Ukraine

[andydp]

Feb 27, 2022 16:36:49 GMT goldenvalley said:

 Ukrainian refugees are going to be the next issue for Europe.  The people leaving the country now are going to end up staying a long time.  A lot of Europe didn't want Iraqi or other Middle Easterners in their countries. But Ukrainians aren't dark skinned or Muslim.

Some 368,000 Ukrainians have fled to European neighbors — mainly to Poland, as well as to Hungary, Moldova, Slovakia and Romania — since Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday, the United Nations refugee agency said Sunday.

Thousands more are still trying to get through the clogged borders, waiting in the cold for hours on end in cars or on foot with just the bare minimal belongings. As of Saturday, there was a nearly nine-mile backlog at the crossing into Poland, with some people waiting for 40 hours in 28-degree temperatures at night, according to a spokesperson with the U.N. refugee agency, Chris Melzer

The scale of the exodus has not been seen in Europe in years. What could become Europe’s biggest humanitarian emergency since 2015 — when more than 1 million refugees mainly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan arrived and triggered a continentwide crisis over whether to accept or reject those fleeing — is swiftly unfolding.

I'm volunteering to do my part:

[LFC]

Accurate information is always tough to come by but this Vox piece reports that apparently the Putin's war isn't going as well as he had hoped.

After four days of fighting in Ukraine, it’s not going especially well for Russian forces. According to Ukraine’s defense ministry, Russia has lost about 4,300 troops and nearly 150 tanks, and both Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, are still under Ukrainian control.

Casualty numbers are unverified and should be treated with some caution, but they’re still a sharp contrast to initial Russian expectations, which assumed the Russian armed forces’ greater numbers and access to more advanced weapons systems would result in a swift, relatively painless invasion. Ukrainian forces, however, have mounted a strikingly successful resistance.

In recent years, much has been made of Russia’s developing hybrid warfare, fusing conventional tactics like ground troops and air campaigns alongside information manipulation and electronic warfare like signal jamming. Nonetheless, on the information front, Russia seems to be losing the war; the sheer volume of video and information coming from Ukraine in real time, plus a young, social media-savvy president and broad, transparent intelligence sharing, have proved to be a powerful antidote to the Kremlin’s disinformation spin.

“It’s been interesting to watch in the last 48 hours, and good to see in many ways, that the Kremlin has lost control of the narrative, internationally, around this war,” Mason Clark, the lead Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a nonpartisan DC-based think tank, told Vox.

The conflict is also markedly different than other recent conflicts, such as those in Syria or Afghanistan. Despite the disparities between Russian and Ukrainian forces, it’s still a war between two formal militaries, as opposed to a decentralized insurgency.

[LFC]

And Putin isn't the only one capable of "hybrid warfare." Russia's hacker groups have proven themselves to be effective on offense. We're about to see how prepared Russia is to play defense.

Faced with a powerful Russian army at its doorstep, Ukraine once again affirmed that it would not go down without a fight. Just as the government called for civilian volunteers to fight against the invasion, it was now seeking volunteer hackers to launch cyber attacks against Russian businesses, banks, and government entities.

On Saturday, Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced on Twitter that the country was creating an “IT Army.” He called on those with digital talents to join the effort and “fight on the cyber front.” Fedorov said that the army would be organizing in a Telegram chat room, where volunteers would be able to complete “operational tasks.”

Although the first task on the channel is for cyber specialists, the vice prime minister explained, there will be tasks for everyone.

When Gizmodo viewed the Telegram group on Sunday, it had more than 194,000 subscribers. The first task encouraged members to “use any vectors of cyber and DDoS attacks” on the websites of 31 Russian business corporations, banks, and government entities.

Targets included natural gas heavyweight Gazprom, oil and gas company Lukoil, and internet company Yandex, among many others. In the financial sector, the IT Army singled out Sberbank, VTB, and Gazprombank, some of the country’s top banks. Russian government entities on the list included the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense.

[AnBr]

Making the Russian oligarchs pay for Putin's blunder.

Ukrainian sailor sinks Russian boss’s $7.7 million luxury superyacht

[AnBr]

Graffiti in Paris

[goldenvalley]

Trevor Noah picked up on the racism of the media as they talk about the war and Ukrainian refugees.  

On Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Noah sharply criticized TV reporters stunned by the violence unfolding in a “relatively civilized,” “relatively European” country that is “not a developing, Third World nation” — as some broadcasters put it.

Journalists have garnered widespread criticism over the past week for implying that the predominantly white people of Ukraine deserve more sympathy than people living in places with mostly nonwhite populations.

“I don’t know about you but I have been glued to the TV all weekend watching all the news,” Noah said.

“And beyond the war itself ... there’s a really interesting thing that I learned. And that is: A lot of people on TV didn’t expect a war like this to happen in, let’s say, certain neighborhoods.”

For example:

“These are prosperous, middle-class people,” said Al Jazeera English anchor Peter Dobbie. “These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

“This isn’t a place — with all due respect — like Iraq or Afghanistan,” remarked CBS News correspondent Charlie D’Agata. “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

I don't recall if such things were said during the war in the Balkans...some of the folks involved in that were Muslims.

[goldenvalley]

Last night my son in law was asking why isn't American doing something tangible to support Ukraine.  Here's what it is doing:

The United States drastically enhanced its shipments of lethal military aid and protective equipment to Ukraine as the prospect of a Russian invasion became more apparent and then a reality, according to a declassified accounting of transfers and sales reviewed by The Washington Post.

The list indicates that as early as December, the Pentagon was equipping Ukrainian fighters with arms and equipment useful for fighting in urban areas, including shotguns and specialized suits to safeguard soldiers handling unexploded ordnance. Over the last week, the Biden administration has increased such shipments, sending Stinger antiaircraft missile systems for the first time and further augmenting Kyiv’s supply of antitank Javelin missiles and other ammunition.

Taken together, the variety, volume and potency of firepower being rushed into the war zone illustrate the extent to which the United States sought to prepare the Ukrainian military to wage a hybrid war against Russia, even as President Biden has expressly ruled out inserting American troops into the conflict.

[jackd]

The sanctions ae "tangible" as well.

[goldenvalley]

The same sort of

Four days after Russia began dropping artillery shells on Kyiv, Misha Katsiurin, a Ukrainian restaurateur, was wondering why his father, a church custodian living in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, hadn’t called to check on him.

“There is a war, I’m his son, and he just doesn’t call,” Mr. Katsiurin, who is 33, said in an interview. “So I called him by myself and told him how is it going here in Kyiv with my family now that Russia started bombing us. That I’m trying to evacuate my children and my wife, that everything is extremely scary.”

He did not get the response he expected. His father, Andrei, didn’t believe him.

“No, no, no, no stop,” Mr. Katsiurin said of his father’s initial response.

“He started to tell me how the things in my country are going,” said Mr. Katsiurin, who converted his restaurants into volunteer centers and is temporarily staying near the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil. “He started to yell at me and told me, ‘Look, everything is going like this. They are Nazis.’”

Mr. Katsiurin is not alone in his frustration. When Valentyna V. Kremyr wrote to her brother and sister in Russia to tell them that her son had spent days in a bomb shelter in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha because of the intensive fighting there, she was also met with disbelief.

“They believe that everything is calm in Kyiv, that no one is shelling Kyiv,” Ms. Kremyr said in a phone interview. She said her siblings think the Russians are striking military infrastructure “with precision, and that’s it.”

She said her sister Lyubov, who lives in Perm, wished her a happy birthday on Feb. 25, the second day of the invasion. When Ms. Kremyr wrote back about the situation on the ground, her sister’s answer via direct message was simple: “No one is bombing Kyiv, and you should actually be afraid of the Nazis, whom your father fought against. Your children will be alive and healthy. We love the Ukrainian people, but you need to think hard about who you elected as president.”

[LFC]

Mar 6, 2022 18:31:23 GMT goldenvalley said:

The same sort of

MAGAts have existed for thousands of years.

[LFC]

Here's a set of links from TPM on the conflict. One states that the Russian military may be getting its hands around its supply chain problems and that's not good. I found this one particularly interesting.

Fascinating and long Twitter thread about how low-tech extractive industries are politically dominant within Russia and more technologically complex industries rate lower down the power and status system.

