Yeah, makes sense.
Posted on 02/26/2022 12:39:36 PM PST by RandFan
I could not believe Putin really would invade Ukraine, because I could see no sensible outcome for him. I still cannot. Initiating a war on this scale has no legal justification, and no moral justification either. Russian troops are in areas which have no wish to be ruled by Russia.
Those of us who opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq must also oppose the illegal invasion of Ukraine. Whether the Ukrainian government is obnoxious or not is as irrelevant now, as the obnoxiousness of Saddam Hussein was irrelevant then. I am as fed up now with being asked if I support Ukrainian Nazis as I was then with being asked if I supported Saddam Hussein.
It is simply illegal to wage a war for regime change, without the endorsement of the UN security council.
I have great sympathy for Russian security concerns about encirclement by NATO and forward missile deployments. But seeking regime change by invasion in Ukraine could not possibly be the answer. I still have not the slightest idea what Putin seeks to achieve. It is simply impossible – and has been since the annexation of Crimea – that a democratic Ukraine is voluntarily going to elect a pro-Russian government. After this invasion, the only way a pro-Putin regime could be maintained in Ukraine would be by extreme authoritarianism, going well beyond the prevailing system in Russia itself.
Let me put it starkly. This can only finish with a government in Kiev which absolutely hates Putin as now do the Ukrainian people, or with Russia maintaining a puppet regime by extreme repression. There isn’t an a way out with a peaceful, neutral Ukraine. Once you try to resolve matters by pure force, you lose that option. If I were Ukrainian, there is no way now I would be agreeing to the demilitarisation of my country.
As for denazification – which certainly is needed in Ukraine – Putin has given the “heroic anti-Russian nationalist” meme of the Ukrainian nazi groups a massive boost. While labeling the entire nation and government as Nazi is just wrong.
I did not think Putin would invade, for all those reasons. I did not even think he would acknowledge moving troops into the Donbass. I was unsure what to argue about that if he did. The Kosovo parallel with the newly acknowledged Donetsk and Lughansk republics is arguable. As a supporter of Scottish Independence, I am open to arguments from self-determination, and you can read Murder in Samarkand on the capriciousness of former internal Soviet borders. But this has gone far beyond that.
Yet we have seen nothing like the simply massive civilian casualties the West inflicted on Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan. Not anything like the same order of magnitude. In the town of Sirte, Libya alone NATO bombing killed 15,000 people. Casualty figures being given for the whole of the Ukraine so far are still in the hundreds, and thank God for that.
Either Putin has not entirely willed the means, or his armed forces are resisting obeying his wishes. Russia has not unleashed anything like the kind of firepower that would need to be unleashed to subdue Ukraine. Western media has gone into full war porn mode, but the extent of real fighting is uncertain. There seems to be a great deal of shadow boxing.
I do not know the explanation for this. It seems very possible Putin has underestimated Ukrainian morale, and really believed Ukraine would crumble. In fact, Zelensky is playing a blinder in terms of maintaining morale, however staged his photo-ops. The more pressing question is whether Putin overestimated the willingness of his own military to kill Ukrainians, or whether Putin himself lacks the will. In Grozny, he was directly responsible for civilian casualties on a truly terrible scale, but is he like the West in putting much less value on Muslim lives?
To date, Kiev has faced nothing like what Sirte faced from NATO or Grozny faced from Russia – but not because Russia lacks the capacity to do it.
If Putin is himself ready for massive Ukrainian deaths, is his military pulling its punches? I am reminded of the War of Slovenian Independence, where the soldiers of the massively superior Yugoslav army just refused to kill Slovenes. In that case, many of the Yugoslav troops were initially told it was just a live fire exercise, which lends credibility to the idea the same is happening with Russian troops here.
Putin has not improved his negotiating position. My own friends and allies on the left are suggesting that the answer is for there to be a ceasefire and Western agreement to no further expansion of NATO, and a new arms control treaty governing missile deployments. That would certainly be ideal but it is not going to happen.
