Quoted in "The Russian guide to Trump’s Cabinet picks/Who’s good for Russia and who’s going to be a problem among Trump’s choices according to Russian commentators" (WaPo)(free-access link).
In other Ukraine news: "Biden admin urges Ukraine to lower draft age to conscript 18-year-olds/Ukraine already lowered draft age to 25 in April" (Fox News)(it "already" went all the way down... to 25).
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39 comments:
"Ukrainian authorities report ..." Are these the same as "Gaza health officials report ..."
Our draft age during the Vietnam War was 18 and the US hadn’t been invaded.
As long as we're on the subject it should be said that the people who dodged that draft are now running our country.
How'd that work out for us?
I'm kinda shocked reading here (and in other places) that Ukraine hasn't yet been drafting the young men. For a year I've seen images and videos of them taking older and middle aged guys off the streets of cities because they had ground through so much of their male population already. I had assumed they had started with their young men.
Interesting, but not surprising, that WaPo is viewing Trump's cabinet selections through the eyes of who's on Russia's side and who is not. Many on the left still thinks Trump works for Russia/Putin.
Whereas, for the last 4 years so many Americans have been asking who in the Biden administration, including Joe and Kamala, are actually good for America? And the answer came on Nov. 5.
When you look at the population pyramid for Ukraine 2023, it's pretty easy to understand why they don't want decrease the 18-24 yo group size. It's already tiny. If they could they would draft the young ones. But there's not very many of them.
It was under Obama (D) that the then president of Ukraine was toppled, Russia invaded (and still occupies) parts of Luhansk and Donetz provinces) and annexed Crimea. Action from Obama - crickets. It was under Biden (D) that Russia invaded Ukraine and occupies still more land. Military-industrial complex (aka deepstate) makes lots of money. Opportunity for graft, Ukraine continues to bleed. Under Trump (R) 1, peace. Who are Putin's tools and enablers, enriching themselves while Ukraine bleeds?
So wtf did cabbage head expect after helping Ukraine target Russia with our advanced longer range missiles? The most reckless, corrupt administration in my lifetime literally attempting to SABOTAGE the incoming US government. From escalating the Russia/ukraine conflict ( then running ), to literally planning to handicap the incoming administration militarily, legislatively and budgeting. And being open about it. Literally seditious, I hope Trump prosecutes them and fires all of the heads of the military. Then uses Viveks odd birthday as the people to fire on day one, then repeat. They no longer serve this country.
That's nice to see you people so happy that Putin is bombing civilian targets in Ukraine with impunity now that Trump is on his way in
Regardless of who did what to whom first and who is on the right side of this war, the continued targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by Russia is literally barbaric and the plain definition of "war crimes" no less punishable than the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Thousands of lives, massive property damage, and billions of money - just to hide Joe Biden's grift.
Biden seems very intent on killing Ukrainians. Was Kornpop from Kyiv? Or was it Kharkiv?
Zelensky's 2013 New Year's Special on Russian state television is available on YouTube. Russia loved him then. I suggest Ukraine show it again this New Year's and beam it into Russia. A nice memory of auld lang syne.
Yeah, how terrible to bomb another country and deprive them of electricity and cause hardship. Y'know like Israel is doing to Gaza and Lebanon, and the USA did to Serbia, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. We blockaded medicines from Iraq for almost 10 years and caused the deaths of thousands of civilians. Albright's response was "Tough cheese".
As we give Israel cluster bombs to commit agression and war crimes in Gaza, and send Zelenskyyyyy landmines and artillery to kill people in Ukraine, let us 'muricans posture and pretend to be moral. LOL!
I'm hoping Trump will end this bloody unneccessary war. You gotta wonder about the average Ukrainian soldier. How stupid to die now, since the war is lost, and the whole thing is just a struggle over a few oblasts.
If Ukraine has demographics similar to Russia it may not make more than a symbolic difference what the draft age is.
maybe the war is part of strategy to reduce future healthcare expenditures?
There are many unarguably true things that we systematically ignore. One of them is enormous extent to which nation states claim a right to control and kill human beings who've done nothing worse than find themselves in the way of some nation's harebrained sense of its destiny
was Afghanistan a trial run to leave arms and munitions behind in
Putin claims that they are trying to get Zelensky to make this very unpopular move in order to stick him with the blame, and then get rid of him. Zelensky is acting as if he believes that that is true.
You know that Ukraine is using video guided drones to attack city buses in the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine? That Kiev has been shelling Russian speaking cities for over a decade? That Putin's "war crime" idictment consists of removing 17,000 orphans from this zone being shelled by Kiev?
I don't usually get into the "war crimes" argument, but compared to how we bombed Serbia, Iraq, Libya, etc, Russia has been treating Ukraine with kid gloves. The main thrust of Ukrainian propaganda is to yell the loudest about the other side doing the stuff that they are doing themselves. They had a plan to ethnically cleans the areas of the territory of Ukraine that have been Russian speaking for longer than Alaska or California have been English speaking.
You mean the US's sense that its "destiny" is manifest, and that it includes the destruction of Russia, and splitting it up into smaller parts where we can pillage it for its resources.
It's all spelled out in the book written by Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbegniev Brzezinski, "The Grand Chessboard." You should read it, it has all played out just the way he wrote it, except that he thought that Russia and China were natural enemies, and would never ally with each other.
This is rich, coming from Joe Biden, who kiboshed a peace deal that was available that would have left Ukraine intact, well, three of them actually. But alas, we wanted that naval base in Sevastopol to belong to NATO, so, too bad, so sad Ukrainians.
