Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, April 25, 2024 19:19
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PAGE 123 of 127

Wednesday, March 20, 2024 10:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Seems like Macron, Scholz, and Tusk are burying the hatchets ... In each other's backs.

SIGNYM

signym's dream is to

T

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 1:33 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

And in real news.

Putin wins the election with 87% of the vote with a record 77% turnout.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/17/europe/putin-wins-russia-presidential-e
lection-intl/index.html

There were about 700 official international observers, in addition to journalists and average Russian citizens monitoring the election, which they described as free and fair

International observers describe Russian elections as free, fair
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/international-observers-describe-
russian-elections-as-free-fair/ar-BB1k8vAM

Russian Elections: Observers, journalists counter reports on voters intimidation in Donbas
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/russian-elections-observers-journ
alists-counter-reports-on-voters-intimidation-in-donbas/ar-BB1k5Mtt

*****

This was basically a wartime vote, when citizens often coalesce around their leader ... as long as they think they're winning.

In contrast, Zelenskiy canceled elections originally scheduled for this spring, sent the more-popular military commander Zaluzhny into effective exile in Britain, and purged the military of Zaluzhny's closer military commanders. Ukraine is "conscripting" men by - literally- kidnapping them off the streets, bundling then into vans, never to be seen again. (Many videos on Military Summary channel) He is stripping smaller towns and villages of their men, hoping to avoid unrest in large cities like Karkhiv, Kiev, Lvov, and Odessa.

Why he needs to do this is unkown, since his latest claim is that only 31,000 Ukrainians have been killed so far.

-----------
"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

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Thursday, March 21, 2024 8:56 AM

SECOND

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

The Russian military continues to undertake structural reforms to simultaneously support the war in Ukraine while expanding Russia’s conventional capabilities in the long term in preparation for a potential future large-scale conflict with NATO.

Shoigu outlined several ongoing efforts to bolster Russia’s conventional military capabilities, more likely as part of Russia’s long-term effort to prepare for a potential conventional war with NATO than as part of the war against Ukraine.

More at https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-20-2024

Charles Michel, the president of the European council, said in a pre-summit letter to leaders: “Now that we are facing the biggest security threat since the second world war, it is high time we take radical and concrete steps to be defence-ready and put the EU’s economy on a war footing.”

More at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/21/eu-leaders-urged-to-put-
economies-on-war-footing-at-ukraine-negotiations

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

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Thursday, March 21, 2024 1:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Your incessant fear-mongering, SECOND. It's not only disingenuous, it's tiresome.

Russia won't attack the EU or NATO unless it's attacked.

And guess what? NATO is ALREADY at war with Russia. From weapons and economic sanctions to intel, targeting, training and command to actual boots on the ground (in secret).

The WEF/ neocon/ NATO plan has ALWAYS been to destroy Russia. Christoforuo said it best

Quote:
A collapse in the Russian economy to sanctions...

A regime change in Russia and then the balkanization of the Russian Federation.
That was their plan, that was their only plan.

They bought into that plan, they believed in that plan... They believed it was rock solid and was not going to fail.

Ursula went to the United States in November, October of 2021. She sat down with the Biden White House. They laid out their entire sanctions plan, they put it all out on the table, they strategized it...

They got the Clown Puppet of Kiev to run around the Munich Security Conference and talk about how Ukraine was going to enter NATO, and how Ukraine was going to get nuclear weapons.

And they finally got Ukraine to provoke Russia to enter the conflict. [Until then Russia had been pressing hard for implementation of Minsk II]

And then they threw the sanctions at Russia. And they were 100 percent, 1000 percent convinced that the Russian economy was going to collapse.

The Russian people would get out onto the street. They would overthrow Putin, and Yolanda Navalny would ride into Red Square on horseback and become the leader of the Russian Federation.

And they were so certain, so confident in their plan that Russia would collapse under sanctions and Putin would be regime-changed out that they were even holding conferences. I reported on this two years ago, they were even holding events, like two-three day events in Brussels, at the headquarters of the European Union, where they were talking about all of the countries that were going to be created from the Russian Federation.

They had names. They had languages. They had leaders for all of these countries. They even had keynote speakers at these events like Kasparov...

And you were going to get six, seven countries out of the balkanization of the Russian federation, and they were going to have access to all of the cheap reources.

And that's how they saw the entire thing unfolding.

https://theduran.locals.com/post/5413022/french-media-wargaming-20k-tr
oops-russia-intel-2k-french-troops-ukraine-eu-panic-keep-war-going

Surely, SECOND, you can't deny YOUR OWN SERIES OF POSTS that described how "unfair" it was that so few people had so many resources, and posted extensively about how Russians ran roughshod over their non-Russian compatriots, and detailed the "decolonization" of Russia?

It was the most honest thing you ever posted.

A reflection of the hoped for outcome of this war, when optimism was riding high.

This was the WEF/ neocon/ NATO plan: destroy Russia, take its resources, using Ukraine as proxy. Poor Ukrainians. They had no idea what kind of meat grinder they were going to get thrown into.

-----------
"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

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Thursday, March 21, 2024 6:34 PM

SECOND

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

March 21, 2024 4:00 am CET

By Jamie Dettmer

https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-volodymy-zelenskyy-elec
tions-eu-ukraine-russia-war/

Wishing something were true doesn’t make it so.

And yet, for the past two years, we’ve had a plethora of predictions suggesting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s days are numbered, that Russians will turn on him or that he’ll be ousted in a Kremlin coup by oligarchs and Russia’s elite, now targeted by Western sanctions and angry over their frozen overseas assets.

Even Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, had confidently predicted that the president’s grip on power could slip abruptly: “In three or four months, I believe there will be a crucial change,” Kasyanov, now in exile, said back in 2022.

Another recurring narrative is that Putin’s afflicted with a fatal malady. “He has been sick for a long time; I am sure he has cancer. I think he will die very quickly. I hope very soon,” Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, announced at the start of last year.

And while former Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s bungled mutiny last summer sparked more hopeful predictions that, surely, it would be the start of Putin’s unraveling, it didn’t prove to be so.

Now, nine months on, Putin’s hold on power is tighter than it’s ever been, and he’s on course to become Russia’s longest-serving ruler since the czars, overtaking Joseph Stalin. And the imitation election that saw him secure 87 percent of the vote has only served to underline the glaring fact that he’s in full suffocating, repressive control of his country — despite the small flash mobs and defiant social media memes to the contrary.

The oligarchs know not to defy the boss. They have only to look at what happened to those who have — from Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead at his home in Berkshire, England to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who served a decade in Putin’s dungeons. And we all know Putin’s friendship with Prigozhin didn’t prevent the Wagner boss from being blown to smithereens on board his private jet either.

“Be brave. One day we will win,” a defiant Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of deceased opposition leader Alexei Navalny, implored after she voted at the Russian embassy in Berlin, writing in her late husband’s name on the ballot paper.

But when?

For years, Putin has steadfastly refused to mention Navalny, the Kremlin’s most vocal opponent for more than a decade, by name — referring to him as “the Berlin patient” or “this person.” Then, in his speech on Sunday, Putin suddenly deigned to use his adversary’s name, dubbing Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony a “sad event.” The Russian president didn’t even bother to shed crocodile tears — naming him was a taunt, a display of power.

And now the Russian opposition is without the larger-than-life Navalny who had mastered the digital age, blending political activism with clever, funny and eye-catching YouTube videos that mock Russia’s political elite and unmask them as corrupt crooks and thieves. “If you really want to defeat Putin, you have to become an innovator, you have to stop being boring,” Navalnaya advised the European Parliament last month. But now the innovative Navalny has gone.

“He was a genius when it came to clever initiatives — and he had a populist, common touch and really understood the social media era,” Khodorkovsky noted to POLITICO.

But even clever memes and stunts like the Navalny-inspired “Noon Against Putin” election protest won’t undermine the Russian leader in a serious way — however much they’re highlighted and applauded in Western newspapers. They can lift dissident morale and irritate the Kremlin, but they won’t engineer Putin’s downfall — or that of the governing system he’s shaped — which, judging by recent opinion surveys from the independent Levada pollster, has the backing of most Russians with a current approval rating of 86 percent. To believe otherwise is just wishful thinking. The absence of any serious mass protest against Putin inside Russia — let alone against his war on Ukraine — speaks volumes. And hard power wins out over soft power.

For some, the lesson to be drawn is that Russians must take up arms. Peaceful opposition is “a dead end,” said Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian lawmaker-turned-dissident. Ponomarev now lives in Kyiv and is the spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, a Ukraine-based volunteer militia thought to number around 2,000 Russian dissidents and defectors — although some in the Russian opposition estimate the tally is much lower. “If people won’t touch weapons, it won’t get us anywhere. People will always find excuses to do nothing, but we need to fight,” he told POLITICO.

He also lamented the “Noon Against Putin” protest, which saw opposition-minded Russians exhorted by Yulia Navalnaya to spoil their ballot papers or write in her late husband’s name. According to Ponomarev, this only boosted participation in the sham election and allowed Russian state media to broadcast footage of voters lining up at polling stations, adding to a false impression of legitimacy. Rather, he has urged Navalnaya, as well as other opposition figures like Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov, to “establish cooperation across the opposition and decide what to do and what not to do — that’s what I told her.” But she hasn’t responded to his appeal.

“I assume she will continue down the path of her husband and not collaborate with others in the opposition. Where people don’t want to cooperate, I think they aren’t interested in securing a victory but are carving out separate roles for themselves, and are putting personal benefits before the benefits for all,” Ponomarev added. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky sees Ponomarev’s proposed strategy of violent upheaval as unrealistic and doomed to fail.

However violent or peaceful, Russia’s opposition seems an irrelevance, no matter how much it’s talked up by some commentators in the West, hoping to raise spirits. “Russia’s prodemocratic opposition was largely a spent force well before February 2022,” analysts from the Center for European Policy Analysis argued in their recent “Containing Russia, Securing Europe” report. And while many of these individuals now continue the fight from abroad and “play an important role in helping to get information in and out of Russia, supporting Ukrainian and Russian refugees, and advocating on behalf of political prisoners, as well as organizing largely futile acts of resistance on the ground, there is little sense that any of these efforts can bring about a change in the makeup or direction of the Russian regime,” they wrote.

So, what does all this mean for Ukraine and the West?

It means that Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is the only realistic goal. This would not only allow Ukraine the sovereign right to choose its own destiny, but it would also deter Putin from further aggression — and it might just save Russia too, being the one thing that could potentially shift the country’s political dynamics. But for such victory to be achieved, the West has to gird itself, accelerate weapons provision and military assistance, and help Ukraine weather the soon-to-come Russian offensives that will likely target Kharkiv and Odesa, as well as build up for another heave to try and push Russia out.

Wishful thinking that Putin’s days are numbered and that a meme will bring him tumbling down need to be pushed aside. It’s time to get deadly serious, Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told POLITICO. “Because time favors Russia, not Ukraine.” Because “on the Russian side, they’re adapting for a long war; they have rebuilt their country completely with war in mind. It’s an authoritarian country that’s completely under the control of the power vertical. The first priority is Russia must be defeated,” he said.

From Putin’s point of view, “If Russia loses, it will undergo a transformation inside. If it wins, it will will dominate Europe.”

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

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Thursday, March 21, 2024 9:02 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

You get your ass handed to you and assume if you ignore it nobody else will notice?
Right.

Here's another thing that isn't going to happen:

Quote:
It means that Russia’s defeat in Ukraine is the only realistic goal.

-----------
"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

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Friday, March 22, 2024 6:09 AM

SECOND

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

David Axe, Forbes Staff | Mar 21, 2024, 4:46 pm EDT

Russian glide-bombs — with pop-out wings and bolt-on satellite guidance kits — arguably are the decisive weapons in the 25th month of the war on Ukraine.

Possibly more decisive than explosive first-person-view drones. Possibly even more so than the traditional king of battle: artillery.

And at present, there’s very little Ukraine can do to fight back. Its best air-defense missiles and launchers are in desperately short supply. Its ex-Soviet fighter jets lack the range to engage the Russian planes releasing glide-bombs. And its ex-European F-16s, which might give the Ukrainians a fighting chance, haven’t yet arrived.

Dropping a hundred or more KAB glide-bombs a day from as far away as 40 miles, Russian air force Sukhoi fighter-bombers systematically demolish Ukrainian defenses, easing the way for Russian army assault groups to advance, albeit still at great cost.
KAB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAB-500KR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAB-1500L

KABs are a major reason the Ukrainian garrison in the eastern city Avdiivka ultimately retreated last month following a brutal, four-month battle. The other main reason, of course, is that Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress cut off aid to Ukraine starting in October, depriving Ukrainian forces of vital ammunition.

At the height of the battle for Avdiivka in mid-February, the Russian air force lobbed 250 KABs in just two days. “These bombs completely destroy any position,” wrote Egor Sugar, a trooper with the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade, which covered the Avdiivka garrison’s retreat.

