Desertor

Ok...STOP.
  I am not a moderator on this forum but I have @BFCElvis on speed dial.  This thread is about the war Ukraine and, yes we have discussed surrounding issues and possible 2nd and 3rd order effects this war could have on the region.  This thread is not about:
- Bafflingly narrow or simply out of date concepts such as solving human cultural overlaps with policy.
- Vilifying the entirely of all Russian peoples as somehow less than human.  No human society, culture or whatever has or ever will be entirely homogeneous, good or bad.  So sweeping ideas of how to solve a "Russian Problem" by a bunch of old guys with too much time on their hands, which they should spend learning more, are not 1) viable or 2) useful here.
- I get we are sore on Russia right now, they earned that one; however, at what point on this incredibly myopic line of thinking do we become worse than that we assign to them?  All in the name of "safety" - a whole lot of atrocity and historic marks of shame lay on the feet of "safety".  I have been to one genocide and trust me none of you know what you are talking about, so stop hijacking the thread.
- FFS, we did not even take the approaches some are proposing here during the Cold War, we went with "contain and attract/entice", and we won that one.  In fact we look back on the occasion of the McCarthy era - which is where this is going- as a dark chapter 
You wanna talk about mass deportations, forced migration, race/ethnic cleansing/purity or any other whack-job nonsense there is literally an entire internet out there, let's try and keep this one small "sane space".    

Now they just need to place a working John Deere at the head of the column... 

let's not get too sidetracked.  Zelensky, we need another high-profile strike to keep us focused please.

The proof that Biden new and believed is the Afghanistan exit. I have zero inside knowledge on this, but I am convinced knowing about Russias plans for Ukraine are why Biden got out of Afghanistan so abruptly. We just would not have been ale to respond the same way with the Taliban suddenly being flooded with Russian kit.

Indeed. However we have seen examples right here on this forum. Russian citizens saying don't worry we know we cannot believe our government propaganda, we are not fooled. Next sentence is about how bad western media is. Next post or sometimes the next few sentences sound just like the talking points of the government propaganda the just claimed not to believe. Makes your head spin.
BTW thanks for the perspective and information you have been posting. Many here really appreciate it.

Perhaps it was already here...You remember this SU-34 that supposedly hit the ground in Alchevsk? Well, it seems it was in fact Russian air defence commemorating downing of MH17 by shooting down its own plane. A worthy and noble feat.
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1548962354595069958
 
Real friends of every Russian politician/oligarch/high commander(?). Common soldiers need to limit to vodka.
But being real, it seems they really plan major holding actions on Kharkiv front and perhaps north of Kyiv. I hope Ukrainians will not get distracted by them.
Whole begginings of LDPR "patriot" movement frankly looks like cheap, Benny Hill version of IRA.

Apart from the explosion, that looks like a screenshot from CM.

And at the risk of awakening the slumbering Old Ones from their Sunken non-Euclidean Thread Beneath The Waves....

 
 
 
 

Ah crap.  You lunatics are worse than Beetlejuice, one had to say his name 3 times, and the Candyman required 5.  Peng swamp denizens need only a single whisper.  
For the newcomers, don’t ask, you do not want to know.  Let us all just be happy that particular dark chapter in the human experience is closed for good.

That's just your opinion. Given that Steve opinion is the one that counts...
If you don't like this thread go contribute something to one of the other CM sub forums instead of trying to derail this one. There are still discussion going on in other threads, dispute your claims otherwise. Go contribute to those discussions and stop being off topic here.

