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Post by philbadfactor on Mar 13, 2022 6:57:04 GMT
and again here ;
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Post by gordo on Mar 13, 2022 17:45:15 GMT
The main reason for this war is that Pres. Putin of Russia wants to end a democratic Ukraine.
He wants it to be like Belarus, and be little more than a satellite country of the Kremlin.
Much the same way they had under the old Soviet era.
Putin wants to rebuild that lost empire.
He is also trying to stop Ukraine from ever joining NATO, as he sees that as a threat to Russia.
But the only "threat" from NATO would be in preventing Russia from waging a war like this on others.
Just why Putin chose this moment, I can't be sure.
But it will backfire badly on Russia.
However, the damage done in the meantime, will be huge.
I have been disappointed with the West for not helping to to defend Ukraine more, or to help them build up their defences over the years.
What little help they've given has clearly been well below what was needed.
While this thing about the billionaires is interesting, and will have a bit to play, the main reasons behind this conflict is as I say, the ideas of Putin wanting to control Ukraine.
I wouldn't put too much store on the billionaires influence on Putin here.
That said, some of the points made in the above video are true enough in some aspects, especially towards the end.
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Post by philbadfactor on Mar 13, 2022 20:27:31 GMT
cheers for the reply Gordo.
We must also remember Putin is reportedly worth in the region of 200 billion himself.
and Ukraine is described as the bread basket of the world.
A tiny % skimmed off that into private wealth eg putins, will be
billions per year. I see him as power crazed but $$$ crazed also.
He must be stopped pronto. Or the pandemic threat will be the least of our worries.
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Post by philbadfactor on Apr 4, 2022 8:49:09 GMT
Here is just one of the videos made by a mainly pro Russian Video maker/Journalist from inside Mariupol.
Here he talks to Russian residents and the hitches a ride on Bus Z with the Russian soldiers.
A look at things from the "other" side.
Could be contrued as Russian Propoganda of course, but that's not the spirit of this guys vids.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 4, 2022 15:23:34 GMT
I would believe anything the pro Russians say. Experts say that Mariupol will be much worse that Bucha. They have no way of knowing how bad it is now because there is no genuine information getting out but it could be thousands dead. Until Russia fecks off or Putin dies of whatever brain disease he has we won’t know the scale of the murder and destruction.
Putin is a fecking nut job so it could only be a brain disease he has I mean, who in their right mind would bathe in elks blood every day!!
The soon he meets his end the better.
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Post by philbadfactor on Apr 5, 2022 8:44:32 GMT
Reading the above it looks like the Russians didn't stand a chance. Thos that survived came back angry and traumatised. Hence the War Crimes. Perhaps that's the reality of war. It brutalises and makes people behave in ways they wouldn't have previously.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 8, 2022 9:41:43 GMT
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Post by philbadfactor on Apr 30, 2022 16:42:02 GMT
How worried are you about World War Three ? For myself I am becoming a little alarmed, especially when you read the left's perspective, and how they claim it's America and NATO who have provoked Russia in order to weaken them. If that's the truth we are in trouble, don't you agree ?[/font]
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/27/pszn-a27.html
The Guns of April
WSWS Editorial Board
27 April 2022
The United States and the NATO powers of Europe have set into motion a chain of events that is leading to World War III.
In her famed work on the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman detailed how miscalculations, the ubiquitous belief in a brief and winnable conflict, and irreversible tactical maneuvers—the “ifs, errors, and commitments”—accumulated as the imperialist powers dragged the workers of Europe into the snarl of the trenches and the slaughter of the Great War.
A similar dynamic is unfolding in the US-NATO conflict with Russia. The US-supplied howitzers and massive deployment of weapons into Ukraine are sounding the Guns of April.
In mid-March, US President Joe Biden repeatedly stated that he would not allow direct conflict between the United States and Russia, because “that would mean World War III.” A month later, this is precisely what the Biden administration is doing.
On Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin presided over a meeting of the representatives of forty nations in a council of war assembled by Washington on its Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the headquarters for the US Air Force in Europe and the NATO Air Command.