The Avdiivka glide-bombing campaign could “herald a change in Russian operations elsewhere along the front line,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. warned as Avdiivka fell.

ISW was right. It now is standard practice for the Russian air force to concentrate its glide-bombing on whichever town the Russian army wants to seize. “Preceding the assault, Russians deploy KAB guided air-dropped bombs against Ukrainian positions and proceed with artillery preparatory shelling,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained.

The post-bombing Russian ground assaults “while relatively small in scale, are consistent and frequent,” Frontelligence Insight noted. “When combined with aerial bomb drops, artillery strikes and drone deployments, these assaults prove to be considerably taxing” on ammo-starved Ukrainian troops.

Thus KAB bombings blasted the Ukrainians out of Avdiivka and, in the following few weeks, also out of the villages just west of Avdiivka. Clearly intending to escalate their attacks on Bilohorivka, 55 miles north of Avdiivka, the Russians are aiming more KABs at that settlement, too.

The Ukrainian air force briefly fought back against the Russian glide-bombers in the weeks after Avdiivka fell. Apparently deploying mobile launchers for American-made Patriot air-defense missiles—each ranging as far as 90 miles—the Ukrainians shot down 13 Russian Sukhoi Su-34s and Sukhoi Su-35s in 13 days.

But then, on March 9, a skilled—or at least lucky—Russian drone-operator spotted a Patriot team on the move around 20 miles from the front line, and cued an Iskander ground-launched ballistic missile that blew up two of the Ukrainian launchers and apparently killed their crews.

Cut off from U.S. aid by Russia-friendly Republicans, the Ukrainian air force cannot easily replace any Patriot launchers it loses. Considering the air force has just two dozen or so launchers, in total, it should come as no surprise that, following the March 9 attack, the service apparently pulled its surviving Patriots farther from the front line.

At the same time, Russian technicians tweaked the KAB design to boost its range from 25 miles to 40 miles. Abruptly, the balance of power shifted. Ukrainian air-defenses no longer could counter the Russian glide-bombers.

And don’t count on Ukraine’s MiG and Sukhoi fighters to take up the air-defense slack along the front line. The Ukrainian air force’s fleet of dozens of Mikoyan MiG-29s and Sukhoi Su-27s can detect aerial targets around 50 or 60 miles away with their N019, N001 or N010 radars and engage them at around half that distance with R-27 missiles.

That means crossing the front line in order to tangle with KAB-armed Russian jets—something Ukrainian pilots do not routinely do. And for good reason. Ukraine’s fighters lack electronic jammers. While flying near or inside Russian lines, they are extremely vulnerable to Russian air-defenses.

The 50 or 60 Lockheed Martin F-16s Ukraine is set to receive from Denmark, The Netherlands and Norway could give Ukrainian commanders new options. Fitted with the AN/ALQ-213 self-protection system—which ties together sensors, podded jammers and countermeasures such as chaff and flares to protect a jet from missiles—the F-16s might safely fly closer to the front line, or even over it.

Spotting targets as far away as 70 miles with their AN/APG-66(V)2 radars, the F-16 pilots could launch AIM-120 missiles from 57 miles away—far enough to hit the glide-bombers without venturing deep into Russian-controlled air space.

Perhaps most importantly, the AIM-120 is a fire-and-forget missile with its own tiny radar. A pilot can maneuver away right after firing it. The best R-27ER is, by contrast, a semi-active missile. A pilot must illuminate the target with his own radar throughout the R-27’s flight. That exposes him to return fire.

No one should claim an F-16 firing AIM-120s is a super-weapon, or invulnerable to enemy missiles. Once it deploys them in combat in the coming weeks or months, Ukraine will lose F-16s and their pilots—potentially a lot of them. The open question is what Kyiv gains with this sacrifice.

If Ukrainian commanders truly appreciate the danger that Russian KABs pose to Ukrainian positions on the ground, they must deploy the F-16s aggressively—and target the Russian Sukhois carrying glide-bombs.

“The challenge posed by the extensive use of KABs is likely to persist,” Frontelligence Insight explained, “and a resolution may only come through the additional procurement and deployment of Patriot air-defense systems and F-16s equipped with advanced air-to-air missiles.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/21/ukraines-f-16s-must-h
unt-down-russias-sukhoi-glide-bombers-even-if-its-dangerous/?sh=7f86f5ad4ff2

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

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Friday, March 22, 2024 2:04 PM

SECOND

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

From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists

As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online to discredit Ukraine’s leader and undercut aid. Some have a Hollywood-style plot twist.

By Steven Lee Myers | March 21, 2024, 12:00 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/business/media/russia-fake-journali
sts.html

A young man calling himself Mohamed al-Alawi appeared in a YouTube video in August. He described himself as an investigative journalist in Egypt with a big scoop: The mother-in-law of Ukraine’s president had purchased a villa near Angelina Jolie’s in El Gouna, a resort town on the Red Sea.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

The story, it turned out, was not true. Ukraine denied it, and the owner of the villa refuted it. Also disconnected from reality: Alawi’s claim to being a journalist.

Still, his story caromed through social media and news outlets from Egypt to Nigeria and ultimately to Russia — which, according to researchers, is where the story all began.

The story seemed to fade, but not for long. Four months later, two new videos appeared on YouTube. They said Mohamed al-Alawi had been beaten to death in Hurghada, a town about 20 miles south of El Gouna. The suspected killers, according to the videos: Ukraine’s secret service agents.

These claims were no more factual than the first, but they gave new life to the old lie. Another round of posts and news reports ultimately reached millions of internet users around the world, elevating the narrative so much that it was even echoed by members of the U.S. Congress while debating continued military assistance to Ukraine.

Ever since its forces invaded two years ago, Russia has unleashed a torrent of disinformation to try to discredit Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and undermine the country’s support in the West.

This saga, though, introduced a new gambit: a protracted and elaborately constructed narrative built online around a fictitious character and embellished with seemingly realistic detail and a plot twist worthy of Netflix.

“They never brought back a character before,” said Darren Linvill, a professor and director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, who has extensively studied Russian disinformation.

The campaign shows how deftly Russia’s information warriors have shifted to new tactics and targets as the war in Ukraine has dragged on, just as Russian forces on the ground in Ukraine have adjusted tactics after devastating battlefield losses.

Groups with ties to the Kremlin continue to float new narratives when old ones fail to stick or grow stale, using fake or altered videos or recordings and finding or creating new outlets to spread disinformation, including ones purporting to be American news sites.

A video appeared on TikTok last month claiming to show a Ukrainian doctor working for Pfizer accusing the company of conducting unlawful tests on children. On the social network X, a man claiming to be an associate producer for Paramount Pictures spun a tale about a Hollywood biopic on Mr. Zelensky’s life.

The tale attributed to Mohamed al-Alawi is not even the only baseless allegation that Mr. Zelensky had secretly purchased properties abroad using Western financial assistance. Other versions — each seemingly tailored for a specific geographic audience — have detailed a mansion in Vero Beach, Fla., and a retreat in Germany once used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda.

The Russians have “demonstrated adaptability through the war on Ukraine,” Microsoft wrote in a recent report that disclosed Russia’s fraudulent use of recorded messages by famous actors and celebrities on the Cameo app to try to smear Mr. Zelensky as a drug addict.

Even when debunked, fabrications like these have proved exceedingly difficult to extinguish entirely.

YouTube took down the initial video of the character Mohamed al-Alawi, linking it to two other accounts that had previously violated the company’s policies. The accusation still circulates, however, especially on platforms, like X and Telegram, that experts say do little to block accounts generating inauthentic or automated activity. Some of the posts about the video appear to have used text or audio created with artificial intelligence tools; many are amplified by networks of bots intended to create the impression that the content is popular.

What links the narratives to Russia is not only the content disparaging Ukraine but also the networks that circulate them. They include news outlets and social media accounts that private and government researchers have linked to previous Kremlin campaigns.

“They’re trolling for a susceptible (and seemingly abundant) slice of citizens who amplify their garbage enough to muddy the waters of our discourse, and from there our policies,” said Rita Katz, the director of the SITE Intelligence Group, an American company that tracks extremist activity online and investigated the false claims about the villa.

The Making of a Fake Journalist

The video first appeared on Aug. 20 on a newly created YouTube account that had no previous activity and almost no followers, according to the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a global nonprofit research organization in London, which traced the video’s spread.

The man appeared in a poorly lit room reading from his computer screen, which was reflected in his thick glasses. He appeared to be a real person, but it has not been possible to verify his actual identity. No one by the name of Mohamed al-Alawi appears to have produced any previous articles or videos, as would be expected of a journalist. According to ActiveFence, an internet security company, the character has no educational or work history, and no network of friends or social connections online.

The video, though, showed what purported to be photographs of a purchase contract and of the villa itself, creating a veneer of authenticity for credulous viewers. The property is, in fact, part of a resort owned by Orascom Development, whose website highlights El Gouna’s “year-round sunshine, shimmering lagoons, sandy beaches and azure waters.”

An article about the video’s claim appeared two days later as a paid advertisement, or branded content, on Punch, a news outlet in Nigeria, as well as three other Nigerian websites that aggregate news and entertainment content.

The article had the byline of Arthur Nkono, who according to internet searches does not appear to have written any other articles. The article quoted a political scientist, Abdrulrahman Alabassy, who likewise appears not to exist except in accounts linking the villa to the corrupt use of Western financial aid to Ukraine. (Punch, which later removed the post, did not respond to requests for comment.)

A day later, the claim made its first appearance on X in a post by Sonja van den Ende, an activist in the Netherlands, whose articles have previously appeared on propaganda outlets linked to the Russian government, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. (She also served as an election observer in an occupied territory of Ukraine during Russian parliamentary elections in September.)

Within days, reports about the villa appeared on X in French and Romanian, and in English on three different Reddit forums.

According to Roberta Duffield, director of intelligence for Blackbird.AI, an internet security company, nearly 29 percent of the accounts amplifying the reports appeared to be inauthentic bots, an unusually high number that would normally indicate a coordinated campaign.

Eight days after the video appeared, Russia state television networks like Channel One, Rossiya 24 and RT (in Arabic and German) reported it as a major revelation uncovered by a renowned Egyptian investigative journalist.

The story seemed to stall there. Naguib Sawiris, the scion of the Egyptian family that owned the development, curtly denied the sale in a reply on X.

And no more was heard from or about the character called Mohamed al-Alawi — until late December.

That was when two new videos emerged on a YouTube channel called “Egypt News,” claiming that he was dead.

The channel had been created the day before. One video showed a man identified as Alawi’s brother, Ahmed, answering questions from another man.

The police, he said, told him that they suspected his brother had been beaten to death by “Ukrainian special forces who acted on behalf of President Zelensky or another high-ranking official.”

He spoke with his hand cupped over his face to obscure his identity. The other video showed what was said to be the site of an attack, though the images were indistinct. “I can’t tell you anything else,” he said in the video, which YouTube later removed. “I’m afraid for my family.”

The video also tried to explain away some of the obvious holes in the initial story, including why there was no evidence online of Alawi’s previous work. “It was his first big assignment,” the man said.

The new episode spread as the first video had. A day later, an article about the death appeared on an obscure website created last year called El Mostaqbal, a name similar to but unrelated to the actual news organization in Lebanon.

“A reporter who announced that Zelensky’s mother-in-law brought a luxury villa has died under mysterious circumstances,” the headline read. Other reports that followed dropped any uncertainty and began referring to his “murder.”

In fact, Egypt’s Ministry of the Interior said there were no reports or evidence that anyone resembling the man in the video had been “subjected to harm.” The statement went on to note that the property itself had not been sold.

Still, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, posts about the supposed killing were viewed a million times on X on Dec. 25.

It also appeared on the website of the Middle East Monitor, or MEMO, operated by a well-known nonprofit organization in London and financed by the government of Qatar. A journalist who once reported from Moscow for The Telegraph of London, Ben Aris, cited it at length on the platform, though, when challenged, he said he had just made note of the rumor. “I don’t have time to check all this stuff myself,” he wrote.

It appeared in English on a site, Clear Story News, that Mr. Linvill of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub had previously linked to Russia’s disinformation efforts. (The site lists no contact information)

Mr. Linvill described the process as a form of “narrative laundering” — moving false claims from unknown or not credible sources to ones that, to the unwitting at least, seem more legitimate.

More Elaborate Narratives

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue studied three other complex narratives about Ukraine, as well.

One featured a French journalist who claimed that the son of George Soros — a regular target of Russian and far-right political attacks — had secretly acquired land for a toxic waste dump in Ukraine. An unnamed doctor in Africa said in another that an American medical charity, the Global Surgical and Medical Support Group, was harvesting the organs of wounded Ukrainian soldiers for transplants for NATO officers.

Then there was the case of a man calling himself Shahzad Nasir, whose profile on X identifies him as a journalist with Emirates 24/7, an English-language news outlet in Dubai, though he has no apparent bylines on the site.

