I read the above and the proof that the USA sabotaged the Minsk agreement of 2015 to stop the fighting in Eastern Ukraine which caused serious problems for the predominant Russian speaking people in the area. The USA pumped billions in armament assistance to the Ukraine - while Obama was president he stopped the assistance of actual arms and used the money to support the fighting in Ukraine by providing medical assistance to Ukraine - like beds and blankets to wounded Ukrainians. Trump made a serious mistake by providing arms assistance in cash and found out in 2019 that the cash assistance was used corruptly through kickbacks to politicians in the USA and then decided to sent arms purchased by the USA Government and provided to Ukraine. Pelosi and Schiff were hard hit financially by the scam and then started impeachment steps against Trump based on no real evidence at all. .
The easy solution would have been for the US Government to subject US Aid to Ukraine to implementation of the Minsk agreement - that would have prevented the invasion of the Ukraine by the Russians. There were other problems that contributed to the invasion and those included arrest of Russian-speaking members of the Ukraine Parliament before the invasion as well as oppression of Russian Speaking people in Government controlled areas in Ukraine and the fact that the USA operated and funded Bio-Labs in Ukraine.
The latter claim was lodged with the UN before the invasion took place by the Russian Government and the refrain from the USA was that it was Russian Disinformation - that was a lie. It unfortunately was NOT a Russian lie and was true. In a statement under oath in the Senate the US Government admitted the bio-labs existed - but she added that there was no harmful research done in the labs - but then added that the US Government was worried about the pathogens developed at the labs would fall into Russian hands. If the research was harmless - why worry about the Russians getting hold of the pathogens? Another myth stated on this site was that the USA was assisting Ukraine to get rid of USSR bio-labs in Ukraine - the sad part of that lie was the fact that after 30 years after the fall of the USSR there are proof of the existence of 25+ bio-labs still being operated in Ukraine and the obvious fact is that the statement of USSR bio-labs being closing was a scam and lie.
In summary the EU countries want a peaceful solution of the problems in Ukraine - the USA does not. Why should that have been? There are 2 things that bothers thinking people - why was the Minsk agreement never implemented to end the civil war in Eastern Ukraine? Why did in the weeks before the invasion while Macron was in serious discussions with the Russians did Biden said the objective of the USA Government was to use the Ukraine situation to get rid of Putin as the President of Russia effectively sabotaging the negotiations? A third question is who in the USA benefit from corruption in Ukraine based on assistance provision by the USA to Ukraine. The USA passed some of the assistance in cash to Ukraine - eg the additional $1 billion provided by a special Congress resolution - aside from the armaments assistance? Why did the Ukraine invested the money received in FTX and what happened to the "investment" by the Ukraine Government in that company? What is known is that FTX provided $70 million to the Democratic Party in assistance to fight the mid=term election - where did that $70 million come from?
I have from the start said the Russian Invasion could have been stopped from happening at all if there was support for coming to a peaceful solution of the situation from especially the USA and that support was missing. I am still in favor of peace negotiations in Ukraine - but as Draad stated there is so intention on the part of especially the USA to agree to such negotiations. The idea of assassination of Putin or his removal from power is also based on propaganda in media - and totally unrelated to reality. Throughout the last 300 years the Russians have resisted invasions and oppression of Russian people bar for one case - and that was the financial support of the west for the Communist take-over of the Russian Government. That situation ceased in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since then the Russians were blamed for every fiasco involving the USA specifically. It reached a crescendo in 2015 when the Democrats in the USA invented the Russian Hoax lies in the USA elections.
The easy solution based on the Minsk Agreemeent was always the way out of the Ukraine problem - but without active support for a peaceful solution by the USA was never in evidence. Until that happened the slaughter in Ukraine would continue. Is the reason for that |money being the route of all evil?
In conclusion what is happening in Ukraine is a crime against humanity - and it should never have happened at all if there were negotiations to solve the problems in Ukraine - what really happened is the USA never supported negotiations and undermined it effectively,
.
blobbok
Senior player
3427 posts
The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order
A shared sense of national history is proving to be a crucial weapon, spurring on Ukraine resistance and Russian soldiers
Mon 26 Dec 2022 10.00 GMT
Last modified on Mon 26 Dec 2022 12.46 GMTThe Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and parish priests.” It’s a country’s taught collective memory, its shared sense of its own history, that are the decisive instruments for mobilisation, and are as important on the battlefield as weaponry.
Few conflicts have been so shaped by the chief actors’ sense of their own national story as the Ukrainian war that began in February. It is the competing grand narratives of the past, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but in Germany, France, Poland, the Baltics, the UK, the US, and even the global south, that make this war so hard to resolve.
