Putin-backed troops quietly move a border on the fringes of Europe

[barbos]

Oh, they got dirty all right. Saakashvili's right hand man, actually a woman (after she could no longer tolerate Saaka and went opposition to him) admitted that State Department MO was simple, you tell them you don't like Russia and Putin you get automatic support and money no further questions.
Then the same people including Saaka went to Ukraine and did the same trick there.

I meant dirty in a positive way. Like Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs kind of dirty.

I know, running around Russian border and handing money to anybody who who is anti-russian is a positive thing.

 

[Jayjay]

Oh, they got dirty all right. Saakashvili's right hand man, actually a woman (after she could no longer tolerate Saaka and went opposition to him) admitted that State Department MO was simple, you tell them you don't like Russia and Putin you get automatic support and money no further questions.
Then the same people including Saaka went to Ukraine and did the same trick there.

I meant dirty in a positive way. Like Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs kind of dirty.

I know, running around Russian border and handing money to anybody who who is anti-russian is a positive thing.

If you say so.

 

[Copernicus]

Explain what point you think the video made about a girl caught in a war zone. Next time, don't just post a video. Make the effort to explain what you think its relevance is to the discussion.

Don't play stupid.

It was reasonable for me to ask you to clarify the point you claimed to be making, since you did not bother to make it clear. In the absence of a clarification, I can only conclude that there was no point. You just posted something and hoped that it would somehow appear to be relevant.

First of all, the US is not Russia, where the major news outlets do not dare report things that embarrass the government. There is no "official stance of the US government media" (although FOX News is arguably the official propaganda organ of the Republican Party). The government informs the media, and they are able to criticize government policy freely.

Bush was the president, so Fox was official government media at the time.
Yes, yet they did not criticize when government lied about 2008 Georgian War.

You claim to have been to the US, but you really seem ignorant of basic facts. Fox News was never anything other than Rupert Murdoch's right wing mouthpiece, which mainly backed Republican Party policies, because Murdoch aligned himself with the Republican Party. Fox never had any "official" government role. It was basically a peanut gallery for the GOP. As for the Georgian War, you have refused to make explicit exactly what you think the US government lied about, so it is reasonable to conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Secondly, what is it that you think the girl exposed as a lie? It should not be that hard to make your point clear instead of trying to make others guess what it is.

Don't play stupid.

Can't answer? No surprise there. You just posted that video as a distraction. Now you can't defend your argument, so you end up posturing.

Thirdly, there is no reason to believe that anything reported in the OP is a lie. It is about current events, not a war that Russia started a decade ago by sending its troops into a neighboring country. Your video tells us nothing whatsoever about the OP. It is a distraction from the topic of discussion.

Russia did not start that war. Georgia backed by US did.

That does not fit the sequence of events as they happened. The Russian-backed Ossetian rebels started the aggression by shelling Georgian villages. Georgian troops responded by going after the aggressors. Russia used that as a pretext to invade South Ossetia.

 

[barbos]

It was reasonable for me to ask you to clarify the point you claimed to be making, since you did not bother to make it clear. In the absence of a clarification, I can only conclude that there was no point. You just posted something and hoped that it would somehow appear to be relevant.

First of all, the US is not Russia, where the major news outlets do not dare report things that embarrass the government. There is no "official stance of the US government media" (although FOX News is arguably the official propaganda organ of the Republican Party). The government informs the media, and they are able to criticize government policy freely.

Bush was the president, so Fox was official government media at the time.
Yes, yet they did not criticize when government lied about 2008 Georgian War.

You claim to have been to the US, but you really seem ignorant of basic facts. Fox News was never anything other than Rupert Murdoch's right wing mouthpiece, which mainly backed Republican Party policies, because Murdoch aligned himself with the Republican Party. Fox never had any "official" government role. It was basically a peanut gallery for the GOP. As for the Georgian War, you have refused to make explicit exactly what you think the US government lied about, so it is reasonable to conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Secondly, what is it that you think the girl exposed as a lie? It should not be that hard to make your point clear instead of trying to make others guess what it is.

Don't play stupid.

Can't answer? No surprise there. You just posted that video as a distraction. Now you can't defend your argument, so you end up posturing.

