Links and Stuff
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map, who is an independent youtuber with a mostly neutral viewpoint.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict and, unlike most western analysts, has some degree of understanding on how war works. He is a reactionary, however.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ ASB Military News, banned from Twitter.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster - crowd-funded U.S journalist, mostly pro-Russian, works on the ground near warzones to report news and talk to locals.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
With the entire western media sphere being overwhelming pro-Ukraine already, you shouldn't really need more, but:
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Yesterday's discussion post.
Took me a bit to see it.
Also funny the caption of photo 2 says “Russian Tochka-U”. Correct me if I’m wrong, Russia has not fired a single Tochka-U this entire invasion
Just a random guy :shrug-outta-hecks:
Idk, on one hand they don’t have them, on the other - they could have easily captured them in 8 years and they’ve decommissioned them only 10 years ago. On a hunch I would say likely ukrainian due to general incompetence, maybe 70-30 chance
If that is a Tochka-U it is almost certainly Ukrainian. Had it been used by Russia, it would be the only Tochka-U fired by Russia in this war. Instead of the Soviet-era Tochka-U Russia used the more modern Iskander and Kalibr missiles.
When the Russians invaded I remember, even left media people were down playing the fascist elements in Ukraine's army and civil society, saying the extent of their influence was negligible and not really a n issue definitely not a reason to NOT support Ukraine, but it sure looks like they're in control of the military and government to me..
I would not say they aren’t there, I’m just thinking it’s all imperialism in the end, with some thick pretexts in places. It’s all kinda like iraq invasion (or yugoslavia if they partition them). Not like saddam was particularly good dude. Leftists I feel should be opposed to it for the same reason. Liberals supporting ukraine though are completely full of shit.
I think all leftists should be anti-war.
Communisms will always be resisted by some and they will act with violence. War is a necessary step on the path. Without it we will not get where we want to go. Even between imperialist nations I think war encourages material analysis on a large scale which furthers the cause.
Not necessarily. WW2 was partially a class war. The eastern front was literally the fighting force of the bourgeoise vs. the worlds biggest proletarian base of power. That didn’t look like a civil war.
US invading Cuba in the bay of pigs was class war, that didn’t look like a civil war.
At first it was defensive war, with following class war characteristics when they’ve purged aristocracy/bourgeoisie (which was later, just they’ve had such superior military control at the time, class war didn’t happen).
Eh, bay of pigs is just imperialistic war. Or in that sense you can reclassify napoleonic wars as class wars of bourgeoisie versus aristocracy.
Kinda sorta, but not really. Russia has both economic levers, has/had significant population buy in in ukraine. They could have put thousands names on the darknet for being nazis, and let enterprising individuals take it. They could have stopped gas flow to europe, and told germany to figure it out with minsk - it would take 2 months for ukraine to yield to capital masters from the west.
I’m not even going into more based directions of financing unions/antifa - it’s not like nazi problem arose organically, they were financed by oligarchs. However, that avenue is not possible for capitalist state.
Its not really comparable to Iraq invasion in any way except the fact that it is an invasion. The context and conditions are vastly different. You know this.
If Russia never grabbed Crimea and Donbas territories in 2014, Ukraine likely wouldn’t have provoked Russia, and this war likely would’ve never happened. Just because those regions were ethnic Russian doesn’t mean Russia had to grab them. They did it because they could, and it unleashed a whirlwind of shit. But some people here don’t want to admit that.
And some leftists want to ignore a shit load of other factors it seems.
Or journalists who have seen enough to understand what's up and want to slip some of this through to try and shake things up.
I see nothing weird here, just a normal Ukrainian guy who loves freedom, democracy and... uh... ancient Slavic sun symbols.
Lol, speaking of sun symbols, during one of russians feely good pieces - kids sending stuff to soldiers to support them, there was a photo with kolovrat symbol on some baggie from kids.
How many Nazis are there that guys with big, obvious Nazi tattoos keep ending up in front of cameras?
I hate to do the reddit thing of just saying "this" but that's basically all I can say, other than an elaboration.
At the beginning of the conflict, I think we all, correctly, suggested that this was an inter-imperialist war in which the working class of Ukraine and Russia are being pitted against each other and that while Ukraine was a bad country and something needed to happen at some point before the Nazi paramilitaries overthrew the government and created a geopolitical tumour in Eastern Europe that could spread to the rest of the body, maybe this wasn't it. That was a reasonable interpretation of what the war was at that time. And there was lots of taking shots at Putin for extremely valid reasons. Like, in this very update, there's an article on how the Russian government continues to attack the LGBT in Russia. It's almost tiring to say that Putin is not a good person personally for a hundred different reasons.
