Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Americans Better Wake Up and Realize the Russians Are genuinely Pissed Off

6 October 2022 by Larry Johnson 324 Comments

Former CIA and security consultant Larry Johnson must be a Putin puppet. As are the 324 commentors (so far)

Quote:
What a difference a decade makes. There was a time when the United States would talk to Russia with at least the pretense of respect. Remember this exchange between then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama?

That was then. Mr. Medvedev is singing quite a different tune now. He made this public statement yesterday:

It is useless and unnecessary to appeal to the prudence of our enemies in the West, the enemies must be forced to ask for mercy in the lost economic battle and end it with their complete and unconditional surrender
https://t.me/intelslava/38460

I do not believe that Dimitry Medvedev was drunk or insane when he said this. I believe he is serious and reflects a view that is widely shared among the Russian leadership. The last seven months has been an eye opener for Medvedev and his colleagues in terms of discovering that the Americans and Europe see Russia as a piece of meat to be carved up and consumed. There is no solution based on compromise or negotiation with the west. Medvedev laid it out starkly and concisely–“complete and unconditional surrender.”

I have seen zero media coverage of this. That is alarming. The American people need to understand that Russia ain’t playing and is not going to roll over and submit like a beaten dog just because the United States insists it will continue to funnel arms and money to Ukraine.

Put yourself in the shoes of the Russian leaders and people. Here is what they have seen over the last 8 years since the democratically elected President of Ukraine was ousted by a western backed coup:

* While professing a deep commitment to democracy, America and Europe ignored the voters of Ukraine and helped orchestrate the unlawful removal of President Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych on the 22 of February 2014.

* In the aftermath of that coup, the newly installed Ukrainian government embarked on a war against Russian speaking Ukrainians. Ukraine wantonly killed civilians and the west remained silent.

* Despite repeated warnings from Russia that it would not tolerate western efforts to bring Ukraine into NATO, the United States and Europe conducted annual military exercises with Ukraine and provided military training and assistance.

* Russia’s attempt to negotiate in December 2021 with the United States over the status of Ukraine was rebuffed.

* In response to Russia’s Special Military Operation, the United States and Europe imposed “draconian” sanctions and embarked on a full scale attempt to punish not just the political leaders of Russia, but all Russians, including denouncing Russia’s rich cultural heritage.

* Russia’s effort to negotiate a peace with Ukraine was shutdown by the U.K.’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

* The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and leading U.S. officials are calling for “decolonizing Russia”–i.e., breaking up Russia into geographic regions.

* Russia’s Nordstream gas pipelines were sabotaged.

Now there is something more ominous. Ukraine and Poland are rattling nuclear sabers. Let us start with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called for the international community to take “preventive action” to deter the potential use of nuclear weapons by Russia in the ongoing war in Ukraine by attacking Russia:

In an address to the Lowy Institute, a nonpartisan international policy think tank in Australia, Zelensky underscored the importance of “preventive strikes, preventive action” so that Russia can get a better picture of the potential consequences if they move to use nuclear weapons.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/3677256-zelensky-calls-for-pr
eventive-action-to-deter-russian-nuclear-strikes/

Poland made mattes worse by claiming this week that it asked the United States to base nuclear weapons in Poland. Polish President Duda told Bloomberg News:

“The problem, first of all, is that we don’t have nuclear weapons,” Duda said in an interview with the Gazeta Polska newspaper published on Wednesday. “There is always a potential opportunity to participate in nuclear sharing.” . . .

MORE AT https://sonar21.com/americans-better-wake-up-and-realize-the-russians-
are-genuinely-pissed-off/

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Tuesday, October 11, 2022 9:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Fortunately there are only 75 days until Xmas, a day of peace and surrendering, which makes it easy to calculate how many missiles Putin needs: 75 * 75 * 24 = 135,000

28 days until November 8th. 28 * 75 * 24 = 50,400

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
HAHAHAHA!

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Wednesday, October 12, 2022 6:40 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
HAHAHAHA!

29 in 100 chance Democrats win both chambers

33 in 100 chance Republicans win both chambers

37 in 100 chance Democrats win the Senate, Republicans win the House

< 1 in 100 chance Republicans win the Senate, Democrats win the House

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/

I don't know what the chances are that Ukraine wins to decide who owns what.

But in 2 years Ukraine and Russia can have another contest.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 12, 2022 6:45 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In terms of the operational art of war, what has Russia done wrong?

The Russians did not adopt a model of leadership and organization based on decentralization and empowering junior leaders. Their model is very officer-centric and centralized. Russia also did not develop an effective NCO [non-commissioned officer] corps. A modern military needs to empower its soldiers to take the initiative and by doing so accomplish great things.

Putin is exercising a great amount of operational control, down to the tactical level. There should be multiple levels of trusted individuals who are then allowed to go out and execute the operation. The other error Russia made was that when they invaded Ukraine they lacked a clear objective, so they did not prioritize the force that was going to achieve it. In the battle for Kyiv, the Russians attacked seven different areas at once. Any reasonably intelligent person who knows about these things would tell you that if your objective is regime change then you have to take the capital and rapidly cut off the heads of government.

The Russian leadership was not stable. They switched out different senior officers in response to their failures. As a practical matter, they also lost a lot of senior officers, including some generals, to Ukrainian attacks, friendly fire and other things. The Russians have really lost the core of their leadership. There is also the much-discussed aspect of the Russian military's failures in terms of logistics, supplies and equipment. Putin did not have the force that he thought he did. Putin does not have Stalin's army, a massive force that can overcome their qualitative deficiencies. Putin does not have the Red Army of old, with its ability to apply mass and force across a wide front. Yet he is still trying to apply that doctrine to the small and now completely eroded and corroded force that he sent to Ukraine.

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/11/ukraines-victory-almost-a-done-deal-m
ilitary-expert-on-how-invasion-imploded/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 12, 2022 8:34 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
HAHAHAHA!
29 in 100 chance Democrats win both chambers

33 in 100 chance Republicans win both chambers

37 in 100 chance Democrats win the Senate, Republicans win the House

< 1 in 100 chance Republicans win the Senate, Democrats win the House

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/

Why do you keep looking at 538 predictions? Nate Silver shouldn't even be employed anymore. Weathermen are more accurate than he is.

Quote:
I don't know what the chances are that Ukraine wins to decide who owns what.

But in 2 years Ukraine and Russia can have another contest.

No. They can't when Democrats aren't funding a proxy war using Ukrainian civilians as their meat shields.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Friday, October 14, 2022 5:52 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Russia’s airstrikes, intended to show force, reveal a shortage of missiles

No matter how many times Russia fires at Ukraine, pro-war Russian nationalists want more.

“It has to be done constantly, not just once but for two to five weeks to totally disable all their infrastructure, all thermal power stations, all heating and power stations, all power plants, all traction substations, all power lines, all railway hubs,” said Bogdan Bezpalko, a member of the Kremlin’s Council on Interethnic Relations.

“Then, Ukraine will descend into cold and darkness,” Bezpalko said on state television. “They won’t be able to bring in ammunition and fuel and then the Ukrainian army will turn into a crowd of armed [men] with chunks of iron.”

But the hawks, who are demanding publicly on TV broadcasts and on Telegram to know why Russia does not hit more high-value targets, won’t like the answer: The Russian military appears to lack sufficient accurate missiles to sustain airstrikes at Monday’s tempo, according to Western military analysts.

“They are low on precision-guided missiles,” said Konrad Muzyka, founder of Gdansk, Poland-based Rochan Consulting said, offering his assessment of Russia’s sporadic air attacks. “That is essentially the only explanation that I have.”

Even as NATO allies on Thursday said they would rush additional air defenses to Ukraine, the experts said the reason Russia had yet to knock out electricity and water service across the country was simple: it can’t.

Since May, Russia’s use of precision guided missiles (PGMs) has declined sharply, with analysts suggesting then that Russian stocks of such missiles may be low.

Tuesday’s attacks mainly used air-launched cruise missiles, which are slower than Iskander guided missiles and easier for Ukraine to shoot down, according to Muzyka. In March, the Pentagon reported that Russia’s air-launched cruise missiles have a failure rate of 20 to 60 percent.

“If Russia had a limitless supply of PGMs, I think that they would still strike civilian targets, because that’s what the Russian way of warfare is,” Muzyka said. He said analysts did not have confirmed information about Russian missile stocks or production levels, and judgments were based on the decline in usage of PGMs and Moscow’s greater reliance on less accurate missiles.

Putin faces limits of his military power as Ukraine recaptures land
But a clue lies in Russia’s failure to destroy the kinds of targets that Ukraine is able to hit using U.S.-supplied HIMARS artillery.

“If we take a look at what HIMARS has done to Russian supply routes, and essentially their ability to sustain war, they’ve done massive damage to ... Russia’s posture in this war,” Muzyka said. “So technically, you know, if the Russians had access to a large stock of PGMS, they could probably inflict similar damage to Ukrainian armed forces, but they haven’t.”

