Let’s be honest here too… Putin is more worried about Ukraine joining the EU than he is NATO. He fears more than anything Ukraine turning into a cool hip Euro country with tourists, EDM festivals, etc. Ukraine turns into Brussels or Denmark and he knows it’s only a matter of time until more and more Russians look over the border and say…”I want that.” Living under a dictatorship actually isn’t all that great. This is all about money and power and one freaking dude who is clinging to it… and might kill thousands of innocent people and maybe spark a world war to keep it.
Clownshow was what your cheating/abused children figure skaters did out there tonight comrade. That's more tragedy though - not their fault your country is so monumetally corrupt. Rots from the head down, like they say...
Comrade since you are so in tune with Putin why don’t you explain why he sent a dozen page letter to the UN accusing Ukraine of mass genocide. It’s obvious to me that the US revealing and saying he’s invading is the only reason he hasn’t invaded yet. Every day that they can delay is a day they miss where it’s frozen enough to move tanks over ice instead of mush. Delaying Putin is smart. Not a clown show. What would be a clown show would be reciting Russian state tv talking points and rooting for an attack that hasn’t been so consequential since Germany invaded Poland. Rooting for a war just so you can have another thing to blame Biden for that isn’t in his control just shows an extreme hatred for American values and freedom.
Putin is bombing schools now https://abcnews.go.com/Internationa...ed-separatist-shelling-hits/story?id=82962555
Biden is far from perfect and he says stupid stuff too often for comfort but he is doing the best he can now and I'm not sure what else people expect. This is just pure partisanship. You have to take every opportunity to criticize your political opponents you can't give any credit to them..
I just don't know how we should brush off such insane sabotage of American interests by the right wing. I mean how far are these guys willing to go in order to just win the midterms so they can then do nothing but more sabotage? I get that the Democrats made life hell for Trump when they could, but I never saw a moment where American interests were sabotaged just to get at Trump. Correct me if I'm wrong there, but I never saw that level of sabotage. Even when we were putting our head in hands watching him do whatever he was doing with Kim Jung, I think everyone universally was rooting for him to actually be successful in achieving some level of peace treaty with Kim, and did welcome dialog... just maybe not that type of meaningless reality TV show.
I know I complemented Trump for meeting with Kim Jong Un. I thought it was a good move. Now after Trump started giving concessions with nothing in return and then his weird love letters, then I criticized him but speaking to your enemies I don't think is a bad thing. What we're seeing now from many critics of Biden is that no matter what Biden does they are criticizing. Whether he speaks to Putin or whether he moves more troops into Eastern Europe. Somehow Biden is both simultaneously appeasing Putin and being a warmonger.
It's not pure partisanship - the openly in pro-Russia, pro coup stuff pushed by Murdoch etc that people like @Commodore gobble up crosses over into something much darker and more illegal. Politics used to stop at the waters edge. GWB - an insanely divisive figure - was the beneficiary of a 90% approval rating. Not so anymore, the Tucker Carlsons of the world are more like Father Coughlin - active pro fascist elements who are trying to hurt their own country.
Do you think anyone is buying the line that being opposed to going to war with Russia over Ukraine makes someone pro-Putin?
It's not but neither is allowing Russia to take control of a democratic country and threaten Europe. That is why Biden is trying to engage in diplomacy while exposing Russian moves. He's doing things to try to keep us from getting to shooting while not just handing over Ukraine.
You have to be the most dense person in the world if you think Putin attacking to try and annex a sovereign country makes us safer from Nuclear war. Under this logic FDR, Churchill, and Stalin would have been wrong to warn the world that Hitler was going to attack and Annex Poland and Chez while pushing for a diplomatic solution because then it somehow makes it more likely that we would be in a World War??? You seriously make zero sense here other than you are trying to find any reason whatsoever to criticize AMERICA and EUROPE's efforts here just because a Democrat is presiding over the presidency currently even if it makes zero logical sense, and talks out of both sides of your mouth. It is in America's interest to warn the world that Putin has amassed an army capable of world war at Ukraine's borders in an effort to bring Putin to the table for a diplomatic solution to bring his troops back to Russia. You also refused to answer my very direct question about why Putin sent the letter to the UN yesterday accusing Ukraine of Genocide. Please explain what the hell that means.
