Ukraine

[Vrede too]

Ukraine shares footage that appears to show a Russian helicopter gunship shot down in flames with a Stinger portable air-defense system, say reports



Mil Mi-24
FIM-92 Stinger


Bruce Cockburn (Canadian) - If I Had A Rocket Launcher (1984)

Lyrics
Wiki

[Vrede too]

Not sure if this is true, but I hope it is:

You know. The one who defrauded the government out of millions of $ on Medicare and then got elected Fl Gov and on to the U S Senate. Rick Scott.

Zelensky had to pause and tell Rick to go on mute, something that we've all wanted to say so many times.

Omg are they all Russian assets?

It's a cross cultural instinctive reaction

[Ulysses]

Excellent video of captured Russian soldier in Ukraine, talking about how he was misled and how sorry he is about what his government has done in Ukraine...

[Vrede too]

(signature: obsessed butthurt )

Awww. , Useless. So much for "Ignored". You fail again. Plus, Useless, you've been busted too many times for anyone to believe you're not reading my posts, anyhow. It's just your excuse for cowering. Awww.

[Vrede too]

Cheney/Shrub playbook:

Russia, without evidence, says Ukraine making nuclear "dirty bomb"

[Vrede too]

Courage:


Russian news anchor says millions of Russians feel invasion is a catastrophe

[GoCubsGo]

Courage:


Russian news anchor says millions of Russians feel invasion is a catastrophe

I'm assuming she's in Russia but I hope not for her sake.

Brave.

[Vrede too]

I'm assuming she's in Russia but I hope not for her sake.

Brave.

It sounds like she says that at the very end, but I'm not 100% sure.

[GoCubsGo]

I'm assuming she's in Russia but I hope not for her sake.

Brave.

It sounds like she says that at the very end, but I'm not 100% sure.

She's in Georgia.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/ukraine- ... ble-moment

[Ulysses]

I'm assuming she's in Russia but I hope not for her sake.

Brave.

She's in Georgia.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/ukraine- ... ble-moment

Tbilisi, Georgia...

[Vrede too]

She's in Georgia.

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/ukraine- ... ble-moment

Tbilisi, Georgia...

The important fact is that she's outside of Russia, not where she is in Georgia. Did that sail over your head?

[Vrede too]

If true, karma:

A Russian warship that attacked Snake Island where Ukrainian soldiers cursed out invaders has reportedly been destroyed

[Vrede too]

McDonald's closed 850 restaurants in Russia.

America wins. . . . or maybe Russia wins.

Cheney/Shrub playbook:

Russia, without evidence, says Ukraine making nuclear "dirty bomb"

Damn, it's like a rerun of 2002-03.

U.S. intelligence pushes back on Putin's bioweapons propaganda

Russia is trying to use baseless claims of a secret Ukrainian bioweapons program as a pretext to seize sensitive facilities in the country, top U.S. intelligence officials warned senators on Thursday.

“Clearly, there is a difference between bioresearch centers and bioweapons centers. Is there anything you can do to help clarify some of the things that are already floating? Because I’m fearful that this could be the new direction of a Russian false flag operation,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner asked CIA Director William Burns on Thursday.

“Unlike Russia, which does have chemical weapons and has used them, and does do biological weapons research and has for years, Ukraine has neither,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, replied.

Burns noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has used chemical weapons in recent years to assassinate his opponents. “And when you couple that with their demonstrated willingness to create false flag operations and try to create the impression that somehow Ukrainians are responsible for this, that should give us all pretty serious reason for concern about their propaganda,” Burns added....

All that's missing is for Putin to claim that Ukraine is a haven for al Qaeda.

[O Really]

All that's missing is for Putin to claim that Ukraine is a haven for al Qaeda.

Yeah, Putin used the same line about bombing the childrens' hospital that the US did in Iraq - "bad guys (military/insurrectionists) hiding inside."
Too bad he didn't also notice and learn from how long and unsuccessful the US occupation was.

[Vrede too]

Yeah, Putin used the same line about bombing the childrens' hospital that the US did in Iraq - "bad guys (military/insurrectionists) hiding inside."
Too bad he didn't also notice and learn from how long and unsuccessful the US occupation was.

Or from the US and USSR occupations of Afghanistan.

There are many differences between Ukraine and Chechnya, but the 10 year Second Chechen War gives us an idea as to how brutal Putin is willing to be. Wiki says "50,000–80,000" killed, though I heard someone say 250,000. Civilian casualties outnumbered military ones by about 10:1, and Chechen casualties outnumbered Russia ones by about 5:1.

[billy.pilgrim]

Yeah, Putin used the same line about bombing the childrens' hospital that the US did in Iraq - "bad guys (military/insurrectionists) hiding inside."
Too bad he didn't also notice and learn from how long and unsuccessful the US occupation was.

Or from the US and USSR occupations of Afghanistan.

