Volnovakha taken by the DPR.

shock and disbelief is inevitable.

Shock and disbelief at what? Come on, Karlin, what’s your prediction?

I think that this is 70% likely: Russia keeps grinding away, and within six weeks controls much or all of eastern and southern Ukraine. But they’ll have taken a very high number of casualties — they already have — and they experience a great deal of trouble in holding and administering the territory.

20% likely: Russia is still stalled in six weeks, and has not achieved firm control over southern and eastern Ukraine.

7% likely: Negotiations succeed and Russia withdraws in exchange for recognition of Crimea, a binding neutrality agreement from Ukraine, some measure of independence for Luhansk and Donetsk, etc.

3% likely: Every other outcome, e.g.: Russia conquers the whole of the Ukraine. Or Poland enters the conflict. Or NATO enters the conflict. Or Japan attempts to take everything up to Sakhalin. Basically, every “wild card” outcome. The wild cards are not exactly unlikely on the whole, but each one is individually unlikely.

My point is that Russia turning things around and rapidly conquering the whole of the Ukraine would be shocking, but I think that it’s very unlikely. The most likely outcomes are not shocking, they are merely depressing.

Some good articles by the ambassador.

https://www.indianpunchline.com/zelensky-rubbishes-bidens-war-on-russia/

https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/21559/Russia-Enters-Successful-Endgame-Ukraine-Signals-No-NATO

Pointless war, knew it would end soon when world Jewry raised concerns at the money various oligarchs were losing. In that sense Ukraine truly is a Western country.

Ukraine will rebuild, the period of CIA and oligarch rule will be as discredited as the nineties were for Russia. The damage to US prestige and the dollar system will be permanent.

I remember 20 years ago, in the first weeks of the second Gulf War, there was a lot of talk that American offensive had stalled and that America was losing in Iraq. Wise heads responded that things would be going slowly until they reached a breaking point–and then they’d go very fast. And this is exactly what happened in Iraq. It’s still the most likely scenario in the Ukraine.

Speaking of Ukrainian oligarchs, I wonder what they are doing. Are they making deals right now? What kind? With whom?

If we knew answers to these questions a lot about Ukraine’s near future would become clear.

Winston Churchill’s strategic and military analysis of the German invasion of Poland and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Poland. Why didn’t the French and British declare war on Stalin for invading Poland too?

“Russians were guilty of gross treachery during the recent negotiations, but Marshal Voroshilov’s demand that the Russian armies, if they were allies of Poland, should occupy Vilnius and Lvov was a perfectly reasonable military demand. It was rejected by Poland, whose arguments, despite their naturalness, cannot be considered satisfactory in the light of current events. As a result, Russia took up the same positions as an enemy of Poland that it might have taken as a very dubious and suspected friend. The difference is actually not as great as it might seem. The Russians mobilized a very large force and showed that they were able to move quickly and far from their pre-war positions. They now border on Germany, and the latter is completely unable to expose the Eastern front. A large German army will have to be left behind to monitor it. As far as I know, General Hamelin estimates its strength at least 20 divisions, but there may well be 25 or even more. Therefore, the Eastern front potentially exists.
Russia is pursuing a cold policy of its own interests. We would prefer that the Russian armies stand in their present positions as friends and allies of Poland, rather than as invaders. But to protect Russia from the Nazi threat, it was clearly necessary that Russian armies should stand on this line. In any case, this line exists and, consequently, the Eastern front has been created, which Nazi Germany will not dare to attack…”

Advice from the top military establishment. It created a Cold Eastern Front. They were always hoping that Hitler might attack Stalin, or that the Russians might attack Germany. Proved to be decisive. Poles are nothing but a pain in the backside. Brave lads but essentially an annoyance.

Poland is the hyena of Europe (Winston Churchill)

Thanks. The ambassador is a jewel of Indian intelligentzia.

I remember 20 years ago, in the first weeks of the second Gulf War, there was a lot of talk that American offensive had stalled and that America was losing in Iraq.

1. That all ended in tears for us Americans. We did lose in Iraq in the end.

2. We had a complete and total control of the air and a whole host of advantages that the Russian military does not enjoy currently.

3. That doesn’t mean Russians would not prevail ultimately, but using historical analogies that bear little resemblance to different combatants in very different conditions isn’t very fruitful.

If I travelled back in time and talked individually to each Russian partisan on this site and informed them of how the war had gone by now, they would be totally shocked and would never believe me.

If I then informed Putin of the same, he would not have launched this idiotic, cruel war. End of.

It’s like you all paid a huge amount for a buffet, found out that the food is extremely rotten and going to kill you, but keep shovelling it all down your throats to get your “money’s worth”.

Cretins.

(Sorry Twinkie, this was not aimed at you but I am still reply limited so I don’t want to delete and re-write as I get 3 in 24 hours.)

Amazing if true. Ukraine may have taken out a Russian ship using a land-based MRLS system:

What do you guess the likely outcome will be?

A funny comment: why did Sleepy Joe not went to beg for oil to the “true” Venezuelan President, Juan Guaido?

Speaking of BFFs and allies:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/9/saudi-arabia-uae-leaders-decline-calls-biden-amid-/

The leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates declined the White House’s requests to speak with President Biden about rising oil prices, according to a report Wednesday.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE’s Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan turned down the opportunity to speak with Mr. Biden, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing U.S. and Middle East officials.

It doesn’t seem like that long ago that none would dare dissing the Prez like this.

I am curious where all this is headed.
PCR raises interesting concerns-too slow, too nice-too much time for the west to meddle.

I can only think about what I know- the slavs I know write brilliant code-but it is very buggy, lots of loose ends.

One has to remember that the west is run by the devil himself-8000 years old, the demon has seen it all and knows every angle to play. A loose end is bound to be pulled.

I am still convinced that Russia will have to waste a NATO country before it is all over.

Which probably means nuclear war.

How so? The Russians are methodically taking over the country. It’s only the msm that claimed the Russians expected an immediate surrender. It takes time to move 100,000 troops along with supplies. We once did an exercise where we moved about 500 men from Arizona to Texas and it took us almost a week just to get set up and our only enemy was the sun. I am unaware of any war against a decent sized country that was over in less than 35 days. That was German and Soviet Union invasion of Poland in 1939. Took US 2 months to dispose of the 3rd world Iraq in a mostly open desert.

This is a good attempt to be positive, but let’s be serious: these are Russian tasks in order of difficulty. The further down the list is the harder they will be to achieve. Basically increasing by orders of magnitude.

1. Achieve air supremacy.

2. Occupy Mariupol.

It seems like Russia will get here in a week, though it is hardly guaranteed.

3. Occupy Kharkiv.

4. Defeat all Ukrainian forces outside of cities.

5. Occupy Odesa.

6. Occupy Kyiv.

This was supposed to happen in 48 hours. It has no chance of happening any time soon. Can the Russian army be combat effective that long? Probably not.

7. Occupy Lviv

How’s this going to happen?

8. Maintain order in Russia, Belarus, Chechnya etc. under crushing economic depression.

Good luck!

9. Pacify infinitely supplied Ukrainian insurgencies.

Literally a 0% chance of this happening.

Since you’re still struggling with “1” and have no plans for anything above “4”, I would wish you luck but the endeavour is rotten and Lavrov will be sweating buckets to make something approaching a non-losers’ peace tonight.

Honestly, though, I do prefer your attempts at propaganda to someone like Pepe Escobar’s. You seem to be an honest patriot doing your best for a completely insane endeavour. People like Pepe Escobar however are just about the most cringe I can imagine. He doesn’t just write geopolitical fan fiction, he writes geo political fan fiction for late middle-aged male incels – the ultimate in cringe demographics.

And that’s before I get to Ron Unz, whose “contribution” to Putin’s propoganda was to argue that he really is like Hitler and that’s why he is great.

Anybody who isn’t Russian, isn’t directly paid money and is still on the Putin train has outed themselves as manipulatable mush-brained morons.

I respect your efforts as you’ve been dealt an awful hand, but some of your commenters are among the world’s most tragic people. Not because they suffer, but because they’re insufferable.

Anyway, I still think that Russia could play a blinder by somehow joining the EU with Belarus and Ukraine. Don’t ask me how they achieve it, but some sort of perfunctory regime change, false hope and change agenda and riding the wave of Western public elief might actually get you somewhere. At that point, the conservative Slavs really would control Europe. From defeat to victory in a few wonder manouervres.

This is also my favoured option. Probably a fantasy, but a lot more fun than pretending that this war and the sanctions are going as planned.

Man, the propoganda war is heating up 🙂

It’s fascinating to me how in our age nothing is simple and clear cut anymore, but everything is “perspective management” and competing narratives.

There is a complete breakdown on what used to be called “consensus reality”. Now all we have is competing narratives.

It was the same with Covid. No “consensus reality” and just a bunch of competing narratives.

If Russian success was obvious and clear cut, Karlin would hardly have to come here with such strident assertions and such insistent insistences.

It was the same with Covid. A clearly deadly or serious plague would hardly have needed such perspective management.

But so it goes in our increasingly weird and not normal age…

In my view, this is a necessary stage in the evolution to something new and a good thing – the old “consensus reality” had obviously outlived its usefulness.

A funny comment: why did Sleepy Joe not went to beg for oil to the “true” Venezuelan President, Juan Guaido?

Two possibilities spring to mind:

-1- National leaders are busy people who do not waste their time meeting with someone who is irrelevant. Thus, Guaido refused to meet with Not-The-President Biden.

-2- Puppeteers controlling the current administration deliberately chose to “maximize evil”. They can do more damage by encouraging Maduro.

PEACE 😇

And that’s before I get to Ron Unz, whose “contribution” to Putin’s propoganda was to argue that he really is like Hitler and that’s why he is great.

Lol, that was awesomely amusing 🙂

I don’t in general read Ron’s pieces because they are so goofy, but that sounds about right and very entertaining – I will have to check that out.

Anyway, I still think that Russia could play a blinder by somehow joining the EU with Belarus and Ukraine. Don’t ask me how they achieve it, but some sort of perfunctory regime change, false hope and change agenda and riding the wave of Western public elief might actually get you somewhere. At that point, the conservative Slavs really would control Europe. From defeat to victory in a few wonder manouervres

.

