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How should west respond to potential (likely) Russian invasion of Ukraine?

War is going according to plan... also it won't be televised. And this would be a big difference between Russia/Ukraine and the US/Iraq... our media was all over it. Yes, the Government was spinning and lying, but we knew it. Russians will have much less access to any actual truth. Doesn't mean the Ukrainians won't exaggerate or make things up to inhibit support drying up, but the Russians are now having a wall built around them by Putin, to prevent them from knowing what is happening in this 'glorious' freeing of Ukraine.
 
Russia may be winning but they are winning ugly.



⚠️ Warning that there are disturbing images in the video below. ⚠️

 
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  • Wow
Reactions: SLD
Wikipedia's contributors are as thorough as usual.  International reactions to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has  United Nations Security Council Resolution 2623 calling for the convening of a special session of the General Assembly. That session, the  Eleventh emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly voted on  United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-11/1

That resolution's text is at Aggression against Ukraine with links to versions in several languages. The page also has an inline viewer of those versions. It "Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter;" and demands the complete withdrawal of Russian military forces from Ukraine and revoking of the "independence" of Donetsk and Luhansk.

UN Charter | United Nations - Article 2 (4) - "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
 
blastula said:
Copernicus said:
This CNN report carries some interviews on the divide in opinion between Russians who completely buy the Kremlin line and (mainly younger) Russians who get more information from other sources such as the internet.

'I know the truth': CNN asks Russians what they think about Putin's war​

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Others don't even know there's a war.

thebulletin.org

Letter from St. Petersburg: Many Russians don't even know there's a war

Russian media is largely hewing to the government's line on the Ukraine conflict and many Russians remain in the dark about the true extent of the war.
thebulletin.org thebulletin.org
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With Russia censoring the war, I was wondering of ways that ordinary citizens can help - and I thought of sending dozens of emails with pictures of the war to as many Russian email addresses as I could find. I know Anonymous is calling for hackers to attack Russia, but I wouldn't know how to hack a website or anything. I also wonder if that is legal under U.S. law? Or does illegal hacking only apply to US based Websites? I did find a general email address for Russia's largest bank and sent them a note asking them to stop the invasion. I doubt it did any good. But I wondered if enough people send emails, it would overwhelm their servers. Not sure what good it would do.

What exactly is a Denial of Service attack? Is that just a bunch of people going to a website so that it crashes? How is that done? Is there a time and site people are lining up to go to? Or just go to any and all Russian websites to see if you can get them to crash? I doubt it's illegal just to visit a website.

I would really love to find several dozen Russian pen pals and keep feeding them Western news stories about what's going on. I could probably send pictures and some of these videos from Russian soldiers talking about their failures. They could at least understand that. I wouldn't even know how to find an ordinary Russian's email address. Granted, my little part wouldn't make a big difference, but if millions of people started doing that, I wonder if it would make a difference?

ETA: Just tried to go to Russia's Defense ministry website and it said it can't be reached.
 
It is instructive to compare  United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262 back in 2014, when Russia took over Crimea. Despite seven sessions of the Security Councl, Russia vetoed its efforts. I can't find a record of the vote back then, but I do find a record of its recent vote, on  United Nations Security Council Resolution 2623
  • For: Albania, Brazil, France, Gabon, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway, United Kingdom, United States
  • Abstain: China, India, United Arab Emirates
  • Against: Russia
(Permanent members bolded)

General Assembly votes:
Position20142022
For100141
Abstain5835
Absent2412
Against115
Total193193

Against the resolutions:
  • 2014: Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe
  • 2022: Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Russia, Syria
Lots of African, Asian, and Latin American countries voted to abstain in 2014, but in 2022, nearly every Latin American country voted for it, though not many more African and Asian countries. Australia and most Pacific Island countries voted for for both of them, except for some Pacific-Island microstates that abstained or were absent in 2014.

The ex-Soviet countries voted (Yes, No, Present (Abstain), Absent in 2014, 2022):
  • Baltic: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia: Y Y
  • Slavic: Ukraine: Y Y, Belarus, Russia: N N
  • Transcaucasian: Georgia: Y Y, Armenia: N P, Azerbaijan: Y A
  • Central Asian: Kazakhstan P P, Uzbekistan: P A, Turkmenistan: A A, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan: A P
All other European countries voted for both, except for Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which were absent from the first one.
 
_123484911_refugee_flow_map_v2_640-ncv2-2x-nc.png

This is interesting. If there is so much support for Russia in Ukraine, as a certain poster claims, why are the vast majority of thos e fleeing heading for the west and not east to Russia?
 
ZiprHead said:


Ukraine: Apartment block just outside Kyiv shelled​

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This is all that they can do. They can't take and hold territory. They can only launch missiles and artillery from afar. They hope that by making life so miserable for the Ukrainians that they'll give up and demand that their leaders surrender. Their just hoping that terror bombing will work.

