REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 30, 2024 15:08
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PAGE 126 of 127

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 11:20 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's racist as shit.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024 11:26 PM

THG



Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
A) It's bullshit.
B) By ignoring the YEARS I asked about, you managed to (clumsily) avoid the question.

THUGR: So you know comrade signym. If you ask a question that is designed to change a topic or to just deflect away from facts that are posted, or waste someone's time, you should expect it to go unanswered. ....

That said, I have no idea what question you are talking about.

T


So .... you DON'T KNOW what question I'm referring to, but you won't answer it anyway???


Quote:
And what I've posted about Russia's' behavior is pure fact


And this is where I call bullshit. I watch Military Summary Channel almost every day, twice a day. Dima is NOT pro- Russian - if anything he's pro-Ukrainian - but one thing he insists on is VIDEO EVIDENCE.

Russians will double tap Ukrainian soldiers all day long! They will bomb military positions and then drone -strike vehicles that are evacuating wounded or even just retreating soldiers.

But I have NEVER seen video evidence of civilians being double - tapped. And if Kiev had video evidence, don't you think they'd splash it all over Telegram and elsewhere?

Maybe one of the confusions is that AFU establishes military positions in civilian structures, using those old durable Soviet high rises for communication/ radar/ drone operators and anti- tank positions; hotels as control centers etc. Dima has always been careful to establish which kinds of positions are being struck. When they're civilian he says so. When they're occupied by military forces, he says so.

BTW, I don't condone attacks on civilians by either side. But I think it's entirely fair that Kiev attack Russian refineries, just as Russia attacks Ukrainian refineries (and power stations) because they support the war effort.

Also, FYI MOST of Ukraine's electricity is produced by nuclear power plants (NPPs), not Thermal or hydro power plants (TPPs, HPPs). IIRC peak demand before the war was about 10.5GW, NPPs produced about 7.5GW of the total.

Russia refuses to bomb NPPs. However, they CAN bomb the substations and lines that distribute that electricity, so altho the plants are still operational they don't do anybody any good.

Just reporting facts as I know them.
Feel free to correct me if you have evidence (not allegations) that I'm wrong.




You spew the same old shit Polish Russian Collaborator signym. But you can't change facts, and those facts show you to be trash. Just like your Russian friends.

T


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Thursday, April 18, 2024 12:38 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


More evidence-free bullshit.

Show me the evidence to back up your so-called "facts".

No evidence?

No facts.


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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 12:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


If T swapped in the N word every time he says Polish or Russian, somebody on Twitter would find him and dox him and somebody else would have his house swatted.



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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 2:25 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


The Polish President Revealed That Foreign Companies Own Most Of Ukraine's Industrial Agriculture



Andrzej Duda represents what’s widely considered to be one of the most pro-American and anti-Russian governments at any time in history so he can’t credibly be accused of “pushing Kremlin propaganda” on this scandalous subject.

The Oakland Institute published a detailed report in February 2023 titled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land”, which exposed how foreign firms have clandestinely taken control of a significant share of Ukrainian farmland by exploiting a liberal law in collusion with local oligarchs. Their findings made waves around at the time but eventually receded from the public’s attention over half a year later once Western outlets like the USA Today misleadingly “fact-checked” it.

They took advantage of social media users conflating indirect ownership through stakes with direct control to discredit the institution’s report, after which it largely faded from the general discourse. Few could have expected that it would be none other than Polish President Andrzej Duda who just breathed new life into it during his interview with Lithuanian National Radio and Television. He was explaining Poland’s problem with Ukrainian agricultural imports when he dropped the following bombshell:

“I would like to draw particular attention to industrial agriculture, which is not really run by Ukrainians, it is run by big companies from Western Europe, from the USA. If we look today at the owners of most of the land, they are not Ukrainian companies. This is a paradoxical situation, and no wonder that farmers are defending themselves, because they have invested in their farms in Poland […] and cheap agricultural produce coming from Ukraine is dramatically destructive to them.”

https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-polish-president-revealed-that

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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 5:08 AM

SECOND

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


Zelenskyy recently signed a separate law cutting the draft age to 25 from 27 to try to secure more fighting power.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/16/ukraines-zelenskyy-signs-new-
army-draft-law-to-boost-conscription

Why is the lowest draft age set to 25 in Ukraine? Is the Ukrainian legislature stupid? Are they unaware of how a real war is fought by a winner, the USA in WWII? If Ukrainians want to win, all Ukrainians, not just a select few, have to change their ways to become effective warriors rather than cheese-eating surrender monkeys or else surrender their land to Russia and then flee to the EU or become landless slaves serving the Russians.

After the Pearl Harbor attack the STSA was further amended (December 19, 1941), extending the term of service to the duration of the war plus six months and requiring the registration of all men 18 to 64 years of age. During World War II, 49 million men were registered, 36 million classified, and 10 million inducted.[31] 18 and 19 year olds were made liable for induction on November 13, 1942. By late 1942, the Selective Service System moved away from a national lottery to administrative selection by its more than 6,000 local boards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States#World_
War_II

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, April 18, 2024 5:41 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine Supercharges Neptun Missile Range, Aims for Tenfold Production Boost

April 17, 2024

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-supercharges-neptun-missi
le-range-aims-for-tenfold-production-boost/ar-BB1lNpoJ

The Ukrainian armed forces have announced an upgrade for the missile that was used to sink the cruiser Moskva in 2022. The missile, known as the R-360 Neptun, will now have a range of up to 621 miles in its updated version, significantly increasing from its previous range of 249 miles.

According to updates shared by the Ukraine Battle Map profile on the X platform, Ukraine is working to extend the reach of its R-360 Neptun missiles and aims to boost their production by tenfold. This enhancement will enable the country's defenders to strike virtually any target within the Black Sea region. With the missile's extended range, all Russian ports in the area will be vulnerable to attacks from the improved Neptun.

Although initially developed as an anti-ship missile, modifications have also enabled the Neptun to be used against land targets. Consequently, according to reports, once the enhanced missile goes into serial production, 59 out of the 99 Russian air bases will be within its reach.

An added feature, the radar altimeter, ensures the missile can maintain a flight height of 10 to 33 feet and remain undetectable by enemy radars.

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, April 18, 2024 12:28 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Numbers of missiles, SECOND, not "intentions".
Kiev has announced all kinds of intentions.
Heck, Zelenskiy is still yakking about a 2025 offensive.

HOW do they intend to do this?
Real, practical steps.
Do they have the resources?
Do they have enough to make a significant difference?
Do they have the time?
It's a question people don't ask, but should! (You included.)

It's not that I discount EVERYTHING that comes out of Kiev, but quite often I comment to hubby "Must be the coke talking!"


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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 1:03 PM

SECOND

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


Ukraine is ignoring US warnings to end drone operations inside Russia

Its superdrones can reach targets as far away as Siberia | April 18, 2024

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/04/18/ukraine-is-ignoring-us-war
nings-to-end-drone-operations-inside-russia

A guard looks on nervously. With every step, the air thickens with the smell of petrol. Around a corner is the workshop, and the buzz of manufacturing. Inside, lab-coated technicians are busy assembling grey birds under the glow of overhead lights. Young men in t-shirts scuttle about, before packing the drones in boxes for onward delivery. The destination for some of them will be 1,000km away and more — hunting for important targets inside Russia.

Since President Volodymyr Zelensky prioritised the technology, Ukraine has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into long-range drones, capable of searching out and striking distant targets. Half a dozen firms now make them.

The best of the new models has a range of 3,000km, able to reach Siberia. Born out of necessity — the West has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons — the programme has disrupted much of Russia’s oil and military infrastructure. But the White House is not happy. It is pushing the Ukrainians to stop the strikes.

America’s concerns have varied, from a rise in the oil price to the prospect of an uncontrollable tit-for-tat in which Ukraine could end up the loser. Fears of the latter rose in late March, when Russia inflicted millions of dollars of damage on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The attacks revealed gaps in air defences and vulnerabilities to Russia’s new Kh-69 low-altitude cruise missile. On April 11th such missiles destroyed Ukraine’s Trypilska power station, 40km from Kyiv, though it was in range of the capital’s Patriot air-defence systems.

So far, Ukraine is ignoring American advice to call off the strikes. “Detective”, an intelligence officer responsible for part of the programme, says he has not received instructions to dial down operations. Yes, there has been a switch away from aiming at oil infrastructure in the past week, but it is probably temporary. “Our targets change day to day. We keep the Russians on their toes.”

One long-range-drone producer claims that not every American representative agrees with its policy. His contacts “winked” while they delivered warnings. “They’re privately telling us to keep going.” The producer predicted an expansion of Ukraine’s drone programme in the months to come. “Russia is scorching Ukrainian earth. It’s time we did the same to European Russia.”

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, April 18, 2024 1:13 PM

SECOND

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


America Should Force a New Trans-Atlantic Deal on Europe

By Eoin Drea | April 17, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/17/washington-europe-nato-spending-m
ilitary-security-russia-ukraine/

In March 1945, the New York Times called Europe a “dark continent” in a condition that “no American can hope to understand.” Destroyed by political extremism and laid waste by a catastrophic war, Europe had become a problem for “every human being in Capetown, in Kansas City, in Brisbane, in Lhasa.”

Quickened by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global rival, the United States’ reordering of a prostrate, rubble-strewn Western Europe in the late 1940s produced an unprecedented economic, political, and societal success. Leveraging its economic strength to shape structural change, Washington facilitated the rebirth of the Western European economy, which quickly recovered from wartime destruction. With the Marshall Plan and other programs, the U.S. government conditioned its support on cooperation among European countries, which kick-started the process of economic and political integration, as the late Tony Judt described so well in his magisterial Postwar.

With U.S. nudging, Germany’s erstwhile enemies also accepted West German rearmament and integration into NATO, which kept the Soviets in check and Western Europe secure. All of this produced a period of peace and prosperity that was unprecedented in modern European history, and it laid the foundation for the continent’s peaceful unification after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Alas, Europe has lived off the diminishing returns of this epic achievement. Despite the European Union’s vast wealth and potential power, it remains reliably incapable of projecting unitary political action. As Ukraine burns, the Middle East festers, and China looms, European countries seem to be returning to their age-old state of division, competition, and distrust. Governments are divided on everything from Russia to Gaza to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. The traditional Franco-German engine of European integration and policy is divided; a dearth of strategic leadership is fragmenting Europe from within. The inability of Paris and Berlin to “speak with one voice” on supporting Kyiv’s war effort, for example, has resulted in protracted disagreements on how to handle the continent’s most serious aggression since World War II.

What the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East—and Europe’s growing panic over the possibility of no longer having the United States at its side—really highlight is that a window of opportunity now exists for Washington, as in 1945, to bend Europe toward a more strategically responsible direction.

The outcome could be a broadly Atlanticist EU that defends itself by combining NATO resources with far greater European military capabilities. It would be an EU that once again views energy and resource security as a core strategic objective and makes economic relations with like-minded allies a central pillar in its own geopolitical ambitions.

Without more pressure from Washington, the EU will very likely remain a diffident, divided, and awkward partner in confronting Russia, China, and other threats, putting both itself and the United States in danger.

Today, three overlapping events provide Washington with the opportunity to reshape Europe. The first is the ongoing war in Ukraine. Without continued U.S. military support, Ukraine not only lacks the capabilities to regain its occupied territories, but could also fail to defend itself from future Russian offensives. And while the EU loves to trumpet its overall financial aid to Ukraine, Washington has so far provided more military aid to Kyiv than all other major donors combined.

The reality is that the EU remains politically unwilling and militarily unable to compensate for current pause in U.S. military aid. In fact, the decades since 1989 have witnessed a dramatic reduction in European military spending, capabilities, and equipment stocks, and most countries have only recently and reluctantly begun the process of rearming. Even with vastly increased expenditures, it will take decades for the EU to meet its defense requirements.

Brussels was barely able to reach agreement in February on a 50 billion euro ($54 billion), multiyear aid package for Ukraine and will likely bicker for years on end over Ukraine’s prospective EU membership. Even the bloc’s modest aim of supplying Ukraine with 1 million rounds of ammunition by this spring quickly turned out to be unachievable. In the medium term, the EU’s approach to defense is what it has always been: Sunday sermons about European ambitions underpinned by a lazy dependence on the United States.

Despite their soaring rhetoric, Brussels and Kyiv understand that without Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin holds the long-term advantage not only in Ukraine, but also all along the EU’s exposed eastern flank. No matter who wins the U.S. presidential elections in November, the United States should use the threat of withdrawing from NATO—something that former U.S. President Donald Trump considered during his administration—to fundamentally reshape European attitudes to their own security and defense.

Washington should explicitly link the continuation of U.S. military supplies for Ukraine to increased spending by European NATO members, significant EU funding for the recently launched European Defence Industrial Strategy, and expedited Ukrainian membership in the EU. Given Ukraine’s critical shortages of military equipment, one need not wait until all the details are hammered out, but an initial agreement should be finalized immediately.

This kind of pressure campaign on Europe could also help overcome the refusal of U.S. lawmakers to provide further aid to Ukraine. Once again, Congress could learn from U.S. policy in the 1940s and EU policy today.

The EU’s ongoing 50 billion euro funding package for Ukraine actually includes more than 33 billion euros ($35 billion) in low-interest loans, rather than grants. This is a similar concept to the lend-lease plan, the program used by the United States during World War II to supply Britain and other allies. The 1941 Lend-Lease Act allowed Washington to send war supplies to any nation deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.” Congress could adopt a similar approach to future aid to Ukraine. In fact, a Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act was already passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden in May 2022, but it expired at the end of September 2023. Its renewal could give Kyiv the military resources—when combined with European financial aid—to regain its territorial sovereignty.

Such an approach applies both a carrot and a stick to reshape the European Union’s security posture and support Ukraine’s survival. While aid to Ukraine critically serves U.S. national security, it is also a pressure point to shape the EU—which would be most affected if Ukraine were overrun—into a stronger, more useful ally.

The second window of opportunity for the United States to pressure Europe is energy policy. The EU’s ongoing decoupling from Russian natural gas supplies has resulted in a broader debate about how to balance the EU’s strict energy transition objectives—which are costing the bloc and its member states several trillion euros—with security of supply. In a welcome onset of energy realism, the EU recently labeled gas and nuclear energy as “climate friendly” transition fuels in moving toward a zero emission economy.

The United States already supplied nearly half of the EU’s imports of liquefied natural gas in 2022, making it the bloc’s energy supplier of last resort. Washington should condition this openly on Brussels remaining committed to achieving real energy security. Europe’s dependency on Russian gas is one reason that Putin thought he had a free hand to invade Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. Washington should press Europe—especially Germany—not to make that mistake again.

Finally, the Kremlin’s war and suspension of gas deliveries to Europe have conspired to unleash political and economic instability in Germany, the EU’s largest and most important economy. Against the background of political chaos—including the monthslong inability to pass a federal budget—an anxious and inward-looking German government is pursuing inconsistent and painstakingly cautious policies on Ukraine aid and other issues, all of which has served to alienate many EU member states. Europe cannot rely on Germany to lead the necessary reorientation of the EU into a bloc capable of developing meaningful military capabilities.

Therein lies the third opportunity and leverage point for the United States. Washington should step into the leadership void—not to lead Europe, but to help hammer out the next phase of the trans-Atlantic security relationship. Many EU member states—including most Nordic, Baltic, Central, and Eastern European states—would welcome direct pressure from Washington to condition trans-Atlantic security relations on clear European policy changes, most notably on a much more serious expansion of defense capabilities and meaningful energy independence from Russia.

That’s why Washington should squeeze Europe like it’s 1945—and why it would benefit both sides.

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, April 18, 2024 2:26 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Numbers of missiles, SECOND, not "intentions".
Kiev has announced all kinds of intentions.
Heck, Zelenskiy is still yakking about a 2025 offensive.

HOW do they intend to do this?
Real, practical steps.
Do they have the resources?
Do they have enough to make a significant difference?
Do they have the time?
It's a question people don't ask, but should! (You included.)

It's not that I discount EVERYTHING that comes out of Kiev, but quite often I comment to hubby "Must be the coke talking!"



When challenged with real-world issues you either spew insult or propaganda that even YOU don't bother to read!



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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 6:27 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

When challenged with real-world issues you either spew insult or propaganda that even YOU don't bother to read!
Lumbering M270 Launchers Just Lobbed Eight ATACMS Rockets With 8,000 Submunitions At A Russian Base In Crimea.

The damage was extensive.

By David Axe | Apr 18, 2024,05:19pm EDT

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/04/18/lumbering-m270-launch
ers-just-lobbed-eight-atacms-rockets-with-8000-submunitions-at-a-russian-base-in-crimea/?sh=47fd53d93f78

On March 12, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden unexpectedly gifted to Ukraine a $300-million consignment of weapons—the last consignment paid for with funds the U.S. Congress approved before Republicans gained narrow control of the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2023.

Five weeks later, the Ukrainian finally put the weapons to good use.

The arms package reportedly included a small number of long-range M39 rockets, also known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS. On Tuesday night, the Ukrainian army fired some—maybe all—of the M39 ATACMS at a single Russian air base in occupied Crimea.

