Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by astvitaliy1982

What is this?

LOTR, some ork general.
The guy on the right side - I have no clue.

[Dargo]

Putin: We are going to win, just like in 1945

In a written statement, Russian President Putin said that the victory will be just like the one in 1945. By this, he is referring to the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany, which will be commemorated in Russia tomorrow.

"Today, like their ancestors, our military is fighting shoulder to shoulder to liberate their homeland from the Nazis. This is done in the confidence that, as in 1945, the victory will be ours," read the statement shown on Russian television.

He went on to congratulate the inhabitants of the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia on their victory over Nazi Germany. He also congratulated the residents of the pro-Russian Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine.

Furthermore, he reiterated the common duty to stop the spread of Nazism.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Skybird

LOTR, some ork general.
The guy on the right side - I have no clue.

It's Gothmog, Lieutenant of Morgul

Markus

[Dargo]

With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply.

https://www.spiegel.de/international...a-7642a301eda6

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Dargo

With the invasion of Ukraine, though, that facade has collapsed and bizarre shortcomings have come to light. Just this week, a secretly recorded conversation emerged in which contract soldiers from the Caucasus detailed all that had gone wrong for them. The men returned home on their own in late March to South Ossetia, a de facto Russian-controlled area on Georgian territory. In a conversation with the region's president, they complained of armored personnel carriers that wouldn't start, tanks that refused to fire, officers who hide from their soldiers out of fear, artillery that missed targets by two kilometers and wounded soldiers who weren't provided with treatment. They also lamented a lack of information, maps and radios and of grenade launchers they said were bent. South Ossetia's president rebuked the men and asked if they thought Russia would lose the war. "Yes, we do," came the reply.

https://www.spiegel.de/international...a-7642a301eda6

Your post reminded me of what I translated from Danish some page back

https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/sho...postcount=3761

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

LOTR, some ork general.
The guy on the right side - I have no clue.

[Jimbuna]

Yet more war crimes...

Dozens of people are feared dead after a bomb hit a school in east Ukraine, where government forces are battling Russian troops and separatists.

Luhansk region's governor, Serhiy Haidai, confirmed two deaths, saying 60 people were feared dead under the rubble of the school in Bilohorivka.

About 90 people had been sheltering in the building and 30 were rescued, seven of them wounded, he added.

Mr Haidai said a Russian plane had dropped the bomb on Saturday.

His accusation could not be verified independently and there was no immediate response from Russia.

Luhansk has seen fierce combat as Russian troops and separatist fighters seek to surround government forces, just over two months since the start of the Russian invasion.

Much of Luhansk, which along with Donetsk forms part of the Donbas region, has been under the control of the separatists for the past eight years.

[Catfish]

Two small russian patrol boats have been hit

[Catfish]

Zelensky speech

[Skybird]

The carricature of a chen cellor held a speech today. What should I say about it? Maybe this old phrase: "words are cheap". Die Welt comments bitterly:

The Chancellor's speech on May 8, 1945 is a missed opportunity. Which, unfortunately, weighs heavily in view of the historical claptrap that can already be expected tomorrow from Vladimir Putin with regard to Ukraine.

The German chancellor has used the traditional May 8 speech to justify his Ukraine policy. There is little to be said against this, except perhaps that he said nothing on this occasion that had not already been heard in the Bundestag and various interviews.

Nothing Scholz said about Germany's liberation day from Nazism is wrong. But he paints a sketchy picture. Which is an omission, because it would have been right to show a complete one, before tomorrow Vladimir Putin uses "his" day of liberation for the next history lies.

So what is important is what Olaf Scholz did not accomplish. This May 8 in particular would have been a great opportunity to remove some historical-political white spots in Germany's relationship with Russia. Without which the deeper dimension of Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine would hardly be understood. The chancellor missed this opportunity.