Wow, well that’s a fascinating idea.

There are so many ways to wage war – some of the most subtle can be the most successful.

For the “Slave empire” to actually take over the West from within rather than stupidly confronting it’s power – is such subtlety even possible in our blunt, stupid, and crass age?

It would be like Christianity taking over the Roman Empire from within – precisely through a process of refusing to fight it.

Are Slavs approaching their moment in history when they can become a “world historical” people – the moment when they push the engine of history forward?

All peoples more or less get this moment.

Probably not quite yet – but maybe soon. The strength and fervor of the Ukrainian resistance is something deeply interesting and suggestive. Russia in it’s current iteration seems played out – only more of the old.

I don’t know…

The times are becoming interesting.

The Russians haven’t yet done anything that might be considered hard. My other post to AK has 9 tasks for them to achieve and it would have been the same at the start of the war.

And to achieve nothing real, they have 12,000+ casualties, Generals being killed and ridiculous equipment losses.

The Russian military will need a cease fire in 2 weeks as it will be exhausted. Russia seems to have no operational reserve and troops are already low morale. This is just the way humans are.

Also, you see, war is not about covering miles, but, instead, it is about political goals. And nothing Russia has so far done has helped achieve those goals. In fact, Russia is far further from achieving those goals than it was 3 weeks ago.

Every military commander needs to ask themselves “what have I been told to do and why?”

And the “why?” is the key bit.

The invasion was launched in order to pacify Ukraine under Russian domination. If you can see a way for Russia to achieve that, and you’re right, then I’d wager you to be the greatest military genius of all time.

Or, if you can see anything that Russia has achieved that has contributed towards that goal, then you’re a total imbecile, or even if you can’t see how Russia is further from that goal than they have been in centuries.

And they have no cards left to play and are facing economic ruin…

Sometimes it is more honourable to know when to give up, rather than playing a losing hand to utter bankruptcy and domestic collapse. Russia still has a huge country. Why not go home and develop it? You don’t lack for land and NATO is entirely non-aggressive to you. They can’t even organise to give planes to the Ukrainians in the heaviest of circumstances. They are 0 threat to your actual homeland. NATO is mostly just a way to keep the public onside with military spending.

I’m not competent to judge how well or poorly the war is going for either side, but I do find it astonishing how ready some people are to believe their own side’s propaganda (this is aimed more at the Uke side). It reminds me of Serbian claims that NATO planes were dropping like flies in 1999 (and all the dopey, desperate Serbs who fell for it) and that goofball Iraqi information minister in 2003. I guess no matter how badly you’re losing, there’s no upside to admitting the truth so why not lie. (To repeat: not saying this is definitely the case for Ukraine. Maybe they’re doing just as well – or even better – than they claim. I’m just wary of believing it.)

The EaEU exists to get Russia better terms for joining the EU than it could as a country. So that one is already under way.

While you description is mostly true, you should concede that your “Powerful takes” claims were over-optimistic. You predicted the end of the coherent Ukrainian resistance in just 1 week. Also, the Russian side suffered a considerably number of losses, and although the Ukrainians losses are way higher, the end body-count will be quite high. In addition there is a pretty low number of deserters. I don’t buy the inflated propaganda that AP place here but the Ukrainians are still fighting. I must concede that the lost “operational mobility” and are mostly entrenched in cities. Anyway, the mess will last at least two more months. Not a cheap victory (and I’m only referring to the military dimension).

To address the points in order:

– I guess it’s forgotten now, but Iraq was quiescent for 2-3 months after the the active, “kinetic” phase of the war. But American civilian administration was bumbling around and the military maintained a “light footprint” (remember this phrase?) so US won the war but then eventually lost the peace. Will Russians do the same mistake? Possibly. But you can be sure that Russians know Ukrainians much better than Americans knew Iraqis.

– This is true, but on the other hand Russians do enjoy some advantages as compared to Americans in Iraq. For example, Russian army is fighting on its own turf.

– Last but not least, I didn’t really intend to make an exhaustive comparison of the US campaign in Iraq vs. the Russian campaign in Ukraine. I am just using that war to make a simple point: Things happen gradually and then they happen suddenly. You shouldn’t make linear extrapolations. This does not necessarily mean that the breaking point is inevitable (e.g. Russia may leave after reaching a diplomatic agreement.) But this is the way to bet.

Shut up woman.

Have you read Sailer’s “What Lessons Will Xi Draw From Putin’s War”?

Just curious, given that you seem to have high opinon of him. 😉

Recently the DrudgeReport headlines also make interesting read. It got me wondering how much I can trust the impression I got there regarding American domestic issues. 😂

Your true disappointment may come in the form of Russia leaving Ukraine after some sort of treaty. Be careful that the ‘shock and disbelief’ you talk of won’t be your own! You’re very invested in both the annexation, and ultimate Russian victory points of view. I think you’re leaving too many uncertainties out of your analysis here- that’s probably the nationalism. Your nationalist biases were imo quite clear in your idea that Ukraine (as a ‘fake state’) would not resist much and roll over quickly, which is more or less the same sentiment as held by colonizing European powers during the decolonization wars.

However, I will admit that if the Eastern front collapses, it’s probably over for the Ukies, at least on the conventional front.

A single phrase explains the fanatical ‘international support’ for the ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of ‘Ukraine’, the abject worship of the clown Zelenski by the chorus of clowns of the “UK Parliament” under the direction of the clown in chief Blojo: ”the most important of groups in Ukraine: the Jews”.

If Putin and his generals were reading these comments he would have won the war within 24 hours of it starting, I am sure.

So many arm-chair generals so willing to offer advice!

Blinken Green Lights —

“Naive” and “Russians” never really sound good together on the lips, IMO. I think Russia calculated that they were willing to lose more of their own soldiers to minimize the “shock and awe” they have to lay down to pacify Ukraine (thus generating the minimum of hatred necessary among the Ukrainian people). They may have figured that if they give logic, Russian messaging (they may not be winning the internet war, but I think they’re probably working the bullhorns and the radios pretty hard at the tactical level), Ukrainian word of mouth time to work, and USkraine brainwashing time to wear off, they’ll be doing what they can to minimize lemming-like behavior from the population. That kind of thing tends to slow down an advance (making it, I dunno, almost “police action”-like, eh?).

But I know a lot less about Russia than you do so…

And Russia is behind an Iron Curtain once again. Do you like that?

What’s crazy is how certain everyone is. I was discussing the war with a goofy 18 year old the other day, and he was just regurgitating western mass propaganda narrative as gospel with zero critical thinking. And he’s a pretty smart kid, even if he is a shitlib. He was flabbergasted when I told him Moscow has a population of like 17-20 million people, he was like, “no, Moscow is like 3 or 4 million” and I said “bullshit, it’s like 17m” with absolute certainty, because I’d just looked it up recently. I hope I punctured his bubble a bit; maybe he’ll go back and review his other “facts.”

How are these people so certain? I keep asking them that. I guess these kids are too young to know how much western media lies? But what excuse do the people here have (Russia shills included)? They can’t all be 18.

I have done a fair amount of reading indie sources, reading between the lines, and sifting facts and thinking critically, and I have my speculative analysis, but it isn’t delivered with certainty, overall. Then again, the western narrative is so stupid that I’m pretty certain it’s wrong on the important facts (how the war is going).

Think I recall hearing that sanctions on Rhodesia were ineffective, at least on the civilian end of it, and that they were able to develop their own packaging plants for basic consumer goods, like breakfast cereal, which seems pretty remarkable, though I suppose that was with tacit support from South Africa and maybe the Portuguese colonies, which however were not as advanced as China is today.

Perhaps, Russia should invade Africa for good measure.

The Russians have taken the coastline, disabled the Ukrainian air force and navy, nearly surrounded the Ukrainian military in the Donbass, surrounded the capital as well as every large population area except Lviv. They’ve secured supply lines for all their troops. They are advancing on every front.

An imbecile I may be, but you have no idea how high or low Russian morale is, or whether “two weeks” in what will take at least 2-6 months, has “exhausted” them. The Ukrainians have a professional military and are following their orders no matter how ridiculous they might be. Staying in the Donbass instead of retreating to a more defensible position across the Dneiper strikes me as a dangerous gambit.

The Russians say the purpose is to break the Ukrainian military and force neutrality on them. Those goals seem quite reachable. I’d say they could probably install a Vichy type government over the whole country if they choose, but we’ll see. In the end, the Ukes will lose at least Crimea and the Donbass anyway, and probably more, when they could have gone along with the Minsk accords and avoided the war altogether.

The weaklings get weeded out by history, while the truly Great Men make their own fortune.

Quite the transformation (into… I know not what).

The best lesson for China is to strike first and strike hard.

Strike first
Strike hard
No mercy
– Kobra Kai

If I were China, I would not try a repeat of Japan in the Second World War.

At least, not in the conventional sense. The Japanese did try to increase our problems with blacks, probably not to any great strategic effect. But in the current year, would be incredibly easy and effective for China to do. By Vietnam, we were already keeping draftees garrisoned in the US, to avoid problems with blacks, and America was a lot saner and more functional back then.

Unfortunate thing about the movie Karate Kid is that beyond the lessons of hard work from humble beginnings, they do play up the racism angle. (One scene where rednecks harass Miyagi at the beach.)

Pretty tragic, when you put it in its local context of what happened to California. Yeah, as if that would have happened in LA, in 1984! Equivalent of Jussie Smollet’s accusation. And, of course, in the remake, Daniel was replaced with a black. But, then again, maybe there was a hidden message in him being Italian. LOL.

It’s a Cauldron.

The Russians have taken the coastline,

Not yet. They haven’t taken Odessa or Mykolaiv.

disabled the Ukrainian air force and navy,

Air force still fights. Tiny Navy is gone.

nearly surrounded the Ukrainian military in the Donbass,

Some of them.

surrounded the capital

Nonsense. Groceries still getting in. People still coming and going (a bunch of foreign volunteers just arrived). Russians to the NW and NE.

as well as every large population area except Lviv.

Odessa not surrounded. No Russian troops even close to Dnipro (Ukraine’s fourth largest city, population 980,000).

Where do you get your “information?”