However, as time has gone by since then, it's become increasingly clear to me, and @granit, and hopefully everybody else, that this is a genuine fracture in the US global hegemony. It's not a culture war thing; it's not countries saying that they dislike the US or NATO (e.g. Macron saying NATO was approaching brain death) but then proceeding to not do anything with their dislike; it's not somebody in some random parliament making a statement about how the United States has done harm to the world; it's not the election of somebody vaguely left-wing in a relatively powerless country before they then negotiate with themselves to become a neoliberal. This is a rupture in the global capitalist order and a re-orientation of globalism and power relations. This actually matters. This cannot be shoved in a corner like coronavirus was. And Russia was the one to initiate that rupture, at potentially great risk to themselves, for reasons that aren't necessarily caused by a principled anti-imperialism, but nonetheless amount to that.
We need to end the stranglehold of the United States on the rest of the world. We need to lift the boots off the neck of the working class before they can even think about rising up and dusting themselves off and taking control of the world and creating socialism and then communism. And, to adapt that famous saying, we're doing that with the countries and governments we have, not the countries we want. It would have been awesome if Cuba and Venezuela and so on had created some kind of AES alliance; it would have been amazing if China had finally decided to stand up and engage in the world beyond peaceful development and sanctioned the fuck out of the United States or something. But Russia was the country that took the plunge, when it was backed into a corner with no way out but through, and that's the reality we live in.
It was Russia who took the plunge
Just like it was in 1917 and in WW2. Russia, whether they chose this fate or not, are world historical guardians against European fascism and colonialism. Not for any principled reason but due to the peculiarities of their geography, resources & conditions. There is a phrase in Russian which roughly translates to “Demons from the West”. Russia has been the gatekeepers between the Eastern World and the Western World, forced to play mediator and to settle disputes with force when the West invades and encroaches every couple decades.
After the USSR collapsed and Russia was totally humiliated and defeated, the triumphant West viciously and mercilessly looted the Russians and kicked them while they were down. The Russians tried to bend the knee and join the west as a vassal and were refused.
This is the inevitable outcome of the Russophobia and chauvinism of the west
It is wild that Russia tried for years to join, and then placate, the west and was snubbed and denied every time.
Which doesn’t even really make sense. The west should have accepted them into NATO and made them another vassal/puppet like South Korea or Japan. Instead they were too hellbent on revenge and huffing too much Cold War ideology, and just wanted to punish Russia instead. They pushed too hard and Russia began to push back and reconstitute itself as anti-West. They could have had an extremely powerful ally but instead they were so arrogant they thought they could just have another colony
The worst thing is this conflict is the fact that liberalism and the great man theory is integrated into people's conscious that we can never have a real discussion on the political implication of the War or of Russia in general. Every time you point out something about western narrative, people would keep going back to how questioning the narrative is being pro-putin.
Do people not understand that what was done to Russia in the 90s and the condition we left behind creates the perfect ingredient to have a Strongman politician with revanchist policy towards the west that tries for 50 years to destroy the legacy of the USSR (regardless if the ideologies that strongman expresses towards it)? Mark Ames in RWN said it once on an episode about Navalny said the same shit: ''Navalny can act like a Liberal democratic poster boy all he wants, but as soon as he discovers that Russia will never be consider as an equal to the west, he will tone into an ultra-nationalist (as if he didn't have a history in the past).
Tbh it’s a fair assessment, coming from China we kind of understand the sentiment. From a global south perspective, there will never going to be any ideological cohesion because waiting for any anti imperialist moment from the global north is like waiting for the “good guy” to eventually take over.
There is no salvation for the global south, only survival in this god’s microwave call geopolitics
Guys, I just found out from a really insightful youtube debate that Ukraine is the least antisemitic country in all of Europe ("not even just eastern Europe!"). Whoooooooooooooooo.
There's a Jewish themed restaurant in Lvov where part of the experience is that you have to haggle over the price.
Everyone knows the UK is the least anti-Semitic country in Europe after we kicked out Jeremy Corbyn.
Nah, the Labour Party has :long-corbyn: and will spend the next century atoning for the crimes against humanity that Corbyn committed, and even suggesting, nay, thinking that your mouth shouldn't be able to be used at any time as a toilet for Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory is tantamount basically being Hitler.
