Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, February 20, 2025 22:18
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PAGE 159 of 159

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 4:32 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trump Says North Korean Soldiers 'Wiped Out' in Ukraine War

Feb 19, 2025 at 1:03 PM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-many-north-korea-soldiers-killed-r
ussia-ukraine-war-2033140

President Donald Trump has weighed in on North Korean troop losses in Ukraine, saying "a large portion have been wiped out."

"Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism. I mean, what's going on over there? Its soldiers are being killed by the thousands on a weekly basis—it's ridiculous," he said.

"And they're not American soldiers, they're Russian soldiers and they're Ukrainian soldiers, largely, although a lot of Koreans have been killed as you know, quite a bit of them have been killed they came over to fight and a large portion have been wiped out but we want to we want to end it, it's a senseless war."

He likened the battlefield to the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, referencing gruesome images that "you don't see, but I see."

It's believed this was the first time Trump referenced North Korean troop casualties in public.

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:19 AM

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

Europe Eyes Unprecedented €700 Billion Military Aid Plan for Ukraine

In 3 years European sent $140.16 billion versus U.S. sending $110 billion to Ukraine

By Vlad Litnarovych | Feb 18, 2025

https://united24media.com/latest-news/europe-eyes-unprecedented-eur700
-billion-military-aid-plan-for-ukraine-5981

The European Union is reportedly working on a multi-billion-euro defense package to support Ukraine’s war effort, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hinting at the sheer scale of the upcoming package, suggesting it could be worth around $732.2 billion (€700 billion), German media Berliner Zeitung reported on February 18.

However, EU leaders recognize the sensitivity of the plan. According to Bloomberg, the spending initiative will only be announced after Germany’s regional elections on February 23 to avoid controversy before the vote.

Select European heads of state met in Paris on Monday to coordinate their response after U.S. officials urged Europe to take concrete action.

“We will launch a large package, the likes of which we have never seen before,” Baerbock told Bloomberg during the Munich Security Conference.

“Just as we had a financial package for the euro crisis or COVID-19, we now need one for European security. This will happen soon.”

Speaking on Bloomberg Television, Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovile Sakaliene stressed that Europe must prepare for a dramatic shift in its security landscape:

“Realization that it’s not the U.S. which will defend Europe, but Europe defending ourselves with help from the U.S. means we will all have to move fast, Germany included,” he said.

Baerbock added that peace can only be achieved through strength, stating that “this requires hard and long-term security guarantees for Ukraine, a strong NATO, and progress in Ukraine’s EU accession talks.”

“As Europeans and as Germans, we stand firmly with Ukraine — militarily, humanitarianly, and financially. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, we, Europeans, have provided over $140.16 billion (€134 billion) in aid to Ukraine, with Germany contributing nearly $46 billion (€44 billion) alone.”

Baerbock further stressed that Europe’s unity is its greatest strength, stating:

“Despite our differences, we move forward together — from Paris to Munich. As Europeans, we must take greater responsibility for our own security. Given the existential threat we face, a major collective effort is required to safeguard our peace and prosperity.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also made it clear that Europe’s response to Trump’s stance will be increased military spending.

“If we, Europeans, fail to spend big on defense now, we will be forced to spend 10 times more if we don’t prevent a wider war. As the Polish PM, I’m entitled to say it loud and clear, since Poland already spends almost 5% of its GDP on defense. And we will continue to do so,” Tusk wrote on X.

Arriving in Paris, von der Leyen echoed this urgency, writing that “we need an emergency mindset” and “we must reinforce defense now.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz voiced support for an EU emergency mechanism that would allow massive increases in defense spending — a proposal pushed by von der Leyen at the Munich Security Conference last week.

Under this plan, EU nations would be exempt from debt and deficit limits when financing military expenditures. This marks a fundamental shift in EU financial policy, as such exemptions have previously been impossible under EU rules.

The new multi-billion-euro defense package could be financed through joint EU debt, similar to the COVID-19 recovery fund.

Earlier, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte declared that Europe is ready to take the lead in providing security guarantees for Ukraine following an “emergency summit” in Paris.

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:21 AM

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

Defiant Ukrainian Drone Operators Followed Fiber Optic Cables To Track A Russian Drone Team Back To Its Base

By David Axe | Feb 19, 2025, 07:46pm EST

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/02/19/spotting-fiber-optic-
cables-reflecting-sunlight-defiant-ukrainian-drone-operators-tracked-a-russian-drone-team-back-to-its-base/

The drone operators from the Ukrainian national guard’s Kara Dag Brigade may not have realized they were committing a profound act of political defiance when, on or just Tuesday, they hunted down a Russian drone team on the snowy battlefield just south of Vodyane in eastern Ukraine’s southern Donetsk Oblast.