The US is not starting a war with Russia. A US war with Russia is not going to happen unless Putin is crazy enough to attack the US. Putin is a de-facto dictator. War or not with Ukraine is up to him and no one else. Ukrainian is a peaceful democracy and is trying to become a stronger democracy. It is trying to become more western and isn't starting a war with anyone. More western democracy = America's interest. Less western democracy (Ukrainian under Putin control) = against America's interest. The US and the west are trying to prevent war and stand up for western democracy. Since you seem to be a fan of Tucker Carlson over this Russia/Ukraine situation, I see your position is for the West to appease to a dictator. You go about doing this by attacking Ukrainian while ignoring Putin's actions, supporting his politically stated demand while failing to understand what he's trying to do (he hasn't been quiet about trying to restore the old Soviet Union). Your stated position is anti-war, but that is not true. When you are against the west's attempts to prevent a war or delay a war (criticize everything that has been done, from releasing Putin's plan, threat of economic sanction, threat of killing the Russian oil pipeline), I see that you don't mind Russia warring and taking over Ukraine. That is Pro-Putin.
It's not about NATO. That's just the excuse. The Reason Putin Would Risk War - The Atlantic Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game? To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic—though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. Indeed, many of his tactics—the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea—are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II; sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918. Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders. But the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power. That story—which has been told several times, by the authors Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha, and most recently Catherine Belton—begins in the 1980s. The later years of that decade were, for many Russians, a moment of optimism and excitement. The policy of glasnost—openness—meant that people were speaking the truth for the first time in decades. Many felt the real possibility of change, and they thought it could be change for the better. Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. As the world’s television screens blared out the news of the Cold War’s end, Putin and his KGB comrades in the doomed Soviet satellite state were frantically burning all of their files, making calls to Moscow that were never returned, fearing for their lives and their careers. For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democratic rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. Putin, like his role model Yuri Andropov, who was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the 1956 revolution there, concluded from that period that spontaneity is dangerous. Protest is dangerous. Talk of democracy and political change is dangerous. To keep them from spreading, Russia’s rulers must maintain careful control over the life of the nation. Markets cannot be genuinely open; elections cannot be unpredictable; dissent must be carefully “managed” through legal pressure, public propaganda, and, if necessary, targeted violence. But although Putin missed the euphoria of the ’80s, he certainly took full part in the orgy of greed that gripped Russia in the ’90s. Having weathered the trauma of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to the Soviet Union and joined his former colleagues in a massive looting of the Soviet state. With the assistance of Russian organized crime as well as the amoral international offshore-money-laundering industry, some of the former Soviet nomenklatura stole assets, took the money out of the country, hid it abroad, and then brought the cash back and used it to buy more assets. Wealth accumulated; a power struggle followed. Some of the original oligarchs landed in prison or exile. Eventually Putin wound up as the top billionaire among all the other billionaires—or at least the one who controls the secret police. This position makes Putin simultaneously very strong and very weak, a paradox that many Americans and Europeans find hard to understand. He is strong, of course, because he controls so many levers of Russia’s society and economy. Try to imagine an American president who controlled not only the executive branch—including the FBI, CIA, and NSA—but also Congress and the judiciary; The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dallas Morning News, and all of the other newspapers; and all major businesses, including Exxon, Apple, Google, and General Motors. Putin’s control comes without legal limits. He and the people around him operate without checks and balances, without ethics rules, without transparency of any kind. They determine who can be a candidate in elections, and who is allowed to speak in public. They can make decisions from one day to the next—sending troops to the Ukrainian border, for example—after consulting no one and taking no advice. When Putin contemplates an invasion, he does not have to consider the interest of Russian businesses or consumers who might suffer from economic sanctions. He doesn’t have to take into account the families of Russian soldiers who might die in a conflict that they don’t want. They have no choice, and no voice. And yet at the same time, Putin’s position is extremely precarious. Despite all of that