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

[Elixir]

Russia's problem is they don't seem to actually have a plan at this point

You mean other than to squander every bit of the Russian people’s resources trying to prop up Putler’s Soviet fantasy?

 

[Harry Bosch]

Ruski Hitler only admitted that your lobbing them at me is an act of terrorism. My lobbing them at you is defending myself from Nazis.

Biden is Hitler, albeit senile.

Biden is one of the worst leaders morally in the history of the world ever... but he has no conscious idea what he is doing.

Yeah... that is a nonsensical accusation there.

So over 10,000 posts, well past a year... still at a quasi-stalemate as the Russian ground forces can't make headway... still. Plan A failed (shock and yawn), Plan B failed (lets try the east), Plan C isn't doing much better (let's throw mercs at the problem). Russia's problem is they don't seem to actually have a plan at this point other than wait until Ukraine gives up. Typically surrendering requires some sort of checkmate being involved. And Putin/Russian military seem to be playing tiddly winks.

Barbos is sadly deep in the throes of the Putler cult. The sad thing is that he can just simply read this thread! From the beginning, his media was feeding him bullshit that he bought into. All that he has to do is go back to page of this thread, read all his posts. He'll see the lies that he was told and bought into. And how they've changed.

 

[Ford]

Ruski Hitler only admitted that your lobbing them at me is an act of terrorism. My lobbing them at you is defending myself from Nazis.

Biden is Hitler, albeit senile.

This just never gets old! We are the Nazis. And yet your country is the one invading a sovereign country, killing it's people, stealing their land and goods. But we're the Nazis! Sounds like you need to get pretty creative to sleep at night!

I'm beginning to think our friend in Moscow isn't creative at all. Just good at copy/pasting from whatever Russian propaganda site is feeding him disinformation. There might even be a database of canned "how to talk to western imperialist scum" answers ready to insert into whatever discussion is at hand. Many of his recent bursts display no critical thinking whatsoever (not that anything he says ever did) but are rather just little more than slogans. You can patiently explain that this whole invasion fits with Putin's stated goals to return Russia to some semblance of the "glory" from the Soviet days and how it's not a "defensive" war at all, and Barbos just shoots back "Biden is Hitler!"

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm beginning to think our friend in Moscow isn't creative at all. Just good at copy/pasting from whatever Russian propaganda site is feeding him disinformation. There might even be a database of canned "how to talk to western imperialist scum" answers ready to insert into whatever discussion is at hand. Many of his recent bursts display no critical thinking whatsoever (not that anything he says ever did) but are rather just little more than slogans. You can patiently explain that this whole invasion fits with Putin's stated goals to return Russia to some semblance of the "glory" from the Soviet days and how it's not a "defensive" war at all, and Barbos just shoots back "Biden is Hitler!"

<removed> The person literally has the blood of thousands on his hands but doesn't seem to mind. Those are the qualities of a psychopath. Can change happen in such cases? I think not. It just has to be opposed and eventually stopped. It's a different brain.

Putin is definitely Hitler by another name. And it seems we in the free parts of this planet are finally waking up to that fact. I personally do not know what it is like to live in a state where I do not have guaranteed freedoms. It must be like in those baboon troops where there's an alpha male that protects the troop but the price for his underlings is obedience and servitude. That's Russia.

And I think we err when we suppose that a person like barbos actually knows better. We only suppose so because it is comforting to think that the bogeyman is actually a decent chap. Putin and barbos would slit the other's throat because that's all the baboons know. Certainly that behavior exists in the free west but it has checks and gets exposed and corrected by the laws those freedoms guarantee. But not in Putinstan.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The A10 Warthog might be better for Ukraine. Designed for ground attack and heavily armored and redundant, able to take a lot of damage. High engines for rough airstrips.

I saw one at an airshow dong low and slow aerobatic maneuvers.

They're unsurvivable in a modern SAM environment.

They're unsurvivable in an 80s SAM environment. They look cool and have been in a lot of movies. Drones or even A-37 Dragonflies provide much better bang for buck.

In rough terrain in the 80s I think they could have gotten in and out fast enough to avoid the MANPAD threat and they could stay below terrain against the launchers that actually could have engaged them. They would have been in danger but the conflict they were planned for nothing would have lasted long.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think the strikes in Moscow, if carried out by Ukraine, are potential fuel to Russian propaganda, both internal and external. Ukraine should tread very carefully, even though it's understandable why they want to retaliate for the last year's worth of terror against their own civilians.