“They actually failed to,” he continued. “They even failed to interdict the main Ukrainian supply roads. They failed to destroy bridges, railways, railway intersections, and so on and so forth.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-s-airstrikes-intended-to-s
how-force-reveal-another-weakness/ar-AA12WCXa

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 14, 2022 7:31 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

With enough Western weapons, Ukraine will continue breaking through Russian defenses. It will use long-range rockets to destroy command posts, depots, and supply lines, making it impossible for Russia to properly reinforce its battered troops. It will shoot down Russian aircraft, preventing the Russian air force from defending its positions. It will keep sinking Russian naval craft. And it will be helped along the way by the Russian military’s many deficiencies: its intense centralization, its emphasis on punishing its forces for mistakes rather than learning from them, and its highly inefficient style of combat. In the face of mounting setbacks, Russian morale will eventually collapse. The country’s soldiers will be forced back home.

Ukraine’s liberation of Crimea and the parts of the Donbas that Russian proxies seized in 2014 will come next. And after Ukraine’s victories elsewhere, these operations are unlikely to be all that taxing. By the time Ukrainian forces get to those regions, the Russian military will most likely be too exhausted to seriously defend them. Many of the male residents of the Russian-controlled Donbas will already have been killed on the frontlines. The survivors (which will likely include most of the region’s remaining male population) are unlikely to be loyal to the Kremlin, given what Putin has put them through. Some Western observers may consider Crimea to be a special case and encourage Ukraine to not press forward there, but although it has been under Russian control longer, its annexation remains every bit as illegal today as it was in 2014. International law should know no compromises or double standards.

The liberation of Crimea and the Donbas should, however, include a reintegration campaign. Because the periods of Russian occupation, with their attendant aggressive propaganda, have lasted so long, residents will need to receive social, legal, and economic assistance from Ukraine as part of reconciliation efforts. These efforts will make for a more delicate operation. As the Ukrainian government restores its governance, it will need to show residents that, unlike Moscow, Kyiv can provide stability and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the world must prepare for what Ukrainian wins in these long-occupied regions will mean for Putin. Annexing Crimea and creating puppet states in the Donbas were two of his signature achievements, and his regime may not survive losing them. The world may want to prepare even before Ukraine moves into Crimea; Putin’s regime will be endangered if Ukraine retakes just the areas Russia seized after February 24. Losing almost all the land it just annexed would be a humiliating failure for Moscow, one that may get Russia’s elites to finally realize that their president’s obsession with war is deeply unproductive and to rise up against him. It would not be the first time in Russian history that a leader has been pushed out of power.

Once Putin is gone, the world must focus on making Russia pay restitution. Moscow should be held fully responsible for the damage it has done to Ukraine, providing reparations to the country and to the Ukrainian people. Ideally, after regime change, Russia will do this of its own volition. But if it doesn’t, the West can redirect hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to Ukraine as collateral. Russia must release all prisoners of war and all Ukrainian civilians it has detained or forcibly moved to Russia. It especially needs to return the thousands of children it kidnapped during the invasion and occupation. Finally, Ukraine and its partners must demand that Moscow hand Putin, other senior Russian leaders, and any figures involved in wartime atrocities over to a globally recognized criminal tribunal. The West should refuse to lift any sanctions on Moscow until these demands are met. They must demonstrate that extreme aggression, genocide, and terror are not acceptable.

This program of penance and justice may seem frightening to international leaders, who believe it could cause instability in Russia. Some analysts even say that the Russian Federation could disintegrate, leading to catastrophic consequences for the rest of the world. Many international leaders had similar fears when the Soviet Union collapsed, including former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, who traveled to Ukraine in 1991 to try to stop the country from seceding from Russia. But these leaders were wrong. Despite the war, Ukraine has become a symbol of democracy around the world. Many other post-Soviet states have grown far wealthier and freer since 1991. If Russia were weakened today, the net outcome would be similarly positive. Its reduced capabilities would make it harder for Moscow to threaten as many people as it does now. And it is simply unjust to try to keep the country’s residents under the foot of a paranoid, genocidal dictator.

Indeed, Ukraine may well need a weaker Russia to protect its wins. At a minimum, it will need substantive regime change to feel safe. Putin’s commitment to eliminating Ukraine and forcing it back into his empire is so extreme that a Ukrainian victory cannot be secure as long as he is in power. And Russia is full of ruthless leaders with a similarly distorted moral compass and a similarly imperialistic worldview. Until Ukraine is allowed to join NATO, it will have to build a powerful military, becoming—as Zelensky put it—a “big Israel”. This is not ideal, and it will be costly. But at least in the near term, it will be the only way that a victorious Ukraine can ensure a long-lasting peace.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk is the chairman of the Centre for Defence Strategies. From 2019 to 2020, he was Minister of Defense of Ukraine.

Much, much more at https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/ukraines-path-to-victory/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 14, 2022 1:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Russia orders evacuation in Kherson amid Ukrainian advances

by Chloe Folmar - 10/14/22 8:36 AM ET

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained incorrect information on the evacuation efforts

Russian authorities on Friday said they would help civilians evacuate the southern city of Kherson, Ukraine, as Ukrainian troops continue to make gains in the area just north of Crimea.

The Ukrainian military has had repeated successes in the south of the country and previously said that it hopes to retake Kherson, one of the provinces annexed by Russia last month, by the end of the year.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin announced a military-aided evacuation from Kherson, which has been occupied by Russia since early March, after Vladimir Saldo, the Russian leader of the Kherson region, called on the Kremlin to aid in protecting residents from the strife between the Ukrainian and Russian troops.

“We suggested that all residents of the Kherson region, if there is such a wish, to protect themselves from the consequences of missile strikes, should go to other regions” of Russia, Saldo said, according to CNN.

A Russian proxy leader in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, contested Saldo’s characterization of the events, saying: “There is no evacuation in the Kherson region and there cannot be any.”

“We urge the residents of the Kherson region to remain calm and to not panic,” he said.

“Nobody is going to withdraw Russian troops from the Kherson region. This is not an evacuation, this is an opportunity to save lives.” (Somebody is a used car salesman.)

Updated at 1:00 p.m.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/3688009-russia-orders-evacuat
ion-in-kherson-amid-ukrainian-advances/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 14, 2022 3:35 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So Kiev is going to fire missiles into civilian areas of Kherson city, same as they fire missiles into the civilian areas of Donetsk city.

What else is new?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Friday, October 14, 2022 6:27 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So Kiev is going to fire missiles into civilian areas of Kherson city, same as they fire missiles into the civilian areas of Donetsk city.

What else is new?

By evacuating Kherson, Russia is luring the Ukrainians into a diabolical trap where the Ukrainian fools, Nazis, torturers, and murderers shall be utterly destroyed. A celebratory victory will be Russia's! All as a Thanksgiving for the great people of Russia who never wavered in their loyalty to Putin's dream of a reunified Greater Russia!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 14, 2022 7:35 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Americans Better Wake Up and Realize the Russians Are genuinely Pissed Off

Oh no comrade, say it ain't so.

T

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Saturday, October 15, 2022 9:27 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So Kiev is going to fire missiles into civilian areas of Kherson city, same as they fire missiles into the civilian areas of Donetsk city.

What else is new?

Brilliant really. If Ukraine army kills all Ukraine people there will be no more war.

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Saturday, October 15, 2022 11:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
“I hate them,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, wrote on social media in early June. “They are bastards and scum,” he went on. “As long as I live, I will do everything to make them disappear."

Ah, a favorite M$M technique: The Snippet. And one that SECOND likes to exploit endlessly.

"Them"?

Who (or what) "them"?

Ukrainian women and children?

Western neocons and warhawks?

Fleas?

Bad shoes?

It's not clear who Medvedev is talking about, or even if he's talking about anything living. But the media just loves them some out-of-context phrases that they can interpret endlessly, and SECOND can quote them endlessly for his propaganda war.

At least Medvedev didn't say he was willing to genocide the entire globe "down to the last 100". Now THAT would have been truly horrific.

A glum Putin is given stern dressing down from President of Tajikistan

Vladimir Putin was given a stern dressing down by the president of Tajikistan in another indicator that the Russian dictator has lost respect and influence in his own backyard. Fellow longstanding dictator Emomali Rahmon, ruler of the Central Asian state of 9 million since 1994, seized upon Putin's woes back home and in Ukraine to give him a piece of his mind and tell him how he really feels during a summit in the Kazakh capital of Astana.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-glum-putin-is-given-stern-dress
ing-down-from-president-of-tajikistan/ss-AA12ZKGx?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=4c31a46535aa45c4ac68e7f3de72817d#image=1

Yep, it's over for Putin. Hey comrade signym. I told you so.

T

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Saturday, October 15, 2022 2:33 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A story from 2018: Don’t Fear the Russian Military

The week-long exercises, which kicked off yesterday, are intended as a show of might. But the country is in no position to wage a real conflict.

Russia, like an animal puffing out its fur and baring its teeth when faced with a predator, wants to look as formidable as possible. As an authoritarian nation, it spends more than it should on its military — more than a third of the total federal budget goes toward security, broadly defined.

