msstate7
Well-known member
If you pour money on me, I'll hug you while smiling big too, 57
Global Events & Politics Überthread
- Thread starter Hawk
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If you pour money on me, I'll hug you while smiling big too, 57
57Brave
Well-known member
https://www.thebulwark.com/putins-useful-idiots-right-wingers-lose-it-over-zelensky-visit/
John Harwood
@JohnJHarwood
"why the Trumpian populist right is consumed w/hatred for Ukraine
—a hatred clearly beyond concerns about the US spending a very
small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent
involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer."
John Harwood
@JohnJHarwood
"why the Trumpian populist right is consumed w/hatred for Ukraine
—a hatred clearly beyond concerns about the US spending a very
small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent
involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer."
sturg33
I
I really do think you have dementia
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.
It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.
The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.
The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches.
Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news.
Through the summer, delegations of military experts and arms manufacturers emerged from presidential meetings questioning whether Mr. Putin understood the reality on the battleground, according to people familiar with the situation. And while Mr. Putin has since then gone to lengths to get a clearer picture of the war, they say, the president remains surrounded by an administration that caters to his conviction that Russia will succeed, despite the mounting human and economic sacrifices.
“The people around Putin protect themselves,” said Ekaterina Vinokurova, a member of his handpicked human-rights council until Mr. Putin removed her in November. “They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.”
The resulting mistakes have shaped Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine—from the initial days, when Mr. Putin thought his soldiers would be met with flowers, to recent humiliating withdrawals in the northeast and south. Over time, Mr. Putin, who has never served in the military, has become so wary of his own command structure that he has issued orders directly to the front line.
This article is based on months of interviews with current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin who broadly described an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points.
Mr. Putin wakes daily around 7 a.m. to a written briefing on the war, with information carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks, according to the former Russian intelligence officer and current and former Russian officials.
For months, a trickle of Russian officials, pro-government journalists and analysts tried to bring word in person to their president about how his invasion was floundering, according to people familiar with the matter.
When one longtime pollster reached out to Mr. Putin’s office about a survey showing lower-than-expected public support soon after the invasion, his office responded, using Mr. Putin’s first name and his patronymic middle name, “Vladimir Vladimirovich doesn’t need to be upset right now,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.
In July, as American-supplied, satellite-guided Himars rockets began to strike Russian army logistics depots, Mr. Putin summoned about 30 business leaders from defense companies to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, according to people familiar with the meeting. After three days of quarantine and three PCR tests, the executives sat at the end of a long wooden table, listening as Mr. Putin described a war effort he considered a success. Ukrainians were only motivated to fight, he told them, because their army was shooting deserters, according to the people.
Then Mr. Putin turned to Chief of General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, who said Russian weapons were successfully hitting their targets and the invasion was going according to plan. The arms makers left the meeting with a sense that Mr. Putin lacked a clear picture of the conflict, the people said.
The defense ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In September, a coterie of Russian military journalists and bloggers—all stalwart backers of the war—met with the president for more than two hours and came away with the same impression, according to people familiar with the matter.
That month, Mr. Putin met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan, and speaking softly, assured him Russia had the war under control, people familiar with the meeting said. Russian troops abandoned hundreds of square miles of territory that same week.
Fifteen days into the war, after his quick strike on Kyiv failed, Mr. Putin scowled in a gold-embroidered armchair as his defense minister briefed him over a video link in a televised meeting.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going to plan,” said Mr. Shoigu. “We report this to you every day.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-russia-ukraine-war-advisers-11671815184?mod=hp_lead_pos9
It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.
The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.
The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches.
Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news.
Through the summer, delegations of military experts and arms manufacturers emerged from presidential meetings questioning whether Mr. Putin understood the reality on the battleground, according to people familiar with the situation. And while Mr. Putin has since then gone to lengths to get a clearer picture of the war, they say, the president remains surrounded by an administration that caters to his conviction that Russia will succeed, despite the mounting human and economic sacrifices.
“The people around Putin protect themselves,” said Ekaterina Vinokurova, a member of his handpicked human-rights council until Mr. Putin removed her in November. “They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.”
