Posted on 06/22/2022 9:47:23 AM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Self-propelled howitzers, the Panzerhaubitze 2000, are the first heavy weapons sent by Germany to arrive in Ukraine. Ukraine confirmed the howitzers and other heavy weapons were received, but says they are just a drop in the ocean of what is needed to fend off the Russian assault.
Russia continues to make advances in the Donbas. Ukrainian officials say its forces have captured several more settlements and now control almost all of the Luhansk region.
Meanwhile, a diplomatic dispute between Russia and Lithuania is escalating after the Baltic state blocked the rail transit of sanctioned goods through its territory to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Lithuania says it's just following EU guidelines — now Moscow's threatening 'serious consequences.'
VIDEO:
First heavy weapons from Germany reach Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYx8ZVrnL9s
Not the first time the Russians fought Ukrainians armed with German weapons.
It is a brutal, stupid, unnecessary war. Everyone involved in bringing it about, and everyone involved in perpetuating it should be ashamed.
This and the Kalinigrad blockaide. Moscow needs to shut off the gas spigot and be done with it.
Why didn’t Ukraine invest in their own defense?
If you can’t keep your borders protected, you always risk a take over.
Russia already has signed contracts, none of which mention sanctions as a valid excuse to stop the flow
so if Russia doesn’t want to honor those and play political games with the oil & gas supply, it will just prove what an unreliable supplier Russia really is
Let’s see if they ever make it to the front lines.
> First heavy weapons from Germany reach Ukraine <
And here I thought this was going to be a post about Operation Barbarossa. Oh, well. I guess everything old is new again.
And I’m only half-kidding here. Putin is a war criminal for invading Ukraine. None of his excuses are good enough. But Germany sure is making it more interesting.
They will probably end up in the Middle East on the arms markets like much of what NATO has sent Ukraine.
This has become quite the proxy war.
It’s only stupid and unnecessary from our point of view.
From Putin’s point of view, the real mission has nothing to do with NATO or biolabs or even nazis in Ukraine (none of which actually bother Putin at all); it’s all about the Russkiy Mir (see http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68606) and creating a new world order based on Russian exceptionalism.
And that Russkiy Mir doesn’t look like a diaspora of sovereign equal states. It’s an ethnonationalist empire, plain and simple:
“In order to claim some kind of leadership — I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area — any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty ... Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
Russia’s TV station pundits recently talked about the cost of that. They surmised that a long term occupation of Ukraine, with forced re-education and re-Russification, would a need to “pacify” up to 15% of the Ukrainian civilian population and eliminate up to a third of that number to account for incorrigible resistance.
For those who are seriously crap at even kindergarten level math, that means Russia’s own TV pundits and Duma don’t have a problem talking openly about having three million Ukrainians executed as part of a collective punishment for being ornery. Putin’s own plans say this generational punishment should last for two two generations.
The genocide that isn’t: <100 people a year were dying due to ongoing conflict in the Donbas, 2019-2022. Source: the DPR, i.e. the people who asked Putin to help end a genocide. Their own body counts.
Actual genocide: Putin’s surrender terms which effectively priced in the deaths of 3 million Ukrainians over two generations. If you simplify that to 20 years it means up to 150,000 a year. Civilians, that is. On top of military casualties.
So, if you put it in that very simple context - a diminishing genocide with 50 civilian corpses a year attributed to it versus a promised genocide with well over 100,000 civilians a year in the firing line - of course it doesn’t look so “unnecessary” from the Uke point of view.
“Why didn’t Ukraine invest in their own defense?”
They did spend millions bribing Biden and other US politicians. They were buying something.
You have a wonderful sense of humor. Germany refuses to pay in rubles, they’re sending heavy artillery to kill Russian soldiers, they stopped Nordstream and seized Gasprom infrastructure, they cut off Russian banking from swift, Germany pretty much will never do business with Russia again until WEF puts a puppet in Moscow….
…and you priggishly opine that Russia must adhere to a contract Germany already negated. Lol
Unfortunately, Ukraine had trusted all the political agreements signed with Russia.
Thanks for your very well articulated comment.
Wrong. Germany has to transfer euros to Russia. At the same time Germany has made it impossible to send euros to Russia. So Russia said they will accept rubles. Write a check to your mortgage company, tack it on the wall, or put it in an escrow account they cannot access. Claim you have paid your mortgage. See how that works out for you.
Unfortunately, that one political agreement only said the US would consider raising issues with Russia and other countries that Ukraine offered it.
It was not a treaty, nor was it meant to encourage spending nothing on defense, nor did it mean Ukraine could create issues with its neighbors.
Unfortunately.
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