Americans softened up the 85 IQ Iraqi military with no outside support after a month of heavy bombing including civilian infrastructure.

It was more like a couple of days of heavy bombing.

Missile strikes began March 19th. Army rolled in March 22nd.

My March 27th, the Americans had established control over Nasiriyah (population 500,000 at the time). That’s after only 8 days.

After 13 days, the largest city the Russians control is Kherson (population 300,000).

American + Brits lost only 200 troops during the entire Iraq invasion.

Russians already have lost at least 1,000 by Russian estimates (they estimated 500 a few days ago), most likely 2,000 or so.

naive and humane Russians

So far, according to UN estimates, Russians have killed about 500 Ukrainian civilians yesterday.

Entire Iraq invasion had 3,200 to 7,000 civilian deaths so Russia is on track to kill as many Ukrainian civilians as the low estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths.

So Russians are killing about as many civilians in Ukraine as Americans did in Iraq, but are losing an order of magnitude more soldiers while gaining population centers more slowly. And they are managing to do this not on another continent but right next door to their homeland. What a senseless debacle.

They all fled the country. The rats fleeing the sinking ship.

Your information is old, and clouded by propaganda except about Dnipro. You are certainly entitled to wishful thinking. I don’t have a side in this fight, so I’m trying to look at the war as clear-eyed as possible. As we all know, “truth is the first casualty of war”.

I’ve typed in names of various towns and hamlets around the motorway/freeway/interstate/autobahn junctions feeding into Kiev. The Ukrianians boast about tanks they’ve knocked out in various key areas at these highway junctions.

Tap in a village after scanning the Google Map, cross reference that with Ukraine claims of knocked out Russian AFV in Google word search. Boryspil Brovary Buzova all towns on the outer ring road into Kiev all places where the Russians are fighting Ukrainian checkpoints and garrisons.

Kiev is surrounded and the artillery is firing. There’s a route out to the south but all those highways are targets if there’s incoming traffic. Well Within range of howitzer, missile and direct fire. Pretty stupid of the mercs to arrive into the drum fire of artillery. I understand Poltava has been bypassed according to Jane’s and the forward elements of column are on the Dneiper near those bridging points.

The Ukrainians are not Arabs.

This Jane’s map, full viewing of sources and verification requires an account. But the map astonishingly suggests a column of Russians has reached the Dneiper by bypassing Poltava. Not like anything can get over those bridges without missiles and bombs landing on them at either side of the bridges. The Dneiper is a fearsome choke point all of its own, would like to see shots of the wrecked stuff that tried to cross.

https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/ukraine-crisis

It would be interesting to read your description of the economic conditions in Russia after that USA launched all its “economic nuclear ICBMs”. They launched their entire arsenal. What is happening and what do you expect to happen?
I think many readers share my curiosity about this sensitive issue.

Have you seen Gonzo Lira’s report in the Unz newslinks section today? He lives in Khirkov but only has second hand sources as he is Chilean and does not speak or read Russian or Ukrainian.

1. he says the Russian report that they have document proof Americans were operating biological weapons facilities is solid.
2. he says the Russian report that they have document proof that major Ukraine army incursion into Donbas was imminent on Feb 22 is solid.
3. he says the civilian safe passage corridor strategy is something they hashed out in Syria and that the great tactical result is it makes it trivial for uncommitted enemy soldiers to readily desert their post.

I am on the other side of the planet and I have no idea how authentic these claims are but he is presenting them at some risk to his own safety so I have very small doubt that he believes it.

Strike first
Strike hard
No mercy
– Kobra Kai

Russians suffered losses due to the order of behaving with mercy. That was an error. May be, from a strict military point of view, they should have conducted the operation on “Berserker mode” from the start. In fact they are still not operating in such a mode.

Denninger thinks Russia has already won!

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245363

Speaking of shock and disbelief, the international faith in Washington which was already in decline seems in free fall now. Things can rot on the inside for a long time before it’s apparent on the outside and the tree dies quickly.
Regardless of the final calculus in Ukraine the world is feeling a lot more multi-polar these days. Even Europe seems intent to chart it’s own course to a greater extent.

It would be like Christianity taking over the Roman Empire from within – precisely through a process of refusing to fight it.

Well done sir…Well done.

According to relatives in Moscow there is no noticeable difference so far.

It just became a lot harder to buy a car or some other Western product but if you don’t happen to be in need of one at the moment this isn’t a problem. Restaurants etc. still function, rubles are worth less but so what? Russian credit cards still work in Russia. Overall life hasn’t changed. I expect it would take weeks if not months for the bank-related and other problems to filter down and result in problems for regular people.

A Russian friend in the USA was screwed though: had inherited an apartment in a large Russian city, hasn’t had time to sell it when the war started. Would have gotten a couple \$100k for it but now the ruble became worthless and money can’t be taken out of the country.

Karate Kid could well be my favorite ever movie. I’ve lost count of how times I’ve seen it. The bottles on the truck scene, I only noticed the gratuitous anti-racism message aspect of it as an adult. Also, virtually all the bad guys are a blond.

But that’s small potatoes compared to the crap Hollywood pulls in other movies. My main complaint about Karate Kid is the plot near the beginning. Daniel’s cool and fun, the sort of guy who’d make friends easily. Indeed, he gets invited to a beach party right away. And when he’s there he takes part in the soccer game (apparently doing well), he not only accepts the challenge to approach the babe but wins her over, and then he stands up for her when her ex is giving her a hard time.

So he loses a fight with Mr Karate Champ, big deal. At least he was man enough to fight (not only threw a punch, but connected). No shame in that. Yet somehow, everyone there immediately starts treating him as some massive loser whom it’d be insulting to be to associated with. That doesn’t even begin to make sense, not even by high school logic.

I never watched the remake with the black kid. But I watched five or six episodes into the Kobra Kai tv series, which was better than I expected it to be. I should actually finish watching that.

Re utu’s ethnicity, from the other open thread.

Ok, I see where you’re coming from, but I think I’d need better evidence than that to feel so confident, given the enormous disparity in base rates (there are way more Poles and Czechs than Silesians).

I expect it would take weeks if not months for the bank-related and other problems to filter down and result in problems for regular people.

I’m not worried about that. My family in Russia got savings accounts that pay 20% (short term though) and with MIR-UnionPay deal I don’t think there will be major banking problems in Russia. Nabiullina is top class. She saved Russia before, she will do it again.

My biggest concern (and so is my family’s) is the “O-ring economy”. Basically little things like spare parts and key ingredients. A lot of this is made in China and won’t be a problem, true, but some key items may be very hard to get. This is a much bigger deal than it seems at first glance because you can have 99.999% of machinery built and ready to go, but without a key microchip it will be completely useless.

Again, this is not the end of the world, but it will take a couple of years for Russia to source those components which is why I see a serious recession risk, beyond silly GDP numbers. Disruptions will be temporary, but severe.

And on my end in the Gulf Coast, European industry is done for. We used to receive ships from Europe for resale in the US to augment our own production. Not anymore. Energy costs are so high, Europe is struggling to stay competitive. They are hedged for now, but can’t throttle production on demand, and when the hedges end… I just tell Europeans to move to the Gulf Coast permanently – we have energy to run. And i think that’s what’s going to happen – EU will de-industrialize and move production to the US. Making America Great Again.

Not saying US industry doesn’t have its own problems, but compared to EU, we are cruising.

Good point about the fight.

Movie had one of my favorite, optimistic theme songs of any movie from the ’80s. Joe Esposito – You’re The Best Around. (It’s right up there with some of the Rocky songs, IMO). Never saw the show, but I know several people who like it.
____
Wonder where Zelenksy will set up shop, assuming he hasn’t already. My money is on the UK.

Your information is old, and clouded by propaganda except about Dnipro.

Have the Russian taken Odessa or Mikolaiv yet? No, they haven’t. So the Russians haven’t taken the coast.

Is Ukraine’s air force gone? No. US DOD claims most of it is still operable and Russia claims the first and second class pilots have been killed but admits that it is still capable of single attempts to sorties by combat aircraft.

Is Kiev surrounded? No. The southern approach is still free. The city is still getting resupplied. It may get surrounded in another couple of days, but it certainly is not surrounded now.

I would have been better served by relying on my own CMP (2020): https://www.unz.com/akarlin/cmp-2021/
— Russia/USSR: 32.8
— Ukraine: 4.0

For comparison, in 1991:
— United States: 92.2
— Iraq: 2.1

I largely concur.

Russia can grind out a War Win via their logistics & material advantage over Ukraine. What strategy will Russia use? Especially for dense urban areas, such as Kiev:

-A- Infantry led approach would incur high casualties.
-B- Extensive artillery use before the infantry goes in would devastate infrastructure.
-C- Surround & besiege without entering. This could tie up huge #’s of troops for an extended period of time.

It would appear that Putin is thinking long term. He wants to Win The Peace. All of the options (A, B, & C) are unappealing choices. The best way forward is:

-D- Negotiating a deal that ends the offensive.

Both sides need to pull back from their initial demands. Admittedly, that is an easy phrase for an outsider like myself to write. Much harder for the participants.

Zelensky’s less than friendly words about about NATO (1) is a first step, though a small one, towards the Russian position. Russian needs to make a roughly similar magnitude, symbolic gesture to keep the ball rolling and build up some good will.

If forced to put numbers on it, I would guess a 50%/50% split on the negotiations working. However, I concede that may be overly optimistic on my part.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-are-all-latest-news-and-developments-ukraine-war-march-8

Not in every place where Russian vehicles have been destroyed have the Russians maintained a permanent presence. At the moment the Russians have stable forces to the NW, W and E but not to the south. The Russian forces around the city are still about 20 km or more away, and there is a large area to the south that remains open. A lot of Kiev is still quiet. The city is getting resupplied, with food weapons and volunteers.

Pretty stupid of the mercs to arrive into the drum fire of artillery.

The point is that there is still a large clear area to the south; Kiev isn’t bottled up yet.

::::::::::::

Overall, this was involves two things:

1. Russia is losing large numbers of men and equipment. These are not really getting resupplied (about 75% of Russia’s usable military is already in Ukraine; we see junk being sent from the Far East, Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel).

