Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 23:26
VIEWED: 568747
PAGE 56 of 111
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
According to Military Summary Channel, Ukraine followed up its drone attack on civilians in Belgorod with a cluster munitions attack on them
A war crime, as even Dima points out.
SIGNYM
T
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So, your response to videos and widespread reports of UKRAINE'S WAR CRIMES is a stupid CARTOON?
I suppose it would be too much for you to adress THE FACTS?
Dood, stop rerunning the propaganda movie playing in your head.
Trump is not colluding with Russia.
Russia is not colluding with Trump.
And stop kidding yourself that you post FACTS.
You post crude propaganda, and none of us are stupid enough to believe it, or you. 
-----------
"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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Quote:When Russians shoot down a Ukrainian missile, the debris falls just about anywhere, including on civilians rather than military targets. Tough luck but that's the physics of an unguided missile falling randomly out of the skies over Russia. Russians won't take responsibility for the unintended consequences of shooting down missiles. Instead, Russians will claim Ukraine committed a targeted war crime. Lying seems to be a Standard Operating Procedure for Russians, so that's why they also called the UK terrorists.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, your response to videos and widespread reports of UKRAINE'S WAR CRIMES is a stupid CARTOON?
I suppose it would be too much for you to adress THE FACTS?
Dood, stop rerunning the propaganda movie playing in your head.
Trump is not colluding with Russia.
Russia is not colluding with Trump.
And stop kidding yourself that you post FACTS.
You post crude propaganda, and none of us are stupid enough to believe it, or you.
UK behind terror attack on Belgorod — Russian diplomat
The United Kingdom is inciting the Kiev regime to terrorist actions in coordination with the United States, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said
https://tass.com/politics/1728303
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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AND NOW FOR SOME ACTUAL REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
Quote:
Yesterday [three days ago now] Russia has send swarms of missiles to strike Ukraine:
" Russia fired more than 150 missiles and drones at Ukraine on Friday in one of the largest bombardments of the war, [Ukrainian] officials said, hitting schools, parks, homes, a hospital and other civilian infrastructure, and rupturing the relative calm of an otherwise quiet winter on the conflict’s static front lines.
The scale of the attack confirmed what many in Ukraine have feared for months — that Russia was conserving its missile stocks throughout the fall for massive strikes in the winter."
It [was] however not schools, parks, homes or hospitals that were the targets.
As Strana [Strana is a top-5 online Ukrainian newspaper founded by journalist Igor Guzhva, in opposition to the current Ukrainian government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strana.ua ] writes (machine translation):
"Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhny said that "critical infrastructure, industrial and military facilities were attacked."
Indeed, judging by many sources, this missile attack was directed primarily at military enterprises and warehouses. Or on other infrastructure. At the same time, unlike last year's massive strikes, the current attack did not focus on energy facilities." https://strana.news/news/454083-raketnaja-ataka-po-ukraine-29-dekabrja
-2023-osnovnye-fakty.html
The Economist confirms the targeting of weapon production facilities:
[A] "source in Ukraine’s defence industry suggests Russia had predominantly targeted defence facilities. Some were connected to missile and drone production. “The attacks had strategic meaning for the enemy, with the aim of reducing our capacity to strike,” the source says. Both sides are locked in a competition to degrade the enemy. “It’s a battle to see who can destroy more of the enemy’s long-range weapons.” " https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/12/29/russia-tries-to-overwhelm-
ukraine-with-missiles
Of course, Zelenskiy & Co are going to announce endlessly about the apparently civilian structures that were hit, so - along with him - let's ignore the other 140+ missiles, bc that's "honest reporting"!
More about that later.
Quote:
This comes three days after the Ukrainian president Zelenski boosted about domestic Ukrainian weapon production:
" Ukraine tripled its domestic production of equipment and weapons in 2023 compared to the year before, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Dec. 27.
Amid rising uncertainty surrounding military aid from key partners like the U.S., Ukraine is looking to increase its own weapons production capacity.
Speaking at a meeting with Ukrainian defense industry workers, Zelensky said there has also been an "extremely significant" increase in domestic ammunition production, especially for artillery.
The production of drone ammunition is being "systematically expanded," Zelensky said. In 2024, "special attention will be paid to the production of explosives and gunpowder, which are in short supply in the world." " https://news.yahoo.com/zelensky-ukraine-triples-weapons-production-161
314865.html
Zelenski is putting his hope on foreign cooperation:
"According to Zelensky, Ukraine's defense complex will become further integrated with the international defense system. In 2023, Ukraine joined forces with German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall to repair Western-produced military vehicles and ultimately produce them domestically in Ukraine.
The joint Rheinmetall-Ukrainian Defense Industry enterprise was registered on Oct. 18. "The creation of a joint enterprise is, without exaggeration, a landmark event that takes cooperation between our countries to a qualitatively new level," Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
Rheinmetall CEO Armin
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, your response to videos and widespread reports of UKRAINE'S WAR CRIMES is a stupid CARTOON?
I suppose it would be too much for you to adress THE FACTS?
Dood, stop rerunning the propaganda movie playing in your head.
Trump is not colluding with Russia.
Russia is not colluding with Trump.
And stop kidding yourself that you post FACTS.
You post crude propaganda, and none of us are stupid enough to believe it, or you.
SIGNYM
I'm sorry comrade; could you remind me who has an arrest on sight warrant issued against them by the Hague?
I know, you were a clown in another life correct?
Just, way too funny.
T
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Why don't you get some hobbies?
Your life and your obsessions comes off as extremely pathetic, Ted.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It's pretty obvious you have very few foreign stamps in your passport. Oh? You don't need a passport? You've seen all you need to know from a screen? Russians are pretty much the same since they get all their "facts" about the Failing West from Putin. Trumptards hear about the Failing NYTimes and Failing California from Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh, that old gem again. We've been over this before ad nauseam. If you're living in a place where the average personal income is $9,733 per year, then everything you buy from food to clothing to transportation to entertainment costs a LOT less than somewhere where the average income is $40k per year. You don't even have to travel out of the country to see that this is true. Somebody working and living in NYC or LA is making a ton more than somebody doing the same job in bumfuck Kentucky doing the same job, but somebody in bumfuck Kentucky isn't paying $3,500 per month for a 600 sq ft. studio apartment.
Another dumb argument from Second with zero facts or evidence provided.
Yeah. Sure. Everybody pays the exact amount for everything sold no matter where they live in the world or what the average household income is.
Got any argument and data supporting that, idiot, or have you finally figured out that without any actual facts backing up anything you think that the only thing you have left is personal insults?
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin and many Kremlin officials have driven deep into the Russian political consciousness the ideas that Ukraine has no independent identity and no basis to continue to exist as an independent state; that any Ukrainian government not totally subservient to Moscow is a pawn of the West and a threat to Russia; that Ukrainian opponents of Russian rule are Nazis intent on conducting genocide against Russians in Ukraine; and that Russia has a legal, moral, and religious obligation to extirpate these supposed threats and restore Ukraine to its rightful place as a historically Russian land.[2] Putin has made these arguments part of his 2024 presidential election platform.[3] Russian administrators are inserting them in curricula throughout Russia and occupied Ukraine.[4] Kremlin mouthpieces speak to the Russian domestic audience with one voice along these lines.[5] Putin is training Russians to commit themselves to the task of subjugating Ukraine, and that training will neither stop nor vanish following some negotiated ceasefire. It will, in fact, shape the thoughts and likely policies of Putin’s successors for years or decades.
The ongoing fighting is consuming Russian forces generated just about as rapidly as Russia puts them into the field. Should an armistice be established, however, few of the conditions shaping the deployments of these forces would hold anymore. New Russian forces would not be consumed by fighting after a ceasefire. The Russians would no longer be forced to mass in particular areas where they are currently attacking but would instead be able to rearrange their forces to optimize for other factors. They would be able to mass artillery, air defense, electronic warfare, and engineering capabilities, specifically bridging equipment, and other supplies in fortified defensive positions near the front line — something they cannot do now as Ukrainian forces attack any concentrations within range of their weapons systems when they see them. The Russians would be able to prepare, train, equip, and deploy reserves in echelons throughout southern and eastern Ukraine to reinforce and support future operations and to improve the road and rail infrastructure needed to move them rapidly around. They could optimize, in other words, for a short-notice attack at times and places of their choosing in ways that the ongoing combat now precludes.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/lands-ukraine-must-liber
ate
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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Stalin Looms Large Over Putin's Russia
By Robert Coalson | January 01, 2024
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-stalin-putin-legacy/32755048.html
“In Russia today, ‘Lenin’ is just a figure in the mausoleum and in museums and nothing more,” wrote Leonid Nevzlin in a 2020 essay for RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “ ‘Stalin’ is our everyday reality. The Putin regime has a completely defined relationship to Stalin, to Stalinists, to Stalinism. This relationship is primarily tied to the roots of the regime. The KGB [and other Soviet security agencies] cannot be against ‘Stalin’ as an idea and as a practice. Stalin is their patron, their fate, and their biography.
“ ‘Stalin’ is a special operation under which the population is being drawn into the process of Stalinization and being recruited to become neo-Stalinists,” he wrote. “In the cultural-psychological sense, we remain a Stalinist society.”
Calling Stalin “the great manipulator,” Tatar activist and political analyst Ruslan Aisin wrote in an essay for RFE/RL’s Idel.Realities in August that Russia’s enduring inheritance from Stalin is one of subordination, conformity, individual isolation, and dislocation.
“We are definitely living inside Stalin’s legacy,” he wrote, “where the main things are fear, atomization, submission, and other social evils.”
Despite his chilling experience looking into the eyes of the broken NKVD executioner and investigating the Smolenka mass graves, Solovyov welcomes the present-day rehabilitation of Stalin.
“Stalin was a wise politician in his day, and those who criticize him just want to tarnish the ideas of communism and our great past,” he said. “Only those who want to distract Russian citizens from the serious failures of the [post-Soviet] reforms need de-Stalinization. The people don’t need it.
“The repressions were a terrible page in our history,” he conceded. “But any regime has its mistakes and dark spots. We need to talk about all the good things that happened under Stalin. And there were a lot of them. Although you could say the state at that time was built on the labor of the repressed, sometimes you need to make sacrifices to achieve certain goals.”
Oleg Yachmenev is a history graduate student at Zabaikal State University in Chita. Many of his instructors, he said, are “active Putinists.” He recalls discussing Stalin’s crimes with one lecturer who in the end said that “although things were bad, it would have been worse otherwise.”
“Unfortunately, it has become the norm to praise the Stalin era because people don’t know the truth about the camps and the repressions,” Yachmenev said. “Now, if I want to get information about those who were executed and I go to the archives, people in epaulets soon appear asking if I am a ‘foreign agent’ who is trying to smear Stalin, the pride of Russia.”
Respect And Fear
The rehabilitation of Stalin has been a feature of the Putin era since the former KGB officer came to power nearly a quarter-century ago. The independent Levada Center polling agency began asking Russians to name “the greatest figure of all times and peoples” in the early 1990s. In 1994, the Soviet dictator polled about 20 percent to take a distant fourth place in the ranking. By 2012, however, he took over first place, a position he has held ever since. By 2021, Stalin was the pick of more than 40 percent of Russians. In 2023, 47 percent of Russians said they regarded Stalin with “respect.”
“‘Respect’ in modern language signifies a warm, sincere feeling but also a recognition of the superior power of the object of the respect,” wrote Levada Center chief analyst Aleksei Levinson in an essay in August. “‘They fear us, which means they respect us’ is commonly heard these days. And it crops up a lot among the responses to questions about Stalin.”
The Kremlin’s manipulation of Stalin’s image and of the psychological legacy of the Soviet experience for the Russian people has evolved since Putin first became president on the last day of 1999, observers say. In the early years, Stalin was promoted
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Will the Ukraine War End in 2024? Experts Weigh In | Dec 28, 2023
"The only way I can foresee the Ukraine war possibly ending in 2024 is if Vladimir Putin dies," Beth Knobel, former CBS News Moscow bureau chief, told Newsweek. "It is theoretically possible that Russia could take advantage of a change in leadership to try to declare victory and just hold onto the land it grabbed since February of 2022," she said. "But even if Putin dies, I think there's only a minuscule chance that Russia would back off from the war, because it has already invested so much of its national image in winning."
"A long-term negotiated settlement also seems highly unlikely. Having spent so much blood, treasure, and prestige on this war, Putin politically cannot afford anything less than a decisive victory," said Gregory Vitarbo, professor of history at Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina.
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-war-end-2024-experts-1853696
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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File this story under #cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys (the sudden bowel-loosening realization that if you are a soldier, you can be killed/wounded/inconvenienced):
Army conscription becomes toxic issue for Ukraine’s leaders
Neither the Ukrainian president nor his top military commanders want to take responsibility for drafting reluctant fighters
By Ben Hall | Jan 1, 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/3ce63abc-9a71-427b-8e11-ab5309288845
As it prepares to enter the third year of full-scale war against Russian invaders, Ukraine needs significantly more troops. But given the risk of a public backlash, the task of raising men for the armed forces has become something of a hot potato in Kyiv, tossed back and forth between Ukraine’s political leaders and its top military commanders. Neither side appears to be willing to take full responsibility for drafting hundreds of thousands of perhaps reluctant Ukrainians to serve in a grim, grinding war.
The tussle began on December 19 when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at his year-end press conference that Ukrainian army chiefs had requested the conscription of 450,000 to 500,000 men. His announcement was extraordinary in two ways.
First, he put a figure on it. Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has kept secret the number of people it has recruited, whether voluntarily or through compulsion, just as it has the number of casualties.
Second, Zelenskyy stressed this was a request from the top brass, one that he had not yet granted. Before approving it, he wanted a detailed plan from his commanders about why so many recruits were needed and what that would mean in terms of troop rotations at the front.
“I need specifics,” he said. “This is a very serious number.”
Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are barred from leaving the country and are supposed to register with military recruitment offices for possible call-up. However, under current rules, only men who are 27 or older can be conscripted. A draft bill to lower that age to 25 was published in December, given that the rules governing mobilisation are the responsibility of parliament.
Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, however, seems loath to take ownership of the bill. Its MPs were instructed not to comment on it and instead refer journalists’ questions to military commanders, according to the Ukrainian Truth media outlet.
The day after the conscription legislation was published, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, was wheeled out to defend it in a TV interview and at his first press conference since February 2022.
Up until then, Zaluzhny had been largely kept out of the media spotlight, with a few exceptions, notably a November interview with The Economist in which he described the war at a “stalemate”, a taboo word in government circles which enraged the president.
In his defence of the recruitment drive, Zaluzhny said the military needed more men and had been included in the drafting of new legislation, but stressed that he was not responsible for all the details.
Asked about the 450,000-500,000 number cited by Zelenskyy, the general said he “did not make any request for any figures”. Revealing any numbers would amount to divulging a military secret, he added.
He also distanced the armed forces from provisions in the bill to expand the conscription orders to Ukrainians living abroad and to impose tougher sanctions on draft dodgers. These were questions for lawmakers to address, he added.
“We are an army, and we should fight, not interfere in the lives of civilians,” he said.
