Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Dargo

This unconfirmed happened yesterday "Yesterday, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine destroyed the command and intelligence center of the 20th Combined-Arms Army of the Russian Army. Killing many officers."

As I mentioned yesterday

We saw how missiles hit a target in Dnipro-This turn out to be the oil depot.

Huge explosion and intense fire for several hours.

Markus

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by mapuc

As I mentioned yesterday

We saw how missiles hit a target in Dnipro-This turn out to be the oil depot.

Huge explosion and intense fire for several hours.

Markus

This happened in the town of Kryvy Rih, some 139.35 km (86.59 mi) southwest of Dnipro, according to reports.

[Catfish]

Where is this AstiVitaly when you need him, he's living in Donbas or so he said, right?
So what happened in Donbas in the last 8 years

Very good video detailing and debunking the myth about Ukraine bombing the Donbass for the last eight years:




"Russia has two infinite resources: Oil and people with negative IQ"

Meanwhile even Putin himself (lmao) has made it clear it is about conquering Ukraine to widen Russia's borders, and not some "Nazi" or "Donbas" bullsh!t

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by Catfish

Where is this AstiVitaly when you need him, he's living in Donbas or so he said, right?
So what happened in Donbas in the last 8 years

I know of my son that a lot of Ukrainians he knows via gaming... are enlisted he knew that Ukraine (Moroccan born) soldier that is condemned to death small world.

[Catfish]

Originally Posted by Dargo

I know of my son that a lot of Ukrainians he knows via gaming... are enlisted he knew that Ukraine (Moroccan born) soldier that is condemned to death small world.

I do not quite understand what you are writing here(?)


To put an end to my last post:

Putin admits Ukraine invasion is an imperial war to “return” Russian land
so f'k Putin's "poor Donbas" justification for an aggressive war

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blog...-russian-land/

[Skybird]

America better starts digging trenches deep in Alaska...

[Skybird]

Now the West's cowardly treatment of aggressive Turkey - which, by the way, is about to launch a new attack in Syria while seeking escalation with Greece - is taking its revenge. The Frankfurter Rundschau writes:

NATO accession countries Sweden and Finland: Hangover in the North

Erdogan's threatening gestures are having an effect on NATO applicants Sweden and Finland, and are causing problems away from NATO's yes or no vote.

Brussels - After the hastily decided Nato membership applications, hangover is spreading in Sweden and Finland. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is even intensifying his blockade policy against the admission of the two alleged "guest houses" for Kurdish terrorists shortly before the Madrid NATO summit, is responsible for this with ever new attacks. The certain expectation of a quick decision at the summit in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to disillusionment, uncertainty and also remorse.

Finland's President Sauli Niinistö, a supporter of NATO membership even before he took office ten years ago, told the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat: "If Helsinki had received signals from Brussels about possible resistance, the membership application would not have been sent to NATO headquarters. But everyone from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden to Erdogan himself had personally assured him that Finland and Sweden were very welcome here and now.

In Stockholm, the newspaper "Svenska Dagbladet," which has also been promoting membership in the military alliance for a long time, ran the following headline on its editorial page: "Sweden should withdraw its NATO application. For one should not grovel before an authoritarian regime and under no circumstances restrict the freedoms of the active exiled Kurdish community in Sweden to please those who trample on freedoms, it said. "What we are left with is a manifestation of self-respect," writes author Lena Andersson.

In a very different tone, government leader Magdalena Andersson proclaims, "We take Turkish concerns extremely seriously." The Social Democrat adds that Sweden has only recently tightened its terror legislation and eased the ban on arms exports to Turkey, which has also been criticized by Erdogan. Standing next to her, Stoltenberg explained that Turkey is a highly important NATO partner with "legitimate concerns." Now, he says, the accession process will probably take longer. Unfortunately, he does not know how long it will take.

However, the governments in Helsinki and Stockholm wanted to avoid temporal uncertainty at all costs, precisely because they were worried about aggressive reactions from Moscow, when they decreed that their countries would leave the alliance almost immediately. Finland has a land border of 1340 kilometers with Russia, while Sweden sees itself in the Kremlin's crosshairs primarily because of the strategically important island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea (NATO jargon: "unsinkable aircraft carrier").

