Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Friday, April 18, 2025 08:37
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VIEWED: 210280
PAGE 164 of 164

Monday, April 14, 2025 7:07 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine a hundred times

No, I have not.

And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.

You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, April 14, 2025 7:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

What is wrong with our generals???

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 6:13 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:
More BS from SECOND'S ridiculous sources.

'Everything we heard from Russians was a lie' — Chinese fighters captured by Ukraine speak out

By Kateryna Denisova April 14, 2025 11:46 PM

https://kyivindependent.com/everything-we-heard-from-russians-was-a-li
e-chinese-fighters-captured-by-ukraine-speak-out/

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 6:22 AM

SECOND

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

Trump blames Zelensky for starting war

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5q0mev07lo

Donald Trump has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a massive Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in Ukraine.

"You don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles," he told reporters at the White House, also blaming former US President Joe Biden for the conflict.

Trump's comments come after widespread outrage over Russia's attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which was the deadliest Russian attack on civilians this year.

The conflict in Ukraine goes back more than a decade, to 2014, when Kyiv's pro-Russian president was overthrown. Russia then annexed Crimea and backed insurgents in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 10:45 AM

SECOND

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

(US will fight as the Russians do. Trump is murdering civilians and gloating about it)

Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs to Reduce Civilian Casualties

The defense secretary’s focus on “lethality” could lead to “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law,” one Pentagon official said.

By Nick Turse | April 15 2025, 7:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-cas
ualties-harm/

The Pentagon had been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press, nongovernmental organizations, government-supported think tanks, and even the U.S. military itself.

But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.

The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.

On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties.

The Army also recently announced it will make law of war training — which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement — optional, in an effort to remove “unnecessary distractions” and increase focus on “decisive action in combat.”

This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on “lethality” and cuts to programs that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks and reports of civilian casualties in war zones like Somalia and Yemen spiked.

“There is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Basically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.”

The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth’s priorities might mean for the world. One of them mused that “lethality” might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”

CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the “CHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.”

Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under different names. But even one of those former officials said that the CHMR enterprise was likely to end up “stillborn,” unable to even complete the phased implementation first laid out in the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan — written at the direction of then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — that was released in 2022.

One official emphasized that CHMR’s core principles provide more benefits to the military than an overriding focus on lethality. “Shrinking or perverting it beyond recognition or getting rid of it altogether does a disservice to the men and women of the DoD and the institution itself, not to mention the American public,” that official said.

The Pentagon refuses to say whether Hegseth will rescind the CHMR instruction, which established the Pentagon’s policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to noncombatant casualties. “We have no new announcements to make regarding office closures or changes to policy at this time,” an unnamed Pentagon spokesperson replied, by email, to repeated detailed questions.

“Dismantling these efforts would undermine years of work to learn from past mistakes and improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm from its operations — work that actually began under the first Trump administration,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “Congress mandated many of these efforts through bipartisan legislation, and it must ensure that the programs it authorized and funded are not abandoned.”

Hegseth has made it clear that enhancing his department’s capacity to kill people is his number one priority. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We will revive the warrior ethos,” he announced. “We will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.”

As a Fox News personality, Hegseth — a former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq — cast troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” During Trump’s first term in office, Hegseth lobbied for pardons of Army Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, and championed Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, each of whom was charged or convicted of war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump granted pardons to Lorance and Golsteyn, and reversed a demotion of Gallagher, tagging Hegseth in a tweet announcing the review of one of the cases.

Hegseth takes a dim view of the Geneva Conventions, which form the foundation of the law of armed conflict, or LOAC, and remain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war by protecting civilians, wounded combatants, and prisoners of war, among others. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth asked, “Should we follow the Geneva conventions? … Aren’t we just better off in winning our wars according to our own rules?”

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that during his time in the military, “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a military lawyer, known as a JAG, made war-fighting more difficult. But rules of engagement, which provide instructions for the use of deadly force in military operations, are issued by a senior commander — not a JAG officer.