Zaluzhny’s appearance to explain the mobilisation drive was necessary, says Mariia Zolkina of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation think-tank in Kyiv, because Ukraine’s “political authorities attempted to distance themselves from this step and redirect responsibility to military leadership”.
Blaming the army for a potentially unpopular move was “destructive and wrong”, Zolkina wrote on X.
Relations between Zelenskyy and his top military comm
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So Far Russia Hasn’t Destroyed Even One Of Ukraine’s 39 HIMARS Rocket-Launchers — And Not For A Lack Of Trying
The arrival of HIMARS in Ukraine compelled the Russians to get their act together. In the war’s second year, Russia’s artillery kill-chain got “more responsive and more flexible,” analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote for the Royal United Services Institute in London. https://static.rusi.org/403-SR-Russian-Tactics-web-final.pdf
https://www.rusi.org/news-and-comment/in-the-news/so-far-russia-hasnt-
destroyed-even-one-ukraines-39-himars-rocket-launchers-and-not-lack-trying
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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That's odd, bc Dima has shown videos of HIMARS getting destroyed. Not many, but more than none.
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"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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Quote:You know what else is odd? For the new year, Putin has retconned his explanation for why Russia went to war:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's odd, bc Dima has shown videos of HIMARS getting destroyed. Not many, but more than none.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 2, 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin identified the West as Russia’s “enemy” and implied that Russia is fighting in Ukraine in order to defeat the West. Putin responded to a Russian serviceman’s question about Western aid to Ukraine during a meeting at a military hospital in Moscow Oblast on January 1, stating that Russia’s issue is not necessarily that the West is aiding Ukraine, but rather that the West is Russia's "enemy."[1] Putin added that “Ukraine by itself is not an enemy for [Russia],” but that Western-based actors “who want to destroy Russian statehood” and achieve the “strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield” are Russia’s enemies. Putin claimed that Western elites are trying to break Russia into five parts and are trying to do so using Ukraine, but that the situation on the frontlines is changing and that Russia will “deal with the [West] faster” than the West can deal with Russia on the battlefields in Ukraine. Putin added that the problem is not in Western aid deliveries to Ukraine and noted that Ukraine has already been “completely destroyed,” that there is “nothing left” of the country, and that it “exists only on handouts.”
Putin implied that Russia is fighting an existential war against the West in Ukraine and noted that Western rhetoric has recently refocused on how to “quickly end the conflict.” This phrasing implies that Putin sees a conflict and potential negotiations between Russia and the West – not a conflict and potential negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Putin added that Russia also wants to end the Russia-West conflict but only on the Kremlin’s terms and emphasized that Russia will not give up its positions. Putin does not view Ukraine as an independent actor and is thus portraying his full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a confrontation between Russian and West – deliberately misrepresenting the reality that Russia invaded Ukraine to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Putin’s emphasis on changing narratives in the West may indicate that he will perceive and/or frame any wavering in Western support for Ukraine and any Ukrainian defeats on the battlefield as a Russian victory in this supposed Russian-Western confrontation.
Putin’s framing of his war in Ukraine as a Russian struggle against the West – and not Ukraine – indicates that he does not intend to negotiate in good faith with Ukraine and is setting information conditions aimed at convincing the West to betray Ukraine through negotiations. Putin is likely deliberately and falsely framing Ukraine as pawn without agency in the Russia-West conflict to mask his expansionist and maximalist goals of establishing full effective Russian control of Ukraine. Putin’s January 1 discussion of negotiations refers to his intent to negotiate solely with the West about Ukraine’s future within the Russian sphere of influence and only about Western abandonment of Ukraine. It does not signal that Putin is interested in negotiating with Ukraine as an autonomous actor. Putin previously adopted a similar line when issuing two ultimatums to the United States and NATO in December 2021, which were intended to force the West to recognize Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by surrendering essential elements of Ukraine’s sovereignty in the name of de-escalating the conflict between the West and Russia that Putin was inflaming.[2] Any Western commitment to negotiations about Ukraine's future that bypass Ukraine will signal to Russia that it can impose its will upon countries that it deems to be in its sphere of influence – even countries beyond Ukraine, and potentially including Finland and Moldova, about which various Russian actors have begun setting informational conditions
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Want 200,000 155mm Artillery Shells A Month For Ukraine? Simplify Production
By Craig Hooper | Jan 2, 2024, 02:27pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2024/01/02/want-200000-155mm-
artillery-shells-a-month-for-ukraine-simplify-production/
It is no secret the artillery fight for Ukraine has devolved into a battle for mass. The West, hoping to pump at least 200,000 155mm rounds a month into the Ukraine fight, is reaching into old stockpiles and even exploring the idea of refurbishing expired shells. These are all viable stopgaps, but, as the West’s ammunition production infrastructure struggles to scale up in 2024, the artisanal, hand-crafted aspects of post-Cold War artillery manufacturing merits some tough scrutiny.
Production is key.
America is set to produce at least 100,000 155mm shells a month by 2025, leaving Europe with the task to boost domestic production of 155mm shells by 150% over the course of 2024.
That is a heavy lift. To beat Russia in the production fight, the West has an obligation to explore every avenue to speed shells to the front. And while raiding old stockpiles and refurbishing expired munitions may offer some relief to Kyiv’s shell-hunger, Ukraine’s allies can do more to speed production by scrubbing their artillery production processes of un-needed and un-necessary requirements.
Excessive requirements are a big problem. To eke the maximum safety, shelf-life, and performance out of each and every shell, Western artillery ammunition is over-engineered—and then, on top of already daunting engineering requirements, the shells are subjected to an array of boutique national requirements.
Having each Western shell lovingly crafted to the exacting tolerances of a Formula 1 race-car engine offers measurable benefit. In ideal circumstances, Allied artillery systems outrange, outfire and hit harder than equivalent Russian systems. But conditions are no longer as ideal.
Any benefit from the West’s exquisite ammunition machining requirements and other time-consuming ammo production steps are likely offset by the degraded field conditions of an actual wartime environment.
Put another way, precision ammunition machining doesn’t make much difference when the shell goes up an overused gun barrel that, in peacetime, would have long been consigned to the scrapheap thousands of shells ago.
This isn’t to say that precision weapons aren’t needed, but a rough-and-ready “deployable” shell — just like the rough and ready M-109 self-propelled gun — is perfectly fine for repulsing Russian human wave attacks. Precision aiming is less of a concern when Ukraine fighters just want to keep hungry and cold Russian conscripts heads-down in their trenches.
Western ammunition is also designed with long-term storage in mind. With a big conventional war long being pretty much an “unthinkable” thing for Europe, frequent artillery employment was secondary to the West’s pursuit of long-term ammunition stability. Long-term ammunition reliability and easy decommissioning after lengthy storage have dominated Western shell requirements.
These peacetime priorities were the correct things for unchallenged armies to pursue. A long-lasting, stable and easy-to-decommission ammunition stockpile is a great thing, but when newly-produced shells are arriving at the front and used within days, some safety and storage features — if they make production more time-consuming or more costly — can be jettisoned.
Speeding ammo production or rapid design changes to advance lethality may not sit well with rear area warrior bureaucrats. In sclerotic procurement systems, change only comes after years of unnecessary study, debate and gamesmanship. Put bluntly, it will take some ruthless leadership to identify and cut requirements that, in the heat of battle, are no longer relevant.
Cherished rice bowls will break. Old, longstanding methods may go away. But, right now, the overarching priority — at least for general purpose artillery ammunition — is lower price and greater speed.
The Jo
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Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 3, 2024
Recent Kremlin and MoD statements and the Russian MoD-affiliated milblogger’s post may be part of Kremlin efforts to set information conditions for Russia to blame Denmark and other Western Arctic countries for any future conflicts with Russia in the Arctic. These narratives are in line with Putin’s declaration on January 2 that the West is Russia’s “enemy” and his further implication that the war in Ukraine is an existential war for Russia against the West.[26]
Efforts driven by Kremlin mouthpieces to set such information conditions may be permeating the larger Russian information space. Another prominent Russian milblogger, who has previously amplified Kremlin narratives about Russia's maximalist goals of imperial reconquest in Ukraine, amplified a post claiming that the next regional “flare up” will be the Baltics and Nordic countries.[27] The post vaguely claimed that an unspecified actor, possibly the West, is preparing the Baltic and Nordic peoples for a confrontation with Russia and that the Baltic and Nordic countries have lacked sovereignty for a long time - echoing Kremlin narratives about how states that are not great powers - like Ukraine - do not have full sovereignty.[28] These informational lines are disturbingly similar to the justifications the Kremlin used to invade Ukraine in 2022 and to continue the invasion. There are no indications that Russia will seek conflict with NATO in the very near future, but Moscow began running similar information operations in Ukraine many years before Russian invasions in 2014 and 2022.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-3-2024
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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Is Russia’s Future a Forever War?
The Kremlin is hunkering down, but 2023 showed that its rule is less stable than it wants us to think.
By Stefan Theil, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy | Dec 29, 2023
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/29/russia-putin-ukraine-war-security
-geopolitics-empire-2023/
Part of what makes Russia’s war on Ukraine such a world-changing event is that it’s not just about the latter’s survival as a state. The war has also cast a spotlight on the future of Russia itself. Will it ever settle in its borders? Will the Kremlin turn its stated aims into action and try to restore its Cold War-era empire beyond Ukraine? What happens if Russia loses the war?
That nuclear-armed Russia is not as stable as its leaders would have us believe became obvious last June, when Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin launched an armed rebellion that brought his mercenaries almost to the gates of Moscow. The most significant challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin since he took power in 2000 ended in Prigozhin’s fiery death and a further crackdown on the regime’s critics.
Since then, Putin has hunkered down for a long war. With some 20,000 Russians arrested for anti-war infractions since 2022, dissent has been smashed. A staged election planned for 2024 will extend Putin’s rule for another six years; all serious challengers have been murdered, jailed, or pushed into exile. The Russian economy has been thoroughly retooled for war.
But whether the gamble Putin took on Feb. 24, 2022, will pay off is still unclear. If he wins in Ukraine, Europe could face other wars as Putin seeks to restore what he believes to be Russia’s rightful sphere of control in Eastern and Central Europe. If he loses, Russia might enter a spiral of instability at home. At Foreign Policy, we asked our best authors to spin some of these scenarios forward. Here are some of their most noteworthy articles from 2023.
1. The Dream of a European Security Order With Russia Is Dead
By Kristi Raik, Oct. 31
How will a future Russia fit into the European security order? France, Germany, and other European states long tried to partner with the Kremlin and grow economic ties. That vision crashed and burned with Russia’s invasion, leaving Europe to struggle for an alternative.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/31/russia-ukraine-war-europe-securit
y-order-nato-peace-negotiation-settlement/
2. Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-Escalate
By Maxim Samorukov, June 13
Putin has everything to gain domestically by keeping his country on a war footing, Maxim Samorukov writes. That is one of many reasons why Moscow has no interest in negotiating an end to its brutal war in Ukraine.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/13/ukraine-counteroffensive-russia-p
utin-war-negotiation-ceasefire-successor/
3. Staring Down the Black Hole of Russia’s Future
By Anastasia Edel, March 10
“Increasingly lawless, economically doomed, and morally bankrupt, Russia is running out of good endings,” writes Anastasia Edel, who grew up in the Soviet Union and is no longer optimistic that Russia can take a turn for the better. She argues that only a clear defeat by Ukraine offers Russians the prospect of positive change after centuries of imperialism.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/10/russia-ukraine-putin-war-future/
4. It’s High Time to Prepare for Russia’s Collapse
By Alexander J. Motyl, Jan. 7
In one of Foreign Policy’s most-read articles in 2023, Alexander J. Motyl examines scenarios for a breakup of the Russian Federation, which still contains dozens of colonized non-Russian peoples. Whatever its likelihood in the years ahead, not planning for such a disintegration betrays a dangerous lack of imagination among Western policymakers, Motyl writes.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/07/russia-ukraine-putin-collapse-dis
integration-civil-war-empire/
5. Russia’s Frighteningly Fascist Youth
By Ian Garner, May 21
In an excerpt from his book, Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth, Ian Garner describes a new generation of Russians that glorif
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Behind the New Iron Curtain
By Marzio G. Mian | Jan 2, 2024
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters.
Over the summer, hoping to do precisely that, I spent a month traveling down the Volga River. In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea. It’s where Europe and Asia meet or part, are bridged or blocked, depending on whether the compass of Russian history is pointing east or west. It’s where it all started, after all, where the empire took root: Along the river one finds many of the cities that have established Russian culture and faith—from Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, to Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), the site of the infamous World War II siege. This is a history that weighs heavily on Russian identity today, as the country continues to look backward, sifting its vaunted past for new myths of grandeur. It seems prepared to resist and to suffer, acts at which Russians have always excelled, and to have resigned itself to a future of isolation, autocracy, and perhaps even self-destruction.
Before starting down the river, I met with Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is an old acquaintance and the director of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, in his office on the museum’s ground floor, where he has carved out a space for himself among piles of books, stacks of paper, and various sculptures. The photographs crowding the room, of him with eminent Western leaders—a smiling Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth—are now themselves relics, not unlike the tapestry of Catherine the Great hanging above his desk.
I asked him about the river. “The Volga was everything, and is still everything,” he told me. “Because it makes you aspire to greatness. It has a sort of intimacy, sheltering and bright skies, not like the wide-open spaces of the steppe or Siberian rivers, which make you feel like a speck in the cosmos.”
Piotrovsky is an illustrious scholar of Arabic studies. I’ve known him for years, but we would normally talk about Canaletto and Byzantium, the great Islamic explorers and his beloved Sicilian wines. This time I found him in full war fervor. And, I was convinced, it was not only to defend his prestigious position: At his age, seventy-nine, he could easily keep his head down and carry on quietly, like most Russians have elected to do. He spoke with his usual calm but looked feverish, as if something were devouring him from the inside.
Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history.
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Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 4, 2024
US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby stated on January 4 that Russia has already launched ballistic missiles acquired from North Korea at targets in Ukraine and continues efforts to acquire similar missiles from Iran. Kirby stated that North Korea provided Russia with ballistic missile launchers and an unspecified number of ballistic missiles and that Russian forces launched at least one of the North Korean missiles into Ukraine on December 30, 2023.[6] Kirby also stated that Russian officials continue efforts to buy ballistic missiles from Iran. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported earlier on January 4 that unspecified US officials stated that Russia could receive Iranian short-range ballistic missiles as early as spring 2024 but that the officials do not believe that Russia and Iran have yet completed a deal.[7]
Russia may be intensifying efforts to source ballistic missiles from abroad because these missiles appear to be more effective at striking targets in Ukraine in some circumstances. Russian forces routinely use short-range ballistic missiles to strike Ukrainian cities closer to the frontline, and these missiles appear to be more effective at penetrating or avoiding Ukrainian air defenses. Ukrainian air defenses have intercepted 149 of a reported 166 Russian cruise missiles in intensified attacks since December 29, 2023, but have only intercepted a handful of the ballistic missiles that Russia has launched at Ukraine in the same period, for example.[8] Russian forces have repurposed S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles for conducting strikes against surface targets in Ukraine, and Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that Ukrainian air defenses struggle to intercept these unorthodox missile attacks using their own S-300 and S-400 systems.[9] Ukrainian forces have also appeared to be less successful in intercepting Iskander ballistic missiles during recent strikes, although Ukrainian forces did intercept an Iskander-M missile during a less intense series of Russian missile and drone strikes on December 30.[10] Ukrainian forces reportedly intercepted all Iskander-M or S-300/S-400 missiles that Russian forces launched at Kyiv on December 12.[11] Ukrainian forces reportedly also intercepted all 10 Kinzhal missiles that Russian forces launched at Ukraine on January 2 with Western-provided Patriot systems.[12] The effectiveness of Russian ballistic missiles thus appears to depend in part on the configuration of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella in the target area and the strike package of which the missiles are part.
