Most liked posts in thread: World war 3....

We mere plebs live in a world where I'd like to think we value the life of others. To people like Putin, Bush and Blair and the like we are expendable nobodies in their pursuit of fame power and wealth.
Remember, primarily war is fought by young men sent to to die by rich folk not wanting to do the dirty work for their blood stained wealth. This conflict just adds more of those young men's grave stones to the thousands already in existence.
Life eh?

 

A "democratic referendum" Good grief!

Open voting in the streets, with no privacy. Polling officials knocking door to door with armed soldiers behind them. Vast numbers of the relevant electorates denied a vote because they've already fled Russian bombardment.

That's as much of a democratic referendum as Liz Truss is a Communist.

I'm really struggling to believe that you actually believe what you have written.

 

Slightly off topic, did anyone watch the fund raising concert for Ukraine last night? I know the intentions are right and that people need financial help but am I the only one feeling a bit uneasy with this? My rational being that other fund raising schemes of this size tend to be for things like natural disasters areas of poverty. Russia should be made to pay for the damage and bloodshed caused with this illegal invasion, as it should with the rebuilding of Ukraines infrastructure. Hope the contracts to rebuild the country aren't given out like the PPE contracts were by Johnson, the buildings would never get built.

 

Russia invaded Ukraine, thus declaring war, not sure why you constantly struggle to believe that fact

 

What the bloody hell are your information sources trevor? The only reason Russia invaded Ukraine is because they can, because Ukraine is NOT already in NATO. Nukes can be fired from hundreds or even thousands of miles away, or from the sea or from the air. Membership of NATO is to guarantee military support if any square inch of its territory is attacked, not necessarily to install nuclear weapons on a country's territory.

This is why Sweden and Finland are now considering applying for membership of NATO. By your logic, does this mean that Sweden and Finland are now deserving of an invasion by Russia? Moldova and Georgia are fair game?

Russia wants to own Ukraine and re-constitute some vestige of the old USSR. Claims of de-nazification are ridiculous. Nazification started with some mad dictator invading an eastern European country to expand his empire over 80 years ago..

 

As have other Western news organisations, to go with independent Russian news organisations shutting down. Seeing as telling the truth -- it's an invasion followed by a war, Russian casualties are mounting, etc. -- can get you imprisoned for up to 15 years, it's no wonder these organisations are halting operations. The local reporters and staff need to be protected.

It's a very old script Russia's following in all their behaviour, from manufacturing pretexts for invasions, to aggrandisement of their successes, to denigration of their opponents, to lying just about every time they open their mouths, to calling their opponents Nazis, to presenting false narratives to their own people. We've seen it all before, from the 1920s onwards.

RCB

 

Look at the complete bollocks that we were told to justify those excursions into the Middle East. "Liberation not invasion", "we'd be welcomes with open arms", "WMD's deployed in 45 minutes" or whatever it was.

It's almost a carbon copy of what the Russians are being told at the moment - except even Vlad hasn't been mental enough to make up the WMD stuff.

I have no doubt that the Russian propaganda machine is in full flow but lets not be quite so gullible to believe it's only the Russians that get lied to.

 

can not believe you are still trying to blame Ukraine for wanting to join NATO. Surely the attacks over the years including Crimea etc are the reason Ukraine want to join NATO

 

What a senseless waste of life (on both sides) , ruin of people’s lives and destruction. A story as old as time where war is concerned. It’s absolute BS them saying they’ve reached their objective. Clearly bit off more than they can chew.

 

Sorry but, whatever he may have said, the idea that Russia/Putin would have accepted neutrality before the war started is naive in the extreme. Zelensky wanted Ukraine to join NATO for defensive purposes because he knew full well that Putin has never accepted Ukrainian independence from Russia. Putin has been itching to bring it fully back into the fold since his puppet leader was booted out by the Ukrainian electorate. Putin simply does not accept that Ukraine is a sovereign country - he regards it as a region of Russia - 'the Ukraine' rather than 'Ukraine'. His views on this are well known and have been repeated by him many times.

