Dude. Have you been living under a rock for the last 6 years?
You're right. Biden is worse in an absolute sense. But the thing is: Obama is a very intelligent man, with an identity to really transform the society. And instead he used that to entrench the problems because it was deemed to be a strategically valuable means to divide and conquer.
Looks like we are about to witness the second Mariupol. Severodonetsk-Lisichansk agglomeration in all likelihood will be encircled in the coming days. Luckily the majority of civilians were already evacuated so it won’t be as devastating and heartbreaking.
My sense is that, at this point, Russia is really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Add to this that their casualties have been very high, and the bases for them to have good morale have never been promising--worsened by terrible leadership and support. My impression is that the Russians presently enjoy an advantage in total numbers of short to medium-range artillery and to some extent "airpower" (must be qualified as 'some extent' because UA has enough potential to threaten air operations to make use of air power risky). Any advantage in armored vehicles and tanks they enjoyed at the outset has largely been squandered, though on paper they may still have more. In any event a BTG with "too many vehicles" and no infantry to dismount when the fight starts is fundamentally one of their organizational problems throughout the last four months, so having more military fighting vehicles is not really an advantage of note.
Basically the Russians have more artillery, an advantage which UA leadership have nullified in the defense of Sieverodonetsk by forcing Russian forces to engage in urban combat where their artillery is not of much use.
If the West does not abandon Ukraine, and actually provides enough of the hardware the government says it needs, then it seems it may be possible for Ukraine to actually win.
I don't remember kurczak having a romance with Putin or Orban. And really you shouldn't lump them together. And why is Trump and nazism in that association chain again.
That's like what Russian establishment does by lumping together "the collective West", liberalism, homosexuality and nazism in a single complex meme.
This makes me think that maybe I should myself stop saying that Putin is literally Hitler because it leads nowhere. Or maybe it takes the conversation to a battle of memes blurring the reality. Every beast is his own kind of beast and differences, in the end, are more telling than similarities.
I don't think we will ever get back to our conversations about feminism. Time passes, people change. I've reconciled many issues I had with this culture and married a feminist. You probably also became less borderline in your views with age. So who knows where we will now find ourselves on that front.
Thanks for the kind words and well wishes, they mean a lot to me.
Ahh! I see Jhessail still has a penchant for wild conspiratorial nonsensical hostility!
Direct question to you Weaver: you are Ukrainian correct?
Did Obama EVER provide real military assistance to Ukraine? It was under the final two years of Obama's second term that the initial Russian breach of Ukraine occurred, and at that time, presumably the U.S. government was still planning on upholding its commitment to the promises given as part of the Budapest Memorandum in 1993(?). Effectively, the U.S. the UK, Russia and perhaps France all promised to insure Ukrainian sovereignty in exchange for handing over all the Soviet nukes with which Ukraine found itself in possession in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, right? This apparently seemed like a good idea at the time for Mr. Kravchuk, the first President of Ukraine, and to be fair it probably was the best approach because nukes are honestly not that useful . . . but I digress. It was Clinton who negotiated that deal a fellow Democrat and if memory serves it managed to get halfway through the U.S. congress as a formalized treaty but Republican opposition in the Senate killed that. So by the time the Ukrainians had already agreed to it, and probably the process of disarming them was underway, the U.S. partisan politics had insured that instead of a treaty it would just be a "promise."
You would think that this would be regarded as an important promise by Obama, a member of the same political party as Clinton, but apparently it was not. Obama was the first U.S. President to effectively turn a blind eye to Russian breaching of Ukrainian sovereignty and breaching of the standing promise from the 1990s. Two more Presidents more-or-less continued that tradition by failing to take a clearly strong stance in opposing Putin's occupation of the Donbas and annexation of Crimea, though it is my understanding that Trump at least began to provide training support and offensive weapons such as javelins and stingers. Biden reversed some of the Trump era support for Ukraine initially on taking office, that is my recollection, and up until it became apparent that there was an enormous zeitgeist of popular support for Ukraine which needed to be catered to, it seems likely that the deals to provide heavy weapons which began to emerge in March might never have emerged; continuing Obama era policies would seem to have been the more likely approach for the Biden administration had they not calculated it would prove to be political suicide.
All of which leads me back to the view I remember holding and espousing in this thread as far back as 2014 (though I have yet to find the first or primary post where I expressed it yet): without major support for Ukraine, sanctions wouldn't do diddly squat to Putin, and would simply kick the can down the road until Putin felt it was opportune to go for it more forcefully. It seems I was correct and the naysayers who feared that supporting Ukraine years ago when it could have saved thousands of innocent lives and trillions in damage were wrong again.
That is what I'm on about anyway.
