What the hell else were they supposed to do in their dilemma?

We didn’t invade Cuba in 1962.

Compare the number of Ukrainian losses with captures of Russian vehicles and they are about even. Maybe ahead because some of the captured Russian stuff is newer / better than what they had before.

I get it. You don’t want to be seen to agree with me even under any circumstances even if I agree with you. I understand.

I don’t know how many hours the Marines waited. I assume they did the barrage at night and started the assault at dawn or maybe vice versa. Midnight was in between so it goes down in history as the next day.

Putinists are rooting for the giant.

Thanks for this comment. A very perceptive analysis.

Maybe they can’t do that. They’re not that good. Also two can play this game.

Thanks for all the detail but it doesn’t change my basic point that the Marines bombarded Fallujah immediately preceding an infantry assault to take the city the very next day while the Russian artillery barrages seem to be mainly done for the purpose of causing destruction of property because no immediate infantry assault follows in most cases.

OK, then about 1,400 destroyed. A Russian tank has a crew of 3 and and APC has a crew of 3 plus 7 passengers. Trucks can vary depending on whether they are troop trucks or what. So let’s say an average of 5 killed per destroyed vehicle. 1,400 x 5 = 7,000 which is a ballpark low estimate though the Ukrainians are claiming a much higher number. This is of course not including Russian troops killed outside of vehicles.

they concluded it was their least bad option given the circumstances.

Well if that is what Putin concluded (and I doubt it – it was more like “I can get away with this because I have the stronger army and the West will not effectively interfere because they are weak and the Germans want my gas and when I succeed I will go down in history as a great Czar who re-enlarged Russia’s empire”) then he concluded wrong, badly wrong. The gains to Russia, if any, will be much smaller than he imagined and the losses, in men and materiel and international respectability and dollars are proving to much more painful than anyone, including Putin, even conceived.

Trolls are out in force on this one.

One tell is that they are usually new posters who haven’t been seen here before. Or post as some “Anon.”

Historical analogies often obscure facts. Neither WWII Japan or the USSR signed or adhered to the Geneva Conventions worked out in the earlier decades. So both of these committed “war crimes” willy-nilly. The Germans did respect those Conventions (not sure if they were signatories) since the Allies also did and Hitler, a former soldier, believed in reciprocity. Germans didn’t respect the Conventions with respect to the USSR, since Stalin didn’t.

Neither the Japanese or the Soviets (Russians) approved of their military personnel surrendering so their fate was of no concern. Fewer than one in 20 captured Germans on the eastern front made it back to Germany, ever. Most Soviet POWs also died; those that didn’t were gulaged by Stalin after the war. Self inflicted war crime by Soviets (Russians).

Yes, there are many hypocritical cases where “rules” of war have been disregarded by the US and others. But no one can honestly claim that the Soviets/Russians ever have shown much respect for any rules of any kind. Though despite the normal lack of top leadership concern, many military officers did uphold them.

Savage behavior begets the same in your enemies. “Mercy” is not a common Russian attribute.

Claims of “Nazis” running Ukraine or committing atrocities against other Ukrainians is pure fiction. Zelensky is Jewish and were this true, we’d be hearing about this for decades from the usual sources. Israel recognizes Ukraine. A handful of Nazi styled militia types is very useful for Russian propaganda. Suspicious minds might wonder who’s been financing them for all these years?

Ukes put out their own propaganda and some have probably shot Russian POWs and have done other bad things to collaborators. But since all the fighting so far has been on Uke territory, you can be sure that nearly all of the war crimes come from the Russians. They treat their own soldiers pretty badly too, from most accounts.

Fortunately, other than trolls, most Russian propaganda is so absurd few believe it.

Putin sponsored his own “local uprising” in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 which was equivalent to the Bay of Pigs. The US sent not one American soldier to Cuba. If you see the Bay of Pigs as being equivalent to Putin sending a full blown Russian Army invasion force then I’m the one who’s laughing at your clear obtuseness.

Putin had every chance to undermine the Ukrainian government with bribery, poison, local collaborators, etc. and his efforts were about as successful as our efforts in Cuba. However, he wasn’t willing to concede defeat and sent a full blown Russian Army invasion force, thereby crossing the line of invading another sovereign country.

Castro created a full blown Russian allied Communist dictatorship 90 miles from the US and we still didn’t invade. Cuba was MUCH more in Russia’s pocket than Ukraine was ever in the US’s. Cuba’s “color revolution” (red) was apparently OK with us.

One of the things that you have to understand is that in most countries (not just shitty 3rd world places) the Constitution is not as sacred and difficult to amend or replace as the American constitution (which BTW is the world’s oldest written constitution that remains in effect – so much for America being the New World). A lot of countries change their constitutions as often as they change their underwear. For example, since 1789, France has had 14 constitutions. The current French Constitution dates all the way back to 1958.

It’s also common for a lot of modern constitutions to be a lot more detailed (and therefore less timeless) than the American Constitution. For example, the US Constitution has nothing to say about the subject of neutrality. It leaves the making of treaties up to the President with the approval of 2/3 of the Senate. By leaving things vague and general, it’s not necessary to amend the Constitution very often. If we had neutrality in our constitution and then took it out, that would be a really big deal but in Ukraine it’s more like changing an ordinary law or policy.

The Constitution of France, for example, enshrines a lot of “rights” that we cover with legislation and aren’t mentioned at all in our Constitution.