The resulting mistakes have shaped Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine—from the initial days, when Mr. Putin thought his soldiers would be met with flowers, to recent humiliating withdrawals in the northeast and south. Over time, Mr. Putin, who has never served in the military, has become so wary of his own command structure that he has issued orders directly to the front line.
This article is based on months of interviews with current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin who broadly described an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points.
Mr. Putin wakes daily around 7 a.m. to a written briefing on the war, with information carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks, according to the former Russian intelligence officer and current and former Russian officials.
For months, a trickle of Russian officials, pro-government journalists and analysts tried to bring word in person to their president about how his invasion was floundering, according to people familiar with the matter.
When one longtime pollster reached out to Mr. Putin’s office about a survey showing lower-than-expected public support soon after the invasion, his office responded, using Mr. Putin’s first name and his patronymic middle name, “Vladimir Vladimirovich doesn’t need to be upset right now,” according to a person familiar with the exchange.
In July, as American-supplied, satellite-guided Himars rockets began to strike Russian army logistics depots, Mr. Putin summoned about 30 business leaders from defense companies to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, according to people familiar with the meeting. After three days of quarantine and three PCR tests, the executives sat at the end of a long wooden table, listening as Mr. Putin described a war effort he considered a success. Ukrainians were only motivated to fight, he told them, because their army was shooting deserters, according to the people.
Then Mr. Putin turned to Chief of General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, who said Russian weapons were successfully hitting their targets and the invasion was going according to plan. The arms makers left the meeting with a sense that Mr. Putin lacked a clear picture of the conflict, the people said.
The defense ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In September, a coterie of Russian military journalists and bloggers—all stalwart backers of the war—met with the president for more than two hours and came away with the same impression, according to people familiar with the matter.
That month, Mr. Putin met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan, and speaking softly, assured him Russia had the war under control, people familiar with the meeting said. Russian troops abandoned hundreds of square miles of territory that same week.
Fifteen days into the war, after his quick strike on Kyiv failed, Mr. Putin scowled in a gold-embroidered armchair as his defense minister briefed him over a video link in a televised meeting.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going to plan,” said Mr. Shoigu. “We report this to you every day.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-russia-ukraine-war-advisers-11671815184?mod=hp_lead_pos9
Last edited:
Tapate50
Well-known member
Btw who reanimated Mitch? Guy looks like he should be on the first season of Walking Dead
sturg33
I
He wore a suit for the orange man, too
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Interesting op-ed piece.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukrain...efense-spending-military-strategy-11673523175
When Russian forces surged into Ukraine in February 2022, the conflict seemed to spell calamity for the U.S.-led order in Asia. Just as Washington was turning its attention to the Indo-Pacific, a conflagration in Europe promised to distract America from the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. But nearly a year later, the Ukraine war hasn’t doomed the balance of power in Asia; instead, it may be stabilizing it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Japan, whose prime minister, Fumio Kishida, visits the White House Friday following historic changes in Tokyo’s national-security and military strategies. Among the bold moves announced last month: a pledge to double defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product by 2027 and to add powerful new capabilities such as long-range missiles to its arsenal. This means that Japan, currently the world’s ninth-largest military spender, could move to third place within five years, behind only the U.S. and China. Already this year its defense budget is due to grow more than 25%.
Tokyo’s embrace of realpolitik is a gift to the free world. It’s also been anything but abrupt. Japan has been slowly modernizing its military and national-security institutions over the past decade with an eye toward an increasingly assertive China. But officials say Russia’s attack on Kyiv helped accelerate these efforts in ways unthinkable 12 months ago. As Mr. Kishida warned last year in previewing the shift: “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow.”
apan’s response echoes something that happened at the dawn of the Cold War, when North Korea’s invasion of South Korea unexpectedly supercharged the West’s defense of Europe. Before Pyongyang’s surprise attack across the 38th parallel in June 1950, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was essentially a bluff. Although Washington had sworn to protect its NATO allies against the Soviets, it had neither developed the war plans nor deployed the troops necessary to do so. The U.S. was still on a peace footing in the most important and dangerous theater of its contest with the Kremlin.
