The Washington Post reports in "Ukraine battles to shape the narrative on its grueling counteroffensive."
"Controlling the narrative is crucial to maintaining public support for Ukraine’s fight.... In recent press briefings, Western officials have expressed unusual levels of concern with how the war is being assessed and reported.... But... Ukrainian military personnel have imposed notably tougher restrictions on access to the front line.... In many respects, the messaging fight is not fair. In Russia, it is now illegal to criticize the military or the war.... On the ground, Ukrainian military officials have made a concerted effort since the start of the counteroffensive to limit the visibility of Ukraine’s losses....?
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65 comments:
So where the fock is the western press? In former times you'd expect tenacious NYT or WaPo journos to be all over the war zone giving first-hand reports. Now they sit behind a keyboard writing about what someone spokesman said at a briefing.
.
If you have to fight for a narrative it means you’re losing the war.
I thought the Dems were the party of peace; the anti-war party.
Make peace! Let Russia keep what it is occupying. A forever war is a bad idea.
How about we just quit giving them money. I think our natiuonal grandpa has grifted enough from Ukraine.
Is this the new Netflix? Think about that, and read it again.
I'm all for good reporting, though. Let' start with who's getting rich.
They can't stop the grift gravy train now. Besides, it has the potential to be the great 2024, completely unrelated to the election, non-conspiracy theory, crisis that requires us to try socialism, I mean social distancing.
In many respects, the messaging fight is not fair. In Russia, it is now illegal to criticize the military or the war....
So, in the interest of fairness, we should what? Make it illegal to criticize the military or the war? That seems to be the implication.
The military and the government controlled the narrative for 20 years in Afghanistan right up until everyone was shocked when the Taliban took over the whole country in a week and we had a disastrous pullout.
But hey, let's trust the same people all over again. This time will be different, right?
War in Europe and now back in the middle east. But, hey, the economy is a good as dog swimming.
Where will Biden et al. launder our money if the Ukraine falls?
The most important part of the narrative is to pretend that this war is "unprovoked."
Here is a thought experiment for you, tell me if you think it's absurd.
After WWII came to a close, and the Soviets were occupying Eastern Europe, per the agreement with FDR and Churchill, the US decides that the USSR is the next big target, something which was commonly believed at the time was that once Hitler was gone, our generals wanted to join the Germans and defeat the Soviets. Does this sound unbelievably unlikely to you?
The CIA then starts nurturing the Ukrainian nationalists, who, while Nazi collaborators, and heavily involved in the Holocaust (sorry, historical fact) were seen as a useful thorn to be placed in the side of the Soviet Union, a cancer placed there that would bloom over the years.
At the fall of the USSR, NATO either directly attacked, or was part of a coalition that attacked Yugoslavia (google "Bringing the Serbs to Heel", Iraq, Syria, Libya, all the while these nationalists, who still worship the collaborator Bandera as a national hero, naming a street after this Holocaust participant, a street that leads right up to the site of one of Ukraine's worst atrocities against Jews, Poles, Slovaks, Russian POWs, etc.
The US backs a violent coup and immediately recognizes the leaders of it as the "legitimate" government of Ukraine, a government which immediately strips many rights from the Russian speakers who live in the large swaths of Ukraine that had for centuries been considered Russia, until Lenin, and then Krushchev simply drew some lines on a map.
Remember that the US will not recognize the leaders of a coup in Niger where they non violently threw out their colonial master, France, which had been led by the same family since its "independence," a family which bragged publicly about fixing elections, and the US is now working to reassert France's neocolonial domination of Niger. We have not had a decent president since Eisenhower, who told the French and the English where to get off in the Suez crisis, and JFK, who may have been talking to Ike when he was taken care of 60 years ago, and suddenly we were deeply involved in a French colonial war in Viet Nam.
Imagine that all of these things are true, and you are Putin, who has seen the video of Khadaffy being killed while being anally raped by an AK-47 at the hands of soldiers who won because NATO took out Libya's Air Force, and bombed Libya's military, and left the country a "shit sow" in Obama's words, and didn't even have the respect to actually invade the country and take responsibility for governing the territory.
