kraze

Sanctions hitting the population are irrelevant because russian population is irrelevant. However sanctions making it worse for the population is a welcome collective responsibility. Remember - the majority of russians is so poor they loot washing machines and copper wedding rings. Not being able to buy a washing machine due to sanctions means nothing when you can't afford a washing machine in the first place. Now when you are a powerful moneybag and is forced to sit inside backwards s-hole that is Russia with the rest of serfs - perspective changes a bit. Every single russian coup is staged by tzar's closest people. Every single time. Remember - stalin was murdered not because he lost some war (although he technically did), but because his closest servants were fed up with him mistreating them. And russians use that guy as their prime role model and an example of the most iron gripped tzar ever. Yet even he didn't die of natural causes.

The general unspoken consensus here is that waging war for occupied Donbass territories is not worth it because, since most Ukrainians have either left, deported or outright murdered by russians (if you think Bucha is bad - imagine how many mass graves there are in 8 years of occupation of those areas), leaving only mostly collaborators and the new generation of those that grew up in 8 years in a bubble of poverty and pure hatred towards Ukraine - getting those back (and at a very bloody price) will be instant trouble for years. Since we don't have any laws in place that will somehow make them "uncitizen" (akin to Baltic States) and, even more, "uncitizen" out of a citizen (leading to instant cries of "omg they treat us like second tier people") - getting those people back means they come here with full voting rights not just for central government, but for local ones too, putting new traitors in there completely legally.

Remember if russians are to say they are against the war they will get punished, so that's why they have to support it in Russ... OH WAIT.

They should start using nearby wood to heat their building then. 40 mln of russians are doing it in a gas/oil rich Russia after all.

The sole fact that russians never stopped considering us their territory, not for a single day. And the sole fact that a mighty #1 woohoo russian army got owned so hard by a bunch of "lenin-invented" "separatists" - that it now needs low morale untrained conscripts just thrown into the meat grinder without any modern weapons (of which they quickly run out) - will show how weak putin is. Failing to defeat a "local rebellion" in "russian" land with best army ever as is IS putin's loss of face.

You think too humbly. Putin set nothing up. Hatred towards Ukrainians is many centuries old. Russian whole "culture" is built to include it in the very same way muslims hate Jews. Hatred towards Ukrainians can be seen in writings of all their "cultural" figures, who show little kindness describing victims of Russia to put it lightly. Heck Dostoyevsky wrote a huge rant about how Ukrainians (among other enslaved Slavic people) are bad because we are so ungrateful of all the "gifts" Russia provides (naming absolute monarchy among them) and want to align with evil Europe. So when a whole country has role models and culture rooted in imperialistic and, often, racist mentality - people in charge don't need to set anything up. They just need to quote Bulgakov. Remember - earliest known laws forbidding Ukrainian language go as far as 18th century. Clearly putin wasn't anywhere to be seen there.

I bet that's the idea. According to Oryx we have captured 30 T72B3 alone and that's just with visual confirmations. And lots of other T-72 variants. Our army is predominantly T64 based so repairing captured T-72 is a problem as you figure

We will see how it goes. Army command is as tight lipped as it ever was. But we can be sure there's going to be a zerg rush in the east from russians now. They have only one month left to "win" their 2 day "special operation" after all - so that they can march on bones of dead people on may 9th and not dirty unamused red square.

Because they got smashed. They didn't just "withdraw". They got surrounded and were running away, dropping lots of their stuff, incl a perfectly working Buk and a perfectly working Flap Lid of S300 system. When you leave perfectly working AD assets with one of them being a strategic control unit that Ukraine is in a dire need of - it's not a withdrawal - it's a rout.

Putin? Try Yeltsin. Or literally any random russian dictator that could've been on the throne. The sole fact that the West completely disregarded horrible russian warcrimes in multiple unjustified wars started by Yeltsin in 1992, just a year after USSR collapse, and instead kept pouring money into Russia and its army while russian soldiers raped, tortured and murdered Moldovans, Georgians and Ichkeriyans is what directly brought us here. In fact if not for Yeltsin's Russia, which was helping Serbia with those very western resources - there would've been no Srebrenica.

It didn't recover. You may not know this but 1 USD was 0.66 rub in USSR. Problem is you couldn't buy dollar anywhere and owning one was jailtime. But everybody was feeling proud it was so cheap. It's very much the same in Russia, except for jailtime for having $ (yet). As in you can't buy dollars anymore. It is forbidden. But you can SELL them to the state. At a sweet price of getting 83 rubles back for one.

https://censor.net/ua/news/3331200/slidy_tortur_tila_zi_zvyazanymy_rukamy_ta_sproby_pryhovaty_zlochyny_zvirstva_rosiyan_u_buchi_fotoreportaj Some more photos from Bucha. Authorities report that more than 600 murdered civilians were found at this point and looks like there will be more. At the same time state press RIA Novosti published an article "what Russia has to do with Ukraine" calling for a new genocide of Ukrainians, calling everyone a nazi, incl. civilians and explaining that every Ukrainian civilian should be punished due to support of the army, how Ukraine has to be destroyed and Ukrainian culture and language forbidden. So Bucha massacre is just a part of the "solution to Ukrainian question" I guess. https://censor.net/ua/news/3331176/rya_novosty_opublikuvalo_stattyu_scho_rosiya_maye_zrobyty_z_ukrayinoyu_iz_zaklykamy_do_deukrayinizatsiyi

