Russia & Ukraine War

[mikeyank]

When Donald Trump was president America was energy independent. Biden has cancelled the Keystone pipeline amongst other things so that Ameica is no longer energy independent and if Donald Trump were still president there is no way Putin would have invaded Ukraine.

I am stunned that so many people on this site actually believe the propaganda about this Ukraine business, the alledged Climate Emergency and the Covid hoax. My only consolation is that the people who believe all this crap are probably vaccinated and boosted and won't be around for much longer!

If you want honest news reporting I sugget this site: https://rumble.com/search/video?q=The Duran . There are many other truth sites on Rumble, Locals and Truth Social.

Wow! It’s hard to decide how to approach this post. While I fully understand that every member of this forum, and not every member of the LGBTQ community is a Democrat or a progressive thinker, but Wow again.

To say, “if Donald Trump were still president there is no way Putin would have invaded Ukraine” and to make reference to, “the propaganda about this Ukraine business” and, “the alledged Climate Emergency and the Covid hoax”.

And finally to say, “My only consolation is that the people who believe all this crap are probably vaccinated and boosted and won't be around for much longer!”, shows just what a sick puppy you are. Again, Wow!!!

 

[kgmets]

Wow! It’s hard to decide how to approach this post. While I fully understand that every member of this forum, and not every member of the LGBTQ community is a Democrat or a progressive thinker, but Wow again.

To say, “if Donald Trump were still president there is no way Putin would have invaded Ukraine” and to make reference to, “the propaganda about this Ukraine business” and, “the alledged Climate Emergency and the Covid hoax”.

And finally to say, “My only consolation is that the people who believe all this crap are probably vaccinated and boosted and won't be around for much longer!”, shows just what a sick puppy you are. Again, Wow!!!

Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the far right's foreign policy favorite, stated that he has first hand knowledge that Trump told Putin, that, if reelected, he would have US withdraw from NATO, so Putin could then walk into and take Ukraine with no significant support from the west. I was chatting with a right wing lady yesterday who gets all of her news from FOX et al, and she was convinced that Biden was senile and utterly ineffectual, which is right wing media's way of ignoring the diplomatic brilliance of Biden's successfully uniting NATO and the west to a degree thought impossible and to the absolute shock of Russia. And the next time you hear a Russophile attacking Ukraine for not fully implementing the ambiguous 2015 cease fire agreement of Minsk, note that he or she will never mention the full explicit unambiguous treaty of 1994 wherein Russia agreed to respect the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine and never attack it if Ukraine agreed to give up its entire nuclear stockpile, which it did. It has reached the point where it is near impossible to have a rational conversation with people who at best ignore and at worst deny the existence of facts that that they do not like. The bottom line is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but everyone is not entitled to make up their own facts! In contrast I find this thread to be most informative. Tampa in particular has expended a lot of time finding and posting some most informative sources.

 

[kgmets]

At this point the war is already appearing to slide away from the two-sided conflict between Russia and Ukraine that Putin believed he could win easily in 3 days. It's quickly morphing into a proxy war between Russia and the West. (One that Putin did not ever expect or bargain for.) There is already evidence that a drawn out war of attrition stands to hurt Russia much sooner and much worse than it does the Ukrainians. The U.S. is already pledging another $33B in aid. Russia does not have a rich uncle or allies to fall back on for billions of dollars in future aid and war materiel to restock its dwindling supplies.

As I've said earlier the Russians have been lying to each other for years about just how much inventory they have in stock for things such as tanks, aircraft, helicopters, ammunition, spare parts, troop transport vehicles, missiles and so on. They have inflated how much they have, which doesn't truly exist. Resupplying their army in Ukraine may not be possible to the extent that they need the supplies. And forgot about adequately resupplying their garrison in Syria any time this year. Putin had better hope that ISIS in Syria doesn't try to do a Taliban-like comeback in the near future. Because few in the world think that Russia would be able to wage an aggressive new conflict again in Syria right now.

While we expect to hear some sensationalistic accounts from Ukrainian sources and some hyped-up numbers in the pro-Ukraine West of how much military hardware Russia has lost so far in Ukraine...and how difficult, time consuming and expensive it will be for Russia to replace it.... For all the reasons I stated earlier, I think some of those possibly inflated numbers (for propaganda purposes) might actually be much closer to correct and in some cases might even turn out to be underestimates. In less than 3 full months of war I think Russia is already losing the war of attrition. Short of a very unlikely decisive victory very soon... Russia will be hurting badly (and soon) in just about every measure.

