which raises the prospect of Ukraine being suitably armed to deliver Russia a sound thrashing, retake the Donbas and Crimea and set up a massive and effective defence system to keep Russia at bay in future.
This, however, would mean not accepting a ceasefire in the short-term (at even greater civilian cost). I'm guessing the hatred that has been stoked amongst the Ukrainians means they are probably much more likely to want total victory than a tainted peace.
the world is not a better place with putin and people like him in power he's not just a psychopathic thug, he is a t3rr0r15t his delusional actions have literally risked millions of lives and for what? he need not die, but be removed from power and maybe isolated a location where he can't harm humanity ever again
"Please can we NOT call Russia’s #nuclear weapons a ‘deterrent’ - these weapons are being used to threaten not to deter."
True, but I'd still quite happily rub it into Putin's wounded pride.
There has been a lot happening but some facts remain that indicate that not all of the Ukrainian reporting is totally off the wall.
Kyiv and Kharkiv have not yet been taken.
There is even still fighting going on for the centre of Mariupol, which is astounding given its location and the fact that it has been under siege for so long.
the world is not a better place with putin and people like him in power he's not just a psychopathic thug, he is a t3rr0r15t his delusional actions have literally risked millions of lives and for what? he need not die, but be removed from power and maybe isolated a location where he can't harm humanity ever again
"Please can we NOT call Russia’s #nuclear weapons a ‘deterrent’ - these weapons are being used to threaten not to deter."
True, but I'd still quite happily rub it into Putin's wounded pride.
There has been a lot happening but some facts remain that indicate that not all of the Ukrainian reporting is totally off the wall.
Kyiv and Kharkiv have not yet been taken.
There is even still fighting going on for the centre of Mariupol, which is astounding given its location and the fact that it has been under siege for so long.
Such a big big part of this has been the relentless social media onslaught about how Russia is inept: invasion forces stopped on the road, tractors pulling their tanks, etc. I wish/hope it's true, but realize that we're getting our own selected stories over here.
Agreed, a grain of salt is warranted.
True, but I'd still quite happily rub it into Putin's wounded pride.
There has been a lot happening but some facts remain that indicate that not all of the Ukrainian reporting is totally off the wall.
Kyiv and Kharkiv have not yet been taken.
There is even still fighting going on for the centre of Mariupol, which is astounding given its location and the fact that it has been under siege for so long.
Such a big big part of this has been the relentless social media onslaught about how Russia is inept: invasion forces stopped on the road, tractors pulling their tanks, etc.
I wish/hope it's true, but realize that we're getting our own selected stories over here.
Such a big big part of this has been the relentless social media onslaught about how Russia is inept: invasion forces stopped on the road, tractors pulling their tanks, etc.
I wish/hope it's true, but realize that we're getting our own selected stories over here.
Such a big big part of this has been the relentless social media onslaught about how Russia is inept: invasion forces stopped on the road, tractors pulling their tanks, etc.
I wish/hope it's true, but realize that we're getting our own selected stories over here.
Lambert ran CNN on this story in yesterdayâs Links, but it isnât going away:
KRIEGSVERBRECHEN IN UKRAINE?| Video zeigt Schüsse auf gefangene Putin-Soldaten. Bild. So here we have what looks like actual evidence (yes, video so deserving of skepticism but apparently solid enough for Bild) of what sure looks like Ukrainian war crimes, vs. US accusations based on the word âchildrenâ written on Russian on a bomb near the now-famous maternity hospital.
I should write about the gas game of chicken, but (mixing metaphors, forgive me), Iâd like to see more shoes drop, or alternatively, more analysis. Polar Socialist noted yesterday:
In 2016 Gazprom had over 70 bcm storage capacity in Russia, and I donât think that includes the depleted fields they also use as storage. So they may well have storage for at least a 3-4 months of production, which may be longer than G7 or EU can be without.
G7-Staaten lehnen Gas-Zahlungen in Rubel ab Tagesschau (âG7 countries reject gas payments in rublesâ). Guurst: âDelusional.â Moi: Itâs a bit rich to be harping about sanctity of contracts after having expropriated $300 billion.
Der deutsche Streit ums Gasembargo Der Zeit. TF: âJust as the Russians get ready to publish their rules for Roubles, Scholz says Germany canât live without gas, even as he refuses to pay in Roubles..â
From the Russian site Aftershock, translated, which summarizes various news stories, including ones in English. Can anyone confirm or deny?
* * *
Russia says West not welcome at peace talks RT (Kevin W). Lavrov cited US conduct in 2014 and 2015, and of course we have the more recent scuttling of the effort to revive the Minsk Accord, formally by Zelensky, but itâs hard to think that the US didnât have a hand in it. Earlier evidence of US intransigence came via Biden Admin escalating with Russia, which reportedly included a meeting that Victoria Nuland had at the Kremlin in October where she was allegedly astonishingly rude and imperious confirmed that the US was even more committed to the idea that it could push Russia around than evah. See Gonzalo Lira starting at 1:36:30. Canât verify accuracy but does not seem implausible in light of Biden âregime changeâ demand. If you read his full speech in Munich, this was no gaffe, it followed from his argument (which also relied on conflating the USSR with modern Russiaâ¦)
The U.S. is, by definition, waging a proxy war against Russia, using Ukrainians as their instrument, with the goal of not ending the war but prolonging it. So obvious is this fact about U.S. objectives that even The New York Times last Sunday explicitly reported that the the Biden administration âseeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmireâ (albeit with care not to escalate into a nuclear exchange). Indeed, even âsome American officials assert that as a matter of international law, the provision of weaponry and intelligence to the Ukrainian Army has made the United States a cobelligerent,â though this is âan argument that some legal experts dispute.â Surveying all this evidence as well as discussions with his own U.S. and British sources, Niall Ferguson, writing in Bloomberg, proclaimed: âI conclude that the U.S. intends to keep this war going.â UK officials similarly told him that âthe U.K.âs No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.â
In sum, the Biden administration is doing exactly that which former President Obama warned in 2016 should never be done: risking war between the worldâs two largest nuclear powers over Ukraine. Yet if any pathology defines the last five years of U.S. mainstream discourse, it is that any claim that undercuts the interests of U.S. liberal elites â no matter how true â is dismissed as âRussian disinformation.â (...)
