Both his parents are compliance lawyers, his father a professor at Stanford. How delusional could he and they be considering he bought them 130M of real estate ?
Does he mean the one when Chamberlain convinced Czech Republic to give its larger army to Germany, it's superior tank factories, concede territory to both Germany and Poland, to rescind the security guarantees the SSSR gave to Czechia ?
And then "pikachu" face when Hitler proceeded to invade Czechia with the same tanks they were given 2 years earlier, as did Poland, then second "pikachu face" when the Reich and SSSR did the same to Poland a minute later ?
That 1937 moment of titanic hypocritical behaviour ?
Englishmen really always love to play the Great Game, no matter the century...
It's good never to underestimate your enemy out of pure spite, it prevents loss in battle and war.
I also think you entire missed the tense of my answer, which is that they are _getting experience_ in the present, while staying freshly rested. Like it or not its a fact. And ever since the first week (when they arrested 450 officers of various ranks for a litany of failures), you haven't seen mass desertions on their part.
So yes, compared to the Ukrainian Army they are fighting, their morale is actually very high.
And as for repairs and maintenance, spend some time on Russia propaganda channels. Among the voluminous thrash you can discard, you'll see vids of the various large field repair centers where yes they do replace on the regular artillery cannon tubes and a lot of parts for a lot heavy stuff they have, not including their own ghanima.
Also, in regards to maintenance, see above commend about arrests.
Moreover, according to various unconfirmed but western sources, 4500+ mechanics've reportedly been hired by the Russian MIC last 3 months. They gotta be working on something don't they ?
And again, Ukraine, if look the large amount of defeatist interviews of western and ukrainian leaders (including their chief of staff), is completely unable to do any of that, and is losing badly.
Modern wars are as much wars of industry as wars of logistics.
It's got about half of that combat troops, according to IISS Military Balance 2021, of which 400K are ground troops.
What they do however is rotate them very often. Reportedly they spend a week at a to,e on the battlefield, then they get rest for a week or two, etc.
This way their entire military gets actual combat experience, the troops are always fresh, and the moral is high. Same with equipment, regular maintenance, etc.
Which is basically why they are able to do the slow grind at the pace they want.
If I'm not mistaken about the solar plant we're talking about, not quite :
That Canadian-financed solar plant has basically been held hostage for the last 3 years by president Zelensky's political financier Mr. Kolomoyski.
After having his cronies (pre-Zelenski) vote a law facilitating renewables investment by foreigners (expedited 6 months permits, etc), and selling a Canadian company the land on which it sits, and having said Canadian consortium pour 2.7B$ in the project, he prevented them from operating.
They couldn't transfer any electric power so produced. He blocked them using by his stranglehold on that part of the Ukrainian power grid, and even going as far as having paid his "private security rent-a-swat-cops" from Kharkhov and Dnipro cutting the alternative lines from helicopters (said private security later forming into a military unit calling themselves "azov something..." (ahem, yeah, some of the very same).
He's basically been racketeering them under the protection of the political parties he finances. Canadian've had enough so there's now a several billion dollar court case going on between the Canadian operators of the plant, the local Ukrainian grid operator (part owned by him) and Kolomoyski's own neighbouring power company.
Caveat : some details may be wrong, as this is from memory, somebody would need to check from accuracy.
> Which countries' oil supply do you think would no longer reach them if Turkey refused to allow transit?
- Current oil and gas from the Caspian Sea Basin, from the Azeris and Iranians[0]
- Future oil and gas from the Caspian (Azeris, Khazaks) [1] [3]
- Future gas from Qatar. The project was frozen due to Syria's Russian and Iranian gas pipeline dalliances. The cynic in me says it's the reason for the Syrian war [2]
> For comparison, here are the oil details for Georgia
Georgia is indeed not important as a producer - depending on whether you count Abkhazia as still in Georgia, or in Russia as there were new discoveries of oil in Ukraine [4].
(note the date of the discovery, note the date of when troubles started in Ukraine... again, paranoid cynic in me says there's a smell to this Burisma thing).
But it IS very important as the location for the existing Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline [5].
