I understand why he's calling for a no fly zone. IF Putin won't use nuclear weapons a no fly zone would create conditions were the Ukrainians could start taking out the artillery positions. I would also end the Russian air bombardment. There are currently hellish conditions in Mariupol and some other Ukrainian cities. Large number of people are dying. A no fly zone would end this a lot faster. It would probably force Putin to withdraw his forces. All of this is as already mentioned dependent on Putin not using nukes of course. And Zelenskyy apparently doesn't believe that Putin would use nukes.
The Ukrainians took out an entire artillery battery on Sunday with counter battery fire. That is a more effective way to neutralize artillery. The battery was towed artillery which is very difficult to shoot and scoot.
The Prypet Marshes where the Russians are is wooded. When not firing the mobile artillery is back under the trees which makes them difficult to locate by air. The supply situation for much of the artillery must be getting pretty low at this point. The fact the Russians exposed an entire gun battery to counter battery fire like they did probably indicates the supply of missiles is running low.
Experts have been trying to gauge how many missiles for the missile artillery the Russians had at the beginning of the war. The low end was about 500, but the Russians have fired about 700. It could be as high as 1000, but probably not much more than that. The units to the NW of Kyiv have been cut off from supply for a week now. They are probably in bad shape.
I know it doesn't look like it, but ultimately time is on the Ukrainian's side.
Just as seeds of WW2 were in China and Spain, so current war is a continuation of deliberate influence seeking in many countries, Donbas and more.
(UK's Tory party was rented for Brexit and more, we'll see if it was fully bought).
Now more people see what was obvious to some, everyone needs to root out corruption and malign influence. Anyone involved should know their best route is to confess, tell on others and not double down. Best way to deal with organised crime is to break the trust, then the networks fall apart.
If we don't complete a cleaning cycle, we risk everything again. Politicians, lobbyists and journalists need to act according to the greater good.
Edit: Twitter hashtag : #ToryRussiaMoney - plenty of info - eg
I've heard that when the Russians were blocked from things like Facebook, the number of nationalist trolls on Facebook dropped significantly. It's an indication how much of the trolling was done by fake accounts.
In the UK the Russians drown Brexit to weaken the UK and in the US they worked hard to drive a wedge between the two parties and to get people talking about ridiculous and sometimes impossible things like they were real. Right up to the second or third day f the invasion American politicians who were trying to curry favor with the people who were sopping this stuff up were singing the praises of Putin. All but a few have gone very quiet about Putin since.
There isn't much talk about American politics right now, the focus is international, but a recent poll found 71% of Americans thought Russia was a serious or extreme threat and 41% thought it was extreme. I'm sure at least some of those people were buying that Putin was a great guy two weeks ago.
In the US the argument about whether the US should stay neutral in WW II or not evaporated like a snowball in a blast furnace the moment Pearl Harbor happened. There are a number of US companies that were happy to do business with Germany as late as 1941 and Charles Lindbergh was vocally pro-Nazi right up to Pearl Harbor.
Some people see "strong men" and see a playground bully trying too be a "big man" when they are really weak and know that nothing good is going to come from them having any power. Other people are impressed by the strong act and think they are powerful and can achieve great things. When the person crosses the line and does something truly horrible, suddenly virtually everyone wakes up and the bulk of the population all starts working in the same direction against the bully.
Putin has been trying to divide the west on the very concept of democracy. Anti-democratic memes have started creeping into western politics. At the same time he's also been working to divide countries from one another and within themselves. United we stand, divided we fall.
The psy-ops campaign the Russians have run on social media the last 10 years or so has been brilliantly successful. They got Brexit in the UK by playing on racism among the native whites who feel "foreigners" are taking away the Britain they believed they knew. Extremist nationalists have almost won high positions in some European countries and have won positions in some others. They also took advantage of existing fault lines in the US to drive wedges as well as helped get their candidates elected.
Humans are herd animals and quite a large percentage of people don't have terribly strong views of their own. They do want to get along with the rest of the herd, so they take on whatever the herd appears to believe. The Russians exploited this with all their trolling. The algorithms on social media helped them do it too.
They plastered social media with a wide variety of extremist ideas. Then waited for people to engage. When somebody did, they got more of the same, often different Russian trolls because the algorithms were designed to do this. In a short while the person who had engaged thinks their new "friends" all believe X and so they do too.
Shortly after the invasion these people had all the fake accounts disappear and instead they are getting a steady stream of the horrors in Ukraine and they have now flipped from "Russia is OK, maybe democracy isn't that great, Putin seems more effective than out people" to "holy **** Putin is a monster!"
Democracy has its short comings. It can take a while to get anything done and sometimes good ideas end up dying because of a few idiots who decide to stop it. But it was Churchill who said "democracy is the worst of all systems, until you consider the alternatives!"
A single ruler is going to get things done faster than in any democracy because they don't have to go through a big debate process. An absolute ruler who is truly benevolent, unselfish, extremely intelligent, and extremely wise could potentially be the best ruler in human history, but when have you ever seen anyone like that who had any ambitions to power? Generally the wiser someone is, the less they want to rule over others.
With an inherited absolute monarchy every generation is a roll of the dice, but you could get someone who is somewhat better than the last guy, but in any autocracy where the autocrat came to power on their own, it's almost always through some kind of treachery, whether literally crawling over the dead bodies of their rivals or metaphorically, they are usually not exactly great human beings.
