REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, November 21, 2024 22:01
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 152140
PAGE 120 of 150

Sunday, February 25, 2024 5:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Avdeevka Denouement: Russian Momentum Turning Point

A lot of revealing things have come to light in the continuing coverage of the Avdeevka denouement. For the first time, the U.S. mouthpiece was forced to acknowledge Russia is having success:
http://stream.mux.com/MERZySxu01XJGdmW5d3bTiZl7e78G9uryfXK3Kp02I11E.m3
u8


This was followed by a series of MSM articles that blew the lid on some of the true losses incurred by the AFU at the final collapse.

The ... WaPo article begins with:

KYIV — Ukraine failed to safely evacuate all its troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka during its disorderly retreat last weekend, despite claims from its new top military commander that the move was designed to save lives and avoid encirclement by the advancing Russians.

But the most shocking report came from NYTimes which stated that soldiers close to the action confirmed upwards of 850-1000 AFU were captured during the chaotic retreats.

So why is this so shocking? Beyond the simple admission of such a huge amount of captures in merely a day or two, the most profound thing is that it confirms Russian figures, which I reported last time. I wrote that Russian sources said at least 500+ had been captured, and pro-UA accounts had scoffed at this number. Thus, if this proves that Russian estimates of captures were accurate, it means Russia’s other even more critical figures are likely accurate as well—for instance, about total AFU losses in Avdeevka.

Shoigu gave the figure as 2,400 casualties just in the final two days of the collapse:

And as for Russia? Shoigu reported the final capture of Avdeevka happened with “minimal losses” on the Russian side:


Some would laugh at the disparity—but as I said, NYTimes already grudgingly proved Russia is giving accurate figures. For anyone who’s been watching the many ‘clean up’ videos that have streamed out post-liberation, you’ve likely seen the mountains of AFU corpses being cleared by Russian forces.
...

Ultimately, MediaZona has Russia averaging something like 200 weekly dead across the entire war since early October, when the Avdeevka offensive began.


Starting Oct 1, and including all of February (which hasn't happened yet) that's about 21 weeks, or 4,200 dead. At the usual rate 3 wounded for each death, that's about 17,000 total casualties across the entire front. I'm sure the figures for January and February will be revised upwards, but probably won't increase the total by more than 15%.

Quote:
[But] the remarkable thing is that the losses for Ukraine appeared to be so grave, that it seems to have set off a downward spiral of panic and collapse. Figures all across the pro-UA side are now ringing alarm bells. For instance, White House spokesman Sabrina Singh said that if aid is not given soon, Ukraine will have to start choosing “which cities they can or can’t defend”:


There are panic-stricken calls for action from within and outside of Ukraine, with dire predictions of collapse


Quote:
The auto-translation messes up a little at the end, but he essentially states that “Russia is rotating troops back and forth everywhere, from Avdeevka, Kupyansk, Rabotino, etc.”:


One running theme has been that with ISR on both sides, "surprises" are impossible. But Ukraine was recently surprised by a Russian offensive in central Donetsk when they were expecting an offensive in the north, near Kupiansk.

The reality is that Russia has so many forces on all five fronts, they can attack on any direction, while Ukraine has to constantly anticipate where to send it's troops to plug the next potential hole.

For example, the AFU pulled troops from the south Zaparozhiy front to bolster Avdeevka, abandoning Krynky and leaving Rabotyno and surround almost undefended.

MORE, MUCH MORE, AT https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/avdeevka-denouement-russian-moment
um

Wherever you see a : a link to original sources follows. Simplicius is extremely good at getting to original sources, well worth following up.

Also, a reminder of what is where





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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 2:16 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


So, according to Vicki Nuland (mother of Project Ukraine and Biden* employee) if Russia gets its $60 billion then it will use that money to serve up some "nasty" "asymmetric" "surprises" again Russia.
And if Budanov holds true to form, that would mean more assassinations (like Daryana Dugina), more attacks on civilians (Ukraine is wasting its HIMARS missiles on civilians in Dontesk City), long-range drone attacks on Moscow office buildings, as well as drone and missile attacks against legitimate military targets like the Russian Black Sea fleet, military airports, and refineries.

That's an admission that the conventional war is lost, and any talk about an offensive in 2025 is just whistling past the graveyard.

But if I were a die-hard neocon, and Project Ukraine was the one thing I'd staked my career on for the past 20 years (like Vicki Nuland) I'd be hoping to get my hands on some of that Russian $300 billion and start attacking Russia directly with every long range missile I could buy, borrow, or beg from any military, our own or allied, stupid enough to trigger a more direct "kinetic" version of WWIII.

Our people in charge aren't thinking, they're obsessed.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 2:53 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


No shit, Sherlock.

Don't forget that the CIA and State Dept work hand-in-glove, with embassies often serving as stations in many nations.

And I would say that my supposition of what Vicki Nuland "wants" to do is a good description of what's been happening for years.

Quote:
CIA Built "12 Secret Spy Bases" In Ukraine & Waged Shadow War For Last Decade, Bombshell NYT Report Confirms

On Sunday The New York Times published an explosive and very belated full admission that US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making
`Including attacks on Russia itself
Quote:
but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago.

Among the biggest revelations is that the program was established a decade ago
2014. Gee, what a shock. Vicki Nuland had been working on that coup for over a decade by then. It was a coup with a purpose.

Quote:
and spans three different American presidents. The Times says the CIA program to modernize Ukraine's intelligence services has "transformed" the former Soviet state and its capabilities into "Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today."

This has included the agency having secretly trained and equipped Ukrainian intelligence officers spanning back to just after the 2014 Maidan coup events, as well constructing a network of 12 secret bases along the Russian border—work which began eight years ago.
So, we weren't provoking Russia?

Quote:
These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders' communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory.

This means that with the disclosure of the longtime "closely guarded secret" the world just got a big step closer to WW3, given it means the CIA is largely responsible for the effectiveness of the recent spate of attacks which have included direct drone hits on key oil refineries and energy infrastructure.

CIA fomenting WWIII.

Quote:
"Without them [the CIA and elite commandoes it's trained], there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them," according to Ivan Bakanov, former head of the SBU, which is Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency.

A main source of the NYT revelations —disclosures which might come as no surprise to those never willing to so easily swallow the mainstream 'official' narrative of events —is identified as a top intelligence commander named Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy.

So, why would a top UKRAINIAN intelligence commander reveal all of these secrets? Is he effectively "burning" the CIA?

Quote:
Clearly, Kiev and Washington now want world to know of the deep intelligence relationship they tried to conceal for over the past decade. It is perhaps a kind of warning to Moscow at a moment Ukraine's forces are in retreat: the US is fighting hand in glove with the Ukrainians.

And yet the revelations contained in the NY Times report also confirm what President Putin has precisely accused Washington of all along.

While the lengthy NYT report is full of fresh revelations and confirmation of just how deeply the CIA has always been involved in Ukraine, below are seven of the biggest contained in the story...

Description of secret spy bunker
The report contains a surprisingly detailed description of one of the 'secret' underground command centers established by the CIA near the Russian border... location undisclosed of course:

"Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.
The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.
There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the CIA."

Elite commando force
Within two years after the 2014 West-backed coup in Ukraine, the CIA had set up a training program for elite Ukrainian operatives:
"Around 2016, the CIA began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)
And the CIA also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence."

Ukraine transformed into an "intelligence-gathering hub"
The US intelligence network in Ukraine (which is tantamount to NATO intelligence network too) has in reality been more extensive than pretty much all prior media speculation has envisioned. Ukraine has long been a massive "intelligence gathering hub" for Washington and its partners:

"In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the CIA station in Kyiv, Ukraine, could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.
Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the CIA may have to scale back.

Pobtecito!

Quote:
Huge NYT admission that Putin was basically right
Below is a hugely ironic excerpt from the Times report. The section begins by noting that Putin has repeatedly blamed the US-NATO for expanding its military and intelligence infrastructure into Ukraine. Not only had this precisely been going on for the past decade, as is now being admitted, but was presented by the Kremlin as a key cause of the Russian invasion of Feb.24, 2022. Putin and his officials were adamant on the eve of the invasion that NATO was militarizing Ukraine. The Times appears to now fully admit that, yes - this was actually the case:

"Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.
...U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin. Yet a tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the CIA and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans. In 2015, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, then Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, arrived at a meeting with the CIA’s deputy station chief and without warning handed over a stack of top-secret files.

2014 Coup ... and Crimea
The report indirectly references this very critical period which set Ukraine and Russian on their tragic collision course:
"With violence escalating, an unmarked U.S. government plane touched down at an airport in Kyiv carrying John Brennan, then the director of the CIA. He told Nalyvaichenko that the CIA was interested in developing a relationship but only at a pace the agency was comfortable with, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
To the CIA, the unknown question was how long Nalyvaichenko and the pro-Western government would be around. The CIA had been burned before in Ukraine.
...The result was a delicate balancing act. The CIA was supposed to strengthen Ukraine’s intelligence agencies without provoking the Russians. The red lines were never precisely clear, which created a persistent tension in the partnership."

Operation Goldfish
Money and advanced tech given by the CIA has allowed the Ukrainians to establish eavesdropping operations far beyond what they would otherwise be capable of. All the while, elite commando teams were being trained by the CIA in European cities as part of a program called 'Operation Goldfish'. The NYT reporting includes a bit of a 'boast' of the Ukrainians now being able to hack into Russian military networks:
" In the bunker, Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the CIA. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications networks.
“This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,” Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.
...The CIA began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.

A stunning admission: "Tiptoeing Around Trump"
Among the most interesting and curious moments of the NYT report is a description of the CIA program's expanse under the Trump administration. The report suggests that the true scope may have even been hidden from Trump.


"MAY have been"?
That Trump_ Russia_collusion hoax was probably designed to both distract Trump from learning what his supposed underlings were doing, and also defang any possible attempts on Trump's part to repair relations with Russia by poisoning the concept from the start. It was important to get Flynn out of the way first because Flynn was probably the only one who had an idea what was being done, how it was being done, and who was doing it.

Quote:
The Russian hawks in his administration quietly did the 'dirty work', we are told:
"The election of Trump in November 2016 put the Ukrainians and their CIA partners on edge.
Trump praised Putin and dismissed Russia’s role in election interference. He was suspicious of Ukraine and later tried to pressure its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to investigate his Democratic rival, Biden, resulting in Trump’s first impeachment."
The report then emphasizes, "But whatever Trump said and did, his administration often went in the other direction. This is because Trump had put Russia hawks in key positions, including Mike Pompeo as CIA director and John Bolton as national security adviser."
And further, "They visited Kyiv to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to include more specialized training programs and the building of additional secret bases." Given the attempt to place Trump in a negative light (he had to be 'tiptoed around'...), it will be interesting to see how he and his campaign respond to the report. But more consequential will be the reaction of Putin and the Kremlin in the coming days.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/cia-built-12-secret-spy-bases-u
kraine-waged-shadow-war-last-decade-bombshell-nyt

As an aside, those USA biolabs in Ukraine were probably more significant than anyone gave them credit for, too.

The CIA directly interfered with our election results.
In another article, many former CIA officers (Is there EVER a "former" officer) manage Google, Meta and other social media content.
No wonder they hate Musk!

Quote:
Google & Meta function as extensions of the US Intelligence Community. With Jacqueline Lopour, Google's Head of Trust & Safety, and Aaron Berman, Meta's Head of Elections Content/Misinformation Policy, both being career CIA officers, it underscores the CIA's substantial control over online censorship.…

"Why are career CIA officers like Jacqueline Lopour & Nick Rossmann, who both have a history of spreading misinformation & promoting the RussiaGate conspiracy theory, now in senior roles in Trust & Safety at Google, deciding what is misinformation & overseeing content moderation?

The cumulative number of former Intelligence Community personnel hired by Meta & Google since 2018 is staggering. Before 2018, there were only a handful. Here are the combined hires by both companies:
CIA-36
FBI-68
NSA-44
DHS/CISA-68
State Dept-86
DOD-121"
Why would Google specifically choose these six senior executives to attend an @ISF_OSAC event in DC?

Everyone in this picture, alongside former CIA Director Robert Gates, is a current senior executive at Google & a former career CIA officer, except for the attorney from Perkins Coie (2nd from the left):


MORE, MUCH MORE, AT https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cia-trust-safety-silicon-valley-us
-intel-revolving-door-bigger-you-thought


So it appears our foreign policy, our President, and our media are controlled by the CIA. I imagine our Congresspeople are too. What did Chuck Schumer say? The CIA has "six way from Sunday" tobgetvat people who go agianst them? And, how would he know??

I don't understand the purpose of these revelations. The only thing I can figure is that Vicki Nuland, Burns et al are laying their cards on the table because they desperately need that $60billion. Not to carry on the fight to 2025, but to get the hell out.

Because, despite their dirty tricks against Russia, pressure and even dirty tricks against our presumed allies (WHO blew up Nordstream, again?), CONSTANT gaslighting and censoring of us Americans ... Russia is POUNDING UKRAINE INTO THE GROUND. THINGS ARE FALLING APART AROUND THEM. Their control over our media, Trump, the economic situation at home and the military situation abroad (and not just in Ukraine) is unraveling.

And all of those fancy bunkers filled with fancy equipment and "eyes only" info on sources and methods, and highly trained Russian-speaking spies are about to be overrun or bombed out of existance.

If they are willing to let this particular cat out of the bag, they must be butt-puckeringly desperate. And I wonder, of course, what else they have to hide, because I'm sure this isn't their only game.

So, what will Russia do?
What will The House?
What will Trump?
And what will the Americzn people?

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 6:30 AM

SECOND

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


Russian officials and state-run and state-affiliated TV channels likely refrained from commenting on the two-year anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion to avoid drawing attention to Russia’s failures to achieve its stated strategic goals in Ukraine and its more immediate goals of seizing all of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, while also suffering high personnel losses.

Russian opposition outlet Agentstvo Novosti reported on February 25 that Russian state TV channels Rossiya 1 and Channel One (Perviy Kanal) and Gazprom Media-owned TV channel NTV did not mention the two-year anniversary of the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in broadcasts on February 24.[1]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-25-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 6:40 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


It boggles the mind, SECOND, how you can find so many lies to post.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 6:52 AM

SECOND

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


Denmark ends Nord Stream blast investigation but concludes deliberate sabotage at play

Denmark on Monday said it had dropped its investigation into the explosions in 2022 on the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Germany, becoming the second nation to do so after Sweden also closed a separate probe, Reuters reports.

