REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, October 31, 2024 13:46
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PAGE 122 of 149

Monday, March 11, 2024 11:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


#Rootin4Putin

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Monday, March 11, 2024 11:42 PM

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Ukraine Attacks Russian Energy Terminal (Drone Strike!) || Peter Zeihan






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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 12:21 AM

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 1:35 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 5:29 AM

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Why Haven’t Russians Rebelled Against The War? Psychology Has Answers

By Alexander Archagov | March 11, 2024

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/03/11/why-havent-russians-rebelled
-against-the-war-psychology-has-answers-a84364


The onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sparked protests ranging from rallies and solitary pickets to mass letters and anti-war statements by celebrities — but even so, only a small percentage of Russians have shown open resistance to the war. The reasons behind this go beyond the fear of political repression. It is also the product of a deep-rooted instinct for psychological self-preservation.

According to OVD-Info, around 15,000 people have been detained at anti-war protests over the past two years. It is exceedingly difficult to use this number to gauge the full scale of Russia’s anti-war opposition. Moreover, sociologists like the Levada Center’s Lev Gudkov assert that 74% of Russians support Putin's decisions regarding the war in Ukraine, a figure that has hardly changed over the two years since the full-scale invasion began. At the same time, 57% support immediately ceasing military actions and entering negotiations, but only if Russia can keep the Ukrainian territories it has conquered.

Contemporary political science does not have a unanimous opinion on what type of political regime Russia falls under. However, many researchers agree that exercising political freedoms including freedom of speech is out of the question.

This is why sociologists like Grigory Yudin question the reliability of polling data, suggesting that most Russians either choose not to respond or to answer in a way that avoids trouble because they believe polls are conducted by the government. Yudin also claims that only about 5% of people respond to public opinion surveys. Figures claiming 74% support for Putin's decisions cannot be adequately interpreted as a result.

Fortunately, we have more than just quantitative data. The Public Sociology Laboratory used focus groups and conducted over 200 interviews in the spring of 2022 and another 90 that autumn to understand which groups of citizens support the war, which are against it, and the arguments used by each group.

As a result, sociologists divided the respondents into three groups: supporters of the war, opponents, and the undecided. Based on these data, it is possible to draft emotional-psychological portraits of each group, and understand their arguments and motives.

For war supporters, until the mobilization was announced, there was simply no war, and if there was no war, there would be nothing to resist. In this sense, the term "special military operation" is brilliantly deceitful. A military operation is not a war. It's something distant, special, that requires no particular attention. In the resulting narrative, Russia is not an aggressor. Rather, it is defending itself against attacks from the sinister “collective West." Ukraine is thus being held hostage by the evil forces resisting Putin’s heroism.

Interestingly, a significant portion of respondents, according to researchers, do not hold Putin responsible for the war in Ukraine. He is also perceived as a victim of circumstances, who was forced into this situation. At the same time, most of these individuals declare they are against the war. But since it seems inevitable, they feel they have to go along with it.

For virtually all respondents, the war came as a shock. To avoid shattering their existing worldview, they made the war a part of it. After all, perceiving your country as an aggressor, and its people as murderers, is unbearable. It is crucial to understand that the human psyche is remarkably adaptive and malleable, allowing survival under even the most extreme conditions.

The study also indicates that war supporters downplay the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine. Russian propaganda draws direct parallels between the "fight against Nazism in Ukraine" and the Great Patriotic War, framing anti-war protest as either impossible, since "we did not start this war," or criminal, as it supports the "global evil of Nazism."

In autumn 2022, the Public Sociology Laboratory conducted a second study to understand how the position of war supporters had changed. This research revealed significant shifts in public perception of the war following the announcement of mobilization: the number of staunch supporters greatly diminished, as more people demanded an end to the fighting.

The war’s remaining supporters see it as a path to peace in Donbas. To them, anyone who thinks differently is unmoved by the suffering of people living in separatist regions. Thus, researchers note, a large portion of war supporters have also become its opponents. However, the perception of the war as an inevitable evil remains unchanged, rendering any actions against it seemingly pointless.

Another group identified by researchers is the undecided, who do not express a clear moral judgment on the war. They are trying to act as if the war does not affect them to avoid becoming distressed from their internal conflict. Research shows that humans naturally try to avoid unpleasant experiences, even if it leads to negative consequences in the future.

However, this attempt to emotionally detach from the events is not always successful. Even before mobilization, the war indirectly impacted many aspects of their lives, causing uncertainty and anxiety. Consequently, their anxiety has become nonspecific, thus not motivating individuals toward any political action. Therefore, this stance is somewhat more "normal than that of either a supporter or opponent of the war.

Finally, the researchers identified a third group who were actively opposed to the war. For these individuals, the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was especially shocking as it contradicted their moral norms.

For a long time, Russians lived with the notion that war was something either relegated to the distant past or happening far away in Syria. War, it turns out, can take place close to home, affecting you and your relatives living in Ukraine or Belgorod. Day after day, watching military reports, war opponents experience anxiety, fear, and pain. These intense experiences simply exhaust people, leading to a sense of helplessness. Propaganda efforts and surveys, creating the image of a majority that supports the war, play a significant role here.

Additionally, resistance does not bring about political change, only violence from law enforcement. Since the beginning of military actions in Ukraine in 2022, Russia significantly tightened legislation against anti-war statements, including adopting a law that criminalizes the dissemination of information deemed false about the actions of the Armed Forces, with penalties up to 5 million rubles ($55,200) and up to 10 years of imprisonment. There has also been increased prosecution for "discrediting the army," leading to criminal cases, searches, and pressure on those critical of the government on social media.

The Russian state harshly punishes individuals for small-scale actions. For instance, Sasha Skochilenko, who replaced price tags in a store with anti-war messages, received 7 years in prison. Though these high-profile cases are relatively few in number, they broadcast how serious the risks of any kind of resistance can be.

Moreover, the motivation of war opponents stems from moral norms of intolerance towards violence. This same moral stance also prevents them from engaging in violence against government representatives. Research shows that the human brain predicts actions based on past actions, and if actions lead to a negative outcome, repeating them seems pointless.

For example, a Socialist Revolutionary from the late 19th century could attempt to assassinate an official or even the tsar, and his comrades would see a real political result from their actions. Even if this result was negative for the revolutionaries in the long term, their brains could justify the action as successful. If someone protests against the war in Ukraine, the likely result is a police baton to the head, administrative arrest, or even a criminal case, but certainly not the cessation of the war or significant political changes. As a result, war opponents often feel in the minority and helpless, and their actions seem to bring only negative consequences for themselves. In such conditions, active anti-war protest becomes simply impossible.

However, despite all this, anti-war resistance among Russians does exist. Firstly, those who have left Russia due to the war actively protest against it, as the risks of state violence for them have become minimal.

Secondly, there has emerged what anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova calls "hidden” anti-war protest. Arkhipov notes a whole movement of anonymous art activism with a distinctly anti-war character. Anti-war stickers in public transport, disguised as standard signs for children and disabled seats, anonymous graffiti with red ballerinas, or even charades that reveal the phrase "no to war," are all new forms of anti-war protest Russians have turned to.

Thirdly, if one broadly understands protest against the war to include actions such as refusing to participate in anything related to the war, then the mass exodus of Russians from the country can also be seen as a form of protest.

Can this situation be changed? It's hard to say. The death of Alexei Navalny showed us that we do not live in a Hollywood movie where the hero defeats the evil emperor. This war could last for many years, even without the mass support of citizens, if the majority views it as a natural phenomenon over which they have no power.

Perhaps the most that war opponents can now do, without resorting to violence, is to continue reminding everyone around them that war is a human-made disaster. It is not an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. The war was not started by gods, but by flesh-and-blood people — meaning it is we, the people, who can stop it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 5:36 AM

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CNN reported on March 11 that NATO intelligence estimates that Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions of unspecified caliber per month totaling about three million shells per year.[20] A senior European intelligence official reportedly told CNN the US and Europe can collectively produce only about 1.2 million shells of unspecified calibers per year for Ukraine. CNN stated that the US military set a goal to produce 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025 and noted that this is less than half of Russia’s current monthly production, but US Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Doug Bush stated on February 5 that this goal of 100,000 shells per month by 2025 only refers to 155mm artillery shells and does not include shells of other calibers that the US produces and that Ukrainian forces use.[21] NATO intelligence estimates of Russian artillery munition production cited by CNN likely include various calibers of munitions, not just 152mm shells that are the analogue to Western 155mm shells, and is likely not a direct comparison to the West’s goals for the production of 155mm shells.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-11-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:18 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
CNN reported on March 11 that NATO intelligence estimates that Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions of unspecified caliber per month totaling about three million shells per year.[20] A senior European intelligence official reportedly told CNN the US and Europe can collectively produce only about 1.2 million shells of unspecified calibers per year for Ukraine. CNN stated that the US military set a goal to produce 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025 and noted that this is less than half of Russia’s current monthly production, but US Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Doug Bush stated on February 5 that this goal of 100,000 shells per month by 2025 only refers to 155mm artillery shells and does not include shells of other calibers that the US produces and that Ukrainian forces use.[21] NATO intelligence estimates of Russian artillery munition production cited by CNN likely include various calibers of munitions, not just 152mm shells that are the analogue to Western 155mm shells, and is likely not a direct comparison to the West’s goals for the production of 155mm shells.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-11-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




No guns for citizens, dammit!

But plenty of guns for everyone else.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:00 PM

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Oh, I'm sure they are Ted. I'm sure they are.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:14 AM

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


Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov discussed with guests on his evening television show which NATO countries Russian nuclear weapons should target, even proposing a viewer competition to decide the city that should get hit first. | Mar 12, 2024 at 10:40 AM EDT

"What should we destroy in Germany for their Taurus (missiles)?" prompting laughter from Sidorov, who said "Hamburg," adding that the small size of the Bavarian town he had studied in—Garmisch-Partenkirchen—meant it "was not worth a missile."

"Maybe we should have an audience vote," said Solovyov. "Which cities are they willing to spare."

In sharing the video, Jake Broe, a former U.S. nuclear and missile operations officer, posted on X: "Solovyov and all their military experts agree that Russia can nuke whoever they want in a first strike against any NATO country.

"Just another day on Kremlin State TV where they casually talk about killing hundreds of millions of people."

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-nato-nuclear-strikes-solovyov-
1878292


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:16 AM

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The Kremlin continues to assert its right, contrary to international law, to enforce Russian federal law on officials of NATO members and former Soviet states for actions taken within the territory of their own countries where Russian courts have no jurisdiction, effectively denying the sovereignty of those states.

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) placed the Estonian Minister of Internal Affairs, Lauri Laanemets, on its online Russian wanted list.[28] Kremlin newswire TASS reported on March 12 that Russian law enforcement agencies stated that Laanemets is wanted for the destruction and damage of Soviet war monuments.[29] The Russian MVD previously put other Baltic and Polish officials, including Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, on the wanted list for the same charges despite Russia’s lack of legal authority to prosecute foreign citizens for allegedly violating Russian laws in foreign states.[30] The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) also banned 347 citizens from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, including many high-ranking Baltic officials, from entering Russia for allegedly having “hostile” policies towards Russia, interfering in Russian internal affairs, persecuting Russian-speaking populations, demolishing Soviet monuments, “glorifying Nazism,” and supplying Ukraine with weapons.[31] The Russian MFA claimed that it could expand the list “at any time.”

