Were Russia and US ever allies? (Split from How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?)

[fromderinside]

For starters there probably never been more than100 US visitors to Georgia in any year since 1945

How is that .... I don't even know what to say to that.
Are you taking all the pills which you are supposed to take?

Of course you don't. You have not an answer to give.

As for pills. Sure I take a few each day. I'm 81, Diabetic, have vascular issues, and I am living with heart failure.

What's your excuse?

 

[barbos]

I'm 81

OK. That's interesting and explains some things.

What's your excuse?

Thanks for asking.
I have no excuse. No serious health problems.
Normal weight, 3 kg over skinny 20 year old myself but working on it.
Normal waist to height ratio. Normal blood pressure, normal glucose level and the rest of the tests. Full hair, some gray but that's normal at my age, sleep well. Can walk 20km in one trip without any aftereffects. Can easily do more, but It depends on shoes and it's really a problem in Russia. Non brand name shoes are utter crap, brand names are expensive and are often crap (fake?) too. I think they simply do better shoes for the US than for Russia. I blame Putin for shoe situation.
Memory is fine, speak english without russian accent. They say speaking foreign language(s) delay dementia, so that's good. But then they also say it's unheard of for people with my level of education/occupation to have normal (old age) dementia anyway.

Now, back to Georgia. What I said are the well known facts. But I am not surprised you don't know them. They are not convenient and that's why US media does not talk about them.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Critical Threats Update.

Reading today's update, it sounds like the nationalists, Russia's scum de la scum are getting vocal. Chechen dog shit, Ramzan Kadyrov is sick of waiting for the Kremlin and calling for a mobilization. In other reporting, he has proposed a draft resolution for a mobilization of all Chechen males 18-26. Of course other governors and propagandists who will have no actual skin in the game are echoing these calls. Those with skin in the game are calling on the oligarchs to fund and fight this senseless war. Moscow citizens are still nearly clueless as to what is going on. They're staring at the Ferris wheel.
What has Putin to say? You remember Putin. That space between the rock and the hard place looks to be getting a bit tighter.

 

[barbos]

I don't know. Haven't looked into it. Show me why you think it's Ukraine, and we'll talk.

You must be working in US State Department, cause that's exactly what they said.
Surprising (not really that surprising) lack of interest.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Do you not understand that the Ukrainian troops dug in where they expected the attack to come? Thus they expected the Russians to attack civilian areas--like they usually do.

That's not what happened. They would put a tank near school and shoot into roughly russian forces direction. Russians respond, then ukro-nazi photograzphers take a picture from a drone making sure that tank is not visible.

Then of course preventing civilians from leaving the their apartment building while they use it as they pleased.

Just how big of a military would Ukraine need to stage all of these alleged stagings?

The Ukrainians would need to mobilize their forces within the vicinity of completely not intruding Russians... near some sort of civilian hot spot. Then waste munitions in an attempt to troll the Russians into responding. And then the Russians would have no choice but to fire near a civilian hot spot.

 

[Elixir]

Barbie seems to think that everyone involved in WWII was preoccupied with Russia.
Russia was a sideshow - just something to keep Hitler spread thin.
Barbie thinks* the US entered the war because Hitler attacked the US. He is unaware that the US entered the war on December 7 1941, after Japan’s unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor. Russia had nothing to do with that. And now, Putler is leading them into complete and total irrelevance.

* I actually don’t think our little Putinista believes most of the absurd BS his politburo asks him to repeat here.

 

[Elixir]

Just how big of a military would Ukraine need to stage all of these alleged stagings?

I think I know how they did it. They hired the Russian Army to help out by pretending to attempt to invade Ukraine.

 

[Elixir]

The notion that NATO is the aggressor in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is so incredibly inane that one wonders about the sanity or intelligence of anyone who believes such utter nonsense.

Part and parcel of Russia’s “ modern warfare”. Make people believe absurdities and you can send them off to commit atrocities.

Ukraine is not part of NATO but even if it were, that does not justify the invasion of Ukraine. Nor does paranoia on the part of a shitty two bit autocrat who is using this invasion to divert the public's attention of the decline of the already low standard of living in Russia.

B-b-but if only it had worked! Russia would be in control of a major portion of the world’s breadbasket, and the proceeds from holding the world’s food supply hostage would have raised the Russian standard of living to a level that would have made Putler a hero.
Gas is running out even as it outlives its usefulness.
But food is a whole other story.