The same day, U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh to discuss closer ties between Russia and the United States and possible paths toward ending the war in Ukraine — on terms favoring Russia, the aggressor. Russia would keep the roughly 20 percent of Ukraine it occupies.

Notably, Ukraine was not invited to send its own diplomats to the talks.

And as the United States veered away from longstanding alliances with European democracies and toward a brutal authoritarian regime, U.S. Pres. Donald Trump tried to shift blame for Russia’s three-year wider war on Ukraine onto Ukraine. “You should have never started it,” Trump said from his Florida estate, addressing Ukrainian leaders who did not start the war.

“You could have made a deal,” Trump added, apparently unaware that Ukraine did make a deal with Russia — the 2014 Minsk Accord — and that Russia used the deal as cover to rearm for further attacks on Ukraine.

But there’s very little the United States can do to compel Ukraine to stop fighting against its Russian invaders and their North Korean allies. And Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky knows it. “If we didn’t accept this ultimatum at the most difficult time, why there is a feeling that Ukraine will accept it now?” he said.

Contrary to Trump’s claim, the United States is not Ukraine’s biggest supporter. With European pledges of $130 billion versus U.S. pledges of $110 billion, “Europe as a whole has clearly overtaken the U.S. in terms of Ukraine aid,” the Kiel Institute in Germany noted.

As Trump led his party, his administration and the country he governs into Russia’s authoritarian embrace on Tuesday, Zelensky immediately pivoted — meeting or calling Turkish Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and French Pres. Emmanuel Macron to firm up European support for a continuing Ukrainian war effort.

Meanwhile, a German official has hinted at a possible $730 billion European aid deal that, if enacted in the coming months, could radically transform Ukraine’s military and sustain Ukrainian resistance for years.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/europe-eyes-unprecedented-eur700
-billion-military-aid-plan-for-ukraine-5981

All that is to say, Ukraine can keep fighting regardless of what Trump says. And that Ukrainian drone patrol near Vodyane on Tuesday demonstrated this enduring capacity for resistance.

The Kara Dag Brigade operators were hunting for Russian drone teams. In particular, teams deploying fiber-optic drones that send and receive signals via millimeters-thick wires rather than via radio — a method of control that helps the operators circumvent intensive Ukrainian radio jamming.

Ukraine has fewer troops and less artillery than Russia, but it has more and better drones, many of which are made in Ukraine and paid for with Ukrainian and European funds.

Preserving that drone advantage — and thus preserving Ukraine’s main means of resistance — requires the Ukrainians blunt any effort by the Russians to boost their own robotic capabilities. Spotting the reflection of fiber-optic cables, the Kara Dag Brigade operators showed the way forward for the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces and its legion of drones.

They followed the sunlight-reflecting fibers back to the Russian team’s hidden base in a clutch of snow-covered buildings — and struck the hapless Russian operators with explosive first-person-view drones.

It was a tactical victory with a strategic message. America may choose to bow to Russia, but Ukraine doesn’t have to.

Sources:

1. Kara Dag Brigade via WarTranslated

2. The New York Times

3. Kiel Institute https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/news/ukraine-support-after-3-year
s-of-war-aid-flows-remain-low-but-steady-shift-towards-weapons-procurement/

4. Volodymyr Zelensky

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:22 AM

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

Meat in the Grinder

Russian milbloggers continue to raise alarm about the Russian military command's poor treatment of wounded personnel. A Russian milblogger published an address reportedly from a battalion commander in the 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (51st Combined Arms Army [CAA], formerly 1st Donetsk People's Republic [DNR AC], Southern Military District [SMD]) to wounded personnel who requested to be pulled from combat, in which the battalion commander reprimanded the injured soldiers for using their injury payments and complaining about their injuries.[82] Another Russian milblogger and former Storm-Z instructor, who frequently complains about systemic issues in the Russian military, criticized the battalion commander for his reprimands.[83] The milblogger accused the battalion commander of failing to manage his forces and criticized the commander's belief that being able to shoot a gun is sufficient recovery from an injury.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-19-2025

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:24 AM

SECOND

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

'I think NATO is over': Retired general declares death of key U.S. alliance

By Sarah K. Burris | February 19, 2025 5:07PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-nato-2671184645/

For 76 years, NATO has prevented war, but not anymore, so long as Trump is President.

