Will Russia Attack Ukraine?

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Originally Posted by Riverman

The situation is indeed horrible and the Ukrainians wanted a partisan style war, which is always dirty and creates a cruel atmosphere which leads to atrocities.
The Russians didn't wanted that war, don't forget that, ever. They only started it because Selenski didn't negotiate about the US-NATO presence, the suppression of Russians and the safety of Donbas, which got attacked. He refused to negotiate and ignored Minsk II. The Russians tried all diplomatic options before.
Never forget that!
And the bolded part of you comment is a blatant propaganda lie, because the Russians in Mariupol don't need to destroy the city to break the local people, but the Nationalist militias which hide between them!
And they need to do it because of the advanced sniper equipment these fighters got from the West!
Most of them are Western Ukrainians and mercenaries, no locals!
To describe these hard and horrible fights as intended "to break the local population" is such a sneaky lie and blatant cynicism!
The Russians hate that they have to do it, but the nationalist militias use the civilian structures for sniper attacks with advanced tools at hand.
Every reasonable and fair observer notes that. To distort the facts is unworthy behaviour.
No doubt horrible things being done by both sides in this war, it should have never started and end as soon as possible.
The problem is that Selenski with the Western Ukrainian nationalists and the USA in his back refuses to negotiate in a fair and serious manner, just like he did in the last three years.
That is the problem, that was the problem. He acted extremely hostile against Russia and the Russians, even though he was voted for by the Ukrainians to make peace...

The Russians do enough bad things, they escalated the war and so forth, commit atrocities as the war gets prolonged, just like the Ukrainians do. Peace is the only solution and what the Selenski-Biden alliance is doing is only good for escalating things even more. This was true when Selenski got elected, it became even more true once Biden was in office, these two just confronted Russia and sought war. That doesn't whitewash Russia at all, but it isn't just "black and white".

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The militia hide is also a Kremlin PR. Because partly they are civilians and they live there.... Again I don't make it 'good' against 'evil'. As you have seen earlier I can see that the Azov Battalion has very radical elements (wiki):
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Azov's founding member Andriy Biletsky, leader of the far right Social-National Assembly (SNA), had stated in 2010 that "the historic mission of our nation" was to lead the "white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival […] a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen", an ideology that political scientist Richard Sakwa traces to the National Integralism of 1920s and 1930s.[97] In 2014, political science lecturer Ivan Katchanovski commented to Radio Sweden on the founder's origins as Patriot of Ukraine, saying: "The SNA/PU [Patriot of Ukraine] advocates a neo-Nazi ideology along with ultranationalism and racism. The same applies to […] members of the Azov battalion and many football ultras and others who serve in this formation."

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Nevertheless this is part of a tangle. The Kremlin has plaid a part in this. Based on dubious claims, it denies Ukraine's right to exist. That in itself fuels nationalism, because many Ukrainians have no appetite for Kremlin domination (nor are they per se Rus). In addition, Putin is constantly stirring up the Donbas. So action is reaction. That is not a good evil, but compare it with a wasp's nest where a stone is thrown.


So there we have the fundamental difference. I am convinced that in a democratic state several 'ethnicities' can coexist. And in the Ukraine we are in many cases dealing with a hybrid situation. So however you look at it whatever major misfortune you see it is Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, it is not a necessity. You can make it a necessity, but I don't share the argumentation underneath, because that's one of ethnicity (which is also arbitrary) and really from the idea of ​​the restoration old Russia and it's sphere of influence. To me this is illegitimate.

So you can talk 'til you drop but at the core I think the authoritarian, repressive Putin regime should find its Waterloo and not impose its will on other countries.

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Originally Posted by Tomenable

You misunderstood what I wrote - it is China which claims Russia's current territory as their own, not the other way around.

At least these red-colored territories of Russia (and perhaps even more of Russia's Far East and Siberia) are Chinese claims:

https://i.imgur.com/Kx1HYtH.png

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Personally, I think the world would benefit from China being broken up into smaller countries, and the communist government liquidated.

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Originally Posted by Jovialis

Personally, I think the world would benefit from China being broken up into smaller countries, and the communist government liquidated.

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Personally, I think the world would benefit from RUSSIA being broken up into smaller countries.

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Originally Posted by Jovialis

Personally, I think the world would benefit from China being broken up into smaller countries, and the communist government liquidated.

