Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Sunday, December 7, 2025 14:19
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PAGE 191 of 191

Saturday, December 6, 2025 3:45 PM

THG

Keep it real please

Russia Russia Russia...

T

Citizens flee homeland in massive exodus avoiding political persecution

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/citizens-flee-homeland-in-massive
-exodus-avoiding-political-persecution/vi-AA1RQnwA?ocid=msedgntp&pc=EDBBAN&cvid=418201d3c9554300af289be7b7a14d78&ei=61

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Saturday, December 6, 2025 8:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Everybody knows that Ukraine’s been crookeder thsn a dog's hind leg since 1991. How else did drug addict Hunter Biden get a cushy job on Burisma’s board? (“And 10% for the big guy.“)

Since everyone knows that Ukraine is MASSIVELY corrupt, why is it being made an issue just now?

Some say ... altho I've yet to see a proper investigation... that if you follow flow of money that occurred under Biden*, a fair bit gets cycled back to Eurocrats and USA Senators.

Quote:
Zelensky 'Systematically Sabotaged' Ukraine Anti-Corruption Efforts, NYT Concludes

Saturday, Dec 06, 2025 - 04:50 PM

Via The Cradle

Over the past four years, the Ukrainian government "systematically sabotaged" oversight of the country's state-owned companies and weapons procurement processes, "allowing graft to flourish," a freshly published New York Times investigation has revealed.

The investigation details how the government of Volodymyr Zelensky sidelined outside experts from the US and EU serving on advisory boards responsible for monitoring spending, appointing executives, and preventing corruption.
EPA/Shutterstock

"President Volodymyr Zelensky's administration has stacked boards with loyalists, left seats empty, or stalled them from being set up at all. Leaders in Kiev even rewrote company charters to limit oversight, keeping the government in control and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent without outsiders poking around," the NYT report says.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/world/europe/ukraine-corruption-zel
ensky.html

-----------

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

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Sunday, December 7, 2025 6:02 AM

SECOND

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

Putin Lives by a Code Trump Doesn’t Understand

Where Trump sees a deal, Putin sees submission.

By Andrew Ryvkin | December 6, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/12/putin-trump-misunder
standing/685167/

Donald Trump still doesn’t seem to have learned a thing about the Russian dictator he calls a friend. He’s tried all kinds of contradictory gambits in pursuit of peace in Ukraine: welcoming Vladimir Putin in Alaska, helping Kyiv blow up Russian oil refineries, offering Russia land it hasn’t been able to acquire militarily. None seems to have had much effect. The Kremlin is holding the line, and Trump can’t get through. On Thursday, Putin said that parts of the U.S. peace plan were unacceptable and that Russia would take Ukrainian land by force.

One reason may be that Trump and Putin are fundamentally incompatible personalities. Trump sees everything as a deal, and for Putin, any deal is a revelation of weakness. Trump is a creature of the Manhattan-real-estate world; Putin grew up amid the rubble of postwar Leningrad. Those Soviet courtyards formed him. In them, he internalized the rules of ponyatiya—an unwritten code, roughly translated as “the concepts,” or “the understandings,” that originated in Stalin’s Gulags and still governs much of life in Russia, regardless of who’s in power.

The ponyatiya of Putin’s youth generally meant never betraying your gang and always standing up for your friends. Putin still lives by these rules. He’s kept the same circle of friends since the 1980s—a good number of them are now billionaires—and no matter how badly they handle a situation, they are hardly ever punished. They’re in their 70s now, but they still play hockey together in what they call the “Night Hockey League,” or the NHL (they had custom jerseys made). Ponyatiya also meant never letting an insult go unanswered. Consider the defectors—not to mention the oligarchs, journalists, and dissidents who have displeased Putin—who have ended up dead.

Putin approaches foreign policy according to the same code. Hierarchy is absolute. The strong must be respected, and the weak must obey. The fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a man whose comedy performances Putin once enjoyed—is now leading a country that’s stopping Russia from reclaiming its imperial glory creates cognitive dissonance. A comedian is supposed to be feeble; a smaller nation without a nuclear arsenal is supposed to submit, and its people are supposed to stay silent.

By the same logic, Putin should regard an American president as equally powerful. Yet Trump has consistently presented himself as the weaker party.

