Posted on 05/29/2014 6:44:33 AM PDT by PaulCruz2016
At least 13 soldiers and an army general were killed Thursday when pro-Russian insurgents shot down a military helicopter outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk, interim President Oleksander Turchinov said.
"I have received reports from Sloviansk itself that the terrorists shot down a helicopter carrying relief troops. Fourteen soldiers, including Gen. (Vladimir) Kulchitski, have died," Turchinov told Ukrainian media.
Pro-Russian militiamen fired a bazooka at the helicopter near Sloviansk, the main pro-Moscow bastion in the Donetsk region, Turchinov said.
(Excerpt) Read more at latino.foxnews.com ...
Russian special forces going to get bonuses
Good thing Putin blinked.
Either the Ukrainian military succeeds in pacifying and controlling the its eastern regions or eventually they will be incorporated into Russia. Realpolitik trumps rhetoric.
It looks like Putin has unleashed war without end in Ukraine. This will not be resolved any time soon.
Is this what modern warfare has devolved into? Both sides calling each other "terrorists"? Maybe that is better than, Krauts or Nips, Skinny's or Gooks.
Ukrainians will only take so much. The Russian mercenaries were denied local support during the Donetsk airport fiasco. While it may take time for the new national government to get it’s ducks in a row, it will happen. If they were smart, they’d buy the mercenaries off and send them back into Russia with their weapons. Putin apparently never learned the lesson inflicted on us when we armed the Afghans. Now he’s arming Chechens. That’s guaranteed to bite him in the ass.
Russia has forced a war on Ukraine, but so far, Russia itself remains completely untouched itself.
Putin has gambled that forcing a civil war in a neighboring country will not involve him or his country, and so far, he is correct.
Ukraine somehow needs to bring war to Russia. Then Putin will face some serious risk in his position and will only then think twice about dismembering Ukraine.
Looks like the Southeast won’t be ‘pacified’ so easily after all.
It's the same lesson we failed to learn from arming the Chinese and the Russians during WWII. They repaid us by arming the DPRK and DRV (as well as by direct military intervention), which inflicted 100,000 deaths on us during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Ultimately, it made sense to arm the Russians to kill Germans and the Chinese to kill Japanese, hastening the end of WWII, just as it made sense to arm the Afghan mujahideen to kill Russians, hastening the end of the Cold War.
If they lose 100K dead, that's pretty easy compared to what Iraqis have lost keeping the country together. My guess is that the number will be lower, unless Russia invades. Heck, we lost 5K in Iraq and our territory wasn't even being threatened. If Ukraine loses 5K dead, they will have been very fortunate. Yugoslavia's partition involved 140K deaths out of a population of 24m. If Ukraine's suppression of the separatists ends up with a body count of less than 300K, it will have merely matched the record of the former Yugoslavia.
Yeah let's not call the separatist thugs, many of them mercenaries from another country, none of them elected in a free election and none of them having the majority support in the region, terrorists.
That would be judgmental and wrong.
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More specifically, looks like the separatist thugs occupying the Southeast won't be pacified so easily.
Bad idea. If the NVA had attacked the continental US, we would have driven them into China, even if we had to fight the PLA to do so.
Rjsimmon is absolutely correct though. "Terrorists" has become the new catch-all term for every government dealing with any sort of domestic armed opposition to their power. Even Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria labeled their foes "terrorists".
It's the banal propaganda term that every government uses today. I have no doubt at all that if the U.S. Civil War took place today, the Lincoln Administration would be calling the Confederacy terrorists.
Did the Confederacy terrorize their own people in the South? I don't think so.
Are pro Russians in Donestk and Lugansk using violence and threats of violence on their own people, a majority of which do not wish to join Russia? The answer is yes.
Just because some may misuse the word terrorist doesn't me we should refrain from using the word correctly when it is appropriate.
The pro Russian thugs in E. Ukraine are terrorists.
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