Putin is aware that the objective indicators do not help him make his case that Russia, with an economy smaller than that of Texas, should be treated as one of the great world powers. Instead, he relies on bluff and bluster, theater and shadow play. He wants to project an image of a dangerous yet confident country, one that should be placated, not challenged. Hence, the pictures we’ll soon see of tanks rumbling across the steppe as rockets, drones, and gunships roar overhead are part and parcel of a campaign to make Russia (look) great again. That campaign also includes Putin’s claims that Russia will soon deploy nuclear-powered cruise missiles. (Prototypes have been tested four times in the past year and have crashed every time.) It’s good to be strong, but it’s more important to be seen as strong.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/don-t-fear-the-russian-military

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 7:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Putin tried for years to stop his military from using Western parts — and mostly failed

By Alberto Nardelli, Bloomberg
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/10/15/world/russia-weapons-west
ern-parts/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

Oct 15, 2022

Even before sanctions cut off access to vital components and technologies for President Vladimir Putin’s defense industry, an internal Russian government review found years of attempts to reduce reliance on imports had largely failed.

Previously unreported assessments show a program with specific targets was put in place from 2019 to slash Russia’s dependence on Western parts for its arsenal by 2025 — everything from radar to advanced submarines to anti-missile defense systems. But an internal review of the plan 10 months before Putin invaded Ukraine found it was falling short on almost every metric.

Conversations with European officials including those familiar with the audit report highlight the protracted struggle by Russian companies and the trade ministry to move away from parts supplied by NATO member states and Ukraine. One of the Russian assessments explicitly warned the state’s defense procurement program could fail under a tougher sanctions regime, a European official said, asking not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

Information on Russia’s challenges in sourcing components has been shared among a number of Western governments and fed into the discussions on trade penalties imposed since late February.

Shortages of modern weapons have forced Russia to rely on models dating to the Soviet era, many of which are less accurate and reliable, according to U.S. and European officials. They said the Kremlin is unlikely to be able to sustain the kinds of massive assaults on Ukrainian infrastructure seen this week, despite Putin’s threats to continue escalating.

Russia is already struggling to resupply its troops on the ground, has suffered heavy losses of tanks and aircraft, and is burning through its missile arsenal, those officials say. In Russia, senior officials have repeatedly said they are able to resupply their forces in Ukraine and Putin on Friday said he had no regrets about the invasion.

Since the war broke out the U.S., the European Union and others have also hit Moscow with hefty sanctions, including penalties designed to cut off access to semiconductors and other key components used in high-tech weaponry.

“The costs to Russia — in people and equipment — are staggering,” Sir Jeremy Fleming, the director of Britain’s signals intelligence agency, said this week of the war in Ukraine. “We know — and Russian commanders on the ground know — that their supplies and munitions are running out.”

The import substitution program was set up in 2014 in the aftermath of Russia’s previous invasion of Ukraine, and accelerated with detailed targets set in 2019. But what has been described to Bloomberg as a 20-page audit by the office of Russia’s prosecutor general in April 2021 — covering a mammoth 177,058 components used in 278 types of military equipment — found widespread shortcomings. In 2020 alone, Russia had hoped for 18,047 substitutions covering 43 types of equipment but only managed 3,148 replacements across five items, the people said.

Kremlin officials have repeatedly said the import-replacement efforts across the economy have missed targets: Putin remarked in 2019 that, “in a number of cases as practice shows, obvious mistakes were made in the planning and organization of work on import substitution.”

The trade minister was recently made a deputy prime minister, according to Russian state media, with greater powers to work on import substitution. The shortcomings have been discussed at meetings where public comments were made afterward.

Still, officials have said the efforts to limit reliance on foreign components allowed the industry to withstand the impact of sanctions imposed after the start of the war. “For some sectors, 100% import replacement isn’t that significant or necessary. But here we need it,” Putin told a group of defense-industry executives last month, calling for ensuring it “as quickly as possible.”

The program for 2019 to 2025 aimed to swap imported technologies, electronics and essential goods for domestic equivalents or items produced from scratch, establish new supply chains and build a strategic stock of critical parts, one of the documents is said to show. A similar effort was established to replace nearly 640 components originating in Ukraine.

The inspection reported some limited successes, the people said. It found nearly all the goals for a small number of radio and laser reconnaissance equipment were met.

At the same time, the assessment showed that Ka-226.80 light, multi-purpose helicopters were allocated more than 230 million rubles worth of import substitution contracts, although they were not even part of the state arms procurement program. Efforts to produce analogue electronic components from scratch didn’t even get off the ground: Of the plan to develop 4,148 different analogues in 2020, Russia managed — none.

One European official said the expectation is for a further degradation of Russian equipment and its armed forces more generally. Some of Russia’s more advanced weapons are dependent on foreign components, such as cruise missiles, TU-22 bombers, submarines, the air defense system Nudol, and anti-aircraft radar.

Last year’s assessment, which includes an extensive list of examples, also found that billions of rubles worth of contracts with Russian entities were running late, the people said. The relevant ministries were unable to control the process and foreign components, including chemicals, specialist materials and electronics, were being covertly used in a number of development projects, according to one of the documents they cited.

Authorities have clearly recognized the extent of the problem.

According to the Kremlin, prosecutors were assigned by Putin to monitor the progress of the program by 2018. Then-Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika said in July 2019 that “import substitution in the defense industry remains a problem.” His successor Igor Krasnov said in 2020 that it was still a matter of concern.

The audit also inadvertently highlights the extent to which European companies had contributed to Moscow’s weapons stocks for years, including after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.

The EU has since expanded its trade restrictions on Moscow. The bloc exported roughly €90 billion ($87 billion) to Russia in 2021, but nearly a third of that has been curtailed, with hundreds of items prohibited. Its most recent sanctions package includes prohibitions on several electronic components found in Russian weapons and aviation parts. The EU has also sanctioned semiconductors, quantum computing equipment and devices identified in Russian equipment used in Ukraine, as well as a few dozen individuals and entities linked to its military industrial complex.

Attempts to replace Ukrainian components also underperformed in 2020, with 212 replacements on four types of equipment against a target of 260 substitutions for 12 types of equipment.

The same year, Moscow was able to establish a strategic supply of spare parts for just over a third of the 7,244 projects it had envisioned, the people said, citing the assessment. And of the 484 projects targeted for supply chain changes, only five saw progress.

“A reliance on Western components won’t stop Russia’s military machine but it will substantially slow down the pace at which Russia can regenerate military power,” according to Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

”While it can find its way around export controls through evasion or substitution with lower quality Chinese or domestic parts, this will introduce challenges in terms of the cost of securing components by more circuitous routes and the quality of substitute components when those are used,” he said. “This in turn will limit Russia’s capacity for building capabilities at scale.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/10/15/world/russia-weapons-west
ern-parts/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 8:12 AM

Warmongering Democrats are the worst Democrats.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 11:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Warmongering Democrats are the worst Democrats.

After Putin finishes Ukraine, there are more countries to conquer. We wouldn't want him to stop with just one when he could have them all! Russia once owned half of Germany. Why not take back what is Russia's and a little more to make Russia's efforts worthwhile?

As Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine continues to escalate, many are asking what the Russian dictator ultimately hopes to achieve.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/inside-vladimir-put
ins-criminal-plan-to-purge-and-partition-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 12:36 PM

1989 TWO. Russia occupied half of Germany as little as 30 years ago. I would have thought because of that they would have made helping Ukraine their number one priorty. They haven't and that's sad.

T

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 1:02 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
1989 TWO. Russia occupied half of Germany as little as 30 years ago. I would have thought because of that they would have made helping Ukraine their number one priorty. They haven't and that's sad.

T

Seriously, Germany placed its fate into Putin's hands when Germany signed long-term natural gas contracts with Gazprom. I assume the Germans are thinking that, once this is all over, the selling and buying between Germany and Russia can go back to almost normal, but only if Germany doesn't extravagantly offend Putin by really trying hard to help Ukraine rather than Germany mostly pretending to help. It is no secret to Putin exactly what Germany has done for Ukraine. So far, not so much.

On the Ukraine War, Germany Has a Leadership Problem. Here’s Why.
https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/ukraine-war-germany-has-leadership-proble
m-heres-why

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 3:30 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Yet another "oopsie" Russian suicide:

One of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation chiefs has been found dead in “suspicious” circumstances prompting a murder investigation.

The body of Lt-Col Roman Malyk, 49, was discovered near the fence of his home as the Russian tyrant announced his chaotic mobilisation was being called off.

The war veteran was allegedly found hanging near a fence in his home

His death comes after a spate of attacks on mobilisation offices across Russia

Last month, Putin ordered the mobilisation of 300,000 extra soldiers to the frontline as his disastrous war continues to falter with Moscow losing ground on the battlefield.

Police investigating the death of Malyk have opened a murder probe but have not ruled out suicide.

Some reports said Putin's enlistment chief died from hanging.

His “suspicious” death comes after a spate of attacks on mobilisation offices across Russia.

Putin has said the mobilisation will end in two weeks after 220,000 men have been enlisted, still 80,000 short of the target set at its beginning.

As many as 70 offices have been hit with Molotov cocktails as anger grows over enlistment.

