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Returning to the 21st century, Ukraine has been amassing a force in the south intended to be a million strong, has warned civilians to evacuate the provinces of Kherson and Zaporizhzhya and has now initiated a counter-offensive with the objective of driving the Russians out of the central Black Sea coastal areas. So far the front around Kherson hasn't shifted, but concentrated artillery strikes have successfully destroyed Russian ammo depots. The Russians were planning on holding (or rigging) a referendum in August for Kherson's annexation into the Russian Federation, and with autumn approaching and food exports still stalled in Ukrainian ports (or stolen by the occupiers), and Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant still in Russian hands, this offensive may have been rushed to preempt catastrophic economic outcomes, and it remains to be seen how successful it will be. With Russian advances in the Donbas slowed to a halt, this looks like it could be a major turning point.

I was watching a youtube video the other day that tries to explain the shortcomings of the VDV in Ukraine from the angle of their TO&E, and in the comments I found a guy named Nikita Lyubarskiy claiming to be serving in the 26th Air Assault Division. When I mentioned that this unit has been implicated in war crimes, he gave me an earful and then either edited or deleted his post shortly thereafter.

It is a long-standing convention in international law and written in the Geneva Conventions to which both Russia and Ukraine are signatories, that soldiers are obligated to take prisoner and care for wounded enemies who pose no further threat. What you are not supposed to do is walk up to him, put your boot on his sternum, and blow his head off and then upload it to r/Ukraine for reddit karma.

Russians of a certain stripe have been fixated on Ukraine's collaboration with the Germans in WW2 and the anti-Soviet insurgency of the OUN/UPA which supposedly lasted until 1956, for a very long time now, long predating Euromaidan, and are deeply resentful of the fact that modern Ukrainians commemorate figures like Bandera, Konovalets, Melnyk and Shukhevych. It's enough for them to slander the entire country or its government as being pro-Nazi or soft on Nazis or whatever when the Hero of Ukraine award is given posthumously to figures they consider criminals. They collate disparate facts like that the Germans raised over 100,000 Ukrainian auxiliaries in the Schutzmannschaften, who participated in ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust, furthermore the existence of Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS, the sight of neo-pagan (suspected white nationalist) symbols and Nazi imagery among protesters at Euromaidan, the Bandera portraits everywhere of course, the incorporation of the Azov Battalion into the national guard and so on. These don't all add up to anything when we're talking about a nation's real identity in the present day, defined by millions of Ukrainians, but it adds up for them. Because they're seeing what they want to see - they want and need Ukraine to be overrun with fascists, so that they can liberate it and reincorporate it, and so they can take revenge on the nigh-mythological Banderovets that they've constructed over the past 70 years. All they have to do is muddy the waters by equating all Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism and the ideological basis is established, but it works a lot better on their own domestic audience than it does on international crowds.

When some suspicious monuments in Ukrainian-Canadian graveyards were recently discovered by concerned citizens, I joked with a friend that there are no more Nazis in Ukraine today, because they all fled here to Canada. If that were actually true then I'm glad they're buried here where they'll be largely forgotten, so that Ukraine today can move on and heal from that war and all its villains. I'll say this, and maybe i'll never post in this thread again: I am a russophile, I have always loved their history and culture, and I have for a long time considered Ukraine a part of that shared cultural space and likewise admired it, but today Ukraine cannot exist within Russia without exploitation and marginalization economically, culturally, politically. That was clear in 2014, and they have chosen independence, complete independence, and have demonstrated in this war their total dedication to that project such that no Russian chauvanist or irredentist can honestly deny. Putin has destroyed any chance, any hope, however dim, of ever reuniting these two nations. He has created a new Ukrainian nationalism by starting this war and waging it with such unwarranted brutality, such reckless if not deliberate and malicious disregard for human life, and frankly such incompetence that it reflects poorly on him and his nation. He and his generals have seemingly tried to render the country uninhabitable and punish Ukraine, not to liberate it. These recent discoveries in Bucha, they are symptomatic of that whole attitude - if they can't have you, they must destroy you, because if you don't want to be Russian, you must be a Nazi. I don't agree with their attitude, I have never felt this way, and I condemn it. It's insane! Victory Day, the 9th of May, is coming up soon. There you will see a Trump Rally in all but name, and perhaps Russia's new war-dead of 2022 will be exploited for whipping up more patriotic fervour and deepening anti-Ukrainian hate. Pay attention, if you have the stomach for it. Ukraine recently switched from using the orange-and-black ribbon to commemorate '41-'45 (taken from the ubiquitous Victory over Germany Medal) to using the more international poppy as a sign of remembrance. This is perfectly understandable when you see how the old ribbon has become an icon of Putinism, chauvanism and thinly veiled warmongering, contrary to the peace won by those very veterans whom they have turned into religious idols. In fact the whole Patriotic War has become a cult. It turns my ****ing stomach to watch their parades in recent years, just as everything in recent months do. I can't remember the last time I felt such repugnance toward something in my life. Likewise the slogan "glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes" used to make me cringe but.... maybe I'm warming up to it.

He's 5'7''. QED.

On the 26th of February, Russian news outlet and Kremlin mouthpiece RIA Novosti published a very interesting article just a bit prematurely and then promptly deleted it, but the Internet Archive managed to catch it. It's written with the assumption that Russian forces have successfully occupied Kyiv and are in the process of pacifying resistance and reorganizing local government in accordance with a new united triune Russian nation and establishing a new world order in opposition to "Anglo-Saxon globalization". The author, Pyotr Akopov, doesn't really tell us anything new about Putin's possible ambitions or the fantasies of the conservative apparatchiki he commands, but what it does do is make the implied explicit and the assumed confirmed.

It's worth a read. Below is a link to the original Russian article and then an English translation provided by the Ukrainian military (it's a fair translation).

Adorno said:

A Ukraine in NATO would mean NATO troops at the Russian border.

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Yes and no. The Soviet Union bordered NATO via Norway since the alliance's creation, and the Russian Federation has bordered five NATO states since 1999 (Lativa and Estonia opposite the Pskov and Leningrad Oblasts; Poland and Lithuania around Kaliningrad). What Ukraine's admission into NATO would do is add over 2,000 km of contact along Russia's own borders and another 900 km along Belarus.

I think Putin was telling us the unvarnished truth when he laid out his grievances. He's not just concerned with buffer zones and NATO expansion for security reasons - that was a partly a pretense - the core issue is he simply regards Ukraine as essentially Russian and the possibility of being unable to directly or indirectly dictate terms to Ukraine regarding its economy, internal politics and foreign policy in intolerable for him. To him, If Ukraine joined the EU or NATO, it would be like losing his legs and being wheelchair bound for life.

This thread could be revived.

I tried to teach Jacob how to use ей and ай, but his head is hard like tree stump and the arms don't reach. Many such cases.

Tinned Tin is a bitcoin miner, he will burn your graphical card, conduct no business with him.

Look at the special character on the 5 key.

"Putting aside killing and wounding hundreds of innocent civilians and being a outspoken white supremacist, dot dot dot ellipsis etc."

Go easy on the senile, Monty.

Imagine having a magazine subscription in 2021.

The British soldiers mounted at the Boston Custom House on the 5th of March 1770 were well within their rights to open fire on the unruly mob that assaulted them. Security at the US Capitol should hold their unruly mobs to the same standard.

Lah intensifies

Distribution of buttons on the frock corresponded to rank.

Captured Joe said:

If people really wanted a Shakespeare adaptation with a black guy why don't they just pick Othello...

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Because it's a condescending and ignorant depiction and black actors are tired of playing him.

I was not being ironic.