Some autocrats are pretty good at PR and know how to set up some nice window dressing, but in the end they are probably just as bad as the despot next door if not worse.
Putin had some people in the world convinced he was a pretty good leader. He especially appealed to those who think a good leader needs to be almost all testosterone, alpha male supreme, etc.
In the end these people are born sociopaths who made "good". True strength is Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King.
Russia has told Ukraine it is ready to halt military operations "in a moment" if Kyiv meets a list of conditions, the Kremlin spokesman said on Monday.
www.reuters.com
LONDON, March 7 (Reuters) - Russia is demanding that Ukraine cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent territories, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Peskov told Reuters that Russia had told Ukraine it was ready to halt its military action "in a moment" if Kyiv met its conditions.
…
"We really are finishing the demilitarisation of Ukraine. We will finish it. But the main thing is that Ukraine ceases its military action. They should stop their military action and then no one will shoot," he said.
I guess the big question is what they mean with the latter. Is it accept our offer and we will leave or give up so we can finish the war and kill Zelensky without any fight?
They are trying to make the ridiculous sound reasonable. It's probably more for domestic consumption than for the rest of the world. Very few outside of Russia are buying it.
And Ukraine seemed pretty neutral before this war started. It was Russia that crossed Ukraine's borders (three times: Crimea, Donbas, and now the entire country), Ukraine has just tried to stay out of Russia's way.
The intent of Russia was a short, sweet campaign to change the leadership of Ukraine with a puppet and get out. At this point anyone in Russia with access to the real information (people in government) are either willfully deluded or realize there is no way Russia can win. At this point there is not a single Ukrainian who would be willing too be a puppet. Any puppet would be dead 10 minutes after the Russians left.
The Russians don't have the army to do an occupation of Ukraine. Ukrainian freedom fighters would tear apart any force the Russians did have there even if they were able to take the cities.
Russia got into a war and the only smart call at this point is to admit complete defeat, get out and give the Ukrainians what they demand. But that's very difficult for any country to do. The wiser heads in the US knew Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were all losing propositions fairly early on, but each one took a while to extricate their forces.
The US had the treasure to burn on extending these wars. The national debt is not great because of them, but the US could do it and so far ignore the consequences. However Russia is in an existential financial crisis.
I finally got the time to read through the entire Twitter thread of the translation of the memo from the unnamed FSB guy. We can't know for sure if it's fake, but if it is a fake, it was done by an excellent fiction writer. It had a mix of the writer's personal angst combined with his (or her) concern about what's going to happen to Russia. This person's job is to run hypothetical scenarios and the scenario for the sanctions is obviously very grim.
They said that the pro-war vs anti-war factions will probably come to a head in Russia within a couple of weeks and the entire economy is going to be ground to dust by June. Russia can't afford for this war to go on even a day longer, but they are going to stick it out until a disastrous end because of national pride.
The author also talked about something nobody has talked about and I hadn't really thought about either. The Russians are propping up Asaad in Syria with their troop presence. The author's opinion was Asaad will collapse very shortly if Russia pulls out. They are going to have to. The author said the only way they can supply those troops is via air since Turkey closed the Straits of Bosporus to the Russians. That's taking transport planes away from the war in Ukraine, tying down experienced Russian troops, and is taking supplies that could be going into Ukraine.
There is talk that Russia is going to go back to the old Soviet style economy, but I don't think they can do it. They built that economy from an agrarian one over a period of decades. They learned to make most of the things they needed themselves over than time. Like most of the world, they were integrated into the world economy and imported a lot of things they need. Many of those things are unavailable and it will take years for them to figure out how to make them internally, build the factories, and get production going. All this while half the country who has never known this kind of austerity are going to be fighting the government to stop being idiots and do whats necessary to reopen to the world.
The current regime will collapse from the sheer weight of the disapproving masses long before they can establish a Soviet type economy. Russia may not be able to establish a true functioning democracy, but the next regime is likely going to accept that the Russian empire is gone and not coming back (the younger generations already accepted that) and try to get along in the world.
After this war the back of the Russian military is going to be broken. That's going to be an existential nightmare for Russians who are convinced the world is out to get them (more the older generations than the young), but having little military for a while they will begin to realize that the world doesn't want to conquer Russia. The world order after WW II is that borders are fixed (unless a country breaks up into multiple countries) and the world considers that sacrosanct. Conquering another country, is considered a very bad thing by just about everyone and the world will probably be even more hyper about that after this war.
That actually plays into territorial safety for Russians if they wake up to the fact that's really how the world works.
I am pretty convinced that with the current switch to offensive stance of the Ukraine people, Putin is looking to be losing this war. I am not even sure if they can even take the capital, let alone fighting off insurgency once that happens.
By day 2 when the advance stalled, I was pretty sure Kyiv was safe from occupation. Their only hope was to capture Kyiv before the Ukrainians could react. It's too late now, the Ukrainian defense is dug in and waiting for them.
yorkshirebylines.co.uk
www.france24.com
www.theguardian.com
www.dailymail.co.uk
news.sky.com
inews.co.uk
www.thenational.scot
www.businessinsider.com
www.trendsmap.com
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. Never liked the song nor the pretentious prick singing it lol. I prefer songs with oomph