Interesting news today that Ukraine has destroyed two more of Russia's major battleships, wiped out a Russian command center in eastern Ukraine killing another major general and just missing by hours the new commanding general of all of the Russian Army, whose nickname from his Syria days is the "Butcher of the East!" Also a report over the weekend is that Putin is to have cancer surgery within the next three weeks and has turned over day to day governing authority to his #2 in command, the extremist jerk who talked Putin into this invasion in the first place!

 

[tampa24]

Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the far right's foreign policy favorite, stated that he has first hand knowledge that Trump told Putin, that, if reelected, he would have US withdraw from NATO, so Putin could then walk into and take Ukraine with no significant support from the west. I was chatting with a right wing lady yesterday who gets all of her news from FOX et al, and she was convinced that Biden was senile and utterly ineffectual, which is right wing media's way of ignoring the diplomatic brilliance of Biden's successfully uniting NATO and the west to a degree thought impossible and to the absolute shock of Russia. And the next time you hear a Russophile attacking Ukraine for not fully implementing the ambiguous 2015 cease fire agreement of Minsk, note that he or she will never mention the full explicit unambiguous treaty of 1994 wherein Russia agreed to respect the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine and never attack it if Ukraine agreed to give up its entire nuclear stockpile, which it did. It has reached the point where it is near impossible to have a rational conversation with people who at best ignore and at worst deny the existence of facts that that they do not like. The bottom line is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but everyone is not entitled to make up their own facts! In contrast I find this thread to be most informative. Tampa in particular has expended a lot of time finding and posting some most informative sources.

Thanks KG. At times I don't know if anyone is really following this thread or not. haha

Yes. The Minsk accords that offered a ceasefire after Russia invaded the Donbas in 2014 was little more than a giant steaming turd that the Ukrainians never wanted to take or accept. But the situation on the battlefield was so against the Ukrainians at the time that they were forced to try (or at least pretend to try) to make something useful out of it. The fact that they didn't fully implement some of the most humiliating stipulations should surprise nobody. But then even Russia didn't live up to all of its own stipulations of Minsk either.

So again, to go through the mental gymnastics of rationalizing that the invasion of Ukraine is somehow justified and deserved... Along with the looting, raping, plundering, forced deportations, mass murder of civilians including children, deliberately starving out civilians by cutting off all their food supply, electricity, water, heat in the winter...a scorched earth policy of trying to raze everything to ground so that it will be totally unfit for human habitation, etc... Simply because Ukraine didn't honor all the clauses to the letter of some supposedly "sacred text" of Minsk...is not a defensible moral argument in the context of the history in that region.

Minsk deserves to be relegated to a very minor footnote of history, where it belongs.

 

[br6205]

The only thing that could change the above is the death of the two.

 

[tampa24]

Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the far right's foreign policy favorite, stated that he has first hand knowledge that Trump told Putin, that, if reelected, he would have US withdraw from NATO, so Putin could then walk into and take Ukraine with no significant support from the west.

Unfortunately that part doesn't surprise me.

I've already said before in here that I will always wonder if Trump is actually a paid foreign agent of Russia. (As in on their payroll and actively betraying the U.S. very knowingly and willingly.)

Or if he is just an "asset" of Russia whose loyalty to the U.S. has been bought off previously (or freely given away) in the past.

Or if he is a useful idiot of Putin's who gets played like a tune because he's so clueless. Trump is so arrogant, ignorant and an intellectual lightweight at the same time, that it's hard to say if he can even comprehend how people play on his desperate need for attention, flattery and selfish transactional relationships in order to manipulate him.

As to whether any of the scenarios (or any hybrid variations thereof) of the three is correct...the world may never know.

 

[br6205]

Yees Tampa I may not comments often but I do pay attention & most always agree.

 

[tampa24]

Stalin's ruthlessness and depravity revisited.

Colored highlighting of text is my own.


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Yahoo

Washington Post


Ukraine says Russia is stealing grain, which could worsen food crisis

Claire Parker
Thu, May 5, 2022, 1:45 PM


Ukrainian officials say that Russian forces have taken vast stores of grain from Ukraine and exported it to Russia, exacerbating the risk of shortages and hunger in areas under Russian control.

Farmers in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces reported that the Russians were "stealing their grain en masse," according to a statement released over the weekend by Ukraine's Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food.

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Agriculture minister Mykola Solskyi said on Ukrainian television last week that he had heard a surge of accounts from elevator operators of Russians seizing grain in recent weeks in occupied areas.

"This is outright robbery," he said, warning that the behavior could cause a food crisis.

One of the world's largest grain exporters, Ukraine has seen its grain industry hobbled by Russian attacks and blockades of sea ports that Ukraine relied on to transport food products to countries around the world. Countries in the Middle East and South Asia rely heavily on Ukrainian grain, and the United Nations World Food Program has warned that the war could exacerbate global hunger.