All right guys, this is a post where I spill my guts in quite an emotional manner, please move along if your're not up for it.
I'll start with stating that I'm really fond of this community that I accidentally found thanks to @Der Zeitgeist. While we differ in perception of some minutiae of the events unraveling in front of us, we all seem to share the same view on whats right and moral in this context. And that is really a lot, more that I could expect from most of my average 'real', 'physical' acquaintances.
For my whole life, since I was an 8 years old kid listening to my grandpa's war tales, I was deeply interested in all things military related. It is easy to get a young boy interested  in this kind of stuff - the power, the agency, the feeling of purpose this provides is unmatched by anything else in the world. Of course  when you're still an adolescent, your understanding of what war/ armed conflict means cannot be deep enough. As I was entering my adulthood, even studying military history academically, I grew to hate the very notion of armed conflict and violence. I guess getting the real grasp of what war means to a regular person was too much to me at this point. I retained my interest, but didn't really pursue it apart from theoretical knowledge. Especially, I dodged the last years of draft i Poland - neither me, nor Polish civil society in general was really ready for it in early 2000's. I was living my life happily since then, like if "The End of History" was and undisputed fact of life.
And it really changed with the start of war in Ukraine. I could easily picture myself in the position of average Kyiv or Kharkiv citizen, a guy in his late 30s, with a reasonable career in IT, concentrated on making a living for his wife and young kids, who is suddenly confronted with the need to physically fight for all that is important for him. 
Of course, in this great community we mostly  concentrate of relatively coldly analysing what is going on, trying to get a grasp of events the way a historian narrates the Battle of Kursk - it is of course THE WAY to practically understand the events and be able to draw conclusions. That's how a commander should look at it, putting his feeling aside. This however isn't the only way to talk about war, especially it isn't the only "right" way to do so. 
On a personal or local society level, what this war is is the fight between right and wrong, between liberty and slavery, between good and evil. Of course, if you are a mature individual, you understand that the good and bad are very relative terms, and it's best to avoid such violent situations at all. Yet, it if comes to the conflict like this, for me the only true way to talk about the people on the very front line, in the trenches facing The Enemy, is poetry and epic prose. The cold analysis is of course important to practical understanding of the situation, yet it doesn't do justice to a person giving his or her life for a greater cause. Having said that, I run at a few videos kept very much in the spirit I outlined here:
A music video to Sabaton's 40:1 song, really fitting the evens of the first few weeks of war. We might've forget it already, but the first days were about the grassroots citizen resistance that in many cases stopped the orcs. Videos from February and March are really reminding of what it is all about:
Here's an Azov oath from 2015, it's as powerful as it gets:
And a subtitled Ukrainian anthem:
There's a conclusion to this rant - today I sent a letter to my local Territorial Defense brigade. They are overflowing with volunteers at the moment, but I'll should be able to join in the winter, early next year at the latest.
It's OK, I'll have the time to get used to morning jogs I guess.

The benefit of money is your ability to buy stuff with it. If there's no stuff to buy money becomes useless as a commodity. Russia is currently under strict sanctions. No matter how much its incoming oil revenue, it can't get translated into 'stuff'. Can't buy cars with it, can't buy airplane parts with it, can't buy farm machinery or computers or medicines.

F**k Putin all the way to hell the effing coward.
I can take a vacation for saying this but I had to get it off my chest.

Say goodbye to your mom...

Say goodbye to your mom...

No, the equipment successfully intercepted the rounds before they could hit the ground 🤣

Part of Russian twittosphere is already suffling theory that NATO wants to starve Kaliningrad and try to provoke Russia into attacking Suwałki Gap. Probably riding on T-34-s.

Finally I begin to believe that some kind of Internacional brotherhood is possible, we just needed the kind of horrible common enemy that rusia makes...

Well said. Nothing to add. Personally I hope this will be the beginning of a more united EU, in which all countries start to think more as Europeans, instead of Dutch, Poles, Germans, Greeks, French and so on. Another positive factor is that Europe and the US showed more unity in the past few months than has been seen in a long time. 

You are only telling half the story to match your narrative.  The UNSC passed 3 resolutions to get Serbia to stop killing people (a fourth after the bombings)  and then passed 1244 which authorized a direct ground intervention by NATO (KFOR).  Further, NATO nations tried to get a resolution but were blocked by China and Russia as you note above...why?  Because Serbians were ethnic cleansing again which everyone still remembered from 1995.  This followed the precedent set in 1995 of NATO airstrikes to protect UNPROFOR, which led to UNSCR 1031 and the NATO ground intervention of IFOR.
Making a link back to US politics and "expansion" in Kosovo makes zero sense - just as it does for Libya frankly.  For Libya, UNSCR 1973 was put forward by France, Lebanon and the UK...what in the hell does this have to do with "Congressional approval"?  1973 was a classic Chapter VII, and again, Russia and China were on the SC and let it go.  Kosovo and Libya were interventions to try and stop repeat humanitarian offenders and dictators from doing worse - not some Rub Goldberg attempt by NATO to rule the world as a puppet of the US.
France intervening without the US - you have heard about Mali (Op Serval)?  In fact there were more: https://www.okayafrica.com/french-military-in-africa/
I can say NATO is a defensive alliance - the history of the Alliance has been defensive from the beginning.  NATO has done interventions on behalf of the UN and failing that, with the support from the international community.  To  make all this some self-centered US political issue is frankly insulting to all the nations and its military members who participated on those missions.
Finally, we know NATO is not a US puppet because it stayed out of Iraq in '03 (which did not have UN cover) and only went into Afghanistan when it did.  This is not the behaviour of a "puppet alliance doing the bidding of a US president who can't rule the planet based on domestic political landscape".  Russia is paranoid...because they are Russia, and no one likes/trust them because of history.  And Putin just took out a big red marker and underlined that dislike/trust for the next 50 years by unilaterally invading a neighbor.  And attempts to play "pick-and-chose" history to create a justification for Russian behaviour is just wrong.   
 