2. Ukraine is also losing men and equipment but at a lower rate after the first couple days, and Ukraine is getting largescale resupplies of both (reserves and territorial defenses and volunteers from abroad keep coming, as do arms shipments of first class weapons)

3. Russia continues to advance steadily but slowly.

I do not know how this war will end, but it seems very likely that Russia will continue to slowly advance while bleeding men and equipment. Eventually it will reach a point when it can no longer advance due to the losses in men and equipment. The question is how far will Russia get before its losses prevent further advance.

Will Russia finally surround Kiev? Likely (but do they have enough to storm the well armed city of 3 million – doubtful). Take Kharkiv? Likely. The city is only 40 km from the border and after 2 weeks and heavy losses Russia has finally managed to just surround it. I’m not sure how long it can hold out. Take Zaporizhia and then Dnipro? Maybe. Odessa too? Maybe, but that’s another large well-armed city. I don’t pretend to know how much Russia will grab but I know it will be harder and take longer than Russian fanboys think it will. Russia is now making concessions in its peace offerings so it recognizes that things aren’t going as well for it as had been expected at the beginning.

Overall, I do expect that Russia will take a lot more than it has now, but I doubt it will be able to take the entire country. And then there will be insurgency. More bleeding.

He knows enough about Poles, Czechs and Slovaks (not just historical facts, but he captures their spirit) that he must be a Slav from this region.; and he seems less critical of Poles than of the others. He also shows a sympathy for Germans that is rare among members of all three nations. So he must be a Silesian (the only pro-German Slavic group in that area), or if not that – a southern Pole with a German grandparent.

its rate of advance has been comparable

Maybe. But what remained of Iraq’s air defense system was eliminated in the first week (not that there was much left after the first Gulf War) and the Iraqi command structure pretty much evaporated overnight (partly because the Iraqis weren’t planning to fight conventionally in the second go, having watched our plight in Somalia compared to their own utter destruction in Desert Storm).

In any case, you know what’s not comparable? The respective casualty rates.

Russians underestimated the degree to which Ukrainians had been brainwashed into their Banderist cult

That sounds suspiciously like a back-handed acknowledgement of the grit and courage of the Ukrainians. Morale seems to matter after all, no? 😉

naive and humane Russians

Are you selling the rest of us something or are you trying to convince yourself?

Mr. Karlin, I thought you were an open-eyed, cold-calculating realist. This kind of a sloganeering is more Baghdad Bob than a sober analyst. You disappoint me.

Movie had one of my favorite, optimistic theme songs of any movie from the ’80s. Joe Esposito – You’re The Best Around.

I was actually going to mention that kickass song, but I forgot. It’s been a favorite workout song of mine (and just generally too) for years now. There’s another song that sounds kickass, just as the Kobra Kai approach the beach on their motorbikes near the start, but only the part that’s played in the movie sounds any good; the song as a whole (“Ride” – by Matches) is crap. What do you mean by “never saw the show”?

Probably the two famous people/characters I’ve most often been told I look like are Daniel LaRusso (ie the Karate Kid) and Danny Zuko (Travolta in Grease). I can see the likeness with Daniel, but I don’t think I look like Travolta at all, not even in that movie. I think it’s just the slick greasy hair I’ve been known to sport, combined with my penchant for wearing black leather jackets that forms the association for people. Oh and Fonzie from Happy Days too, but again it’s more the jacket than actually looking like him.

It may turn out that we will always owe a debt to Ukrainians if this puts us on a saner geopolitical path and compels us to hang up our world policeman’s badge.

Your reasoning is sound enough, but assigning a 90% subjective probability to it? You’re a braver man than I.

What do you guess the likely outcome will be?

I don’t do predictions, because only fools, crazies, or people selling something offer up predictions. The fact is no one can predict the future (one might get lucky once or twice), and everyone is just guessing. Some guesses are more educated than others, but they are still speculations.

That goes double for any kind of combat, where there are opposing wills. Recently another commenter asked for my opinion of what would happen in a particular MMA fight, and I answered similarly. There are just too many unpredictable variables in war, as in a person-to-person fight. In the latter, there is a saying, “So-and-so is totally going to win this fight… unless he slips on a banana peel or something.” Well, the world is full of banana peels. So I only offered up what I saw as strengths and weaknesses of each fighter.

I don’t have anything original to add about the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict, but I will just make a few personal comments and observations:

1. I was surprised that the Russian air force has not achieved a total control of the air and has not provided a completely dominant overwatch and close air support. I read a number of different theories as to why, but the most plausible explanations (at least to me) seem to be that a) Russian air crews are not well-trained, certainly not on par with the best of Western air forces and are not proficient in mounting high-complexity joint air operations with a lot of aircraft and coordinating ground elements and b) the Russians don’t appear to have a large stockpile of precision-guided munitions, with which to launch highly precise attacks on the ground. In absence of those, launching night attacks (to avoid MANPADs) with dumb bombs is bound to be inaccurate and ineffective – and much more likely incur collateral damage.

2. I was also surprised with how easily some Russian armored vehicle columns were ambushed by the Ukrainians in the early part of the war. As a number of observers pointed out, Russian ground forces – here and there – seemed not to operate well as combined arms teams, with armor, infantry, and artillery mutually supporting and covering for each other in advances. That’s something one expects of poorly-trained and -motivated conscripts. Given the increasing professionalization of the Russian army in the past decade, I expected a much greater facility in combined arms operations especially at the small scale, tactical level.

3. As well, I found the Ukrainian resistance to be unexpectedly fierce so far. I generally have a pretty dim view of the training level, morale, and effectiveness of armed forces personnel below the first-tier military nations, so I thought the Ukrainians would crumble rather quickly. I think their unexpectedly better resistance forced a re-evaluation and re-thinking on the part of the Western nations, that likely would have written off the conquest of Ukraine, albeit with a lot of verbal furor, denunciations, and recriminations. I certainly did not expect the former comedian president of Ukraine to be so inspirational to his countrymen.

4. All this said, I think the conventional war is still Russia’s to lose. The fact remains that there is a huge manpower and materiel disparity between the two forces in Russia’s favor. I would think a more salient question wouldn’t be so much about whether Russia will or will not win, but how much losses and suffering Russia is willing to incur and to inflict in order to achieve the said victory. For that matter, while Ukrainian morale seems to holding up well so far, formal resistance could collapse quickly if the Ukrainian national command authority were to be captured or killed. These are intangibles that cannot be measured or predicted.

5. Of course, that then begs the question: even if Russia were to win (which is not in any way guaranteed), what will a Russian occupation look like? Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld once wrote that, in a post-modern world, when the strong fights the weak in a long war, the strong loses. Having failed to topple Ukraine in a lightning attack, Russia will have to use much more destructive means to achieve victory, which will only embitter the population it was supposed to “liberate,” even setting aside the enormous international opprobrium. Although hardly assured one way or another, the prospect of a Russian victory being Pyrrhic and the conquest of Ukraine being a poisoned pill cannot be dismissed easily.

6. Yet another question, which I am not in any way qualified answer, is the issue of domestic consensus in Russia. Putin is an undisputed authoritarian leader, but he is not a God-Emperor. Surely he is to a varying degree sensitive to the Russian “street” opinion and domestic legitimacy. As with the CCP in China, I think Putin derives much of that domestic legitimacy from the fact that his rule has coincided with the re-rise of Russia as a world player, not to forget the rise in living standards. I cannot even begin to predict how and to what extent Russia’s economy and standard of living will be affected by this war and how long the current domestic consensus (53% or something close to it supporting the war) would persist in the face of varying scenarios of negative outcomes (one shouldn’t forget the effect of the Afghan War on the Soviet Union, which turned out to be far more sensitive to losses of its young men than the supposedly more brittle American domestic morale in Vietnam).

I guess this is a rather longwinded version of “Things turned out differently than I thought, and I have no clue what’s going to happen next.” 😉

For comparison, in 1991:

United States: 92.2
Iraq: 2.1

So it went much more quickly and more smoothly.

What were the comparative numbers in 2003 (or 2011)?

And how smoothly do you think OIF went in the end?

Numbers matter, but there are many intangible elements in war. A lot of banana peels. We Americans learned that the hard way more than once. It appears the Russians need to learn it more than once too.

Nonetheless, while I might have been temporarily humiliated, it is Russia whose final victory is all but assured.

That sounds more sober than before. Here is a more interesting use of your intellect, instead of bombastic Russian neo-imperialist slogans: what plausible conditions do you think would lead to the “but” outcomes?

The fact that the US DoD has declined to accept the donation of Polish MIG-29s suggests they know something that lots of Internet Tough Guys don’t.

his [Steve Sailer’s] takes on it are highly cartoonish

The main lesson China actually learns from Russia/Ukraine is to strike the US military bases at Guam and Japan when invading Taiwan FROM THE OUTSET.

And you think Mr. Sailer’s takes are “cartoonish”?

In what reality do you think China will actually strike “US military bases at Guam and Japan when invading Taiwan”? I can’t think of a worse strategy for China, which will, in a stroke, eliminate any anti-war, pro-China business lobby in the U.S., hugely inflame both American and Japanese populations and likely draw all American Pacific allies into a larger regional war against China, even if China were able to occupy Taiwan quickly.

Do you get your ideas on international conflicts from video games?

I think this is a deeply wishful, and indeed “cartoonish,” thinking on your part as a Russian nationalist.

February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865 compared with December 1, 1991, to ????, 2022.

Throughout the South, fences were down, weeds had overrun the fields, windows were broken, live stock had disappeared. The assessed valuation of property declined from 30 to 60 percent in the decade after 1860. In Mobile, business was stagnant; Chattanooga and Nashville were ruined; and Atlanta’s industrial sections were in ashes.

One of the greatest calamities which confronted Southerners was the havoc wrought on the transportation system. Roads were impassable or nonexistent, and bridges were destroyed or washed away. The important river traffic was at a standstill: levees were broken, channels were blocked, the few steamboats which had not been captured or destroyed were in a state of disrepair, wharves had decayed or were missing, and trained personnel were dead or dispersed. Horses, mules, oxen, carriages, wagons, and carts had nearly all fallen prey at one time or another to the contending armies. The railroads were paralyzed, with most of the companies bankrupt. These lines had been the special target of the enemy. On one stretch of 114 miles in Alabama, every bridge and trestle was destroyed, cross-ties rotten, buildings burned, water-tanks gone, ditches filled up, and tracks grown up in weeds and bushes. … Communication centers like Columbia and Atlanta were in ruins; shops and foundries were wrecked or in disrepair. Even those areas bypassed by battle had been pirated for equipment needed on the battlefront, and the wear and tear of wartime usage without adequate repairs or replacements reduced all to a state of disintegration.