Now ask yourself how you would feel about the military bloc with this history setting up shop and taking in the second largest army in Europe, controlled by Ukrainian nationalists who still resent the defeat of Hitler, those resentments nursed by the CIA, and who are less than 200 miles from Moscow, then tell me that the war is "unprovoked."
George Washington's Farewell Address is as true today in its essentials as it was when he gave he. We don't have to worry about being invaded, we live in a fortress, we should stay out of other countries' business. The only thing we have to worry about is inviting nukes to cross the ocean and put an end to America's meddling in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. One thing the Russians and Chinese know well, is that after a nuclear war, Eurasia will not be ruled by a country that has to cross oceans to do it.
If we are so worried about the crimes of the Russian Empire over the centuries against her neighbors, maybe we should be spending the hundred of billions settling Indian land claims, and honoring the treaties that we have signed.
Ah the narrative.
So they’re going to reshape the narrative instead of winning the war? If you ain’t in it to win it then how about you negotiate a peace? There’s a guy who wrote the book on negotiation you could call on.
It's amazing how much theft you can cover up when you're allegedly supplying arms for another country to fight a war that is so large and real that, CNN doesn't even cover it.
All those Pentagon audits should add up next time one of them is done.
"Controlling the narrative is crucial to maintaining public support for Ukraine’s fight...."
Acknowledging they are in the Propaganda business.
If you don’t like what people are saying, change the propaganda.
It seems both sides are better at defense than offense.
In February of 2022 I thought this would be over in a week. Now its endless.
Gee. Just a few weeks ago even asking what the end game might be was considered almost treasonous.
Munitions depleted? Elections upcoming. I guess it's time.
Oh yea, and Israel is finding out about the effects of flooding a corrupt regime with weapons. Wait until these man-portable anti aircraft missiles, and anti-tank missiles (think armored vehicles ferrying around heads of state) start showing up in North America.
But Joe Biden's clients in Ukraine must be served! Blackrock has bought up huge swaths of agricultural land in Ukraine, and that investment will be lost if the US... err, I mean Kiev, does not prevail in this conflict! This is Russia's Viet Nam! Except that Viet Nam was thousands of miles from America, and involved no vital US interests. If Viet Nam was in Canada or Mexico, right on our border, we would have won and it would not have been a close thing.
Here is Chris Hedges, former Balkans Bureau Chief from the New York Times, and Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, before that prize became one more bauble handed out to its toadies by the regime, explaining what New York Times "reporting" out of Ukraine actually is, it's transcribing the pronouncements of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry without questioning any of it.
https://youtu.be/N0H7PIJcEP0?si=_C-aBmOvXpM5yj4G
Obama's world ethnic Spring series. Trump aborted the Iran-ISIS Affair or at least delayed its puberty. Perhaps he can be instrumental to progressing Biden's Slavic Spring, too.
WaPo bitterly clings to a handmade tale and deficit investment.
Since NATO was never going to commit to come in on the side of the Ukrainian government, what we have done is string the Ukrainians along for 20 months now giving them just enough weapons to burn through at least a half-million young Ukrainians. Now that we are reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of weapons since the West no longer manufactures the kinds of arms in the quantities the Ukrainians need, the Ukrainians are in a kind of no-man's-land- not strong enough to win, not strong enough to make the Russians give up, and not enough weapons to hold the Russians at bay for much longer. All of this was obvious 20 months ago to anyone with an IQ above body temperature.
You want to know the key clue to how feckless our support was always going to be- that half the aid went to the Ukrainian government pay for civil servants (government employees) and pensions. Seriously- what the fuck? 100% of the aid should have been given in arms if we were going to go down this path at all.
The ghost of Woodrow Wilson rises over the swamp.
Persuading two sides to settle a dispute may be called a political settlement. Making the victim of an attack stop trying to fight back and just accept its fate is more properly called complicity in abuse.
