Posted on 05/28/2022 5:09:53 AM PDT by dennisw
IS Ukraine LOSING the war in Donbas? Defenders fall back to avoid capture as Russians advance after blasting towns to wastelands while Boris Johnson offers fresh support to Ukrainian president Zelensky Withdrawal from the Luhansk region likely, admits Ukraine in new war blow
Area is hugely significant and one of main aims of Putin and Russia's invasion President Zelensky said Ukraine was protecting Luhansk as best it could Putin had launched invasion under the aims of capturing Luhansk and Donetsk Boris Johnson offered renewed support for Ukraine in a phone call with Zelensky
Ukraine has admitted it may have to retreat from its last post in the Luhansk region as Russian forces continue their relentless march.
Putin's forces - now into their fourth month of the invasion - have concentrated on the east of the country in recent weeks.
Ukrainian soldiers leaving Luhansk will be a blow to the country, due to its symbolic significance in the war.
This morning Boris Johnson offered fresh support to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Zelensky said they spoke on the phone about 'strengthening defence support for Ukraine, intensifying work on security guarantees and supplying fuel'.
He added: 'We must work together to prevent a food crisis and unblock Ukrainian ports.'
Putin wants both Luhansk and Donetsk regions in full and their capture was one of his earliest objectives in the deranged despot's so-called 'special military operation'.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
The items you listed are not true, but you have done a pretty good job of repeating the Russian talking points. Or did you just translate them to English?
Russia is winning because they are spending the blood and toil and using DRP and have some justification
The threat of nuclear war is being provoked by us for politics
That has got to be the dumbest and most idiotic comment ever.
What are you, like five years old?
More broadly, American was born in revolution and war, in a world often defined by revolution and war, where pacifist is commonly just a synonym for prey or victim. In the modern era of global markets and nuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs, isolationism is impossible -- but prudence is required.
Is US and NATO aid and support for Ukraine in resisting invasion and dismemberment by Russia prudent? I believe so, but such a discussion turns on a rational calculation of national interest. An effort to measure purity of motive is a distraction and snare.
You do seem to have a rather romantic view of the permanence and distinctiveness of those pre-1914 'Empires'. Two of them, the German and the Russian, had emerged only after a slow accretion of its neighbours to one originally small state, and it was only late in that period that Prussia had absorbed most Teuton peoples, and Muscovy most Slavs. And the third, the Hapsburg, existed only by virtue of astute marriage arrangements.
As for the presently disputed lands, it's worth remembering that for centuries before the 19th they had been part of another vanished empire, the dual commonwealth of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland, which for much of that period had been the largest and the dominant power in Eastern Europe: occupying most of the lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea, including the whole of what is now Byelorussia and most of Ukraine. If historical possession is to be a criterion, then who's to say that the present state with the greater claim is not Russia but... Lithuania.
Norman Davies (in Vanished Kingdoms, Allen Lane 2011) is good on the essential fluidity and impermanence of all these structures, some of which happened to be temporarily dominant in 1914. I recommend it.
Whatever the other sins which you may lay at the door of Wilson, I think he can be spared responsibility for the post-1918 rearrangements in Europe. They would probably have been very little different if Wilson had not chosen to involve himself so directly. Lloyd George and Clemenceau had already agreed a broadly similar arrangement before Wilson went public with his, ah, punctilious speech, after which they inevitably became attached to his name. The League of Nations was certainly Wilson's baby, but that's another matter...
That government set up snipers to shoot its own citizens, which made them angry. Imagine if instead of just killing Ashley Babbitt the Capital Police had shot dozens of peaceful protestors outside of the Capitol Building on January 6th.
You try to gloss over the fact that Yanukovych was voted out be the Parliament. But would you have the same opinion if the US Senate impeached a President here? How about if they impeached and removed Joe Biden? Would that be a "coup"? No, it would be an act of the duly elected representatives of the people, even though Democrats and leftists would complain about if for years and call it a coup. Just like you are calling the removal of the Russian stooge Yanukovych a coup.
But your entire argument full of Russian spin misses one point. Zelensky was elected directly by the Ukrainian people in 2019. His election and his government was elected by the people, and what happened 5 years before that has no relevance to his election or today.
Under your theory the Russians have some reason to invade Ukraine today, in 2022, because their preferred politician was removed from office in 2014. That's nonsense.
On the net, what facts doe you have for that? Or is it simply your preferred belief? I can argue facts and evidence and try to persuade you, but faith is another thing entirely.