Green line and numbers are 'for' NATO, purple 'against', yellow - 'dunno'. Note how just before the invasion support for joining NATO was at an all time low with those 18%. And note how it never even went above "deciding" 50% since. (polling started in 2002 because nobody even considered an idea before that, I guess it had something to do with putin preparing to occupy Crimea and almost doing it in 2003)

Justified for whom? In the beginning of 2014 only 18% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO and about 3/4 (undeservedly) considered russians ok guys. Everybody was more than happy to stay neutral and there were no issues apart from russian soldiers looting something and killing ukrainians in Crimea once a year just for fun - but our government always tried to sweep that under the rug and pretend it never happened. The war began in 2014, the justification was that Ukrainians are subhuman and don't deserve to have a country. And it flew perfectly well with the russian population. Pretending that NATO is somehow a reason for the war that started 8 years ago when Ukraine was extremely anti-NATO is your typical russian BS designed to give "russian-friendly" politicians in the West a reason to keep letting Russia do its crimes.

I'm pretty sure DMS knows full well it's a real war crime done by his army. And is ok with it. I talked to a lot of russians and hear them talk a lot in the last 8 years to know about this classic "let's act naїve" act. It's almost like a group mentality in relation to standing up for holiness of their country where they consciously deny every obvious fact until they can't anymore. Then they go "well Ukrainians deserved it anyway, whatcha gonna do about it?".

Clearly all the dead people are SBU plants with ketchup from nearby store for blood, destroyed cities are bad CGI, stolen washing machines and wedding rings are a sign of russian wealth and I'm "racist" - because that's logical.

I don't think there was any smart thinking like that. Remember - Ukraine was given from "a few hours" to "48 hours" before it stops existing - as an excuse to not help. I think some even hoped they won't need to bother because it will be over quickly and business will go on as usual. Europe was taken by surprise just like Russia. The sole fact that first sanctions weren't even realistically considered and had to be put together for a week kinda proves that. as a side note - Germans finally sending us 5000 helmets they were promising to send us a month before the escalation and stalling up until a week after Feb 24th.- when everybody already was sending us a wild assortment of fun shooty-killy things - became an ironic Fifth Element pool ball meme here for a while (until panzerfausts came)

I completely agree and I won't say that West isn't helping. The help is great and makes a real difference. However in retrospective the likes of Merkel aren't blameless for what's happening today as German government, for example, was saving Russia in 2014 from worse punishment and heavily downplaying the 2014 invasion and occupation, not to mention trying to hinder any military help to Ukraine over the past 8 years.

About "role models." Russian "role models" are their war criminals from WW2. Remember - Russia started WW2 with nazis, they murdered, raped and looted their way through half the Europe in just the same way nazis did, while also committing horrible atrocities against own "liberated" population. So it should not be surprising why they are what they are - when their generations grow up worshipping the likes of Zhukov, who himself, being a marshall of USSR, looted personally.

The general issue here is political behavior of Germany more than anything else. Trying to stall sanctions, trying to maneuver around them and finding excuses to keep dealing with Russia, while pretending they care, is what makes it so painful to see. Not to mention that whole "turning off Swift for russians? Sanctions? Your country will be over in a few hours" disgrace while actively blocking weapon shipments beforehand. Should at least be honest.

That's not it. In every single war russians fought they always did heinous warcrimes. Remember - they were winning in Georgia and Syria and they did literally the same thing. Massacre of Aleppo by russians was a prime example of russians just going in and killing everyone they see. And they even filmed how they tortured civilians. That video where two russian soldiers break bones of a syrian civilian with a sledgehammer gave me the creeps until they started doing that here. As I've pointed out earlier - for a westerner it's hard to comprehend how unbelievably violent russians are.

Furthermore much of russian financial stats are just as full of lies as stats about their "#2 army in the world". The proof, apart from russians looting things anyone can afford in any european country, is, quite unsurprisingly, in Google maps. A huge chunk of their population still lives in wooden barracks that have no toilets, most cities have whole streets made of those. Dirt roads are the norm in most regional centers and don't, just don't google images for "трасса лена". If their nation was wealthy - would they still be living in absolutely horrible conditions?

"Russia is generally more wealthy than Ukraine" Yes, that's why russian butchers loot washing machines Because russians are wealthy and Ukrainians are poor.

It's natural for most people to comprehend someone's behavior from their own mental/cultural position. And anything that is outside of the norm of the civilized person seems like a funny quirk - hence the genuine fascination of the western folk with russian/soviet "culture", not realizing those aren't funny quirks. Not funny at all. Hence why it's so hard to explain to any person whose neighbors are either getting high in Amsterdam or chill in cafeterias near the Eiffel Tower - how anyone can be so genuinely evil and barbaric - it seems truly unbelievable and exaggerated. And then you get Bucha and Mariupol.

All in due time. I mean in the perfect world if the West somehow decides the valid point of giving us some kinda ballistic missiles is a valid point - dropping one on $1 bln putin's palace would've been a massive psyop, considering that palace is not far and next to a Black Sea coast