Does anyone have any real "interests" in The Balkans other than praying they don't start up more trouble ?
Libya - yeah that was a mess .

I guess what he is saying is that these "interventions" don't have a great track records and were usually excuses for pursuing American interests. Quite often they made things worse, in fact. Probably another reason why Germany isn't that keen on supporting any adventures.

To not be misunderstood, NATO serves the interventionist cause as an international fig leaf for aggressive U.S. military action.
 ‘It’s not America doing this, we’re answering the international call for justice.’
Politicians in part use this concept of multilateral international support to try and sidestep domestic support/authorization.  Recall Bush I’s team considered they didn’t have to get Congressional support, and argued the president was already authorized to answer the UN’s call to military action.  Now they wisely obtained that support prior to hostilities (unlike Clinton (vote failed for Congressional authorization) and Obama (never even sought Congressional authorization)). 

Do you think any EU members were going going to initiate a bombing campaign against Serbia without the U.S.?  It’s almost as laughable logistically as it is from a military efficacy standpoint.
As for the UNSC:
NATO countries attempted to gain authorisation from the UN Security Council for military action, but were opposed by China and Russia, who indicated that they would veto such a measure. As a result, NATO launched its campaign without the UN's approval, stating that it was a humanitarian intervention. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in the case of a decision by the Security Council under Chapter VII, or self-defence against an armed attack – neither of which were present in this case.[34]
With respect to Libya, again the U.S. president failed to obtain Congressional approval, and I already linked the UK parliament’s report on the lies used by Western politicians to justify the bombing campaign and support for the Islamist revolutionaries:
An in depth investigation into the Libyan intervention and its aftermath was conducted by the U.K. Parliament's House of Commons' cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee, the final conclusions of which were released on 14 September 2016 in a report titled Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options.[232] The report was strongly critical of the British government's role in the intervention.[233][234] The report concluded that the government "failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element."[235] In particular, the committee concluded that Gaddafi was not planning to massacre civilians, and that reports to the contrary were propagated by rebels and Western governments. Western leaders trumpeted the threat of the massacre of civilians without factual basis, according to the parliamentary report, for example, it had been reported to Western leaders that on 17 March 2011 Gaddafi had given Benghazi rebels the offer of peaceful surrender and also that when Gaddafi had earlier retaken other rebel cities there were no massacres of non-combatants.
The idea that France would have militarily intervened without the U.S. is not tenable.  This military intervention never happens without the White House agreeing to it, for what we have learned are dubious public reason.  

Regardless, neither the Serbian or Libyan interventions where ‘defensive’ responses by NATO, bolstering the notion the ‘defensive alliance’ was indeed more than that, and used to aggressively intervene in foreign countries that had never attacked a NATO member.  
That is reality.  
You can say the Russians are paranoid, but you can’t say truthfully that NATO is just a defensive alliance.  Clinton and Obama decided to use it for diplomatic cover when they lacked UN and Congressional authorization for their desire to solve problems with bombs.  

IMO, there is a difference between asking s.o. to be grateful and expecting it. If I help someone I don't say: "I helped you, now say thank you!". But like most human beings I do expect some form of gratitude even if it's just a nod or a smile. We work like that. What I don't expect to happen is being instulted for not having helped more or faster even if that was true. Doesn't mean that can't be brought up as constructive criticism in a polite way and in addition. You may like it or not and an insult might help your ego but it will not further your cause, period.
And to turn your point around, who cares for what reason someone helps as long as the result is the same? Do you honestly think the US and UK are sending all those weapons just because it is the right thing to do? Of course, geopolitical and economical reason play a roll, too, not to mention upcoming elections. Leaves a mildly bitter taste but in the end what counts here is the result.
As @Aragorn2002 said, it also doesn't sound too unrealistic. You rightly criticised Scholz more than once but the Polish government also didn't play entirely fair during the last months. Whatever, as I said above, we all have ulterior motives, that's a (sad) fact of life. Maybe we should stop bickering about it, in the long run only the populists and Putin profit from that.

Western crap? Talking about BS. That EU money was and is used to modernize the Polish economy, industry, road system, military and such. You're more Polish than you seem to think. But indeed, let's stop this BS.