"Unfortunately, my own view is the damage is done," he said of Trump's failures in foreign policy. "It's now irrevocable. There's not a shred of rational argument among European powers to trust the United States' commitment to NATO and Article Five."

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 8:54 AM

SECOND

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

Zelenskyy commits cardinal sin: he tells the truth about Trump

All America’s allies know that Trump is trapped in a disinformation bubble, but Zelenskyy said it out loud

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/19/kyivs-white-house-wooing
-implodes-as-zelenskyy-tells-the-truth-about-trump

Trump, he observed, is “trapped in this disinformation bubble”. He was stating the obvious, but not even Zelenskyy could have known how fetid the air inside Trump’s bubble has become. Now we know.

Trump’s tirade on his own app, Truth Social, is a distillation of the greatest hits of Russian disinformation from the past three years. He said Zelenskyy was “A Dictator without Elections” (something Trump has never said about Putin) who had hoodwinked the Biden administration into a $350bn war of choice, which only “TRUMP” could fix. The president’s repeated references to himself in the third person and all caps erased any lingering doubts about the single unifying compulsion now driving Trump foreign policy.

The child who guilelessly points out the emperor has no clothes is the hero of the folk tale, but the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s story did not have a vast nuclear arsenal and the world’s mightiest army. Telling the truth is cathartic, but getting into a personal spat with Trump amid the dizzying euphoria of his restoration to the Oval Office risks serious damage to your country.

That begs the question: what will work with Trump now? He admires autocrats and is eager to please them, but that is not really an option for the world’s remaining democracies. The hope in western European capitals, based on patchy evidence from the first Trump term, is that if they can make discreet common cause with the calmer heads around Trump he can be gently steered away from his more extreme whims.

In that regard, they have some faith in Marco Rubio and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff. They may be able to talk the president out of his stated plan to own and ethnically cleanse Gaza, if only because it would be so disastrous for the US. But from the evidence of Trump’s rants, the poison about Ukraine has seeped deeper into the president’s nervous system.

Zelenskyy’s best option might be to persevere with the offer of an American share in Ukraine’s rare earths. Trump’s first offer was to take half of the spoils with no security guarantees in return. But the absurd opening offer is likely to be just part of his “art of the deal” brinkmanship. Further negotiations may distract him, like a dog with a bone, from his profound pro-Putin impulses.

It is a long shot. It is also an act of faith to believe this Trump episode in American history will eventually pass. But we are not even one month into his chaotic second term. For a country like Ukraine, facing an existential threat, it is going to be a very long four years.

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 9:55 AM

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

Ukraine’s capitulation means entire West fall - Polish Prime Minister

February 20, 2025, 07:12 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/tusk-ukraine-s-fate-will-decide-the-futur
e-of-the-west-50491669.html

A forced capitulation of Ukraine will amount to the collapse of the entire Western community, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X on Feb. 19.

His statement comes amid US-Russia negotiations in Riyadh and controversial remarks by Donald Trump, who echoed Russian propaganda claims and downplayed Ukraine’s role in the talks.

"A forced capitulation of Ukraine would mean a capitulation of the whole community of the West," he wrote.

Tusk emphasized that this outcome will have global consequences.

"And let no one pretend that they don’t see this," he added.

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

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 10:13 PM

THG

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Thursday, February 20, 2025 10:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Ukraine’s capitulation means entire West fall - Polish Prime Minister

February 20, 2025, 07:12 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/tusk-ukraine-s-fate-will-decide-the-futur
e-of-the-west-50491669.html

A forced capitulation of Ukraine will amount to the collapse of the entire Western community, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X on Feb. 19.

His statement comes amid US-Russia negotiations in Riyadh and controversial remarks by Donald Trump, who echoed Russian propaganda claims and downplayed Ukraine’s role in the talks.

"A forced capitulation of Ukraine would mean a capitulation of the whole community of the West," he wrote.

Tusk emphasized that this outcome will have global consequences.

"And let no one pretend that they don’t see this," he added.

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

I feel bad for Poland. They're one of the only few European countries that are keeping all the Democrats and Muslims and other gutter trash out of their country.

They celebrate the fact that whites are a minority in London now.

Europe was already invaded a long time ago.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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