Thirdly, there is no reason to believe that anything reported in the OP is a lie. It is about current events, not a war that Russia started a decade ago by sending its troops into a neighboring country. Your video tells us nothing whatsoever about the OP. It is a distraction from the topic of discussion.

Russia did not start that war. Georgia backed by US did.

That does not fit the sequence of events as they happened. The Russian-backed Ossetian rebels started the aggression by shelling Georgian villages. Georgian troops responded by going after the aggressors. Russia used that as a pretext to invade South Ossetia.

Invade South Ossetia? they were already there. They have been there since 199x, way before Putin appeared on the scene.
You can go to Georgia ask anybody and they will tell you that it's obvious that Saaka started the war. The only question is, did he have explicit permission from US. You keep repeating lies.

 

[steve_bank]

It was reasonable for me to ask you to clarify the point you claimed to be making, since you did not bother to make it clear. In the absence of a clarification, I can only conclude that there was no point. You just posted something and hoped that it would somehow appear to be relevant.


You claim to have been to the US, but you really seem ignorant of basic facts. Fox News was never anything other than Rupert Murdoch's right wing mouthpiece, which mainly backed Republican Party policies, because Murdoch aligned himself with the Republican Party. Fox never had any "official" government role. It was basically a peanut gallery for the GOP. As for the Georgian War, you have refused to make explicit exactly what you think the US government lied about, so it is reasonable to conclude that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Secondly, what is it that you think the girl exposed as a lie? It should not be that hard to make your point clear instead of trying to make others guess what it is.

Don't play stupid.

Can't answer? No surprise there. You just posted that video as a distraction. Now you can't defend your argument, so you end up posturing.

Thirdly, there is no reason to believe that anything reported in the OP is a lie. It is about current events, not a war that Russia started a decade ago by sending its troops into a neighboring country. Your video tells us nothing whatsoever about the OP. It is a distraction from the topic of discussion.

Russia did not start that war. Georgia backed by US did.

That does not fit the sequence of events as they happened. The Russian-backed Ossetian rebels started the aggression by shelling Georgian villages. Georgian troops responded by going after the aggressors. Russia used that as a pretext to invade South Ossetia.

Invade South Ossetia? they were already there. They have been there since 199x, way before Putin appeared on the scene.
You can go to Georgia ask anybody and they will tell you that it's obvious that Saaka started the war. The only question is, did he have explicit permission from US. You keep repeating lies.

Actually the USA made it clear it would not intervene in any conflict. To say Russia was a victim is biased.

 

[steve_bank]

Fromm a documentary the region is ethically fractured. There are a number of areas with ethnic Russians who speak Russian and see themselves as Russian expatriates. Ukraine was lines on a map and was never to be a unified country.Putin's propaganda worked. He sold Russia to its citenzens as a global power equal to the USA. Part of that is expansion, even if it is a useless Ukraine.

 

[steve_bank]

Putin wants the Baltic states back. I remember the videos of Russian tanks in Poland and Solidariyu.

You failed your history class. Tanks were in Czechoslovakia (and Hungary before that) and were not just soviet (russian) ones. They were tank from Warsaw Pact countries.

And no, nobody wants Baltic states back.

Russian or Warsaw Pact tanks, it was on orders from Moscow. By the way, back in the 70s I knew a Hungarian refugee.

You reveal yourself. Putin said publicly he thought the great 29th century tradgedy was the Soviet collapse. He also said publicly he wants to reconstitute the old client states. It is on video.

He is working at destabilizing Poland and other small Baltic states. Without NATO Putin would act overtly, as in Crimea and Ukraine amd Chchnya.

 

[barbos]

Putin wants the Baltic states back. I remember the videos of Russian tanks in Poland and Solidariyu.

You failed your history class. Tanks were in Czechoslovakia (and Hungary before that) and were not just soviet (russian) ones. They were tank from Warsaw Pact countries.

And no, nobody wants Baltic states back.

Russian or Warsaw Pact tanks, it was on orders from Moscow. By the way, back in the 70s I knew a Hungarian refugee.

Well, not all Warsaw pact countries obeyed the order.