That there are few if any risks graver or more reckless than a direct U.S./Russia military confrontation should be too obvious to require explanation. Yet that seems to have been completely forgotten in the zeal, arousal, purpose and excitement which war always triggers. It takes little to no effort to recognize the current emergence of the dynamic about which Adam Smith so fervently warned 244 years ago in Wealth of Nations:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.
For all its powerful geopolitical symbolism, the first-ever multilateral Arab-Israeli summit on Israeli soil was a largely transactional affair.
But the real business of the hastily arranged summit on Monday was urgent diplomacy, spurred by the war in Ukraine and the pending nuclear
agreement with Iran: The United States wanted to press Israel and four Arab countries to take a harder line against Russia over its invasion of
Ukraine, while they in turn wanted American assurances that Iran would be constrained.
The 18-hour summit produced no concrete public results, but there were hints of a behind-the-scenes thaw between the United Arab Emirates and
the United States after weeks of growing tensions. Washington has been frustrated by the Emiratesâ neutral response to the Russian invasion,
while Emirati officials were angry at what they see as American indifference to Iranian threats to Emirati security.
Don't look for long-term consistency in enactment of principles when it comes to US foreign policy.
I'm reading every day that there is this consistency. And that's what this is supposedly all about (now). Rules (not necessarily law).
People who supposedly use these rules don't just decree (and do) stuff internationally (again problematic when it comes to sovereignty whether ally or foe) because they can.
A bit of a continuum you might say. A dictatorship in international relations.
The appeal of this recent ad hoc reinvigorated consensus is obvious.
Didn't happen though, did it? Don't remember sanctions or US oligarchs losing their yachts. There were people who thought the US was engaging in war crimes (and the US president being criminal), but of course no accountability (ever).
Those Kurdish allies don't get to decide on sovereignty. You're sidestepping the issue. You'd be OK with some dissident US group (fighting for Liberty!) inviting over the Chinese/Russians to help them out?
The US was criticized for the invasion. Some, including American lawyers and statesmen, called for Bush's trial as a war criminal. The lack of sanctions and other responses against the US was likely due to our economic and military power. Also, Saddam was not a sympathetic character even in Iraq or the surrounding region. Then too, the US convinced a lot of other countries that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs and strong ties to Al Qaeda.
As for Syria (and I stand corrected: we did carry out military attacks in Syria), as Westslope points out the US was fighting against Daesh, ISIS, etc. Some attacks were I gather conducted in support of Syrian rebels but by and large the US had a limited role in the Syrian civil war. The rebel groups begged the US to intervene but Obama did not want to put US troops into another Middle East conflict right after pulling the US out of Iraq as he promised to do.
Don't look for long-term consistency in enactment of principles when it comes to US foreign policy. Even the US has very hard practical limits about how much force it can apply to situations needing justice, morally correct intervention, humanitarian aid, etc. The US will also if necessary put principles on the back burner if it feels that its national interests are at stake. The Domino Theory came about in part because of our blinkered view of Communism as a monolithic force superior to nationalism and regional relationships between states. We violated respect for national sovereignty during the Vietnam War because we feared that once one nation in the area went Communist (namely Laos during the Eisenhower admin, much less so Vietnam), other nations would follow.
You can criticize the US for supporting conflict in Syria but remember ISIS came about in part when the US largely left Iraq and the Iraqi military didn't stand up. We left Iraq because (in part) we believed Iraqis should govern the country, not us. So adherence to principle helped cause a serious military crisis when ISIS took over parts of Syria.
Lost in all this whataboutism is the fact that Russia had no morally justifiable reason to invade Ukraine. Ukraine did not pose a threat to Russia militarily. Russia had already seized Crimea under the false claim that the region had never been ceded to Ukraine by the USSR. It had been as part of a treaty. Russia had long fomented rebel forces in the Donbas region and inserted its own troops in disguise into the area. Russia had tried to install its own puppet rulers in Ukraine through fixed elections. Russia invaded Ukraine because it intends to absorb Ukraine into a resurrected empire.
Furthermore, Russia has deliberately targeted civilians and non-combatants during its invasion with guided missiles and bombs. It has leveled a number of cities. The last time I checked, ten million Ukrainians have been displaced. Russia has repeatedly violated its promises of safe passage for refugees. Russia also lied and lied and lied about its intentions, swearing that it wouldn't invade.
So, again, let's stop shrugging our shoulders here and saying the West shouldn't do anything or this invasion was largely the West's fault.
bad ones! 