> Still, I don't think Turkey can demand an unlimited price from NATO, and Erdogan shouldn't try to over-play his position.
I believe he shouldn't. But I believe he will.
There's been very recent vocal public discussion in his party about Greece and the danger of American bases there (i.e. they're not against Russia, so against whom are they?) and the US being a long-term trustworthy partner (see coup attempt years ago, for which it was Russia who warned Erdogan of the danger).
If Russia manages their "all-in" gamble (win in Ukraine, win at the economic/monetary game), and China extends the Belt and Road, Turks (not just Erdogan) won't hesitate to turn against NATO, attack, and at a minimum get the whole of Cyprus, if not parts of Thrace.
I believe they can allow themselves that, because as much as the Gulf is the economic brain of the elite of the Muslim world, Istambul and Ankara are the heart and center of the vascular system for middle-and low classes. They are litterally the centerpoint of logistics for that system (i.e. Turkish airlines).
Except this isn't a competition of popularity, but geographic-politics.
If you lose Turkey, consequences are:
- Lose in max 20 years for good all of the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaidjan, etc) and the access to oil and gas which US and UK have fought for hard over 30 years (BAC pipeline, Chechnya War, Ossetia War, Ingushetia War, Dagestan War, etc, as well as chaos around Burisma Corp & Hunter Biden, all to create a second huge pipeline through Ukraine, etc)
- Loose all east-Turkic airfields and nuke missile sites, as a consequence lose > half the pressure on Iran, part of pressure on Russia
- Loose the Black Sea to Russia almost in full, even without losing Odessa in this war.
- Loose for good the ring of all originally Gokturkic nations around Russia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Ouzbekistan, etc).
- Lose for 100 years Syria, Lebanon and Iraq
- Only Israel will be left to protect the Suez Canal, as Egypt is being lost to Russia (again) and China as we speak. Transforming Israel it into a greater Massada fortress it already is : great plan, no worries there.
- Loose all access the newly discovered oil and gas below the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean: problems for Greece, North Macedonia, Albania, Italy in 20 years.
- In 30 years see Turkey restarting the Ottoman empire against Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. UAE is already gone (see new Sheiks declarations).
That gains China the almost totality of the new silk road. Also, this loses gains what's missing to China's Belt and Road initiative. It cementis its Eurasian economic influence for 200-300 years.
All of that in 30-50 years max loses the modern Anglo-Saxon influenced economic-cultural-political system the European Union wholesale due to economy.
Worldwide UK then US maritime empires ? Who'll care. At best North+South American influence for the Anglos.
We already stepped in it. A number of pundits and public figures have been tweeting (I know, ironic) sentences in substance similar to "Free speech advocates are the promoters of white supremacy and white colonialism", also said equivalent to Jan 6th supporters.
Some proeminent ones have even quit Twitter altogether with that as a message.
> it like how all of the Mckinsey types who turned into counter-terrorism consultants around 2004.
If you look at a number of developping political scandals, it seems they turned to pandemic consultants two years ago in at least France, Australia, and a couple others.
That all nice and well. Not to sound to much of a "doomer":
But, in the meantime, how are you going to manufacture all of the necessary inputs for the eco-transition if half of europe's manufacturing capacity is offline for lack of electricity ? How are you going to manufacture R2000 insulation without the necesarry petrochemical inputs ?
Nobody has alternate sources. It'll take the US 2 years to put offline a tenth of what Russia delivers, 5 for a quarter, and... that's it. Oh, and let's not forget how much coal Poland imported from Russia.
I think at this point it's time to accept it'd been smarter for the EU Nato members to arm themselves more, get Ukraine into the EU first, operate the eco-transition of the continent by 2030, and then play at extending nato.
Which ironically is basically what, except for the last part, Lavrov proposed last November...
No problem. Thanks for reading it. It was somewhat cathartic to write.
> It just shows how we just see one side of the picture in the West.
Yes, and feel I could only make sense of the differences because I grew up and lived first half of my life West. As such, I fully understand both cultures and the "feel" of them, but also have two sets of sources for history, general approaches to politics, and news.
I firml believe had I not originally been son of immigrants, it wouldn't have been so.
