Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[Ted Lange 16110]

840K people follow this fucking clown.

 

 

[Brisketexan 105154]

840K people follow this fucking clown.
 
 

What a giant piece of shit.
1 - accuse Ukraine without evidence, and with pretty stout evidence to the contrary.
2 - claim to be pissed off and appalled by an attack on civilians…as Russia commits war crimes against Ukrainian civilians every fucking day.
Yep, that’s the David Sacks checklist. What a fucking waste of the chemicals that make up the human body.

[Pato del Muerto 52524]

Do those other listed incidents have another party happily proclaiming it was them?  After the US told the world that something like it appears to be imminent?

[F250 28778]

Wrong thread.

Edited March 23 by F250

[Bevo 13579]

46 minutes ago, Ted Lange said:

840K people follow this fucking clown.

 

 

I don't know who David Sack is, someone educate me. I wonder if he believes his BS or if he is simply a grifter paid by Russia.

[B00M 6418]

1 hour ago, Schulz2.0 said:

It's not a hard concept. Russian oil being taken completely out of the system means the price oil of jumps to $120ish a barrel. Helping the Russian-aligned far right in Europe and the US doesn't help Ukraine's interests. The goal was to force Russia to sell oil and refined products at a steep discount.

If Ukraine brings Russian oil exports to zero, doesn’t Ukraine win in short order?

I don’t expect that regardless. Maybe long term successful Ukrainian attacks being Russian exports down by 50%… so far they’ve reduced refining capacity by what, 10-15%?

Intuitively I do think that Russia going to zero brings oil to $120/barrel at current demand levels. Would love if an expert can run the numbers. 

frankly this feels like the US throwing it out there as cover … stop Ukraine… don’t… 

[tx 3 putt 77060]

 

2 minutes ago, B00M said:

If Ukraine brings Russian oil exports to zero, doesn’t Ukraine win in short order?

I don’t expect that regardless. Maybe long term successful Ukrainian attacks being Russian exports down by 50%… so far they’ve reduced refining capacity by what, 10-15%?

Intuitively I do think that Russia going to zero brings oil to $120/barrel at current demand levels. Would love if an expert can run the numbers. 

frankly this feels like the US throwing it out there as cover … stop Ukraine… don’t… 

 

they need to hit all the refineries again, with the fist of god 

[statsman 5472]

17 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I don't know who David Sack is, someone educate me. I wonder if he believes his BS or if he is simply a grifter paid by Russia.

I wondered the same, before. I think he is some tech guy, connected to Musk somehow. 
 
There is a funny type of intelligence that wants to see patterns and conspiracies where there really aren’t any. These are the people who get honestly sucked in by the Russian propaganda nonsense. You can spot them by their pet responses:

”That’s what they’d like you to think.”

”You really believe that’s a coincidence?”

It seems to be a real desire to demonstrate being smarter than everyone else  

There is a poor woman, named Victoria Nuland, an under-secretary of state, who by all accounts does a hard working and merit-worthy job. This poor woman’s career is nearly ruined by these conspiracy mongers. They claim she is the chess piece mover controlling US foreign policy behind the scenes. 

Edited March 23 by statsman

[atomheartbevo 89727]

9 minutes ago, statsman said:

There is a funny type of intelligence that wants to see patterns and conspiracies where there really aren’t any. These are the people who get honestly sucked in by the Russian propaganda nonsense. You can spot them by there pet responses:

23 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I don't know who David Sack is, someone educate me. I wonder if he believes his BS or if he is simply a grifter paid by Russia.

He’s a South African to begin with. His being friends with Elmo and his ability at being in on PayPal and some other tech companies at the start didn’t really cross over into figuring out winners outside of the tech industry - Sacks was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and then a big Ron DeSantis supporter, and that carries over into the Russian stuff.  He’s the guy who would have picked Walter Mondale to beat Reagan, or Argentina to beat England. Japan to beat the US, etc.

edit: it’s not a CR thing, the guy does not know how to judge people/situations well. He should stick to tech companies.

Edited March 23 by atomheartbevo

[Bevo 13579]

8 minutes ago, statsman said:

There is a poor woman, named Victoria Nuland, an under-secretary of state, who by all accounts does a hard working and merit-worthy job. This poor woman’s career is nearly ruined by these conspiracy mongers. They claim she is the chess piece mover controlling US foreign policy behind the scenes. 

I did a quick search and the first article that I read, well let's just say I disagreed with pretty much all of it.

The author was Marco Carnelos who was an Italian diplomat, who I know nothing about. I also know nothing about the publisher, the Middle Eastern Eye.

 

Victoria Nuland: Farewell to the queen of US foreign policy disasters
Marco Carnelos
22 March 2024 14:07 GMT | Last update: 1 day 7 hours ago
For 30 years, from Iraq, Syria and China to Ukraine, Russia and Israel, Nuland's impact on US foreign policy has been disastrous. Let's hope her successor is an improvement
 

Sometimes, major policy changes are anticipated and even symbolised by mere bureaucratic decisions.