There is rising fury over mobilisation officials forcibly recruiting men with little or no training in apparent violation of the rules, amid heavy military losses for Russia.

Armed conscript-snatching teams of enlistment officers backed by police have been operating in Russian cities, grabbing men on underground trains, on the street, and in offices.

Russia has put in place extra security for mobilisation teams and enlistment offices.

They are to be protected by national guardsmen, said MP Alexander Khinshtein.

The mobilisation has led to hundreds and thousands of men fleeing abroad, voting with their feet against Putin.

Married father-of-two Malyk was a veteran of Russia’s war in Chechnya and friends and family strongly denied he killed himself.

He was in charge of enlistment in Partizan district and surrounding areas in Primorsky region.

He was described by friends as a “strong and courageous man” who was “not broken under the weight of harsh military events and great losses” in Chechnya.

“He was a man of his word and deed, known and respected in the city for his honesty and integrity,” he said.

Earlier this month in neighbouring Khabarovsk region Yury Laiko, 41, a military enlistment commissioner, was dismissed amid mayhem over the forced mobilisation of local men.

He was blamed for “errors” in manically conscripting thousands of reservists in vast Khabarovsk region, half of whom were found to be “unfit for service”.

Governor Mikhail Degtyaryov said “several thousand of our countrymen received summonses and arrived at the military registration and enlistment offices.

“Half of them we returned home as not fulfilling the selection criteria for enlistment into military service…[so] military commissar Yury Laiko was dismissed”.

On Friday, Putin promised the messy mobilisation would be called off in the next two weeks - perhaps in a effort to regain support for his war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, thousands of protesters have been arrested in Russia following a series of rallies across the country against Putin's mobilisation orders.

This comes as humiliating pictures of Putin's "Daddy Army" have emerged showing old-looking men clutching shiny new weapons and getting ready to head to the frontline amid the military debacle.

Drunken newly conscripts were also filmed staggering, fighting and falling asleep as they were packed into school buses to be taken to training camp as another video filmed inside a bus showed the mobilised men drinking vodka from huge bottles.

At the time, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky described Putin's decision to mobilise 300,000 reservists as a "frank admission that their regular army, which has been prepared for decades to take over a foreign country, did not withstand and crumbled".

https://www.the-sun.com/news/6450417/putin-mobilisation-chief-found-de
ad-suspicious-circumstances/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 16, 2022 4:50 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Looking at the detaled military maps from the militry summary channel

OCT 1, 2022

OCT 15, 2022

it looks like the front line is essentially static, despite Kiev victory claims

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Monday, October 17, 2022 5:51 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

“To understand Russia now – and what might happen in the future – you have to understand what happened back then. For it is out of that rage, the violence, the desperation and the overwhelming corruption that Vladimir Putin emerged.”- filmmaker Adam Curtis, who also made The Century of the Self.

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone
What It Felt Like To Live Through the Collapse of Communism . . . and Democracy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/other/adam-curtis-astonishing-
autopsy-of-the-fall-of-russia-will-leave-you-wide-eyed/ar-AA12U7PL

A few places to see the 7 part TV show:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0d3hwl1/russia-19851999-trauma
zone

https://comment.rlsbb.ru/russia-1985-1999-traumazone-s01-1080p-ip-web-
dl-h264-playweb/

https://tpb25.ukpass.co/search.php?q=TraumaZone

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, October 17, 2022 6:39 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Police and military officers swooped down on a Moscow business center this week unannounced. They were looking for men to fight in Ukraine — and they seized nearly every one they saw. Some musicians, rehearsing. A courier there to deliver a parcel. A man from a Moscow service agency, very drunk, in his mid-50s, with a walking disability.

“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.

In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.

Police and military press-gangs in recent days have snatched men off the streets and outside Metro stations. They’ve lurked in apartment building lobbies to hand out military summonses. They’ve raided office blocks and hostels. They’ve invaded cafes and restaurants, blocking the exits.

At a predawn sweep on the Mipstroy1 construction company dormitories on Thursday, they took more than 200 men. On Oct. 9, they rounded up dozens at a Moscow shelter for the homeless.

The press-gangs appear to descend at random. It is terrifying — and, at times, comically haphazard.

' ' ' An official barged into Alexei’s office on Tuesday. Two police officers and several plainclothes military officials arrived and demanded his identification. They ordered him to go with them quietly “or we will use force,” he said.

“I was panicking,” he said. “I’d never been detained before. Everyone knows that if you are detained by the police in Russia, it’s very bad.”

Suffering massive military casualties and repeated defeats in Ukraine, Russia has begun cannibalizing its male population. The hard-eyed pundits on state television are demanding more Ukrainian blood and more sacrifice from Russian men who they say have grown too used to soft living.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/16/russia-mobilization-me
n/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022 5:41 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

If Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, then it will likely move on to attack other former Soviet states, according to a former Russian diplomat who argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned his country into a "fascist state."

In an essay published by Foreign Affairs on Monday, Boris Bondarev described a feeling of dread waking up to the news in February that Russia had invaded Ukraine. The 20-year diplomat resigned his post at the Russian Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva soon after Russian forces attacked the former Soviet republic. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/sources-russia-misco
nduct-boris-bondarev

"The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become," Bondarev wrote. "It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity."

"The war," he continued, "shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state."

Bondarev recounts taking part in negotiations with the United States in January 2022, when Russia was building up troops and equipment on Ukraine's borders while making demands of the US and NATO that were simply non-starters. The negotiations, he recalls, convinced him that the Kremlin was "laying the groundwork for war or had no idea how the United States or Europe worked — or both."

His office was bewildered as well. "No one could understand how we would go to the United States with a document that demanded, among other things, that NATO permanently close its door to new members," he wrote.

'Warped by its own propaganda'

Fascist states exploit two undeniable themes found in Putin's Russia: a national sense of victimhood and perceived former greatness, both of which are often addressed by way of aggression. Putin's strongest play at home is appealing to nostalgia for a Russian empire. Without it, Bondarev maintains, he has nothing — and Western policy toward Ukraine should reflect this.

"To justify his rule, Putin wants the great victory he promised and believes he can obtain," Bondarev wrote. "If he agrees to a cease-fire, it will only be to give Russian troops a rest before continuing to fight."

And if he wins, "Putin will likely move to attack another post-Soviet state, such as Moldova, where Moscow already props up a breakaway region," Bondarev wrote, referencing Transnistria, which Insider visited soon after the invasion of Ukraine.

There is "only one way to stop Russia's dictator," according to Bondarev, and that is defeat. "With broad support from NATO, Ukraine is capable of eventually beating Russia in the east and the south, just as it has done in the north," he wrote.

A defeated Putin will have to answer to Russians now living under sanctions in a pariah state.

Fascist states have a tendency to implode as dictators surround themselves with sycophants, frank counsel replaced with pleasant lies. With Ukraine, for instance, there are indications that Russian leadership was misled on anticipated Ukrainian resistance and Russia's ability to wage war.

Bondarev describes this as Moscow being "slowly warped by its own propaganda." Sanctions against Russia over its 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, for example, had a devastating impact even as they were publicly derided as a minor irritant — a denial that those at the highest levels of power appeared to buy into themselves.

As a diplomat working on export and arms control issues, Bondarev saw how Russia's vaunted military-industrial complex was dependent on Western companies for everything from radiation-proof electronics used in satellites to the cloth used in their aircraft.

"The sanctions suddenly cut off our access to these products and left our military weaker than the West understood," Bondarev wrote. "But although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia's strength, the foreign ministry's propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out."

The delusion at the highest levels of Russia is why negotiations will not work, Bondarev wrote, arguing that any peace deal rushed into now will only serve as a delay tactic.

"There's only one thing that can really stop Putin," Bondarev wrote, "and that is a comprehensive rout."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-s-russia-has-become-a-fasci
st-state-and-must-be-stopped-in-ukraine-says-ex-diplomat-who-defected-after-the-invasion/ar-AA134mls

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022 5:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Sources of Russian Misconduct
A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin
By Boris Bondarev

November/December 2022

For three years, my workdays began the same way. At 7:30 a.m., I woke up, checked the news, and drove to work at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. The routine was easy and predictable, two of the hallmarks of life as a Russian diplomat.

(Read in Russian) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/kak-rossiya-stala-fa
shistskoy

February 24 was different. When I checked my phone, I saw startling and mortifying news: the Russian air force was bombing Ukraine. Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa were under attack. Russian troops were surging out of Crimea and toward the southern city of Kherson. Russian missiles had reduced buildings to rubble and sent residents fleeing. I watched videos of the blasts, complete with air-raid sirens, and saw people run around in panic.

As someone born in the Soviet Union, I found the attack almost unimaginable, even though I had heard Western news reports that an invasion might be imminent. Ukrainians were supposed to be our close friends, and we had much in common, including a history of fighting Germany as part of the same country. I thought about the lyrics of a famous patriotic song from World War II, one that many residents of the former Soviet Union know well: “On June 22, exactly at 4:00 a.m., Kyiv was bombed, and we were told that the war had started.” Russian President Vladimir Putin described the invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation” intended to “de-Nazify” Russia’s neighbor. But in Ukraine, it was Russia that had taken the Nazis’ place.