In November, he claimed that cronies of Mr. Zelensky bought two yachts — Lucky Me and My Legacy — for $75 million. His evidence, like Mohamed al-Alawi’s, includes photographs of the vessels and purported purchase agreements.

In fact, as the BBC documented in December, the yachts had not been purchased and remained for sale. Despite numerous efforts by fact checkers to dispel it as rumor, the claim circulated extensively.

Last month, the character Nasir reappeared in another video. This time he had a new version of the tale, claiming that the purchases had been scuttled after he exposed the secret deal.

The ramifications of these campaigns are difficult to measure precisely. There are signs, though, that they resonate even when proved false.

Senator J.D. Vance, a Republican of Ohio and an outspoken critic of Ukraine aid, seemed to embrace the claim in December during an interview on “War Room,” the podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, the onetime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump.

“There are people who would cut Social Security — throw our grandparents into poverty — why?” Mr. Vance said. “So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

That prompted a public rebuke this month from a Republican colleague, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who ridiculed those who repeat unproven allegations.

“They’ve heard somebody say that if we pass this bill, that we’re all going to go ride to Kyiv with buckets full of money and let oligarchs buy yachts!” he said of critics of the assistance to Ukraine, in what he later called a reference to Mr. Vance’s comments. “I wonder how the spouses of the estimated 25,000 soldiers in Ukraine who have died feel about that? I mean, really, guys?”

Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 22, 2024 2:42 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
From Russia, Elaborate Tales of Fake Journalists

As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online to discredit Ukraine’s leader and undercut aid. Some have a Hollywood-style plot twist.

Kiev does a good enough job discrediting itself. Just recently, Zelenskiy claimed that only 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers were KIA. And just yesterday, Kiev claimed to have shot down more than 90% of the missiles aimed at them.

-----------
"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

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Friday, March 22, 2024 3:00 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Just yesterday, Kiev claimed to have shot down more than 90% of the missiles aimed at them.

Signym, you are lying. This is from yesterday, where the claim is 60% = 92/151:

The Air Force says the air defenders destroyed 92 air targets out of 151:

55 Shahed-136/131 strike UAVs;
35 Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles;
2 Kh-59 guided missiles.

https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/03/22/russia-fired-151-drones-and-mis
siles-ukraine-downed-92-aerial-targets-this-morning/

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Friday, March 22, 2024 3:12 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

That's not what they said yesterday.

-----------
"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

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Friday, March 22, 2024 3:24 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's not what they said yesterday.

Who is your "they" spreading lies, Signym? Because Ukraine's Air Force contradicts your "they": https://t.me/kpszsu/12175

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, March 22, 2024 3:45 PM

SECOND

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

22 Mar 2024

“Now it’s official: the SMO (Special Military Operation) is recognised as a war,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik analysis firm told the Reuters news agency.

“Of course, the SMO de facto became a war a long time ago But this is a certain psychological boundary, beyond which different requests can be made of both the population and the elites than during the SMO,” she added.

Mark Galeotti, author of several books on Putin and Russia, shared a similar view on the social media platform X.

“That ‘internal mobilisation’ is actually the key thing: the Kremlin’s demand that every Russian get into a wartime mindset, and realise there is now no middle ground between being a patriot and a traitor (as Putin defines these).”

“We are in a state of war. Yes, it started out as a special military operation, but as soon as this group was formed, when the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, it became a war for us,” Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov told Arguments and Facts, a weekly newspaper based in the country.

“I am convinced of that. And everyone should understand this, for their internal motivation.”

But prevaricating Peskov straddled the fence:

Peskov, in subsequent remarks to reporters, clarified that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were still legally qualified at home as “a special military operation” rather than as a war.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/22/russia-is-in-a-state-of-war-i
n-ukraine-kremlin-says-for-the-first-time

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Friday, March 22, 2024 4:22 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The west is at war with Russia.

If anyone is going to resort to nukes first, it would be the west, bc Russia is winning the conventional war.

-----------
"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

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Friday, March 22, 2024 5:03 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The west is at war with Russia.

If anyone is going to resort to nukes first, it would be the west, bc Russia is winning the conventional war.

Countries that were conquered by Russians have gone to the EU because Russians once again seek domination:

March 22, 2024

For Ukraine, military victories against Russia have become harder to achieve since the 2022 invasion. Yet that is not the case on a less visible front against other types of Russian aggression – in nearby countries that also have a minority of Russian speakers.

From the Baltics to Central Asia, former Soviet states are seen by President Vladimir Putin as part of “the Russian world,” with supposedly a distinct civilizational identity that justifies Moscow’s meddling. Here are some recent victories by such countries as they choose an identity based on universal ideals, such as equality and freedom:

On Thursday, European Union leaders gave a thumbs-up to opening formal talks with Bosnia-Herzegovina on joining the 27-member EU and embracing its values. The offer was a major step toward preventing the kind of ethnic violence that engulfed southeast Europe in the 1990s after the Cold War – and that the world now sees in Ukraine.

Also on Thursday, Moldova’s Parliament agreed to press toward membership in the EU, saying integration with the bloc is now the country’s “top priority.” The government plans a referendum later this year to gauge public support. Polls indicate it would win. As a neighbor of Ukraine with a sizable number of Russian speakers, Moldova has endured intense pressure from Moscow not to make the reforms necessary to join the EU, such as an independent judiciary.

In early March, Armenia hinted it was ready to distance itself from Moscow’s influence and embrace the EU. “Many new opportunities are largely being discussed in Armenia nowadays and it will not be a secret if I say that includes membership in the European Union,” Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan told Turkey’s TRT news channel.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0322/Victo
ries-against-Russia-outside-Ukraine

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Friday, March 22, 2024 6:03 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Countries are joining NATO bc they've been bamboozled by the west about Russia's goals.

-----------
"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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 12:04 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Countries are joining NATO bc they've been bamboozled by the west about Russia's goals.

Are you sure the right words are "bamboozled" and "Russia's goals"? Perhaps the country carefully reviewed Russia's history of conquering and controlling the country? And the EU is not the same as NATO. Countries that Russia had conquered and then withdrew from have joined the EU for trade reasons.

I would bring up Russia's history of murdering tens of millions of Russians but Signym has denied that happened. Murderous Russian history would tend to make a country avoid Russia because the Russians might murder them like Russians murdered Ukrainians during Holodomor.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Holodomor

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 12:10 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The west is at war with Russia.

If anyone is going to resort to nukes first, it would be the west, bc Russia is winning the conventional war.

Ain't nobody using any nukes. Not going to happen. The odds of that are absolute zero.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 12:25 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The west is at war with Russia.

If anyone is going to resort to nukes first, it would be the west, bc Russia is winning the conventional war.

Ain't nobody using any nukes. Not going to happen. The odds of that are absolute zero.

Makes you wonder why Russia had 40,159 nukes in 1986 for no reason. 159 nukes would have been more than enough if Russia was not gonna use a weapon.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Nuclear notebook
Global nuclear weapons inventories, 1945-2013
Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris
https://doi.org/10.1177/0096340213501363

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 2:54 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Countries are joining NATO bc they've been bamboozled by the west about Russia's goals.

SECOND: Are you sure the right words are "bamboozled" and "Russia's goals"?

Yes, I'm sure. Bc, unlike you, I'm not controlled by cartoonish 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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 6:57 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Countries are joining NATO bc they've been bamboozled by the west about Russia's goals.

SECOND: Are you sure the right words are "bamboozled" and "Russia's goals"?
Yes, I'm sure. Bc, unlike you, I'm not controlled by cartoonish propaganda.

You are not controlled? But you keep predicting victory for Russia and keep repeating Putin's (and Trump's) talking points. I don't predict who will be victorious and don't know when it comes. But I do know that Russians have killed tens of millions of Russians and millions of Ukrainians (Holodomor), which makes Russians the worst people -- some Russians did the killing and spineless others pretended it was deserved or didn't happen. And I do know from decades of experience with Trumptards (and Trump) that they are a huge hazard to themselves and others. I want defeat and failure for the worst people in America, the Trumptards, and the worst people in the Ukraine War, the Russians. All the talking by Russians that they are the best and the West is the worst is a bunch of nonsense from the worst people in Russia. The same goes for Trumptards, the worst people (lazy, stupid, self-righteous, dishonest, untrustworthy, ignorant) in America whose spokesman, Trump, is a blathering salesman/criminal convincing retards they are the best despite making the worst possible lives for everyone by their actions and inaction.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 23, 2024 6:58 AM

SECOND

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

Collecting the Dead Russia Left Behind

Civilians who gather dead Russian soldiers face many of the war’s perils along the front, where death is ubiquitous.

March 22, 2024 Updated 1:22 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/world/europe/russia-ukraine-toll-bo
dies.html

Oleksii Yukov spends many of his nights dodging drones, navigating minefields and hoping not to be targeted by Russian artillery as he races to collect the remains of fallen soldiers from the battlefield.

In just three shattered tree lines around the ruined village of Klishchiivka outside Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought seesaw battles for well over a year, he collected 300 bodies. They were almost all Russian, he said, left behind in a maelstrom of violence where the struggle to stay alive often outweighs concern for the dead.

Mr. Yusov has been collecting bodies from the bloody fields and battered villages of eastern Ukraine for a decade. He is now the head of a group of civilian volunteers called Platsdarm, and has witnessed more death than he would care to remember.

But as Russia presses a slow-moving offensive at great human cost, Mr. Yusov says the toll is still shocking.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:12 AM

SECOND

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

Kremlin Says Russia in a ‘State of War’ - March 22, 2024

Moscow officially refers to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation,” seeking to downplay the impact of the two-year conflict on civilian life in Russia. At the same time, thousands of Russians have faced prosecution under wartime censorship laws that ban calling the invasion a “war.”

Responding to journalists’ questions later on Friday, Peskov said his comments to Argumenty i Fakty were not meant to indicate that Russia was de jure at war, but rather “de facto.”

“There are no kind of legal changes connected to this, [as before] this is a special military operation,” he said. “But de facto, basically, this has turned into a war for us.”

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/03/22/kremlin-says-russia-in-a-sta
te-of-war-a84570

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:28 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Countries are joining NATO bc they've been bamboozled by the west about Russia's goals.

SECOND: Are you sure the right words are "bamboozled" and "Russia's goals"?

SIGNY: Yes, I'm sure. Bc, unlike you, I'm not controlled by cartoonish propaganda.

SECOND: You are not controlled? But you keep predicting victory for Russia

Bc among other things, Russia's logistic lines are short, the European part of NATO has been skimping its military commitmentsfor decades (hiding behind USA's skirts), USA logistic lines are very long, and military not geared to a land war. Plus anyone who holds your cartoonish view of Russians as drunk orcs and the economy as "a gas station masquerading as a country" ... clearly hasn't been paying attention to anything except propaganda.

Quote:
and keep repeating Putin's ... talking points.

And if you hadn't noticed our breaking agreements almost as soon as we make them, fomenting terrorism, war, and regime change on Russia's border (Chechnya, Georgia, Kazakstan, Ukraine, and Belarus) as well as our triumphalist goal of "full spectrum dominance" of the entire globe... and Russia's strategic partnership with China beginning in 2013... well, you haven't paid attention to anything except geopoltiical nonsense and economic propaganda either.

Like I said, you function on cartoonish propaganda. Your posts say so.

-----------
"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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:35 AM

SECOND

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

Working Fast And Accurately, Russian Drones And Missiles Are Finding And Destroying More of Ukraine’s Best Weapons

Russia’s kill-chain has come a long way in two years

By David Axe | Mar 22, 2024, 09:49pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/22/working-fast-and-accu
rately-russian-drones-and-missiles-are-finding-and-destroying-more-of-ukraines-best-weapons/?sh=11e32a6679ec

Russia’s deep-strike kill-chain continues to inflict painful losses on Ukraine’s hard-to-replace air-defense systems. Two weeks after a Russian drone spotted, and a Russian rocket quickly struck, two of Ukraine’s Patriot surface-to-air missile launchers, the Russians have found and hit a Ukrainian NASAMS SAM battery.

A video Russian forces posted on social media on Saturday depicts what appears to be a precision missile strike on a launcher for a Norwegian-designed National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, 30 miles from the front line in Zaporizhzhia Oblast in southern Ukraine. A NASAMS’ AIM-120 missile ranges, you guessed it, 30 miles.

It’s the second likely loss of a NASAMS launcher. Prior to Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress cutting off aid in October, the United States donated to Ukraine a dozen NASAMS batteries, each with several radars, at least one control station and between nine and a dozen launchers.

Ukraine is set to receive—from Canada, Norway and Lithuania—another 15 to 18 NASAMS launchers, so it’s not about to run out. But that doesn’t make the recent strike any less chilling. For two years, the Russians struggled to hit mobile targets more than a few miles from the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 25-month wider war on Ukraine. This spring, that changed.