Right to culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Right to form political parties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Right to health care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Right to join trade unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Right to own property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11, 32, 33
Right to renounce citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Right to rest and leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Right to self determination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3, 35
Right to strike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Right to transfer property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Right to work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

The Russians were up to no good in Cuba and we rightly kicked them out

I missed the part where we kicked them out. They left their giant Lourdes bases voluntarily at the end of the Cold War because they ran out of money (ironically it was done by Putin, early in his rule – the Cubans complained bitterly because the base had been a source of badly needed funds to the tune of \$200 million/year). A few years ago there was talk of Russia reopening the base but after 2014 it seems to have dropped off the (ahem) radar.

“Russia isn’t doing some Caesar-like adventure. ”

Yeah, Caesar was a winner, whose life was one brilliant victory over a more numerous foe after another.

Putin single-handedly has ruined the good reputation of the Russian military that took the sacrifices of WWII and the Cold War to build up. He’s a loser.

You know that the Russians had very extensive bases in Cuba, right?

The Lourdes SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) facility, located near Havana, Cuba, was the largest facility of its kind operated by Russian foreign intelligence services[2] outside of Russia. Located less than 150 km (93 mi) from Key West, the facility covered 73 km2 (28 sq mi). Construction began in July 1962.

At its peak during the Cold War over 1,500 KGB, GRU, Cuban DGI, and Eastern Bloc technicians, engineers and intelligence operatives staffed the facility.

I wish Putin could bring it to a swift, successful conclusion and stick our elites in the eye with it.

This in essence is why the alt.right is advocating for Putin and repeating his lies with such great enthusiasm. He hates the American elites and globohomoism and so do you. He wants to cut the globohomos down a notch and this is something that you would welcome.

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. To the extent that he is a patriot (it’s mostly for show anyway) he is a Russian patriot and would want ANY America, even the nonglobohomo America of your dreams, cut down to size. He is not really your friend. Even if you told him, hey, I’m not in favor of that globohomo stuff and I’m with you on the white Christian civilization thing, he would just as soon put a bullet in the back of your head anyway if he thought that you were interfering with Russia’s goals.

2. His whole morality shtick is an act. He couldn’t really give a shit about Christian morality. Elites in Russia, of whom he is the #1 elite, have a BOTTOMLESS contempt for their own people. They live like royalty with palaces and yachts and the folks in the provinces regard a washing machine as a luxury good. Our elites treat poor whites like dogs but in Russia they treat them like shit. Putin sends young Russian (and Kalmyk and Chechen and whatever) boys from the provinces to be cannon meat in Ukraine and he can’t even be bothered to scrape up the pieces and send them back to their mamas.

Kissinger said the Communists entering the Italian government was a grave threat to the West.

I remember when that happened, and then the American tanks surrounded Rome and they leveled Naples with rockets and artillery.

No wait, that didn’t happen.

Russian chauvinists sound like teenagers who just discovered Noam Chomsky when talking about the US and then morph into Ragnar Redbeardovich when talking about Russia.

I don’t know who or how or why the Wikis are being edited – anyone can edit them. If you don’t like the edits go and revert them and see what happens (you can look at the history page to see when and how things changed).

But personally (and my mother and her family were from Galicia) that was then and this was now. When I went back my shtetl I met some really old and hunched over people. When I was younger and I met people like that I would think to myself, hmmm what were you doing in 1942? But I did the math in my head and I realized that even these toothless old dudes would have been no more than children at the time of the Holocaust. AFAIK, 99.9% of the people in Ukraine who took part in the Holocaust are either dead or close to dead. Demjanjuk, who was 22 when he became a camp guard, died a decade ago at age 91. So even if every single Ukrainian was a Nazi collaborator back in the day, no one alive today is responsible for their misdeeds.

Germany has been a good friend of the US since shortly after the end of the war. No one in America says that we shouldn’t support Germany or allow it to be in NATO, even though Germany bears even more responsibility for the Holocaust that Ukraine.

If the people in Ukraine today are “Nazis” they are a funny kind of Nazi who elected a Jewish president and where the right wing parties didn’t break 3% of the vote and hold no seats in the parliament. Hungary is a lot more “Nazi” than Ukraine. The Soviets did a lot of evil stuff but you can’t say that they didn’t thoroughly denazify Ukraine after the war, such that it really isn’t in need of further denazification by Putin. If you want to look for Ukrainians to denazify, you’ll have a lot better luck in Canada or the US because dudes like Demjanjuk didn’t make it in the post war USSR.

What evidence do you have beside the laughable Russian claims? As Twinkie pointed out, it appears that over two thousand pieces of Russian equipment have been destroyed (this is well documented despite of course the usual Russian attempts at denial of the obvious):

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

Each one of these tanks, APVs, trucks, etc. would have had several crew members.

Here’s some evidence:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10698995/More-7-000-unclaimed-Russian-soldiers-bodies-Ukrainian-morgues-claims-Kyiv.html

I suppose you could go to Ukraine and actually count the bodies in the morgues. Or the Russians could accept back the bodies of their fallen soldiers and reunite them with their loved ones as is done by all civilized countries.

Maybe the Ukrainians are lying but it seems to be a strange kind of lie because the Russians could easily call them on it and if they didn’t produce the bodies it would be a source of further friction. Also they are distinguishing between the number they claim have been killed (19,000) and the number of bodies that they are holding (7,000). If they were just liars they could claim to have 19,000 corpses.

What the hell else were they supposed to do in their dilemma?

