kraze

So according to him Ukraine totally asked a russian crew to go and die in a fire so we could make a great movie. On multiple occasions.

Can still hand them off quietly. Could've pretended Luxembourg is giving us planes and see how Russia falls all over itself trying to somehow retaliate at a landlocked non-NATO member in the middle of Europe, surrounded by two nuclear NATO countries.

They prepared the population. Everybody believed Kyiv will fall in 2 days. Including putin himself. In fact russians mocked us for years that it will take 2 days tops. Well ok, putin gave his troops an additional day to capture Kyiv for 3 days total - in case something would go horribly wrong.

Clarification needed about who encircles who - seeing as how rear fuel convoys catch on fire daily

Painting MiG29s in Ukrainian colors and letting Ukrainian pilots fly them home isn't escalation, it's transfer of Ukrainian jets to Ukrainian airspace. If putin really wants to justify a fight with NATO - he doesn't need any real reason to. Just like he never needed one for every single russian invasion ever. He may just come on TV and say "today NATO bombed Voronezh, now we need to invade Lithuania and kill neonazis in there" - and it will work smoothly.

Not sure what exactly has putin done to build up Russia in the past decades... The vast majority of russians live in poverty, it's just that their GDP numbers are written on the other side of a piece of imported toilet paper that has their "modern" army stats written on it, while they fight in an Afghanistan era helmets. According to russian Vedomosti Russia today sees a shortage of cashier check tape due to sanctions because they import the damn thing. As for the "land bridge" - Putin doesn't give a rat's arse about that one, he wants whole Ukraine, it's ideological to him. Not to mention that having a "land bridge" wouldn't quite work a few months down the line when cops that protect the dwarf will have to wipe their butt using the birch tree bark. As for China - russian banks are now mass moving towards yuan as a primary foreign currency. Not sure that being so dependent on one of the least reliable countries similar to yours will be much of a help.

Question is how crazy is everyone in and around the chain of nuclear command. It's not like he has a big red button connected remotely to every nuke in the country - especially considering extremely dated and rusty russian military communication technology. That order will have to go through a lot of people willing to die in a nuclear fire. In fact Cold War history knows a few of such examples with near launches caused by human error and stopped by cool heads.

@sburke Oh I completely agree. In fact I fully agree that this is our fault due to trying to be "friends" with Russia and feeding the corrupt and, in all honesty, the West owes us nothing since we have no defense agreements of any kind. I'm more upset about the West not realizing that a war with Russia is inevitable and it will be much much worse for everybody if Russia is allowed to go without higher army losses in Ukraine. History shows time and again that when an insane dictator that has fanatical following isn't stopped prematurely - it ends with a huge tragedy. It's not like Russia stops being nuclear when it invades, say, Lithuania in a few years. I mean Putin did say his territorial claims extend to everything that wasn't in NATO pre-1997, e.g. whole USSR and its fake "people's republics" aka "Warsaw Pact".

Because everybody in the West is so afraid of Russia (what if it attacks NATO now in 2022 and not inevitably in 2025 or whenever) they barely agreed to supply us with weapons (exception being UK, that just said screw it and went all in with NLAW and Stingers) - so this saga with planes looks more like "we don't want to upset Russia any more, but want to pretend like we are doing something about mass civilian murder"

Russia is an empire. Like any other empire in history - it consists of dozens of different ethnicities. And to keep that all together and not infighting permanently - an empire has to erase ethnicity's culture, language, identity - naturally nobody would agree to any of that peacefully - so an empire has to genocide its way through all the resistance to forced change until people are turned into a grey mass with no past and no roots. It's been like that since ancient Egypt and Rome and it's no different now. Furthermore an empire has to expand to exist, because empires are extremely conservative and improving living conditions among other things isn't the priority because of that - so stagnation is death of an empire. Proven by the USSR and British Empire in 20th century. With Ukraine, however, it's amplified by the ever falsified russian history, where they want their roots to start in Kyivan Rus and not in Golden Horde, khans of which created Muscovy, because for a supposed empire to have its roots among barbarians is degrading or something. So they just have to have Kyiv or their history makes no sense even to them. This thing with ethnic cleansings here isn't something recent - it's been going on for 300 years. Russia first captured most of Ukrainian territories only in 18th century and since then they did continuous genocides with millions of victims, down to literally forbidding us from speaking our native language - in fact it was forbidden as recently as 1991. Hence why you see putin spewing insanity about "Lenin inventing Ukraine" and other fascist nonsense about "borderlands" (Kyiv being a "borderland" of 'Kyivan' Rus was always funny to us). As for us - seriously we didn't hate russians up until 2014, we would've happily never cared about them at all. I mean I personally wasn't even interested in what's going on in their country and even happily ignored their trashy behavior towards us up until 2014.