For years, Trump was eager to prove that he had a great relationship with Putin. He courted the Russian leader with summits, diplomatic overtures, and long phone calls, even as the rest of the free world shunned him. Trump made no secret of his admiration, either. He called Putin a “genius” for moving troops to eastern Ukraine, praised him as tough, and at one point said that the Russian dictator was “outsmarting our country at every single step.” The media filled in the rest of the picture, suggesting that Trump was ready to concede America’s interests, principles, and allies for the sake of being accepted by an adversary. Putin may well have come to the same conclusion and, following the code of the streets, understood himself as dominant and the U.S. president as having relinquished his claim to Putin’s respect.

Sometimes, Putin lets his attitude toward Trump slip. At the 2018 U.S.-Russia summit, Trump publicly sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies. The Kremlin propagandist Pavel Zarubin—known for his unfettered access to the Russian president—got hold of the summit’s guestbook. Trump wrote, “Great Honor,” while Putin simply added his signature and the date. “Please don’t be angry; I understand that we could have talked more. It’s just awkward to keep others waiting—they’ll get upset,” Putin said of his upcoming call with Trump to the audience at Russia’s Strategic Initiative Forum this summer. To a Western ear, that doesn’t sound like much, but for someone like Putin—or any Russian street kid, for that matter—“getting upset” is a feminine trait. To apply it to a man is not courtesy; it’s an insult.

Trump has mostly approached the war in Ukraine as though it were a business transaction—a straightforward quid pro quo. The White House has repeatedly floated a list of proposals for Putin to end the war: recognition of Crimea as Russian, de jure control over parts of eastern Ukraine, and a package of economic incentives. The content of these offers matters less than the act of offering; in Putin’s world, initiating a deal is a sign of weakness. The moment Trump extends his hand, he marks himself as submissive and invites Putin to demand more. The better strategy would be to instead apply pressure and wait for Putin to make the first move. In dealing with Putin, in other words, Trump keeps thinking he’s entering a Manhattan boardroom, when in fact he’s walking into a Leningrad courtyard—and blinking first.

Putin has made mistakes in this relationship too, such as assuming that Trump is incapable of being tough on Russia. Before the latest peace proposal, the American president imposed sanctions on Russia’s top two oil companies, put a 50 percent tariff on India for purchasing Russian oil and weapons, and entered into talks with China about pressuring Moscow to end the war in Ukraine. In response, the Russian leader resorted to a show of force: He began appearing in military uniform, something he normally does only rarely, and issuing one nuclear threat after another.

Putin unveiled the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered cruise missile, at the end of October, and started talking about testing the weapon. He then sent Kirill Dmitriev, his economic envoy, to Washington on a bizarre charm offensive. Predictably, Dmitriev told U.S. reporters that sanctions weren’t hurting Russia’s economy. He also presented a box of chocolates stamped with quotes from Putin to Representative Anna Paulina Luna, one of the few people on Capitol Hill advocating for ending the war essentially on Russia’s terms.

Trump reacted to Putin’s saber-rattling by saying that Russia should end the war in Ukraine instead of testing a nuclear-powered missile—and added that the United States has a nuclear submarine positioned off Russia’s coast. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed Dmitriev on CBS News, calling him a “Russian propagandist.” After yet another of Putin’s threats, Trump announced that he would resume nuclear testing. That’s when Putin backed down: In an effort to ease tensions, his press secretary clarified that Russia would be testing nuclear engines, not warheads. It was the clearest example of the kind of approach that actually works on Putin.

Nevertheless, the 28-point peace plan Washington first presented late last month was a sweet deal for Putin and appeared to have been drafted with significant input from Moscow. It called for Ukraine to give up the Donbas, abandon its NATO ambitions, cap the size of its military, and hold elections within 100 days. It also offered amnesty to Russians accused of war crimes and invited Moscow back into the G8. But the U.S. was forced to seek European and Ukrainian input, and on December 2, the Kremlin predictably rejected the proposal, though negotiations haven’t yet come to a complete close.

If the talks end in failure, as seems probable, Trump may react with frustration and impose additional sanctions on Russia. Or, just as likely, he may show how little he’s learned by coming back with another deal. Nothing in the underlying dynamic—or the bloodshed—will change if Trump keeps assuming that Putin wants American investment, a G8 seat, and the Donbas more than he wants to destroy Ukraine.