power and all of that money, despite total control over the information space and total domination of the political space, Putin must know, at some level, that he is an illegitimate leader. He has never won a fair election, and he has never campaigned in a contest that he could lose. He knows that the political system he helped create is profoundly unfair, that his regime not only runs the country but owns it, making economic and foreign-policy decisions that are designed to benefit the companies from which he and his inner circle personally profit. He knows that the institutions of the state exist not to serve the Russian people, but to steal from them. He knows that this system works very well for a few rich people, but very badly for everyone else. He knows, in other words, that one day, prodemocracy activists of the kind he saw in Dresden might come for him too. Putin’s awareness that his legitimacy is dubious has been on public display since 2011, soon after his rigged “reelection” to a constitutionally dubious third term. At that time, large crowds appeared not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but several dozen other cities as well, protesting electoral fraud and elite corruption. Protesters mocked the Kremlin as a regime of “crooks and thieves,” a slogan popularized by the democracy activist Alexei Navalny; later, Putin’s regime would poison Navalny, nearly killing him. The dissident is now in a Russian jail. But Putin wasn’t just angry at Navalny. He also blamed America, the West, foreigners trying to destroy Russia. The Obama administration had, he said, organized the demonstrators; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, had “given the signal” to start the protests. He had won the election, he declared with great passion, tears seeming to well up in his eyes, despite the “political provocations that pursue the sole objective of undermining Russia's statehood and usurping power.”
Part 2 In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, of the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election. All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar. Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness. It’s a long way from the Donbas to France or the Netherlands, where far-right politicians hang around the European Parliament and take Russian money to go on “fact-finding missions” to Crimea. It’s a longer way still to the small American towns where, back in 2016, voters eagerly clicked on pro-Trump Facebook posts written in St. Petersburg. But they are all a part of the same story: They are the ideological answer to the trauma that Putin and his generation of KGB officers experienced in 1989. Instead of democracy, they promote autocracy; instead of unity, they try constantly to create division; instead of open societies, they promote xenophobia. Instead of letting people hope for something better, they promote nihilism and cynicism. Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail. These are big goals, and they might not be achievable. But Putin’s beloved Soviet Union also had big, unachievable goals. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors wanted to create an international revolution, to subjugate the entire world to the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. Ultimately, they failed—but they did a lot of damage while trying. Putin will also fail, but he too can do a lot of damage while trying. And not only in Ukraine.
It's also smart to get NATO and EU "on paper" to promise sanctions now when it's politically easier to say (although, Italy somehow is able to say "No energy sanctions please" - they've always been closely financially/politically tied with Russia and economically weak). It also helps, steel the Ukranian people in the face of an enormous threat by showing moral&material support and helping fight a whole lot of disinformation. This is important because them lying down for the enemy is the best outcome that Putin could hope for (and republicans for that matter). This is where it's hard to think critically because no normal person wants there to be bloodshed. But bloodshed been happening for 8 years. Ukranian economy is strained. This is super serious and many effects human lives tremendously. The administration fighting the diplomatic/PR war well so far and I'm sure it helps that Europe is seeing that ideological threat is real now, given that even the beacon of freedom/democracy, the US, is susceptible to authoritarian threats (Trump and January 6th coup efforts). There has to be some sort of ostracizing mechanism applied to Tucker&FOX - they are actively helping the enemy's geopolitical goals. It's an absolute treachery. Comrade @Commodore should be ashamed. And like @txtony 's atlantic article (and many other major publications) have said, we can easily call Putin's Russia an "enemy". That system over there is socially unstable with an emotional leader that lacks any checks on him at the helm of monstrously lethal strategical forces (NUKES). At least China is stable economically and so far have been less impulsive with use of their military or meddling in other country's elections. And then there is North Korea and Iran.
Which of these things makes it a clownshow? It seems to me Monday is the most likely invasion day - Putin building goodwill with China waiting for the Olympics to end.
The strategic folly of a Russian invasion of Ukraine Putin might conquer Ukraine, but he won't win this war https://theweek.com/foreign-affairs/1010376/the-strategic-folly-of-a-russian-invasion-of-ukraine