Bryant — who worked as a Special Operations joint terminal attack controller, or JTAC, and called in thousands of strikes against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups across the greater Middle East before serving as chief of civilian harm assessment — said that Hegseth has little grasp of the laws of war.

“In Hegseth, you have a Secretary of Defense who really does not understand LOAC. Every time I’ve heard him talking about his time in Afghanistan and the law of armed conflict, he’s talking about things that were not actually LOAC but policy,” said Bryant. “So, Hegseth blames all his experiences of being overly restricted in combat on military lawyers and LOAC — when the types of operational restrictions he has cited have nothing to do with lawyers, the law of armed conflict, or international law.”

The Signal Chat among senior Trump administration officials (and a journalist) discussing military strikes in Yemen revealed that the attack targeted a civilian residence in an effort to kill a Houthi target. It is one of more than 200 strikes conducted in Yemen by the Trump administration since the beginning of March, carried out in an attempt to force Houthi fighters to halt attacks on ships in the Red Sea, which the Houthis say is in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Local Yemeni authorities say more than 50 civilians have been killed in the attacks.

(Hegseth is currently under investigation for his use of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app. That inquiry is being conducted by Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins because Trump fired Robert Storch from his Senate-confirmed Pentagon inspector general role as part of his firings of 17 inspectors general across the government in January.)

Fifteen civilians were reportedly killed and at least 20 injured in strikes on March 15 and 16, alone, according to Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. “In just two days of strikes under the new Trump administration, U.S. forces reportedly killed half the number of civilians killed in a full year of strikes under Biden,” the group reported.

These strikes were conducted with CENTCOM’s civilian harm mitigation and response officers still on the job. “The CHMR team at U.S. CENTCOM continues to be focused on their assigned tasks. There has been no change to their status or work focus,” a nameless “defense official” told The Intercept by email. “We do not anticipate the DoD CHMR effort at CENTCOM being shutdown at this point.”

Trump also recently posted a black-and-white video showing more than 70 people gathered in a circle. An explosion occurs during the 25-second video, leaving a massive crater. “These Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack,” Trump claimed, without offering a location or any other details about the strike. “Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis!”

A former U.S. drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in the CENTCOM and Africa Command regions during the first Trump administration was skeptical of the vetting process that identified the targets in Trump’s video. “My suspicion is that it is very low. NAI — names, area of interest — and gatherings would be all that is required. This is not proper vetting, if this is what they are doing,” he told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity due to his nondisclosure agreements with the government. “Remember in his first term the whole of AFRICOM was shut down due to negligent strikes. They had multiple ‘missed’ strikes that killed civilians.”

After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks in Somalia tripled and U.S. military and independent counts of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones — including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen — increased. Since taking office a second time, Trump again rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional war zones.

During his first overseas trip as defense secretary, Hegseth met with senior AFRICOM leaders and signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes. “The president and the secretary of defense have given me expanded authorities,” Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of AFRICOM recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re hitting them hard. I now have the capability to hit them harder.”

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that one April 2018 attack on al-Shabaab militants in Somalia — conducted under Trump’s loosened rules — killed three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.”

The Pentagon’s inquiry into the attack that killed Luul and Mariam found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle. The U.S. strike cell members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male, killing Luul and Mariam in a follow-up attack as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the strike — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths. For more than six years, Luul and Mariam’s family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by AFRICOM, but did not receive a response.

When asked how the demise of CHMR would affect AFRICOM operations, spokesperson Kelly Cahalan punted. “CHMR is an OSD policy,” she told The Intercept, referring to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “We aren’t going to speculate about potential policy changes.”

Multiple sources, speaking on background, said that CENTCOM chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla had specifically advocated for civilian harm mitigation efforts, which the Washington Post previously reported, purportedly telling others that his CHMR officers were an integral part of the command’s operations. CENTCOM refused to offer comment. “We have nothing to provide you on this,” a “defense official” wrote in an email.