The multi-billion dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of blasts in the Swedish and Danish economic zones in September 2022, releasing vast amounts of methane into the air.

Russia and the West, at loggerheads over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February that year, have pointed fingers at one another. Each has denied any involvement and no one has taken responsibility.

"There is not sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case in Denmark ... and therefore the Copenhagen Police has decided to conclude the criminal investigation of the explosions," Denmark's police said in a statement.

Police added that they believe there was deliberate sabotage of the gas lines.

Sweden earlier this month dropped its investigation into the explosions saying it lacked jurisdiction in the case but had handed evidence uncovered over to German investigators, which are yet to publish any findings.

The Kremlin has responded to a decision made by Denmark to drop its investigation into the 2022 Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosions, saying it was “close to absurdity.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Denmark had recognised that the blasts had been an act of premeditatd sabotage, but had decided not to go further with the investigation anyway because the case involved Copenhagen’s close allies.

He said Denmark had refused requests to provide information about its investigation.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/feb/26/russia-ukraine-war-
live-missiles-drones-kharkiv-dnipropetrovsk-eu-leaders-summit-elysee-zelenskiy

I think Ukraine sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines to cut off a Russian stream of revenue supporting the war. Ukraine should sabotage empty crude oil carriers headed for Russia, again to cut off another revenue stream, but unlike the two pipelines, there are thousands of moving carriers, making sabotage thousands of times more difficult than pipelines. And the crude oil carriers are not owned by Russia. Russia owned the Nord Stream pipelines. Sabotaging carriers not owned by Russia would be unjustifiable unless Ukraine first declared war officially on the true owners of the carriers.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 7:27 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
CIA Built "12 Secret Spy Bases" In Ukraine & Waged Shadow War For Last Decade, Bombshell NYT Report Confirms

On Sunday The New York Times published an explosive and very belated full admission that US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making
`Including attacks on Russia itself
Quote:
but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago.

Among the biggest revelations is that the program was established a decade ago
These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders' communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory.

This means that with the disclosure of the longtime "closely guarded secret" the world just got a big step closer to WW3, given it means the CIA is largely responsible for the effectiveness of the recent spate of attacks which have included direct drone hits on key oil refineries and energy infrastructure.

CIA fomenting WWIII.

Quote:
... [T]he revelations contained in the NY Times report also confirm what President Putin has precisely accused Washington of all along.
... Putin was basically right

Below is a hugely ironic excerpt from the Times report. The section begins by noting that Putin has repeatedly blamed the US-NATO for expanding its military and intelligence infrastructure into Ukraine. Not only had this precisely been going on for the past decade, as is now being admitted, but was presented by the Kremlin as a key cause of the Russian invasion of Feb.24, 2022. Putin and his officials were adamant on the eve of the invasion that NATO was militarizing Ukraine. The Times appears to now fully admit that, yes - this was actually the case:

"Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the CIA, together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

...

Operation Goldfish
Money and advanced tech given by the CIA has allowed the Ukrainians to establish eavesdropping operations far beyond what they would otherwise be capable of. ...

" In the bunker, Dvoretskiy pointed to communications equipment and large computer servers, some of which were financed by the CIA. He said his teams were using the base to hack into the Russian military’s secure communications networks.
“This is the thing that breaks into satellites and decodes secret conversations,” Dvoretskiy told a Times journalist on a tour, adding that they were hacking into spy satellites from China and Belarus, too.

...The CIA began sending equipment in 2016, after the pivotal meeting at Scattergood, Dvoretskiy said, providing encrypted radios and devices for intercepting secret enemy communications.

A stunning admission: "Tiptoeing Around Trump"
Among the most interesting and curious moments of the NYT report is a description of the CIA program's expanse under the Trump administration. The report suggests that the true scope may have even been hidden from Trump.


"MAY have been"?
That Trump_ Russia_collusion hoax was probably designed to both distract Trump from learning what his supposed underlings were doing, and also defang any possible attempts on Trump's part to repair relations with Russia by poisoning the concept from the start. It was important to get Flynn out of the way first because Flynn was probably the only one who had an idea what was being done, how it was being done, and who was doing it.

MUCH MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/cia-built-12-secret-spy-bases-u
kraine-waged-shadow-war-last-decade-bombshell-nyt

As an aside, those USA biolabs in Ukraine were probably more significant than anyone gave them credit for, too.

The CIA directly interfered with our election results.
In another article, many former CIA officers (Is there EVER a "former" officer) manage Google, Meta and other social media content.
No wonder they hate Musk!

Quote:
Google & Meta function as extensions of the US Intelligence Community. With Jacqueline Lopour, Google's Head of Trust & Safety, and Aaron Berman, Meta's Head of Elections Content/Misinformation Policy, both being career CIA officers, it underscores the CIA's substantial control over online censorship.…

"Why are career CIA officers like Jacqueline Lopour & Nick Rossmann, who both have a history of spreading misinformation & promoting the RussiaGate conspiracy theory, now in senior roles in Trust & Safety at Google, deciding what is misinformation & overseeing content moderation?

The cumulative number of former Intelligence Community personnel hired by Meta & Google since 2018 is staggering. Before 2018, there were only a handful. Here are the combined hires by both companies:
CIA-36
FBI-68
NSA-44
DHS/CISA-68
State Dept-86
DOD-121"
Why would Google specifically choose these six senior executives to attend an @ISF_OSAC event in DC?

Everyone in this picture, alongside former CIA Director Robert Gates, is a current senior executive at Google & a former career CIA officer, except for the attorney from Perkins Coie (2nd from the left):


MORE, MUCH MORE, AT https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cia-trust-safety-silicon-valley-us
-intel-revolving-door-bigger-you-thought


So it appears our foreign policy, our President, and our media are controlled by the CIA. I imagine our Congresspeople are too. What did Chuck Schumer say? The CIA has "six way from Sunday" to get at people who go against them? And, how would he know??

I don't understand the purpose of these revelations. The only thing I can figure is that Vicki Nuland, Burns et al are laying their cards on the table because they desperately need that $60billion. Not to carry on the fight to 2025, but to get the hell out.

Because, despite their dirty tricks against Russia, pressure and even dirty tricks against our presumed allies (WHO blew up Nordstream, again?), CONSTANT gaslighting and censoring of us Americans ... Russia is POUNDING UKRAINE INTO THE GROUND. THINGS ARE FALLING APART AROUND THEM. Their control over our media, Trump, the economic situation at home and the military situation abroad (and not just in Ukraine) is unraveling.

And all of those fancy bunkers filled with fancy equipment and "eyes only" info on sources and methods, and highly trained Russian-speaking spies are about to be overrun or bombed out of existance.

If they are willing to let this particular cat out of the bag, they must be butt-puckeringly desperate. And I wonder, of course, what else they have to hide, because I'm sure this isn't their only game.

So, what will Russia do?
What will The House?
What will Trump?
And what will the American people?


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 9:22 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:

The CIA directly interfered with our election results.

So it appears our foreign policy, our President, and our media are controlled by the CIA. I imagine our Congresspeople are too. What did Chuck Schumer say? The CIA has "six way from Sunday" to get at people who go against them? And, how would he know??

I don't understand the purpose of these revelations. The only thing I can figure is that Vicki Nuland, Burns et al are laying their cards on the table because they desperately need that $60billion. Not to carry on the fight to 2025, but to get the hell out.

Because, despite their dirty tricks against Russia, pressure and even dirty tricks against our presumed allies (WHO blew up Nordstream, again?), CONSTANT gaslighting and censoring of us Americans ... Russia is POUNDING UKRAINE INTO THE GROUND. THINGS ARE FALLING APART AROUND THEM. Their control over our media, Trump, the economic situation at home and the military situation abroad (and not just in Ukraine) is unraveling.

And all of those fancy bunkers filled with fancy equipment and "eyes only" info on sources and methods, and highly trained Russian-speaking spies are about to be overrun or bombed out of existance.

If they are willing to let this particular cat out of the bag, they must be butt-puckeringly desperate. And I wonder, of course, what else they have to hide, because I'm sure this isn't their only game.

So, what will Russia do?
What will The House?
What will Trump?
And what will the American people?
Neither Signym nor ZeroHedge included the original URLs because both are lying sacks of shits:

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/02/25/7443679/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligen
ce-russia-war.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 2:20 PM

SECOND

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


Putin’s Second Genocide

by Gunnar Heinsohn | Feb 26, 2024

Gunnar Heinsohn (1943-2023) founded the Rafael-Lemkin-Institut at the University of Bremen in 1993, Europe’s first center for the comparative study of genocide, and served as its director until 2009.

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/02/putins-second-genocide.h
tml

Following his initial genocide—committed from 1999 to 2009 in Chechnya—Vladimir Putin has now embarked on a second, under the pretext of preventing an alleged genocide of Russians in Eastern Ukraine. A historic first.

Putin evidently sought legal grounds for a war of aggression, and all his experts could come up with was the UN Convention on Genocide. Under article 1, the Convention’s Contracting Parties—147 states, including Russia—are obliged to “prevent” genocide, not merely to punish it. Such a provision does not exist even for the prevention of an ordinary civil war. Putin’s accusation of genocide, leveled at Ukraine, and his strict avoidance of the terms war and invasion, can be explained by the will to embellish his monstrous project.

Like all murders, genocide requires intent and planning. A spontaneous massacre may leave 1,000 dead, but legally speaking it is still a case of mass manslaughter. Premeditated genocide, on the other hand, though it be hindered after “only” 100 people have died, has nevertheless produced 100 victims of genocide. This is a crucial legal distinction.

Genocide may still be said to occur if only some members of the group in question are targeted for killing. [Article 2 affirms: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…”.] Rafael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish drafter of the Convention on Genocide, deliberately included the term “part” because he had himself witnessed two instances of partial genocide.

In September 1939 the Germans began murdering the Polish intelligentsia. This was the Intelligenzaktion, carried out 22 months before the Holocaust proper began, and it moved Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of Hitler’s military-intelligence service, to stage his own internal resistance to Germany’s SS, for which he would be hanged in Flossenbürg in April 1945. The murder of Polish officers and civil servants by Russians followed in 1940, in Katyn and other places. Both mass murders were intended to destroy Poland’s culture and allow the rest of the population to be enslaved, and either Germanized or Russified. One of the signatories to the death warrant at Katyn, Mikhail Kalinin, is honored by Russia to this day in the name of the city of Kaliningrad, formerly known as Königsberg.

Why is Putin carrying out another genocide following his second Chechen war? He wants to spare the Russian Empire the fate of its Western counterparts. In 1998, the year before he became prime minister, he was director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, where he established a special department for the preservation of the Empire. Its agents were tasked with creating the conditions, in the former Soviet Union, for the rebirth of the Imperial Russia under the control of Moscow.

The Spaniards, the Dutch, the Belgians, the French, and the British, having tried in their turn to hold on to their empires by force, were all defeated in wars fought in their colonies after 1945. They too committed massacres and destroyed cultural artifacts. In 1974, with Portugal’s loss of its colonies, the last of these empires was finished.

During its period of decline, France came the closest to civil war. President Charles de Gaulle survived two assassination attempts by seditious officers, in 1961 and 1962, and granted Algeria its independence after years of bloodshed. At the time, the North African territory was like a French Ukraine: one out of six citizens was French. Those who were forced to leave Algeria for France responded by burning down schoolhouses. Even the country’s largest library—part of the University of Algiers—went up in flames.

Why did these attempts to preserve empire fail? Europeans could not understand how it was that, having subjugated 90 percent of the Earth, they were now on such a losing streak. Well, over a period of 450 years, by criminalizing birth control, they had obliged their women to produce six to eight children each, and thus to provide their respective empires with more personnel than was lost in the process of conquest and colonization. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the birth rate for women in the various Western empires fell to just two per capita, while at the same time each of their female colonial subjects was bearing an average of six to eight children. And, as of 1970—starting in Germany—Europe had fallen to fewer than two children per woman.

The Russians were suffering a similar decline, and had made the same mistake during the first Chechen war (1994-1996): They had failed to take into account the fact that, until 1914, the Czars had had around a hundred out of every thousand men of military age under their command, which meant that, in spite of all the losses they suffered in their wars of conquest, and despite the emigration of settlers, they were able to maintain their demographic strength.

So it was the same faulty logic as had plagued the West that brought about the Russian military fiasco in Chechnya. Boris Yeltsin lost many soldiers, as well as, eventually, the war, because, although Chechen women lost an average of two sons each in the fighting, they were bearing a total of three to four per capita, and thus were able to ensure the survival of their Muslim families.

Putin analysed Yeltsin’s failure and, beginning in 1999, began to deploy a combination of two genocidal techniques. He continued to kill advocates of Chechen nationalism, while offering princely rewards to the Russified, thus winning himself some fanatical champions. At the same time, he took a page from the Argentine junta’s Guerra sucia, its “Dirty War,” which saw the kidnapping and murder of at least 9,000 leftwing activists between 1974 and 1983 and thus ended the militant student movement. For his part, Putin had some 5,000 Chechens kidnapped (of a total population of about a million), young men not yet of combat age but likely to follow their older brothers into battle. He had them murdered and hid their bodies. Transposed to the populations of Switzerland or Austria, this would mean 40,000 young men; in German proportions, 400,000. [Proportional to the population of the United States, this would amount to more than a million-and-a-half young men.] He was thus able to cancel the Chechen freedom fighters’ birth-rate advantage.

Such a calculated and successful genocide is unique in the 21st century, and has made Putin the first European victor in the wars of decolonization fought since 1945. His claims of an alleged threat on the part of NATO, or of Slavic brotherhood, have played no role of any kind. His entirely undisguised motive has been the violent retention of Czarist conquests. The Chechen territory was annexed by force in 1859, in the pursuit of which Czar Alexander II had at least 100,000 Chechens deported to Siberia to break their stalwart resistance to his rule.

Following this doubly genocidal strike in the Caucasus, nearly all top-ranked Western politicians began falling over each other, vying for the favor of the dictator in the Kremlin. Warnings, foremost among them from Russia’s Baltic and Polish victims, who were all too familiar with Moscow’s history, were pooh-poohed as reactionary, while Russian nationalism, and the sense that Russia was not only invincible but immune to reprisal, reached a new zenith.

