REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Sunday, April 28, 2024 07:40
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PAGE 105 of 127

Thursday, November 16, 2023 7:38 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:
This report fails on thoroughness, transparency, and logic. Or maybe its a language problem. In any case, clear as mud. Very poorly written.

Oy!!
Then you will really hate this book, Signym, because it shows how Putin rewrites every bit of history to make Russians the heroes of their own fake stories:

A few words from Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia
By Jade McGlynn

The whole book can be downloaded for free from https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Jade+McGlynn

The future of cultural consciousness

According to the Russian media and government’s depictions of patriotism, cultural consciousness is attained through, and evidenced by, a true understanding of historical (allegorical) truth. Essentially, this idea can be reduced to the tautological formulation that Russians are defined by (and special because of) their unique understanding of their own history and culture but that you can only be Russian if you possess this consciousness of your culture (primarily history). Cultural consciousness is not a coherent ideology so much as a way of selling the core components of a worldview – that Russians needs a strong state, that Russia must develop along its own special path and that Russia is a great power with a mission to carry out in the world – in a way that also underpins the approved cultural memory.

Even the most cursory of inspections reveals that cultural consciousness offers a conceptualization of Russianness lacking in any concrete vision of Russia’s future beyond that of influence and power projection. Despite the media’s depictions of the template of coming-to-cultural-consciousness and the politicians’ heated orations equating Russianness with an embrace of historical justice, this is first and foremost a discourse of political legitimacy. As the Russian academic Igor’ Zevelev argues, it is about keeping the elites in power:

“In the end, from the broad assortment of ideas that appeared in intellectual discourse about Russia’s post-Soviet identity over the last twenty years, were chosen those [strands] which seemed the most suited to legitimizing the government and strengthening the independence, strength and influence of the Russian state.” – Zevelev 2014

The lack of a vision for the future reflects the cynicism inherent in the government’s efforts to subjugate discussions of Russian identity to their own immediate political requirements: Russian history, politics and identity are all instruments through which to legitimize the government and its rule. In place of ambitious plans or hopes for the future, there is, once again, this sense of nostalgic anticipation: looking forward to the future only for its similarities to the past. This also helps to deflect from the current lack of any attractive or viable political alternative to Vladimir Putin. Moreover, cultural consciousness provides a spur to action and a sense of purpose that can be realized outside of Russia’s borders, mobilizing and justifying Russian military action in Ukraine.

This sense of purpose, alongside the well-documented appeal of nostalgia, and the opportunity to present Russia as restoring at least some of a lost and idealized past, will likely encourage the Kremlin to continue to return to the emotive and symbolic potential of uses of history, from historical framing through memory wars to memory diplomacy. For this reason, the government and media’s uses of history will only become even more extreme as their war in Ukraine continues, especially if it continues to flounder. Consider, for example, the winter of 2019–20, when Putin responded to his flagging popularity ratings by engaging in a memory war over the causes of the Second World War with various Polish politicians (BBC 2019a) and by promising to inscribe into the new constitution the sanctity of the ‘true’ memory of the Great Patriotic War and Great Victory (Sokolov 2020), a promise he kept. Consider also the Moscow city authorities’ efforts in 2021 to distract from anti-government protests sparked by Aleksei Navalny’s Putin’s Palace YouTube exposé by introducing a referendum over whether to return a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, to Lubyanka Square.

The selected examples above show the diverse application of history in Putin’s Russia and the diverse historical narratives put into political employment: what might be ignored or disdained at times (Dzerzhinksii, Lenin) may prove useful or be brought into the fold depending on political need. But to function, all of these efforts depend on a level of emotional gratification and on engaging the public. After all, ordinary Russians can and will reject and approve and adapt different aspects of the official representations of the past; they are not merely passive receptacles of the official top-down narrative, even taking into account the limits that the government have placed on historical enquiry with the aim of constricting debate.

Although this book is concerned with official efforts to control and inculcate a narrative, including how the Kremlin adapts to citizen-led efforts, it is worth noting that existing empirical studies of Russians’ collective memories of the Second World War suggest they are markedly homogenous but differ (in terms of content) from other combatant nations’ collective memories (Abel et al. 2019). This is despite the generational divide caused by perestroika, in which those who grew up before Gorbachev’s reforms demonstrated more detailed knowledge of key events of the war compared to those who grew up during the reform era, who were also more willing to engage critically with history (Wertsch 2002). Certainly, the legislative changes that have occurred under Putin have made critical engagement a less promising endeavour, but the lack of historical knowledge has no doubt also worked in the authorities’ favour. Research has shown that those who are most committed and attentive to Putin’s selective commemorations and narratives, reading his articles with gusto, also scored the lowest among all participant groups in an objective Second World War knowledge test, despite evaluating their knowledge highly – alongside their willingness to ‘correct’ false Western historical narratives (Frederick and Coman 2022). This is merely another representation of what we have already seen: that the promotion of history as a form of cultural consciousness is about power- and identity-building rather than knowledge of oneself or one’s nation.

It is perhaps for this reason that there is so much emphasis on triumph and celebration: many Russians were traumatized by the sudden collapse of the USSR, by the collapse of not only its prestige but also their own. Jobs that were high-status and useful went for months unpaid, whereas those previously (and often correctly) stigmatized as criminals and speculators were now on top. This topsy-turvy moral universe led many to reach for certainties of old and the Russian government found a way to fit these into a neat narrative that made sense for the contemporary era and its own political requirements. Some have taken this focus on the positive aspects of Russian and Soviet history as evidence that the Kremlin just sweeps tragedies under the carpet. However, the reality is somewhat different: the Kremlin’s uses of history are in fact dependent on a lurking and enduring sense of political, national and often personal trauma and tragedy. That sense of loss and humiliation is politically convenient provided it can be diverted to support the three core elements of the Kremlin’s worldview: Russia needs a strong state; Russia must follow its own special path of development; Russia is a messianic great power.

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, November 16, 2023 11:33 AM

SECOND

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


A few words from War and Punishment: The Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
By Mikhail Zygar

This book is not only about the present but also about the past — about the historical myths from which today’s politics has grown and which it is founded upon. I carefully and impartially read the historical sources and tried to trace the origins and development of the brutal Russian Empire that gave rise to the current war. This book is by no means an attempt to write the history of Ukraine. Rather, it is a “detective story through the eyes of the criminal,” a chronicle of how Russia has oppressed Ukraine for the past five centuries.

The whole book can be downloaded for free from https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Mikhail+Zygar

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, November 16, 2023 1:27 PM

SECOND

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


The EU’s Membership Plan for Ukraine Could Easily Backfire

By Paul Hockenos | November 16, 2023, 9:33 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/ukraine-europe-eu-accession-expan
sion-russia-balkans-backfire/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

The best way to expand Europeans’ peace and prosperity, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is to lock all liberal-minded states from the Baltics to the Balkans into the institutions and structures of democratic Europe. “Enlargement is a vital policy for the European Union,” she said. “Completing our union is the call of history. … We all win.”

But the gambit could backfire if Brussels proves as uneven as it has in the Western Balkans, where the enlargement process has ground on for 20 years — and even triggered a backlash in countries that have become frustrated and disappointed as a result of unfulfilled promises despite many years of imperfect but hard-won reforms. These unfortunate countries not only remain outside of the EU, but some are run by national populists who are moving in the other direction and forging alliances with the EU’s geopolitical rivals, including Russia and Turkey. Given the complexities of integrating the likes of Ukraine and Moldova, it’s easy to imagine them experiencing the same treatment from the EU — and rousing the same kind of backlash in response.

In the early 2000s, the EU opened the enlargement process to all of the Western Balkan countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. But two decades later, only Croatia has joined — the blame for which lies at the feet both of the aspiring countries and the EU itself. An array of internal issues and bilateral spats between the countries have obstructed them from fulfilling all of the obligations of membership, including standards of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Serbia has long-standing rule of law and corruption issues that have become worse after initially getting better, and its fraught relationship with Kosovo complicates its status all the more. Likewise, Kosovo has Serbia blocking its way, as well as the fact that several EU states refuse to recognize its independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina is highly unstable, the postwar peace accords having divided a country that mostly observes the peace but can’t move forward with reform.

The fact that Albania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia are basically ready to go—and have been for years now—illustrates that much of the problem lies with the EU itself. In the wake of accepting Romania and Bulgaria (2007) and Croatia (2013), many member states expressed “enlargement fatigue” and felt that consolidation, not enlargement, was the order of the day—most vocally France, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Of course, in light of the nightmare of the EU’s trials with authoritarian Poland and Hungary, which threw wrenches in its workings, every EU country is wary of new members whose patchy democratic credentials might cause them to do the same. Nor is enlargement a popular stance: In France and Germany, just 35 percent and 42 percent of respondents, respectively, desire enlargement. In Austria, just 29 percent. Rubbing salt in the wounds, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a European Political Community for like-minded non-EU states that fall short of membership benchmarks (and any interested EU countries)—a purgatory of sorts for loser nations.

The lack of a clear path or concrete timeline has brought momentum on demanding reforms to a standstill and, in some countries, even reversed it. Many of the Western Balkan countries now have potent political forces in their midst that dismiss the EU as hypocritical and its benchmarks as counterproductive. The loss of momentum toward membership has initiated a vicious cycle, argued a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. It stated: “Stalled reform efforts contribute to slow economic growth, which in turn justifies skepticism within the European Union about future enlargement. With membership more of a distant or unachievable prospect, public attention and political focus [in the Balkans] shift toward other areas, making it harder to justify policies required to align with the EU acquis. Thus, greater political space is created for populist candidates or for political leaders to cater to EU competitors, such as China or Russia.”

Today, the region is rife with the detritus of the EU’s failures. There is no better example than Serbia, which applied for EU membership in 2009 and since 2012 has been a candidate for accession—languishing in the waiting room, as it is called. Reforms according to the acquis communautaire have lurched forward only to slide back again. While some critics attribute this to the Serbs’ lack of effort and illiberal political culture, others say the complicated country would have fared much better with a firmer helping hand from Brussels.

From 2017 until earlier this week, the right-wing nationalist Aleksandar Vucic, a onetime ally of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, served as president, a post from which he pledged alliance to the EU reform process on one day and then praised Russian President Vladimir Putin the next. Although the Serbia of today is a different animal than the one of 20 years ago, largely as a result of the EU processes, it has been slow to address the tough reforms addressing organized crime, rule of law violations, corruption, and judicial independence. This year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Vucic said, in words that almost every regional leader could utter: “We are not as enthusiastic as we used to be, in a way that European Union is not that enthusiastic about us as we thought it was.” He said he was “pessimistic” about Serbia entering the EU any time soon.

Belgrade’s disillusionment has made it open to overtures from Russia. Moscow bolsters radical nationalist parties and the Orthodox Church, as well as Milorad Dodik, the Serbian nationalist former co-president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In terms of geopolitics, Serbia has undermined the Euro-Atlantic sanctions regime against wartime Russia. Not only does it refuse to implement trade and financial sanctions, but it also imports Russian natural gas. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the situation is much the same.

The EU’s rationale in taking this monumental step with Ukraine and Moldova makes sense on a number of levels. Ukraine has staked its very existence on identifying as a liberal democracy; ultimately, it is the chief reason behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and his disinclination to relent. A proper democracy aligned with Western Europe rather than Russia undermines the stripe of illiberal, authoritarian state that Russia and its satellites embody and want to perpetuate. Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and tenacious defense of its territory since the Russian invasion in 2022 underscore how serious Ukraine is about its commitment to becoming a Western-style democracy. And this striving has been recognized by the Euro-Atlantic alliance in the form of military and humanitarian aid, international diplomatic engagement, and in June 2022 the award of EU candidate status.

But Ukraine and Moldova will soon have to embark on the tough economic reforms the EU requires—and the challenge of doing so at a time of war. “This is why the European Commission cannot run the process of Ukraine’s accession in the same way for the Western Balkans,” argued Vessela Tcherneva of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations. “As a country at war, Ukraine’s accession must contain bold and coherent political messaging and larger amounts of funding linked to its reconstruction.”