Some experts worry that the pending demise of CHMR, the firings of the judge advocates general, and loosened rules of engagement for drone strikes and commando raids is part of a broader push to shunt aside ethics and accountability across the military.

“The U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”

“We’re seeing a dramatic reversal of progress across the armed forces, which will ultimately undermine the United States’ strategic goals. Military success isn’t measured by the number of people the armed forces kill; it’s measured by winning carefully-planned battles designed to achieve a strategic military goal without causing needless destruction,” Daphne Eviatar, the director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “By emphasizing lethality and eliminating training on the laws of war, loosening rules of engagement and firing anyone with power to exercise oversight over U.S. armed forces, the U.S. is setting up its own warfighters to fail.”

Bryant voiced similar concerns about where the potential demise of CHMR efforts would ultimately lead. “I do worry about the direction that Hegseth and the Trump administration are going after this first step of dissolving the CHMR enterprise. Is this administration now going to try to change the warfighting culture and doctrinal standards of the U.S. military, and have us executing our next conflict more like Israel has carried out in Gaza?” he asked. “If we do get into a large-scale conflict — whether in Europe or China or elsewhere — will we not care one way or another about the civilian populace? Will our current low tolerance for civilian casualties and historically conservative application of ‘proportionality’ under international law be completely reversed?”

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

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Tuesday, April 15, 2025 3:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump blames Zelensky for starting war

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5q0mev07lo

Donald Trump has blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war with Russia – a day after a massive Russian attack killed 35 people and injured 117 others in Ukraine.

"You don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles," he told reporters at the White House, also blaming former US President Joe Biden for the conflict.

Trump's comments come after widespread outrage over Russia's attack on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Sunday, which was the deadliest Russian attack on civilians this year.

The conflict in Ukraine goes back more than a decade, to 2014, when Kyiv's pro-Russian president was overthrown. Russia then annexed Crimea and backed insurgents in bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine.

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

That's just silly. Barack Obama started that war. Zelensky is just a child rapist and former not-funny comedian.

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

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

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Wednesday, April 16, 2025 8:34 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 6ixStringJack:

That's just silly. Barack Obama started that war. Zelensky is just a child rapist and former not-funny comedian.

The Russians are not satisfied with only conquering Ukraine. Will Trump be blamed by you for what Russia does next?

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Head Sergey Naryshkin threatened a Russian attack against NATO states in response to NATO states building up their defenses in line with US President Donald Trump's push for Europe to increase its own defense capabilities. Naryshkin claimed on April 15 that NATO states are strengthening their positions on their borders with Belarus and Russia, including Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast.[19] Naryshkin claimed that Poland and the Baltic states "should understand" that the "first to suffer" in the event of "NATO aggression" against the Union State of Russia and Belarus will be the Polish and Baltic political circles that have spoken about building up their defenses along their borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad Oblast — although Naryshkin claimed that Russia "will certainly" inflict damage on the entire NATO bloc in this event.[20] Naryshkin claimed that European states, such as France, the UK, and Germany, are escalating the war in Ukraine, so Russia "needs to act preemptively" and "is ready for this."[21] Russian officials, including Putin, repeatedly threatened NATO in 2023 and 2024.[22] Naryshkin appears to be claiming that European efforts to shoulder more of Europe's own defense requirements and to defend against future Russian aggression — in line with Trump's calls for such efforts — are allegedly provocative and escalatory.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-15-2025

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

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Wednesday, April 16, 2025 9:43 AM

SECOND

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

Russia Jails Own Soldier For Surrendering in Ukraine

Apr 15, 2025 at 9:54 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-jails-soldier-surrendering-ukraine-205
9892

A Russian soldier has been jailed for 15 years for voluntarily surrendering to Ukrainian forces, marking the country's first such prosecution.

On Tuesday, a Russian military court in the country's Far East sentenced Roman Ivanishin, a serviceman from Sakhalin who had been deployed with the 39th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry for comment by email.

