Then there’s Ron Q. Watkins, who is 1/2 Korean.
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It’s a shame that he doesn’t love the woman who gave birth to him and raised him.
I guess that’s a family value now?
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“I never realized I had a face” sobs man who supported the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
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one of the many terrible things about this war is knowing that there are russian troops who don’t want to be there either.
you have one dude ( and his friends ) pushing people into a situation where they are killing each other for his benefit.
he’s got too much power i think to hope for mass desertion. the fact he was asking ukrainians to do so though means it probably is something he’s worried about from russian troops
this is all just so awful for the people of both countries.
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But honestly…who cares? That’s the sort of thing you can sort out later. People are dying. They should please shut down the system.
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Given the logistics issues maybe they ran out out batteries?
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The oil and gas industry always will demand “a few more days” from the banking authorities lest a single dime get lost or frozen. Meanwhile, in the spirit of neoliberal capitalism, they’re trying to figure out how to profit from this humanitarian disaster.
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Throwing loved ones to the lions in order to advance yourself is part of the deal
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Probably because he’s convinced he’s right and can do it better. I suspect he’d see mass casualties of Ukrainians as a feature, not a bug.
Yeah… I think I’ve said that several times, in fact in the past couple of days.
Today, there is no ‘legal’ route to the U.K. for Ukrainians fleeing Russian war crimes.
Fortunately, there are other countries just waiving any passport requirements for Ukrainians…
One thing a foreign power occupying part of your country often does it concentrate a sense of who you are…
Absolutely disgusting and appalling comment from the Bulgarian prime minister. Really outrageous.
@GagHalfrunt, he’s also saying what other European powers who are less willing to show their racism were thinking, too. Not that the rest of Europe should not be doing exactly what they are doing, but they SHOULD also be doing that for Africans, Arabs, and Afghans fleeing from conflicts started by the west.
They didn’t kill him, at least… he got to live the rest of his life out at his dacha…
With regards to Turkey, that’s hilarious, because one of the major conflict points between the Old Russian Empire and the Ottoman empire back in the day was… access to the Black sea!
Russian forces are handing out gas masks to its troops in Donbas.
We successfully fought off enemy attacks
I’m not surprised… I don’t think Russian people wanted this, except maybe a few hardcore Putin supporters, but I don’t think the majority of even the military was excited about this…
He’s a student of people like Dugin, who actively distort history to suit his own ideology…
Well, given its heel turn in recent years…
I don’t know. Given some of the reports people have been posting here, I’m not so sure.
mtaibbi. “I didn’t bother to take this possibility seriously enough. To readers who trust me not to make those misjudgments, I’m sorry.”
@navarro - Taibbi LIVED in Russia in the early post Cold War days…
Right, and how long until the average Russian soldier decides that they’d rather flee than deal with that for a few years…
I think that’s the thing that scares me the most… that they did that. They don’t have to actually launch a nuke at all - they can just fuck up the exclusion zone…
Great for the average person to throw out a window on invader’s heads.
Meh.
I guess we’ll find out.
Yep. I’m sure some are enthusiastic, but I bet many are not.
Yep. Sanctions should hurt, and if we have to suffer a little blowback to stop this, then we should do so gladly.
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Hey, lions don’t feed themselves!!
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“never trumpist” rod dreher, who claims out loud to be a christian (for some value of that term) has taken the false-equivalence route to the island of absurdity in an essay he published at the american conservative on thursday. (if you want to read the whole article you can look it up, i’m not driving traffic to him)–
Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.
Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture.
. . .
But what about the Western empire today? To my eyes, we are decadent, and ruled by an elite that despises our own history, traditions, and the unwoke deplorables among us. We are ruled by an elite who think of many of us as savages: racist, transphobic bigots who must be brought to heel…
Putin is an authoritarian who uses Western decadence in the same way the Soviet regime did: to justify its own repression. Nevertheless, that decadence really is there!
his opinion seems to be that people who are mean to racists and don’t tolerate transphobes are too decadent to be allowed to survive. he’d rather live under a putin or an orban then under a bernie sanders or an ocasio-cortez because the former would put those minorities and gender degenerates in their place, amirite!
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I’d like to keep the lights on in Germany too, but I also don’t entirely understand how we got to the point that we should care more about those avaricious planet-destroyer’s stock profits than the fate of literal nation-states.
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wow! great summary of some of the best parts of the thread so far 
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Observations today by Tariq Ali:
Thoughts?
[1] As I said in an earlier blog the war aims of Russia are now the creation of a puppet state. Nothing else makes sense. To achieve this goal, speed is essential and with confused reports coming out it’s not easy to analyse what is happening on the ground. This is already turning out to be different from the Crimea. If the Russian army is not able to take the capital Kyiv , Odessa and other big cities and gets bogged down, Putin’s reckless adventure could begin to implode. The only other serious option is a repeat of Chechnya, but this would be a huge risk since the Ukrainians are not Muslims and NATO would find a way to intervene. A surgical military operation from the air (like NATO’s Bombing of Belgrade and Novi Sad during the Yugoslav civil war) would cause massive damage and the loss of civilian lives. This next week is vital from that point of view.
[2] NATO’s coup of 2014, removing the elected pro-Russian President and sending a mediocre bureaucrat (Victoria Nuland) to select a new Prime Minister was the shot across the bows that has backfired badly. They assumed that Russia would take it lying down and rejected all suggestions for a neutral, de-militarised buffer state as well as the Minsk Accords. That is when the war really began. The assumption of the US was that Putin might, at the most, take the Donbass which was bad, but tolerable. In fact most people were of that view, including many in Putin’s own outer circle.
[3] An immediate end to the war and a negotiated settlement is the only acceptable outcome as NATO realises only too well, but that will depend now on how this wretched war pans out.
[4] The eruption of a stop-the-war movement in Russia is the first indication that thousands of citizens are prepared to come out, oppose their own government knowing full well that it will lead to repression. To them we must pay unstinted tributes. They are courageous sisters and brothers and one hopes that the demonstration planned for Sunday in Moscow will go ahead. While the Tories and Labour are attacking Stop the War in Britain because it does not favour NATO’s criminal and obscene wars, they praise the Russian marchers. The party of Hypocrisy and Lies forms the government. The party of Cant sits on the opposition front bench and the handful of left MPs are bullied into submission. What a sad state of affairs.
(5) In Italy there have been a few demonstrations outside NATO bases. In France the leftwing Presidential candidate Melenchon has called for France to withdraw from NATO. These stirring are not unimportant.
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well… he can fuck off then.
People posted A LOT after I went to bed last night!!! A lot, a lot!!! 
Oh, give me a bit to read that! You got a direct link to where this was posted or was it FB?
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It was FB.
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This seems like it’s already happening, especially since they (as others have pointed out) ignored logistics for more than a very short blitzkrieg.
I hope that’s how it will end, soon. But knowing Putin and how much he’s put on the line here…
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