Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

[Sunsilver]

Oh, my goodness...how COULD they?? Quite amused at Russia's apparent outrage...
Note - as the article states this has yet to be independently verified.

Ukraine airstrike hits Russian fuel depot:

https://news.yahoo.com/moscow-accuses-u ... irculation

[RoseMorninStar]

I've heard a couple takes on the helicopter attack on the oil refinery. It COULD have been Ukraine and I guess it is a fair target in war (far better than hospitals, schools, shopping malls, and homes).. a warning that Russia has destroyed their 'home' the same applies to Russia. On the other hand I've heard it also could have been Russia wishing to blame it on Ukraine to further justify their attack and aid in 'enthusiasm' for the war because they have called up a draft.

[River]

Russia's really leaning hard into the whole abusive-ex thing...

Could have been Ukraine striking back. Could have been a planned false flag operation. Could also have been a huge mistake now being dressed up as a false flag.

[RoseMorninStar]

Russia's really leaning hard into the whole abusive-ex thing...

Big time.

[Frelga]

Defense Ministry about Belgorod attack: Ukraine not responsible for catastrophes in Russia.

The ministry's spokesperson said that Ukraine is repelling Russian aggression on its territory, and is not responsible for all “miscalculations" in Russia, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

Via @KyivIndependent, a local newspaper

[Sunsilver]

As Russian troops pull back from Kyiv, they are laying mines. Now that video Frelga posted in Bag End of Ukrainian drivers dodging mines on the road is starting to make more sense! Still...

https://news.yahoo.com/zelenskyy-russia ... 47453.html


Nice bit of irony here - the U.S. is helping to transfer Soviet-made tanks to Ukraine:

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/us-helping-tr ... 00922.html

[N.E. Brigand]

The pictures of atrocities apparently committed by Russian troops in towns from which they have now retreated are horrifying.

[Eldy]

The photos from Bucha are absolutely sickening, and I fear what's going to be found in other areas as they're liberated. This, plus the separation of military-aged men from the women in children forcibly removed from Mariupol, brings up really unpleasant thoughts of Srebrenica. I don't make that comparison likely, and I fervently hope this isn't representative of a larger phenomenon, but the Russian military's track record with this type of abuse of civilians is, to put it lightly, atrocious.

[Frelga]

20220318_103315.jpg (39.04 KiB) Viewed 1716 times

There is no reason to think that what happened in Bucha was an exception rather than the rule. This is the reason why there are no Ukrainian voices calling for surrender or even concessions. They know that it would not save civilian lives.

In WWII, my family lost whole branches. It is from that perspective that I feel strongly that the comparison to Holocaust is entirely justified and reasonable
.

[N.E. Brigand]

Are we sure Tucker Carlson didn't use to post here?



"It might be worth asking ourselves . . . why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every job in my middle class town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?"

Holy @#$%. Warning: disturbing images.

To be fair, I don't know of any evidence that they were eaten.

[Sunsilver]

N.E. Brigand, the easiest way for the Russians to kill those dogs was to shoot them. But I don't see a single drop of blood in the video. This makes me wonder if they were either euthanized by injection or gassed.

It may be possible they were humanely destroyed because there was no one to look after them.
Okay, they could have been poisoned, too...

[N.E. Brigand]

The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti yesterday published a new assessment of the so-called "denazification" of Ukraine which apparently argues that a majority of Ukrainians are Nazis, that any Ukrainian who took up arms against the Russian "special operation" (i.e., invasion) should be eliminated, that Ukraine is a more serious threat than Nazi Germany was, that the Ukrainian population needs to experience the full horror of war in order to fully understand the evils of Ukraine's political leadership, and that this project should last for at least 25 years.

[Eldy]

I try to avoid any Internet Tough Guy chest-beating, but I hope there's enough pressure from this to make Western governments provide any weapons Ukraine asks for. I'm not gonna argue for directly entering the war (which would include a no-fly zone), but anything up to that should be on the table. Russia has been doing this shit for too long. It's not morally worse for this to happen in Europe* than anywhere else, but there's no excuse not to act when it's in NATO's back yard.


*Chechnya is in Europe, too, but the Caucasus region is far enough from Western Europe that it's apparently easy for people to forget that from this distance.

[N.E. Brigand]

I'm seeing person-on-the-street interviews from Moscow in which Russians tell TV reporters that Ukraine should be wiped off the map, that it's "just a chunk of land that Lenin once gave away," and much the same could be said about the Baltic states and Poland, that "we will take it for ourselves," and that this is a return to the proper ordering of things. Other comments, less extreme, indicated that the speakers believe Russia's biggest challenge will be rebuilding Ukraine afterwards and taking care of its remaining population after they've been freed from their supposed Nazi leadership and have a "calm and stable" government.

(And yes, it does occur to me that just a few years ago the then-President of the United States was referring to certain Caribbean and African nations as "&*^%hole countries," and also that many Americans described the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms not dissimilar to the less extreme Russian commentators mentioned above. Some people are farther along the road to hell than others.)

[Frelga]

Bucha is what Ukrainians expected from the start.

Olexander Scherba, formerly Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, makes a very important point here.

#Russia knows: most people in the West believe “truth is somewhere in the middle”. So, to cover up & confuse, they need to lie big. The bigger the lie - the further is “the middle” from truth.

Thats’s what they’re doing now about #BuchaMassacre. Lying big.

#StandWithUkraine

It's not morally worse for this to happen in Europe* than anywhere else, but there's no excuse not to act when it's in NATO's back yard.

It's not just not worse, it's the logical consequence of the West doing nothing about Syria and Chechnya in the hopes that making putin richer will magically make him nicer.

Russian army must be ground into dust and ashes in Ukraine, or Europe will see ww3 at home, unfolding out of precisely the thinking that caused ww2.

[N.E. Brigand]

Incredible work by the New York Times proving that the Russian government is lying when it claims images of the dead bodies in Bucha are fake:

(Warning: graphic images, although far from the worst that have been shared over the past week.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

For Rose:

Code: Select all

https://www.facebook.com/watch?v=344579774395587

[N.E. Brigand]

"I wonder what 'bitte bitte' means."



As I recall, in one of his letters, Tolkien talks about war crimes committed by the aggrieved party in an unprovoked war. And I think somewhere else he discussed the expected treatment by the good peoples of captured orc prisoners.

[RoseMorninStar]

War is awful. Especially in cases such as this- to feed the ego of one man, as it too often is.

[Sunsilver]

"I wonder what 'bitte bitte' means."

?? Someone is really asking that? It means 'please please' in German. I wasn't able to watch the video, as the NYT has a paywall. But it sounds horrible...