Russia has previously used narratives about Russia’s right to protect its “compatriots abroad” (which includes Russian speakers), its alleged fight against neo-Nazism, and its dissatisfaction with the treatment of Soviet monuments in former Soviet states to justify its invasions of Ukraine and aggression against other countries, including NATO member Estonia, in the past.[32]

ISW continues to assess that Russia‘s attempted use of pseudo-legal mechanisms against Baltic officials are part of the Russian efforts to set informational conditions justifying possible Russian escalations against NATO states in the future.[33]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-12-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, March 14, 2024 5:36 AM

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Ukrainian shortages of ammunition and other war materiel resulting from delays in the provision of US military assistance may be making the current Ukrainian front line more fragile than the relatively slow Russian advances in various sectors would indicate.

Ukrainian prioritization of the sectors most threatened by intensive Russian offensive operations could create vulnerabilities elsewhere that Russian forces may be able to exploit to make sudden and surprising advances if Ukrainian supplies continue to dwindle. Russia’s retention of the theater-wide initiative increases the risks of such developments by letting the Russian military command choose to increase or decrease operations anywhere along the line almost at will.

German outlet Der Spiegel published interviews with unnamed Ukrainian commanders on March 12 who stated that almost all Ukrainian units and formations have to husband ammunition and materiel because of the overall ammunition shortage and that some Ukrainian units with limited ammunition and materiel can only hold their current positions if Russian forces do not “attack with full force.”[1]

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi warned that there is a threat of Russian units advancing deep into Ukrainian formations in unspecified areas of the frontline.[2]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-13-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, March 14, 2024 5:36 AM

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Without Congressional Action, U.S. Army Will Miss Artillery Ammunition Target to Help Ukraine

By Jack Detsch | March 13, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/13/united-states-military-aid-ukrain
e-congress
/

The U.S. Army will be forced to cut its artillery production target by more than a quarter if Congress fails to pass the national security supplemental that provides military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel as well as weapons to replenish U.S. stockpiles, military officials said on Tuesday.

“Bottom line is that short of the supplement that we will end up hitting a ceiling,” said Maj. Gen. Joe Hilbert, the Army’s director of force development, in a briefing on Tuesday. “Without the supplemental, we will cap out at about 72,000 [rounds] a month.”

A little more than $3 billion of the total $106 billion supplemental request bill—which has been debated over in Congress for nearly five months, although it passed in the Senate in mid-February—would go toward buying more 155 mm artillery shells and building new production facilities, including in California, Virginia, and Tennessee. General Dynamics is planning to open three artillery production lines in Mesquite, Texas, to provide for the growing demand.

In fighting the largest land war in Europe since World War II, Russia has expended between 12 to 17 million rounds of artillery ammunition since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago; the astronomical rates of fire have been used to dislodge entrenched defenses and spur advances on both sides.

The U.S. defense industrial base has more than doubled its output of 155 mm artillery ammunition since December 2022. U.S. companies are currently producing about 30,000 shells a month, and the Army hopes to increase that tally to 60,000 rounds per month by September 2024, and to 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.

“We’ve got two issues in terms of defense budgets,” said Jeb Nadaner, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy. “One is the orders you place, in a year’s budget. But the other one is, can the industrial base produce it? And the base is really creaky.”

Artillery is not the only major weapons capability that the Pentagon is hoping to build up. The supplemental also includes plans to boost production for U.S.-made Patriot air defense interceptors to 650 per year, about a 15 percent increase. Ukraine operates a handful of the U.S.-built air defense systems. The supplemental also provides funding for a TNT factory that would provide explosives for artillery rounds and other weapons systems, Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, told reporters earlier in March. The bill also includes $3.4 billion in funding for the flagging U.S. submarine industry.

With no U.S. artillery ammunition arriving in Ukraine since December, Kyiv has tried to build more weapons of its own. The U.S. Army has already awarded contracts to American companies to help assemble and fabricate every piece of a 155 mm round—which, at about 6 inches at the base, includes energetic explosives such as TNT, primers, fuses, artillery charges, propellants to ignite the cannons, and the projectile itself. Ukrainian officials have said that they can fabricate projectiles, and multiple U.S. companies have agreed to produce explosives and propellants on Ukrainian soil, but Ukrainian officials say that Kyiv can’t build charges on its own.

Ukraine has received about 300 artillery weapons capable of firing 155 mm rounds since the start of the war—nearly half of them coming from the United States—ranging from U.S.-made M777 howitzer cannons to French Caesar guns and self-propelled German Panzerhaubitze.

But with rounds supplied by U.S. producers dwindling, European countries are turning to ad hoc solutions to keep Ukrainian guns firing. NATO has signed a $1.2 billion artillery ammunition contract to procure rounds on behalf of Belgium, Lithuania, and Spain. The European Union—which is months late on its target of producing 1 million artillery shells by the start of this month—is hoping to get to 1.4 million shells produced by the end of the year. But short of that, a Czech-led initiative has sought to source 800,000 rounds of artillery ammo from outside the European Union for Ukraine.

And while European officials are confident that they can continue the upward trajectory for artillery ammunition production and other weapons needed to help the Ukrainians, such as air defense projectiles, they insist that they can’t do it without the United States, which has a larger overall defense industrial base.

“We physically don’t have the weapons that are needed at the front,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington on Tuesday. If the aid package doesn’t arrive, Sikorski said, NATO’s eastern flank will likely need to be reinforced with more U.S. troops, to head off a possible further westward assault from the Russians.

The United States has also had to turn to accounting tricks. On Tuesday, Pentagon officials said that they had cobbled together a new $300 military aid package for Ukraine using savings from Army contracts that had run under budget.

Ukraine is down to firing less than 2,000 rounds per day, down from around 6,000 per day last summer. Researchers estimate that Ukraine needs to fire at least 75,000 rounds a month—more than its current rates—to keep up a defensive war. Without enough rounds, U.S. defense officials say, Ukraine could be pushed back.

“Just look at what’s happening on the battlefield today around Avdiivka and other places,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters on Tuesday, referring to a Ukrainian city that recently fell to Russian forces. “Ukrainians are struggling without ammunition.”

Still, Washington’s artillery shell production goal for the end of next year is less than half of what Russia is producing right now. And Russia’s economy, which has been converted to mobilize for war, is outproducing countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean all on its own. CNN reported on Monday that Russia was on track to produce three times more munitions than the United States and Europe combined this year.

And the Biden administration’s massive $850 billion defense budget plan would cut the amount of money that the Pentagon is pledging to build up training grounds and stage U.S. troops on NATO’s eastern flank. Those cuts are due to the U.S. military’s desire to focus on preparations for a future conflict with China, said Maj. Gen. Charles Lombardo, the director of training for the Army’s deputy chief of staff, during a press call on Tuesday.

“China, North Korea, Iran, Russia—they don’t have many problems producing things out of their defense industrial base. They are producing unbelievable quantities,” said Nadaner, the former U.S. defense official. “If you look at the United States and its allies, we can’t produce enough shells, we can’t produce enough ships, we can’t produce enough submarines. The system can’t produce much.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, March 14, 2024 5:49 AM

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Vladimir Putin's leaked document reveals plan to 'spread chaos' across Europe

A leaked document appears to show Vladimir Putin's plan to 'spread chaos' across Europe after the war in Ukraine has finished - and it could plunge the continent into war

By John O'sullivan, Charlie Jones | 13:45 ET, MAR 13 2024

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/vladimir-putins-leaked-document
-reveals-32347829


The letter, believed to be addressed to Putin, outlines a five-step plan to be implemented after the war in Ukraine and the 'fall of the Kyiv regime'. The letter states: "After the conclusion of the SMO [special military operation] in Ukraine and the fall of the Kyiv regime, Russia's confrontation with the West will not stop, but will only intensify."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, March 14, 2024 8:13 AM

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


The West Is Still Oblivious to Russia's Information War

Paralyzed by free speech concerns, Western governments are loath to act.

By Ian Garner | March 9, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/09/russia-putin-disinformation-propa
ganda-hybrid-war
/

A few weeks ago, a Russian autocrat addressed millions of Western citizens in a propaganda event that would have been unthinkable a generation ago—yet is so normal today as to be almost unremarkable. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin has now been viewed more than 120 million times on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. Despite the tedium of Putin’s two-hour-long lecture about an imaginary Russian and Ukrainian history, the streaming and promotion of the interview by Western platforms is only the latest successful foray in Russia’s information war against the West, which Moscow is showing every sign of winning. And in this war, the Kremlin is not just weaponizing social media, but relying on Westerners themselves to spread its messages far and wide.

A decade into Russia’s all-out information war, the social media companies seem to have forgotten their promises to act after the 2016 U.S. presidential election interference scandal, when Russian-sponsored posts reached 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. Policymakers not only seem oblivious to the full breadth and scope of Russia’s information war, but fears about stifling freedom of speech and contributing to political polarization have led them and the social media companies to largely refrain from any action to stop Russia’s ongoing campaign.

This inaction comes amid growing signs of Russian influence operations that have deeply penetrated Western politics and society. Dozens—if not hundreds or more—of Russian agents have been observed everywhere from English towns to Canadian universities. Many of these agents are low-level and appear to achieve little individually, but occasionally they penetrate institutions, companies, and governments. Meanwhile, a flood of money props up Moscow’s ambitions, including hundreds of millions of dollars the Kremlin is pouring into influencing elections, with some of that money covertly (and overtly) funneled to political parties and individual politicians. For many decades, Western societies have been deluged with every sort of influence imaginable.

While there have been some countermeasures since the start of Russia’s latest war—including the United States and European Union shutting off access to Russian media networks such as RT and Sputnik in early 2022—these small, ineffective steps are the equivalent of information war virtue signaling. They do not fundamentally change Western governments’ lack of any coherent approach to the many vectors of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare. At the very moment when Kremlin narratives on social media are beginning to seriously undermine support for Ukraine, Western governments’ handle on the disinformation crisis seems to be getting weaker by the day.

For Putin’s Russia, “information-psychological warfare”—as a Russian military textbook calls it—is intended to “erode the morale and psychological spirit” of an enemy population. A central aspect of a wider war against the West, it is conducted online through relentless barrages of fake, real, and misrepresented news, through a cultivated network of witting and unwitting shills such as Carlson. The Kremlin’s messaging has an extraordinary reach: In the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts by Kremlin-linked accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Westerners. Every one of those views is part of a full-spectrum attack against the West designed not just to undermine support for Ukraine, but to actively damage Western democratic systems.

Moscow launches its attacks using a playbook familiar to anyone who watched the disinformation campaigns linked to the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Bots, trolls, targeted ad campaigns, fake news organizations, and doppelganger accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories concocted in Moscow—or in St. Petersburg, where then-Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ran an army of trolls posting on Western social media. If the specific technologies are new, Russia’s strategy of information warfare is not. During World War II, Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg memorably described the pen as “a weapon made not for anthologies, but for war.” From the early Bolshevik era to the end of the Cold War, his peers spent decades spreading disinformation abroad in hopes that countries targeted by Russia would be unable to “defend … themselves, their family, their community, and their country,” as Soviet journalist turned defector Yuri Bezmenov put it.

What is undoubtedly new is a polarized Western public’s enthusiasm for re-centering its own identity around Moscow’s narratives—and becoming an unwitting weapon in the information war. Take, for example, the QAnon movement, whose supporters have long gathered critical energy from talking points supplied and amplified by Moscow through social media. QAnon supporters espouse a range of grievances familiar from Russian propaganda: anti-LGBTQ+, anti-liberal, and especially anti-Ukraine sentiments. QAnon channels on the messaging app Telegram, for example, rapidly turned into fora for anti-Ukraine and pro-war sentiment.