This could certainly be the case for the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who recently announced her retirement after three and a half decades serving as a senior US foreign policy official under ten different secretaries of state. She has probably decided to leave what appears more and more like a sinking ship.

The decision, which has been accompanied by scant coverage in western mainstream media, incontrovertibly signals the abject failures of the Biden administration’s policies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The first was supposed to isolate and sanction Russia and bring it to its knees, hopefully triggering a regime change in Moscow.

The second was the unwavering support extended to Israel to reaffirm a Pax Americana in the region through the Abraham Accords, crowned by a deal with Saudi Arabia, and to silently sweep the Palestinian question under the rug.
 

Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv, short of funding and weapons, seems to have no capability left to affect the war's trajectory.

Sanctions against Russia backfired spectacularly, creating massive problems for Europe’s industrial competitiveness. Ultimately, Moscow has been isolated only by the western countries, while its political and trade relations with the rest of the world are unaffected. On the contrary, they are growing, as is its economy.

In the Middle East, notwithstanding Washington's massive support to Israel in its war in Gaza - for which the US is borderline complicit in a genocide - the Netanyahu government is blatantly ignoring the Biden administration’s pleas to restrain its military offensive and to allow humanitarian aid to a starved Palestinian population.

A ceasefire, or a humanitarian truce, remains elusive, as does a deal for the dual release of the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian prisoners. Finally, an Israeli-Saudi deal seems more distant than before.

In the pantheon of US power, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs is the third-ranking member of the US State Department, after the secretary and their deputy. Nevertheless, it is the real engine of US foreign policy.

Nuland has not been just a high-level US diplomat, she has been the spearhead, the golden girl of the US warmongering neoconservative and liberal interventionist movements, which in barely two decades have given humanity the Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Palestinian disasters.

In such a desolate landscape, then, if any face should be associated with the last decade's US policy on Russia and, particularly, with the critical file of Ukraine, it is Nuland’s.

Her career, in which she held top positions within the US foreign service, witnessed the progressive deterioration of US-Russian relations and also US-China relations, to the point where the risks of military confrontation in Europe and East Asia haven't been as high since the most hectic days of the Cold War.

Nuland married Robert Kagan, one of the key founders of the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, which strongly advocated aggressive US military intervention around the world. Nuland shared Kagan's views on Russia, and pursued an obsessive anti-Russian policy, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the fateful Nato’s eastwards expansion.

In fact, so relentlessly has she pursued them, that she has now helped create an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

It is a rare thing, even in the glorious annals of US diplomacy, to have had an official combine Russophobia, Sinophobia and Islamophobia to produce so much damage.

From 1993 to 1996, Nuland was chief of staff to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the architect of the Clinton’s administration policy on Russia. The 1990s were the happy years of the US-Russia relationship, at least from the American standpoint.

Russia's then President Boris Yeltsin was much loved by the US foreign policy establishment because he was weak and ready to execute all the “instructions” coming from Washington. Among them, the disastrous economic shock therapies, including fake privatisations, which created a class of oligarchs that seized control of the country's resources and accumulated immense fortunes that were syphoned out of the country.

But these were not good years for the general Russian population, whose level of poverty plunged to Stalin-era levels. These were the years that slowly created the conditions for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

Under Yeltsin, Russia was not only keen to adopt US-prescribed economic remedies but also to tolerate acts blatantly detrimental to its historical interests, such as the Nato-led war which broke Kosovo from Serbia in 1999.

In the George W Bush administration, Nuland served on the foreign policy staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. History can tell us how much damage US foreign policy caused at that time, starting with the Iraq disaster.

From 2005 to 2008, Nuland was the US ambassador to Nato. At the infamous Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, she pressed allies to grant membership action plans to Ukraine and Georgia.

When the German and French governments refused, she was involved in the blunder in which Nato promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted.

Later, in the first Obama administration, she was spokesperson for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and present at the creation of two further disasters: the regime change war in Libya, which turned the country into a failed state, and the unrealistic “Assad must go policy”, which helped transform a peaceful uprising in Syria into a brutal civil war, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

However, her most important accomplishment, for which she deserves an imaginary academy award for foreign policy blunders, was her handling of the Ukrainian file in her capacity as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs under the second Obama administration.

There, she organised the “Maidan coup”, according to the Russian narrative, where she brilliantly succeeded in bringing Ukraine under the western political umbrella and ousting Ukraine's legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. This overturned a previously agreed political deal brokered by European powers to avoid Ukraine descending into chaos. Famously, in a leaked call to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, she said "Fuck the EU" at the time.