“That is the beginning of the end,” I told my wife. We decided I had to quit.

Resigning meant throwing away a twenty-year career as a Russian diplomat and, with it, many of my friendships. But the decision was a long time coming. When I joined the ministry in 2002, it was during a period of relative openness, when we diplomats could work cordially with our counterparts from other countries. Still, it was apparent from my earliest days that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was deeply flawed. Even then, it discouraged critical thinking, and over the course of my tenure, it became increasingly belligerent. I stayed on anyway, managing the cognitive dissonance by hoping that I could use whatever power I had to moderate my country’s international behavior. But certain events can make a person accept things they didn’t dare to before.

The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become. It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity. It gave Moscow an excuse to crush any domestic opposition. Now, the government is sending thousands upon thousands of drafted men to go kill Ukrainians. The war shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state.

But for me, one of the invasion’s central lessons had to do with something I had witnessed over the preceding two decades: what happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda. For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the country’s meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs. We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric and to uncritically parrot to other states what the Kremlin said to us. But eventually, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries; it was our own leadership. In cables and statements, we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness and demolished the West’s arguments. We had to withhold any criticism about the president’s dangerous plans. This performance took place even at the ministry’s highest levels. My colleagues in the Kremlin repeatedly told me that Putin likes his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, because he is “comfortable” to work with, always saying yes to the president and telling him what he wants to hear. Small wonder, then, that Putin thought he would have no trouble defeating Kyiv.

More at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/sources-russia-misco
nduct-boris-bondarev

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022 7:19 PM

I wonder if after living in Russia for a good period of time now, Edward Snowden realizes how important collecting information and keeping secrets is to the security of the planet? I'm betting not.

I wonder if he realizes how stupid he actually is. Probably not. I wonder what he thinks when he hears the leader of his new adopted country talk about using Nukes. I wonder what he thinks of the way his new country, invaded a neighboring country, in order to steal land, and conquer with the intent of completely destroying that nation. And while doing so kills and rapes women and children without conscience or forethought.

I wish someone would ask him. I'm betting he would not voice his narcissistic opinion answering these questions. Nope, I think not. He lives in Russia now. If he were truthful, he'd be executed. Or at the very least, sent to the front.

T

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022 4:38 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and the Midterm Candidates Peddling Russian Propaganda

by Laura Thornton

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/13/musk-carlson-trump-midterm-electi
ons-russia-propaganda-war-ukraine-candidates/

Laura Thornton is a senior fellow and the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. Twitter: @LauraLThornton https://twitter.com/LauraLThornton

When Tesla chief executive Elon Musk tweeted his support for Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine, he used some highly revealing language. Crimea should be Russian, he tweeted, because of “Krushchev’s mistake” — a reference to Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev’s redrawing of internal Soviet borders. That particular wording has never been part of the U.S. debate about Ukraine, but it is the standard language used by the Kremlin for its claims on Ukrainian land. It’s not the only talking point Musk has embraced that will be familiar to anyone following Kremlin propaganda.

Musk’s tweets are a prominent example of a worrisome trend: Kremlin talking points are creeping back into the U.S. debate. Few issues have united Democrats and Republicans again after years of intense polarization as much as supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion. In the U.S. Congress, there has been strong bipartisan backing for weapons deliveries and other aid to Kyiv, as well as for fortifying NATO’s eastern frontier. Until recently, voices supporting the Kremlin were few and far between, most prominently, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump. Carlson openly declared he was on Russia’s side, and Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for his cleverness for invading Ukraine. As noisy as they were, these voices were overpowered by a consensus about the war and how the United States should respond.

Now, there are cracks in this consensus, with Musk the latest example of Russian propaganda slipping back into the public conversation. With campaigning for next month’s U.S. midterm elections heating up, Putin’s talking points are increasingly being spread by candidates running for office, as we document with the Midterms Monitor, a joint social-media tracking project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshal Fund and the Brennan Center for Justice. The monitor has captured more than 2,300 tweets by U.S. candidates for Congress or high state office dealing with Ukraine since Aug. 1. Many of these posts are critical of Russia and back U.S. policy on the war. Some criticize the high cost of aid. But a noisy minority — most, but not all, Republicans — are also parroting the most egregious Kremlin propaganda. Should these candidates be elected, especially to Congress, they could push for a shift in U.S. policy on Ukraine.

Some of these candidates have taken their cues from Fox News, the most influential source of pro-Russian disinformation in the United States. As catalogued by The Bulwark, the network’s hosts have labeled Ukraine as parasitic, called Ukrainians’ defense of their country an attack on Russia, and called the war “another Russia hoax” as part of a plot led by Democrats. In a bizarre twist of reality that directly repeats Russian propaganda, the Conservative Political Action Conference called Ukraine’s own territories claimed by Russia “Ukrainian-occupied” in a tweet last month. Showing a Russian flag waving in the background, the tweet also demanded an end to U.S. “gift-giving” to Ukraine. (The tweet was later deleted but can be read here in full.)

Republican candidates — and some Democrats — are joining in. Many anti-Ukraine messages center on keeping money at home. J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, is campaigning on an end to aid for Ukraine and just called for “negotiations” with Putin, who of course continues to insist on Ukraine’s dismemberment. Mayra Flores, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives from Texas, tweeted: “Congress just voted to send another $12,300,000,000 to Ukraine! … Why aren’t we putting America’s best interests first?” Allen Waters, a Republican House candidate from Rhode Island, shared, “#AmericaFirst not #Ukraine. Keep Rhode Island safe from nuclear conflict.”

But candidates are also repeating Kremlin narratives almost verbatim. This includes calling Ukrainians “Nazis,” accusing Kyiv of war crimes, saying the United States started the war, and blaming Washington for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions. Donnie Palmer, a Republican House candidate from Massachusetts, praised Trump by saying: “did he get us into a war … did he blow up 2 pipelines, is he backing Nazis in Ukraine?” Eric Brewer, Republican House candidate from Ohio, attacked the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Carpenter: “@USAmbOSCE Carpenter is omitting the context for Putin’s military operation … He’s ignoring Ukraine’s 8 years of war crimes & Russia’s 8 years of restraint. Putin acted late.”

Derision for the Ukrainian government is being spread as well. “What classy people the government of Ukraine employs,” tweeted Irene Armendariz Jackson, a Republican House candidate from Texas, at a Ukrainian diplomat who used an expletive in response to Musk’s suggestion to surrender Crimea. Some candidates have blamed Ukraine’s NATO aspirations for the war instead of Putin’s clearly stated view that Ukraine has no right to exist as a country.

Among the Democrats who have joined in, by far the most prolific is Geoffrey Young, a House candidate from Kentucky. He has tweeted some 680 times about Russia or Ukraine since Aug. 1, including retweeting the Russian state-owned propaganda network RT, Redfish, and some of Russia’s most infamous propagandists, such as Dmitry Polyanskiy, Moscow’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations. When he’s not celebrating Russian military advances, Young parrots the Kremlin’s attacks on NATO and launders Putin’s narrative that Ukrainians are “Nazis.” “Since 2014, the war criminals, aggressors, and mass-murderers in and near Ukraine have been Washington first & foremost, NATO, the Ukrainian government (which has been a U.S. puppet), and groups of Ukrainian Nazis,” he tweeted. Of the Biden administration, he wrote: “My country is being run by genocidal war criminals.” In part due to these positions, Young has not received support from the Democratic Party.

There is little doubt that some of these positions are the result of Russian influence operations, not least because some candidates are retweeting Russian propaganda sources. The ideas, too, aren’t all homegrown. Framing Ukraine as a Nazi state did not originate in U.S. domestic debate, but was imported from mainstream Russian discourse, just like Musk’s phrasing of the supposed “mistake” that made Crimea a part of Ukraine.

American anti-Ukraine voices are also often rebroadcast on Russian state media for a Russian audience, which also serves the Kremlin’s propaganda operations. Naturally, Musk’s proposal to dismember Ukraine was all over Russian state media, while Sputnik highlighted former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s announcement on Monday that she is leaving the Democratic Party because it is supposedly run by a “cabal of warmongers.” Similarly, RT has amplified Republican Congressman Paul Gosar’s statement that the United States “doesn’t owe Zelensky a damn thing.”

A compounding problem is that much of our tracked social media content with the highest user engagement—counting likes and retweets—is critical of Ukraine. This may be a result of the social media algorithms or just human behavior, where negativity attracts more attention. The most-tweeted mentions of “NATO,” for example, do not favor the alliance’s effort to help Ukraine defend itself, which is the majority consensus among Americans. Instead, Twitter is flooded with content calling NATO a “war machine.”

Not every anti-Ukrainian candidate will win office next month. But if enough of them do, they could shift critical foreign policy decisions in Washington. Congress could reduce the aid Ukraine desperately needs. The return of U.S. political divisions over Russia would also send troubling signals to the United States’ already skittish European allies, who are understandably anxious about U.S. foreign policy shifts if a Republican president is elected in 2024.