While ordinary users are certain that they are merely speaking their minds, a domestic policy issue has ultimately turned into a vehicle for Moscow to exert influence over national security decisions. QAnon support has spread from the United States to countries across the West—and each group of adherents, regardless of location and platform, seems to espouse the same pro-Putin sentiments and the same skepticism about providing support for Ukraine.

Such phenomena are all too familiar, whether they relate to the U.S. presidential election influence scandal, to the constant reiteration of Moscow’s talking points about NATO, or to the web of useful idiots—from quasi-journalists to rappers—who seem to function as mouthpieces for the Kremlin by consistently spreading favorable narratives under the guise of asking questions or presenting two sides of a story.

Moscow also exploits non-Western networks, such as Telegram and TikTok, to its own advantage. Today, 14 percent of adult Americans regularly consume news from Chinese-owned TikTok, where thousands of fake accounts spread Russian talking points—and where Russian propagandists can count hundreds of thousands of followers. TikTok has occasionally revealed Russian bot networks, but its efforts to stop the spread of Kremlin-aligned content have been lackluster and ineffective. Millions of Americans hoover up material created by Moscow’s propagandists, bonding with influencers and other users who also share this material, constantly propagating Moscow’s viewpoint on Ukraine. TikTok’s unwillingness to cooperate on countering such disinformation has left U.S. lawmakers with little choice but to mull an outright ban of the network—and even then, that would largely be over China-related concerns, not because lawmakers recognize the crucial role TikTok plays for the Kremlin.

Even where they ostensibly have more control, U.S. policymakers have been unwilling to do much to stem the tide of pro-Russian propaganda. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X, the network has all but openly welcomed Russian influence campaigns onto its servers. The platform even hosts Kremlin-aligned neo-fascists such as Alexander Dugin, who uses it to spread his apocalyptic vision of the war in Ukraine to his 180,000 followers, including via discussion spaces in English. Hundreds of accounts—many belonging to ordinary Westerners—boost Dugin’s reach (and that of similar figures) by following him as well as liking or commenting on posts. X’s streaming and promotion of the Carlson interview and Musk’s own echoing of Russian talking points—such as highly specific claims about Ukraine using phrasing normally employed only by Russian officials—have come in for heavy criticism. But just as damaging are the smaller communities created around figures such as Dugin, where Western users do much to spread an anti-Ukraine message.

As we enter the third year of Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine, it has become apparent that the Kremlin’s information war is fully integrated into the military one. Some of that is aimed at Ukraine, with Russian disinformation campaigns attempting to sow distrust in the country’s political and military leadership. But for the Kremlin, the information war against the West is key. That’s because Putin’s theory of victory in Ukraine runs through Western capitals: If Western support can be undermined over time, Kyiv will lack the weapons and resources to keep fighting. The war over Western opinion is therefore at least as existential for Putin as the fight on the ground in Ukraine.

Yet despite abundant examples of Russian narratives showing up in Western debates, there is almost no serious discussion within governments or among the public about how to end Russia’s information war on the West. Many in the West worry that interfering online will lead them down the slippery slope of repressing free speech. Perhaps they cannot see the conceptual link between information war and military war—and refuse to recognize that the West is already at war with Russia, even if that war is not a military one.

If anything, there are signs that governments are taking Russia’s influence campaigns less seriously today than in the past. The British government first stymied the release of a damning report on Russian interference in British politics—and once the report was released, it did little to act on the findings. In Washington, the Biden administration is scaling back its efforts to head off Russian disinformation. Flummoxed by a barrage of criticism reflecting freedom of speech concerns, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security shuttered its Disinformation Governance Board in August 2022, even as Americans were being barraged by an unprecedented wave of pro-war and anti-Ukraine propaganda on social media. Since then, the U.S. State Department’s parsimonious funding has chiefly gone to small-scale nongovernmental organizations offering fact-checking and disinformation tracking services—a drop in the bucket at best.

When Western governments do address foreign hybrid threats, such as cybersecurity and election interference, they are increasingly focused on China. And invariably, they still identify such threats merely as “influence” or “interference,” rather than as part of a larger, concerted military effort. Their responses thus mistakenly circumscribe Russia’s hybrid warfare as a discrete, restricted, and targeted policy of disruption. In reality, it is an ongoing, fluid, and broad phenomenon that invites continued violence.

Any Western vision for future peace in Ukraine—and any discussion of a return to business as usual with Russia—must be paired with restrictions on Russian interference and influence in Western daily life. Ukraine, which has been actively battling Russian influence as part of its war against Moscow since 2014, has already developed approaches from which the West could learn.

First, Ukraine has taken to heart that “information is a weapon that Russia is using against the West,” as Ihor Solovey, head of Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, put it to Foreign Policy. The West, too, must reframe Russia’s disinformation campaigns and other influence activities in the language of war. Academics arrested in Norway and Estonia, Western politicians serving Kremlin-controlled companies, and fake Facebook groups all function—for Moscow—as part of the same military spectrum that includes soldiers and tanks. When an agent or influence operation is uncovered—such as the German Wirecard executive exposed as a Russian spy—politicians should be clear in stating that the West is under attack from Russia.

Second, Western policymakers must act in concert—forming a coalition analogous to the Ramstein group that coordinates military aid to Ukraine—to pass laws and take other measures to ensure that Russia is not able to feed its information directly to Western citizens through social media. Although citizens should be free to discuss any stories they like, enemy combatants should not have the right to free speech in the West. That means that figures such as ultranationalist Dugin should not be welcome on Western social media. The platforms should be threatened with paralyzing penalties for allowing Moscow’s propaganda to spread.

The U.S. State Department’s recently released framework for combatting disinformation falls far short in this regard. When Moscow is already fighting its hybrid war deep inside Western societies, restricting Moscow’s access to social media portals is an urgent and essential act of national defense. The time for vague plans, investigations, and reports is over. It is time to use the West’s superior technical capacity to ensure that no Russian bots, trolls, or fake accounts are able to access X, Facebook, and other platforms again.

Finally, Western governments must move beyond ineffective fact-checking to embark on a mass program of civic education through schools, universities, and public advertising. Such a program should relentlessly emphasize the threat that Russia’s influence poses, clearly label it as an ongoing war, and give the public tools for understanding and countering Russian attacks in their varied forms. A recent Canadian government campaign was a good start, but framed disinformation as a vague threat that “hides well”—rather than exposing it as the tool of a foreign government attacking Western societies. Ukraine’s program of anti-disinformation education has proved robust and could serve as a model.

Of course, some Western citizens could still choose to access Russian propaganda through non-Western services, such as Telegram and TikTok. A truly bold government would respond to the Russian threat not just defensively but in kind—for instance, by flooding pro-Russian channels on Telegram with Western messaging and establishing other channels that subtly spread anti-Russian narratives.

When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin spent millions of dollars on trolls to spread its messaging online. For Putin, the money was well spent. Since then, Russia’s approach has been constantly refined, reaching deeply into electoral processes and public debates—ultimately affecting decisions about how and whether to aid Ukraine. Yet Western policymakers are still letting themselves be caught on the back foot, because they either do not or will not confront the reality that the Kremlin is waging a war on the West in which all citizens are already a part. Resolving this problem will require bold and potentially unpopular action.

As artificial intelligence and other technologies make the dissemination of messaging to Western audiences ever easier—and as the tide appears to be turning in Moscow’s favor on the battlefield in Ukraine—it is time for Western governments to act. Otherwise, Moscow will win not only a military war in Ukraine but a hybrid one all across the West.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 15, 2024 6:58 AM

SECOND

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


Russian regional governments have reportedly increased economic incentives for Russian volunteers to sign contracts for military service. Russian opposition outlet Vazhnye Istorii reported on March 14 that Russian regional governments have increased one-time payments for signing a contract by a factor one and a half, or 225,000 rubles ($2,460), on average.[72] Vazhnye Istorii noted that Astrakhan and Nizhny Novgorod oblasts offer 500,000 rubles ($5,465) for signing a contract whereas Moscow Oblast offers 800,000 rubles ($8,744), suggesting that there is wide variance of economic incentives by Russian federal subject.[73]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-14-2024


In January 2023, the median salary was 43,500 rubles per month. In July 2023 it was 53,571 rubles per month. An immediate 800,000 rubles is a fat bonus just for signing a piece of paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_federal_subjects_by_aver
age_wage


Russia's inflation rate is 7.4%, the highest of any major economy.
https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/russia-inflation-rate/

What happens when you sign one of those Russian Army contracts? We can't know when it is a Russian tricked into signing because Russians are secretive, but when an Indian signs for the money, it is no secret that the Russians tricked the Indians: "Indians die fighting for Russia"
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/14/as-indians-die-fighting-for-r
ussia-families-recount-their-pleas-for-help


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 15, 2024 7:01 AM

SECOND

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


Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev posted a detailed call for the total elimination of the Ukrainian state and its absorption into the Russian Federation under what he euphemistically called a “peace formula.”[1] Medvedev’s demands are not novel but rather represent the Kremlin’s actual intentions for Ukraine — intentions that leave no room for negotiations for purposes other than setting the precise terms of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Medvedev begins the “peace plan” by rhetorically stripping Ukraine of its sovereignty, referring to it as a “former” country and placing the name Ukraine in quotation marks. Medvedev laid out the seven points of his “peace formula,” which he sardonically described as “calm,” “realistic,” “humane,” and “soft.”[2] The seven points include: Ukraine’s recognition of its military defeat, complete and unconditional Ukrainian surrender, and full “demilitarization”; recognition by the entire international community of Ukraine’s “Nazi character” and the “denazification” of Ukraine’s government; a United Nations (UN) statement stripping Ukraine of its status as a sovereign state under international law, and a declaration that any successor states to Ukraine will be forbidden to join any military alliances without Russian consent; the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and immediate provisional parliamentary elections; Ukrainian reparations to be paid to Russia; official recognition by the interim parliament to be elected following the resignation of Ukraine’s current government that all Ukrainian territory is part of Russia and the adoption of a “reunification” act bringing Ukrainian territory into the Russian Federation; and finally the dissolution of this provisional parliament and UN acceptance of Ukraine’s “reunification” with Russia.[3]

The tone of Medvedev’s post is deliberately sardonic, and the calls he is making appear extreme, but every one of the seven points in Medvedev’s “peace formula” are real and central pieces of the Kremlin’s ideology and stated war aims and justifications — Medvedev just simplified and synthesized them into a single brutal Telegram post. The first two of the seven points call for the complete military defeat, disarmament, “demilitarization,” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin identified the full “demilitarization” (stripping Ukraine of all its military and self-defense capabilities) and “denazification” (complete regime change) as Russia’s main goals in Ukraine when initially announcing the invasion on February 24, 2022. Putin and other Kremlin officials have frequently re-emphasized these goals in the subsequent two years of the war.[4] Medvedev’s calls for the resignation of all Ukrainian authorities and the creation of a new provisional government are calls for regime change simply made with more specificity about the methods. The demand that any successor state to Ukraine be forbidden to join military alliances without Russian permission is a call for Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, a demand that Putin and other Kremlin officials reiterate regularly.[5]

Putin established the principles that align the Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine with Medvedev’s seven points in Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin claimed in that article that Ukrainians and Russians are historically one united people who were violently and unjustly separated by external nefarious forces.[6] Putin used this essay to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and claims over its own political, social, historical, linguistic, and cultural development — all suggestions that underpin Medvedev’s calls to dissolve Ukraine as a legal entity and fully absorb it into the Russian Federation. Putin and other Russian officials have long set informational conditions to define Ukraine as an integral and inseparable part of Russian territory and set Russia’s goal in Ukraine as “reuniting” Ukrainian territories with their supposed historic motherland.[7] Medvedev’s “peace formula” makes explicit and brutal what Putin and the Kremlin have long demanded in somewhat more euphemistic phrases: that peace for Russia means the end of Ukraine as a sovereign and independent state of any sort with any borders. Those advocating for pressing Ukraine to enter negotiations with Russia would do well to reckon with this constantly reiterated Russian position.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-14-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 15, 2024 7:45 AM

SECOND

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


Three Ukrainian Helicopters Landed Near The Front Line. A Russian Drone Was Watching—And Russian Artillery Was Ready.