Bloody and tense years followed, especially in the Donbas region, where fighting broke out between the new US-backed regime in Kyiv and pro-Russian forces in the east, and the relationship between Russia and the West deteriorated after the former, as a reaction, seized control of Crimea.

There was a four-year pause in Nuland's career between January 2017 and January 2021, during which she did not deploy any ticking bombs. The reason is simple: she was not welcome in the new Trump administration.

Unfortunately, under the new Biden administration, Nuland was back and she assumed the critical job of undersecretary of state for policy. With Nuland back, the Kremlin immediately concluded that there was no room for any understanding with the US.

Discreetly, and largely unreported by mainstream media, western military involvement in Ukraine increased and so did Russian anger. It was a trend that, after all, had been ongoing since 2014, as recently revealed by the New York Times.

Three years later, what Nuland leaves behind is nothing short of disastrous.

She has accomplished an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

US moral standing has been severely injured, and, in the best case, the global rest are indifferent to US pleas and narratives.

Western democracies are also facing moral bankruptcy in the rubble of Gaza while the International Court of Justice has accepted to inquire if Israel, whose right to self-defence has been uncritically supported for too long by the West, is committing a genocide.
 

The only words of common sense are coming from Pope Francis who, in the case of Ukraine, has urged the international community to recognise how desperate the situation is and to consider peace negotiations to spare further casualties; even the pope was not spared shameful attacks on him from those distorting his words.

In the Middle East, the picture is similarly gloomy. Like the Ukraine situation, the conflict in Gaza is reaching a stalemate, while the risk of escalation remains high, especially with a potential major conflict looming along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Meanwhile, US leverage over Israel has zeroed, and the Biden administration blindly perseveres in preaching its narratives of good and bad.

Last year, when Wendy Sherman stepped back as US deputy secretary of state, Nuland was nominated as acting deputy secretary of state. Nuland was close to being crowned and it would have been the coronation of her career.

But in what was probably one of its smartest decisions, the Biden administration picked the National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell, for the job. Campbell had been the architect of another failed policy, Hillary Clinton’s pivot to Asia.

Let’s at least hope that Campbell does not turn China into what Russia was for Nuland.

 

[statsman 5472]

5 minutes ago, Bevo said:

I did a quick search and the first article that I read, well let's just say I disagreed with pretty much all of it.

The author was Marco Carnelos who was an Italian diplomat, who I know nothing about. I also know nothing about the publisher, the Middle Eastern Eye.

 

Victoria Nuland: Farewell to the queen of US foreign policy disasters
Marco Carnelos
22 March 2024 14:07 GMT | Last update: 1 day 7 hours ago
For 30 years, from Iraq, Syria and China to Ukraine, Russia and Israel, Nuland's impact on US foreign policy has been disastrous. Let's hope her successor is an improvement
 

Sometimes, major policy changes are anticipated and even symbolised by mere bureaucratic decisions.

This could certainly be the case for the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who recently announced her retirement after three and a half decades serving as a senior US foreign policy official under ten different secretaries of state. She has probably decided to leave what appears more and more like a sinking ship.

The decision, which has been accompanied by scant coverage in western mainstream media, incontrovertibly signals the abject failures of the Biden administration’s policies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The first was supposed to isolate and sanction Russia and bring it to its knees, hopefully triggering a regime change in Moscow.

The second was the unwavering support extended to Israel to reaffirm a Pax Americana in the region through the Abraham Accords, crowned by a deal with Saudi Arabia, and to silently sweep the Palestinian question under the rug.
 

Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv, short of funding and weapons, seems to have no capability left to affect the war's trajectory.

Sanctions against Russia backfired spectacularly, creating massive problems for Europe’s industrial competitiveness. Ultimately, Moscow has been isolated only by the western countries, while its political and trade relations with the rest of the world are unaffected. On the contrary, they are growing, as is its economy.

In the Middle East, notwithstanding Washington's massive support to Israel in its war in Gaza - for which the US is borderline complicit in a genocide - the Netanyahu government is blatantly ignoring the Biden administration’s pleas to restrain its military offensive and to allow humanitarian aid to a starved Palestinian population.

A ceasefire, or a humanitarian truce, remains elusive, as does a deal for the dual release of the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian prisoners. Finally, an Israeli-Saudi deal seems more distant than before.

In the pantheon of US power, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs is the third-ranking member of the US State Department, after the secretary and their deputy. Nevertheless, it is the real engine of US foreign policy.

Nuland has not been just a high-level US diplomat, she has been the spearhead, the golden girl of the US warmongering neoconservative and liberal interventionist movements, which in barely two decades have given humanity the Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Palestinian disasters.

In such a desolate landscape, then, if any face should be associated with the last decade's US policy on Russia and, particularly, with the critical file of Ukraine, it is Nuland’s.