> Also, if I may add to this: according to polls in 2013[1], popular support for Ukraine joining NATO was very low.
Thanks, I didn't know about that! All this time, based on personal experience, I actually believed outrigh support to be between 35-40%. Eye opening !
> This is to say that maybe it was more like "the US was pushing for Ukraine to be part of NATO" rather than Ukraine (as in the Ukraininan people) "was the one asking for NATO membership".
(sorry, it's a long one, you caught me on a day off, so I wrote long)
> Don't they have a right to decide? So why not let them take that risk if they wish?
Of course they do, they are recognized as a sovereign nation.
And again, without painting Russia as an innocent dove it ain't : this is why you won't find Lavrov or Putin ever having formally and directly asked Ukraine not to join. They limited themselves to saying publicly it was not something they wanted from their neighbour.
The only thing they asked formally and directly Ukraine not to do was 8 years ago about a planned EU trade treaty which directly contradicted the one they had already had in place for 10-15 years - that helped trigger Maidan.
What Russia has been asking is from NATO : that NATO should agree to never seek Ukraine out as member (which NATO did), or if Ukraine formally asked, to refuse them forever [0] - this was what the entire un-diplomatic ballet we saw last three months was about.
For an everyday's man analogy, see [1] below.
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> Perhaps the real criticism should be that NATO dragged their feet for too long
I don't believe they did drag their feet (see [0] below). It's just that Moscow threw a monkey wrench into an accelerated entry with Crimea, just as it did in Georgia with Ossetia.
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> How do we know that NATO fears weren't simply a useful pretext for empire building ambitions?
IMHO this particular attack's public rationale is 2/3rd a pretext (it's indeed geo-economics), and 1/3rd a justification (NATO has been starting wars and "color revolutions" all over the place for 30 years at a sustained rythm, you objectively can't trust them not to continue).
Adam Shiff said it in front of the Senate a couple of years ago: "U.S. backs Ukraine ‘so we can fight Russia over there, and not here"
But in truth/big pictures, yes it's empires (plural) building and management. More importantly, it's cultural and economic systems clashing, as we're living in a networked world more than a world of nations now.
Lavrov made it extremely plain two days ago: "It's not about Ukraine at all, it's about the ordering of the world. The current crisis is a pivotal moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like,[...]"
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> aggressive and unwanted Russian political interference, maybe they thought that Russia would invade anyway, and this was their only way to prevent that from happening.
I have a more neutral view.
The country is unbelievably corrupt and disfunctional. Not one person there controls the whole of the state, least of all the president. It's several overlapping influence networks (and mafias). All presidents, ruling cabinets, oligarchs since then were always compromitted to a high degree by either side.
No power bloc ever let the territory Ukraine be truly sovereign ever, even less so after Leonid Kuchma's departure.
As such, NATO did not prevent or "try to prevent" anything. It's just slowly losing this particular battle of interference to armored brigades, while it won others such fights in Ukraine in the past.
For having followed Ukrainian politics for 15 years (friends and work friends), and setting aside his apparently heroic resistance and actual presidential behaviour the last few weeks, I find anybody calling Zelensky anything else than a supremely corrupt authoritarian puppet of Kolomoiski's (and now of any of Kolomoiski's "friends") woefully uninformed. Same as for calling its parliament "democratic".
IMHO, this why what should in fact be the richest, largest country in Europe on paper is in fact the poorest. It is a state without a nation (yet) whose institutions are weak enough for it to not having ever known true independence and true sovereignty.
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> Why should we capitulate and allow one authoritarian nation to dictate the foreign policy decisions of a democratic neighbor?
Again, my view is much more neutral, but also way way more cynical an blasé than yours.
I find calling Ukraine a democracy somewhat unrelated to its reality for at least 20 years. Similarly, I don't think anybody is defending democracy or the lives of ukrainians there right now.
To start, I generally replace the words "civilised western world" with "self-content wealthy armed nations controlling all flows of money", and Russia is "disgruntled armed nation controlling a lot of commodities flows".
Why so ?