Why It Matters

Ivanishin is the first Russian soldier to face criminal prosecution for voluntarily surrendering in Ukraine in the war, according to the newspaper.

What To Know

Russian prosecutors had sought a 16-year prison term for the soldier, who surrendered to Ukrainian forces in June 2023. He was returned to Russia in January through a prisoner exchange after talks mediated by the United Arab Emirates, and subsequently charged with voluntary surrender, attempted voluntary surrender on at least one other occasion, and desertion.

After Ivanishin surrendered in Ukrainian forces in the Donetsk region, a video circulated in which he could be heard denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale of invasion and calling on fellow Russian soldiers to desert.

Ivanishin's trial was held behind closed doors. He denied all the charges, according to Kommersant.

Desertion and voluntary surrender have been persistent issues for Russia's military throughout President Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Both offenses carry severe penalties under Russian law—desertion is punishable by up to 10 years in prison, while voluntary surrender can result in a sentence of 10 to 15 years.

Last February, a Russian anti-war project named Get Lost, which was created to help Russia's men evade or escape conscription in Ukraine, said cases of desertion from the military had increased tenfold that year.

And in November, Russian investigative outlet iStories said an "entire regiment" of more than 1,000 soldiers deserted Russia's 20th Guards Motor Rifle Division stationed in Volgograd.

Russia is also reported to have forcibly sent hundreds of its military deserters to the front line in Ukraine. Some were held at gunpoint and were physically abused or detained for resisting, according to Verstka, an independent Russian news outlet.

What People Are Saying

Ivanishin's former colleagues told independent Russian news outlet Okno that the soldier "wasn't eager to go to war," but he feared persecution for refusing mobilization. He also didn't imagine that "it would be so brutal in Ukraine."

One of Ivanishin's relatives told Okno: "It was hell there, just hell, according to him. Not only are you fighting and don't understand what for, but your own people are setting you up all the time. They'll send you into an assault without support, or put you in a pit, or beat you up while you're drunk."

What Happens Next?

Ivanishin will serve his sentence in a maximum security facility.

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

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Wednesday, April 16, 2025 1:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

This isn't 2021. You don't get a multi-million NIKE deal for taking a knee anymore.

Besides, stupid, they don't give that to white people anyhow. They just tried to ruin your life if you didn't take a knee with the grifter who made more money in 2 years of grifting than the vast majority of us will ever see in our entire lives.

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

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

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 7:16 AM

SECOND

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

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces recently executed at least one unarmed Ukrainian prisoner of war (POW) near Rozdolne (northeast of Velyka Novosilka). The Ukrainian General Prosecutor's Office and Donetsk Oblast Prosecutor's Office reported on April 16 that there is footage of Russian forces taking three Ukrainian servicemembers prisoner near Rozdolne on April 11 and executing one of the unarmed Ukrainian POWs.[18] ISW has observed a sharp increase in credible reports and footage of Russian forces executing Ukrainian POWs throughout 2024 and 2025 and continues to assess that Russian military commanders are either complicit in or enabling their subordinates to conduct these executions in violation of international law.[19]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-16-2025

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

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 7:22 AM

SECOND

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

Russia Is Trying to Push River Borders

By Elisabeth Braw | April 16, 2025, 12:44 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/16/russia-estonia-narva-river-buoys-
borders/

Almost a year ago, Russian border guards removed half the buoys that had been placed to mark the border between Russia and Estonia in the Narva River. Estonia’s government has repeatedly (and politely) reminded Russia to return the buoys, without which users of the Narva River have no way of knowing on which side of the border they are. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Russia has failed to do so.

Altering maritime borders is no trivial matter—especially when Russia is using force to try to redraw the map of Europe.