In Slovakia, a new anti-war government has just been elected. Slovakia borders Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Waffen SS division, Galicia, which was just honored in Canada with a standing ovation in parliament, was sent by the Germans to Slovakia to put down an uprising against Nazi rule there, brutally put down that uprising. That's how the Galicia SS "fought the Russians." One wonders how many votes that that standing ovation cost the pro Ukrainian parties there.
Hungary, also on Ukraine's border, is completely sympathetic to Russia's position on NATO expansion. Hungariains also numbered among the victims of the Galicia SS, BTW. Killing Hungarians was all about "fighting Russia. Kiev sent large numbers of ethnic Hungarians to die in the artillery meat grinders set up by Russia. Early in the war, these battles served an ethnic cleansing purpose for Kiev. Ah, those were happier days.
Poland's government has come out hard against Kiev recently. Presumably they are just lying to the Polish people and will come back to support Washington, the same way that Italy's populists did as soon as the election was safely behind them, Poles numbered heavily among the victims of the Galicia SS, you know, killing Poles was all about "fighting Russians."
Here in North America, the history of the Eastern Front is not much emphasized, since we Americans and our buddies the Brits did not play a huge part in it, but those who lived it on their soil remember it the same as we remember Iwo Jima, Saratoga, Gettysburg, Normandy, etc...
After much hand-wringing about slow progress and grim assessments of Ukraine’s prospects through the summer, Ukrainian and Western officials in recent weeks have focused on reshaping the narrative...
I suppose "grim assessments through the summer" is one way to use the past tense to avoid the actual developments that would be reported as "grim milestones" had it been a Republican in office?
The US public and Congress have consistently stayed behind presidents at war ever since the Second World War—Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq and supported a 350,000 person army in West Germany for over 40 years. The American public no longer supports imperial wars in the Muslim world principally due to lack of demonstrated effectiveness and success (and one certainly is not fighting for "freedom" there).
The Ukraine war is central to sustaining the credibility of Nato from autocratic threat from the east, which has been its basic mission since 1949.
Impatience by American voters might lead Washington to up the military capability of Ukrainian forces with more and more efficacious weapons. A look at the map indicates that more and more effective weapons might permit the bombardment of territory inside Russia bordering the occupied Ukrainian areas and interdict and disrupt the resupply of Russian armies inside the Ukraine. One points this out only to show that Russia has many vulnerabilities which have yet to be exploited by western-supplied Ukrainian forces. When it comes to upping the game, most of the initiative seems to lie with the west, not with Moscow.
Will Biden and his top advisers decide to up the tempo in the Ukraine before or after the November 2024 election? There are both political and strategic arguments supporting either approach to the timing. But upping the game is probably inevitable; it is getting time to finish this conflict.
The Americans have suffered numerous setbacks since 1945, but they are also stronger than ever. No one has the American strategic reach and resource depth.
Ultimately, the Americans are going to finish this war. This time it will be different.
Rich. You voted for this. So just shut the F up.
"So, Rich, when will you join the Ukrainians on the front line?"
You and Chuck can form the LLR Brigade.
Serious Question: How many military aged men (or women) are LEFT in the Ukraine?
The WSJ regularly runs cheerleading pieces on their Ukraine war, and i've noticed that ALL the pix of Ukrainian soldiers are pix of OLD men. It's hard (for me) to guess how old an eastern europian man is.. But the ones in the pix almost ALWAYS look at LEAST 40; NEVER a pic of someone that could be in their twenties.
Now, those pix are Ukraine taken and Ukraine approved; so MAYBE they just want it to LOOK Like there's no more kids.. But i can't imagine Why??
Seems to me that ALL the young men from the Ukraine are now refugees in western europe or in the grave.
Our proxy war SEEMS to be running low on proxies. AND the US military can't fill Current demands..
As i've asked before.. IF this war is SO IMPORTANT; What happens WHEN we Lose?
Michael said...
Now they sit behind a keyboard writing about what someone spokesman said at a briefing.