I lost family to NATO airstrikes, then depleted uranium cancers. I then learned over the years, as people started talking, scandals erupted, archives were opened, posthumous autobiographies were published, tribunals made judgments that the leaders of various sides in my country shared bank ownerships in Paris and London, that 3/4th of all regional wars' outcomes were mostly upon in much in advance following plans made in the 50s by infiltrated ex-Gelhen SS officers and NATO leadership in secret treaties, that recent intel. services heads and a couple prime ministers were CIA and BND assets, that Biden in 1985 as Senator was charged by a Reagan NatSec order prepared by Bush 1st to do the US political side of split the country, etc, etc ,etc. Could go on for hours.
Consequently, I can't believe all the people alive and in power then in the western political establishment became suddeny genuinely interested in the good health of other populations.
As such, all the concepts you used in that sentence are, for me, just an efficacious, long running and successfull PR/indoctrination ploy.
None maps to any situtation in reality [2]. It's just way better structured than anything the KGB ever did.
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> There is no evidence of this that I've seen, and absent that evidence such a phrasing is misleading
To me, it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck.
The treaty was about cataloguing and destroying the stock as per existing treaties - that takes some months to a year, not 17 years, and you don't renovate the labs.
Also, "food surveillance" ? There enough small medical labs on every 5th street corner all over eastern europe for that to be a ridiculous claim.
To wit, somebody unearthed a contract further sample gathering contracted through a Pentagon tender with Black & Veach to opperate it as such (also build 4 new labs). Also, nobody in the US disavowed the list of bacteries and viruses studied as part of these contracts, as presented by the Russian, and confirmed by the WHO press release - whereas such samples should have been announced to the BWRC treaty office on day 1 first in 1997, then again at the signature of the 2005 Obama Lugar treaty.
Finally, the US DoD guy in charge of counter-proliferation does more than just hint at it in a pre-invasion interview concerning these labs [3].
Anyways, we'll know for sure if the Kremlin is full of it or not soon enough, they are reportedly preparing a well documented lawsuit, with plenty of witnesses.
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[0] Now of course, public claims set aside, the reality : 3/4th of Ukraines Army were NATO trained last 8 years, 2 bataillons each for 2 months, then 2 months on the Donbass front; between 5-7B$ in equipment were transferred/bought with IMF loans; NATO military intelligence and satellite recon were, as is now obvious, already fully integrated with UA MoD command (as per an article I saw, IIRC in The Guardian, just Britain evacuated 700 officers the week before the attack); the SBU was basically a CIA regional office; Britain was almost finished building a NATO-standards port south of Kherson; the first half of Christa Freeland's career; Burisma, the company with a CIA director, Biden's son, Kolomoiski on the board had taken control of several gas transhipping nodes.
[1]
In more plain words, some guy's ex-girlfriend has all rights to ask a neighbor two houses over out, as well as to ask him to move in next door together. She's her own woman after all.
That guy can also still politely ask said neighbour to agree to refuse her advances and to move together for the sake of peace in the street. That is ok too, the neighbor is also his own man.
After all, both guys have violent pasts, and have short triggers. Also, the guy and the neighbor already had several fight, including the neighbor punching the guy 8 years ago + both fighting about another girlfriend 14 years ago [1].
Now Russia here is the guy who did that peacefully until it decided to beat the ex-girlfriend up on Feb 25th.
But biggest problem actually is both the neighbor and the guy are into polyamory. In fact they both have harems of babymamas they gaslight into giving them hard earned cash. They are also both supposedly reformed sociopathic criminals.
Funnily enough, the unsufferable Home Owners Association board of the next street over (the EU Commission) made everybody there start a hunger strike for some reason, supposedly because the guy is running a grocery, while leaving for the girl baseball bats she can't reach right outside her house.
Unfunnily, everybody defunded the UN cops.
[2] As spoken by former Prime Minister Henry Palmerstone in the British Parliament in 1848, the full quote is as follows: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
The article says in essence says he supposedly replaced in his houselhold both known knowns and known unknowns with unknown unknowns in the interest of improving security and thwarting poisoners in the direst time of crisis since he took power ?
Damn, sounds really counter-intuitive. I guess I really need to go read some army's manual on personal security.
