Posted on 08/23/2022 7:09:26 AM PDT by SpeedyInTexas
Six months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, signs are accumulating that the balance on the military and economic battlefields is slowly tilting the way of Kyiv and its Western backers. ... Some results of the war already seem settled. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rewrite the ending of the Cold War by restoring Moscow’s historic sphere of influence in Eastern Europe has failed. His war on Ukraine has instead united almost all of Europe against him, revivifying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is poised to add Sweden and Finland as new members.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I know all that but it has little to do with my point that no one really knows what the situation is inside Ukraine
That’s a good breakdown of what has happened thus far.
He was not 'legally impeached'. There was a coup.
The Rada was inquorate, as many members managed to flee Ukraine before the Right Sector thugs took over. The remainder voted in the knowledge that their legs would be broken and their families violated if they did not vote to impeach in a defective motion of the Rada.
I long thought the only solution to Afghanistan was to turn it into a glass covered parking lot. Nuke every nook and cranny in the whole country. You cannot deal with an entire country irrevocably mired in 4th century barbarism. Left to their own devices, perhaps their existence would be tolerable. But it never could be. They consistently wanted to harbor other country barbarism and to export its own tribal terror to the rest of the world. Glass covered parking lot. Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Actually I didn't pay any attention to those posts.
No, it didn't take the US 20 years to evict the Taliban from Kabul. US invasion and takeover of Afghanistan took 2 months, 1 week and 3 days ending with the eviction of the Taliban from Kabul. October 7 – 17 December 2001. Occupation obviously is a different matter, which the Russians will face also.
I don't have to speculate, I just have to watch what the Russians are doing daily: slow Russian advances, preceded by massive artillery bombardments.
I believe it was “denazification” of Ukraine. Perhaps they are one in the same. Yes?
Nice try at changing the word though.
Russia has NOT crushed a much smaller Ukraine in 6 months and is itself a much diminished power in the eyes of the world. They are having trouble recruiting replacements for their weakened army and have lost much of their first line equipment. Only way for Russia to win is the if they resort to nuclear weapons and that’s never going to happen! Putin would be assassinated if he even suggested it.
Ukraine as the Duchy of Grand Fenwick?
Peter Sellers would approve.
I agree.
I agree.
Just as our 2020 “election” was a coup.
This seems an apposite moment to quote a masterful post by Travis Mcgee
Travis: I hope I am not doing violence to the sense of your post.
Quote follows:
How long did it take us to "have" all of Afghanistan and Iraq? SHOCK AND AWE! A matter of weeks!
But our "control that was country-wide was only a millimeter deep, like morning dew. "Control" that disappeared every moment an American gun barrel was not aimed at a piece of ground. Every night in Kabul, for example, for 20 years, the Taliban ruled, not us. Our bases were forts, where Americans only sallied forth in armored convoys with air cover. For 20 years.
How are those glorious super-fast "victories" looking, 20 years out? Instead, Russia is "digesting" what it takes, kilometer by kilometer. Incorporating it. Allowing the civilians to get Russian passports. Paying unpaid Ukrainian salaries and pensions. etc.
If you want to compare our super-fast "glorious victories" in Iraq and Afghanistan to Russia in the Donbass, the true test of success will take a few years to evaluate.
Honest observers give no extra points for rapid "shock and awe" victories that evaporate like morning dew. What counts is who is running the place 10 or 20 years later, without needing forts and checkpoints and attack helicopters to dominate every grid square at gunpoint.
Hope this was useful.
Kiev still has food, running water, sanitation, electricity, cell phone service, and Internet.
Kiev would be a reduced to a smoking pile of ash and cinder if this is as depicted in the first sentence of this article.
Kiev still has food, running water, sanitation, electricity, cell phone service, and Internet.
Kiev would be a reduced to a smoking pile of ash and cinder if this is as depicted in the first sentence of this article.
My hats off to your Founding Fathers. No irony - they created an amazingly sturdy political edifice that looks like it may be able to absorb and survive the impact of the monstrous Biden coup.
But how we can ever make it up to the J6 prisoners, and the police 'suicides' I do not know. May God be with them.
US evicted the Taliban from Kabul in two months. Russia has taken 20% of Ukraine after six months. Lets be honest, nobody thought the Russians would be invading for six months.
Which should tell you that invading and conquering the entire country wasn't the primary goal. Had the 40,000 sent to Kiev cowed the Ukrainian government into a similar reaction as what had happened in Crimea in 2014, then Russia would likely have been satisfied with that; however, after 8 years of NATO build-up, that would have been unlikely.
What it did accomplish was distracting Ukrainian forces from the east long enough for Russian, DPR, and LPR forces to establish a front against Ukraine's many fortifications in the Donbass.
(Let's not forget that I've only ever seen the "three days to conquer Ukraine" meme from pro-UA or anti-RU sources; Russia, as far as I'm aware, has never stated that timeline.)
My uninformed opinion FWIW - is that - while the Taliban were never going to change, the country could have been policed indefinitely from Bagram Air Base.
A careful Trump drawdown anchored on Bagram would have looked very different from Biden's Utter Debacle.
Just as Vietnam and Iraq could have ended in stable, honourable settlements, but each was turned into unspeakably bloody f*ckfests by the Democrats.
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