Her career, in which she held top positions within the US foreign service, witnessed the progressive deterioration of US-Russian relations and also US-China relations, to the point where the risks of military confrontation in Europe and East Asia haven't been as high since the most hectic days of the Cold War.

Nuland married Robert Kagan, one of the key founders of the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, which strongly advocated aggressive US military intervention around the world. Nuland shared Kagan's views on Russia, and pursued an obsessive anti-Russian policy, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the fateful Nato’s eastwards expansion.

In fact, so relentlessly has she pursued them, that she has now helped create an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

It is a rare thing, even in the glorious annals of US diplomacy, to have had an official combine Russophobia, Sinophobia and Islamophobia to produce so much damage.

From 1993 to 1996, Nuland was chief of staff to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the architect of the Clinton’s administration policy on Russia. The 1990s were the happy years of the US-Russia relationship, at least from the American standpoint.

Russia's then President Boris Yeltsin was much loved by the US foreign policy establishment because he was weak and ready to execute all the “instructions” coming from Washington. Among them, the disastrous economic shock therapies, including fake privatisations, which created a class of oligarchs that seized control of the country's resources and accumulated immense fortunes that were syphoned out of the country.

But these were not good years for the general Russian population, whose level of poverty plunged to Stalin-era levels. These were the years that slowly created the conditions for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

Under Yeltsin, Russia was not only keen to adopt US-prescribed economic remedies but also to tolerate acts blatantly detrimental to its historical interests, such as the Nato-led war which broke Kosovo from Serbia in 1999.

In the George W Bush administration, Nuland served on the foreign policy staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. History can tell us how much damage US foreign policy caused at that time, starting with the Iraq disaster.

From 2005 to 2008, Nuland was the US ambassador to Nato. At the infamous Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, she pressed allies to grant membership action plans to Ukraine and Georgia.

When the German and French governments refused, she was involved in the blunder in which Nato promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted.

Later, in the first Obama administration, she was spokesperson for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and present at the creation of two further disasters: the regime change war in Libya, which turned the country into a failed state, and the unrealistic “Assad must go policy”, which helped transform a peaceful uprising in Syria into a brutal civil war, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

However, her most important accomplishment, for which she deserves an imaginary academy award for foreign policy blunders, was her handling of the Ukrainian file in her capacity as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs under the second Obama administration.

There, she organised the “Maidan coup”, according to the Russian narrative, where she brilliantly succeeded in bringing Ukraine under the western political umbrella and ousting Ukraine's legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. This overturned a previously agreed political deal brokered by European powers to avoid Ukraine descending into chaos. Famously, in a leaked call to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, she said "Fuck the EU" at the time.

Bloody and tense years followed, especially in the Donbas region, where fighting broke out between the new US-backed regime in Kyiv and pro-Russian forces in the east, and the relationship between Russia and the West deteriorated after the former, as a reaction, seized control of Crimea.

There was a four-year pause in Nuland's career between January 2017 and January 2021, during which she did not deploy any ticking bombs. The reason is simple: she was not welcome in the new Trump administration.

Unfortunately, under the new Biden administration, Nuland was back and she assumed the critical job of undersecretary of state for policy. With Nuland back, the Kremlin immediately concluded that there was no room for any understanding with the US.

Discreetly, and largely unreported by mainstream media, western military involvement in Ukraine increased and so did Russian anger. It was a trend that, after all, had been ongoing since 2014, as recently revealed by the New York Times.

Three years later, what Nuland leaves behind is nothing short of disastrous.

She has accomplished an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

US moral standing has been severely injured, and, in the best case, the global rest are indifferent to US pleas and narratives.

Western democracies are also facing moral bankruptcy in the rubble of Gaza while the International Court of Justice has accepted to inquire if Israel, whose right to self-defence has been uncritically supported for too long by the West, is committing a genocide.
 

The only words of common sense are coming from Pope Francis who, in the case of Ukraine, has urged the international community to recognise how desperate the situation is and to consider peace negotiations to spare further casualties; even the pope was not spared shameful attacks on him from those distorting his words.

In the Middle East, the picture is similarly gloomy. Like the Ukraine situation, the conflict in Gaza is reaching a stalemate, while the risk of escalation remains high, especially with a potential major conflict looming along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Meanwhile, US leverage over Israel has zeroed, and the Biden administration blindly perseveres in preaching its narratives of good and bad.

Last year, when Wendy Sherman stepped back as US deputy secretary of state, Nuland was nominated as acting deputy secretary of state. Nuland was close to being crowned and it would have been the coronation of her career.

But in what was probably one of its smartest decisions, the Biden administration picked the National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell, for the job. Campbell had been the architect of another failed policy, Hillary Clinton’s pivot to Asia.

Let’s at least hope that Campbell does not turn China into what Russia was for Nuland.