A reaction to the defeat and changes in society began immediately, with vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan arising in 1866 as the first line of insurgents. They attacked and killed both Yankees and their black allies. By the 1870s, more organized paramilitary groups, such as the White League and Red Shirts were established.

Always thought Daniel was a thinly veiled East Coast Jew fighting the evil blind gentile country club kids.

The US had bribed the senior Iraqi commanders not to fight. They are such different wars, fought by different military doctrines and goals, I don’t think it is worth comparison.

I’ve been reading over your older articles, and it seems you got this right back in 2018 – https://www.unz.com/akarlin/ww3/

A full-scale invasion and occupation of Eastern Ukraine and/or Novorossiya is still plausible, but it will be an order of magnitude more difficult than in 2014. The Ukrainian Army is more experienced, better funded, has been purged of its pro-Russian elements, and its disposition is no longer concentrated in the west of the country.

and most importantly

The maximal one involved an advance to the Dnieper, which they estimated would require 91,000-135,000 troops and could have been accomplished in 11-14 days.

this assumed an advance from Russia proper – no Crimea, or Belarus. Given how long it took for Russia to get from its border to Kiev (about 7 days or so), this is not far off. To advance towards the Dniepr in the center, Russia probably would need to take Kharkiv (or at least its leadership thinks so), because otherwise logistics become untenable and my guess is it expected Kharkov to be declared an open city, which it almost was, until the ukies militarily occupied it.
Not sure if this is correct, as I’m not too well versed in military matters, but it seems to me that a major lesson of this war is that sieging cities is harder than expected – can’t say if the reports that Russians attempted to bypass Kharkiv is true or not, but if it is, that strongly adds to my argument

Overall, it seems that Russia is performing slightly above expectations, but not nearly as much as what you predicted directly before the war (or quite possibly even the general staff).But given how reserved the russian army is being, that’s honestly not that bad. Destruction of most of the Ukrainian army will probably take slightly more than 2 weeks after the couldron in Donbass is finished, then Kharkiv will fall, allowing Russia to occupy eastern Ukraine, along with a simultaneous push towards taking Odessa and then it seems that Ukraine will focus most of its defenses on Kiev, which will likely be besieged.

https://voxday.net/2022/03/01/ukraine-invasion-a-comparative-analysis/ – this post that estimated how long the occupation would take based on extrapolating the speed of advance up unitl 1.3. and their guess was 40 days

another interesting part of that article

However, in the rest of the Ukraine, “Russophile sentiment” collapsed by a standard deviation in the course of 2014; support for joining Russia in Novorossiya collapsed from ~25% to ~5%. Consequently, assuming this collapse was “deep” as opposed to temporary, the garrisoning forces required now might be much larger than four years ago.

I think you’re right about there being no real insurgency, though – perhaps except in parts of Galicia

Karate Kid could well be my favorite ever movie. I’ve lost count of how times I’ve seen it.

For many people of color, nothing is more special than seeing someone on a TV show or in a movie that looks like them. For children, this representation in films is vital because it gives them hope.

The ultimate truth of the matter is that Russia is a relatively untalented/low human capital and utterly corrupt country – this part won’t change – with no real future. Incorporating part of the Ukraine in it won’t change that.

The future lies solely with China, the USA and the EU – the latter two if they ever decide to be realistic about some issues.

This is obvious and it’s what’s really bothering Karlin and leads him to jerk off over this war so hard with these comic book villain proclamations. It’s doubly hilarious that he supplements them with nonsense about the Russian humanitarian spirit that he doesn’t even believe himself.

China refused to supply spare parts for RF aviation needs:

10.03.2022, 12:35

Представитель Росавиации Валерий Кудинов сообщил, что КНР отказалась поставлять России запчасти для самолетов. Он также заявил, что Россия будет искать поставщиков авиазапчастей в других странах, например в Турции и Индии.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5250918

I thought Dmowski was an asshole (albeit post-1945 Poland is strangely similar to his vision in some respects) but this quote is quite insightful.

Odessa is blockaded by the sea. Kiev is surrounded, now, in the South, according to people on the ground in Ukraine, not in DC in the news room or at the White House propaganda office. From where are these Ukrainian jets taking off and where are they flying missions. I haven’t even heard that from the various Western propagandists. It’s soothing to believe the underdog is fighting hard and having success, and the Ukrainians are tough people, fighting hard, but they aren’t succeeding and from what I see, and I’m not there, I cold be wrong, it looks like the Russian military is steadily taking control of the country.

A platoon or squadron of tanks cuts off incoming convoys of food ammo men medicine etc. Stable? Lol. Don’t beclown yourself. The point of tanks is to act as a disruptive element in the rear area of an enemy held position. An attacker doesn’t need to be the stable element. If the Russians are not taking approx 5% hits on their tanks they are not using them right.

Inadvertently the Ukrainian boasts about knocking out tanks here and there indicates the actual positions of the Russian advances. It’s easy enough to track live Russian positions by looking at specific hamlets Ukrainians tweet from and cross checking that on the Google map. Janes also have a map which is proprietary. But that shows Kremenchuk bridge in the Center of Ukraine under attack by the land units of the Russians. It’s hard to believe but it’s also possible given their reckless abandon in comparison to a casualty conscious British or American Army.

Odessa is surrounded. Transnistria constitutes a Western facing blocking force. There’s a route out of Odessa but anything doing in can be bombed along the one remaining road and I’d guess the Russians have recon forces on that road anyway.

In the old days Kharkov would have been erased by artillery. To encourage the others.

You never know how things will turn out. pic.twitter.com/OYTlEeJzFP

— John Delury (@JohnDelury) March 10, 2022

It’s a damn shame that Rand Paul didn’t have the data so he could ask Fauci about this when he had him there under oath. I imagine we might maybe never see Fauci ever again.

The weaklings get weeded out by history, while the truly Great Men make their own fortune.

To be great, one needs to weed out a children’s hospital? Real valiant stuff Karlin…hope you derive great satisfaction from your “fortune”. 🙁

Karlin forgets to mention that the Dmowskites were successfully refuted by the Pilsudskyites. Underneath his Polish/Russian posturing, he always maintained that the Russians were lowly and part of an inferior culture. Well, at least he got something right.

“Speaking of Ukrainian oligarchs, I wonder what they are doing. Are they making deals right now? What kind? With whom?”

The trouble with Israel, from the oligarch POV, is that they could wind up with a shitty apartment surrounded by Haredim and no dock space for the yacht. And Florida is overbuilt.

Half of Mariupol have been cleansed and is free of Azovites. Donetsk forces using MLRS to hunt down Azovites retreating. I think this is the beginning of the end of this infamous battalion.

Thanks.

The truly great things in history don’t get accomplished through sheer violence, but quietly.

Alexander the Greats conquests dissolved a generation or two after his death, the Athenian Empire barely lasted a generation or so…

The Roman Empire only lasted as long as it did because it provided a long term moral vision, peace and security, like the American Empire (although both in the end were evil).

Christianity, the “loser” philosophy, lasted two thousand years and is still with us, and ruled the fates of kingdoms…

Unprincipled violence makes a splash in the short term but never has long term staying power…

But they never understand this, the short sighted men of power…

I don’t know how this Russian adventure will end, but it will not end in long term glory as Karlin expects.

Yet, more Russian fake news:

“Russia claims without evidence that the maternity hospital it bombed — which killed a child — was a Ukrainian militia base”

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-says-mariupol-maternity-hospital-militia-base-no-evidence-2022-3

In any case, at the time of the bombing, were any Azov members inside of the hospital?

I’ve looked over the photographs of the Pregnant woman, what was she doing in the maternity hospital overnight? Why is she an internet influencer? Why did they let her climb down the stairs? Then change her clothes and carry her in a stretcher over a shell crater? when there’s a perfectly good parking lot outside the building on the other side full of SUV bristling with plate carrying clad men with carbines? Why was the hospital trying to function when it’s filthy from weeks of neglect and has no visible staff to carry out care? I saw no nurses or doctors or administration staff in any of the images. Was she there for a routine late term check up or in labor?

I don’t have any answers to you questions, however, I fail to understand why a hospital should even be considered as a legitimate object of bombardments? It seems like just pat and parcel of terror being unleashed by Russian troops against Ukrainian civilian structures.

Surely, you’re not doubting or denying the wholesale bombing of civilian apartment buildings, houses, churches, medical centers, businesses that have been occurring right from the very beginning of this disastrous war?

I fully expect there to be a massacre in Maruipol though. The hospital according to the Maps available is on the outer north north east suburb of the city. That suburb is on the north bank of a river. A little bit like Irpin in on the Kiev front where that bridge was blown up by retreating Ukrainians. It’s probably the exact area that the Russians will assault once the bombardment stops.

The immediate area around the hospital ought to emptied out of non combatants. Yes, the Russians are sending a warning for people to get out of that area before tanks arrive.

Maybe the city ought to surrender now?

Alexander set up several kingdoms for his generals. The Roman Empire can be understood as a post hellenistic successor to the Diadochi. Although they came up with the idea of a Respublica and a war machine to back it. The Greeks provided the material culture and literacy. Remember the Gospel was actually written in Greek. That’s eternity right there.

Have you read any of the new Sarah Rudin translation? She has a bunch of comments regarding the meaning of the original Greek words which they never taught me any thing like it in Sunday School.

Sure, but Alexander did not exactly create a world spanning empire lasting ages.

Admittedly, the whole thing was just a boyish adventure, a lark, and regarded in that light it’s not so bad.

But what was truly enduring about Greece was not it’s military or political might but as you note, it’s culture, it’s language, etc.

And so it always is. Physical power never counts for much in the long run, but that’s a lesson that has to be relearned again and again.

