Bs nonsense. You'd eat hot coals before giving Zelensky credit for anything.
The Ukraine war. (Yes, we'll mind our manners)
- Thread starter BigBlueFanGA
- Start date
Feinstein had a Chinese spy as her personal driver for over a decade. Swalwell slept with a Chinese spy and she placed a person on his campaign for president. Hunter Biden had video on his laptop of him sleeping with a Chinese Military officials daughter who is suspected of being a spy, Adam Schiff has ties to China, Mitch Mcconnell even has weird ties to China businesses. Money is ruining our government.
They let a spy balloon fly all over and claimed it was no big deal. The list is endless.
I don’t disagree about the conditions of western Carolina. Start a thread on that if you want.
STAY.ON.SUBJECT
My post on how bad the Russian economy is triggered you and had nothing to do with that . You’ve always overhyped Russia’s economic condition and said sanctions had no effect 🤣.
You do realize Russia is bankrupting itself doing these worthless tests, right? You think they are willing to go to war against NATO? Waiting on a (your) response to their dismal economic condition. Bet that ICBM launch against Dnipro got you really excited like a little kid under the Christmas Tree. 🤣
This guy sums my views up pretty well. There's not enough room for a lot more good stuff.
"If you believe the media, Donald Trump’s election cast Ukrainians into a state of misery. In fact, according to every source I queried, most Ukrainians now have a halting sense of hope. Mr. Trump’s ascendancy means that the bloody standoff to which the Biden administration has consigned them for nearly two years might, emphasis on might, begin to change."
"....critics on the right have inserted a variety of arguments for not arming them: Ukraine’s government is corrupt, Russia has legitimate territorial claims against it, the war is a distraction from China, and so on."
"... plainly Kyiv has fight left in it. Nearly three years after its leadership was expected to flee and its government to fall, Ukraine has managed to hold off its much larger foe. Thanks to a brilliant surprise attack last summer, Ukraine occupies several hundred square miles of Russian territory in Kursk. That Ukraine has performed so well despite the fetters placed on it by the U.S. administration tempts one to think that an emancipated Ukrainian military could win the war after all."
"Mr. Trump has no easy choices on Ukraine. Continuing aid would displease some of his most committed and highest-profile supporters and require him and his national security advisers to articulate America’s interests in ways Mr. Biden never did. On the other hand, cutting off Ukraine and forcing it to accept humiliating terms would make him what Mr. Biden became after the Afghanistan withdrawal—betrayer of a viable U.S. ally. The look for Mr. Trump will be worse: Unlike Afghanistan, there are no American soldiers in Ukraine, only American hardware. And with no U.S. troops to enforce a land deal, as in South Korea, very little time would pass before Mr. Putin recommences the war. Worst of all: Just as the Afghanistan debacle of 2021 occasioned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, in turn, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, America’s abandonment of Ukraine would, as sure as the sun rises in the east, invite aggressions elsewhere around the globe."
"There is a simple reason malign regimes can be counted on to capitalize on American retreat, as the Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev put it to me in a conversation this week. Those regimes, he believes, each serve not separate and distinct ideologies but a single one."
Mr. Yarim-Agaev isn’t famous—he lacks even a Wikipedia page. But he has earned a reputation as someone who speaks perceptively on the global aims of antidemocratic regimes. He maintains many contacts in the Russian government.....“The main thing to understand about this war is that it is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war between totalitarian bloc and democratic alliance. It’s proxy war.” Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with territorial claims or security concerns, he insists. “It is first and foremost war against America. Putin’s aggression is for one and only one reason: Ukraine shows democratic way of development and pro-Western way, pro-American way, and becoming ally with America and the West.” That doesn’t sound to me like a situation from which lasting peace terms are likely to emerge.
"With regard to Russia and its aims in Ukraine, he says, we aren’t dealing with an individual tyrant, Vladimir Putin. “We are dealing with ideology. And you cannot charm totalitarian ideology, you cannot have a good relationship with totalitarian ideology, you cannot make deals with it.”
So the question of Ukraine will have to be settled on the battlefield? “Yes,” he says. In Mr. Yarim-Agaev’s view, Russian objectives in Ukraine aren’t substantively different from Iran’s designs on Israel, the Taliban’s on America, North Korea’s on South Korea and China’s on Taiwan.
The vast cultural and political differences between these regimes obliges me to ask him to explain what he means by that term “totalitarian ideology.” “It’s very simple,” he begins. “There is such a thing as totalitarian socialism. Now, all those countries are forms of totalitarian socialism. Totalitarian socialism can exist in three forms: international totalitarian socialism, which we also call communism; national totalitarian socialism, which we call Nazism, and religious totalitarian socialism, which we know in form of Islamism.” What these forms of tyranny have in common is an absolute commitment to destroy democratic capitalist nations, especially America.
Accordingly, Mr. Yarim-Agaev puts forward the provocative thesis that Iran wants to destroy Israel not because it’s a Jewish state. “Iran itself claims that Israel is little satan and big satan is the United States,” he points out. “So it always aims at America, and it does it through Israel. It’s not antisemitism, although the mullahs are antisemites. It’s because Israel is democratic country and American ally.”