Indeed, sometimes this war feels less like the end of history and more like the revenge of history.
Georgiy Kasianov, the Ukrainian historian, puts history in the cockpit of a conflict that may create a new world order. “Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine spurred in large part by historical fiction,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Ukrainians, too, harbour a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives.”
Putin is sometimes described not as commander in chief, but as Russia’s historian in chief. The ground for this war was prepared by the Russian president’s pseudo-historical essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in July 2021. In this document, Putin argued Ukraine was, historically, indistinguishable from Russia, citing Oleg the prophet’s 10th-century dictum: “Let Kyiv be the mother of all Russian cities.”
Rados?aw Sikorski, the former Polish foreign minister, said he became sure an invasion would happen when he read that essay and learned Putin had ordered it to be sent to every serving Russian soldier. “The plan was to do again what Russia had repeatedly done to Ukraine in the past: extermination of its elites, Russification of its culture and population and the subjugation of its resources to its own imperial needs. Ukraine could be permitted as peasant folklore but not as a free and democratic nation choosing its own destiny and allies.”
When Putin talked about Ukraine needing to disarm and making Russian its second official language, it was not only about restoring Ukraine as part of Russia, but a staging post to the full reinvention of the Russian empire.
During his Victory Day speech in Moscow in May 2022, the president told Russian soldiers back from the Ukrainian front they were “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did” – for “the motherland” and the defeat of nazism. The Ukrainian revolution of 2013 was a fascist “Banderite coup”, the government in Kyiv a “junta”, Nato enlargement an Anschluss, and the EU a decadent threat to Russian culture. Russia in 2022, according to Putin, was like the USSR in 1941, threatened by an invasion from the west.
Zabuzkho argues that this deep historical sense of injustice and betrayal drives not just Putin, but the whole of Russian society. “One wants to find Russians who are not preoccupied with self-pity right now. The feeling of injustice is one of the most distinct symptoms of the moral breakdown that characterises so much of Russian society today.”
Ukraine, too, has its own sense of injustice and points its accusatory finger at Russia. Olesya Khromeychuk, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London, argues: “Ukraine’s historical experience – of statelessness and struggle, repressive external rule and hard-won independence – has shaped Ukraine into the nation we see today: opposed to imperialism, united in the face of the enemy, and determined to protect its freedom. For the people of Ukraine, freedom is not some lofty ideal. It is imperative for survival.”
Ukraine’s identity took time to form after it gained independence in 1991. Two narratives competed – one national and nationalist, the other Soviet nostalgic. This was not unique among post-Soviet states, but the process was never more intense or confrontational than in Ukraine.
Battles were fought over school textbooks, monuments, the choice of national anniversaries, street names, state archives, or the status of the Holodomor – the human-made famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians – as a genocide. Under the “historical presidency” of Viktor Yuschenko between 2005 and 2010, 159 historical decrees were issued, the vast majority about the de-communisation of Ukraine.
In the process history was often royally misused. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory for instance between 2014 and 2019 came to be dominated by a narrow group of rightwing nationalists that defined Ukraine in purely ethnic anti-Russian terms.
Unpopular leaders such as Petro Poroshenko relied on increasingly divisive and crude ethnic appeals to patriotism, thinking it was the shortcut to remaining in power. In 2015 the government even issued a set of “memory laws” that made questioning the official, deeply anti-Soviet view of Ukraine’s past punishable with prison terms of up to 10 years.
It was not until the advent of Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the “independence generation” – those who grew up after Ukraine left the Soviet Union – that Ukraine addressed issues of the past, identity and language in a more inclusive way, as Olga Onuch sets out in her book The Zelensky Effect. Zelenskiy, a former comedian and actor elected in 2019, understood the importance of history. Indeed, in the opening series of Servant of the People – the TV show that made his name – Zelenskiy plays a history teacher trying to convince his pupils of the importance of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the historian who, in 1903, first tried to show how Ukrainian history was not merely a part of an overarching Russian story.
In his new year address in 2020, Zelenskiy asked Ukrainians to ask themselves, “Who am I?”, and not find an answer by simply excluding others. “Our passports don’t say whether we are the right kind of Ukrainians or a wrong one. There is no entry there, saying ‘patriot’, ‘Maloros’ [a derogatory term used to describe a Ukrainian native with no national identity], ‘vatnik’ [a derogatory term for a pro-Russian citizen] or ‘Banderite’ [a derogatory term for a Ukrainian nationalist]. It says: ‘citizen of Ukraine’, who has rights and obligations. We are all very different.” The idea was to live together with respect.
