Dissonance (and others) point out multiple errors in your posts and you just post up more crap. Did you even read post 741? How can you stand being wrong so often? Do you value personal integrity?
Well, this is one thing you’re not wrong about. Ukraine is on the front lines of a larger war, between the authoritarian mindset, and the liberal democracy mindset. Putin, and others like him around the world, are openly dismissive of democracy, and western democracies in particular, because they think we are weak, degenerate, and corrupt. Not unlike what Hitler and Mussolini thought back in the lead-up to WWII.
Russia has been actively trying to undermine democracy all over the world, in order to prove to everyone else that Putin is right about us being weak, degenerate, and corrupt. One of the reasons he started this war is that he really believed Ukraine would fall within days or weeks, and the weak et al. western powers would simply accept that as a fait accompli. And you know, after the example of Crimea, he wasn’t entirely crazy to think that might work.
But he made the same mistake Hitler made. He mistook common sense for weakness. Like any sensible person, the western powers did not want to go to war, because we understand that even a small war that we win is extremely destructive. We really would prefer to avoid a war if possible. But at the same time, if you push too far, at some point we’ll decide the cost of winning a war is less than the cost of losing it.
And then you’re fucked.
Because at the base, Putin’s ideas are crap. We are not weak, we are gentle. We are not degenerate, we are diverse. And while we may be corrupt, the worst of our corruption pales in comparison to what is just normal under an authoritarian regime. Authoritarianism is predicated on corruption. It functions on the sole basis that some in-group has all the power, and everyone else can get bent. Rules only apply in so far as someone in power wants them to apply. And every time we end up in this spot, in an actual war between the sides, authoritarianism has lost almost every time. Fundamentally, it only survives when the cost of uprooting it really is too high.
Putin made it worthwhile to oppose him, and now he’s paying the price.
You are cordially invited to eat all the shit.
Like your buddy Vlad?
Insofar is one word.
In North America, yes. In other places, not so much. (notsomuch).
Welcome to Canada, the land where we get yelled at by Americans when we use British spelling, and get yelled at by Brits when we use American spelling.
Ah, Russia, the land that uses only the best imported ammunition, from North Korea.
That article has a pretty brutal reminder of just what kind of ‘soldiers’ Russia has been using in its futile bid to break into Bakhmut, which has reportedly mostly been conducted by the Wagner group:
One of the officers held a massive sledgehammer, and Olesya was scared that he would hit her husband with it, her mother said. Later, on the way to the station, an officer told Olesya that the hammer was a “hello from Wagner,” the murky mercenary group led by Kremlin-connected business executive Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who sent the private army to fight in Ukraine alongside the Russian military.
The sledgehammer has become an eerie symbol of Wagner after a Telegram channel affiliated with the group released a video that appeared to show the execution of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a 55-year-old murder convict who was released from prison to fight in Ukraine. Nuzhin was killed with a sledgehammer after abandoning the mercenary group.
Yevgeny Nuzhin was one of ~20,000 or more convicts serving long prison terms in Russia recruited extrajudicially from Russian prisons into the Wagner group to serve in Ukraine in exchange for their freedom for serving sentences for serious crimes, in Nuzhin’s case for murder. Such ‘soldiers’ obviously will have severe problems of any positive motivation to not surrender at the first chance, so Nuzhin was made a grotesque example of negative motivation when Wagner released a video of his execution by hitting his skull, taped to a brick wall, with a sledgehammer
On 12 November, a Wagner Group-affiliated Telegram channel released a video titled “The hammer of revenge”[5] showing Nuzhin’s “execution for treachery” using a sledgehammer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of Wagner Group, claimed responsibility for his killing saying that it was “dog’s death for the dog.”
I won’t link the video or a still image of his last moments of life reading a scripted statement; but it’s pretty easy to find it and a translation of his statements and the final word splashed across the screen - “Judged” - by googling’ Yevgeny Nuzhin video’. And as a reminder to our Komrad, the Wagner group are the ones with the Nazi tattoos.
…and the full support of Putin. This is exactly what Putin wants from his soldiers.
Putin claimed that Nazis were controlling Ukraine and he needed to liberate them, so he sent actual Nazis to conquer the country.
It has to be really hard to write for The Onion these days.
Well, you’re heard of the anti-missile missile, haven’t you? Same principle.
Since 2020, I’ve gotten used to real news reading like the Onion or the Babylon Bee. Whoever said “reality is stranger than fiction” was dead-on.
Good news: They did come to an agreement. The war will end when Russia decides to honor that agreement.
I see what you did there.
You’re months out of date. The Russian propaganda line is now that the Ukranians are demons. Homosexual demons.
I am not kidding.
Also, it’s pretty clear now that while the first intentions were to quickly invade, topple the government and put a puppet in place to run Ukraine like a vassal state…
The current plan is to simply bomb and destroy as much of Ukraine as possible, and kill as many Ukrainians as possible. They know they can’t hold any territory, so they are just going to destroy and kill for as long as they can.
That’s all. No real purpose to it, except to cause destruction and death.
Gaalzebub?
Baphometrosexual?
No, Russia absolutely still thinks they can conquer Ukraine.
This is, after all, fairly consistent with the country’s military history of outlasting their opponents. They have won a lot of wars that way. Granted, it hasn’t always worked - they lost World War One - but that’s their plan.