Those of us who grew up during the Cold War aren’t accustomed to thinking of post-1991 Russia as a totalitarian country in the way Soviet Russia was. But Mr. Yarim-Agaev thinks Mr. Putin’s regime has combined some nationalistic elements of Nazism with the symbols and tactics of unreconstructed communism—“Lenin’s tomb still sits in the middle of Red Square,” he notes—to form a kind of hybrid totalitarianism."
"... totalitarian ideologies of all kinds are undergirded by anti-Americanism. Wars and conflicts are happening all over the globe, but North Korea sends 10,000 troops only to Ukraine to aid Russia, and Iran sends drone technology to Russia in its war with an American ally. Iran, he says, isn’t a theocratic country, although it is ruled in part by mullahs. “It is also, and maybe more so, ruled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a military and not a religious force.” If Iran considered the Islamic creed the most important thing, Mr. Yarim Agaev says, “it couldn’t have good relationship with China, which persecutes its Uyghurs population. It couldn’t have a good relationship with Russia, which twice made war on Chechnya,” a mostly Muslim region. “Anti-American totalitarian ideology is the important thing.”"
"What about the fear of provoking Mr. Putin into the use of tactical nuclear weapons? “It’s blackmail, and nothing but that,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “And first of all, all military experts say that tactical nuclear weapon doesn’t work. It is senseless—you cannot conquer with it because you shoot it in front of you and then you cannot enter the territory.” Never mind the assurance of counterattack, in which case “there would be no more Russia, and Russia knows that.”
The larger point, he says, is that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and lesser totalitarian states—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua—will do anything to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S. “They fight against America,” he says, “but they always fight through somebody else. They attack Israel, they attack Ukraine. China may attack Taiwan at any moment, maybe even the Philippines. But they don’t want confrontation with United States because they know that’s suicide.”"
"What about the argument, heard on segments of the right since the war began—Vice President-elect JD Vance has repeated the charge—that Ukraine is corrupt and certain to squander whatever aid the U.S. sends? “Baseless,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “The best proof that it isn’t so is the effectiveness of Ukraine’s army in using American weapons, which has exceeded Western military experts’ expectations. This would not have happened if significant part of our equipment had not reached its destination.” The claim has more to do, in his view, with the “completely erroneous” perception that Ukraine had something to do with Mr. Trump’s December 2019 impeachment and Mr. Biden’s election the following year. The assertion that venality is a sufficient reason for one democratic nation not to aid another in a time of war sounds particularly odd coming from political figures, like Mr. Vance, who allege corruption at the highest levels of the U.S. government."
"If you believe the media, Donald Trump’s election cast Ukrainians into a state of misery. In fact, according to every source I queried, most Ukrainians now have a halting sense of hope. Mr. Trump’s ascendancy means that the bloody standoff to which the Biden administration has consigned them for nearly two years might, emphasis on might, begin to change."
"....critics on the right have inserted a variety of arguments for not arming them: Ukraine’s government is corrupt, Russia has legitimate territorial claims against it, the war is a distraction from China, and so on."
"... plainly Kyiv has fight left in it. Nearly three years after its leadership was expected to flee and its government to fall, Ukraine has managed to hold off its much larger foe. Thanks to a brilliant surprise attack last summer, Ukraine occupies several hundred square miles of Russian territory in Kursk. That Ukraine has performed so well despite the fetters placed on it by the U.S. administration tempts one to think that an emancipated Ukrainian military could win the war after all."
"Mr. Trump has no easy choices on Ukraine. Continuing aid would displease some of his most committed and highest-profile supporters and require him and his national security advisers to articulate America’s interests in ways Mr. Biden never did. On the other hand, cutting off Ukraine and forcing it to accept humiliating terms would make him what Mr. Biden became after the Afghanistan withdrawal—betrayer of a viable U.S. ally. The look for Mr. Trump will be worse: Unlike Afghanistan, there are no American soldiers in Ukraine, only American hardware. And with no U.S. troops to enforce a land deal, as in South Korea, very little time would pass before Mr. Putin recommences the war. Worst of all: Just as the Afghanistan debacle of 2021 occasioned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, in turn, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, America’s abandonment of Ukraine would, as sure as the sun rises in the east, invite aggressions elsewhere around the globe."
"There is a simple reason malign regimes can be counted on to capitalize on American retreat, as the Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev put it to me in a conversation this week. Those regimes, he believes, each serve not separate and distinct ideologies but a single one."
Mr. Yarim-Agaev isn’t famous—he lacks even a Wikipedia page. But he has earned a reputation as someone who speaks perceptively on the global aims of antidemocratic regimes. He maintains many contacts in the Russian government.....“The main thing to understand about this war is that it is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a war between totalitarian bloc and democratic alliance. It’s proxy war.” Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with territorial claims or security concerns, he insists. “It is first and foremost war against America. Putin’s aggression is for one and only one reason: Ukraine shows democratic way of development and pro-Western way, pro-American way, and becoming ally with America and the West.” That doesn’t sound to me like a situation from which lasting peace terms are likely to emerge.