Ukrainian officials say hunger is a growing threat at home, too - and accuse Russia of deliberately seeking to prevent Ukrainians from consuming or selling their agricultural products.

Ukraine had 30 million tons of wheat in storage as of last month. Deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy said Thursday that Ukraine has enough food stocks in the parts of the country it still controls to feed the population there, Reuters reported. But in Russian-occupied territory, it may be a different story, officials warned.

Two months into its invasion, Russia controls swaths of southern Ukraine - a region that helped the country earn its reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. Vysotskiy said on Ukrainian television this week that the Russians had exported about 441,000 tons of grain from four occupied regions: Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk.

Vysotskiy said 1.4 million tons of grain were stored in occupied territory and are needed for daily food needs of Ukrainians who live there.

More than 90 percent of farmland in Luhansk is concentrated in the northern part of the region, which Russian forces have taken over since February, Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor of Luhansk, said on his Telegram channel. The Russians removed or destroyed a quantity of grain in the region that would have met residents' needs for three years.

The Washington Post could not verify the accuracy of the claims. The U.N. World Food Program said it was was unaware of any grain seizures and exports by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine.

The Kremlin denied Ukraine's allegations, according to Reuters.

Reports of Russian attacks on Ukrainian grain facilities have also mounted. Haidai accused Russia of attacking a grain elevator tons of grain in Rubizhne, a city in Luhansk, in April. Nearly 19,000 tons of wheat and about 9,400 tons of sunflower product was destroyed, he said. Earlier this week, the regional governor of Dnipropetrovsk shared a video of a rocket attack which he said destroyed a grain warehouse in the Synelnykove district.

Satellite images provided to The Washington Post by Planet Labs, a public Earth imaging company, taken on April 8 and April 21, show the elevator before and after the attack. In the April 21 image, the majority of the facility appears completely flattened.

The Kremlin has denied targeting civilian infrastructure.

German Agriculture Minister Cem Ozdemir has accused Russia, the world's top wheat exporter, of using the war in Ukraine to gain a competitive advantage on the export market.

"We keep getting reports about targeted Russian attacks on grain silos, fertilizer stores, farming areas and infrastructure," he told RedaktionsNetzwerk, a network of German regional newspapers, on Monday, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently aimed to "eliminate Ukraine as a competitor in the long term."

Ozdemir said Russia was trying to capitalize on growing world hunger.

Speaking to Fox News' Griff Jenkins on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused countries of making backroom deals with Moscow to buy grain "stolen from Ukraine." He did not name the countries.

If confirmed, the alleged grain seizures and attacks targeting grain facilities could fuel allegations of war crimes. International law prohibits pillaging places taken in war and intentionally starving civilians by depriving them of food and basic necessities.

Ukrainian officials allege Russia is trying to cause a famine in Ukraine. Some have drawn parallels to the Holodomor, the famine engineered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that killed about 4 million people in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, mostly farmers and rural residents. While even the most serious of today's allegations hardly compare, the resonance runs deep, amid a conflict that has opened unclosed historical wounds.

Solsky, the agriculture minister, described alleged Russian pillaging of grain in recent weeks as reminiscent of the 1930s.

"The goal is the Holodomor," Haidai, the Luhansk governor, said after the grain elevator bombing in Rubizhne.

Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova, in a Facebook post, repeated the comparison, and called the exportation of grain from occupied areas a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The term invokes a horrific episode of cruelty from Moscow toward the Ukrainian people. During the Holodomor - which means death by hunger - Stalin sought to put down resistance to collectivization by blocking rural Ukrainians from accessing food. Some desperate Ukrainians resorted to cannibalism.

Historians widely describe the famine as deliberate Soviet policy. Raphael Lemkin, an international law expert who coined the term "genocide," called the Holodomor "the classic example of Soviet genocide."

Russia has blockaded Ukraine's Black Sea ports, preventing Ukraine from exporting grain and other agricultural products. Zelensky said Ukraine could lose tens of millions of tons of grain as a result of the blockade, telling Australian news program 60 Minutes that "Russia wants to completely block our country's economy."

Global food prices are already skyrocketing. Countries such as Egypt, Lebanon and Pakistan, which rely heavily on Ukrainian wheat, are likely to be hardest hit by export blockages.

Since the war began, Ukraine has sought other ways to transport wheat out of the country. Vysotskiy, the deputy agriculture minister, said the country had increased grain exports in April through these alternative routes, and that he expected another uptick in May.

But Ukraine can't export nearly as much wheat by train as by sea, and the World Food Program has warned that without functioning ports, the risk of famine around the world is growing.


Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-says-russia-stealing-grain-174503867.html

 

[br6205]

Should anyone be surprised. Those tactics were used in the past.

