Toru Hashimoto, the former Mayor and Governor of Osaka (city and prefecture), current national political figure and noted right-wing looney keeps getting into fights with people over the war in Ukraine.
Earlier this month, he twice got into it with a professor who happens to be from Ukraine on national TV (he gets invited to a lot of news talk shows for some reason).
Now, he is in a nasty Twitter war with another professor who is an expert on geopolitics. He called a professor at one of the best universities in Japan âa moron to the core.â
His main points are (1) Ukraine should surrender because people will continue to die until they do and (2) NATO shares some of the blame because they did not maintain military balance with Russia.
Even the right-wing press is not being kind to him.
tl;dr Kadyrovâs soldiers spend their time making videos instead of fighting. Kadyrov himself hasnât gone to Ukraine. He is an influencer and information warrior who thinks that looking powerful is the same as being powerful.
Quite proud of the support my country is showing, both as a state and as a society. We currently host over 37 thousand refugees from Ukraine, making up about 1.3% of the total population in Lithuania, with over a thousand arriving daily over the past week - quite a lot, though not nearly as much as in countries neighboring Ukraine. National and city governments have made various arrangements for medical care, education, employment, benefits payments - e.g. here is a list of services that are available in Vilnius. There are public displays of support everywhere - people hang Ukrainian flags from their windows or balconies, attach them to cars, there are arrangements of blue and yellow flowers, balloons or clothes in shops, etc.
I generally donât agree with Bret Stephens, but this article definitely made me re-think Russiaâs strategy.
Thesis: Putin didnât really miscalculate, or expect to quickly subdue Kyiv. Instead itâs a calculated escalation of force, including more and more shelling of civilians under the guise of âheâs backed into a corner and doesnât have any options,â with the aim of getting Ukraine and the West to give him what he really wants as a âface-saving exit.â
What he really wants is the gas-rich fields of Ukraineâs East, and cement his control of Crimea. If he had just attacked with that as the aim, Ukraine and the West would never have let him take them.
Instead, now Ukraine and the West see a crazed madman who seems willing to cause any amount of destruction unless we give him something to allow him to withdraw without seeming to âlose,â and all of a sudden giving him control of the land he actually wants is looking more attractive. And a condition for his withdrawing (which the West seems to accept) is that once he leaves the sanctions fall.
Ukraine will be left without its wealth as a welfare state for the West.
(NB: I dip into this thread only occasionally, sorry if this has all been discussed.)
It seems to me that an officer refusing to fight an unjust war that his or her country started can be all of the following without any contradictions:
The moral and correct thing to do
Against the laws of Russia
Reasonable grounds for losing oneâs job as an officer in the military until a Russian court determines that following orders would have been an illegal act.
Why do we think that bullies are super-geniuses. He fucked up. anyone can see he fucked up. Right wingers are trying to preserve their love of strong men by pretending like they are always 10 steps ahead of the libtards⌠We really need to stop letting them drive our narratives, because they are almost always 100% incorrect about everythingâŚ
Another hot take from the NY Times editorial section.
Not only has this war gone badly for Russia with crippling losses to his military and a complete loss of global intimidation status, but it opened the door for the Ukraine to retake areas previously annexed in counterattacks or demand their return in peace talks.
What Putin really wanted was to storm Kyiv and take out Zelensky in a repeat of the Crimea annexation. That failed within hours of the initial invasion. Now he is just killing civilians out of spite. Actions with zero strategic or tactical value. Like he did in Syria and Chechnya. That is not being brilliant, that is just being a scumbag.
Ukraine is in no mood to give territory to Russia as a consolation prize, nor would it be rational to even claim it was Putinâs goal.
Strongmen are generally not brilliant people and seldom employ strategies beyond, âlets see what I can get away withâ.
The lawyers say that Rosgvardia officers can only be required to go abroad under certain circumstances, which donât apply to the âspecial military operationâ.
â Are there legal grounds for reinstatement? To what degree were they required to take part in the âspecial military operation?â
â If there was an armed conflict, an emergency situation, or martial law, the terms of the contract could be changed without their consent for six months. But we donât have an armed conflict or a war, itâs just a âspecial military operation.â The law doesnât say anything about that. You can go there [as a Rosgvardia officer], but only if you agree to it.
I canât read the article, but what you say is the gist, then I counter:
If that was his goal, he paid a needlessly heavy price in both men and materials. If capturing part of the east was always the goal all along, he would have went in on just the one front, not the 3, and sent up a line and a DMZ zone. Even if Ukraine wouldnât have âlet themâ, it would have allowed for more conventional warfare against a much smaller army. It also wouldnât have galvanized the world nearly as much, because you wouldnât have millions of refugees and scenes of historical buildings burning. In short, the world would care less if a chunk had been bitten off.
But it wasnât They made it very clear in the original speeches and propaganda they expected to sweep in, topple the government, and be watching the soccer game later that week.
He also isnât a crazed madman. He is using the tried and true method of total destruction and indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets to both crush morale and infrastructure and made the Ukrainians deal with a humanitarian crisis on top of a war.
Putin is a very savvy authoritarian, but he is not a military strategist. This isnât 4D chess where losing more solders in a month than in any other war since WWII was all part of the plan. It is exposing Russiaâs military to be largely a facade. It looks good on paper and in propaganda videos. But in reality is under-equipped, under trained, and sorely lacking on logistics. It is an embarrassment that Ukraine has managed to bloody the Bear so badly.
So they are moving goal posts and creating alternative âwinâ scenarios. Which is a smart thing to do. They are faced with the reality of what is going on, and need to change the narrative so that the Russian people feel like the âSpecial Operationâ was a success.
But make no mistake, it was not. It was never the plan and the West shouldnât be entertaining the idea that this was all according to plan
Ok, well I certainly hope they win the case. IANAL, especially one versed in Russian law, but it would seem weird to me to claim that a âspecial military operationâ in which people are shooting each other canât also be considered to be an âarmed conflictâ whether or not Putin is willing to call it a war.
I suspect that (part of) the original reason it was called a âspecial military operationâ was that the planned operation consisted of troops and tanks moving, entirely unopposed, into position across Ukraine, ousting local authority figures, replacing them with Putin yes-men/henchmen and so on - i.e. a complete lack of armed conflict.
But as to whether a Russian National Guard employee can have their contract changed to cover this, is a matter for the Russian legal system (which often seems to consist of asking âwhat would Putin want?â)
The lawyer implies that calling it an armed conflict would have consequences under Russian law that the government would want to avoid.
And if it is a military conflict, another question immediately arises: who started it? Oops. And nobody wants to answer this question, since thereâs a completely different qualification of the actions [in the Russian Criminal Code] â and I donât mean the soldiersâ actions. Thatâs why they wonât recognize whatâs happening as an armed conflict.
Because the nyt is a bootlicking cesspit in love with authoritarian brutality? I honestly think some people are so committed to bringing Putinâs Russia to the US that they canât let themselves admit what a horrific shambles Putin has made of Russia.