This recipe must apply to the Western Balkans as well, since the EU can’t leave it festering while granting perks and revamped processes to Ukraine and Moldova. The EU hasn’t lost the Western Balkans yet, but it could, were it not to make amends now. This would mean, among other things, increasing pre-accession EU funds and providing early access to certain policy areas. Most experts agree that a Ukraine at peace and backed wholeheartedly by Brussels could make the grade. Essential is that Ukraine’s reform-minded politicians can convince its citizenry that the hard slog to get there is worth the effort.

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, November 16, 2023 1:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Just so the original doesn't get buried in even more bullshit:


The report makes no sense as reported

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Recent Russian opinion polls indicate that roughly half of Russians maintain support for the war in Ukraine and for Russia to engage in peace negotiations.
So, to be clear... half of Russians want Russia to do both? Engage in war AND negotiate?

Quote:
The Levada Center – an independent Russian polling organization
funded mostly by the USA..
Quote:
– reported on October 31 that 55 percent of respondents to a recent poll believe that Russia should begin peace negotiations while 38 percent favor continuing to conduct the war.
Not to be nitpicky, but this conflicts with the first statement that a majority wants Russia to continue the war AND negotiate. So is this an either/ or? Or are there more than two choices? (Eg: fight and negotiate, fight don't negotiate, negotiate don't fight, don't know.) There's a missing 7%, so I expect there's at least a third choice and possibly a fourth.

If that's the case, and one choice is "fight and negotiate" (55%) while the other choice is "fight, don't negotiate" (38%) then the vast majority [93%] want Russia to continue fighting.

Quote:
The Levada Center observed that while these numbers
which numbers? They quote two sets

Quote:
slightly increased between September and October by four percent, they have largely remained consistent since July 2023.[14] The Levada Center added that support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine remained high with 76 percent of respondents stating that they support Russian military operations in Ukraine. The Levada Center reported that 62 percent of surveyed Russians believe that the full-scale invasion is progressing well, while 21 percent of respondents believe that the war is going reasonably or very poorly for Russia.[15]
Well, THAT is an unusual way to report the results! How can we tell how many people think the war is going "poorly"? WE CAN'T. Maybe 62% think it's going well, 20% think it's going "reasonably" and only 1% think it's going "poorly". Since whoever authored this report seems intent on hiding that "poorly" figure, my bet is that it doesnt tell the story that the author wants

Quote:
The Levada Center reported on November 14 that two-thirds of respondents believe that Russia is headged in the right direction and of those who believe the opposite,
Since most opinion polls give more than two choices (right direction, wrong direction, neutral, don't know) this report seems intent on hiding that "wrong direction" figure as well. Again, probably bc it doesn't tell the story that the author wants

Quote:
45 percent (of... 10%?) cited the war in Ukraine.[16] Opposition-leaning Russian research organization Russian Field reported similar numbers supporting negotiations on November 15, noting that 48 percent of respondents said that Russia should engage in peace negotiations and that 74 percent would support Russian President Vladimir Putin if he signed a peace agreement “tomorrow.”[17] Russian Field stated that 36 percent of respondents believe that the war is going well for Russia whereas 25 percent believe that the war is going poorly for Russia and that respondents who trust Telegram channels are twice as likely to believe that the war is going poorly for Russia as those who rely on Russian television.[18]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-15-2023
This report fails on thoroughness, transparency, and logic. Or maybe its a language problem. In any case, clear as mud. Very poorly written.

Oy!!


*****

I don't intend to pick through more layers of bullshit, lies, misquotes, and half-truths, SECOND. This was yet another demonstration that the crap you post is, well, crap.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, November 16, 2023 1:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine.

How long do you think you're going to live now that the US has moved on, Zelensky?

You'd better find the bunker Greta Thunburg and Fauci have been hiding out in and disappear forever.


Maybe Elvis and Tupac are there too and at least you'll have some music to listen to.



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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, November 16, 2023 5:51 PM

SECOND

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


Cluster munitions proving exceptionally effective in battle — Ukrainian officer

November 16, 2023, 12:30 PM

Cluster munitions used by Ukrainian forces are remarkably effective against enemy troops, Deputy Commander of the 3rd Assault Brigade, Maksym Zhorin, said in an interview with NV Radio on Nov. 15.

“Our artillerymen actually quite enjoy it when they are given a mission that involves using cluster munitions,” said Zhorin. “But the enemy does not enjoy them at all because it is truly very unpleasant. As a rule, after their deployment, it is rare for anyone to remain unscathed in the area of application. It is a significant advantage.”

He noted that cluster munitions allow for covering the entire area where an enemy infantry group or their light-armored vehicles disperse, inflicting substantial damage on Russian forces.

Ukraine began using cluster munitions provided by the United States at the end of July. The White House explained that the decision to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine was dictated by battlefield conditions — on top of U.S. stockpile of conventional artillery shells running low.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry emphasized that it would use cluster munitions only in areas of Russian military force concentration, outside of cities, to avoid risks to the civilian population.

https://english.nv.ua/nation/cluster-munitions-proving-exceptionally-e
ffective-in-battle-ukrainian-officer-50368952.html

File this story under: "Kill them. Kill them all."
https://www.quodb.com/search/Kill%20them.%20Kill%20them%20all
https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/movie-tv/kill-them-all/108925407/

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, November 16, 2023 6:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Decision to supply cluster munition was dictated by lack of 155 mm unitary munitions.



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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, November 17, 2023 6:43 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:
Decision to supply cluster munition was dictated by lack of 155 mm unitary munitions.
Decision to supply tactical nukes to destroy the Crimean Bridge would be dictated by Ukraine's lack of tactical nukes. Nuking Russia is wrong but nuking the bridge Russia built in Ukraine is right.

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, November 17, 2023 6:43 AM

SECOND

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


A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on November 16 that Russian state media may have falsely convinced the Russian people that “everything is fine” in Russia’s war in Ukraine.[10] The milblogger claimed that he does not understand why Russian state media devotes so much time to promoting narratives about the “imminent collapse of Ukraine" and portrays the Russian war effort so positively that Russian viewers think that signing a military service contract is unnecessary. Another Russian milblogger who previously served throughout the front in Ukraine and correctly assessed Russia’s foundational problems in Kharkiv Oblast in spring 2022 criticized several unnamed Russian milbloggers for their recent overly positive reporting about Russian counterattacks on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.[11] The milblogger claimed that the other milbloggers preemptively claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks on the east bank and criticized them for setting unrealistic expectations for Russian forces. The milblogger noted that such overoptimistic claims are forcing Russian servicemen to “catch up” to these Russian politicians’ and commanders’ unrealistic expectations of Russian battlefield successes. The milblogger’s complaint suggests that the situation in Kherson Oblast remains very ambiguous and is dynamic. The milblogger’s complaint mirrors recent reports that the Russian General Staff uses battlefield maps that differ from tactical reality and that local Russian commanders order Russian forces to conduct routine assaults to make gains that align with the Russian General Staff’s inaccurate maps.[12] Disjointed Kremlin efforts to consolidate control over the Russian information space and report overly optimistic news are likely creating these cycles of coalescence and backlash among Russian sources. The Russian information space may grow increasingly volatile as the rift between the Kremlin optimists and their critics expands.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-16-2023

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, November 17, 2023 6:53 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Those wacky anonymous milblogers. What will they say next?

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, November 17, 2023 7:23 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 6ixStringJack:
Those wacky anonymous milblogers. What will they say next?
That Trump will be the next President.

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, November 17, 2023 8:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Those wacky anonymous milblogers. What will they say next?
That Trump will be the next President.


Your joke has no logic behind it since you were just putting your faith in what the people at understandingwar.com were telling you that some random anonymous Russian milbloggers were supposedly writing.

The joke here is that they would be telling you that Joe Biden* is going to keep his presidency* after next November.

Get better writers for your scripts.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, November 17, 2023 12:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Decision to supply cluster munition was dictated by lack of 155 mm unitary munitions.
Decision to supply tactical nukes to destroy the Crimean Bridge would be dictated by Ukraine's lack of tactical nukes. Nuking Russia is wrong but nuking the bridge Russia built in Ukraine is right.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
When you get caught in one stupid statement you make an even more abysmally stupid one, hoping that people will get distracted, argue you on it and forget your first stoopidity.

Cue TRUMP! TRUMPTARDS! HOLDOMOR! in 3.... 2....

You're funny!!!




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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, November 17, 2023 5:20 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 you get caught in one stupid statement you make an even more abysmally stupid one, hoping that people will get distracted, argue you on it and forget your first stoopidity.

Cue TRUMP! TRUMPTARDS! HOLDOMOR! in 3.... 2....

You're funny!!!


16:43 ET, Thu, Nov 16, 2023 | Russia shows off devastating 'meteorite' missile in chilling threat to the West

. . .

Russia denied the claims and said the launches had been successful.

https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/118670/Russia-meteorite-mi
ssile-avangard-nuclear-weapon

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, November 17, 2023 5:23 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


It's called deterrence, SECOND.


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, November 17, 2023 5:26 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


And now, back on topic:


Quote:
MSM Admits "Magical Thinking" Guided Its Reporting On Ukraine... Many [hundreds of -SIGNY] Thousands Of Deaths Later
Friday, Nov 17, 2023 - 11:40 AM

A very short while ago, any US politician or media pundit publicly calling for peace negotiations in Ukraine with Russia's Putin was branded 'pro-Kremlin' and somehow compromised. For example, mainstream media has sought to isolate and cancel thinkers like John Mearsheimer for his realism toward Moscow and the conflict, and urging immediate ceasefire which would require territorial concessions from Kiev. It was only in September that one prominent publication branded him "the world's most hated thinker."

But now, at a moment Ukraine's leadership itself has become more desperate while admitting its forces are facing almost insurmountable odds, the D.C. beltway consensus has clearly and drastically changed, and now it's apparently okay to admit the following...

"It's Time to End Magical Thinking About Russia's Defeat.

Putin has withstood the West's best efforts..."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_EqdLUaMAAMbKK

The WSJ piece actually calls for a longer-term strategy of confronting Russia, while also admitting that Washington's approach thus far has been based on "magical thinking".


How about... fraud? Lies? Brainwashing? Gaslighting the public?
The reality is that the war in Ukraine was part of America's (and the UK'S and EU's) long-term plan, in effect since 2000, to regime change Russia and steal its assets. It had nothing to do with freedom or democracy. In fact, the opposite.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, November 17, 2023 5:52 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 called deterrence, SECOND.
No, it is making a death threat. People who aren't receiving the respect/deference/land/loot they feel god promised them won't wait for god. Instead, they are making threats to take what they want violently. Russians want Ukraine. Trumptards want America. No surprise that Russia makes threats against the EU and America. Trumptards make threats, too, but they don't have nukes.

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, November 17, 2023 6:50 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Uh huh.

Last I checked, it wasn't Russia parking missiles on our border. It's the other way around.

Cue TRUMP!! TRUMPTARDS! HOLDOMOR!



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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Friday, November 17, 2023 10:01 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:
Uh huh.

Last I checked, it wasn't Russia parking missiles on our border. It's the other way around.

Cue TRUMP!! TRUMPTARDS! HOLDOMOR!

For the sake of their mental health, Russians are allowed to believe they can destroy the USA. The old M.A.D. doctrine, Mutually Assured Destruction, makes it easier for Russians to sleep at night. But it could be that Russia only survives because the USA is magnanimous. For example:

On August 30, 1945, Major General Lauris Norstad dispatched a document to his superior, General Leslie Groves, outlining a total of 15 “key Soviet cities” to be struck with U.S. atomic weapons, headed by the capital Moscow. This was followed by another 25 “leading Soviet cities” listed for annihilation, topping this latter group was Leningrad, almost destroyed during the Nazi siege finally lifted in late January 1944.