The relative success that Russian forces have had in striking targets in Ukraine with ballistic missiles in combination with cruise missiles and drones may be prompting an intensification of Russian efforts to source ballistic missiles from abroad. Russia can reportedly produce roughly 42 Iskander missiles and four Kinzhal missiles per month, although it is unclear how many S-300/S-400 missiles Russia can produce.[13] Russia‘s defense industrial base (DIB) likely cannot produce ballistic missiles at the scale required for a persistent strike campaign in Ukraine that relies on regularly expending a large volume of ballistic missiles, and Russia likely has to source ballistic missiles from abroad if it wishes to maintain large-scale missile strikes against Ukraine.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-4-2024
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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*yawn*
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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A Hard-Won Victory That Ukraine Stands to Lose
By Anthony Borden, Mykhaylo Shtekel | January 4, 2024, 10:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/ukraine-russ
ia-weapons-counteroffensive/677010/
The Ukrainian counteroffensive has consisted of grueling battles like this one. Its gains are now at risk.
In a trench war, depth matters, and on a hilltop outside Orikhiv, 35 miles southeast of Zaporizhzhia, the Russians were dug in more than six feet deep. They’d fashioned a sunken city, a maze of crossed trails extending nearly a mile and commanding an unobstructed view five miles in all directions.
From that hilltop, known to the Ukrainian military as Position X, the Russians controlled the vital road south. If the Russians were to push forward, to take Orikhiv and move toward Zaporizhzhia, they would advance from that position. If Ukraine’s counteroffensive were to progress in the southeast, with the goal of eventually retaking Melitopol and choking Russian land access to Crimea, it would have to start by gaining Position X.
Last June, Ukrainian forces overcame Russia’s established position on their fifth attempt, after several months and many casualties. Taking Position X was a high point in a tough counteroffensive campaign and a demonstration of Ukrainian capacity. With enough weaponry, Ukrainian persistence, ingenuity, and courage can prevail over numerically superior and better-equipped Russian forces—especially in close combat, where Ukrainians have an overpowering motivational advantage and Russians tend to flee.
But the cost and difficulty of the battle also illustrated just how monumental a task Ukraine set itself with its counteroffensive. The Russians dug in at Position X commanded the high ground and held every advantage in terms of weapons and manpower. The Ukrainians defeated them with clever and flexible tactics, as well as sacrifice, endurance, and luck. But the factors that made this victory so hard-won will make it as hard or harder to repeat.
Read: Ukraine is losing Eastern European allies
After taking Position X over the summer, Ukrainian troops were able to advance down the southern road and recapture the village of Robotyne. But now the flow of armaments from the West has slowed and Ukrainian lines are stretched. Russian troops have recently regained several hundred yards in bitter fighting there and threaten to retake Robotyne. We visited Position X with Ukrainian troops in November 2023 and spoke with commanders about their victory there and the battlefield beyond.
“I understand that our Western partners were expecting a different counteroffensive,” a deputy battalion commander with the 65th Mechanized Brigade, whose call sign is Poltava, told us. “They said it would be fast, and all the rest. But this is not that war.”
Russia’s forward outpost at Position X was built to last. Prepared with the assistance of Wagner forces, its earthworks included protected gunner posts, large munitions stores, and regular blindages—sections covered with beams, dirt, and sandbags for cover. More than a dozen mini-dormitories with tree-trunk roofs, boarded walls, and bunk beds could accommodate 100 Russian soldiers at a time and were wired for lighting with generators. The Russians had arranged the trenchworks in the shape of an X, which allowed them to meet any advance with a hail of fire from two angles, from covered machine-gun positions every 10 to 20 yards. The entire area was also heavily mined.
Ukraine’s 65th Mechanized Brigade therefore made its initial foray last March with hardened vehicles: Vietnam-era armored personnel carriers (APCs) from the Netherlands, which maneuver slowly, have poor communications, and need frequent repair. The APCs also belch and churn at an infernal volume, announcing their approach from more than five miles away. On one of the first Ukrainian attempts, in March, an APC took three direct hits from a bazooka to no effect. But a fourth pierced the hull.
“We had two 200s [deaths] in the car, a commander and a gunner. Three
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Statement by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield | January 4, 2023
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) recently provided Russia with ballistic missile launchers and several dozen ballistic missiles.
The DPRK and Russia are both blatantly violating the United Nations arms embargo on the DPRK, which prohibits all UN Member States from procuring arms or related materiel from the DPRK and prohibits the DPRK from exporting arms or related materiel.
The Russian Federation’s pattern of behavior – flouting its responsibilities as a member of the UN Security Council and Member State, propping up regimes engaged in proliferation of arms, ballistic missiles, and related materiel – is unacceptable.
The United States will continue to work with allies and partners to identify, expose, and counter the Russian government’s attempts to acquire military equipment from the DPRK or any state that is prepared to support the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. We will raise this issue in the January 10 Security Council briefing on Ukraine. And we will keep strengthening cooperation to address the DPRK’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.
https://usun.usmission.gov/statement-by-ambassador-linda-thomas-greenf
ield-on-russias-pursuit-and-use-of-weapons-from-the-dprk-in-violation-of-un-security-council-resolutions/
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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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's odd, bc Dima has shown videos of HIMARS getting destroyed. Not many, but more than none.
SIGNYM
T
Russian man: "Evil happens because good people are silent"
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Europe’s Artillery Future: Cluster Munitions
By Craig Hooper | Jan 3, 2024, 04:00pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2024/01/03/europes-artillery-
future-bigger-new-energetics-more-barrels-and-cluster-munitions/?sh=21c879cf573b
With Russia already seeding Ukraine with mines, it is time for Europe to put aside the demonstrative, “feel-good’ niceties of a cluster bomb weapons ban to discuss how these weapons are doing in the brutal and ugly business of killing Russian soldiers.
Put bluntly, the ban itself may now be unsustainable. Though much of Europe—35 countries so far—ban cluster munitions, cluster munitions have remained important tactical tools for most European armies, and, with each 155mm cluster munition offering the equivalent destructive power of 10 normal 155mm high explosive shells, the grim calculus in favor of cluster munitions is obvious.
With Russia’s continued defiance of international norms of peaceful behavior and European battle strategies baldly calling for a body count, the Convention on Cluster Munitions is looking like more of a hinderance than a help. At a minimum, the document prevents countries maintaining old stockpiles of European-built cluster munitions from transferring those munitions to Kyiv, and, if Russia continues fighting, the ban will make the manufacture of modern cluster munitions in Europe impossible.
With Russia—and every major Russian ally—refusing to join the cluster munitions ban, continued adherence to the cluster munitions ban seems somewhat self-defeating. If these widely-despised and feared weapons are working in Ukraine, it might be time to suggest setting the ban aside, as something Europe might do if Russia continues fighting into the next year.
With cluster munitions, the West is running on borrowed time. Hounded by activists, few modern cluster munition manufacturers still exist. Even though the U.S. is not a signatory to the agreement, the last American cluster munitions manufacturer halted production in 2016. Small-scale cluster munition prototype studies are underway in the U.S., but there’s no real enthusiasm about replacing America’s lost cluster munitions production capability.
The U.S., of course, has plenty of old cluster munitions still in storage. In 2011, the U.S. government reported that it maintained more than 6 million cluster munitions of various types. These aging weapons should, where possible, be readied for transfer to Kyiv, and replacement efforts stepped up.
Europe has the capability to resist—and even defeat—Vladimir Putin. With their clear strategy, Estonia, one of the smallest, least populous European counties to sketch out the way forward (Estonia, by population, is in league with Cyprus, Luxembourg, Montenegro and Malta), is punching far above its weight. But it seems strange that, in a provocative call to kill or wound 50,000 of Estonia’s Russian neighbors every six months, Estonia didn’t dare risk irking the European signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
It is time to put diplomatic niceties aside. If Europe agrees that it wants Ukraine to kill 100,000 Russians a year, cluster munitions will do a lot to help Ukraine meet those grim goals.
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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Dbl
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Ukraine is using cluster munitions on civilian centers in Russia. They can't be trusted not to commit obvious war crimes.
Meanwhile, how about catching up on some real news?
Hmmm....
Russia launched the largest drone and missile strike ever. Targets included munitions and drone factories, weapons stockpiles, command centers, foreign "volunteers" in hotels etc in Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv, and especially Kiev. Not only did this obliterate western and Ukraine made weapons and factories, it made life in Kiev less "normal", and weakened support for Zelenskiy and the war.
Their air defenses appear almost nonexistent.
Ukraine is still thrashing around how to conscript 500,000 soldiers. The Rada has been talking about it for about a month. Zaluzhny and Zelenskiy are tossing the conscription between each other like a hot potato. Considering the political situation in Kiev, neither one wants to be on the losing side of the equation.
Meanwhile, I've seen at least a dozen videos of "recruiters" literally kidnapping men off the street.
Russia is slowly moving the front forward. Since they're now the attackers they're vulnerable to weapons strikes, but since Ukraine is almost out of 155 mm shells, drones are working overtime. Russian soldiers complain most about drones, for which defenses seem incomplete at best.
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"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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Quote:Ukraine is still thrashing around about how to demolish the Crimean Strait Bridge.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ukraine is still thrashing around how to conscript 500,000 soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge#Attacks_during_the_Russia
n_invasion_of_Ukraine
The battle of Ukraine v Russia is best described as the battle of Dumb v Dumber. When two meatheads, Russian and Ukrainian, slug it out in a street fight, the larger usually wins, unless an observer who is also a competent marksman with a gun decides the winner.
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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More real news...
Having been warned agianst it by the IMF, Central Banks, economists, and scholars of international law, Biden* looks determined to steal Russia's frozen assets and give them to Ukraine, with the EU's blessing.
The downside?
IMF and some central banks fear that stealing national assets from western banks will make every other cash-rich nation and oligarch in the world (Gulf states, China, oil rich African states) pull their money from western banks where it, too, could be stolen. We saw that effect when Russia was kicked out of SWIFT which accelerated non-SWIFT bank exchanges. This theft is not a big problem for the USA since our banks hold little Rusian assets, but definitely a problem for Brussels, which holds most of the estimated $300 billion Russian foreign reserves.
And clearly, we don't mind throwing our allies under the bus, having blown up their source of cheap natural gas causing inflation and deindustrialization, and urging them to demilitarize themselves. The EU and European national elites, being the flaccid puppets that they are, may quibble and cavil temporarily but will eventually fold.
I predict a further decrease in USD and EUR in international trade.
Another downside? Stealing national assets is an act of war. Should Russia decide to retaliate, it will be Europe on the front line. Good for us, not so much for them.
Yet another downside: it won't affect Russia's military or economy. Russia has written those reserves off, and is doing fine without them.
And it won't help Ukraine's military. They might be awash with money, but the cupboard is bare of relevant current weapons like 155mm shells, Patriot missile installations, APCs and tanks. The latest strikes across Ukraine demonstrate what happens when you try to manufacture weapons inside Ukraine. And how many drones can you use without drone operators?
It won't go to reconstruction either, since you have to be able to protect reconstruction. I think what will happen with some of that money is that it will pay salaries for another few months and keep the Kiev government afloat, preventing outright abandonment. The parts that are designated to "increasing weapons manufacturing in Ukraine" will go straight into contracts with western weapons manufacturers, who wont be able to do anything of the sort. And part of it will, go to ......
*****
The other thing Biden* is considering is long range missiles like the American Tomahawk and the German Taurus, which will be used to strike the Crimean Bridge and targets inside Russia. I noticed that Czech Viper launchers were used to send cluster munitions into civilian Belgorod with nary a demur from the west, so I expect more of the same k war crimes) from from the west.
(By contrast, Russia doesn't target civilian centers, and I doubt that it will even after provocation by the collective west. Just saying.)
F16s are also heading Ukraine's way, but the consensus is that it's too few. Also, since they need pristine runways for takeoff, they will probably taking off from NATO airstrips.
And finally, the USA has a three-star general to oversee Ukraine's war effort.
Ukraine's proxy status is getting thinner and thinner, and NATO's war on Russia is becoming more and more naked.
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"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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Quote:Signym, you are a lying sack of shit. Russia caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to Ukraine. Russia will never voluntarily pay for damages, regardless of what any international court rules. Forcefully taking the money against Russia's strong objections is the only way to get Russia to pay. Other countries won't lose their money because they are NOT destroying another country. That is either too subtle for Signym to understand or Signym is a lying sack of shit who completely understands who she is and what she is doing but doesn't take care to stop. Kind of like Russians.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
More real news...
Having been warned agianst it by the IMF, Central Banks, economists, and scholars of international law, Biden* looks determined to steal Russia's frozen assets and give them to Ukraine, with the EU's blessing.
The downside?
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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Russian missiles and drones are terrorizing Ukrainians. You can help bring safe skies.
We can set an example for our own politicians. And we can bring a bit of peace at the beginning of 2024 to a people who have suffered greatly.
By Timothy Snyder | Updated 5:08 a.m. ET Jan. 5, 2024
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2024/01/05/ukraine-war-r
ussia-drone-detection/72052546007/
The air raid siren in Odesa, Ukraine, didn't wake me. It's sometimes too easy to get used to what should never be normal.
Russia had no reason to invade Ukraine in February 2022. The reasons Vladimir Putin gave, having to do with his view that another people do not exist, have the whiff of genocide. The invasion itself is the crime of aggression.
For nearly two years, Russia has committed countless war crimes. These are not just what happens in war. The filtration camps, the kidnaping of children, the executions of civilians – these are all atrocities, and they are all illegal. Russia has no excuse for sending rockets, cruise missiles and drones into Ukrainian cities.
In Odesa last September, the day before I had visited a cathedral – hit by a Russian rocket. I wanted to go to an outdoor cafe – hit by a Russian rocket. As it turned out, the cruise missile that night was headed not for this southern city but for the port of Izmail.
Russia has been using its drones and cruise missiles to target Ukrainian ports and storage facilities, to try to prevent Ukrainian foodstuffs from being exported to Africa and the Middle East, where of course they are needed.
Russian cruise missiles and Russian drones (often supplied by Iran) are regularly used, especially in cold weather, to target Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. This is a possible war crime. It's not just what happens. It is a deliberate decision, made in Moscow, to make civilians suffer and die by denying them electricity and water in wintertime.