Bullies are always getting into “dilemmas” like this – “I had no choice but to punch that kid in the nose. It’s his fault, he made me do it.” Paranoids always see imaginary threats.

Was Joe Biden really threatening to invade Russia ? Germany with its (up until now) tiny army and the rest of Europe with its nice white lady defense ministers who were concerned with trannie rights in the military? Don’t make me laugh.

The irony of Putin is that he is bringing about the thing that he feared the most. Ukraine would have never dreamed of bombing Russian oil terminals or attacking Russian ships or killing Russian soldiers but now they are doing it. Germany would have never rearmed based upon Biden’s ineffective pleading. But now they are doing it. Sweden and Finland would have never joined NATO but now they are giving strong consideration to it.

This is partly intentional on Putin’s part. He did not invade just to grab some territory. His aim was to discredit the West and show that they are a paper tiger. He wanted to provoke a crisis and then win it. He was supposed to depose Zelensky and install a puppet regime who would permanently cede Crimea and “recognize” the independence of the Donbas and the West was supposed to impose some kind of slap on the wrist meaningless sanctions. China would take courage from the ineffectiveness of the West and do its thing to Taiwan and now there would be a bipolar world between the declining Western powers and the rising autocratic ones. Putin was going to make the world Safe for Autocracy. It has all just gone horribly wrong.

The Russians always draw the opposite lesson because they are not looking for consistency, they are looking for excuses for their own bad behavior. Instead of condemning Western misbehavior (well they do that too) they emulate it on a larger scale. Hey, the West stole an apple – who are they to tell us that car theft is wrong?

the Russians don’t want to frighten their potential collaborators in Ukraine.

Interesting thought. Many people here (falsely) claimed that the people lying dead in the street with their hands tied up might have been collaborators killed by the Ukrainian resistance during the Russian occupation but the Russians themselves made no such claims – they said that these corpses had been placed on the street AFTER they left (not taking into account that nowadays there are cameras everywhere including up in the sky).

They would have had less problems with their timeline if they made the former claim but they didn’t. Perhaps you have hit the reason, although frankly the Russian lies seem to be situational and ad hoc and there doesn’t seem to be any grand strategy or consistency to them other than to refute everything that casts them in a bad light.

Regardless of whether Ukrainians are killing collaborators elsewhere, there appears to be abundant evidence such as survivor testimony that the dead on the street in Bucha were mostly or all killed by the Russians.

In any case, a favorite Russian tactic is to point to something that the West has done in error or on a very small scale and use this to license massive and intentional misconduct by the Russians Instead of emulating the best of the West, they seek to emulate the worst. As Stalin said, quantity has its own quality. One or two collaborators or Russian prisoners killed by rogue Ukrainian irregulars is not the same as a Moscow directed campaign of genocide.

No, but Putin spent (or thought he spent) billions manipulating the internal politics of Ukraine. Yanukovych’s palace alone must have cost a pretty penny. Now it turns out that a lot of that money ended up invested in London flats and never made it to Ukraine, but he THOUGHT that he was buying influence. When Russia spends \$ that’s OK because Ukraine is in its “sphere of influence” but when we do it, it’s a “Color Revolution”.

Russia, BTW, spent billions in Cuba for decades, 90 miles from Florida. If the ground rules prohibit spending \$ in each other’s sphere of influence, what were the Russians doing in Cuba?

Yes, that’s the whole point. Putin, as a KGB man, is thoroughly cynical. There are no honest feelings – everything is just a question of what strings you can pull to get people to do what you want. Religion, patriotism, money, kompromat, whatever works in order to get the job done. As someone else said, if you allow yourself to have such feelings that means that you’re the freier (sucker). A KGB man plays other people. He does not allow himself to be played.

This is one reason why he is so angry at his officials and has had some arrested. Putin is the one who is supposed to persuade YOU with his lies. You are not supposed to persuade HIM with yours.

I thought you told me that destroying a city was not a good tactic – it just creates more hiding places for insurgents. Why did the Marines do this if it’s not effective?

As I understand it, following the artillery bombardment, the Marines immediately (the next day) entered the city (after clearing the streets with armored bulldozers). Softening up the enemy by preceding an infantry assault with an artillery barrage is a time tested technique.

But this isn’t what the Russians are doing. They seem to randomly destroy some apartment building or train station, often quite distant from the front lines, with missiles, where the only goal seems to be to kill civilians and sow terror. They have been bombarding Mariupol for over a month now but the ground assault never comes. So this seems to be quite unlike what the Marines did in Fallujah.

1,351 was an old number. Even the Russians aren’t stuck on that lie anymore. People here who want to follow the Moscow line have to keep up because the Moscow line keeps shifting. This used to be a problem for Moscow followers in the West. Nowadays you can probably get an app or something but in the old days you had to read the Daily Worker carefully or you could really get in trouble. You might be praising the heroic work of Comrade Yezhov only to find out that Comrade Yezhov was really a wrecker and this praise might put your own loyalty in question.

Yesterday, Putin spokesman Peskov said that the casualties were “a huge tragedy for us”. He didn’t release any new #s but presumably “a huge tragedy” implies more than 1,351 deaths.

In addition to the 7,000 to 15,000 deaths estimated by NATO (that was 2 weeks ago so by now we are probably on the high end of that range) they estimated total casualties (killed and wounded) in the range of 30 to 40,000. This is a significant chunk of the total # of Russians who invaded Ukraine and would explain why they withdrew from the Kiev region. Once a unit loses more than a certain % of its troops it loses its combat effectiveness. Key men (the Russians have lost 7 generals) are no longer present, important equipment has been lost and those who remain are demoralized. There is no hope of using such units to advance further and keeping them in place was just causing further losses as ATGMs and accurately placed artillery, etc. continued to rain down on their head despite their state of the art tree branch and hay stack camouflage.