The above nuclear plans were being composed three days before the Second World War had even officially concluded (on September 2, 1945), and a mere two weeks following Japan’s surrender.

These initiatives, targeting the USSR for destruction, were actually developing at least as early as March 1944, at a time when Moscow was a vital wartime ally. Due to ongoing Soviet intelligence reports, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was privy to America’s nuclear project most certainly by April 1942, but quite likely earlier.

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/declassified-cold-war-nuclear-pla
ns-u-s-would-have-blown-up-half-the-world/

The USA has had plenty of time, talent, and money to complete a weapon far nastier, more aggressive, and tightly targeted at Russia than mere H-bombs, some weapon that doesn't kick up clouds of radioactive dust. The Russians might not be as magnanimously allowed to continue as they were after WWII. But Russians aren't going to get any warning from the USA ahead of 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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Friday, November 17, 2023 11:54 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Uh huh.

Last I checked, it wasn't Russia parking missiles on our border. It's the other way around.

Cue TRUMP!! TRUMPTARDS! HOLDOMOR!

For the sake of their mental health, Russians are allowed to believe they can destroy the USA. The old M.A.D. doctrine, Mutually Assured Destruction, makes it easier for Russians to sleep at night. But it could be that Russia only survives because the USA is magnanimous. For example:

On August 30, 1945, Major General Lauris Norstad dispatched a document to his superior, General Leslie Groves, outlining a total of 15 “key Soviet cities” to be struck with U.S. atomic weapons, headed by the capital Moscow. This was followed by another 25 “leading Soviet cities” listed for annihilation, topping this latter group was Leningrad, almost destroyed during the Nazi siege finally lifted in late January 1944.

The above nuclear plans were being composed three days before the Second World War had even officially concluded (on September 2, 1945), and a mere two weeks following Japan’s surrender.

These initiatives, targeting the USSR for destruction, were actually developing at least as early as March 1944, at a time when Moscow was a vital wartime ally. Due to ongoing Soviet intelligence reports, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was privy to America’s nuclear project most certainly by April 1942, but quite likely earlier.

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/declassified-cold-war-nuclear-pla
ns-u-s-would-have-blown-up-half-the-world/

The USA has had plenty of time, talent, and money to complete a weapon far nastier, more aggressive, and tightly targeted at Russia than mere H-bombs, some weapon that doesn't kick up clouds of radioactive dust. The Russians might not be as magnanimously allowed to continue as they were after WWII. But Russians aren't going to get any warning from the USA ahead of time.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Except at that point, we had used up our only two nuclear weapons. We didn't even have one left, let alone 40.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Saturday, November 18, 2023 6:09 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:

Except at that point, we had used up our only two nuclear weapons. We didn't even have one left, let alone 40.
At that point, the USA had an assembly line to build nukes until Japan surrendered.

Before the end of World War II, the United States was planning to detonate a third bomb — and more — on Japan. Signym and most Americans believe that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan was always the plan. But the historical evidence shows otherwise. Not a single document from before Japan’s surrender indicates that only two bombs were to be used. It wasn’t until after the war ended that new meaning was given to the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A surge of memoirs produced by those involved in the Manhattan Project asserted it was common knowledge that two atomic bombs would be enough.

But, before the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one thought two bombs would end the war. Most certainly, not the two men in charge of the Manhattan Project. Three days after the Trinity Test, General Groves wrote to Oppenheimer that it would be necessary to drop Little Boy and Fat Man and possibly two more Fat Man bombs.

The pilot of the plane that dropped Little Boy, Colonel Paul Tibbets, told varied accounts. According to his earliest recollection, it would take five atomic bombs to force surrender. He had fifteen bombers and trained crews ready to go in case they needed to drop more atomic bombs during the war.

On August 13, 1945—four days after the bombing of Nagasaki—two military officials had a phone conversation about how many more bombs to detonate over Japan and when. According to the declassified conversation, there was a third bomb set to be dropped on August 19th. This "Third Shot" would have been a second Fat Man bomb, like the one dropped on Nagasaki. These officials also outlined a plan for the U.S. to drop as many as seven more bombs by the end of October.

https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/articles/third-shot

Signym, Moscow and Leningrad could have been next, and by next I mean in 1945. But little man Truman was scared of the power and responsibility. He choked.

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, November 18, 2023 6:10 AM

SECOND

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


Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov dismiss criticisms of the Russian government and the war in Ukraine as unfounded and urged Russian citizens to self-censor. Putin stated at the International Cultural Forum in St. Petersburg on November 17 that “the head is not only a tool for speaking but is also for thinking before you say something.”[20] Putin commented that many educated, knowledgeable, and talented adults do not follow or understand what is happening, presumably in Ukraine, but acknowledged that “the mood in society and the opinion of a country’s people...is an objective factor that no one can escape.”[21] Peskov similarly stated in a video interview published on November 17 that there should be a level of censorship during wartime that would be unacceptable during peacetime.[22] Peskov stated that the line between criticizing the Russian military and discrediting the Russian forces is very thin and advised those who want to “indiscriminately” speculate about and criticize the Russian military to “think ten times” before doing so.[23]

Peskov also stated that he believes Putin will announce his presidential campaign and that he "does not doubt” that Putin will win the 2024 presidential elections.[24] Peskov also responded to a question about Russian leadership after Putin and the characteristics that Putin’s eventual successor should have, stating that Putin’s successor should be someone exactly like Putin.[25]

May I suggest Putin as Putin’s successor? If you have been following the TV show Foundation, the Emperor cloned himself so that he could always rule. That was very Russian. See Lenin's and Stalin's Mausoleum for how creepy Russians are. https://tv.apple.com/us/show/foundation/umc.cmc.5983fipzqbicvrve6jdfep
4x3

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-17-2023

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, November 18, 2023 6:17 AM

THG





T

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Saturday, November 18, 2023 7:29 AM

SECOND

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


Russia Wants Female Prisoners to Give Birth as Population Fears Grow

Julia Davis, journalist and creator of the Russian Media Monitor, posted a photo Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) showing a billboard featuring a split image of a baby in the womb on one side and a young child wearing military fatigues and saluting.

The image reportedly translates to read: "Protect me today" and "I'll be able to defend you tomorrow."

"The link between Putin's current and potential wars and looming restrictions on abortion is far from subtle," Davis wrote.

In a piece published Thursday by The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Davis documented how Russia's population dwindled by about 997,000 people between October 2020 and September 2021 — its largest ever peacetime decline.

She also noted that the Kremlin has attempted to combat the population decrease by forcibly bringing in Ukrainian refugees, women and some 700,000 children — of which war crime warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, commissioner for Children's Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.

Meduza, an independent Russian- and English-language independent news outlet, reported on November 13 that the anti-abortion movement is being pushed by women like Natalya Moskvitina, who established the "Women For Life" organization.

She reportedly believes rape victims should give birth and that "true womanhood" is only possible through motherhood. She has also stated that women who have fewer than three children are part of a global evil.

The foundation, which has allegedly received grants and funding directly from the Kremlin, also openly instructs its volunteers to employ "manipulation" and deceit when talking with pregnant women.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-wants-female-prisoners-give-birth-low-
birthrate-babies-1844810

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, November 19, 2023 8:36 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Meanwhile, Ukraine sends pregnant women to the front...



*****
Now for an ON TOPIC observation: I noticed on Military Summary channel while there are plenty of videos of Russia bombing, shelling, droning, and attacking Ukrainian positions all along thr front, there are few videos of Urainian troops doing anything. Yesterday IIRC there were two. I don't know what's going on, but it appears that Ukrainian soldiers have stopped fighting, except as infantry.

A Ukrainian pilot defected to Russia and took his SU 27 with him.

Penny Pritzker, wealthy wife of Governor Pritzker and part of the Chicago Dem machine, was delegated to oversee Ukraine reconstruction [pause for laughter] and went to Kiev to give Zelensky and Yermak these stark words:

Quote:
Imagine there may be no help

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/imagine-there-may-be-no-help-conc
lusions-of-us-special-representative-s-visit-to-ukraine/ar-AA1k1fU4

With Yermak apparently in discussion with Alex Soros, I wonder if the plan is to throw Ukraine into Soros' waiting arms, where he will strip Ukraine of its national assets and resources, and Russian assets in Ukraine, in return for a few dollars/ Euros more to keep Kiev officials warm and well fed this winter, where they will continue pretending that Ukraine can be revived.

I think Ukraine is toast*. I believe we will see mass desertion before the end of the year, when soldiers utterly run out of ammo.

* Altho, come to think of it, Ukraine's been toast for at least six months. With an economy, government and military 100% dependent on foreign donations and no tax receipts to speak of, Ukraine disappeared as a functioning nation and economy.

So, to quote Kissinger:

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, November 19, 2023 10:25 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Newsweek: Ukraine Sure Doesn't Look Like a Democracy Anymore

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-sure-doesnt-look-like-democracy-anymo
re-opinion-1844799

Even stupid people eventually figure that one out.

The rest of us knew that Ukraine was never actually a Democracy.

Hell... even the word Democracy itself when used like that is a misnomer.

America isn't a Democracy either. It's a Democratic Republic.

There's a BIG FUCKING DIFFERENCE between the two, but stupid people who watch CNN/MSNBC and read Newsweek for the "truth" have no idea.



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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, November 19, 2023 3:15 PM

SECOND

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


Russia frees killers from prison to go to war and kill in Ukraine

By Mary Ilyushina | November 18, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/18/putin-pardon-criminals
-murderer-ukraine/

Vladislav Kanyus, a young man from Kemerovo in southwestern Siberia, brutally killed his ex-girlfriend Vera Pekhteleva, torturing, suffocating and stabbing her for hours.

He was sentenced in July 2022 to 17 years after a high-profile trial that reignited a national conversation in Russia about the lack of protections against domestic violence and law enforcement indifference to such cases. But then Pekhteleva’s bereaved mother, Oksana, received a photo of Kanyus — not in prison but in a military uniform surrounded by other Russian soldiers.

Her daughter’s murderer was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin in exchange for taking up arms in Ukraine.

“I thought I was going crazy, I keep zooming into this photo and staring into his face in disbelief,” Oksana Pekhteleva said, described the shock it brought to her family. “You know what the human psyche is like, the first stage is denial.”

To avoid calling another controversial mobilization and risk angering the public ahead of presidential elections next year, Russia’s military has relied increasingly on prison recruitment to bolster its ranks, a tactic pioneered by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the late Wagner Group mercenary boss.

According to rights activists, the Russian Defense Ministry has enlisted as many as 100,000 people this year by scouring prison colonies and offering to chop off years from the sentences of people convicted of some of the country’s most gruesome crimes.

Just days after the Kanyus pardon made headlines came news that a former police officer convicted for his role in the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent journalist, was also pardoned by Putin after serving six months of military duty in Ukraine.

The ex-police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2014 as one of five men charged with organizing Politkovskaya’s murder. (Who ordered the killing was never determined.) Politkovskaya’s work, uncovering Russian abuses during the Chechen wars, had resulted in numerous threats and attacks before she was shot to death in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.

Khadzhikurbanov’s lawyer told Russian media that his client recently signed another contract and will remain in the army.

Kanyus was secretly pardoned in April. Vera Pekhteleva’s family was not informed but suspected that he was out of prison when they received the photo of him holding a weapon.

By fall, Kanyus was posting photos of himself barbecuing on social media. About a week ago, Vera’s father got an official notice from the local prosecutor’s office informing them that Kanyus had indeed been pardoned and sent to the front line.

The Kremlin has expressed no regret when questioned about Putin’s decision to free murderers to reinforce the Russian ranks in Ukraine.

“Convicts, including those convicted of serious crimes, atone for crimes with blood on the battlefield, in assault brigades, under bullets, under shells,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters.

Alena Popova, a human rights activist who represents Pekhteleva’s family and has long lobbied for the introduction of a domestic abuse law in Russia’s criminal code, said she is concerned that freed convicts will bring a wave of violence back home, emboldened by their early release.