You have to understand the realpolitik of the Western elite. They will never damage their own interests. That is why the sanctions that would really hurt Putin, targeting companies like BP and Shell over their Russian interests or the real oligarchs like Usmanov, Deripaska and Abramovic, will never happen because they would damage the interests of the British elite. It is why the UK government fly Ukrainian flags but will not let Ukrainians come without visas. They don’t really care about the ordinary people at all.
The NATO leadership now see Putin in a position where he either has to back down and retreat, or inflict massive casualties on the Ukraine and get bogged down there for decades. If they wanted to save the Ukrainian people, this would indeed be the time for West to negotiate. But the lives of ordinary Ukrainians mean nothing to them.
So rather than find Putin a ladder to climb down, they will strike heroic poses, wave Ukrainian flags and send more weapons. I fear Putin will go for the mass deaths scenario. Macho is his entire brand, and his speech last Sunday was worryingly fundamentalist. I do wonder if he is losing the room at home – he spoke of the end of the Soviet Union as a calamity, but Russians under forty cannot even remember the Soviet Union at all. Nobody under 50 can remember it in any kind of functioning order.
One final thought for now. I applaud those brave people in Russia who have demonstrated for peace. Almost 2,000 have been arrested. But remember this – under the Tory government’s new policing bill, taking part in a demonstration in England and Wales not approved in advance by the police could bring up to ten years in prison. Just one example of the rife hypocrisy submerging us all at present.
Craig Murray is a former British diplomat
They used to have before it all started.
Ukrainians don’t hate Russia, they hate Putin.
If Putin is removed from power, Ukraine could well agree to give up on NATO membership in favor of a treaty of friendship with the new regime.
That's the thing. The Russian people are going to have to overthrow Putin.
Nice link. Marxists are always straight up with the facts.
I visited Kiev a few years ago - I didn’t see any Nazis. Quite a few people were using the Russian hard g pronunciation rather than the Ukrainian h pronunciation - that’s not saying they want to be ruled by Russia, just that they can speak Russian.
Thinking same but had not heard that. Be nice if they had a squadron holed out somewhere but..
Yeh, uh no. Its going to end when Putin’s people kill the cabal operators they came to kill and have dismantled the corrupt criminal cabal holding the Ukraine hostage. Then he will likely cut a deal with Zelensky and go home. Everything else is globalist press nonsense.
Taking Kiev by extreme force would result in only being able to keep Kiev by extreme force.
Many Ukrainians harbored a grudge against Russia for Stalin’s targeting of them for mass starvation during the Holodomor. Russians argued that yes it had been horrible but lots of others including Russians had been starved to death too and in any case, Stalin was a brutal tyrant born of the Communist period not reflective of Russia yada yada yada.....and besides the Ukrainians and the Russians are closely related people and have had historic ties going back centuries (all of which is true).
So while many Ukrainians were anti-Russian it was by no means all of them. Some were favorably disposed toward Russia. I think that is gone forever now. Now the narrative that the Holodomor was a RUSSIAN and not necessarily just communist crime against the Ukrainian people is going to be cemented in the minds of Ukrainians and on top of that there is this unprovoked invasion of Ukraine which was no military threat to Russia with no warning or declaration of war.
Ukraine is likely to lose the eastern portion of the country that is majority Russian (including Crimea) but what remains will now probably eventually be let into NATO and the EU. Yes it has problems from corruption to too many neo Nazi groups who will now be strengthened by Russia’s invasion.
Russia is going to be isolated from the West, left much poorer than it currently is, and likely to be left as a vassal state of China.
I am really amazed and happy to see how so many freepers have red pilled and now are awake. I thought it would never happen.
That’s bullcrap given that Putin asked exactly that.
Are we Imperial Russia or Austro-Hungary?
I look at Biden and I torn between the two!
If true, do you believe it contributes to the American interest?
Yeah, I forgot about them. Agree they’re a possible choice.