The unpredictable Erdogan makes the accession candidates the pawns of geopolitical conflicts over whose resolution they have not the slightest influence. It is a foregone conclusion that the Turkish head of state, who is suffering from domestic political problems, is using his veto against NATO expansion primarily as a bargaining chip against Biden in order to break the U.S. blockade of Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system.

Neither the Finnish nor the Swedish government leaders are allowed to say that so clearly. One could only irritate Erdogan even more. Three months before the next elections, the Swedish head of government, Andersson, will have to make a complete verbal effort, because the survival of her weak minority government depends on the factionless Amineh Kakabaveh, of all people. The ex-leftist, who came to Sweden as the child of Kurdish refugees, keeps demanding new guarantees for her vote for exactly what Erdogan cites as the reason for his veto against NATO membership.

Ahead of this week's budget vote in the Riksdag, Social Democratic members of the government are sounding as coy about Kakabaveh's demands as they are about Erdogan's. They seem to prefer not to be heard at all when they declare: No, no new concessions have been made to her. But they stand by the old ones, of course.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


It would be a further kick in the balls for Europe if the Scandinavians withdraw their request and NATO remains seated with its beloved war-monger Erdoghan.
Formally, a NATO member cannot be expelled, only voluntarily leave, and Erdoghan will never do that. But one can end all military, economic and diplomatic cooperation under endless pretextual reasons and not give a damn about the other. Which would be practically the same thing like membership cancellation.
But that will forever be too much to ask of sentimental Europeans.

I hope Biden does not get soft on banning Turkey from US weapons deals for having bought the S400 and its radar.
The Scandinavians should preserve their pride.

The loss for NATO would be very big.

Erdoghan presents Putin a present on the silver plate.

[Skybird]

Sergei Medvedev, born in 1966, is a Russian political scientist, historian, and journalist. He was a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In 2020, he received the Pushkin House Book Prize for the best English-language book on Russia for his collection of essays, "The Return of the Russian Leviathan." His article first appeared on the website "Holod".




The violent crimes of the Russian army in Ukraine are the mirror of an archaic culture of evil that has not let the country out of its clutches until today

Butcha, Irpin, Mariupol: these are names that stand for the massive violence that the Russian army carries out on the territory of Ukraine. It is rooted deep inside Russian society. Now what has always been the case at home is leaking out.

After a hundred days of war, the ability to be horrified and shocked dulls. But then new evidence of the Russian army's atrocities emerges, and one plunges into the abyss again.

In early April, Russian soldiers in the village of Termakhivka near Kiev took five young men off the street, tied them up, laid them in a circle in a field, and left them like that for two weeks, a rifle pointed at them. At night, the temperature dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius and it was snowing. One of the men was shot in the leg. He lay there for nine days with the open wound. Then the soldiers dragged the body of a villager and threw it in the middle of the circle: "So you can sleep well."

These soldiers had hardly seen the film "Grus 200" by Alexei Balabanov - the prophetic director who, among other things, had predicted the phenomenon of Russian fascism - but even the late filmmaker could have learned something from their perverse fantasies.

Orgy of epic violence

What has been happening in Ukraine for the past three months is an orgy of epic, unbounded violence. With mass shootings and bestial torture, the murder of civilians, just like that, out of boredom, for fun, with rape and murder of parents in front of their children and vice versa, with violence against women and girls from eight to eighty years old.

To read these reports is unbearable, but necessary, out of a duty of compassion and empathy, but also in an attempt to understand where this archaic evil that the Russian army has brought upon the country comes from, from what earthly abysses, from what nightmares and horror movies. Has a genetic mutation taken place in Russia that has produced indifferent sadists who have now arrived on Ukrainian soil?

The survivors who witnessed these atrocities tell about it not so much full of fear as massively astonished: "Vpershe take batschymo", we see such a thing for the first time: "We had no idea that such a thing was possible."

You don't have to be Fyodor Dostoevsky, Yuri Mamleyev or Vladimir Sorokin to explore the darkest corners of the Russian soul. One need only look at the chronicle of police violence, the torture in police stations and penal colonies, the crimes of the army, to understand that the events in Butcha, Irpin, and all the other towns and villages occupied by the Russians are neither excess nor pathology. Rather, they are a part of the norm, routine practices of the Russian violent apparatus.

The journalists of "Project" have uncovered the antecedents of the Russian units stationed in Butsha - the name of this village near Kiev will from now on be spoken, like Katyn or Samashki.