 

Thank you for the example. I think a more accurate summation of her career is “she was a mid to high level state department employee for thirty years”. 

[956 Worldwide 34715]

Please don’t post about Toria Nuland, you’ll summon Anastasis to this thread. 

Edited March 23 by 956 Worldwide

[Schulz2.0 28960]

2 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Who is buying their oil?  India and China?  Why does all oil have to go up if their production is cut?  Weren’t we recently mad that they were buying Russian oil very cheap?  Why didn’t cheap Russian oil move the price of worldwide oil down to match?

India and China. Refined products get further exported by India and China. If you take 4m bpd off the global market, it drives prices up. Oil has a relatively inelastic demand. The Russian oil wasn't selling at a huge discount. Supplies have been relatively constant, but oil would be much higher if China and Europe's economies weren't in slight recessions.

Edited March 23 by Schulz2.0

[956 Worldwide 34715]

20 minutes ago, statsman said:

Thank you for the example. I think a more accurate summation of her career is “she was a mid to high level state department employee for thirty years”. 

She’s a force of nature who’s done a lot of good and also made some missteps.  Her missteps have nothing to do with the shit the conspiracy minded Russia apologists put out. 
 

And history has proven her right about 2008, we should have let Georgia and Ukraine in NATO and figured it out along the way.  Her assessment of who Putin was and the language he speaks was correct, Merkel and Sarkozy were wrong. 

[Ted Lange 16110]

 

 

[Gatorubet 30246]

38 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

He’s a South African to begin with. His being friends with Elmo and his ability at being in on PayPal and some other tech companies at the start didn’t really cross over into figuring out winners outside of the tech industry - Sacks was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, and then a big Ron DeSantis supporter, and that carries over into the Russian stuff.  He’s the guy who would have picked Walter Mondale to beat Reagan, or Argentina to beat England. Japan to beat the US, etc.

This is certainly not a light read, but I found this to be an exceptional explanation of how and why we think how we think. And, more intriguing to me, why otherwise successful and intelligent people completely whiff on figuring out what looks like glaringly, easy decisions/opinions. 

 

 

 

[statsman 5472]

Wait,…didn’t Argentina beat England? Or, are we not talking about 1989 World Cup?

[Schulz2.0 28960]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/23/russia-fsb-tries-to-link-ukraine-to-moscow-attack-despite-is-claiming-responsibility

[Born to Run 6569]

 
 

Crimson Jihad has come a long way with their videography team.

[956 Worldwide 34715]

39 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

This is certainly not a light read, but I found this to be an exceptional explanation of how and why we think how we think. And, more intriguing to me, why otherwise successful and intelligent people completely whiff on figuring out what looks like glaringly, easy decisions/opinions. 

 

 

 

Russian dupes and stooges almost universally are fairly smart people who first adopted some unrelated terrible opinion— like being a racist, communist, goldbug, etc. David Sacks was a libertarian first.  It’s almost never straight to Russian stoolie.
 

They aren’t used to being told they are wrong and stupid and the Russians are happy to cultivate and nurture their grievance and tell them they are Very Special Smart Boys (they are almost always men).  

It’s nearly always psychology and nothing to do with brains.  Even the real cloak and dagger stuff, it’s always some grievance or just feeling like no one recognizes your special smartness.  The Russians are great at this, they “get” Westerners and are in some ways simply aggrieved Westerners themselves.  
 

The PRC exploits ethnic ties and greed, the Cubans exploit ideology.  They aren’t as good at the psychological thing. 

[Braff Zacklin 13618]

8 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

__________ dupes and stooges almost universally are ... people who first adopted some unrelated terrible opinion— like being a racist, communist, goldbug, etc. David Sacks was a libertarian first.  It’s almost never straight to ______ stoolie.

Made some minor edits. Re-read and draw your own conclusions.

[B00M 6418]

21 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Russian dupes and stooges almost universally are fairly smart people who first adopted some unrelated terrible opinion— like being a racist, communist, goldbug, etc. David Sacks was a libertarian first.  It’s almost never straight to Russian stoolie.
 

They aren’t used to being told they are wrong and stupid and the Russians are happy to cultivate and nurture their grievance and tell them they are Very Special Smart Boys (they are almost always men).  

It’s nearly always psychology and nothing to do with brains.  Even the real cloak and dagger stuff, it’s always some grievance or just feeling like no one recognizes your special smartness.  The Russians are great at this, they “get” Westerners and are in some ways simply aggrieved Westerners themselves.  
 

The PRC exploits ethnic ties and greed, the Cubans exploit ideology.  They aren’t as good at the psychological thing. 

Got damn, dudes afraid of dollar inflation up in here catching some serious strays 

[KYHorn 17076]

1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

It’s nearly always psychology and nothing to do with brains.  Even the real cloak and dagger stuff, it’s always some grievance or just feeling like no one recognizes your special smartness.  The Russians are great at this, they “get” Westerners and are in some ways simply aggrieved Westerners themselves.  