But with the onset of the Korean War, the threat of communist armies marching across borders was no longer a mere abstraction. The appointment of the first NATO supreme allied commander and the creation of an allied military headquarters soon followed. The Truman administration also undertook a massive arms buildup—the cost of which it previously balked at—and approved a secret policy paper called NSC-68, which provided a blueprint for a much tougher approach to Moscow.
The biggest loser of the Korean War thus ended up being Stalin. The adventurism of a Soviet client state in a peripheral corner of the Cold War backfired against the Kremlin on its central front in Europe. One U.S. strategist later said, “Thank God Korea came along.” Today, America’s Asian allies increasingly cite Russian aggression as a vital wake-up call that has spurred new military and geopolitical seriousness across the Indo-Pacific.
There are of course differences between the present moment and the early 1950s. North Korea was a Soviet satellite, whereas Russia is a great power in its own right. And if Ukraine is to change the West’s geopolitical strategy in the Indo-Pacific as profoundly as the Korean War did Europe’s, Japan’s leadership has to become the rule, not the exception.
In the U.S., the conflict has been an impetus to increase munitions stockpiles and add surge capacity to the defense-industrial base. In both cases, military deficiencies exposed by the war are starting to be tackled with an eye toward China.
But these are still modest steps relative to the scope and urgency of the challenge in Asia. They likewise pale in comparison with the U.S. response to Korea 70 years ago, when American defense budgets nearly tripled as a percentage of GDP.
Herein lies a final lesson from this history: By provoking the U.S. to put steel into the spine of the NATO alliance, North Korea inadvertently bolstered deterrence in Europe. In this way, a tragic blow-up in Northeast Asia probably helped keep the Cold War from turning hot elsewhere—saving Moscow and the West alike from worse cataclysms.
If the conflict in Ukraine boosts military strength and preparedness in the Indo-Pacific, it too may contribute to the conditions for great-power stability in the long run. Rather than foreshadowing deadlier and more destructive wars to come, Ukraine’s struggle could provide the path to averting them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukrain...efense-spending-military-strategy-11673523175
When Russian forces surged into Ukraine in February 2022, the conflict seemed to spell calamity for the U.S.-led order in Asia. Just as Washington was turning its attention to the Indo-Pacific, a conflagration in Europe promised to distract America from the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. But nearly a year later, the Ukraine war hasn’t doomed the balance of power in Asia; instead, it may be stabilizing it.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Japan, whose prime minister, Fumio Kishida, visits the White House Friday following historic changes in Tokyo’s national-security and military strategies. Among the bold moves announced last month: a pledge to double defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product by 2027 and to add powerful new capabilities such as long-range missiles to its arsenal. This means that Japan, currently the world’s ninth-largest military spender, could move to third place within five years, behind only the U.S. and China. Already this year its defense budget is due to grow more than 25%.
Tokyo’s embrace of realpolitik is a gift to the free world. It’s also been anything but abrupt. Japan has been slowly modernizing its military and national-security institutions over the past decade with an eye toward an increasingly assertive China. But officials say Russia’s attack on Kyiv helped accelerate these efforts in ways unthinkable 12 months ago. As Mr. Kishida warned last year in previewing the shift: “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow.”
apan’s response echoes something that happened at the dawn of the Cold War, when North Korea’s invasion of South Korea unexpectedly supercharged the West’s defense of Europe. Before Pyongyang’s surprise attack across the 38th parallel in June 1950, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was essentially a bluff. Although Washington had sworn to protect its NATO allies against the Soviets, it had neither developed the war plans nor deployed the troops necessary to do so. The U.S. was still on a peace footing in the most important and dangerous theater of its contest with the Kremlin.
But with the onset of the Korean War, the threat of communist armies marching across borders was no longer a mere abstraction. The appointment of the first NATO supreme allied commander and the creation of an allied military headquarters soon followed. The Truman administration also undertook a massive arms buildup—the cost of which it previously balked at—and approved a secret policy paper called NSC-68, which provided a blueprint for a much tougher approach to Moscow.