Like Russia, Ukraine is also a senescent nation, with an average age of well over 40. Both countries are fighting with the smallest military-age generation of their demographically documented history. Putin’s genocide in Ukraine does not require indiscriminate massacres, nor raping and pillaging by his soldiery. His main target is the Ukrainian educated classes. Putin’s current genocidal playbook is borrowed from the one perfected by Hitler and Stalin in 1939 and 1940.

This is why Ukrainian city mayors and their families are being kidnapped and murdered. Here too, it isn’t the number of victims that is critical for the definition of genocide, but Putin’s declared aim of annihilating Ukrainian culture, so as to subject the rest of society to Russification and control by the Kremlin.

Even if Kyiv had surrendered after just two days—as was expected not only by Moscow, but also by Washington—and the invasion had ended swiftly with Russian occupation, this would by no means have spelled the end of Putin’s genocidal operation against the Ukrainian elite. It was in fact specifically because this murderous program was known to Washington that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered sanctuary to President Volodymyr Zelensky and other selected representatives of the Ukrainian nation.

Prior to February 24, 2022, Putin devoted greater care to planning the murder of Ukrainians than to the war he eventually unleashed, since he was counting on immediate surrender, but not on the disappearance of Ukrainian nationalism. This is why many of those killed in Bucha were systematically hunted down, since they were local political leaders, combat veterans from the Donbass, or members of the territorial defense forces, as reported by the Kyiv Independent, which went on to recount how Russian forces had carried lists of names and addresses of those marked out for death.

Just as ethnic Germans in 1939 had helped establish lists of Polish physicians and schoolteachers to be murdered, there are spies living among the Ukrainians today, leading Russian special units to the houses of their victims. The military honor bestowed by Putin on one of his strike forces shows that the killings were not only meticulously planned, and thus a genocide, but that they are intended to continue. In the meantime, the Ukrainians are aware of what awaits them in the event of defeat or surrender.

April 29, 2022

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 11:02 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Why did Ukraine's CIA-trained spy guy, Budanov, claim Navalny died of natural causes?

To distract from the fact that Navalny was murdered. By his wife.




That explanation makes sense: Navalny was no longer useful to the USA as a possible Putin replacement/ regime-changer. However, he WAS useful as a perpetual victim (claiming to have been poisoned more than once) and, ultimately, martyr. The timing of his death was convenient distraction from the fall of Avdeevka, and happened just a couple of days after his wife visited. (,Which she hadn't done in over a year.,)

So the CIA gets its timely distraction, Putin gets the blame, the prisoner swap is scuttled, Yulia Navalnya gets $10million (j/k) and crowned as his successor, and everyone in the western deep state is congratulating themselves on another successful assassination.
:thumbsup:

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, February 26, 2024 11:58 PM

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:
Why did Ukraine's CIA-trained spy guy, Budanov, claim Navalny died of natural causes?

To distract from the fact that Navalny was murdered. By his wife.




That explanation makes sense: Navalny was no longer useful to the USA as a possible Putin replacement/ regime-changer. However, he WAS useful as a perpetual victim (claiming to have been poisoned more than once) and, ultimately, martyr. The timing of his death was convenient distraction from the fall of Avdeevka, and happened just a couple of days after his wife visited. (,Which she hadn't done in over a year.,)

So the CIA gets its timely distraction, Putin gets the blame, the prisoner swap is scuttled, Yulia Navalnya gets $10million (j/k) and crowned as his successor, and everyone in the western deep state is congratulating themselves on another successful assassination.
:thumbsup:
Wowie! Signym, you are a lying sack of shit.

The Death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s Most Formidable Opponent

The opposition leader, who died in prison, had been persecuted for years by the Russian state. He remained defiant, and consistently funny, to the very end.

By Masha Gessen | February 16, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/the-death-of-alexey-navalny-
putins-most-formidable-opponent

Alexei Navalny spent at least a decade standing up to the Kremlin when it seemed impossible. He was jailed and released. He was poisoned, and survived. He was warned to stay away from Russia and didn’t. He was arrested in front of dozens of cameras, with millions of people watching. In prison, he was defiant and consistently funny. For three years, his jailers put him in solitary confinement, cut off his access to and arrested his lawyers, piled on sentence after sentence, sent him all the way across the world’s largest country to serve out his time in the Arctic, and still, when he appeared on video in court, he laughed at his jailers. Year after year, he faced down the might of one of the world’s cruellest states and the vengeance of one of the world’s cruellest men. His promise was that he would outlive them and lead what he called the Beautiful Russia of the Future. On Friday, they killed him. He was forty-seven years old.

Hours after the news of his death broke, his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, addressed the Munich Security Conference. “I don’t know whether to believe the news, the terrible news, which we are only getting from state-controlled sources in Russia,” she said, from the conference’s main stage. “As you all know, for many years we’ve been unable to believe Putin and his government. They always lie. But, if it is true, I want Putin and everyone around him, his friends and his government, to know that they will be held responsible for what they have done to our country, to my family, and to my husband. The day of reckoning will come very soon.”

In Russia, Vladimir Putin was visiting an industrial park in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals. He took questions from staff and students, who were seated a safe distance from the Russian President on what appeared to be the plant floor. Putin seemed to be in an unusually good mood. He bantered and flirted with the audience. He boasted that Western sanctions in response to the war in Ukraine had boosted industrial production inside Russia. He hadn’t seemed so jovial in public in years.

In exactly a month, Russia will hold a ritual that it calls an election. With no actual alternative to Putin, who has total control of the media and the so-called electoral institutions, the current Russian President will be crowned for another six-year term, extending his time in power to thirty-one years. Navalny tried to run against Putin six years ago, but the rigged system stopped him. His very name was banished from the airwaves. Still, even when the system shut him out, and, later, when it put him in prison, Navalny remained Putin’s most formidable opponent.

Putin could only envy Navalny’s ability to mobilize Russians. In July, 2013, as the political crackdown that accompanied the beginning of Putin’s third official Presidential term intensified, a court in the provincial city of Kirov sentenced Navalny to five years behind bars on trumped-up embezzlement charges. That evening, thousands of people risked arrest by taking to the streets in Moscow in a rare spontaneous protest. The following morning, Navalny was summarily released from prison, in violation of established legal procedure. Putin had long been terrified of mass protests. Now he had to be equally afraid of Navalny, a man whose very existence seemed to make people capable of overcoming their own fears.

It’s tempting to see Navalny’s apparent murder, as some American analysts have, as a sign of weakness on the part of Putin. But a dictator’s ability to annihilate what he fears is a measure of his hold on power, as is his ability to choose the time to strike. Putin appears to be feeling optimistic about his own future. As he sees it, Donald Trump is poised to become the next President of the U.S. and to give Putin free rein in Ukraine and beyond. Even before the U.S. Presidential election, American aid to Ukraine is stalled, and Ukraine’s Army is starved for troops and nearing a supply crisis. Last week, Putin got to lecture millions of Americans by granting an interview to Tucker Carlson. At the end of the interview, Carlson asked Putin if he would release Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter held on espionage charges in Russia. Putin proposed that Gershkovich could be traded for “a person, who out of patriotic sentiments liquidated a bandit in one of the European capitals.” It was a reference to Vadim Krasikov, probably the only Russian assassin who has been caught and convicted in the West; he is held in Germany. A week after the interview aired, Russia has shown the world what can happen to a person in a Russian prison. It’s also significant that Navalny was killed on the first day of the Munich conference. In 2007, Putin chose the conference as his stage for declaring what would become his war against the West. Now, with this war in full swing, Putin has been excluded from the conference, but the actions of his regime—the murders committed by his regime—dominate the proceedings.

Russian prison authorities have said that Navalny felt ill after returning from his daily walk, lost consciousness, and could not be revived. They have ascribed his death to a pulmonary embolism. Anna Karetnikova, a prisoners’-rights activist and a former member of the civilian-oversight body of Russia’s prison system, has said that prison authorities routinely use embolism as a catchall term. Sergey Nemalevich, a journalist with the Russian Service of Radio Liberty, noticed that the ostensible timing of the death didn’t seem to jibe with Navalny’s recent description of his schedule in solitary confinement: he had said that his daily walk took place at six-thirty in the morning, but prison authorities claimed that, on the day of his death, he returned to his cell in the afternoon. Nemalevich suggested that Navalny was dead long before an ambulance—which authorities said took a mere seven minutes to travel twenty-two miles to the prison—was called to declare him dead.

Navalny, who was educated as a lawyer, became active in politics in the early two-thousands and emerged as a public figure around 2010. His early politics were ethno-nationalist, at times overtly xenophobic, and libertarian. He advocated for gun rights and a crackdown on migrants. But he found his agenda and his political voice in documenting corruption. He built a movement based on the premise that citizens, even in Russia, could and should exercise control over the way that government money is spent. In the ensuing years, he evolved from an ethno-nationalist to a civic nationalist, from a libertarian to a social democrat. He learned new languages, read incessantly, and incorporated new ideas into his program. He focussed, increasingly, not only on political power but on social welfare. During the past three years, he used the pulpit provided by an endless series of court hearings to air his political views. In a courtroom speech on February 20, 2021, he outlined a vision for a country with a better health-care system and a more equitable distribution of wealth. He proposed changing the slogan of his political movement from “Russia will be free” to “Russia will be happy.” He continued to assert this hopeful agenda, even as he grew more and more gaunt and even as he was forced to appear in court on a video screen, separated from his audience by glass, a grate, and thousands of miles.

Navalny’s public voice was full of irony without being cynical. He saw the targets of his investigations as ridiculous men with large yachts, small egos, and staggeringly bad taste. He took their abuses seriously by cutting them down to size. This was half of his charisma. The other half was his love story. More than anything else in the world, it seemed, he wanted to impress Yulia. Confined to a cube in a courtroom, he put his hands in the shape of a heart, gesturing at her. He sent love notes from prison, which were posted to social-media for him. On her birthday last July, he posted,

You know, Yulia, I’ve made several attempts at writing the story of our meeting.

But every time after I write a couple of sentences, I stopped in terror and couldn’t keep going.

I am terrified that it could have not happened. I mean, it was a coincidence. I could have looked in the other direction, you could have turned away. The one second that determined the course of my life, could have turned out differently. Everything would have been different.

I probably would have been the saddest person on earth.

How awesome is it that we looked at each other back then and that now I can shake my head, drive away these thoughts, rub my forehead, and say, “Phew, what a weird nightmare.”

This seemed the only thing that could have scared him. Reading his wildly popular social-media accounts felt like watching a romantic comedy, but one that starred a superhero.

A year after the Kremlin’s attempt to put Navalny away failed, Putin took a hostage: Alexei’s brother Oleg was jailed on trumped-up charges. It was an old reliable tactic. The henchmen assumed that, with Oleg behind bars, Alexei would cease his political activities to keep his brother safe. But the brothers made a pact to keep going. Alexei built a sprawling organization that expanded far beyond documenting corruption. He ran for mayor of Moscow. He built a network of political offices that could have enabled a Presidential race if such a thing as elections actually existed. He grew frustrated that journalists weren’t following his leads or undertaking investigations of their own, and so he founded his own media: YouTube shows and Telegram channels that publicized the results of his group’s investigations. Navalny’s work spawned an entire generation of independent Russian investigative media, many of which continue working in exile, documenting not only criminal assets but also war crimes and the activities of Russia’s assassins at home and abroad.

The state harassed Navalny, placed him under house arrest, pushed the organization out of its offices, jailed some of its activists and forced the rest into exile, declared them “extremists,” and started going after people who had donated even a small amount of money to the group. Then, in August, 2020, the F.S.B. poisoned Navalny with Novichok, a chemical weapon. He was meant to die on a plane. But the pilot made an emergency landing, doctors administered essential first aid, and Yulia took over the superhero role, pressuring the authorities to let her take Alexei to Germany for treatment.

After weeks in a coma, Navalny emerged and teamed up with another investigator, Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian journalist then working with Bellingcat. Grozev got the receipts: the flight manifests that showed that Navalny had been trailed by a group of F.S.B. agents, some of whom also happened to be chemists. Navalny supplied the performative flair. He called his would-be murderers on the phone and managed to get a guileless confession out of one, complete with the detail of where the poison had been placed: in the crotch area of Navalny’s boxer shorts. The scene would later be incorporated into the film “Navalny,” which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, but, before that, Navalny put it in his own made-for-YouTube movie, titled “I Called My Killer. He Confessed.” It was released on December 21, 2020.

A month later, Navalny flew back to Moscow. His friends had tried to talk him out of it. He wouldn’t hear of staying in exile and becoming politically irrelevant. He imagined himself as Russia’s Nelson Mandela: he would outlive Putin’s reign and become President. Perhaps he believed that the men he was fighting were capable of embarrassment and wouldn’t dare to kill him after he’d proved that they had tried to. He and I had argued, over the years, about the fundamental nature of Putin and his regime: he said that they were “crooks and thieves”; I said that they were murderers and terrorists. After he came out of his coma, I asked him if he had finally been convinced that they were murderers. No, he said. They kill to protect their wealth. Fundamentally, they are just greedy.

He thought too highly of them. They are, in fact, murderers.

All over Russia on Friday, people were laying flowers in memory of Navalny. In the few cities where memorials exist to past victims of Russian totalitarianism, these monuments became the destinations. Police were breaking up gatherings, throwing out flowers, and detaining journalists.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 4:33 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Why did Ukraine's CIA-trained spy guy, Budanov, claim Navalny died of natural causes?
To distract from the fact that Navalny was murdered. By his wife.

That explanation makes sense: Navalny was no longer useful to the USA as a possible Putin replacement/ regime-changer. However, he WAS useful as a perpetual victim (claiming to have been poisoned more than once) and, ultimately, martyr. The timing of his death was convenient distraction from the fall of Avdeevka, and happened just a couple of days after his wife visited. (Which she hadn't done in over a year.,)

So the CIA gets its timely distraction, Putin gets the blame, the prisoner swap is scuttled, Yulia Navalnya gets $10million (j/k) and crowned as his successor, and everyone in the western deep state is congratulating themselves on another successful assassination.
:thumbsup:

SECO D: Wowie! Signym, you are a lying sack of shit.


