Well let’s hope so. But I would not be surprised if some western fuckwit came out and said ‘we cannot carry on shipping arms to Ukraine while peace talks are going on’. We know who those fuckwits typically are (many in the right-wing media) but there are western fuckwit leaders who are not beyond such pusillanimous cavilling (naming no names, Boris and Liz).
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A funeral service will be held for the immediate family on Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022, with Pastor Doug McClure officiating.
Hmmm…
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putin’s previous military aggressions have been so successful primarily because he used the russian military to achieve much more modest and limited goals. the difficulty they’ve had here seem to be because he was putting too much faith in his own legend. he seems to have been getting high on his own supply.
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He can get as high as he likes on some of his own supply of natural gas, whenever he likes, as far as I am concerned. And not metaphorically.
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Americans support sanctions.
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Correct. It really looks like he thought this would be only slightly more difficult than taking Crimea. The whole Ukraine is still within the realm of possibility but is several more magnitudes of difficulty at least.
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I love Paddington. Please look after this President!!
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if putin had chosen to take only the donbass region he would likely have been quickly successful. as it is, he has shown his fallibility in a dramatic fashion. not a good look for an authoritarian trying to hold onto power.
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“Dear citizens. We urge you to stop this madness, do not send your sons and husbands to certain death. Putin makes us lie and puts us in danger,” the hacked site read. “In a few years we will live like in North Korea. What is it for us? To put Putin in the textbooks? This is not our war, let’s stop it!”
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As a general principle, I’d have expected any professional army going into combat to have all personal phones removed and stored at base before leaving
This is what you wrote. And what I replied to when I pointed out that hey can’t even keep cell phones and drugs out of prisons. I made no assumptions about any possible policy.
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It’s more a matter of, “do they have enough for all independent maneuver units and are they all trained in their use?”
Also, this isn’t really the first time armies have gotten burned for cell phone use in combat theaters (PDF) Home, front, and mobile phones: The case of the Second Lebanon War
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In light of the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine, the International Judo Federation announces the suspension of Mr. Vladimir Putin’s status as Honorary President and Ambassador of the International Judo Federation.
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Just FYI. I’m sure y’all have English and other foreign sources and can use machine translation services, but this is is a natural-language article by a German and American journalist in a major German magazine:
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At the start I really thought that was what he was going for: unilaterally declare these two BS “republics”; send in Russian “peacekeepers”; wait for Ukraine to send in troops (preferably including the fascist Azov Brigade) to take their territory back; claim the Kyiv is the “fascist agressor”; hope that the West stands by and treats it as a “minor regional conflict”.
That could have turned into the full-scale war for Ukraine that Putin obviously wanted but would have been somewhat more manageable and unfold in stages. Instead he went for this full-scale invasion that elicited minor surprise but not a whole lot of shock from everyone else.
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Perhaps they could offer Mr Putin the eleventh dan, if he only promises to withdraw and then stay within borders.
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I read his unstated point as being that this is not really a professional army as we understand the concept in the West. There are certainly disciplined units in the ground forces but for the most part this is the usual Russian mix of mass waves of less-than-enthusiastic conscripts combined with colonial/ethnic terror units that are known to be comfortable committing war crimes (the Chechens this time around).
To give one example, no-one who studies Russian history is at all surprised that the tank commanders were selling their own fuel to Byelorussian locals when they (thought they) were on training exercises. In contrast, imagine if an American or German tank commander was caught doing this.
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Oh, okay. I can see that it can be taken that way, Good point.
Though I can’t really believe that the Russian military and especially counter intelligence didn’t think of soldiers having cell phones.
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Or any other electronic/digital device.
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