Onuch and her co-author, Henry Hale, argue Zelenskiy was critical to giving Ukrainians a chance to “realise they shared a rich common fate that transcended linguistic, national and religious diversity”. This generation did not want just to shed their Russianness, but find a new Ukrainian civic identity linked to a hard-fought idea of common values. As a Russian-speaking Jewish person from south-east Ukraine, Zelenksiy was perfect to demonstrate how Russian-speaking Ukrainians, including those in the east, could fully identify with the Ukrainian state and express their patriotism.
That mattered when the war began. The Polish historian Adam Michnik argues that the future of Ukraine as part of Europe was always going to depend not only on the western cities of Lviv and Kyiv, but also on the cities to the south and east, Kharkiv and Odesa. “There is no doubt, under Putin’s rockets, both Kharkiv and Odesa chose Europe.”
In short, Putin was invading a country that very much existed – one he no longer understood.
The FSB told the Russian president that a superior army could capture Kyiv and decapitate its leadership in hours, as it had in Crimea in 2014, since it was invading an artificial and politically apathetic country that distrusted its leaders. Just to make sure, it supposedly spent $1bn fomenting discontent among the Russophone population in Ukraine and promoting pro-Russian politicians. Unfortunately, the FSB’s agents siphoned off some of the money and then fabricated data on pro-Russian attitudes to please Moscow.
As a result, many Russian soldiers, poorly briefed on the invasion, seemed genuinely bewildered by a Ukrainian volunteer defence force determined to protect their homeland. When they reached cities such as Kherson they were greeted with shotguns, and not flowers.
“The Ukraine in your news and the Ukraine of real life are two entirely different places,” Zelenskiy warned Russians on the eve of the invasion, “and the difference is that the latter is real”.
By day three of the invasion it was apparent to Russian commanders that serious mistakes had been made from which the operation has never fully been able to recover. Russia’s hubris and overconfidence led to false assumptions that sabotaged the mission.
The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, provided a concise summary of the critical importance of Russia’s initial mistakes. He told a Lords select committee in November: “This war has exposed the whole pitch about ‘night one, day one’. You might translate it as saying, ‘When the balloon goes up, you take out the air defence of your adversary and then you can pick and choose at will and do your targeting.’
“What if you do not manage to do that on day one, night one, and it takes three weeks, as the Russians found out? On their day one, night one, the Ukrainians rather cleverly drove out of their barracks, dispersed their arsenals or used deception in their air defence capabilities. Knowing that this was going to happen, the Ukrainians used false trails for where their air defence was so that Russia hit all the wrong places. Suddenly, day one, night one becomes three weeks, four weeks. You run out of your complex weapons and you are now where the Russians are.”
Ten months on from the initial invasion, Ukraine’s extraordinary resilience and courage has staved off defeat, but not guaranteed victory. Europe’s post-cold war security landscape has changed, and yet nothing is settled. This is still a moment of transition.
The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov describes the war as “more like a game of poker than chess. On a chess board, all the pieces are face up, but poker is essentially a game of incomplete information, a game where you have to guess and act on those guesses.”
The most difficult guess is estimating how long the other side can withstand this level of destruction in terms of manpower, ammunition and morale. Each side has to increase the cost of war for the other in the hope the enemy is close to cracking.
Yet the toll is already massive. The US chief of staff, Mark Milley, claims as many as 100,000 Russian soldiers have died. Based on open-source references, the Oryx site determined that the Russians had lost a total of 1,491 main battle tanks since 24 February, of which 856 different types were destroyed, 62 damaged and 55 abandoned, and the Ukrainians had taken more than 518. Russia, albeit involuntarily, became Ukraine’s most important arms supplier.
By one calculation, the US has spent 5.6% of its annual defence budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s military capability.
The successive battlefield defeats have damaged the reputation of the great Russian military. First there had to be the “regrouping” in the north, when Russia realised it could not take Kyiv and Chernihiv. On 6 September came the stunning collapse of the Russian front in the north-east in the Kharkiv region. On 11 November Russia withdrew from the port city of Kherson, retreating from territory it had announced as annexed and part of Russia only 40 days earlier. The goal of establishing a land corridor to Transnistria – a Russian-backed breakaway region of Moldova, one of Ukraine’s western neighbours – is, for now, abandoned. Since September Ukraine says it has reclaimed more than 8,000 sq km (3,089 sq miles) of Russian-occupied territory.