Austin, fresh from a visit to war-torn Kiev, confirmed that the war in Ukraine is a war between US and NATO, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. He announced that Washington would be assembling every month going forward a comparable international gathering of high-ranking military figures—which he termed the Ukrainian Contact Group—to “focus on winning” the conflict with Russia.
The aims of the war are now clear. The bloodshed in Ukraine was not provoked to defend its technical right to join NATO, but rather was prepared, instigated and massively escalated in order to destroy Russia as a significant military force and to overthrow its government. Ukraine is a pawn in this conflict, and its population is cannon fodder.
The Ramstein war council was organized to plot the next stage in this scheme. Prior to and in the aftermath of the meeting, the US and other NATO powers announced the deployment of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, tanks and tactical drones.
The Contact Group, Austin declared, must “move at the speed of war.” In accordance with this direction, Germany announced Tuesday that it would deliver an unspecified number of Flakpanzer Gepard “anti-aircraft cannon tanks,” while Canada reported that it would be sending M777 howitzers, anti-tank munitions and armored vehicles. “The distinction limiting escalatory weapons,” which existed in the first weeks of the war, Air Force Magazine noted, “appears to have melted away.”
The pretense that the US and NATO are not at war with Russia has also “melted away.” Former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges stated on Sunday that the US aim in the conflict was “breaking the back” of Russia.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded, accusing the United States of pressuring the Ukrainian government to sabotage peace talks and of conducting a proxy war in Ukraine. He warned that there was a “serious, real” danger of nuclear war. Austin dismissed Lavrov’s warning as “dangerous and unhelpful.”
What nonsense! Washington assembles a war camp and states that it aims to “break the back” of Russia. When Russia responds that such language and goals raise the danger of nuclear war, Washington declares this to be … unhelpful.
The United States has made clear that it aims to crush Russia and topple its government. Faced with such an existential threat, the use of nuclear weapons becomes a tactic the Russian ruling class will weigh. Washington is determined to win the war, the Putin government is determined to prevent that from happening. There is no way out for either side but escalation. Lavrov is in fact correct: nuclear war is a real and serious danger.
The real driving forces behind the war have emerged in the course of the conflict. The US and NATO powers goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, refusing to negotiate over Russia’s demand that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO. Russia termed its invasion a special operation, signaling that it intended a contained, tactical maneuver to stabilize its position in the region.
The US, however, would not allow such a rearrangement and sought either to sink Russia in the quagmire of a “grinding occupation,” or to organize its defeat. To this end, Washington worked to undermine all efforts at a negotiated settlement. The rhetoric of Washington justifying this policy has deepened the conflict. Biden accused Putin of war crimes, then of genocide, and called for regime change in Moscow. Each new formulation had an irreversible, escalatory character, a click in the ratchet of war.
Despite the massive and mounting infusion of military equipment into Ukraine—Washington has shipped more than $3.7 billion worth of weaponry since the beginning of the war—the regime in Kiev has not been able to orchestrate the decisive defeat of Russia. The danger, seen from the standpoint of the US and NATO, is that Russia will be able to consolidate its control over Eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea coast. If the Ukrainian forces do not drive forward, then the advantage, at least from a military standpoint, shifts to Russia.
The development of the conflict, set in motion in the Oval Office and deliberated in the Kremlin, is increasingly in the hands of military men and it is reaching a point of no return. A decisive defeat of Russia in the conflict requires the ever more direct involvement of the NATO powers themselves, up to and including the deployment of troops.
With its arms shipments, sweeping declarations and councils of war, the United States has staked its entire credibility on the defeat of Russia in this conflict. “The stakes reach beyond Ukraine and even beyond Europe,” Austin declared on Tuesday. The fate of American hegemony, including the credibility of its threats against China, hangs in the balance. The reckless decisions made by Washington have thus become the major premise in the logic of further escalation.