And, that spokesman is a trans "woman" from the USA; that is an OBVIOUS CIA operative.
This is OUR war
"I just want for people to stop dying."
Remember that guy?
Rich-
An army does not control contested ground until a grunt is standing on top of it.
Ukraine does not have the grunts to force Russia out.
We need to recognize that essential fact. Who is going to supply the grunts?
"Ultimately, the Americans are going to finish this war." I guess we have your answer.
"Ultimately, the Americans are going to finish this war. This time it will be different."
It has been reported that Jor Biden has redirected aid from Ukraine to Israel. 8 Billion dollars of promised aid will be given instead to Israel.
Biden earlier stated that The United States will do everything necessary for Israel to protect itself.
I haven't checked the source, this is just a tweet from somebody, still.
"No one has America's resource depth..." - Rich
Yeah, let's go on to AliBaba and order several shipping containers of combat drones and artillery shells from China... Oh wait. They aren't even selling that stuff to Ukraine, leaving Ukraine at a large disadvantage in the drone department.
Could it be that Trump was right about offshoring our strategic industries to China and Viet Nam, and the indefensible Taiwan?
Could it be that Trump was right about not handing Putin the whip hand on energy production by limiting that of the US?
Could it be that Trump was right about Europe not pulling its own weight on defense spending?
Could it be that Trump was right about the border?
He is not a perfect man, but he sure got a lot of stuff right that the Riches of the world got completely wrong.
"Making the victim of an attack stop trying to fight back and just accept its fate is more properly called complicity in abuse."
The Ukrainians are victims of abuse all right. We led them right down the primrose path into a war that we thought that we could win by sanctions alone. We will be lucky if it doesn't go nuclear, and the only way to avoid that is to accept that we screwed up, and missed every opportunity for a political settlement that would have left Ukraine intact, and to accept the consequences without dragging Europe into a wider war.
Rich, the Warhawk said..
..up the military capability of Ukrainian forces with more and more efficacious weapons.
A look at the map indicates that more and more effective weapons might permit the bombardment of territory inside Russia..
One points this out only to show that Russia has many vulnerabilities!
Rich? Curious WHAT you mean, by more and more effective weapons?
i assume MGM-140 ATACMS?
AND, i ASSUME you mean F-16's, and F-33's ? What about B-2's? We CAN'T give them B-21's they're not in service yet. But we COULD give them Minuteman III's, they'd be more effective weapons!
Afterall, warhawk Rich does NOT care WHERE this war goes.. As Long as it KEEPS GOING
Y'all think i'm taking warhawk Rich out of context?
warhawk Rich said..
But upping the game is probably inevitable; it is getting time to finish this conflict.
Ultimately, the Americans are going to finish this war. This time it will be different.
If Not Minuteman III's? Then WHAT is going to make this time "different" ??
The 82nd Airborne? The 1st Armored? The 4th Infantry? ALL of them? Something more and more effective?
Tell us warhawk Rich? Where WOULD you draw the line? and WHY?
IF this war is SO IMPORTANT; WHAT do we DO when we LOSE?
Seems like it was, as I kinda figured, fake news about the 8 billion to Israel, there isn't even 8 billion left in the coffers for Ukraine, but what did happen was that we emptied the strategic reserve of artillery shells warehoused in Israel and gave them to Ukraine. That I clearly remember happening.
if 'goal post' can be shifted to win debates and arguments why not 'borders' to declare victory in WAAAAAR
There was never any chance that Ukraine's "Counter offensive" would have gained any significant territory. They don't have air superority and they dont have a massive advantage in Artillery or AFVs.
This war is a digusting mess. Its useless forever war that needs to end by negotiation. Ukrainians are being drafted and thrown into a meat grinder. They can't win. And I'm angry that MY tax dollars are being used to kill people in a war that has ZERO to do with defending the USA.
Meanwhile, you got pigs like Miss lindsey and Mittens chortling about how we're "Killing Russkies" and "Weakening Putin" for such a "Cheap Price".