Popova and her team said they are being flooded by calls and messages from people who have already come in contact with, or fear seeing, their abusers or the killers of their loved ones. Most cases most don’t generate headlines, she said, because people are afraid to speak out.

Affected families fear repercussions because their abusers are fighting in what Putin has described as a “war for Russia’s future.” Any criticism of those taking part in hostilities could be viewed by the authorities as criticism of the war or of the military — which is now illegal in wartime Russia.

Some of the most prominent rights activists in Russia, such as Popova and organizations such as Nasiliu.net (No To Violence), have been labeled foreign agents, a designation that puts anyone in contact with them at risk and further scares off women who might seek help.

“All this is preventing us from shedding light on how massive this problem really is,” Popova said. “These people are coming back from the war with post-traumatic stress disorders — their hands had blood on them before and then they went to Ukraine and killed more people there — and they see that the entire system is backing them so they feel an absolute sense of impunity.”

“Just before you reached out to me, I had a message from a young woman whose friend saw a rapist who long stalked her on the street, and took a handful of pills,” she added. “And this is just one case.”

Families of victims have virtually no recourse to overturn the pardons, said Ilya Politkovsky, Anna Politkovskaya’s son. In a statement published by Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where their mother worked, Politkovsky and his sister, Vera Politkovskaya, said they viewed Khadzhikurbanov’s pardon as “an outrage against the memory of a person killed for her convictions and professional duty.”

“If I am being honest, we suspected this may happen,” Politkovsky told The Washington Post. “When this whole prison recruitment just started, I had a feeling that Khadzhikurbanov would really want to go to war.”

“I think it’s unfair and illegal,” he said. “But, unfortunately, we are powerless and cannot change anything in this regard.”

Pekhteleva’s family has filed a request to launch an investigation into the actions of their local prosecutor’s office, which recommended Kanyus for pardon and did not inform the family about his whereabouts. The family had petitioned to be notified of all of Kanyus’s movements during trial, a measure permitted by Russian law for the safety of crime victims.

“We have been so humiliated by all this and no one wants to bear the responsibility,” Oksana Pekhteleva said. “There is such a flagrant violation of our law. … Why does our state treat us in such an outrageous way?”

The fast track to freedom via the trenches in Ukraine, made possible by the Russian judicial and penitentiary systems, stands in stark contrast to the severe punishments being meted out against antiwar activists for minor infractions.

On Thursday, for example, Alexandra Skochilenko, a pacifist artist from St. Petersburg, was sentenced to seven years for replacing a few supermarket price tags with antiwar messages.

Alexei Gorinov, a member of a Moscow municipal council who was the first person sentenced under a law penalizing the spread of “false information” about the Russian military after the invasion of Ukraine, recently had another case brought against him even though he is already incarcerated.

In a statement, Gorinov’s supporters said that he was being accused of justifying terrorism, because he had made positive statements about an explosion that damaged the Crimean Bridge — Putin’s prized infrastructure project connecting Russia to Crimea, the illegally annexed peninsula.

Kanyus, who never admitted his guilt in court, spent less than half a year in prison for the brutal murder. Five police officers received suspended sentences for negligence after neighbors said they tried for three hours to get help as they heard Vera Pekhteleva’s cries, but there was no response. By the time a neighbor broke the door open with a crowbar, she was already dead.

“I feel like he will still get what’s coming to him, as there is also the judgment and punishment of our Lord,” Oksana Pekhteleva said. “I am not afraid of him but I am afraid that one day he may seduce some other girl, and if he was once capable of doing what he did and got away with it, he may torture her just like he did to my child.”

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, November 19, 2023 9:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


According to Meduza
Quote:
Records from Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service indicate that Russian prisons contained a total of almost 349,000 people at the start of August. By September, that number had decreased by about 1,000 — a change consistent with a years-long trend of the number of prisoners gradually decreasing. Over the two months that followed, however, the prison population declined by more than 23,000, reaching 338,000 by early October and 325,000 by early November.


So that "up to 100,000" is probably a lot like Russian KIA figures: exaggerated to absurdity.

I don't have a problem with prisoners serving their sentences in the military. (Think French Foreign Legion, or any number of Hollywood movies )

I DO have a problem with releasing them into society where they might commit crimes again. It's hard enough returning normal people to society. So unless military service is some sort of reform process, I think this might ultimately be dangerous to society.

Another question is whether they will show the necessary discipline, or will they use their newfound freedom to commit crimes.

And finally, I'd be worried about their level of training. The Kremlin didn't have problems with Prighozin recruiting from prison, and, frankly, neither did I. But where they put their foot down... and there were many places where they could have .. was the number of casualties that those men suffered taking a city that Russia had no intention of taking.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Sunday, November 19, 2023 10:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
According to Meduza
Quote:
Records from Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service indicate that Russian prisons contained a total of almost 349,000 people at the start of August. By September, that number had decreased by about 1,000 — a change consistent with a years-long trend of the number of prisoners gradually decreasing. Over the two months that followed, however, the prison population declined by more than 23,000, reaching 338,000 by early October and 325,000 by early November.


So that "up to 100,000" is probably a lot like Russian KIA figures: exaggerated to absurdity.

I don't have a problem with prisoners serving their sentences in the military. (Think French Foreign Legion, or any number of Hollywood movies )

I DO have a problem with releasing them into society where they might commit crimes again. It's hard enough returning normal people to society. So unless military service is some sort of reform process, I think this might ultimately be dangerous to society.

Another question is whether they will show the necessary discipline, or will they use their newfound freedom to commit crimes.

And finally, I'd be worried about their level of training. The Kremlin didn't have problems with Prighozin recruiting from prison, and, frankly, neither did I. But where they put their foot down... and there were many places where they could have .. was the number of casualties that those men suffered taking a city that Russia had no intention of taking.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM





Examining Prison
Releases in
Response to COVID:
Kelly Lyn Mitchell
Julia Laskorunsky
Natalie Bielenberg
Lucy Chin
Madison Wadsworth
July 2022
LESSONS LEARNED FOR REDUCING THE
EFFECTS OF MASS INCARCERATION

https://robinainstitute.umn.edu/sites/robinainstitute.umn.edu/files/20
22-07/Examining%20Prison%20Releases%20in%20Response%20to%20COVID%20-%20July%202022.pdf

Quote:
We estimate that a total of 80,658 people were released from prisons in 35
jurisdictions (34 states and the federal prison system) due to COVID-related
policies, which was equivalent to about 5-1/2% of the total state and federal
prison population in 2019




More than a million prisoners have been released during COVID-19, but it’s not enough

https://theconversation.com/more-than-a-million-prisoners-have-been-re
leased-during-covid-19-but-its-not-enough-170434

Yeah. Let them all out.

But just not in your neighborhood, right lady?

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, November 20, 2023 6:32 AM

SECOND

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


Here is an article about Ukrainian Commanders being too incompetent to command

After Losing a Leg, One Ukrainian Army Officer Is Mad At His Commanders. But He’s Not Mad at His American-Made M-2 Fighting Vehicle.

The M-2 saves lives, Mykola Melnyk said.

David Axe | Nov 18, 2023,04:03pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/11/18/after-losing-a-leg-on
e-ukrainian-army-officer-is-mad-at-his-commanders-but-hes-not-mad-at-his-american-made-m-2-fighting-vehicle/

Mykola Melnyk was a lawyer in Ukraine when Russia invaded in 2014. Melnyk immediately abandoned his practice and volunteered to help the Ukrainian army to defend Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

Nine years later, Melnyk—now a 38-year-old senior lieutenant—joined the army’s new 47th Mechanized Brigade. The brigade that, on June 9, would lead the initial assaults of Ukraine’s long-planned 2023 counteroffensive.

Melynk’s counteroffensive was a short one. On day one, he stepped on a mine and lost a leg, barely surviving. Looking back on the counteroffensive’s chaotic early days, the lawyer-turned-infantryman has ... opinions.

Ukrainian military leaders underestimated the Russians’ determination to hold territory they’d captured, Melynk said in a wide-ranging interview with Censor. The same leaders changed units’ organization and equipment at the last minute, wrecking their cohesion, Melynk claimed. Ukrainian aviation didn’t show up to support the ground troops, he added.
https://censor.net/en/resonance/3453607/company_commander_of_the_47th_
brigade_mykola_melnyk_the_russians_knew_our_routes_of_advance_and_everything

But for all his criticism of the top brass and the air force, Melynk had only good things to say about the American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles his company rode into battle. “The Bradley withstood everything,” Melynk said.

The 47th Brigade is the main operator of the roughly 200 M-2A2ODS(SA) Bradleys that the United States pledged to Ukraine early this year.

Updated for better situational awareness (the “SA” in the designation) in the aftermath of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm (the “ODS”), the 28-ton, nine-person M-2 with its 25-millimeter autocannon and add-on reactive armor might be the best IFV in Ukrainian service, although Ukraine’s ex-Swedish CV90 could also claim that honorific.

Yes, the 47th Brigade has lost dozens of M-2s. But many of them might be recoverable and repairable. And more importantly, the 47th Brigade hasn’t lost dozens of M-2 crews. The Americans designed the vehicle to protect its occupants, after all. “A Bradley may be hit, but the crew survives,” Melynk said.

The same can’t be said of the BMP-2 IFV, Russia’s answer to the M-2. Hit a BMP-2, Melynk said, and “the entire crew dies.”

Melynk’s own M-2 ate a Russian shell during the assault on June 9. “The projectile hit under the right side,” the former lawyer recalled. “The armor withstood the fragments, but the shockwave tore the wiring in the vehicle.” The driver was concussed, but the M-2’s 600-horsepower diesel engine kept right on running. “We drove on.”

In Melynk’s experience, the M-2 is most vulnerable to attack from the air. Which makes sense, as the Bradley’s designers left the tops of the hull and turret lightly-protected in order to add protection—and weight—to the front and sides.

“The only case when the Bradley did not withstand impacts was from the work of helicopters,” Melynk said. He recalled a raid bv Russian air force Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopters that hit a 47th Brigade assault column. “One Bradley detonated.”

But Melynk stressed that, in other cases, the 47th Brigade’s M-2s rolled right through Ka-52 raids. “In principle, this is a very reliable vehicle,” he said.

The M-2 saves Ukrainian lives. After Melynk stepped on the mine that took his leg, an M-2 speeded in to evacuate him.

But the Bradley’s robustness doesn’t make it some wonderweapon. According to Melynk, some Ukrainian commanders genuinely believed Russian troops would simply give up the first time they saw a Ukrainian M-2—or Leopard 2 tank—rolling toward them.

“The whole plan of the big counteroffensive was based on simple things: a Muscovite sees a Bradley, a Leopard—and runs away,” Melynk said.

That of course didn’t happen. It took the 47th Brigade and other counteroffensive units five months, and many casualties—including Melynk—to advance 10 or a dozen miles along several axes.

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, November 20, 2023 6:35 AM

SECOND

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


The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear

Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.

By Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. | November 16, 2023, 4:39 AM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/ukraine-russia-war-us-congress-ai
d-weapons/

Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.

Now, some of these successes could be reversed because of waning U.S. support. The false claim of a battlefield stalemate has brought about a new narrative that Americans should stop helping Ukraine because it cannot win. Alarmingly, the U.S. House of Representatives has delayed voting on the Biden administration’s request for supplemental military aid. Without new assistance from the United States, Ukraine will soon run out of arms, ammunition, and funds to fight effectively against the occupying Russian forces. Most urgently, the Ukrainian government needs air defense systems to protect its people and civilian infrastructure against Russian missiles and Iranian drones this winter. And Ukraine also needs additional weapons to defend and extend last year’s gains.

Putin clearly understands Ukraine’s precarious position in the U.S. Congress. Recently, he boasted that Ukraine would last only a week if the United States stopped providing military assistance. Putin is wrong: The Ukrainians have made it abundantly clear that they will continue to fight. Recall how, in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainians across the country prepared Molotov cocktails to defend against the Russian invaders. Putin’s statement, however, once again proves that he is not seeking to negotiate. Instead, he is waiting for the United States to quit on its Ukrainian partners so he can launch a new offensive to seize more of Ukraine and destroy its democracy. Without U.S. assistance, more Ukrainians will certainly die, and Ukraine may well lose more territory.