That broad is a fucking disaster zone. They didn’t expect the Russians to go all in like this. So many of these Congress critters have lost their retirement plans bacause of this invasion.

Mr. Unz,

How old are the Ukrainian laboratories?

It is hard to imagine “new” facilities with “new” scientists. The idea that the U.S. would build a research facility adjacent to the Russian border, near Kharkiv, lacks plausibility.

One giant risk with closing “old” weapons development facilities relates to staff. Scientists & technicians have significant amounts of knowledge in their heads. There are huge risks if they are desperate for money and feel forced to sell that information to feed their families.

In U.S. budget terms, providing a stipend fund is cheap insurance. The scientists get to work on non-military projects and the potential threat of knowledge wandering off is averted. At least one of the “weapons labs” is an agricultural crop science research center.

PEACE 😇

I don’t in general read Ron’s pieces because they are so goofy

I am grateful to Ron for two things:

–This website where we can seriously debate a variety of topics
–His amusing “resistance” to “crazy conspiracy theories”–They are all “crazy” until the magic moment when he finally believes them–one at a time. All it takes is a couple of “respectable” folks to “get it” and Ron is persuaded. That is a rather creative approach to epistemology.

😉

It turns out when she said “fuck the EU” she was more serious than she intended. She was just acting like a bad ass braggadocio and now look at them. : (

I have no love for Azovites or their Russian Nazi enemies. At this point however Azov is just a sideshow to the overall Ukrainian military effort, while the entire state of Russia is behaving like Germany or Italy in the late 1930s.

Ukrainians are claiming some progress outside Kharkiv:

Kharkov is surrounded. It should surrender before extermination.

Look at the train station n in Berlin.

Thank you. You are by far the most knowledgeable military expert writing around here (perhaps the only military expert), your comment is much appreciated.

even if Russia were to win (which is not in any way guaranteed), what will a Russian occupation look like? Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld once wrote that, in a post-modern world, when the strong fights the weak in a long war, the strong loses. Having failed to topple Ukraine in a lightning attack, Russia will have to use much more destructive means to achieve victory, which will only embitter the population it was supposed to “liberate,” even setting aside the enormous international opprobrium. Although hardly assured one way or another, the prospect of a Russian victory being Pyrrhic and the conquest of Ukraine being a poisoned pill cannot be dismissed easily.

I have one very strongly Russian nationalist family branch in Ukraine (children of an uncle who lived in Russia and returned to Ukraine with a Russian wife). The usual stuff – “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, staunch members of the Russian Orthodox Church, had opposed Maidan, etc. They are now messaging me about if I’ve heard if America will close the skies so that the murderous Russians will stop killing our people.

I came across a very true comment – Putin managed to do what Ukrainian nationalists had failed to do in 30 years – convince even Eastern Ukrainians that Bandera was correct about the Russians.

They are now messaging me about if I’ve heard if America will close the skies so that the murderous Russians will stop killing our people.

Considering Ukrainians managed to shoot down 5 various RF Sukhoi bomber planes last week, they’re doing the closing job quite well themselves too.

…oligarch rule will be discredited

Their assets are being destroyed in both Ukraine and Russia. That will be the biggest economic consequence of the war. Their easy gains after 1990, and now easy losses – the oligarchs basically privatized public assets and watched them go up in value as order returned. They are not happy, and Washington is desperately pleading with them and threatening them so they overthrow Russia’s government.

It is amusing to watch: soft power meets hard power. Financial ‘assets‘ meet soldiers. As in the past when those two meet, the soft power shrieks and the hard power prevails.

There is a hit to prestige, but also a reassertion of reality over virtual worlds. This will be tough on a lot of people, they will never forgive.

It is amusing to watch: soft power meets hard power. Financial ‘assets‘ meet soldiers. As in the past when those two meet, the soft power shrieks and the hard power prevails.

The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler). No the same words but the very same idea.

I agree that Twinkie’s comments here are good and sensible. Comments of many others and Karlin’s in particular are on subhuman level and should be ignored but not forgotten.

On the front we should see the impact of 17,000 anti-tank weapons and several hundreds of Stingers delivered in last week and a new batch of drones from Turkey that was brought to Polish-Ukrainian border two days ago.

Ukrainian propaganda should emphasize battlefield successes more for continued military support rather than Russian atrocities.

The MiG-29 debacle demonstrated that the US does not have what it takes when after publicly egging Poland on to transfer the MiGs to Ukraine it got cold feet when the ball was in its court.

Sanctions are too weak. Germany does everything to do nothing.

Zelensky is right that no-fly zone should be imposed. In the game of nuclear chicken you can’t be a chicken by refusing even to enter the game.

Setting up the sanctions trap for China to walk into… we might end up with hostile tertiary sanctions for those who do business with targets of secondary sanctions (e.g. whoever banks and retailers depending on UnionPay since it is partnering with MIR). The 2 groups combined can be a sizable chunk of the Chinese economy, enough to trigger a private divestment campaign like the one we’re seeing with Russia. A123 will love this for an opportunity to exploit for his Trumpist bloc autarky/hard decoupling dreams.

CHINESE COMPANIES THAT AID RUSSIA COULD BE SHUT DOWN, U.S. COMMERCE SECRETARY TELLS NYT

U.S. COULD “ESSENTIALLY SHUT” DOWN SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION OR ANY CHINESE COMPANIES THAT DEFY U.S. SANCTIONS – COMMERCE SECRETARY TO NYT

— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) March 8, 2022

(reposting from the dead past thread so don’t delete)

I agree. Putin has both blood and iron and he’s also got grain, gas and oil. The last three Hitler did not have. There’s also strong sympathy for him among Arabs, Indians and Chinese.

You sound like you’re discussing a conflict with your long ago ex-wife who rejected you, or even mother, or probably actually both, not the Putinist attempt at the systematic destruction and murder of a European country of 40 million people. Go see a therapist. You have no idea what reality is.

Alexander set up several kingdoms for his generals.

Probably it wasn’t intentional, but this phrasing is pretty misleading, implying that Alexander had any sort of plan for succession prior to his death, intending to divide his empire up like that.
Certainly he didn’t intend for 40-odd years of constant warfare as his generals carved up his conquests, exerminating the entire Makedonian royal family in the process.

But yes, Christianity is fundamentally a syncretistic faith, mixing Greek paganism and philosophy with Judaism, although the latter predominates. And of course, Rome would have had a much harder time pacifying and governing the East-Med had the region not been undergoing Hellenisation for centuries prior.

As for Aaron B’s comment, despite its early spread, the idea Christianity (like any monotheistic religion) didn’t owe much of its spread to extreme violence and persecution is pretty dim.

Well, yeah he died young. I am familiar with the Hellenistic Kingdoms that followed. Maybe his commanders murdered him. The Greek influence on the world via that trashing of Persia was pretty profound anyway.

Henry Higgins

Where were you when NATO destroyed Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan? When Georgia attacked South Ossetia and Kiev bombed Donbas for 8 years killing 10k civilians?

Was that systematic enough for you? Are only European countries worth your concern?

That is reality, it all happened. With your level of hypocrisy therapy won’t help. You hide and pretend to forget. You blubbered here about ‘Western good intentions’ in the past, a very detached naive view.

SO, I AM GOING TO PUT OUT A CALL TO ALL MY SUBSCRIBERS:

PLEASE Respond to this tweet and add suggestions for all the excellent #Twitter sources that tell the story not shown in the Western media. Thank you!

— Gleb Bazov (@gbazov) March 10, 2022

SO, I AM GOING TO PUT OUT A CALL TO ALL MY SUBSCRIBERS:
PLEASE Respond to this tweet and add suggestions for all the excellent #Twitter sources that tell the story not shown in the Western media. Thank you!
…
There are a lot of #Telegram sources in Russian.
The following one is in English—they select Russian sources and translate them. Here:
t.me
Military events in Ukraine
All important military or social events in Ukraine
https://t.me/military_events_in_Ukraine

There are good Russian sources. I will give you a few:
https://t.me/boris_rozhin
https://t.me/rybar
https://t.me/voenkorKotenok
https://t.me/mig41
https://t.me/voenacher
https://web.telegram.org/z/#-1497591396
https://web.telegram.org/z/#-1215462939
DIRECTLY FROM INSIDE #KHARKOV:
https://t.me/z_kharkovnash

Not so much on twitter. aside from Gleb Bazov there is RWApodcast, Mark Sleboda, anybody else?
If you want to follow the war developments it’s best to sign up for the Telegram app. In English on Telegram there is also Russian Min Defense English https://t.me/mod_russia_en and Bellum Acta https://t.me/BellumActaNews

What do you mean by “never saw the show”?

Heard the TV show is “woke around the edges” so to speak. Is there a tranny character or a gay, or something? If so, I don’t think I could watch it.

There’s another song that sounds kickass, just as the Kobra Kai approach the beach on their motorbikes near the start, but only the part that’s played in the movie sounds any good; the song as a whole (“Ride” – by Matches) is crap.

Reminds me a bit of Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” from the Highlander movie. I mean, not to be too harsh on Queen, but it does have a gay tinge at the very end. I suppose Freddy Mercury would still be alive, if we lived in a less tolerant world.

Actually, now that I think about it the spread of Greek culture, and especially it’s total adoption by Rome, provides almost as good an example as Christianity for the idea that genuine transformation isn’t accomplished with force.

It’s also interesting that twice Rome adopted the culture of a people they defeated and completely transformed themselves in their image. That’s remarkable and suggests things about what constitutes victory and defeat that the simple minded men of force cannot understand.

Back to the original idea, for Slavs and Russia to join the EU and transform it from within?

One precondition for being a cultural hegemon – or an initiator of cultural change on a vast scale – is to be physically weak, it seems. Neitzsche once made the point that one only has so much energy, and if one devotes this to military strength one will have nothing left to devote to “matters of the spirit”.

It seems to me he was largely correct in this.

The West is right now the wealthiest and most powerful culture on the planet, and has been devoting all it’s energies to building up physical wealth and power – so it’s not surprising that the West should be culturally and spiritually empty.

China of course is even worse in these departments.

So then – if we follow the rule of cultural renewal only being successfully undertaken by the physically weak, the defeated peoples, the losers in the game of power and wealth all the “smart” people think is so important, well then, we should expect global culture to be saved from some peripheral state or people, some defeated group or nation.