This view that Ukraine is not a sovereign independent country is a widely held viewpoint in Russia that has a long history. Two days ago the BBC Russian editor reported this:

'On the eve of the talks, I watched Russian state TV's flagship weekly news show - it's a useful barometer of what the Kremlin is thinking. The presenter quoted at length a Russian philosopher and theologian from 90 years ago.
"Russia cannot and must not lose Ukraine... it must be part of Russia, even against Ukraine's will... if Ukraine wants to fight with Russia, let it. But whatever price Russia pays for such a war, it will fight to the victorious end." '

This is clearly not the view of a country/regime/leader that is satisfied with Ukranian neutrality.

It is totally understandable that Zelensky wanted to join NATO for protection, knowing that Putin - having already illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas - was biding his time to invade and subjugate the rest of Ukraine. Any independent country in the position of being bordered by a military superpower with obvious designs on its territory would have sought protection from a large neighbouring defensive alliance.

As for your repeated assertion of Zelensky 'hiding his army in civilian buildings' - where do expect him to station them - out in the open fields? Did you expect them to go charging into open battle where they can be easily pinpointed and blown to smithereens by the far superior Russian air and artillery power? A smaller army defending its territory against a much larger, more powerful invading force has to use whatever cover it can get to even up the odds. If Russia didn't want to get bogged down in a guerrilla war then it shouldn't have invaded in the first place.

It's perfectly clear that Russian bombardment of Ukrainian urban areas has gone far beyond the targeting of hiding Ukrainian soldiers. They are obliterating entire towns and neighbourhoods. They are employing the same scorched earth tactics they used in Syria - destroying entire settlements, large and small, to try to break the Ukrainian population's will to resist. It is estimated that 5,000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol alone. This is not targeted attacks on Ukrainian troops - it is systematic genocide.

BBC News - Ukraine War: Putin demands Mariupol surrender to end shelling
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60926470

Putin thought his army was going to waltz into Ukraine, occupy major cities and be either welcomed as liberators or met with surrender. His goal was always to restore Ukraine to a Russian province. He badly miscalculated so, faced with his army in disarray and retreat, he has resorted to flattening whatever he can and bombing the population into submission.

 

"Special military operation" - it's not a special military operation, it's a full scale invasion of a sovereign independent country FFS. Using Putin's own weasel words does you no favours.

"Killing his own people". You mean the separatists Putin emboldened by his illegal annexation of Crimea, rigged referenda etc. There has been fighting in Donbas since 2014 since Putin encouraged Russian separatists to break away. But he has used lies about genocide - fact checked and dismissed for lack of evidence many times - as an excuse to pursue his dreams of recreating the lost Soviet empire. He simply cannot accept that the former satellite Soviet states are independent countries that have no wish to 'return to the fold". He denies the reality of Ukraine as a separate country, believing it to be simply a region of Russia. Ukraine wants to be a modern western European nation and Putin can't accept that - but it isn't his choice to make, it's Ukraine's.

"Brought on themselves". No they didn't. That viewpoint only works if you accept Putin's logic that Ukraine has no right to choose its own destiny, its own political system and its own alliances. Ukraine has not threatened to invade Russia, has it? The only reason it wants to join NATO is because it is constantly under threat from its belligerent larger neighbour. If Russia hadn't annexed Crimea and made its desire to return Ukraine to the Russian 'motherland' perfectly obvious there would have been no need for Ukraine to seek the protection of NATO

Your crowing about Putin being one step ahead marks you out as a Putin apologist. Yes of course the west is restricting pro- Russian views. I'm not an idiot, I know that full well. But, restricted or not, nothing alters the simple fact that Russia has invaded another country in an attempt to deny the democratic choice of that country to become a western democracy. Russia also had the choice to take that path after the fall of the Soviet Union. Had it done so there would no longer be a need for NATO. But it didn't. It retreated into its centuries-old insular, despotic ways and missed it's opportunity to join the modern world. Putin is a nostalgist for a lost Russian empire and his obsession with recreating it is what has caused this unnecessary warfare.