This happened last winter, and it is happening again now.
These realities make the politics as usual in Washington infuriating. It's very easy for us to help the Ukrainians win this war. What we supply them amounts to about a nickel on the Defense Department dollar. Most of that is spent in the United States, on American industry, paying American workers.
Ukrainians fighting Russia on behalf of America and NATO
In fighting the war, Ukraine is performing an extraordinary service to Americans. It is fulfilling the entire NATO mission, absorbing and halting a full-scale Russian attack. It might be deterring a Chinese offensive in the Pacific by showing how difficult offensive operations can be.
We have no excuse for treating any of this as normal. What the Russians are doing in Ukraine is a test for the whole international legal order and for people who say they care about freedom. What the Ukrainians are doing to protect legal order and freedom in general is extraordinary.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in Washington recently, he was told whom he needed to thank. As an American, this makes me very uneasy. It is we who need to learn to thank our friends.
It is the Ukrainians who have been, in the millions, turned into refugees. It is the Ukrainians who have, in the tens of thousands, been killed or wounded on the battlefield or by those rockets, drones and cruise missiles. It is the Ukrainians who are fighting this war.
And it is the Ukrainians who can win it – if the U.S. government does what it should.
How you can help Ukraine win war against Russia
In the meantime, we can all help.
In Ukraine, there is a strong tradition of what is called civil society. This means doing what the government doesn't do, filling the gaps or helping the government do what it should be doing. This Ukrainian government understands that it needs support, and not just from other governments.
I was approached by United24, President Zelenskyy's funding platform, and agreed to help raise money for a very special project. The Ukrainians have developed an
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Fuck Ukraine.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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PATRIOT interceptors are estimated to cost about $4 million per missile.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12297
Forbes calculated the cost based on the estimates that one Russian Kh-101 cruise missile costs $13 million, a Kalibr cruise missile costs $ 6.5 million, a Kinzhal ballistic missile costs $15 million, an Iskander costs $3 million, and one Shahed 136 drone costs $50,000, among others.
https://news.yahoo.com/forbes-estimates-russias-jan-2-154556571.html
Western weapon's wins against Russia are 'intelligence bonanza'
By Chris Panella | Jan 4, 2024, 2:58 PM CST
https://www.businessinsider.com/western-weapons-wins-against-russia-ar
e-intelligence-bonanza-2024-1
Ukraine says it has shot down 25 Russian Kinzhal missiles with Patriot systems since last May.
Any such kill improves the Patriot's accuracy and algorithms, benefiting other users of the system.
It's invaluable intelligence for the West and further highlights the need for more air defenses.
Ukraine's made good use of its Western-provided Patriot air-defense systems, shooting down plenty of Russian missiles, aircraft, and drones, including some advanced, albeit overhyped, weaponry.
But the intercepts, while a win for Ukraine, are also gathering hoards of data for other Patriot operators, making the system smarter and better. It's just one example of how the war in Ukraine is, as one missile-defense expert told Business Insider, an "intelligence bonanza."
And as Ukraine defeats threats, there's also a growing recognition of the importance of robust air and missile defenses, vital for defending and deterrence and, in Ukraine's case, survival amid an increase in missile and drone attacks.
On Tuesday, Ukraine said it shot down all 10 of the new Kinzhals fired during a vicious air assault, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine praising the incident as "what heroism supplied with advanced systems looks like." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too, hailed Western-provided air defenses like Patriots, IRIS-T, and NASAMS for saving "hundreds of lives."
The reported kills nearly doubled the tally of Kinzhals destroyed in the war. Just Sunday, Ukraine said it had shot down 15 Kinzhal missiles using Patriot batteries since the first recorded intercept last May, which was confirmed by the Pentagon.
A Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson, Col. Yurii Ihnat, praised the Patriot's ability to counter a variety of missile threats. The rate at which the Patriot may have intercepted Kinzhals indicates Ukraine has learned well how to operate its Western air defenses and developed a strong defense against the missile the Russians have touted as an unstoppable hypersonic weapon.
But Ukraine is not the only one benefiting from these engagements. For other Patriot operators, such as the US, new data about how to counter specific threats, such as the Kinzhal, is incredibly useful information.
"Every Ukrainian downing of Russian hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal with the Patriot missiles will improve the Patriot missile intercept algorithm — and increase accuracy for all Patriot systems, a benefit for the US, the rest of NATO, and other Patriot AD users," Jan Kallberg, a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis who was a professor at West Point, posted on X.
That data is valuable for both the US and its NATO allies, giving them a rare opportunity to live test systems and learn more about how not only to engage but also defeat Russian weaponry.
"The larger point is the intelligence bonanza that we are capitalizing on by observing or capturing Russian systems" without actually having any troops on the ground, Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who's the director of the Missile Defense Project there, told Business Insider. He said the opportunity was giving the US valuable data on Russia for potenti
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"Ukraine says..." is your tipoff to a lie. The chance of a Patriot missile hitting a Kinzhal, if the Patriot system is mated with Israel's fancy ultrafast predictive radar (as was done recently), is about 10-15%.
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"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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I have no idea who Lord Bebo is, but he (they?) is (are?) universally available as LordBebo and Mylordbebo on X, TikTok, Telegram, YouTube and who knows where else.
Lord Bebo posted an interesting video on YouTube about the war in Ukraine from a Russian drone operators POV
I've seen LOTS of drone footage on Military Summary, but there's no audio. And that makes a huge difference. Where you might see small squads of men moving from building to building or clearing trenches under a watchful drone, it looks kind of random. But There's a lot, and I mean A LOT, of communication going on between drone operators and soldiers, between drone operator and drone operator, and between squads. I don't have time to describe everything I heard, but the drone operator was telling a squad which building to clear. When the squad reported they were being shot at, the operator found which building they were being shot at from. Another drone operator broke in to tell them there was a Ukrainian APC coming down the main road, going to their rear. As it turns out, the APC was evacuating Ukrainian soldiers. It's not soldiers all by themselves anymore. There's probably a drone watching and an operator telling .... Sometimes nagging... ("Throw the grenade in the building and go in ... Throw the grenade in the window and enter. FUCK! THROW THE GRENADE AND GO IN") them what to do. With a lot of "fucks" thrown in.
This was, of course, from a Russian POV but I assume it's the same on the Ukrainian side.
-----------
"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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Quote:Who told you 10-15%?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
"Ukraine says..." is your tipoff to a lie. The chance of a Patriot missile hitting a Kinzhal, if the Patriot system is mated with Israel's fancy ultrafast predictive radar (as was done recently), is about 10-15%.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 7, 2024
Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky continued the Kremlin narrative that Russia is engaged in an indirect conflict with the West in Ukraine. Polyansky claimed that Ukrainian forces are not planning to march on Moscow because the “Kyiv regime will lose soon,” but noted that NATO threatens Russia’s existence because the alliance is leading the war against Russia in Ukraine.[71] Polyansky’s statements are similar to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s January 1 identification of the West as Russia’s “enemy” and are likely aimed at setting information conditions aimed at convincing the West to betray Ukraine through negotiations.[72]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-7-2024
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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During Russia’s New Year’s show The Little Blue Light 12 months ago, one of its hosts, Dmitry Guberniev assured the viewers that victory in Ukraine was near. He said, “Life is like a biathlon or ski racing. If you’re having a hard time, then the finish line is near.” During the same program, comedian Yevgeny Petrosyan claimed that the West had tried to destroy Russia but instead was forced to freeze and suffer without Russian gas supplies. He boasted: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”
The mood was markedly different during this year’s festivities. Instead of laughing at the West, Petrosyan wished fellow Russians to have “barns and cellars that are fully stocked and regularly replenished with patience and optimism.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/shocking-reality-of-ukraine-blowback-ham
mers-putin-at-home
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Putin recast his war as Russia’s eternal ideological struggle. “The point is not that they (the West) are helping our enemy. They are our enemy,” he said. “They are solving their own problems with their hands. That is what it is all about. Unfortunately, this has been the case for centuries and continues to be the case today.”
“Though it has been their (the West’s) goal to deal with Russia from time immemorial, we will deal with them faster,” Putin assured the wounded during his hospital visit.
“And the most important thing we have is … the unity of our people and society. Because there is an understanding of how important your job on the battlefield is in the armed struggle for our country and our future.”
Putin’s previous proclamations of “denazifying” Ukraine and “battling the forces of satan” are no longer enough justification.
The messages pushed by the Putin regime’s leading ideologists increasingly resemble caricatures. Indeed, the less credible the information, the more willing Putin’s ideologists are to use it.
One recent accusation by long-term Putin associate Security Council chief Nikolai Patruschev states that “Anglo-Saxon elites” believe Siberia to be the safest refuge from an impending eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano in the western United States. And that is why the West wants to invade Russia.
Other such extraordinary claims include Poland having secret territorial designs over Belarus and Ukraine.
And Finland wanted to seize a broad swath of northern Russia.
The Kremlin relies on stories designed to support slogans such as
“We are not the same as everybody else!”
“We have a special DNA!”
“We are fighting godlessness and the enemies on our country’s Western borders!”
“We have to defend ourselves by reclaiming our ancient territories and ‘liberating’ them!”
In short, the best defense of the beleaguered Russian nation is offense.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/06/news/russian-president-vladimir-putin-re
veals-countrys-new-enemy/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Putin Goes Full Bond Villain
By Brendan Cole | Jan 08, 2024 at 9:24 AM EST
A counterintelligence directorate created by former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin and made famous by the James Bond novels of author and former British spy Ian Fleming has reportedly made a return to Russia.
SMERSH is a portmanteau of the Russian for "death to spies," or "smert shpionam." It was announced in 1943 as a move to target Nazi spy rings, traitors and foreign agents during the World War II, before it was disbanded in 1946.
Fleming portrayed the group as cold-blooded foes of James Bond. One of his characters was Rosa Klebb — an assassin handy with a flick-knife shoe, who was played by Austrian actress Lotte Lenya in the 1963 film version of From Russia with Love.
SMERSH has been recreated in the present day to hunt down intelligence officers Moscow believes are targeting Russia.
https://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-bond-villain-smersh-stalin-mod
-1858646
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Russia launched another huge missile strike against Ukraine after Orthodox Christmas (which was Jan 7).
There are very few videos of the strikes, since Ukrainian security services arrested people who posted videos online of explosions from the last waves of strikes.
Cities hit include Odessa, Krivoy Rog, Zaparozhiy, all around Kharkov and from Kharkov eastward to the border shelled and struck, and cities to the west (but since no announcement from Russia and no videos or posts from there, hard to say which ones).
Also, active and some Russian advances along much of the frontline.
See Military Summary Channel for this morning
-----------
"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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Quote:And yet Russian victory does not arrive because Russia does not have a sufficient number of multi-million dollar missiles. It's time for Russia to bring out the nukes, which it has more than sufficient numbers of and which it never stops hinting that it will use one day soon.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia launched another huge missile strike against Ukraine after Orthodox Christmas (which was Jan 7).
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Quote:Russia is attriting Ukraine and, by extension, NATO and the USA. As had been said, you want to wear your opponent down so much that at the end you can knock him down with a feather. Not at that point yet.
Originally posted by second:Quote:And yet Russian victory does not arrive because Russia does not have a sufficient number of multi-million dollar missiles. It's time for Russia to bring out the nukes, which it has more than sufficient numbers of and which it never stops hinting that it will use one day soon.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia launched another huge missile strike against Ukraine after Orthodox Christmas (which was Jan 7).
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
-----------
"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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Quote:That explains why Germany only had 7 million dead while fighting on land, sea, and air on two fronts with supply lines stretching 1,000 miles while Russia had 27 million dead fighting on one front with short supply lines. A sensible military strategy is to hit your enemy at its weakest point as hard and fast as possible. That is how successful military campaigns are conducted.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia is attriting Ukraine and, by extension, NATO and the USA. As had been said, you want to wear your opponent down so much that at the end you can knock him down with a feather. Not at that point yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Signym, if Russia had the goal you claim, it would have cut all fuel deliveries from Russia to the World, not just some European countries, at the same time it invaded Ukraine once the spring thaw had passed and the ground was hard. Then Ukraine, EU, UK, and USA would have been knocked out in the first round, a worthy goal for Russia. But Russia didn't because its goal was to steal all Ukrainian land by capturing Kyiv.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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A 1929 Soviet novel shows how dangerous ideas can destroy a society.
By Anastasia Edel | January 8, 2024
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/chevengur-andrey-pla
tonov-russia-book-review/677042/
As Vladimir Putin’s army continues to wage war in Ukraine, many people may find themselves probing the culture of modern Russia to make sense of the war. In the past, those looking to art or literature to better understand Russian society might have picked up works by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But these writers feel less relevant today: The 19th century is receding into the distance, and so are the glorified or mystical qualities its authors ascribed to Russia and its people.
Today, few books offer the level of insight into modern Russian history as Chevengur does, a 1929 novel by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov, composed as the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union and consolidated power. Never published in its entirety in his lifetime, Platonov’s epic of the Russian Revolution has recently been translated into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781681377681
Despite having been born in Russia, I discovered Platonov relatively late in life. He wasn’t taught in Soviet schools, and tamizdat (banned material published abroad and smuggled back to the U.S.S.R.) wasn’t available in the provincial town where I grew up. Though Platonov was himself a Communist who took part in the Bolshevik revolution, he owed his obscurity to Joseph Stalin, who disliked his depictions of the savage undercurrents of the revolutionary dream. (Platonov simply saw his book as a truthful ode to Soviet power.) His four novels and numerous plays, scripts, stories, and sketches thus weren’t available in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
Chevengur shows how an embrace of violence destroys the soul of a nation, and lays bare humanity’s inexhaustible capacity for carnage in the search for a better future. Terror isn’t a side effect of the Revolution, the novel suggests, but rather something endemic to Russian society.
Even after Stalin’s death, and during glasnost, the period of liberalization that led to the rediscovery of Platonov’s work, he was eclipsed by other previously banned writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I hadn’t even heard the name Platonov until I moved to America in the late 1990s and merged my book collection with my husband’s. One summer evening in California, I plucked a plain green volume with a mysterious name — Chevengur — from our bookcase and didn’t put it down until I read the last sentence. I remain under its spell.
Set from 1913 to the mid-1920s, a dramatic decade that spanned World War I, revolutions, famines, epidemics, and civil war, Chevengur charts the breakup of the old Russia and the birth of the new communist world. Like War and Peace, Chevengur is a portrait of a society in crisis. But unlike Tolstoy, whose epic is wrapped into an entertaining upper-crust-family saga, Platonov begins his story in an entirely different social milieu: a Russian village where misery is a “habit rather than a torment.” Part coming-of-age novel, part odyssey, part dystopian chronicle, Chevengur has no epic battle scenes, no love triangles, and no glory. It shows the Revolution and the country that engendered it as they were — strewn with dead bodies, broken promises, and dreams turned into nightmares.