Russia does have the option of just ending the war. If the Kremlin ended the war they could:
1) Re-establish trade links with the world's largest economies
2) End a huge drain on the state budget
3) End a huge drain on the country's already strained demographics.
4) Boost their currency, regain access to the global financial system.
5) Not be cut off from large parts of the world, not just economically but also socially and culturally. Become a country that people respect.
In every way, stopping the war is the most rational thing for Russia to do. Good for the people, and oligarchs will also make more money. But I don't think Putin sees it this way.
The narrative was always bullshit. All the stories about clever Ukrainian forces out-teching reluctant Russian conscripts saddled with obsolete equipment were obviously just cover for one uncomfortable overriding fact. It’s Russia, bitches. They’re simply not going to lose unless they decide to.
Ultimately, the Americans are going to finish this war.
@Rich, excuse me but I hope you aren’t advocating for the US evolving this war from a proxy war against Russia into a direct US vs. Russia conflict. I have a son, daughter-in-law, and world’s smartest and most beautiful one year old granddaughter living close to DC and I’d rather they did not disappear into a mushroom cloud.
This time it will be different.
Sure, kid. Riiiiight.
“One-off budget revenues to go up in 2024 as Moscow’s defense spending has tripled. Vladimir Putin’s cabinet is turning to increasingly irregular revenue-raising measures to fund a rapid rise in defense spending.”
Russia Plans Huge Defense Spending Hike in 2024 as War Drags
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-22/russia-plans-huge-defense-spending-hike-in-2024-as-war-drags-on
And yet some of the Republicans want to stop this. A fraction of western GDP to tie down Russia, and help save Ukraine.
True patriots and defenders of the West.
France once surrendered to the overwhelming military might of Germany to avoid the destruction of their country, and France still exists. Ukraine had that option
“A look at the map indicates that more and more effective weapons might permit the bombardment of territory inside Russia”
Absolute insanity. The Russians won’t forget where those weapons came from. An invitation to decades of asymmetric warfare and an intransigent, unreconcilable, Russia.
So basically, the Ukraine is concerned that if we find out how bad the war is really going, we will cut off funding. In response, they are colluding with "Western officials" to "change the narrative" - in other words, to lie to us about the war so as to "shore up support" - keep the money train flowing. They are also restricting press access to the front lines, so that nobody can discover the truth of the situation (which, again, they are colluding to mislead us on). And on this basis, Joe "the Big Guy" Biden just gave another $325 million in weapons and supplies, the ultimate destinations and utility of which we will not be able to judge (because, yet again, Ukrainian and Western officials are colluding to prevent us from discovering the truth).
On Thursday, Putin said that if Western nations stop sending weapons to Kyiv, 'Ukraine will have a week left to live.'..."
Seems like Putin can't read the room - if he keeps his mouth shut, aid might dwindle, but no one is going to cut back if he says he will annihilate the country immediately upon their doing so.
In many respects, the messaging fight is not fair. In Russia, it is now illegal to criticize the military or the war.
That's not what makes it unfair. What makes it unfair -- or at least asymmetrical -- is that the Ukraine is almost completely dependent on the charity and goodwill of foreign countries, without which they will swiftly run out of the weapons and ammunition they need to fight a conventional war to hold their territory. And Russia is not.
The propaganda war is arguably more important to the Ukraine, in the short run, than meaningful battlefield successes, because if the Western Powers stop donating money and materiel, they won't get a long run. I think they have a tricky balance to strike. To some extent even the timing and extent of the "counteroffensive," this summer, seems to have been dictated by the government's propaganda needs more than by military needs and preparation. And the Ukraine doesn't have the flexibility to make strategic withdrawals the way Russia can, e.g. the Russian withdrawal from Kherson last year, which, at the time, Ukrainian authorities were warning might be a trick, because they were well aware that Russia could hold the city for some time yet.
Meanwhile, Russia can manufacture most of what they need and buy the rest from willing sellers. Winning the propaganda war isn't mission critical for them. They don't need to be loved by a bunch of foreigners right now; all they need to do is undermine Western confidence in the Ukraine enough to stem the flow of weapons and money.