The damage was extensive. Imagery from the ground at Dzhankoy air base, 100 miles south of the front line, confirms the Russians lost at least four launchers belonging to an S-400 long-range surface-to-air missile battery. The Ukrainian defense ministry claimed the rockets also knocked out the S-400’s control center and four precious air-defense radars.

According to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, a regiment of helicopters and three squadrons of attack jets—dozens of aircraft in all—fly from Dzhankoy. It’s unclear whether any of the aircraft were damaged or destroyed on Tuesday night, however. “The enemy carefully hides the number of affected aircraft,” the defense ministry in Kyiv noted.

A video the ministry released on Thursday seems to depict seven or eight M39s streaking into the night sky, presumably somewhere around the free city of Kherson. Each 100-mile-range rocket carried nearly a thousand grenade-sized submunitions inside its 13-foot body—meaning as many as 8,000 individual explosions rocked the Russian base.

While the Ukrainian army’s wheeled High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems can each launch a single two-ton M39, the M270s can launch two. Considering the Ukrainians tend to operate their HIMARS and M270s in platoons of four launchers, it’s likely the latter carried out the raid on Dzhankoy.

The speedy HIMARS are media darlings in Ukraine: symbols of one of the Ukrainian military’s few technological advantages over the bigger and better-funded Russian military. The Tuesday raid was a rare chance for the lumbering M270s to shine.

The first consignment of M39s from the United States arrived in Ukraine last fall, a few weeks before the initial U.S. funding for the Ukrainian war effort began to run out.

Considering that aid package included just 20 or so M39s, it’s likely the belated aid package in March—which the White House paid for with unexpected savings from a previous contract for weapons for Ukraine—included fewer of the 1990s-vintage munitions. It’s possible there were just eight rockets, and that platoon of M270s fired all of them at Dzhankoy in a single fiery barrage.

If the damage was as bad as the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed, it may have been worth it to fire all the M39s. The Ukrainians can take comfort in knowing it’s highly likely they’re about to get more ATACMS rockets—potentially a lot more.

That’s because the Republican Speaker of the House, Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, is finally bringing to a vote Biden’s proposal to spend $61 billion on weapons and other aid for Ukraine through the end of the year. The long-delayed vote, which is strongly opposed by a minority of Russia-friendly Republicans, is scheduled for Saturday—and is expected to pass.

A provision in the bill requires Biden to send more ATACMS to Ukraine. There are hundreds of the old rockets in the U.S. inventory, and their solid fuel is expiring soon. There’s no reason the White House couldn’t send all of them to Ukraine after the vote this weekend.

And there’s no reason the Ukrainian army can’t fire them at any Russian base within a hundred miles of the front line.

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, April 18, 2024 8:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
If the damage was as bad as the Ukrainian defense ministry claimed...


And yet, despite this supposedly happening yesterday, as of this noon Dima says no photographic confirmation of damage.

He's been burned too many times by Kiev fake news.

BTW Ive seen videos of the launch. I counted five.

Like him, I'll wait until some ... what is that, again? Oh yeah ... EVIDENCE ... shows up, before I assess what happened.



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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Friday, April 19, 2024 6:48 AM

SECOND

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


Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov specified that the Russian offensive effort that Ukrainian officials have been forecasting will likely begin in June 2024. Budanov stated in an April 17 article in the Washington Post that Russia will launch a “big” offensive in June 2024 with the aim of seizing all of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.[1]

Budanov also stated that Russian forces will try to make battlefield gains throughout 2024 as part of efforts to influence Western decision-making. Budanov had previously forecasted that a future major Russian offensive would begin in late May or early June 2024, and it is notable that Budanov has now narrowed his forecast to June and identified the likely aim of the Russian offensive. Previous major Russian offensive efforts have similarly aimed to seize the remainder of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.[2]

Ukrainian officials, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, have recently warned about the threat of a potential future Russian ground offensive operation targeting Kharkiv City.[3]

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly warned that US security assistance is vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend against possible future Russian offensive operations in summer 2024.[4]

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

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, April 19, 2024 7:10 AM

SECOND

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


You would think Russia would have ten million volunteers eager to accept less than normal pay since the Nazis of NATO are an existential threat to Russia.

Russia to Hire Contract Soldiers (at 10 times normal pay) in Bid to Avoid Unpopular Draft

Kremlin anxious not to stir fears that triggered 2022 exodus

Young men walk past a billboard promoting contract army services in St. Petersburg, Russia.

By Bloomberg News | April 18, 2024 at 3:47 AM CDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/war-in-ukraine-russ
ia-to-enlist-more-hired-soldiers-to-avoid-conscription

Russia is preparing to enlist more contract soldiers as it presses its invasion of Ukraine, aiming to avoid at least for now another mass call-up that could undermine popular support for the war.

The Kremlin is anxious not to repeat the September 2022 mobilization, which shook public confidence and triggered an exodus of as many as a million Russians from the country, three people informed about discussions on the matter said.

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, April 19, 2024 8:45 AM

SECOND

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


Mysterious Accidents at US and UK Defense Facilities Spark Russian Sabotage Fears

Published Apr 19, 2024 at 7:28 AM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/us-nato-defense-facilities-ukraine-russia-sab
otage-1892099

A recent string of mysterious accidents at defense facilities in the U.S. and U.K. that have been producing weapons and equipment for Kyiv's forces in the war in Ukraine has fueled speculation on social media of possible Russian sabotage.

It comes amid rising tensions between Russia and the West, more than two years into Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian officials have regularly accused the United States of instigating a new world war in coordination with members of the NATO military alliance.

On Wednesday, two Russian nationals who were taken into custody by German police in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth were accused of preparing to bomb industrial and military sites in the country.

The federal prosecutor's office said Dieter S, 39, and Alexander J, 37, both German-Russian nationals, had been in contact with Russia's military intelligence agency (GRU) and had plotted to carry out acts of sabotage with the intention of disrupting the supply of military aid to Ukraine.

The Russian Embassy in Berlin called the accusations an "outright provocation," Russia's state-run news agency Tass reported.

More itty-bitty details at https://www.newsweek.com/us-nato-defense-facilities-ukraine-russia-sab
otage-1892099

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, April 19, 2024 12:11 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Military Summary Channel



More Russian missile strikes on the Ukrainian military.

Boy, it's a good thing Russia is running out of missiles!

*****
Zelenskiy has until May 21 to negotiate a surrender. After that, his LEGAL term as Predident expires and there will be no one for the Russians to negotiate with. Dima believes at that point Russia will opt for a purely military solution.

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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Friday, April 19, 2024 3:17 PM

SECOND

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


Why Donald Trump ‘hates Ukraine’

The once and possibly future U.S. president blames the country for his political woes.

By Veronika Melkozerova | April 18, 2024 4:00 am CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/why-donald-trump-hates-ukraine-us-cong
ress-kyiv-war/

As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.

It was, after all, a phone call with Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019, after he was accused of seeking to influence the 2020 election by leaning on the Ukrainian leader to investigate current President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

There’s every sign the country is still preying on his mind. When Congress moved this month to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — legislation governing the surveillance of suspected international adversaries — Trump took to social media to object.

“KILL FISA,” he posted on Truth Social. “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS.”

That Trump was likely referring to the wiretapping of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is unlikely to have gone unnoticed in Ukraine, where officials are watching the U.S. presidential election campaign for signs of what it could mean for their war effort.

As the presumptive Republican candidate, Trump has already triggered fear in Kyiv by boasting he could end the war in 24 hours and musing that he hopes it ends before he is forced to decide whether to give Ukraine to Moscow.

The mention of Manafort, oblique though it was, will only heighten concerns in Ukraine that the U.S. president still holds a grudge against a country he sees as intimately involved with delegitimizing his presidency.

From the first intimations of Russian interference in America’s 2016 presidential campaign, to an investigation by a special prosecutor, to Trump’s 2019 impeachment, all roads — it can sometimes seem — lead through Kyiv.

“Trump hates Ukraine,” said Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who once served as a fixer in Ukraine for Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and later turned against the former president. “He and people around him believe that Ukraine was the cause of all Trump’s problems.”

Many more details about how Ukraine makes Trump's skin crawl at https://www.politico.eu/article/why-donald-trump-hates-ukraine-us-cong
ress-kyiv-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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Saturday, April 20, 2024 2:16 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.
Everything about this sentence is wrong.

Speaker Johnson is bringing a funding bill up for a vote, WITHOUT "border protection" funding.

Trump gave him the go-ahead.

The only thing the money is meant for is to stave off a Ukrainian collapse unyil aftrr November. And I don't think it'll work.

I'm pretty sure Trump blames "the interagency"- and especially Hillary and the FBI - for his problems.

It's just one ridiculous narrative after another, isn't it?



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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 8:02 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's just one ridiculous narrative after another, isn't it?
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signaled Russia’s intent to seize Kharkiv City in a future significant Russian offensive operation, the first senior Kremlin official to outright identify the city as a possible Russian operational objective following recent Ukrainian warnings that Russian forces may attempt to seize the city starting in Summer 2024. Lavrov stated during a radio interview with several prominent Russian state propagandists on April 19 that Kharkiv City “plays an important role” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s idea of establishing a demilitarized “sanitary zone” in Ukraine to protect Russian border settlements from Ukrainian strikes.[1]

Lavrov stated that Putin has very clearly stated that Russian forces must push the frontline far enough into Ukraine – which Lavrov explicitly defines as into Kharkiv Oblast – to place Russian settlements outside of the Ukrainian strike range. This requirement is a very vague definition that could include the entirety of Ukrainian territory as long as an independent Ukrainian state exists and is willing to defend itself.

Lavrov stated in response to a question about where Russian forces will go after creating a “sanitary zone” that Russian authorities are “completely convinced” of the need to continue Russia’s war against Ukraine. Lavrov responded in seeming agreement to a comment from one of the interviewers, who suggested that Lavrov’s earlier remarks meant that Russian forces will have to continue to attack further into Ukraine after creating the “sanitary zone” to protect the settlements that would then be within the zone and Ukrainian strike range.

Lavrov’s remarks suggest that the Kremlin will likely use the idea of a constantly shifting demilitarized “sanitary zone” to justify Russian offensive operations further and further into Ukraine.

Lavrov claimed during a radio interview with Russian state media on April 19 that the West made Moldovan President Maia Sandu “openly drag Moldova into NATO, either directly or through unification with Romania” and that the West did the same with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.[27] 

Lavrov criticized both Moldova’s and Armenia’s moves towards the West and urged them to rethink their decisions by claiming that the West will force its citizens to fight in a possible future war against Russia. Russian officials have recently claimed that the West is “dragging” the South Caucasus region into a “geopolitical confrontation” between Russia and the West and explicitly threatened Armenia over Armenian outreach to the West.[28] 

Lavrov’s comparison of the Moldovan government to both the Armenian and Ukrainian governments is likely a tacit threat. ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin is likely trying to destabilize Moldovan society, attack Moldova’s democratic government, and prevent Moldova’s accession to the European Union.[29]

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

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, April 20, 2024 8:38 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's just one ridiculous narrative after another, isn't it?
War in Ukraine
Inside the Efforts to Try Russians for Ukraine War Crimes — In Argentina

In a country long traumatized by torture, Putin’s victims hope to get their day in court.

By Janine di Giovanni | April 18, 2024, 05:19pm

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/prosecutors-seek-to-try-russians
-for-ukraine-war-crimes-in-argentina

The American peace advocate Norman Cousins once said, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” The quote has often been linked to Ariel Dorfman’s profoundly moving play, Death and the Maiden. Therein, a middle-class Chilean woman who is a trauma survivor, having been subjected to torture and other unspeakable torments, confronts the man who had terrorized her years earlier during her country’s brutal dictatorship.

For decades, I have documented torture and war crimes, first as a journalist for Vanity Fair and now as executive director of the Reckoning Project (TRP), an organization that gathers evidence on the systematic horrors Ukrainians have endured since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. When survivors tell me how they managed to bear unimaginable physical pain, a common yet excruciating description I have heard is that they had to kill something deep inside their psyches.

How can these survivors ever hope to heal? One way—which is the main mission of the Reckoning Project—is to ensure that at least some of those who have committed war crimes are held accountable in court. If authoritarian leaders remain in power—as in Argentina in the 1970s and ’80s, and in Russia today—accountability is impossible. The question then becomes: how to create a reliable legal framework so these victims and crimes don’t go unnoticed? A method gaining traction utilizes a principle known as universal jurisdiction, which allows existing global laws to be applied to serious international crimes in territories where the crimes weren’t committed. In many ways, this is justice without borders.

Perpetrators of heinous crimes could now be investigated—in some cases prosecuted—in foreign countries. Ukraine took notice. The level of criminality inflicted on the country’s citizens has been so vast—Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin’s office has identified over 120,000 incidents—that TRP’s legal experts began to consider where outside of Ukraine or Russia they might plan trials against the transgressors.

Since the war began, TRP has gathered more than 300 testimonies from victims of crimes that occurred in Ukraine. This week, thanks to key stakeholders in Argentina and Ukraine, the first universal jurisdiction complaint against members of Vladimir Putin’s military and its affiliates was filed in Buenos Aires. The initial case will present charges based on the testimony of one key survivor—and loads of supplemental evidence—accusing occupying soldiers of committing thousands of acts of extreme torture.

Why Argentina? Partly because of that country’s painful past. During the so-called Dirty War of 1976–1983, some 30,000 Argentinians were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. One favored method of torture involved electrocution (also allegedly used by Russians against Ukrainian captives). Thousands of Argentinians “disappeared.” In several instances, political prisoners were pushed out of airplanes into the Atlantic.

Today, a kind of solidarity has emerged between Ukraine and Argentina. Not only have the countries’ lawyers and prosecutors shared harrowing stories, but on Ukraine’s battlefields Argentinian forensic teams have been working closely with their Ukrainian counterparts to identify remains and determine causes of death.

. . .

Why do people resort to such brutality in wartime? And what can be done to help alleviate the lingering agony of those who survive that brutality?

Thirty years and eighteen wars later, I still haven’t answered the first question. But I am beginning to see how the pain of victims can be minimally assuaged. Is universal jurisdiction a perfect form of justice? No. But it provides a path forward. The coming trial in Argentina is a crucial step by which survivors of war crimes can envision a form of redress.

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, April 20, 2024 8:59 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's just one ridiculous narrative after another, isn't it?
Russia doesn’t have capability to knock Ukraine out of war: Ex-US commander

By John T Psaropoulos | April 19, 2024

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/19/west-needs-to-overcome-fear-o
f-winning-in-ukraine-says-ex-us-commander

Delphi, Greece – For General Ben Hodges, who once commanded NATO forces in Europe, the worst-case scenario for Ukraine is for Western powers to “keep doing what we’re doing, exactly right now”.

He told Al Jazeera in an interview on the sidelines of the recent Delphi Economic Conference in Greece that a paralysed US Congress, over-cautious White House administration and fearful allies in Europe constitute a Russian marketing success.

Take the German refusal to send Ukraine 500km-range (310-mile) Taurus missiles.

“That is 99 percent because [Olaf Scholz] is convinced that if [Donald] Trump is [US] president, then he will withdraw the nuclear shield from Europe and turn his back on NATO,” said Hodges, referring to the former US Republican leader who is running again this year.

“Germany then, unlike France and the UK if it ended up in a conflict with Russia over Taurus, would be without a nuclear deterrent.”

Or take the administration of US President Joe Biden, which Hodges described as “unduly scared”.

“They think that if Ukraine liberates Crimea, that will lead to the collapse of the regime [of Russian president Vladimir Putin], or that Putin will think he has no choice but to use a nuclear weapon to prevent that from happening,” said Hodges. “I think those are two false, unfounded fears. I hope it does lead to the collapse of the Putin regime. It’s not something we should fear. It’s something we should plan.”

Believing Russia’s nuclear threats is likely to produce a split in the Western alliance, with more ambitious leaders providing more provocative forms of help to Ukraine.

“I think there is a very real possibility that certain European countries will insert themselves,” he said. “I can imagine Poland, even France, some others, in some way saying, ‘We can’t afford not to do it’.”

French President Emmanuel Macron caused Russia to renew its nuclear threats after he suggested last month that NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine should not be ruled out.

Macron’s generals and foreign policy wonks later finessed that message, suggesting NATO troops could only ever play a supporting role, and not participate in active combat.

Russian forces ‘do not have the capability’

Hodges was deeply sceptical about how well Russia has succeeded in conventional warfare.

Since the fall of Avdiivka in Ukraine’s east on February 17, its forces have “oozed” forward, swallowing several villages, as Ukrainian forces have performed tactical retreats.

“Here we are in April, and [the Russians] are oozing out. Why is that? I think it’s because that’s the best the Russians can do. They do not have the capability to knock Ukraine out of the war.”

Russia, he said, lacked the ability to equip large armoured formations that could move rapidly, with supporting artillery, engineers and logistics.

