Posted on 02/11/2024 10:26:12 AM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
The war in Ukraine is primarily a war for control of people, not land. Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine twice not mainly because he desires Ukraine’s land, but rather because he seeks to control its people. Putin’s project, explicitly articulated in the 2021 article he published justifying the 2022 full-scale invasion, is the destruction of Ukraine’s distinctive political, social, linguistic, and religious identity.[1] Putin seeks to make real his false ideological conviction that Ukrainians are simply confused Russians with an invented identity, language, and history that a small, Western-backed minority is seeking to impose on the majority of inhabitants. He sees language as one of the primary determinants of ethnicity—Russian speakers, he claims, must be Russians regardless of the state they live in.[2] The Russian Federation has claimed special rights to protect Russians in the former Soviet states since the 1990s, although the Kremlin did not act on those claims until Putin became president.[3] Putin’s aim to destroy Ukrainian identity, language, and culture is thus one of the primary objectives of his entire enterprise.
The stakes of this war thus transcend hectares of land. They include the lives, freedom, and identities of nearly five million Ukrainians currently living under Russian occupation, the nearly five million more whom the Kremlin has illegally deported to Russia and the additional millions who have fled their homeland to other parts of Ukraine or abroad.[4] Dry, abstract, “realist” discussions about pressuring Ukraine to make “concessions”—to “trade land for peace”—ignore the reality of the war. This war is about people as well as land, and Western leaders cannot dismiss the consequences of the policies they pursue and demand.
Russia first experimented with its occupation playbook in 2008 when it invaded Georgia and occupied the Georgian territories of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia “republics.”[5] Russia further developed means and methods of occupation in Ukraine after it invaded and seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014. The international community denounced the 2014 invasion, refused to recognize Russia’s claims to these areas, and heavily sanctioned involved Russian actors.[6] The international response, however, failed to discourage Russia from continuing its occupation of Ukraine and setting conditions for the 2022 full-scale invasion. Russia succeeded in forcing the international community to accept and internalize the 2014 occupation enough that many even in the West now view the 2014 territories as different from the rest of Ukraine.
Russia is now applying these means and methods of occupation on an expanded scale in the Ukrainian territories it occupied since the full-scale invasion that began on February 24, 2022. The Kremlin’s occupation design aims to eliminate Ukrainian identity by forcibly integrating occupied Ukraine into Russia socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, religiously, and bureaucratically. Moscow ultimately seeks to persuade Kyiv and its supporters that the forced integration of Ukraine into Russia, and the resulting elimination of Ukrainian identity, are permanent and irreversible so that the Kremlin can fully subjugate these territories and people for its own gain.
Putin also seeks to use Ukraine as a source of mobilizable manpower in part to address Russia's demographic issues. Russia has been struggling since the beginning of the 1990s with a demographic crisis, caused by declining birthrates, an aging population, low life expectancy (particularly amongst males of working age), and high levels of emigration.[7] The war has somewhat exacerbated Russia’s demographic challenges because 800,000- 900,000 Russians fled the country after the start of the war, including up to 700,000 who ran after Putin ordered partial mobilization in September 2022.[8] Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) data shows that Russia’s labor shortage amounted to 4.8 million people in 2023, a problem that has reduced Russia’s economic output.[9] Rosstat also estimated in 2023 that Russia’s population will decline naturally at a rate of more than 600,000 people per year until 2032.[10]
Rosstat reported that the Russian population was 146 million as of January 1, 2023.[11] Five million Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied areas, plus the 4.8 million Ukrainians whom Russia has deported into the Russian Federation, thus comprise about 7 percent of the current Russian population. Russian efforts to control Ukrainian land and seize its people are therefore in part intended to offset Russia’s population decline and workforce shortages.
It was Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis, after the illegal coup WE fomented that setoff a civil war, that persecuted and tried to ethnically cleanse the ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine.