More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-once-forgotten-novel-that-exp
lains-russia-s-violence/ar-AA1mCUp6
Download a free copy of Chevengur from the mirrors at https://libgen.is/fiction/?q=Andrey+Platonov
Download Robert+Elizabeth+Chandler’s other translations from
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Robert+Elizabeth+Chandler
https://libgen.is/fiction/?q=Robert+Elizabeth+Chandler
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:For explanations of why Russians are that way there are Russian novels. For explanations of why 6ixStringJack is this way, there is the movie Joker. 6ix, your sympathizing with the Joker's situation revealed your inner self.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=63327&mid=10857
85#1085785
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:Russia is attriting Ukraine and, by extension, NATO and the USA. As had been said, you want to wear your opponent down so much that at the end you can knock him down with a feather. Not at that point yet.
Originally posted by second:Quote:And yet Russian victory does not arrive because Russia does not have a sufficient number of multi-million dollar missiles. It's time for Russia to bring out the nukes, which it has more than sufficient numbers of and which it never stops hinting that it will use one day soon.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia launched another huge missile strike against Ukraine after Orthodox Christmas (which was Jan 7).
SIGNYM
That's funny, the purpose in war is to win. Not to lose all your troops and equipment. And Putin's intention was not to expand NATO, which is what his actions led to.
T
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:For explanations of why Russians are that way there are Russian novels. For explanations of why 6ixStringJack is this way, there is the movie Joker. 6ix, your sympathizing with the Joker's situation revealed your inner self.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=63327&mid=10857
85#1085785
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
That tired line again, huh?
Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:6ix, once you sympathize with the Joker quietly murdering his mother with a pillow, you can't take it back by writing "That tired line again, huh?" Your mother should not allow you into her presence because you might suffocate her with a pillow. Yes, I know your mother was bad, but you are not under her control now. Consult with your local Sigmund Freud for what to do about your twisted mind, 6ix. Wanting your own mother dead is why you keep writing "Fuck Ukraine".
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:For explanations of why Russians are that way there are Russian novels. For explanations of why 6ixStringJack is this way, there is the movie Joker. 6ix, your sympathizing with the Joker's situation revealed your inner self.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=63327&mid=10857
85#1085785
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
That tired line again, huh?
Fuck Ukraine.
Then there are these nihilistic gems that would make Sigmund Freud ask 6ixStringJack to leave his office and never return.
Quote:http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=36&tid=65735&p=4
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Every time there was a show that me and my old man liked and it got cancelled, I'd just say instead of leaving it on a cliffhanger like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, they should have just had one final episode where the entire planet gets nuked and everyone dies. Firefly could have had the sun go supernova and everyone dies. Freaks and Geeks? Maybe North Korea fired the first nuke and everyone dies.
You can't cancel my show. I'm going to destroy it first.
Let's just kill off pretty much all the main characters on both sides at the end and call it a day.
--------------------------------------------------
But I'm glad they just killed everyone off and made it so that the entire season didn't matter since the network killed it.
--------------------------------------------------
I like the idea of a supernova just killing everybody in the solar system off, because FOX killed Firefly anyhow, so Joss should have just said fuck it and made a huge catastrophe outside of anybody's control just coming in and making the entire show as pointless as FOX decided it was.
--------------------------------------------------
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Putin said much the same. If Russia cannot have what it wants, why should the world survive? Why should life go on without Russia? Just his subtle way to remind the world he has nukes. The Joker did the same in his movie. He'd kill everybody if he can't have fame.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Iskander on descent (R) v Kinzhal (L).
If it's not glowing on the way down, it's not a Kinzhal.
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Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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NATO Hits Only One of Two Major Spending Targets
Jan 10, 2024 at 3:00 AM EST
https://www.newsweek.com/nato-hits-major-equipment-target-2024-2014-su
mmit-20-percent-1859101
The fierce backbiting of the alliance's "brain death" era—as described by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019—is generally in the rear view mirror.
Allied leaders agreed on two key 10-year spending targets at the Wales summit in September 2014. By 2024, they said, members would "move towards" or beyond spending 2 percent of GDP on their militaries, while committing 20 percent of annual defense spending to major new equipment and related research and development.
As the deadline approaches, the picture is mixed. The majority of NATO nations have still not reached the 2 percent threshold, much to the chagrin of those who have. NATO estimated that as of July 2023, all 31 member states had surpassed the 20 percent spending target; seemingly a big win for a bloc so often consumed by expenditure disputes.
"If you take the technical way of looking at those targets, 20 percent is as important as 2 percent," Fabrice Pothier, a former director of policy planning for NATO, told Newsweek. "It's not just about how much you spend, it's where you spend it." (If 80 percent of spending goes to pensions, NATO is not buying defense. Rather its spending is a social welfare program.)
But even amid success, tough questions remain. "Where do you put this 20 percent?" Pothier asked. "Do you put it in developing some Europe-grown technologies like in air defense? This is what the French would like to do, to fill one of the biggest gaps in the NATO, and especially European, defense toolbox."
"Or do you go more for existing technology like the U.S. Patriot system and the Israeli systems, which is what Germany is proposing?"
"These debates, which can be quite technical, can become very political," he added. "If the two main European military powers go in different directions about where they want to put their money, you're not going to build that defense industrial base for certain technologies—like air defense systems—that will be robust enough to actually create the kind of mass of production that you need."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Nearly 50 Nations Say Russia Must 'Cease' Accepting Weapons From North Korea
Nearly 50 countries released a joint statement on Tuesday condemning the relationship between North Korea and Russia after Russia launched North Korean ballistic missiles at Ukraine at least twice in recent weeks.
https://www.state.gov/joint-statement-on-dprk-russia-ballistic-missile
-transfers/
The statement — issued by the State Department — called on Russia and North Korea to “immediately cease all activities that violate” the three United Nations Security Council resolutions it said the countries are violating through their arms transfers, one of which explicitly bans the transfer of arms with North Korea.
https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/s/res/1718-%282006%29
I'm sure Russia won't change despite the stern words of these statements, but if the message was also attached to a highly explosive device delivered to Putin, that might motivate change. When Putin reads "We condemn in the strongest possible terms the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) export and Russia’s procurement of DPRK ballistic missiles" Putin starts laughing when he gets to the words "strongest possible terms" and never finishes reading even to end of that sentence.
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How Ukraine Must Change If It Wants to Win
A beleaguered country needs more than volunteerism and chutzpah to protect its version of democracy.
By Anne Applebaum | January 9, 2024, 8:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/rustem-umerov-defens
e-minister-ukraine/677060/
On December 29, Russia launched the largest missile attack against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. On January 2, another attack of the same magnitude hit schools, hospitals, and apartment blocks across Ukraine. Early yesterday morning—the day after Orthodox Christmas—the Russians hurled yet another missile barrage at Ukraine. Together, these attacks sent a message: Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in negotiations, cease-fires, or swapping land for peace. Although he cannot overwhelm Ukraine militarily, Putin now believes that he can keep up the pressure, destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, wait for Ukraine’s allies to grow tired, goad the Ukrainian public into turning against the government, and then win by default.
Often, this new phase of fighting is described as a “war of attrition,” as if the only thing that will determine the outcome is the number of bullets. But although the number of bullets does matter, the war has an important narrative and psychological component too. Alongside the bombings, Kremlin officials are now telegraphing to everyone—to Western politicians and journalists, to Ukraine, to the Russian people—that they can absorb 300,000 casualties and massive equipment losses, that their country’s economy is thriving, that they are willing to devote half of the national budget to defense production indefinitely. At the same time, the Russians and their supporters in the United States and Europe describe Ukraine as corrupt, politically divided, and, above all, certain to lose. In Washington, some Republicans justify their (so far) successful attempt to block American aid to Ukraine by using this language. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister who courts investment from Russia and China, does the same when blocking European aid.
Ukrainians know that negotiations with Russia are fruitless, and in any case not on offer. They also know that military loss still means the same thing that it meant when Russia invaded in February 2022: occupation, mass repression, concentration camps, and the end of an independent Ukraine. They also know that the Russians are much weaker than they claim. Their soldiers still stumble into traps; their commanders still seem to be improvising. The Russian public is tired of the war and of the falling living standards it has created. Nevertheless, to beat the Russians militarily and psychologically, to undermine the Russian propaganda repeated by Orbán and the MAGA right, to maintain their alliances and defend their territory until the Russians have had enough, they have to change.
Two years ago, in the weeks that followed the full-scale invasion, ordinary people pitched in to buy night-vision goggles, the managers of chic bistros mobilized to feed troops, men drove their children to the border and then went home to fight in the territorial army. Now the volunteerism, chutzpah, and wild energy that carried the army and the society forward for the past two years have to be transformed into systems, institutions, and rules. Ukraine needs not just the most enthusiastic army, but the best-managed. Ukraine needs not just clever engineers who build innovative sea drones, but the most modern defense industry in Europe, if not the world. Finally, Ukraine’s government needs to eliminate any remaining corruption and mismanagement—and convince its allies that it has done so as well.
I did not invent these recommendations. I heard them in Kyiv, late last month, from Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s new defense minister.
To outsiders, Umerov might seem an odd choice for this job. Born in 1982 in Uzbekistan because Stalin had sent Umerov’s Crimean Tatar family into exile there in 1944, Umerov returned to Crimea with his parents on
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It amazes how many lies Anne Apolebaum works into each para
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Quote:Since the article was by Anne Applebaum, not Apolebaum, you have photophobia. But I've always been convinced you and the Russians were from the Mirror Universe of Star Trek where characters are aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic in personality.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It amazes how many lies Anne Apolebaum works into each para
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Universe#Characteristics
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Just wanted to give you a little update since you obsess over my expenses buddy...
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I understand your position since you can't afford to fix your house because wood is outrageously expensive.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
There is a Path to Victory in Ukraine
The Delusions and Dangers of Defeatist Voices in the West
By Dmytro Kuleba | December 14, 2023
It was almost two years ago that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And here we are, still talking about the war that nobody cares about.
Sure. Let's send them another $150 Billion, Joe*.
Fuck Ukraine.
Yes. Wood is outrageously expensive because of Bidenflation.
I can afford it. I choose not to pay that much for it. I haven't worked in 4 1/2 years and I've got plenty of money left because I never buy anything on credit and I bide my time and wait for the sale or clearance. That's how I got $2,000 of pre-Bidenflation baseboard and trim to do my entire house for $125.
It will get done. Just not at this price.Quote:
You can't pay your taxes, either, but fortunately, you don't have any income to tax.
Sure I can. I just wasn't going to pay more than my share and I got them to drop my property taxes by nearly $800 per year, and that will be every year going forward too.
Funny though... They didn't get around to filing the paperwork on time so I had to pay their full amount and I won't be reimbursed until about 2 months before the next bill is due. But the point is I had the money to pay for it.
And you're right. I don't have any income tax.
How was work today, bitch?Quote:
Meanwhile, Biden is sending the equivalent of 3% of the Pentagon's budget to Ukraine so that the other 97% isn't another year of complete waste with nothing to show for it.
$150 Billion.
I lived on $7,000 this year.
If everybody knew how to use money like I do, 21,428,571 Americans could have paid for everything they needed to live off of that money sent to Ukraine.
Or... I could have lived 21,428,571 years off of that money.
We've had 3 years of nothing to show for anything under the Biden* Administration. Including Ukraine not winning a war that it's never going to win.
I just bought ten 6' Oak closet poles for the job. Normal price is $22.98 per rod. They were on sale for $19.99 and there is a no-limit $10 rebate per rod.
So normal price with tax would have been $245.87.
Because I waited patiently for 27 days for a sale I knew would pop up eventually, my price after rebate is now going to be $113.98, and whatever I buy in the future with the $100.00 rebate card I get in the mail 10 weeks from now gets the sales tax taken off of it too, so it really in essence only cost me $106.98 for $245.87 worth of wood because I didn't run out on December 14th and buy it like you would have.
That's a 56.49% savings and all it cost me was 27 days more waiting on a job that I've been wanting to get done for 12 years now anyhow.
SPOILER ALERT: Even before Joe Biden* sat in that chair the first day it would have cost me a lot more than $106.98 for all that wood if I'd paid full asking price for it when Trump was still President.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:6ix, I also include you, along with Signym, Russians, Nazis, and Texas Trumptards in general, as menaces from Star Trek's Mirror Universe. Your lives are woeful because you are in the wrong universe. Once that is widely known, your troubles will double until you return to the mirror. (The Mirror Universe plans to conquer this universe but fails. That's your role. Strife. Defeat. Repeat. Forever.)
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
SPOILER ALERT: Even before Joe Biden* sat in that chair the first day it would have cost me a lot more than $106.98 for all that wood if I'd paid full asking price for it when Trump was still President.
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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Not at all a legitimate reply to my post.
Ignored, just as anything you ever post should be.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:You act like someone who shamefully crossed over from Star Trek's Mirror Universe. 6ix, you, Signym, and the Russians lived in a perverse version of reality and you hate this version that doesn't need you. You cry that you are the good guys in the original universe and that if you got your way here, all would be well but what you have accomplished so far on your mission is making life worse.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not at all a legitimate reply to my post.
Ignored, just as anything you ever post should be.
Here are the Russians comparing their Mirror Universe version of WWII to their version of the Ukrainian War's events:
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 10, 2024
The Kremlin’s effort to use the mythos of the Great Patriotic War (Second World War) to prepare the Russian public for a long war in Ukraine is at odds with Russia’s current level of mobilization and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical attempts to reassure Russians that the war will not have lasting domestic impacts.
St. Petersburg outlet Fontanka published an interview with Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrei Kartapolov on January 9 wherein Kartapolov stated that even in the “victorious years of 1944 to 1945” the Soviet forces faced difficulties, prompting the interviewer to ask Kartapolov if Russia was now figuratively in 1944-1945 (i.e. nearing the end of the war in Ukraine).[1] Kartapolov attempted to expand the erroneous analogy between the Soviets’ fight against Nazi Germany and Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by claiming that Russia is currently figuratively somewhere in December 1943 and moving into 1944.[2] The Soviet military launched a series of successful offensive operations following its defensive victory at the battle of Kursk in July 1943 and by December 1943 had reached the banks of the Dnipro River and Kyiv in Ukraine. Kartapolov explained his logic by claiming that Ukrainian forces failed in the summer 2023 counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast in a way similar to Nazi Germany’s losses in battles in 1943.[3] Kartapolov’s analogy makes little sense, particularly given the fact that the Russian forces have not gained notable ground in recent months as the Soviet forces did in the months before December 1943.[4] The interviewer asked Kartapolov if his analogy suggests that Russia’s war in Ukraine will end in 2024, forcing Kartapolov to admit that Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Second World War cannot be literally compared.[5] Kartapolov nevertheless continued to use allusions to the Second World War to claim that the Russian military would continue the war in Ukraine until it installed a “banner over the Reichstag” (i.e. complete victory in Ukraine that achieves all of Putin’s maximalist objectives).[6]
Kartapolov also alluded to the Second World War in response to a question about demobilization for Russian servicemen called up during Russia’s partial mobilization by arguing that mobilized Soviet personnel did not go home in 1942 just because they had been fighting for a year.[7] Kartapolov characterized Russian calls for demobilization as part of operations by Ukrainian and Western intelligence services.[8] The interviewer pushed back against Kartapolov’s allusion and stated that the entire Soviet Union was mobilized during the Second World War whereas only one percent of the Russian population is mobilized today (likely referencing Putin’s December 1 decree alleging that the Russian military has a total of 2.039 million personnel, 1.32 million of whom are combat personnel on a population of roughly 145 million).[9] The interviewer argued that either Russian officials should mobilize the entire country or mobilized personnel unwilling to sign contracts should be able to conclude their military service.[10] Kartapolov responded by reiterating the Kremlin’s rhetorical line that there is no need for general mobilization now or in the near future.[11]
This exchange prominently highlights the disconnect between Russian force generati
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You act like someone who shamefully crossed over from Star Trek's Mirror Universe.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not at all a legitimate reply to my post.