“I don’t think it exists. That’s why I feel fairly confident that the mission for [Ukrainian] general Oleksandr Syrskyi for the next several months is to stabilise this as much as he can to buy time for Ukraine to grow the size of the army, to rebuild the defence industry of Ukraine, as well as give us time to find more ammunition for them. I think of 2024 as a year of industrial competition. So the army has got to buy time.”

On the day Hodges spoke to Al Jazeera, Ukraine’s parliament passed a new mobilisation law that aimed to raise about 300,000 new troops and bring the standing army to 1.2 million.

Contrary to the punitive measures for avoiding the draft that had circulated, Ukraine doubled down on incentives in the new law, such as free downpayments and lower mortgage rates for front-line soldiers, and a payout of $400,000 if they are killed.

In what may be groundbreaking practice for a European army, Ukraine is also offering incentives for battlefield successes.

“If you damage a Russian weapon you can get from 12,000 hryvnias ($300) to 900,000 hryvnias ($22,700) depending on the weapon and whether you destroyed or took it,” Ukrainian parliamentarian Yulia Klymenko told Al Jazeera.

“For example, if you get a Russian tank, you get [almost] a million hryvnias. And we have enough tractors to steal things.”

In the early days of the war, images of Ukrainian soldiers towing Russian tanks that had run out of fuel using farming tractors were shared widely on social media. These were reconditioned to fight for Ukraine.

Hodges wants Ukraine’s Western allies to closely participate in Ukraine’s bravery and innovative spirit, rather than merely cheerleading it.

The attitude he suggests is simply for allies to adopt Ukraine’s strategic objective – restoring the 1991 borders.

“Nobody believes” the US president any more when he often encourages Ukraine with phrases such as “We’re with you for as long as it takes”, said Hodges.

“‘We’re going to do what it takes’. That’s a statement of a strategic aim that then allows the development of a policy.”

That policy should include giving Ukraine immediately any available old inventory and diverting some new weapons under construction for export.

For instance, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently said Ukraine needs 25 Patriot launchers to cover air defence gaps across the entire country.

“The Swiss are the next in line to buy 12 different [Patriot] launchers. The president can say to Raytheon, ‘I’ll protect you in terms of liability, we’ll work with the Swiss, tell them to stand fast, prioritise to Ukraine’,” suggested Hodges.

Russia appears to have done something similar with India, holding back two S-400 air defence systems it was to deliver to New Delhi this year.

Restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders would include winning back Crimea, the territory Putin annexed in February 2014. “Whoever controls Crimea wins,” said Hodges.

“From here the Russians … can control any part of southern or eastern Ukraine.”

Russia has demonstrated this repeatedly, launching missile and drone attacks on Odesa, Kherson and Zaporizhia from airfields in Crimea.

Hodges clearly believes this war is winnable.

He summed up his attitude: “Stop coming up with excuses, and stop our self-deterrence and hesitating.”

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, April 20, 2024 2:05 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's just one ridiculous narrative after another, isn't it?
Russia’s War Against Evangelicals

By Peter Pomerantsev | April 20, 2024 6:00 AM EDT

https://time.com/6969273/russias-war-against-evangelicals/

After they beat Azat Azatyan so bad blood came out of his ears; after they sent electric shocks up his genitals; and after they whacked him with pipes and truncheons, the Russians began to interrogate him about his faith. “When did you become a Baptist? When did you become an American spy?” Azat tried to explain that in Ukraine there was freedom of religion, you could just choose your faith. But his torturers saw the world the same way as their predecessors at the KGB did: an American church is just a front for the American state.

Azat was dragged back to the makeshift cell in the occupied city of Berdiansk, in southern Ukraine, where he was held with six others in a cellar that had a bucket for a toilet and hard mattresses on the floor. The other inmates wondered how he could be religious when the punishments meted out to him were so much worse than to them. Azat answered he felt God was always with him. He prayed for the other inmates to be spared. When the torturers returned they left the others alone but told him to come with them: “This time we will kill you.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is accompanied by a strategic effort to repress, control, and crush religious groups outside of the Kremlin-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian Orthodox Church. There are over thirty cases of religious clergy killed and kidnapped. 109 known cases of interrogations, forced expulsions, imprisonments, and arrests. 600 houses of worship were destroyed. And these are just the confirmed numbers, with the real ones in the information blackout of the occupied territories will likely be higher.

Evangelicals are targeted by the Russians disproportionally, and Azat’s story is typical of Russia’s systemic persecution of Protestants in occupied Ukraine. Protestants were the victims of 34 percent of the reported persecution events, and 48 percent in the Zaporizhzhia region where Azat was held. Baptists made up 13 percent of victims – the largest single group after Ukrainian Orthodox. Under Russian control 400 Baptist congregations have been lost, 17% of the total in Ukraine.

There’s a reason for this. Protestants flourished in the democratic decades since the end of the U.S.S.R. Baptists are the third largest denomination in Ukraine. The mayor of Kyiv between 2006-2012 was an evangelical. And for the Russian occupiers, they are perceived as agents of America.

Petro Dudnyk, Pastor of the Good News Church, explains that the occupying forces "thought and spoke like this: you are the American faith, the Americans are our enemies, the enemies must be destroyed." Inside Russia Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned, as is missionary work for Mormons. Evangelical groups are constrained by laws banning missionary activity and labeling some groups as “undesirable organizations.” The U.S. Congress Commission on International Religious Freedom considers Russia one of the world’s “worst violators” of religious freedom, on par with Iran and Pakistan.

What this persecution highlights is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is more than just the latest iteration of the Kremlin’s centuries-old attempt to crush Ukraine’s freedom. It is also part of the Kremlin’s larger war against America. By hurting those who practice an “American” religion the Kremlin can claim it is striking against American power—while picking on the powerless.

The Russian persecution of Protestants is pursued through intimidation, expropriation, enforced conversion, and even murder.

"Your church has no right to exist, as it has connections with America and other Western countries," Russian authorities told the deacon of the Pentecostal church in Nova Kakhovka, Oleksandr Prokopchuk. They arrested him and his 19-year-old son. Both were later found dead in a forest. In occupied Sloviansk four members of the Evangelical Church of the Transformation were accused of being American spies because some U.S. dollars were found in their pockets. They were subsequently shot and killed.

But it’s not just individual clergy Russian forces go after, sometimes it’s whole congregations. As soon as Russia take over a city armed men turn up during prayers. The investigative news outlet, The Counter-Offensive, has reported on the fate of an Adventist congregation in Donetsk, where, the pastor explains, “every week or two there were searches. People would come with machine guns. Sometimes a tank would come. …they said, 'You are Americans, this is an American church, this is not [a Russian] church. We were treated like dogs. They beat us. Some were killed. Some disappeared."

When Russian occupying forces shut down the Melitopol Christian Church, they used sledgehammers to break into the building. Members were interrogated as to whether the church was hiding any Americans. The house of worship was expropriated and given to a Russian Ministry. Its fifty foot cross was chopped down. Click here for video.

Sometimes the Russians also try to “cure” protestants. Viktor Cherniiavskyi, was held for 25 days, beaten with a baseball bat, and given electro-shocks. A Russian Orthodox priest was present in this process and tried to cast demons out of him for being an evangelical Christian. The torturers used a Taser to help the exorcism along.

The way the priest and the torturer worked together is emblematic of the interconnection between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. The Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, who was reportedly a KGB agent in the 1970s, has vociferously supported the invasion of Ukraine, openly backs the destruction of Ukraine’s sovereignty, and promises Russian soldiers their sins will be washed away. When Russian forces accuse evangelicals of being agents of the U.S. they are projecting how the Moscow patriarchate aids and abets Putin. The tradition of priests working for spy agencies continues with Orthodox priests in Ukraine who report to the Moscow Patriarch having also been found guilty of reporting directly to the Russian security services.

Only 4% of Ukrainian Patriarchs remain faithful to Kirill’s Moscow Patriarchate—the vast majority have moved to the Orthodox Church under the Kyiv Patriarchate. Moreover, 85% of Ukrainians think that the Moscow branch of the Orthodox Church is a security threat. The Ukrainian Parliament is considering a bill that would prohibit religious organisations that are controlled by a country waging armed aggression against Ukraine. Steven Moore, a former Republican strategist who now runs a center documenting religious crimes in Ukraine, compares the approach to the struggle to legislate against TikTok in the US. According to Moore “Congress wants to ban TikTok unless it gets new ownership. The parliament of Ukraine has drafted a bill to close individual churches affiliated with Russia unless they find ‘new ownership’ and renounce the Russian affiliation.”

But such nuance is lost on some lawmakers and media in America, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, who accuse the Ukrainian government of attacking religious freedom. It’s a twisted situation thinks Moore: while Russia literally murders and tortures Protestants, Ukraine is attacked for trying to find a balance between religious freedom and security.

When I asked Azat about Americans who think Russia a bastion of Christianity while Ukraine persecutes Christians he shook his head in bemusement: “The Russians have come here to kill and oppress—that is against God’s law, let alone human law.”

Altogether Azat spent 43 days in captivity. I asked him how his faith had helped him through the ordeal. He described one moment in particular. After a night of torture so bad he couldn’t walk any more. He lay on the floor of his cell, desperate for water. But there was none in the cell. At that moment it began to rain—a rare occurrence in the stifling summer of Berdyansk. Azat managed to rip a plastic tube from the wall and use it to funnel water from the narrow basement window. As he drank it in it felt like God had answered his prayer.

When we spoke Azat was in Zaporizhzhia, where he now works as a Baptist Children's Pastor and founded a children’s centre, Garne Misce. Zaporizhzhia is near the front lines, and is under constant bombardment from Russia, partly due to stalled military support for Ukraine. For the moment the children have warm, bright rooms for study and play.

I asked Azat what life was like for Baptists still inside the occupied territories. Some, he said, meet in secret, in peoples’ apartments. This is how the evangelical movement first developed in the Soviet Union. Others get the ‘choice’: they can keep their congregations if they collaborate and give speeches praising Putin, and supporting the invasion. “That’s what the Kremlin fears about Protestants - we follow God’s law, not theirs. But they want to have everything under their control.”

This story is supported by testimony from The Reckoning Project.

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, April 20, 2024 5:53 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.
Everything about this sentence is wrong.



The House of Representatives on Saturday passed a series of foreign aid bills that include $60.8 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26.38 billion in aid to Israel, $8 billion in aid to the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, and a foreign aid bill that includes a TikTok ban provision.

House approves $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-approves-95-billion-in-a
id-to-ukraine-israel-and-taiwan/ar-AA1nlCHL


Yup, and half the republicans voted against it.

tick tock...

T

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 6:14 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.




Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.


SIGNY: Everything about this sentence is wrong.

THUGR:
Quote:
The House of Representatives on Saturday passed a series of foreign aid bills that include $60.8 billion in aid to Ukraine, $26.38 billion in aid to Israel, $8 billion in aid to the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan, and a foreign aid bill that includes a TikTok ban provision.

House approves $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-approves-95-billion-in-a
id-to-ukraine-israel-and-taiwan/ar-AA1nlCHL


Yup, and half the republicans voted against it.


So.

Neither Trump nor his allies "blocked" aid to Ukraine.
In FACT, the part that Trump objected to ...$10 billion financial aid to the Zelenskiy regime ... he said would let pass if written as a loan.

Funny how so much of what you post doesn't even have a passing resemblance to reality!
Rumor, lies, libel, allegation, and spin.
No facts?
It would be nice to see some.



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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 6:44 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So.

Neither Trump nor his allies "blocked" aid to Ukraine.
In FACT, the part that Trump objected to ...$10 billion financial aid to the Zelenskiy regime ... he said would let pass if written as a loan.

Funny how so much of what you post doesn't even have a passing resemblance to reality!
Rumor, lies, libel, allegation, and spin.
No facts?
It would be nice to see some.
Signym, you are full bullshit. Trumptards always turn into lying sacks of shit when it serves them. As Trump does, so do his Trumptards. But doing as Trump does has not served them well in Congress.

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine.

At the beginning of 2024, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

The anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine rebellion started in the Senate. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats to approve aid to Ukraine in February. Dissident House Republicans then threatened to force a vote if the Republican speaker would not schedule one. Speaker Mike Johnson declared himself in favor of Ukraine aid. This weekend, House Republicans split between pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine factions. On Friday, the House voted 316–94 in favor of the rule on the aid vote. On Saturday, the aid to Ukraine measure passed the House by 311–112. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will adopt the House-approved aid measures unamended and speed them to President Biden for signature.

As defeat loomed for his anti-Ukraine allies, Trump shifted his message a little. On April 18, he posted on Truth Social claiming that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!” But that was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.

. . .

The Ukraine vote gives the most significant clue. Here is the issue on which traditional Republican belief in U.S. global leadership clashes most directly with Trump’s peculiar and sinister enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And on this issue, the traditional Republicans have now won and Trump’s peculiar enthusiasm got beat.

To make an avalanche takes more than one tumbling rock. Still, the pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump vote in the House is a very, very big rock. On something that mattered intensely to him—that had become a badge of pro-Trump identity—Trump’s own party worked with Democrats in the House and Senate to hand him a stinging defeat. This example could become contagious.

Republicans lost the House in 2018 because they were beaten in districts once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Eric Cantor. They lost the presidency in 2020 in great part because their vote eroded among white suburban men. They lost the Senate in 2021 because Trump fatigue cost them two seats in Georgia. They lost Senate seats and governorships in 2022 because they put forward Trump-branded candidates such as Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

Republicans alienated too many of their own—and paid the political price. They alienated their own because of Trump’s hostility to Ukraine, and that price was paid in blood and suffering by Ukraine’s soldiers and civilians.

The issues that were supposed to keep the Trump show on the road have proved squibs and fizzles. Inflation is down. Crime is down. Republicans threw away the immigration issue by blowing up—at Trump’s order—the best immigration deal they’ve ever seen. The attempt to confect Biden scandals to equal Trump’s scandals turned into an embarrassing fiasco that relied on information from a suspected Russian spy indicted for lying to the FBI. And Trump himself now faces trial in New York State on one set of felony charges. He faces a federal trial, probably starting this fall, on the even graver criminal indictments arising from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Each of these warnings and troubles has deflated Trump. He has deflated to the point where he could no longer thwart Ukraine aid in Congress. Ukraine won, Trump lost. That may be a repeating pattern in the year ahead.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/trump-republican-vot
e-ukraine-aid/678148/

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, April 20, 2024 6:53 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, you lie about everything, even yourself.
Not gonna bother to read yet another wall of crap that even YOU don't bother to read.
(See your quote, below)

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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 7:11 PM

THG


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So.

Neither Trump nor his allies "blocked" aid to Ukraine.
In FACT, the part that Trump objected to ...$10 billion financial aid to the Zelenskiy regime ... he said would let pass if written as a loan.

Funny how so much of what you post doesn't even have a passing resemblance to reality!
Rumor, lies, libel, allegation, and spin.
No facts?
It would be nice to see some.
Signym, you are full bullshit. Trumptards always turn into lying sacks of shit when it serves them. As Trump does, so do his Trumptards. But doing as Trump does has not served them well in Congress.

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine.

At the beginning of 2024, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

The anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine rebellion started in the Senate. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats to approve aid to Ukraine in February. Dissident House Republicans then threatened to force a vote if the Republican speaker would not schedule one. Speaker Mike Johnson declared himself in favor of Ukraine aid. This weekend, House Republicans split between pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine factions. On Friday, the House voted 316–94 in favor of the rule on the aid vote. On Saturday, the aid to Ukraine measure passed the House by 311–112. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will adopt the House-approved aid measures unamended and speed them to President Biden for signature.

As defeat loomed for his anti-Ukraine allies, Trump shifted his message a little. On April 18, he posted on Truth Social claiming that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!” But that was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.

. . .

The Ukraine vote gives the most significant clue. Here is the issue on which traditional Republican belief in U.S. global leadership clashes most directly with Trump’s peculiar and sinister enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And on this issue, the traditional Republicans have now won and Trump’s peculiar enthusiasm got beat.

To make an avalanche takes more than one tumbling rock. Still, the pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump vote in the House is a very, very big rock. On something that mattered intensely to him—that had become a badge of pro-Trump identity—Trump’s own party worked with Democrats in the House and Senate to hand him a stinging defeat. This example could become contagious.

Republicans lost the House in 2018 because they were beaten in districts once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Eric Cantor. They lost the presidency in 2020 in great part because their vote eroded among white suburban men. They lost the Senate in 2021 because Trump fatigue cost them two seats in Georgia. They lost Senate seats and governorships in 2022 because they put forward Trump-branded candidates such as Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

Republicans alienated too many of their own—and paid the political price. They alienated their own because of Trump’s hostility to Ukraine, and that price was paid in blood and suffering by Ukraine’s soldiers and civilians.