If it's real I don't think the intent would be retaliation, but rather making Russia deploy defenses against them because the elite got scared. Defenses in Moscow are not in Ukraine.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm beginning to think our friend in Moscow isn't creative at all. Just good at copy/pasting from whatever Russian propaganda site is feeding him disinformation. There might even be a database of canned "how to talk to western imperialist scum" answers ready to insert into whatever discussion is at hand. Many of his recent bursts display no critical thinking whatsoever (not that anything he says ever did) but are rather just little more than slogans. You can patiently explain that this whole invasion fits with Putin's stated goals to return Russia to some semblance of the "glory" from the Soviet days and how it's not a "defensive" war at all, and Barbos just shoots back "Biden is Hitler!"

The obvious fact is that barbos is Hitler. The person literally has the blood of thousands on his hands but doesn't seem to mind. Those are the qualities of a psychopath. Can change happen in such cases? I think not. It just has to be opposed and eventually stopped. It's a different brain.

barbos believes what he has been told. Which is odd, because when he is exposed to bullshit science claims, he is always the first one to take aim and not be kind. But politics is a whole didn't part of the brain... and barbos reacted entirely differently to bullshit political claims.

Putin is definitely Hitler by another name

Putin is a third-rate Stalin. Sociopath, but only going so far. Hitler led a plan to massacre over ten million civilians and tore Europe to shreds.

 

[Ford]

Putin is definitely Hitler by another name

Putin is a third-rate Stalin.

At this point, Putin's not even that. He's a third-rate Vladimir Putin.

Twenty years ago he was riding around in a pickup truck with a US President. His country was still considered a near-peer to the other permanent members of the security council. Yes, underneath it all he was a vicious thug, but the popular image was literally a guy riding shirtless on horseback. Plus he was one of the richest heads of state in the world. At the top of an oligarchy and rolling in money.

Now? He's a hollow shell of that man. A paranoid recluse who won't let even the people in his own "inner circle" within 20 feet of him. The "fearsome Russian Bear" of a military has been exposed as a weak, corrupt (though we kinda knew that) force that can't hold it's own against a supposedly weaker neighbor led by a television comedian. His dreams of a "Greater Russia" are all but dead, and he's caused enough damage to Russia's military and economy that even if someone gives him a taste of his own medicine (polonium, if I remember correctly) or he "falls" out of a window, the country will take decades to recover. When the dust clears, his "legacy" will be a strong, Western-armed NATO member right on Russia's border, and a public grappling with (again) the fact that they were lied to about how "glorious" their country was to the rest of the world.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Very true. Russia was at a cross roads of potential prosperity and stifling oligarchy. Putin went with oligarchy. And the nation that had plenty of room to prosper has really be running its wheels, getting little traction. Their position in the world is almost solely held by the fact they have nuclear weapons and large swaths of natural resources. They lack production however, and Putin has been wanting Russia to return to being strong, instead of being prosperous. It worked well for South Korea. And even the Middle East is attempting to diversify, but Russia seems to be stuck in a Make Russia Great Again loop... when Russia wasn't often all that great. And then they blame France/England and now the US and NATO for that.

When the reality is, if Russia opened up their markets, instead of having people seize them for their personal gain, Russia could be in a much better position today. Which kind of shows this Ukraine mess as really being about trying to gain a legacy for Putin, as he has almost nothing to show for his leadership over multiple decades. But, as barbos will tell us, that is the US's fault.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Amusing Infographics shitpost video. Putin's war fails, revolution breaks out, Putin dies. Possible? Maybe.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Which kind of shows this Ukraine mess as really being about trying to gain a legacy for Putin, as he has almost nothing to show for his leadership over multiple decades.

Not even close.

In the U.S. Putin would amount to a shitstain on barbos's underwear. He succeeds in Putinstan because he's a ruthless mobster, able to murder his critics and imprison his opponents. In a free country he'd be in prison or holding some menial job somewhere.

He invaded Ukraine primarily because he's a greedy criminal afraid of being held accountable for his crimes, as he's seen with other dictators. Everything else is propaganda.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I see it as a late life crisis. He made his very successful career as a corrupt politician, but as death approaches, he realized that his administration had failed to accomplish anything but meddling in neighboring nations. I doubt Putin would have had any issues retiring and being free to engage in his untold stolen wealth. I see this as a larger issue for him. The unique thing with Ukraine is that usually Putin is discrete enough to get away with his tyranny. He wasn't this time, and it didn't go remotely well. All of his claims were lies and Ukraine doesn't identify as Russia. So he has gone from legacy to face saving.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Which kind of shows this Ukraine mess as really being about trying to gain a legacy for Putin, as he has almost nothing to show for his leadership over multiple decades.