The Russian border guards arrived in the middle of the night between May 22 and 23, 2024. When they left, they took with them 24 buoys marking Estonia’s border with Russia along the Narva River. Although maritime borders are typically marked only on naval charts, not through visible cues, such buoys have long demarcated the two countries’ maritime border and allow anyone using the Narva River to know which side of the border they are on—which is particularly important for Estonians being careful not to stray into Russian waters.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the arrangement worked satisfactorily. Since riverbeds shift, every spring—just before the summer season, when all manner of anglers, small-boat owners, and canoeists use the river—the two sides would assess the Narva’s riverbed and correspondingly adjust the light buoys marking the border.

Last spring, Estonia repeated the procedure the way it has done every year. But there was one major difference: In 2023, Russia had declared that it disagreed with Estonia’s proposed positioning of the buoys. So last year, “we decided to release the floating marks into the water for the summer season according to the 2022 agreement, because they are necessary to avoid navigational errors, so that our fishermen and other hobbyists do not accidentally wander into Russian waters,” Eerik Purgel, the head of the Estonian Border Guard Bureau of the East Prefecture, said in a statement.

Russia, though, objected to the locations of around half of the planned 250 floating marks. What to do? Estonia decided to install the buoys anyway, in Estonian waters, on the basis of the border as it had been agreed in 2022. On May 13, 2024, Estonian authorities installed the first 50 buoys. Nine nights later, the Russian border guards removed half of them. Because the buoys were on the Estonian side, fetching them involved Russian guards intruding into Estonian waters to execute the removal.

Since then, they’ve been gone. Estonia could put them back, but Russia would simply take them away again. Instead, Estonia has been asking Russia to put the buoys back, arguing that they form the official marking of a legitimate border. Russia, alas, has not complied. The maritime border (or rather, its visible part) is gone.

Imagine if Russia or another country had unashamedly removed border markings on land. We’d notice it; in fact, it would be a huge deal, especially if it involved a NATO member state. But until now, water has been different, the borders more flexible and less visible.

Since the early 2010s, China has exploited the world’s lack of attention to maritime borders by starting to build artificial islands in parts of the South China Sea that belong to the Philippines and other countries. It was a blatant violation of internationally agreed borders, but since the construction proceeded gradually, a few concrete layers at a time, no one could think of what, exactly, to do about the violation.

Turning to an arbitral tribunal under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, as the Philippines did, changed nothing: Even though the tribunal unanimously sided with Manila, China simply ignored the ruling. Now China possesses artificial islands, complete with military installations, in these waters.

The buoys place Estonia in a conundrum. Russian nationalists have long indicated that they want to retake the Baltic states, annexed by force in 1940 and not freed until 1991, and they have plenty of advocates in the Kremlin. Removing border buoys is hardly the equivalent of a full-blown invasion, but it’s also not a negligible act. It is, in other words, gray-zone aggression—or, as former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves calls it, geopolitical microaggression. “It’s another silly game the Russians play,” he told me. “Just in the past few months, we’ve seen them put explosives in sex toys in Lithuania, we’ve seen the shadow fleet, we’ve seen cable cuts, and at the moment there’s a lot of GPS jamming in Estonia. It’s a constant policy of harassment. They’re letting us know that they’re there and can be a problem.”

“Russia only understands one thing, and that’s power,” one senior officer said.

Removals of maritime borders are far from the only Russia-related headache in the Baltic region these days. For the past 18 months or so, nations in the region have been affected by GPS jamming, most of which originates in Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. Last year, Estonian authorities received 307 official reports of aviation disruptions, 85 percent of which related to GPS. The cause appears to be Russian jamming to protect its military installations, Estonian authorities say.

Regardless of the cause, GPS disruption poses a risk to aviation. Estonian authorities say civil aviation in Estonian airspace remains safe—if only because pilots and air traffic controllers know how to navigate without GPS. “Fortunately, there was a time before GPS, and people still remember the procedures and the equipment that ensure safety and navigational capability,” Mihkel Haug, a member of the board of the Estonian Air Navigation Services, told public broadcaster ERR News.