The people of the regions annexed overwhelmingly voted for Yanukovych and were under no obligation to remain part of an illegal formed government that hated, persecuted and killed them.
The narrative you're pushing is brazen lie.
>They have a limited attention span, and they’ll run out of the prepared shite-post material they’ve been given in an hour or two.<
Nobody gives us any material, Chad.
Unlike you brain dead zeepers, we don’t have Deny’s, The Enforcer, The Russian Dude, etc. to depend on for our daily dose of propaganda.
Zeepers don’t have the intellectual capability to form their own opinions.
Zeepers are Sheeple.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/06/12/a-case-study-in-american-propaganda/
The president and founder of the Institute for the Study of War is Kimberly Kagan, a military historian who is married to Frederick Kagan, who is also a military historian and does work for ISW. Frederick is a well-known neoconservative, though not as well-known as his brother Robert. In the 1990s, Robert Kagan, along with Bill Kristol (who is on ISW’s board), founded the Project for a New American Century, which in the view of some observers played an important role in convincing George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
###
Robert Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, is the state department official who very publicly supported Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution—the overthrow of pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych, which led Russia to seize Crimea and give military support to secessionist rebels in the Donbass. Nuland also played a behind-the-scenes role in this transition of power that, according to some of her detractors, amounted to orchestrating a coup.
And as long as we’re going down rabbit holes: The Kagan-Kristol Project for a New American Century was funded by arms makers, thanks largely to the work of Lockheed Martin executive Bruce P. Jackson, who became a director of PNAC. Jackson had earlier organized the US Committee to Expand NATO, which successfully lobbied for what its name suggests it lobbied for. Some people think NATO expansion—in particular George W. Bush’s 2008 addition of Ukraine to the list of future members—helped cause the Ukraine war, but in any event NATO expansion has over the past quarter century made lots and lots of money for Lockheed Martin and other arms makers.
Meanwhile, Wyatt over at Defense Politics - ASIIIAAA gives us the latest news on Avdeyevka: Russia blocks reinforcement to Operationally Encircled Avdiivka - Day 717 (10/2) Ukraine War SITREP [20 minutes].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CUgiw4X3lQ
Hopefully, the “Kotlovoy General” Syrsky pours more precious AFU troops into the cauldron.
General 404 was also the Hero of Debaltsevo back in 2015. 
That's something I'd gladly pay for.
It’s cute how they think we actually read in entirety the garbage they slop all over FR.
Will the “Kotlovoy General” reinforce failure, as is his usual way?
Great article that explains a lot about Putin’s behavior. He is willing to burn Ukraine to the ground rather than to have to see it have a more prosperous existence by joining the West, because it would completely undermine his delusion, much like Hitler’s, that Russia is superior to all nations. And even better, its fact-based, well-reasoned argument is making the trolls’ heads here explode, judging from the unhinged screeching and baseless insults above.
Facts to Putinistas is like garlic to vampires.
There is zero regard for the lives of the troops that will be slaughtered.
"Robert Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, is the state department official who very publicly supported Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution"
Also important history - Britannica:
In 2002 Ukrainian Pres. Leonid Kuchma appointed Yanukovych prime minister. Yanukovych, who did not speak Ukrainian prior to his appointment, shared Kuchma’s desire to maintain close ties with Russia.
As the 2004 presidential election approached, Yanukovych was presented as Kuchma’s clear successor, and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin offered support for his candidacy.
During the campaign Yanukovych’s chief opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, became ill after an apparent assassination attempt, and the race drew international attention.
The results of the first round of the election were inconclusive. In the November runoff Yanukovych was declared the winner, in spite of exit polling that showed Yushchenko with a commanding lead.
Yushchenko’s supporters took to the streets by the tens of thousands in a series of protests that were dubbed the Orange Revolution, and the runoff results were overturned by the Ukrainian Supreme Court.
In a new runoff held on December 26, 2004, Yanukovych was soundly defeated.
Syrsky’s AFU cannon fodder call him “General 200”, for the military code for KIA [killed in action].