[LFC]

Feb 21, 2022 21:54:29 GMT jackd said:

Did everyone notice that in "recognizing " the two "republics" in the Donbas, Putin is repeating his tactics in Georgia?  Also has been issuing the populace Russian passports as he did in Georgia.  This is not likely to end well.

[LFC]

Mar 7, 2022 17:07:03 GMT LFC said:

Putin is a f***ing monster. I saw video this AM of civilians being shelled as they tried to escape. He's way past military and government attacks. He just wants to murder those who don't bow before him. (Hmmmm. Sounds a bit familiar.)

Russian tanks were spotted in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin where thousands of people are crammed into apartment high rises, vulnerable to Russian missile attacks. As shelling picked up pace on Monday, women, children and elderly men crammed onto trains out of the city headed west in what has become an increasingly desperate situation for those who still can’t quite believe their country is being invaded. The United Nations predicts that at least 5 million Ukrainians will be displaced in the war.

As bullets rained down over the port city of Mariupol, which has seen some of the deadliest clashes of the war so far, a ceasefire agreement meant to allow civilians to escape has again been breached after neither side reportedly put down their weapons. The director of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the BBC on Monday that even if the ceasefire is honored, the way out is extremely dangerous. Some of his staff were trying to leave town along a path designated safe only to find it had been laced with land mines. It is unclear who laid the mines, but both sides blamed the other. “The road indicated to them was actually mined,” Dominik Stillhart told BBC Monday. “That is why it is so important that the two parties have a precise agreement for us then to be able to facilitate it on the ground.”

Oh, c'mon. It's quite clear who placed the mines. Occam's Razor, bitch.

The escape routes Putin is supposedly allowing all flow right into Russia because, you know, that's where people want to go when they're being murdered by Russian troops.

The Kremlin has been accused of staging a sick stunt after telling Ukrainians who want to flee the brutal Russian invasion of their nation that they’re free to enter Russia or Vladimir Putin’s puppet state Belarus. On Monday, Russia’s defense ministry announced it would be opening supposedly safe “corridors” from several Ukrainian cities, including the capital Kyiv, that only lead to Russian or Belarusian territory. The cynical plan was immediately called out by Ukraine and its western allies. A spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the plans as “completely immoral” and accused Russia of attempting to “use people’s suffering to create a television picture.” U.K. government minister James Cleverly told BBC News that the corridor announce was “cynical beyond belief.” He added: “Providing evacuation into the arms of the country that is currently destroying yours is a nonsense.”

[LFC]

This isn't going to play well back in Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has emphasized that, whatever else happens, he won’t let Russian conscripts go into the Ukraine meat grinder.

Russia has mandatory one year of military service for men. On Wednesday, the country’s military suggested that it might have made a bit of a mistake: to the surprise of top Russian brass, it turns out that “the presence of conscript soldiers have been uncovered in units of the Russian armed forces, participating in the special operation in Ukraine.”

The supposed discover came, the military said, after Ukrainian forces attacked a supply column with conscripts.

“A group of soldiers, including conscripts, has been taken captive,” Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement.

The use of conscripts has the potential to be particularly sensitive for Putin, in part because service is mandatory. Reports have consistently suggested that some conscripts are forced to sign contracts to extend their service.

“Yesterday, conscripts were removed from the zone of military activities — they had been forced to sign contracts, or had their signatures signed for them,” Russian senator Lyudmila Narusova said last week. “Only four people were left alive out of a company of 100.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said in the Wednesday statement that it intends to remove all conscripts from Ukraine.

[LFC]

Putin has created generations of enemies in Ukraine with his indiscriminate attacks on people, towns, cities, and refugees. He has no aim other than to punish Ukrainians for not rolling over and making him look bad and he'll slaughter as many as it takes to salve his pathetic ego.

A local legend says that in 1941, a Nazi soldier tried to burn down the Church of St. George in Zavorychi, a small town on the outskirts of Kyiv, but was stopped by an act of God. Just this week, Vladimir Putin’s tanks finished the job for him. As they shelled the town indiscriminately on their way towards the capital, the church caught fire and burned to the ground.