And this spring, Polish authorities uncovered Russian-steered aggression involving explosive-laden sex toys. The Polish authorities allege that on instructions from a GRU officer, a Ukrainian residing in Poland had inserted explosives into cosmetics, pillows, and sex toys; driven to Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital; and handed them over to a woman also working for Russia, whose task was to get the items to different places in the region where they would explode and harm, even kill, people.

Last fall, parcel bombs were discovered in airliner facilities in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Poland; prosecutors and intelligence agencies linked the parcels to Russia and said some of the parcels originated in Lithuania, though it’s not clear whether they too had been handled by the as-yet-unidentified woman with the sex toy explosives.

Compared with the risk of explosions, heaven forbid aviation accidents, the removal of maritime border markers may seems manageable. But a border is a border, even if it’s in the water. If Russia can remove the Narva buoys with impunity, it’s likely to conclude that it can disregard or alter other maritime borders, too. The removal of border buoys, though, falls short of the military attacks that NATO was set up to counter, and so does other gray-zone aggression.

“Even getting something onto the NATO agenda as an Article 4 matter is big,” Ilves said. “Even when we were targeted by the big cyberattack in 2007, we were blocked from putting it on the NATO agenda. Whenever we raise issues like these at NATO, we’re being told that it’s just below the level of outright aggression.” NATO’s Article 4 states that the “Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.”

In The Defender’s Dilemma, I set out ways in which the Western alliance can better detect and counter gray-zone aggression. Many of them include building and enhancing societal resilience. When I wrote the book, I didn’t think of border buoys as vulnerable to gray-zone aggression, but societal resilience can help there, too. Imagine if Russia (or China, for that matter) tried to alter another maritime border and ordinary citizens turned up in such numbers that taking action would result in civilians being harmed or even killed. Ilves has another solution: Europe, he said, needs an organization that focuses on threats that don’t quite meet the level of collective defense under NATO’s Article 5.

Either way, Estonia’s border buoys belong along its side of the maritime border with Russia. If we keep highlighting the issue, the Kremlin might just decide that altering the border isn’t worth the price.

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

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 2:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Urainian officials reported ...

= trashcan

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 2:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The one good thing about SECOND scouring the internet for anti-Russia stories is that I can catch up on the bullshit in one easy scanning.

AURAPTOR was good like that, too. If I wanted to know what Limbaugh dittoheads were saying on any particular day I could always count on him to tell me.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Thursday, April 17, 2025 2:39 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Meanwhile,

"... a lot of changes on the ground because Russia improved their position along the entire line of contact"

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 18, 2025 7:43 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Is Helping Putin Kill Ukrainians

Trump refuses to sell Patriot missiles for Ukrainian Air Defense

By Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 16, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-is-helping-putin-kill-ukr
ainians

When I wrote in early March, “The Week The USA Started Killing Ukrainians”, some people said it went too far. They said that the US not aiding Ukraine was not the same as killing Ukrainians, that Trump still wanted a deal, etc, etc. Well, it turns out that I did not go far enough.

Just in the last few days we have incontrovertible proof of how Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians—both some now and many more in the future. Its the combination of what the US will not sell Ukraine (even though Ukraine has the money to buy them), the Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and how the two come together. Let’s start with what came out in the last few days.

Ukraine is desperate to purchase Patriot anti-air missiles, as the Ukrainians are running out of this vital system. These were provided (too late) by the Biden Administration in 2023. From the moment they appeared, however, they revealed themselves to be the most effective air-defense weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal. The Ukrainians have used them to great effect—shooting down some of Russia’s most advanced aircraft and, crucially, some of Russia’s most difficult to shoot down missiles that have been fired against Ukrainian cities. Indeed, the Patriots have proven quite effective against Russian Kinzhal missiles, which the Kremlin used to boast could not be intercepted.

Having Patriots allowed the Ukrainians to keep the power on during the Russian Winter attacks in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. However, they are very expensive to use. Zelensky claimed in February that 10 Patriot missiles were fired to bring down 6 Russian ballistic missiles—and that the cost of the Patriots was around $30 million.