Hard to be anti-semitic when you don't have any left...wonder where they all went and why?
It’s not even true. Ukraine has more documented anti-Semitic hate crimes than all the rest of the ex-Soviet bloc
Yeah, I know, Ukraine still has a sizable Jewish community, though the fall of the SU greatly diminished it.
"Rabbis Jonathan Markovitch of Kyiv and Shmuel Kaminetsky of Dnipro are considered to be among the most influential foreigners in the country."
Markovitch isn't a fucking Foreigner FFS!! (Kaminetsky was born in Israel tho, kinda cringe) he were born there, his grandparents were born there. He's more fucking Ukrainian than the Queen is English!
It's easy not being antisemitic when your forebears massacred all the jews.
https://archive.ph/LBN71
Nazi-adjacent Brits have entered the "And Find Out" portion of their military adventure. Apparently captured along with Azov in Mariupol.
If you call serving with Nazis as a mercenary "living"
Same stuff but from Telegram: "The DPR court sentenced to death the foreign mercenaries who fought against Donbass and the Russian Federation. Mercenaries sentenced to death who fought on the Ukrainian side in the Donbass can appeal the decision of the DPR court within a month and ask for a pardon. If the head of the DPR pardons the convicts, the death penalty can be commuted to life or 25 years in prison.
The death penalty, according to the laws of the DPR, is carried out by firing squad." Edit: the source - https://t.me/EurasianChoice/14969
It's so transparent how every "pro-Russia official" is specified as such so you know they're wrong ahead of time, yet to see a "pro-Ukraine official" mentioned in these articles.
It is funny how transparently partisan they are in their coverage of war crimes trials. When pro-Ukrainian officials convict Russians, they talk about murder, war crimes and humanised the victims by giving little personal details like their age but when they talk about allied courts convicting pro-Ukrainian combattants, it's all "show trials" and "trumped up charges".
Honestly all war crimes trials are show trials, and always have been. Victor's justice, nothing more.
I love how that angloid rag goes to such great lengths not to tell who sentenced the three mercenaries. Instead of "a Donetsk court" or even "a court in the unrecognised separatist Donetsk republic" we are just told that "pro-Russian officials" did it.
It is also funny how the angloids just assume that the two British mercenaries will be used INA prisoner exchange instead of actually going to pay for their crimes (fuck the Moroccan guy though). Nothing bad can ever happen to good and white people.
Those br*t mercs have been sentenced to death by DPR courts, according to Russian telegram
So much for their claims that they were all just smol bean cooks & medics i guess
Does anyone have a link to that? If not, I'm sure there will be media about it soon
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/09/britons-sentenced-to-death-russian-occupied-ukraine-aiden-aslin-shaun-pinner
I saw ClathrateG already answered, but i figured i might as well give you the link to where i saw it if you want it:
https://t.me/RTnewsEU/3897
A bunch of journalists critical of imperialism have been banned from paypal a day after the Paul Mason leaks
I can't put into words how much I hate that fucking snake
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/09/zelenskiy-compares-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-to-covid Zelenskiy: Russian invasion of Ukraine is ‘Covid-22’ and weapons are vaccine :so-true:
So by that analogy Zelensky should be careful with what he wishes for, the US will stop giving a shit about Ukraine within the next 3 months then and then pretend the war never happened and everyone will start insisting that Ukraine should learn to live with the dead and the lost territories.
So when is he going to tell the population that the invasion is going to be part of life and the people don’t need to wear body armor while shopping for groceries in the sniper alley?
Tugs, fishing-boats, and even barges can be modified easily to hide all kinds of improvisational armament, endowing almost any platform with the delightful capability to scare, harass, and even sink Russian vessels—almost anywhere in the world.
Uhhhh i'm pretty sure that widespread adoption of using (and arming!) civilian watercraft by Ukraine would just lead to the Russian navy concluding that any and all naval traffic be considered a potential threat, which would only make the blockade WORSE you fucks i stg
Not to mention a lot of innocent sailors getting blown tf up, but i'm sure the dipshit who wrote that slop would be fully happy with that outcome, given that they'd have the chance to pin more atrocities on Russia's uNpRoVoKeD aGgReSsIoN
Sorry Jack, they don't look like terrorists
:biden-troll: :us-foreign-policy:
Just to make the point clear, there is no actual Russian blockade. Russia already committed to safeguarding the commercial vessels that want to leave.