Was Budanov recruited and trained by the CIA?
Well, NYT says so, so it must be so!

Did Budanov say that Navalny died from natural causes?
Well, that was widely reported by the M$M, so he must have said it

Does the CIA lie, cheat, steal, and assasinate?
Well, Brennan said so, and the NYT just listed their successes at terror attacks and assassinations, so that must be true, too!

Was Navalny ever able to scrape up enough votes to get even one representative in the Duma? Was he ever a "formidable opponent"?
NOPE! At the height of his political popularity (appx 2011) he managed to get 19% of a vote ... for Mayor of Moscow.

Did Yulia JUST visit her husband and claim he looked healthy during her visit ?
Yep!

Just the facts, ma'am.

The rest is my own supposition.
But methinks thou doth protest too much.
Too plausible?


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 5:59 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:

The rest is my own supposition.
But methinks thou doth protest too much.
Too plausible?
Signym, you are so full of shit that it is coming out of your nose, literally, not figuratively:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11885
92#1188592

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 6:00 AM

SECOND

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


Over 20 heads of state, including 15 European Union (EU) leaders met in Paris on February 26 to discuss ramping up ammunition supplies to Ukraine.[16] French President Emmanuel Macron organized the conference and announced the creation of a new coalition to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles and munitions.[17] Macron also stated that France “will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war” and that European states should prepare for possible Russian escalations in the coming years.[18] Estonian Prime Minister Kaya Kallas stated that Estonia is providing long-term military aid to Ukraine worth 0.25 percent of Estonia’s GDP through 2028 and called on Ukraine’s other supporters to make similar commitments.[19]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-26-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 6:44 AM

SECOND

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


Russia Claims It Destroyed More Than Triple of Ukraine's Entire Air Force

Published Feb 26, 2024 at 10:38 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-jets-helicopter-aircraft-losse
s-1873253

Russia has downed 839 Ukrainian jets and helicopters in two years of all-out war, Moscow said ahead of the second anniversary of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a figure significantly higher than the size of Ukraine's fleet outlined by Russia in early 2022.

Kyiv had up to 250 warplanes and helicopters on combat duty when Russian forces crossed into Ukraine in late February 2022, Igor Konashenkov, the head of Russia's information department at the Defense Ministry, said in a clip published by Moscow, dated March 2022, that has resurfaced online.

On Friday, Moscow said Ukraine had lost 572 fixed-wing aircraft and 267 helicopters, totaling 839 aircraft losses. In updated figures published on Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry then said Ukraine had lost a total of 841 aircraft and helicopters, including 574 jets.

It may be "driven by propaganda and disinformation, aimed both at its enemies and its own population," Frederik Mertens, an analyst with The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Newsweek. Russia's own losses in high-profile Ukrainian strikes appear more palatable if Kyiv has also taken bruising hits, Mertens said.

The Ukrainian Air Force had 124 combat-capable aircraft before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to the 2022 Military Balance, an annual count of the world's armed forces compiled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. Ukraine also had around 46 helicopters, by this count.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 9:39 AM

SECOND

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


Russia Advances in Ukraine With 'Staggering Magnitude' of Losses: Petraeus

"Having written so many letters of condolence to American mothers and fathers, particularly during the surge in Iraq, I don't know how he can actually look at this, how Putin can deal with this," Petraeus — who in a storied military career led the allied effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan — said of the Russian dictator.

The fate of other leading figures in Russia's invasion, he said, may speak to Putin's mindset. "I think, for example, [Yevgeny] Prigozhin literally went mad, in part because of the enormous casualties of the Wagner Group."

Petraeus spoke with Newsweek just hours after Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi announced the withdrawal from Avdiivka.

"This is not a strategically significant piece of terrain," he added. "It's basically a town that has been destroyed, totally. And giving that up, allowing Russia to take control of that, I don't think it has huge significance. Actually, it simplifies the defensive line."

"There's no collapse here. There's an orderly withdrawal, under pressure to be sure, but not some massively strategically significant achievement by the Russians. I think it's even less so than Bakhmut was last year, frankly. Which was so costly, and what did it really get them in the end?"

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-advances-ukraine-staggering-losses-pet
raeus-avdiivka-1873354

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 12:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The rest is my own supposition.
But methinks thou doth protest too much.
Too plausible?

SECOND: Signym, you are so full of shit that it is coming out of your nose, literally, not figuratively:


Aha! An insult!
Must mean you can't actually... er... DISCUSS ...the topic.

And, you posted something from Patraeus?
Why do you even repost that failed General and "ex" CIA professional liar?

He failed in Iraq and lied about it
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/08/afghanistan-iraq-generals-soldiers
-disciplined-911/

And then there was this....

Quote:
David Petraeus and the fall of a general
23 April 2015

Former US General David Petraeus, one of the most senior US military commanders of the post-9/11 era, has been sentenced to two years of probation for leaking classified material to his mistress.

The seeds of his downfall were sown in 2012 when he resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after acknowledging an extramarital affair with Paula Broadwell.

Prosecutors said that while Ms Broadwell was researching a book about him in 2011, Petraeus gave her eight binders of classified material.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-20276786

This full-court press from the CIA and neocons for that $$61 billion sounds like that "51 intelligence officers" who signed the letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was "Russian disinfo": a whole lotta liars spouting a whole lotta crap.



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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 1:40 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Meanwhile, for some REAL news.
RUSSIA IS ADVANCING ACROSS THE ENTIRE FRONT.
EUROPE and the CIA are in a panic.
Ukraine has signed security agreements with Italy, France, Canada (Canada????), and Denmark.

The supposition is that different European nations would each be assigned a section of western Ukraine to defend.

Western boots on the ground in Ukraine.

These people are morons.

Quote:
Moscow Reacts To Macron Proposing European Boots On The Ground In Ukraine
Tuesday, Feb 27, 2024 - 08:20 AM

French President Emmanuel Macron is now openly discussing the possibility of sending European troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians, which would without doubt trigger WW3 between major nuclear powers.

His jingoistic words came just at the end of a summit held in Paris in support of Ukraine, which involved 20 mainly European leaders. He said of efforts to arm the Ukrainians with more advanced weapons, "people used to say give them just sleeping bags and helmets." But he emphasized that now "Nothing should be ruled out."

Nukes?

Quote:
He admitted there is as yet "no consensus" on sending Western troops Ukraine but he laid out that "We will do anything we can to prevent Russia from winning this war."

Macron warned in his remarks, "There is a change in Russia’s stance. It is striving to take on further territory and it has its eyes not just on Ukraine but on many other countries as well, so Russia is presenting a greater danger."

OMFG. I think people are past being stampeded by yet another hair -on-fire politician waving his/her arms and hyperventilating.

Quote:
"We’re at a critical moment in this conflict that requires us to take the initiative," Macron said while also unveiling a new European coalition which is to provide Kiev with medium-range and long-range missiles. President Putin and top Kremlin officials have repeatedly rejected the charge that Russia is seeking to wage an expansionist war in Europe and in other former Soviet satellite states.


Keep in mind that the NYT article admitted that Putin was right, the west was weaponizing Ukraine against Russia, and Russia's war in Ukraine is about Russia's border security, not expansion. The west also broke every agreement they made about NATO expansion, nuclear weapons, and peace in Ukraine.

Who's the aggressor?


Quote:
According to CNN, "Macron had told reporters at a news conference that while he and the other 21 European leaders present did not agree on deploying military personnel, the prospect was discussed openly." However, Germany, the UK, Poland and others have rejected the possibility of deploying troops, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz - who was among those present - later emphasizing that participants were "unanimous" in being set against it. The statement out of the UK prime minister's office was interesting, given it admits the "small number of personnel" already on the ground in Ukraine:

Britain is not planning a "large-scale deployment of troops" in Ukraine, Prime Minister Sunak’s press secretary said. "Other than a small number of personnel who are in the country supporting the Ukrainian armed forces, we have no plans for a large-scale deployment," he was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Germany's Scholtz tried to caution, "What was agreed among ourselves and with each other from the very beginning also applies to the future, namely that there will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or NATO states."

Everything Scholz ever said he wouldn't do, he did. He makes it a practice to cross his own red lines.


Quote:
Zakharova pointed out in this regard that just a month ago, the top French diplomat had denied that Paris was involved in recruiting mercenaries for the Kiev regime, slamming direct evidence as "crude Russian propaganda."

Referencing an infamous French SS division from WW2, Zakharova further quipped: "Emmanuel, have you decided to form a Charlemagne deux (two) division to defend [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky’s bunker?"

But Moscow also warned of major direct conflict with the West. According to more from the Kremlin response: "The very fact of discussing the possibility of sending certain contingents to Ukraine from Nato countries is a very important new element…in that case, we would need to talk not about the probability, but about the inevitability (of a direct conflict)."

But the Kremlin wasn't the only one to provide a sarcastic critique of Macron's words. This was the tone even among some allies. For example Germany’s deputy chancellor Robert Habeck called out France for not doing much heavy lifting on transferring weapons to Kiev compared to other in the alliance.

"I’m pleased that France is thinking about how to increase its support for Ukraine, but if I could give it a word of advice — supply more weapons," Habeck said Tuesday. And yet President Macron wants to 'talk tough' and issue maximalist threats of direct action.

All of this comes as Ukraine is in retreat, following Russia's capture of the eastern city of Avdiivka. Several other smaller towns and cities have also fallen, with Ukraine's front lines in disarray. This has resulted in several days of what might be called empty threats being issued from the West, as it sits helplessly while watching Russian forces advance.


https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moscow-reacts-macron-raising-pl
an-european-boots-ground-ukraine


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 7:07 AM

SECOND

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


Macron wants to lead Europe on Ukraine, but France may not let him

French president faces blowback across the political spectrum for not ruling out a Western military presence in Ukraine.

All French opposition forces have already rounded on him. Marine Le Pen, on the far right, has pilloried his assertion that Western troops in Ukraine “shouldn’t be ruled out” as toying with “the lives of [France’s] children,” while far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said it was “madness” to pitch “one nuclear power against another nuclear power.” More mainstream forces, such as the Socialist Party and the conservative Les Républicains, also condemned the French president’s muscle-flexing.

https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-wants-to-lead-on-ukraine-but-fr
ance-might-not-let-him/

Macron, the daring cheese-eating surrender monkey, suggests a faint possibility of fighting Russians in Ukraine. The other monkeys screech, moan, and throw feces at Macron.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 7:12 AM

SECOND

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


Russia relishes NATO disarray after hasty denials of plan to deploy ground troops to Ukraine

PUBLISHED WED, FEB 28 2024, 5:00 AM EST

• Russia appears to be relishing the gaffe French President Emmanuel Macron made this week in suggesting that NATO countries discussed the possibility of Western ground troops being deployed in Ukraine, saying such an eventuality could not be “ruled out.”

• Macron’s suggestion was widely — and very publicly — rejected by NATO member countries Tuesday, leaving France looking isolated.

• Russian officials have commented widely on the situation, appearing to enjoy NATO’s division and France’s humiliation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/28/russia-relishes-macron-humiliation-aft
er-nato-denial-on-ground-troops.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 1:03 PM

SECOND

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


Use profits from frozen Russian assets to arm Ukraine, says Ursula von der Leyen

European Commission head outlines plans for joint weapons procurement for Kyiv

By Henry Foy, Alice Hancock, Paola Tamma | Feb 28, 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/d6059942-eaf2-4e57-be03-7e589fe86a79

Ursula von der Leyen said windfall profits from Russian frozen assets should be used to buy weapons for Ukraine as discussions intensified between European allies about how to continue supporting the war-torn country.

The proposal comes amid a lack of consensus over the legality of using roughly €300bn in Russian sovereign assets frozen by G7 allies in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

“It is time to start a conversation about using the windfall profits of frozen Russian assets to jointly purchase military equipment for Ukraine,” the European Commission president said in a speech to EU lawmakers on Wednesday. “There could be no greater use for that money than to make Ukraine and all of Europe a safer place to live.”

The commission will present a formal proposal in two weeks, a person familiar with the discussion said.

Her statement is the first time the EU has linked the use of frozen Russian sovereign assets to potential weapons procurement as friction grows between western allies about how to provide financial and military support for Ukraine.

After French President Emmanuel Macron suggested that deploying western troops to Ukraine could not be ruled out, Berlin told Paris to instead “supply more weapons” for Kyiv.

Von der Leyen’s proposal will need unanimous approval from the EU’s member states, which have so far agreed only to set aside the windfall profits, not whether they can be used, or how.

France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters at a G20 meeting in São Paulo “that the best use of those windfall profits remains to be discussed among the 27 member states”, adding that von der Leyen’s proposal is “a very interesting one”.

However, he said there was no legal basis for seizing Russian assets themselves.

“We don’t have the legal basis to seize the Russian assets, and we should never act if we don’t obey by international law and the rule of law,” he said.

Christian Lindner, Germany’s finance minister, told reporters in São Paulo that von der Leyen’s proposal was a “realistic step that is legally secure and which can be implemented quickly”, according to Reuters.

Previous discussions focused on moving the proceeds into the EU budget as a conduit for investing in Ukraine’s reconstruction. Using them for weapons could involve a different channel, such as the European Peace Facility or other EU mechanisms used to purchase ammunition directly from manufacturers, according to an EU diplomat involved in the discussions. That process is likely to take some time.

“There’s no rush. Member states want to tread very carefully on this given the potential political, legal and economic implications,” they said. “It’s a classic case of [von der Leyen] trying to push the envelope.”

A senior EU diplomat said: “We have agreed they should be dedicated to reconstruction ‘in particular’. Which gives us wriggle-room to use them for other things if there’s an emergency need, like weapons right now.”

Talks over an EU fund used to reimburse governments that supply weapons to Ukraine are also stuck because of disagreements over the rules governing the facility, with France restating its position that EU money should be used to purchase weapons made in the bloc.

In parallel, EU countries have been seeking to raise €1.5bn to buy foreign-made weapons for Ukraine under a Czech Republic-led fallback plan.

Ukraine has warned its allies that it is running perilously low on ammunition. Kyiv has said it particularly needs long-range weapons to damage Russia’s military logistics.

The US has been pushing its G7 allies to confiscate about €300bn of frozen Russian sovereign assets, the majority of which are held in Belgium. But EU countries remain concerned about the risk of retaliatory measures by Moscow.