Washington drags behind it the major powers of Europe, as it assembles, with the hubris of empire, a war camp on the continent. Britain has been deeply complicit in every escalatory step, and Germany and France are taking up their assigned roles. Washington gathers the military conspirators on a US airbase in Germany, the country which once launched Operation Barbarossa, holds the Germans as virtual bystanders, and plots its war with Russia.
The leaders of the imperialist powers, above all the US, are proceeding with a recklessness bordering on criminal insanity. But it is a recklessness that arises out of class interests and the logic of the capitalist crisis. Driving the escalation of the conflict are not only geopolitical interests but, even more significantly, the intractable economic, social and political crisis in every major capitalist country, above all the United States.
As was the case with World War I, the same contradictions that give rise to imperialist war also provide the impulse for world socialist revolution. Even as the war develops, mass protests and working class struggles are erupting throughout the world, fueled by the surge in inflation and historically unprecedented levels of social inequality.
The plans for world war are being implemented entirely behind the backs of the population. Workers must be alerted to the danger, and the growing struggles throughout the world fused with the fight against imperialist war and the capitalist nation-state system.
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Post by Deleted on May 2, 2022 10:22:36 GMT
I honestly don’t see that. This is Putin trying to stay relevant and wanting to grab some of the territory USSR lost back. I do think it could rumble on for a while and the situation is extremely unpredictable. Hopefully someone will kill Putin before it goes much further?
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Post by philbadfactor on May 2, 2022 13:40:48 GMT
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Post by gordo on May 3, 2022 3:44:05 GMT
Gosh phil, they are real crazy folks out there with insane ideas!!!
But alas, there actually are a number of folks both in Europe and in USA who believe such things.
Such openly anti Jewish stuff, I haven't come across since the days of that little Austrian dude who joined the German army at World War One, and became leader of Germany, and we all know who he was..... A.Hitler!
Look, these folks have to know, the USA is not, and never has been a threat to Russia.
NATO, is not, and never has been a threat to Russia.
However, NATO is a threat to Russia trying to retake Europe.
NATO is there for the defense of Europe, and Russia isn't best pleased at that!
The stuff posted within that Link, is pure 100 percent nazi propaganda.
While it is true that some Jewish folks were behind the 1917 Russian revolution, the suggestion they were representative of Jews in general, is insane. And as for communist ideology and thinking, it doesn't come from Russia, but rather, some Russians took it up. Communist ideas started long before then.
In Paris following the debacle of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, there was a bit of an uprising, and we had the Paris Commune.
Tens of thousand ended up dead thru all of this. Both sides as bad as each other, it has to be admitted in the end.
The great Basilica of Sacred Heart on Monmartre, is built upon where the Paris Commune made its stand.
So, this claim, "communism" as it ended up, was an entirely Russian, or Jewish thing, is totally fake.
Also, the Russian communists were just as anti Jewish as they were anti Christian.
Basically, they were plain anti religion!
Many Jews themselves, ended up in Gulags in Russia.
The communists weren't shy of persecuting the Jews.
Stalin was once said to be a trainee Orthodox priest, but that didn't stop him persecuting Christians.
This war in Ukraine has nothing to do with NATO or USA or anyone else.
It is entirely about Russia wanting to rebuild its old Soviet Empire.
Pres. Putin lamented the loss of that Empire, the same way we have certain folks in GB who lament the loss of the British Empire.
There are actually some who still lament most bitterly, the loss of Ireland, and the Indian Raj!
The difference between those few in UK who bewail the loss of an olden times Empire, and the Kremlin, being, the dude in charge of Russia, thinks he has the power to restore at least some of his lost Empire.
Thus he blames Ukraine for being too pro Western.
He blames Ukraine for having one solitary military group who have no connection with Ukraine Government or military, for being pro nazi.
Not that said group was actually pro nazi, but rather, their use of nazi symbols was a way of showing defiance towards the Kremlin. (An ill advised use of such symbolism, I would say.)
But the real nazis have been the Russians, who come complete with their new pro war sign, that of the now infamous letter "Z" which is so akin to the nazi swastika, it is surprising how few have made that connection, thus far.
As for anything Biblical here, there is nothing "Biblical" to be found, as far as Russia is concerned.