Ignored, just as anything you ever post should be.
I've lived here the whole time motherfucker.
You're in my universe, and you're always wrecking my calm with your bullshit.
Don't ever bring up my finances again. I have far more a handle on them than you will ever manage.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:You lived in Indiana, where shitheads run the state. I lived in Texas, where shitheads also run the state, but I learned how to evade their deep-seated stupidity that keeps them suffering and poor. You haven't learned. The smarter Russians learned how to evade the hereditary stupidity of Russian shitheads, but effective evasion required the smart ones to emigrate from Russia. Russia ought to have been able to instantaneously crush Ukraine. But because most of the smartest Russians had a long time ago left the country, Russia struggles with military strategy and tactics from the brains of the least competent/energetic.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You act like someone who shamefully crossed over from Star Trek's Mirror Universe.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not at all a legitimate reply to my post.
Ignored, just as anything you ever post should be.
I've lived here the whole time motherfucker.
You're in my universe, and you're always wrecking my calm with your bullshit.
Don't ever bring up my finances again. I have far more a handle on them than you will ever manage.
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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Have fun at work today making money to pay off all those loans you're never going to pay off before you die, bitch.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:I have no debt. I do have people who owe me, all of whom are Trumptards. They are very erratic at repaying on time, especially the one who owes me $898,392. Despite it being a zero-percent interest loan. Trumptards are lying sacks of shit, but I knew that before the first loan. All it takes is a phone call to my lawyer to shove those liars into bankruptcy. Some might even kill themselves. No skin off my nose what happens to them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Have fun at work today making money to pay off all those loans you're never going to pay off before you die, bitch.
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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Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told a “People and Defense” conference last weekend that “there could be war in Sweden.”
He noted that it wasn’t his “primary intention to appeal to your fear, but rather to your situational awareness” and said he was trying to make Swedes aware of the potential for conflict, and to ask them to be prepared.
When asked to respond to Bohlin’s comments, Sweden’s military Commander-in-Chief Micael Bydén said he agreed with the minister, stating: “We need to prepare as far as possible, at all levels, throughout society.”
Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on Thursday announced a fresh 80 million euros ($87.5 million) in military assistance to Ukraine, and said Estonia would provide long-term assistance equaling 0.25% of its GDP over the next four years.
“If all the countries supporting Ukraine made a similar commitment, this would lead to a definite victory for Ukraine,” Kallas said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/11/ukraine-war-live-updates-latest-news-o
n-russia-and-the-war-in-ukraine.html
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have no debt.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Have fun at work today making money to pay off all those loans you're never going to pay off before you die, bitch.
Nobody buys that or any of the other bullshit you're selling.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Ah. Since you can't deny she's lying you become the typo Nazi and hurl personal insults?
Originally posted by second:Quote:Since the article was by Anne Applebaum, not Apolebaum, you have photophobia. But I've always been convinced you and the Russians were from the Mirror Universe of Star Trek where characters are aggressive, mistrustful and opportunistic in personality.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It amazes how many lies Anne Apolebaum works into each para
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Universe#Characteristics
Quote:
How Ukraine Must Change If It Wants to Win
Ukraine can't win
Quote:Its version of democracy includes banning opposition parties and jailing opposition activists, canceling elections, and kidnapping men off the street to serve in the army
A beleaguered country needs more than volunteerism and chutzpah to protect its version of democracy.
Quote:Infamous rabid neocons
By Anne Applebaum
Quote:Targets are military installations: weapons factories, troop concentrations, air defense systems, depots etc. Civilian targets were rarely struck, and according to Ukraine's head of Air Force, by incoming missiles knocked astray by air defense missiles (I quoted him previously)
| January 9, 2024, 8:30 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/rustem-umerov-defens
e-minister-ukraine/677060/
On December 29, Russia launched the largest missile attack against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion. On January 2, another attack of the same magnitude hit schools, hospitals, and apartment blocks
Quote:Finally! Truth!
across Ukraine. Early yesterday morning—the day after Orthodox Christmas—the Russians hurled yet another missile barrage at Ukraine. Together, these attacks sent a message: Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in negotiations, cease-fires, or swapping land for peace.
Quote:First of all, "he" isn't fighting Ukraine, it's Russia. Second, Ukraine is ALREADY being overwhelmed.
Although he cannot overwhelm Ukraine militarily,
Quote:mind-reading
Putin now believes
Quote:targets are military not civilian. But Ukraine does use civilian buildings for military uses
that he can keep up the pressure, destroy Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure,
Quote:
wait for Ukraine’s allies to grow tired, goad the Ukrainian public into turning against the government, and then win by default.
AFAIK Russia is making every move to guarantee a military victory. If there happens to be a coup in Ukraine, that's a side effect
Quote:Russian KIA estimated at 50,000
Often, this new phase of fighting is described as a “war of attrition,” as if the only thing that will determine the outcome is the number of bullets. But although the number of bullets does matter, the war has an important narrative and psychological component too. Alongside the bombings, Kremlin officials are now telegraphing to everyone—to Western politicians and journalists, to Ukraine, to the Russian people—that they can absorb 300,000 casualties
Quote:Not sure about "massive" losses, but at the rate Russia is producing tanks, shells, drones etc they can absorb more than Kiev and the west
and massive equipment losses,
Quote:by all reports, including the IMF and western visitors, it is
that their country’s economy is thriving,
Quote:lie
that they are willing to devote half of the national budget to defense
Quote:EVERYBODY (except western neocons) describe Ukraine that way! These are well-known facts
production indefinitely. At the same time, the Russians and their supporters in the United States and Europe describe Ukraine as corrupt, politically divided,
Quote:
and, above all, certain to lose. In Washington, some Republicans justify their (so far) successful attempt to block American aid to Ukraine by using this language. Viktor Orbán, the
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Russians are highly organized for a long-term war. Ukrainians? Not so much.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 11, 2024
The reported concentration of the Russian military’s entire combat-capable ground force in Ukraine and ongoing Russian force generation efforts appear to allow Russian forces to conduct routine operational level rotations in Ukraine. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on January 11 that Russian forces have 462,000 personnel in Ukraine and that this represents the entire land component of the Russian military.[1] Skibitskyi stated that most Russian units in Ukraine are manned at between 92 and 95 percent of their intended end strength and that the size of the Russian grouping in Ukraine allows Russian forces to conduct rotations throughout the theater.[2] Skibitskyi stated that Russian forces withdraw units that are at 50 percent or less of their intended end strength to rear areas and return them to the front following recovery and replenishment.[3] Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev stated on January 11 that the Russian military has successfully replenished Russian forces in Ukraine through an ongoing crypto-mobilization effort that generated over 500,000 new personnel in 2023.[4]
ISW previously observed routine Russian struggles to conduct operational level rotations from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 through Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive.[5] The apparent Russian ability to generate forces at a rate equal to Russian losses likely provides Russian forces the ability to replenish units that the Russian command has withdrawn from the line due to degradation and later return these replenished units to the front.[6] Russian forces maintain the initiative throughout eastern Ukraine, and the absence of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations likely removes pressure on operational deployments that had previously partially restrained the Russians‘ ability to conduct rotations.[7] Russian forces have not seized the battlefield initiative in Kherson Oblast, however, and appear to be degrading units and formations operating near the Ukrainian bridgehead on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River without making apparent efforts to conduct operational level rotations (although they do appear to conduct tactical-level rotations).[8] Russian forces have conducted several regroupings during localized offensive operations in the Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Lyman, and Kupyansk directions since early October 2023, which likely provided Russian forces time to conduct the rotations Skibitskyi described.[9] ISW has not observed widespread Russian complaints about a lack of rotations throughout the theater since summer 2023, and the overall tempo of Russian operations is consistent with Skibitskyi’s reporting.[10]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-11-2024
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Russians are highly organized for a long-term war. Ukrainians? Not so much.
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 11, 2024
The reported concentration of the Russian military’s entire combat-capable ground force in Ukraine and ongoing Russian force generation efforts appear to allow Russian forces to conduct routine operational level rotations in Ukraine. Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on January 11 that Russian forces have 462,000 personnel in Ukraine and that this represents the entire land component of the Russian military.
"The Russian military is one of the largest in the world, with an estimated active duty personnel of around 900,000 and an additional 2 million in reserve"
https://thegunzone.com/how-large-is-russian-military/
"Russia has one of the largest militaries in the world. It ranks fifth by active military personnel, which was measured at over 830 thousand[ active duty
https://www.statista.com/topics/9957/armed-forces-of-russia/
-----------
"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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How the best chance to win the Ukraine war was lost
By Yaroslav Trofimov | January 9, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/09/ukraine-war-win-cha
nce-west-lost/
Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. This article is adapted from his new book, “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence.”
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was flying home on a Turkish Airlines plane from New York when Russia invaded. He had just been welcomed into the White House by President Biden. It felt like he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, he thought. The warm handshakes, the empathetic smiles were meant to be final farewells — for him, and for his country.
In Washington, and in most European capitals, no one expected Ukraine to survive in February 2022. The CIA director, William J. Burns, had secretly flown to Kyiv at Biden’s request, warning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia was planning to assassinate him.
“They spoke about the physical liquidation of our leadership, about the creation of filtration and concentration camps,” said Zelensky’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov. “But what could we do? We kept asking: give us weapons. But they didn’t really give weapons to us.”
As the United States shut down its embassy in Kyiv ahead of the invasion, it did ship some weapons to great fanfare, such as Javelin antitank missiles. But the quantity was puny: only about 90 Javelins, according to Danilov. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while also briefed about the hopelessness of the Ukrainian cause, had overruled internal objections and authorized a heftier load of about 2,000 NLAW missiles. Still, those were weapons best suited for a guerrilla campaign, not a conventional war.
At the time, Ukraine’s military leadership, under Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had successfully kept Kyiv’s war planning secret — and not just from the Russians. Neither Washington nor many senior officials in the Zelensky administration knew Zaluzhny’s blueprint. “We were pessimistic about Ukraine holding out in part because the Ukrainians didn’t share any of their preparations or planning with us,” a senior Pentagon official told me later. “And the preparations and plans that they did share with us were military deception.”
Western governments were stunned by the speed of the Russian advance and mindful of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warnings not to interfere. Johnson called Zelensky with an offer to arrange an escape, one of several such calls that the Ukrainian president received. One possibility, Johnson explained, was to set up a Ukrainian government-in-exile in London, the way a Polish government-in-exile had been established there after the Nazi and Soviet invasions of 1939. Zelensky asked for weapons instead.
Poland, perhaps because of its history, was the only nation that didn’t despair in these early hours. Rerouting his connecting flight, Kuleba attended Poland’s national security council meeting on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion. The Polish government, like other NATO members, had been told by the alliance’s intelligence that a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state was near certain. Still, Warsaw refused to give up. Immediately, Poland sent several truckloads of ammunition and heavy weapons. “The Poles believed in us more intuitively than fact-based, because all the facts spoke against us at the time,” Kuleba recalled.
The mood was very different in other European capitals. “Nobody was giving the Ukrainians any chances,” Johnson said. “If this is going to happen, the best thing is that maybe it should happen quickly,” a senior aide to German chancellor Olaf Scholz told him at the time.
In his speech on the day of the invasion, Putin threatened unimaginable consequences should the West try to help Kyiv. And, since the first days of the war, the White House’s overriding priority had been not to overstep Russia’s “red lines” and provo
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Options to seize Russian assets and funnel them to Ukraine
By Natasha Bertrand | Fri January 12, 2024, 12:00 PM EST
Officials have spent the last year quietly trying to figure out how to divert billions of dollars in frozen Russian money to cash-starved Ukraine.
The proposal the US has hit on, described in detail here for the first time, is based on a novel legal theory to justify seizing and transferring to Ukraine the roughly $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets.
The legal case is necessary, officials explained, not only so that the US is on solid legal ground in the event that Moscow challenges the seizures in an international forum or in a US court, but also so that the US can convince a critical mass of allies to join in the effort.
The US has put a new twist on the law, however, by arguing that instead of returning the seized assets to Moscow if it comes back into compliance, the West can keep the money as a down payment of sorts toward what Russia will owe Ukraine anyway for its reconstruction.
“It is temporary and reversible insofar as Russia is going to owe Ukraine much more than that ($300 B) for the unbelievable damage Russia has inflicted,” the senior administration official said. “And really, it’s Russia’s obligation to make up the difference in time.” The US would describe these assets as a “credit” towards what Russia will eventually owe, the official added.
Much more at https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/12/politics/us-proposal-russian-assets-ukr
aine/index.html
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Options to seize Russian assets and funnel them to Ukraine
Oh good. We don't have to give any more money from the Social Security fund to child rapist Zelensky now.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:How much would payroll tax need to be increased to keep Social Security solvent?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Options to seize Russian assets and funnel them to Ukraine
Oh good. We don't have to give any more money from the Social Security fund to child rapist Zelensky now.
An immediate increase in the combined payroll tax rate from 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent would be sufficient to allow full payment of the scheduled benefits for the next 75 years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+would+payroll+tax+need+to+be+
increased+to+keep+Social+Security+solvent
If you are 6ix, you won't know that SS taxes only pay for SS benefits, nothing else. Certainly not pay for foreign policy decisions.
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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Quote:
Journalist Gonzalo Lira Reported Dead In Ukrainian Custody
Friday, Jan 12, 2024 - 02:20 PM
Journalist Gonzalo Lira has died while in Ukrainian custody, according to his father.
"Gonzalo Lira, Sr. says his son has died at 55 in a Ukrainian prison, where he was being held for the crime of criticizing the Zelensky and Biden governments," wrote Tucker Carlson on X. "Gonzalo Lira was an American citizen, but the Biden administration clearly supported his imprisonment and torture."
In May, Lira was arrested by Ukrainian authorities because he “publicly justified” the Russian invasion, according to a press release by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
The statement from Kiev said that Lira “has the citizenship of one of the countries of Latin America” but omitted that he is also California-born U.S. citizen, as ZeroHedge contributor Space Worm reported at the time.
Following his release, Lira said he was tortured in a Ukrainian prison, explaining that "two thugs held my head and used a toothpick to scratch the whites of my left eye, while asking me if I could still read if I had just one." Lira informed followers that he was making a mad-dash via motorcycle towards the Hungarian border:
According to journalist Alex Rubernstein, Lira said that he had double pneumonia (both lungs), which was ignored by the Ukrainian prison holding him.
