What you seem to forget is that people under Russian occupation also have shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and heat… AND they have to deal with the Russian occupiers taking whatever they want, displacing people out of what shelter there is, putting people into “filtration centers” where they are interrogated, sometimes tortured or even murdered, children are separated from parents and send to be adopted by Russians far away.
They will suffer either way.
More like Medieval Age. People lived in Ukraine before there was electrical systems or central heating. I’m not saying it will be a pleasant winter, not at all, but it’s not instant death or impossible to endure.
You’re being rather generous assuming they have access to social media. You need cell service and electricity for that, you know.
I have absolutely no doubt there are a lot of traumatized people in Ukraine right now.
I can’t speak for any particular woman, but if I were a pregnant woman in Ukraine I’d really, really try to opt for breastfeeding. It has its drawbacks, too, but under current conditions it’s a lot more manageable than formula and bottle feeding. How interesting how you assumed the default was formula.
“We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it. It’s all these ‘gatherers’ and ‘sharers,’ I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing and we never see most of the stuff again.”
Hence, the willingness of not only Ukraine but also some neighbors to get pregnant women and the mothers of small children out of the the danger zone and support them.
Unfortunately, too many of the women left behind were given no choice about avoiding pregnancy - the occupiers raped a lot of women, and some of them became pregnant as a result. Pretty sure there is no access to safe abortion due to simply lack of medical care on all levels.
I think too many people don’t consider that part of the equation when going “oh, poor dears, they’re in the cold and dark”. Sure, but if liberated by Ukraine they probably have fewer fears of rape/torture/murder on top of all that.
“1. Putin dies”: This may, just possibly, come to pass in the reasonably near future, if one can believe a report that Putin slipped and fell on stairs earlier this week, and that he is suffering from various serious medical problems. As far as I can tell, the source cited in this Newsweek article is the only (so far unconfirmed) source for the tumble.
Even assuming Putin dies or is otherwise removed from running things, there’s no guarantee that any successor won’t double down on the war, right?
Sadly it seems like most of the people most likely to succeed Putin are if anything actually worse.
On the other hand, most of those people have nowhere near the level of support amongst the people that Putin enjoys. The hypothetical worse successor may experience a much greater degree of pushback against future mobilization, for example.
Which, of course, is one of the reasons Vlad is still with us. Most of his potential assassins get that offing him would be an extremely dangerous move that could very easily backfire and make the situation much worse. We have to hope that if he is soon to demise, it happens in the most bland and unremarkable way imaginable.
Yup, so fast that they finished the negotiations decades ago.
It’s not Putin’s successor that we have to worry about. It’s his successor’s successor’s successor, many times over. Anyone who had any sort of grip on any of the levers of power fell out a window a long time ago, to make sure that they wouldn’t be a successor. Which means that whoever the nominal successor is, they won’t last long before themselves being toppled. Russia will bumble through a parade of incompetents, until eventually finding someone who somehow managed to hide their competence from Putin. And with how efficient Putin was at eliminating competence, that could take a very long time.
Which would be good news for Ukraine, on multiple levels. All it takes is for just one of those successors to blame all of Russia’s troubles on the invasion (which is close to accurate) and call it off, and Ukraine can then join NATO and make it much harder for the next incompetent to re-start the war. And even if none of them do that, a constant churn of incompetent leadership would result in the Russian military working even less effectively than it is now.
The new Russian miltary building should be a tempting target for HIMARS. It’s almost too convenient. Seems odd that a new military base would be easily identified by satellite. Ukraine needs to verify it’s not a trap full of civilians.
That’s what it was always about. They said from the very beginning that they don’t think there is such a thing as a distinct Ukrainian nationality. Even if Russia had walked right in at the start, and not killed a single person, it would have been a genocide–the destruction of a people. The Russian position has always been that Ukrainians are just confused Russians.
Malware is attacking municipal offices and courts in Russia.
Mayors’ offices and courts in Russia are under attack by never-before-seen malware that poses as ransomware but is actually a wiper that permanently destroys data on an infected system, according to security company Kaspersky and the Izvestia news service.
Here’s a very interesting data point to consider: the Kremlin conducted a poll of its citizens on how they feel about the war in Ukraine and over half report they favor peace negotiations now. This is what Meduza has reported:
It’s a given that any poll released by the Russian government is basically a work of fiction. The numbers are whatever Putin wants them to be. So what is being signaled here? Putin is growing truly desperate to end the conflict he started as quickly as possible. The “poll” is an attempt in diplomatic-speak to convey to the West that he’s crying uncle and is prepared to make concessions, just to keep something - anything - enough to declare ‘victory’ before either the Russian economy starts to implode next year, or Russian forces experience a morale collapse.
Many commentators have speculated that Putin has been fed a rose-colored picture throughout this war, but I’m convinced Putin is no fool when it comes to politics and realizes, as do his generals, that his forces are losing and will continue to lose as the war progresses, no matter how many ill equipped and ill-trained soldiers they can throw on the field.
I believe that the war must ultimately end in some sort of diplomatic agreement, but only after one side or the other prevails on the battlefield.