In sum, these are a very effective but expensive system. They have made Ukraine much safer than it would be otherwise.

And the very effectiveness of the Patriots has provided Trump with a weapon to help kill Ukrainians. Even being sparing in their usage, Ukraine is running out. Patriots are an American system and the USA has been the source of most of the missiles. Right now there is no new US aid on its way to Ukraine. All we have had in 2025 is the left-over amounts of Biden Administration aid, whereas Trump and the GOP Congress have made no efforts to get any more aid for Ukraine—and that reality is not changing.

Russia understands this and is trying to make Ukraine use up all of its Patriots missiles. In the last few weeks the Russians have been using some of their advanced ballistic missiles against Ukrainian civilian targets, from Sumy last week (see picture above) to Kryvyi Rih the week before, to Dobropillia a little before that.

This seems very much to be a deliberate, targeted campaign to terrorize Ukrainian civilians and force the Ukrainians to use up their dwindling stock of Patriot missiles.

And it is working. The Ukrainians are desperately trying to get their hands on more Patriots—and its reached the stage that they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get more. Zelensky told CBS news that he wanted to buy up to 10 new Patriot systems and their missiles, which would be a major win for the US defense economy. Zelensky said he wanted to buy 10 U.S.-made Patriot systems — worth $1.5 billion each — to shield Ukrainian cities from relentless Russian missile and drone strikes.

"We will find the money and pay for everything," Zelensky said, stressing that Ukraine is prepared to purchase, not request for free, the $15 billion package.

Trump is refusing to sell them—even though that would benefit US workers and help the US economy. Indeed, in the last few days he has started boasting about the fact that Ukraine is desperate to buy more Patriots, and he is refusing to make a deal. Two days ago he told an Oval Office press conference:

Quote:
"He's always looking to purchase missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles."

And it was just reported in Das Bild that the EU made it known that they would support a $50 billion weapons purchase for Ukraine from the USA—including Patriots. Trump has refused to sell to Ukraine, at any price. https://glavnoe.in.ua/en/news-en/trump-refused-to-support-ukraine-even
-in-exchange-for-50-billion-from-the-eu-bild

Remember months ago, when those who said that Trump would definitely be willing to help Ukraine by selling them weapons? Well it turns out that was another lie.

So here we have it. The USA (Trump is the duly elected president with the support of Congress—so this is the official position of the US government) is now working together with the Russian government to see more Ukrainians killed. The USA is encouraging a Russian missile campaign against Ukrainian civilians by letting the Russians know that the US will deprive Ukraine of the means to defend those civilians and no longer provide Ukrainian Patriots.

So, the next time a Russian missile lands in a Ukrainian city and bodies litter the streets, realize this is an act that is being encouraged and supported by the USA. The USA is no longer a defender of democracy in Europe, it is an enabler of dictatorship and death.

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

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Friday, April 18, 2025 8:37 AM

SECOND

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

The Kremlin is adopting increasingly threatening rhetoric towards Europe aimed at preventing Europe from supporting Ukraine and defending itself. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova warned on April 17 that Russia will consider any missile strike with German Taurus missiles against Russia to be Germany's direct participation in the war in Ukraine.[15] Zakharova also threatened Estonia, mirroring Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Head Sergey Naryshkin's recent threat that Poland and the Baltic States would be the "first to suffer" in the event of "NATO aggression" against Russia or Belarus.[16] The Kremlin has repeatedly used similar threats against Western states sending military aid to Ukraine as part of Russia's wider reflexive control campaign to influence Western decision-making and deter aid to Kyiv, including nearly identical threats against the US regarding allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with ATACMS.[17] The Kremlin likely seeks to portray European efforts to augment both European and Ukrainian defensive capabilities as provocative in order to push European countries into self-deterring from providing Ukraine with additional military support and bolstering European defensive capabilities.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-17-2025

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

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