In a bloody month for Ukrainian air-defenders, artillery gunners and aviators, Russian forces have found and destroyed the Patriots, their first-ever High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System and a pair of Mil Mi-17 assault helicopters. In each case, the Ukrainian systems were tens of miles behind the front line, and either on the move or about to move.

It should be obvious by now that the Russians’ kill-chain—the networked drones and artillery that allow them to spot targets deep behind the front line and hit them before they move—is getting better, fast.

In theory, Russia widened its war on Ukraine 25 months ago with a speedy kill-chain based on various data networks, which fuse targeting data from surveillance drones and other reconnaissance assets with the fire-control systems of artillery batteries.

In practice, Russian targeting networks rarely worked as designed—and mostly for human reasons. To put it simply, senior Russian commanders didn’t trust junior Russian commanders to open fire based on new—and fleeting—intelligence.

Leaders “are culturally averse to providing those who are executing orders with the context to exercise judgement,” Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a 2022 report for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

That began to change last year—and the reforms have accelerated this year. The Russians are deploying more and better surveillance drones passing better data along more robust networks to more front-line artillery and rocket batteries and attack-drone crews.

“Russia is using new technology to improve sensor-to-shooter links,” Blair Battersby, a British Army warrant officer, wrote for the U.S. Army’s training command. More to the point, Russian commanders seem to be giving front-line forces more leeway to act on their own.

Surveilling deeper, and shooting farther, faster and more accurately, Russian forces are mitigating one of their longstanding disadvantages—and blunting what once was a key Ukrainian advantage. The relative freedom of movement that Russia’s slow targeting afforded Ukrainian forces.

It should be painfully obvious to Ukrainian commanders that their troops and equipment no longer are safe within 50 miles of the front line—especially while out in the open during daytime.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here. Send me a secure tip.

Sources:

1. Russian defense ministry: https://twitter.com/WarVehicle/status/1771214299999981852

2. Royal United Services Institute: https://static.rusi.org/359-SR-Ukraine-Preliminary-Lessons-Feb-July-20
22-web-final.pdf

3. Blair Battersby: https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/2024/01/12/tradoc-russia-addressing-missing
-links-in-kill-chain/

4. Oryx: https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-ukr
ainian.html; https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/04/answering-call-heavy-weaponry-su
pplied.html

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:52 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh BTW, the rest of your post is another equally cartoonish view of "good guys" and "bad guys", justified by fake histories and caricatures of entire groups of people.

It never occcurs to you that you're a bad guy, and that the USA has been rampaging acroos the globe, bringing misery, destruction, and death to millions, for at least 50 years?

-----------
"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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 9:01 AM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh BTW, the rest of your post is another equally cartoonish view of "good guys" and "bad guys", justified by fake histories and caricatures of entire groups of people.

It never occcurs to you that you're a bad guy, and that the USA has been rampaging acroos the globe, bringing misery, destruction, and death to millions, for at least 50 years?

In my entire life I have never run into a worthless asshole who knew that about themselves. With assholes, it's always not their fault when their life goes wrong. They have to shift the blame. Whether it is Russians whining that it is the EU's fault that Russians are misunderstood humanitarians or Trump blaming Democrats for the Trumptards' catastrophic life ("I'm innocent and being politically persecuted by the DA" -D.Trump) it is always the same: assholes can't believe or understand their fucked lives are caused by them being stupid, lazy, dishonest and obnoxious.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 23, 2024 2:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

That's you, denying the fact the we did bad and are, in fact, an Evil Empire. Not the only one that ever existed, but clearly in that category.

And your way of denying that YOU, in fact, are evil.
You're certainly evil there, pathologically lying, threatening, defaming, attacking... and justifying your evil with fake histories and mental cartoons about what "they" are like and how "you" are superior. No wonder you try to justify our Evil Empire.

But we know what you are, son. Your constant lies and hate and self-justifications give you away.

Yanno, why don't you tear yourself away from your dark little world? Get out into reality. Get some sun on your face, breathe some fresh air, do something you can feel proud of, instead of justifying your toxicity with propaganda nobody believes?

-----------
"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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 3:01 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Putin Vows Revenge For "Bloodbath" Moscow Attack, Points Finger At Help From Ukraine, As 11 'Terrorists' Captured

The official death toll from Russian authorities in the wake of Friday's terror attack on a Moscow concert hall has reached 133 killed, with some unofficial reports saying there could be as many as 140 or more. As the scene continues to be processed and investigated, and given some of the hospitalized are in critical condition, the death toll is likely to rise. Over 150 were wounded in the attack, which involved a group of well-equipped attackers sporadically shooting into crowds as they walked through the mall and into the concert hall. Three children are still in the hospital, with one in critical condition.

The mall and complex at the Crocus City Hall music venue appears to have burned for many hours through the night. Russia's Investigative Committee later said more bodies were recovered from be smoldering building. Importantly, authorities on Saturday announced the capture of four suspected gunmen, also amid unconfirmed social media videos purporting to show some of the detained alleged gunmen.
Stillframe images: Daily Express

Eleven people total have been detained connected with the terror attack which the Federal Security Service (FSB) has said includes "four terrorists who were directly involved in the terrorist attack on Crocus."

After the Friday night rampage at the venue just outside Moscow, "the perpetrators tried to escape by car, fleeing towards the Russian-Ukrainian border," the FSB said Saturday "The criminals intended to cross the Russia-Ukraine border and had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side," the FSB statement alleged.

The four alleged gunmen were detained "not far from the border with Ukraine". This has raised suspicion in the Kremlin over Ukraine's involvement, despite the widespread media reports in the West that it was ISIS-K. As we noted earlier, Russian media has not echoed the Western reports highlighting an ISIS-K statement of responsibility.

But then, when has our media ever even tried to report the truth? AFAIK the first statement that it was ISIS behind the attack came from the CIA.
Sounds like "plausible deniability" to me...

Quote:
Instead, in addressing the crisis President Vladimir Putin has vowed to punish the perpetrators of the barbaric terrorist act while also charging that Ukraine prepared a "window" to help the terrorists escape.

At one point during the five-and-a-half minute video address, Putin said: "All perpetrators, organizers and customers of this crime will suffer fair and inevitable punishment. Whoever they are, whoever guides them. I repeat, we will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this attack on Russia, on our people."

He continued while pointing the finger at Ukraine: "All four direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack, all those who shot and killed people, were found and detained. They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border. A total of 11 people were detained."

Putin then added: "The Federal Security Service of Russia and other law enforcement agencies are working to identify and uncover the entire accomplice base of terrorists: those who provided them with transport, outlined escape routes from the crime scene, prepared caches, caches of weapons and ammunition."

"The main goal now is to prevent those who are behind this bloodbath from committing new crimes," the Russian leader stressed.

But both Washington and Kiev have been quick to reject any narrative of Ukraine's involvement.

Does anyone expect them to say any different???

Quote:
White House spokesman John Kirby said Friday, "The images are just horrible. Just hard to watch, and our thoughts obviously are going to be with the victims of this terrible, terrible shooting attack," before emphasizing that there's "No indication at this time that Ukraine or Ukrainians were involved in the shooting."

Yeah. We say the same thing about Gaza. And yet, we continue to arm Israel.

Quote:
US intelligence officials speaking to The New York Times said the Islamic State (ISIS-K) was behind it, and claimed Washington even tried to warn Moscow that some kind of big terror attack was coming.

Uh huh. Didn't Victoria Nudelman promise Russia a "nasty surprise" before she was booted from office?

"We lied, we cheated, we stole" -Mike Pompeo, former CIA director.
And given the CIA's history, indeed its MISSION of lying, why should anyone believe them now?

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-vows-revenge-bloodbath-mo
scow-attack-points-finger-help-ukraine-11-terrorists

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

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:19 PM

SECOND

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But then, when has our media ever even tried to report the truth? AFAIK the first statement that it was ISIS behind the attack came from the CIA.
Sounds like "plausible deniability" to me...

Signym, with your reaction I wasn't mistaken in calling you a stupid asshole. Putin said Ukraine did it so Signym takes the hint and embellishes it and says the CIA and Ukraine did it. Bravo, Signym! You win the internet prize for the dumbest asshole. Stupendous achievement!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:24 PM

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

'Forgottenness' Review: Can Ukraine Escape the Curse of Nonexistence?

By Johannes Lichtman | March 23, 2024, 7:00 AM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/23/ukraine-literature-novel-forgotte
nness-tanja-maljartschuk-russia-war-publishing/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

In her 1996 novel, Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Oksana Zabuzhko wrote that for Ukrainians, “Fear was passed on in the genes.” Zabuzhko, one of the most important living Ukrainian writers, was referring to the childhood fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person in the Soviet era. Anyone who approached you could be spying for the KGB, and if you let a careless word slip, the bad men would come “and put Daddy in prison.” But that line captures what Zabuzhko’s novel is about: the inherited fear of oblivion born between the hungry jaws of empire, or what she calls the “eternal Ukrainian curse of nonexistence.”

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex was a sensation when it was published in Ukraine, but it took 15 years for it to be translated to English. Even then, it didn’t find a U.S. readership until the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. The book’s path is emblematic of the tough road to English translation, much less readership, for novels written in Ukrainian. Until this year, not a single novel translated from Ukrainian had been published by a major U.S. publisher.

Tanja Maljartschuk’s Forgottenness, the first to break that barrier, is a book about Ukrainian identity and the struggle against nonexistence. Originally published in 2016, when it won the BBC’s Ukrainian Book of the Year Award, it tells the story of a contemporary Ukrainian writer who becomes obsessed with Viacheslav Lypynskyi, an important Polish figure in the early 20th-century Ukrainian independence movement. Lypynskyi studied Ukrainian at university in the early 1900s, when teaching the language was scandalous; both Russians and Poles considered it “a dialect of either Russian or Polish, or both concurrently.” Printing Ukrainian works was also prohibited, “punishable by imprisonment or exile.”

Throughout history, Ukrainians have faced this paradox: a denial of their existence (Ukrainian isn’t a language) combined with brutal repression (and you are forbidden to speak it). As Maljartschuk writes, the struggle makes many “lose their minds.”

Forgottenness is full of characters shrugging, often in dramatic situations. While American critics often lament shrugs (along with nods and smiles) as lazy dialogue tags, for the Ukrainian writer, the shrug is an important gesture. Soviet-born U.S. writer Gary Shteyngart once wrote, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that Ukraine’s coat of arms could be a man shrugging. This attitude can easily be mistaken for nihilism, but it is far more complex than that. On its most basic level, it comes from a learned acceptance that many situations are beyond one’s control. For generations of Ukrainians, this acceptance has been necessary to maintain sanity.

Ukrainians have found different ways of shrugging. In Forgottenness, the unnamed narrator remembers how her father, like many Ukrainian men of his generation, became immersed in kung fu in the 1980s, needing to feel like he could protect himself. Her grandfather, after feigning insanity to avoid military service, worked as a forced laborer, melting down church bells that were transported across the Soviet Union to be made into weapons; for years, he responded to most things with a joke, fueling himself on laughter.

She remembers how her grandmother was left at an orphanage by a father who would soon die in the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin’s terror famine of 1932-33, during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death. In an attempt to understand and connect with her family, the narrator asks her mother how this genealogy of suffering affected her. “Mom shrugged. ‘What was there to be affected by? That’s how things were, and that’s all there is to it.’”

The narrator has the opposite reaction. Her fascination with Lypynskyi, who almost lost his mind, falling into infirmity under the weight of defending the idea of a Ukrainian nation, comes partly from identifying with him. For the narrator, her inability to shrug leads to an existential crisis. She becomes terrified of the outside world. For months, she stops going outside. She begins to mop her floor relentlessly. She stands on her head to see things from a different perspective. She obsessively reads old newspapers in search of references to Lypynskyi. She is desperate to understand history. In a recurring image of the novel, she imagines time as a blue whale eating plankton by the millions. There is no mystery as to whom the plankton represent.

The historical parts of Forgottenness can be challenging, both to follow and to witness, for the simple reason that Ukrainian history is challenging. Lypynskyi lived through the early 20th century, a time when hope for a Ukrainian nation flickered before being brutally smothered.

As the narrator puts it, in the three years after the Russian Revolution, “Kyiv, like a loose woman, changed hands over ten times … and each new seizure ended in bloody purges.” Borders change, names change, empires come, empires go, and everyone dies. One reason that Maljartschuk’s is the first Ukrainian-language novel to break into U.S. commercial publishing is that so many Ukrainian writers from the 20th century were permanently silenced.

As Ukrainian writer Anastasia Levkova recently wrote, under Stalin, 500 of the foremost Ukrainian writers were executed. But she is quick to point out that Stalin was not solely responsible for silencing Ukrainian literature: For example, Vasyl Stus, one of the most famous Ukrainian poets of the 20th century, died in a Soviet forced labor camp decades after Stalin’s death. It is not just Stalin, nor is it just current Russian President Vladimir Putin—it is the Russian Empire that denies Ukrainian history, Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian existence.