That's your statement in case you forgot. Is it truthful?
If it is true then what basis do you have for your opinions about the conflict in Ukraine?
NATO’s security interests are adversely affected by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, especially Poland and the Baltic members. Even Sweden and Finland, previously nonmembers, now want in out of fear of Putin and Russia. And Britain has been even more supportive of Ukraine than the US.
After the debacle they staged in northern Ukraine, Russia is now (perhaps only temporarily) making some limited gains in the Donbas region. Whether they succeed in holding on to those gains or not, only time will tell.
[...] they are spending the blood and toil [...]
What does that even mean?! That they had been suffering no casualties until now?! And are you attempting to imply that Ukraine is not "spending blood?"
[...] and have some justification
Russia, due to its unjustified and unprovoked attack and invasion of Ukraine, has made itself a pariah state for at least two decades.
The threat of nuclear war is being provoked by us for politics
Huh?!
The West is to blame for Russia threatening to launch nuclear weapons because their "Special Military Operation" is at risk of failing?!
Regards,
Really? We did not win every round, but we won the Cold War. And nowadays, South Korea is a free and prosperous democracy allied with the US, while Americans are prized as tourists and trade customers in nominally communist Vietnam — with Hanoi City having over two dozen McDonalds.
Debacle
You need to read beyond Daily Mail Alex
I’m not sure what facts you are questioning. Is it the information about ISW or the consequences of what is happening? Regarding ISW, you can trace conflict of interest easily through Wikipedia. As for faith, I stated what I believed. I don’t know how to post links but I look at a lot of information on YouTube and have found commentary helpful. One of the sources is The Duran, originating from London and Greece. Other sources I consult are all over the map and Biden is not shy in blaming the conflict for all sorts of problems we have. News reports about the fraying of relations with Brazil, Venezuela, India, Turkey, Hungary and Poland are rampant. One place I don’t look for information is mainstream media and legacy newspapers. Take that for what it’s worth.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton on the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" (1942-2008)
More to the point, we have abundant evidence for Putin's views from the early 1990s as a deputy mayor in St. Petersburg that the collapse of the USSR was a great tragedy, and that the new Russian state needed to reassert centralized control and make Russia the dominant power over Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
Once Putin attained national office as Yeltsin's successor, he diligently, even obsessively pursued those objectives -- in addition to looting the country along with his circle of oligarchs. To cement himself into power, Putin had critics and adversaries imprisoned, killed, or menaced into silence. Immense sums were spent by Putin to rebuild Russia's military, with a series of small wars undertaken to expand Russia's influence.
The response of the US political class and most of Europe was to ignore and indulge Putin's small wars, brutality, and corruption and then to cut defense spending, lap up cash from Putin and his oligarch allies, expand business and economic ties with Russia, and look for some sort of durable political accommodation with him. It did not work because Putin's success emboldened him. As the French say, appetite grows with eating.
In late 2021, as the US and NATO were warning of Russia's military buildup on Ukraine's borders as being preparation for an invasion, Russia denied the accusation but laid out terms: no NATO membership or other help for Ukraine, a curtailment of NATO military activity in Eastern Europe, the withdrawal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, and the removal of NATO battalions and weapons from former Warsaw Pact member Poland and from the Baltic Republics. Reuters reported this at the time: Russia demands NATO roll back from East Europe and stay out of Ukraine, December 17, 2021.
Notably, with invasion forces at the ready Putin and his propaganda outlets also disparaged Ukraine as a country led by Nazis and drug addicts and not genuinely a nation. There methods were reminiscent of Hitler's attack on Poland as the opening act of WW II.
If there was "provocation" by the US and NATO it was in not firmly rejecting Russia's demands and moving new military forces into the region but instead seeking talks with Russia. In effect, as Russia was openly preparing to mug seemingly derelict old granny Ukraine, and the US and NATO were acted like feeble oldsters capable of being only ineffectual bystanders. When the mugging started though, granny resisted and the apparently feeble bystanders were packing and willing to act.
Put to the test of an invasion, Russia's military proved to be incompetent and Ukraine unexpectedly determined to resist, with a flamboyant leader who appealed to the US and West European public for support. Contrary to early US and NATO military assessments, Ukraine imposed heavy casualties on Russia's invading forces, the US and NATO enacted substantial sanctions on Russia and began shipping crucial weapons and war materiel to Ukraine -- depleting their own stocks to do so and with West European and world economies faltering due to sanctions.