BTW. to all you armchair warriors and people who think this is a game of "Risk" - what the fuck does the Donbass or the Crimea have anything to do with the USA?
We're 5000 miles away. And 10 years from now, we'll stil be 5,000 miles away. And Russia will still be there. Right on Ukraine's border.
If you think the Russians wanting the Donbass and Crimea is just "Crazy Putin's" idea, you are wrong. The Russian people want that territory, and they think it rightfully belongs to them. And they're going to think that 4 years from now and 10 years from now. But hey lets risk WW III Over that.
You immoral fools just love war. Seems like every 10 years the USA has to get involved in some useless foreign war in some obscure place because "So-and-so is just like Hitler" and "IF we dont stop him now, we'll be fighting them in Long beach". Of course after the war is over, all the warmongers forget about it, and stop caring. And then, they're off to the next war in some other place thousands of miles away and completely unrelated to defending the USA.
Seems to me that the Russians are lallygagging on this war.
Maybe Putin cooked up this scheme with Zelensky and is getting a cut of the sweet American cash.
'So where the fock is the western press? In former times you'd expect tenacious NYT or WaPo journos to be all over the war zone giving first-hand reports. Now they sit behind a keyboard writing about what someone spokesman said at a briefing.'
Yes! In over a year I think I've seen a total of 3 minutes of footage on network or cable news.
Is there really a war?
This 'war' is a great opportunity for not only money-laundering, but for the US to deplete its obsolete weapons (and get more cash for the new) and test out the new ones.
"How about we just quit giving them money."
Well, we don't give them money, we give them stuff -- tanks, artillery, ammunition, soon F-16s, etc., all made in the USA. Most of the manufacturers are subject to 'made in the USA' obligations for what they supply to the Pentagon, and it carries over to the stuff the US is sending to Ukraine. Compared to any other option for taking down the Russians in a way that will end any future threat of aggressive action by them, letting the Ukrainians whack them hard is far and away the cheapest and most effective one available. To the extent that the quagmire the Russians now find themselves in discourages the Chinese from military adventures, that's an added bonus. Anyone here doubt that, if a shooting war starts in the South China Sea, the US will inevitably be dragged in?
All just another way of saying that the US investment in the Ukrainians is the cheapest solution to two major problems for the US -- and as it happens, the only practical solution presently on offer. So, for our own sake, don't be a short-sighted cheapskate.
A fraction of western GDP to tie down Russia, and help save Ukraine.
Sign up, boy. Get your ass over there. Save Ukraine.
"Viet Nam was thousands of miles from America, and involved no vital US interests."
It's obvious you've never had a bowl of pho.
tim in vermont (12:32pm):
"France once surrendered to the overwhelming military might of Germany to avoid the destruction of their country, and France still exists. Ukraine had that option."
I guess it's just too bad about the tens of thousands of French Jews who were murdered after France surrendered, and the hundreds of thousands who were never born as a consequence of those murders. A decent human being would have thought of that.
Twist the tail of a nuclear power with unlimited natural resources and see what happens. Ukraine was always functioning at the mercy of Moscow. NATO was always dancing with death by expanding eastward and blowing up gas pipelines. This was entirely obvious from the VERY START of the war. War Pigs control NATO.
I'm not expressing any ideology here, just realpolitik and a memory for the dirty brutality of the US-USSR Cold War. The Eastern Bloc lived under the thumb of the USSR in less-than-ideal circumstances for decades. The world seriously believed nuclear war "WWIII" was possible from 1945 until the 1990s. NATO cannot and should not try to "save" or "reclaim" ethnic Russians who inhabit the historical front door to Russia and who very much want to be part of Russia (i.e., the Crimea region; the main locus of combat).
The Ukrainian comedian president...may live a natural lifespan if under constant guard or if moved to exile. But, don't fly on any planes, don't get on any boats, don't ride on any trains, don't ride in any cars, don't accept any gifts, don't open the door to strangers, and hire a food taster. I suppose he may last as long as Osama Bin Laden if he stays very quiet in a walled compound.