You reveal yourself. Putin said publicly he thought the great 29th century tradgedy was the Soviet collapse. He also said publicly he wants to reconstitute the old client states. It is on video.

I eagerly await for the video, especially for the second part

He is working at destabilizing Poland and other small Baltic states.

And when he is not working he eats children.

Without NATO Putin would act overtly, as in Crimea and Ukraine amd Chchnya.

Wow, you are really smoking some powerful shit. This pot legalization was not a good idea.

 

[Copernicus]

That does not fit the sequence of events as they happened. The Russian-backed Ossetian rebels started the aggression by shelling Georgian villages. Georgian troops responded by going after the aggressors. Russia used that as a pretext to invade South Ossetia.

Invade South Ossetia? they were already there. They have been there since 199x, way before Putin appeared on the scene.
You can go to Georgia ask anybody and they will tell you that it's obvious that Saaka started the war. The only question is, did he have explicit permission from US. You keep repeating lies.

I think that the events detailed on the Wikipedia page for  South Ossetia are fairly accurate, especially as I recall the beginnings of the conflict. The territory was nominally part of Georgia, but Russia had been backing South Ossetian rebels. A contingent of Russian troops were in the country as part of a peacekeeping force, but the real conflict started from unprovoked attacks by Russian-backed rebels, who continually shelled Georgian villages. Predictably, that provoked Georgia into sending troops in to stop the attacks, and that gave Russia its pretext for a fullscale military invasion. Georgia was never going to prevail in that military conflict.

As for the Central European Soviet satellites, the so-called "Warsaw Pact" nations, they were always experiencing resistance actions against Soviet occupation. Their militaries were largely unreliable auxiliaries, but it was clear with the Hungarian revolt (which was put down bloodily by Soviet occupation troops) and the peaceful Czech  Prague Spring in 1968 that the Warsaw Pact was nothing but a puppet force controlled by the Soviet Union. I remember the Prague Spring particularly well, because Czechs used a wide range of nonviolent resistance tactics to hold off Soviet control for a full 8 months. The Soviet military predicted that they could crush the resistance in 4 days. In fact, one invasion force from Poland even got lost, because locals painted over street signs and did all they could to confuse the invaders. I was later told by a Soviet friend, a sociologist from Moscow University, that Moscow had serious problems with their own troops, because they were being called "Nazis" by nonviolent resisters, who even painted swastikas on the invader's tanks. They ended up having to rotate some Red Army troops out of Czechoslovakia because of morale problems. A violent resistance would likely have been put down in a week or so, but nonviolent resistance was far more effective than the bloody Hungarian uprising and the Polish resistance. Ultimately, the Czech's won their independence from Russian control with the  Velvet Revolution. And all of those "Warsaw Pact" nations moved as quickly as possible to join NATO. Because they saw what would happen when Russia recovered from the breakup of the Soviet Union. They wanted an insurance policy against reoccupation.

Barbos is simply too young to remember any of this.

 

[ZiprHead]

Barbos is simply too young to remember any of this.

I wouldn't say too young. Too propagandized and not enough factual news reporting, maybe. Or maybe he's just following orders.

 

[Copernicus]

Barbos is simply too young to remember any of this.

I wouldn't say too young. Too propagandized and not enough factual news reporting, maybe. Or maybe he's just following orders.

My opinion is that his beliefs about history and politics are fairly common among Russians. What I meant by my "too young" remark is that he has no memories of the Prague Spring or Hungarian uprising. I have dim memories of the Hungarian situation, because I was just a schoolchild, but I knew people later who had escaped Hungary at the time. I also followed the Prague Spring situation closely, because it affected my relations with Russians at the time. And many Czechs had the foresight to leave the country when the opportunity presented itself. I always felt that the Czechs had the best response to the occupation--almost completely peaceful. Nonviolent resistance is harder to get people to try, but it is almost always more effective than violence, which armed troops know how to deal with.

 

[Copernicus]

Here is Condoleezza Rice's recollection of the Russian invasion of South Ossetia and threat to topple the Georgian government: Russia invaded Georgia 10 years ago. Don’t say America didn’t respond.