The Russians’ kill-chain is improving.

By David Axe | Mar 13, 2024, 05:08pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/13/three-ukrainian-helic
opters-landed-near-the-front-line-to-reload-a-russian-drone-was-watching-and-russian-artillery-was-ready/?sh=15270ad335e6


The strike extends a startling kill-streak for Russian forces in Ukraine. In just the last week or so, the Russians have knocked out their first Ukrainian High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, their first launchers for a Ukrainian Patriot air-defense battery and now a pair of helicopters.

It should be obvious by now that the Russians’ kill-chain — the networked drones and artillery that allow them to spot targets deep behind the front line and hit them before they move — is getting better, fast.

In theory, Russia widened its war on Ukraine 25 months ago with a speedy kill-chain based in part on the Strelets data network, which fuses targeting data from surveillance drones and other reconnaissance assets with the fire-control systems of artillery batteries.

In practice, Strelets and other Russian targeting networks rarely worked as designed—and mostly for human reasons. To put it simply, senior Russian commanders didn’t trust junior Russian commanders to open fire based on new — and fleeting — intelligence.

Leaders “are culturally averse to providing those who are executing orders with the context to exercise judgement,” Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a 2022 report for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

That began to change last year — and the reforms have accelerated this year. The Russians are deploying more and better surveillance drones passing better data along more robust networks to more front-line artillery batteries and attack-drone crews.

“Russia is using new technology to improve sensor-to-shooter links,” Blair Battersby, a British Army warrant officer, wrote for the U.S. Army’s training command. More to the point, Russian commanders seem to be giving front-line forces more leeway to act on their own.

Surveilling deeper, and shooting farther, faster and more accurately, Russian forces are mitigating one of their longstanding disadvantages—and blunting what once was a key Ukrainian advantage. The relative freedom of movement that Russia’s slow targeting afforded Ukrainian forces.

It should be painfully obvious to Ukrainian commanders that their forces no longer are safe within 50 miles of the front line—especially while out in the open during daytime.

They have two choices. Pull their own helicopters, rocket-launchers and air-defenses batteries farther from the front—or add protection. The Ukrainians could break the Russian kill-chain by jamming or shooting down the surveillance drones that usually are the first links in the chain.

But that means deploying more jammers and air-defense systems, both of which currently are in high demand and short supply.

Ukraine’s allies could help, of course. But its biggest ally, the United States, has sent just one package of military aid in the nearly three months since pro-Russia Republicans in the U.S. Congress began blocking fresh funding for Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 15, 2024 10:07 AM

SECOND

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


March 15, 2024, at 6:26 a.m. MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Russian human rights activist Oleg Orlov was asked to sign a form saying he was willing to fight in Ukraine despite the fact he is 70, his organisation said on Friday.

Orlov, a leader of the rights group Memorial that won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was sentenced last month to 2-1/2 years in prison for "discrediting the armed forces" after he took part in anti-war demonstrations and published an article in which he said Russia had descended into fascism.

Orlov "inquired with a laugh if they weren't bothered about his age - this year he will be 71. They replied they weren't bothered about anything," Memorial said.

It said he was getting used to life in a small cell with 10 other people and that his fellow inmates were treating him with respect and addressing him as "batya", an affectionate word for father.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-03-15/russian-rights-g
roup-says-jailed-leader-70-was-asked-to-fight-in-ukraine-war


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, March 15, 2024 7:37 PM

SECOND

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


‘Unity is strength,’ insist Macron, Scholz and Tusk as trio tries to bury the hatchet over Ukraine strategy

There were hopes the Polish prime minister would help mediate between Paris and Berlin.

By Clea Caulcutt and Joshua Posaner | March 15, 2024 7:28 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-olaf-scholz-donald-tus
k-unity-ukraine-strategy
/

BERLIN — French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk staged a show of unity in Berlin on Friday in an effort to bring a reprieve to weeks of bickering between France and Germany.

Scholz insisted “unity is strength” while Macron chimed in that the three leaders were “united and determined” in their support for Ukraine during statements to the press after talks at the chancellery. The leaders did not take questions.

Tensions between France and Germany over support for Ukraine have spilled into the open in recent days, and Friday’s talks were seen as an opportunity to patch things up. It was hoped that Tusk, who was joining a three-way summit for the first time since becoming premier, would help mediate between Scholz and Macron.

Ahead of the meeting, Tusk upped the stakes in tweeting that that what Ukraine needs is “less talk and more ammo,” an apparent rebuke of Macron. The French president has adopted increasingly hawkish rhetoric and doubled down on comments about the prospect of sending Western ground troops to Ukraine, but Paris itself has been under fire for talking tough while lagging behind in terms of actual military aid donated to Kyiv.

In Berlin, Macron adopted a more conciliatory tone towards his allies, saying that the three countries were committed to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” but “never to prompt an escalation.”

Scholz said the leaders agreed to buy shells for Ukraine on the global market, ramp up production and use windfall profits from frozen Russian assets to fund defense gear in the future — a shift from Berlin’s earlier stance, but it remains unclear how that would work in practice across the EU.

The commitments from Scholz could supercharge efforts to procure artillery shells for Ukraine in the midst of a supply crunch which has left Kyiv struggling to hold back Russia’s artillery bombardments.

A Czech scheme to finance the purchase of 800,000 artillery rounds on the global market has already gathered enough funding from a coalition of capitals to procure 300,000 shells and negotiate over a further 200,000. Portugal on Friday became the latest state to join with a €100 million contribution.

The German chancellor also said in Berlin that a new coalition of countries would team up to support Ukraine with long-range artillery capabilities within the so-called Ramstein format of countries which coordinates allied military aid to Ukraine.

Returning from a trip to Washington on Tuesday, Tusk said that “whatever happens” the leaders have a “responsibility for Europe” and “a strong Europe is important for Ukraine.”

Clea Caulcutt reported from Paris and Joshua Posaner from Berlin.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 12:23 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Seems like Macron, Scholz, and Tusk are burying the hatchets ... In each other's backs.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Saturday, March 16, 2024 12:29 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


And in real news...

Kiev's cross border drone attacks and attempted raids into Belgorod and Kursk over the past three days ended in disaster for Ukraine.


There is a pattern to their madness, tho. They launched drone attacks near the Zaparozhiy Nuclear Power Plant, a drone attack on a Russian power plant in Rostov, and one of the cross border raids was aimed at a Russian nuclear weapon storage facility, no less. Not that Kiev in trying to steal Russian nuclear materials. Kiev just wants to create a nuclear incident on Russian territory during Russian elections.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Saturday, March 16, 2024 1:56 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Well... Kiev doesn't. Obama and NATO do.



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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 7:59 AM

SECOND

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


Forever War Footing

Although Putin’s war planners envisaged a lightning attack that would take Kyiv in a matter of days, diplomats, insiders, observers and activists largely believe that Putin is now ready for a far longer conflict that could take years, if not decades.

“Putin appears to have dug in; he will not stop the war unless he is forced to do it,” said a senior western diplomat in Moscow. “We do not believe he is serious about any peace talks and it would be up to Ukraine anyway to decide them. From my rare meetings with Russian diplomats, I get a sense that they are feeling more self-assured than after the start of the war.”

Russia is devoting an estimated 7.5% of its GDP to military spending, the highest proportion since the cold war, and the government’s lavish spending has meant that factories making weapons, ammunition and military equipment are working double or triple-shift patterns, and welders collecting overtime can make as much as white-collar workers. A defence insider predicted that levels of spending would only continue to increase, he said, calling the change a “new permanent phase” that could last “many years”.

Publicly, Putin has played down the potential for an all-out war with the west, saying this week he did not believe that the United States was planning on nuclear war by modernising its strategic forces. But, he added, “If they want to, what is there to do? We are ready.”

And while Putin claimed he is “ready to negotiate” with Ukraine this week, he also dismissed “wishful thinking” and smeared Zelenskiy as a drug user. “I don’t want to say this, but I don’t trust anyone,” he told Kiselev of potential security guarantees from the west.

“I believe any signals that Putin might be sending about wanting peace are just a way for him to delay western weapon deliveries to Ukraine,” said Bondarev.

Even anti-war Russians regularly parrot views that the west bears some culpability for propping up the Ukrainian side, either by deterring possible moments to conclude a peace or prolonging a conflict that they believe Putin will never allow himself to lose.

“It’s clear that this war isn’t going to end with a victory for either of the sides,” said the former senior Russian official. “It won’t end. It will end as a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict is going to continue for 100 years.”

Under constitutional changes he orchestrated in 2020, Putin could remain in power until 2036, when he will be 83 years old.

For young Russians, often referred to as Generation Putin, another decade looms under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the only president they have ever known.

“I am pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Russia,” said the businessman living under sanctions. “I would advise young people with a good education to leave and build a new future abroad. Russia is not going to run out of money … It will just be a stagnant, militaristic nation.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/15/a-forever-war-more-repre
ssion-vladimir-putin-for-life-russias-bleak-post-election-outlook


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 8:01 AM

SECOND

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


Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev questioned the sovereignty of Latvia, a NATO member state, and threatened Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics following Medvedev’s March 14 call for the total elimination of Ukraine and Ukraine's absorption into Russia under Medvedev's “peace formula.” Medvedev threatened Rinkevics’ life in a post on March 15 and claimed that Russia will hang Rinkevics alongside the current “Nazi” Ukrainian government for “wish[ing] for the death of Russia.”[33] Medvedev also claimed that Latvia is a ”non-existent country.” ISW previously noted that Medvedev’s sardonic and extreme March 14 ”peace formula” more explicitly outlines real and central elements of the Kremlin’s ideology and stated war aims and justifications.[34] Medvedev’s March 15 post is a similarly explicit presentation of the Kremlin’s ideological framing of the war in Ukraine as part of Russia’s longer-term conflict with the West and NATO that Putin has previously alluded to by claiming that Russia is fighting a geopolitical “Nazi” force gaining power in the West.[35] Medvedev’s threats against Rinkevics and the current Ukrainian government follow previous Kremlin efforts to assert its right, contrary to international law, to enforce Russian federal law on officials of NATO member and former Soviet states for actions taken within the territory of their own countries where Russian courts have no jurisdiction, effectively denying the sovereignty of those states.[36]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-15-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 8:03 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

There is a pattern to their madness, tho. They launched drone attacks near the Zaparozhiy Nuclear Power Plant, a drone attack on a Russian power plant in Rostov, and one of the cross border raids was aimed at a Russian nuclear weapon storage facility, no less. Not that Kiev in trying to steal Russian nuclear materials. Kiev just wants to create a nuclear incident on Russian territory during Russian elections.

In the real world, paranoid fantasies are most often a means of justifying preemptive atrocities. “If we don’t kill them now, they’ll kill us later” is a staple of right-wing nationalist rhetoric because it lets you blame the victims for what they would have made you do to them if you hadn’t done it first. Reactionaries see themselves as reacting, always, to the aggression of the left. This is why they tell apocalyptic stories about BLM mobs, Biden’s willful dereliction of duty in the matter of border security, or the zombie wasteland that progressives have made of San Francisco: to create a permission structure for all kinds of actions that would normally be off-limits. If they say ludicrous things, then, or describe a reality that has no bearing on the actual world we live in, their lurid fantasies nevertheless serve a purpose. As the hosts of the Know Your Enemy podcast like to ask about conservative thinkers, “What are they giving themselves permission to do?”

https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/dune-2-movies-frank-herbert-books-me
aning-differences.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 12:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Nobody gives one single shit about Ukraine.