Fuck you Rich you fucking chicken hawk. Yeah, both types.
Rich. You might have missed the part where this war didn't have to happen. In fact there wasn't one until the moron you elected decided to give Russia the green light to invade. You're an idiot. Go play in trffic.
Get your bitch ass over there Dolan. I mean screw everybody bleating for war everywhere. What the fuck is wrong with you people?
The reason Ukraine needs to ‘reshape the narrative’ is that Russia’s very professional propaganda division has had great success fooling a lot of otherwise intelligent people (and a few simpletons) into believing things that are utterly false. Just a few examples from this thread:
1. Is Hamas acquiring American weapons diverted by corrupt Ukrainians? No. Not only is there little or no evidence of any such sales to anyone, but Hamas would be stupid to pay good money for weapons from Ukraine, even if they could, and then try to get them past the Black Sea Fleet blockade, when Russia, Iran, and the Taliban will give them all the weapons they want for free, delivery included.
2. Is Ukraine bribing Biden and other American ‘grifters’? It was doing that under the previous president (Poroshenko), but Ukraine voted the corrupt bastard out of office by an almost 3-1 margin 4 1 / 2 years ago in favor of a non-politician running on a clean-up-corruption platform. As I have pointed out before – to deafening silence from the usual gang of idiots – Zelenskyy has delivered on that promise, arresting and removing the chairman (=Chief Justice?) of the Supreme Court, indicting the mayor of Odessa (3rd-largest city and largest port), both for taking bribes, and lots more. The fact that Hunter Biden left the board of Burisma the same month Zelenskyy came to power should give you a hint.
3. Is there no real war in Ukraine (xxx)? If you look around Twitter, you can easily find all the evidence anyone would need to know that there is quite a brutal war going on, and that the Russians are knowingly committing every war crime known to the Geneva Convention on a regular basis. Thanks to ubiquitous camera-phones, we have more information about this war than any before. We don’t need the morons in the traditional mass media.
4. Is Ukraine losing? Their geographic advance has been slow but steady, but their destruction of Russian units has been much faster. They have also done remarkable things in the last month or two away from the front lines. They destroyed two large ships in Sevastapol, a submarine and a tank landing ship, and also made two of the three drydocks in Sevastapol useless, because both ships are far too damaged to be removed from the drydocks by floating them out. The entire Black Sea Fleet has now moved to Novorossiysk, but they’re not safe even there: Ukraine disabled another tank landing ship there in August. Ukraine also blew up the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastapol, killing dozens of officers including the commander of the fleet (a 3-star admiral) and a couple of generals. Before that, they recaptured some oil platforms west of Crimea with Russian radars on them, and destroyed the Russian radar and missile system on the western tip of Crimea, using Special Forces in small boats.
(cont'd)
Other signs that Russia is losing: since the war began, they’ve shot down 5 of their own fighter jets – Su-34s and Su-35s – and 2 of the 5 have been in the last 2 weeks. They’ve also had a helicopter pilot defect with his aircraft and a cargo of spare parts, and a fighter pilot defect in the UAE, though without his plane, both in the last month or so. And there are hundreds of cell-phone videos on Twitter of Russians complaining about lack of ammunition, swarms of drones, hopeless ‘meat’ assaults, drunken officers, and so on. They’re losing and they know it.
5. Is there room for a peace deal (Dave Begley, 7:24am)? The Ukrainians won’t and shouldn’t give up the millions of citizens Russia is murdering, raping, and torturing in the occupied areas, or the millions more who have been shipped to Russia against their will. (Russian state journalists openly talk about solving their own ‘great replacement’ problem – the much higher birth rates of Chechens and Mongols and the rest – by forcing Ukrainians to turn Russian. They’ve also stolen tens of thousands of children from their parents.)