 

[Hermit]

Barbie seems to think that everyone involved in WWII was preoccupied with Russia.
Russia was a sideshow - just something to keep Hitler spread thin.

Sideshow? You are using a meaning of the word nobody is familiar with.

For most of the war, 75-80 percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II.

The Soviet Union lost somewhere between 20 and 27 million (military and civilian) lives. In contrast, France (including colonies) lost 600,000, the UK (including Crown Colonies) 450,900 and the US 419,400.

 

[bilby]

Barbie seems to think that everyone involved in WWII was preoccupied with Russia.
Russia was a sideshow - just something to keep Hitler spread thin.

This is nonsense. WWII was two not-quite-independent wars: Japan vs the rest of SE Asia, which the Japanese then foolishly turned into Japan vs the USA; And Nazis vs Communists, which boiled down to Germany vs USSR.

Germany vs France, England and (later) USA was a sideshow; Hitler won that war before the USA even started fighting it, but stupidly attacked the USSR before he had finished mopping up.

By FAR the largest amount of fighting in the European theatre was Germany vs USSR. The Western Front was utterly minuscule in comparison.

 

[Elixir]

Germany vs France, England and (later) USA was a sideshow

Who is a sideshow depends on whose act you’re following. The US at first viewed the Germany vs Poland thing as the Europe Show. Hitler kept trying to provoke the dog but it took Japan to make it bite.

 

[Elixir]

Sideshow? You are using a meaning of the word nobody is familiar with.

Yeah, sorry. I only meant before ‘41 when the German threat was under debate in Europe. During the time period when Barbos contends Hitler was attacking the US causing them to intervene.

 

[bilby]

Germany vs France, England and (later) USA was a sideshow

Who is a sideshow depends on whose act you’re following. The US at first viewed the Germany vs Poland thing as the Europe Show. Hitler kept trying to provoke the dog but it took Japan to make it bite.

Hitler made perhaps his biggest blunder when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor; He declared war on the US, which made it easy for FDR to override the remaining isolationist sentiment in Congress, where there was strong support for keeping out of Europe, and concentrating only on the Pacific theatre (until Pearl, most of that support wanted to stay out of the war completely).

Had Hitler reiterated his neutrality towards the US, it would have made things much harder for Roosevelt and Churchill, who wanted a 'Germany First' approach.

Had he declared war on Japan (citing the Yellow Peril would have fitted in perfectly well with his racist policies elsewhere), he could have put the USA into an awkward position of being technically allied to Nazi Germany - and of course, Germany's distance from the Pacific theatre would have meant that he needn't have committed much (if any) actual materiel or manpower against the Japanese.

An intelligent Führer would have thought it through and declared against Japan, rather than going with his knee-jerk reaction of supporting their cause. But he likely felt that the Japanese threat against the Russian Far East was more valuable to him than keeping the Americans from becoming his enemy. IMO he was badly mistaken, as Stalin didn't worry too much about the Japanese threat; Certainly not enough to keep a worthwhile number of Soviet divisions pinned to the Manchurian border and the Vladivostok coast.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Really? you believe that?
What about Georgia?

Let me refresh your memory about them.
US conducted a coup there, installed a puppet regime and then paid and trained army and then supported their attack on Russia in order to return territories which were never really georgian.
Of course you can call it unsupported conspiracy theories. Except this is what georgians themselves believe and more importantly what closest allies of Saakashvili say. They literally said "US supported only these people who were openly anti-russian" The only way to get money from State Department in Georgia was to promise to hate Russia.

Hint: When you need complex plots to explain what's happening you're probably wrong. In the real world complex plans fail when the enemy doesn't react as you expect. It's part of why your army performs so poorly--your soldiers aren't flexible enough.

The "coup"s you keep talking about are simply the locals deciding they don't want Moscow's puppets in charge.

Spring-Summer 2014, ukrainian "government" suddenly starts calling East Ukrainian "separatists" terrorists. That's weird, everybody says, I mean they are obviously separatists, but there were no terrorism involved.
Then a leak about secret CIA head visit to Kiev appears. Then it gets confirmed by US critters. Then date checked and it appears change in naming magically coincided with the visit.