Ukraine, one character in Forgottenness laments, “has so many million bodies but so few actual people.” The Russian Empire won’t even allow remembrance of the bodies. When the narrator goes to visit Lypynskyi’s grave, she cannot find it, because the cemetery’s headstones were bulldozed and used to line the floors of pigsties during collectivization. How is she to come to terms with her past when the empire has erased it?

As she’s fighting panic attacks, the narrator watches pigeons across the street building nests and laying eggs on neglected balconies. “Once in a while, the building’s owners would toss the eggs off the balconies onto the asphalt below. The pigeons would then sit on the roof and dispassionately observe the destruction of their offspring.” The pigeons shrug not because they don’t care, but because—what choice do they have?

The narrator’s inability to be like the pigeons almost kills her. But she can still think, write, and face her crisis head-on. In what might seem like an anti-climax, but is actually a triumph, she seeks out a therapist. As she puts it, in her part of the world, “the human head has one purpose—to eat.” Her mother condemns her for being a drama queen. But the narrator finds another woman, a professional, who listens and who cares. She begins to trust her. She starts talking her way out. Through language and solidarity with a fellow Ukrainian, she finds her way back to the world.

Maljartschuk, a Vienna-based Ukrainian novelist, wrote Forgottenness between the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, a period when Ukrainian art, newly liberated from colonial shackles, was blossoming. Its Ukrainian title, Zabuttya, means both “forgetfulness” and “oblivion,” and although this is not a novel about the war, no event has brought the threat of oblivion into more urgent focus than Russia’s invasion.

According to Forgottenness’ promotional materials, Norton’s inspiration for publishing the book was a March 2022 article in the New York Times about the urgency of bringing Ukrainian literature to the West after Russia’s invasion. Because of the sudden prominence of Ukraine in the American consciousness, there is the temptation for Americans to read Ukrainian literature today anthropologically, approaching it as a window into the country instead of an imaginary story about Ukrainian characters.

To be clear, this is not a criticism of the publisher: I am very grateful that Norton published Forgottenness, and I hope that more U.S. publishers will follow its lead. But how does it affect the reader’s experience to approach the book with images of rubble in mind? How does an American reader get around the trap of reading Ukrainian fiction like it’s nonfiction—of reading it for information rather than emotion—when current events are the reason for its translation into English? The narrator’s panic attacks are brought on not by missiles but by the chaos in her mind and the fear in her genes. Is it not disrespectful to read the book as a guide to understanding Ukraine in 2024?

Fortunately, Forgottenness shares a way to read itself and also to read Ukraine’s latest fight for survival. Maljartschuk personifies the statewide struggle against oblivion in the individual struggle to accept the things you can’t change while refusing to accept the things you can. The struggle, I believe, applies to both the narrator and Ukraine, past and present. The story speaks to what came immediately before the book was published: the Maidan Revolution, in which Ukrainians from every class and background risked their lives to drive out the pro-Russian puppet government, holding Independence Square in Kyiv for three months in the face of a harsh winter, police snipers, government-hired thugs, kidnappings, and torture. But Forgottenness can also speak to what will come after.

The narrator says of her grandfather feigning madness to get out of fighting: “Between a slavish existence and a heroic death, he chose the former, and only thanks to this choice did I become possible.” In her words, she is “the offspring of meekness in the face of power and fear in the face of death.”

But there is no trace of meekness in today’s Ukraine. A generation of Ukrainian writers and artists are now on the front lines of battle or in the rear guard, tirelessly fundraising for equipment for soldiers.

“Everything I’ve done in my life has only come to be by overcoming great fear,” Maljartschuk said in an interview following the 2022 invasion. Fear, as Zabuzhko wrote, lives in the genes. But fear need not paralyze. “Ukrainians are no longer victims,” Maljartschuk added, “but fighters.”

Johannes Lichtman is a writer whose first novel, Such Good Work, was a 5 Under 35 honoree from the National Book Foundation. His newest novel, Calling Ukraine, will be out in paperback in April. Twitter: @Johaaaaaannes

Download Oksana Zabuzhko’s book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is/fiction/?q=Oksana+Zabuzhko

Download Tanja Maljartschuk’s book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is/fiction/?q=Tanja+Maljartschuk

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 23, 2024 11:46 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But then, when has our media ever even tried to report the truth? AFAIK the first statement that it was ISIS behind the attack came from the CIA.
Sounds like "plausible deniability" to me...

SECOND: Signym, with your reaction I wasn't mistaken in calling you a stupid asshole. Putin said Ukraine did it

And I'm correct calling you a liar, bc that's not what Putin said.

Quote:
Russian authorities captured the four suspects as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/russian-detains-11-afte
r-deadly-concert-hall-attack-108419908

Quote:
SECOND so Signym takes the hint and embellishes it and says the CIA and Ukraine did it.
And that's not what I said either.

I don't believe the CIA; it's their job to lie.

I don't believe Kiev,they lie all the time too.

Quote:
Ukrainian Defense Intelligence alleged Friday – without giving evidence that the attack was planned by Russian special services to justify increased strikes on Ukraine.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/23/europe/moscow-attack-what-we-know-intl/
index.html

Since the suspects were captured I'm sure we'll find out more.

So go fuck yourself. In the nicest possible way.

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Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, March 24, 2024 6:09 AM

SECOND

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

How Putin's Police State Leaves Russia Vulnerable To Terrorist Attacks

The intelligence services are focused on political investigation and intimidation of citizens. They do not fulfill their direct responsibility to protect society from real threats.

The Kremlin casts President Vladimir Putin as something close to a savior, a strong leader who has brought stability and security following the chaos of the Soviet collapse.

The mass-casualty events that have punctuated his nearly 25 years as president or prime minister — and the recurring images of explosions, flames, and helpless victims desperate to escape harm — badly undermine that narrative. Instead, analysts say, they tell a story of a leader whose focus on the protection and prolongation of his own power have come at the expense of the security of the people.

Putin’s critics say that more than three decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia remains a country in which the state puts its own interests far above those of its citizens.

More at https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-police-state-russia-vulnerable-terrorist
-attacks/32874298.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Sunday, March 24, 2024 6:18 AM

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

Putin signs Law for Patriotic Russian Criminals

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on March 23 that will release individuals from criminal liability if they are called up for mobilization or sign military service contracts.[67] The law exempts servicemen from criminal prosecution for any crimes committed in Russia and crimes committed in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts before September 2022, when Russia illegally annexed the oblasts.[68] The provisions reportedly only apply to people who have committed minor or “medium gravity” crimes and do not apply to people accused of terrorism, sexual crimes, or violations of public safety.[69] ISW previously assessed that the law will likely allow Russia to expand its recruiting base outside of existing convict recruitment schemes.[70]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-23-2024

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Sunday, March 24, 2024 6:33 AM

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

Ukraine’s War Could Break Apart Moldova and Transnistria for Good

By Paul Hockenos

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/21/moldova-transnistria-ukraine-russ
ia-war-odesa/

In the crowded labyrinth of the open market in downtown Chisinau, the capital city of Moldova, a babble of languages ripples through the throngs of traders hawking a bewildering array of fresh produce, cheap textiles, electronic wares, and much more. A customer may broach the terms of a deal in, say, Ukrainian, and get an answer in Romanian, or propose a price in Romanian and be answered in Russian. Among themselves, the traders from across this diminutive country of 2.5 million, wedged precariously between its outsized neighbors Romania and Ukraine, communicate in other tongues, too.

Moldova is a multiethnic country that wears its patchwork diversity on its sleeve. Particularly in urban centers, the majority Romanians live very much together with Ukrainians, Russians, and the Turkic Gagauz. But the war in Ukraine has completely upended the tenuous status quo that existed before February 2022. The war’s outcome, whether in Ukraine’s or Russia’s favor, has existential consequences for the tiny country nursing aspirations of joining the European Union.

Political convictions in Moldova have long spanned the gamut from aspirations of greater Romanian nationalism to Soviet nostalgia, from pro-Russia patriotism to civic pride in an independent, EU-embedded Moldova. This fractured landscape is also reflected in the country’s geography. Since the first days of its independence in 1991—when the Soviet Republic of Moldova jettisoned Soviet authority and declared statehood, basically for the first time ever—the Republic of Moldova itself has been fractured.

A breakaway, Russia-kowtowing enclave called Transnistria established itself east of the Dniester River—complete with about 1,500 Russian troops that remain there today—while the Gagauz minority, courted by Moscow and Ankara, staked out broad autonomy in the south.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first priority is to stop Moldova from joining the EU and integrating with the West, especially since the EU boosted Moldova to candidate status shortly after the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war. But his aspirations may be far wider. Last week, Russia drew the ire of Moldovan authorities by setting up polling stations in Transnistria for its roughly 200,000 residents to vote in the Russian presidential elections held from March 15 to 17. It was a move that harks back to the initial steps taken to absorb occupied territories in Crimea and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine into Russia itself.

“Everything is at stake for Moldova now,” said Alexei Tulbure, the director of the Moldovan Oral History Institute.

If there’s one thing that just about all of Moldova’s peoples agree upon, regardless of political ideology, it is that they have next to no agency to affect the fate of their country—and ultimately, the fate of their own futures. “Moldovans breathe quietly,” according to a Ukrainian saying, mocking the country’s helplessness.

“It’s in the back of our minds,” said Alina Radu, the founder of the independent weekly Ziarul de Garda, of the possibility of the country losing its territory, or autonomy, to Russia. She compared the threat that the country now faces to the first months of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, when the Russian military seemed to be on the doorstep of the nearby Ukrainian city of Odesa. Transnistria’s armies seemed to be preparing to lend Russia a hand there. Had they been successful, all of Moldova could have come under Russian domination.

The staging ground for any future assault on Moldova is still likely to be Ukraine. Putin regularly confirms that Odesa is a military priority and has recently stepped up missile attacks there. It is a development that Moldovans are watching with trepidation. It’s one that Moldova’s allies in the West should be watching, too.

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

Even over its grinding first decades—marred by civil war, raging corruption, abject poverty, and mass emigration—Moldova’s prospects weren’t as starkly imperiled as they are today. Unlike most Ukrainians—who declare that victory over Russia is the only possible outcome—Moldovans have thought through worst-case scenarios.

“If Ukraine is defeated and Russia carves out a land corridor to Transnistria, Moldova will effectively cease to exist as an independent county,” Radu explained. “If they cross the Dniester River to occupy Moldova proper, then most of the population could well flee to Romania and points in Europe.” Her entire editorial staff has fixed plans to relocate to offices in the Romanian cities of Iasi and Bucharest, she said.

This certainly, at the very least, would put an abrupt end to Moldova’s EU and NATO aspirations, which is Washington’s primary concern. Upon signing a security cooperation deal with France on March 7, Moldovan President Maia Sandu—a 51-year-old Romanian-speaking graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government—told French President Emmanuel Macron that “our shared security is at stake. If the aggressor is not stopped, he will keep going, and the front line will keep moving closer. Closer to us, closer to you.”

Were Russia to take Moldova, it would open a second frontier with direct access to an EU member state. The United States is obviously aware of this threat and upped its defense assistance to Moldova from $3 million in 2022 to more than $30 million today. The United States and France also provided the country with hundreds of millions to shift its energy supply westward.

Ukraine, according to many Moldovans, including Sandu, is fighting for Moldova’s independence, too. “We’re very grateful to Ukraine,” said Ludmila D. Cojocaru, a historian at the National Museum of History of Moldova in Chisinau. “At the moment, it is the guarantor of our freedom.”

On the other hand, “if Ukraine pushes Russia back,” said Radu, the editor, “the Russian troops will have to leave separatist Transnistria, and it will dissolve.” As far as she is concerned, the peoples of Transnistria—hostages, she called them, to the criminal clique controlling the territory—would be more than welcome to join the Moldovan state in full. As for the alleged gangsters who have lorded over the region for 30 years, they will face justice—if they’re naïve enough to hang around, she said.

Until Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Moldova’s overwhelming geopolitical preoccupation was with the self-styled Transnistrian Moldovan Republic (PMR)—recognized as a state by no country in the world, not even Russia. Since a brief but bloody civil war in the region that took an estimated 700 lives in 1992, a hard-nosed, Russian-backed mafioso cartel named Sheriff Holding Co. has turned the vertical sliver of land into an entirely captured, one-party authoritarian state that conducts lucrative black-market business from the eastern bank of the Dniester.

The 90-minute minibus trip from Chisinau to PMR’s capital city, Tiraspol, passes a steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction: This workforce, which possesses Moldovan passports, can no longer find employment in Transnistria since its business to the east was cut off abruptly when Ukraine slammed shut the border last year, a body blow to the Sheriff cartel. At the Dniester, a solitary, AK-wielding Russian Army soldier stands in front of a makeshift border, not unlike Checkpoint Charlie in the divided Berlin.

