-match-russias-ammu
nition-production-in-2025/

The European Union has accelerated its production of projectiles and will match Russia's production capacity in 2025, EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said in an interview with French news outlet La Tribune on June 14.

The performance of the European defense industry has been lackluster, as the EU failed on its promise to deliver 1 million artillery shells between March 2023 and 2024. After supplying only about half of the promised rounds, Brussels shifted the deadline to the end of this year.

"By the end of this year, the EU plans to reach the level of 1.7 million projectiles per year, and in 2025 to match the production capacity of Russia, that is, to produce 2.5 million projectiles per year," Breton said.

Reports have suggested that Russia is managing to produce artillery shells at triple the speed of Ukraine’s allies for a quarter of the price.

Earlier this month, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin claimed that his country had increased ammunition production by more than 20 times.

"We accelerated the production of ammunition," Breton said. "In March 2023, we produced 500,000 shells a year in Europe and were already better than the Americans, who produced only 300,000. But since then, we have doubled this capacity."

The EU adopted the first-ever European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS) in March to support the competitiveness and readiness of the bloc’s defense industry midst growing threats from Russia.

Breton also emphasized that the bloc must continue to increase defense purchases "against the tension in relations with the Russian Federation," as Europe "must continue to rearm in the coming years."

"This need is shared by many EU member states and can benefit our defense industry. But it must be able to deliver weapons to the European army on time."

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

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Sunday, June 16, 2024 7:11 AM

SECOND

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

Ukrainian First Deputy Defense Minister Lieutenant General Ivan Havrylyuk reported that Western military assistance has begun to arrive in Ukraine, but that Western military assistance will likely not arrive at scale and significantly impact the frontline situation for several more weeks to months.

Havrylyuk told the Associated Press (AP) in an article published on June 15 that Ukrainian forces are still waiting on most of the US military assistance announced in late April 2024 to arrive in Ukraine, but that the limited amount of aid that has arrived is already reducing Ukraine's artillery shortages.[13] Havrylyuk stated that Russian forces' artillery advantage has recently decreased from seven-to-one to five-to-one as a result of US aid arrivals. Havrylyuk expressed hope that Ukraine will be able to better defend its airspace in the future following the arrival of F-16 fighter jets and other Western-provided air defense assets. AP also interviewed several frontline Ukrainian commanders and servicemen who confirmed that Ukrainian forces began receiving limited amounts of Western-provided shells but noted that the shells have not arrived at the scale that Ukrainian forces need to fully defend against Russian attacks. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský announced on June 14 that the first round of ammunition from the Czech artillery initiative has begun to arrive in Ukraine and that the Czech initiative will continue to purchase and supply ammunition for Ukraine throughout 2024.[14] Lipavský noted that five countries have already contributed funds to the initiative and that 15 additional countries have pledged to support the initiative.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-june-15-2024

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

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Monday, June 17, 2024 7:52 AM

SECOND

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

The vast majority of the countries and international organizations that participated in the Ukraine-initiated Global Peace Summit in Switzerland on June 15-16 signed a joint communique on June 16 reaffirming support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.[1]

The communique also reaffirmed support for Ukrainian operation and control over the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to ensure the safety of nuclear energy and installations, "free full, and safe" commercial navigation in the Black Sea to ensure global food security, the exchange of all prisoners of war (POWs), and the return of all "deported and unlawfully displaced Ukrainian children" and other unlawfully detained Ukrainian civilians. Over 80 countries and international organizations signed the communique, although Saudi Arabia, India, South Africa, Armenia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Brazil (which attended the summit as an "observer") were among the countries that did not endorse the communique.[2]

The Ukrainian President's Office emphasized that the purpose of the summit was to facilitate "fair peace ... based on the United Nations (UN) Charter and international law," highlighting Ukraine's effort to garner support from the international community in ending the war on terms that do not violate international law by compromising Ukraine’s territory integrity or sovereignty.[3]

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte stated on June 16 at the summit that "Russia should not be at the [negotiating] table now" and that there will only be peace in Ukraine "when Russia agrees to international principles and the UN Charter." ISW continues to assess that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in good-faith negotiations and only feigns interest in negotiations in specific instances as part of a wider informational effort to seduce the West to preemptively make concessions that would violate Ukraine's sovereignty.[4]

Putin is unlikely to be interested in good faith negotiations for the foreseeable future given that he recently outlined a theory of Russian victory in Ukraine based on the assumption that Russian forces are capable of indefinite creeping advances on the battlefield to outlast Western support for Ukraine.[5]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-june-16-2024

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

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Monday, June 17, 2024 8:23 AM

SECOND

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

Trump threatens to cut US aid to Ukraine quickly if reelected

June 16, 2024 1:01 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-ukraine-russia-war-threat
ens-cut-aid-election-2024/

At a campaign rally in Detroit, Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman of all time” for Kyiv’s push to secure U.S. support in its effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression more than three years after Moscow's all-out invasion.

“He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends,” Trump said.

“I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect,” said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S. election.