They weren't separatists, they were dancing to Moscow's tune if not actual Russian army soldiers. Straight out of Moscow's playbook--create a supposedly local group (at a minimum Moscow-trained and armed, often with actual Russian troops if they can get away with it), have them claim to be the government, then go to the aid of that "government". You use the same play every time, we recognize it and know it's not locals.

People in these small countries need to understand that they DO have an option of staying away from all this nonsense, just stop electing frauds who are bought and controlled by the US. Problem, of course, most people are stupid and believe US government.

And when countries try to stay out of it you eat them. That's why everyone's rushing to join NATO--they don't want to be eaten.

 

[Jayjay]

The evidence that it was a Kalibr missile is overwhelming.

Says who? I don't really care for that. Just show me how changing frame rate of the video can make it dissappear.

I just did.

And if you have eyes, you'll note that the missile doesn't disappear in any frame. It's just faded (4th and 5th frames below).

You said that you will concede, if I show you how the effect happens. I did that. Now it's your turn: concede the point and move on.

(I'll also note that all your other stupid points have been soundly refuted also, so there isn't much to move on to, except to admit that it was a Russian missile strike and not a mine.)

 

[Jayjay]

And you do realize, that I could use the same argument to disprove that Ukraine hit the Luhansk city hall in 2014?

Nazi regime admitted it.

But not at first. And way to go missing the point: which was that if there is actual direct evidence, as there was of the Luhansk city hall air strike even before Ukraine admitted it, then speculation about motives is moot.

We have direct, incontrovertible evidence of Russia's missile strike on Kharkiv city hall. So your speculation that it couldn't have been Russia because "it wasn't a military target" is moot. And besides, Russia has hit civilian targets multiple times after that, so it was a bad argument to begin with.

 

[Jayjay]

As you can see, the missile is faded and duplicated in some frames

faded&duplicated != disappeared.

And yes, faded AND duplicated is how it ends up when it has to approximate frames.
And it's all irrelevant because the video in question was not put through rate conversion. We know that because it means "duplicated" and mixed frames which are not present there.

What do you mean "was not put through rate conversion"? How do you know? CCTV cameras regularly use European tv standards with is 25 fps (or 50fps interlaced), whereas computer displays are commonly 60hz or more, and the default recording frame rate in most cell phones is 30 fps. These are not outlandish assumptions to make, even if we don't know exactly what the original frame rates are.

I reproduced a similar enough effect. Just because it's not exactly the same is irrelevant, because it's not a digital conversion, it's someone recording a computer display on a cell phone. The synch between the videos is essentially random, and if you do it multiple times, you get slightly different result each time.

So, what now? Video is fake?

No, the video is real.

But even if it was fake, you haven't explained how a faker would make a mistake and forget to add the missile in one frame? And that would somehow disprove all the other evidence, like the fact that there were multiple strikes in the same location. Your whole argument is full of holes.

 

[Jayjay]

Do you not understand that the Ukrainian troops dug in where they expected the attack to come? Thus they expected the Russians to attack civilian areas--like they usually do.

That's not what happened. They would put a tank near school and shoot into roughly russian forces direction. Russians respond, then ukro-nazi photograzphers take a picture from a drone making sure that tank is not visible.

Then of course preventing civilians from leaving the their apartment building while they use it as they pleased.

Not sure if there is any evidence of such. Even Amnesty's report didn't mention anything about civilians actively prevented from leaving apartment buildings.

And Russians do the same thing, by their own admission. The instructions that Russian agitators were handed out with answers to possible questions from the locals included this:



If Russia didn't regularly use civilians as human shields, there would be no need to answer such a question.

 

[Hermit]

Sideshow? You are using a meaning of the word nobody is familiar with.

Yeah, sorry. I only meant before ‘41 when the German threat was under debate in Europe. During the time period when Barbos contends Hitler was attacking the US causing them to intervene.

Thanks for clarifying what you meant to say.

Before Operation Barbarosssa the USSR was not even a sideshow. Both Hitler and Stalin were stalling for time when the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact was signed. Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knew the pact was a sham. It was not a matter of if the two would come to blows. The questions were who would start firing first and when.

Here is a cartoon by David Low - published in the Evening Standard, 21 October 1939 - two months after the pact was signed and a year and seven months before Hitler broke it.