This is not the same thing as spending \$5 billion on a Color Revolution.

The US is not ashamed that it spends \$ on promoting democracy. This is no secret. Only in the mind of Putin and his followers is promoting democracy the same thing as fomenting a Color Revolution. Putin so crooked that he literally cannot imagine anyone acting from other than the most base motives because that’s all he has in his head – nothing but depravity.

There is free press in Russia.

Go away with your lies. Nobody wants your bullshit here. The last vestiges of a free press in Russia were destroyed when Putin started this war. This war is based on concealing the truth from the Russian public so a free press would spoil the hermetic bubble he needed to conjure up Nazi Ukraine.

As of 2021, Russia ranked 150 lowest out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. That was before the war started – I’m sure in the next ratings it will be in the high 170s. N. Korea will still beat them. Poor Russia – can’t be #1 in anything, not even in repression.

Go away, I wasn’t asking you. I’m sick of your Putinist bullshit. Russians claims that they wanted to minimize civilian casualties are sick lies in the face of what is going on in Ukraine and you are pathetic for repeating them and foolish for believing them. You remind me of the American academics who used to fall for Stalin’s lies. What is it about academics that makes them fall for totalitarian lies? Orwell said that there are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.

Does this look like “minimizing civilian casualties”?

Who are you going to believe, Putin or your own lying eyes?

1. Serious question – if this is not a winning (is in fact a counterproductive) tactic, then why do the Russians do it? Are they stupid, evil, misguided, what?

2. If you are a civilian resident of one of the cities that Russia has targeted and cannot escape (because the Russians also shoot anyone who tries to escape) then the fact that this is not a “winning” strategy for the Russians makes no difference to you because you will be just as dead either way.

I see there are buttons for Agree, Disagree, etc. but is there a button for “Sod Off, Wanker”?

Steve/Ron – could you add one of those please?

The Pentagon will want to have a good look at the Krasukha-4. I get the feeling that the flow of military equipment from NATO to Ukraine is not 100% one way.

That being said, something like that is only good when you have absolute air supremacy. When something like this is lit up it is the equivalent of a Klieg light for anti-radiation missiles. You might as well put a giant neon “DESTROY ME” sign on the roof of this thing.

Of course it is nice that the Russians are retreating in disarray and leaving behind such valuable hardware completely intact. This is not a cheap piece of hardware.

And Ritter is absolutely wrong on how “easy” it is to block communication channel in this day and age.

And getting easier every day. When the war started, Musk opened the Starlink (internet satellite) network to Ukraine and sent thousands of terminals (dishes). Each Starlink antenna is about 12 x 19 inches or approximately the size of a cookie sheet. Especially at night, these would be impossible to spot and could be easily camouflaged (painted to match roof tiles, etc.) , not that Russian forces were free to fly over Kiev anyway.

“

The quality of the link is excellent,” [Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation] Fedorov said through a translator, using a Starlink connection from an undisclosed location. “We are using thousands, in the area of thousands, of terminals with new shipments arriving every other day.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/19/elon-musk-ukraine-starlink/

The Moscow Times is designated as a “foreign agent” in Russia

Being designated as a “foreign agent” in Russia is a badge of honor. Putin has used the “foreign agent” laws to shut down all activity that was not government controlled – free press, NGOs, etc.. This is straight from the Fascist playbook: “”Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Putin is not exactly a Nazi (not anti-Semitic for one thing) but he’s definitely a Fascist. He has created a Fascist state in the Mussolini mold.

During this war, Russia has forced many of the “conscripts” to sign contracts in order to retroactively fulfill Putin’s promise not to deploy conscripts. Voila, you’ve signed the contract (at gun point), now you are a contractor and there are no more conscripts in Ukraine!

https://www.foxnews.com/world/ukraine-invasion-russian-conscripts-military-contracts-family

This is an old Russian ploy. When my mother was sent to Siberia she was forced to sign a contract stating that she had volunteered to move there. The Russians are into “cargo cult” rule of law. You observe all of the forms associated with rule of law – contracts, a court system, trials, etc. All that is lacking is the actual substance.

More graphic details with photographic and video evidence from Bucha. Apparently the Ukrainians were keeping LOTs of pre-putrefied bodies in reserve so that they could bring them out when the Russian left.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/06/bucha-barbarism-atrocities-russian-soldiers/

Can the heroic laborers in the Russian lie factories keep up with the increasing high pile of corpses?

It appears as if the gang that was occupying Bucha was an exceptionally psychopathic and murderous group of thugs – maybe Wagner or Chechens or both. In most other occupied towns, the Russians might have murdered a mere handful and mainly confined themselves to torture, mock executions, washing machine theft, rape, etc. but the guys in Bucha really went hog wild and outdid themselves.

Could they have jammed all the communication satellites too?

Sometimes I feel like the internet Russia supporters are living in some sort of antique reality in their head, like their knowledge of warfare ended with Clausewitz. ” The Russians should cut the telegraph lines to Kiev! Then they should lure the Ukrainian cavalry into a cauldron!”

The Russian Army itself keeps fighting as if it is 1945 . “Those bazookas will bounce right off of the invulnerable cope cages on our T-34s.” Then they talk to each other on their walkie-talkies and look for some Mädchens to rape and Nazis to kill.