Nobody wants to hear your sob stories about them when you're happy to leave your own border open to animals that rape and murder American citizens.

You, your party and the current administration are pure trash.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, March 16, 2024 1:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

There is a pattern to their madness, tho. They launched drone attacks near the Zaparozhiy Nuclear Power Plant, a drone attack on a Russian power plant in Rostov, and one of the cross border raids was aimed at a Russian nuclear weapon storage facility, no less. Not that Kiev in trying to steal Russian nuclear materials. Kiev just wants to create a nuclear incident on Russian territory during Russian elections.

SECOND: In the real world, paranoid fantasies are most often a means of justifying preemptive atrocities. “If we don’t kill them now, they’ll kill us later” is a staple of right-wing nationalist SECOND'S rhetoric ....



Son, do you even READ your own posts???
Paranoid fantasies!
They are ever the staple of neocons and globalists.

Saddam WMD!
Terrorists!
Nuclear weapons!
Gassed his own people!

I mean, hell, nobody is going to say the quiet part out loud: We destroyed this nation because we wanted their oil/gas/gold/farmland/resources/strategic position that will allow us to attack something bigger.

I challenge you to find a single post of yours about Trump or Russia that isn't some version of The End of Democracy As We Know It or Russia Will Invade The Globe And Put Us All Under The Yoke Of Tyranny.

Why don't you obsess about something real for a change?



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Saturday, March 16, 2024 3:32 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Europe Panics As Trump Rises From The Political Grave
Saturday, Mar 16, 2024 - 07:30 AM

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

So last week was fun.

It started with the US Supreme Court’s 9-0 beatdown of using the 14th Amendment to punish political opponents.

Then the Wicked Witch of Kiev, Vic(Toria) “Cookies” Nuland was forced out at the State Department after decades of torturing the world with her psychopathy.

Then Donald Trump pretty much sent Nikki Haley back to her Waffle House outside of Greenville.

It ended with French President Emmanuel Macron making “believe me” eyes at the world that NATO was ready and willing to send troops to Ukraine. Whose troops? Clearly not French troops, which are only good at this point for “going on safari in northern Africa,” according to Col. Doug MacGregor.

Also, clearly not British ships, which can’t seem to get out of port. I think I’m noting a kind of tit for tat going on between Boeing airline failures and British naval ones… but I could just be conspiratorial like that.

*bong*

No, the answer has always been that it would be US troops in Europe fighting Europe’s war that everyone — The UK, Davos and their EU apparatchiks, and the US Neocons — thought would be a slam dunk to bleed Russia out.

And I’m sure that’s exactly the way they plotted it out in their Microsoft Project file over at Globalist Central.

That has obviously not taken place and it is Ukraine that is now in serious trouble. Truth be told, which has been in very short supply since the war started two years ago, Ukraine has always been in serious trouble.

And that has led, predictably, to the situation we see now. US support for Project Ukraine is coming to an end, if it hasn’t ended already. And the panic in Europe is palpable.

This was all very predictable if you accepted the framework that there was a split at the top of the US hierarchy. One faction committed to the Davos vision of the future which implied a compliant, even beaten, US and another that looked up from their quote screens and said, “Uh… no.”

The handwriting was on the wall about eight months ago when the big NATO Summit in Vilnius ended with the whimper by then UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace. Wallace was supposed to replace Jens Stoltenberg as NATO General Secretary and was shot down by no less than Joe Biden (JOAH Bii-Den!).

After that, there was no more real talk of Ukraine joining NATO. Zelenskyy went back to Kiev with the big sads after Biden gave him nothing as well. Then, in October, US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was ousted in a coup by Matt Gaetz and a handful of GOP fiscal hardliners.

They immediately got new Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to tie all further foreign aid funding to as many spending cuts and dollars for border security as a slim majority in Congress would allow.

And since then Biden has been forced to look under the couches at the Pentagon for a few spare millions to send to Ukraine. He found 300 of them the other day As bad as things are, that the number starts with an ‘m’ rather than a ‘b’ has to be considered a victory.

The Senate tried to blackmail Johnson with their ridiculous $95 billion aid bill and Johnson just ‘boss moved’ Chuck Schumer by calling a two-week recess. Now, the best they can hope for a smaller bill with a lend/lease contingent with no money going to ‘humanitarian aid’ — a euphemism for pocket lining.

And despite his movement towards the Senate warhawks, Johnson is still using Ukraine aid as a means to push domestic funding reforms first. Every day these things are haggled over is another day which runs out the clock on Project Ukraine as Russian forces take towns and villages daily in the Western Donbass.

Again, not an ideal solution by any stretch of the imagination, but a Pyrrhic victory nonetheless.

But this is the state of play after last week and it’s far better than it was at the beginning of the year, since this money was already expected six months ago.

It’s put Europe in the position of finally removing the mask completely. Because as the US keeps slowly pulling away from Ukraine the calls from the EU for America to stay the course grow louder and more strident.

Remember, that in 2022-23 when it looked like the US was hellbent on going forward in Ukraine, European leaders like Macron and others were more circumspect. They wanted to virtue signal about the dangers of Ukraine escalating. They got to look like the moderates in the war room, while still sending billions in aid and weapons, arm-twisting everyone into compliance.

The mask-off event for Europe’s real position on this war was their threatening Hungary’s Viktor Orban with complete economic devastation if he didn’t allow their $50 billion aid package to go through the European Council.

Now that all of Nuland’s military plans have failed, Ukraine’s army has been destroyed for the third time, and all of their attempts to undermine the US legally and economically (Powell must Pivot!) have fizzled, Europe finds itself in the blind panic.

Because as poll after poll suggests, Trump will return to the White House in January and has plans to end the killing and the other shenanigans in Ukraine quickly. Orban is acting as Trump’s voice of reason to both Eastern Europe as well as Russia itself.:

Orban, who spoke with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Friday, did not explain how exactly the American would do that, but said that cutting the flow of US aid was a crucial part of the plan.

”If the US will not provide the money, Europeans on their own will not be able to finance this war, and then the war will end,” Orban said in an interview with M1 broadcaster on Sunday.

During his presidency, Trump had shown himself to be “a man of peace,” the Hungarian leader claimed. That stance puts him in alignment with Hungary, unlike the administration of US President Joe Biden and many members of the EU, he added.

”The American Democratic government and the leadership of the EU, as well as the leadership of the largest EU member states are pro-war governments. Donald Trump is pro-peace, Hungary is pro-peace. At the bottom of everything lies this difference,” Orban declared.


Trump’s many things, but he is no dummy when it comes to money. Cut the flow of funds and you end the war. The wildcard is the seizure of Russia’s foreign exchange assets which would be the dumbest thing all these people could do. This is why they won’t shut up about it.

For his part, Putin is as done with the current regime in the EU as he is with the Biden junta in the US. He’s tried to reason with them, and all we hear is the most over-the-top vitriol from the usual suspects, like Macron.

Putin understands now that the only diplomacy will occur is at the point of his gun or not at all. And if Ukraine is going to escalate on behalf of Europe to attack critical infrastructure inside Russia he will take the gloves completely off, rather than just carpet bomb the line of contact.

I told you last year that no matter what the West thinks there will be “No Truce With the Heartland.” And the way for Russia to beat the west in Ukraine was to continue letting them think they had a chance to win by leaving just enough hope to have the West keep funneling billions into a slaughterhouse.


But, regardless of any of that, there will be no truce in the Heartland. Russia will not back down. China will back them to the end, as will OPEC+ and the rest of Central Asia. But they will not escalate one inch further than they need to. Allowing the West to keep thinking they can win is the ultimate form of grinding out a superior opponent.

And even if Ukraine winds up being a decade-long meat grinder with no clear victor, it will serve everyday as a warning to the rest of Asia that there is no going back and their future is better served with their neighbors than accepting bribes to remain viceroys on the West’s payroll.


Soulless ghouls like David Cameron and Lindsey Graham think this is the best money ever spent, killing Russians without any real European or American lives being spent.

I guess Slavs aren’t people too.

And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s exactly what has happened, Russia has led Europe into the ultimate cauldron, which now looks more like a political and economic black hole. And we’re far beyond the event horizon.

What it has done has left the world with no doubt what the real agenda behind this war, which really has very little to do with Russia itself.

The real agenda is preserving the colonialist business model of old Europe and Great Britain which the US was seduced into believing we were equal partners in. Clearly we aren’t in their minds.

If I’ve come to understand anything over the past few years of covering geopolitics it is that every time you think you understand the imperatives behind current events, another layer is peeled back to reveal an even deeper truth.

And today that deeper truth is that this is Europe’s war with Russia because with a Russian victory in Ukraine they are at the mercy of all the world’s major energy producers — the US, Russia, the Middle East.

This isn’t about Russia’s aggression, or the redrawing of borders through military means.

So, with their true face revealed and their quislings in the US Capitol calling in every marker, we’re going to watch this tragedy drawn out for another year or two in the hope that the US commits suicide on their behalf. For whatever reason actually motivates them, people like Mitch McConnell, Graham and John Cornyn will happily sell what’s left of the country out to salvage their own pathetic skins.

The fact that they’d do this for a bunch of equally pathetic Eurocrats is the most tragic part of this entire affair.

But this is how change ultimately has to occur, by pushing the real motivators to the front of the stage, shining the klieg lights on them and watching them squirm before unleashing another round of rotten food at them.

And what better humiliation for them than for Donald Trump to be the guy passing out tomatoes…





-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, March 17, 2024 6:45 AM

SECOND

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


Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed that Romania is "not a nation" in an expletive-filled rant rejecting a call for Moscow to return the country's confiscated gold.

Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia and close ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin, blasted the "nonentities" and "weaklings" running Europe while dismissing any possibility of returning the gold in a social media post on Friday.

On Thursday, the European Parliament voted in favor of a non-binding resolution calling for Russia to return national treasures to Romania that Moscow has kept since World War I, including an assortment of jewels and 91.5 metric tons of gold.

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-ally-slams-weaklings-running-europe-exp
letive-filled-rant-1879906


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 17, 2024 10:53 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Since western media deliberately mangles what Russian officials say, this is what Medvedev posted on social media

Quote:

“I don’t even know how to respond to such impudence.
The EU has stolen $300 billion worth of Russian assets and is now demanding that Russia return gold to Romania. There is nothing to say except f*** off,”



Indeed.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, March 17, 2024 11:07 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Since western media deliberately mangles what Russian officials say, this is what Medvedev posted on social media

Quote:

“I don’t even know how to respond to such impudence.
The EU has stolen $300 billion worth of Russian assets and is now demanding that Russia return gold to Romania. There is nothing to say except f*** off,”



Indeed.

Did the Western Media mangle this, Signmy?