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Russia has also paid a toll in lost diplomatic prestige. In meetings with Central Asian republics, Putin sometimes find himself humiliated and contradicted, and there is talk of a security vacuum in the Caucasus as Russian prestige withers. Positive diplomatic support for Russia, as opposed to hedging, is confined to Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea. In one international diplomatic body after another, the “Russia not welcome” sign is going up. The Chinese defence minister, Wei Fenghe, in June said his country would not be providing one bullet to Russia, portraying the relationship as a partnership, not an alliance.
In the annual Anholt-Ipsos Nations Brands index, published in November, Russia has fallen from 27th out of the 60 nations polled to 58. The founder of the index, Simon Anholt, says: “Such a collapse in a country’s national prestige will cripple the ability of its business, its government and most importantly its people to trade and engage with the international community. It will do so for years, if not generations, and will inflict more damage than any economic sanctions”.
Again, national stories will play their part in testing that resolve. Moscow had bet on a return to American isolationism and a Trump triumph in the midterm elections in November. The theory was that in swing districts, Americans would rise up against the cost of gas and the war. It is true a slow erosion of support for the war among Republicans emerged in some polls, but Joe Biden seemed to tell a more compelling story about democracy under threat in the US and in Europe.
As a result, Biden has been left with greater scope than expected to continue to shape his own Ukraine policy in the next two years.
At the start of December, Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House foreign affairs committee, defined that scope by saying Republicans would not be advocating an end to US funding, but greater scrutiny and decisiveness. Given Biden has provided Ukraine with more than $18.6bn in security assistance and $13bn in direct economic assistance, it was hardly surprising McCaul demanded more accountability for US spending. But his main point was different. “The problem right now is Iranian drones are going into Crimea, but the Ukrainians can’t hit those Iranian drones unless they have the longer-range artillery called the ATACMS [army tactical missile system]. For some reason … [the Biden administration] will not put those weapons into Ukraine. When we give [Ukraine] what they need, they win. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long and protracted war.” They are not the remarks of a man bent on reviving the American isolationist tradition.
If the US is for the moment closed off as a choke point, Putin’s next best option was Berlin. But the energy blackmail he directed at Germany now looks as likely to explode in his own face as bring about German deindustrialisation.
Through a mixture of state planning and individual parsimony, Germany has weaned itself off Russian energy, an extraordinary achievement for a country that was dependent on Russia for 55% of its gas. German industry has reduced gas consumption by about 25% since the year’s start, while production has only fallen by 1.4%. The state has found alternative suppliers, including in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
Given the state of German reserves, blackouts this winter seem less likely in Europe, even if next winter is more worrying.
Germany has led the efforts to quell anger about rising bills by constructing hugely expensive subsidy packages. Since the start of the energy crisis in September 2021, according to the Bruegel Institute, a staggering €705.5bn (£614bn) has been allocated or earmarked across European countries to shield consumers from the rising energy costs.
But will it be enough? The nights are longer, the thermometers have dropped and energy bills are landing, so the witching hour is here. The recurring nightmare of Zelenskiy’s young strategic communications team is that Ukraine’s suffering drops out of the news, and the country, once synonymous with freedom, becomes a burden. “Our principle is simple,” says Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff. “If we fall out of focus, we are in danger.” The attention of the world serves as a shield.
So far the drumbeat of rebellion is faint and confined to the fringes on the left and right.
That has forced Putin to switch tactics again and resort to different tools of war to weaken Europe’s resolve. The attacks on civilian energy structure that bega
clevermike
Hall Of Fame
47663 posts
It certainly shook up the World Economy into a deadly spiral of inflation and an amazing increase in bribery and corruption in Governments - especially in the USA. Have a look at Fried and the Ukraine - they give taxpayer money to Ukraine as aid Ukraine invest it in Fried CC - who paid it back to the Democrats and compliant political crooks.
mozart
Hall Of Fame
37460 posts
The Ukrainian people defined courage in 2022. I have huge respect for what they have done.
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
" I have huge respect for what they have done."
Me too, but the media is adding some smoke and mirrors to glorify a horrible war...Fck Putin, Fck Pretensky & Biden and all the other world leaders who didn't stop this...still can't believe this is happening.
AJH
Senior player
2114 posts
I wonder just how much money is going to be "Transferred back" to the USA from Ukraine before the 31st Dec to the politicians who are responsible for this war and all its horrors to innocent folks.
Shameful and a disgrace to the human race.
Stavanger1
Bok regular
1560 posts
Fck Putin, Fck Pretensky & Biden and all the other world leaders who didn't stop this...still can't believe this is happening.
And Fck DbDraad, stop trying to suggest there is some sort of equivalency between the two sides.