The EU has focused on profits arising from €191bn of Russian state assets that are accumulating as securities reach maturity and Belgian central security depository Euroclear reinvests them. Last month member countries agreed to set these profits aside in a separate escrow account as a first step towards allocating them to Ukraine. The commission estimates this may generate about €3bn a year, depending on interest rates.

But doubts persist on the confiscation of profits, with countries including France, Germany and Italy urging caution.

Since announcing her intention to run for a second term at the helm of the EU executive, von der Leyen has made defence a central part of her re-election campaign.

“The threat of war may not be imminent but it is not impossible,” von der Leyen said on Wednesday, as she outlined plans for a European Defence Industrial Strategy that would include proposals for joint procurement of weapons for EU countries.

Additional reporting by Michael Pooler in São Paulo

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 1:09 PM

SECOND

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


After Russia invaded Ukraine, its seafood industry thrived

According to Stephanie Madsen, the head of the US-based At-Sea Processors Association, Russian fish made it through EU and US borders ultimately in disguise, under another country’s label.

Madsen testified in front of the US Congress that Russian fish exports also directly funded Moscow’s war in Ukraine. In 2023, newly-added Russian fish export duties and $3.97bn from auctions distributing pollock and crab fishing quota reportedly went to support Putin’s warfare.

“I think they would feel very uncomfortable if they thought that their fish sticks that they’re eating at home or the [fish] sandwich that they’re eating at lunch was made up of Russian pollock that was supporting the Russian regime in its war against Ukraine.”

Much more at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/28/fishy-business-after-russia-i
nvaded-ukraine-its-seafood-industry-thrived

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 2:26 PM

SECOND

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


Why Germany is Holding Back on Taurus Missiles

Chancellor Scholz does not want any German soldiers involved in the planning or combat of Russian targets, neither on site in Ukraine nor from Germany. Scholz said that "this clarity is necessary. I am surprised that some people ... don't even think about whether what we are doing could, so to speak, result in participation in the war."

For the Taurus missiles, German soldiers would have to either lead the attack operations in Ukraine on site or from a distance – with lots of additional effort – and also provide and continuously update highly classified data libraries with electronic identifications of enemy defense systems and much more.

Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-germany-is-holding-back-on-ta
urus-missiles-insights-from-an-ex-colonel/ar-BB1j2774

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 4:48 PM

SECOND

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


Comedy in Combat Culture

Understanding the Use of Humor in Crisis and Conflict

By Maj. Sally Williamson, Australian Army | September-October 2023

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Editi
on-Archives/September-October-2023/Combat-Culture/

There are few leaders with a job more serious right now than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Yet, this emergent world leader still finds the odd occasion not to take himself too seriously. During an interview with David Letterman in an underground train station in Kyiv nine months after the large-scale Russian invasion, Zelensky joked:

Two Jewish guys from Odesa meet up. One is asking the other, “So what’s the situation? What are the people saying?”

And he goes: “What are people saying? They are saying it’s a war.”

“War? What kind of war?”

“Russia is fighting NATO.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, Russia is fighting NATO!”

“So, how is it going?

“What do you mean, how is it going? Seventy thousand Russian soldiers are dead. Missile stockpile has been almost depleted. A lot of equipment is damaged, blown up. That’s the situation.”

“And what about NATO?”

“What about NATO? NATO hasn’t even arrived yet!”

We can reconsider the Zelensky joke from the opening paragraph as both a stress-coping mechanism and a means of voicing dissatisfaction toward NATO. Although the subject of his joke is primarily Russia, there is a hint of deprecation toward his powerful Western-based allies. Zelensky makes his humorous yet poignant criticism in such a way that his message is clear and culturally acceptable given Ukraine’s position within the global hierarchy. His joke is appropriate and relatable, and he delivers it at a time and to both an internal and external audience who is ready to receive it.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 1:43 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
"Americans Are Being Lied To About Ukraine" - Tucker Carlson Reflects On Putin, Zelensky, Navalny & Nuclear War
Carlson explained that the West's escalation of the conflict long ago into a full-blown proxy war has not only resulted in more needless Ukrainian deaths, but it has been devastating for the United States. "I reject the whole premise of the war in Ukraine from the American perspective," Carlson told Fridman. "There’s a war going on that is wrecking the US economy in a way and at a scale that people do not understand."



https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/tucker-carlson-gives-wide-rangi
ng-reflection-putin-interview-americans-are-being-lied

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:56 AM

SECOND

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


A Financial Times (FT) investigation published on February 27, reportedly based on leaked classified Russian military documents from 2008-2014, outlines Russia’s purported criteria for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. FT reported that the documents show that Russia has war-gamed avenues for employing tactical weapons and alleged that the files show that Russia has a lower threshold for using nuclear weapons “if the desired result can’t be achieved through conventional means” than Russian officials have ever publicly admitted.[28] FT stated that the criteria for a nuclear response vary between “an enemy incursion on Russian territory” to more specific parameters, such as “the destruction of 20 percent of Russia’s strategic ballistic missile submarines.” FT noted that unspecified experts have confirmed that the documents remain relevant to Russian nuclear doctrine despite the fact that they are over a decade old. ISW cannot independently verify the legitimacy of the documents but has frequently observed that Russian actors invoke nuclear rhetoric and threats of nuclear weapons use to target the Western information space and instill concern aimed at weakening Western support to Ukraine.[29] It has long been established that Russian nuclear doctrine includes the option to use nuclear weapons in conventional wars at thresholds much lower than Western states.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-28-2024

[28] Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike
https://www.ft.com/content/f18e6e1f-5c3d-4554-aee5-50a730b306b7

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 8:05 AM

SECOND

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


Putin warns West that sending troops to Ukraine risks nuclear war

By Alexander Smith | Feb. 29, 2024, 6:41 AM CST

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-warns-west-sending-troops-ukr
aine-risks-nuclear-war-rcna141089

“This is very dangerous because it could actually trigger the use of nuclear weapons,” he said. “Do they not understand that?”

The Russian leader said his strategic nuclear forces were at "full readiness" and suggested that a hypersonic nuclear weapon he first mentioned in 2018 was approaching a full state of readiness — a claim that cannot be verified.

Putin has often made such threats over the past two years since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But this week’s warning was, in the eyes of some observers, his most pointed to date.

On Monday, Macron caused a stir by suggesting that the West “should not exclude” the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine. This would be a huge practical and symbolic step for allied support of Kyiv, which has so far extended to providing billions of dollars for its defense but has deliberately stopped short of sending its own forces for fear of starting a direct war with nuclear-armed Russia.

The U.S. and others quickly poured cold war on the idea, with the White House saying that it had “been clear that the U.S. will not send troops to fight in Ukraine.”

Mark Galeotti, head of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, and an honorary professor at the University College London, said Macron had handed Putin a “propaganda gift” because it boosted the Russian leader’s narrative that Moscow is fighting the West at large, rather than just Ukraine.

During Putin’s speech, “his reference to potential NATO deployments to Ukraine was less, in my opinion, about warning off the West so much as using it to reinforce his message that this is a struggle against the whole collective West,” Galeotti told NBC News. “Macron gave him something of a propaganda gift.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 9:39 AM

SECOND

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


Why Is Trump Trying to Make Ukraine Lose?

The former president isn’t in office—but is still dictating U.S. policy.

By Anne Applebaum | February 29, 2024, 6:15 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/one-global-issue-tru
mp-cares-about/677592/

Nearly half a year has passed since the White House asked Congress for another round of American aid for Ukraine. Since that time, at least three different legislative efforts to provide weapons, ammunition, and support for the Ukrainian army have failed.

Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, was supposed to make sure that the money was made available. But in the course of trying, he lost his job.

The Senate negotiated a border compromise (including measures border guards said were urgently needed) that was supposed to pass alongside aid to Ukraine. But Senate Republicans who had supported that effort suddenly changed their minds and blocked the legislation.

Finally, the Senate passed another bill, including aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, and the civilians of Gaza, and sent it to the House. But in order to avoid having to vote on that legislation, the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, sent the House on vacation for two weeks. That bill still hangs in limbo. A majority is prepared to pass it, and would do so if a vote were held. Johnson is maneuvering to prevent that from happening.

Maybe the extraordinary nature of the current moment is hard to see from inside the United States, where so many other stories are competing for attention. But from the outside—from Warsaw, where I live part-time; from Munich, where I attended a major annual security conference earlier this month; from London, Berlin, and other allied capitals—nobody doubts that these circumstances are unprecedented. Donald Trump, who is not the president, is using a minority of Republicans to block aid to Ukraine, to undermine the actual president’s foreign policy, and to weaken American power and credibility.

For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize. Johnson himself said, in February 2022, that a failure to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine “empowers other dictators, other terrorists and tyrants around the world … If they perceive that America is weak or unable to act decisively, then it invites aggression in many different ways.” But now the speaker is so frightened by Trump that he no longer cares. Or perhaps he is so afraid of losing his seat that he can’t afford to care. My European colleague shook his head, not because he didn’t believe me, but because it was so hard for him to hear.

Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.

Many also understand that Trump is less interested in “fixing the border,” the project he forced the Senate to abandon, than he is in damaging Ukraine. He surely knows, as everybody does, that the Ukrainians are low on ammunition. He must also know that, right now, no one except the U.S. can help. Although European countries now collectively donate more money to Ukraine than we do (and the numbers are rising), they don’t yet have the industrial capacity to sustain the Ukrainian army. By the end of this year, European production will probably be sufficient to supply the Ukrainians, to help them outlast the Russians and win the war. But for the next nine months, U.S. military support is needed.

Yet Trump wants Congress to block it. Why? This is the part that nobody understands. Unlike his son, Trump himself rarely talks about Ukraine, because his position isn’t popular. Most Americans don’t want Russia to win.

Often, Trump’s motives are described as “isolationist,” but this is not quite right. The isolationists of the past were figures such as Senator Robert Taft, the son of an American president and the grandson of an American secretary of war. Taft, a loyal member of the Republican Party, opposed U.S. involvement in World War II because, as he once said, an “overambitious foreign policy” could “destroy our armies and prove a real threat to the liberty of the people of the United States.” But Trump is not concerned about our armies. He disdains our soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” I can’t imagine that he is terribly worried about the “liberty of the people of the United States” either, given that he has already tried once to overthrow the American electoral system, and might well do it again.

Trump and the people around him are clearly not isolationists in the old-fashioned sense. An isolationist wants to disengage from the world. Trump wants to remain engaged with the world, but on different terms. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and maybe this is what he means: If Ukraine is partitioned, or if Ukraine loses the war, then Trump could twist that situation to his own advantage. Perhaps, some speculate, Trump wants to let Russia back into international oil markets and get something in return for that. But that explanation might be too complex: Maybe he just wants to damage President Joe Biden, or he thinks Putin will help him win the 2024 election. The Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was very beneficial to Trump in 2016; perhaps it could happen again.

Trump is already behaving like the autocrats he admires, pursuing transactional politics that will profoundly weaken the United States. But he doesn’t care. Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans who understands the significance of this moment, describes the stakes like this: “We are at a turning point in the history not just of this nation, but of the world.” Once the U.S. is no longer the security guarantor for Europe, and once the U.S. is no longer trusted in Asia, then some nations will begin to hedge, to make their own deals with Russia and China. Others will seek their own nuclear shields. Companies in Europe and elsewhere that now spend billions on U.S. energy investments or U.S. weapons will make different kinds of contracts. The United States will lose the dominant role it has played in the democratic world since 1945.

All of this could happen even if Trump doesn’t win the election. Right now, even if he never regains the White House, he is already dictating U.S. foreign policy, shaping perceptions of America in the world. Even if the funding for Ukraine ultimately passes, the damage he has done to all of America’s relationships is real. Anton Hofreiter, a member of the German Parliament, told me in Munich that he fears Europe could someday be competing against three autocracies: “Russia, China, and the United States.” When he said that, it was my turn to shake my head, not because I didn’t believe him, but because it was so hard to hear.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 10:15 AM

SECOND

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


Republicans used to back Ukraine. Then came middle fingers in Alabama.

By Danielle Paquette | February 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/29/ukraine-support-alaba
ma-political-divide/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In the early days, long before Russia’s war entered its third year, drivers honked and smiled when Natalia Reznick stood by the roadside holding her handmade sign: “Support Ukraine.”

Then one afternoon in November (2023), a man lowered his truck window and flipped her off.

She might have dismissed that as a fluke if, a few weeks later, another man hadn’t approached her booth in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and asked, “Haven’t we given you enough money?”

“The hostility shocked me,” recalled Reznick, 44, whose late father was Ukrainian. “I felt it then — the shift.”

She had been trying to collect a couple hundred dollars for food and medicine — food and medicine! Yet somewhere along the way, even a stay-at-home mom’s little charity effort outside a northern Alabama grocery store became mired in another American culture clash.

To many Republicans here and across the country, “Support Ukraine” is now a liberal cause — a costly diversion from more pressing domestic issues, such as securing the southern border. Some think European allies should bear the responsibility for stopping Vladimir Putin’s takeover, casting Kyiv’s potential ruin as not America’s problem. Others suspect aid funds might be landing in the wrong pockets. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed this month, without evidence, that U.S. tax dollars meant to help Ukrainian forces have vanished in an “enormous theft.” Then he slammed Ukraine as “one of the most blatantly, notoriously corrupt places in the world.”

It’s a far cry from the display of unity two years ago, when Putin launched his invasion and politicians from both sides of the aisle scrambled to arm Kyiv, Reznick thought. Billions of aid dollars flowed through her city, Huntsville, a defense industry hub with an Army base one local official called the “center of gravity for supporting the Ukrainians.”

Plenty of conservatives in this community, a purple dot in a sea of bright red, are proud of that distinction. The president of the county’s GOP men’s club, for instance, describes himself as a “Mitt Romney Republican” and openly blasts Putin an enemy of freedom.

The mood among the MAGA devotees, however, has lately veered toward mistrust, said Reznick, a Democrat. Her circle, she acknowledges, is a “progressive bubble,” but still, she had never dreamed of being confronted outside a Trader Joe’s or anywhere else in Huntsville.

She could understand why her neighbors wouldn’t want to spend money on a war overseas. She could understand heartbreak over this nation’s woes. But the nastiness? The way Tuberville had insulted an already battered Ukraine?

“It’s unbelievable,” she said.