I agree that there is a degree of hypocrisy in the west, which has plenty of blood on its hands. But Putin cannot be allowed to get away with this invasion. If he does then where next? The Baltic States? Poland? Czech Republic? It's clear that he has never accepted their independence and would get them back if given a chance.

There is a difference between Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria etc and what is happening in Ukraine. Regardless of the rights or (mostly) wrongs of those campaigns they did not primarily set out to slaughter large numbers of the civilian populations. There were undoubtedly far too many civilian deaths but they were not the primary purpose. By contrast, what Putin is now doing is the systematic wide scale destruction of civilian areas with no regard whatsoever for the scale of civilian deaths. Just as he did in Aleppo, it is a deliberate scorched earth policy designed to kill indiscriminately and terrorise the civilian population of Ukraine into surrender. If you can't understand the distinction between the two then I can't help you. Of course there is media bias but the sheer scale of destruction and civilian deaths goes far beyond anything that can be explained away by bias or Ukranian subterfuge. Nothing that Ukraine has done or not done can justify the destruction and war crimes that we are seeing

I'm still keen to learn which of Putin's demands you believe to be reasonable and which sources of information can give a more nuanced view of the situation. I'm happy to give the Russian viewpoint a fair airing as long as it's not simply a reiteration of the belief that Ukraine really belongs to Russia and that belief alone justifies the invasion.

 

The thing is there's an element of truth in there about the control of information - which is a concern to me.

However when you take that stance and then jump straight into the depths of Russian propaganda is makes the point worthless. You can't warn of the dangers of one sided misinformation on one side and then simply parrot the one sided information that is coming from the other.

And you make a fair point about the operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan too. I wish the politicians involved in starting those conflicts had been seen in the Hauge at some point. But that is where you tie yourself in nots again - you can't condemn those actions but say that Russia is well within their rights to cross into Ukraine and annex part of their legal territory. Now that's double standards!

 

I agree it’s not nice that countries have to sit on the sidelines, but all we can do is offer support for refugees, put sanctions on Russia and demand peace at this stage. If he didn’t have nuclear weapons it would be a different story but you’re literally risking known civilisation of you get involved with military action.

That said I do feel there’s a lot of double standards from many in the west, where was the outcry for sanctions and saying let every refugee in when Israel attacked Palestine or with the Syrian refugee crisis?

 

I see the “do your own research” lads have been hard at work again.

 

The Liberty Bacon Beacon (TLB) is a fringe online news source that promotes vaccine hysteria,[1][2] chemtrail conspiracy theories,[1][3] the FEMA concentration camps conspiracy theory,[4] hysterical GMO woo,[5] the international Jewish conspiracy[6] and other far-right survivalist bullshit. Unsurprisingly, they embrace and promote all the wacky conspiracy theories associated with the worst of Trumpism. It has the Russian red star as a logo.

Infobrics is Russian. United States intelligence reports have identified two Russians, Denis V. Tyurin and Aleksandr G. Starunskiy, with ties to the G.R.U. and who make sure the messaging and disinformation drafted by the intelligence officials are pushed by InfoRos and on InfoBrics.org and OneWorld.Press.

trevor is a victim of disinformation.

 

Those people protesting in Russia are extremely brave. If arrested they risk a 15 year prison sentence. Kudos to them.

 

Yes essentially, I'd like to make clear that I don't think we are the unequivocal good guys in this. Again, I think Ukraine joining NATO is a needless provocation of Russia, however it isn't for Russia to dictate to another sovereign country how to run it's foreign policy.

 

There's always two sides to propaganda, we never get the truth because there is no truth. There is clearly more behind this war than just an apparent madman dictator. I certainly don't agree with what Putin has done but then I vehemently disagreed with the conflicts we as a nation took part in on the basis of 'liberation.'