And the Russians don’t give a damn about Russian-speakers in the Donbas: they are openly aiming to utterly destroy Ukraine as a nation and a culture, and to restore the entire Soviet Union: all 15 ‘republics’. In fact, now state media is talking about restoring the Russian Empire: they want Poland and Finland, too, and Alaska. Yes, they have mentioned Alaska more than once.
Anyone who follows @JuliaDavisNews, @TheKremlinYap, or @francis_scarr on Twitter knows this: they translate Russian TV. The Russians only want a cease-fire in-place so they can rearm and then attack again. That’s what they did in 1995 when they lost the First Chechen War: they signed an agreement, rearmed, broke their agreement and attacked again in 1997, killing hundreds of thousands, including every single Chechen who signed the 1995 agreement, in the Second Chechen War. Ukraine, and the world, don’t need a repeat of that on a larger scale.
6. ‘tim in vermont’ is, as usual, utterly wrong in everything he says about the history and politics and geography of Ukraine. One small example (8:50 am): Ukraine is “less than 200 miles from Moscow”. Has he even looked at a map? The sparsely-inhabited roadless corner of Ukraine closest to Moscow is at least 300 miles from Moscow, and the closest provincial (‘oblast’) capital to Moscow, Sumy, is 654 km (=406 miles) from Moscow by road, and it’s a very direct road. Poor chump is off by a factor of 2:1 on a basic fact.
7. No, ‘tommyseq’, Ukraine is not “concerned” that we may “find out how bad the war is really going”, they’re concerned that so many believe Russian lies about how badly the war is supposedly going, when it’s going tolerably well, and would be damned near over if Biden would get off his ass and deliver the promised F-16s, M-1 tanks, and ATACMS he promised months ago.
Rich said...
The US public and Congress have consistently stayed behind presidents at war ever since the Second World War—Korea, Vietnam … [My emphasis]
“Hey! Hey! LBJ!
How many kids did you kill today?”
No, having lived through the 1960s — and having been drafted — I’d say you’re just a touch off in the US public’s support for Johnson as a war Predident.
If the talking points that the single-male-name accounts are dropping into comment sections all over are any guide, the narrative re-shaping is going to fail, because we're just getting a more hyperbolic rehash of the same old stuff.
I keep reading people who all say--using slightly different words--"we're bleeding the Russian army dry without any loss of American life! We'd be fools to pull the plug now."
Well, setting aside that some people actually care about the thousands and thousands of Ukrainian lives being thrown away to capture zero significant territory, we've blown through 10 years of stockpiled munitions with no capability of replenishing those stocks faster. No way. Not like "It would be very expensive." Much more like "It will be impossible."
Keyboard war-hawks seem to think something along the lines of "Oh, we'll just put the weapon-factories on triple shifts if we need more stuff." But we actually don't have enough trained or trainable workers to do that. The average age of the essential engineers and highly skilled factory workers in that sector is nudging 60 (and many of the most essential are actually in their 70s but still working--though how long that lasts given the terrible management everywhere is a real question).
There are a lot of reasons for this, including about 20 years of internet/computer engineering tech money pulling away talent from less glamorous fields, but we do not have the skilled workers to ramp up production, and no one has any idea how to create enough of them given the disastrous situation in higher ed right now.
The fact is that a huge cohort of students lost 2 years of learning to lockdowns and remote "learning," and many places are STILL doing way too much remote for the students to really learn. And although many fields have just quietly but massively lowered their standards, if you lower your standards in munitions engineering and manufacturing or at the chemical plants that produce the essential feedstock chemicals, you get extremely destructive accidents and failures.
So we may have "bled Russia dry" (though I doubt it, as Putin has just been conscripting off anyone he finds inconvenient and shipping them to the Ukraine war), but Russia has bled US dry of equipment we can't replace quickly, and that creates a very dangerous situation, as it incentivizes enemies to act sooner rather than later.
We can't afford to send any more money to Ukraine, and we REALLY can't afford to keep sending equipment. The war is a stalemate; let it be a stalemate without running Ukrainian soldiers into a meatgrinder and without burning through all the rest of the U.S. military's preparedness.
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