At this point, it’s pretty safe to assume that every single Russian denial or claim that something is “fake” is a lie. Russia has been telling parents of POWs that videos of their own children are “fake” when it’s friggin’ obvious to the parents that these are their own children. “Fake” to the Russian government no longer means “not true” it means “true but it casts us in a bad light so we will automatically say that it is fake.” Is there ANY unfavorable to Russia coverage coming out of Ukraine that is NOT fake according to Russia? It’s ALL fake according to the Russian and their shills. The photos of the damaged Russian tanks are fake, the photos of the dead are fake, everything is fake. Reality no longer exists. The headlines in Russian papers might as well be “The reports of the atrocities that will occur in the Donbas tomorrow are fake.”

It’s kind of pointless to contradict the Russian denials because the Russia supporters will just invent more lies to cover their last lies as fast as you debunk them. First the bodies weren’t there at all until the Russians left and then when the satellite photos showed that was a lie and that they were there for some time, the satellite photos were “fake”. If the BBC reporters say that there is a smell, then the BBC reporters are lying. There is always an answer for everything.

As I mentioned in another post, the purpose of such denials is not really to convince the unconvinced in the West (and the small number of convinced obviously need no convincing – they are going to buy into Russian lies no matter how thin their credibility) . It is to sow FUD (at least temporarily) among a much larger group so that people who are on the fence and maybe don’t want to have their lives disrupted by losing access to Russian gas have a face saving way of saying, “Well, the Russians are denying it and we don’t know for sure what the truth is, blah, blah, blah so how can we impose sanctions based on something that we don’t know for sure is true.” There is no level of proof that is going to satisfy those who don’t want to be satisfied.

Upton Sinclair said “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Americans could walk into a sporting goods store and order a Thompson submachine gun by mail

This doesn’t make any sense. Why would you need to go to a store in order to order a gun by mail? You would do one or the other but not both. When Lee Harvey Oswald wanted a rifle, he just ordered it directly from Klein’s Sporting Goods located in Chicago, as advertised in the February 1963 American Rifleman.

He, being somewhat short of funds, got the \$19.95 Italian bolt action carbine.

The Russian Armed Fores are comprised of 400,000 professionals who look like this.

LOL. Maybe there are 20,000 that look like that and the rest are various degrees of frightened conscript, drunk, dead, wounded, deserted or captured by the Ukrainians, etc.

Or as the Russian Army tells the families, “on assignment”:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/06/private-pivovarov-is-on-assignment-how-russia-hides-its-military-casualties-a77247

In a cross between Dead Souls and Catch 22, a Russian soldier is not “dead” or even “missing” until their body is recovered but the Russians are refusing to take back their corpses from the Ukrainians. They are just in limbo. The ultimate mind fark is when the Ukrainians send the family a video of their POW son and the Russians tell the family that the video is “fake” as if people can’t recognize their own children.

But soldiers who have not yet been identified as deceased do not automatically fall into the category of missing. Bodies not returned to Russia, unidentifiable or buried in Ukraine are also not included in the list of those who were killed in action, lawyer Anastasia Burakova told The Moscow Times.

These men, she said, “have no legal status and are listed neither among the dead, nor among the living.”

After a year of no contact, soldiers’ relatives can apply to a court to have a serviceman declared missing in action.

President Vladimir Putin promised that the families of servicemen killed in Ukraine would receive 7.4 million rubles (approx. \$90,000) each. If a serviceman’s death is not legally established, relatives will not receive compensation, Burakova and Scherbak said.

The ground rules of war vs. diplomacy in the 19th century were different (Gen. Grant BTW regarded the Mexican War as a shameful land grab). What Russia is doing or attempting to do in Ukraine would have been entirely within the norms of 19th century conduct (and many centuries before that) for any powerful country with weaker neighbors. Putin in fact is acting EXACTLY like a 19th century Czar. From his words and deeds (and not by mind reading) it is clear that he regards himself as the restored Czar of All the Russias (this btw was the title of the previous Czar, the Russias being Russia itself, White Russia (Belarus) and “Little Russia” (Ukraine)).

The problem is that Russia is not doing this in 1822 but in 2022, on a continent where perhaps 30 million people or more died in two world wars in the previous century and in a world where nuclear weapons promise the possibility of even greater losses. (The greatest estimates of deaths in the Mexican War on both sides and counting civilian deaths and deaths from disease still don’t break 50,000). The implicit bargain at the end of WWII is that such wars for territory would no longer be permissible. Once you open the door to historical grievances and border disputes being a valid basis for war in Europe, the possibilities for endless war emerge – German has grievances against Russia (and Poland) regarding the lost territories of E. Prussia. Poland has grievances against Ukraine and Lithuania. Romania has grievances against Russia. Hungary has grievances against everyone.

That’s very dandy, but that original question is more like asking if a mango tastes more like beef or an onion.

Absolutely not. The Russian Army, the LAPD and the SS are all types of armed forces so it’s a fair question to ask whether the actions of Russian Army more closely resembled one or the other. Our host, BTW, seemed to think it was more like the LAPD and that the Russians were shooting people only out of mistaken identity in a panic situation.

Now since he wrote that, further evidence of SS like behavior has come out. German intelligence was apparently listening to the Russian coms in Bucha ( the fact that the Russians have unencrypted coms is further indication of what clowns they are – even the Nazis had Enigma). In these communications, there are orders issued that state: “First you interrogate soldiers, then you shoot them.” AFAIK, the LAPD never does this. Even the SS, for the most part, did not shoot American and British POWs (but the Russians did execute the Polish officer corps at Katyn so I suppose you are right that the Russian Army is behaving most like the Russian Army – it’s just that the Russian Army is WORSE than the SS in some respects).