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Of course that will never happen, especially when even Republicans are servile to their interests, and are protected even by people like Trump.

The internal contradiction of the Western capitalism, ultimately being self-annihilating.

"The capitalists will sell us the rope which we will hang them with"

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Conflicts of interest[edit]

As Secretary of Transportation, Chao appeared in at least a dozen interviews with her father, James, a shipping magnate with extensive business interests in China.^[65] The Transportation Department's inspector general cited numerous instances where Chao's office helped promote her family's shipping business.^[66] The inspector general asked the Trump administration's Justice Department in December 2020 to consider a criminal investigation into Chao, but the DOJ refused.^[66] Ethics experts said the appearances raised ethical concerns, as public officials are prohibited from using their office to profit others or themselves.^[65] Federal disclosures cited by The New York Times revealed a gift to Chao and her husband Mitch McConnell from Chao's businessman father James, valued between $5 million and $25 million.^[67] The company her father founded (and which her sister, Angela, currently runs), The Foremost Group, has extensive ties to the Chinese state and Chinese elites.^[67] It obtained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of loans from a bank owned by the Chinese state, has substantial interests tied to a major shipyard funded by and long-term contracts with a steel producer owned by the Chinese state. In what The Times described as "a rarity for foreigners", Angela and James Chao have served on the boards of a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder, and Angela has been on the board of the Bank of China, as well as the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (which was created by the government of China).^[67]
From January 2018 to April 2019, 72% of the total tonnage shipped by Foremost was shipped to and from China. The Foremost Group has almost no footprint in the United States other than its headquarters in New York.^[67] During the period when Chao appeared with her father at promotional events for the family company, the US Department of Transportation repeatedly sought to cut funding and loan guarantees for domestic American shipping companies, shipyards, and shipbuilders. These proposed budget cuts were rejected by Congress in a bipartisan fashion.^[67] Chao's Department also sought for three years to prevent funding for a program that supports the viability of small domestic US shipyards, and a separate program that issues loan guarantees for the construction or reconstruction of ships with American registration.^[67]
Chao pledged in 2017 to sell the stock she had earned while she was on the board of directors of Vulcan Materials, one of the largest suppliers of road-paving materials in the United States,^[68][69] by April 2018.^[68][70] After the Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets reported in late May 2019 that she was still holding the stock, worth $250,000 to $500,000, she sold it on June 3, 2019,^[70][69] for a gain of $50,000 since April 2018.^[70]
In June 2019, Politico reported that in 2017 Chao had designated her aide Todd Inman as a special liaison "to help with grant applications and other priorities" for Transportation Department projects in the state of Kentucky, the only state to have such a liaison. Inman was to act as an intermediary between the Department, local Kentucky officials, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is Chao's husband. This resulted in grants of at least $78 million for projects in Mitch McConnell strongholds Boone County and Owensboro. Inman had worked on the 2008 and 2014 re-election campaigns of McConnell; McConnell and local officials brought up the grants when he announced in Owensboro in December 2018 that he was running for re-election in 2020. Inman later became Chao's chief of staff.^[71]
In September 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform began an investigation into whether she used political office to benefit her family's business interests.^[72][73] A September 16 letter from the Oversight committee to Chao documented allegations that the Department of Transportation was forced to cancel a trip to China in 2017 that Chao had planned to take because State Department ethics officials challenged her attempts to include her family members in official meetings with the Chinese government.<sup>[74]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine...pector_General</sup>

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Originally Posted by Vallicanus

Personally, I think the world would benefit from RUSSIA being broken up into smaller countries.

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I don't know, I don't see much brightness in "a battle of the oligarchs" also about the red button....

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Originally Posted by Northener

am convinced that in a democratic state several 'ethnicities' can coexist.

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Sure, but why should they, if there is a fairly clear cut border and people in these regions can just vote? There is no reason to press them into a state they don't want to prove the point. Mariupol too was almost taken by the separatists in the 2014 war. If it would, it would be now clearly pro-Russian and part of the Donbas Republics. But Western Ukrainian nationalists came in and fought back, which is why this is now a front city. It wouldn't be otherwise.

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And in the Ukraine we are in many cases dealing with a hybrid situation. So however you look at it whatever major misfortune you see it is Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, it is not a necessity.