By all accounts, her dad’s home country was losing ground to Russia and dangerously short on gear needed to fight back.

Tuberville was one of the two Republican senators from Alabama blocking that gear. They had opposed the latest foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine, which was ultimately able to pass the Senate with bipartisan support, Reznick had noted with relief, yet now looked doomed to languish in the House.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has refused to bring the package up for a vote until “we take care of our own first,” raising concerns that it could be held up through spring, if it survives the congressional standoff at all.

Such resistance has become increasingly popular among right-leaning voters, according to a December poll from the Pew Research Center: Nearly half of Republicans said the United States, Kyiv’s single largest defense backer to date, is providing too much aid to Ukraine, a steep climb from the invasion’s earlier stages. Just 16 percent of Democrats shared that view.

Reznick blames the shift on former president Donald Trump, who has expressed admiration for Putin, criticized Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and declined to say which side should win the war.

She was alarmed when, at a rally this month, Trump said he would let the Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that didn’t spend enough on defense. Conservatives who had rushed to protect Ukraine, meanwhile, flipped to follow his lead. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), after visiting Kyiv last May, urged Biden to “do more” — and then voted against doing more, explaining, “I talked to President Trump today and he’s dead set against this package.”

Now Trump was railing online against aid for Ukraine “WITHOUT THE HOPE OF PAYBACK,” and Reznick was in the library, checking her email one late February morning to see if Huntsville’s congressman, Rep. Dale W. Strong (R), had responded to her pleas for help.

Strong once backed support for Kyiv, too, before pivoting to say at a news conference last year that his concern “is about the southern border.”

“Nothing,” Reznick said, refreshing her inbox.

So she unpacked her markers and began work on another poster for a Ukraine rally the next morning at a downtown park, wondering who would show up and what they would say.

***

That evening, two women who would not be attending the Ukraine rally were chatting at a fitness studio across town.

Cindy Prylinski was finishing her front-desk shift and thinking, as she often did, about her 30-year-old daughter who lives hundreds of miles away in a much bigger city.

She didn’t like strangers knowing which city. She worried about someone targeting her daughter, hurting her daughter.

“This country doesn’t feel safe anymore,” she said as her clients streamed out of a ballet barre class.

No one she knew had been targeted or hurt, but coverage of the southern border was spooking her. Prylinski, 64, pictured unvetted folks slipping into Texas with drugs and guns and making their way to God knows where.

“We shouldn’t be in Ukraine when our own borders aren’t closed,” she said. “We should worry about our own country, about the cartels.”

Her favorite media personalities — Glenn Beck, a conservative radio host, and Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow — hammered the topic relentlessly, and at some point, Prylinski had grown suspicious of anything to do with Ukraine.

Yes, she knew the aid money was an economic boon for Huntsville and the thousands of workers here who design, assemble and ship out military weapons.

“But we could redirect that money,” she said, “to the invasion on our own border.”

Where had the aid dollars actually gone, anyway? Prylinski could see no impact. Were Biden and the Democrats secretly pocketing some of the money? She believed they had stolen the 2020 election, so that wasn’t out of the question.

“I don’t trust ’em as far as I can throw ’em,” she said.

One of her clients, Stacy Oberman, 56, an engineer now lacing up her tennis shoes, agreed that they shouldn’t trust the left. Democrats, she thought, were courting immigrants to “buy votes.”

She also harbored some skepticism toward Zelensky. Were things really as dire as he had been saying?

“Is Zelensky bluffing?’ she asked.

Trump had recently posted that no aid should be given to any country “unless it is done as a loan,” and Oberman thought that sounded like a better idea, one that prioritized America’s financial health.

“If this country collapses in five years,” she said, “there will be no more aid for anyone.”

Over the last two years, both Oberman and Prylinski have seen people standing around Huntsville with signs in support of Ukraine, among other causes they saw as liberal.

Some people yell at them and flip them off, Prylinski had noticed.

“And that’s never okay,” she said.

The yellers, she thought, should save their anger for Biden and the Democrats.

“Not people expressing their freedom of speech,” Prylinski said.

**

She draped blue and yellow flags on the gazebo at Big Spring Park. She taped signs to a table: “ARM UKRAINE. CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN.”

She fixed a red beaded crown in her blonde hair, one similar to traditional accessories she had seen people wear in her Ukrainian home city, Kharkiv, which had lately been constructing schools in underground bunkers.

Anya Kuklis, 41, had helped organize dozens of “Support Ukraine” rallies and charity events in Huntsville since the war began, but this one, on the invasion’s second anniversary, felt especially urgent as America’s aid package seemed to be in jeopardy of falling apart.

“Call Dale W. Strong,” she advised anyone who would listen, passing out blue and yellow beaded bracelets.

Kuklis moved here 14 years ago for her husband’s job. Over the last year, like Reznick, she had spotted her first middle finger — then a few more — while standing outside a church with her own “Support Ukraine” sign, trying to direct traffic to craft or bake sales.

On a good day, she and her friends raised $3,000 to cover food and medicine for Ukrainian soldiers. They would PayPal the money to her cousins in the region, one of whom was a soldier.

A lot of people, she was touched to see, were still passionate about that mission. Donations weren’t dropping off. The group’s blueberry lemon lavender bread remained a hit.

Things had taken a painful turn last summer, though, when a man rolled up and mockingly tossed pennies at her feet.

Kuklis chose to focus on what happened later that day, when another man parked his car and handed her a $100 bill. He was from Iraq, he explained, so he understood the horrors of war.

“Trying to look at the positives,” Kuklis said.

That was easy to do on this Saturday when the sun was shining, making up for the occasionally fierce gusts of wind, and she counted at least a hundred people — including a teary-eyed Reznick — bursting into a chant of “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!)

No middle fingers. No pennies.

Not everyone was chanting along, though. Behind them, families strolled beside the park’s canal, mostly minding their own business and tossing crumbs to ducks.

Virginia Spicka, 26, was hanging out with her 2-year-old son, her 17-month-old daughter and 57-year-old mother, who, much to her gratitude, was making sure their stroller wasn’t blowing into the water.

“Let’s put this way over here in the grass,” her mother said, laughing.

They had been talking about the nursing student who had been found dead two days earlier in a Georgia university town, a tragedy that had dominated conservative media. The nursing student had been out for a jog by herself, and now Spicka was worried about her sister, who loved to run solo.

Federal immigration officials had confirmed that the man accused of murdering the young woman had entered the country illegally from Venezuela.

“That is what we need to be worried about,” Spicka said. “The border. Not Ukraine.”

Her kids looked eager to feed the ducks. They just had to find change for a dollar, since the crumb dispensers around the park accepted only quarters.

“Maybe I can take this to the Ukraine rally,” said her mother, flashing the dollar, “since they’re getting so much money.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 10:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 2:16 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.


Indeed.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 2:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Republicans used to back Ukraine. Then came middle fingers in Alabama.

By Danielle Paquette | February 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/29/ukraine-support-alaba
ma-political-divide/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In the early days, long before Russia’s war entered its third year, drivers honked and smiled when Natalia Reznick stood by the roadside holding her handmade sign: “Support Ukraine.”

Then one afternoon in November (2023), a man lowered his truck window and flipped her off.

She might have dismissed that as a fluke if, a few weeks later, another man hadn’t approached her booth in a Trader Joe’s parking lot and asked, “Haven’t we given you enough money?”

“The hostility shocked me,” recalled Reznick, 44, whose late father was Ukrainian. “I felt it then — the shift.”

She had been trying to collect a couple hundred dollars for food and medicine — food and medicine! Yet somewhere along the way, even a stay-at-home mom’s little charity effort outside a northern Alabama grocery store became mired in another American culture clash.

To many Republicans here and across the country, “Support Ukraine” is now a liberal cause —
No. It's a phony cause, like our invasions and regime changes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya and our proxy wars in Syria and Georgia.

Quote:
a costly diversion from more pressing domestic issues, such as securing the southern border.

Some think European allies should bear the responsibility for stopping Vladimir Putin’s takeover,
continuing our proxy war of aggression against Russia

Quote:
casting Kyiv’s potential ruin as not America’s problem. Others suspect aid funds might be landing in the wrong pockets. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed this month, without evidence,
Because transparencyand accountability are lacking. This is like the well-known cash flood to Iraq and Afghanistan, which lined a lot of pockets and funded a number of NGO buildings on "Embassy row" but didn't rebuild or secure either nation..

Quote:
The Pentagon spent $62.3 billion in 2022 on Ukraine for weapons, ammunition, training, logistics, supplies, salaries and stipends, according to the Joint Strategic Oversight Plan for Ukraine Response report. Inspectors general for several agencies released the report in January.

The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development spent $46 billion for activities ranging from border security to basic government services such as utilities, hospitals, schools and firefighting. Other government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, spent another $5 billion.

The report noted the difficulty U.S. agencies had accounting for the billions spent.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/02/19/oversight-ukra
ine-russia-military-aid/11271555002/

Quote:
that U.S. tax dollars meant to help Ukrainian forces have vanished in an “enormous theft.” Then he slammed Ukraine as “one of the most blatantly, notoriously corrupt places in the world.”


Because it is ....

Quote:
Ukraine climbs global corruption ranking: Country's current position revealed
Albania, Argentina, Belarus, Gambia, Ethiopia, and Zambia are one point ahead of Ukraine, scoring 37.

The rest of the article is just blah blah blah. But it starts out with a lot of propaganda.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 6:47 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


The Duran did a good job of explaining why the EC wants to keep project Ukraine going, according to Tom Luongo: Eurobonds.

Background: The European Commission (EC) is an UNELECTED bureaucracy wanting to govern all of the EU nations, superceding each nation's trade, cultural, legal, agricultural, economic, military, financial, judicial, and foreign policies. Ursula van der Leyen (van der Crazy) and Brussels bureaucrats have been hankering for that centralized power for a long time. The one thing they DON'T have is the power to levy taxes on insitutions and individuals within the EU.

They're trying get around that is by issuing "Eurobonds" ...

Drats, busy. More later.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, February 29, 2024 11:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Derailed by this...

Quote:
Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia
Thursday, Feb 29, 2024 - 07:45 PM

This is the single most important, dangerous and highly revealing statement from a top defense official in the West in a long time... It also demonstrates the precarious urgency of the moment and the huge stakes going into the November US election. The world truly stands on the precipice of a nuclear nightmare with the following fresh assertion of Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said before Congress on Thursday:

"If Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia," Austin stated.

What's more is that this came the very day that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned things could easily spiral toward nuclear war in the scenario that NATO sends troops to Ukraine.

According to the fuller context of the Pentagon chief's statements, he emphasized that more Washington funding is crucial for Ukraine in order to prevent a situation where "one country can redraw its neighbors’ boundaries and illegitimately take over its sovereign territory."

"We know that if Putin is successful here, he will not stop. He will continue to take more aggressive actions in the region ... Blah blah blah

What is even more alarming about this statement is that everyone now knows that Ukraine forces are in retreat at this very moment...


No.
What is REALLY alarming is that by now everyone who read or even heard about our weaponizing Ukraine SINCE 2014 knows that everything that Putin said about NATO, the USA, and the CIA is TRUE: WE provoked the war.

What is WITH these 'tards???
Is Ukraine part of NATO???
NO.
So??

Who the fuck believes these maroons anymore, anyway?


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 7:26 AM

SECOND

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


Putin used his February 29 address to the Federal Assembly to attempt to convince the Russian public that his next term as president will be defined by Russian military success in Ukraine but not at the expense of stagnating or decreased social and economic welfare.

Putin claimed that the West is attempting to draw Russia into an arms race as the West successfully did with the Soviet Union in the 1980s to the detriment of the Soviet Union’s economy. Putin emphasized, however, that the Russian government is taking measures to develop the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) while increasing social and economic spending, likely in an effort to demonstrate to the Russian public that Russia has measures in place to avoid ballooned defense spending reminiscent of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

Putin also emphasized that Russia possesses weapons that can strike Western countries and claimed that Western escalation is threatening a possible nuclear conflict that could destroy civilization.[20] Putin and Russian officials frequently invoke nuclear threats to instill fear in Western audiences and weaken Western support for Ukraine.[21]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-february-29-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 7:38 AM

SECOND

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


Tucker Carlson Throws Putin Under the Bus

By Kaitlin Lewis | Feb 29, 2024 at 4:01 PM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-throws-putin-under-bus-1874897

Tucker Carlson bashed Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification for invading Ukraine, claiming that the "denazification" of the country was "one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard."

Speaking with host Lex Fridman in a podcast episode released Tuesday, Carlson discussed his controversial interview with Putin released earlier this month. The former Fox News star has faced mounds of backlash for meeting with the Kremlin leader, which was the first time Putin agreed to sit down for an interview with Western media personnel since the start of the war in Ukraine.

Putin and Carlson's interview touched on a long list of topics, from a long-winded Russian history lesson to Putin's thoughts on the next U.S. presidential election. Carlson also described his first impression of Putin as someone who "seemed nervous," telling Fridman that the Russian president "went into [the interview] like an over-prepared student."

Fridman specifically asked Carlson for his opinion on Putin's justification for continuing the war in Ukraine, which in part is to achieve the "denazification" of the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, has repeatedly dismissed the Kremlin's claims that Kyiv's government is openly "pro-Nazi."

"I thought it was one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard," Carlson told Fridman. "I didn't understand what it meant."

"I hate that whole conversation because it's not real," he continued. "It's just ad hominem. It's a way of associating someone with an evil regime that doesn't exist anymore."

Nazism, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, describes the body of doctrines held by the Nazi Party movement led by Adolf Hitler in Germany. According to Carlson, Nazism does not exist anymore because it "is inseparable from the German nation."

"I'm very anti-Nazi," he told Fridman. "I'm merely saying there isn't a Nazi movement in 2024. It's a way of calling people evil."

Newsweek reached out to the Kremlin's press office via email for comment.

Putin has also complained about his conversation with Carlson, telling Russian journalist Pavel Aleksandrovich Zarubin that he had prepared for the former television host to "behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions."

"I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond in the same way," Putin said.

The Russian leader also explicitly mocked Carlson during the interview, pointing fun at the fact that his attempts to get a job with the CIA were repeatedly unsuccessful.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov previously told reporters that Putin gave an interview to Carlson because "he has a position which differs" from other Western media."