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev questioned the sovereignty of Latvia, a NATO member state, and threatened Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics following Medvedev’s March 14 call for the total elimination of Ukraine and Ukraine's absorption into Russia under Medvedev's “peace formula.” Medvedev threatened Rinkevics’ life in a post on March 15 and claimed that Russia will hang Rinkevics alongside the current “Nazi” Ukrainian government for “wish[ing] for the death of Russia.”[33] Medvedev also claimed that Latvia is a ”non-existent country.” ISW previously noted that Medvedev’s sardonic and extreme March 14 ”peace formula” more explicitly outlines real and central elements of the Kremlin’s ideology and stated war aims and justifications.[34] Medvedev’s March 15 post is a similarly explicit presentation of the Kremlin’s ideological framing of the war in Ukraine as part of Russia’s longer-term conflict with the West and NATO that Putin has previously alluded to by claiming that Russia is fighting a geopolitical “Nazi” force gaining power in the West.[35] Medvedev’s threats against Rinkevics and the current Ukrainian government follow previous Kremlin efforts to assert its right, contrary to international law, to enforce Russian federal law on officials of NATO member and former Soviet states for actions taken within the territory of their own countries where Russian courts have no jurisdiction, effectively denying the sovereignty of those states.[36]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-15-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 17, 2024 11:23 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I'd need to see the original quotes, in full, and in context.

Western media cherry picks words here or there, and then spins them into unrecognizability.

For example, YOUR previous post never quoted Medvedev's "fuck off" statement, which was THE direct response to Romania's demand for gold, but went bunny- trailing for anything Medvedev might have said about the EU or Romania, going back months to find a word here or there they could string together into a "statement"..

BTW the Kremlin's official response to the demand for gold was

1) We already returned most if it
2) Be happy that we did not demand reparations from WWII, when ROMANIA WAS ALLIED WITH HITLER.
3) Romania is just trying to shore up its failing economy, with its farmers on strike and all

*****

But you have no interest in truth. Your mission here is to spread lies. Keep up the good work discrediting yourself.




-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, March 17, 2024 11:58 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'd need to see the original quotes, in full, and in context.

But you have no interest in truth. Your mission here is to spread lies. Keep up the good work discrediting yourself.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

I'd like to see the original quote, in full, and in context that convinced you I have no interest in truth. But then I'd like to see the same for your Kissinger quote.

Signym, your Henry Kissinger quote can’t be trusted. I don't expect you to understand the ax-grinding difference between your quote and the original, but try a little harder.
Here is what Kissinger actually said:

Henry Kissinger said in November 1968, after Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president but before he took office: “Nixon should be told that it is probably an objective of Clifford to depose Thieu (South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu—ed.) before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem (who was assassinated), the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

The quotation referred to America’s role in Vietnam. If America doesn’t stand by its friends and allies, the quotation explains, then it might ultimately be less dangerous to be America’s enemy.

Much more at
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/it_may_be_dan
gerous_to_be_americas_enemy_but_to_be_americas_friend_is_fatal


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 17, 2024 1:02 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.



Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I'd need to see the original quotes, in full, and in context.

But you have no interest in truth. Your mission here is to spread lies. Keep up the good work discrediting yourself.



SECOND: I'd like to see the original quote, in full, and in context that convinced you I have no interest in truth.



Son, you post about Medvedev is just the latest example of your disinformation campaign, and I already handed your ass to you on that one.
I've handed your ass to you on a lot of your posts.

You lie about yourself, REAVERFAN. You lie about everything.
And now you're demanding FURTHER proof of your lies?
That's just another one of your lies.

Nobody believes you anymore. Not even THUGR, and he's supposedly on "your side" and gullible as all hell.


Tear yourself away from the internet. Get out in the sun. Breathe fresh air. Do something you can be proud of. You'll feel a lot better about yourself.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, March 17, 2024 1:20 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Son, you post about Medvedev is just the latest example of your disinformation campaign, and I already handed your ass to you on that one.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Signym, you have been told that your Kissinger quote is false, but you persist in using it because of your ax-grinding, meaning you are working for an ulterior purpose or toward a selfish end.

https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/it_may_be_dan
gerous_to_be_americas_enemy_but_to_be_americas_friend_is_fatal


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 17, 2024 2:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Another one of your lies.
I already handed your ass to you on that one, too.

You really can't help yourself, can you???






-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, March 17, 2024 6:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


And now for some real news.

According to Military Summary Channel, Kiev continues to launch drones and rockets at civilian centers in Moscow, and the Belgorod, Kursk, and Rostov regions, and specifically at the city of Belgorod. Most of the drones and rockets were shot down, but three landed in Belgorod city and a teenage girl was killed.

Obviously not a military action, but designed to terrorize the civilian population and interfere with this last day of voting in Russia.

Many of the missiles are being launched from Czech "Vampire" MLRS. Putin has said these attacks will not go unpunished.

I wonder what Russia will do, and who will get punished?


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, March 18, 2024 7:22 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And now for some real news.

Many of the missiles are being launched from Czech "Vampire" MLRS. Putin has said these attacks will not go unpunished.

I wonder what Russia will do, and who will get punished?

Putin will punish Russians gullible enough to volunteer for his special military operation. The least cynical Russians are the most likely volunteers.

Ukraine war: Russian schoolbook urges teenagers to join the army

By Maria Korenyuk | March 13, 2024

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68550459

A new Russian school textbook has been produced that distorts the history of the war against Ukraine and encourages students to join the army.

It has been designed for a new subject entitled "Fundamentals of Security and Defence of the Motherland".

The lesson is compulsory for high school students aged 15 to 18 in Russia and occupied territories in Ukraine.

It will be taught once a week from September, replacing a lesson known as "Fundamentals of Safe Living".

Former soldiers are expected to teach the new subject and Russians with a degree in pedagogy - the method and practice of teaching - who return from the war are already being offered free retraining courses to become teachers.

The first textbook for the new subject, called The Russian Army in Defence of the Fatherland, has been produced by leading Russian education publisher Enlightenment. Among its authors are two senior figures who work for the defence ministry and Kremlin newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

Its 368 pages are filled with stories describing the "heroic achievements of Russian soldiers" from the 13th Century to the present day.

"Dear colleagues, we all understand the importance of presenting information to our students from the perspective of [Russia]," publishing representative Olga Plechova told an online introductory session for teachers in January, which the BBC watched.

"We cannot convey alternative viewpoints to the students. So this textbook will assist you in addressing children's questions and providing accurate coverage of certain events."

The book's authors praise Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and celebrate Soviet victories in the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War Two.

They also acclaim the role of the Russian military in seizing Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014, which they term the "reunification of Crimea with Russia".

The schoolbook also devotes a section laced with distorted history to explain Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, using the Kremlin term "special military operation".

"When there was a coup d'état in Kyiv in 2014, the new government initiated a crackdown on everything Russian," the authors assert, before making a series of false claims.

"Russian books were burned, monuments were destroyed, Russian songs and the Russian language itself were banned... 'Russian blood' cocktails were served in restaurants."

"Cities in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where dissent against such policies existed, were bombarded by Nazi shells and rockets."

The authors state "it was Ukraine and Nato who planned to start the war", bizarrely suggesting "a huge number of Ukrainian troops and armoured vehicles were concentrated at the borders".

In fact it was Russia that massed more than 100,000 troops both along its border with Ukraine and in Belarus, ostensibly for joint military exercises, only to launch its full invasion on 24 February 2022.

Ukrainian political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko sums up the textbook as "all misinformation and lies".

The book goes on to claim falsely that the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which was pounded for almost three months by Russian bombing, was destroyed during battles with "Nazis" and "foreign mercenaries".

"Russia fights with integrity," the authors insist. In several excerpts, they suggest Russia prioritises the safety of Ukrainian civilians and minimises destruction, while "Ukraine frequently targets civilian infrastructure".

During the winter of 2022-23, Russia destroyed more than 40% of Ukraine's electricity infrastructure with more than 1,000 missile and drone attacks, according to Kyiv figures.

As for Russian integrity, Mr Fesenko says there are plenty of examples proving exactly the opposite. "We all remember the tragedy in Bucha, where dozens of Ukrainian civilians were killed by Russians and women were reportedly raped."

Another section of the book starts with an in-depth overview of the structure of Russian Armed Forces and increasingly calls for over-18s to sign up for the army.

The textbook lists the required documents and links to the application form as well as nearby addresses for enlistment. It highlights military benefits like free medical care and insurance, attractive salary and three meals a day.

Young men from occupied Ukrainian territories, such as Crimea and Donbas, who have been subject to aggressive propaganda for 10 years and have little opportunity to earn money, may be enticed by these economic bonuses, warns Olha Skrypnyk, head of a Crimean human rights group.

The schoolbook may help increase the numbers joining the military, she believes: "So these children go to war and die."

Russia does not give details of its casualties in the war in Ukraine but in two years of war, at least 1,240 soldiers under the age of 20 were killed according to open-source information confirmed by the BBC's Russian service.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 18, 2024 7:27 AM

SECOND

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


Russian authorities continue to militarize children in occupied Ukraine as part of efforts to Russify Ukrainian children and create a resource for Russia’s future force generation needs.

Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Military Administration Head Artem Lysohor stated on March 17 that Russian authorities have approved the creation of the Luhansk Cadet Corps under the Russian Investigative Committee (Russia’s rough equivalent to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation), possibly before 2025.[61]

Lysohor stated that Luhansk Cadet Corps will teach Ukrainian children about pro-Russian concepts including their “debt” to the Russian “Motherland.” The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated on March 17 that Russian authorities have spent a decade developing a plan to introduce a Russian federal military training system for civilians in occupied Crimea and plan to introduce the same military training system in occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.[62]

The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated the Kremlin ordered the establishment of centers for military-patriotic education and military training for civilians in each of Russia’s municipal entities and in occupied Ukraine and that occupation authorities are focusing on the expansion of the Young Cadets National Movement (Yunarmiya) as part of these efforts. The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that occupation authorities plan to build an “Avangard” military-patriotic education center in occupied Sevastopol in 2025-2027 that will train about 5,000 Ukrainian children annually. The “Avangard” centers reportedly cooperate with the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF), and the Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) will reportedly use the new “Avangard” center in Sevastopol to recruit personnel from occupied Crimea. Yevpatoria occupation administration head Elena Demidova announced in October 2023 that Russian occupation officials opened an “Avangard” center in the “Gagarin” children’s health camp in occupied Yevpatoria, Crimea, which reportedly accepted its first group of 100 ninth-through-eleventh grade students in early October 2023, to teach Ukrainian children basic Russian military training and organize “patriotic leisure activities.”[63]

Russian opposition outlet Verstka reported in August 2023 that the Russian Investigative Committee and its head, Alexander Bastrykin, were using toys, clothes, and school supplies to coerce Ukrainian children in orphanages in Russia to join the Russian cadet corps and that Bastrykin ordered some Russian cadets corps to prepare to receive Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine as early as February 25, 2022.[64]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-17-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, March 18, 2024 8:03 AM

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


Ukraine debates mobilising more men to fight Russia after two years of war

Russia seems ready to increase its attacking army after Vladimir Putin was re-elected, leaving Kyiv little choice but to do the same.

By John T Psaropoulos | 18 Mar 2024

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/18/ukraine-debates-mobilising-mo
re-men-to-fight-russia-after-two-years-of-war


In a fight taking place far from the front lines, Ukrainian lawmakers are debating a bill that could make or break their country’s fortunes in this war.

The bill would raise up to half a million new soldiers, increasing Ukraine’s standing army by half.

The increase is 10 times as many new men as the 12 brigades Ukraine raised for its 2023 counteroffensive, and it could enable the country to finally break Russia’s stranglehold on its southern regions, cutting the front in half and forcing the Kremlin into a negotiation on Kyiv’s terms.

Ukraine may have little choice because it is currently fighting a war of attrition experts say favours the side with greater manpower resources – Russia. It also seems likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin would raise more troops after his re-election.

“Putin is… planning to mobilise more men, once the election is over,” Tim Less, a lecturer at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, told Al Jazeera.