By delaying further assistance to Ukraine, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his supporters are acting against the United States’ own interests. Congress should approve new aid to Ukraine as fast as possible—not as a gesture of charity for Ukraine but as a hard-nosed and clear-headed investment in U.S. security objectives.

The moral argument for supporting Ukraine is clear. Despite the United States’ numerous past mistakes and current flaws, I still believe that it should be a force for good in the world. Russia’s war of colonial conquest is immoral and wrong. We cannot allow the world to return to a state of anarchy, where powerful countries can change borders at will. We cannot stand by as civilians are slaughtered, prisoners tortured, people raped, and children kidnapped. Withdrawing military assistance to Kyiv will not end the war but rather prolong it, leading to more deaths on both sides. The war in Ukraine is a democracy defending itself against a dictatorship. It is simply wrong to let an autocrat invade, occupy, annex, and destroy a country with a political system that Americans and so many others around the world deeply believe in. Global public opinion polls show that a majority of the world’s people prefer democracy to other forms of government. Unlike some other wars, there can be no confusion about right and wrong in this conflict. Those in Congress who cherish international law, human rights, and democratic values should not find it hard to pick a side.

But if moral arguments are not enough to sway members of Congress and their constituents, there are also some compelling realpolitik arguments for providing more aid to Ukraine. U.S. military assistance to Ukraine directly serves U.S. national security far beyond Ukraine. There are four ways a Ukrainian victory advances core U.S. interests.

1. A Ukrainian victory will dramatically diminish the threat from Russia. Even this year, which some observers have wrongly described as a military stalemate, Ukrainian forces have been systematically degrading the Russian army, destroying military infrastructure, and pushing the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Crimea and the western Black Sea. The U.S. government now estimates more than 350,000 Russian military casualties—enormous losses for a fighting force once thought to be the world’s third-most powerful. The Ukrainians have destroyed massive amounts of Russian weaponry, including main battle tanks, fighter aircraft, submarines, and landing ships.

Without any direct U.S. involvement in fighting Russia, U.S. assistance has helped substantially degrade a major military threat to U.S. allies and potentially the United States itself—a strategy called “offshore balancing.” A defeated or vastly depleted Russian army will allow the United States to spend less on European defense, send fewer soldiers to NATO bases in the Baltics and Poland, worry less about being drawn into a future European war, and shift its money and attention toward other problems at home and abroad. Ukrainians are fighting the Russians today so that Poles, Estonians, and perhaps Americans do not have to fight them tomorrow. Russia’s imperial appetites will be neutralized only after a clear, humiliating defeat. A Russia that finally stays within its own borders is clearly in the U.S. national interest.

It is also premature to give up on Ukraine winning back its territory. This year, Ukrainian forces had to launch a counteroffensive without the weapons they needed to do so effectively. If the United States and Ukraine’s many other supporters stay the course, that will not be the case in future counteroffensives. Senior Ukrainian officials I met in Kyiv in September believe, as many outside experts do, that time is on Ukraine’s side in a drawn-out fight, especially when their warriors are better protected by fighter jets and air defenses, better armed with longer-range missiles, and better equipped with more sophisticated, domestically developed drones.

After the war ends, Ukraine will emerge as a powerful U.S. and NATO ally. Ukraine’s military will be one of Europe’s largest and best-armed, a defensive bulwark to deter future renewed Russian aggression and keep the peace. Already, Ukraine is moving away from its Soviet-era systems and adopting U.S.- and NATO-made weapons. After the war, Ukraine should quickly be invited to join NATO as it will become a serious provider of security for all of Europe. Ukraine could also become a reliable weapons supplier to NATO—who is building better sea drones than Ukraine today? It will also emerge as a major customer of U.S. weapons. More generally, a democratic, market-oriented, reconstructed Ukraine embedded in the European Union and NATO will be a significant economic partner for both Europe and the United States.

For Russia, defeat in Ukraine will speed up the demise of Putin’s domestic system of autocratic rule, just as the Soviet Union’s bloody and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan hastened the end of the Communist dictatorship. The end of Putinism will not happen overnight; it will most likely gain momentum only after Putin’s death or incapacitation. The United States and its European allies have a profound interest in weakening autocratic rule in Russia. A Russian defeat on the battlefield accelerates that outcome.

The opposite in equally true. If the United States abandons Ukraine now, the Russian threat to U.S. allies in Europe will only grow. Putin’s regime will become even stronger and threaten the United States’ democratic European allies even longer into the future.

2. The war’s outcome has clear implications for U.S. security interests in Asia. A Ukrainian victory, bolstered by strong U.S. and allied support, will make Chinese President Xi Jinping think harder about invading Taiwan, an assessment I heard repeatedly from top officials in Taiwan during a trip there last summer. If the United States continues to help Ukraine, Xi will be more likely to believe that the U.S. commitment to help Taiwan is credible. A U.S.-supported Ukrainian victory will also undermine Xi’s hypothesis that the United States is a declining, overextended power and that the democratic world can no longer act in unity for any sustained period.

Again, the opposite is equally true: If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, Xi will feel emboldened. If the United States stopped supporting Ukraine, Xi might assess that U.S. support for Taiwan would be temporary and feckless. Just as Putin is trying to do today in Ukraine, Chinese leaders will wait for politicians in Washington to doubt the wisdom of military and financial assistance to an embattled Taiwan and then call on Taipei to negotiate. To all those Republican members of Congress who argue that the focus should be on countering the China threat: Defeating Putin is a critical component of that grand strategy. Cutting military aid to Kyiv is precisely the wrong message to send to Beijing.

3. The war’s outcome will affect global U.S. interests. A Ukrainian victory would be a win for all those wanting to preserve the rules-based international order established and maintained by the United States since the end of World War II. Among that order’s amazing achievements have been the end of European overseas imperialism, establishing the taboo of annexation, and setting the global rules that brought an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity to the world. Wars of outright conquest and annexation, so frequent before 1945, rarely occurred, even during intense superpower competition during the Cold War. These outcomes served U.S. interests and made the world safer for Americans. A return to a Hobbesian world of annexation and imperialism would not serve U.S. interests. Americans would be dragged into these conflicts and potentially be at war with other major powers. The United States has no interest in returning to that kind of world.

4. The outcome of the war will have major implications for the contest between democracies and autocracies. Throughout its history, the United States’ enemies and rivals have been dictatorships, not other democracies. Think of imperial Japan, imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. When autocracies become democracies, it makes the United States safer. Think of post-1945 Japan, Germany, and Italy and then post-communist Europe, including Russia during its brief democratic phase in the early 1990s. Similarly, powerful autocracies make Americans less secure. Think of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A Ukrainian victory will chalk up a win in the democracy column, perhaps even helping to reverse a nearly two-decade global trend of democratic erosion. In the great-power contest with China over the next several decades, democratic and liberal ideas constitute some of the greatest advantages of the United States and its democratic allies; this makes defending democracy a national interest. This is not just idealism: As former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright argued, “Promoting democracy … is not just the right thing to do. For America it is the smart thing to do.” Nowhere is this struggle of ideas more acute than in Ukraine. If Ukraine wins, the momentum for democrats around the world will grow, including those in neighboring Russia and Belarus. If Ukraine loses, the momentum for dictators will grow. The stakes are that high.

It is time for Congress to vote on a new assistance package for Ukraine. A yea vote is not only good for Ukraine but also a prudent investment in the national security of the United States.

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, November 20, 2023 7:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Fuck Ukraine.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, November 20, 2023 8:30 AM

SECOND

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


Russia is such a successful country compared to the EU.

Russia's Desperate Scramble To Stave Off Demographic Catastrophe
Nov 20, 2023 at 5:48 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-population-demographic-catastrophe-abo
rtions-children-1845110

Valery Seleznyov, a member of the Russian State Duma, last week proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive.

"Russia really does have a demographic problem," the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, said on November 12 as he called for a nationwide ban on "encouraging women to have abortions."

"It's a vast country, but there are not enough people. Not even mentioning the economy...We really need more people, this is obvious, everyone admits it," he said.

During a meeting with members of his Civic Chamber on November 3, Putin said Russia has an acute abortion problem.

In recent months, private clinics in Russian regions—including in the Chelyabinsk region in the Ural mountains and in Tatarstan in central Russia—have stopped offering abortions, according to authorities. The move is also being considered in Russia's Kaliningrad region.

Authorities have also started to restrict access to abortion pills and emergency contraception amid a surge in demand that followed the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In 2022, sales of abortion pills were up 60 percent, according to Nikolay Bespalov, development director of the RNC Pharma analytical company, the Associated Press reported.

Russia for decades has been experiencing a population decline, and this appears to have worsened amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, with high casualty rates and men fleeing the country to avoid being conscripted to fight.

As of January 1, 2023, 146.45 million people were estimated to be residing on the Russian territory, marking a decrease of approximately 530,000 from the previous year, according to Statista.

It is estimated that Russia's population will fall to about 132 million in the next two decades. The United Nations has predicted that in a worst-case scenario, by the start of the next century, Russia's population could almost halve to 83 million.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's Foreign Ministry via email for comment.

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, November 20, 2023 11:36 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Case for Supporting Ukraine Is Crystal Clear

Note to Congress: Ukraine aid is not charity but serves critical U.S. interests.

By Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. | November 16, 2023, 4:39 AM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/ukraine-russia-war-us-congress-ai
d-weapons/

Last year, the Ukrainians defeated Russia’s invading army on the battlefield, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin all of his core objectives for the war. He failed to de-militarize Ukraine, install a puppet government in Kyiv, bring Ukraine back into Russia’s fold, and stop NATO expansion. Today, Ukrainians are more committed to their nationhood than ever, and their democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, remains in power. Ukraine now has a stronger military and closer ties to NATO than ever before; Finland has joined the alliance, and Sweden is set to follow. In 2022, Ukraine’s armed forces won the Battle of Kyiv, the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Battle of Kherson, liberating more than 50 percent of the territory that Russia had occupied since launching its full-scale invasion.


Blah blah blah...

Even the headline is wrong. We have NO interest in Ukraine, critical or otherwise. And every sentence after that is a lie.

That's one thing I appreciate about fff.net: I can get a dose of crazy propaganda all in one place, instead of having to hunt for it all over the net.



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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, November 20, 2023 11:41 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Demographics of the EU:


Birth rate
9.5 births per 1,000 (2020 est.)[2]
Death rate
10.7 deaths per 1,000 (2021 est.)[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Monday, November 20, 2023 12:06 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:
Demographics of the EU:


Birth rate
9.5 births per 1,000 (2020 est.)[2]
Death rate
10.7 deaths per 1,000 (2021 est.)[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_Union
Signym, I am assuming you don't realize that Europe is grotesquely over-populated (denser than India) while Russia is ridiculously underpopulated (and getting more underpopulated each time a Ukrainian kills another worthless Rusky ):

Russian population density, people per square km, 9

European Population density, people per square km, 2021 - Country rankings: The average for 2021 based on 47 countries was 599 people per square km.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/population_density/Europe/

If you compare economies, Russia is the size of Canada, a country that can well afford to build more nukes than Russia or North Korea but Canada is not so stupid as to actually do it. And certainly, Canada is not stupid enough to threaten the world with a nuclear holocaust, something Russia and North Korea do every day because those stupid leaders think it is smart to make threats and call out red lines that must not be crossed or else nuclear holocaust.

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, November 20, 2023 10:26 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


WTH does poppulation density have to do with anything? That just means there are more than enuf resources for everyone.

And, with apologies to our neighbors to the north, their economy is unbalanced: they only produce what the USA wants to import*, and their so-called GDP is overly driven by rampant real estate speculation.

* Their basic production like cement, fabrics, chemcicals etc is low, and they're way light on technology. They couldn't produce a rocket if their lives depended on it, for example and I haven't heard of any advances in material science, have you?