A caveat concerning my position: The Rubicon (or RubiDon would be more apt) has been crossed by Russia. Nobody in charge is actually interested in rehashing the morality of any recent past. A new cold war is on, and all of this will disappear in the annals of history. Only internet denizens like us do for our own edification, so please don't take what I write here with much passion.
> Are you referring to the period between the Budapest Memorandum[0] in 1994 and the Russo-Georgian War[1] in 2008?
No, the Munich European Security Conference a year earlier in 2007 during a very public speech in front of the assembly [0]. I suggest watching it in full rather than just reading the wiki.
I believe the Russio-Georgian war is a consequence of that. See "Relations between Georgia and the West" section in the wiki same page you linked to :
- "During the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, [...] George W. Bush campaigned for offering a Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Georgia and Ukraine. Germany and France said that offering a MAP to Ukraine and Georgia would be "an unnecessary offence" for Russia. [...]"
Then further on:
- "[...] on 4 April, Putin said that NATO's enlargement towards Russia "would be taken in Russia as a direct threat to the security of our country". [...] Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Yuri Baluyevsky said on 11 April that Russia would carry out "steps of a different nature" [...] a military action was planned and explicit orders were issued in advance before August 2008. Russia aimed to stop Georgia's accession to NATO."
As such, I believe the current Ukraine war is only a complete repeat of what the Russo-Georgian war was then, only on a grander scale.
Indeed, to counter NATO moves ever since 2007, Russia has been using a mirror version of the standard NATO bombing military-diplomatic playbook and PR justifications for action from Kosovo in 1999 (first Ossetes and Abkhazes as "freedom fighters" and Georgia instead of Serbia, now substituted with DPR/LDPR as "freedom fighters" against Ukraine).
> I'm not sure what proposed agreements you think the US, EU and NATO should have acquiesced to in that time, or what requests they declined to answer.
Russia was not proposing any new agreements at first [1], just to renew all existing and expiring ones signed since the 1960's (ex.:[2] Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe ). Russia started talking about new agreements, and negociating a "new european security architecture" only after the Trump-Putin Summit in 2018.
Bush through Condoleeza-Rice had started dismantling various mutual anti-missile shield treaties, various nuclear safety provisos, litterally refusing to answer to direct and public requests by Putin since 2006-7 to renew or renegotiate them after 7 new members were included in NATO in 2004, and a couple more later.
Meanwhile, cruise missile batteries for which the nuclear warheads can be substituted to conventional in less than an hour were installed in newly 2004 accepted members Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Poland [3].
That attitude was kept by US presidents right until Blinken finally engaged in an exchange this January. Ever since, at almost at all international conferences Putin or Lavrov made public speeches or PR sessions at, they repeated demands to discuss these matters.
Note : As a hillarious aside concerning the current worldwide pearl-clutching on how "nobody knew about Ukraine's bioweapons labs in either Russia or the US", or any other NATO-Ukraine military cooperation before 2013 for that matter, read the first two paragraphs of this 2005 WaPo article on a bioweapons treaty [4] signed right after the Orange revolution [5]. There are photos on the net of Obama next to a stockpile in one of them.
[2] I'm not surprised you haven't even heard about any. I've been working in Eastern Europe for the last 12 years, so I follow news on both "sides" of the media spectrum. On the other side of the now fallen "Berlin Wall" (or if you tuned in on RT), you couldn't fail to hear about it very, very, very regularly from the horse's mouth.
I saved the article for later reading, but I can't fail to notice the formulation of the title. Merriam-Webster defines "rogue" as:
<<... of or being a nation whose leaders defy international law or norms of international behavior >>
Who then get's to call another one a "rogue" ? According to what authority, what right to pass such judgment ? Does a criminal who escaped justice because he corrupted the judge get to call out another one the very same because the other one refuses to be judged ?
I find it symptomatic that the Ur-think-tank for the US defense complex arrogates itself that right. I see this as a unipolar denial of sovereignty, denial of agency, of basic interstate respect. No wonder the situation devolved.
The same often say Putin and Russians only understands force. What then does such an title show that the US thinkers understand ?