The issues that were supposed to keep the Trump show on the road have proved squibs and fizzles. Inflation is down. Crime is down. Republicans threw away the immigration issue by blowing up—at Trump’s order—the best immigration deal they’ve ever seen. The attempt to confect Biden scandals to equal Trump’s scandals turned into an embarrassing fiasco that relied on information from a suspected Russian spy indicted for lying to the FBI. And Trump himself now faces trial in New York State on one set of felony charges. He faces a federal trial, probably starting this fall, on the even graver criminal indictments arising from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Each of these warnings and troubles has deflated Trump. He has deflated to the point where he could no longer thwart Ukraine aid in Congress. Ukraine won, Trump lost. That may be a repeating pattern in the year ahead.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/trump-republican-vot
e-ukraine-aid/678148/




Well said TWO. I'd only add that signym shows again she is not very bright. In what way does she prove this. She obviously can't figure out Biden is the king of forging loans. The mentioned 10 billion, is just another loan that will never come due.

Too funny

T

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 7:49 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you lie about everything, even yourself.
Not gonna bother to read yet another wall of crap that even YOU don't bother to read.
After the fact face-saving, Trump jumped to the winning side after his side was about to lose Ukraine. Too many words to read, Trumptard?

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, April 20, 2024 8:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


AS IF you read your own bullshit!
:

You lie about everything.


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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 9:40 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
AS IF you read your own bullshit!
:

You lie about everything.
In a powerful effort to sum up the stakes before the vote, the former Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made a stridently graphic appeal: “I hope our colleagues will choose democracy and decency rather than autocracy and evil because I fear if you choose the Putin route, you will have blood on your hands, blood of the children, blood of their mothers raped in front of their parents, raped in front of their children,” she said.

Too long for you to read, Signym? The Soviet Union collapsed because of the Afghanistan War. It will be justice if Russia collapses because of the Ukraine War.

https://www.google.com/search?q=did+the+afghanistan+war+cause+the+sovi
et+union+to+collapse

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, April 21, 2024 12:07 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


More bullshit from The Swamp, via Swamp Thing SECOND.


Dood. You really expect anyone to believe Pelosi? Or you?
It's not the length.
It's the crap.

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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Sunday, April 21, 2024 8:49 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
More bullshit from The Swamp, via Swamp Thing SECOND.


Dood. You really expect anyone to believe Pelosi? Or you?
It's not the length.
It's the crap.
It is not surprising you act this way, Signym. You have been in trouble for a very long time.

Signym, it is not a surprise when someone who rated you as a slow-reading, slow-thinking, lazy employee would be called a “sociopathic supervisor” by you. I’m pretty sure that you were as worthless as a worker as you are at fff.net. The Trumptards I know are the crappiest employees, squandering their energy in diversions, coming back from lunch mentally exhausted and drunk, ready for a nap at their desk:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11912
52#1191252
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
But we also had a rummy game, and THAT table was fierce. Gave me a headache.
I was just looking for some good-natured fun and relaxation at lunch. I had enough headaches at work with a sociopathic supervisor. A little levity always helps the day along.

Signym, it is not a surprise that you are diseased, either:
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=11912
53#1191253
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Did some research on my latest dx. I was just happy to finally get one, but most of my doctors are serious about it. Turns out the treatment, while not as bad as the disease, is pretty consequential and can lead to "irreversible" immune suppression and lifelong risk of serious infections requiring hospitalization.

Reactivation of dormant diseases like TB and the various hepatitises is a real possibility, so I've been tested for all that.

No more live-virus immunizations. They want me all updated on that. Been told I'm gonna have to mask up and wash my hands, a lot.

Then there is the problem of my gardening. The soil is full of mold spores and gram negative (the kind that's hard to treat) bacteria. I may have to give that up. Since I'm on an antibiotic that makes people sensitive to sunlight, I practiced gardening in long sleeves, with a sun hat, N95, and glasses. It wasn't too bad but I think my doctors and family may put theur collective feet down.

Gardening is both my responsibility, and my passion. It's one thing I really enjoy.


The only one happy is my ENT surgeon. Just had another debridement on Wednesday. She was all smiles, very happy with the results and doesn't anticipate any more outpatient surgical procedures, just in-office. I think what's making her happy is that she and ny rheumatologist are communicating, and she's not in this all by herself.

Well, on with my day. Gotta get thru all the non-fun stuff (dishes, laundry pre-scrubbing, cooking prep, paperwork) before I get to the fun stuff (gardening). On a bit of a steroid energy high ... SIX, this must be what you feel like a lot of the time ... so gotta burn off all this good energy doing something useful. When the steroids come down, I know I'll droop.

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, April 21, 2024 8:51 AM

SECOND

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


Political Warfare and Congress
My Testimony from 17 April

By Timothy Snyder | Apr 19, 2024

https://snyder.substack.com/p/political-warfare-and-congress

The essence of “political warfare,” in the sense defined by the Chinese communist party, is that Beijing uses media, psychology, and law to induce adversaries to do things counter to their own interests.

Political warfare works through you or it does not work. So if you are not willing to think about yourself, you are not thinking about political warfare.

I had the honor of testifying to Congress on the question of Chinese political warfare this past Wednesday, April 17th. This testimony was before the Oversight Committee, which has devoted months of time, money, and attention to an impeachment inquiry which is based on a mendacious claim by a man in contact with Russian intelligence services.

That congressional impeachment inquiry, based on a Russian fabrication, then became the subject of Chinese propaganda tropes, designed to spread the lie that President Biden took a bribe. This false notion, generated by Moscow, can only be spread by Beijing because there are Americans in the middle, American elected officials, who do their part.

A hearing on political warfare in Congress, and especially before this particular committee, requires self-reflection.

The hearing had some moments of interest, many of which are circulating as clips. Feel free to post your favorites in the comments.

The below text is my formal written testimony, which you can find in with all the notes and references on the congressional website. https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Snyder-Testimon
y.pdf

Video of my opening remarks is here. https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1781006324697895358

The entire session can be viewed here. https://www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=VoQZjUCT6bU&t=2030s

Download all Timothy Snyder’s books for free from https://libgen.is//search.php?&req=Timothy+Snyder

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=timothy+snyder

•••

Testimony to Oversight Committee, “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare, Part I”

Professor Timothy Snyder, 17 April 2024

Democracy is in decline, dragged down by the autocratic lie. The autocrats offer no new visions; instead they lie about democracies and insert lies into democracies. The test of disinformation is its power to alter the course of crucial events, such as wars and elections.

Russia undertook a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the basis of a big lie about Nazis.

Even as we meet today, Russian (and Chinese) propaganda shapes House debates about Ukraine, the most important foreign policy decision of our time. In domestic politics, the most important matter in coming months the coming presidential election.

To begin with the war. Beijing cares about Ukraine because it is the decisive conflict of our time. It can spread lies about Ukraine thanks to prior Russian labor. Beijing wrongly blames the war on Washington. Chinese information actions seek to attract American actors around to Russian propaganda tropes meant to justify Russian aggression and bring about American inaction.

Though Americans sometimes forget this, Ukrainian resistance is seen around the world as an obvious American cause and an easy American victory. So long as Ukraine fights, it is fulfilling the entire NATO mission by itself, defending a European order based in integration rather than empire, and affirming international order in general. It is also holding back nuclear proliferation.

Given these obvious strategic gains, American failure in Ukraine will lead other powers to conclude that a feckless and divided United States will also fail to meet future challenges. The fundamental goal of Russian (and thus Chinese) propaganda is to prevent American action, thereby making America seem impotent and democracy pointless -- also in the eyes of Americans themselves.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is intimately connected to a possible Chinese war of aggression against Taiwan. As Taiwanese leaders continually and urgently remind us, Ukrainian resistance deters Chinese aggression. Ukraine deters China in a way that the United States cannot, without taking any action that Beijing could interpret as provocative. A Russian victory in Ukraine, therefore, would clear the way for Chinese aggression in the Pacific. It would strengthen China's ally, force Europe into a subordinate relationship to Beijing, and discredit democracy. It would also bring into Russian hands Ukrainian military technologies that would be significant in a Chinese war of aggression.

Russia's one path to victory in Ukraine leads through minds and mouths in Washington, DC. Russian and Chinese propaganda therefore celebrates the inability of Congress to pass aid for Ukraine, and praises those who hinder the passage of such a bill. But the specific propaganda memes that China spreads (and some American leaders repeat) about the war are of Russian origin. Russia is the leader in this field; China is imitating Russian techniques and Russian tropes.

A central example is the Russo-Chinese invocation of "Nazism." Russian began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the grotesque claim that its aim was the "denazification" of Ukraine. (Ukraine is a democracy with freedom of expression, assembly and religion, which elected a Jewish president with more than 70% of the vote. Russia is a one-party state with a leader cult that is fighting a criminal war and suppressing all domestic opposition.) This "Nazi" meme was immediately boosted by the Chinese government. Over the weekend before this hearing, a Member of Congress tweeted this Russian disinformation trope.

The Russian war of destruction in Ukraine is the pre-eminent test of democracy; U.S. elections come next. Russia is also the leader here. China has has no Paul Manafort. It lacks American human assets with experience in directing foreign influence campaigns and close to American presidential campaigns. Nothing China has done (as yet) rivals the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

On social media, CCP propaganda demeans the Biden administration. But China's social media campaign on behalf of Trump in 2024 looks like a copy (a poor one) of Russia's on behalf of Trump in 2016. CCP propaganda invokes the false charges raised in impeachment hearings, but the lies that China magnifies arose from a person in contact with Russian intelligence. What China can do is try an influence campaign based on a Russian initiative -- and American impeachment hearings. Insofar as this works at all, it is a cycle: Russia-America-China -- with the Chinese hope that the propaganda it generates from Russian initiatives and American actions will cycle back to distress Americans and hurt the Biden administration.

The CCP's internet propaganda is posted on X (Twitter). Likewise, Russia's denazification meme did not need a Russian or a Chinese channel to reach Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Nor did she need a Russian or Chinese platform to spread the disinformation trope further. She and her American followers used X (Twitter).

Marjory Taylor Greene is not the only member of Congress to have presented the Russian "denazification" trope in public debate. In the case of Matt Gaetz, we know that the transmission belt was Chinese, because he cited a Chinese state propaganda source in congressional debate.

It is not clear in what sense X is an American platform; in any event, its owner, Elon Musk, has removed prior safeguards identifying state propaganda outlets, driving much higher viewing of Russian and Chinese propaganda. Under Musk, X (Twitter) has been particularly lax in policing known Chinese propaganda accounts, ignoring their flagging by government and other platforms. Musk has also personally spread specific Russian propaganda tropes.

Russian lies are meant not only to disinform, to make action more difficult, but also to demotivate, to make action seem senseless. Russian memes work not by presenting Russia as a positive alternative, but by demoralizing others. No one wants to be close to "Nazis," and the simple introduction of the lie is confusing and saddening.

The same holds with the Russian meme to the effect that Ukraine is corrupt. A completely bogus Russian source introduced the entirely fake idea that the Ukrainian president had bought yachts. Although this was entirely untrue, Representative Greene then spread the fiction. Senator J.D. Vance also picked up the "yacht" example and used it as his justification for opposing aid to Ukraine.

The larger sense of that lie is that everyone everywhere is corrupt, even the people who seem most admirable; and so we might as well give up on our heroes, on any struggle for democracy, or any struggle at all. Ukraine's president, Volodymr Zelens'kyi, chose to risk his life by remaining in Kyiv and defending his country against a fearsome attack from Russia which almost all outsiders believed would succeed within days. His daring gamble saved not only his own democracy, but opened a window of faith that democracies can defend themselves. It confirmed the basis lesson of liberty that individual choices have consequences. The lie directed at Zelens'kyi was meant not only to discredit him personally and undermine support for Ukraine, but also to persuade Americans that no one is righteous and nothing is worth defending.

Insofar as legislators such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and J.D. Vance are vectors of propaganda, they are themselves playing a part of the Russian (or Russo-Chinese) operation. As such they are not merely spreading fictions; they are also modelling a "Russian" style of government, a politics of impotence, in which big lies are normal, corruption is thought to be routine, and nothing gets done. Russian lies about Ukraine are meant to prevent action to help Ukraine; but in a larger sense they are also meant to spread the view that those in power are incapable of any positive action at all.

When legislators embrace Russian lies, they demobilize the rest of us, conveying the underlying notion that all that matters is a clever fiction and a platform from which to spread it. A first step legislators can take is to cease to spread known propaganda tropes themselves. Russian (or Russo-Chinese) memes work in America when Americans choose to repeat them.

Republican leaders quite properly raise concerns about Russian memes in the Republican mouths. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have warned in recent weeks that Russian disinformation has shaped the views of Republican voters and the rhetoric of Republican elected officials. Representative Michael R. Turner said that "We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor."

For this and other reasons, the problem cannot be dismissed as "foreign." Elite American actors such as Congressional representatives and billionaires know what they are doing when they spread Russian memes. Most Americans, however, confront them unknowingly.

From the perspective of Russia (and China), all social media platforms present an attack surface. Non-Chinese platforms are the main vectors of Russian and disinformation. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, the largest Facebook group for American Christians was run by people who were neither. While ByteDance/TikTok is important, it is less so than Twitter and Facebook. Social media as such favors hostile interventions over locally reported news. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, the main Facebook site for American Christians was run by people who are neither.

ByteDance/TikTok is an attractive target for legislation, but a ban on TikTok unaccompanied by other policy will have limited effects. It will not prevent China from carrying out influence operations in the United States, nor would it stop China from gathering information on American citizens. To hinder Russian (and Chinese, and other) operations, all platforms would have to be regulated.

In the contest between authoritarian and democratic regimes, it will ultimately be not just self-defense but creative initiative that defines and saves the democracies. The era of hostile disinformation is also the era of the decline of reporting, and the two phenomena are linked. An American who has access to reporting will be less vulnerable to disinformation, and better able to make navigate the demands of democratic citizenship. A victory over disinformation will be won in a climate in which Americans have access to reliable information and reasons to trust 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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Sunday, April 21, 2024 9:44 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Political Warfare and Congress
My Testimony from 17 April

By Timothy Snyder | Apr 19, 2024

https://snyder.substack.com/p/political-warfare-and-congress

The essence of “political warfare,” in the sense defined by the Chinese communist party, is that Beijing uses media, psychology, and law to induce adversaries to do things counter to their own interests.
wow!

That happens here in the USA all the time!

We're inveigled, stupefied, lied to, convinced... to support self- destructive things ALL THE TIME!

Whooda thunk was a Chi-Com invention??





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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Sunday, April 21, 2024 10:01 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Political Warfare and Congress
My Testimony from 17 April

By Timothy Snyder | Apr 19, 2024

https://snyder.substack.com/p/political-warfare-and-congress

The essence of “political warfare,” in the sense defined by the Chinese communist party, is that Beijing uses media, psychology, and law to induce adversaries to do things counter to their own interests.
wow!

That happens here in the USA all the time!

We're inveigled, stupefied, lied to, convinced... to support self- destructive things ALL THE TIME!

Whooda thunk was a Chi-Com invention??

Specifically, who is doing the lying? It is an easily identified American sub-culture. Since I can remember back to Richard Nixon and General William Westmoreland, who ran for governor of South Carolina as a Republican after he retired from lying about how close to victory he was in the Vietnam War, it is Republicans doing the lying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Westmoreland#Later_years

Nixon and Westmoreland are long dead, but I am still hearing the constant yammering of liars. They are Republicans, just ordinary people who cannot stop lying about everything all the time and they are big supporters of Trump.

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, April 22, 2024 7:27 AM

SECOND

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


The Five Futures of Russia

By Stephen Kotkin | April 18, 2024

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/five-futures-russia-
stephen-kotkin
(This one is on us. You are currently enjoying a Foreign Affairs article.)

STEPHEN KOTKIN is Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941–1990s, the last in his three-volume biography. https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Stephen+Kotkin

Vladimir Putin happened to turn 71 last October 7, the day Hamas assaulted Israel. The Russian president took the rampage as a birthday present; it shifted the context around his aggression in Ukraine. Perhaps to show his appreciation, he had his Foreign Ministry invite high-ranking Hamas representatives to Moscow in late October, highlighting an alignment of interests. Several weeks later, Putin announced his intention to stand for a fifth term in a choiceless election in March 2024 and later held his annual press conference, offering a phalanx of pliant journalists the privilege of hearing him smugly crow about Western fatigue over the war in Ukraine. “Almost along the entire frontline, our armed forces, let’s put it modestly, are improving their position,” Putin boasted in the live broadcast.

On February 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the sudden death of the opposition activist Alexei Navalny, aged 47, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, from which he had continued to reach his millions of followers with instructions on how to protest Putin’s plebiscite. A month later, the most one could say was that the Kremlin had at least waited until after the voting was staged to announce Putin’s victory.

Putin styles himself as a new tsar. But a real tsar would not have to worry about a looming succession crisis and what it might do to his grip on power in the present. Putin does; that is partly why he must simulate elections. He is now set in his office until 2030, when he will be in his 78th year. Male life expectancy in Russia does not even reach 67 years; those who live to 60 can expect to survive to around 80. Russia’s confirmed centenarians are few. Putin might one day join their ranks. But even Stalin died.

Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, turned out to be that rare would-be tsar who named a successor and smoothed his path to power. In 1999, Yeltsin, facing chronic health challenges and fearing that he and his “family” of corrupt cronies might face prison after he stepped down, chose Putin to preserve his liberty and legacy. “Take care of Russia,” Yeltsin offered as a parting instruction. In 2007, aged 76, he died a free man. But the protector has refrained from emulating his patron’s example. In 2008, Putin briefly stepped aside from the presidency, in recognition of the same two-consecutive-term limit that Yeltsin faced. Putin appointed a political nonentity in his place, shifted himself to the position of prime minister, and came right back for a third presidential term in 2012 and then a fourth. Finally, he induced his counterfeit legislature to alter the constitution to effectively remove any term limits. Stalin, too, had stubbornly clung to power, even as his infirmities worsened. He refused to countenance the emergence of a successor; eventually, he suffered a massive, final stroke and fell into a puddle of his own urine.

Putin is not Stalin. The Georgian despot built a superpower while dispatching tens of millions to their deaths in famines, forced labor camps, execution cellars, and a mismanaged defensive war. Putin, by contrast, has jerry-rigged a rogue power while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths in a war of choice. The juxtaposition is nevertheless instructive. Stalin’s system proved unable to survive without him, despite having an institutionalized ruling party. And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy. This fusion of fragility and path dependence derives from many factors that are not easily rewired: geography, a national-imperial identity, an ingrained strategic culture. (The nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin remarked of his country that everything changes dramatically every five to ten years but nothing changes in 200 years.) Still, whenever and however Putin might go, his personalistic autocracy and, more broadly, Russia already face questions about the future.

Putin’s regime styles itself an icebreaker, smashing to bits the U.S.-led international order on behalf of humanity. Washington and its allies and partners have allowed themselves to be surprised by him time and again—in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and central Africa. This has provoked fears about the next nasty surprise. But what about the long term? How, in the light of inescapable leadership mortality and larger structural factors, might Russia evolve, or not, over the next decade and possibly beyond?

Readers seeking odds on Russia’s trajectory should consult the betting markets. What Western officials and other decision-makers need to do, instead, is to consider a set of scenarios: to extrapolate from current trends in a way that can facilitate contingency planning. Scenarios are about attempting to not be surprised. Needless to note, the world constantly surprises, and something impossible to foresee could occur: the proverbial black swan. Humility is in order. Still, five possible futures for Russia are currently imaginable, and the United States and its allies should bear them in mind.

Over the course of multiple presidential administrations, Washington has learned the hard way that it lacks the levers to transform places such as Russia and, for that matter, China: countries that originated as empires on the Eurasian landmass and celebrate themselves as ancient civilizations that long predate the founding of the United States, let alone the formation of the West. They are not characters out of the playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, ripe for conversion from street urchins to refined ladies: that is, from authoritarian, imperialist regimes to responsible stakeholders in the U.S.-dominated international system. Efforts to remake their “personalities” invariably result in mutual recriminations and disillusionment. Leaders such as Putin and China’s Xi Jinping did not capriciously reverse a hopeful process; in no small measure, they resulted from it. So Washington and its partners must not exaggerate their ability to shape Russia’s trajectory. Instead, they should prepare for whatever unfolds.

RUSSIA AS FRANCE

France is a country with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions—and also a fraught revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries abolished the monarchy only to see it return in the guise of both a king and an emperor and then disappear again, as republics came and went. France built and lost a vast empire of colonial possessions. For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbors.

Today, these traditions live on in many ways. As the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville shrewdly observed in his 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution, the revolutionaries’ efforts to break definitively with the past ended up unwittingly reinforcing statist structures. Despite the consolidation of a republican system, France’s monarchical inheritance endures symbolically in palaces in Versailles and elsewhere, in ubiquitous statues of Bourbon dynasty rulers, and in an inordinately centralized form of rule with immense power and wealth concentrated in Paris. Even shorn of its formal empire, France remains a fiercely proud country, one that many of its citizens and admirers view as a civilization with a lingering sense of a special mission in the world and in Europe, as well as a language spoken far beyond its borders (60 percent of daily French speakers are citizens of elsewhere). But crucially, today’s France enjoys the rule of law and no longer threatens its neighbors.

Russia, too, possesses a statist and monarchical tradition that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system and a fraught revolutionary tradition that has also ceased to be an ongoing venture yet lives on in institutions and memories as a source of inspiration and warning. To be sure, the autocratic Romanovs were even less constrained than the absolutist Bourbons. Russia’s revolution was considerably more brutal and destructive than even the French one. Russia’s lost empire was contiguous, not overseas, and lasted far longer—indeed, for most of the existence of the modern Russian state. In Russia, Moscow’s domination of the rest of the country exceeds even that of Paris in France. Russia’s geographical expanse dwarfs France’s, enmeshing the country in Europe but also the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. Very few countries have much in common with Russia. But France has more than perhaps any other.

Contemporary France is a great country, although not without its detractors. Some decry what they deem its excessive statism, the high taxes necessary to underwrite uneven services, as well as a broad socialistic ethos. Others find fault with what they perceive as France’s great-power pretensions and cultural chauvinism. Still others lament France’s difficulty in assimilating immigrants. But it is possible to be disappointed in these or other aspects of the country and still recognize that it provides the closest thing to a realistic model for a prosperous, peaceful Russia. If Russia were to become like France—a democracy with a rule-of-law system that luxuriated in its absolutist and revolutionary past but no longer threatened its neighbors—that would constitute a high-order achievement.

France tramped a tortuous path to become what it is today. Recall Robespierre’s revolutionary terror, Napoleon’s catastrophic expansionism, Napoleon III’s self-coup (from elected president to emperor), the seizure of power by the Paris Commune, the country’s rapid defeat in World War II, the Vichy collaborationist regime that followed, the colonial Algerian war, and the extraconstitutional acts of President Charles de Gaulle after he came out of retirement in 1958. One might be seduced by the notion that Russia needs its own de Gaulle to help consolidate a liberal order from above, even though no such deus ex machina looms on Russia’s immediate horizon. But only hagiographers believe that one man created today’s France. Notwithstanding the country’s moments of instability, over generations, France developed the impartial, professional institutions—a judiciary, a civil service, a free and open public sphere—of a democratic, republican nation. The problem was not mainly that Yeltsin was no de Gaulle. The problem was that Russia was much further from a stable, Western-style constitutional order in 1991 than France had been three decades earlier.

RUSSIA RETRENCHED

Some Russians might welcome a transformation into a country that resembles France, but others would find that outcome anathema. What the world now sees as Putinism first surfaced in the Russian-language periodicals and volunteer societies of the 1970s: an authoritarian, resentful, mystical nationalism grounded in anti-Westernism, espousing nominally traditional values, and borrowing incoherently from Slavophilism, Eurasianism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. One could imagine an authoritarian nationalist leader who embraces those views and who, like Putin, is unshakable in the belief that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction but who is also profoundly troubled by Russia’s cloudy long-term future—and willing to blame Putin for it. That is, someone who appeals to Putin’s base but makes the case that the war against Ukraine is damaging Russia.

Demography is a special sore point for Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalists, not to mention the military brass and many ordinary people. Since 1992, despite considerable immigration, Russia’s population has shrunk. Its working-age population peaked in 2006 at around 90 million and stands at less than 80 million today, a calamitous trend. Spending on the war in Ukraine has boosted Russia’s defense industrial base, but the limits of the country’s diminished labor force are becoming ever more evident even in that high-priority sector, which has around five million fewer qualified workers than it needs. The proportion of workers who are in the most productive age group—20 to 39—will further decline over the next decade. Nothing, not even kidnapping children from Ukraine, for which the International Criminal Court indicted Putin, will reverse the loss of Russians, which the war’s exorbitant casualties are compounding.

Productivity gains that might offset these demographic trends are nowhere in sight. Russia ranks nearly last in the world in the scale and speed of automation in production: its robotization is just a microscopic fraction of the world average. Even before the widened war in Ukraine began to eat into the state budget, Russia placed surprisingly low in global rankings of education spending. In the past two years, Putin has willingly forfeited much of the country’s economic future when he induced or forced thousands of young tech workers to flee conscription and repression. True, these are people that rabid nationalists claim not to miss, but deep down many know that a great power needs them.

Given its sprawling Eurasian geography and long-standing ties to many parts of the world, as well as the alchemy of opportunism, Russia is still able to import many indispensable components for its economy despite Western sanctions. Notwithstanding this resourcefulness and despite the public’s habituation to the war, Russian elites know the damning statistics. They are aware that as a commodity-exporting country, Russia’s long-term development depends on technology transfers from advanced countries; Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made it harder to use the West as a source, and his symbolic embrace of Hamas’s nihilism gratuitously strained Russia’s relations with Israel, a major supplier of high-tech goods and services. At a more basic level, Russia’s elites are physically cut off from the developed world: hideaways in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), however agreeable, cannot replace European villas and boarding schools.

Although a Russian authoritarian regime has once again proved resilient in war, Putin’s grave lack of domestic investment and diversification, his furtherance of demographic distress, and his role in the country’s descent into technological backwardness could yet compel hardcore nationalists—among them many elites—to admit that Russia is on a self-defeating trajectory. Many have privately concluded that Putin conflates the survival of his aging personal regime with the storied country’s survival as a great power. Historically, at least, such realizations have precipitated a change of course, a turn from foreign overextension to domestic revitalization. Last summer, when the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death squad marched on Moscow, it did not elicit bandwagoning by military officers, which is one reason Prigozhin called it off. But neither did it galvanize the regime’s supporters to defend Putin in real time. The episode furnished an unwitting referendum on the regime, revealing a certain hollowness inside the repressive strength.

Retrenchment could result from hastening Putin’s exit, or it could follow his natural demise. It could also be forced on him without his removal by meaningful political threats to his rule. However it happened, it would involve mostly tactical moves spurred by a recognition that Russia lacks the means to oppose the West without end, pays an exorbitant price for trying, and risks permanently losing vital European ties in exchange for a humiliating dependence on China.

RUSSIA AS VASSAL

Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West. The Chinese-Russian bond has surprised many analysts aware of Beijing and Moscow’s prickly relations in the past, including the infamous Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which culminated in a short border war. Although that conflict was formally settled with a border demarcation, Russia remains the sole country that controls territory seized from the Qing empire in what the Chinese vilify as unfair treaties. That has not stopped China and Russia from bolstering ties, including by conducting large-scale joint military exercises, which have grown in frequency and geographic scope in the past 20 years. The two countries are fully aligned on Russia’s grievances regarding NATO expansion and Western meddling in Ukraine, where Chinese support for Russia continues to be crucial.

Chinese-Russian rapprochement predates the rise of Putin and Xi. In the 1980s, it was Deng Xiaoping who performed a turn away from Moscow more momentous than the one Mao Zedong had carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. Deng gained access to the American domestic market for Chinese producers, the same trick that enabled the transformation of Japan and then South Korea and Taiwan. Deng’s divorce from the communist Soviet Union for a de facto economic marriage with American and European capitalists ushered in an era of astonishing prosperity that birthed a Chinese middle class. But China and Russia remained intertwined. Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang Zemin, who had trained at a Soviet factory, brought Russia back as a mistress without breaking the U.S.-Chinese marital bond. Jiang placed orders that helped resuscitate Russia’s forlorn military-industrial complex and modernize China’s own weapons production and military. In 1996, Jiang and Yeltsin proclaimed a “strategic partnership.” Despite modest bilateral trade, China’s domestic economic boom indirectly helped bring civilian Soviet-era production back from the dead by lifting global demand and therefore prices for the industrial inputs the Soviet Union had produced in low quality but high quantity, from steel to fertilizer. Just as the United States had helped forge a Chinese middle class, so, too, did China play a part in conjuring into being Russia’s middle class and Putin’s economic boom.

Nevertheless, societal and cultural relations between the two peoples remain shallow. Russians are culturally European, and few speak Chinese (compared with English). Although some elderly Chinese speak Russian, a legacy of Moscow’s erstwhile centrality in the communist world, that number is not large, and the days when Chinese students attended Russian universities in great numbers are a distant memory. Russians are apprehensive of China’s power, and many Chinese who hold weakness in contempt ridicule Russia online. Stalwarts of the Chinese Communist Party remain unforgiving of Moscow’s destruction of communism across Eurasia and eastern Europe.

And yet the profundity of the personal relationship between Putin and Xi has compensated for these otherwise brittle foundations. The two men have fallen into a bromance, meeting an astonishing 42 times while in power, publicly lauding each other as “my best friend” (Xi on Putin) and “dear friend” (Putin on Xi). The two kindred souls’ authoritarian solidarity is undergirded by an abiding anti-Westernism, especially anti-Americanism. As China, the former junior partner, became the senior partner, the two autocratic neighbors upgraded relations, announcing a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in 2013. Officially, trade between Russia and China surpassed $230 billion in 2023; adjusting for inflation, it had hovered around $16 billion three decades earlier and stood at just $78 billion as recently as the mid-2010s. The 2023 figure, moreover, does not include tens of billions more in bilateral trade that is disguised using third parties, such as Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and the UAE.

China still buys military aircraft engines from Russia. But otherwise, the dependence goes in the other direction. Western sanctions accelerated the loss of Russia’s domestic vehicle industry to China. Moscow is now holding a substantial pile of renminbi reserves, which can be used only for Chinese goods. But despite innumerable meetings over decades, there is still no final agreement on a major new natural gas pipeline that would originate in Siberia and make its way to China through Mongolia. The Chinese leadership has keenly avoided becoming dependent on Russia for energy or anything else. On the contrary, China is already the global leader in solar and wind power and is working to displace Russia as the top global player in nuclear energy.

Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.

Russian elites, even as they vehemently denounce an imaginary U.S. determination to subjugate or dismember their country, have by and large not raised their voices against Putin’s subordination of Russia to China. And lately, Russian commentators have taken to retelling the tale of Alexander Nevsky, who in the thirteenth century reigned as prince of Novgorod, one of the states folded into Muscovy, the precursor to imperial Russia. When faced with a two-front challenge, Nevsky chose to fight the crusaders of the west, defeating the Teutons in the Battle of the Ice, and to accommodate the invading Mongols of the east, traveling across central Asia to the capital of the Mongol Golden Horde to be recognized as grand prince of Russia. In this telling, the Western Christians were determined to undermine Russia’s Eastern Christian identity, whereas the Mongols merely wanted Russia to pay tribute. The implication is that today’s accommodation of China does not require Russia to relinquish its identity, whereas a failure to confront the West would.

This is bunkum. It took Russians centuries to free themselves from what their school textbooks uniformly called the Mongol yoke, but Russia has survived relations with the West for centuries without itself ever becoming Western. Being non-Western, however, does not necessarily mean being anti-Western—unless, of course, one is struggling to protect an illiberal regime in a liberal world order. Russia existed within its post-Soviet borders for two decades before Putin decided the situation was intolerable. Now, having burned bridges with the West and blamed it for the arson, he has little recourse other than to rely on China’s good graces.

The great and growing imbalance in the relationship has induced analysts to speak of Russia as China’s vassal. But only China decides whether a country becomes its vassal, whereby Beijing dictates Russian policy and even personnel, and assumes the burden of responsibility. It has no binding treaty obligations with Russia. Putin possesses only the 70-year-old Xi’s word—and Xi, too, is mortal. Nonetheless, the two leaders continue to denounce the United States’ bid for hegemony and cooperate closely. A shared commitment to render the world order safe for their respective dictatorships and dominate their regions is driving a de facto vassalage that neither fancies.

RUSSIA AS NORTH KOREA

In deepening Russia’s dependence on China, Putin or his successor could draw paradoxical inspiration from the experience of North Korea, which in turn could give Xi or his successor pause. During Beijing’s intervention to rescue Pyongyang in the Korean War, Mao, employing a proverb, stated that if the lips (North Korea) are gone, the teeth (China) will be cold. This metaphor implies both an act of buffering and a condition of interdependence. Over the years, some Chinese commentators have doubted the value of propping up North Korea, particularly after the latter’s defiant nuclear test in 2006. Faced with UN sanctions, which China joined, North Korea’s leadership pressed forward aggressively with its programs for nuclear weapons and missiles, which can reach not just Seoul and Tokyo but also Beijing and Shanghai. Still, China’s leadership eventually reaffirmed its backing of Pyongyang, in 2018. Given North Korea’s extreme dependence on China for food, fuel, and much else, Beijing would seem to have its leader, Kim Jong Un, in a vice grip.

Yet Pyongyang loyalists sometimes warn that the teeth can bite the lips. As ruling circles in Beijing have discovered time and again, Kim does not always defer to his patrons. In 2017, he had his half brother, Kim Jong Nam, who was under China’s protection abroad, murdered. Kim can get away with defiance because he knows that no matter how much he might incense Beijing, China does not want the regime in Pyongyang to fall. If the North Korean state imploded, the peninsula would be reunited under the aegis of South Korea, a U.S. treaty ally. That would amount to China, at long last, losing the Korean War, which for more than 70 years has remained suspended by an armistice. A loss of the Korean buffer could complicate Beijing’s options and internal timelines regarding its hoped-for absorption of Taiwan, since China would face a more hostile external environment close by. Historically, instability on the Korean Peninsula has tended to spill over into China, and an influx of refugees could destabilize China’s northeast and potentially much more. So Beijing appears to be stuck in a form of reverse dependence with Pyongyang. Xi would not want to find himself in a similar position with Moscow.