Russian missiles didn't stop our MiGs from turning a number of russian pilots into the future sunflowers

This answers the question if copium cages stop anything

If the world beating a single country into the dirt together can be considered a "world war"

We flushed them out in general (hence russians completely failing to grasp the picture here), so you can do too. And Ukraine is considerably more corrupt than any EU country

"The embassy responded to Wisley's action on Monday by calling it a "criminal act of insanity against a peaceful diplomatic mission." I strongly suggest Ireland check that embassy for the presence of heavily armed leprechauns without insignia, a bunch of hesbollah and ISIS terrorists and a Z-marked T-72 or two.

If EU ever considered Russia to be reliable - they must've been effing blind. Russia has been abusing their gas deliveries to Ukraine (and ALL other non-EU neighbors) since 1991 to enforce whatever political decisions they wanted.

Ugh, this was a second invasion of Georgia, not even the first one, which happened back in 1993. But back in the '90s and up until 2014 the West tried to pretend like nothing was happening, like Russia had the right to ex-USSR countries and everybody kept shush about it because russian money and resources mattered more than lives in a dozen countries russians invaded in the past 30 years. Everybody was crossdressing into a peace dove as russian soldiers were cutting out civilian intestines and popping no less civilian eyeballs all around the globe. So, of course, spoon feeding the new Hitler brought us to this moment and now everybody is very very 'concerned'.

Two weeks? Putin himself said that if he wanted - he'd take Kyiv in two days. And apparently that was the plan. The only plan. The fact that we are now seeing russian tanks dressed up for a parade getting tractor'd on the frontlines and a muppet Yanukovich being constantly moved back and forth between Russia and Minsk, making idiotic statements - proves that russians are still out of touch with reality and stubbornly act as if it was 2002. They expected Yanukovich being put in power and greeting their parade tanks in Kyiv on Feb 27th with happy liberated Ukrainians throwing flowers at them, glad that we have no freedom anymore and going to concentration camps the next day with a big smile. It's as if all of Russia is suffering from collective insanity and nobody at any point have said "waidaminute"

I don't think it 'participated' in a parade. I think it was going to participate in a victory parade in Kyiv on Feb 26/27 in that insane russian reality

Do you realistically believe NATO wouldn't end up fighting Russia directly? Imagine scenario where Ukraine falls or Russia survives - in fact any scenario where Russia keeps existing as is - guarantees a direct confrontation. Russia is like planet Earth's cancer and history proves time and again that if cancer is left untreated - it will progress exponentially - so not getting involved now means a lot bigger problems later. Remember - only a year ago nobody believed there will be a "big war in Europe". so even if NATO wins - casualties may be in 6 or 7 digits. If not an outright nuclear annihilation.

Nope, you are wrong. NATO is very much off the table at this point for one major reason - NATO is extremely afraid of Russia and will never accept Ukraine ASAP. They are afraid of helping us now directly - do you realistically think they will want (have the balls) to defend us if we were a member? It's the reason Baltic states are so worried because they see how potentially not ready NATO is and there's a chance it won't protect them either. So in the absolutely "best" case scenario joining will take years, years we wouldn't have, especially if agreeing to any of russian terms. However with what little indirect help NATO does provide it's possible to survive this and see Russia finally cease existing.

Occupied Donbass is full of such events, "Izolyatsiya" itself is basically a prime example of such concentrarion camp, that also included torturing women through rape by russian soldiers. And I'm pretty sure there's no difference between russian soldiers in there and anywhere else. It's just that we don't know much yet about what they are doing on the currently occupied territories, apart from what is captured by the CCTV - but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Pretty sure nearly 40 bombed hospitals, 200 destroyed schools and whole villages ceasing to exist - means russians know perfectly well what they are doing very deliberately. And that's before we even get to pilots and arty POWs talking, as well as their docs filled with coordinates for civilian targets.

"russian conscript kids" came here to kill, rob and rape - and many are doing it right now, mind you.

Time won with Minsk accords was used absolutely to its fullest to change a lot of things in the army. This is why it was such a shock for russians when they realized they aren't fighting an army that was stuck in the '80s together with them, like it was back in 2014 - but an army that trained hard for years by NATO in how to do logistics and insurgency. Of course UAF isn't as effective as US army in that regard - but the difference is major.