Two flags fly from the checkpoint: the Russian flag and a green-and-red PMR flag that sometimes—but not all the time—sports a hammer and sickle in the upper right-hand corner just as had the flag of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the empty, deafeningly quiet streets of Tiraspol, the only image more prevalent than the bust of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is the Sheriff logo with its Wild West-inspired star. (“Sheriff” was the nickname of Moldovan police officer Viktor Gushan, who is one of the former Soviet sphere’s wealthiest oligarchs.)

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

The conflict between Transnistria and the Moldovan state, which never ceded sovereignty over the eastern bank territory, remained largely frozen for years despite international diplomacy to initiate a thawing. As long as the matter remained unsolved, Sheriff’s honchos padded their coffers and Moscow maintained a forward pawn that kept Moldova off balance; through propaganda and puppets, Russia influenced Moldova’s internal politics to the extent that until 2021, all but one Moldovan government reflected positions largely in line with Moscow, much as did in Ukraine until 2014. Interestingly, until the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine had sided largely with the Transnistrian ruling clique, business and Russian reinforcements flowing over the Ukraine border while Moldova remained tightly in check.

But now it is the Transnistrians who are on the back foot—and not sure how to play it. The narrow lick of land suddenly finds its greatest ally far away, and its residents are well aware that Ukraine could occupy it within a week, Anatolii Dirun, a former Transnistrian politician, told me. Resupply from Russia is blocked by Ukraine. The PMR made a feeble cry to Moscow for help on Feb. 28, but stopped short of calling for it to intervene.

In fact, the gangsters of Transnistria are petrified and thus playing both ends against the middle: Russia and Moldova proper. All of the region’s trade now runs through Moldova proper—and most of that carries on to the EU through Romania. More Transnistrians than ever before work, study, and learn Romanian in Moldova proper, part of a deft strategy by Sandu to integrate Transnistria back into Moldova.

“Transnistria’s leaders are trying to be prudent—as they don’t have much of a choice,” Oazu Nantoi, a member of the Moldovan Parliament who belongs to Sandu’s party, told Foreign Policy.

And yet, the Transnistrian government, in league with the Gagauz and pro-Russian forces in Moldova proper, remains beholden to Moscow and gladly lends it a hand in chipping away at the Moldovan government’s sovereignty.

The fact is, said Alexei Tulbure, an ethnic Ukrainian and the director of the Moldovan Historical Institute, Moldova is an easy target. It remains a very weak state, he noted, and thus wide open to tampering. “We had hoped that the war would consolidate Moldova the way it did Ukraine’s population, bring us all onto the same page. But this didn’t happen,” he said. Polls show that about a quarter of the country is still pro-Russian.

Russia’s chief means to destabilize its targets are bought votes, propaganda, cyberwarfare, and political parties. There are a handful of Russia-friendly (some also Russian-financed) parties that toe Putin’s line to one degree or another. For most of Moldova’s recent history, a combination of these parties had held power. The propaganda is “very strong and very toxic, and it rings like it’s straight from Moscow,” said Mariana Aricova of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting office in Chisinau, whose job is to monitor and counter the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.

The Russian campaigns to topple the Sandu government have picked up pace as the Moldovan presidential election, scheduled to take place in autumn along with a referendum on EU membership, grows nearer. And the Sandu government has responded as if its life depends on it, even by banning one of the pro-Russian parties and shutting down six television channels for alleged misinformation.

But “it didn’t really change much because the banned party has regrouped under a new party, and the Russian message gets out through other channels, like the Internet,” Aricova said.

Above all, Moldovans fear being squashed in a power struggle in which they have no say. Many observers see a slow, gentle reintegration of Transnistria into a federally structured Moldova as a first step in the right direction—Sandu’s chosen path. The Sandu government is seizing the moment as a unique opportunity to reconnect with Transnistria—and from there, to bring the entire country, as one, into the EU. The carrots of cross-border employment prospects, full Schengen Area travel rights, European structural and investment funds, minority rights guarantees, and higher wages could be enticing to everyone—save, of course, Transnistria’s criminals.

In terms of a proven mentor, there’s none better than Romania, which has surged to become Eastern Europe’s second-largest economy after Poland. The question is whether Sandu can pull this off without shattering the fragile country in the process. But then, the war raging next door might just take care of that for her.

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

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Monday, March 25, 2024 7:34 AM

SECOND

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

Ukraine Just Blew Up Two More Russian Landing Ships. It’s Too Late To Matter.

Russian logistics in southern Ukraine rely less and less on ships.

By David Axe | Mar 24, 2024, 08:24am EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/24/ukraine-just-blew-up-
two-more-russian-landing-ships-its-too-late-to-matter/?sh=38fb3311144a

. . . the hits have come too late to serve another war aim: strangling the Russian field armies in occupied southern Ukraine. As recently as a few weeks ago, the Kremlin counted on the Black Sea Fleet’s landing ships, as well as the rail and road bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, to supply its southern regiments and brigades.

Back then, it was possible effectively to cut off the southern Russian forces by sinking landing ships and striking the bridge—two things Ukrainian forces did with some regularity.

No longer. A herculean effort by Russian engineers has added a new railway connecting Rostov in southern Russia to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and—in the south—Berdyansk and Mariupol. The new rail line decreases by days the time it takes to move a freight car from southern Russia to southern Ukraine.

Railroads are much harder to interdict than ships are.

All that is to say, the Russians no longer depend so much on their landing ships to supply their forces along the southern front. So while it’s gratifying for friends of free Ukraine to see Russian Ropuchas burn — it also is an increasingly meaningless spectacle.

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

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Monday, March 25, 2024 11:30 AM

SECOND

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

Russia Is Back to the Stalinist Future
With a Soviet-style election, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has come full circle.

March 24, 2024, 8:13 AM

By Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the founder of Myrmidon Group.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/24/russia-putin-stalin-soviet-electi
on-war-repression-political-prisoners/

In 1968, the American scholar Jerome M. Gilison described Soviet elections as a “psychological curiosity”—a ritualized, performative affirmation of the regime rather than a real vote in any sense of the word. These staged elections with their nearly unanimous official results, Gilison wrote, served to isolate non-conformists and weld the people to their regime.

Last Sunday, Russia completed the circle and returned to Soviet practice. State election officials reported that 87 percent of Russians had cast their vote for Vladimir Putin in national elections, giving the Russian president a fifth term in office. Not only were many of the reported election numbers mathematically impossible, but there was also no longer much of a choice: All prominent opposition figures had been either murdered, imprisoned, or exiled. Like in Soviet times, the election also welded Russians to their regime by serving as a referendum on Putin’s war against Ukraine. All in all, last weekend’s Soviet-style election sealed Putin’s transformation of post-Communist Russia into a repressive society with many of the features of Soviet totalitarianism.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-election-vladimir-putin-fake-l
egitimacy-moscow-ukraine/

Russia’s return to Soviet practice goes far beyond elections. A recent study by exiled Russian journalists from Proekt Media used data to determine that Russia is more politically repressive today than the Soviet Union under all leaders since Joseph Stalin. During the last six years, the study reports, the Putin regime has indicted 5,613 Russians on explicitly political charges—including “discrediting the army,” “disseminating misinformation,” “justification of terrorism,” and other purported crimes, which have been widely used to punish criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine and justification of Ukraine’s defense of its territory. This number is significantly greater than in any other six-year period of Soviet rule after 1956—all the more glaring given that Russia’s population is only half that of the Soviet Union before its collapse.

In addition to repressive criminal charges and sentences, over the last six years more than 105,000 people have been tried on administrative charges, which carry heavy fines and compulsory labor for up to 30 days without appeal. Many of these individuals were punished for taking part in unsanctioned marches or political activity, including anti-war protests. Others were charged with violations of COVID pandemic regulations. Such administrative punishments are administered and implemented rapidly, without time for an appeal.

On March 4, 2022, a little over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Russia’s puppet parliament rapidly adopted amendments to the Russian Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code that established criminal and administrative punishments for the vague transgressions of “discrediting” the Russian military or disseminating “false information” about it. This widely expanded the repressive powers of the state to criminally prosecute political beliefs and activity. Prosecutions have surged since the new laws were passed, likely leading to a dramatic increase in the number of political prisoners in the coming years. In particular, punishments for “discrediting the army” or “justification of terrorism”—which includes voicing support for Ukraine’s right to defend itself—have resulted in hundreds of sentences meted out each year since the war began. The most recent such case: On Feb. 27, the 70-year-old co-chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting” the Russian military.

As the Proekt report ominously concludes, “In terms of repression, Putin has long ago surpassed almost all Soviet general secretaries, except for one—Joseph Stalin.” While this conclusion is in itself significant, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the totalitarian state Putin has gradually and systematically rebuilt.

As in the Soviet years, there is no independent media in Russia today. The last of these news organizations were banned or fled the country after Putin’s all-out war on Ukraine, including Proekt, Meduza, Ekho Moskvy, Nobel Prize-winning Novaya Gazeta, and TV Dozhd. In their place, strictly regime-aligned newspapers, social media, and television and radio stations emit a steady drumbeat of militaristic propaganda, promote Russian imperialist grandeur, and celebrate Putin as the country’s infallible commander in chief. In another reprise of totalitarian practice, lists of banned books have been dramatically expanded and thousands of titles have been removed from the shelves of Russian libraries and bookstores. Bans have been extended to numerous Wikipedia pages, social media channels, and websites.

Human rights activists and independent civic leaders have been jailed, physically attacked, intimidated into silence, or driven into exile. Civic organizations that show independence from the state are banned as “undesirable” and subjected to fines and prosecution if they continue to operate. The most recent such organizations include the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, Memorial, the legendary Moscow Helsinki Group, and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. In their place, the state finances a vast array of pro-regime and pro-war groups, with significant state resources supporting youth groups that promote the cult of Putin and educate children in martial values to prepare them for military service. Then there are the numerous murders of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists at home and abroad. Through these various means, almost all critical Russian voices have been silenced.

Private and family life is also increasingly coming under the scope of government regulation and persecution. The web of repression particularly affects the LGBT community, putting large numbers of Russians in direct peril. A court ruling in 2023 declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist and banned the rainbow flag as a forbidden symbol, which was quickly followed by raids and arrests. Homosexuality has been reclassified as an illness, and Russian gay rights organizations have shut down their operations for fear of prosecution. Legislation aimed at reinforcing “traditional values”—including the right of husbands to discipline their wives—has led to the reduction in sentences and the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.

Many of the techniques of totalitarian control now operating throughout Russia were first incubated in territories where the Kremlin spread war and conflict. Chechnya was the first testing ground for widespread repression, including massive numbers of victims subjected to imprisonment, execution, disappearance, torture, and rape. Coupled with the merciless targeting of civilians in Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, these practices normalized wanton criminal behavior within Russian state security structures. Out of this crucible of fear and intimidation, Putin has shaped a culture and means of governing that were further elaborated in other places Russia invaded and eventually came to Russia itself.

In Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014, there has been a widespread campaign of surveillance, summary executions, arrests, torture, and intimidation—all entirely consistent with Soviet practice toward conquered populations. More recently, this includes the old practice of forced political recantations: A Telegram channel ominously called Crimean SMERSH (a portmanteau of the Russian words for “death to spies,” coined by Stalin himself) has posted dozens of videos of frightened Ukrainians recanting their Ukrainian identity or the display of Ukrainian symbols. Made in conjunction with police operations, these videos appear to be coordinated with state security services.

In the parts of Ukraine newly occupied since 2022, human rights groups have widely documented human rights abuses and potential war crimes. These include the abduction of children, imprisonment of Ukrainians in a system of filtration camps that recall the Soviet gulags, and the systematic use of rape and torture to break the will of Ukrainians. Castrations of Ukrainian men have also been employed.

As Russia’s violence in Ukraine has expanded, so, too, has the acceptance of these abominations throughout the state and in much of society. As during the Stalin era, the cult of cruelty and the culture of fear are now the legal and moral standards. The climate of fear initially employed to assert order in occupied regions is now being applied to Russia itself. In this context, the murder of Alexei Navalny ahead of the presidential election was an important message from Putin to the Russian people: There is no longer any alternative to the war and repressive political order he has imposed, of which Navalny’s elimination is a part.

All the techniques and means of repression bespeak a criminal regime that now closely resembles the totalitarian rule of Stalin, whom Putin now fully embraces. After Putin first came to power in 1999, he often praised Stalin as a great war leader while disapproving of his cruelty and brutality. But as Putin pivoted toward war and repression, Russia has systematically promoted a more positive image of Stalin. High school textbooks not only celebrate his legacy but also whitewash his terror regime. There has been a proliferation of new Stalin monuments, with more than 100 throughout the country today. On state-controlled media, Russian propagandists consistently hammer away on the theme of Stalin’s greatness and underscore similarities between his wartime leadership and Putin’s. Discussion of Stalinist terror has disappeared, as has the memorialization of his millions of victims. Whereas only one in five Russians had a positive view of Stalin in the 1990s, polls conducted over the last five years show that number has risen to between 60 percent and 70 percent. In normalizing Stalin, Putin is not glossing over the tyrant’s crimes; rather, he is deliberately normalizing Stalin as a justification for his own war-making and repression.