Why they thought that it was more important to wipe out Russian culture and join a military bloc hostile to their huge neighbor, basically like Canada going into an alliance with Russia and China, was more important than peace and working towards prosperity, well, who can say. Watch the documentary "Ukraine on Fire" though, for video evidence of the ultra nationalists in Ukraine carefully training children to hate.
How do you say agitprop in Esperanto?
I wonder how many wars have been waged to help cover-up a wayward leader’s son’s graft.
Likely many.
If the US hadn't been invaded, why was the Thirteenth Amendment being systematically violated?
Brzizenski, like far too many foreign policy advisors, never understood the United States. He had insights mainly about Eastern Europe and massive blind spots about China, but in the end, the effective commie fighter knew too little about America and fell for Obama just like all the rest of the slobbering idiots.
If he couldn’t figure out Obama was groomed by diehard communists , maybe it’s because he also could never understand that he was also groomed by even more diehard Maoists.
It's demographic suicide which reveals the malice of a foreign minority ruling over Ukraine. Eastern European countries trying to mobilize that generation, including Russia if it happened there, would be exposing themselves as failed states. The fact American pawns of those foreigners encourage such a draft reveals the deeper, ultimately Satanic, motives behind that proposal.
The more people focus strictly on Ukrainian issues, the less sense any of this makes. Does Lindsay Graham actually believe Ukraine controls strategic resources worth a gorillion dollars? Maybe, but men like him don't actually give the deep state marching orders. Does Alex Vindman and the rest of the foreigner cabal have a deep-seated hatred for the country that exiled them? Getting warmer, but not quite.
Put simply, there is a non-NATO ally who realizes that Russian arms sales are an existential threat, and will only become more so with time. That "ally" is more than capable of burning the entire West to the ground to save a few thousand of its own people, at which point its "allegiance" will transfer away.
You seem to forget that it was your Democrat vote that started this.
No. To increase it. How many politically connected NGOs are making the graft for both partys.
My understanding is, the Ukrainians have resisted drafting 18-24 year old men because their birth rate is already very low. If they kill off that generation, there may be no Ukraine in 30 years.
Jaq. I chose the terminology "nation states" because I wanted to apply the comment broadly to "nation states". You seem to want it to only apply to the US and its allies. Why?
Older men fighting makes more sense. They’ve already had kids. Demographically and economically it makes more sense to have middle aged and old people fight the wars.
That's nice to see you people so happy that Putin is bombing civilian targets in Ukraine with impunity now that Trump is on his way in.
Maybe you could share with the rest of the class which administration occupies the White House right now.
Perhaps, but not -physically-. When reflexes, stamina, and physical strength matter, experience would have to be amazing to make up for that. And the vast majority of people in the AFU are NOT amazing army veterans. The grinder is an increasingly psychopathic machine, and anyone telling you how grateful Ukrainians are to be pushed into it has a truly evil agenda.
1. The Ukraine War has proved that Russia is a paper tiger. It's NOT the old USSR - which rolled over the Germans and was a threat to roll over NATO.
2. I laugh at commenters who treat the Ukrainian leadership as a joke -- remember what Hitler said about Churchill?
3. The fact is, "Russia" compared to "the Soviet Union" is a paper tiger.
4. NATO serves a real purpose. The West may -- no, will -- allow appropriate "border adjustments" in Eastern Europe, but the states of eastern Europe that want to remain free can remain free.
What kind of 'escalation' is it when we grudgingly allow Ukraine to fire a few dozen missiles at military targets after Russia has fired 4,000+ missiles the other way, the vast majority at civilian targets? And the Russian ones are at least as large and long-range on the average. Taking one tiny step towards evenining things up is not 'escalation' in any rational sense of the word.
We of course know nothing of the sort. What Jaq writes is the usual Putinite propaganda lies. Russia hit a Ukrainian city bus just a few days ago. Has Ukraine ever done that, or do Russians just take the video of their own warcrimes, relabel it, and blame Ukraine for what they did themselves? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
As for "shelling Russian speaking cities for over a decade", that is another filthy lie. Has 'Jaq' never seen any of the many Twitter pictures labeled "Donbas [city x] after ten years of Ukrainian shelling" (brightly lit metropolis with Christmas lights) and "Donbas [city x] six months after Russian liberation" (piles of rubble with not a single human being left alive)? Again, the truth is very easy to find.
Does he not know that many of the "17,000 orphans" (actually a lot more) 'rescued' by Putin were not in fact orphans, but were stolen from their Ukrainian parents and told falsely that their parents were dead or didn't want them?
The idea that "Russia has been treating Ukraine with kid gloves" is stupidly and disgustingly false. They murder Ukrainian prisoners every week, and post it on social media as something they're proud of. They train their drone operators by hunting civilians - they call it "going on safari": they use drones to murder civilians walking down the street in Kherson city, or just driving down the road. Again, they boast about it on social media. I've asked before if Jaq can name any war-crime the Russians are not committing in Ukraine, and he's never even tried.
The quotation from which Ann begins is disgusting. We know that Zelenskyy refused a ride out of Kyiv when the full-scale invasion began. We know that he frequently visits the front, meeting troops in bunkers 2-3 miles from the front lines.
Putin, on the other hand, rarely meets anyone in his office without putting them at the far end of a 30-foot-long table. He has multiple 'doubles', and doesn't even bother to disguise it: he once made public appearances in three separate places simultaneously. He goes whole weeks without appearing in public. When he does appear, you can see that he's trying very hard not to allow anyone to see his hands shaking or his leg twitching. He's obviously terrified.
In short, Zelenskyy is a brave man, Putin a gutless coward as well a war-criminal and general all-around swine.
Maybe it's because there is no way that the US and the UK will be able drafting 18 year old boys for WWIII if Ukraine won't even do it.
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