One of the chocolates Dmitriev brought to the U.S. featured a quote from Putin that perfectly captured the Russian president’s worldview. It read, “If a fight is unavoidable, you have to hit first.” When Washington greets Putin with praise, it gets smiles, handshakes, and a reiteration of Moscow’s maximalist demands in return. Trump doesn’t have to become a friend to Ukraine, and he almost certainly never will. But he does need to learn how to deal with Putin. Only then will the Leningrad courtyard, with its unwritten rules, cease to be big enough for the both of them.

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

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Sunday, December 7, 2025 6:20 AM

SECOND

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

Weekend Update #162: The Best Week Since November 5, 2024

Phillips P. OBrien | Dec 07, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-162-the-best-wee
k

The Trump administration did a great favor to Ukraine and all of Europe this week. It stopped lying publicly about its position on both and made it all but impossible for European leaders to keep fantasizing about the USA riding to the rescue. In fact, if you look at the new US National Security Strategy, it is clear that Europe is now viewed as more threatening to the USA in Trump’s mind than either Russia or even China.

. . .

Also, the ranged war continues on in a familiar but pretty horrible pattern this week. The Russians launched another mass attack on Friday night against Ukrainian power supplies, causing blackouts. The Russians fired 653 drones and 51 missiles of which the Ukrainians were able to shoot down 585 drones and 30 missiles.

This is not a great rate of interception by the Ukrainians, meaning 68 drones and 21 missiles hit their targets. And the US, btw, is slow walking anti-air supplies to Ukraine, to help Russia as much as possible.

The Ukrainians, in return, launched a number of large UAV and possibly missile attacks on Russia (we are not sure how many missiles were used). The Ukrainians specifically mentioned targeting Russia’s large Ryazan refinery and also a steel factory which makes metal casings for shells, etc.

It is the mass differentiation between what Russia can do and what Ukraine can do that is most striking—and highlights why Europe knowing the truth is crucial. European states can and should do more now. Taurus for Ukraine would of course be important, but all anti-air help is also vital. Now that they know that Trump is not only with Putin but is also out to destroy the European system, hopefully European leaders will act.

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

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Sunday, December 7, 2025 7:05 AM

SECOND

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

2000 Meters to Andriivka (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

Download from https://yts.lt/movies/2000-meters-to-andriivka-2025

2000 Meters to Andriivka
2025 [UKRAINIAN]
Documentary / War

Available in:
720p.WEB | 1080p.WEB | 1080p.x265
WEB: same quality as BluRay

Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh
93% TOMATOMETER · 46 reviews
IMDb Rating 8.7/10

Plot summary

Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.

TRAILER

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

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Sunday, December 7, 2025 8:43 AM

SECOND

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

As Ukraine Fights Corruption, Trump Does the Opposite

Ukrainians want honest government, even as American and Russian kleptocrats circle their country.

By Anne Applebaum | December 7, 2025, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2025/12/ukraine-fighting-cor
ruption-trump/685162/

A few days ago I called Oleksandr Abakumov, a senior detective at the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. I wanted to ask him about his investigation into a kickback scheme in his country’s energy industry. While we were talking, I got interested in Abakumov himself. As he was explaining his motivations, I was struck by the surprising contrast between people like him—the Ukrainian civil servants and civil-society activists who have been demanding transparency from their leaders for two decades—and the American and Russian negotiators who met this week in Moscow, perhaps to decide Ukraine’s fate.

Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Drones and missiles hit Ukrainian cities most nights. Many Ukrainians nevertheless want, even now, to have a government that’s accountable to the public. Meanwhile, American and Russian kleptocrats are circling the country, looking for ways to do deals that benefit themselves.

Abakumov’s career was directly shaped by his country’s history. Until 2014, he was a police detective in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. At the beginning of that year, a series of mass protests in Kyiv persuaded Ukraine’s corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country. Furious at the loss of their puppet, the Russians immediately invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine, including Luhansk. Ukrainian elections brought a new president to power. Popular demand for reform led to the creation of new institutions, including the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, which has from the beginning intended to eliminate high-level state corruption.

Abakumov’s life changed too. He left occupied Luhansk and moved to Kyiv. In 2016, he went to work for NABU, taking a job that he considers to be a great honor. Certainly, NABU is popular: Last summer, after President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to shut the agency down, Ukrainians organized the largest mass protests the country has seen since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. The president changed his mind, and the agency remained open. The job also appeals to Abakumov’s patriotism. He believes that if he can help eliminate high-level corruption, then he can help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty and its democracy. “Corruption equals Russia, and we are not Russia,” he told me.

