Russia and Ukraine

[Deesse23]

I dunno Thump. Bel just might.

Bet he'd only do it once, though.

I'm not justifying any of those things. The accusation is absurd.

Detailed analysis of Neo-Nazi involvement in Ukraine:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.100...98724-3_11

Also many other relevant books at this publisher.

[The Grand Nudger]

If you read the report it shits on the Russian propaganda right from the outset. That’s old news to anyone who’s been watching the whole thing, since even the Russians acknowledged it was a bunch of bullshit years back.

[Leonardo17]

BrianBoru:
 
Russia is still the world’s 3rd biggest military and has a huge nuclear arsenal. So the only thing you can do is to keep supporting Ukraine.
 
Fake Messiah:
 
I’m wondering if D. Trump isn’t cutting the tentacles of Russia and China one by one. (Venezuela, Cuba, perhaps Iran). Since they took Maduro a week ago I have started thinking that there is some “more intelligent” element somewhere that is guiding D. Trump and his team about the more sensitive issues of this world.


 
- This war is a meaningless war. It’s not about the Tsar trying to expand his empire. It’s not even about The Party resisting to Western Capitalism.
 
+ None of these two would have sacrificed that many man for this little territory.

[The Grand Nudger]

Correction. Russia has the 2nd best army in Ukraine, and the 5th largest in the world. Whereas Ukraine has the best army in Ukraine, and the 20th in the world ranked by size. Repeatedly violating russias red lines and ignoring their nuclear threats as they continue to embarrass what's left of the russian forces.

I find your wonderings about trump to be akin to imagining a dogs next chess move. What about that man or his comically incompetent regime has ever suggested, to you, that there's anything more intelligent going on?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Trump getting something right is an example of the broken-clock theory. His understanding of foreign affairs could be fitted in a thimble with room to spare.

[Fireball]

The precision military (unlawful) abduction of Maduro was executed by trained professionals of the US military. The chump's involvement doesn't even extend to pointing the weapon, solely the order to fire. Anything greater in effort would hurt his bone spurs.

[The Grand Nudger]

They just brought him to a hastily constructed room to watch it happen, like a surprise screening of the patients favorite show.

[Fake Messiah]

Putin’s great-power project faces the ‘end of an era’

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, he promised Russians they would “do it again” — send their armed forces westward and sweep to victory like the Soviet Union did against Germany.

Today, the Russian president has kept half that boast. As of this week, the war Putin once hoped would be over in just three days has stretched out for longer than Moscow spent fighting the Nazis.

To make matters worse, even as Moscow bogs down in Ukraine, the global network of allies Putin spent two decades building seems to be falling apart, put to the test by an unexpectedly belligerent U.S. President Donald Trump.

During its almost-four-year campaign in Ukraine, Moscow has captured only a wedge of the country, at a cost of some 1.1 million Russian casualties and mounting disruption at home. This month some 600,000 Russians were left without electricity in the border region of Belgorod following a Ukrainian missile strike.

Meanwhile, internationally, there appears to be little Putin can do to stop his allies from being picked off one by one.

The Kremlin has been on the back foot in the Middle East since late 2024, when the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria deprived it of a reliable partner in the region.

Moscow was also seemingly unable to protect its closest friend in South America earlier this month when the United States captured Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a leader who had dutifully made the trip to Moscow for Putin’s Victory Day Parade in May last year.

Embarrassingly, Moscow wasn’t even able to fend off the unprecedented U.S. seizure of an oil tanker flying a Russian flag.

Just a year ago, Putin signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement with Tehran. Now the regime — which supplied Russia with killer Shahed drones for its fight in Ukraine — is in danger of being toppled by protesters whom Trump has indicated he could intervene militarily to defend.

“An entire era is coming to an end,” wrote a pro-war military blogger under the pen name Maxim Kalashnikov on Sunday, reflecting growing criticism of the Russian leadership.

Russian authorities, he argued, had spent too much time trying to create an image that the country was a great power rather than taking steps to ensure it became one. The promise that “‘we can do it again’ has failed,” Kalashnikov concluded.

Journalists friendly to the Iranian regime have reported that Moscow in recent weeks supplied Iran with Russian-made Spartak armored vehicles and attack helicopters, presumably to help fend off protesters, said Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran relations and a contributor to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“But, of course, the Iranians have no illusions that if the situation were to become truly critical, Russia would simply step aside, as it did in the case of Bashar al-Assad,” he said, referring to the fall of the Syrian dictator’s regime in 2024 and his subsequent exile to Russia.

The reality is that the Moscow-inspired alliance was always largely fiction, said former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev.

“Neither Venezuela nor Iran are part of any Russian empire,” he said. Following its invasion of Ukraine, “it was important [for Russia] to show that it was not alone, but that’s propaganda.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir...ect-faces/