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Tuesday, November 21, 2023 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


There Are Only Two Options Left In Ukraine

Nearly two years after the Russian invasion, I traveled the country to pose a fundamental question to the Ukrainians I met: How does this end?

By Matt Gallagher, Published: Nov 20, 2023
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a45805515/ukraine-russian-invasi
on/

A Soul in Bakhmut

Victory is now much more than a word in Ukraine. It’s a conviction, an aim to be willed into existence. Even the bitter fighters, even the most dejected know it’s victory or death. But what it’s costing to get there transcends any quantifiable figure or metric. Numbers lose their meaning quickly, at any rate. Personal stories are the only measures that don’t fade.

And measures in wartime are whole lives.

Valerii Fedorchuk, a Ukrainian soldier who carries himself with both assurance and stirs of sadness, points toward the valley below us, where a row of ruined buildings scars the horizon. Heavy artillery rumbles from that direction, followed by plumes of smoke. Wherever the shells end up landing, it’s not where we stand, in the hills surrounding the Bakhmut front in eastern Ukraine. It’s a bright August afternoon and he’s taken me here to provide a panorama of the battlefield. Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian defenses is underway and moving. It’s going slower than many Western observers predicted or hoped, but it is moving. And every meter of land matters in a war that many of those same observers believed would be over in seventy-two hours last February, with the Kremlin in control of their proud, smaller neighbor.

That didn’t happen, in large part because of people like Fedorchuk. Fifty years-old, barrel-chested with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, his call sign of “Soul” neatly fits his disposition. He strikes me as the kind of father who, in peace time, would be at every one of his kid’s soccer games, encouraging yet not afraid to let the referee know when a foul is missed. He’s not in peace, though. And as an artilleryman with the 3rd Assault Brigade, he’s resolute in what must be done in the weeks, months, perhaps years to come. “Victory will be achieved when we kick the enemy out [of Ukraine] and make them realize we don’t need them, that they should stay where they belong.”

“Bakhmut used to be a beautiful city,” he continues. “Now it is like a cancer, how it looks, how it feels. And like any cancer, we must kill it to save the body. It is the result of the Russian world [coming into it]. Anything the Russian world touches turns to that.”

Outgoing rockets fired closer to our position answer the artillery. This machinery, this industrial violence, sounds with fantastical dissonance in the countryside it emerges from, green trees and yellow hills and indolent blue streams that belong in a painting. Such is life in the Donbas in 2023.

Like so many now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Fedorchuk never thought he’d become a soldier. Once a professional weightlifter, Fedorchuk was coaching college-aged athletes and running a human-rights nonprofit when Russia invaded last year. After some discussion, he and his family decided to leave their home in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, for the relative safety of western Ukraine. Days later, Irpin came under heavy shelling and temporary Russian occupation, leaving up to 300 of their neighbors and friends dead.

He spent the initial months of the war running supplies and aid from the Polish border to frontline villages. As Western attention waned, so did the amount of aid, causing him to wonder what more he could do. So he decided to enlist, in part to represent his family, he says. He has two sons and a younger brother with serious health issues. This matters in Ukrainian society, to have a brother or son or mother or sister in uniform. It matters a lot.

We walk through some reserve trenches dug in case the Russians mount another advance. Fedorchuk stresses they’ll never have to use them, but their presence suggests that someone somewhere has considered otherwise. They are deep and narrow and tight, which helps limit the impact zone of munitions dropped from drones.

“The Russians now, they fight pretty good,” Fedorchuk says, explaining that the enemy’s tactics have evolved since the disastrous attempt to seize Kyiv last spring. Russian suicide drones like the Lancet, a cheap, single-use weapon, and the Chinese-made Mavic 3 quadcopter, are particularly feared by Ukrainian fighters. “But as we push them back, we hear their excuses over the radio. They say it has to be Americans or Poles, all of NATO … it’s too embarrassing to admit,” he says, his voice deadpan, “that it is only us.”

Fedorchuk’s unit, the 3rd Assault Brigade, has made its name fighting in Bakhmut, holding the city through the winter and into much of the spring through terrible, World War I-like conditions. Formed last January, it emerged from veterans of the Azov Regiment, which has a reputation in the West for its founding far-right politics, but many in Ukraine now primarily associate it with military ferocity. They held out for months in underground steelworks during 2022’s Siege of Mariupol, an act of bravery that had a profound effect on Ukrainians’ views of the regiment. There’s a war for memory going on, and Fedorchuk is mindful of it.

“I joined 3rd Assault because they were ready to fight,” he says plainly. “They had real, relevant military experience.” And what about the other thing? Are Azov, well, Nazis?

“I love our allies,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “They do much for us. But if it were not for Americans, the idea of ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ would not be a thing.”

(That’s not quite accurate—Azov’s old insignia featured an inverted Wolfsangel, after all—but he’s got a point. I think of an acquaintance who worked as a journalist in Ukraine for the decade preceding Russia’s invasion, who once said to me that in those years, sometimes the only way to get Western readers to care about a story was to have an extremism angle in it. So whatever the truth of that angle, whatever its relevance, it became magnified to those reading about Ukraine from faraway.)

Numbers lose their meaning quickly. Personal stories are the only measures that don’t fade.

We emerge from a trench and stake a claim on a nearby grassy hill. There’s more artillery from over there, then there’s more rockets from over here. Fedorchuk goes on to say that most in his unit are people who suffered from the Russian world, from eastern Ukraine, the sort of men Putin says want to be proper Russian citizens. He himself speaks both Ukrainian and Russian but admits he’s still more comfortable with the latter.

“I am old but I try hard to change,” he says with a laugh when my interpreter compliments his Ukrainian. “My sons speak perfect Ukrainian. This is important to me.”

His eldest son is twenty, studying international politics elsewhere in Europe. The son keeps asking to return to fight alongside his father. The father keeps telling him no.

Only now do I realize the depths of what he meant by serving to represent his family.

“I fight now so he has purpose,” Fedorchuk says. “He’ll be needed after the victory.”

The rubble of Hotel Druzhba, Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine

A stratum of broken window glass crunches under my boots. There’s police around and the Red Cross and recovery crews and Polish TV news and no one anywhere seems in any particular hurry. Time passes differently, I suppose, in aftermath.

This residential block was obliterated by two Russian Iskander ballistic missiles two dinnertimes ago, the weapons staggered apart by forty minutes to ensure first responders were struck during the second attack. It’s called a double tap.

In Ukrainian, Druzhba translates to “friendship.” This is one of those dark ironies that only the stupidity of war can ever account for. Nine people were killed in these strikes. More than eighty were wounded. There’s nothing like a legitimate military target anywhere close.

Residents say the hotel was popular with journalists and aid workers. This is happening more and more across the central and eastern parts of the country. Deliberate targeting of voices with reach. Down the street, I watch a young man on the fifth floor of an apartment building sift through the remnants of his bedroom while looking up at the hole he once called a ceiling. He argues with his mom, standing a couple feet away in her own open silo. On the ground level beneath them, a bicycle remains chained to a fence. It’s somehow untouched, pristine. It holds a basket with drooping pink flowers in it.

Forest War

Some 260 miles northwest of the Bakhmut trenches, beyond the scarred city of Kharkiv, through a winding stretch of highway pockmarked by craters, past ceaseless fields of tall, fading sunflowers and harvested corn, there’s another type of war being fought. It’s quieter, defined by its dense forest terrain instead of urban combat. But there are still bullets and drones and mortars and minefields, not to mention the toils of daily life in a machine that may well, at any moment, require you die for it.

Media and Yarko are soldiers I befriended during my previous trips to Ukraine. (They both requested pseudonyms be used for this article so they could speak freely.) They’re serving in Sumy Oblast, in the same special intelligence company. Sometimes their missions are straight reconnaissance, sometimes they’re more unconventional. Sometimes they conduct offensive operations across the Russian border. Their main enemy in recent weeks has been a Spetsnaz unit (Russian special forces) probing Ukrainian infrastructure in the region and ambushing solo vehicles driving forest roads. Stopping those efforts has become a new priority.

“It’s a lot of cat and mouse in the woods,” Yarko says, describing a type of warfare NATO recon soldiers have trained for over decades, with minimal opportunities to do it for real. Over our lunch conversation, Media and Yarko describe privately-donated drones that have saved them from ambushes, carved-out RPG shells they turn into homemade aerial bombs with 3D-printed fins, and hand-me-down munitions acquired from sources they couldn’t even begin to guess at that include an honest-to-Christ Mk 2 “pineapple” hand grenade that must have first been issued to a soldier sometime around the outbreak of the Korean War. The Western world expects Ukraine to fight like a NATO country without quite outfitting it as one.

Media is thirty-nine, and worked in government in western Ukraine before the invasion. He enlisted in June 2022 as a combat medic and had the continual misfortune of proving himself capable. Recently he earned a battlefield commission, was promoted to lieutenant, and now leads the equivalent of a platoon. He hates it, he says, because he feels like he’s always letting someone down, even when he makes the only correct decision available.

“Hating it is proof that you’re the right man for the job,” Yarko offers.

The Ukrainian man nods in a way that doesn’t necessarily signify agreement.

Yarko, forty-one, is an American and veteran of the US Air Force. He first came to Ukraine as a volunteer military trainer last spring. After spending “several months” thinking it over, he enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine two months ago. While there’s possibly a couple thousand Americans serving across Ukraine’s international legion, or in small, patchwork legion-like units, Yarko believes he’s one of the few Westerners with an official AFU-contract.

“It was time to do something where it was structured, had some support elements,” he says, pointing out that in addition to all the ethical reasons he had for joining, he now has medical coverage for the first time since coming over. He’s taught himself Ukrainian and is now conversational in it. Though his own military background wasn’t exactly this, he’s found similarities.

“Brotherhood is brotherhood,” he says. “You still have the same dynamics and personalities. You have the really smart guy. You have the two jocks that lift weights all the time.” When I ask what’s not alike, he echoes the refrain of damn near every Western vet I’ve encountered in Ukraine since last March: “This is just way, way different … there’s no question that you're fighting for good versus evil. It's not any question as to why you're in the war, which was usually the case for us [in Iraq and Afghanistan].”

Both Yarko and Media spent much of the winter in Bakhmut, part of a mass defense of the war’s nexus before Russia’s Wagner Group finally—and ultimately temporarily—seized control of the city in late May. Media worked with reconnaissance teams during his months there, and slides away from my probing questions about the experience. “We were protected by God,” he says. “That’s all I know.”

Yarko shares a bit more. He was charged with helping train new arrivals during his months there, right before they went off to the trenches. Many of them were draftees. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” he says. “The hell of holding the line in Bakhmut will be something that no words could ever actually truly depict … they would typically send BMPs [infantry fighting vehicles] and groups to just come through [the] tree line and assault wave after wave after wave after wave after wave … it was no strategy, or I should say no tactics. It was just [human] waves.”

His face drops. The words end there.

Media opens up, too, eventually. Leaves are translated to “vacations” in Ukraine, and Media’s on his way back from one. I ask what coming and going from this war is like.

“My mind was still here,” he admits. He refuses to go into his home city in western Ukraine. He finds it too jarring, and doesn’t like how he feels about the civilians going about their normal lives, even though he intellectually understands that’s part of what he’s protecting. “I cannot stabilize. I cannot feel the ground,” he says. He met his family at a cottage in the Carpathians instead.

He didn’t find much solace until the last day. “We spent the whole time in the water. And I guess the water just made changes with me. I washed everything away with the waterfalls and swimming with children in their pool. And the water is the only thing that made an effect that positive.”

There’s much sadness in his voice. There’s much resolve in it, as well. I ask him how this ends.

“I’m not pretending anymore.” The once taciturn Media cuts loose. “I am deeply sure there will be no victory. There will just be the finish. That's the stop of the war, of the active phase of war. And then the war will be moved to another phase, like a mirror of 2014.”

He pauses, unsure if he should keep going. He does.

