War in Ukraine

Yes, Western NGO’s, like Soros, have been heavily involved, for decades, in turning countries like Ukraine against Russia. We are currently witnessing the brutal effects …

 

Military experts evaluate the massive failure of Russia's Kharkiv Offensive. Consensus: Russia had a golden opportunity, and blew it. Again.

Experts believe that Putin rushed the offensive to stay ahead of the resumption of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and used inexperienced soldiers, instead of waiting until more experienced and capable soldiers were available.

Russia had a golden opportunity to open a new front in Ukraine but is squandering it, military experts say (yahoo.com)

 

Russia once more probing the depths of its prisons for more troops in a desperate attempt to win a hopeless war with Ukraine. This time: female convicts are being conscripted into military service to fight in Ukraine. Nothing says "winning the war" like dragging female convicts into the fight.

Russia has started sending female convicts to fight in Ukraine: report (yahoo.com)

 

Russia continues to force foreign workers and students from Africa into battle with Ukraine, in violation of Geneva Conventions.

It's not just convicts. Russia is forcing its African migrants and students to fight for them in Ukraine. (yahoo.com)

 

A different kind of human trafficking: nabbing peeps in different parts of the world to send them to Ukraine to fight for mother Russia.

 

News flash for isolationists: Al Qaeda is now back in business in Afghanistan, recruiting holy warriors to attack the U.S. More evidence that ignoring international problems will make all nations more dangerous, including the U.S.

Al Qaeda chief invites foreign fighters to train in Afghanistan, target West: 'Safe haven for terrorists' (yahoo.com)

 

I'm calling BS. His strategic imminence Jake Sullivan assured the President, over the collective advice of every single one of his career military professionals, that withdrawing from Afghanistan and publicly sacrificing a friendly democracy would have no such adverse consequences.

 

This is especially true since Ukraine's primary (certainly not only) measure of performance is enemy casualties. And Russia understands this all too well, which is why they are working so hard to hide their true numbers of dead and badly injured from their own population. Depending on which group is doing the analysis, they are two to three times the number that Russia begrudgingly releases, a rate that is simply not sustainable without another round of conscription.

 

Salty much? I still see an economy which has thrived in the face of U.S. sanctions and I see a military that has been awoken. Perhaps they weren’t up to par in February 2022. Perhaps. But they are also gaining valuable experience and are on the offensive. They have a booming economy. And most importantly, they have ramped up to wartime production levels and that will cancel out any material aid Ukraine is getting from the West. Don’t get mad at me Biden’s sanctions didn’t work. Has he ever made a sound decision in foreign policy? Ever?

 

We keep talking about this - Russia has moved to a wartime footing - that is not sustainable in the long term. Almost all of the current "boom" in the economy is driven by national defense spending.
The question is how long can they keep it up.
Given that western conservatives have been trying to stop aid to Ukraine since the first months of the invasion, my guess is Russia can probably keep this up longer than the west will.
I guess we'll see.

Hopefully sanctions continue to evolve and find new ways to hurt Russia's economy, but I doubt the West is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to do so.

 

Breaking: Russia fails to overrun Ukraine’s second-largest city with 15,000 troops.

*armchair generals imputing imaginary goals to Russia so as to disparaging it.

 

Military recruiters had offered the inmates one-year contracts as combat medics, frontline radio operators, and snipers,

wonder what roles they ended up playing when they got there. no challenges with sexual abuse in that environment...

 

sounds like the foreigners need to GTFO or join the meat brigade, at least they have a choice

 

Yes. More often than not. Personal flaw. I balance it out by being more loyal to my country than I am to my party.

Outstanding examples of seeing what we want to see instead of what's there. I've seen even better cases of an incredible will to disbelieve in people whose spouses have been having affairs for years behind their backs. As I said when you first predicted imminent doom for Ukraine -- what? a year ago? more? -- I will dispassionately reassess Russia's military prowess and the economic power that feeds it when I see real victories on the ground. And we haven't. Not yet.

I'm not remotely mad at you for the sanctions "not working." I have been open about my barely disguised contempt for some in this Administration who naively believed that any degree of economic measures would "work" in the sense that you mean. But that is what happens when you have a theory of the way the world works (in this case, liberal internationalism) and you are not able to adjust your thinking to new realities no matter how much new data contradicts your suppositions.

Yes, of course. Off the top of my head, he has made several decisions with respect to Ukraine that were correct, even if it took him in some cases too long to come to obvious conclusions only after feeling pressures from Congress and our allies. Unrelated to Ukraine, he quietly made the correct decision to not rejoin the TPP. Our support of Israel in the wake of October 7th has been mostly correct. Some stuff that you won't hear about for years that has (apparently) cooled tensions with China and pushed off confrontation over Taiwan seems to have been correct. So far, I'm also not opposed in principle to a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia predicated on their normalizing relations with Israel.

Now if your actual point is that the bad has far outweighed the good, then I have less of an argument with you. His decisions with respect to Afghanistan were terrible. Categorically. Even if one wants to argue that Afghanistan was not intrinsically worth saving, it is more difficult to argue with a straight face that our actions did not encourage and accelerate Russian intentions with respect to Ukraine (and China with respect to Taiwan). Whatever cost we want to profess we "saved" by getting out of Afghanistan we are spending (necessarily) in great excess of with our aid to preserve Ukrainian sovereignty. Almost every decision made with respect to Iran from the Administration taking office until late last year was stupid, naive, and reflective more of a desire to do the opposite of what Trump did than what was in our national (not party) interest. I could fill a thread on that topic, but the bottom line (not easy to argue against) is that we are no closer to another "deal" with Iran, which they were not any more likely to honor than they did the last "deal," but we have managed to antagonize Saudi Arabia at the exact moment when we needed their help lowering oil prices to increase pain on Russia. On Ukraine, I will stand on previous criticism I have already expressed in this thread, but except for the general decision to support Ukraine (which I am obviously in favor of) I think the Administration's decisions have been more wrong than right, and it has been unnecessarily slow in correcting the wrong decisions. As I have said until I have been blue in the face, I think replacing (lawyer and political hack) Jake Sullivan with a serious individual who actually understands the subject on which they are supposed to be advising the President is roughly two years overdue.

But, hey, if you don't like this President's foreign policy, then be mad at your guy for losing a very winnable election in 2020. That election was close enough that just some modest behavioral changes (with the exact same policy) could have been decisive. It was within Trump's power to knock off the juvenile insults, tweets, and pissing contests with the media, judges, members of Congress, and even his own guiding coalition of advisors. He could have acted like the statesman and professional he was being paid to be in public and thrown his childish tantrums in private. But he didn't. And now you want to double down on a guy who learned nothing from why he lost and who has even less of a chance of winning than he did last time, barring something very strange happening. I hope you enjoy complaining about how it was unfair that you lost more than you enjoy winning.

 

Pretty soon Ukraine will have no Abrams left. Ah well, bring on the next wonder weapon that’s going to turn the tide …

 

Trump.

 

Trump, what?

 

A new artificial reef.



MSN

 

and?