Apparently the Wagner Group played a leading role in the atrocities. More to the point, you could compare the Russian Army to the Wehrmacht and the Wagner Group is the SS.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/possible-evidence-of-russian-atrocities-german-intelligence-intercepts-radio-traffic-discussing-the-murder-of-civilians-in-bucha-a-0a191c96-634f-4d07-8c5c-c4a772315b0d

The people who are quibbling over whether the publicly release satellite images are real/fake and what day they were taking on and whether the satellites were even overhead on those days (the quibbles are almost certainly false and just more Russian disinformation) are fighting the wrong battle because the intelligence services have their own satellites and probably have more and better images. Such disinformation might serve to create FUD now (which is the point – Russian disinformation isn’t really supposed to convince people in the West other than a handful of Putin fanbois – it’s supposed to make you think “we really don’t know for sure what is happening” and it works remarkably well in that role as you can see here) but at the war crimes trials evidence with a formal chain of custody will be presented and will be correlated with radio transmissions and forensic evidence and maybe even testimony from underlings who are captured, etc.

The Russian UN Ambassador (who BTW looks and sounds like a cartoon caricature of a Russian official) is clearly nervous and stumbles over a question about the bodies on the street in Bucha:

He makes a Kinsley Gaffe:

the corpses that lie on the streets [in Bucha] that were never existing before the Russian troops arrived

He is probably nervous about whether he is going to get dragged into the war crimes trials. Von Ribbentrop ended up on the gallows.

Actually he died (or grew close to death – I think they moved him to bed in the end) lying in a puddle of his own filth on the ground, untreated and then poorly treated for many hours because #1 only Stalin could give orders (including orders that Stalin receive medical treatment) and he was unconscious and in no position to give orders, so Catch 22, and #2 Stalin had had all the best doctors in Moscow imprisoned so that all that was left was a bunch of hacks.

And soon after his death, his fellow Georgian and right hand man/henchman was deposed and executed and soon after that, Stalin himself was denounced and Stalin’s body removed from its place of honor in Lenin’s Tomb.

So there was some small measure of cosmic justice in the end.

And isn’t annexation to Moscow’s rule a way for DNR and LNR to circumvent local crime lords?

1. Putin is not proposing formal annexation to Russia for DNR and LNR. His demand is that Ukraine recognize their “independence”.

2. Such independence (in the “rebel held” areas) is nominal. Such governments and their thug rulers exist as Moscow puppets – they are armed and funded by Moscow and remain in office only for so long as Moscow wants them to. Presumably after the war, the same thug rulers will control the enlarged territory of the DNR and LNR on behalf of Moscow. Putin likes these fake “independent” states because they give him deniability, just like all the shell corporations that own his yachts and palaces.

Wasn’t getting bombarded by the Ukrainian military part of what made DNR and LNR a nasty place?

The border areas inside Ukraine adjacent to the DNR and LNR have been getting equally bombarded by the “rebels” and they aren’t comparably thug run.

The DNR and LNR are little microcosms of Russia – the way your country would be if John Gotti or Whitey Bulger was the President. Putin is just the Capo di Tutti Capi – the Thug in Chief and their puppet rulers are his captains. BTW, one of the things that Putin did early on was to abolish elected regional governors in Russia – he appoints the governors now. All power must emanate from the center.

Duh. You can’t have an anti Jewish pogrom without Jews and few Jews lived in Russia outside the Pale.

If Ukraine is the Russian`s absolute best effort at damage control I’d hate see their worst.

You’re wrong. My SAT scores were within 20 points of each other and both were high. My kids were the same. Jews are strong in both math and verbal as are S Asians.

What I was saying is that the Russian tactic is to pound the city and its inhabitants to rubble. That’s how they won in Checnya.

And what about people touching the hair of Black Women. Hair touching is WORSE than genocide. The dead no longer care but the anguish a Black Woman whose hair has been touched is endless.

Again with the guns. Can’t we get Abolish Public Schools in to complain about the public schools in Ukraine? I gave you the link – there are already something like 5 to 7 million guns in private hands in Ukraine or enough to equip most men of fighting age. These guns were of limited use when the Russian Army rolled in with armor.

Ukraine (at least the Kyiv region) was tough to occupy ( largely due to heavy weapons and official armed forces, not hunting rifles) but the Russians nevertheless managed to slaughter a lot of innocent civilians. Amateurs equipped only with rifles are simply no match for a modern army, especially a ruthless one that is willing to slaughter civilians indiscriminately. Had there been more partisan type activity, the Russians would have massacred even more civilians in their Nazi style – you kill one of ours, we shoot ten civilians. In Chechnya and in Syria there was heavy resistance and the Russians just pounded their cities into dust the same as the Germans did with the Warsaw Ghetto. Rifles vs. howitzers is no contest.

Your just playing word games . Being a slave to the machinations of the elite in America is just a metaphor and is nothing like actual slavery.