Ultimately, it is the fate of the smart, powerful people to be dominated by the people they physically defeat 🙂

And that is an amusing, and cheering, idea.

The people of Mariupol ought to surrender. They are in a hopeless military situation and are effectively being held hostage by dead ender fanatics. Kharkov too. Encouraging them to fight against a conventional military besieging them is proof your position is insane.

You could have been writing such texts to people of Moscow and Leningrad in 1941 and even getting hefty rewards in reichsmarks for that 😉

A123 will love this for an opportunity to exploit for his Trumpist bloc autarky/hard decoupling dreams

I have repeatedly stated that the better option is a gradual decoupling. So, “love” is clearly invalid language construction

The term “Trumpist” is also wholly incorrect in terms of lingustics. The MAGA movement is much larger than a single individual. “Christian Populist” is much more accurate identification.
_____

A hard decoupling will be the 2nd Great Leap Backwards for the PRC. If Xi and his CCP Elites wish to starve millions of Chinese peasants to death… There is little the civilized world can do to intervene.

America is food independent. Energy independence is also easy for the U.S. once the science deniers are moved out. It will not be painless, but a hard decoupling will lead to long term prosperity.

PEACE 😇

. . . he’s an ideal foil for them to attack, much like that Klaus Schwab fellow of the World Economic Forum.

https://journal-neo.org/2022/02/16/davos-and-the-purloined-letter-conspiracy/

Davos and the Purloined Letter Conspiracy; F. William Engdahl

Right, it seemed like such obvious propoganda meant to undermine morale 🙂

1) You can’t possibly succeed against a larger force.

2) We will deny you the status of heroes.

It’s such textbook propoganda meant to sap morale.

People fight and die to be heroes.

However, for the imperialistic force to “explain” to their victims that they are not autonomous individuals but merely weak children being manipulated, and that imperialistic force “knows better” what they think – this is absolutely disastrous propoganda, but surprisingly difficult for imperialistic forces to avoid.

It’s primary effect is to stiffen resistance, because it provides such an absolutely glaring reminder of the paternalistic contempt in which the imperialistic power holds it’s victim – and just how much of an “inferior” he is considered by the aggressor force, with all the implications this has for what sort of treatment he will suffer should he be conquered. It’s such a perfect reflection of the attitude or arrogance and contempt that led to the physical invasion to begin with.

Much better propoganda would be to recognize and express admiration for the heroism and sacrifice of your victim – to show that you do not consider him a contemptible inferior, but a fully autonomous actor – to convince him he may expect respect and dignified treatment, some level of equality, should he be conquered – to convince him his sacrifice may not be necessary.

That might stand a chance of weakening morale. But contempt only stiffens resistance.

Nevertheless, imperial empires can never resist expressing this kind of utterly counterproductive, paternalistic contempt for their victims, because it is the natural outgrowth of the imperial mindset.

They wouldn’t be imperial if they didn’t have this very mindset and value system, and expressing it clearly is a necessary part of the “fun” of being imperial.

So they have no choice, really, to be stupid and self defeating…

America is food independent.

I just came from the local Wally-world and there was not a single bag of Goldfish. Just goes to show the “depth” of knowledge of an Israeli propaganda bot.

Wouldn’t you have preferred that Leningrad surrendered?

They ought to surrender.

How do you say “Glory to the heroes” in Ukrainian? Let them have their glory then.

Some raving lunatic has a closet full of goldfish.

The goldfish manufacturer (which multinational owns Pepridge Farms?) loves this shit.

If you eat less goldfish and more peanuts and raisins your insulin chain will be grateful!

Stalin ordered that they fight until death. Or starve until death. Or kill their children and eat them to the children’s death.

Death cults are sometimes all the rage.

Probably, it was more quotidian than that. The Greeks were influential on the Romans because they had greater numbers than them. I assume that you are also referring to the Etruscans. Same thing again.

Oh, I am sure it wasn’t just numbers. They had a certain genius, but partly that was derived from their numbers, though not entirely.

Meanwhile, early Christianity probably did a better job of maximizing fertility than other cults, so also a numbers game.

Though, it is my personal theory that Ukraine could have been conquered culturally. With a large amount of effort and thought. But I might be wrong about that. Hard to match the volume of the sinister effluvia and money coming from the West.

As for Aaron B’s comment, despite its early spread, the idea Christianity (like any monotheistic religion) didn’t owe much of its spread to extreme violence and persecution is pretty dim.

Well, until Christians got into power, they didn’t really have the ability to systematically persecute anyone. So there certainly was an element of essentially peaceful spreading. When they became the official state religion, they really ratcheted up the persecution. If the pagans had treated Christians with the same brutality that Christians treated pagans, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.

That’s if they ever tell them the truth. Now they’ve banned Russian media in the West and the information superhighway is jammed with Western propaganda we’re entering the Orwellian 1984 situation with regard to what news the public is served. Even if some speck of truth gets through it’ll be dismissed as lies and Russian propaganda. And the minute of hate is now all day long, day in day out.

Wow, nice defensive outburst that ranted totally off topic and thank you for absolutely confirming my observation about you.

Are only European countries worth your concern?

I’ll go a little with you on one of your two deflections, because it helps me further explain my point and because I have nothing to be ashamed of.

I do care more about Europeans as an abstract.

Do you have a problem with that? Good for you.

And yes, I particularly care for white Europeans. Indeed, of my 6 favourite people in the world, all are very white and all but one has light eyes and light hair. Is that morally wrong???

You can call that racist stuff, or just, you know, having a family.

I also know in my heart that every living being deserves love and compassion, but not being God, I recognise that my affection is limited and idiosyncratic. Shocking, I know!

One thing however that I am not limited in, for whatever reason, is my ability to be honest with myself. Whereas it seems that you are extremely limited in this regard. Go back, read my comment and ask yourself how come your view of geopolitics corresponds just so perfectly with your personal emotional life.

Lol, how absurd.

But don’t worry. Your life was actually important and well lived. You just can’t see it. Nonetheless, you needed to learn what you are in the process of learning, slowly, and you’ll have such a great feeling of existence when you eventually realise it, at the near end of your this lifetime or perhaps next.

(Btw, Anatoly, I made this point about Beckow prior to seeing the news about Kanye. I promise. Pretty funny. If you want to do sterling work as a Russian propagandist you should advise that they follow online keywords like “cheap whisky”, “misery” and, perhaps rather hopefully for them, “Viagra.”)

The Russian military is in a hopeless position. There is no way for them to pacify Ukraine. They are being held hostage by a botoxified, aged President and his corrupt coterie. Tens of thousands of them will die for the cause of murdering Ukrainians. They should all immediately turn back home, put a 7.62 in Putin’s head and go see their mothers with some flowers to say sorry for almost breaking their hearts.

As for Mariupol, henceforth to be known as Helm’s Deep, I pray to any listening being to aid their relief. And who knows how it will turn out? It is always darkest before the dawn.

In the future, I hope someone goes through U2’s catalog and systematically purges the woke parts of it, using DeepFake to make the lyrics based. “Pride” will become a song about Enoch Powell. “Angel of Harlem” will be about a Dutchwoman. Instead of BB King, Bono will collaborate with Morrisey.

Financial ‘assets‘ meet soldiers.

Why is assets in sneer quotes? There is much sense in what you say (and some nonsense too – “Ukes are going to desert en masse, just you watch!”), but the inner commie can’t help coming out, I guess.

Financial assets aren’t mere fictions. They inextricably tied to production. Someone has to produce something that someone wants to buy in order for there to be a claim on the cashflows that are hence produced – ie a financial asset. If I have a legal claim on a cashflow, damn straight I am thinking of that as asset.

Has anyone ever really pretended that financial assets, of themselves, could stand up to hard military force? Not as far as I know. But perhaps there is a case to be made that Europe has been too absorbed in hedonistic values and neglected the military factor that is the ultimate guarantor of prosperity.

They aren’t even wild caught in Alaska like they used to be.

I heard they are farm raised in fetid conditions in Indonesia fed on a diet of expired off brand Doritos.

Gross.

I used to not being able to understand the English lyrics, until I do. 😩😂

I don’t believe pulling off a Pearl Harbor would be the lesson learned by China.

Actually, the lesson for China should’ve been pretty straight forward. It is to make preparations, more preparations. And if it is made to align with general development instead of a bunker attitude, then it should be settled. The other parties can do not much at all.

Wait, there were more Greeks than Romans?

But if numbers were a significant factor, the much larger Near Eastern empires would have been much more culturally influential, and that tiny peninsula jutting out of the Western half of Asia would not have been the greatest cultural influencer in the history of the world 🙂

As for the early Christians, they achieved dominance on a timescale far too small for fertility patterns to play a significant role – assuming they even did have better fertility.

I am starting to read an interesting book called “The Patient Ferment” about the early Christians and how they spread – the thesis of the book is that the early Christians lived in a visibly more appealing way – they were, at least at first, really more loving, harmonious, kind, cheerful than their pagan neighbors, who at that late date in antiquity were often very corrupted in their personal and sexual lives, and who had lost their zest for life and were attached to uninspiring philosophies of “consolation”, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism that were about reducing pain rather than living joyously.

That being said, I’m not suggesting there is some kind of absolute division between spirit and the physical – in fact the two are closely interlinked.

Spiritual health and physical health and flourishing go hand in hand! And one of the first indicators of a corrupt or dying spirituality is physical breakdown, as we are seeing today.

However, the relationship is one that is “non-obvious”, in that prioritizing physical survival as the materialist does actually makes one less good at surviving long term – and making power and wealth your priority, likewise, makes flourishing and ultimate survival less certain.

Because as the oldest and truest spiritual adage has it – you must give up your life to save it.

Who do you want to enforce a “no-fly zone”? America? Nato? Are you really in favor of starting WW3? I understand the Ukrainians asking for it, but anyone outside of Ukraine who would try it, is obviously calling for a nuclear war. The Russians didn’t invade the US, they didn’t even invade one of our erstwhile allies, they invaded a country that’s been in their sphere of influence forever. I like Ukrainians, they’re a nice people, but I don’t remember any of them fighting alongside Americans in Korea, Vietnam, various Central American adventures, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Africa. They are not, nor have they ever been, an ally of the US.