The issue was always that Ukraine mined their own ports so the ships can't leave. Ukraine also refuses to de-mine the ports using their fear of a Russian attack as an excuse. The reality is Ukraine and the west want Russia to be blamed for the fictional Ukrainian grain crisis so as to serve as a scapegoat for the global food crisis.
This is the same shit as when people get sent out armed in minimal identification.
Remember when Zelensky was handing out rifles to everyone who could walk and then people complained about Russia shooting civilians?
Global Supply Chains Rattled by Winds of War Naked Capitalism
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions imposed on Russia are adding strains to already disrupted global supply chains. This column introduces a new indicator to show that the war is already rattling global supply chains. It also argues that despite the modest share of Russia and Ukraine in global trade, the ramifications for global activity can be sizeable as both countries are among the top global exporters of energy products and raw materials that enter upstream in the production processes of several manufactured goods and that may be hard to substitute in the short term.
This article gets very economically into the weeds and I'm not smart enough to comprehend it without devoting like 30-60 minutes to digest it all and google all the acronyms, so if you're the type of person who loves that shit, then go have fun in there.
But just to bring something from the comments on nakedcapitalism to here:
"The trouble with global resources is you tend to think of them like pieces on a chess board. So when you see Neon being taken off the market, it is like seeing a knight being taken off a chessboard. But it is not like that at all. It is more like a Jenga tower. And yes, you can remove a fair number of pieces but take the wrong one out and down she comes. So you look at a problem in the supply chain and you try and work out the effects downstream as they work their way out. The west tells Russia no computer chips for you so Russia says no means to produce chips for you either. So trying to work out an arrangement may take months but in the meantime, a shortage of computer chips is now going to get much worse. Meanwhile here is a new problem to contend with in the supply chains – ‘An explosion in Texas has knocked out 20% of US LNG export capacity for at least three weeks’"
This is definitely a vibe I've gotten from the articles I go through, and that I think @granit has talked about a few times, which is that these people - scientists, analysts, journalists, whatever - view everything as atomized units, disconnected from everything else. As the comment above says, it's not like that at all - everything in the economy is, to a lesser or greater extent depending on the product (e.g. lego vs iron ore), related to everything else.
I sometimes feel like if, like, the entire agricultural system crashed over the course of a month due to some freak supervolcanic eruption or sun activity or something, and only 25% of the crops were being grown, that these analysts would be like "Oh, no worries, agricultural products only makes up (to make up a number) 6.7% of the global GDP! It'll suck, but the system will keep on ticking!" and then all make surprised pikachu faces when the entire global economy collapses because most of the workers in other industries start starving and dying, because everything is related to everything else.
Emergent systems. Complexity arising from the interactions of simple elements. A small ripple in the water showing the presence of a great creature moving underneath.
freakin Putler!!1 :angery: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/v8dmdu/polish_president_says_calls_with_putin_like/ speaking to Hitler -Bild , on a side note how does he know what that was like? :soviet-hmm:
Putin: "Please don't put nukes on my borders or bomb ethnic Russians for 8 years please"
The west: "This is JUST like when Hitler said he was gonna invade European countries and put the untermensch in concentration camps"
Two EU countries oppose Ukraine’s candidacy RT
While the European Commission will likely recommend next week that Ukraine be granted candidate status, Denmark and the Netherlands may block this step toward EU membership, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Danish officials are reportedly concerned about Ukraine’s track record of corruption and the rule of law.
Ukraine applied to join the European Union in February, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated in April that a decision on formally bestowing candidate status on Kiev could be made within “a matter of weeks.” While the commission is expected to deliver its opinion on Ukraine’s candidacy next week, and while EU leaders are expected to discuss the matter in Brussels one week later, the process may not be as streamlined as von der Leyen has promised.
A number of anonymous officials told Bloomberg that while a majority of the EU’s member states are willing to support candidate status for Ukraine, some – including the Netherlands – are in opposition.
Once again, the unity of the West is truly staggering. I bet Putin didn't expect everybody to be so united in their opposition to him! I bet he's so mad!
Washington Starts Blame Game Over Defeat In Ukraine Moon of Alabama
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The New York Times, here via Yahoo, has some rather weird piece over alleged lack of intelligence on Ukrainian warplanes:
U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine's War Strategy, Officials Say
"President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has provided near-daily updates of Russia’s invasion on social media; viral video posts have shown the effectiveness of Western weapons in the hands of Ukrainian forces; and the Pentagon has regularly held briefings on developments in the war.