“A part of me has died” with no hope of being resurrected, said Julia Tymoshenko, a 22-year-old native of the town who supplied The Daily Beast with a video depicting the wreckage. “I always loved Easter… waking up at 3 a.m. to bless the food. People of our village used to bring baskets filled with goods and place them in a circle around the church.”

Now, Julia’s anguish has turned into rage.

“Those bloodthirsty bastards opened fire from their rusty tanks straight at my crib, my motherland… This church was a symbol of that community and my childhood at grandma’s. I can only imagine the sorrow my grandma felt watching from her window how the church was turning into ashes,” she said. “Everything that is left alive in me now burns.”

[LFC]

A group of Republicans come up with a bullshit reason to support Putin by holding up aid to Ukraine. He really does own quite a few of them.

Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, a small group of Republican lawmakers seized on Russia’s buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border to make a tenuous point about a situation 6,600 miles away: President Joe Biden needs to do something about the southern border of the United States.

The conservative group of lawmakers introduced legislation tying military assistance to Ukraine with the status of the U.S.-Mexican border.

You may think conservatives would abandon their politically performative legislation after Russian President Vladimir Putin actually mounted his attack: His forces have been killing civilians and attacking Ukrainian cities for two weeks now. Just this Wednesday Russian forces bombed a Ukrainian maternity hospital.

But in spite of the carnage, many of these Republicans are doubling down.

Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), one of the original cosponsors of the bill, said he “absolutely” still wants to move the proposal forward, even though aid to Ukraine is needed now more than ever.

“I do support aid for Ukraine. However, I support this,” Good told The Daily Beast this week.

Yeah, sure you do Bobby.

[pnwguy]

Mar 11, 2022 17:55:14 GMT LFC said:

A group of Republicans come up with a bullshit reason to support Putin by holding up aid to Ukraine. He really does own quite a few of them.

Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, a small group of Republican lawmakers seized on Russia’s buildup of troops on the Ukrainian border to make a tenuous point about a situation 6,600 miles away: President Joe Biden needs to do something about the southern border of the United States.

The conservative group of lawmakers introduced legislation tying military assistance to Ukraine with the status of the U.S.-Mexican border.

You may think conservatives would abandon their politically performative legislation after Russian President Vladimir Putin actually mounted his attack: His forces have been killing civilians and attacking Ukrainian cities for two weeks now. Just this Wednesday Russian forces bombed a Ukrainian maternity hospital.

But in spite of the carnage, many of these Republicans are doubling down.

Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), one of the original cosponsors of the bill, said he “absolutely” still wants to move the proposal forward, even though aid to Ukraine is needed now more than ever.

“I do support aid for Ukraine. However, I support this,” Good told The Daily Beast this week.

Yeah, sure you do Bobby.

I believe the name was changed to Boris

[LFC]

The government of Ukraine told us long about about the danger of Trump's withholding of military equipment and how it would embolden Putin. Mission accomplished, Donald. I suspect you've received a pretty fat payoff for being a traitor.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 14, 2022 13:58:08 GMT LFC said:

The government of Ukraine told us long about about the danger of Trump's withholding of military equipment and how it would embolden Putin. Mission accomplished, Donald. I suspect you've received a pretty fat payoff for being a traitor.

Trump thought he was getting paid via the "information" about Hunter Biden.  I wonder if that was in lieu of cash.  It seems like operating through Guiliani and his crew removed Russia a step or two away from the situation.

It still confounds me that the Senate Republicans let him off on this.  He held up the arms shipment that Congress already approved and apparently Trump approved it too and he did admitted he did so with that statement of the call he was so proud of.  

[LFC]

Mar 14, 2022 15:54:20 GMT goldenvalley said:

It still confounds me that the Senate Republicans let him off on this.  He held up the arms shipment that Congress already approved and apparently Trump approved it too and he did admitted he did so with that statement of the call he was so proud of.  

Confounds yet doesn't surprise. Such is the state of American conservatism.

[LFC]

Zelensky is trying to give Putin a face-saving way to extract himself from his massive blunder that is destroying the Russian economy while allowing his country to remain free and to advance economically. (It's pretty obvious that tying yourself to Russia is NOT a good way to advance economically.)