However, we do have actual revelations from another source regards the direct threat Russia has posed to the World.
In Portugal, in a small place called Fatima, in 1917, three shepherd children had a vision, and they were told in that vision Russia would be a threat to the World. And mind, Russia was in complete chaos at that time. Who could have thought it possible?
Certainly not the Germans, who helped Lenin to spark the Russian Revolution, but only to bitterly regret it later.
The children were told that the ongoing World War One would end soon, but that a great conflict would take place starting in 1938.
And actually, that was when World War Two properly began, with Germany taking over the Czech borderland of Sudetenland.
Had the Allies refused Germany's demands in 1938, that War might not have happened, or at least, would have been totally different to what we ended up with, as the border defenses of Czechoslovakia were the best in all Europe. Not even France had anything to compare.
Had Germany to face those defenses, if the Czechs fought back, it would have changed everything.
But it didn't happen like that, and the Allies, just as the West today had been doing this past number of years with Putin, sought to appease Hitler.
Had NATO been in some kind of alliance with Ukraine and had NATO forces on the ground, there is no way Russia would have gone into Ukraine.
But I suspect, the West felt it would be a provocation to Russia, to include Ukraine, but as we see now, it didn't make any difference, Russia went to War with Ukraine, anyhow.
It has nothing to with Jews or nazism. That is Kremlin making up wild excuses.
The actual nazis, as noted above are the Russians, today.
And they don't want Ukraine to be a Democracy, and be part of the West.
They want it to do as Kremlin demands of it.
They want it to be like Belarus, and a few other places such as Kazakhstan, etc.
The fact is, everything predicted by those 3 young children at Fatima, Portugal, 1917, has come to pass. Every single word of it.
It has been unfortunate those with the power to do something about that Fatima prophesy, "they" mainly being at the Vatican, didn't heed the dire warnings! For it was to the Church the warnings were given, but chose not to act.
Now that they have, it has been way too late.
Now, it is clearly the case the West is not without fault.
Not for expanding NATO, but for other things, like the War in Iraq in 2002.
That was noted by Putin, who waited his time before making his own excuse to go into Ukraine years later.
And that was without doubt, one of Putins, motivators.
But while Iraq was a Regional threat, Ukraine had threatened no one, and certainly not Russia.
So, yes, the West has its faults.
Funding the mullahs in Afghanistan was another Western fault. Which was one of the reasons we ended up with the 2001 attacks in USA.
But none of which can be used to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the barbaric manner of that invasion.
Russia, has revealed itself, as still the selfsame communist regime it was in the earlier part of the 20th Century, but now, not only has Putin shown himself to be emulating Stalin, he has thrown in hitler to his mix, yet dares complain Ukraine is a bedrock of nazism, while he, Putin, is using nazi war tactics into the bargain!
Thus, I have no time for those who try defend Russia's motives here. They think Ukraine should be ruled from Moscow, and if they want to be free like the rest of us, that's too bad.
Well, it isn't too bad.
Russia is in the wrong, and Russia has rightly been condemned.
We should be able to discern faults of the West to be condemned, and they are quite a few, (I'd add support for Saudi Arabia, being another such fault) without then trying to justify Russia because of those faults.
Alas, there are some folks who don't and can't not see the awful reality.
But then most of those folks aren't having to deal with Russian troops on their very doorstep!
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Post by philbadfactor on Mar 26, 2024 9:44:10 GMT
I watched a documentary last evening about this war. It was on BBC2 see here for the review; www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/25/ukraine-enemy-in-the-woods-review-bbcI agree with the views of the reviewer it was an excellent piece of film making, footage shot with bodycams cut together with interviews of the combatants fighting the Russians in a forest trying to protect a Railway Line. 99 soldiers went out. 66 were seriously injured and 10 died. In other words your chances of being injured or killed were greater than your chances of coming back unscathed. The piece didn't pull too many punches and showed the true horror of close armed combat. They captured one Russian who said "war is not for me". I'd have to agree with him about that. Though for some, at times, it's obviously thrilling. |
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