On the whole, it is hard to see where an honest case can be made that Russia was provoked or that the US and NATO were spoiling to supply and support Ukraine as a proxy against Russia. More accurately, Putin and Russia got the war they wanted and are losing.
That's a lot of actually! Anyone interested can read your claims and my criticism of them, and do their own investigation and see who knows more. Clearly my post was much more detailed than either your original post, or this response. Mine included links, dates and a timeline.
Let the readers decide!
You listed a long, and heavily Russian talking points spin on what happened in 2014. I wrote that all my myself, using the three or four articles in Wikipedia and the primary source documents as my references. No Russians were involved in creating my post. The facts are readily available, and most of them are not in dispute.
In reality hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens rose up to protest a corrupt government with close ties to Russia.
Ukraine had a population before the war of 44 million people, and a couple hundred thousand, no matter how emotional they are, and how violent they are willing to get should not be allowed to overthrow the government.
Hundreds of thousands of Americas participated in Black Lives Matter / Geroge Floyd's protests. Does that mean that it would have been OK if they had driven Trump out of office, when something like 65 million people voted for him?
Another meaningless piece of rhetoric you are throwing around: the Ukrainian Government of 2013 was "pro-Russian".
So? I see that YOU don't like that, and we know Joe Biden and his minions don't like that. But really, objectively why is that intrinsically a problem, one deserving a coup. Ukraine borders Russia. Ukraine has millions of Russian speaking citizens, who self-identify as being of Russian ethnicity. Ukraine and Russia have a long interlocking history. Ukraine in it's current configuration only dates to the fall of the Soviety Union. So, there are many reasons that many or even a majority of Ukrainians might have like the pro-Russian policies of the President and his party?
That government set up snipers to shoot its own citizens, which made them angry. Imagine if instead of just killing Ashley Babbitt the Capital Police had shot dozens of peaceful protestors outside of the Capitol Building on January 6th.
Well it's a good analogy. The Government's story (which Biden just repeated again this weekend) is that the January 6 "Insurrectionists" killed multiple policemen in the attack on the capitol.
The Patriots story is that Ashli Babbet was shot dead and one or two other people were killed outside the capitol by the police, who choked and beat unconscious protesters in the environs.
So, even in the case of Jan 6 there is complete disagreement over who did what to whom. In a similar fashion it's never been determined who killed each of the 100+ protesters who were killed. Naturally the force of the rioters (and the Euro-Globalist backers, and NGOs) cried out that the security forces had killed everyone. Others claimed that it was the militias aligned with the protesters who shot people, partially because they are souless fascists (ie "Nazis") The famed Azov movement was the group providing the muscle for the Euro-Maiden protesters. Another fact that is beyond dispute, but quite inconvenient.
In the USA we've seen quite a bit of the Leftist paramilitaries shooting people. (The assassinated a pro-Trump demonstrator in broad daylight in Portland a few years ago.)
So, no, I don't think you can say with any certainty who killed who in the midst of chaotic events of the Maiden Revolution in Feb 2014. Such is the nature of violent Revolutions.
You try to gloss over the fact that Yanukovych was voted out be the Parliament.
I'm not "glossing over it" I'm denying it. I'm explicitly stating that just because his signature ended up on some extra-constitutional document doesn't legitimize it.
But would you have the same opinion if the US Senate impeached a President here?
Impeachment is clearly laid out in the US Constitution. So no., I would not object.
How about if they impeached and removed Joe Biden? Would that be a "coup"? No, it would be an act of the duly elected representatives of the people, even though Democrats and leftists would complain about if for years and call it a coup.
But those are not equivelent. Here is a theoretical equivelant:
What if Nancy Pelosi passed by a simple majority an motion to removed Donald Trump, and after weeks of riots and threats against him and his person a peace treaty was signed by Trump, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Nancy Pelosi and signed as witnesses by the Presidents of Mexico, and PM;s of Canada, Jamaica and Cuba explaining how the 5 months of violence and killing will end, the antifa will disarm, and Trump would resign in 6 months?Yes, I would call that a coup.
So, once again, provide facts to support your claims. Here is the link to the Wikipedia article on Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine.