Interesting. This seems to fit Robert Hanson pretty well.

[Schulz2.0 28960]

 

[Walser 1109]

2 hours ago, Born to Run said:

2 hours ago, Ted Lange said:

 
 

Crimson Jihad has come a long way with their videography team.

Battery Aziz!

[Schulz2.0 28960]

1 minute ago, Walser said:

Battery Aziz!

[hookem2010 2624]

3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Please don’t post about Toria Nuland, you’ll summon Anastasis to this thread. 

I was about to say, I don't really remember the name outside of Ana thinking she was the one person/thing he couldn't #bothsides about. There was no opposite and equally bad counter to her, apparently. 

[AUS-97HORN 11809]

1 hour ago, Schulz2.0 said:

 

whatever the Uks were aiming at, they fucking hit it 3 times in 7 seconds  and other 2 times  in 5 seconds at the other site ( I think air defense blew up a 3rd one )

[Scheiss Meister 8408]

22 minutes ago, AUS-97HORN said:

whatever the Uks were aiming at, they fucking hit it 3 times in 7 seconds  and other 2 times  in 5 seconds at the other site ( I think air defense blew up a 3rd one )

My first thought was, "Damn!  Ukrain wanted that target thoroughly destroyed!"  But if you are targeting a high value target in a hotly contested airspace, you shoot three or four rounds at it to increase your chances of a hit.  When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight.

[Anastasis 23475]

1 hour ago, hookem2010 said:

I was about to say, I don't really remember the name outside of Ana thinking she was the one person/thing he couldn't #bothsides about. There was no opposite and equally bad counter to her, apparently. 

LOL. She is actually the epitome of #bothsides as it relates to American foreign policy. I will admit, I do not understand the rehabilitation of arch-neocons like Nuland, nor the adoption of neocon foreign policy across our political spectrum. We don't seem to be capable of learning from recent history and policy failure. But hey, maybe this time the outcomes will be different.  

Edited March 24 by Anastasis

[atomheartbevo 89727]

1 hour ago, AUS-97HORN said:

whatever the Uks were aiming at, they fucking hit it 3 times in 7 seconds  and other 2 times  in 5 seconds at the other site ( I think air defense blew up a 3rd one )

Wonder if they had info about somebody being there.

[statsman 5472]

Ukraine’s armed forces desperately need fresh troops to hold back massed Russian offensives—but political dithering is leaving front-line units threadbare
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraines-battered-army-grapples-with-growing-troop-shortage-6d695eba?st=pq9g1pwjmrmycmt&reflink=share_mobilewebshare

[Bevo 13579]

19 minutes ago, statsman said:

Ukraine’s armed forces desperately need fresh troops to hold back massed Russian offensives—but political dithering is leaving front-line units threadbare
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukraines-battered-army-grapples-with-growing-troop-shortage-6d695eba?st=pq9g1pwjmrmycmt&reflink=share_mobilewebshare

 

 

That is terrible news - like it makes me doubt my support. Maybe it is typical for people not to want to fight when their country is in peril but that is at odds with my thoughts.

[InkaUtexas 25986]

I don't doubt my support. But Ukraine is going to have to give up more land. Guard Kyiv, pull back from the east and keep hitting where you can. Trying to hold cities this size of San Marcos? Nah...

A few things that come to mind. Ukraine has to support their industry. Not just war, but food. Have they mobilized their female population into civilian roles? What about the men who left? Do you take an experienced shop worker or electrician and send them to the front?

And mobilization requires training. It takes time. it takes equipment. Where are they getting it? 10K rounds of 155 might sound cool, but who is going to shoot them?

[Anastasis 23475]

6 hours ago, Bevo said:

I did a quick search and the first article that I read, well let's just say I disagreed with pretty much all of it.

The author was Marco Carnelos who was an Italian diplomat, who I know nothing about. I also know nothing about the publisher, the Middle Eastern Eye.

 

Victoria Nuland: Farewell to the queen of US foreign policy disasters
Marco Carnelos
22 March 2024 14:07 GMT | Last update: 1 day 7 hours ago
For 30 years, from Iraq, Syria and China to Ukraine, Russia and Israel, Nuland's impact on US foreign policy has been disastrous. Let's hope her successor is an improvement
 

Sometimes, major policy changes are anticipated and even symbolised by mere bureaucratic decisions.

This could certainly be the case for the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who recently announced her retirement after three and a half decades serving as a senior US foreign policy official under ten different secretaries of state. She has probably decided to leave what appears more and more like a sinking ship.

The decision, which has been accompanied by scant coverage in western mainstream media, incontrovertibly signals the abject failures of the Biden administration’s policies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The first was supposed to isolate and sanction Russia and bring it to its knees, hopefully triggering a regime change in Moscow.