Comments on the article:

Carlson is finally realizing that he got played.

So it took Tucker 3 or so weeks to figure this out? What a genius.

Looks like Tucker is not going to get a house in the same neighborhood as Tara Reade, Edward Snowden, and Steven Seagal after all.

Poor Russian trolls, they'll have to find a new spokesman. Never mind, we learned this week that the Kremlin spends 1.1 billion on propaganda, enough to afford the White House.

If you read the article, Tucker doesn't believe in Nazis, he thinks they cannot exist out of the context of the Third Reich. Now that's the dumbest thing I ever heard, especially from a current day Nazi like Tucker, who owes his success to promoting modern day nazism... wait, it's starting to make sense now... It's like that saying, “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist.”

After Putin savaged Tucker for being a lightweight that he has zero respect for, this is the best Mr. Brown nose can do?


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 7:54 AM

SECOND

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


U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned on Thursday that NATO will be drawn into war if Ukraine is defeated by invading Russian forces.

https://www.newsweek.com/nato-will-drawn-war-russia-if-ukraine-loses-l
loyd-austin-1874913

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 10:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine. Fuck NATO. Fuck Lloyd Austin.



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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 12:08 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned on Thursday that NATO will be drawn into war if Ukraine is defeated by invading Russian forces.

https://www.newsweek.com/nato-will-drawn-war-russia-if-ukraine-loses-l
loyd-austin-1874913



I already posted this.

Why the repeat?

Is Ukraine in NATO????
NO???

Then WTF is he talking about?

He's just another one of those lying psycopaths who doesn't give a shit about America or Americans.

And why this urgent urgency for $$$$.

THE WAR IS LOST, DOOD. Throwing more $$$ at Ukraine isn't gonna help them, or us. It's just one last (corrupt) payday. Gotta throw $$ at your bought and paid for oligarchs, CIA assets, MIC colleagues, Eurocrats, and bankers. Right?




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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 12:48 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Back to Eurobonds ....

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The Duran did a good job of explaining why the EC wants to keep project Ukraine going, according to Tom Luongo: Eurobonds.

Background: The European Commission (EC) is an UNELECTED bureaucracy wanting to govern all of the EU nations, superceding each nation's trade, cultural, legal, agricultural, economic, military, financial, judicial, and foreign policies. Ursula van der Leyen (van der Crazy) and Brussels bureaucrats have been hankering for that centralized power for a long time. The one thing they DON'T have is the power to levy taxes on insitutions and individuals within the EU.

They're trying get around that is by issuing "Eurobonds" ...

Drats, busy. More later.


The Eurocrats' problem (They always call for MOAR "EUROPE"!) is that the EC has a common currency and a central bank (European Central Bank, ECB) but no direct revenue stream, i.e. no power to tax individuals or corporations. In fact, the EU treaties specifically FORBID the ECB from issuing European bonds. They have a European stabilization fund" but that has to be agreed to by every Euro nation. Eurobonds would be different: issued by the ECB, but payout backed by non-democratcally imposed ECB taxes.

Eurobonds were first proposed in 2008 and several times since.
MERKEL (Germany) had been a cobble in the Eurocrats' shoe on that issue, and Germany, being the industrial powerhouse of Europe and the biggest source of growth and savings was able to block Eurobonds.

EUROCRATS THEREFORE NEEDED TO DESTROY GERMAN POWER AND THE GERMAN ECONOMY IN ORDER TO GRAB THAT POWER.

So Merkel retired, and a bunch of transnationalists and diehard Eurocrats were wedged into place. Just looked at the Green Party poopheads running Germany today! They are not only assenting to the destruction of Germany (why have they not raised a fuss about Nordstream?), some are actively participating.

Back to Eurobonds.

There was one "crisis" that led to Eurobonds, and that was the Covid crisis. (Climate shift is another "crisis" that TPTB are using to tighten control over populations.)
It was supposed to be a one-time thing, but bureaucrats whose sole goal is MOAR CONTROL use exceptions as precedents.

So now that Project Ukraine is going down the tubes, Eurocrats and Rothschild bankers (van der Leyen, Macron, Habeck, Baerbock etc.) are talking up the "spectre that is haunting Europe" (Russian invasion) to create a "European army" which must, of course, be funded and equipped using.... Eurobonds.

It has nothing to do with Russia. It's literally painting a "CRISES" to grab more taxes and more power, lower living standards, and squeeze more out of the average person.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" indeed!

*****

This explains only part of the drive for Project Ukraine. There are many factions interested in the project, from
die-hard ideologues like the Kagan clan to
deepstate "interagency" actors who love the funding and prestige of moving and shaking the world, to
MIC reps embedded in the Pentagon whose interest is more mercenary, to
transnational financiers like BlackRock and Monsanto who were hoping for a big Russian, or at least Ukrainian payday, to
braindead politicians who believe what they read in the NYT (No, they don't have better sources of info, they and their staff read and believe press clippings just like most people.)

Right now TPTB are in panic mode. Some want to push this hobby-horse further (Eurobonds), others (CIA) have already burned their operations, some American conservative and European populist politicians sense that winds have shifted (huge demonstrations in Europe by farmers and truckers, USA border security). Blame-shifting between the Pentagon and the CIA. Fear of another Afghanistan-style collapse.
The one thing they can all agree on: MOAR $$$!



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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 1:52 PM

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:

And why this urgent urgency for $$$$.

THE WAR IS LOST, DOOD. Throwing more $$$ at Ukraine isn't gonna help them, or us. It's just one last (corrupt) payday. Gotta throw $$ at your bought and paid for oligarchs, CIA assets, MIC colleagues, Eurocrats, and bankers. Right?
Modern Banzai Charge: Russian Troops Pile Onto Vehicles, Speed Toward Ukrainian Lines ... And Die.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/26/modern-banzai-russian
-troops-pile-onto-vehicles-speed-toward-ukrainian-lines--and-die-but-the-tactic-is-helping-russia-advance/?sh=3626e4c6b5ef

During World War II, Japanese troops often resorted to human-wave attacks they hoped would overwhelm Allied troops. The Allies labeled these attacks “banzai charges”—and responded by opening fire with machine guns and mortars.

Eighty years later in Ukraine, Russian troops are resorting to similar tactics. The difference now is that the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition, mostly owing to Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress continuing to block U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Infantry-first “meat assaults” are nothing new in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, but the tactics are evolving. Noting the Ukrainians’ desperate shortage of artillery ammo, the Russians are betting that back-to-back-to-back waves of troops, riding in or on infantry fighting vehicles, can deplete Ukrainian firepower faster than the Ukrainians can deplete Russian manpower.

The Ukrainian Center for Defenses Strategies noted the modern banzai tactics in fighting around west of the ruins of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. “A strike group, comprising 100 to 200 personnel on eight to 12 IFVs, rapidly advances to the front line of the Ukrainian defense forces and initiates an attack,” CDS explained.

“Due to a [Ukrainian] ammunition shortage, a segment of the assault group reaches the target and engages in combat. Concurrently, another assault group swiftly moves towards the battle area.”

“This tactic allows for a continuous build-up of effort but results in substantial enemy losses,” CDS concluded. “Up to 60 percent of armored vehicles in a single attack and up to half of the personnel. This also leads to increased casualties in the Ukrainian defense forces units, which is critical for them.”

The Russian army’s 70th Motor-Rifle Regiment deployed the tactic in Robotyne, in southern Ukraine, on Saturday. At least two BMP-3 tracked IFVs barreled into the devastated settlement—the southernmost Ukrainian position in Zaporizhzhia Oblast—and, firing as they moved, dropped off infantry who then sheltered in collapsed buildings.

The BMP-3s retreated, leaving the infantry to fight alone against the Ukrainian 65th Mechanized Brigade and its explosive drones. It seems there were few Russian survivors.

So the Russians tried again the next day, this time rolling three BTR-82 wheeled IFVs toward Robotyne. A Ukrainian mine popped one of the BTRs. A Ukrainian soldier reportedly from the 118th Mechanized Brigade hit a second BTR with a rocket-propelled grenade, at least temporarily halting the assault.

The banzai attacks are extremely costly for the Russians, and help to explain why the Russians are losing around 800 troops a day, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry. And why the Russians have, in the estimation of open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua, written off or abandoned 19 BMPs and BTRs in just the last two days.

In the first two years of the wider war, the Russians on average lost around 80 BMPs and BTRs per month. Lately, they’ve been losing them at a rate of hundreds per month. That’s attrition that even the Russians, with their large stocks of old Cold War vehicles, can’t sustain for very long.

It’s not for no reason the Kremlin has enough IFVs for maybe another year of hard fighting. At which point Russian troops will have to find other ways of riding into battle.

But in the short term, the modern banzai charges—however costly for the Russians—are working.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 3:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND
Modern Banzai Charge: Russian Troops Pile Onto Vehicles, Speed Toward Ukrainian Lines ... And Die.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/26/modern-banzai-russian
-troops-pile-onto-vehicles-speed-toward-ukrainian-lines--and-die-but-the-tactic-is-helping-russia-advance/?sh=3626e4c6b5ef


I HAVE SEEN NO SUCH THING ON MILITARY SUMMARY CHANNEL, WHICH POSTS EVERY CONCEIVABLE CLAIM TO, AND VIDEOS OF, ANY SORT OF UKRAINIAN "VICTORY". Simplicius is also good at linking to original sources/videos.

If this happened more than a couple of times, I'd know.

Stop posting bullshit.
Liar.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 5:59 PM

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:
Originally posted by SECOND
Modern Banzai Charge: Russian Troops Pile Onto Vehicles, Speed Toward Ukrainian Lines ... And Die.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/26/modern-banzai-russian
-troops-pile-onto-vehicles-speed-toward-ukrainian-lines--and-die-but-the-tactic-is-helping-russia-advance/?sh=3626e4c6b5ef


I HAVE SEEN NO SUCH THING ON MILITARY SUMMARY CHANNEL, WHICH POSTS EVERY CONCEIVABLE CLAIM TO, AND VIDEOS OF, ANY SORT OF UKRAINIAN "VICTORY". Simplicius is also good at linking to original sources/videos.

If this happened more than a couple of times, I'd know.

Stop posting bullshit.
Liar.
Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated over the Russian Army's meat grinder tactics.
https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/90436

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 6:30 PM

SECOND

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


With A Million Shells About To Ship, Ukraine’s Artillery Crisis Could End Soon

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/01/with-a-million-shells
-about-to-ship-ukraines-artillery-crisis-could-end-soon/?sh=53678c45a88f

In awkward fits and starts, Ukraine’s European allies finally are piecing together the financing and industrial resources to supply the Ukrainians with the artillery ammunition they need.

Several separate and parallel initiatives—a European Union arms deal, a Czech-led bulk ammo-purchase and a portfolio of bilateral deals between Ukraine and individual allied countries—should ship at least 700,00 shells over the next couple of months.

The Ukrainians might get, via Europe, more than a million shells this spring. And if Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress finally end their blockade of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the next month or so, as seems likely, Ukrainian batteries could enjoy a windfall of way more than a million shells as spring turns to summer.

That’s not quite enough artillery ammunition to match Russia’s supply of ammo from its own factories and, more importantly, from North Korea. But it’s enough ammo for the Ukrainian armed forces at least to hold the line against Russia’s much larger armed forces. And maybe to begin planning for a new offensive.

Which country has more and better artillery ammunition might be the decisive factor as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its third year.

It was artillery parity, thanks to a U.S. purchase of a million South Korean shells, that allowed Ukraine to go on the attack last summer. And it was the abrupt end of U.S. aid—and the subsequent withholding of perhaps a hundred thousand shells this winter—that forced Ukraine to cede the battlefield momentum back to Russia.

Meanwhile, Russian’s offensive this year has been been sustained by the Kremlin’s purchase, from North Korea, of around 400,000 shells a month for four months in a row starting in September.

Notably, as many as half of the shells are duds, according to an official at Ukraine’s intelligence directorate. But despite the high dud rate, the Russians are firing around 10,000 shells a day all along the 600-mile front of their wider war. The Ukrainians are firing just 2,000 shells a day.

While the Ukrainians somewhat have compensated by flinging as many as 50,000 explosives-laden first-person-view drones every month for several months now, an FPV drone can’t fully replace a 155-millimeter shell. The drone might range two miles with a pound of explosives. The shell carries 25 pounds of explosives at least 15 miles.

Increasingly unafraid of Ukrainian howitzer batteries, Russian batteries have been massing, out in the open, for devastating salvos that level Ukrainian fortifications. With more ammo, the Ukrainian gunners could scatter the Russian gunners.

Republicans’ abrupt blockade of ammo supplies might not have been so devastating for Ukraine’s war plans had the European Union honored its pledge to supply Ukraine with a million shells in 2023.

Struggling to expand production without also investing a lot of money or political capital, E.U. countries ultimately shipped just half a million shells last year. It was an embarrassing betrayal—and one that E.U. officials only now are making right with a planned shipment of 170,000 shells through March.

At the same time, the United Kingdom, Finland and other NATO countries individually have pledged to Ukraine undisclosed quantities of shells through 2024. Perhaps a few thousand a month.

But it’s the Czech Republic that’s poised to reverse Ukraine’s artillery misfortunes. At the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 18, Czech defense policy chief Jan Jires shocked his audience when he announced his government had identified 800,000 artillery shells “sitting in non-Western countries.” Those countries apparently include South Korea.

The shells could be had for $1.5 billion.

“Most of these countries [are] unwilling to support Ukraine directly for political reasons so they need a middleman,” Jires said, according to Politico reporter Paul McLeary and other sources. The Czech Republic would be that middleman, if Ukraine’s other allies would help to pay for the ammo.

Two weeks later, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, The Netherlands and around a dozen unspecified countries had cobbled together more than half of the financing: enough for around 400,000 shells. And if the Czechs can come up with the rest of the money, they could buy the other 400,000, too.

The Czech-brokered shells plus the late E.U. shells should get Ukraine shooting again through the spring and into the summer at a rate of perhaps 6,000 shells a day.

And if Mike Johnson, the far-right Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, ends his party’s blockade of further U.S. aid to Ukraine, those 6,000 shells a day could become nearly 10,000.

The U.S. Army has been ramping up ammo-production at its factories in Texas and Pennsylvania and now can make 36,000 shells a month—most of which could go to Ukraine. But only if Congress pays for them.

