Posted on 12/31/2021 1:54:49 AM PST by blueplum
Russia's Vladimir Putin has warned his US counterpart Joe Biden that imposing new sanctions over Ukraine could lead to a complete breakdown in relations.
In a phone call late on Thursday, the Russian president said such sanctions would be a "colossal mistake".
Mr Biden, meanwhile, told Mr Putin that the US and its allies would respond decisively to any invasion of Ukraine....
....The build-up has prompted concern in the West, with the US threatening Mr Putin with sanctions "like none he's ever seen" if Ukraine comes under attack....
...Although the two sides exchanged warnings during the call, Russian foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters shortly after that Mr Putin was "pleased" with the conversation. He added that it had created a "good backdrop" for future talks.
A senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the tone had been "serious and substantive....
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Anyone who actually believes Biden is going to respond to Russia invading Ukraine with the military is basically a gigantic moron. Russia initiated this entire farce and will finish it as it began: with the West sitting there with its thumb up its collective ass. If Russia takes Ukraine, Poland will be the next country subjected to Russian military pressure, and NATO will continue to lose credibility until it is completely eliminated.
Don't see anything in the article that references "paranoia within WH warmongers". In fact the article points out that "In 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and soon after started to back a separatist insurgency in Ukraine's east that has seen some 14,000 people killed in periodic fighting."
I think this is more of a demonstration that NATO is to be contained or limited in growth. All these trade sanctions since 2013 has taught Russia to rely upon itself and China.
As for Biden? He’s totally relying upon the WH insiders to run the strategy and they aren’t capable of much. I can’t recall any point in the past fifty years where the President was this weak, and no real strategy for foreign affairs.
Long range Soviet strategy, which Russia still upholds, has always been this: the dismantling of NATO. It's not just to "limit" the growth. Russia will--and already has--even complained of completely irrelevant and minor military movements far from its borders and in NATO countries, such as threatening Poland and telling them they are a military target for daring to put up anti-missile defenses. That same year they made that threat, Russia was openly cheating on the INF treaty and developing more deadly nuclear weapons.
Russia wants to discredit and ultimately destroy NATO. With NATO gone, Russia can re-constitute the Soviet Union at its leisure.
Things get weird and we could be playing Vault Tech for real.
Just kidding. I hope.
no?
“measured voice “ “ he and others in the White House are deeply worried” “ “ominous”
Where is the "paranoia" or the "WH warmongers"? The world in correctly worried. Russia invaded Crimea and south-eastern Ukraine in 2014 and is now threatening a wide scale invasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War
Putin needs a bullet in the head.
The Eastern Europeans know the Russians and hate them.
Ukrainian Jews are firmly on the side of Ukraine against the Russians and do not see Ukraine as a "Nazi" land, even though Ukraine is far from perfect:
"So is the Maidan movement "more a pogrom than a revolution" as Putin has described it, and what — or whom — should Ukraine’s Jewish community fear most? Despite the substantial presence of right wing nationalists on the Maidan during the revolution, many in Ukraine’s Jewish community resent being used by Putin in his propaganda war. (In the photo above, a poster in Sevastopol portrays Crimea’s vote to secede as a choice between Russian citizenship and living in a Nazi state.) On March 5, 21 leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community signed an open letter to Putin excoriating the Russian president for using Ukraine’s Jewish community to bash the interim government — and insisting that the real threat to Ukraine’s Jews emanated from Russia: "We know that the political opposition consists of various groups, including some that are nationalistic. But even the most marginal of them do not demonstrate anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia. And we certainly know that our very few nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government — which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services."
"This letter to Putin brought forth an important point: namely, that much of the real anti-Semitism directed at Ukrainian Jews is actually coming from Russia.As David Fishman, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and director of Project Judaica (JTS’s program in the former Soviet Union), explained: "When we look at what is going on the ground in Eastern Ukraine, we are seeing the revival of language of Russian imperial ideology from 100 years ago, which is both very nationalistic and very anti-Semitic, as well as anti-Ukrainian." Echoing what he wrote in an earlier article, Fishman noted that there has been a shift in how the Kremlin is using Jews in Ukraine. "Having failed to convince world public opinion that the new Ukrainian regime is anti-Semitic, we have recently had news programs on Russian state television asserting that leading Ukrainian political figures such as Tymoshenko and Yatseniuk are actually Jews," he continued. "Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and the Russian far-right inside Russia proper say that frequently, but it is the Russian government that sent such anti-Semitic extremists into Ukraine." Even the Russian media is actually scaremongering over "Jews" running Ukraine.
It goes on:
"In fact, Yaakov Dov Bleich, an American-born rabbi recognized as Chief Rabbi of Ukraine since 1990, says that the recent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions have largely been staged Russian provocations designed to discredit pro-Ukrainian activists and Kiev’s interim government. Bleich is not a Pollyanna about the existence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and remains deeply concerned about Svoboda and Tyahnybok’s unapologetic use of anti-Semitic language — but he is much more concerned about Russia:
"All of the recent attacks on synagogues and Jews have taken place in the east where the Russian extremists are operating. Meanwhile, in the West, where there are supposedly ultra-nationalist extremists, all has been quiet. The Ukrainian Jewish Community is definitely more afraid of Putin and these pro-Russian hooligans than of Ukrainian anti-Semitism."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/07/why-jews-and-ukrainians-have-become-unlikely-allies/
BTW, I'm not sure why you'd bring this up, out of context, without any prompting. I would assume you're a Russkie sock puppet, to use your own name.
In Ukraine, the Ternopil State Regional Council building has been decorated with a huge portrait of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera .
As for Bandera, in WW2 Ukraine, people who fought against the communists didn't have much choice in friends. He is considered a hero or a villain depending on who you talk to, and was later imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp. He was in jail when the killings of Poles took place, but he did have nasty things to say about them.
False....Ukraine overthrew its elected government in Feb 2014 in a Western back coup hours after the embattled President had signed an agreement to hold early elections. In the absence of Constitutional order that followed his ouster, several eastern Ukraine oblasts chose self governance over tyranny. One of them, Crimea, took the additional legal step of voting to reincorporate itself with Russia and is no longer part of Ukraine. Reconciliation with the other separatist oblasts in Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk is supposed to be governed by the Minsk2 agreement...which the United States is not a party to and which the puppet regime in Kiev ignores.
At no point after the western backed coup did Russia "invade" Ukraine. Under a long standing lease agreement with the Constitutional government of Ukraine, Russia had troops stationed in Crimea where its Black Sea fleet is located. After the western backed coup, most of the Ukrainian military in Crimea also chose to affiliate with their Russian counterparts. Russia supports the Eastern oblast separatist movements and has provided some unofficial direct military support along with a lot of humanitarian support, but nothing along the lines of what pantywaists like NATO General Breedlove or nutjobs like John McCain were ranting about at the time.
Fixed it for you, princess.
Eastern Ukraine was invaded by Russian troops. Since that time, Eastern “Russians” have loved it so much, more than a million have fled back to Ukraine. As for Crimea, Sevestopol in Crimea had 123% voter turnout due to obvious fraud. 93% or so of the peninsula, despite large numbers of Crimean Tatars and millions of opponents to the Russian invasion, supposedly voted to split from the country. Meanwhile, all reports on the ground indicated almost no voter turnout in large swathes of Crimea:
“In Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea, turnout for Sunday’s referendum reached an astonishing 123% of registered voters. There may be an explanation for this number that doesn’t involve the simple stuffing of ballot boxes:
“One reporter from Kiev showed his Russian passport and was handed a ballot and allowed to vote. This raised questions in Kiev if perhaps the Russian soldiers and Russian paramilitary occupying the area since late February had been allowed to cast votes.”
“Despite the reported unusually high voter turnout in Crimea, eyewitnesses stated that there were no lines and that many voting stations were nearly empty. This was just one of the irregularities reported during the “referendum”. Among others: Russian citizens who did not hold a Ukrainian passport were allowed to vote, and members of the so-called election commissions, accompanied by police, forced those who did not want to go to polling stations to vote in the street, according to censor.net.ua. Voter turnout was “reinforced” by nearly 90,000 phantom voters in Sevastopol. In late 2013 there were 385,462 citizens in Sevastopol, according to the Sevastopol Statistics Service. This number included children under 18 and other people not eligible to vote. However, Mykhailo Malyshev, Chair of the Crimea Supreme Council Referendum Commission, stated that in Sevastopol alone 474,137 voters participated in the “referendum”, making Sevastopol’s voter turnout 123 percent. Moreover, even those who decided against boycotting the “referendum”, did not have the option to vote for preserving the current status of Crimea: the ballots provided two unconnected options to vote for: either Crimea becoming a part of Russia, or the restoration of the 1992 Crimean Constitution with Crimea remaining a part of Ukraine.
https://uacrisis.org/en/831-crimean-referendum-fraud-neo-nazis-over-100-turnout
“The Russian government’s claims that the March 16 referendum in Crimea resulted in a 96.7% vote in favor of annexation were always extremely dubious. But now, as Paul Roderick Gregory of Forbes points out, a report by Russia’s official Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights suggests that the real numbers were far different from those previously claimed:
“The website of the “President of Russia’s Council on Civil Society and Human Rights” posted a blog that was quickly taken down as if it were toxic radioactive waste. According to the Council’s report about the March referendum to annex Crimea, the turnout was a maximum 30%. And of these, only half voted for annexation – meaning only 15 percent of Crimean citizens voted for annexation.
“The fate of Crimea, therefore, was decided by the 15 percent of Crimeans, who voted in favor of unification with Russia (under the watchful eye of Kalashnikov-toting soldiers).
“Although the report appears to be absent from the English-Language Council website linked by Forbes, it is still available at the Council’s Russian-language website here. The report states that it is based on interviews with numerous Crimean officials, experts, civil society leaders, and ordinary citizens. Gregory has somewhat misinterpreted the figures there, which nonetheless are far different from those previously claimed by the Russian government.”
NOW Crimea might vote to remain with Russia... after all, Putin has stuffed the place with Russkies from the mainland, with some estimates indicating at least 1 million Russian orcs and goblins being moved into the place! Putin pulled a Joseph Stalin and did to Crimea what Stalin did to Eastern Ukraine. After the Holodomor, killing something like 10 million Ukrainians, Stalin sent countless numbers of Russians to colonize the now deserted lands.
How can anyone sustain a 50 minute conversation with Joe Biden whose mind will check out within 5 minutes of opening the conversation? Did they hand the phone over to Ron Klain after Biden started rambling on with Vlad about how he once was a long haul truck driver?
Feb 2014: Ukrainian Rabbi Tells Kiev's Jews to Flee City
Feb 2018: Ukrainian monument to Jewish Holocaust victims vandalized
Dec 2021: Ukraine - Swastika and antisemitic leaflets near the menorah in Uzhgorod
Your first article talks about a single congregation fleeing as a precaution. It doesn't say who they're afraid of, and since there have been no anti-semitic attacks in Ukrainian controlled territory, the Chief Rabbi and the other Jewish leaders are correct.
As for the vandalization: the Jews themselves view them as Russian provocations.
So yes, "Ukrainian Jews are firmly on the side of Ukraine against the Russians." In fact, Ukraine's current President is Jewish and a former TV actor.
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