Russia and North Korea could scarcely be more different. The former is more than 142 times as large as the latter in territory. North Korea possesses the kind of dynasty that Russia does not, even though each Kim family successor gets rubber-stamped as leader by a party congress. North Korea is also a formal treaty ally of China, Beijing’s only such ally in the world, the two having signed a mutual defense pact in 1961. (Some Chinese commentary has suggested China is no longer obliged to come to North Korea’s defense in the event of an attack because of Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, but the pact has not been repealed.) North Korea faces a rival Korean state in the form of South Korea, making it more akin to East Germany (which of course is long gone) than to Russia.

Despite these and other differences, Russia could become something of a gigantic North Korea: domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing. It remains unclear how much Putin divulged in Beijing, in February 2022, about his plans for Ukraine when he elicited a joint declaration of a Chinese-Russian “partnership of no limits” that soon made it appear as if Xi endorsed the Russian aggression. Not long after China released a peace plan for Ukraine, Xi traveled to Moscow for a summit, at one point appearing with Putin on an ornate Kremlin staircase that, in 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister under the Nazis, had descended with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, while cementing the Hitler-Stalin pact. And yet a Kremlin spokesperson spurned the possibility of peace, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government accepted China’s vague document as worthy of discussion. (China’s low-level peace mission to Kyiv fell flat.) Later, after Chinese diplomats bragged to all the world and especially to Europe that Xi had extracted a Russian pledge to not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Putin’s regime announced it was deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. (China went on to criticize the deployments.) It is not likely that any of these episodes were intended as explicit slights. But they made observers wonder about Russia’s evolution toward a North Korean scenario, for even if unintended, they revealed the potential for Moscow to embarrass Beijing without suffering consequences.

Since the Prigozhin mutiny, Xi has stressed what he calls “the fundamental interest of the two countries and their peoples,” implying that the special relationship would outlast the Kremlin’s current leadership. In truth, an authoritarian China could hardly afford to lose Russia if that meant ending up with a pro-American Russia on its northern border, a scenario parallel to, yet drastically more threatening than, a pro-American, reunited Korean Peninsula. At a minimum, access to Russian oil and gas, China’s partial hedge against a sea blockade, would be at risk. But even if China were gaining little materially from Russia, preventing Russia from turning to the West would remain a topmost national security priority. An American-leaning Russia would enable enhanced Western surveillance of China (the same way, in reverse, that U.S. President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao enabled Western surveillance on the Soviet Union from Xinjiang). Worse, China would suddenly need to redeploy substantial assets from elsewhere to defend its expansive northern border. And so China must be prepared to absorb Pyongyang-like behavior from Moscow, too.

RUSSIA IN CHAOS

Putin’s regime wields the threat of chaos and the unknown to ward off internal challenges and change. But while keenly sowing chaos abroad, from eastern Europe to central Africa and the Middle East, Russia itself could fall victim to it. The Putin regime has looked more or less stable even under the extreme pressures of large-scale war, and predictions of collapse under far-reaching Western sanctions have not been borne out. But Russian states overseen from St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, both disintegrated in the past 100-odd years, both times unexpectedly yet completely. There are many plausible hypothetical causes for a breakdown in the near future: a domestic mutiny that spirals out of control, one or more natural catastrophes beyond the authorities’ capacity to manage, an accident or intentional sabotage of nuclear facilities, or the accidental or nonaccidental death of a leader. Countries such as Russia with corroded institutions and legitimacy deficits can be susceptible to cascades in a sudden stress test. Chaos could well be the price for a failure to retrench.

Even amid anarchy, however, Russia would not dissolve like the Soviet Union. As the KGB’s final chief analyst lamented, the Soviet federation resembled a chocolate bar: its collective pieces (the 15 union republics) were demarcated as if with creases and thus were ready to be broken off. By contrast, the Russian Federation mostly comprises territorial units not based on ethnicity and without quasi-state status. Its constituents that are national in designation mostly do not have titular majorities and are often deeply interior, such as Tatarstan, Bashkorto­stan, Mari El, and Yakutia. Still, the federation could partly disintegrate in volatile border regions such as the North Caucasus. Kaliningrad—a small Russian province geographically disconnected from the rest of the federation and sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, more than 400 miles from Russia proper—could be vulnerable.

Were chaos to engulf Moscow, China could move to retake the expansive lands of the Amur basin that the Romanovs expropriated from the Qing. Japan might forcibly enact its claims to the Northern Territories, which the Russians call the southern Kurils, and Sakhalin Island, both of which Japan once ruled, and possibly part of the Russian Far Eastern mainland, which Japan occupied during the Russian civil war. The Finns might seek to reclaim the chunk of Karelia they once ruled. Such actions could spark a general unraveling or backfire by provoking a Russian mass mobilization.

Amid chaos, even without major territorial loss, criminal syndicates and cybercriminals could operate with yet more impunity. Nuclear and biological weapons, as well as the scientists who develop them, could scatter—the nightmare that might have accompanied the Soviet collapse but was essentially avoided, partly because many Soviet scientists believed a better Russia might emerge. If there were to be a next time, it’s impossible to predict how Russians might weigh their hopes against their anger. Chaos need not mean a doomsday scenario. But it could. Armageddon might have only been postponed, instead of averted.

CONTINENTAL CUL-DE-SAC

A Russian future missing here is the one prevalent among the Putin regime’s mouthpieces as well as its extreme-right critics: Moscow as a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs. “We need to find ourselves and understand who we are,” the Kremlin loyalist Sergei Karaganov mused last year. “We are a great Eurasian power, Northern Eurasia, a liberator of peoples, a guarantor of peace, and the military-political core of the World Majority. This is our manifest destiny.” The so-called global South—or as Karaganov rendered it, “the World Majority”—does not exist as a coherent entity, let alone one with Russia as its core. The project of Russia as a self-reliant supercontinent, bestride Europe and Asia, has already failed. The Soviet Union forcibly held not just an inner empire on the Baltic and Black Seas but also an outer empire of satellites, ultimately to no avail.

Russia’s world is effectively shrinking despite its occupation of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. Territorially, it is now farther from the heart of Europe (Kaliningrad excepted) than at any time since the conquests of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More than three centuries after appearing on the Pacific, moreover, Russia has never succeeded at becoming an Asian power. That was true even when World War II presented it with opportunities to avenge itself against Japan for the defeat Russia suffered at its hands in 1905, to reestablish the tsar’s position in Chinese Manchuria, and to extend its grasp to part of the Korean Peninsula. Russia will never be culturally at home in Asia, and its already minuscule population east of Lake Baikal has contracted since the Soviet collapse.

Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Armenians are embittered, Kazakhs are wary, and Belarusians are trapped and unhappy about it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.

There is no basis for Russia to serve as a global focal point, drawing countries toward it. Its economic model offers little inspiration. It can ill afford to serve as a major donor of aid. It is less able to sell weapons—it needs them itself and is even trying to buy back systems it has sold—and has been reduced in some cases to bartering with other pariah states. It has lost its strong position as a provider of satellites. It belongs to a pariah club with Iran and North Korea, exuberantly exchanging weapons, flouting international law, and promising much further trouble. It’s not difficult to imagine each betraying the other at the next better opportunity, however, provided they do not unravel first; the West is more resilient than the “partnerships” of the anti-West. Even many former Soviet partners that refused to condemn Russia over Ukraine, including India and South Africa, do not view Moscow as a developmental partner but as scaffolding for boosting their own sovereignty. Russia’s foreign policy delivers at best tactical gains, not strategic ones: no enhanced human capital, no assured access to leading-edge technology, no inward investment and new infrastructure, no improved governance, and no willing mutually obliged treaty allies, which are the keys to building and sustaining modern power. Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.

Russia has never sustained itself as a great power unless it had close ties to Europe. And for Putin or a successor, it would be a long way back. He undid more than two centuries of Swedish neutrality and three-quarters of a century of Finlandization (whereby Helsinki deferred to Moscow on major foreign policy considerations), prompting both countries to join NATO. Much depends on the evolving disposition of Germany: imagine the fate of Europe, and indeed the world order, if post–World War II Germany had evolved to resemble today’s Russia rather than undergone its remarkable transformation. Germany played the role of bridge to Russia, securing peaceful unification on its terms and lucrative business partnerships. But as things stand, Moscow can no longer cut deals with Berlin to revive its European ties without fundamentally altering its own political behavior, and maybe its political system. Even if Russia did change systemically, moreover, Poland and the Baltic states now stand resolutely in the way of Russian reconciliation with Europe as permanent members of the Western alliance and the EU.

Russia’s future forks: one path is a risky drift into a deeper Chinese embrace, the other an against-the-odds return to Europe. Having its cake and eating it, too—enduring as a great power with recaptured economic dynamism, avoiding sweeping concessions to the West or lasting subservience to China, dominating Eurasia, and instituting a world order safe for authoritarianism and predation—would require reversals beyond Russia’s ability to engineer.

IS THERE A BETTER WAY?

Russia’s basic grand strategy appears simple: vastly overinvest in the military, roguish capabilities, and the secret police, and try to subvert the West. No matter how dire its strategic position gets, and it is often dire, Russia can muddle through, as long as the West weakens, too. Beyond Western disintegration, some Russians quietly fantasize about a war between the United States and China. West and East would maul each other, and Russia would greatly improve its relative standing without breaking a sweat. The upshot would seem to be self-evident: Washington and its allies must stay strong together, and Beijing must be deterred without provoking a war. The conventional options, however, have severe limits. One is accommodation, which Russian rulers occasionally need but rarely pursue—and, when they do, they make it difficult for the West to sustain. The other is confrontation, which Russian regimes require but cannot afford, and the opportunity costs of which are too high for the West. The path to a better option begins with a candid acknowledgment of failures, but not in accordance with received wisdom.

Calls to recognize Russia’s “legitimate” interests are frequently heard in critiques of U.S. policy, but the great-power stability purchased by indulging coercive spheres of influence always proves ephemeral, even as the agonies of sacrificed smaller countries and the ignominy of compromising U.S. values always linger. Consider that in the aftermath of Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s maneuvering, China and Russia are closer than ever. Arms control is effectively dead. Détente died before many people even knew what the word connoted, but the damage in Indochina, Latin America, South Asia, and elsewhere remains palpable even now. Kissinger might have argued that these disappointing results were the fault of others for failing to adhere to his practice of shrewd balancing in international affairs. But any equilibrium that depends on the dexterity of a single person is not, in fact, an equilibrium.

Many advocates for and past practitioners of engagement assert that the multidecade U.S. policy of engaging China was smarter than it looked, that American policymakers were always skeptical that economic growth would lead China toward an open political system but believed it was worth trying anyway. Some also claim they hedged against the risk of failure. Such retrospective image burnishing is belied by the glaring insecurity of global supply chains (as revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic) and the pitiful state of the U.S. defense industrial base (as revealed by the war against Ukraine). In the case of Russia, Washington did hedge, expanding NATO to include almost all of eastern Europe and the Baltic states. But that had less to do with an unsentimental assessment of Russia’s possible trajectory than with the shame of Yalta, when Washington proved powerless to deliver on its promises of free and fair elections after World War II, and the post-1989 pleas of the potential new entrants for admission. Critics of NATO expansion, for their part, blame it for Russia’s revanchism, as if a repressive authoritarian regime that invades its neighbors in the name of its security is something unexpected in Russian history and wouldn’t have happened anyway had the alliance not expanded—leaving even more countries vulnerable.

Russia can muddle through, as long as the West weakens, too.

Peace comes through strength, combined with skillful diplomacy. The United States must maintain concerted pressure on Russia while also offering incentives for Moscow to retrench. That means creating leverage through next-generation military tools but also pursuing negotiations in close cooperation with U.S. allies and partners and aided by so-called Track II exchanges among influential but nongovernmental figures. Meanwhile, Washington should prepare for and assiduously promote the possibility of a Russian nationalist recalibration. In the event that Russia does not become France any time soon, the rise of a Russian nationalist who acknowledges the long-term price of extreme anti-Westernism remains the likeliest path to a Russia that finds a stable place in the international order. In the near term, a step in that direction could be ending the fighting in Ukraine on terms favorable to Kyiv: namely, an armistice without legal recognition of annexations and without treaty infringement on Ukraine’s right to join NATO, the EU, or any other international body that would have it as a member. Putin might well achieve his war aims before a Russian nationalist officer or official gets the chance to accept such terms, but the high costs to Russia would persist, as the conflict could shift from attritional warfare into a Ukrainian insurgency.

As strange as it might sound, to create the right incentives for retrenchment, Washington and its partners need a pro-Russian policy: that is, instead of pushing Russians further into Putin’s arms, confirming his assertions about an implacably anti-Russian collective West, Western policymakers and civil society organizations should welcome and reward—with visas, job opportunities, investment opportunities, cultural exchanges—those Russians who want to deconflate Putin and Russia but not necessarily embrace Jeffersonian ideals. It would be a mistake to wait for and reward only a pro-Western Russian government.

The West should also prepare for a Russia that inflicts even greater spoliation on a global scale—but not drive it to do so. Some analysts have been urging U.S. President Joe Biden (or a future president) to pull off a reverse Nixon-Kissinger: to launch a diplomatic outreach to Moscow against Beijing. Of course, China and the Soviet Union had already split well before that previous American gambit. Separating Russia from China today would be a tall order. Even if successful, it would necessitate looking the other way as Moscow coercively reimposed a sphere of influence on former Soviet possessions, including Ukraine. The tightness of the Chinese-Russian relationship, meanwhile, has been mutually discrediting, and it has bound Washington’s allies in Asia and Europe much more closely to the United States. Rather than a reverse, Washington could find itself in an updated Nixon-Kissinger moment: asking China to help restrain Russia.

OPPORTUNITY ABROAD, OPPORTUNITY AT HOME

The supreme irony of American grand strategy for the past 70 years is that it worked, fostering an integrated world of impressive and shared prosperity, and yet is now being abandoned. The United States was open for business to its adversaries, without reciprocation. Today, however, so-called industrial policy and protectionism are partially closing the country not just to rivals but also to U.S. allies, partners, friends, and potential friends. American policy has come to resemble China’s—right when the latter has hit a wall.

To be sure, technology export controls have a place in the policy toolkit, whether for China or Russia. But it’s not clear what the United States is offering in a positive sense. A strategic trade policy—reflected by initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which Washington crafted but then abandoned—might be a nonstarter in the current domestic political climate. A nimble administration, however, could repackage such an approach as an ambitious quest to secure global supply chains.

World order requires legitimacy, an example worth emulating, a system open to strivers. The United States was once synonymous with economic opportunity for its allies and partners but also for others who aspired to attain the prosperity and peace that the open U.S.-led economic order promised—and, for the most part, delivered by reducing inequality on a world historic scale, raising billions of people out of poverty globally, and fostering robust middle classes. But over time, the United States ceded that role, allowing China to become synonymous with economic opportunity (as the leading trade partner of most countries) and manufacturing prowess (as a hub of technical know-how, logistics mastery, and skilled workers). To recapture lost ground and to restart the engine of social mobility at home, the United States, which has a mere 1.5 million mathematics teachers and must import knowledge of that subject from East Asia and South Asia, needs to launch a program to produce one million new teachers of math within a decade. It makes little sense to admit students to college if, lacking the universal language of science, engineering, computers, and economics, they are limited to majoring in themselves and their grievances.

The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.

Investing in people and housing and rediscovering a civic spirit on the scale that characterized the astonishing mobilizations of the Cold War around science and national projects would not alone guarantee equal opportunity at home. But such policies would be a vital start, a return to the tried-and-true formula that built U.S. national power in conjunction with American international leadership. The United States could once again be synonymous with opportunity abroad and at home, acquire more friends, and grow ever more capable of meeting whatever future Russia emerges. The American example and economic practice bent the trajectory of Russia before, and it could do so again, with fewer illusions this time.

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, April 22, 2024 2:05 PM

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


This is around the 1,000,000th time Russia has threatened to nuke the world, almost as many times as Russia's protege, North Korea, has made the same threat:

Russia warns the world is on the brink of a ‘direct military clash’ between nuclear powers

Holly Ellyatt | Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 11:57 AM EDT

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/22/ukraine-war-live-updates-latest-news-o
n-russia-and-the-war-in-ukraine.html

Russia warned Monday that the risk of a “direct military clash” between Russia and nuclear powers in the West is rising.

“Westerners are dangerously balancing on the brink of a direct military clash between nuclear powers, which is fraught with catastrophic consequences,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a video message to the participants of the Moscow Nonproliferation Conference.

The comments come after Russia reacted angrily to the U.S. House of Representatives passing a $61 billion foreign aid package for Kyiv at the weekend.

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, April 23, 2024 6:16 AM

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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This is around the 1,000,000th time Russia has threatened to nuke the world, almost as many times as Russia's protege, North Korea, has made the same threat.
In case you were wondering about the philosophy of life motivating Russia to threaten a million times to nuke the world . . .