“Among other things, he has banned the exit of fighting-age men from the country and banned the antiwar candidate, Boris Nadezhdin, from standing in the election, for fear he may generate opposition to the war effort,” said Less. “Putin appears to have concluded that further mobilisation is essential to press home Russia’s advantage on the battlefield and that this is what he will do.”

With US aid stalled – perhaps permanently – by congressional Republicans, Putin may have concluded that 2024 was his year to win the war and that forces the moment to its crisis for Ukraine.

“It’s been two years of hell for us,” said Inna Sovsun, who sits on the Security, Defence and Intelligence Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, where the bill is being discussed.

Her partner has been fighting on the front lines since Russia’s invasion and she supports raising more troops, but only if there’s an end in sight for those who’ve already served.

“There are people who are leading normal lives. We would like to know there is a point in the future when he will be demobilised and someone else will take his place. This is being hotly debated and there is no answer right now,” she told Al Jazeera.

Ukraine mobilised men over the age of 27 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country on February 24, 2022. But only a third of its million men and women in uniform are on active combat duty, facing what Kyiv estimates are 462,000 Russian soldiers, and Russia’s Putin claims are 617,000.

The rest of Ukraine’s personnel are in supporting roles, including tens of thousands posted to the currently quiet northern border with Belarus, from where Moscow’s original main thrust towards Kyiv came, lest it should be repeated.

A more efficient rotation of those in uniform might fill some combat roles, but not enough, says the military.

There are also some tens of thousands to be gleaned from closing loopholes to the draft.
After Russia’s invasion, young men rushed to enroll in PhD programmes at private colleges and there was an uptick in marriages to women with minor disabilities. The committee is closing these and other exemptions.

But that is where the low-hanging fruit ends and the difficult decisions begin.

Last December, after the counteroffensive failed to execute his strategy, then-Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi put the matter on the table, demanding half a million more soldiers.

“This is a significant number,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after meeting his top generals, apparently unconvinced that the economy could spare them, or allies could train and equip them.

“I told them I need more arguments to support this direction, because this is a matter of people first and foremost,” Zelenskyy said.

The Verkhovna Rada had already passed a bill in the spring of 2023, lowering the conscription age from 27 to 25.

Zelenskyy didn’t sign it, and last month he dismissed Zaluzhny – it is believed, partly due to this disagreement.

“What Zelenskyy is actually doing is trying to leverage more arms from the West, which he sees either as an alternative to mobilisation or a precondition for this, while allowing his new commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, to assess the situation on the ground,” said Less.

Sovsun believed the lowering of the draft age is a foregone conclusion and parliament “will get it done by the end of March”.

The committee has discarded punitive measures included in a January 4 draft seen as human rights violations, such as freezing draft dodgers’ bank accounts or preventing them from selling property – though a travel ban outside Ukraine will likely remain.

The debate now focuses on creating incentives for enlisting, said Sovsun, such as guaranteeing six-monthly rotations and a term limit of 36 months.

“The 36-month [term limit] is still in play in a very specific way – we don’t particularly like the wording – that those who serve will have the right to demobilize after 36 months based on the decision of the commander-in-chief,” she said. “Basically, if the decision is not taken it doesn’t happen. [We want it] to be automatic.”

The measure could mean an exodus of experienced troops in March 2025, but Sovsun believes it is necessary.
“There are some units that have been on the front line for 24 months. That is extremely difficult and it’s inefficient. People need rest,” she said.

In theory, Ukraine has a pool of 10 million men aged 18-61 it can draw on to replace demobilised troops. In practice that number may be smaller.

Ukraine had a population of 48 million in 2001, but as much as a quarter of it is willingly or unwillingly under occupation, and many people fled from unoccupied western regions, too, when the invasion happened.

Then there is the human factor Zelenskyy alluded to.

“People are extremely tired. [The war] has taken its toll on everybody, and I started thinking, how many years can people live like this?” Sovsun said.

A NATO-Russia war?

Perhaps partly to boost Ukrainian morale, and to send a message to Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron on February 26 raised the issue of sending in NATO troops – raising the risk of a Russia-NATO war.

While there was “no consensus” on the sending of Western ground troops to Ukraine, “nothing should be excluded. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war,” Macron said.

“[Macron’s] generals and members of his cabinet have spoken specifically about the idea of deploying forces in supporting roles – clearing mines, manning defences and training Ukrainian soldiers, for example – to free up the Ukrainians to confront the Russians on the front line,” said Less.

Russia may see it differently, preparing to face the West directly.

“The Kremlin has for over a decade now … spoken of a war with the West,” Rory Finnin, a Ukraine historian at Cambridge University, told Al Jazeera.

“We may not have been interested in that war, but clearly their war is interested in us. I don’t think it’s simply a war against Ukraine … Russia wants to see dysfunction and division in the West. It’s the only way it can amplify its own power.”

Jade McGlynn, a Russia expert at the War Studies Department of King’s College London, agrees that Russia is psychologically prepared to fight the West directly.

“If the West had been totally against Russia [after the Cold War], that would have been different, but sometimes there are things that are worse than being hated. For example, being ignored,” McGlynn told Al Jazeera. “And that keeps coming up.”

For now, though, Ukrainians have to count on their strength alone.

“There is no justice in war,” said Sovsun. “There is no just way to say who should serve and who shouldn’t and there is no fair way of doing this, but at least it should be more equally distributed, this weight of war.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


A Suspicious Pattern Alarming the Ukrainian Military

Story by Graeme Wood | March 17, 2024

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Kateryna Chernohorenko, sent me a statement noting that U.S. satellite companies have supported Ukraine. But she said that her ministry’s experts suspect that Russia “purchases satellite imagery through third-party companies” that do business with Western satellite-imagery companies, and that these images “could be used in armed aggression against Ukraine.”

Ordering imagery from these companies is simpler than you might think. Stale, blurry images are free on Google Maps. Fresh, crisp imagery of something you may or may not wish to blow to smithereens costs a little more. A site called https://spymesat.com/ tracks various companies’ satellites and will give a cost estimate for a brand-new image taken the next time one of them passes over the location you choose. In the business, ordering a satellite to take an image is called “tasking.” The companies offer astonishingly fast turnaround times, at costs in the low thousands of dollars. Faster turnaround and higher resolution raise the cost. I zoomed in on the apartment where I stayed in Odesa early in the war, and the site told me that a U.S. company would let me task its satellite for $1,200 when it passed in just a few hours. If I went there now and painted BOMB ME in huge letters on the roof, the paint would still be wet for its close-up.

For even less, one can order archival imagery from Ukraine—some of it very recent, and of militarily significant areas. The city of Zaporizhzhia is about an hour’s drive from the front line. An Atlantic staffer requested a recent satellite photo of that city from a reseller that works with Planet, a San Francisco-based commercial satellite company. The staffer gave the reseller a credit-card number and a name, and received a high-resolution image just minutes later.

An executive of a firm that analyzes satellite imagery told me that the firm noticed a pattern dating back to 2022, by cross-referencing tasked images against actual attacks. (The executive requested anonymity because the firm does business with the same satellite companies whose images it reviewed, and does not want its relationships to sour over bad publicity.) The executive identified more than 350 Russian missile strikes in the first year of the war, all deep within Ukrainian territory. I showed a selection of cases to Jack O’Connor, who teaches geospatial intelligence at Johns Hopkins University, and he wrote back, “The data suggests that the Russians are doing what the Ukrainians suspect.” He was, however, cautious about what one can infer with certainty, no matter what patterns one sees. “There is no direct causal relation that can be proven from this data.”

Much more at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-suspicious-pattern-alarming-the
-ukrainian-military/ar-BB1k5906


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024 7:08 AM

SECOND

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


The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that 99.8 percent of the personnel in the Russian armed forces voted in the presidential election of whom 97.27 percent voted for Putin.[15] Putin claimed that he did not expect such high election results in occupied Ukraine and that the results demonstrate that people in occupied Ukraine are “grateful for Russian protection” and, therefore, he said that Russia will do everything to ensure the “protection” of occupied Ukraine.[16] Putin is likely continuing efforts to set informational conditions to justify a protracted conflict and long-term occupation of Ukraine under the guise of “protecting” civilians in occupied Ukraine who are only in danger because of the Russian invasion.[17]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-18-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, March 19, 2024 9:07 AM

SECOND

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


Putin’s Friends Celebrate Re-Election With Photos of Mass Hanging
YES, THAT’S A THREAT

Images of Russian “traitors” being executed were shown on state TV in a chilling warning about the next six years of the “Supreme Commander.”

By Julia Davis | Mar. 18, 2024 3:16PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-friends-celebrate-re-election-wit
h-photos-of-mass-hanging


“Everyone understands, Russia is currently in a certain historic stage. It would be incorrect, not to say criminal, not to support the Supreme Commander.”

Referring to the enemies of Putin’s regime as “Vlasovites,” Bulatov said that a picture is worth a 1,000 words and put up a photograph of what happened to Andrey Vlasov, a controversial figure in Russian history. Showcasing a graphic picture of a mass hanging, Bulatov said, “Here they are! This is how they ended up. There is no other way. Enough with half-measures. Traitors have to be dealt with in a radical way.” Serukhanov chimed in, “This is it, this is the only way.”

It should be noted that Russian propaganda uses broad strokes in describing not only armed resistance, but Putin’s opposition leaders as “Vlasovites.” For years, Putin’s top propagandists referred to Alexei Navalny as a “traitor” and argued that he deserved to die. The main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in prison, just in time for Putin’s big show.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 2:47 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Putin’s Friends Celebrate Re-Election With Photos of Mass Hanging
YES, THAT’S A THREAT

Images of Russian “traitors” being executed were shown on state TV in a chilling warning about the next six years of the “Supreme Commander.”

By Julia Davis | Mar. 18, 2024 3:16PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-friends-celebrate-re-election-wit
h-photos-of-mass-hanging


“Everyone understands, Russia is currently in a certain historic stage. It would be incorrect, not to say criminal, not to support the Supreme Commander.”

Referring to the enemies of Putin’s regime as “Vlasovites,” Bulatov said that a picture is worth a 1,000 words and put up a photograph of what happened to Andrey Vlasov, a controversial figure in Russian history. Showcasing a graphic picture of a mass hanging, Bulatov said, “Here they are! This is how they ended up. There is no other way. Enough with half-measures. Traitors have to be dealt with in a radical way.” Serukhanov chimed in, “This is it, this is the only way.”

It should be noted that Russian propaganda uses broad strokes in describing not only armed resistance, but Putin’s opposition leaders as “Vlasovites.” For years, Putin’s top propagandists referred to Alexei Navalny as a “traitor” and argued that he deserved to die. The main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in prison, just in time for Putin’s big show.




Huh. And yet, no picture of "the" picture. So for now, this is more of a "somebody said that somebody said" story.


As usual, the western press and SECOND thrive on snippets, misquotes, and rewrites [lies].

What Putin said was that altho there is no death penalty in Russia, if Russian citizens are found fighting for Ukraine they will be dealt with as traitors, including on the battlefield.
THAT'S a threat
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 4:54 AM

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


Ukraine’s European partners continue efforts to stand up significant initiatives to provide military support to Ukraine. Bloomberg reported on March 19 that the European Union (EU) has prepared draft legislation that would allow the transfer of profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine as early as July 2024.[27] EU High Commissioner Josep Borrell stated that the EU should transfer 90 percent of Russian frozen asset revenue to an EU-run fund to finance security assistance for Ukraine and that he will submit a formal proposal for this mechanism to EU member states on March 20.[28] Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for National Defense Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz additionally announced on March 18 that Germany and Poland are creating an “armored vehicle coalition” to support Ukraine and noted that Sweden, the UK, and Italy have already declared their willingness to participate in the coalition.[29]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-march-19-2024


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 5:04 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Huh. And yet, no picture of "the" picture. So for now, this is more of a "somebody said that somebody said" story.