Putin now resembles Stalin more closely than any other Soviet or Russian leader. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov—not to mention Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—Putin has unquestioned power that is not shared or limited in any way by parliament, courts, or a Politburo. State propaganda has created a Stalin-like personality cult that lionizes Putin’s absolute power, genius as a leader, and role as a brilliant wartime generalissimo. It projects him as the fearsome and all-powerful head of a militarized nation aiming, like Stalin, to defeat a “Nazi” regime in Ukraine and reassert hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe. Just as Stalin made effective use of the Russian Orthodox Church to support Russia’s effort during World War II, Putin has effectively used Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill as a critical ally and cheerleader of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. And just like Stalin, Putin has made invading neighboring countries and annexing territory a central focus of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

Putin’s descent into tyranny has been accompanied by his gradual isolation from the rest of society. Like the latter-day Stalin, Putin began living an isolated life as a bachelor even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like the later Stalin, Putin lacks a stable family life and is believed to have replaced it with a string of mistresses, some of whom are reported to have borne him children for whom he remains a remote figure. Like Stalin, he stays up late into the early-morning hours, and like the Soviet dictator, Putin has assembled around him a small coterie of trusted intimates, mostly men in their 60s and 70s, with whom he has maintained friendships for decades, including businessmen Yury Kovalchuk and Igor Sechin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and security chief Nikolai Patrushev. This coterie resembles Stalin’s small network of cronies: security chief Lavrentiy Beria, military leader Kliment Voroshilov, and Communist Party official Georgy Malenkov. To others in leadership positions, Putin is a distant, absolute leader who openly humiliates seemingly powerful officials, such as spy chief Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to hesitate in his support during Putin’s declaration of war on Ukraine.

Through near-total control of domestic civic life and media, his widening campaign of repression and terror, relentless state propaganda promoting his personality cult, and his vast geopolitical ambitions, Putin is consciously mimicking the Stalin playbook, especially the parts of that playbook dealing with World War II. Even if Putin has no love for Soviet Communist ideology, he has transformed Russia and its people in ways that are no less fundamental than Stalin’s efforts to shape a new Soviet man.

Putin’s massive victory in a Soviet-style election last weekend represents the ratification by the Russian people of his brutal war, militarization of Russian society, and establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. It is a good moment to acknowledge that Russia’s descent into tyranny, mobilization of society onto a war footing, spread of hatred for the West, and indoctrination of the population in imperialist tropes represent far more than a threat to Ukraine. Russia’s transformation into a neo-Stalinist, neo-imperialist power represents a rising threat to the United States, its European allies, and other states on Russia’s periphery. By recognizing how deeply Russia has changed and how significantly Putin is borrowing from Stalin’s playbook, we can better understand that meeting the modern-day Russian threat will require as much consistency and as deep a commitment as when the West faced down Stalin’s Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

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

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Monday, March 25, 2024 4:14 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I noticed this thread dropping down. Must be because Ukraine is losing, and people are getting tired of SECOND's red herrings and lies.

So, in news about Ukraine:

Ukraine sent another wave of rockets and drones at civilians in Belgorod. Approximately 40 rockets were fired from Vampire launchers over two nights. Most, if not all, were brought down by AD.

Russia over the course of about five days launched a series of missile and drone attacks, first at Kiev command centers etc. Then targeting electricity production, leaving Kharkov and Odessa in the dark, as well as military units, weapons manufacturers, etc. all aross Ukraine to Lviv. Then Odessa and an airstrip being upgraded for F-16s and possibly a gas storage field. Then back to Kiev for a Patriot missile system.

Russia has advanced west of Avdiivka to the river, in four "prongs", and the spaces between the prongs are being filled in.

West of Bakhmut, Russia took several villages and is within sight of Chasov Yar, the next city.

Ukraine also launched a huge drone strike at Sebastopol and claims to have critically damaged the Yamal, a Russian landing ship. Satellite photos are too poor to confirm the hit.

-----------
"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

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Monday, March 25, 2024 4:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I noticed this thread dropping down. Must be because Ukraine is losing, and people are getting tired of SECOND's red herrings and lies.

I'm doing my best not to argue with him and Ted anymore.

I certainly don't give one single shit about Russia or Ukraine, so I'm just ignoring this issue from now on.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, March 25, 2024 6:55 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Okie dokie!

*****

Update: According to Military Summary Channel, Russia uncorked it's Zirkon missile. It flew from somewhere in Crimea to Kiev in about six minutes. The air raid sirens went off and the explosion happened about 30 seconds later. The target was Kiev's GRU/SBU building. I think they're hunting Budanov, who had apparently gone into hiding.

Also, the four terrorists gave up their training base, which happened to be in Turkey. (Yanno, I thought Turkey was involved. I can't imagine ISIS-K being able to scratch up the $$ for that kind of operation) IDK if Turkeye had knowledge of this training base ... it's the kind of game that Erdogon would play ... but once Russia officially informed Turkeye of the training base, they were rounded up right quick.

Presumably those people will lead further upward.

Dima at Military Summary Channel is drawing a connection between the terrorists being rounded up and the strike on the GRU/ SBU building in Kiev. Interesting, if true.

-----------
"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

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Monday, March 25, 2024 8:19 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

If they can cut off bank accounts to an entire nation, the Freedom Convoy never stood a chance.

The New World Order is in control now.

Look back fondly on 2019 and before it. Because the life we used to know will never be again.

Russia, China, and Iran are the New Axis powers. Between them they have everything they need (armies, nukes, oil revenues) to take over half the world, especially when the weak and woke West is "too civilized" to do a damn thing about it.

During 1945 when Russia was invading Germany from the East and then sacking Berlin, the Russian Army was actually encouraged by their officers to terrorize the civilian population. As many as 3 million German women and girls were brutalized and raped, often gang-raped. I wonder how CNN and the rest of their oh-so-progressive ilk will live with that reality playing out in front of their smug self-righteous retarded faces.

I reject your premise that we need bullies and corrupt bad guys to deal with their bullies and corrupt bad guys. I further reject your premise that Russia China and Iran can take over half the world unless they currently hold that much territory. Their expansionism will be checked. Especially now since they are seeing the consequences Russia is and are going to suffer.

So far, it’s said the Russians have lost 14 planes, 8 helicopters, 102 tanks, 536 BBM, armored combat vehicles, 15 heavy machine guns, and 1 BUK missile since Feb. 24, according to Ukraine's military. The Kremlin also lost over 3,500 soldiers. Remember, this does not include the sanctions, and China is watching.

They’re getting their clocks cleaned by an army with half their resources and training. China is even less capable of actual fighting. Iran and North Korea are little more than an irritant. As for America being to woke to fight back, think again.

Without firing a shot America and our allies have helped Ukraine shame the Russian army. If Putin wants he’ll commit the rest of his troops and shut the active war down but the Ukrainian army has sent a chilling message to Moscow. And it is prepared to fight as an insurgency going forward.

You want to talk about woke? Europe has been woke. Reminded why they stand united as NATO. It’s one of the biggest consequences of Russia’s behavior. NATO now has a huge new commitment to sustaining, improving and expanding.

tick tock

T

RUSSIA IN CHAOS; SHIPS HIT, PLANES DESTROYED! Breaking Ukraine War News With The Enforcer (Day 760)

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Monday, March 25, 2024 9:08 PM

THG

Wagner Soldiers Are Joining The Fight Against Russia in Belgorod Breaking News With The Enforcer

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 4:20 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I love it when you post nonsense, THUGR. That way, when you're proven wrong you can sit on it and spin.

-----------
"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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 7:29 AM

SECOND

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

Don’t Fear Russia’s 3.3-Ton Glide-Bomb. It’s Massive Overkill When A 1.1-Ton Glide-Bomb Will Kill You Just Fine.

Beside, it’s not clear a Russian air force fighter-bomber could fit a 3.3-ton munition.

By David Axe | Mar 25, 2024, 05:54pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/25/dont-fear-russias-66-
ton-glide-bomb-its-massive-overkill-when-a-11-ton-glide-bomb-will-kill-you-just-fine/?sh=5635cb477b3b

When Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu inspected weapons factories in Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia recently, one new munition stood out: a massive 3,000-kilogram bomb that was much bigger than the workers tinkering with it.

Fitted with wings and satellite guidance, a FAB-3000 would make a powerful standoff munition, a retired Russian colonel and military analyst told state media. “These are very powerful bombs because they cause enormous destruction,” Viktor Litovkin said.

But as a glide-bomb, the FAB-3000 also would be unwieldy and likely lacking in range. Don’t worry about the 3.3-ton FAB-3000. Instead, worry about the Russian glide-bombs that aren’t impractical for everyday use: the FAB-500, FAB-1000 and FAB-1500.

The Russian air force largely sat out the back half of the first year of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine starting in February 2022. Once Ukrainian air-defenses had recovered from the shock of the initial Russian attack, it became prohibitively dangerous for Russian warplanes to fly over, or past, the front line.

And to be clear, they had little choice but to do so in order to attack Ukrainian forces. The Russian air force unlike most Western air force had not invested much in long-range precision munitions.

That began to change last year. Bolting pop-out wings and satellite-guidance kits to 1,100-, 2,200- and 3,300-pound dumb bombs, the Russians produced rough analogues of the American Joint Direct Attack Munition and French Hammer glide-bombs.

Lobbing these munitions—which Ukrainians call “KABs”—initially from as far away as 25 miles, Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers could flatten Ukrainian positions without exposing themselves to Ukraine’s heaviest air-defenses.

Glide-bombing now is a standard tactic for Russian forces—and the key to whatever modest territorial gains they’ve achieved in their costly winter-spring offensive. Daily barrages of a hundred or more glide-bombs flattened what was left of Avdiivka, a former Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine, and forced the Ukrainian garrison to withdraw in mid-February.

“These bombs completely destroy any position,” wrote Egor Sugar, a trooper with the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade, which covered the Avdiivka garrison’s retreat.

But the glide-bombing didn’t end with Avdiivka. In all, the Russians have dropped 3,500 FAB-500s, -1000s and 1500s this year, according to Ukrainain lieutenant general Ivan Gavrylyuk. That’s 16 times as many glide-bombs as they dropped last year, Gavrylyuk said.

Ukraine’s best air-defenses, its American-made Patriots, range as far as 90 miles and can, in principle, hit the glide-bombers before they release their munitions. But only if the Patriot crew hit the road and deploy close to the front line.

That apparently is what happened in February, when Ukrainian air-defenses shot down 13 Russian Sukhois in 13 days. But the redeployment ended in disaster around March 9, when a Russian drone spotted a Patriot convoy 20 miles from the eastern front line—and cued an Iskander ballistic missile that blew up at least two Patriot launchers.

The Ukrainians pulled back their surviving air-defenses—and the Russians resumed their relentless glide-bombing. At the same time, a new wing kit has extended the range of the standard Russian glide-bomb from 25 miles to around 40 miles, making it even harder for the Ukrainians to target the bombers.

Given the relative impunity with which the Russian air force can glide-bomb Ukrainian positions—and also given the apparent massive supply of glide-FAB-500s, -1000s and 15000s—there’s no compelling reason for the Russians to field 6,600-pound versions of the munition. “They appear excessively powerful for strikes against Ukrainian positions,” the Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team concluded.

The basic problem is that the FAB-3000 probably wouldn’t fit under a 48-foot-wingspan Su-34. No, the Russian air force might have to load the giant glide-bombs on Tupolev Tu-22M bombers with 110-foot wingspans.

Considering the likely poor glide performance of a 3.3-ton bomb, the bombers might have to fly within a few miles of the front line, likely exposing them to much greater danger than Russian commanders are comfortable with.

It’s worth noting that the Russian air force frequently launches bomber raids targeting Ukrainian cities, but never actually flies its precious Tupolev bombers inside Ukraine proper. Instead, they fire cruise missiles from many hundreds of miles away.

As long as Russia has plenty of smaller FABs or KABs and enough Su-34s to carry them, a FAB-3000 should remain an oddity—especially as a glide-bomb. Actually deploying the 3.3-ton munition is risky overkill given how devastating the smaller glide-bombs already are on their own.

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 7:33 AM

SECOND

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

Russian Ambassador to the Hague Vladimir Tarabin reiterated the Kremlin’s debunked claim that Ukraine is developing biological weapons in US- and NATO-funded biolabs in Ukraine during an interview published on March 25.[27] Tarabin also claimed that Ukrainian forces are “systematically” using a “wide range of toxic chemicals” against Russian military personnel in unspecified areas of the frontline, including chemical substances banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).[28] Tarabin’s reliance on the already discredited biolabs narrative calls into question his other allegations.