Behind the New Iron Curtain

Caviar, counterculture, and the cult of Stalin reborn

by Marzio G. Mian, Translated by Elettra Pauletto

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/

The city is generally known as the Russian Chicago, because of its great industrial vitality and popularity with merchants and criminals. But in the summer, Samara becomes the Saint-Tropez of the Volga, with elegant beaches and a fashionable riverside promenade that is second only to Sochi’s. And just like Sochi, it seems to be a destination for hardcore Putin supporters. Bourgeois kids traverse its streets on scooters, wearing expensive American sneakers and the hottest T-shirt of the season—one bearing Stalin’s face and the phrase 'If I were here, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this shit'.

Stalin built a secret bunker under an old Communist Committee building in town in 1942, just after the narrow Soviet victory at the Battle of Moscow. These days it’s a pilgrimage destination. I went on a tour of the bunker, in which at least half my group consisted of people in their twenties. We descended to find the control room and apartment for the head of the USSR. The bunker was never used, but the guide explained that it was updated during the Cuban Missile Crisis and again after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Today it can hold up to six hundred people for five days and “even gets cell phone service.” Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”

In this second summer of what Andrei called the “war on evil,” even the most zealous popes indulge the Stalin worship, despite his confiscation of Orthodox Church assets and the fact that he has turned many of their cathedrals into prisons, factories, and army barracks. It was Piotrovsky, at the Hermitage, who suggested I meet a young priest named Mikhail Rodin, whom he called “an emerging voice.” He lived in Balakovo, Piotrovsky added, “a place forgotten by God.”

Father Rodin, who is forty-four and has four children, belongs to the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church, which was born out of a seventeenth-century schism with the official Orthodox Church. A long history of repression and semi-clandestine masses followed. But today, the conflict with the main church, presided over by the crusading Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, seems to have subsided, with both factions supporting Russia’s sacred mission in Ukraine.

I arrived in Balakovo in the evening, the smell of ammonia in the air. Though the city revolved around two of the biggest power plants on the Volga, all its roads were dark. The only sign of life came from the Lucky Pub, which was hosting a concert by the Kiss, a popular local rock band—all the kids seemed to know their songs. I entered and felt like I was in the Midwest; there were pool tables, darts, French fries in baskets with checkered paper, and a sign reading make love not war.

Batyushka Rodin, who speaks excellent English, said that his church near Balakovo’s squalid industrial zone—a luxury lodge with fragrant pine logs, an oven to make the communion bread, icons donated by parishioners—had been financed by one Robert Stubblebine, an American native who relocated to Moscow. He’s known as a VP and early shareholder of Yandex, the Russian Google, started by his business partner Arkady Volozh, an oligarch who has called the war “barbaric” (probably just in an unsuccessful bid to be taken off the list of sanctioned billionaires).

Rodin had other ideas. “The war is the last opportunity to bring salvation to the human soul,” he said with a beatific smile. “In the Book of Revelations, John the Apostle wrote of these last trying times for the human race, when everyone would have to choose their own path: they will either stay with God or go forth to great pain and suffering forever.” His tone didn’t change when I asked about Stalin’s resurgent popularity. “I don’t want to judge, because God can’t be removed from the hearts of Russians,” he said. “No one called Stalin for help, no one called the Party for help. Everyone cried out to God!”

I know Russian priests fairly well—they tend to be rough and arrogant. Rodin was different, at once modern and archaic. He uses social media and medieval mannerisms. He has traveled a bit, but for him there is no place like Russia. I asked him what being Russian meant to him. “We’re influenced by the immense nothingness around us, and by the harsh climate,” he said. “In a land like this, you have to have an objective, a dream. We Russians need to have something big to strive for. We dreamed of communism, equality, and of a life where no one is exploited by anyone. Every person the same as the next.” He went on: “If Russians believe in something, they believe until the end. They believe in God. They’re ready to die for their faith. They believe in communism. They’re ready to die for that. They believe in Russia and they’re ready to sacrifice themselves for Russia.”

Even the atomic bomb, batyushka?

“Of course,” he replied quickly. “We’re ready to sacrifice ourselves. Because if we don’t win, we’ll burn it all down. If we can’t achieve this bright future, then what’s the point in living?” He grew more heated. “Our president is saying what everyone is thinking. If we don’t have the Russia we want, we’re ready to martyr ourselves, sacrifice ourselves and the whole world if it’s unjust and evil. There’s no need for a world like that.”

I was back out on the street when I saw that I had a voicemail from Albert, from Shubert Island. He had composed a new reggae song: “At sunset the Volga is bathed in pure light,” he sang, “when illuminated by love, my heart is the same.”

From the January 2024 issue

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, April 23, 2024 6:19 AM

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


Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren stated on April 19 that the Netherlands will contribute 150 million euros (about $159 million) to the German-led initiative to supply Ukraine with air defense systems and will purchase 60 million euros (about $64 million) worth of short-range air defense equipment for Ukraine to combat drone strikes.[62]

German Minister of Economic Affairs and Vice Chancellor Robert Habek and Head of Diehl Defense Helmut Rauch announced on April 18 that Germany will deliver an additional IRIS-T air defense system to Ukraine in a few weeks.[63]

Latvian Defense Minister Andris Spruds stated on April 22 that Latvia is prepared to give Ukraine a short-range air defense system.[64]

Denmark announced on April 16 that it will allocate 2.2 billion Danish kroner (about $314 million) worth of military assistance to Ukraine, including funds to strengthen Ukraine’s naval capabilities, purchase ammunition and drones, and produce missile components.[65]

Denmark announced that it would allocate 200 million Danish kroner (about $28 million) of this package to buy materiel for the Ukrainian military from Ukrainian manufacturers, becoming the first country to commit to this system of Western aid procurement for Ukraine.[66]

A crowdfunding campaign in Slovakia to support the Czech initiative that began on April 16 has raised $3.4 million as of April 22.[67]

The Office of the President of Ukraine stated on April 18 that Ukraine and the Czech Republic have begun negotiations on a bilateral security agreement.[68]

German State Secretary of Economic Affairs and Climate Action Sven Giegold stated on April 19 that Germany approved 5.2 billion euros (about $5.5 billion) worth of military equipment exports in the first quarter of 2024, of which about 3.8 billion euros (about $4 billion) went to Ukraine.[69]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-22-2024

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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Tuesday, April 23, 2024 12:42 PM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
He went on: “If Russians believe in something, they believe until the end. They believe in God. They’re ready to die for their faith. They believe in communism. They’re ready to die for that. They believe in Russia and they’re ready to sacrifice themselves for Russia.”

Even the atomic bomb, batyushka?

“Of course,” he replied quickly. “We’re ready to sacrifice ourselves. Because if we don’t win, we’ll burn it all down. If we can’t achieve this bright future, then what’s the point in living?” He grew more heated. “Our president is saying what everyone is thinking. If we don’t have the Russia we want, we’re ready to martyr ourselves, sacrifice ourselves and the whole world if it’s unjust and evil. There’s no need for a world like that.”
In case you were wondering what philosophy of life motivates Russia to threaten a million times to nuke the world, an excellent place to start:

Leo Tolstoy on Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World

By Maria Popova | June 3, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/03/tolstoy-confession/

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, April 24, 2024 6:19 AM

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


Opinion | Ukraine Aid in the Light of History

By Paul Krugman | April 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/ukraine-aid-military.html

On Saturday the House of Representatives finally overcame MAGA opposition and approved a new aid package for Ukraine. The Biden administration presumably had matériel ready to ship, just waiting for congressional authorization, so the effects of this legislative breakthrough will be quick.

Like many observers, I’m simultaneously relieved, ashamed, angry and worried by what has happened. I’m relieved that a nation under siege will probably — probably — get aid in time to survive, at least for a while, something that was increasingly in doubt given overwhelming Russian artillery superiority. I’m ashamed that things got to this point — that America came so close to betraying a democracy in danger. I’m angry at the political faction that blocked aid for so many months, not, as I’ll explain below, because of reasonable concerns about the cost, but probably because they want Vladimir Putin to win. And I’m worried because that faction remains powerful — a majority of Republicans in the House voted against Ukraine aid — and could still doom Ukraine in the years ahead.

But let me set emotions aside and try to do some analysis. In particular, let me take on some myths about aid to Ukraine. No, spending on Ukraine isn’t a huge burden on America, coming at the expense of domestic priorities. No, America isn’t bearing this cost alone, without help from our European allies. Yes, U.S. aid is still crucial, in part because Europe can supply money but isn’t yet in a position to supply enough military hardware.

To understand these points, I find it useful to look back at the obvious historical parallel to current aid to Ukraine: Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, which began delivering aid to Britain and China in 1941, before Pearl Harbor brought America officially into World War II.

It is often forgotten how controversial that aid was at the time. Many people are probably aware that there was an America First movement that opposed any aid to embattled Britain, in part because some of its prominent leaders, notably Charles Lindbergh, were racist and openly sympathetic to the Nazis.

I suspect that fewer people are aware that even in Congress, Lend-Lease was a deeply partisan issue. The initial bill, enacted in early 1941, passed the House with very little Republican support. Even more strikingly, support for Lend-Lease (triangles pointing up in the chart below) was closely correlated with economic ideology (Dimension 1). Almost all liberals favored supporting Britain in its darkest hour; many conservatives didn’t:


Credit...Voteview.com https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH0770006

Yet the aid passed. Congress appropriated $13 billion before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This was an immense sum at the time — about 10 percent of America’s annual gross domestic product. Somewhat surprisingly, however, not much of that total consisted of weaponry. As the American Historical Association noted: “Our munitions industry was still largely in the tooling up state. And the flow of finished weapons was at first only a trickle.”

Indeed. Europe had begun rearming years before World War II started, while an isolationist United States hadn’t developed much of a defense industry — to take a famous example, the Sherman tank didn’t go into production until 1942. As a result, most of America’s initial aid took the form of food — at first we were less the arsenal of democracy than its breadbasket.

How does aid to Ukraine compare with that experience?

First, it’s vastly smaller relative to the size of our economy. The just-passed package will roughly double the cumulative aid we’ve given Ukraine, but at about $60 billion it’s less than one-fourth of 1 percent of G.D.P. — around one-fortieth the size of the initial Lend-Lease appropriation. Anyone claiming that spending on this scale will break the budget, or that it will seriously interfere with other priorities, is innumerate, disingenuous or both.

What about claims that America is bearing too much of the burden? Last week Donald Trump accused Europe of failing to pay its share: “Why is it that the United States is over $100 Billion Dollars into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us in separation? Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America in order to help a Country in desperate need?” (Eccentric, more or less Germanic capitalization in the actual post.)

The answer to his questions is that his assertions are false. As the Kiel Institute reports, “The data show that total European aid has long overtaken U.S. aid — not only in terms of commitments, but also in terms of specific aid allocations sent to Ukraine.” Notably, many though not all European nations are spending substantially more in support of Ukraine as a percentage of G.D.P. than we are:

Total bilateral aid Government commitments in % of GDP

Credit...Kiel Institute for the World Economy https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tra
cker/

What is true is that the United States has provided more military aid than Europe:
Government support to Ukraine: Military aid, € billion

Credit...Kiel Institute for the World Economy https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tra
cker/

Why? Remember that in the first year of Lend-Lease, America couldn’t supply much in the way of weapons, despite the immense size of our economy, because years of low military spending had left us with an underdeveloped military-industrial base. It took a couple of years to translate America’s overall industrial might into comparable military might. Right now Europe is in a similar situation: It has the money to help Ukraine, and for the most part it has the will, but it doesn’t have the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s military needs.

Will this change? Europe is moving toward increased military capacity, but more slowly than it should, and American aid remains essential.

So as I said, I’m relieved that America has finally released essential aid, but still very worried about the future. For now, at least, U.S. support remains crucial to Ukraine’s survival.

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, April 24, 2024 6:22 AM

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


United Kingdom (UK) Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the UK’s largest ever package of military assistance to Ukraine valued at 500 million pounds (around $662 million) on April 23.[19]

Sunak announced on April 23 that the UK will provide over 400 vehicles, 4 million rounds of small arms ammunition, 60 boats, air defense equipment, and Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine. Sunak also stated that the UK will increase its military spending to 2.5 percent of its GDP by 2030, with spending gradually increasing to 87 billion pounds (about $108 billion) in the next six years.[20]

Sunak stated that the increased defense spending will put the UK “on a war footing” as the UK is facing an “axis of authoritarian states with different values...like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China.”[21]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-april-23-2024

For reference to Sunak stating that 2.5% defense spending puts the UK “on a war footing” – at the height of the Second World War, the UK was spending around 53% of its GDP on its military. Defense spending was budgeted at 2.53 percent GDP in 2021. So Sunak’s “increase” to 2.5% in 2030 is a decrease from 2.53% in 2021.




Military expenditure (% of GDP) - United Kingdom
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=GB

Defence Spending since 1900
https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/past_spending

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, April 24, 2024 6:28 AM

SECOND

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


Europe — but Not NATO — Should Send Troops to Ukraine

By Alex Crowther, Jahara Matisek, and Phillips P. O’Brien | April 22, 2024

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/europe-not-nato-should-send-tro
ops-ukraine

ALEX CROWTHER is a Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and a retired U.S. Army Colonel.

JAHARA MATISEK is a Military Professor at the U.S. Naval War College, Research Fellow at the European Resilience Initiative Center, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. The views expressed here are his own.

PHILLIPS P. O’BRIEN is Head of the School of International Relations and Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

A taboo has been broken in Europe. Only a few months ago, it would have been inconceivable for European leaders to propose sending European troops to Ukraine. But on February 26, French President Emmanuel Macron said the deployment of European forces to Ukraine could not be “ruled out.” Since then, other European officials have joined the chorus; the Finnish defense minister and Polish foreign minister have both suggested that their countries’ forces could end up in Ukraine. These comments, combined with existing support for such measures in the Baltic states, show that there is a growing bloc of countries open to direct European intervention in the war.

These explosive comments are driven by shifting conflict dynamics. The debate in the U.S. Congress over sending military aid to Ukraine has been a debacle. A new aid package is finally on track for approval, but the months of dithering in Washington have dismayed Europeans and given Moscow hope that Western resolve to support Kyiv is cracking. Russian forces—bolstered by equipment from China, Iran, and North Korea—have taken advantage of the gap in U.S. military support for Ukraine by stepping up their attacks on civilians and nonmilitary infrastructure. In early April, knowing that Ukraine was running short of antiaircraft ammunition, Russia launched a missile attack that destroyed the largest power plant in the Kyiv region. Earlier, in March, Russian forces targeted a hydroelectric dam in Dnipro and other electrical facilities around Kherson, undermining Ukrainian industry and making the country’s economy more dependent on the European electrical grid. Further damage to critical infrastructure, nuclear power plants, and agricultural land will dramatically raise the costs of reconstruction, for which Ukraine’s partners in the West will likely have to foot much of the bill.

As Russian forces speed up their advance, the possibility that they could break through Ukrainian defenses along the eastern front and challenge Ukrainian control of Kharkiv or even Kyiv presents Europe with a security threat it cannot ignore. A Russian victory in Ukraine would vindicate President Vladimir Putin’s revisionist ambitions and belief in the inherent weakness of the West. It would enable the Kremlin to keep Russia on a war footing—an all-of-society approach to conquest that European countries would be unable to match. There is no reason to expect Putin to stop with Ukraine. He has called the breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, lamenting that “tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.” The Baltic states are in danger, as is Poland: last year, the former Russian prime minister and Putin loyalist Dmitri Medvedev described the Baltics as “our” (meaning Russian) provinces? and Poland as “temporarily occupied” (meaning by NATO).

By threatening to send troops, European countries are trying to disrupt this worrying trajectory. To truly change the outcome in Ukraine, however, European countries must do more than simply talk about deployments. If the United States continues to delay aid, and especially if it elects Donald Trump (who has pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, presumably by allowing Putin to keep his ill-gotten gains) as president in November, Europe will be Ukraine’s only defender. European leaders cannot afford to let American political dysfunction dictate European security. They must seriously contemplate deploying troops to Ukraine to provide logistical support and training, to protect Ukraine’s borders and critical infrastructure, or even to defend Ukrainian cities. They must make it clear to Russia that Europe is willing to protect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. Accepting the dire reality of the situation in Ukraine and addressing it now is better than leaving a door open for Russia to accelerate its imperial advance.

CHANGE THE CONVERSATION

The idea of European troops deploying to Ukraine has elicited predictable objections. The Kremlin was outraged by Macron and others’ recent statements warning of war—possibly a nuclear one—with all of Europe. Washington and Berlin also responded angrily. Both Germany and the United States have strictly limited the aid they gave Ukraine throughout the war, agonizing that Russia might make good on its threats of escalation, and they sharply criticized the more hawkish European states for what they see as unnecessary provocation.

