Ukraine Invaded by the Russians - March 2022

NATO bombed Serbia and Libya and were in Afghanistan.
I was totally against that. Anywhere else?
They are supposed to be a defensive alliance working in the North Atlantic.

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Again, Syrians are white… some are even Christian.

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that’s what you get for committing genocide, bombed. god forbid NATO stops genocide.

Which means nobody is listening to you.
That’s good!

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I am sure the creatures you back at Rand, the Trilateral Commission, etc. are tuning in to this thread, reading your words and being influencing into making their decisions.

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@cake is just antiwar. He was antiwar considerably before this war broke out.

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and who is waging war on whom? :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I agree with Varoufakis on this. Whilst it is unpalatable to think of making any concessions to Putin after he has unleashed this war, for the sake of Ukraine the US should be prepared to undertaken talks with Russia that would include the possibility of Ukrainian military neutrality. Certain issues like Crimea could be kicked down the road to be decided in a decade. Waiting months and years as people continue to die in the hope of an eventual regime change in Russia is not in Ukraine’s interests. A negotiated settlement offers a decent chance of ending the war and giving Ukraine a democratic, European-facing future. Maintaining the high rhetoric and pushing for regime change, Biden’s current apparent plan, is unlikely to achieve the goal of ousting Putin and will probably lead to prolonged bloody quagmire in Ukraine.

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Biden rightly – and loudly – condemns Vladimir Putin for war crimes against civilians in Ukraine that the U.S. routinely committed against civilians in Syria and swept under the rug. To this day nobody in the U.S. cares about war crimes committed against civilians in Syria.

In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.

Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors. . . .

An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70. . . .

The rules allowed U.S. troops and local allies to invoke it when facing not just direct enemy fire, but anyone displaying “hostile intent,” according to a former officer who deployed with the unit numerous times. Under that definition, something as mundane as a car driving miles from friendly forces could in some cases be targeted. The task force interpreted the rules broadly, the former officer said.

The aftermath of that approach was plain to see. A number of Syrian towns, including the regional capital, Raqqa, were reduced to little more than rubble. Human rights organizations reported that the coalition caused thousands of civilian deaths during the war. Hundreds of military assessment reports examined by The Times show the task force was implicated in nearly one in five coalition civilian casualty incidents in the region.

Publicly, the coalition insisted the numbers were much lower. Privately, it became overwhelmed by the volume of civilian casualty claims reported by locals, humanitarian groups and the news media, and a backlog of civilian casualty assessment reports sat unexamined for months, two people who compiled the reports said. . . .

Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children. The human rights organization Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently posted photos of the bodies, calling it a “terrible massacre.”

Satellite images from four days later show the sheltered bank and area around it, which were in the control of the coalition, appeared to have been bulldozed.

David Eubank, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who now runs the humanitarian organization Free Burma Rangers, walked through the area about a week later. “The place had been pulverized by airstrikes,” he said in an interview. “There was a lot of freshly bulldozed earth and the stink of bodies underneath, a lot of bodies.”

Concerned that details of the airstrike would be buried as well, Colonel Korsak alerted the Air Force’s version of the F.B.I., the Office of Special Investigations. In an email Colonel Korsak shared with the Senate Armed Services Committee, a major responded that agents probably would not look into it, saying the office typically investigated civilian casualty reports only when there was “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”

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Just listened to this while drinking my morning coffee. Some interesting points, if you are interested in military hardware and its future.

Also watching the latest VICE report now. F*ck, this is painful to watch, people dealing with the loss of their loved ones. :cry:

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Here’s an NPR interview of David Philipps, one of the co-authors of the New York Times report:

NCO initiative was probably developed in the stormtrooper small unit infiltration tactics which allowed the Germans to break the Western Front stalemate towards the end of WW1, a trick the allies hadn’t managed convincingly, even with tanks. Under the Nazi it was developed further in recruits by Hitler Youth training pre-enlistment.

IIRC, during the Soviet era, the Red Army had higher ranking officers at lower levels in its organisational structure. Thus you’d have a captain as a platoon cdr where the British would have a second lieutenant, and so on up the hierarchy.

That sort of thing is hard to change, so is likely to still be true in todays Russian army, and may be one reason (of many) why they are apparently suffering more high ranking casualties than some commentators claim to expect.

VICE reporting is excellent . They don’t hide the reality. The civilians getting bombed and massacred just going about their lives or sitting quietly at home.

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By the way, I know probably not many people watched that video. I just wanted to add that why the maker of the video feel like it is justified to turn Russian into China’s Canada.

He said out of all of China’s neighbors, only one nation petitioned to join NATO, twice, and that would be Russia. Therefore China could just use Russia’s own excuse to invade Ukraine to invade Russia and take control of it.

You don’t get to just say this kind of stuff in China unless you have the official approval, and it might be a sign that the CCP is testing the waters.

And Zelensky certainly wants to fight to the last man in a losing battle.

Total bullshit.
Zelensky is on record as pushing for peace every single day. Even read the headlines today?

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There’s certainly a difference when reporters go to where it’s really risky as opposed to reports from the relative safety of cities like Kiev and Lviv. There surely will be critics pointing to VICE’s tendency of milking those gruesome and heart breaking images to get everything out of the situation. It’s a tricky balancing act. Are they showing reality or are they focusing too much on the extreme side of reality?

:thinking:

For me the vice reports really showed me what is going on . Nothing else compares. I get to see the regular people who stayed behind. Like the firemen the caregivers , the paramedics , the grannies and granddad, the guy working the mortuary , I really felt for that dude. And another paramedic who had been badly injured while doing his job, with his leg shot up and shrapnel in his lungs . Last thing he said was 'help our country ’ before going to hospital . Remarkable.
This is reality of the front lines . This is the reality of innocent people getting maimed and killed .

You can hear the shells going off nearby and see the massive damage in the cities.
Those reporters are putting themselves in huge danger though.

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I believe Zelensky is now willing to concede neutrality, meaning no NATO for Ukraine. But it seems now Putin wants Ukraine divided into two separate regions. This shows what a huge lie Putin’s reason for attacking Ukraine was. Putin has a way out but he wants more. It seems he wants BOTH neutrality and division of the country. I’m not sure what I would do if I was Zelensky. But at the very least, I don’t think Zelensky deserves any criticism. Save all that for Putin.

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Putin also wants the demilitarization of Ukraine. Basically what he is saying is let me back out of Ukraine for now without losing face in Russia, and then when I come back next time, I’m just going to waltz in and take the whole thing.

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