Americans have such an easy life that they are prone to this. My father once told me a story about something a woman said to him when he was working in a butcher shop in the early 1950s, after he had come to America, something that stuck with him for decades. The woman must have somehow known or figured out that he was a Holocaust survivor (some of the guys had the number tattoos on their arm but he hadn’t stayed at Auschwitz long enough to get tattooed – the Russians were approaching and they shipped him on to Germany right away). And unprompted (except by her own feelings of guilt) she said to him, “You know, in America during the war we didn’t have it so great either. We had meat rationing, you know.” As if having meat rationing and being nearly starved to death as a concentration camp prisoner are really the same thing.

I keep seeing the same thing here – our government is “oppressive”, so therefore it’s really no different than the kind of reign of terror that exists when the Russians come to town and start executing people. You really have no idea what real oppression is.

I don’t do false choices.

That’s not a false choice. If I asked you , is a mango more like a peach or a potato, you could say, well it’s neither, a mango tastes like a mango but probably you would concede that it tastes more like a peach, because that has no political implications. There is nothing false about a choice like this.

But here you are just trying to dodge our gracious host’s perfectly valid question because it leads to further implications that you don’t like. First you try to deflect it onto me even though it was Steve’s question and then you say the question is not valid (you should take that up with Steve – how dare he post false choices!) – you’ll do anything not to give a straight answer. Others are screaming false flag or the Ukrainians do that too or the Americans do that too or my dog does that too. Anything not to have to deal with the implications of another genocide in the heart of Europe.

There have been false flags in the past so therefore everything that happens is a false flag. Nothing is ever real, especially not things that you don’t like and wish to ignore.

Do you know any slaves personally? No because we abolished slavery 150 years ago.

The 2nd Amendment guys tell me that the militia consists of all able bodied men. Therefore you belong to the militia and it’s ok for the Russians to kill you.

That was meant as an ironic joke by Billy Wilder, not a policy proposal.

the \$5B in color revolution money we provided

Please provide a source for \$5B in color revolution money. There was no such thing.

it deserves more serious consideration than it is likely to get today. But perhaps its time will come.

This is a polite way of someone is a crank who holds eccentric views that are out of step with mainstream scholarship.

Maybe the Russians could have leveled their house (with tanks) from a distance but that’s not “like the SS” specifically.

That’s what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto. In any case they would have been just as dead.

That’s not how it works under the Geneva convention. You’re saying that genocide is OK.

Are you OK with private citizens owning Javelins? Because even rifles (WITH ammo) are worthless against tanks.

Again, you have set this up as heads I win, tails you lose situation. If Oleg and his neighbors are all executed by the Russians because they are bearing rifles (WITH ammo) then the Russian are justified in executing them as irregulars out of uniform – it’s not even a war crime. If they DON’T get rifles (which BTW are legal in Ukraine), then they were stupid for not resisting and got what was coming to them. Either way they are dead.

Estimates of the number of guns in private hands – including 2 million registered and an estimated 3-5 million unregistered firearms – suggest that in Ukraine there are between 9.9 and 15.8 firearms per 100 people.10 3 5 Based on data from the study which calculated the lowest estimates in this range, Ukraine ranked 14th in the world for the number of civilian firearms in its national stockpile, and 49th in the world for the number of civilian firearms per head of population.3

https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/cp/ukraine

The reason I mentioned handguns was not to denigrate (are you still allowed to use that word) fine white Americans but because ownership of rifles is legal in Ukraine so I assumed you were talking about their restrictive handgun laws.

I repeat that lack of rifles (AND ammunition) or bad gun laws in Ukraine or my musings about the monopoly of force in another context several years ago or whatever your obsession is has nothing to do with the topic at hand which is that the Russians are executing unarmed non-combatants in cold blood.

You are a man of wide ranging curiosity – how Jews made Matzos in the Middle Ages and so on. But suddenly when it comes to such “details” you are uninterested.

The satellite photos from March 18, which were downloaded to many sources before the Bucha Massacre became public, show bodies lying in the street in the positions in which they were later found when Bucha was liberated, thus falsifying the Russian claim that the bodies did not not appear until after they had left. The Russians apparently did not take into account that Bucha may have been photographed by satellite during their occupation when they invented their lie. Ooops. Had they known this, they would have invented a better lie that was consistent with the satellite photos. But they didn’t.

Unless our intelligence agencies have a time machine, it is simply not possible that the satellite photos were faked.

The US Army executed German POW’s in cold blood when they proved inconvenient (cf. THE IRISHMAN).

LOL. A Hollywood movie is your source. Frank Sheeran was a bullshitter and a drunk and maybe beat up a few guys for the union in his younger days. But the idea that he was this James Bond type hitman who went around killing people by the dozen either in the war or after it was just a tall tale of the type that drunken Irishmen love to spin.

John Carlyle Berkery, who worked in the Philadelphia mob at the same time as Sheeran, said he was “full of shit.” Berkery added, “Frank Sheeran never killed a fly. The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”

I wasn’t the one who brought up the SS. Steve did.

The title of his post was Bucha: More Like the SS or the LAPD?

As between the two, I pick SS. Which one do you vote for? Does the Russian Army remind you more of the LAPD?

Those Israelis with rifles are all well and good fighting against Fedayeen, but as you point out in your other post, Russia has a (fairly) modern army with tanks and such, against which rifles are suicidal. Unless you think that the Ukrainians should have been keeping Javelins in their gun cabinets, the lack of a 2nd Amendment in the Ukrainian Constitution is not really their problem.

As for who thought the 2nd Amendment applied to the National Guard, that would be the Supreme Court for most of the post Civil War period. It wasn’t until Heller (2008) that the court firmly recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms.

BTW, since a Javelin is something that you can bear in your arms, does the 2nd Amendment extend to the private ownership of Javelins? Asking for a friend.