But despite the flow of all this news to the public, U.S. intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures, according to current and former officials.
Governments often withhold information from the public for operational security. But these information gaps within the U.S. government could make it more difficult for the Biden administration to decide how to target military aid as it sends billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine.
...
Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified at a Senate hearing last month that “it was very hard to tell” how much additional aid Ukraine could absorb.
She added: “We have, in fact, more insight, probably, on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side.”
One key question is what measures Zelenskyy intends to call for in Donbas. Ukraine faces a strategic choice there: withdraw its forces or risk having them encircled by Russia.
Andrei Martyanov rants about the piece:
"Well, NYT decided to start steering clear of this whole Russia "lost in Ukraine" BS it promoted together with neocon crazies, and begins this ever familiar tune of the "intel failure". Right.
U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine's War Strategy, Officials Say
Hm, how about I put it bluntly--the U.S. never had clear picture on anything, especially on Russia, or, as a private case, [the Special Military Operation] and completely bought into Ukie propaganda, which shows a complete incompetence of the "intel" in the US.
...
The narrative on [the Special Military Operation], in reality, is dead and the failure is not being set, it already happened. It is a fait accompli no matter how one wants to put a lipstick on the pig.
Larry Johnson thinks there is another another motive behind the story:
"Frankly, I find it hard to believe that there are not solid analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency who know the answers to all these questions. The real problem may not be a lack of intelligence. Nope. It is the fear of telling the politicians hard truths they do not want to hear.
Given the billions of dollars the United States is spending on “intelligence” collection systems, it is time for the Congress and the American public to demand that the intelligence services do their damn job."
I do not believe for one moment that U.S. intelligence services do not know what is going on in Ukraine and in Kiev. They know that the Ukraine has lost the war and will have to sue for peace as soon as possible.
They also have told the White House that this is a case and that the whole idea of setting up the Ukraine to tickle the Russian bear was idiotic from the get go. The question now is who will take the blame for the outcome. Who can the buck be passed to?
There is always the option for politicians, as Andrei assumes is the case, to blame the intelligence and the various agencies which provide it. This was done when the war on Iraq, based on false claims weapons of mass destruction, started to go bad for the U.S.
But what the NYT piece does is passing the buck from the intelligence community to president Zelensky of Ukraine: "He did not inform us about the bad position his country was in."
It is cover your ass time and Zelensky prominence in the 'west' makes it possible to blame him personally for the outcome of the war.
On May 31 the Council of Foreign Relations, with its head Richard Haass, had a public discussion about the state of the war in Ukraine. One of the participants was the former Deputy Commander of the United States European Command Stephen M. Twitty. He knows and makes absolutely clear where the war stands:
TWITTY: I think the war in the Donbas is starting to turn to the Russians’ favor, and when you take a look at—and I’m particularly talking about the eastern part of the Donbas—the Russians have transitioned from trying to pour all their combat power into the Donbas to obliterating every single town. Whether it be Rubizhne, Lyman, they’re working now on Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk as well, they’re obliterating these particular towns, and that’s how they’re making their headway. They’re not putting a bunch of combat power with infantry forces and tanks in there. They’ve taken all their artillery and they’re treating it like Mariupol and that’s how they’re making their headway. So they’re starting to make some headway in the eastern Donbas and so we have to watch that one closely.
HAASS: ... Why don’t we reverse [our policies]? General Twitty, is there something that the president said? Are things we’re not doing that we should be doing? Is there things that you would recommend at this point?
TWITTY: Well, as I take a look at this, you know, Secretary Austin came out that we’re going to weaken Russia. We have not really defined what weaken means, because if you take a look at the Ukrainians right now, I take a strong belief in Colin Powell’s doctrine—you overwhelm a particular enemy with force. And right now, when you take a look at Ukraine and you take a look at Russia, they’re about one to one. The only difference is Russia has a heck of a lot of combat power than the Ukrainians.
And so there’s no way that the Ukrainians will ever destroy or defeat the Russians, and so we got to really figure out what does weaken mean in the end state here. And I will also tell you, Richard, there’s no way that the Ukrainians will ever have enough combat power to kick the Russians out of Ukraine as well, and so what does that look like in the end game.
There follows some discussion with other participants about potential outcomes the U.S. would like to see, like Ukraine in the state that it was in before 2014.