NATO countries last week moved forward with a plan for the alliance to take over from the U.S. in coordinating military aid to Ukraine, a shift widely perceived as an effort to "Trump-proof" the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.

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

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Monday, June 17, 2024 9:01 AM

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

While Ukraine has 80 countries on its side, Russia has North Korea, which is very like Russia, constantly threatening to nuke the world:

Russia’s Putin to visit North Korea in rare trip as anti-West alignment deepens

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/17/asia/north-korea-russia-putin-visit-int
l-hnk/index.html

Vladimir Putin is set to travel to North Korea for a two-day visit starting Tuesday, the Kremlin said, in the Russian president’s first trip to the country in more than two decades . . .

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Monday, June 17, 2024 9:31 AM

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

Russia’s war in Ukraine is flooding the EU with illegal cigarettes

By Mark Temnycky | 06/16/24 8:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4721702-russias-war-in-ukrai
ne-is-flooding-the-eu-with-illegal-cigarettes/

Russia’s war in Ukraine has exacerbated crime inside the country. According to the Brookings Institution, it “significantly affected regional illicit economies and criminal networks.” This is not surprising, as all available resources, including those of law enforcement agencies, are directed to war-related activities. When a foreign invader is at the door, suddenly the black market in counterfeit tobacco, often run by Russian-associated organized criminal gangs, becomes a secondary concern.

According to the Tobacco Reporter, illegal cigarettes, which “accounted for [one-fourth] of the Ukrainian tobacco market,” are draining valuable resources needed to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s ongoing invasion. The Ukrainian government has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in tobacco tax revenue amid this criminal industry’s steady growth.

This black-market industry is affecting areas beyond Ukraine. The European Anti-Fraud Office has stated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine expanded tobacco smuggling routes, creating an illicit cigarette problem throughout the European Union. Due to the proliferation of these criminal products, the European Union member states have also lost hundreds of millions of euros in budget revenues.

If Ukraine cannot demonstrate progress in resolving the illicit trade issue as a financial menace, then the malign cynics and critics of Ukraine may be vindicated.

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

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024 6:07 AM

SECOND

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

Russia is reportedly experiencing issues with producing artillery shells and select artillery systems. Ukrainian military analyst Petro Chernyk stated on June 17 that Russia likely has about 8,000 to 9,000 artillery barrels stockpiled and is able to produce about 150,000 to 170,000 artillery shells per month.[79] Chernyk stated that Russia, however, suffers from shortages of explosives for these shells, especially nitrocellulose — an intermediary good used in producing gunpowder and explosives.

US officials have recently stated that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is supplying Russia's defense industry with nitrocellulose.[81]

Chernyk stated that Russia is gradually shifting from using self-propelled racked artillery systems to towed systems but that Russia is suffering from unspecified problems with the tractors needed to pull such artillery pieces. Chernyk stated that Russia will be unable to increase its production of newer, higher-quality self-propelled artillery systems, such as the 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV and the 2S34 Khosta, as Russia only has five to six machines that can manufacture these systems.

Sky News, citing open-source research from US-based consulting firm Bain & Company, reported on May 26 that Russian defense industrial producers will likely be able to manufacture and refurbish 4.5 million artillery shells in 2024 (375,000 shells per month), suggesting that Russia may be refurbishing more shells than it is producing.[80]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-june-17-2024

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

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024 6:21 AM

SECOND

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

Russia charges a Ukrainian with 'Terrorism' for downing A-50 Radar Plane
(Previously, Russia claimed the A-50 was not shot down. Then Russia claimed the A-50 crashed due to friendly fire.)

Jun 18, 2024 at 5:47 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-a50-plane-ukraine-investigative-commit
tee-1914060

Russia's investigative committee said on Monday that it had approved a "preventative measure in the form of detention" against Colonel Mykola Dzyaman, a commander in Ukraine's military, in connection with the loss of a Russian aircraft on February 23.

The committee said the aircraft "was not intended for combat operations, had no weapons, and the flight was taking place exclusively in the airspace of the Russian Federation."

Colonel Dzyaman allegedly "gave an illegal order to his subordinate military personnel to destroy it," according to Russian authorities, which said 10 crew members on board had been killed and the aircraft destroyed.

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

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024 8:00 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
SECOND: Are Putin’s Nuclear Threats Working?

They prefer that Russia should actually nuke us to demonstrate that they're serious?

a) The west CAN'T win. We can't win this conventional war (which BTW WE started) and nobody wins in a nuclear war.

The whole issue for Putin is NATO EXPANSION TO RUSSIA'S BORDERS AND NEAR ABROAD SECURITY.

June 18, 2024 7:30am EDT
A record 23 of NATO's 32 member nations are hitting the Western military alliance’s defense spending target this year. In 2021, only six nations were meeting the goal. That was before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Defense spending across European NATO allies and Canada was up nearly 18% this year alone, the biggest increase in decades. Thanks, Putin! (He responded by threatening to nuke the world.)

https://www.foxnews.com/world/record-number-nato-members-reaching-defe
nse-spending-goal-ukraine-war-persists

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

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