In their investigation, dubbed “Operation Midas,” Abakumov and his colleagues have accused several people in the government of taking money from contracts involving the state nuclear-power company—a particularly sensitive charge at a moment when many Ukrainians live without electricity, thanks to Russian bombing campaigns.

Foreign coverage of “Operation Midas” often relies on the passive voice, as if the scandal has a will of its own (“Scandal Consumes Top Aide”). But people such as Abakumov, who is a part of the Ukrainian state, worked to make the scandal public. They have interrogated cabinet ministers, published surveillance recordings, searched apartments. The Ukrainian Parliament has dismissed two ministers. Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky, has fled the country. Late last month, the president’s closest adviser, Andriy Yermak, resigned following a search of his apartment. All of this means that the political system is healthy, operating according to the law.

I should note that quite a few Ukrainians, and indeed many Europeans, believe that the investigation has somehow been assisted by the Trump administration, as a way of weakening Zelensky to force him to capitulate. Given that the Trump administration has stopped advocating for anti-corruption policies around the world and, following the closure of USAID, has dramatically decreased cooperation with Ukrainian law enforcement, this seems implausible.

Abakumov told me that he believes corruption, not transparency, weakens Ukraine. If Ukraine tolerates corruption, he said, “this is the way we lose, during the war, during negotiations, during rebuilding Ukraine.” Daria Kaleniuk, one of Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, told me that with this investigation, “we have the chance to save the country and make it stronger.”

These beliefs are radically different from those held by Ukraine’s opponents. From the beginning of his career, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, has sought to enrich himself and his entourage at the expense of ordinary Russians. Putin himself was a pioneer in the use of secret offshore accounts and shell companies to transfer state assets into his own pockets. He has also spent years seeking to prevent those ordinary Russians from finding out about his finances.

In January 2021, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny released a meticulously documented film, Putin’s Palace, which revealed a network of kickbacks and payments to the Russian president far larger, more far-reaching, and more baroque than the scandal under investigation in Ukraine. The result: Navalny, who had just been arrested at the Russian border, was sent to a Siberian prison, where he later died. Putin kept his palace, complete with its private hockey rink and hookah bar, and his money. He blocked all further investigations into his wealth, jailed protesters, drove real journalists out of the country, and launched an invasion of Ukraine.

The Americans taking part in the recent Moscow negotiations are not brutal dictators, but neither are they civil servants acting purely in the interests of transparency, accountability, and patriotism. Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the owner of an investment company that received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, are now conducting the main negotiations. Their Russian counterpart is Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund, which has strong ties with its Saudi counterpart. He is believed to have met Kushner while doing business in the Gulf.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal revealed that these three businessmen met in Miami Beach in October to discuss not just Ukraine but also future Russian-American business deals. Russian businessmen who are known to be close to Putin have been “dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals” in front of American companies, the Journal explained, to “reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.” Some of the companies have connections with Donald Trump’s family.

Witkoff and Kushner are not taking kickbacks on government contracts, as some Ukrainian officials are now accused of doing. The corruption they represent is more profound: They are using the tools of the American state in a manner that happens to benefit their friends and business partners, even while they do terrible damage to American allies, American alliances, and America’s reputation. This is a conflict of interest on a grand scale, with no real precedent in modern American foreign policy.

In Ukraine, the state itself is investigating the government, the cabinet, even the president’s closest advisers. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Kash Patel’s FBI investigating anyone in Trump’s White House. Any Russian who investigates Putin goes to jail. The word corruption has many nuances, and we aren’t using enough of them when we talk about Ukraine.

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

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Sunday, December 7, 2025 2:19 PM

SECOND

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

December 7, 2025 02:57 pm GMT

The Kremlin has welcomed Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy document and claimed it is “largely consistent with our vision”.

The US president unveiled a new framework for his administration’s foreign policy and defence priorities on Friday, at a time when many in Europe hold wider concerns that Washington has a pro-Russia bias.

The NSS largely ignores the threat Russia poses to the West and instead concentrates a lot of its content on targeting America’s allies in Europe.

It claims economic decline in the continent is “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” – while also claiming the EU’s activities “undermine political liberty and sovereignty”.

Much more at https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russias-reaction-to-trumps-new-
national-security-strategy-is-deeply-worrying_uk_69358773e4b0e3887427ce33

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

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