While I'd like to argue that it won't, we have to be realistic. Terror bombing of cities didn't work in WWII; both Germans and Brits were surprisingly resilient and didn't turn on the government. Industry adapted in both countries. It just sucked for everyone involved. But other times, cities surrendered. I think this will be more like WWII. I just hope Zelensky will hold on. If he does, the Ukrainians will too.
 
Putin has said he doesn't intend to occupy all of Ukraine, just murder a few people he doesn't like (called "Nazis" for PR purposes), maybe install some kind of puppet regime, but mainly destroy their military capability. If he intends to just withdraw to the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, and maybe keep the land route to Crimea, he'll still need to get all of those abandoned vehicles out. Otherwise, the Ukrainians will use them when they rebuild their military. But the devastation he causes to Ukrainian infrastructure will likely take decades to repair, just as it did after the Nazis overran Ukraine. Russia will be struggling too much with its own tanking economy to help, even if it installed a friendly regime that wanted to help Ukraine recover.
 
 Volodymyr Zelenskyy - why two y's?

His last name contains a common adjective-forming suffix in the Slavic languages. In those langs traditionally written in the Roman alphabet, it is -ski or -sky, while the Cyrillic-alphabet versions are transcribed in several ways. The most common way is -sky, though I've seen -ski, -skiy, -skii, -skij, -skyi, and -skyj. In "Intelligent Life in the Universe" (1964), coauthor Iosif Shklovsky used "Shklovskii". His other coauthor was Carl Sagan.

Reconstruction: Proto-Slavic/-ьskъ - Wiktionary (-isku) has the forms on the attested Slavic languages, along with the Proto-Slavic reconstruction *-isku

With the Baltic langs, we get Reconstruction: Proto-Balto-Slavic/-iškas - Wiktionary *-ishkas

Its Greek cognate is -ίσκος - Wiktionary -iskos

In the Germanic langs, we get Reconstruction: Proto-Germanic/-iskaz - Wiktionary *-iskaz with descendants Old English -isc, English -ish, Dutch -s, German -isch, Icelandic -(i)skur, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish -(i)sk

Going even further gets us Reconstruction: Proto-Indo-European/-iskos - Wiktionary


That bit aside, there are various sound shifts between Russian and Ukrainian that show up in versions of city names, like Kharkov ~ Kharkiv, Lvov ~ Lviv, and Lugansk ~ Luhansk. Another spelling shift is Odessa ~ Odesa.
 
SLD said:
Now that Russia has blocked Facebook for “Anti Russian discrimination“ is IIDB next?
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Wishful thinking. @barbos will be free to post propaganda on IIDB throughout this conflict. :LOL: I mean, I do hope barbos stays safe and active on this forum regardless of whether I disagree with his (her?) opinion.

Edit: I'm really not kidding about Barbos staying safe.
 
Gospel said:
SLD said:
Now that Russia has blocked Facebook for “Anti Russian discrimination“ is IIDB next?
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Wishful thinking. @barbos will be free to post propaganda on IIDB throughout this conflict. :LOL: I mean, I do hope barbos stays safe and active on this forum regardless of whether I disagree with his (her?) opinion.

Edit: I'm really not kidding about Barbos staying safe.
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I agree. I like the fact that he has stuck with us for so many years. Even though I am on his ignore list and shit list, I have tended not to hold any grudges. I realize that much of the time he just said stuff to get a rise out of me and others, and that's something you get used to in discussion forums. And being on his ignore list has been something of a relief, since I am not getting in any verbal spats with him anymore. It's better to be a spectator than a combattant. :)
 
Russia is now threatening to bombard Ukrainian cities indiscriminately.
 
Copernicus said:
SigmatheZeta said:
Russia is now threatening to bombard Ukrainian cities indiscriminately.
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Bombardments will stop when Ukrainians decide they prefer Russia over the West?
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The beatings will continue until morale improves.

seriously this is beyond the pale. I never dreamed he would go this far. It’s time for us to intervene. We could, using our air power alone, utterly destroy their forces in Ukraine, and there’s little they could do about it. The question is whether it could be contained at that point. If we made it clear that we won’t actually attack Russia. Just when they cross the border.

The Russians are having issues obviously. That’s why they’ve resorted to terror bombing. They’re utterly incompetent at anything else.

But if we don’t intervene, they will turn effectively to genocide. They will not stop at Kiev, but continue to Moldova. If we don’t stand up to it now, we are as complicit as the “good Germans” who didn’t stop the Holocaust.

And furthermore, if we don’t, the Baltic states are next, and he’ll rattle the nuclear sword to try and force it, thinking we will back down.

It’s time to stand up.
 
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