He has at least two children from a previous marriage and perhaps another four with another woman. Whether their safety means anything to him, I don’t know.
Well, seeing as how I don’t think those relationships had love on either side, I can’t see him caring about the byproducts. Those women should have been using birth control, it wasn’t his fault.
As I also can’t imagine any one refusing that man’s mating call, I wonder if untreated syphilis is the issue.
Despite all the stories I’m hearing of dogged Ukrainian resistance and slow-going for the Russians, it seems like the Russians are advancing, however slowly. Is time really on the Ukrainians’ side or will Russia win in three, six or twelve months if they can just keep slogging at the current rate?
The question is, can Russia keep going as they have, if it remains a slow, bloody slog? Can they put up with continued losses of troops and equipment (and the loss of morale which may already be underway)? And, just how much of a shambles will their economy be in three or six months?
Also, it’ll become increasingly likely that a protracted war will lead Putin to go with even more brutal tactics against Ukraine’s civilians.
Why? Just because Putin seems like an evil man? . His first wife was no one of any great importance when he met her, so there was no particular advantage to their marriage. Don’t make the mistake of thinking reprehensible people never fall in love or even assuming that Putin is necessarily an out and out sociopath. He might be. On the other hand he might be rather more complex in his motivations.
I mean he may truly not give a shit about his family. But I wouldn’t leap to any conclusions. We really don’t know what he thinks on that score.
One thing people forget about “false flag” attacks is that, at some point, they rely on the target of the attack wanting to get into a war, or at least, being willing to get into a war. If the target would really rather avoid the war, they always have the option of deciding the attack wasn’t all that bad, and letting bygone be bygones.
And Belarus, as a whole, certainly seems to be at that point. They’ve seen what this war has done to Russia, militarily and economically, and they appear to want no part of it. It’s going to take a lot to change that.
I’ve seen her pics, she was a hotty back in the day. The only great advantage she had could have just been great tits, Putin didn’t need anything else. Plus, he divorced her. How much love does a divorce show? How much love does having a mistress while married show?
I dunno. I’m just one very unimportant person, how much does my opinion really matter anyhow?
That, or it’s a pantomime show for Putin’s benefit. We really don’t know what’s being said in confidence between the governments of the US and China, so it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. I could see a situation where China has said, “Hey, US, Putin is really putting pressure on us to Do Something, but we really don’t want to, but at the same time, we want to keep our lines of communication to him open, in hopes that we can de-escalate this whole mess, so could you guys do a bit of public dick-wagging, so we have an excuse for dragging our feet?”
I think the US would probably go along with such a plan, at least for a while, in hopes that China could pull off a diplomatic solution to this mess.
They will just destroy entire cities and murder/kidnap civilians. There is no end game for Russia now except for destruction.
Based off of the pace we’re seeing, the only things that will save Ukraine are either 1) a massive collapse in Russian morale, or 2) direct American/NATO intervention in the war or 3) the US and NATO stepping its deliveries of arms, fuel, food, and other supplies to Ukraine way more urgently than the current rate.
1# may happen. 2# and 3# don’t look likely.
I would say that it is now a war of attrition. Russia has a much larger base of everything, but they are also losing pretty much everything at a faster rate. I think the question now is whether the Russian military will be destroyed as a fighting force before the country of Ukraine is pounded into rubble.
If Ukraine is prepared to transition to an insurgency, the only way the killing stops is if the Russians leave. There won’t be a single entity to surrender to the Russians. The Russians can give up and leave on the orders of one man (not necessarily Putin).
A Psychopath would kill his family on the way out.
I’ve said it before, but I’m an advocate of a more aggressive response to this catastrophe. Putin has bluffed before about using nuclear weapons (even more explicitly than this time, in fact) and he’s likely bluffing again, and would at any rate not likely respond to something like the enforcement of a no-fly zone with a nuclear attack on the whole of the western world. No one is suggesting an outright attack on Russia itself. And, as unhinged as Putin might be, history has shown that it’s very unlikely that nuclear first-strike orders would be obeyed absent a direct attack on Russia. Direct confrontations between nuclear powers have happened before.
Ukraine’s getting its air defense beefed up:
S-300 surface-to-air missile system.
I mentioned this earlier, in my post where I also mentioned rumors that Mariupol had fallen. I was glad to here the city hadn’t (so far) fallen, I had hoped the forcible deportation rumors were also untrue.
“Hostages” implies bargaining or ransom/release later. I would not assume that. Putin seems to want to punish the Ukrainians for not submitting. I would not be surprised if those people are taken to remote areas and essentially kept as prisoners for the rest of their lives. And that’s one of the more pleasant scenarios I can imagine.
Horribly, if this is true, I suspect that they’ll never be seen again. And it’s awful (in addition to everything else visited upon Ukraine) to imagine being one of those prisoners and their loved ones.
Highly likely, but can you bet the fate of the world on that?
Another Russian senior officer is killed.
A wise man once said the Russians love their children too. The problem isn’t that they don’t love their own children, it’s that they (Putin and the people he puts in charge) don’t care about anyone else’s.