Oh yeah I completely laughed at that. Just thought it was more of a "even THAT corrupt mess had had enough".
Counterpoint: I don’t think anyone was saying he wasn’t always ruthless and utilitarian. But in terms of pure Russian nationalism, never mind ethics, yes, there was a strategic genius to his actions. Don’t for one second think that meant I admired the bastard. I wrote a paper on it for National Defense University in 2018, comparing and contrasting his actions in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine (2014). What impressed me, professionally, was his patience: he would take a little bite of what he wanted and then quietly back off before the world got too outraged; then as soon as the world forgot about the last bite, he would bite again. I thought this was true all the way up until five days ago. When he got his “peacekeepers” into Donbas on those BS pretenses, I said, “Aha! That’s what he really wanted, to get regular Russian soldiers in to consolidate his gains on the Left Bank.” I thought the buildup for a real invasion was posturing at that point, and the world probably would have breathed a sigh of relief, grumbled a bit, but then let him keep yet another bite. What is different this time is Putin seems to have lost his typical patience and calculation he has shown for the last 20 years. I have often said Putin is not Hitler, specifically because of how strategically patient he was. Now he’s gone and proven he was Hitler after all; he just took a little longer in demonstrating it.
Fine. Run only humanitarian aid & people (there's volunteers flying in to go to Ukraine) through this guy's territory, then route everything else through Poland, then when this is done keep blasting the info out there he refused to help. Make him/his supporters pariahs.
I wonder if this is the continuation of the same weird (and peculiar to Eastern Europe) gripe Hungary has always had with Ukraine? Hungary pushed out statements a year or two ago explaining that they were blocking Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO to protest Ukraine’s new law requiring public business to be conducted in Ukranian because, while it was intended to counter Russian influence in eastern Ukraine, it also infringed on the rights of ethnic Hungarian minorities in Ukraine who are citizens of Ukraine because the border moved, not because they moved there, and who should be allowed to continue using Hungarian as their primary language.
Listening to the UN GA. The Russian ambassador’s gaslighting is clearly meant for an audience of one.
If he continues to set nukes up and keeps threatening to use them, at what point does the US step in with NATO and stop him? Because he's not backing down. Maybe time to threaten HIM - stop this nonsense, negotiate, or put on your brown pants.
Yeah this is the "I'm toeing the line, don't kill me" performance so Putin doesn't include him in a tea party.
From CNN live...But they're not targeting civilians, right? " Residential neighborhood in Kharkiv hit by rocket attack, Ukrainian officials say From CNN's Gianluca Mezzofiore, Katie Polglase and Paul Murphy A residential neighborhood in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, has been hit by a rocket attack on Monday, according to Ukrainian officials and multiple social media videos geolocated by CNN. The videos show multiple rockets exploding closely together in a residential part of the Saltivka neighborhood in north-east Kharkiv, close to a supermarket. One video shows a rocket booster lodged in the street pavement, as civilians look on. According to the Kharkiv City Council, the latest shelling of the city has left one female civilian dead, and 31 wounded. The wounded are made up of 15 servicemen and 16 civilians, according to the city council in a news statement. "
Russia 100% seems to be using Grad MLRS rocket artillery to shell civilian parts of Kharkiv. Some fairly brutal pictures on Twitter that I won’t link here, including an elderly woman with the lower half of her leg lying probably 20 feet away in the middle of the street.
I know there's US vets volunteering and going. Any chance we park some Spooky & A10s and let them go to town? You know, as Ukranian volunteers of course.