There’s reason to hope. Brian Fitzpatrick, moderate House Republican, has filed a special legislative vehicle called a “discharge petition” that, with the backing of a few more moderate Republicans as well as most Democrats, could bypass Johnson and other extremists and bring Ukraine aid to a vote, potentially as soon as this month.

Fitzpatrick told Axios he was confident in the petition getting enough support. How many Republicans would buck their leadership in order to arm Ukraine? “More than you think,” Fitzpatrick said. There are “a lot of people who know it's the right thing to do.”

Czech-brokered shells and, to a lesser extent, E.U.-made shells should keep Ukraine in the fight. And with American shells, potentially tens of thousands per month, the Ukrainians could do more than just survive. They might think about going back on the attack.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 6:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Ukraine is a fucking crisis.

Flush Ukraine down the toilet.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Friday, March 1, 2024 9:53 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND
Modern Banzai Charge: Russian Troops Pile Onto Vehicles, Speed Toward Ukrainian Lines ... And Die.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/02/26/modern-banzai-russian
-troops-pile-onto-vehicles-speed-toward-ukrainian-lines--and-die-but-the-tactic-is-helping-russia-advance/?sh=3626e4c6b5ef

I HAVE SEEN NO SUCH THING ON MILITARY SUMMARY CHANNEL, WHICH POSTS EVERY CONCEIVABLE CLAIM TO, AND VIDEOS OF, ANY SORT OF UKRAINIAN "VICTORY". Simplicius is also good at linking to original sources/videos.
If this happened more than a couple of times, I'd know.
Stop posting bullshit.
Liar.

SECOND: Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated over the Russian Army's meat grinder tactics.
https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/90436


More crap from a source that breathes, drinks, and shits lies 24/7/365.

So, you're saying that Proghozin was assassinated .. by the Kremlin, no less ... because of the Kremlin's own military policy???!
How does that even pass the laugh test?

THE RUSSIAN ARMY DID NOT WANT TO TAKE BAKHMUT. It was supposed to be grind the Ukrainian Army.
Prigozhin, for his own reasons, decided he wanted to "take" Bakhmut, against orders. In fact, before the Bakhmut operation was over, Russian command was so disturbed by what he was doing they forbade him from recruiting from prisons anymore.

The Russian army uses a variety of tactics.
One is strategic: they attrit the Ukrainian army throughout it's entire depth of operation. From its ports and bridges and railways to the west and south, all the way to Ukraine's eastern front.

They prepare battlefields ahead of time, with artillery, flamethrower, heavy bombs and/or drones before they engage.
That way, once they engage the UA they never encounter its full force.

I've seen several approaches. One is where the Russian army advances, engages, and then pulls back, drawing the UA forward into a prepared fire sack. Rabotyno and Stepove have been crossed by each side many many times, but each time, the UA army loses more and more soldiers. Russian army also likes to prepare "cauldrons", but they never close it completely. They leave an opening through which the UA pours in more reinforcements, only to have them slaughteed.

It's much, much easier for the Russians to defend than to attack, so they like to provoke attacks in a time and place of their choosing. "Active defense" is what they call it. "Toying with the mouse" is what it looks like to me.

Unlike the UA, Russia rarely commits to defending, or taking, a particular territory "at all costs". That's why they withdrew from Kherson and Kharkov.

I'm not sure what their threshold is ... it's probably numeric, like casualties per day ... but they will definitely stop attacking in a certain area if UA defenses are too strong. The only committed advances I've seen were Mariupol, Bakhmut (and that wasn't supposed to happen. The Russian army wound up too far forward of its defenses after that), and Avdeevka. And Avdeevka fell because it took a tremendous pounding by heavy bombs.

Anyway, you keep passing on tropes and memes that are really just laughable lies.

Eventually if we keep believing in, and operating on, lies, we will fail majorly.

I think we're there, and for whatever part you played in cheerleading on a ridiculous policy, you're to blame. One would almost think you want to see the USA destroyed.




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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, March 2, 2024 6:32 AM

SECOND

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


Europe Battles Powder Shortage To Supply Shells For Ukraine

By Tom Barfield | March 1, 2024

https://www.barrons.com/news/europe-battles-powder-shortage-to-supply-
shells-for-ukraine-0173c7d0

Production of artillery shells is a key contest between Ukraine's allies and Russian invaders

Hard-to-find gunpowder is hindering Europe's scramble to provide hundreds of thousands of shells for Ukraine's defensive effort against Russian invaders, with solutions only starting to emerge.

"We have all become aware of the need to face up to the scarcity of some components, especially gunpowders," French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday after a gathering of Kyiv's allies in Paris.

"Powder is really what's lacking today," he added.

Gunpowder goes into propellant charges that hurl artillery shells -- such as the NATO-standard 155-millimetre projectiles used in many guns sent to Ukraine -- over distances of tens of kilometres.

"A simple explosive artillery shell has three parts. It has a steel casing, a high-explosive main charge and a detonator" usually set to trigger the blast on impact, said Johann Hoecherl, a munitions expert at the German armed forces university in Munich.

"Propellant charges are usually separate, because (gunners) will take one or two, up to six or even eight" depending on the desired range, he added.

While the propellant is still referred to as gunpowder "it's not powder at all these days, it's made up of rods or pellets", Hoecherl said.

In a video on its website, German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall illustrates stackable propellant cylinders filled with explosive pellets slotting in behind a shell in the breech of a cannon.

Rheinmetall – 155mm Artillery Modular Charge System



Europe counts a very small number of powder producers, said Jean-Paul Maulny, deputy director of France's Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS).

They include firms like Eurenco, with operations in France, Belgium and Sweden, and Nitrochemie, majority-owned by Rheinmetall, with sites in Germany and Switzerland.

With many countries pushing to bring production home, France "is in the process of relocating part of Eurenco's production to Bourges" around 200 kilometres (125 miles) south of Paris, Maulny said.

"This is one of the bottlenecks for munitions," he added. "The top question is the quantity of production."

EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton told reporters in Paris Friday that the bloc also faced challenges finding the raw materials for gunpowder.

"To make powder, you need a specific kind of cotton, which mostly comes from China," he said.

Nitrocellulose, also known as guncotton, is a key ingredient in gunpowder manufacture.

"Would you know it, deliveries of this cotton from China stopped as if by chance a few months ago," Breton added.

China and Russia have in recent years ramped up economic cooperation and diplomatic contacts, and their strategic partnership has grown closer since the invasion of Ukraine.

In Russia this week, China's Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong declared relations "are at their best period in history".

Breton said that "Nordic countries have found a substitute for the Chinese cotton... innovation is at work, precisely to meet the need for powder, because... we have problems today with powder capacity".

Companies producing the substitute ingredients for powder would be among those selected for grants under the EU's Act In Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) to be announced next week, Breton said.

Breton predicted that EU efforts to boost artillery shell output would bring the bloc's annual production capacity to between 1.5 million and 1.7 million by the end of this year.

He estimated that the equivalent figure for Russia was "a little below two million".

"Everyone is putting themselves in a position to manufacture on a much larger scale," said IRIS expert Maulny.

"For now, the Ukrainians are short of shells... the Russians don't have a shortage since they got stocks from the North Koreans, but it could happen in the coming months," he added.

"No-one was ready for a high-intensity conflict where there's enormous consumption of military equipment. We haven't seen a war like this since World War II," Maulny said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, March 2, 2024 6:33 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine and the Netherlands signed a 10-year bilateral security agreement on March 1.[24] Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that the Netherlands announced that it would provide 2 billion euros (about $2.17 billion) in military aid to Ukraine in 2024 and additional security assistance over the next 10 years.[25] Zelensky stated that the bilateral security agreement prioritizes assistance in air defense and artillery systems and naval and long-range weapons.[26]

The Dutch MoD also announced that it is increasing its contribution to the Czech initiative to provide artillery shells to Ukraine from 100 million euros (about $108 million) to 250 million euros (about $271 million).[28]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-1-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, March 2, 2024 6:34 AM

SECOND

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


The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on March 1 that documents it obtained of the draft treaty from the 2022 Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiations indicate that both sides initially agreed that Ukraine would be a “permanently neutral state that doesn't participate in military blocs.”[1]

The draft treaty also reportedly banned Ukraine from receiving any foreign weapons or hosting any foreign military personnel. The WSJ reported that Russia pushed for the Ukrainian military to be limited to 85,000 soldiers, 342 tanks, and 519 artillery systems, whereas Ukraine wanted the caps to be 250,000 soldiers, 800 tanks, and 1,900 artillery systems. Russia also reportedly demanded that Ukrainian missiles be limited to a range of 40 kilometers, a range that would allow Russian forces to deploy critical systems and materiel close to Ukraine without fear of strikes. The Kremlin has repeatedly called for the “demilitarization” of Ukraine since its full-scale invasion but has not previously provided details on what that would specifically entail.[2]

The Ukrainian military in 2014 – before Russia’s first invasion – consisted of about 130,000 personnel, and the documents from 2022 indicate that Russia intended to drastically reduce Ukraine’s military to such a level that Ukraine could no longer defend itself.[3]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has most recently emphasized the idea of a “demilitarized” or “sanitary” zone in Ukraine that would place Russian territory – including occupied Ukraine – out of range of both Ukrainian frontline artillery systems and Western-provided long-range systems.[4] Putin likely aims for the ”demilitarization” of Ukraine to allow him to enforce his will upon Ukraine without any substantial resistance.

Reported details of the draft treaty suggest that Russia intended to use the treaty to set conditions for future attacks against Ukraine while also prompting the West to make concessions on Ukraine’s sovereignty. The WSJ reported that the United States, United Kingdom, China, France, and Russia were to be guarantors of the treaty.[5] Russia also reportedly wanted to include Belarus as a guarantor. The guarantor states were supposed to “terminate international treaties and agreements incompatible with the permanent neutrality of Ukraine,” including military aid agreements. The WSJ did not specify if other non-guarantor states would have to terminate their agreements with Ukraine as well, although this is likely considering that the treaty would ban Ukraine from having foreign-supplied weapons. It is unclear what Russia considers to be “incompatible” with a permanently “neutral” Ukraine, although the Kremlin most certainly would have broadly interpreted this as forbidding Ukraine from joining NATO, which is stipulated by Ukraine’s constitution, thereby likely demanding that Ukraine amend its constitution.[6]

Russia reportedly wanted all guarantors to agree on a response should Ukraine be subject to any attacks, but the WSJ stated that the guarantor states were unlikely to agree on a response should Russia attack Ukraine again – likely due to the guarantor states’ diverging interests. This stipulation likely intended to allow Russia to influence, predict, and prepare for the international response to any possible future Russian attacks on Ukraine. ISW continues to assess that any ceasefire would benefit Russia, giving it time to reconstitute and regroup for future offensive operations.[7]

Russia’s territorial objectives beyond the areas it occupied in 2022 likely prevented Russia and Ukraine from agreeing on the status of Russian-occupied areas in Ukraine in April 2022. The WSJ reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were to hold “face-to-face talks” to discuss areas of eastern Ukraine that Russian forces have occupied since 2014, but that this meeting never took place.[8] The need for Putin and Zelensky to discuss the matter independently and separately suggests that the Russian and Ukrainian negotiating delegations were unable to reach an agreement on the status of the Russian-occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, likely due to Russia’s wider expansionist territorial desires, as Kremlin officials have repeatedly indicated.[9] The WSJ did not report on any clauses in the treaty concerning Russian-occupied territory outside of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.

Russian authorities suggested that the Kremlin has likely adopted a more extensive set of goals regarding Ukraine over the course of Russia's war against Ukraine. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov responded to the leaked April 2022 draft agreement between Russia and Ukraine, claiming that the draft agreement is “no longer relevant” and that “conditions have changed.”[10] Peskov's statements are likely part of a current trend of increased Russian confidence in the Russian military’s capabilities and the attainability of Putin’s maximalist war objectives following the recent seizure of Avdiivka and prolonged US debates about military aid to Ukraine.[11]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-1-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Saturday, March 2, 2024 9:04 AM

SECOND

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


German Soldiers not needed for Taurus deployment in Ukraine: Bundestag refutes Scholz's claim

By Daria Shekina | Germany, Fri, March 01, 2024 - 22:43

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/soldiers-not-needed-for-taurus-deploym
ent-1709325830.html

The statement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the presence of German troops in Ukraine is mandatory for deploying long-range Taurus missiles there is untrue, says the head of the European Committee in the Bundestag, Anton Hofreiter.

He notes that Scholz's claims regarding the Taurus missiles "clearly do not correspond to reality."

As an example, Hofreiter explains that South Korea has 260 Taurus missiles at its disposal, but there are no Bundeswehr soldiers there.

"The chancellor is clearly lying," he adds.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE
second 11.21 05:55
second 11.21 08:41
second 11.21 08:54
second 11.21 10:17
SIGNYM 11.21 14:36
second 11.21 17:07
SIGNYM 11.21 17:52
THG 11.21 19:05
SIGNYM 11.21 20:33
second 11.21 21:58
second 11.21 22:01

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
Thread of Trump Appointments / Other Changes of Scenery...
Thu, November 21, 2024 22:03 - 40 posts
Elections; 2024
Thu, November 21, 2024 22:03 - 4787 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, November 21, 2024 22:01 - 7476 posts
1000 Asylum-seekers grope, rape, and steal in Cologne, Germany
Thu, November 21, 2024 21:46 - 53 posts
Music II
Thu, November 21, 2024 21:43 - 117 posts
Lying Piece of Shit is going to start WWIII
Thu, November 21, 2024 20:56 - 17 posts
Are we in WWIII yet?
Thu, November 21, 2024 20:31 - 18 posts
More Cope: "Donald Trump Has Not Won a Majority of the Votes Cast for President"
Thu, November 21, 2024 19:40 - 7 posts
Biden admin quietly loosening immigration policies before Trump takes office — including letting migrants skip ICE check-ins in NYC
Thu, November 21, 2024 18:18 - 2 posts
All things Space
Thu, November 21, 2024 18:11 - 267 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, November 21, 2024 17:56 - 4749 posts
Hip-Hop Artist Lauryn Hill Blames Slavery for Tax Evasion
Thu, November 21, 2024 16:36 - 12 posts
 VIEW MORE TOPICS 

FFF.NET SOCIAL