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov says Ukraine and Russia are now discussing “concrete formulations, that are close to agreement.” He says that potential agreement is on the basis of a Ukrainian proposal of neutrality on the model on Sweden or Austria, in which Ukraine forswears NATO membership but has its own military and independent foreign policy is free to seek EU membership and whatever other ties with other countries it wants. This seems in line with what I mentioned yesterday that President Zelensky appears to have been telegraphing. He’s made a series of statements in recent days saying he’s soured on NATO, that NATO’s never going to accept Ukraine, etc. That may be true as a prognostication and I’m sure he’s not happy about it. But the logic of saying seems aiming at softening the ground for including non-membership as part of a peace settlement. Take it off the table yourself, accept it through your own agency rather than as a diktat. This part about Zelensky is my interpretation. But I’m pretty confident this is correct. I also speak these negotiations may be much closer to fruition than people are thinking.

So yes, in order to save his people and give his country a future he has to cater to the fragile ego of a f***ing child, a bratty, spoiled, evil, and very dangerous nearly 70 year old child. No wonder Trump loved Putin. They are cut from the same cloth steaming pile.

[LFC]

Not exactly the cake walk Putin envisioned.

A fourth Russian major-general has been killed in Ukraine as military losses mount for Vladimir Putin. Oleg Mityaev, commander of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division, was killed in a failed attempt to storm Mariupol on Wednesday. His killing was claimed by the Azov Battalion, which posted a picture of his corpse—his face covered by his general’s epaulette—on social media before Ukrainian officials identified him. Mityaev was the former deputy commander of Russian forces in Syria. The Daily Mirror reported that he died alongside “seven elite special-operations fighters from the feared Dzerzhinsky Division of the country’s national guard,” which it said was under Putin’s direct control. Around 20 Russian generals are thought to be leading the Ukraine invasion, and unexpected losses and communication problems have forced them into high-risk frontline positions. Ukraine claims to have killed 13,800 Russian servicemen since the invasion began Feb. 24.

[LFC]

Holy crap! If these figures are remotely accurate it explains why man-child Vladimir Putin has decided to simply slaughter civilians and destroy the homes of the survivors. He army ego is taking a massive hit.

Staggering Figures

U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the death toll for Russian troops in Ukraine has climbed to more than 7,000 since the invasion began.

• That’s higher than the U.S. troop death toll over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

• About 14,000 to 21,000 Russian troops have been injured, according to the intelligence officials.

• At least three Russian generals have died in the fighting.

Maybe he should have stuck to an operation more akin to the invasion of Grenada.

[LFC]

Speaking of Putin now simply out to slaughter civilians, I guess for making him look bad, here's a theater where hundreds of people took shelter. They wrote the word "children" in large letters in two parking lots so they could be seen from the air. They blew it up anyway.

A theater where hundreds of people had taken shelter in Mariupol was bombed on Wednesday, according to local authorities, as hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped in the coastal Ukrainian city that has been encircled for weeks by Russian forces.

Mariupol City Council, who shared an image of the destroyed building, said Russian forces had "purposefully and cynically destroyed the Drama Theater in the heart of Mariupol."

"The plane dropped a bomb on a building where hundreds of peaceful Mariupol residents were hiding," it said.

CNN has geolocated the image and confirmed it is of the theater in the southeastern port city. The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images.

Videos of the aftermath showed a fire raging in the theater's ruins. The number of casualties is unknown, authorities said.

"It is still impossible to estimate the scale of this horrific and inhumane act, because the city continues to shell residential areas," the council wrote on Telegram. "It is known that after the bombing, the central part of the Drama Theater was destroyed, and the entrance to the bomb shelter in the building was destroyed," it added.

Is it any wonder Trump loves Putin? Ukraine isn't rolling over and doing his bidding so he's showing them how "tough" he is by slaughtering women and children and destroying where they live and shelter. His death can't come too quickly for the betterment of the world.

[pnwguy]

Mar 17, 2022 15:46:40 GMT LFC said:

Is it any wonder Trump loves Putin? Ukraine isn't rolling over and doing his bidding so he's showing them how "tough" he is by slaughtering women and children and destroying where they live and shelter. His their deaths can't come too quickly for the betterment of the world.

FIFY