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I am and always was against this invasion. But I understand why he did it and now it happened, we have to find a way out of this mess without just blaming one side, because the Ukrainians and Americans have their fair share.

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So you can talk 'til you drop but at the core I think the authoritarian, repressive Putin regime should find its Waterloo and not impose its will on other countries.

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Its not on "other countries", its about a specific, corrupted, American manipulated, anti-Russian regime which acted arrogant, brutal and insolent. If the Kievan regime would have serious, honest politicians which did a negotiate in a honourable way, all would be very different. But this Selenski regime is a disgrace and that he betrayed his voters, including many Russian voters in Ukrainian, which voted for him to make peace and reconcile with Russia is a massive betrayal. You can see on the map I posted some pages ago, that the Western nationalist Ukrainian core voted for Poroshenko. He was the alternative candidate, pushed by the oligarchs and the US services, to catch the vote of the "more moderate" and even some pro-Russians, to prevent a second term of the even more nationalist Poroshenko. They got tricked into this war, and into this corrupted authoritarian regime, with false promises, by skewed media coverage and massive propaganda.
Poroshenko at least said who he was and what he does, but that regime is a trickster. You can read up on the election campaign and the people behind it yourself.

Now he gets all the support from the Western Ukrainian nationalists, because he followed the warpath, he just made it more "skilled" and manipulative, creating the "Ukrainian victim" narrative better than Poroshenko could have ever done and he is now hardcore anti-Russian, which is their main concern, anyway.

Mariupol is a largely Greek city, not Russian.

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Originally Posted by Jovialis

Personally, I think the world would benefit from China being broken up into smaller countries, and the communist government liquidated.

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China is very homogenous ethnically compared to Russia. There are only very few regions where ethnic Han are not majority.

Well, you gotta admit that Chinese Xiaomi Redmi phones are much better than American phones.

China is a very ancient civilization and it will continue to exist even 5000 years after the last memories of the USA and Russia fade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy9s4cYJa2I

The Chinese will be the first who enter the era of transhumanism, because the West is too politically correct to do this.

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Sure, but why should they, if there is a fairly clear cut border and people in these regions can just vote? There is no reason to press them into a state they don't want to prove the point. Mariupol too was almost taken by the separatists in the 2014 war. If it would, it would be now clearly pro-Russian and part of the Donbas Republics. But Western Ukrainian nationalists came in and fought back, which is why this is now a front city. It wouldn't be otherwise.

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Or the reverse why should they not!
Ethnicity is a deciding factor for you apparently. As it was before with the believers in Europe (take Catholic and Protestant) it can also be the case here, a peaceful coexistence is more than dividing into alleged ethnicities with high fences around it and armed to the teeth. Is not necessary.

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I am and always was against this invasion. But I understand why he did it and now it happened, we have to find a way out of this mess without just blaming one side, because the Ukrainians and Americans have their fair share.

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Its not on "other countries", its about a specific, corrupted, American manipulated, anti-Russian regime which acted arrogant, brutal and insolent. If the Kievan regime would have serious, honest politicians which did a negotiate in a honourable way, all would be very different. But this Selenski regime is a disgrace and that he betrayed his voters, including many Russian voters in Ukrainian, which voted for him to make peace and reconcile with Russia is a massive betrayal. You can see on the map I posted some pages ago, that the Western nationalist Ukrainian core voted for Poroshenko. He was the alternative candidate, pushed by the oligarchs and the US services, to catch the vote of the "more moderate" and even some pro-Russians, to prevent a second term of the even more nationalist Poroshenko. They got tricked into this war, and into this corrupted authoritarian regime, with false promises, by skewed media coverage and massive propaganda.
Poroshenko at least said who he was and what he does, but that regime is a trickster. You can read up on the election campaign and the people behind it yourself.
Now he gets all the support from the Western Ukrainian nationalists, because he followed the warpath, he just made it more "skilled" and manipulative, creating the "Ukrainian victim" narrative better than Poroshenko could have ever done and he is now hardcore anti-Russian, which is their main concern, anyway.

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It's not one and the same.
These are the long lines in history:

https://www.raamoprusland.nl/dossier...erial-delirium

This is eloquent written with a right eye for history not that imperial Kremlin propaganda kind of thing. You can't refute this history!