Like all efforts to defend against information operations, the spread of Kremlin talking points in the U.S. political debate can only be countered by proactively debunking, counter-messaging, and flooding the zone. Ukraine’s defenders need to go on the offensive by stating why the outcome of the war matters to the United States. Supporters of Ukraine, not least the Biden administration, have plenty to learn from Ukraine itself, which has effectively shaped the narrative and out-operated the Kremlin in the information space.

If the bipartisan and popular consensus in support of Ukraine is to be maintained, Democrats and Republicans need to put forward an unambiguous defense of Ukraine and not let a noisy minority of candidates and celebrities like Musk grab the public stage. Come November, we will know if they succeeded.

More at https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/13/musk-carlson-trump-midterm-electi
ons-russia-propaganda-war-ukraine-candidates/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022 5:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and the Midterm Candidates Peddling Russian Propaganda

RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!

Fuck you dude.

Quote:
by Laura Thornton

And fuck you too, Laura. You're just mad you're losing your biggest propaganda machine Twitter.

But hey, you still have Chinese owned Tik Tok to brainwash the kids with.

Quote:
But candidates are also repeating Kremlin narratives almost verbatim. This includes calling Ukrainians “Nazis,” accusing Kyiv of war crimes, saying the United States started the war, and blaming Washington for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions.

Nobody is calling Ukranians Nazis. There are ACTUAL Nazis in Ukraine. And besides, you fucking goofballs spent 4 years calling everyone you disagreed with a Nazi. I've got dozens of examples of Ted calling me a Nazi. I've got hundreds of your alter-ego Reaverfan doing so.

The US did start the war. Washington is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline explosions.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022 1:43 PM

Cites

T

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 3:38 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by THG: Cites

You wouldn't need them if you had been paying the slightest attention at any time during the last EIGHT FUCKING YEARS!

Nazi torchlight parade

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Thursday, October 20, 2022 3:50 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Meanwhile, parts of Kherson are being evacuated in prep for the anticipated Kiev offensive in the region.

Overall command has been given to General Surovikin.

He gave an interview in which he laid out Russia's overall plan for the SMO in Ukraine. They will focus on using standoff weapons to "grind down" the Kiev army, and preserving civilian and infantry lives. That explains the absence of large numbers of Russian infantry on the frontline. In addition, they're degrading Kiev's military by striking military targets and electrical generation far behind the front lines. Gaining or defending territory is not the top of priorities.

Meanwhile Kiev is fighting a different war, using "human waves" to claim territory, and sabotage to demoralize Russians. So large number of soldiers are being sent into Russian artillery, air force and tank fire.

So the question is whether Russian standoff weapons can degrade Kiev's military capability faster than Kiev can throw people at it.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Friday, October 21, 2022 7:38 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Meanwhile Kiev is fighting a different war, using "human waves" to claim territory, and sabotage to demoralize Russians. So large number of soldiers are being sent into Russian artillery, air force and tank fire.

So the question is whether Russian standoff weapons can degrade Kiev's military capability faster than Kiev can throw people at it.

Great piece of Putin fan fiction, Signym. You make Russians sound heroic and turned the Ukrainians into aliens from Tom Cruise's movie "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014) or the rumored sequel "Live Die Repeat and Repeat". The aliens keep coming in wave after wave after wave. Cruise needs endless ammo if he is going to win.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5617712/

This is NOT Putin fan fiction:

Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states. By Francis Fukuyama

The weaknesses of strong states have been on glaring display in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is the sole decision maker; even the former Soviet Union had a politburo where the party secretary had to vet policy ideas. We saw images of Putin sitting at the end of a long table with his defense and foreign ministers because of his fear of COVID; he was so isolated that he had no idea how strong Ukrainian national identity had become in recent years or how fierce a resistance his invasion would provoke. He similarly got no word of how deeply corruption and incompetence had taken root within his own military, how abysmally the modern weapons he had developed were working, or how poorly trained his own officer corps was.

The shallowness of his regime’s support was made evident by the rush to the borders of young Russian men when he announced his “partial” mobilization on September 21. Some 700,000 Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, and any other country that would take them, a far greater number than has actually been mobilized. Those who have been caught up by the conscription are being thrown directly into battle without adequate training or equipment, and are already showing up on the front as POWs or casualties. Putin’s legitimacy was based on a social contract that promised citizens stability and a modicum of prosperity in return for political passivity, but the regime has broken that deal and is feeling the consequences.

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support have produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. These reversals have triggered a huge amount of finger-pointing in Moscow; the Kremlin is cracking down even harder on dissent. Whether Putin himself will be able to survive a Russian military defeat is an open question.

Politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and of course Trump in the U.S. have all expressed sympathy for Putin. They see in him a model for the kind of strongman rule they would like to exercise in their own country. He, in turn, is hoping that their rise will weaken Western support for Ukraine and save his flailing “special military operation.”

Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights, whether that is the European Union or the administration in Washington. But reality has intervened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a real dictatorship trying to crush a genuinely free society with rockets and tanks, and may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake. By resisting Russian imperialism, the Ukrainians are demonstrating the grievous weaknesses that exist at the core of an apparently strong state. They understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221019192529/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 21, 2022 12:30 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Lots of words, no evidence.

For example, yu would have thought the Finns would have reported on the total number of military-age men crossing their border. While they reported an increase (approx double the number seeking visas) how many Russian travel to Finland each month anyway? Was that an increase of, say, 500 to 1000?

Georgia, no friend of Russia, would hav no issue reporting the number of military-age Russians crossing their border, both legally and illegally. Number of bus tickets? Airline tickets? Visas applied for? Border interceptions? This is an article of assertion without actual investigation.

I'm sure there are military-age men leaving Russia but like the number of Russian KIA in Ukraine, the number is greatly exaggerated.

And we both know that the western press doesn't hesitate to publish lies that would cause a mortal human being to blush.

Quote:
Kyiv has claimed that while over 9,000 of its troops have perished in the fighting, nearly 55,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/finland-shuts-borders-russia-conscriptio
n-age-men-flee-putin-order

Like the USA military, there are weaknesses in the Russian military. But Russians are great at counting missiles, shells, tanks and rockets, and they seem to have plenty of those.

*****

My civilian intepretation is that the ease with which the LDNR took Kherson early on, and the overall acceptance of the general population, led to complaisance - much like in Kharkov. General Surovikin looked at defensive preparations, and said "What? No minefields? No tank traps? No fortified counter-batteries? No anti-air radar? No trenches?????" and has started to remedy to situation. Meanwhile, Kiev is (apparently) attempting to blow the Novaya-Kharkova dam to flood the areas downstream.

What I'm reading is that Kiev is directing its military to keep up a steady stream of attacks along the Kherson line of contact- anywhere from a couple of hundred to a thousand men in each attempt- but that so far the attacks have been repulsed with heavy losses for Kiev. Some people have explained these attacks as "reconnaissance in force" - my imterpretation is that means sending in a group large enough to activate Russian artillery so that western intelligence can locate them before the BIG offensive takes place. Which is still expected, bc Biden* and western neocons and NATO need SOMEthing before the mid-terms/various governments fall apart. The BIG attack is yet to be launched.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Friday, October 21, 2022 3:36 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's yearslong crusade against Ukraine has finally come home to roost as Republicans call for abandoning Kyiv

A far-right faction of the GOP has increasingly pushed against continued assistance to Ukraine, saying the billions the US has provided to Kyiv are too costly and not worth the risk of sparking a wider conflict with Russia.

The GOP's gradual shift away from Ukraine and toward Russia has been years in the making, but right-wing hostility toward Ukraine hit a pivotal point during Donald Trump's presidency.

In addition to peddling the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election, Trump was impeached in 2019 for withholding hundreds of millions in vital aid to Ukraine as it fought a war against Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region.

While withholding the aid, Trump and his allies pressured Zelenskyy, a political neophyte who won the 2019 election in a landslide victory, to launch an investigation targeting the Bidens ahead of the 2020 US election.

Foreign policy experts said Trump's actions — dangling security assistance in exchange for political favors — were a threat to the US's national security and bipartisan support for Ukraine. But the vast majority of congressional Republicans rallied to Trump's defense, and ultimately, just one Senate Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to convict the former president over his actions.

In the years since, Trump has continued to take a controversial stance on Ukraine, praising Russian President Vladimir Putin's justifications for invading as "genius" and "savvy." The former president has often lauded the Russian leader, going out of his way to avoid criticizing Putin amid a historically contentious period in US-Russia relations.

Anti-Ukraine sentiment doesn't just come from the top of the GOP. Putin has long been seen as a hero by the alt-right and white nationalists, and since Russia invaded Ukraine, many prominent right-wing politicians and media figures have moved in lockstep with the Kremlin, creating a feedback loop where each side amplifies and recycles the other's propaganda.

On Fox News, for instance, the far-right host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly echoed a nonsense conspiracy theory, which originated in Moscow before taking root in the US, suggesting that Ukraine houses US-funded bioweapons labs.

Russian state-sponsored media outlets in turn frequently feature Carlson's segments, and in March, Mother Jones reported that the Russian government instructed state media that it was "essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson" to spread negative information about Ukraine, the US, and NATO.