And as it turns out, these are units that were known for their brutality even in peacetime. For example, the 64th motorized rifle brigade of the 35th Army from Khabarovsk is notorious at home. Their nickname "Mletschnik" is even used to scare children. Suicides occur there time and again, conscripts and contract soldiers flee the unit; in February 2014 alone, there were seven deaths within three weeks in Troop Unit 51 460, which is stationed in Knyaz-Volkonskoye. It is significant that Vladimir Putin gave this very unit the honorary title of a Guard unit after it withdrew from the Kiev area - as if he were awarding it for the war crimes it committed.

A similar trail trails behind it the 127th Motorized Rifle Division of the 5th Army, also stationed in the Far East: it regularly appears in crime reports, and in its vicinity one finds corpses of soldiers without heads.

In Butsha, it was not some fanatics who were at work (there were rumors about special units of the Rosgvardiya and Chechen troops - although apparently they were also involved in the brutal massacres), but regular units of the Russian army, which, despite all the reforms of Anatoly Serdyukov and large-scale image campaigns, still relies on brutality as the only means of leadership.

Lethality and Victory

Jeffrey Hon of the London School of Economics and Political Science has researched the violent practices of the Russian army. He concludes that the Russian army's war crimes have gone unpunished in the 21st century-from Chechnya and Georgia to Syria and the Donbass to the beginning of the current phase of the war. The Russian armed forces, unlike Western armies, have not developed an institutional culture that would minimize civilian casualties: No safeguards against unjustified, indiscriminate violence exist in the Russian army.

"The Russian army's atrocities today result from a latent inability to overcome the legacy of its Soviet predecessor," says Hon. "Lethality and victory at all costs remain the Russian army's top priorities."

The same is true of the other institutions of the Russian power apparatus: the police, which sends Omon units to the front lines, the Russian Guard, the penal system. In recent years, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices in penitentiaries and access to social networks, terabytes of shocking evidence of torture, abuse, and rape have leaked to the public, becoming common practice in Russian prisons for decades and the norm in the administration's dealings with prisoners and among prisoners themselves.

Soldiers fighting in Ukraine today come from the most depressed and crime-ridden Russian regions, where the prison subculture significantly shapes the male population: Most of the men have either served time themselves or have close friends and relatives who have served time; the youth there are involved in the AUE [a youth movement that glorifies crime crime and propagates violence] networks-and now this order, with its "customs" and practices of extreme physical and sexualized violence, has spilled over into the occupied territories of Ukraine: Russian prison despotism has spilled over the walls of the camps and across the country's borders.

Mirror of the elites

The violence is not limited to state institutions; it also prevails in families, in the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, younger and older, superiors and subordinates. It seeps out of intercepted telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their commanders, in which vulgarities, threats, and humiliations run rampant. From soldiers' phone calls and chat messages with their families, in which maudlin sentimentality is mixed with cruelty and cynicism, in which wives tell their husbands what to eat in Ukrainians' homes and what size shoes to take, and others admonish them, "When raping Ukrainian women, use a condom."

This violence is second nature to Russian society; it has become the identifying code for a society based on hierarchy and subjugation, on taking away and dividing resources, in which brute force is above morality and power is above the law.

This order is approved by the behavior of the ruling class, which drives the common people to death with its blue-light limousines, always getting away with it; it is authenticated by the speeches of President Putin, who teaches that you "hit the weak" and you "have to hit first," earning thunderous applause.

Normally, this violence, which maintains and legitimizes the country's social and political order, is reserved for internal use, but now for the first time - with a 200,000-strong invading army - it has spilled across Russian borders en masse, sanctioned by the state and justified ideologically. Putin's remarks about "Nazis and drug addicts," picked up from propaganda fakes (which apparently serve as his main source of information about the state of the world outside his bunker), are taken literally by the occupiers, who ask the surprised Ukrainians whose homes they break into, "Where are the Nazis here?"

To stay with the military metaphor: Russia is sewn like a soldier's coat. Not like Akaki Akakiyevich's, from which all Russian literature emerged, but like the uniform of a simple soldier, one of the basic archetypes of an eternally fighting nation. The coat has an outside and an inside. On the outside - rough, coarse and worn through by the centuries - is the land, the empire, the vastness, the war, are the tanks and planes, the atomic bomb, space, culture, Moscow and Petersburg, churches and castles. On the inside, invisible to the outside world but clinging tightly to the body, are slavery, rabble, crime, lies, tyranny, and the inevitable cruelty of Russian life.

