Russia Invades Ukraine. Again by captaincrunch

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Thursday, August 7, 2025 08:25
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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:12 AM

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

Since January 2022, the EU has imported €297 billion worth of Russian goods, including oil, nickel, natural gas, fertilizers, iron, and steel.

This continued trade underscores Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and industrial exports, complicating efforts to enforce sanctions effectively.

Since January 2022, the United States has imported $24.51 billion of Russian goods.

https://www.reuters.com/world/three-years-into-war-us-and-europe-keep-
billions-trade-with-russia-2025-08-05/

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

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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:12 AM

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

Behind the ads Ukrainian units make to compete with one another

Amid a nationwide shortage of soldiers and growing competition among brigades, Ukraine’s military units are turning to advertising agencies to help them stand out and boost recruitment.

By Artem Moskalenko | Aug 06, 2025

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/behind-the-ads-ukrainian-units-mak
e

Imagine looking at a billboard in the street and instead of seeing a sign for Coca-Cola or Adidas, you lock eyes with a Ukrainian soldier. He is urging you to join his brigade.

This isn’t some sci-fi vision taken out of a movie: it’s everyday life in Ukraine, where the challenge of military recruitment has moved far beyond the front lines.

Military ads are now found in the metro stations, in big billboards in the streets, and even show up on coffee mugs and shirts.

Alina Tkachenko, the brand leader at one of Ukraine’s most popular advertising agencies, is one of those helping ensure that these ads spread to even more cities.

“The full-scale war has added a lot of creativity to the Ukrainian military, including its advertising. Billboards and videos [television advertising] have appeared everywhere. This [military service] has become a part of the advertising market,” she said.

Ukraine is unique in the world in that its units compete with each other for talent. The government approved a decentralized recruitment process in the fall of 2024.

If young soldiers voluntarily sign up for a brigade, they won’t be conscripted into a needs-of-the-army role. This creates an incentive for would-be soldiers to shop around, and for brigades to compete for stronger reputations.

At a time when manpower shortages on the frontline have become a serious problem, each brigade has been finding ways to attract more soldiers.

It’s a deeply human problem that hints at what motivates people – what message would get people off the couch to risk their lives for their country?

See Billboards and Videos at https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/behind-the-ads-ukrainian-units-mak
e

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

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Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:25 AM

SECOND

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

Ukraine Won’t Surrender

Tim Mak and Adrian Karatnycky on battlefield reality, stalled U.S. support, and why Ukraine won’t give up

By David Frum | August 6, 2025, 10:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/08/david-frum-show-u
kraine-tim-mak-adrian-karatnycky/683772/

I think that the fact that Europe is stepping up with cash and with collaboration on potentially on weapons production—Ukraine has, as I say, been developing its long-range missiles.

I’ve always believed that the only way to get Russia to negotiate is to hit the Russian power grid in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, which together represent 35 to 40 percent of the Russian GDP. If you can knock these things out for 5 percent of the time, it’s a huge impact or, you know, bigger impact than sanctions on Russian growth, and it brings the war in a more dramatic way, and it is a legitimate war target because there are many missile- and military-production facilities in the Moscow and St. Petersburg areas. And I think that the reciprocity, the ability for Ukraine to respond, would probably reduce the Russian attacks on the civilian targets in Ukraine, which have really been scaled up in the last two months.

Frum: Tim, what’s your view of what happens if the United States is even somewhat successful in forcing some kind of unfavorable peace?

Mak: I want to challenge the underlying assumption. I don’t think that they’re going to be able to force a peace on Russia’s terms. I remember in the very first weeks of the war, I heard someone say that as long as there’s a 12-year-old kid in Ukraine with a plastic fork, there’s going to be resistance to Russia and Russian occupation. There is no appetite whatsoever in Ukraine for accepting a peace that would permit the takeover of additional territories simply through diplomacy. And that’s what, I think, in the near term, a diplomatic outcome would look like.

Ever since the Oval Office dustup between Zelensky and Trump, I think Ukrainians have increasingly, to Adrian’s point, adopted the view that they need to have a backup plan and that they need to be able to be more self-sufficient and less reliant, even psychically, on American support for morale or equipment or whatever.

And so I think over the last few months, those plans have been put in place. I don’t think you’ll see that Ukraine will accept just a dictated peace in which they have to give up huge amounts of sovereignty and territory and freedom of action in order to achieve a short-term peace—which, by the way, no Ukrainian believes, or very few Ukrainians believe, would be sustainable in the long term. They believe that this would just be the prelude to the next war, which is coming in a matter of a few years.

Frum: Is there any voice—Adrian, you’ve chronicled the transformation of Ukraine from a culture and a people into a state. Is there any voice in the Ukrainian state system that would be willing to play ball with the Trump-Witkoff vision of the Ukrainian future?

Karatnycky: No. I mean, I think there may be a residual 5 percent of people with a kind of Soviet mentality and maybe a few percent who feel comfortable being in Russia’s embrace. But I would say, the society is as consolidated as ever in Ukrainian history. The culture is as dynamic as ever. This is like the high point of Ukrainian unity, and I think that that’s actually a counterweight to the earlier part of our discussion.

The Ukrainian people are united in the purpose of defending their way of life, their culture, their—to an extent—language, their civilization, which they see as a more open one than what Russia offers. And this unity is not going to be broken by disputes about anti-corruption policy or even some inordinate concentration of power by the president. That they will stick together. They will fight. And I think eventually, they will resolve this in a way that defends the existence of a persistence of a sovereign state.

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

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