Twitty then explains why those ideas are all unrealistic and that what is needed instead are immediate negotiations:
TWITTY: Yeah. So I got a couple of things for you, Richard. So I want to go back to what you said. Pre-2014—I want you to think about that one, because I’ve had time to think about it hearing others here, and what I will tell you, Richard, you know, I learned from the National War College there’s something called ends, ways, and means.
So if that’s your end state—pre-2014—then I’m interested to hear the ways and the means because, from a military standpoint, if that’s the way then the means would be the Ukrainians lack, again, the ability to pull that off to pre-2014. They just lack that ability. They don’t have the combat power.
And I also want to remind you we hear a lot about Russian casualties and Russian losses. We hear very little about Ukrainian losses, and keep in mind they’re losing soldiers throughout this war as well. They started at approximately two hundred thousand. Who knows where they are today?
And so it’s hard to recruit and maintain that level of professionalism in that military. So that’s my first point. The end, ways, and means, they lack that, to be able to go back to the pre-2014.
The second point that I would make is, you know, as you look at the DIME—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—we’re woefully lacking on the diplomatic piece of this. If you notice, there’s no diplomacy going on at all to trying to get to some type of negotiations. And I don’t think that we can lead that, given where Putin thinks about us.
But if you sit back and think about those that could possibly be a part of this negotiation team, you know, you have the—two of them are in—that I’m going to list are in NATO. One is President Orbán out of Hungary. Perhaps he can help out in the negotiation effort. The other one is President Erdoğan of Turkey. Longtime friends of President Putin, although some view that relationship as transactional. I don’t know. Let’s put it to the test and see.
Part 2
Someone objects and makes a case for 'giving the Ukraine more time' by pushing more weapons to them. Twitty dismantles that argument:
TWITTY: —Charlie, I agree 100 percent. But I will tell you, when you look at time, the Ukrainians have to go into negotiations with the upper hand at a position of strength, and so right now they are at a position of strength. The more this war goes on we never know if that’s going to wane, and then they will lack the ability to go to the bargaining table at a position of strength and may lose more than they intended, and so let’s keep that in mind as well.
There it is. The professional military and intelligence people know exactly what is up. The Ukraine is already in a very bad situation and from here on it can only get worse. They expect that the Ukrainian frontline will break down. I am sure they are urging, like Twitty does above, for immediate negotiations using whatever third party is available.
It is the White House for which such an outcome is not what it had hoped to achieve. It can in fact not allow it. It is currently blocking any negotiations because admitting to a loss in Ukraine would give the Republicans more ammunition to damage Biden.
Yves Smith detects some signs that, behind the curtains, some direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are actually taking place:
"We may know in due course, but this development, even if these talks are more at the feeler stage, is proof that Zelensky is losing power. Recall that there has already been some chatter about a possible military coup. And it is hardly uncommon for the senior officials of a leader on the ropes to start negotiating with the other side, both out of the best interests of their country and to improve their odds of survival.
...
So that is a long winded way of saying that Zelensky may not have altered his stance, but that instead he is no longer driving the train. And it may also be that some in the Ukraine government are also trying to get the UK’s and US’s hands off the wheel. It may be too early for that to happen, but if they keep trying to shore up Zelensky when his own senior staff (and the military) are turning against him, they could find they bet on the wrong horse. Again, I’m not saying this is a likely outcome, but the fact that it is even conceivable is a big change in the state of play."
Passing the buck to Zelensky, to then have him removed from this planet, may indeed be the best outcome for the White House ... and for Ukraine.
In summary, as the title suggests, the West is beginning to realize that the war will not end with even a Ukraine stalemate like the Donbass 2014-2022, and instead will be Russia cleaving territory off until Ukraine surrenders or the whole country is annexed. Perhaps Macron was among the first to realize it when he started to be like "...well, we mustn't humiliate Russia too much, right guys? Maybe we could end the war soon now that we've owned Putin, right guys? We've obviously won already, so why keep fighting? Guys?" But now the media is trying to figure out who to pin the blame on for this.
But if you sit back and think about those that could possibly be a part of this negotiation team, you know, you have the—two of them are in—that I’m going to list are in NATO. One is President Orbán out of Hungary. Perhaps he can help out in the negotiation effort. The other one is President Erdoğan of Turkey.
Erdogan and Orban :agony:
It will probably almost definitely be your %9 prediction (10 would get too many ppl mad) unless my prediction gets at least 10 upbears and warps the reality just the way I intended
They cancelled requirement to sell 50 percent of foreign currency into the market, fucking dipshits. Bette they’ve kept it and lowered to 5 percent interest rate