My reasoning
AH - Because they had an old fossil in charge. Also, this empire was tired and decrepit. (Are we? I am afraid the answer might be yes!)
Russia - Like Biden Czar Nicholas was incapable of running a popsicle stand let alone a government. His government was full of corrupt place seekers much like DC. Tired and decrepit society/government also.
Yeah, makes sense.
At most, a temporary deferral of NATO membership might be agreed to as part of a cease fire. Otherwise though, the case for Ukraine's membership in NATO has been strengthened to the point that it becomes near undeniable.
The most likely outcome for the current conflict is for Putin to be forcibly retired or overthrown as sanctions bite hard against the oligarchs. And since more casualties among the Ukrainians and more refugees will lead to more severe sanctions and more NATO help for Ukraine, Putin and Russia have no military solution.
Is any of this the West's fault? No. The fault is with Putin and his oligarch buddies.
Historians urge stronger anti-fascist fight, or Biden administration could be next Weimar Republic
He and Wolf agreed that the president’s forceful Jan. 6 address was a good start. But the two historians warn that Biden must back up his strong words with strong action. “The Social Democrats vowed to resist Hitler and the Nazis by burying guns in their back yard,” Wolf said. “You shouldn’t say things like that unless you mean it.”
The mob, which aimed to overthrow the November 2020 election and keep Trump in power, included members of white supremacist and white nationalist militia groups, QAnon cultists, and neo-Nazis.
[snip]
Pizzo said that if the Republicans retake the House—and possibly the Senate—in November, and Trump or a Trumpian is elected president in 2024, American democracy will likely perish.
“The Republicans will systematically dismantle every circuit breaker, every firebreak, every levee—pick your analogy,” he said. “We are already closer to a fascist coup than we have ever been in our history.”
Against a fascist-dominated GOP, democracy needs every ally it can get
The assault on democracy by violent white supremacists and MAGA-fascists, backed by extreme right-wing billionaires, is ongoing. The GOP radicalization continues as the Trump-MAGA movement purges the party of all internal opposition, including state election officials who reject the Big Lie. MAGA supporters are terrorizing, liquidating, or taking over local government institutions that determine the mechanics of democracy. The right-wing propaganda and brainwashing media assault on the truth and GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court assault on democratic rights is constant.
Biden indicts Trump for leading the ongoing conspiracy against democracy
Implicating Trump’s backers in the fascist wing of the Republican Party, Biden said they still hold a “dagger at the throat of America and American democracy” and remain determined to sabotage voting and democratic elections. “The former president and his supporters have decided the only way for them to win is to suppress your vote and subvert our elections,” Biden charged. He excoriated the laws being written in GOP-ruled states “not to protect the vote, but to deny it.”
Over 400 bills have been drafted or passed since Jan. 6 which attempt to kill voting rights, including more restrictive ID laws, limits on absentee voting, the slashing of early voting periods that working class people often rely on to vote outside of work hours, the establishment of Republican-dominated “election commissions” to scrutinize ballots, the empowerment of GOP “poll watchers” to intimidate voters, and outright purges of voters from the rolls—especially voters of color.
Right wing steers country toward white supremacy and dictatorship
Murray, Ky., State University historian Brian Clardy says it’s past time for the Democrats to start reminding voters–loudly, clearly, and unceasingly–precisely where Donald Trump and the Trumpian Republicans are steering the country:
Straight toward white supremacy and authoritarianism.
“This is not bean bagging,” he said. “This is not cocktail party conversation. This is real. This is serious, and it is frightening.”
You do understand that this is about a worldwide battle to get rid of the New World Order right? That’s all its about. Its not about conservatives or liberals or anything that mundane.
The illegal belligerent criminal force that has captured our govt is going to be going down very soon also.
The NWO satanic cabal is everyone’s enemy.
Unknown as of now. It certainly harms Russia’s long term interests to have another neighbor like Poland which has a historical grudge against them.
I see, a perverted perception of interest. The Russians and Chinese can do it in Latin America if not in the US proper.
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