 

[tampa24]

Some of these POW interviews run rather long. So if you have a short attention span, you might want to skip some of the lengthier ones. They are not for the faint of heart. The content is emotional and can be disturbing. But I share them nonetheless as a lesson of the futility and the heartbreaking waste of war.

Again, for the sake of full disclosure these POW interviews are considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That's why we are not seeing them being aired on CNN, Fox, or other news programs. The Ukrainian captors go out of their way to try to show that they are getting consent before filming and posting these online. But when you have a David and Goliath situation where the largest country on the planet is attacking and invading a tiny country in comparison...and using rape, starvation, genocide, forced deportations, the leveling of civilian buildings on purpose... Some amount of restraint and fair play goes out the window if you are the underdog in the situation.

 

[br6205]

TY Tampa for your dedication to spreading the word

 

[tampa24]

It will be very interesting to see what Putin has in store for tomorrow's Victory Day celebration in Moscow. It's one of the next opportunities he has to really get the world's attention. Does he have a game-changing announcement that will threaten the current international order? Doubtful. But we'll see. We'll find out soon just how worrying his next moves are for the war. Will he hint at new fearsome weapons or even the use of "limited" nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Will he make a formal declaration of war on Ukraine? Will he make a formal call for a mass national mobilization of troops? And if so, will he ask for a few hundred thousand, or up to a million or more? Will he declare martial law? How will he be able to pull off expanding the war if he claims that it's already going so well for Russia?

He will no doubt try to put a ribbon on and declare victory on Russia's few accomplishments so far. The seizure of a southern land bridge linking Crimea to Russia, the nearly complete conquest of Mariupol, making Ukraine an almost landlocked country, etc.

On one gamble that he has already lost though is what he hoped would be the usual nuclear blackmail of the West. He thought he could saber rattle the possible use of nuclear weapons and he would just bend the West over, like he did with his surprise invasion of Crimea in 2014. The U.S. and the West have finally called his nuclear bluff. His threats of the use of his great nuclear arsenal don't result in great fear and brown-nosing from Washington. If anything now, his repeated warnings and boasting of his nuclear weapons appear more and more pathetic, whiney and childish, rather than actually intimidating.

The U.S. has jumped into this proxy war in Ukraine with both feet. Putin's nuclear warnings be damned. Because they know that if Putin gets away with annexing all of Ukraine...then Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic States and possibly even other NATO Eastern European countries like Poland are eventually next. Then we definitely have a highly likely nuclear war.

And worse than that for Putin...nobody from Kiev, to Washington, to Beijing, to Tokyo greatly fears Putin's "Mighty Russian Army". Russia has always relied on the world's fear of it on the international stage. Right now it's not projecting very much of that. And that's a big problem for both Putin and Russia as the country tries to dig itself out of this hole of its own making.

If a new world order emerges from a Putin success at gaining new territory by force, then Taiwan and numerous other border disputes will break out into war all over the globe. Africa for instance would erupt. From top to bottom. One can only imagine what might happen in the Middle East. So the U.S. has a very keen interest in maintaining a global order that respects current borders and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all.

 

[br6205]

We shall see where this ends as often it do not go where the perpetrator intends.

 

[kgmets]

Wow the Ukrainian Army has kicked butt over the weekend in northeast Ukraine the with Russian Army in retreat and even blowing up bridges after they cross them so the Ukrainians will not catch them! Also that implies that the Russian Army has no intention of returning or else they would need those bridges.

 

[br6205]

As my Jeff always said "We live in hope".

 

[tampa24]

Wow the Ukrainian Army has kicked butt over the weekend in northeast Ukraine the with Russian Army in retreat and even blowing up bridges after they cross them so the Ukrainians will not catch them! Also that implies that the Russian Army has no intention of returning or else they would need those bridges.

As my Jeff always said "We live in hope".

Exactly. I hope that's the case that they have given up on taking Kyiv. But we know there will undoubtedly will be some Ukrainian defeats in the weeks and months ahead.

 

[tampa24]

Here's a pet rescue group in Ukraine whose YT channel I was following long before the war. I'm a puppy and dog lover at heart. Unfortunately since the war started their job of rescuing, feeding, treating injuries, disease or neglect...along with finding new forever homes for the dogs is much more complicated.

 

[tampa24]

 

[tampa24]

 

[tampa24]

So today's Victory Day parade in Moscow was a bust. Rather than it being a showstopper of drama and international intrigue, it was muted and more restrained than usual. Putin had no new blistering offensive in Ukraine to warn of or brag about. He didn't declare war. So the country is still in a "Special Military Operation" mode. He didn't declare a grand national mobilization. I suspect that the Russian military just doesn't have lots of extra of the modern military vehicles and weapons they like to show off in the annual parade. Too much of the military's resources are focused on the Ukrainian theater.