"With regard to Russia and its aims in Ukraine, he says, we aren’t dealing with an individual tyrant, Vladimir Putin. “We are dealing with ideology. And you cannot charm totalitarian ideology, you cannot have a good relationship with totalitarian ideology, you cannot make deals with it.”
So the question of Ukraine will have to be settled on the battlefield? “Yes,” he says. In Mr. Yarim-Agaev’s view, Russian objectives in Ukraine aren’t substantively different from Iran’s designs on Israel, the Taliban’s on America, North Korea’s on South Korea and China’s on Taiwan.
The vast cultural and political differences between these regimes obliges me to ask him to explain what he means by that term “totalitarian ideology.” “It’s very simple,” he begins. “There is such a thing as totalitarian socialism. Now, all those countries are forms of totalitarian socialism. Totalitarian socialism can exist in three forms: international totalitarian socialism, which we also call communism; national totalitarian socialism, which we call Nazism, and religious totalitarian socialism, which we know in form of Islamism.” What these forms of tyranny have in common is an absolute commitment to destroy democratic capitalist nations, especially America.
Accordingly, Mr. Yarim-Agaev puts forward the provocative thesis that Iran wants to destroy Israel not because it’s a Jewish state. “Iran itself claims that Israel is little satan and big satan is the United States,” he points out. “So it always aims at America, and it does it through Israel. It’s not antisemitism, although the mullahs are antisemites. It’s because Israel is democratic country and American ally.”
Those of us who grew up during the Cold War aren’t accustomed to thinking of post-1991 Russia as a totalitarian country in the way Soviet Russia was. But Mr. Yarim-Agaev thinks Mr. Putin’s regime has combined some nationalistic elements of Nazism with the symbols and tactics of unreconstructed communism—“Lenin’s tomb still sits in the middle of Red Square,” he notes—to form a kind of hybrid totalitarianism."
"... totalitarian ideologies of all kinds are undergirded by anti-Americanism. Wars and conflicts are happening all over the globe, but North Korea sends 10,000 troops only to Ukraine to aid Russia, and Iran sends drone technology to Russia in its war with an American ally. Iran, he says, isn’t a theocratic country, although it is ruled in part by mullahs. “It is also, and maybe more so, ruled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a military and not a religious force.” If Iran considered the Islamic creed the most important thing, Mr. Yarim Agaev says, “it couldn’t have good relationship with China, which persecutes its Uyghurs population. It couldn’t have a good relationship with Russia, which twice made war on Chechnya,” a mostly Muslim region. “Anti-American totalitarian ideology is the important thing.”"
"What about the fear of provoking Mr. Putin into the use of tactical nuclear weapons? “It’s blackmail, and nothing but that,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “And first of all, all military experts say that tactical nuclear weapon doesn’t work. It is senseless—you cannot conquer with it because you shoot it in front of you and then you cannot enter the territory.” Never mind the assurance of counterattack, in which case “there would be no more Russia, and Russia knows that.”
The larger point, he says, is that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and lesser totalitarian states—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua—will do anything to avoid direct confrontation with the U.S. “They fight against America,” he says, “but they always fight through somebody else. They attack Israel, they attack Ukraine. China may attack Taiwan at any moment, maybe even the Philippines. But they don’t want confrontation with United States because they know that’s suicide.”"
"What about the argument, heard on segments of the right since the war began—Vice President-elect JD Vance has repeated the charge—that Ukraine is corrupt and certain to squander whatever aid the U.S. sends? “Baseless,” Mr. Yarim-Agaev says. “The best proof that it isn’t so is the effectiveness of Ukraine’s army in using American weapons, which has exceeded Western military experts’ expectations. This would not have happened if significant part of our equipment had not reached its destination.” The claim has more to do, in his view, with the “completely erroneous” perception that Ukraine had something to do with Mr. Trump’s December 2019 impeachment and Mr. Biden’s election the following year. The assertion that venality is a sufficient reason for one democratic nation not to aid another in a time of war sounds particularly odd coming from political figures, like Mr. Vance, who allege corruption at the highest levels of the U.S. government."
On Thursday, the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was hit by a Russian air strike which eyewitnesses described as unusual, triggering explosions that went on for three hours.
The attack included a strike by a missile so powerful that in the aftermath Ukrainian officials said it bore the characteristics of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
Western officials were quick to deny this, saying that such a strike would have triggered a nuclear alert in the US.
Hours after the strike, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a TV address, said that Russia had launched a "new conventional intermediate-range" missile with the codename Oreshnik,"
Carry-on with your exaggerations.
Russia's Oreshnik missile: What we know
Russia's President Putin said the new powerful missile was used against Ukraine on Thursday.
www.bbc.com
The response was supposed to be about Russias economy. You deflect like a politician. Am I supposed to be impressed by a non-nuclear ICBM?
Never mind, it wasn't even an ICBM.
How well is our economy doing? How well is Germany and the UK doing? War hurts everyone. It's one of the things we said last year. People like you kept saying war spending only hurt Russia but helps our economy... LOL.
Also... ICBM or not... They can hit London with that before Britain could even respond.