Such opposition does not lessen the benefits that European forces would provide in Ukraine, and the fact that Berlin, Moscow, and Washington all reacted so strongly shows why it is so important to have this discussion. European leaders have demonstrated that it is possible to break out of a one-sided escalation debate that, until how, has worked to Russia’s advantage. In the previous pattern, Moscow has threatened escalation, and Berlin and Washington have responded with words and actions aimed at de-escalation—a dynamic that deters both Germany and the United States from sending the more advanced missile systems that Ukraine desperately needs. Now, Europe is making the threats, and Russia is looking deeply uncomfortable.

Too many politicians and pundits in the United States and Europe echo Putin’s own talking points by warning that any kind of external intervention in Ukraine would lead to World War III. In reality, sending European troops would be a normal response to a conflict of this kind. Russia’s invasion disrupted the regional balance of power, and Europe has a vital interest in seeing the imbalance corrected. The obvious way to do this is to provide a lifeline to a Ukrainian military that could once again be left high and dry by the United States, and the best lifeline would be European soldiers. Unless the politics in the United States change, Ukraine will need alternate sources of assistance to keep its fight going—and Europe is the natural backer.

SEND IN THE TROOPS

European forces could undertake either noncombat or combat operations to relieve some of the pressure on Ukraine. A strictly noncombat mission would be easiest to sell in most European capitals. European forces could relieve the Ukrainians performing logistics functions, such as maintaining and repairing combat vehicles. By staying west of the Dnieper River—a natural barrier protecting much of Ukraine from Russian advances—European forces would demonstrate that they are not there to kill Russian soldiers, preempting the inevitable Russian accusation of European aggression. Some Ukrainian vehicles are already being sent to Germany, Poland, and Romania for substantial repairs, but conducting this task closer to the front would speed up the process, reduce the time equipment is out of combat, and free up more Ukrainian forces for combat duties. French, Polish, and other European military advisers could also provide lethal and nonlethal training within Ukraine to further professionalize the country’s military. If additional mobilization expands the Ukrainian military in the coming year—which seems likely—increased capacity to train new recruits inside Ukraine will be particularly useful.

Of course, European forces could do more than repair and train. The most limited form of European combat missions could still remain west of the Dnieper River and be defensive in nature. One such mission could involve strengthening Ukraine’s air defense capabilities in this region by deploying personnel, providing equipment, or even taking over command and control of the Ukrainian air defense system. The risks of escalation would be minimal, as European forces would have little chance of killing the Russian military pilots who launch munitions into Ukraine from Belarusian and Russian airspace. But they would help shoot down cruise missiles and drones. In doing so, European-led air defense batteries would free up more Ukrainian troops to protect forces near the frontlines while also frustrating Russian attempts to destroy critical infrastructure and terrify the Ukrainian population into surrender. European forces could perform other defensive and humanitarian tasks, too, such as demining and defusing unexploded Russian ordinance. Taking over such work from Ukrainian personnel would help protect civilians and support Ukraine’s economic recovery, as farmers are now struggling to plant and harvest crops in fields full of mines and other unexploded munitions.

Sending European troops would be a normal response to a conflict of this kind.

Another combat role—which, like an air defense mission, would likely not engage Russian forces—would involve patrolling parts of the Ukrainian border where Russian troops are not deployed, such as the Black Sea coast and the borders with Belarus and Transnistria (a breakaway region in Moldova occupied by Russian forces). Guarding these flanks would free up more than 20,000 Ukrainian troops (and the weapons and ammunition they carry) to fight on the frontlines. It would also reduce the likelihood of a new front opening along these borders, as Russia would almost certainly seek to avoid broadening the war by attacking other European militaries. European forces could also help secure Ukraine’s three remaining Black Sea ports, which are vital to both the Ukrainian economy and global food security, relieving additional Ukrainian soldiers. Any kind of European operation in Ukraine would carry emotional weight as well. The presence of European troops would raise the morale of the Ukrainian people and reassure them that their country’s future is in Europe.

Finally, Europe needs to consider a direct combat mission that helps protect Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper. In addition to reducing the burden of the Ukrainian military in these regions, the presence of European troops would make it unlikely that Russian forces would advance across the river, protecting much of Ukraine from conquest. One potential Russian target is Odessa, Ukraine’s main port where most of the country’s exports are shipped. If Russian troops were to approach the city, European forces in the vicinity would have the right to defend themselves by firing on the advancing soldiers. They could help thwart a Russian offensive that, given Odessa’s strategic position, could strangle the Ukrainian economy and position Russian forces for a potential invasion of Moldova. Moscow would try to spin any lethal response to a Russian attack as European aggression, but Russia would be responsible for any escalation.

PUTIN ON THE BACK FOOT

The risk that deploying European soldiers to Ukraine in any capacity will escalate the conflict is overblown. Russia has precious little room to scale up its conventional attacks, short of deploying biological or chemical weapons. It has already lost more than 90 percent of its prewar army, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, tens of thousands of combat vehicles destroyed, and the vast majority of its most advanced weapons systems expended in attacks on Ukraine. Sanctions have made Russian weapons production more difficult and costly, and the deployment of troops to Ukraine has left Russia with barely enough forces to guard the rest of its long border, let alone mount a significant operation against other European states. In January 2022, the Russian army was widely considered second only to the U.S. Army; today, it may not even be the most powerful army in Ukraine. But if European leaders were to let Russia win in Ukraine, Putin’s takeaway would be that making nuclear threats could allow him to conquer more countries without provoking a European military response.

The real question is whether Russia would actually use nuclear weapons if European forces enter Ukraine. Arguably, this is already a moot point, given that special operations forces from Western countries are currently operating inside Ukraine. Moscow regularly employs aggressive rhetoric toward NATO members, but so far it has been all bark and no bite, avoiding contact with NATO forces and focusing instead on neighboring countries outside the alliance, such as Georgia and Ukraine, that it can safely kick around. Putin threatened to attack Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states back in 2014, and over the next several years he threatened to invade Finland and Sweden for joining NATO, Norway for hosting additional U.S. troops, Poland and Romania for housing ballistic missile defense facilities, and “any European countries” that allowed U.S. missiles to be deployed on their soil. In the past decade and a half, the Kremlin has threatened or run war games that simulate the use of nuclear weapons against Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the Baltic states, the European Union as a whole, and, of course, NATO and the United States. At some point, European leaders must ignore Putin’s saber-rattling, which is merely propaganda premised on the baseless notion that NATO wants to attack or invade Russia.

The arrival of European forces in Ukraine would change Putin’s calculations.

Ultimately, Russia cannot afford to fight multiple European countries at once, much less start a nuclear war. Tellingly, the countries that are most likely to be targeted in a nuclear attack—those that border Russia, particularly Poland and the Baltic states—are the least concerned about that prospect but rightly fear the aggression of a reconstituted conventional Russian military, buoyed by success in Ukraine. Europe is far richer, is more technologically advanced, and has a much larger population than Russia. Moscow knows it cannot win by provoking the whole continent, and it seeks to avoid the U.S. military intervention that would very likely follow if Russian forces were to invade a NATO country and trigger Article 5 of the alliance’s charter.

Instead, Russia is basing its hopes for victory almost entirely on Europe treating Ukraine as separate from the rest of the continent. So far, its hopes have come to pass. European leaders have tolerated attacks on Ukraine that would have triggered a united European response had they happened in any NATO or EU member state. This attitude has allowed Russia to escalate its war in Ukraine, safe in the knowledge that the rest of Europe will keep its distance.

The arrival of European forces in Ukraine would change that calculation. Moscow would have to face the possibility that European escalation could make the war unwinnable for Russia. Moreover, a European-led response would subvert Russian propaganda that NATO countries’ intervention in Ukraine is merely an American ploy to undermine Russia. The narrative that NATO is the aggressor in this war is popular in many parts of the world, and countering it could help Europe further isolate Moscow both diplomatically and economically. And because European forces would be acting outside the NATO framework and NATO territory, any casualties would not trigger an Article 5 response and draw in the United States. Russia’s opponent would not be NATO but a coalition of European countries seeking to balance against naked Russian imperialism.

Ukraine is doing the best it can, but it needs help—help that European countries are able and increasingly willing to provide. Rather than force Russian escalation, a European troop presence would be more likely to prevent the conflict from spreading and prevent further damage to Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure. European leaders do not need to follow the dictates of an increasingly unreliable United States about how the battle in Ukraine should be waged; they can and should decide for themselves how best to ensure the continent’s freedom and security. Europe must do what it takes to safeguard its own future, and that starts with making sure Ukraine wins this 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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Wednesday, April 24, 2024 7:30 AM

SECOND

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


Lawmaker Complains That Young Russians Value Their Lives Too Much

“The person for whom life is the most important thing will sell out their country.”

By Allison Quinn | Apr. 23, 2024, 8:47 AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/lawmaker-complains-that-young-russians-v
alue-their-lives-too-much

Alexei Zhuravlev, the first deputy chairman of the State Duma’s defense committee, also reminded the audience on Tuesday of the time he told a German journalist on live TV that Russia would “come and kill you all.”

(Russia is paying contract soldiers 10 times more than ordinary jobs, but Zhuravlev is displeased that only 1,000 Russians are signing contracts daily. The Russian Army needs more manpower to “come and kill you all.” )

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, April 24, 2024 8:57 AM

SECOND

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


German Chancellor to Putin: Stop "Appropriating" Kant

By Camilla Jessen | Apr. 23, 2024, 2:46 PM CET

https://www.dagens.com/news/german-chancellor-to-putin-stop-appropriat
ing-kant

While Putin has referred to Kant as his "favorite philosopher," the German Chancellor highlighted that Kant's concepts of human rights and human dignity, as well as his ideas about war and peace, are fundamentally at odds with Putin's practices in Russia and his aggressive actions in Ukraine.

Kant was born, lived, and died in Königsberg, which became part of the Soviet Union in 1945 and was later renamed Kaliningrad in 1946.

P.S. – Russia stole Königsberg and refuses to return it to the rightful owners, who either fled or were “expelled” (a euphemism for a bullet into the back of the head). You’ve got to love those Russians for being straightforward murderers and thieves, but you can’t love that Russians lie about how they came to own the land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg

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, April 25, 2024 7:35 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine Is Still Outgunned by Russia

Even with the approval of new U.S. aid, most of the artillery Ukraine needs won’t get to the front until next year.

By Jack Detsch | April 23, 2024, 5:49 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/23/ukraine-war-artillery-shortage-pr
oduction-military-aid-bill/

Ukraine is still likely to be outgunned by Russian artillery for much of the rest of 2024 despite Congress nearing the passage of a $60 billion military aid bill for Kyiv, officials and analysts told Foreign Policy, as both the United States and Europe ramp up production of NATO-standard rounds and restock their own arsenals.

For months, Ukrainian troops have been firing about 2,000 rounds a day, barely enough to sustain a defensive war against the Russians. And even with the approval of new U.S. aid, most factories have yet to ramp up production.

“The problem is there is a huge shortage—worldwide—of artillery shells,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker. “The Europeans said they would provide us a million shells—they provided only 30 percent of those. The Americans have dried out their stocks, and they’re also delivering to Israel. And they are only ramping up the production line.”

The congressional seal of approval, expected to come Tuesday or Wednesday, will mean that the Biden administration can begin to replenish the U.S. Defense Department’s stockpiles of ammunition that the United States might need to fight a war of its own someday, thereby allowing the White House enough leeway to begin sending artillery to the Ukrainians from storehouses in Europe without harming U.S. military readiness. Reuters reported that the Biden administration is preparing a $1 billion package that will include artillery, rockets, and lots of vehicles.

But the expectation is that the administration will spend much of the year rebuilding U.S. stockpiles to prewar levels as the U.S. Army aims to level up artillery production to 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe’s stockpiles are empty. Most of the output from the European Union’s initiative to get 1.4 million shells into Ukrainian hands—about half of which have already been delivered—won’t get there until the end of 2024. So Ukraine’s partners on the continent are searching under the couch cushions and looking for suppliers outside the European bloc to find enough artillery to keep Kyiv’s gun barrels hot.

The Czech Republic appears to have sourced enough money from a consortium of European countries to buy 500,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition and is currently working on getting the first batch to Ukraine. The Estonian government, which also has an initiative to crowdfund artillery shells for the Ukrainians, has not started fundraising.

Refurbishing old artillery ammunition is about 30 percent cheaper than buying new shells, European officials said, but much of it comes from former Soviet satellite countries that aren’t keen to be on the Kremlin’s bad side.

“I think it’s fair to assume that the Ukrainians for the next 12 months will be able to have a monthly fire rate of maybe roughly 75,000 to 85,000 [shells] per month, which boils down to something like 2,400 to 2,500 rounds per day,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who conducted a study recently examining Ukraine’s rate of artillery fire.

Gady said that is about the minimum amount that Ukraine needs to sustain a defensive war against the Russians. “That doesn’t leave any room for offensive operations this year,” Gady added. And congressional critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine—such as Sen. J.D. Vance, who argued in the New York Times this month that the United States simply doesn’t have “the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war”—are going to continue to make that case loudly.

In the meantime, Russia is on track to produce 3.5 million rounds in 2024 and might be able to surge to produce 4.5 million rounds by the end of the year. But there are questions as to whether Russia is starting to max out its industrial capacity. The Kremlin can’t extend working hours—their weapons shops are already working around the clock—so European officials expect that Russia will have to build more factories to produce the shells that it needs. Russia is also getting artillery shells from North Korea and Iran, but some of them are so old that they’re misfiring.

The hope is that by the beginning of 2025, the United States and European defense companies will be producing shells on a significant enough scale to put the Ukrainians on the front foot again. Without enough shells, the Ukrainians have been using first-person-view drones instead, which can be taken down with jamming equipment and can’t fly at night.

The Ukrainians are trying to juke the numbers in their favor by getting more high-explosive rounds, which some see as a key defensive weapon as they try to stave off Russian assaults across the 600-mile-long front line. “The Ukrainians are basically committed to largely being on the defensive this year,” a congressional aide told Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity to talk about the situation on the battlefield. “Cluster munitions are … a top five defensive weapon as they’re trying to marshal their forces.”

Every round of dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, known as DPICMs in military parlance, is about four to five times more deadly than a conventional artillery round, the congressional aide said. There are about 3 million DPICM rounds in U.S. arsenals, dating all the way back to the Cold War—and the Biden administration has the authority to send $500 million worth more of the rounds and is likely to approve them soon—but the weapons have high “dud” rates, meaning they don’t always go off when fired and can be left behind for civilians to encounter, often with deadly consequences.

CNN reported this week that the Biden administration is also expected to provide the Ukrainians with long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems for the first time. But with U.S. and European factories just starting to work double time to get themselves—and the Ukrainians—the weapons they need, Kyiv is expected to spend much of 2024 digging defensive trenches, as it has been doing for months.

It’s not clear those fortifications will be as effective as the multitiered Russian lines that blunted Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, though.

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, April 25, 2024 7:37 AM

SECOND

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


Ukraine still has a major problem that aid can't fix

By Tom Porter | Apr 24, 2024, 8:11 AM CDT

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-still-has-major-problem-that-u
s-aid-fix-russia-2024-4

"The most important source of Ukrainian weakness is the lack of manpower," Konrad Muzyka, director of the Rochan military consultancy in Poland, told Reuters.

Oleksandr, a battalion commander, told The Washington Post in February that companies in his unit are staffed at around 35% of normal levels.

This week, Ukraine said it had suspended consular services for military-age male Ukrainians abroad, in an apparent attempt to get tough on young men who fled the country to avoid being sent to fight.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's government has reduced the draft age from 27 to 25. (25 years shows the Ukrainians are not being serious. For an example of seriousness, on November 11, 1942, the US Congress approved lowering the minimum draft age to 18 and raising the maximum to 37. If the Ukrainians don’t get serious, they will lose and deserve to lose.)

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, April 25, 2024 8:03 AM

SECOND

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


Biden admin isn’t fully convinced Ukraine can win, even with new aid

Few Biden administration officials or lawmakers say the $60 billion package means Ukraine walks away from the battlefield with its country fully restored.

By Alexander Ward | 04/24/2024 02:27 PM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/biden-ukraine-russia-war-aid-
00154143

Biden administration officials expect the $60 billion will last at least through the end of this presidential term. Should Biden win reelection against former President Donald Trump, it’s unclear if he would need to ask Congress — which could see Republicans lead both the Senate and House — for another authorization.

(It is perfectly clear that this war will continue for years. What is unclear is why anybody thinks it won't. It is also unclear why those dummies in Ukraine have not devised a workable plan to close the Kerch Strait Bridge permanently. Surely some Ukrainian knows how. If nobody does, this is very sad for Ukraine.

On a similar note, surely some Ukrainian knows how to cross or go around a Russian minefield without their weaponry, ammo, and other supplies being blown to smithereens. If nobody does, this is also very sad 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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Thursday, April 25, 2024 8:17 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Still beating a dead horse, I see.

Ukraine can't win this conventional war.

NATO can't win this conventional war.

Not only that, but even with our "secret" delivery of ATACMS in February and this most recent aid package, there is a strong possibility that Ukraine will collapse before November. Now THAT would be poetic justice.

The only bloc that might be motivated to go nuclear is the west because time is on the BRICS' side.

Got the "I told you so's" primed and ready to go.




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

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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