You seem to have trouble understanding what this was. It was NOT a simple parliamentary docuement. Here is Wikipedia's description of it:
The Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine are the documents, signed on 21 February 2014 by the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and the leaders of the parliamentary opposition under the mediation of the European Union and Russia. The signing of the Agreement was intended to stop the mass bloodshed in Kyiv and to end the sharp political crisis, which began in November 2013 in connection with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to suspend the process of signing the Association agreement with the European Union.Now, if there is some other completely normal documents, passed in accordance with the existing Ukrainian Constitution in force at the time, then by all means provide a link to it for us! (Oh, but there isn't, so you're still pretending that the peace treaty wasn't the proof and seal of the coup. But, obviously, just reading it, it was the Seal of the Coup, and the unimpeachable proof that a coup took place.An agreement to resolve the political crisis was signed by the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko (Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform), Arseniy Yatsenyuk (All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland") and Oleh Tyahnybok (Svoboda). Witnessing the signing was made by the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Poland – Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Radosław Sikorski and the head of the Department for Continental Europe of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Eric Fournier. Special representative of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Lukin, who participated in the negotiations, refused to put his signature under the agreement.[1]
Just like you are calling the removal of the Russian stooge Yanukovych a coup.
I remember that Trump was called a "Russian stooge" every day, all day long on CNN, and MS-NBC, and the other networks, and in the pages of the NY Times, and the Washington Post and in the hundreds newspapers that rely on AP feeds. FOR ABOUT THREE YEARS.
Was he a Russian stooge? NO!
Even if the President of Ukraine was pro-Russian, so what? As explained above that's a legitimate political position (sort of like an America President being pro-Mexican, even though Mexican is a violent narco-State.
If the Left had succeeded in forcing Trump from office (with the security situation in D.C. deteriorating to the point he feared for his life and the life of his family) would the fact that he'd been called "A Russian stooge" over-and-over by his detractors make the coup OK with you?
In other words, name-calling doesn't change anything.
But your entire argument full of Russian spin misses one point.
It's my thinking, my analysis and my writing you are debating here. For the record I am not Russian, nor even Russian heritage. So stop with the false ad-hominem's already.
Zelensky was elected directly by the Ukrainian people in 2019. His election and his government was elected by the people, and what happened 5 years before that has no relevance to his election or today.
Well not exactly. If he agreed to the partition of his country and letting the Donbas region's two start-up States have their independence, and acknowledged that Crimea voted to become part of Russia -- your point would hold more water.
But, as things stand he was elected and claims to rule over all of the formally united territory of the Ukraine, but none of the people in the disputed territories voted for him.
Leaving aside Biden's cheating, if he claimed the Phillipines were still part of the USA he couldn't really point to the 2020 USA election to bolster his claim. The Philippines didn't vote in it.
Donbas region and Crimea didn't vote for Zelinsky, in the same way.
Under your theory the Russians have some reason to invade Ukraine today, in 2022, because their preferred politician was removed from office in 2014. That's nonsense.
Well it's not really "my theory", it's what we know from the public statements.
Ukraine's continued military attacks on Donbas, their continued embrace of NATO, in contradiction to security agreements previously made with the USA, a whole raft of recent behaviors led to the Russian government to mount the Special Military Operation. But, it does all go back to the US State Department / Soros-funded NGO / Ukrainian Nationalist / Useful Idiot coup of 2014, yes.
No one is obligated to go to war to protect another country. No religious moral code demands that, nor risking war, nor arming other countries.
Up until relatively recently, everything east of the Dnieper River belonged to Russia. That also happens to be the demographic border between the ethnic / linguistic / culturally Russian-Ukrainians and the Germanic-Ukrainians (which used to belong to Poland (Galacia)). Far more recently than Israel, yet everyone let Israel retake most of Israel.
For example, even though you rely on Wikipedia, "I wrote that all my myself, using the three or four articles in Wikipedia.." You claim that nobody can know who did the shooting that killed 100 protestors. But that isn't what the Wikipedia article you relied on says.
"In January and February 2014, clashes in Kyiv between protesters and Berkut special riot police resulted in the deaths of 108 protesters and 13 police officers,[21] and the wounding of many others. The first protesters were killed in fierce clashes with police on Hrushevsky Street on 19–22 January."
"The second active phase started February 18. After a brief truce on 19 February, the clashes renewed 20 February. According to the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, special forces (Berkut) and Interior Troops snipers[9] shot at people on Maidan and/or snipers located in nearby buildings, with the special forces firing with AK-47 assault rifles.[10] 20 February was the bloodiest day of the clashes, with at least 21 anti-government protesters killed.[11] The final death toll from these clashes in late February was 103 protesters and 13 police" Your own source
But notice that what you are writing is not supported by the very sources you cite. If Wikipedia, and the original source documents that are cited from the Wikipedia article are your source then you have to conclude that all you know is what they wrote. And they certainly didn't say "it's never been determined who killed each of the 100+ protesters who were killed".