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
"stop trying to suggest there is some sort of equivalency between the two sides"
Never said that...you stop pretending the West are squeaky clean in this mess...Putin is 100% responsible for this, but I see no urgency from NATO to end this...no diplomacy...some economic pressure, but not enough to make it count...it really looks like NATO is content in fighting a proxy war with Russia...stop pretending this is the only option...it wasn't in 2014 and it sure ain't now.
mozart
Hall Of Fame
37460 posts
Draad everybody was shocked when Putin invaded, so it wasn’t’ planned by anybody. And everybody thought Russia would roll over Ukraine in 8 weeks. Why would the West want that to happen.
You are on firmer ground if you argue that the West has blown the incorporation of Russia into modern society. The constant criticism, the failure to be inclusive….the clear snub at the Sochi games. All stupid
And I can’t imagine Biden in his reduced state has developed any working relationship with Putin. Nonetheless, attacking Ukraine right after the world had emerged from the worst of Covid with supply chain issues, was an act of wanton irresponsibility.
It will take a long time for Russia to rebuild any trust.
Crusadersfan
Bok regular
1992 posts
As long as Russia is a slave state nothing will change.
Hopefully the stupid slaughter of the youth of Russia will awake the masses to the futile murder and they will finally wake up to the egotists that they have let shackle them for so long.
Not holding my breathe but modern technology might just open their eyes to the situation
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
"Nonetheless, attacking Ukraine right after the world had emerged from the worst of Covid with supply chain issues, was an act of wanton irresponsibility."
I agree 100%, but there are more arrows in the quiver than throwing billions of $ of weaponry at Ukraine...more can be done to stop this...I might be wrong, but I see no urgency from the West to stop this...and it p!$$3$ me off no end.
sharkbok
Hall Of Fame
16002 posts
The only acceptable solution is that Russia leaves Ukraine, but Putin won't accept this.
Ukraine will not cede territory to Russia, and the West will not compromise on this either.
If Putin was to walk away from Ukraine he would probably lose power in Russia, and subsequently be killed - so he has no exit plan.
If anyone could suggest a "negotiated settlement", go ahead.
I propose killing Putin because this is the only realistic way of ending this war anytime soon. Hopefully, the Russians can do this and save the world allot of hassle.
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
Assassinating Putin is a valid option...threatening him directly is also an option...and the sanctions against Russia is not nearly as harsh as they could be...with the lives lost already and those still at stake, much more can be done to force some sort of solution.
mozart
Hall Of Fame
37460 posts
Well maybe more could be done….but the increase in the use of coal because of displaced Russian gas is so dramatic that it offsets the climate change benefits of 15 years of wind/solar initiatives in the US. Some dramatic shifts are occurring .
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
If the war ended today, there would be no need for sanctions and Europe would be able to start using Russian energy immediately. It wouldn't be a problem anymore....Russia is still allowed to sell oil at a forced discount, but the lower price os still more than the price of Brent while Trump was president...significantly so...token, slap on the wrist sanctions, not really designed to force Putin to quit his quest in Ukraine.
The Western support for Ukraine with the supply of weapons is hurting Russia, but it drags out the war at an enormous cost of lives. If NATO was serious about really ending the war they should enforce a complete embargo on anything to and from Russia, or something...and they should have warned Putin of the consequences even before the invasion...one gets the idea he knew he would get away with it...he didn't count on the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people though...History will remember their Spartan-like heroics, but the lives lost on both sides is just too horrible for words...it's been almost a year.
Pakie
Rugby Legend
6694 posts
Draad everybody was shocked when Putin invaded,
It was predicted months in advance from intelligence sources, not so?
DbDraad
Hall Of Fame
18074 posts
Ja Pakie, the only surprise was the resilience and guts of the Ukrainian people...but the whole Zelensky thing is off... looks scripted...him and his wife...plays out like Hollywood and him being an actor and all.
Devil's Advocate
Rugby Legend
4819 posts
"If NATO was serious about really ending the war they should enforce a complete embargo on anything to and from Russia, or something...and they should have warned Putin of the consequences even before the invasion...one gets the idea he knew he would get away with it...he didn't count on the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people though...History will remember their Spartan-like he roics, but the lives lost on both sides is just too horrible for words"
Yep, agreed
Plum
Hall Of Fame
9874 posts
Meanwhile, Europe is dipping deep into the coffers to get through the winter.
Moonrover
Bok regular
721 posts
"Meanwhile, Europe is dipping deep into the coffers to get through the winter."
Yep meanwhile Gazprom has completed a 3000km gas pipeline to China from Russia.
China the winner,maybe they blew up Nord.
blobbok
Senior player
3427 posts
.,
blobbok
Senior player
3427 posts