Look, I understand that the 2nd Amendment is your thing like abolishing public education is Abolish Public Education’s thing. But honest to goodness, Ukraine’s problems with the Russian Army and its tanks and specifically the problems of the recently deceased citizens of Bucha (individually or collectively) would not be solved if handgun ownership was legal in Ukraine. You are off on a tangent.

Yes, and Afghans prefer naan and lamb and Ukrainians prefer rye bread and pork, but this does not change the fundamental nature of war which is that it’s difficult to take and hold someone else’s country when everyone there hates you, even the people who didn’t hate you before you invaded their country. And in the end, the Afghans, for all their primitiveness, had Western shoulder fired missiles to shoot at Russia tanks and helicopters and the Ukrainians have the same so that the battles were not that different.

According to you, the Russians are supposed to draw lessons from America’s invasion of Afghanistan but not their own. Rather strange wouldn’t you say?

As for what you are thinking, you are thinking of having lunch. Amiright?

Again, what people are doing here (the Russians love when you do this) is conflating American mistakes with Russian intentional acts. There is a big difference in the treatment at law of accidental homicide vs. intentional homicide. It’s quite obvious that many of the civilian deaths that the Russians are causing are 100% intentional murder/ executions and not accident or mistaken identity (unless you consider mistaking all Ukrainians for Nazis to be a legitimate case of mistaken identity).

Most of the people killed in this war have been Russian soldiers killed by Ukrainians,

We don’t know that. The Ukrainians (like the Russians) have not been releasing military casualty figures because they don’t want to damage morale. Furthermore, we really don’t know at this point how many civilians the Russians have killed although it appears to be many thousands. If the Russian plan to starve Ukraine out succeeds, it could be millions.

of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocents stroll are passing on information to set up ambushes or are look outs for a Javelin team.

Of course in great many cases Ukrainian civilians ostensibly taking an innocent stroll are actually taking an innocent stroll (or actually desperately seeking food because they are starving or trying to make it back home or to a cellar, etc.). The Russian appear to shoot on sight with no attempt to distinguish between the enemy spies and innocent civilians. How would they even know if they were spies if they just shot them on sight? Maybe by luck some of the people that they shot really were enemy spies but if so it’s only by chance because the Russians were going down the street and shooting everyone that they saw. No matter how many excuses you make, this is a war crime.

People here seem to want to give the Russians “the benefit of the doubt” but the Russians have done nothing to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the women who say that they were raped by Russian soldiers (often after the Russians had just executed their husbands) really had consensual sex with them but given the history, I would start with the presumption that they are telling the truth.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/world/europe/russian-soldiers-sexual-violence-ukraine.html

Killing the enemy males and taking their women is something that is deeply rooted in human history but this is the 21st century – we are supposed to be more civilized than that.

It appears that Putin’s bullshit about being there to eliminate Nazis is actually being believed by Russian soldiers. They are going around shooting Ukrainian civilians because they are convinced that all Ukrainians are Nazis and it’s OK to execute Nazis.

You would have thought that the Russians would have learned this in their own Afghan war, which in some ways is very similar to Ukraine. Russian tanks and helicopter cross the border to a (then) adjacent country to protect Russian interests. They are not greeted as liberators. After some early Russian advances, the people of that country are armed by Russia’s enemies and begin inflicting heavy losses on Russian armor, aircraft and troops. Russia is forced to retreat. The only difference is that Afghanistan played out over a period of years and not months, but the sequence is very similar.

Part of the reason why Putin did not draw the right lessons is that (despite his KGB background) he does not see himself as the successor to the Communists, he sees himself as the successor to the Czars.

In that case, he could have looked to the Russo-Japanese war for another case where the Russians got their asses kicked by a supposedly “inferior” country.

So if Bush is no different than Putin, this means that Saddam Hussein is no different than Zelensky. I disagree.

This is playing into the Russian’s game. They take the West’s bottom as their starting point and they plumb the depths of depravity from there.

Suppose that heaven forbid you once hit a pedestrian by mistake with your car. In Putin’s mode of thinking, this means that he has the right to drive down the road and intentionally mow people down, as many as he feels like hitting. After all, you killed someone with your car – who are you to say that killing people with your car is wrong?

When you are six years old, your parents tell you, “if your friends jump off of a building, that doesn’t mean that you should do it too.” As the avatar of White Christian morality (supposedly) Putin should aspire to be BETTER than America, not worse. Apparently no one taught Putin that lesson.

Most European societies don’t have a tradition of civilian gun ownership, especially not handguns. America, with its Revolutionary roots and abundant hunting tradition, is somewhat unique in this regard (and even in America for a long time it was thought that the 2nd Amendment applied mainly to the national guard and that cities could regulate handgun carry to the point where it was effectively banned except for a handful of special exceptions). Maybe America (which BTW has a very high rate of hand gun homicide by white country standards) is the outlier here and Ukraine is the “normal” country in regard to its gun ownership laws.

OTOH, when the war was imminent, Ukraine did start handing out guns so that people could form self-defense militias.

You’re changing the subject here – what you are saying has nothing to do with what happened to Oleg. Would it have helped Oleg if he had a gun? Was he suppose to take on the Russian Army by himself? If he had had one, people here would say that he was a combatant out of uniform and the Russians would have been justified in shooting him.

But in fact he was unarmed and shooting him was an undeniable war crime and no, the LAPD doesn’t drag innocent civilians out of their houses and execute them.