Let's get specific. Olaf Scholz says: "Once Russians and Ukrainians fought together at the greatest sacrifice to put down Germany's murderous National Socialism." What Scholz could have said, but didn't: before Russians and Ukrainians fought together against Hitler, Hitler and the totalitarian Soviet ruler Stalin fought against the Ukrainians. And the Poles and the Balts. Why would it have been important to point this out?

Before Stalin fought against fascism, he had allied himself with that very fascism. And he did it for the purpose of enlarging his Soviet empire - at the expense of independent countries, above all the Poles. A German-Russian understanding at the expense of the Eastern Europeans had already been announced in the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo between the Communist Russian Empire and Germany of the Weimar Republic.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact 17 years later continued this line in a cruel way - in the secret additional protocol Poland was eliminated. In the two years between this dictatorship pact and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the two totalitarian rulers implemented this policy - they did it together.

Even before that, in 1931 and 1932, Stalin waged a terrible campaign against Ukraine - signing the death warrant for more than three million Ukrainians who starved to death because of his brutal policies. This policy - the Holodomor, is one reason why Ukrainians do not want to fall under Russian yoke again under any circumstances.

For those who think this is a thing of the past, the Green Minister of Agriculture, Cem Özdemir, recently explained that Putin is pursuing a "policy of starvation" with regard to Ukraine in particular - Russians are stealing wheat and they are preventing the export of wheat to Africa through a naval blockade. Starvation policy is a continuum of Russian war policy. It would have been good and right of Scholz to point this out.

The Chancellor then reminds us that May 8, 1945, has been considered "Liberation Day" since Richard von Weizsäcker's tribute. But that is only half the truth. For East Berlin and East Germany, May 8, 1945 was a day of liberation from National Socialism. However, it was not a day of liberation from totalitarianism. For one totalitarian rule was replaced by another, the communist one. In East Germany, this has left its mark to this day - right into the state chancelleries, such as that of Manuela Schwesig in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

This was true not only for the GDR, but for all of Eastern Europe. Poles, Balts, Hungarians, Yugoslavs were deprived by Stalin of the chance to live in freedom. Why this historical fact is still important today? Because Putin is just trying to restore the Russian world of Stalin in a historical revisionist way.

And the lesson of Weizsäcker's "Day of Liberation" should be to prevent history from repeating itself for Eastern Europe - to prevent liberation from turning into a new prison. Scholz could have pointed out that this was also the rationale behind the eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union.

Not a single Eastern European state freely chose to align itself with Russia. Without exception, all countries that had been under Russian rule sought to free themselves permanently from it when, due to Russian weakness, a window of opportunity opened at the beginning of the 1990s.


Olaf Scholz says that "Never again!" is the lesson of May 8, 1945, only to note: "And yet it happened again - war in Europe." In politics, however, nothing "happens" just like that. Nothing "happens" because everything has its reasons. What "happened" first was this: The supposedly so "flawless" democratic Putin developed a neo-colonialist ideology of conquest, which he has been talking about openly for 15 years. The West, including Germany, did not listen to Putin.

This non-listening can almost be called an act of aggressive ignorance. The reason lies in a combination of Russophile naiveté and economic greed. The Germans, especially willing Social Democrats, liked to believe that Russia was an addition of Dostoevsky, Gogol and Chekhov. However, according to the profound contemporary Russian writer Yerofeyev, what is glorified in Germany as the "Russian soul" accounts for perhaps 15 percent of Russianness. The rest, according to Jerofejew, is - until today - Ivan the Terrible.
Scholz indulges in what has lately been called "cognitive dissonance"

Concluding thought: Scholz allows himself what has recently been called "cognitive dissonance," the discrepancy between word and deed. One can hardly speak of "maximum solidarity" with Ukraine when there is no gas embargo, when "Leos" and "Marder" are not delivered and ammunition for the Cheetah is just as missing as a delivery date for this shooting tool.

"Maximum solidarity" in the Scholzian sense means what can be done if one does not want to provoke Putin. One can certainly justify this with the Chancellor's oath of office. Only one should not then give the impression that one is doing everything.

And the war goal issued by Scholz with regard to Ukraine leaves one perplexed, to say the least. Ukraine will "endure," says the chancellor?

As what? Within what limits?

One should not be surprised if all this is not only too little for the Ukrainians. But also the other Eastern Europeans. They have long wanted Germany to play a leading role.

In this respect, Chancellor Scholz will definitely not deliver.

Because he doesn't want to.

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


He is and will remain a Teflob-layered blasé braggart, turncoat and vain.

[Dargo]

What happens in the Donbas, however, offers Putin only a choice between different types of defeat.

If the battle reaches an autumn stalemate, he will have precious little to show for so much loss and pain. If the military momentum shifts and his forces get pushed back, even more so. And even if the Russians succeed in overrunning the whole of the Donbas and all across the south, they still have to hold those territories for the indefinite future in the face of several million Ukrainians who don't want them there.

Any significant Russian military success will likely create a major, open-ended insurgency that will get bigger for every district Russian forces may overrun. Putin went for broke in February with Plan A. The failure of that scheme means that plans B, C or any subsequent plans still leaves Russia going for broke - needing to suppress some or all of a very big country.

One way or another, Russia will have to keep fighting in Ukraine, either against the population, or against the Ukrainian army, and quite possibly both simultaneously. And as long as Kyiv sticks to its current line that demands Russian withdrawal before any concessions can be contemplated, there is not much Putin can do but carry grimly on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61348287

[Skybird]

In Germany, and Berlin, there are still quite many Sowvjet monuments on public display, Germany signed an obligation to keep these . But I find it intolerable that after Russia's repeated attacks on other states and its atrocities over the last 30 years, and the murderous and tyrannical role of the Red Army in the brutal suppression of the popular uprisings in the CSSR, Hungary and East Germany, people still pretend that this, the Stalinist facet of this "army", does not exist. We should let the Russian military cemeteries rest in peace, but we should dispose of the Soviet "honorary monuments" on the garbage heap of history just like the busts of Marx, Lenin and Engels that are still to be found here and there.

By the way, the Berlin police issued a ban on displaying Ukrainian flags in the city for today; a large 25-square-meter flag was confiscated, as were small paper flags that Ukrainian demonstrators distributed at a Soviet memorial. One should not risk that offended Russian fascists could feel provoked, was the official excuse. Compare: the annual Al Kuds Day is regularly used by Palestinian Arabs and radsical Mohammadeans to call in long protest processions for murder and manslaughter against Israeli Jews, the state of Israel and the Zionists, and to deny Israel's right of existence. Not in Ramallah - but in the middle of Berlin.

[astvitaliy1982]

I also know how to quote a bunch of sites from the Internet))) And I also read that two UFOs, one Death Star and three Jedi were shot down near Kiev today. An explosion occurred at a school in the village of Belgorodovka, which is located between Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, where an entire company of AFU servicemen was located. 57 riders were killed.

According to reports from local residents, the following information was received:
— There were about 80 people in the school building, of which more than 50 were Ukrainian servicemen, the rest were local residents (mostly old people and children);
— No one has seen any Russian aircraft. Local opinions were divided about the causes of the explosion: someone saw the "arrival" from the AFU positions in neighboring Seversk, others talk about a purposeful provocation.
— 20 wounded were hospitalized in Lisichansk hospitals. The EMERCOM unit, which has been missing in Belogorovka for a long time, was waiting for this strike nearby, as were representatives of foreign media, so "active work" began a few minutes after the explosion.

[mapuc]

At least one T-90M, Russia's most advanced tank, has been destroyed in fighting. The T-90M was introduced in 2016 and includes improved armour, an upgraded gun and enhanced satellite navigation systems.

https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status...289856/photo/1

Markus

[astvitaliy1982]

I have a question for you from life. You are a civilian, you are indoors (for example, in your house). On one side of the house is the Ukrainian army, on the other side is the Russian army. Both shoot. Question! How to determine whose bullet can kill you?