It's almost as if Vicki Nuland has tried to erase all 3-letter-agency related history of the Khazarian Mafia's 100-year-ago artificial adoption of national socialism (a leftist movement, unlike academics and Wikipedia have propagandistically promulgated), just as those nearly a millennium ago forcibly adopted the Judaic religion.
Imagine that! In more recent years, we know nazis via the Scherf family as Bushism.
It infuriates the globalists (think Bush, WEF, IMF, WHO, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and related groups) that Russia has resisted monetary control via the self-appointed elite globalists as those latter have through color revolutions foisted their loan-based, fiat currency upon so many countries. (President Kennedy's attempt to overthrow that private Federal Reserve currency was one of the main reasons the CIA assassinated him. "Coincidentally," JFK's newly-introduced silver certificate currency was immediately retracted by LBJ.)
Parallel to the US attacking the Soviet currency in the late 1980s, Nuland's 3-letter-agency-based attack has sought to expand its biowarfare capability through scores Ukrainian-based of BSL-3, BSL-4 labs. Putin has not-implausibly claimed these labs' efforts have targeted unique DNA markers of the Russian folk.
The alliance of self-appointed elites has propagandized the American citizenry to rob it of well over a hundred billion US dollars to ship to the Azov-Movement-controlled Ukrainians that the US--under Barry, a Rockefeller--installed in 2014. Small wonder the "Big Guy" has sought to perpetuate his kickbacks for aiding Uke oligarchs and companies such as Burisma.
Right on bro
“You know this is a conservative site, right? Always has been. So, of course we’re going to laugh at leftists coming on here to bloviate their leftist garbage.”
Right on. Most of us here are sympathetic to Ukraine but think America should stay out of it. That’s not good enough for the pro-Ukraine crowd, if you aren’t in favor of all-out war and destruction of Russia, they slander you as an appeaser or a Putinista. They’re mostly weirdo foreigners with no real skin in the game.
The post references an article by Putin in 2021. I did not see any links to it.
There is entirely too much babble about what someone said, instead of presenting the exact words whatever someone said.
As to language in Ukraine, this seems to be a very difficult item to get at. I spent some time on the Wiki, which has pre 2022 content, to find what reality is. It’s very difficult. There is a lot of agenda demanding acceptance of the idea that Ukraine’s Ukrainian language is the overwhelming preferred speech. But the Wiki says this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine — note particularly the last para:
According to research data from the Kyiv National Linguistic University, currently not displayed on its website but preserved, in particular, on ‘accessed.on.Academia.edu’,[11] as of 2009, a somewhat different picture was observed in the use of Ukrainian and Russian languages in everyday communication by Ukrainian citizens.
Gallup Poll results underscore the prevalence of national language use over Russian; when asked in what language they preferred to conduct the Gallup interview, only respondents in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus overwhelmingly chose Russian. Ukraine and Kazakhstan retain larger Russian populations. In Belarus, where the interethnic differences between the Belarusians and Russians are minimal, Russian is one of the official languages.
Also, earlier in 2008, according to Gallup Institute research, it was found that 83% of Ukrainian citizens chose to fill out (and did fill out) a questionnaire in Russian.[12] The methodology was that the survey was not related to the topic of language, but the questionnaires themselves were in three versions: in Russian, Ukrainian, and English. Thus, a result was achieved that was not related to the national or ideological identification of the respondents, with the results presented in the table above.
Pretend-esident had a prosecutor there fired for threatening his money train and openly bragged about it; recorded.
Putin want's Russia's access to the Black Sea first and foremost; a not-unreasonable wish where most of the population has ties to Russia, it's a critical trade and defense access and he DID make several attempts to resolve this civilly.
Yes, Putin is a dictator verging on megalomaniacal but his blowing Tucker down with knowledge shows he's not insane, totally aware of world status and feels he stands for his nation. We need a guy like that standing for us. Oh wait...
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