The second was the unwavering support extended to Israel to reaffirm a Pax Americana in the region through the Abraham Accords, crowned by a deal with Saudi Arabia, and to silently sweep the Palestinian question under the rug.
 

Two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv, short of funding and weapons, seems to have no capability left to affect the war's trajectory.

Sanctions against Russia backfired spectacularly, creating massive problems for Europe’s industrial competitiveness. Ultimately, Moscow has been isolated only by the western countries, while its political and trade relations with the rest of the world are unaffected. On the contrary, they are growing, as is its economy.

In the Middle East, notwithstanding Washington's massive support to Israel in its war in Gaza - for which the US is borderline complicit in a genocide - the Netanyahu government is blatantly ignoring the Biden administration’s pleas to restrain its military offensive and to allow humanitarian aid to a starved Palestinian population.

A ceasefire, or a humanitarian truce, remains elusive, as does a deal for the dual release of the Israeli hostages and the Palestinian prisoners. Finally, an Israeli-Saudi deal seems more distant than before.

In the pantheon of US power, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs is the third-ranking member of the US State Department, after the secretary and their deputy. Nevertheless, it is the real engine of US foreign policy.

Nuland has not been just a high-level US diplomat, she has been the spearhead, the golden girl of the US warmongering neoconservative and liberal interventionist movements, which in barely two decades have given humanity the Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Palestinian disasters.

In such a desolate landscape, then, if any face should be associated with the last decade's US policy on Russia and, particularly, with the critical file of Ukraine, it is Nuland’s.

Her career, in which she held top positions within the US foreign service, witnessed the progressive deterioration of US-Russian relations and also US-China relations, to the point where the risks of military confrontation in Europe and East Asia haven't been as high since the most hectic days of the Cold War.

Nuland married Robert Kagan, one of the key founders of the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, which strongly advocated aggressive US military intervention around the world. Nuland shared Kagan's views on Russia, and pursued an obsessive anti-Russian policy, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the fateful Nato’s eastwards expansion.

In fact, so relentlessly has she pursued them, that she has now helped create an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

It is a rare thing, even in the glorious annals of US diplomacy, to have had an official combine Russophobia, Sinophobia and Islamophobia to produce so much damage.

From 1993 to 1996, Nuland was chief of staff to US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, the architect of the Clinton’s administration policy on Russia. The 1990s were the happy years of the US-Russia relationship, at least from the American standpoint.

Russia's then President Boris Yeltsin was much loved by the US foreign policy establishment because he was weak and ready to execute all the “instructions” coming from Washington. Among them, the disastrous economic shock therapies, including fake privatisations, which created a class of oligarchs that seized control of the country's resources and accumulated immense fortunes that were syphoned out of the country.

But these were not good years for the general Russian population, whose level of poverty plunged to Stalin-era levels. These were the years that slowly created the conditions for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

Under Yeltsin, Russia was not only keen to adopt US-prescribed economic remedies but also to tolerate acts blatantly detrimental to its historical interests, such as the Nato-led war which broke Kosovo from Serbia in 1999.

In the George W Bush administration, Nuland served on the foreign policy staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. History can tell us how much damage US foreign policy caused at that time, starting with the Iraq disaster.

From 2005 to 2008, Nuland was the US ambassador to Nato. At the infamous Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008, she pressed allies to grant membership action plans to Ukraine and Georgia.

When the German and French governments refused, she was involved in the blunder in which Nato promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted.

Later, in the first Obama administration, she was spokesperson for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and present at the creation of two further disasters: the regime change war in Libya, which turned the country into a failed state, and the unrealistic “Assad must go policy”, which helped transform a peaceful uprising in Syria into a brutal civil war, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

However, her most important accomplishment, for which she deserves an imaginary academy award for foreign policy blunders, was her handling of the Ukrainian file in her capacity as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs under the second Obama administration.

There, she organised the “Maidan coup”, according to the Russian narrative, where she brilliantly succeeded in bringing Ukraine under the western political umbrella and ousting Ukraine's legitimately elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. This overturned a previously agreed political deal brokered by European powers to avoid Ukraine descending into chaos. Famously, in a leaked call to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, she said "Fuck the EU" at the time.

Bloody and tense years followed, especially in the Donbas region, where fighting broke out between the new US-backed regime in Kyiv and pro-Russian forces in the east, and the relationship between Russia and the West deteriorated after the former, as a reaction, seized control of Crimea.

There was a four-year pause in Nuland's career between January 2017 and January 2021, during which she did not deploy any ticking bombs. The reason is simple: she was not welcome in the new Trump administration.

Unfortunately, under the new Biden administration, Nuland was back and she assumed the critical job of undersecretary of state for policy. With Nuland back, the Kremlin immediately concluded that there was no room for any understanding with the US.