"I have had double pneumonia (both lungs) as well as pneumothorax and a very severe case of edema (swelling of the body). All this started in mid-October, but was ignored by the prison. They only admitted I had pneumonia at a Dec. 22 hearing," reads the letter. "I am about to have a procedure to reduce the edema pressure in my lungs, which is causing me extreme shortness of breath, to the point of passing out after minimal activity, or even just talking for 2 minutes."
In response to Lira's reported death, his father allegedly wrote: "I cannot accept the way my son has died. He was tortured, extorted, incommunicado for 8 months and 11 days and the US Embassy did nothing to help my son. The responsibility of this tragedy is the dictator Zelensky with the concurrence of a senile American President, Joe Biden." ,
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/journalist-gonzalo-lira-reported-d
ead-ukrainian-custody-according-father
-----------
"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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Who is this guy Signym writes about?
Edward Hunter Christie @EHunterChristie knows who he is:
So, apparently, low-life clown Gonzalo Lira really is dead. His trajectory is well documented. And yet American pro-Moscow agitators such as @TuckerCarlson bent the known facts beyond recognition so as to present Lira as some kind of martyr and so as to demonise Ukraine as it continues to fight a harrowing war for its national survival.
This tells us that Tucker Carlson is a deeply evil and perverted man. A pied piper for calculated callousness in the face of fascism and war.
Quote: So while it's unfortunate that Gonzalo Lira has died, I really can't bring myself to feel any remorse.
As a failed pick-up artist who encouraged and taught men how to sleep with impoverished Eastern European women who turned Russian shill while Russia was attacking Ukraine he was nothing more than a dirt bag.
He was first warned by Ukrainian authorities that his actions were illegal, yet he continued.
He was then placed under house arrest, a very lenient punishment here in Ukraine.
He then violated the conditions of his house arrest by attempting to escape to Hungary.
Ironically he contracted severe pneumonia, something he struggled with and died in a Kharkiv hospital, a city which is constantly attacked by the country he supported.
Honestly, I wouldn't care if the Tate brothers rotted in a Romanian prison either.
3:36 AM · Jan 13, 2024
https://twitter.com/EHunterChristie/status/1746104032341455266
More about Gonzalo Lira at https://www.google.com/search?q=Gonzalo+Lira
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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The War That Neither Ukraine nor the West Can Afford to Lose
By Serhii Plokhy | 12 Jan 2024, 04:09 PM IST ( with inputs from The Wall Street Journal )
https://www.livemint.com/special-report/the-war-that-neither-ukraine-n
or-the-west-can-afford-to-lose-11705055921894.html
The war between Russia and Ukraine can continue indefinitely unless the West realizes that what’s at stake isn’t just the fate of Ukraine but the future of the West itself.
As the New Year arrived in Ukraine with the Russian missile attack on Kyiv on the early morning of Jan. 1, 2023, there were two main questions on the minds of policy makers around the world. The first pertained to the fate of the continuing Russian winter offensive, while the second concerned the results of the planned Ukrainian spring counteroffensive.
The answer to the first question came in May when Yevgeny Prigozhin withdrew his Wagner Group troops from the ruins of Bakhmut. Taking control of Bakhmut had come at a high cost to Wagner, with perhaps 20,000 soldiers killed, most of them convicts recruited by Prigozhin from Russian prisons.
This was the sole significant success of the offensive. Bakhmut was to remain under Russian control, but Prigozhin rebelled when the Kremlin decided it didn’t need his services and ordered to roll his troops into the regular Russian army. The mutiny revealed fissures between the Russian political and military leadership, which didn’t rush to protect the regime. The Kremlin eventually assassinated Prigozhin, but the military brass’s dissatisfaction with Putin’s handling of the war suggested possible trouble in the future.
The counteroffensive
The failure of the Russian offensive opened the door for Ukraine’s June counteroffensive. Despite some optimistic predictions, the destruction of the Russian Army-controlled section of the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River effectively dashed Ukrainian hopes of using the dam as a bridge to cross the Dnipro and sever the supply lines connecting Russian troops in the south of Ukraine with their logistical hubs in Crimea.
As a result, the situation on the mainland reached a stalemate. Less than 200 square miles changed hands since the beginning of the year. Russia managed to stabilize the front line by bringing at least 300,000 additional soldiers and officers into the Russian army. Ukraine, as well as being outnumbered 3 to 1 in terms of manpower, lacked superiority and often even parity in firepower.
While the Ukrainians had received tanks, fighting vehicles and antiaircraft missile batteries, they didn’t receive the F-16 fighters they had requested, nor the U.S. ATACMS long-range guided missiles. Delays in supply were caused by various reasons, including disagreements between NATO commanders and their Ukrainian counterparts on the required weaponry and timing, quarrels between the allies on who should supply what (notably the public dispute between the U.S. and Germany regarding supply of Leopard and Abrams tanks), and White House concerns about crossing Putin’s red lines and provoking a nuclear war.
No end in sight
But efforts to prevent the war from escalating no doubt will contribute to lengthening it, likely through 2024 and beyond.
What’s more, the battles of 2024 will be fought amid a political event—the U.S. presidential election—that will be as important to the future of the war as any individual offensive. The U.S. remains the largest Western supplier of weapons to Ukraine and is second only to the European Union in financial assistance to Kyiv. The political uncertainty in the U.S. will greatly affect the country’s ability to provide Ukraine with crucial military aid.
Ukraine is likely to face a shortage of munitions at some point in the coming year. Yet it takes time for Ukraine’s Western partners to increase the production of munitions. The U.S. has already doubled the production of some artillery shells, but there is long way to go to meet the demands of the Ukrainian front.
Meantime, the European Union is unlikely to meet its pledge to suppl
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Gonzalo Lira
Quote:
In October 1996, Lira made a deal with G. P. Putnam's Sons to publish his first... book called Counterparts. The story is about a strong female FBI agent and her "counterpart," a CIA operative. In 1997, he released a Spanish novel called Tomáh Errázurih. In 1998, he directed a short action film called So Kinky. His second book, Acrobat, came out in 2002. In 2005, he filmed Secuestro in Chile, which did well in the box office during its opening weekend. Between 2010 and 2013, Lira shared his ideas about economics and other topics on his blog. Sometimes, he reposted them on Business Insider and Naked Capitalism. He also contributed to a financial website called Zero Hedge. In that time, he contacted economist Steve Keen to work together on a project, but Keen mentioned that Lira made big promises and didn't deliver, leading to issues with collaborators and employees. Starting in 2017, Lira was active on YouTube using the name Coach Red Pill (CRP). He shared content that was disrespectful towards women and anti-feminist, attracting the attention of a group called incels. Lira's videos gave advice like "never date a woman in her thirties" and claimed that women only want money, a house, and kids. In one video, he suggested people in Western democracies move to a less developed country because of his concerns about COVID-19 vaccines. He posted many videos, gaining subscribers and views. In November 2021, Lira deleted most of his CRP content and started using his real name. He lived in Kharkiv and had a family with a Ukrainian woman, with whom he had one daughter.
I listened to many of his videos from Kharkiv. He rarely spoke DIRECTLY about the war's effect on the city, altho he videoed missile damage from the streets once or twice. He used to host a program called "Roundtable" where he and two or three guests would discuss a variety of political and economic topics.
Of all of the rountable discussions I've heard over the years, IMHO he was THE BEST host and moderator. Conversation flowed from one person to another and one interesting idea to another. Prompted by Lira's questions, following a person's train of thought and either extending it or counterposing it in unexpected ways, and passing that ball to someone else.
The guy was brilliant. DREAMTROVE (on his better days) brilliant. But foolhardy and an attention whore. He knew the SBU was looking for him, and for months every listener expected that video to be his last. And finally, it was.
The American Embassy should have interevened and had Lira deported. No American should die in a foreign jail for expressing an opinion, and nobody should excuse his death by slagging his personality.
-----------
"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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So, Russia's largest missile/ drone attacks on Ukraine were on Dec 29, Jan 3, Jan 8, and Jan 13. Anyone besides me notice a pattern?
*****
Russia is still having problems with drones whenever they go on a (local) offensive, which exposes their equipment and soldiers. I think their solution to the problem is to deny drone manufacturing and NATO ISR as much as possible because they haven't been able able to solve the drone problem at the front line.
-----------
"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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Quote:Evil is not a once-and-done with Russians. They repeat. For recent examples:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, Russia's largest missile/ drone attacks on Ukraine were on Dec 29, Jan 3, Jan 8, and Jan 13. Anyone besides me notice a pattern?
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 13, 2024
Russian forces are reportedly increasingly using chemical weapons in Ukraine in continued apparent violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Russia is a party. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces have used chemical weapons 626 times since the beginning of the full-scale invasion and have used them at least 51 times so far in 2024.[18] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces currently launch chemical weapons at Ukrainian positions up to 10 times a day and that Russian forces typically use drones to drop K-51 grenades filled with irritant CS gas (2-Chlorobenzalmalononitrile), a type of tear gas used for riot control (also known as a Riot Control Agent [RCA]), onto Ukrainian positions.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces used a new type of special gas grenade containing CS gas against Ukrainian positions on December 14, 2023.[20] The Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade previously acknowledged on December 22 that the brigade deliberately uses chemical weapons by dropping K-51 grenades from drones onto Ukrainian positions near Krynky in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.[21] Russia is a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which prohibits the use of RCAs as a method of warfare.[22]
A fire destroyed a large warehouse in St. Petersburg belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries on January 12.[23] Russian sources claimed that on the night of January 10 to 11 a mass fight broke out between migrant workers at the facility and that this prompted Russian authorities to conduct a raid on the warehouse, during which several migrants received military summonses.[24] Russian law enforcement recently detained 700 migrants at a Wildberries warehouse in Moscow Oblast and issued some military summonses in November 2023.[25] Russian authorities have consistently conducted raids on migrant communities to issue military summonses to naturalized migrants and coerce other migrants into military service.[26] Wildberries appears to be a notable target for these mobilization raids, and the company has previously admitted that such raids have interrupted their operations.[27]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-13-2024
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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Russian Orthodox priest faces expulsion for refusing to pray for victory over Ukraine
From whom comes the church's motivation to expel the priest? Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who is a staunch supporter of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his war in Ukraine.
The priest faces expulsion from the Russian Orthodox church for refusing to read out a prayer asking God to guide Russia to victory over Ukraine.
In a verdict published on Saturday, a church court said Aleksiy Uminsky should be “expelled from holy orders” for violating his priestly oath. The decision was forwarded for approval to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian church who strongly backs President Vladimir Putin.
The case shows how the church is clamping down on internal dissent as it throws its support behind Putin and his “special military operation” in Ukraine, which is now nearing the end of its second year.
The church court said Uminsky had broken his oath by refusing to read the “Prayer for Holy Rus” – an archaic name for Russia – which Kirill has made compulsory at church services.
“Behold, those who want to fight have taken up arms against Holy Rus, hoping to divide and destroy its united people,” said the prayer first pronounced by Kirill on 25 September 2022, seven months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Arise, o God, to help your people and grant us victory through your power.”
Dozens of Russian Orthodox priests have been punished for challenging the church’s line on the war – for example, by reading out prayers for peace instead of victory – according to Christians against War, an online group that has documented their cases.
Uminsky was the most prominent casualty so far. He had served for 30 years as senior priest at the church of the life-giving holy trinity in Moscow before being abruptly fired this month, just before Orthodox Christmas, in a move that paved the way for Saturday’s verdict. He was renowned for his hospice work for dying children and adults, and led the funeral for former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 2022.
In an interview last November, Uminsky said that the language of war and the “special military operation” was “in no way compatible” with church liturgy.
He encouraged believers to seek out priests who “pray more for peace than for victory and understand that any victory is always a pyrrhic victory in these wars … In modern wars any victory is almost always equivalent to self-destruction.”
Ksenia Luchenko, an expert on the Russian Orthodox church at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the verdict against Uminsky was unsound because the prayer he was accused of refusing to read had not been considered and approved by the highest body of the church, the Holy Synod.
She said his punishment was “evidence of Patriarch Kirill’s usurpation of power in the Russian Orthodox church and violation of its statutory documents.”
More at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/russian-orthodox-priest-
faces-expulsion-for-refusing-to-pray-for-victory-over-ukraine
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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Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Never blame Trumptards for being retards at life. Instead, they must blame the Democrats, Hollywood, Big Business, or even blame Ukraine for Trumptards' problems. 6ix, you won't be fine because you are blameworthy for what happens to you but you are too crazy to realize your problems are all your fault. Don't shift the blame to Ukrainians and the ammo the US sends them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
The Putin-loving portion of Russia has the same problem as the Trumptard portion of America. Neither blame themselves for what happens to them. And so it keeps happening.
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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Putin Ally Says Poland Is 'Next'
By Thomas Kika | Jan 13, 2024 at 10:15 AM EST
While the Ukrainian "special military operation" continues, Russian officials hint at similar invasions in the near future, usually suggesting former Soviet Union territories as likely targets, such as Moldova or the Balkan States.
The latest potential future target hinted at by a Russian official is Poland, which was never officially a Soviet territory, but did exist alongside it in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
Aleksey Zhuravlyov made the suggestion about Poland. Zhuravlyov is a Russian lawmaker and member of the State Duma known for his nationalistic and militaristic tendencies.
"Another question is to you, guys in the West, what are you going to do about it?" Zhuravlyov asked. "They understand very well that Ukraine is finished. So what's next? Sweden is getting ready and so are the Balkans. The Poles have quieted down a bit, they probably started to realize that they are next. Of course, we have no illusions, but we understand that all of them are getting ready for the next stage of war."
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-says-poland-next-ukraine-war-rant-
russian-tv-1860470
Meanwhile, Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, made a comment in response to a visit by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Kyiv. If the UK sends not just a Prime Minister but also soldiers, Russia will declare war on the UK. More details: "I hope that our eternal enemies - the arrogant British - understand that deploying an official military contingent to Ukraine would be a declaration of war against our country," Medvedev wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Along with being inept warriors, Russians are violent blowhards and braggarts.
https://news.yahoo.com/russias-medvedev-says-uk-troop-125315205.html
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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Mediazona's updated list of confirmed Russian dead.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
-----------
"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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Never blame Trumptards for being retards at life. Instead, they must blame the Democrats, Hollywood, Big Business, or even blame Ukraine for Trumptards' problems. 6ix, you won't be fine because you are blameworthy for what happens to you but you are too crazy to realize your problems are all your fault. Don't shift the blame to Ukrainians and the ammo the US sends them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
What problems are you referring to?
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:That's why you keep repeating lies?
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, Russia's largest missile/ drone attacks on Ukraine were on Dec 29, Jan 3, Jan 8, and Jan 13. Anyone besides me notice a pattern?
SECOND::Evil is not a once-and-done.
For recent examples:
Quote:
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 13, 2024
Russian forces are reportedly increasingly using chemical weapons in Ukraine in continued apparent violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Russia is a party. The Ukrainian General Staff reported
Evidence?
Casualties with chemical weapons injuries?
Chemical residues?
Independent investigators?