China is also helping Africa to develop.

Yes, we can say that they are colonizing Africa - but they are doing it in a much more humanitarian way than Europeans once did.

Jovialis - in your US state, the oldest building is probably younger than my grandma.

Compare this to China which is among the very few still surviving Ancient civilizations.

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Originally Posted by Tomenable

Jovialis - in your US state, the oldest building is probably younger than my grandma.

Compare this to China which is among the very few still surviving Ancient civilizations.

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Well, their own government did a lot to destroy the history of that civilization in the Cultural Revolution. So Marxism is self-annihilating too.

Pentagon Report:

THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States

https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/D...0%20201301.pdf

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Originally Posted by Jovialis

Pentagon Report:

THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States

https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/D...0%20201301.pdf

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This is what the Chinese Communist government thinks of the United States:

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The rise of multiculturalism in the United States, and the West more broadly, has destroyed, or “decentered” in the language of the multiculturalists, the American Creed, in favor of an explicitly multiracial, multicultural society that celebrates differences rather than requiring assimilation. Huntington’s American Creed has been replaced by an ideology that rejects its core principles and beliefs in favor of promoting any culture, so long as it is not Western. From the perspective of the Chinese, it is hard what to make of this. In their view, the United States is explicitly rejecting the principles that made the country great, and united it. It is fair to say that the Chinese have not fully thought through the impact of multiculturalism on the West. According to Sinologist John Copper, the Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline. Their belief is that it is bad for the United States, weakening it at a time when the United States is already weakened due to its alien political ideology and different cultural values, with too strong a focus on individualism. From the Chinese viewpoint, all of this conspires to cause the breakdown of American society and the lack of purpose in life for most Americans. Yet, at the same time, they embrace American popular culture. In essence, they think the American people are good but the American government and dominant beliefs are bad. One major implication of this is that the Chinese government may have less of a desire to confront the U.S. due to the expectation that it will collapse of its own internal discord.

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Originally Posted by Vallicanus

Personally, I think the world would benefit from RUSSIA being broken up into smaller countries.

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Russia is weak, I'd rather see China go down first.

The Chinese do not need to attack the United States, instead, they have been galvanizing internal discord. They have been buying corporations, and other institutions, and push woke rhetoric. They create bots on social media that play both sides of the fence on controversial topics, in order to incite unrest.

This has been proven:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...l-media-294315

The Chinese government is trying to facilitate the downfall the USA, by stirring up internal discord, as the 2013 Pentagon report shows.

https://youtu.be/6vyY4rnJ7lA

Российские солдаты отправляют через СДЭК краденные в Украине вещи в РФ. Мозырь, Беларусь, 2.04.2022 // Russian soldiers send items stolen in Ukraine to the Russian Federation via SDEK. Mozyr, Belarus, 2.04.2022

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Originally Posted by ihype02

Russia is weak, I'd rather see China go down first.

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The Chinese live in their own lands.

Unlike Russians and Americans both of whom live in lands stolen from Indigenous Siberians and Native Americans, respectively.

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Originally Posted by Jovialis

The Chinese do not need to attack the United States, instead, they have been galvanizing internal discord. They have been buying corporations, and other institutions, and push woke rhetoric. They create bots on social media that play both sides of the fence on controversial topics, in order to incite unrest.

This has been proven:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...l-media-294315

The Chinese government is trying to facilitate the downfall the USA, by stirring up internal discord, as the 2013 Pentagon report shows.

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May be we should start another topic about the Chinese.....

And Chinese and woke? I don't think to the Chinese woke is saying anything at all....don't overestimate the significance of an American phenomenon Jovialis. A wok says without doubt more to the Chinese ;)

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Originally Posted by ihype02

Russia is weak, I'd rather see China go down first.

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Good luck with that!

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Originally Posted by Northener

May be we should start another topic about the Chinese.....

And Chinese and woke? I don't think to the Chinese woke is saying anything at all....don't overestimate the significance of an American phenomenon Jovialis. A wok says without doubt more to the Chinese ;)

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No, you don't get it.

They think USA being multicultural is bad, and they are pushing wokeism to created internal discord. They think we are weak becausewe have woke ideology here.

Read the Pentagon report I posted.

Anyone know if Russia is pegging it's ruble to gold, Z5000 rubles per gram?