"When we see Fox News commentators, from our perspective, promote isolationist positions — that looks like support for Russia," Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of Ukraine's parliament, recently told NPR.

Some GOP opposition to continuing aid to Ukraine is tied to Trump's "America First" policy vis-a-vis foreign affairs. Trump embraced a non-interventionist stance and was often critical of US spending abroad, particularly when it came to NATO and European security.

Congressional Republicans like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have echoed these sentiments in their criticism of US assistance to Ukraine.

It's a remarkable shift for the Republican Party, which for years touted a hawkish position on foreign policy, especially as it related to leading adversaries like Russia. But under Trump's stewardship, the party has become increasingly isolationist, and its growing opposition to aiding Ukraine is the latest and clearest sign of that.

https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-midterms-win-could-threaten-ukrain
e-help-putin-2022-10

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 6:48 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Meanwhile, Kiev is (apparently) attempting to blow the Novaya-Kharkova dam to flood the areas downstream.

Kherson Flooding Would be Like Dropping 'Atomic Bomb' if Putin Strikes Dam

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S. think tank, assessed this week that Russian forces may be preparing to carry out a false-flag attack on the Kakhovka HPP where Kyiv is conducting extensive military action to take back its territory.

The ISW in its assessment on Wednesday cited Vladimir Saldo, head of Kherson's Russian-installed administration, as claiming this week that Ukraine intends to destroy the strategic facility.

The new commander of Putin's army in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, also claimed on Wednesday that he had received information that Kyiv intends to strike the dam at the Kakhovka HPP, which he alleged would cause destructive flooding in Kherson.

The ISW said Russian authorities likely intend these warnings about a purported Ukrainian strike on the Kakhovka HPP to set an information environment for Russian forces to damage the dam themselves, and blame Ukraine for the subsequent damage and loss of life, all while using the resulting floods to cover their own retreat further south into the Kherson region.

https://www.newsweek.com/kherson-flooding-atomic-bomb-putin-kakhovka-d
am-1753506

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 8:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The flight of Russian men shows Russian propaganda failures

As in any autocracy, it is difficult to know in Russia why people claim to support the “special military operation” in surveys and refrain from protesting. Is it because they agree with the government — or because they fear the consequences of opposing it?

For this reason, the response to the military call-up last month was revealing. Tens of thousands of fighting-age men rushed to Russia’s borders to exit the country; those who could afford last-minute plane tickets flew wherever they could. Ordinary citizens attacked military recruiting offices and held demonstrations in regions where they were previously rare.

If people actually believed the official rationale for the war and the Kremlin’s repeated claims of battlefield successes, we would expect that eligible draftees would voluntarily, even enthusiastically, sign up for the cause — as Ukrainians did after the invasion, or as so many Americans did after 9/11. But we saw the opposite. People with skin in the game revealed they did not buy the claim that Russia was fighting an existential battle against the West.

Why are Russians skeptical?

People might be skeptical of Kremlin propaganda for several reasons. First, while state television is the most common way people get their news, Russians, especially youths, are also active on social media, which is not censored as thoroughly.

Second, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the war, according to the U.S. government. Military recruiters have sought new troops most aggressively in the parts of Russia that have already lost the most young men. Seeing relatives and neighbors return in body bags can be a reality check against televised propaganda about the war.

Third, Russians have been exposed to baseless claims for years — which may have numbed them to it. The West has been portrayed as an enemy for so long that the war rhetoric may have lacked the urgency it might have had otherwise. People may have accurately discerned Putin’s resolve while discounting his rationale for the invasion.

Incendiary rhetoric may lose its persuasive power while still being intimidating

Many Russians may still support the war, whether or not they believe Putin’s rhetoric. Others may go along with the regime simply because they feel that is the safest attitude.

But as Russian casualties mount and ordinary people are asked to sacrifice for the war, the propagandists’ job becomes more difficult. The Kremlin will need to rely increasingly on policing and surveillance to maintain stability.

To alert people to the fact that dissent will be punished, Putin may further intensify his rhetoric, even as it rings ever more hollow. His recent speech accusing the West of “Satanism” and issuing nuclear threats was probably intended not only to signal his resolve to the West, but also to deliver a warning to Russian citizens.

Once a regime loses its ability to persuade, ruling becomes more costly. But the Kremlin apparently hopes that as long as it can instill fear, including through strident rhetoric, it will be able to deter massive resistance — even as the consequences of its invasion hit closer to home.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/russia-public-opini
on-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 8:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The flight of Russian men shows Russian propaganda failures

As in any autocracy, it is difficult to know in Russia why people claim to support the “special military operation” in surveys and refrain from protesting. Is it because they agree with the government — or because they fear the consequences of opposing it?

For this reason, the response to the military call-up last month was revealing. Tens of thousands of fighting-age men rushed to Russia’s borders to exit the country; those who could afford last-minute plane tickets flew wherever they could. Ordinary citizens attacked military recruiting offices and held demonstrations in regions where they were previously rare.

If people actually believed the official rationale for the war and the Kremlin’s repeated claims of battlefield successes, we would expect that eligible draftees would voluntarily, even enthusiastically, sign up for the cause — as Ukrainians did after the invasion, or as so many Americans did after 9/11. But we saw the opposite. People with skin in the game revealed they did not buy the claim that Russia was fighting an existential battle against the West.

Why are Russians skeptical?

People might be skeptical of Kremlin propaganda for several reasons. First, while state television is the most common way people get their news, Russians, especially youths, are also active on social media, which is not censored as thoroughly.

Second, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the war, according to the U.S. government. Military recruiters have sought new troops most aggressively in the parts of Russia that have already lost the most young men. Seeing relatives and neighbors return in body bags can be a reality check against televised propaganda about the war.

Third, Russians have been exposed to baseless claims for years — which may have numbed them to it. The West has been portrayed as an enemy for so long that the war rhetoric may have lacked the urgency it might have had otherwise. People may have accurately discerned Putin’s resolve while discounting his rationale for the invasion.

Incendiary rhetoric may lose its persuasive power while still being intimidating

Many Russians may still support the war, whether or not they believe Putin’s rhetoric. Others may go along with the regime simply because they feel that is the safest attitude.

But as Russian casualties mount and ordinary people are asked to sacrifice for the war, the propagandists’ job becomes more difficult. The Kremlin will need to rely increasingly on policing and surveillance to maintain stability.

To alert people to the fact that dissent will be punished, Putin may further intensify his rhetoric, even as it rings ever more hollow. His recent speech accusing the West of “Satanism” and issuing nuclear threats was probably intended not only to signal his resolve to the West, but also to deliver a warning to Russian citizens.

Once a regime loses its ability to persuade, ruling becomes more costly. But the Kremlin apparently hopes that as long as it can instill fear, including through strident rhetoric, it will be able to deter massive resistance — even as the consequences of its invasion hit closer to home.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/russia-public-opini
on-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The closest Scott Radnitz has ever been to war was a multi-player HALO match while he was being rawdawged by one of his soy-filled college roommates.

I'd ask why you idiot Leftists talk about Russians as if they're some sort of homogeneous blob, but because you're part of a hive-mind yourself it's not a question worth asking. And if I did bother asking several of you, you'd all give me the same answer because you are soulless NPCs.

How the hell are any of you going to function after all of your social media and news sites die off now that the unlimited venture capital has dried up?

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 9:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The closest Scott Radnitz has ever been to war was a multi-player HALO match while he was being rawdawged by one of his soy-filled college roommates.

I'd ask why you idiot Leftists talk about Russians as if they're some sort of homogeneous blob, but because you're part of a hive-mind yourself it's not a question worth asking. And if I did bother asking several of you, you'd all give me the same answer because you are soulless NPCs.

How the hell are any of you going to function after all of your social media and news sites die off now that the unlimited venture capital has dried up?

Russia has an economy smaller than Canada's because Russians are lazy, stupid, and belligerent. It is no surprise when Russian assholes brag endlessly despite doing poorly in this world and lash out at people who are doing far better. The same dynamic happens between North Korea and South Korea. In case you don't know, 6ix, South Korea has an economy about 57 times larger than North Korea, despite South Korea having zero H-bombs. To hear North Koreans and Russians tell their "success" stories, H-bombs are the very foundation of a successful country. Evidence proves that is a lie. North Koreans brag continuously, just like Russians do, about their superiority while at the same time claiming their opposition is vastly inferior and will be conquered, one of these days. Republican angry poor white trash learned how to behave from the belligerent braggarts of North Korea and Russia.

GDP between South Korea and North Korea from 2010 to 2021
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1035390/south-korea-gdp-comparison
-with-north-korea/

Putin’s Last Hope to Win in Ukraine Is a GOP Victory in November
VLAD’S ALLIES: Just when Russia is on the ropes, Republican leaders are already signaling they’ll cut aid to Ukraine if they win control of Congress.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-last-hope-to-win-in-ukraine-is-a-
gop-victory-in-november
Putin and the Republican Party are supportive because they are like-minded.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 12:46 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Still waiting for Kiev's Big Offensive in Kherson. Or anywhere, for that matter.