Something has got mixed up

We have become accustomed to it and wear it, which constantly itches and scratches us; isolated patriots even think that it is the price of our greatness, and are secretly proud of this order of Russian life: our garden may not be weeded, and we do our needling in the open, but for that we have the ballet, literature, an enigmatic soul, and a vast empire.

But now something has got mixed up: Russia has "stripped itself bare", turned over the soldier's coat and revealed all its inner shabbiness in the form of the "invading army". It has presented to the whole world the senseless Russian rage, sinister barbarism, its criminal mentality, cruelty, violence and contempt for human dignity and human life, both that of Ukrainians and its own soldiers.

All the national characteristics we have learned to live with have suddenly become visible: The unpatched holes, the weak points, crooked seams, the half-rotted fabric of the Russian soldier's coat have come to light, and this is no longer a disaster for reputation, but for civilization. It destroys the power of staging on which Russia was founded for the last couple of centuries: the external form of the country, revealed in this obscene war, now corresponds to its content - Russia has presented itself to the world as it really is.

One can be shocked at the abysmal evil that has opened up in Butscha and Mariupol, but one should not be surprised: All of Russia is our Butcha.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung

[Catfish]

What average Russians may think about their country, and the west

https://wartranslated.com/what-might...ans-worldview/

[Skybird]

^ Nice read, reminds me a lot of what a girlfriend from university times told me, she and her fmaily were Russian migrants with German ancestors some generations ago (returning "Russland-Deutsche"), and she had returned form Archangelsk (one big pissoir, she said, that much it stank of urin everywhere).

She used to say the West will never understand Russia/Russians, and that the next big clash between the West and Russia is only a quesiton of time (we were in the early 90s!) , and that Russia has something in its bones like bone cancer that keeps it grey and grim and brutal and depressing, forever, and makes sure this atittude gets carried on to next generations, endlessly. Thats why she never wanted to go back to Russia, at no cost. She also said that it was a very dirty place, and when I reclal the sights when we transited back and forth between West-Berlin and West Germany and passed through the Eastgerman villages and small towns, I know what she means. Life was/is grey in these places. And you can take these words literally, please, everything looks grey. Even things they had painted in colours, were painted in red or yellow - still had a grey teint in them. Shades of grey were omnipresent, everywhere. Any everything was rotting.

I think catfish's text and the one I directly linked to before, give a good idea of the mentality and its origin that makes this war the brutal and inhumane gencoide that it is. I just read that the Russians especially hint down teachers of Ukrainian history and language. They want to annihilate Ukrainian identity. Genocide cannot become more obvious. Problem is for the Russian perpetrators it is not offending to call it that. For them its a compliment. Bubble-Olaf and Macronman, whose cape yesterday got severly cut shorter, really must stop talking to Putin - And the BBC should not interview the Russian Goebbels, Lavrov. Whats the value in listening to a liar and propagandist and giving him a stage?

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Now the West's cowardly treatment of aggressive Turkey - which, by the way, is about to launch a new attack in Syria while seeking escalation with Greece - is taking its revenge. The Frankfurter Rundschau writes:

NATO accession countries Sweden and Finland: Hangover in the North

Erdogan's threatening gestures are having an effect on NATO applicants Sweden and Finland, and are causing problems away from NATO's yes or no vote.

Brussels - After the hastily decided Nato membership applications, hangover is spreading in Sweden and Finland. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is even intensifying his blockade policy against the admission of the two alleged "guest houses" for Kurdish terrorists shortly before the Madrid NATO summit, is responsible for this with ever new attacks. The certain expectation of a quick decision at the summit in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given way to disillusionment, uncertainty and also remorse.

Finland's President Sauli Niinistö, a supporter of NATO membership even before he took office ten years ago, told the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat: "If Helsinki had received signals from Brussels about possible resistance, the membership application would not have been sent to NATO headquarters. But everyone from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. President Joe Biden to Erdogan himself had personally assured him that Finland and Sweden were very welcome here and now.