An unnamed Russian company command also claimed that Ukrainian forces are using phosphorus ammunition shells in unspecified areas of the Zaporizhia direction, which are not banned in conventional warfare by the CWC but are prohibited from use against civilians.[29] Russian forces have used white phosphorus against urban areas in Ukraine, risking civilian harm on several occasions.[30]

Kremlin officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have been accusing the West of continuing to fund biolabs in Ukraine since before the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[31] Western publications, officials, and international organizations have long debunked this Russian narrative.[32] These Russian claims are not comparable to the Ukrainian and Russian reporting of Russian forces using chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile (CS) gas or chloropicrin (PS), both of which the CWC — which Russia ratified in 1997 — bans in warfare.[33] Several Russian and Ukrainian sources have provided evidence of the use of such banned chemical agents against Ukrainian positions on the battlefield.[34]

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

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 7:35 AM

SECOND

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

Russia’s Glide-Bombs Are ‘Miracle Weapons.’ And Ukraine Is Still Months Away From Fighting Back With F-16s.

David Axe | Mar 25, 2024, 07:04pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/25/russias-glide-bombs-a
re-miracle-weapons-and-ukraine-is-still-months-away-from-fighting-back-with-f-16s/?sh=694477915182

The Russian air force is lobbing a hundred glide-bombs a day on Ukrainian positions along the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 25-month wider war on Ukraine.

The KAB glide-bombs are a “miracle weapon” for the Russians, Ukrainian Deep State noted. And the Ukrainians have “practically no countermeasures.”

To put into perspective how dangerous the situation is for Ukrainian brigades right now, consider that it took just 125 KABs a day for several days finally to make the defense of Avdiivka, a former Ukrainian stronghold in eastern Ukraine, untenable for the Ukrainian army’s 110th Mechanized Brigade.

The brigade had other problems, of course—specifically, a desperate shortage of artillery ammunition that became inevitable once Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress cut off aid to Ukraine in October.

But the KABs were the final straw. “All buildings and structures simply turn into a pit after the arrival of just one KAB,” wrote Egor Sugar, a trooper with the Ukrainian 3rd Assault Brigade, which covered the Avdiivka garrison’s retreat in mid-February.

It’s possible that a massive expansion of Ukraine’s front-line air-defenses might blunt Russia’s glide-bombing edge. The Ukrainian air force shifted part of a 90-mile-range Patriot surface-to-air missile battery closed to the eastern front line around February and managed to shoot down as many as 13 Russian air force Sukhoi Su-34 glide-bombers and escorting Sukhoi Su-35s.

The pace of the glide-bombings may have ebbed somewhat as the shoot-downs spiked. But then, around March 8, a Russian drone spotted the Patriot battery on the move 20 miles from the front line—and cued an Iskander ballistic missile that blew up two Ukrainian launchers.

The Ukrainian air force has just three batteries of American-made Patriots, altogether with around three-dozen launchers. Cut off from further U.S. aid, the air force couldn’t risk losing more Patriots—not when the service also was trying to defend Ukrainian cities against Russian missiles.

So in mid-March, the glide-bomber shoot-downs ended—and the glide-bombings resumed at a rate of a hundred per day. Standard Russian tactics right now are for the Sukhois to, according to Deep State, “water” a Ukrainian garrison with KABs—and then for Russian infantry to attack in small but frequent “banzai charges.”

“Despite a certain stabilization of the front at the beginning of the month, the enemy has been carrying out a large number of rollbacks and banzai attacks for the past 10 days,” Deep State reported Saturday.

It’s unclear how the Ukrainians might end the KAB crisis. Ukrainian lieutenant general Ivan Gavrylyuk said the belated arrival of the Ukrainian air force’s ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters should help.

And yes, that’s possible. The F-16 has better sensors, self-defenses and missiles than the air force’s current Sukhoi and MiG fighters have. If Kyiv is willing to risk its precious F-16s—just 50 or 60 of which it’s set to receive starting this spring or summer—it might succeed in beating back the glide-bombers.

But it could be a while before the F-16s are in country in sufficient numbers to make much of a difference. In the meantime, the Ukrainian air force only can deploy ground-based air-defenses against the Russian bombers.

Leaving aside the risk to the air-defense crews, these crews also are low on certain types of missiles, Gavrylyuk said.

That’s an obvious reference to the air force’s best Patriot missiles, which mostly are made in the United States. Unless and until Republicans relent and approve $61 billion in long-delayed funding for Ukraine’s war effort, the Ukrainians might never have enough Patriots to fight back against the glide-bombing that now is the key to Russia’s battlefield gains.

“These and other factors make it difficult for the defense forces of Ukraine to carry out the tasks of repelling the aggressor,” Gavrilyuk said.

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 8:04 AM

SECOND

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

The Tyranny of Expectations

Winning the Battle but Losing the War, From Ukraine to Israel

By Dominic Tierney | March 25, 2024

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/tyranny-expectations?utm_source
=pocket-newtab-en-us

In early 2022, much of the world applauded the heroic Ukrainian troops who held back Russian forces outside the gates of Kharkiv and Kyiv. “This is Ukraine’s finest hour, that will be remembered and recounted for generations to come,” declared then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “Its soldiers have demonstrated immense bravery,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In a speech from Warsaw, U.S. President Joe Biden proclaimed that Russian forces “met their match with brave and stiff Ukrainian resistance.”

Two years later, Ukrainian soldiers are again resisting massive Russian military assaults, this time in Donetsk, Luhansk, and elsewhere. But now there are far fewer cheers. Instead of celebrating Ukrainian valor, many observers are chiding the country for not turning the tide and going on the offensive. Last November, for example, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made revealing comments to two Russians (who were pretending to be African Union officials): “There is a lot of fatigue, I have to say the truth, from all the sides. We are near the moment in which everybody understands that we need a way out.” Ukraine may again be holding off a more powerful aggressor. Yet this outcome now seems like a stalemate, if not a defeat.

The global shift in perceptions is an example of the tyranny of expectations—or how assumptions about who will win a war can skew judgments about who prevails. Outside observers, both experts and laypeople alike, do not evaluate military results by simply tallying up the battlefield gains and losses. Instead, they compare these results to their expectations. As a result, states can lose territory and still be deemed winners if they overperform. States can take land and be labeled losers if they underdeliver. The resulting conclusions about the winners and losers, however skewed, can even rebound and shape the battlefield. Ukraine, for example, lost territory during the initial weeks of Russia’s invasion. But Kyiv’s unexpectedly resolute defense earned it widespread Western assistance, which helped it liberate numerous cities in the following months.

For Ukraine, the tyranny of expectations initially worked to its advantage. After the invasion, Kyiv was the underdog, with U.S. government officials estimating that Russia might overrun most of the country in just a few days. When Russia failed to seize the capital, Western countries were impressed by Ukraine’s performance, which encouraged them to provide more material aid. In turn, Ukraine launched a series of successful counteroffensives that liberated roughly half the territory Moscow had taken.

But in the process, Kyiv was saddled with great expectations. Western observers began suggesting that Ukraine might somehow drive a bedraggled Russia out of all the territory it took in 2022—and perhaps even the land that Moscow seized in 2014. Some analysts, such as Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University professor and former State Department official, argued that Ukraine’s offensives could cause the Russian military to collapse. The Ukrainian government, for its part, encouraged such thinking. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged that Ukraine would liberate all its territory and fight “until the end” without “any concession or compromise.” Top Ukrainian officials openly suggested that a cascade of Russian defeats might force Russian President Vladimir Putin from power.

These expectations, however, were completely unrealistic. Russia incurred tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of casualties, but the country was still much stronger than Ukraine. Its GDP was nine times the size of its neighbor’s, and its population was over three times as large. After suffering setbacks, Moscow mobilized more forces, spent months laying mines and preparing other defenses, and learned to use drones more effectively. As a result, when Ukraine launched a highly anticipated offensive in June 2023, it faced fierce resistance. Its efforts quickly stalled out.

For Ukraine, growing skepticism comes with a silver lining.

In the West, overblown expectations of Kyiv’s imminent success led to widespread disappointment with the Ukrainian counteroffensive, as well as grim prognoses for the war’s future. “I know everyone wants Ukraine to win,” said Republican Senator Ron Johnson in December. “I just don’t see it in the cards.” One poll of Europeans in early 2024 found that only ten percent predicted a Ukrainian victory on the battlefield, whereas 20 percent foresaw a Russian victory and 37 percent expected a compromise deal. U.S. and European officials—concerned that the campaign had reached a stalemate and that Kyiv was running short of men and materiel—have even talked with Ukraine about peace negotiations.

The darkened mood has translated into growing skepticism about providing assistance to Ukraine. In October, for example, Republican Senator Mike Lee called the conflict “America’s new forever war.” In December, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “What the Biden administration seems to be asking for is billions of additional dollars with no appropriate oversight, no clear strategy to win, and with none of the answers that I think the American people are owed.” In January, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico declared that the only way to end the conflict was for Ukraine to give up territory.

For Ukraine, growing skepticism is, of course, bad news. But the pessimistic turn comes with a silver lining: it may, once again, make Kyiv look like David fighting Goliath and lower expectations for the future. If so, analysts may celebrate Ukraine’s defiance and criticize the slow pace of Russian advances. After all, despite its greater power, Russia is still struggling to capture Ukrainian territory, and Kyiv has enjoyed clear wins in some arenas of the war—such as targeting the Russian navy in the Black Sea. Fighting Russia to a near-standstill remains a massive achievement for Ukraine. Here, Kyiv can better manage expectations by combining confidence in its long-term success with a realistic appraisal of its short-term difficulties. Ukraine, for example, should make clear to policymakers and its global audience that it is a massive underdog battling a brutal dictator and perhaps the third-greatest military in the world, and yet will ultimately prevail in its fight for independence. This story might help unlock more Western aid.

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 10:17 AM

SECOND

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

‘Broadening’ consensus on need to defeat Putin among EU leaders, says Lithuanian president

The further a country lies from Russia, the more its leaders need to be persuaded of the threat posed by Vladimir Putin.

March 25, 2024, 8:11 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/broadening-consensus-on-need-to-defeat
-putin-among-eu-leaders-says-lithuanian-president/

‘Everyone but two’: EU leaders near consensus on need to defeat Putin — Lithuanian President

March 26, 2024, 02:05 AM

https://english.nv.ua/nation/consensus-on-defeating-russia-without-neg
otiations-is-broadening-in-eu-50404317.html

“We do not have any leader who still trusts Putin; anyone, that is, except for two of them.” He was referring specifically about the Prime Ministers of Hungary and Slovakia, Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, having the closest ties with the Russian dictator, Politico reported.

Even though the debate is shifting towards working to defeat Russia, instead of negotiating, it is not especially important unless it is accompanied by weapon supplies and substantial support for Kyiv, Politico wrote.

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 10:31 AM

SECOND

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

‘Give us the damn Patriots’ — Ukraine needs air defenses now, minister says

In a POLITICO interview, Ukraine’s chief diplomat Dmytro Kuleba delivers some blunt messages to Kyiv’s allies.

By Jamie Dettmer | March 25, 2024 9:00 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/give-us-the-damn-patriots-ukraine-need
s-air-defenses-now-minister-says/

KYIV — Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba doesn’t mince his words. There’s one item his country desperately needs to fend off Russia’s relentless missile attacks.

“Give us the damn Patriots,” he demanded. Originating in the United States, Patriot surface-to-air missiles are the best defense system to combat the ballistic missiles that have been raining down on Ukraine with increasing intensity in recent days.

“If we had enough air defense systems, namely Patriots, we would be able to protect not only the lives of our people, but also our economy from destruction,” he added.

Last week, it was reported that the US has urged Kyiv to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure and oil facilities, fearing Ukrainian drone strikes will drive up global energy prices. Kuleba wouldn’t confirm that, but asked if he sometimes feels Western allies want Ukraine to fight with one hand tied behind its back, he replied: “Yes, I do.”

Kyiv is, of course, unconditionally grateful for all the support that is coming from the Western alliance, he said. But he worries the allies’ actions don’t always match their rhetoric and as the war drags on, they are “going back to the usual way of doing politics.”

He describes a vicious circle – weapons are withheld or delayed or supplied in insufficient numbers and then the allies say Ukraine is retreating, it is impossible for Ukraine to win. And the allies ask themselves, why they should provide Ukraine with “game-changing” weapons.

“But guys all this picture of reality that you paint for yourselves is the outcome of one simple fact — that Ukrainian soldiers do not have sufficient amounts of weapons because you did not provide them,” he said.

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

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Tuesday, March 26, 2024 8:19 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I love it when you post nonsense, THUGR. That way, when you're proven wrong you can sit on it and spin.

SIGNYM

Russia LAUNCHES Assassination Attempt On Ukraine Spy Chief Budanov

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