It doesn't matter how many lies are published in western press. They can (and do) tell us endless fairy tales, but in the end reality trumps fiction.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 4:52 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Still waiting for Kiev's Big Offensive in Kherson. Or anywhere, for that matter.

It doesn't matter how many lies are published in western press. They can (and do) tell us endless fairy tales, but in the end reality trumps fiction.

The Russians have achieved impressive numbers which R.J. Rummel compiled for easy reference:

Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 by R. J. Rummel
https://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Politics-Soviet-Genocide-Murder-ebook/dp
/B074VDV6V9/

Contents

1 61,911,000 Victims: Utopianism Empowered, 1917-1987 1
Appendix 1.1 16
Appendix 1.2 24

2 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period, 1917-1922 33
Appendix 2.1 49

3 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928 61
Appendix 3.1 73

4 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period, 1929-1935 81
Appendix 4.1 103

5 4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1936-1938 109
Appendix 5.1 117

6 5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939-June 1941 127
Appendix 6.1 138

7 13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period, June 1941-1945 151
Appendix 7.1 168

8 15,613,000 Victims: Postwar and Stalin’s Twilight Period, 1945-1953 191
Appendix 8.1 201

9 6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period, 1954-1987 217
Appendix 9.1 226

Download R. J. Rummel’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.nz/search.php?req=R.+J.+Rummel

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 5:19 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Still waiting for Kiev's Big Offensive in Kherson. Or anywhere, for that matter.

It doesn't matter how many lies are published in western press. They can (and do) tell us endless fairy tales, but in the end reality trumps fiction.
The Russians have achieved impressive numbers which R.J. Rummel compiled for easy reference:

Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 by R. J. Rummel
https://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Politics-Soviet-Genocide-Murder-ebook/dp
/B074VDV6V9/

Contents

1 61,911,000 Victims: Utopianism Empowered, 1917-1987 1
Appendix 1.1 16
Appendix 1.2 24

2 3,284,000 Victims: The Civil War Period, 1917-1922 33
Appendix 2.1 49

3 2,200,000 Victims: The NEP Period 1923-1928 61
Appendix 3.1 73

4 11,440,000 Victims: The Collectivization Period, 1929-1935 81
Appendix 4.1 103

5 4,345,000 Victims: The Great Terror Period 1936-1938 109
Appendix 5.1 117

6 5,104,000 Victims: Pre-World War II Period 1939-June 1941 127
Appendix 6.1 138

7 13,053,000 Victims: World War II Period, June 1941-1945 151
Appendix 7.1 168

8 15,613,000 Victims: Postwar and Stalin’s Twilight Period, 1945-1953 191
Appendix 8.1 201

9 6,872,000 Victims: Post-Stalin Period, 1954-1987 217
Appendix 9.1 226

Download R. J. Rummel’s books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.nz/search.php?req=R.+J.+Rummel

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

But what does this have to do with ... anything?
Yanno, you used to blame the Soviets for waging war "inefficiently".

This is just more crap-splatter from you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 6:49 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But what does this have to do with ... anything?
Yanno, you used to blame the Soviets for waging war "inefficiently".

This is just more crap-splatter from you.

You might not have noticed, but Russia has a seat now at the UN Security Council only because the Soviet Union, before it killed itself, previously held that seat. https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/current-members

Signym, whether you can understand or not, there is continuity between the dead Soviet Union and sickly Russia. Russia took up where the Soviet Union left off in killing people. Some call it genocide. I call it Russian stupidity, ignorance, and mindless belligerence. Russians don't know when to stop killing or who to target because Russians have mental problems, possibly alcoholism-related. Just see Russian history of murdering people in Ukraine, which goes back for centuries. But Signym being Signym, unless the drunken murder happened in front of Signym, it did not happen.

Contrast Russian history with, oh, Canadian history. The Canadians have a bigger economy than Russia, despite having only a quarter of the population. The big difference? Canadians aren't drunkenly murdering their neighbors or each other or committing suicide. A country like Russia could achieve as much as Canada has done if Russia gets sober, stops wasting its time on war and stops preparing for war. I think Putin drinks too much because Russia is poor compared to Canada. Putin keeps wanting to kill himself and the world over Russian poverty. Every week Putin makes the same suicidal threat to use nukes. Very sad situation. Drinking less would probably fix it.

https://www.worlddata.info/country-comparison.php?country1=CAN&cou
ntry2=RUS

Putin worried about alcohol addiction of Russia's top leadership
Thursday, 15 September 2022, 11:40
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/09/15/7367562/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 9:17 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The dratted dbl

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 9:18 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

SECOND, you have accused Putin of being the equivalent of Hilter, Stalin, and Ivan the Terrible all rolled into one, and accused Russians of being brutal, backward, lazy, genocidal, authority -loving cannibals, not any different than they were under the tsars or Stalin.

And you think the Russians don't know what people like you think am of them?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Saturday, October 22, 2022 9:50 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The closest Scott Radnitz has ever been to war was a multi-player HALO match while he was being rawdawged by one of his soy-filled college roommates.

I'd ask why you idiot Leftists talk about Russians as if they're some sort of homogeneous blob, but because you're part of a hive-mind yourself it's not a question worth asking. And if I did bother asking several of you, you'd all give me the same answer because you are soulless NPCs.

How the hell are any of you going to function after all of your social media and news sites die off now that the unlimited venture capital has dried up?
Russia has an economy smaller than Canada's because Russians are lazy, stupid, and belligerent

You've never met a Russian in your entire worthless fucking life.

Only racist Democrats could label the people of an entire huge country as worthless and without any individualism with every ounce of hate they can muster and not consider themselves the bad guys.

You are a garbage human being.

--------------------------------------------------

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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Sunday, October 23, 2022 6:31 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND, you have accused Putin of being the equivalent of Hilter, Stalin, and Ivan the Terrible all rolled into one, and accused Russians of being brutal, backward, lazy, genocidal, authority -loving cannibals, not any different than they were under the tsars or Stalin.

And it's all true, so what's your point comrade?

T

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Sunday, October 23, 2022 6:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Still waiting for Kiev's Big Offensive in Kherson. Or anywhere, for that matter.

It doesn't matter how many lies are published in western press. They can (and do) tell us endless fairy tales, but in the end reality trumps fiction.

Russia’s military leadership has withdrawn its officers in the Russian-annexed city of Kherson across the Dnieper River in anticipation of an advance of Ukrainian troops, the Institute for the Study of War think tank said Sunday.

To delay the Ukrainian counteroffensive as the Russians complete their retreat, Moscow has left newly mobilized, inexperienced forces on the other side of the wide river, it added.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/military-think-tank-russia-withdr
aws-officers-from-kherson/ar-AA13hcKr?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=3780be71a87e4b71cc96a6f0ad7a7044

More cannon fodder. It's coming soon enough. Are you in a hurry to see more dead Russians? Hey signym, have I ever told you I told you so?

T

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Sunday, October 23, 2022 7:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you have accused Putin of being the equivalent of Hilter, Stalin, and Ivan the Terrible all rolled into one, and accused Russians of being brutal, backward, lazy, genocidal, authority -loving cannibals, not any different than they were under the tsars or Stalin.

And you think the Russians don't know what people like you think am of them?

Is this the best defense you can make of what Russians have accomplished since WWII? The Russians would have achieved so much more if only the world understood the true meaning of being Russian? The true meaning is found in the 7 part series Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone by filmmaker Adam Curtis, who also made The Century of the Self.

What It Felt Like To Live Through the Collapse of Communism . . . and Democracy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/other/adam-curtis-astonishing-
autopsy-of-the-fall-of-russia-will-leave-you-wide-eyed/ar-AA12U7PL

“To understand Russia now – and what might happen in the future – you have to understand what happened back then. For it is out of that rage, the violence, the desperation and the overwhelming corruption that Vladimir Putin emerged.”- filmmaker Adam Curtis, who also made The Century of the Self.

A few places to see the 7 part TV show:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0d3hwl1/russia-19851999-trauma
zone

https://comment.rlsbb.ru/russia-1985-1999-traumazone-s01-1080p-ip-web-
dl-h264-playweb/

https://tpb25.ukpass.co/search.php?q=TraumaZone

TraumaZone: Russia 1985-1999 S01E06 (1994 to 1998}

TraumaZone: Russia 1985-1999 S01E07 (1995 to 1999)

Signym, the TraumaZone is what happens when an entire country gets delusions of grandeur. Rather than rising to the level of Canadian prosperity, Russia has fallen to the level of North Korean prosperity because the Russians, deep into their delusions about themselves, made too many plans that were too high-flying to execute successfully.

I'm certain that if Kim Jong-un of North Korea decided to follow Putin's example with Ukraine by invading South Korea, South Korea would be at least as heavily damaged as Ukraine has been damaged. Unfortunately, North Korea would not be more prosperous for having invaded, just as Russia is not more prosperous for invading Ukraine, but with Delusions of Grandeur, physical and economic reality doesn't matter to North Koreans or Russians, since only their easily bruised feelings are real.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, October 23, 2022 7:27 AM