“A new generation in the Donbas has grown up already, children who lost their parents, their fathers, fighting the Ukrainian enemy, and they're watching the TV, and that's the main source of influence on their brain. So they are thinking another way. And that might take a great source not only from Ukraine, but from the world, to make them change.”

Media has had it with war, as only a good soldier fighting one can.

“There’s too many bombs,” he says. “Too many mines, too much dirty territory. There’s just too much.”

A gas station, frontline adjacent, somewhere in southern or eastern Ukraine

An American fighter warns us: do not linger at a particular gas station near the front. That strip’s been shelled before, he says, but still, damn near every Ukrainian commander in the area goes there to shoot the breeze, use a real bathroom, eat hot dogs.

We go anyway, though try not to stay long. As we’re about to depart, my interpreter’s phone rings. A public-affairs official in Kyiv is frustrated with us because I filled out some paperwork wrong. So we wait in the parking lot of the gas station while he figures it out. Something with a rocket engine flies directly over us. It sounds like a small plane but faster, louder. Every hot-dog eating soldier in the parking lot takes cover until the monstrosity in the sky clears out. The noise of nothingness returns.

Enemy of the Kremlin

We meet Olena Bilozerska, a senior lieutenant in the Artan Battalion of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (DIU) in a sleepy village in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. There’s a clean after-rain smell in the air, and kids clamber up a World War II tank monument in the central square. We’re two hours late because the direct route was being shelled by Russian artillery across the river. So much of Ukraine is now like this. The line between war and peace can fade quickly.

“It’s a unique possibility to defend your country with a weapon in your hands,” Bilozerska says about why she serves. Now forty-four, she first joined the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps in 2014 and went to the frontline that spring. The particular weapon in her hands tends to be the Zbroyar Z-10, her sniper rifle of choice. Though self-taught, she soon proved herself an excellent marksman and was assigned as her unit’s sniper. She detailed her experiences there in a memoir published in 2019, Diary of an Illegal Soldier, including a memorable scene in which she kills two enemy combatants and wounds another.

Her book, and subsequent public profile, caused much consternation across the border. Kremlin propagandists have made bogus announcements of her death on multiple occasions, and also accused her of being a war criminal, or fraud, or somehow both. None of it bothers her. “We have a saying in Ukraine,” she says. “The dog which is barking is not biting. So let them do that.”

A native of Kyiv, Bilozerska became an officer after her initial stint, and later spent time as an artillery platoon leader. She demobilized in 2020, resuming life as a civilian, writer, and veterans’ advocate. “But I knew every day,” she says, “that if a full-scale invasion appeared, or [there was] any kind of possibility that Russia would attack us more intensively, I would return.”

Slender, with strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, Bilozerska exudes a professional-military cool under a camouflage hat and behind aviator sunglasses. Though she may once have been an anomaly as a Ukrainian woman in uniform, Bilozerska stresses that she no longer is. She estimates that about 5,000 women soldiers now serve along the front doing various jobs.

I ask what her country needs more of. The former artillery platoon leader does not hesitate. “The great problem in the Ukrainian army, the main thing we need more of, is artillery shells,” she says. This is something I hear across regions, across different sections of the front, across rank and background and specialty. But no one makes the case for more artillery more firmly than Bilozerska. “Even more than jets and planes, this is how we will win. It affects everything, where we advance, how quickly.”

Later I ask Bilozerska what I ask most every Ukrainian: how does she believe this ends? For her, peace is possible only through Ukrainian victory.

“Any peace document that the Russians can sign is worthless,” she says, “because they will not implement it, they will not abide by it. I want [Western readers] to know that Russia will use excuses just to restore themselves and attack again.”

The rubble of Ria Pizza, Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine

From amidst the wreckage of a pizzeria in the small industrial city of Kramatorsk, I begin to realize the extent to which Russia is willing to go to exterminate its neighboring country. Thirteen people were killed here while out at dinner in late June, including three teenagers. Russia wants more than just to occupy Ukraine, I see. It wants to end it. As a place, as an idea.

“No words are needed after a tragedy, all words slide into a whirlpool,” the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina once said. “Perhaps it is justice that is needed in such moments.” Amelina was among those killed here in Kramatorsk, thirty-seven years old and only beginning to find the international readership her work deserved. We spot a framed photo of her at a nearby memorial for those murdered in the strike. I close my eyes and search for the words to convey what this all is, and means, and what is lost when we turn away from it.

Twenty Days in Mariupol

It’s been almost seventeen months since Mykyta Leutskiy fled his home city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine. He’s still not sure why he was spared when so many of his friends and neighbors were not. “Our destinies were side by side,” he says. “Until they weren’t.”

Twenty-four years old, Leutskiy is big and bashful and keeps looking away to the ground as he rummages through what he calls his “damaged memories.” He lives in Dnipro now, a vibrant riverfront city located in the hard center of Ukraine that’s become both a hub for various aid organizations and a sanctuary for displaced civilians fleeing the battles and occupiers.

Last February, like many Ukrainians, like many across the world, Leutskiy thought normalcy would endure, that peace, or something like it, would hold. “We just didn’t believe that anything like that would happen to us. That's not usually what you plan for in your life.”

But Russian artillery began pounding Mariupol the first day of the invasion, February 24, 2022. About forty friends and coworkers gathered at a German pub near the city center that Leutskiy managed because it had a large basement and plenty of frozen foods they could share. Most in the group believed whatever the Russians had planned would soon pass by them, like a summer rain.

Twenty infernal days of bombardment and siege followed.

“Every day was different,” Leutskiy says. He can rattle them off one by one. There was the day they heard their childhood school had been destroyed. And the day the windows shattered on the first floor from a nearby explosion, which led to a mass sickness from the cold. The endless rumors of parents and siblings missing, some found, some ever-missing. Then there was the day they ventured out for more supplies and saw neighborhood kids dead from the shelling, strewn across the street separate and alone, an image Leutskiy knows he’ll carry with him to his own last moment.

The Russian army surrounded Mariupol in full on March 2. The siege of the port city would continue for weeks. On March 16, the theatre house was razed by Russian airstrikes, killing as many as 600 people sheltering there. The day after, Leutskiy’s father insisted it was time to go.

This was no easy choice. There had been reports of Russian military firing on civilian vehicles. And it was a dice-roll if Russian checkpoints would even let them pass, particularly military-age males like Leutskiy. But to stay in their native city would be to accept becoming part of what would soon be known Mariupol’s “caravan of death.”

Their small convoy of three vehicles left Mariupol on March 17, joining a large flow of traffic heading west. There were a lot of children in their group, and Leutskiy thinks they, and a man with shrapnel in his spine who needed medical attention, are why the Russian soldiers waved them through the checkpoints.

More than a year later, “I’m still surprised at how people act regular here,” he says, gesturing toward a bustling commercial strip. Leutskiy’s settled in well—an owner of an area restaurant was joining the Ukrainian army, and upon taking a liking to the young Leutskiy, put him and a colleague in charge of his business.

But Dnipro’s not home. Mariupol is. Leutskiy’s not sure he’ll ever return, though.

“I feel like it will never be the same [there],” he says. As candid and open as he’s been, he’s avoided eye contact much of our conversation. Only now does he look up and hold against my scrutiny. “But I really do want to go back.”

Restaurant in a cellar, Derybasivska Street, Odesa

It’s Saturday night in the party district of Odesa and we manage to find the one guy here who wants to talk about the war. He finds us, rather, as a Ukrainian cover of “Come Together” plays and while a waitress fetches him beer after beer. She’s Koryo-saram, a descendent of Koreans forcefully deported to the fringes of Soviet empire in the 1930s by Stalin. I want to talk to her more about it, but the drunk man won’t allow it. He’s a soldier, infantry, home on leave for a few days. Are we CIA Navy SEAL Ranger Biden advisors or what, he wants to know. Even as he grins, there’s violence on his face.

“I want a good helmet,” he says. He’s shouting now. “A soldier’s helmet.” He pantomimes the one he’s been given, a single-strap steel pot that never keeps on his head when he runs. We stay for a while, but as we rise from our table to leave, he clasps my forearm, hard. He’s a big man. I wouldn’t want to encounter him in a trench.

“Please,” he says. His voice is half-sloppy rage, half-drunken clarity. “Please help.”

I look down into the hollow black of his eyes to find a man already certain of his own death.

New Veterans

In Lviv, the gateway city in the far west that’s about as removed from the battles as anyplace in Ukraine can be, I meet Orest Krykovskii, a fifty-four-year-old historian and photographer who volunteered for military service right after the invasion. He’s beginning to tell his journey of going from citizen to soldier to wounded veteran when a young woman sitting adjacent to us in a coffeeshop leans over and says, in Ukrainian, “????? ??? ?? ??????.” It’s the equivalent of “Thank you for your service.”

But it’s nothing like when an American says it. There’s no throat-clearing, or veiled political tribalism. She says it because she means it from the bottom of her soul. Then she departs. Krykovskii tears up and is quiet. “I feel that it helps remind me what I was fighting for,” he eventually says.

Krykovskii served as an infantryman with the 103rd Territorial Defense Brigade. A quiet, contemplative man, he joined because he couldn’t shake a hard question: If not me, then who? Little training followed, he says, though he did already know how to fire weapons. He was sent to the Donbas, in May 2022, a little more than two months after he’d enlisted.

It was the first time he’d been to that part of his country. “If I’m being honest,” he says, “I was amazed because it always felt like enemy territory [before]. But being there, in the hills, the beauty of the terrain, I felt the Cossack spirit for the first time. It was just perfect. I knew then: it is real Ukraine.”

His first experience in combat came via heavy artillery. “I know that fear. How it feels like when it’s falling somewhere near you.” He points out, politely, that none of the Western trainers he encountered before being sent east had prepared them for this. I don’t interrupt though I know why: none of them, none of us, ever experienced anything like it.

Only a few days after, before a massive Russian offensive in the area, artillery struck the abandoned school his platoon had taken for temporary quarters, near the small village of Bilohorivka. Ten were killed in the blink of an eye.

“We had a father and son serving together in [that] platoon,” Krykovskii says. “After that shelling, the son died. So the father was left alone. And he was an example for us, how we should act. If he was holding strong, why should we be weak?”

Another Lviv-area infantry veteran, Fedir, spent eight days on the front before getting wounded. (Fedir is a pseudonym so he can speak freely.) After being drafted last autumn, he was sent to the Donbas after one month of training. “I’m lucky,” he says. “Before, people were sent to the close-combat areas with only one or three days.”

In his early thirties and a car mechanic in his past life, Fedir doesn’t resent his military service, but he does speak with the reckless honesty of a soldier who’s over telling half-truths. He describes the trenches as “a different planet.” He talks about the one-kilometer walk from his unit’s command post to the trenches like it was the path to hell itself. The days began with heavy shellings every dawn. At night came the phosphorous bombs, but at least then, he says, you could risk a piss.

He laughs when I ask about Ukrainian artillery support. “Basically, we had only just rifle and that's it,” he says. “We felt the full dominance of Russian forces in the air, on the ground, because there is nothing you can do with just a rifle.”

He describes a common Russian tactic as sending human waves at the Ukrainian lines, using their “cannon meat” to detect where the heavy Ukrainian guns were. Then artillery and mortars would be called upon those positions.

“You will stay on the frontline until you be[come] 200 or 300,” Fedir says. These are the code words for killed in action and wounded in action, respectively.

The harsh January winter was slowly killing him. Until it saved him. In -20 Celsius degrees, during a bitter storm, his feet froze. Medics rendered him combat ineffective and, thinking of his young son the entire way, Fedir popped a handful of painkillers and hobbled six kilometers to the casualty-collection point. He’s dealing with lingering neurological damage but knows he’s better off than many. As he continues physical therapy, he awaits a military medical commission that’ll determine his future. It’s possible he’ll be sent back to the trenches in the months to come.

I think I have Fedir pretty well pegged: the brave but furious soldier populates every army worth a damn. Then he surprises me when I ask if he resents the politicians who often bring up “Victory” but seem to never explain what that will entail.