The Germans were happy to have the Leningrad population starve to death. Hitler wanted that City erased. Moscow on the other hand was unconquerable. Too large to populous too sprawling. Leningrad could be hemmed in more or less and only had one supply route. It was just enough supply to resist the siege and neglect by the Germans. Who should have stormed the city.

Maruipol can’t be supplied. They should surrender. But that would mean the band of lunatics controlling the town are going to have to be heroic.

There’s a whiff of sulphur in the Ukie Case.

All Western “journalists” are in Kiev waiting for “the big battle” while the real action is west of Donbass, where Ukrainian tropos are being methodically encircled. There is just a crazy Chinese journo following the action in Mariupol and now in this front. The guy is awesome. He has guts.

2.2 million Ukrainians quit Ukraine. That’s deserting. How many more are internally refugees?

Heard the TV show is “woke around the edges” so to speak. Is there a tranny character or a gay, or something? If so, I don’t think I could watch it.

Oh the tv show. Umm, not that I can remember, and I am usually highly sensitive to this sort of thing – although, again, I’ve only watched some five episodes.

I can take a gay character as long as he or his gayness is merely in the background, and even then the most I can take is a momentary direct reference to it (and I’d probably never watch that film again). “Strong” female characters don’t bother me, although recent ones – especially in “hero” roles – have me rolling my eyes every few minutes. A tranny in any capacity, I’d immediately switch it off.

I could see (I think) the direction the plot was going, and I thought it was being nicely set up. If you weren’t a fan of the movie, you probably wouldn’t care to watch, but if you were, the tv show should hold your interest.

I don’t know – I’m not Ukrainian. Maybe I should learn, though.

They have earned their glory, though, and they don’t need me to give it to them.

One of the creepier things I’m seeing on the alt right is this attempt to deny the Ukrainians their heroism and sacrifice, and assure them that they are merely pathetic children who can’t possibly know their own minds, and they, American alt righters, know much better that Ukrainians are being manipulated, and their chosen leader who they’ve rallied around and been inspired by, is actually manipulating them etc etc.

I mean, it’s ok to support Russia – not really, you’d have to be pretty cretinous and dumb, but I can see some kind of retarded right wing argument of the kind that Putin represents an attractive alternative to Global Liberalism etc that we would all prefer to live in lol.

Deluded, but ok, some people can’t help being retarded (and as someone who deeply wants to see the current Woke Materialism replaced by a much better spiritual vision, if Putin is your more appealing alternative than you have a serious, serious, serious PR problem – and not just a PR problem, but a philosophical problem lol).

But why do the alt righters always do the ignoble and low-class trashy thing – why are their moral instincts always so reliably trashy – when it comes to how they talk about Ukrainians dying for their beliefs.

I mean, a little self-overcoming, a little respect for your enemy, is actually noble.

I have to say that I go with Russia on this one. Both sides are being atrocious in generating propaganda, naturally.

I am aganostic on the bioweapons. There were 11 sites in Soviet times. The US started to pay to have the stockpiles destroyed in 2005. Some may have been missed, deliberately hidden by Ukrainians. Pharam testing is a big indutry in Ukraine. So some of the labs are still active in pharma.

No way does Ukraine make chemical weapons with ammonia. Russia does. The ammonia plant is in Samara. It is the world’s biggest. There was a pipeline to Odessa (maybe Mariupol, I forget) where there was a urea (fertilizer) factory. That was closed in 2014 post war. A new pipeline was built to a place near Taganarog. Ammonia is very energy intensive to make. Ukraine could not make industrial quantities. They couldn’t afford the energy. A chemical weapon based on ammonia will be Russian whatever the propaganda claims.

Screechers gonna screech.

Spare us your old lady psycho-babble. You didn’t answer my points because you have no answer. That is worse than deflection, that is in effect a capitulation.

I do care more about Europeans as an abstract. Do you have a problem with that?

We all seem to care more Europe, so do I – but that doesn’t mean that murdering non-Europeans is not even noticed. You try desperately to ignore it, not to see it, reaffirming all the worst stereotypes about Europeans. Well, at least about elderly women semi-retarded Europeans.

I would remind you that Serbs are Europeans – the attack on Serbia by NATO was what started this unfortunate chain of events. Didn’t that bother you?

I have no idea who Kenya is, do you mean the country? You seem to live in your own head, no rules, no context, no deflections, no other viewpoints.

Russia will have a pyrrhic victory even if they can fully mobilize and throw conscripts at Ukraine, and leverage their export position.

Even a Gay and Nazi country has resolve when facing existential threat, and Russians aren’t facing the Gays, but the Nazis. Export embargoes and bans hurt both the supplier and consumer.

Opinions are not so malleable when blood is involved. Putin has managed to even lose eastern Ukrainians to Russia for a generation.

Patrick Lancaster is also reporting from there and he’s still on youtube.

Excess food calories are produced in America. Higher fertilizer prices may slightly reduce output, however the average American girth shows that the nation is nowhere near a food shortage. (1)

Russia and Ukraine are not “breadbaskets to the world”; they are breadbaskets to Europe, parts of the middle east and parts of Asia (in the northern hemisphere). It is more accurate to say Russia and Ukraine are to Europe what the United States is to North America.

Spot shortages of specific SKU’s are not even panic buying. Multinational BigAg firms weaved a supply chain heavily reliant on shipping. Overreaction to the CCP’s WUHAN-19 virus generated port restrictions. Most of the products missing from shelves tie back to this. (1)

Raw material foodstuff is exported to China, ASEAN nations and Mexico, processed and shipped back into the U.S. as a finished product. This is the same design-flow with food as previously exploited by other economic sectors, including auto manufacturing.

Multinational corporations, BIG AG, are now invested in controlling the outputs of U.S. agricultural industry and farmers. This overall process is why food prices were rising so fast in the past decade. Government COVID intervention in the food supply chain made these pricing issues worse. Government energy policy under the guise of Build Back Better is pouring fuel into the inflationary furnace.

The free market was not determining price before COVID; there was no “supply and demand” influence in the modern agricultural dynamic. Food commodities have been a controlled market just like durable goods. The raw material (harvests writ large) was exploited by the financial interests of massive multinational corporations.

All of these dynamics created the meteor which quietly hit the ocean when no one noticed.

Now the tsunami warning sirens are sounding and people are starting to wonder why…

MAGA Reindustrialization is America’s long term solution to avoiding disruptions when unreliable foreign suppliers fail to deliver.

Europe needs something similar. For example, weaning itself from unreliable natural gas suppliers. It would be best to do this gradually, but Europe could survive a hard decoupling.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/09/global-governments-begin-warning-of-critical-food-shortages/

fed on a diet of expired off brand Doritos.

That’s where that after taste in the Flavor Blasted Xtra Cheddar comes from!

Opinions are not so malleable when blood is involved.

Blood is thicker than water, but so is shit.

The Ukrainian people could have avoided this by giving a little autonomy to the Donbass and pledging military neutrality.

It is so simply and obvious that we must look for a reason why it was not done.

Dem Jews?

One of the creepier things I’m seeing on the alt right is this attempt to deny the Ukrainians their heroism and sacrifice, and assure them that they are merely pathetic children who can’t possibly know their own minds, and they, American alt righters, know much better that Ukrainians are being manipulated, and their chosen leader who they’ve rallied around and been inspired by, is actually manipulating them etc etc.

I think what you are actually seeing on the “alt right” is the belief that a Ukraine “win” will leave the country a vassal of the US and Western Europe, looted by western plutocrats, flooded with third world immigration, and dominated by Big Tech censorship.

Is that a “win” worth fighting for? It is not that Ukrainians don’t “know their own minds”, it is just they do not understand the end game that “victory” will bring.

Screechers gonna screech.

There is an easy solution. If you want the screeching to stop. All you have to do is stop shilling and screeching for your precious Xi. Are you related to Godfree Roberts?

The State Department decides when a hard decoupling will start,

Incorrect. The CCP will unilaterally decide if a hard decoupling will occur.

Everyone rational expects Not-The-President Biden’s directives to be rapidly & 100% reversed. His puppeteers lack the power to do much of anything. They could not even arrange a few MiG’s for Ukraine.

the largest famine in human history

If the CCP Elites start a unilateral decoupling, Xi will deliver the largest famine in human history to China’s workers. Ukraine is likely to have one or more poor harvests due to combat operations. Russia cannot supply all of the calories that China is currently importing from America.

PEACE 😇

A platoon or squadron of tanks cuts off incoming convoys of food ammo men medicine etc. Stable? Lol.

When food and people regularly come in and out of the city then the city is not blocked or surrounded. Even if a small Russian group pushes in some direction before getting destroyed.

Here is where the Russians were earlier today:

As you can see, the city was far from surrounded.

I spoke to my cousin who lives in the city. Her grocery store was full today, she bought some meat, bread and even pet food. So yes, things are going into the city, there is not yet a siege. Soldiers are also coming in. Her neighborhood is quiet, though just in case she sleeps in the corridor, away from windows.

OTOH Bucha (a NW suburb) where I also have cousins is a nightmare. Most got out after the early battles but there is one couple there being used as human shields by the Russians. We lost touch for a few days but were able to make contact yesterday. No safe way out. It is a nightmare.

But that shows Kremenchuk bridge in the Center of Ukraine under attack by the land units of the Russians.

Any further evidence of this supposed land attack? This supposedly happened March 7 and then not a trace of this attack upon the Kremenchuk bridge. Looks like it did not occur.

It is so simply and obvious that we must look for a reason why it was not done.

Russia demanded that the autonomous territory be given veto power over the rest of the country’s policies. No country would tolerate that. It would mean EU off the table and Ukraine either forced into Eurasia or in its unaffiliated limbo that led to impoverishment after the USSR split up (in contrast to every one of its neighbors who linked to the EU and who got a lot wealthier by doing so). Majority of Ukrainian people rejected this.

How would you (or the regular American people) like it if the Mexican parts of the USA were given special autonomous status and given the right to veto national policies that they didn’t like?

Dem Jews?

One of the two main pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, Vadim Rabinovich, is Jewish: