Posted on 11/05/2023 6:02:22 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Update from Ukraine | Ruzzians were kicked out from Krynky | Landing Operation goes well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmSV3YQAY8g
Invasion Day 619 – Summary November 5, 2023 https://militaryland.net/news/invasion-day-619-summary/
The weekly recap of the latest unit changes on our Deployment map. https://militaryland.net/news/recap-deployment-map-changes-week-44/
[NOTE: two summaries per week, released on Wednesday and Sunday]
*** Great interactive maps with viewer controlled Map magnification tool to use for each Front!
https://militaryland.net/maps/
Not at all -- there are several posters here howling berserkly about an alleged Ukrainian "draft dodger" and you are the first one to claim that you yourself was drafted & served honorably.
I also received a draft notice, but it was after I enlisted in 1969 and that was after I had enjoyed a college deferment for four years.
So, I understand that draft laws can be flexible and allow for special circumstances.
The allegation of "draft dodger" does not necessarily apply to everyone who's not currently serving in uniform.
Worldtraveler once upon a time: "Lost some of my basic training company buddies. who were gathered up in body bags."
So did I.
I served in West Germany for three years, "standing guard" near the Fulda Gap to prevent KGB Old Soviets from doing there what they are now doing in Ukraine.
And it worked great, because we looked strong enough to deter "Crazy Ivan" from launching his massive tank armies into West Germany.
Ukraine demonstrates in spades what happens when we look weak, stupid and corrupt.
That's just nonsense.
9/11/2001 was 100% the result of first Clinton's and then Bush II's administrations' inability to comprehend the nature of the radical Islamist threats, much less devise a strategy to defeat them.
Nor did the US government ever really, though today we seem better equipped to prevent an exact repeat of 9/11/2001.
The "blowback" you refer to actually began circa 630 AD, when Muhammad began waging war against "western culture" of that time and has continued unabated ever since.
Ever since, sometimes radical Islamists are successful in conquest of new countries, sometimes they are defeated and retreat, but they never, ever stop waging war against "infidels" or "apostates".
9/11/2001 was just one minor battle in a war that has raged for now nearly 1,400 years.
The perpetrators of 9/11 didn’t hate us for our freedom and goodness, rather it was our decades of intervention in the Middle East. Read a book rather than wasting time writing 3000 word posts on this forum. You damn potato peelers are all the same.
Hey Joke. I served. And, for more info, google me, boy.
As to your concern about Davydov, read the Kyiv Post:
"Davydov can't wait to see the Ukrainian peninsula liberated from Russia. He recentlyleft Ukraine for the sake of his wife and daughter for an undisclosed safe country in Europe. He continues his popular videos without the background noise of sirens and hopes to resume his old day job in the near future."As Butler said, "war is a racket."In "A Top-10 of Pro-Ukraine YouTube Warriors to Guide You Through 2023," Kyiv Post, January 2, 2023.
Source: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/6341
The "undisclosed safe country in Europe" is from where he posts his monetized YouTube videos -- Switzerland.
"Another popular channel is Denys Davydov. He is a former airline pilot based in Kyiv, Ukraine, who lost his job in Ukraine once the war started. Now he focuses solely on the Ukraine war and has over 464,000 subscribers to his channel. Davydov is routinely posting 600K to 800K views per video that he posts now. That could be bringing in $1800 to $2,400 or more per video at a $3.00 RPM (revenue per mille) rate. His monthly YouTube earnings could be over $63,000. Even if it is half of that rate this YouTube star is making serious bank."
In "YouTube Channels on the Ukraine War Are Making Bank," Newsbreak.com, 22 October 2022.
Source: https://original.newsbreak.com/@mark-hake-1587739/2795821285140-youtube-channels-on-the-ukraine-war-are-making-bank
I prefer succinctness: Youcrayne is, by any objective measure, a hyper corrupt craphole infected with child trafficking gangs, organ harvesting gangs, massive money laundering operations and government corruption that is legendary. If you've ever worked with Youcraynians and also RuZZZIIaaans, you'd know just how deeply ingrained the penchant for thievery and conning is among them. There is no denying it. Youcrayne is a sinkhole of corruption and our also corrupt government has no business sending hard working US taxpayers' money there. End of story./
Why are you so madly in love with that horribly corrupt place? Why are you always putting massive effort on FR to defend it?
The evil you're trying to defend is indefensible from a moral, and rational, viewpoint.
And, as you say, you didn't respond because you had already been recruited, so in reality you weren't "dodging the draft," were you? So, how is this similar to Davydov's actual draft dodging?
Stop the silly Youkazoidal obfuscations, man!
Clever little rhetorical move there, BroJoke, trying to amp-up your service, which was basically standing guard duty at the Fulda Gap, where not one US serviceman was ever KIA. Ugh.
So, were you in 'Nam, Iraq? Kuwait? Grenada? Afghanistan? Syria? Where were your buddies KIA?
Man, so I think you're an old Cold Warrior who's still smarting from the fact that you never got your "glorious" war against the old Soviet Union. Many Youcrayniacs are, you know. . .
There's not going to be a Soviet Union 2.0. Find a new crusade or maybe get into cosplay or sharpen your Stratego skills instead of trying to defend one of Europe's most corrupt nations, once which even leftist/globalist Jean Claude described as "corrupt, from top to bottom, throughout all levels of society."
Your absurd claim that Davydov is a “draft dodger” is not based on any public knowledge of his legal status.
You make the claim only because it sounds good to you.
I’ve simply drawn analogies to show that not everyone who doesn’t serve is necessarily a “draft dodger”.
“But you don’t care in the least, do you?
You just love that term “draft dodger” so so so much you’re going to yell if from the mountain tops until the cows come home, right?
“draft dodger, draft dodger, draft dodger, draft dodger, draft dodger... etc.”
It sounds so good to you, you just can’t stop yourself from yelling it over & over, can you?”
Truth & ogic do not serve the agenda of the anti-Ukraine gang.
Nonsense, they hate us because they are radical Muslims and we are not, period, everything else is just excuse making.
The real fault here was not that they tried to kill us, because they always want to kill us, that's their nature, it's what they do -- like lions on a savannah, we are the great herds of herbivores, they must kill us to live.
The real fault was that we were not prepared for their attacks and had no serious plans to defeat them.
We still don't.
JonPreston: "Read a book rather than wasting time writing 3000 word posts on this forum.
You damn potato peelers are all the same."
I actually did read a book or two, about radical Islam.
Here is the five word summary: "They are not our friends."
Oh really? Was that before or after you began to hate your own country?
World powers have often been known to intervene, overtly and covertly, to overthrow other countries’ governments, install pliant regimes and then prop up those regimes, even with military action.
However, more often than not, what seems like a good idea in the short term often brings about disastrous unintended consequences, with intervention causing countries to dissolve into conflict and intervening powers emerge as targets of violence. That sequence is starkly apparent today, as countries that have meddled in the Middle East face a surge in terrorist attacks.
Last month, Salman Ramadan Abedi — a 22-year-old British-born son of Libyan immigrants — carried out a suicide bombing at the concert of the US pop star Ariana Grande in Manchester, England.
The bombing — the worst terrorist attack in the UK in more than a decade — can be described only as blowback from the activities of the UK and its allies in Libya, where external intervention has given rise to a battle-worn terrorist haven.
The UK has not just actively aided extremists in Libya; it encouraged foreign fighters, including British Libyans, to get involved in the NATO-led operation that toppled former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 2011.
Among those fighters were Abedi’s father, a long-time member of the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, whose functionaries were imprisoned or forced into exile during Qaddafi’s rule.
The elder Abedi returned to Libya six years ago to fight alongside a new Western-backed Muslim militia known as the Tripoli Brigade. His son had recently returned from a visit to Libya when he carried out the Manchester Arena attack.
This was not the first time a former “Islamic holy warrior” passed extremism to his Western-born son.
Omar Saddiqui Mateen, who carried out June last year’s Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida — the deadliest single-day mass shooting in US history — also drew inspiration from his father, who fought with the US-backed mujahedeen forces that drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The US’ activities in Afghanistan at that time might be the single biggest source of blowback terrorism today.
With the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and Saudi Arabia’s money, the CIA staged what remains the largest covert operation in its history, training and arming thousands of anti-Soviet insurgents.
The US also spent US$50 million on a “jihad literacy” project to inspire Afghans to fight the Soviet “infidels” and to portray the CIA-trained guerrillas as “holy warriors.”
However, after the Soviets left, many of those holy warriors ended up forming al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups. Some, such as Osama bin Laden, remained in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt, turning it into a base for organizing international terrorism, like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
Others returned to their home countries — from Egypt to the Philippines — to wage terror campaigns against what they viewed as Western-tainted governments.
“We helped to create the problem that we are now fighting,” then-US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted in 2010.
Yet the US — indeed, the entire West — seems not to have learned its lesson.
Clinton herself was instrumental in coaxing a hesitant former US president Barack Obama to back military action to depose Qaddafi in Libya. As a result, just as former US president George W. Bush will be remembered for the unraveling of Iraq, one of Obama’s central legacies is the mayhem in Libya.
In Syria, the CIA is again supporting supposedly “moderate” extremist rebel factions, many of which have links to groups like al-Qaeda.
Russia, for its part, has been propping up its client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — and experiencing blowback of its own, exemplified by the 2015 downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula.
Russia has also been seeking to use the Taliban to tie down the US militarily in Afghanistan.
As for Europe, two extremist citadels — Syria and Libya — now sit on its doorstep, and the blowback from its past interventions, exemplified by terrorist attacks in France, Germany and the UK, is intensifying.
Meanwhile, bin Laden’s favorite son, Hamza bin Laden, is seeking to revive al-Qaeda’s global network.
Of course, regional powers have also had plenty to do with perpetuating the cycle of chaos and conflict in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia might have fallen out with a fellow extremist-bankrolling state, Qatar, but it continues to engage in a brutal proxy war with Iran in Yemen, which has brought that country, like Iraq and Libya, to the brink of state failure.
Moreover, Saudi Arabia has been the chief exporter of intolerant and extremist Wahhabi Islam since the second half of the Cold War. Western powers, which viewed Wahhabism as an antidote to communism and the 1979 Shiite “revolution” in Iran, tacitly encouraged it.
Ultimately, Wahhabi fanaticism became the basis of modern Sunni terror, and Saudi Arabia itself is now threatened by its own creation.
Pakistan — another major state sponsor of terrorism — is also seeing its chickens coming home to roost, with a spate of terrorist attacks.
It is high time for a new approach. Recognizing that arming or supporting Muslim radicals anywhere ultimately fuels international terrorism, such alliances of convenience should be avoided.
In general, Western powers should resist the temptation to intervene at all. Instead, they should work systematically to discredit what British Prime Minister Theresa May has called “the evil ideology of Islamist extremism.”
On this front, US President Donald Trump has already sent the wrong message. On his first foreign trip, he visited Saudi Arabia, a decadent theocracy where, ironically, he opened the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology.
As the US and its allies continue to face terrorist blowback, it is hoped that Trump comes to his senses, and helps to turn the seemingly interminable War on Terror that Bush launched in 2001 into a battle that can actually be won.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
My exact words were: "Turns out, none of you courageous berserkers served even one day yourselves, at least not in the US military."
Those words seemed true to me when I posted them, now some have claimed you did if fact serve, and you even claim to have been drafted.
If so, then I thank you for your service.
You should still know enough about draft laws to understand that not everyone gets notified and not all those notified must serve immediately, some get deferments, some get exempted.
None of those people deserve the howls of "draft dodger" you guys are heaping on this Davydov fellow.
You have no knowledge of his actual status, and yet you bellow "draft dodger" just as if you did know.
Ergo, you are just as much a liar as anyone who makes claims they can't verify.
Worldtraveler once upon a time quoting: "Davydov is routinely posting 600K to 800K views per video that he posts now.
That could be bringing in $1800 to $2,400 or more per video at a $3.00 RPM (revenue per mille) rate.
His monthly YouTube earnings could be over $63,000.
Even if it is half of that rate this YouTube star is making serious bank."
I just checked it, Davydov's daily videos average just over 600,000 views.
How much he makes on those is unknowable, since for one thing, how many viewers sit through the ads?
I never do.
Also, a typical senior airline pilot makes circa $400,000 per year, so Davydov may or may not be earning more today on YouTube than he did as an airline pilot.
If it's true that he lives in Switzerland, then good chance his cost of living, versus his pre-war life in Ukraine, is high enough to eat up whatever extra he's now earning.
Bottom line is: there's no legitimate reason for you guys to howl berserkly at a Ukrainian whose biggest "crime" is accurately reporting on Vlad the Invader's war against Ukraine.
Sadly, for you, not a single word of your lengthy screed is established fact and all of it is Russian propaganda sewage.
The objective truth is just what I've posted here: in the past 20+ years Ukrainians have made huge efforts to clean up their own corruption and put crooked officials in jail -- unlike either the USA or Russia.
The results for Ukraine include improving their corruption score by more than double, while Russia's remained unchanged, and the US score declined (got worse) by over 10%.
Arguably, Ukrainian corruption was what the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Revolt were all about -- Ukrainians trying to overthrow their own corrupt officials, especially those toadies to Russia.
Helping to defeat Ukrainian corruption is also arguably why Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected president in 2019 and why Ukrainians continue to fire or arrest officials found to be less than honest -- in stark contrast to either the USA or Russia.
Rocco DiPippo: "Why are you so madly in love with that horribly corrupt place?
Why are you always putting massive effort on FR to defend it?
The evil you're trying to defend is indefensible from a moral, and rational, viewpoint."
Because every word you've posted here is 100% lies, and there is no good reason for you to do that.
Something insane is rattling around in your brain, and I just can't figure out what that is.
Maybe you can explain it?
So far, I've seen not even one shred of evidence to support claims that this Davydov fellow "dodged" his draft.
Like everything else about Ukraine which is driving you so crazy, it seems to me as just another figment of your very overactive imagination.
What a silly little argument you make.
Free Republic is a forum using generally anonymous monikers.
Ergo, nothing any of us says without some additional citations or URLs as supporting evidence is valid, as you think you can play the game. You are anonymous, as so any "testimony" you or any of us might then make is a "claim" one "can't verify."
What a silly little argument.
Apparently Free Republic is filled to overflowing, then by your game, with individuals who make "claims they can't verify,"
You included.
Seriously, why are you driving yourself crazy with anger and resentment?
There's no reason for it, so calm down and you'll be fine.
If you had read my post #74, you'd see that I was drafted/enlisted in 1969, Vietnam era.
Many of those who trained with me went to Vietnam, but the Army decided it wanted me in Germany instead, and of course I didn't object.
Rocco DiPippo: "Man, so I think you're an old Cold Warrior who's still smarting from the fact that you never got your "glorious" war against the old Soviet Union.
Many Youcrayniacs are, you know. . ."
Seriously, your brain is absolutely boiling with insane nonsense, you need to calm it down, maybe take pill or something, to help you tell the difference between reality and pure lunatic fantasies.
The truth is our job in West Germany was to prevent the Old Soviets from doing there what they are now doing in Ukraine, and we did our job, we kept the peace.
Ukraine illustrates what happens when Old Soviet KGB agents perceive weakness around their borders.
Rocco DiPippo: "There's not going to be a Soviet Union 2.0.
Find a new crusade or maybe get into cosplay or sharpen your Stratego skills instead of trying to defend one of Europe's most corrupt nations, once which even leftist/globalist Jean Claude described as "corrupt, from top to bottom, throughout all levels of society."
In fact, Russians are indeed rapidly Sovietizing, to include raising up Uncle Joe Stalin as their great hero and imposing strict controls on all elements of Russian society.
They don't yet claim to be communists, but they are clearly fascists in every sense of that word.
So, Old Soviet KGB Vlad the Invader doesn't need a Soviet Empire 2.0, he'll be perfectly content with a new Russian Empire, which occupies the same spaces.
As for your buddy Jean Claude, I have no idea who he is, or why I should respect words attributed to him regarding Ukraine.
As far as I can tell, it's just more Rocco DiPippo crazy-talk.
Your article from 2017 by an anti-American Indian living in Berlin is almost 100% bovine excrement.
Some of it might be factual enough, but Chellaney entirely misses the real problem, which is that Westerners in general and Americans especially are unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, so we end up treating our enemies like friends and our friends like enemies and the results are the total chaos and confusion we can see everywhere we look.
The solution is so simple it boggles the mind -- when people or countries act like our enemies, we treat them like our enemies and when they act like our friends, we treat them like our friends.
Everything else is just nonsense.
With Project Ukraine in collapse, it’s safe you have been wrong for two years about the biggest NATO proxy war failure in the history of the organization. Before Ukraine, you were wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and the entire Middle East. Take it back to back to Vietnam, since you gave a military date of 1969. So why after this long track record of foreign policy idiocy would anyone take you seriously?
How many hours did you spend crafting this convoluted, disingenuous spew?
Again, why are you so madly in love with the craphole you worship? Why are you OK with sending AMERICANS' money to it? Are you anti-American?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.