In Stockholm, the newspaper "Svenska Dagbladet," which has also been promoting membership in the military alliance for a long time, ran the following headline on its editorial page: "Sweden should withdraw its NATO application. For one should not grovel before an authoritarian regime and under no circumstances restrict the freedoms of the active exiled Kurdish community in Sweden to please those who trample on freedoms, it said. "What we are left with is a manifestation of self-respect," writes author Lena Andersson.

In a very different tone, government leader Magdalena Andersson proclaims, "We take Turkish concerns extremely seriously." The Social Democrat adds that Sweden has only recently tightened its terror legislation and eased the ban on arms exports to Turkey, which has also been criticized by Erdogan. Standing next to her, Stoltenberg explained that Turkey is a highly important NATO partner with "legitimate concerns." Now, he says, the accession process will probably take longer. Unfortunately, he does not know how long it will take.

However, the governments in Helsinki and Stockholm wanted to avoid temporal uncertainty at all costs, precisely because they were worried about aggressive reactions from Moscow, when they decreed that their countries would leave the alliance almost immediately. Finland has a land border of 1340 kilometers with Russia, while Sweden sees itself in the Kremlin's crosshairs primarily because of the strategically important island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea (NATO jargon: "unsinkable aircraft carrier").

The unpredictable Erdogan makes the accession candidates the pawns of geopolitical conflicts over whose resolution they have not the slightest influence. It is a foregone conclusion that the Turkish head of state, who is suffering from domestic political problems, is using his veto against NATO expansion primarily as a bargaining chip against Biden in order to break the U.S. blockade of Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system.

Neither the Finnish nor the Swedish government leaders are allowed to say that so clearly. One could only irritate Erdogan even more. Three months before the next elections, the Swedish head of government, Andersson, will have to make a complete verbal effort, because the survival of her weak minority government depends on the factionless Amineh Kakabaveh, of all people. The ex-leftist, who came to Sweden as the child of Kurdish refugees, keeps demanding new guarantees for her vote for exactly what Erdogan cites as the reason for his veto against NATO membership.

Ahead of this week's budget vote in the Riksdag, Social Democratic members of the government are sounding as coy about Kakabaveh's demands as they are about Erdogan's. They seem to prefer not to be heard at all when they declare: No, no new concessions have been made to her. But they stand by the old ones, of course.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


It would be a further kick in the balls for Europe if the Scandinavians withdraw their request and NATO remains seated with its beloved war-monger Erdoghan.
Formally, a NATO member cannot be expelled, only voluntarily leave, and Erdoghan will never do that. But one can end all military, economic and diplomatic cooperation under endless pretextual reasons and not give a damn about the other. Which would be practically the same thing like membership cancellation.
But that will forever be too much to ask of sentimental Europeans.

I hope Biden does not get soft on banning Turkey from US weapons deals for having bought the S400 and its radar.
The Scandinavians should preserve their pride.

The loss for NATO would be very big.

Erdoghan presents Putin a present on the silver plate.

Yes, the S government is weak and are direct depending on left and have been so almost 7 years, the main thing here is that Anderson follow the mainstream and not have own control what rly happen outside her door. All things considered is basically about what "other" think not strong enough to carry on in a adekvat way. (Side note) Look to "Swedistan" to day is more like war-zone itself. However the election in September will be a last call for S....

[mapuc]

Russia warned NATO member Lithuania that unless the transit of goods to Russia's Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea was swiftly restored then Moscow would take undisclosed measures to defend its national interests (Reuters)

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...it-2022-06-20/

Words again or do they dare ?

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Only Vlad can answer that.

[Jimbuna]

Russia has become China's biggest supplier of oil as the country sold discounted crude to Beijing amid sanctions over the Ukraine war.

Imports of Russian oil rose by 55% from a year earlier to a record level in May, displacing Saudi Arabia as China's biggest provider.

China has ramped up purchases of Russian oil despite demand dampened by Covid curbs and a slowing economy.

In February, China and Russia declared their friendship had "no limits".

And Chinese companies, including state refining giant Sinopec and state-run Zhenhua Oil, have increased their purchases of Russian crude in recent months after being offered heavy discounts as buyers in Europe and the US shunned Russian energy in line with sanctions over its war on Ukraine.

The imports into China, which include supplies pumped through the East Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline and shipments by sea, totalled nearly 8.42m tonnes last month, according to data from the Chinese General Administration of Customs.

That pushed Saudi Arabia - formerly China's biggest source of crude oil - into second place with 7.82m tonnes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61861849

[Jimbuna]