As usual, the western press and SECOND thrive on snippets, misquotes, and rewrites [lies].

What Putin said was that altho there is no death penalty in Russia, if Russian citizens are found fighting for Ukraine they will be dealt with as traitors, including on the battlefield.
THAT'S a threat

The Vlasov Army: Nazi Sympathizers Or WWII Freedom Fighters?
https://www.rferl.org/a/the-vlasov-army-nazi-sympathizers-or-ww-ii-fre
edom-fighters-/30313961.html


"It's absolutely clear that without the Vlasov army fighters the Prague [fighters] would have suffered colossal human losses," Aleksandrov said. "The number of victims was still high, some 1,500 victims, but it could have been worse, much worse."

After the fighting ceased, Vlasov was among a group of ROA fighters to fall into the hands of U.S. soldiers. As fate had it, the Americans later handed him and other ROA members over to the Soviets in a prisoner exchange.

Vlasov and other ROA leaders were executed in Moscow in August 1946 after a closed-door trial.

Beating The Red Army To Prague

On May 8, when an official "capitulation protocol" between the Czech National Council and the Nazi leadership entered into force, Vlasovites were in Prague. Absent were Red Army units which entered the Czech capital a day later.

"The Red Army appear in Prague only once the war had ended," Aleksandrov stated in the 2015 interview. "De jure and de facto."

That chronology conflicts with the long-standing Soviet, and Russian, narrative of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

"The question of the Vlasovites suggests the whole Russian myth is based on a lie," Jan Sir, a professor in the Russian and Eastern European department of Prague's Charles University, told the Czech news site Lidovky.cz.

Aleksandrov faced harsh criticism in 2016 over his doctoral thesis on Vlasov. War veterans and some academics have called for his prosecution under a Russian law forbidding the propagation of "wars of aggression."

One Russia history professor who also served in the war said in 2016 that Aleksandrov's thesis "destroys the memory of Russia's greatest victory."

Whose History?

The competing history of the Vlasov army is not the only chapter of World War II that Russia has taken issue with.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 9:16 AM

SECOND

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


There Was No Russian Election

Vladimir Putin staged an elaborate charade—so why did some Western media outlets play along?

By Anne Applebaum | MARCH 20, 2024, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/russias-non-election
/677808
/

There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated. Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.

Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality. While that exercise unfolded, Putin’s only significant political opponent, Alexei Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. Two Russian presidential candidates collected the requisite number of signatures to stand, both said they opposed the war in Ukraine, and both were removed from the ballot. Three practically unknown people were allowed to remain on the ballot, but they did not criticize Putin and did not oppose him in any way. One of them declared that he hoped Putin would win. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, men in balaclavas forced people to vote at gunpoint.

Some Western media nevertheless covered this orchestrated drama as if it really were an election. Reporters interviewed voters, cited “exit polls,” even commented on the “results,” as if these things mean anything in a country whose leadership lies openly about everything: economic statistics, war casualties, Russian history. Reuters ran a headline declaring Putin had won “in a landslide.” The earnest coverage was exactly what Putin hoped he would get. He knows, after all, that he is an illegitimate leader, and he knows that he abandoned the Russian constitution. This non-election was his messaging exercise, designed to show Russians, and the rest of the world, that he intends to stay in power anyway, illegally. He especially needs the foreign press, which is widely and frequently quoted inside Russia, to help him demoralize his internal opposition and frighten external opponents. Foreign recognition gives him the legitimacy he craves.

This grotesque charade was in addition a form of distraction, because Putin also knows that his war in Ukraine is an ongoing disaster for Russia. The number of dead, wounded, and missing Russian soldiers now exceeds 315,000. The Ukrainian military claims that there were nearly 6,000 Russian casualties just last week. The Russian navy has lost several ships to Ukrainian drones, and has now retreated from the western part of the Black Sea. The Russian air force has lost several planes to Ukrainian missiles just in the past month, and the army, hundreds of tanks. Ukrainian sabotage and drone strikes have now hit multiple Russian oil refineries, cutting production by as much as 10 percent. Putin needs to deflect Russian attention, and our attention, away from all of these fiascos. Once again, foreign press coverage helps, especially in the United States, where Russian money, Russian propaganda, and Russian influence in the congressional Republican Party have successfully held up military aid for Ukraine for more than half a year. Putin isn’t winning in the Black Sea, but he can win in Washington, if only he can inject a bit more hopelessness and helplessness into the American debate.

Finally, Putin has a more universal goal: By holding this non-election and calling it an election, the Russian regime mocks democracy itself. Putin’s critics want political alternatives, not just a different leader. They use the language of democracy and rights. Navalny once spoke of a “virus of freedom” that spreads rapidly and cannot be snuffed out. Putin needs to halt this virus, undermine this language, kill off any hope that Russia could ever be a different kind of place.

He also needs to eradicate the virus of freedom everywhere else that it flourishes, in order to prevent it from reinfecting Russia. On Sunday, this dictator who murders his opponents commented on Donald Trump’s legal troubles, which he described as the “use of administrative resources” against him. “The whole world is laughing at it,” he said. Trump is accused of breaking multiple laws in multiple states—while in business, while president, and even since he left office. By describing him as a victim of political persecution, Putin demeans the very idea of rule of law, and supports the Trump campaign at the same time.

In the Cold War era, this form of argumentation was known as whataboutism: deflecting criticism of your own system by attacking someone else’s. Back then, we recognized this verbal game and we had some resistance to it. Not all of us do anymore. We might have to relearn the games played by dictators—and we can start by calling things by their real names. So I’ll say it again: There was no election in Russia last weekend. Putin did not win. His regime is so brittle that it arrests and fines people who are overheard criticizing the war in restaurants, persecutes people for laying flowers on Navalny’s grave, orchestrates ostentatious shows of support. And someday it will be gone.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 9:29 AM

SECOND

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


‘Record falsification’: Kremlin critics decry vote won by Russia’s Putin
Although Putin’s popularity among most Russians is not in doubt, observers and analysts say the recent election was far from free and fair.

By Mansur Mirovalev | 20 Mar 2024

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/20/record-falsification-kremlin-
critics-decry-vote-won-by-russias-putin


Mykola sarcastically wonders whether he “voted” correctly.

The Ukrainian police officer left his home village near the southeastern city of Mariupol on February 25, 2022, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

More than two years later, his elderly parents, who opted to stay under Russian occupation, told him they saw his name in the list of voters at the March 15-17 presidential vote.

In his absence, election officials faked his “vote” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mykola alleged, echoing reports of widespread vote rigging documented by rare and heavily persecuted independent monitors in the Russia-occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions – and in Russia proper.

Mykolay’s parents also told him about how masked, heavily armed servicemen plodded the streets accompanying election officials who urged residents to fill in early ballots.

“Government employees have been forced to vote, required to provide photo reports” showing their ballots with Putin’s name ticked off, Mykola, who withheld his last name and his village’s location to protect his parents, told Al Jazeera.

Vote rigging in the Russia-occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions harks back to the decades of similar practices documented in Russia that included coercion to vote, ballot staffing, and “carousels” – when groups of people are bussed to dozens of polling stations.

This reporter, accompanied by an independent election monitor in a northern Moscow suburb during the 2012 presidential vote, witnessed the arrival of several busloads of men, some of them visibly drunk, who loudly said they “only vote for Putin”.

Hours later, the same men arrived at a different polling station, this reporter observed.

An election official at the time said the “usual” winners at previous elections were either Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov or flamboyant ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

However, the polling station always reported Putin’s victory, the official – a tired teacher who finished counting the votes at 4am – said on condition of anonymity.
‘Record falsification’

Some 110 million Russians were eligible to vote this month, and 87.1 million cast their ballots at polling stations or used an electronic voting system, Russia’s chief election official Ella Pamfilova said.

Almost 65 million of them voted for Putin, she said.

But at least 31.6 million votes for Putin were falsified, claimed Novaya Gazeta, an independent newspaper that has for decades been among the most trusted media outlets in Russia.

Novaya Gazeta’s analysts used a mathematical model developed by election monitor Sergey Shpilkin that uses a discrepancy between voter turnout and votes for each candidate.

If turnout at an individual polling station suddenly increases, the voting goes up sharply only for one candidate against statistical odds – namely, Putin, according to the model.

This year’s vote beat all previous records of vote rigging, Novaya Gazeta claimed.

“This is a record amount of vote falsification at a presidential vote in Russia,” it reported.

Golos, Russia’s last independent election monitor whose staffers and volunteers have faced fines and arrests, said the vote was the least constitutional since Putin came to power in 2000.

“We’ve never seen a presidential campaign that was so far from constitutional standards,” Golos said in a statement.

The key word of this year’s presidential campaign was “imitation,” it said.

The Kremlin imitated the freedom of choice and campaigning with the participation of opposition candidates who were only figureheads from pro-Kremlin political parties, it said.

The Kremlin also imitated transparency and openness, election monitoring and the independence of election officials, Golos said.

To a jailed Putin critic, Putin’s futile attempts to make his rule look legitimate were on full show.

“Perhaps, the results of these ‘elections’ must make the antiwar part of the public apathetic. Apparently, they were designed to,” Ilya Yashin, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail for lambasting Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, wrote on Facebook on Monday.

“But it only makes me smirk with derision. These ‘elections’ are not a sign of the dictator’s force, but his self-exposure,” he wrote.

And yet, the vote indicates a tectonic shift in public opinion “from generally antiwar and neutral views to generally prowar ones”, Nikolay Mitrokhin of Germany’s Bremen University told Al Jazeera.

He said even though the turnout was below the official figure, about two-thirds of voters still turned up because of a massive and hugely successful “propaganda” campaign that was boosted by Ukraine’s indiscriminate bombing of border Russian regions.

Even pro-democratic Russians, once neutral about the war, now want “Russia’s unambiguous victory,” he said.

One of the reasons is “a response to Ukraine’s response to the war, and Putin’s propaganda in particular,” Mitrokhin said.

When average Russians want to check what they hear from Kremlin-controlled media, they surf Ukrainian websites and “see that yes, they are hated, called not just aggressors, but various racist names, and everything Russian and related to Russia is banned,” Mitrokhin said.

A Russian national who lives in Germany agrees with him, having seen how elderly Russian-speaking men who emigrated from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan respond to Ukrainian activists picketing the Russian consulate in Frankfurt.

“Sometimes, fights broke out,” Konstantin Rubalsky, a 47-year-old IT expert who visited the consulate a dozen times to obtain documents for his children, told Al Jazeera. “Kazakh grandpas are tough and respond with force.”

Another reason why Russians voted for Putin, Mitrokhin added, is the resilience of their economy in the face of Western sanctions along with Moscow’s moderate gains on the front lines in 2023 and early 2024.

Even though Russia has been hit with the largest set of sanctions in modern history, high oil prices and increased military spending heated the economy and triggered a consumption boom.

“I’ve never seen Moscow consume so much, they’re buying stuff like there’s no tomorrow,” David, a lawyer in Moscow who withheld his last name, told Al Jazeera.

After Russian suppliers found ways to deliver sanctioned Western goods via ex-Soviet republics and use cash or cryptocurrencies to pay for them, anything is available, he said.

“The boom is obvious, and those who gain from it feel different emotions, from guilt to gambling rush,” he said. “But all of my friends understand the fun could be over tomorrow.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024 10:35 AM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Seems like Macron, Scholz, and Tusk are burying the hatchets ... In each other's backs.

SIGNYM






signym's dream is to

T




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