-----------
"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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Quote:There is an entire book about people like you, Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution. People like you don't want to know. I still remember your denials about Russia shooting down Flight MH17, one example out of many of your habits.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Evidence?
Casualties with chemical weapons injuries?
Chemical residues?
Independent investigators?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Signym, don't ever change. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s view of human nature may be of some interest since it was shaped by the age of war and revolution. In his 1919 essay “Dreams and Facts,” he wrote:
The influence of our wishes upon our beliefs is a matter of common knowledge and observation, yet the nature of this influence is very generally misconceived. It is customary to suppose that the bulk of our beliefs are derived from some rational ground, and that desire is only an occasional disturbing force. The exact opposite of this would be nearer the truth: the great mass of beliefs by which we are supported in our daily life is merely the bodying forth of desire, corrected here and there, at isolated points, by the rude shock of fact. Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination.
From page 176 of Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution by Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, 2023
Download the free book from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Leonid+Trofimov
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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Quote:You do not have money to buy the proper tools for your carpentry. Other Trumptards have such worries because they, like you, are ill-suited to life in an America they find hostile. They want President Trump to fix their problems so that they can continue to behave stupidly, with maximum freedumb. Russians have the same problem of being ill-suited for life in Europe, which is why they have Putin to tell them it is Europe that needs to change, not Russians.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
What problems are you referring to?
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11863
53#1186353
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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Ukraine’s plight chills spirits in the Baltics
Worries about US reliability and Nato weakness leave Lithuania and its neighbours exposed
By Edward Lucas | Monday January 15 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Times
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraines-plight-chills-spirits-in-t
he-baltics-q8sw2f5jn
An unspoken question hung in the air as I joined thousands of Lithuanians in a snowy Vilnius last week to greet President Zelensky at the start of his whistle-stop tour of the Baltic states. Are we next?
The contrast between the cheerfully decorated, peaceful streets of the Lithuanian capital and the ravaged towns and cities to which the Ukrainian delegation would return was stark. Ukraine’s plight is keenly felt in the Baltics, which underwent similar torments in living memory.
At the weekend, three million Lithuanians commemorated the anniversary of a Soviet massacre in 1991, the bloodiest episode of the struggle to regain independence. Only 20 miles of lightly-defended, rolling countryside lie between Vilnius and the border with Belarus, Russia’s closest military ally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Events
In the summer after that massacre, there was another: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2046867/lithuania-commemorate
s-medininkai-massacre-anniversary
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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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Evidence?
Casualties with chemical weapons injuries?
Chemical residues?
Independent investigators?
SECOND There is an entire book about people like you,
A book about science, hypothesis testing, and reasoning?
Where's the evidence for ANYTHING you allege?
-----------
"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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You do not have money to buy the proper tools for your carpentry.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
What problems are you referring to?
Sure I do. I already have all of them I'm likely to ever need.
Are you referring to me mentioning that I wasn't going to spend $6,000 on a Multi-Spindle Pocket Hole machine while you were stalking me in the Garden?
https://www.kregtool.com/shop/pocket-hole-joinery/commercial-machines/
multi-spindle-pocket-hole-machine/DK3100.html
I can count on zero hands how many people I know in my life who own one or would ever even need one. What would be the ROI on that purchase? I was going to drill 2 holes in 19 oak spindles and chances are very high that I would never have a need for that machine for the rest of my life.
I've already devised a much better way to make what I need anyhow, and on the off chance that I don't already own the right sized hole saw that I need for the way I'm doing the job now, I'll spend 5 bucks to get one, or maybe I'll get fancy and buy a step drill bit and splurge 15 bucks for it.
You're such a dumb, useless cunt.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Ukrainian officials announced that Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian A-50 long-range radar detection aircraft. The Russian information space strangely claimed that the aircraft was destroyed by friendly fire from Russian air defenses.[10] The A-50 is used to coordinate Russian air defense activity and the claim that Russian air defenses shot down the A-50 would amount to a calamitous failure on the part of Russian forces, if true. A Russian source that focuses on Russian aviation blamed Russian commanders who lack the proper background required for their positions.[11]
The current commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Colonel General Viktor Afzalov, has an extensive background in Russian air defense operations.[12] Whether his lack of experience as a pilot poses any problems for Russian air operations, which is questionable, his experience as an air defender should have been appropriate to ensure that Russian forces do not shoot down their own airborne control aircraft. A Russian insider source claiming to be an employee of an unspecified Russian security structure claimed that unspecified Russian actors created a “duck” (a Russian term for a false claim) about how Russian forces shot down the A-50 to reassure Russian pilots that missions over the Black Sea and Sea of Azov are still safe and that human error was the cause of the incident.[13] It is unclear why Russian pilots should be more comfortable with the idea that their ground-based air defenders are so incompetent.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-january-15-2024
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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Quote:Your ambition is many times larger than your skill/knowledge. This Old House will show you how to build a less ambitious version of what you need:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You do not have money to buy the proper tools for your carpentry.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
What problems are you referring to?
Sure I do. I already have all of them I'm likely to ever need.
Are you referring to me mentioning that I wasn't going to spend $6,000 on a Multi-Spindle Pocket Hole machine while you were stalking me in the Garden?
https://www.kregtool.com/shop/pocket-hole-joinery/commercial-machines/
multi-spindle-pocket-hole-machine/DK3100.html
I can count on zero hands how many people I know in my life who own one or would ever even need one. What would be the ROI on that purchase? I was going to drill 2 holes in 19 oak spindles and chances are very high that I would never have a need for that machine for the rest of my life.
I've already devised a much better way to make what I need anyhow, and on the off chance that I don't already own the right sized hole saw that I need for the way I'm doing the job now, I'll spend 5 bucks to get one, or maybe I'll get fancy and buy a step drill bit and splurge 15 bucks for it.
You're such a dumb, useless cunt.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11864
00#1186400
To bring this back to the Russians, their ambitions are much larger than their skills/knowledge, which is why they have struggled, starved, turned to cannibalism, suffered and died through out their history. Russians do love to blame their neighbors for Russia's self-caused problems. And then inflect their personal and mental troubles on their neighbors.
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Your ambition is many times larger than your skill/knowledge.
Incorrect. This is how you learn to do stuff and how to make things. This is how you you take what is pictured in your imagination and make it come to life. Sometimes some things are going to be more challenging than other things, and yes... you are going to be limited by the tools you have in your arsenal if you don't happen to have a $100,000 worth of tools in your garage, but there's almost never a problem that can't be solved in a much more economical way if you have the will and the persistence to get it done. You are rarely ever limited by skill or knowledge, especially in the age of the internet where it's easy to learn how to do things.
I have plenty of free time, and I have a vision for this house. I'll get there, eventually. I've already got 4,000+ pictures more than the overlook you've posted.
You know this. You've already seen many of them since you're always lurking in the Garden.
In just the kitchen alone I've turned this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
Sure... the cabinet work took about half a year for me to complete, and wasn't even truly completed for another 2 years until I finally got around to building my own drawers that were missing on either side of the sink. But the cabinets you're going to buy today for $20k+ are garbage pressed wood everywhere but the faces and the doors, and these things are rock solid actual wood through and through from the late 50s. And they're perfect.
All the trim I bought was essentially free with clearance and rebates and the credit card I pulled at the time that gave me $250 back with $1000 worth of purchases in 90 days. The new flooring was a cutoff at the end of a roll that I got for 30% off, and my friend and his old man helped me install it because we were bartering a lot of work.
All in all, the huge kitchen remodel cost me way under $1,000 so far, and because I spent the time working at it I saved all of that great cabinetry from going into a landfill instead of spending 1/3rd of what I paid for the whole house to buy new cabinets.
You're not getting a kitchen remodel done for less than $30k in 2024, and if you were going to buy cabinets like the ones that I've restored, it might cost you $60k or more to do it.
Quote:
This Old House will show you how to build a less ambitious version of what you need:
My first thought was going to be to tell you that this was a video on how to build a hand rail on a porch and it didn't apply to my situation where I've got a rectangular box with no access from the outside, but I watched it and I might actually slightly modify how I was going to do this now. (Having an open mind is a good thing... I'd advise you to try it sometime).
I can't build the entire "baluster system" in one solid piece like they did. The problem is that I've already put trim and caulk up, and the existing construction was not perfectly level and plum. If I were to make one solid piece to install right now, there would be gaps in certain places at the top that can't be hidden anymore by trim, and I still likely have to make some minor adjustments on how the poles attach to the top because after 65 years of settling the floors in this house aren't perfectly level either. (It would have been interesting to see him put a level on the rail when he was done installing it, because I can almost guaranty you that the porch wasn't level and his hand rail is just as out of level as the porch was. If he accounted for that off camera, he didn't mentio
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Quote:You are finding meaningfulness in wood. Good for you, but for those who aren't soulful artists, it is only carpentry, not the purpose of life.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Like I mentioned before, I'm going to leave as many options open as possible until I get to a point where final decisions are going to need to be made, and I've got plenty of scrap wood to test ideas out on to make sure they're sound before I do something I can't undo.
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You are finding meaningfulness in wood. Good for you, but for those who aren't soulful artists, it is only carpentry, not the purpose of life.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Like I mentioned before, I'm going to leave as many options open as possible until I get to a point where final decisions are going to need to be made, and I've got plenty of scrap wood to test ideas out on to make sure they're sound before I do something I can't undo.
Well... I do think of myself as an artist.
I've never made the claim to anyone that I was a carpenter.
At some point in my life I put down the sketch pad and graphite pencils and picked up a hammer, a saw, a drill and a paintbrush, and then I got myself the best canvas to work on that I'll probably ever own in my life.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Lovely sentiment. Now back to war:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well... I do think of myself as an artist.
I've never made the claim to anyone that I was a carpenter.
At some point in my life I put down the sketch pad and graphite pencils and picked up a hammer, a saw, a drill and a paintbrush, and then I got myself the best canvas to work on that I'll probably ever own in my life.
Dramatic video captured a blaze in a flat near the base, during which a woman can be heard screaming: "Mother of God, we've got to get the hell out of it."
Voronezh, a city of more than one million people, lies some 155 miles from the border with Ukraine.
Russia declares state of emergency after 'Ukraine kamikaze drone attacks' on key airbase
By Matthew Dooley | UPDATED: 07:15 ET, Tue, Jan 16, 2024
https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/124486/Russia-state-of-eme
rgency-ukraine-attack-airbase
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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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Never blame Trumptards for being retards at life. Instead, they must blame the Democrats, Hollywood, Big Business, or even blame Ukraine for Trumptards' problems. 6ix, you won't be fine because you are blameworthy for what happens to you but you are too crazy to realize your problems are all your fault. Don't shift the blame to Ukrainians and the ammo the US sends them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fuck Ukraine.
The Putin-loving portion of Russia has the same problem as the Trumptard portion of America. Neither blame themselves for what happens to them. And so it keeps happening.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Agreed...
T
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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Your ambition is many times larger than your skill/knowledge.
Incorrect. This is how you learn to do stuff and how to make things. This is how you you take what is pictured in your imagination and make it come to life. Sometimes some things are going to be more challenging than other things, and yes... you are going to be limited by the tools you have in your arsenal if you don't happen to have a $100,000 worth of tools in your garage, but there's almost never a problem that can't be solved in a much more economical way if you have the will and the persistence to get it done. You are rarely ever limited by skill or knowledge, especially in the age of the internet where it's easy to learn how to do things.
I have plenty of free time, and I have a vision for this house. I'll get there, eventually. I've already got 4,000+ pictures more than the overlook you've posted.
You know this. You've already seen many of them since you're always lurking in the Garden.
In just the kitchen alone I've turned this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
And this...
Into this...
Sure... the cabinet work took about half a year for me to complete, and wasn't even truly completed for another 2 years until I finally got around to building my own drawers that were missing on either side of the sink. But the cabinets you're going to buy today for $20k+ are garbage pressed wood everywhere but the faces and the doors, and these things are rock solid actual wood through and through from the late 50s. And they're perfect.
All the trim I bought was essentially free with clearance and rebates and the credit card I pulled at the time that gave me $250 back with $1000 worth of purchases in 90 days. The new flooring was a cutoff at the end of a roll that I got for 30% off, and my friend and his old man helped me install it because we were bartering a lot of work.
All in all, the huge kitchen remodel cost me way under $1,000 so far, and because I spent the time working at it I saved all of that great cabinetry from going into a landfill instead of spending 1/3rd of what I paid for the whole house to buy new cabinets.
You're not getting a kitchen remodel done for less than $30k in 2024, and if you were going to buy cabinets like the ones that I've restored, it might cost you $60k or more to do it.Quote:
This Old House will show you how to build a less ambitious version of what you need:
My first thought was going to be to tell you that this was a video on how to build a hand rail on a porch and it didn't apply to my situation where I've got a rectangular box with no access from the outside, but I watched it and I might actually slightly modify how I was going to do this now. (Having an open mind is a good thing... I'd advise you to try it sometime).
I can't build the entire "baluster system" in one solid piece like they did. The problem is that I've already put trim and caulk up, and the existing construction was not perfectly level and plum. If I were to make one solid piece to install right now, there would be gaps in certain places at the top that can't be hidden anymore by trim, and I still likely have to make some minor adjustments on how the poles attach to the top because after 65 years of settling the floors in this house aren't perfectly level either. (It would have been interesting to see him put a level on the rail when he was done installing it, because I can almost guaranty you that the porch wasn't level and his hand rail is just as out of level as the porch was. If he acco
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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wow. I've never seen the "before" before.
Yeah. I still haven't found all of my old pics before I got that tablet, but I did manage to find a nice little cache of them after all this time looking for this stuff. I was looking for one photo in particular for my dad, but I still haven't found it.
I'm always down for a little bit of Serendipity.
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Can you redo our kitchen?
That depends. You guys willing to room and board me for the next year.
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Im sure you'd be better at it than THUGR. Or SECOND.
Well... to be fair to them, and to you, and to anybody else really, I do get a lot of enjoyment out of this type of work and I've got more free time than most. That's a couple of real big motivating factors for me that most other folk wouldn't have when it comes to this type of stuff. I've always been a perfectionist too, so when things finally start coming together the way that I want them done and have visualized them in my head for so long it really becomes a great source of pride for me.
There's certain artistic touches that are going to be different from person to person and varying skill levels of course, but like my friend's dad always used to say to me about all of the work he did and taught me how to do "it ain't rocket science". (I always felt he was short-changing himself and his skills, but he was about the most modest man I've ever known despite the lifetime of skills he developed).
I'm sure Second and Ted could do it. Even if the end result didn't look like mine, most of the stuff that people pay to have done on their homes is done by skilled people but they're on a time frame and need to make that money so corners are always cut when they can get away with it and at the end of the day as long as everything is structurally sound nobody is ever going to notice any imperfections unless you're putting a huge spotlight on it and showing it to everyone. My friend's dad's one rule really was to make sure that everything at eye-level was perfect, otherwise don't sweat the details.
He wasn't wrong. Hell... Nobody ever noticed the last 2 years that my baseboard in the living room never got repaired and painted, and if I didn't mention it when people came over they might not have ever noticed that I finally got around to doing it.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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