Honestly what’s all the fuss about this stuff even about? It’s just a MLRS. Even if it was by far the most advanced MLRS in the world, it’s still just a MLRS. It blows up like any other piece of equipment. Same with the M777. It’s just a fuckin howitzer. A howitzer system doesn’t win you a war. It doesn’t even fucking matter at all in any way, unless you chuck in hundreds and hundreds of them fueled by hundreds of thousands of shells, backed by solid supply lines including replacement parts and service crews…
…and Ukraine is getting like a handful of the HIMARS. Who the fuck cares? They’ll get blown up like all the other shit they had at some point, but cause some civilian deaths in Donetsk in the meantime. Great. Slavyansk is still coming under siege, the cauldron around Zolote and the one around Lysychansk is still there. Ukraine is still losing hundreds and hundreds of men a day. They’re still out of ammo and armor. Their morale is still crumbling. They still don’t have any offensive capabilities.
I don’t remember the exact timeline, but that’s basically what happened around the Istanbul negotiations. Reports started coming out the Ukrainians were getting ready for concessions regarding Crimea and the PRs, neutral status, the Russians pulled out of Northern Ukraine and then suddenly all negotiations broke down followed by massive arms pledges by especially the UK and US. Reportedly Boris, like you said, told them they had to stop if they wanted further supplies.
Same thing seems to have happened right at the start of the war. Russia came in all over the place with deep operations, threatening all major cities and forced the Ukrainians to come to the negotiation table asap. As we know those broke down after Western promises, among one of the negotiators getting executed.
This carnage could’ve been prevented so many times over the last 8 years, but the nationalist forces in Ukraine and the broader West just couldn’t help themselves but to escalate further and further.
Great point and honestly thinking about it now, I can’t see a future for those refugees or future rump Ukraine, period.
Ukraine will likely lose its access to the Black Sea. It will definitely lose the East, which means almost its entire industrial base and natural resources. It has lost and is continuing to lose a substantial amount of its workforce and consumer base. The women and children have fled, the men are getting killed and wounded. It will retain a traumatized, beaten, crippled and old rump population.
And this remaining rump Ukraine, a corrupt neoliberal oligarchy even before the war, will be hit with further shock therapy (as per Von der Leyen calling for Ukraine increasing its attractiveness for investment today) and be plundered till eternity by all the debt and war leases it’s accumulating currently.
Oh and as cherry on top we flooded this place - filled with radical lunatics as is - with untrackable weapons.
Yeah no, those refugees will have no choice but stay away. Material support for them will diminish as the libs mind starts to attach to the next thing. The refugees will become increasingly disillusioned with the West as Ukraine will be dropped and abandoned eventually. Weapons and instability from rump Ukraine will permeate all of Europe eventually.
But hey, have you seen that new meme of Putler with makeup xddd haha eww Russian man gay
Absolutely true. It’s worth mentioning though that, from what we know so far, this war has seen exceptionally low civilian casualties compared to the scale of the conflict. Close to a million people under arms involved in this war, massive artillery barrages, lots of urban combat, hundreds of missile and air strikes across the country. Yet even the Ukrainian Prosecuter Generals Office today published about 280 children have died since the war started (no idea if they counted those in the PRs) and some 500 injured. Now every single one of them is a tragedy and one too many. It’s still almost unbelievably low in a war like this. And I’ve seen this number float around for some weeks now, so it isn’t really rising apparently.
This also illustrates just how fucking deadly sanctions are. A couple months or years of sanctions are orders of magnitude more deadly. Almost 4 months of conventional war, urban war with hundreds of thousands of fighters - 280 dead. A couple years of sanctions - 500,000 dead.
Unfortunately that likely means the worst and deadliest time is still to come for Ukraine due to the material disintegration of the country’s infrastructure and economy. The food, medicine shortages you mentioned will be the real killer and we all know the West will spend a minuscule amount to relieve those compared to the insane arms supplies now.
It btw also shows how little regard the US has for civilian lives in its wars.
Oh for sure. Everyone with half a brain, so literally anyone not rabidly cheering for Ukraine, knew this was happening from day 1 and that this would the cost of Western arms supplies dragging out this slaughter. The only people cheering for this were dumb as libs “supporting Ukraine”. Even staunchly pro-russian channels were aware of this tragedy and had more compassion for these losses than Western libs.
Still shocking seeing these numbers confirmed imo. 20,000+ entirely pointless causalties per month is just staggering. And the worst is still to come in the closing Donbass cauldron.
Same with Trump really. Guy weakened US global power massively and severely reduced US power projection. At this point though I reckon it’s fair to say it’s not really due to these 2 guys, but due to the internal logic of the empire. It demands overextension, interventions, etc and this imperative now inevitably leads to multipolarity, reduced US power abroad and at home. Unfortunately to keep this up material conditions for the US population will continue to be worsened. So it’s going to get more violent and insane no matter who the next puppet in the oval office will be.
BRICS expansion can’t come soon enough to build a support network for the third world to shield them from the fallout of the empire’s slow death.
Well good thing they’re currently waging total economic war against one of the largest exporters of metals in the world, while doing their best to alienate China as well.
On that point I’ve seen a couple pictures of Ukrainians using American howitzers. Apparently they’ve shipped them without the electronic targeting system. Could be related.
I assume for the same reason anyone would ever buy any crypto - in hopes of large rates of growth. That’s all it ever was anyway, no? If you continue to buy at low points and sell at high points the crashes would even become desirable to maintain the rate of profit even when the highs in absolute term don’t reach as high?
Again, I haven’t really looked into this stuff since like 2018, but that’s what I figured back then. If this is something different - and media is making it sound like it is - I don’t understand how especially the relevance of the stablecoin stuff.
Can someone update a comrade only tangentially informed about the crypto-sphere? Read this article earlier today and that opened up more questions than it answered. Is this more substantial than the countless previous crashes/downturns?
This has been going on for a while. Just look at Berlin - full of well-off petty bourgeois/labour aristocracy kids moving to the hip, somewhat run-down, “scene” parts of town, buying >100$ tshirts in exclusive boutiques, wearing golden signet-rings, living in unaffordable houses “among the poors”, wasting hundreds of bucks per month on blow, other drugs and raves, always carefully looking run-down and wasted to fit in with the aesthetic of the actual poor parts of the city and its population. It’s become a fashion statement to live as close as possible and look as close as possible to the most desperate parts of the population. Heck, if you manage to score some friends from the lower classes for clout even fucking better.
It’s the final commodification and abstraction of poverty and it’s fucking disgusting.
Media (Der Spiegel) already publicly speculating about a “Kanzlersturz” (chancellor-removal) by the CDU/CSU bloc. Probably not going to happen, but still insane that a chancellor barely half a year into his term is being threatened by the usually big industrialist party for not escalating a conflict threatening to destroy German industry.
The guy’s a milquetoast neoliberal fad, but how crazy is it that a guy like that could be facing removal for not being hawkish and suicidal enough. Imagine a political class and public so hell bent on destroying themselves they’re attacking someone like this.
That’s the weird thing about it. There’s nothing to gain here for anyone but the US. Ukraine is not and was never going to join NATO. Neither workers nor industry stand to gain anything from this. Not even the politicians making these calls stand to gain from it due to the social upheaval and unrest this is causing and which they are aware of.
Seized in connection with the sanctions against Russia and thus directly related to the war in Ukraine and the economic & energy war surrounding it.