In fact, there is an entire Wikipedia article that lists the individual people killed and how they were killed. That article is readily available, you probably already read it.
If you did you would know that many people died from gunshot wounds, usually "shot by a sniper", like Valeriy Opanasyuk, who had 4 children. But you decided to put out the Russian spin anyway.
I find it amusing how much effort you will put into trying to make excuses for Russia invading Ukraine. You need arcane arguments about how a document signed by Yanukovych himself was somehow unusual, and a coup, even though that happened in 2014, and since then Ukraine has had another election. If Russian hadn't seized Crimea, and the Russian backed militias that took over the Donbass hadn't seceded from Ukraine those people could have voted in the 2019 election.
Your complain about them not getting to vote in 2019 is silly. Did the residents of Georgia get to vote in the 1864 US election? No, they didn't.
Why are you spinning so hard to justify Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine? Regardless of what happened in Ukrainian politics in 2014 is that a reason for the Russian government to be destroying cities, bombing civilians, and killing thousands and thousands of civilians? Does whatever political process unfolded in 2014 justify the rape and murder of teenage girls by Russian soldiers today?
Many Freepers have argued the case far better than I can. I will say I was impressed with an article by Jacques Baud, a former Swiss military intelligence officer and expert on eastern European countries, where he traced the history and runup to this conflict since at least 2014. It was posted on FR in April and you can find it by doing a search using Ukraine as your reference. I might be able to get further into discussion with you if you like after this holiday is over.
Regards.
You know, like the people breaking the windows and urging everyone to storm the capital. They were supposed to be GOP'ers, and they were wearing MAGA hats. But there are odd videos of them changing out of more antifa looking gear just for the photo ops? It's not 100% clear either way, but certainly the people who denounced everyone saying it was a false flag back in January, if they are being honest, have to admit it's hard to say that there were not a lot of instigators involved
So just because the "official story", which is very much what Wikipedia provides in most cases, says the people doing the shooting were the government troops following orders of the deposed former President (well, what would you expect them to say?).
Does you utter lack of ability to provide the thing you've been claiming for two days -- a link to the regular-order parliamentary motion where President Viktor Yanukovych was removed?
And, seeing as were agreeing on Wikepedia as a baseline:
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych (Ukrainian: Віктор Федорович Янукович, pronounced [ˈwiktor ˈfɛdorowɪtʃ jɐnʊˈkɔwɪtʃ] (listen); Russian: Виктор Фёдорович Янукович; born 9 July 1950) is a former politician who served as the fourth president of Ukraine[5] from 2010 until he was removed from office in the Maidan Revolution in 2014, after a long series of protests in support of the European Union by diverse civil-society groups.
Wait? What? Yanukovych was removed in a REVOLUTION, not just as a normal parliamentary vote as you've been claiming all over Free Republic for weeks?
So, I understand you want to drop this, entirely, without conceding you were wrong. Lame, like a liberal!
Notes:
The BBC, that known Russian disinformation site.
Ukraine Maidan deaths: Who fired shots?
On 20 February 2014, more than 50 anti-government protesters were shot dead in Kiev's Maidan square. The massacre triggered the collapse of Ukraine's pro-Russian government, prompting Moscow to annex Crimea and sparking a separatist war in the east.At the time, riot police were blamed for the deaths, but they were not the only ones shooting that day.
The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse, who witnessed the shootings, returned to investigate and spoke to people on both sides about whey think happened.
And from Consortium News:
The Buried Maidan Massacre and Its Misrepresentation by the West
Therefore, it is remarkable that five years after this massacre shook the world, no one has been sentenced for any of the Maidan killings. This was the best documented case of mass killing in history, broadcast live on TV and the internet, in presence of thousands of eyewitnesses. It was filmed by hundreds of journalists from major media in the West, Ukraine, Russia, and many other countries as well as by numerous social media users. Yet, to this day, no one has been brought to justice for this major and consequential crime.
Wow! Sounds a lot like how no-one has been even investigated for the shooting of Ashli or the beating/strangulation deaths that took place outside the capitol.
Why is that? Can you figure it out?
Well because the Biden admiistration and Team Corrupt Democrats don't want light shined on something. They want the narrative preserved.
Just like your favorite corrupt government in Central Asia.
The thing about you is, you just pretend not to know this stuff. You know it very well.
Still waiting for the link to the regular paliamentary process that removed Yanukovych. Should be easy to find...
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