Not even close.

In the U.S. Putin would amount to a shitstain on barbos's underwear. He succeeds in Putinstan because he's a ruthless mobster, able to murder his critics and imprison his opponents. In a free country he'd be in prison or holding some menial job somewhere.

He invaded Ukraine primarily because he's a greedy criminal afraid of being held accountable for his crimes, as he's seen with other dictators. Everything else is propaganda.

Bush invaded Iraq based on lies and false claims and got away with it. Not any different from Putin, really.

 

[Elixir]

Bush invaded Iraq based on lies and false claims and got away with it. Not any different from Putin, really.

Seriously???
Bush did not raise the American flag over Iraq, attempt to absorb Iraq’s land and call it America’s rightful territory, attempt to exterminate the Iraqi people, claim Iraqi resources for the USA, or direct a campaign of genocidal terror. Just for starters… I think those differences are significant.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Bush invaded Iraq based on lies and false claims and got away with it. Not any different from Putin, really.

Seriously???
Bush did not raise the American flag over Iraq, attempt to absorb Iraq’s land and call it America’s rightful territory, attempt to exterminate the Iraqi people, claim Iraqi resources for the USA, or direct a campaign of genocidal terror. Just for starters… I think those differences are significant.

No, despite expert dissenting on the invasion, they invaded Iraq to overthrow a guy they had a beef over... and then through the pure magic of arrogance, managed to run Iraq straight into an insurgency that saw easily over 100,000 Iraqis get killed (with some estimates going notably higher) and over a million Iraqis being displaced. W isn't as bad as Putin, from a personal moral sense, but the W Admin is responsible for a lot of Iraqi deaths. Their arrogance got some many people killed.

 

[TomC]

Bush invaded Iraq based on lies and false claims and got away with it. Not any different from Putin, really.

Seriously???
Bush did not raise the American flag over Iraq, attempt to absorb Iraq’s land and call it America’s rightful territory, attempt to exterminate the Iraqi people, claim Iraqi resources for the USA, or direct a campaign of genocidal terror. Just for starters… I think those differences are significant.

You mean he didn't win his war.

That's history. But he hasn't left the USA for a long time either. Because most of us realize that his invasion of Iraq was quite as evil as Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Tom

 

[Ford]

Because most of us realize that his invasion of Iraq was quite as evil as Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Tom

Barbos thinks Putin's invasion of Ukraine wasn't evil at all. In fact he seems to buy into the narrative that it wasn't an invasion, either. Just a "special military operation" where Russian troops "rescued" a breakaway province that had become infested with "Nazis."

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Bush invaded Iraq based on lies and false claims and got away with it. Not any different from Putin, really.

Seriously???
Bush did not raise the American flag over Iraq, attempt to absorb Iraq’s land and call it America’s rightful territory, attempt to exterminate the Iraqi people, claim Iraqi resources for the USA, or direct a campaign of genocidal terror. Just for starters… I think those differences are significant.

And he didn't poison his critics and imprison his opponents at home. Shrub shit on democracy but to say it was no different than Putin's actions is clearly not accurate. How many people died when they fell out of windows or fell off boats?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Because most of us realize that his invasion of Iraq was quite as evil as Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Tom

Barbos thinks Putin's invasion of Ukraine wasn't evil at all. In fact he seems to buy into the narrative that it wasn't an invasion, either. Just a "special military operation" where Russian troops "rescued" a breakaway province that had become infested with "Nazis."

The Ruski battle cry, "We have met the Nazis, and they are us!"

 

[TV and credit cards]

Strangely quiet on the Ukrainian front. Not even hearing of Ukrainian strikes on Russian supply lines much. I would think this is what Ukraine would be doing at this time. Perhaps Russia is trying to keep their usual milbloggers quiet on this for morale purposes.
I wonder if the recent strikes on Moscow were designed to see if it would get Russia to reposition some of their air defenses back on the city.
Russia keeps lobbing missiles at Kyiv but are almost wholly ineffective now.
I don’t know what Russia has left they can use. Seems the only weapon they have in abundance are lies.