The biggest loser of the Korean War thus ended up being Stalin. The adventurism of a Soviet client state in a peripheral corner of the Cold War backfired against the Kremlin on its central front in Europe. One U.S. strategist later said, “Thank God Korea came along.” Today, America’s Asian allies increasingly cite Russian aggression as a vital wake-up call that has spurred new military and geopolitical seriousness across the Indo-Pacific.
There are of course differences between the present moment and the early 1950s. North Korea was a Soviet satellite, whereas Russia is a great power in its own right. And if Ukraine is to change the West’s geopolitical strategy in the Indo-Pacific as profoundly as the Korean War did Europe’s, Japan’s leadership has to become the rule, not the exception.
In the U.S., the conflict has been an impetus to increase munitions stockpiles and add surge capacity to the defense-industrial base. In both cases, military deficiencies exposed by the war are starting to be tackled with an eye toward China.
But these are still modest steps relative to the scope and urgency of the challenge in Asia. They likewise pale in comparison with the U.S. response to Korea 70 years ago, when American defense budgets nearly tripled as a percentage of GDP.
Herein lies a final lesson from this history: By provoking the U.S. to put steel into the spine of the NATO alliance, North Korea inadvertently bolstered deterrence in Europe. In this way, a tragic blow-up in Northeast Asia probably helped keep the Cold War from turning hot elsewhere—saving Moscow and the West alike from worse cataclysms.
If the conflict in Ukraine boosts military strength and preparedness in the Indo-Pacific, it too may contribute to the conditions for great-power stability in the long run. Rather than foreshadowing deadlier and more destructive wars to come, Ukraine’s struggle could provide the path to averting them.
nsacpi
Expects Yuge Games
Britain on Saturday indicated it will provide tanks to Ukraine, which would reverse the West’s nearly yearlong resistance to giving the Ukrainians some of its most powerful weapons to fight Russia.
The announcement is expected to ratchet up pressure on Germany to commit to sending its coveted Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or to at least allow other European countries that have those German-made tanks to give them to Ukraine.
The Polish government said this week that it would happily send some of its German-made tanks, though Berlin would need to allow it.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about the “ambition” to provide Britain’s Challenger II tanks and additional artillery systems, a statement from Downing Street said. It did not specify how many of the tanks, though British media have reported in recent days that a small number of the tanks were under consideration.
Ahead of the British statement, Mr. Zelensky had thanked Mr. Sunak on Saturday for “the decisions that will not only strengthen us on the battlefield, but also send the right signal to other partners.”
The Challenger II would be the first Western-made main battle tank to be sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February. Officials in the United States and Europe have long worried that sending tanks could prompt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to escalate the conflict.
That calculus has begun to change in recent weeks, as Western officials worry they have limited time to help Ukraine prepare for an anticipated Russian offensive this spring. They have become more willing to take risks, in part because the Ukrainians have performed so well on the battlefield and have used other sophisticated Western weapons well.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/14/world/russia-ukraine-news
The announcement is expected to ratchet up pressure on Germany to commit to sending its coveted Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, or to at least allow other European countries that have those German-made tanks to give them to Ukraine.
The Polish government said this week that it would happily send some of its German-made tanks, though Berlin would need to allow it.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about the “ambition” to provide Britain’s Challenger II tanks and additional artillery systems, a statement from Downing Street said. It did not specify how many of the tanks, though British media have reported in recent days that a small number of the tanks were under consideration.
Ahead of the British statement, Mr. Zelensky had thanked Mr. Sunak on Saturday for “the decisions that will not only strengthen us on the battlefield, but also send the right signal to other partners.”
The Challenger II would be the first Western-made main battle tank to be sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February. Officials in the United States and Europe have long worried that sending tanks could prompt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to escalate the conflict.
That calculus has begun to change in recent weeks, as Western officials worry they have limited time to help Ukraine prepare for an anticipated Russian offensive this spring. They have become more willing to take risks, in part because the Ukrainians have performed so well on the battlefield and have used other sophisticated Western weapons well.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/14/world/russia-ukraine-news