“I'm completely alright with it because I have to separate the political speech from the war,” he says. “All wars have this in common. Because the politicians, they are supposed to say that, right? The citizen is supposed to believe.”

Across the city, Krykovskii also awaits a medical commission. On September 27, a bit after nine in the morning, four long months after losing half his platoon at the school, a Russian drone caught him and a colleague out in the open. They’d been sent on a mission to establish communication with headquarters, and “someone had to go.” An artillery round landed soon thereafter. There was a flash and an explosion. Shooting pains in his left leg and hip let him know he was alive but hurt badly. His friend was somehow unhurt, helping him first with the tourniquet and then to a friendly pickup truck sent to investigate.

“I was just lucky, I felt God behind my shoulders,” Krykovskii says. “Probably it was my mother’s prayers.”

Doctors would pull seven distinct shards from his leg and hip, though two remain and “will stay with me forever.” One struck a large nerve and now he wears a black compression sleeve on the length of this leg. He’s not sure he’ll be able to walk much in the future. He joined in 2022, he says, in part because he’d regretted not doing so in 2014, when Russia first seized Crimea and entered the Donbas. He’d long wondered what if. Now he knows. He’s completed the soldier’s cycle, is back home in Lviv, glad to be alive yet uncertain of what it meant, and even more uncertain of what awaits.

I ask how he now feels about going to fight.

“I did my part,” he says.

And what of yesterday? What about his life before?

“Now that,” he says, “feels faraway.”
____________________________
Matt Gallagher is the author of four books, including Youngblood, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Daybreak, a novel about the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict that will be published in February 2024 by Atria/Simon & Schuster. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his family.

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, November 21, 2023 6:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I've been reading reports of Ukrainian "anti-retreat forces" for a while. Most recently read a report that Ukraine won't evacuate dead or wounded soldiers from the east (Russian) side of the Dneiper, and if you insist on being evacuated they'll take you back across the river and shoot you. But, that was an expat Russian saying that.

But, for the first time ever, I saw a documented video of Ukrainian shooting at Ukrainians on Military Summary Channel, and the pro-Ukrainian commenter didn't interpret this as "friendly fire" but bc a forward unit refused to advance into Avdiivka and the unit to the rear was firing on them with what looked like tank rounds.

He mentioned Ukrainian anti-retreat forces again today when he was mapping out the front line in Avdiivka.

****

One comment that I heard was that soldiers in the front line know how desperate the situation is, but that Kiev has done such a good job gaslighting its own people that those in cities far behind the front lines, like Lvov/Lviv and Kiev think everything's going OK. Especially since dollars and euros are flowing there. Coffee shops are open, and cabarets are booming.

It seems to me that women and university students have mostly been spared conscription. But that, given the uninvolvement of the more sheltered part of Ukie society, the most gung-ho forces and leaders (Azov, Aidar) are agitating for total conscription.

I'm not sure what the WH, Pentagon, and CIA think of that idea. On the one hand, I think the DNC and WH just want Ukraine to go away. OTOH they may still be hanging on to the idea that Ukraine can still pull a victory, or at least a negotiated end (as opposed to a surrender) out of the situation. There still are about 30,000 training outside of Ukraine, 30,000 or so stalwart nationalists/ neo-Nazis, and a fair number of APCs and artillery systems remaining. It's possible that between a conscription drive, trained soldiers coming back home, and nationalists/ neo-Nazis at home, Ukraine can gather enough soldiers for one last throw. The only stumble on that point is even tho they may have weapons they might be lacking munitions.


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Tuesday, November 21, 2023 6:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol. Looks like Second is posting full novels here instead of pirated links today, huh?

Fuck Ukraine.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, November 21, 2023 7:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
lol. Looks like Second is posting full novels here instead of pirated links today, huh?

Fuck Ukraine.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.


I usually quit reading his bullshit after I stumble on some ridiculous lie, but this time I gritted my teeth and plowed thru a whole two paras. I gave up after wading thru that much crap.

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Wednesday, November 22, 2023 6:25 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 6ixStringJack:
lol. Looks like Second is posting full novels here instead of pirated links today, huh?

Fuck Ukraine.


I usually quit reading his bullshit after I stumble on some ridiculous lie, but this time I gritted my teeth and plowed thru a whole two paras. I gave up after wading thru that much crap.
Signym and 6ix, what the hell happened to you two to screw you up so completely? ( A long time ago I stopped believing your problems in the real world were caused by the world. Your problems are caused by your flaws. Redesigning the world to your preferred specifications would make everybody else's life worse, including your own.)

20 Days in Mariupol (full documentary) | FRONTLINE and The Associated Press



Ukrainian journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues risk their lives to document Russia's siege of Mariupol in this FRONTLINE/AP documentary.

Mariupol was the front line, but the people there were cut off and had such a limited perspective — at one point, people didn’t know who to blame for the bombing, Russia or Ukraine.

People would see the press sign on the helmet and would go, “Tell me the news.” You were like a walking radio station in the city, everybody would come and say, “Hey, what’s the news? Is Kyiv still there? What’s with Kherson — I have relatives there.”

At that moment I thought: If this is a bigger story of the city, a big theme of that story would be misinformation, misinterpretation, and isolation.

For me, it’s not only a military siege, but an information siege — and its effect on a modern society. That was an eye-opening experience. In just, let’s say, three, four days, when the city was cut off from all the telephone lines, from the internet, this society just collapsed. I’ve never seen anything like that. People started to panic, to loot. They started to get confused whose fault it is, who’s bombing them.

https://www.vox.com/2023/11/21/23955754/20-days-in-mariupol-documentar
y-russia-ukraine-war

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

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Wednesday, November 22, 2023 7:46 AM

SECOND

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


Never surprising when Russia denies doing what it is doing:
Russia denied on Monday accusations that it was sending migrants to the Finnish border. "We do not accept such accusations," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/11/20/russia-denies-sending-migran
ts-to-finland-border-a83157

Putin aims to "break" NATO. ISW publishes a new report
Story by MCZ | 10:22 AM EST, November 21, 2023

https://essanews.com/putin-aims-to-break-nato-isw-publishes-a-new-repo
rt,6965464879986817a

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) implies in its report that Moscow's hybrid warfare tactics on the Finnish-Russian border may be part of a larger strategy. The think tank suggests that "the objective is to destabilize NATO member states near Russia's borders."
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-20-2023

The ISW points out that present tensions between Russia and Finland are predominantly caused by an artificially created migration crisis, likely contrived by Russia at the Finnish border.

In retaliation, Finland chose to shut its border crossings on November 17. Two days later, on November 19, it announced plans to construct fences along its border with Russia. These measures came in response to information from Finnish authorities on November 12 regarding an influx of asylum seekers at the country's eastern border.

ISW Recalls Poland Situation

The Finnish government has accused Russia of engineering this migration crisis. Migrants and refugees reaching the Finnish border are from third countries like Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Somalia, crossing over from Russia.

The ISW highlights the parallels between the situation at the Finnish-Russian border and the migration crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border in 2021.

In November 2021, thousands of migrants from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries flooded the Polish-Belarusian border, causing a significant humanitarian crisis. Many endured extreme cold weather conditions, living in makeshift camps in the Belarusian forests.

NATO Destabilization and Diversion from Ukraine

European Union officials have claimed that Russia and Belarus had orchestrated this crisis, using migrants as tools in their political pursuit against EU and NATO countries. The ISW underlined that the Kremlin took advantage of this fabricated crisis in 2021 to accuse NATO of aggression towards Belarus.

The think tank's report proposes that the current border dispute between Russia and Finland might be a "reflection of Moscow's strategy to destabilize NATO countries in the area and to "divert attention away from the conflict in Ukraine".

"Putin's intention of instigating a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 aimed to fracture NATO – a goal he persists," the ISW report states.

Russia Threatens Finland

Finland became a NATO member on April 4, 2023. On the same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry released a statement indicating that Russia would be "compelled to take retaliatory actions" against Finland.

The ISW report repeats, "The ISW consistently predicts that Putin's intent of instigating a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was to fracture NATO – a target he persists".

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, November 22, 2023 8:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, November 22, 2023 8:48 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 6ixStringJack:


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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
I was thinking of a mechanical analogy to 6ix, Signym and the Russians. This is from real life: an axial compressor that is out of balance. It is moving gas but the noise and vibration is worrisome. If the compressor is not shutdown very soon, it will throw a blade, which will cause a cascading failure that destroys everything, including the compressor building. Where is the shutdown button for the Russians? Where is a skilled maintenance crew to disassemble the Russians and fix what is wrong?

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, November 22, 2023 10:36 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:


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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
I was thinking of a mechanical analogy to 6ix, Signym and the Russians. This is from real life: an axial compressor that is out of balance. It is moving gas but the noise and vibration is worrisome. If the compressor is not shutdown very soon, it will throw a blade, which will cause a cascading failure that destroys everything, including the compressor building. Where is the shutdown button for the Russians? Where is a skilled maintenance crew to disassemble the Russians and fix what is wrong?



Here's a biological analogy to Second.

You're a limp dick, impotent waste of carbon.

Oh wait. That's not an analogy. That's just you.

Go jump off a building and that will fix a lot of problems, including your own.

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

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, November 22, 2023 12:18 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, you should have watched Patrick Lancaster. He's a former American sailor turned reporter, who was able to work on the Russian side of the front line, and he interviewed people even as shooting was going on. He pretty much wandered the streets of Mariupol without a Russian "minder" (altho the soldiers might warn him away from a particular street where even I could hear shooting and small explosions) and, as a Russian speaker, he was able to interview people on the spot and gather their opinions and impressions.

I stay informed. YOU stay brainwashed.


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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, November 23, 2023 8:18 AM

SECOND

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


US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported on November 21 that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bombs and that Iran may be preparing to transfer short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.[9] ISW has observed Russian forces increasingly using glide bombs, particularly modified FAB-500, KAB-500, and RPK-500 aerial bombs equipped with glide bomb structures, in the Lyman and Kherson directions.[10] It is unclear whether Kirby meant that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bomb components or with fully constructed glide bombs. The Critical Threats Project (CTP)-ISW’s Iran Update reported on August 14 that Iran produces a variety of glide bombs domestically, such as the Ghaem glide bombs, Yasin long-range glide bombs, Sadid glide bombs, and Balaban glide bombs.[11] Iran commonly uses these bombs with its various drone platforms, likely including the Shahed-131/136 drones that Iran supplies to Russia. A Russian milblogger previously amplified claims that Russian Su-25 aircraft may be compatible with Iranian glide bombs.[12] Iran presented several glide bomb variants at the Russian Army-2023 Forum in Moscow in August 2023 and possibly during Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s visit to Tehran in September 2023.[13] Kirby added that Iran also continues to supply Russia with drones and artillery ammunition.[14] Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Deputy Chief Major General Vadym Skibitskyi stated on November 6 that Iran may continue to send small batches of Shahed-131/136 drones to Russia despite increased Russian efforts to produce Shahed drones domestically and Iran’s fulfillment of its first Shahed supply contracts with Russia.[15] CTP-ISW previously assessed that Iran and Russia may conclude a drone and missile sale agreement following the expiration of UN missile restrictions against Iranian missile and missile-related technology exports on October 18, 2023.[16]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campai
gn-assessment-november-22-2023

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, November 23, 2023 1:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported on November 21 that Iran is supplying Russia with glide bombs and that Iran may be preparing to transfer short-range ballistic missiles to Russia....


Oh, boo hoo. Big fucking deal.

We, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, UK, Norway, Denmark, Canada, Sweden, and Finland are supplying Ukraine with missiles, rockets, tanks and other armored vehicles, mines, shells including cluster munitions, etc We even "borrowed" shells from S KOREA and ISRAEL, and pretty much went across the world begging for shells.

What's your point?

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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Thursday, November 23, 2023 5:47 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


https://odysee.com/@Overthrown:6/video_2023-06-26_13-46-30:9

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

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM



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