There are many differences between Ukraine and Chechnya, but the 10 year Second Chechen War gives us an idea as to how brutal Putin is willing to be. Wiki says "50,000–80,000" killed, though I heard someone say 250,000. Civilian casualties outnumbered military ones by about 10:1, and Chechen casualties outnumbered Russia ones by about 5:1.

Sounds like a smaller version of our Iraq

[billy.pilgrim]

They be crazy folk

[Vrede too]

They be crazy folk

Interesting article. I'm not entirely comfortable with our once again being and supporting the merchants of death.

Why some American leftists are critical of U.S. assistance to Ukraine

... Putin, an authoritarian nationalist who has enacted laws targeting LGBTQ people and jailed liberal dissidents, has never been lionized on the left. Still, a cadre of far-left activists and pundits argue that the U.S. risked provoking confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO to its borders, and some are opposed to giving military aid to Ukraine or imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

“Everyone I know is united in condemning this war, and none of us like Putin,” Branko Marcetic, a staff writer at the Marxist journal Jacobin, told Yahoo News. But, he said, that doesn’t mean the U.S. should arm Ukraine.

“The idea of sending weapons to Ukraine — I think there’s a defensible argument for it,” Marcetic said. “The problem is, there was a similarly defensible argument for arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s when they were fighting a Soviet invasion.”

Good point.

The mujahideen were militias that fell into civil war with one another after the Soviets withdrew. The Taliban grew out of that war, later giving safe harbor to al-Qaida. Similarly, Marcetic warns, U.S. weapons could wind up in the hands of Ukrainian neo-Nazi militias such as the Azov Battalion, a part of the Ukrainian National Guard. Putin, who said at the onset of the war that Russia’s aim was “the de-Nazification of Ukraine,” has used the existence of groups like the Azov Battalion to justify his invasion.

“Because Putin has used that pretext, and because it’s such a big element of Kremlin propaganda at the moment, that in the West there’s a whole idea of ‘there’s no Nazi problem in Ukraine’ ... which is just not true,” Marcetic said.

Azov Battalion

Back to the article:

... “Putin’s invasion was unjust, illegal and immoral,” she added. “But that doesn’t make arming Ukraine to fight a protracted miserable proxy war, with no winners but the war industry, the right thing to do.” ...

In a recent editorial, the Nation magazine, a left-liberal tribune, while decrying the invasion, called for diplomacy instead of “a rush to arms” or sanctions that it warned “will hurt not only Russia — oligarchs and ordinary citizens alike — but also Europe, the US, and the global economy’s bystanders.”

Some fear a global recession.

... Concerns that NATO’s post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe could lead to a confrontation with Moscow are by no means limited to the left. As Ukraine fights for survival, there are some democratic socialists who come to some similar conclusions as their unlikely allies on the right about how the U.S. should, or should not, respond to the war in Ukraine.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, for example, worries that replacing Russian oil with oil from Saudi Arabia will empower the Middle Eastern kingdom, which has a deplorable record on human rights and is prosecuting a brutal war in Yemen. Omar, along with fellow left-leaning Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, was one of two House Democrats who voted Wednesday against banning Russian oil imports; they were joined in their opposition by 15 right-wing Republicans.

“If our issue is that we don’t want to buy oil from a powerful country that is conducting a devastating war on its weaker neighbor, I just don’t see Saudi Arabia hardly being a principled solution,” Omar said in a radio interview on “Democracy Now” on Tuesday.

Good point. Fuck Saudi Arabia, too.

Omar has been clear that she opposes Russia’s invasion and supports U.S. aid to Ukraine....

In fact, all of the members of Congress who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America, including Bush and Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have broadly backed the Biden administration’s alliance with Ukraine.

But the organization to which they belong has other ideas. In its Feb. 26 statement on the war, the DSA criticized Russia’s invasion but also came out against any effort to arm Ukraine or sanction Russia. It also called for the end of U.S. involvement in NATO.

“This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict,” the group’s National Political Committee wrote. “DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.”

It's true. Arms for Ukraine could get even more Ukrainians killed while Russia still wins in the end.

... Just as Trumpist conservatives hearken back to their movement’s isolationist, pre-World War II history, leftists and socialists urging the U.S. to withdraw from NATO are expressing their ideology’s anti-imperialist instincts.

“People on the left who call themselves anti-imperialist ... believe that no big power, especially their own country, should be an imperial power, should have the right to have a large military, should have the ability to intervene around the world,” Kazin said....

“One dark reality that many in the West will soon have to reckon with is that the future of a democratic Ukraine is not worth a larger land war or a nuclear threat,” wrote Ross Barkan, a left-wing pundit and former New York state Senate candidate, in a recent column.

“In diplomacy, human life must be prized first, and if a so-called appeasement strategy is what saves us from further civilian slaughter, it will have to be the strategy pursued.”

Where are y'all at?
For overt military intervention like with a no-fly zone?
For arming Ukraine?
Against arming Ukraine?
Fence straddler like me?

[Ulysses]

Sometimes I wonder if the world has gone mad.

Other times I know it has.

[billy.pilgrim]

Fence