Discreetly, and largely unreported by mainstream media, western military involvement in Ukraine increased and so did Russian anger. It was a trend that, after all, had been ongoing since 2014, as recently revealed by the New York Times.

Three years later, what Nuland leaves behind is nothing short of disastrous.

She has accomplished an increased risk of a major global conflict that could affect three strategic theatres at the same time: Europe, the Middle East and East Asia.

US moral standing has been severely injured, and, in the best case, the global rest are indifferent to US pleas and narratives.

Western democracies are also facing moral bankruptcy in the rubble of Gaza while the International Court of Justice has accepted to inquire if Israel, whose right to self-defence has been uncritically supported for too long by the West, is committing a genocide.
 

The only words of common sense are coming from Pope Francis who, in the case of Ukraine, has urged the international community to recognise how desperate the situation is and to consider peace negotiations to spare further casualties; even the pope was not spared shameful attacks on him from those distorting his words.

In the Middle East, the picture is similarly gloomy. Like the Ukraine situation, the conflict in Gaza is reaching a stalemate, while the risk of escalation remains high, especially with a potential major conflict looming along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Meanwhile, US leverage over Israel has zeroed, and the Biden administration blindly perseveres in preaching its narratives of good and bad.

Last year, when Wendy Sherman stepped back as US deputy secretary of state, Nuland was nominated as acting deputy secretary of state. Nuland was close to being crowned and it would have been the coronation of her career.

But in what was probably one of its smartest decisions, the Biden administration picked the National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell, for the job. Campbell had been the architect of another failed policy, Hillary Clinton’s pivot to Asia.

Let’s at least hope that Campbell does not turn China into what Russia was for Nuland.

 

Yeah, this guy has clearly no idea what he is talking about. 

[atomheartbevo 89727]

 

[atomheartbevo 89727]

 

[Parliament 14260]

I’m gonna guess a foreign terrorist arrested in Russia is not read his Miranda Rights.

[statsman 5472]

8 hours ago, Bevo said:

 

 

That is terrible news - like it makes me doubt my support. Maybe it is typical for people not to want to fight when their country is in peril but that is at odds with my thoughts.

If this war is about the size of Ukraine’s military, they do not have a chance of winning. Thats the war Russia wants to fight, where soldiers are just numbers, and they are expended as needed. 
 
Ukraine’s only chance is to fight as a western army, but they need the advantages of a western army- the top weapons, and functioning supply chains. 
 
But, here we are. Two years in, and nobody in the west has gone into wartime production of artillery shells. They have been given various defunct missile systems, and they are running out. Frankly, the western governments are not acting seriously. We act as if it is a strategy to give them three different tank systems, in various states of disrepair, and say, “MacGyver this into a victory”. 

[JesusSweatDuck 17784]

2 hours ago, Parliament said:

I’m gonna guess a foreign terrorist arrested in Russia is not read his Miranda Rights.

Not sure if you can hear it after they cut off your ear and try to feed it to you 

[KYHorn 17076]

 Looks like they hit a few major targets

Officially confirmed!

In Sevastopol, the Ukrainian Defense Forces successfully hit the large landing ships Yamal and Azov, a communications center and several infrastructure facilities of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the General Staff reported.

OSINTtechnical reports that at least three Storm Shadow missiles hit the main communications center of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

According to the OSINTtechnical project, military units of missile gunners and FSB are also located there.

Last night, the most massive attack "for the entire time of the SMO" was carried out on Sevastopol, official Russian channels wrote.

According to the occupation authorities of the peninsula, allegedly "the air defense system shot down several dozen missiles, including British Storm Shadow missiles, on their approach to the city." 

The occupiers confirm that the main communications center of the Russian Black Sea Fleet was the target of the attack.

According to Russian media, 34 military personnel were killed, 40 wounded, and three Su-27 airplanes were damaged at the Belbek airfield.

Edited March 24 by KYHorn

[atomheartbevo 89727]

The Polish Ministry of Defense has now Confirmed that at least 1 Russian Long-Range Cruise Missile briefly entered Polish Airspace tonight over the Town of Oserdów, and remained there for roughly 39 Seconds, before it was Redirected towards its Final Target in the Ukrainian Region of Lviv; the Missile is claimed to have been Tracked by Air Defense Radars the entire time it was within Polish Airspace, and that all Necessary Precautions were taken to Protect the Territory of Poland during tonight’s Russian Missile Attack against Western Ukraine.

Edited March 24 by atomheartbevo

[Bevo 13579]

18 minutes ago, statsman said:

If this war is about the size of Ukraine’s military, they do not have a chance of winning. Thats the war Russia wants to fight, where soldiers are just numbers, and they are expended as needed. 
 
Ukraine’s only chance is to fight as a western army, but they need the advantages of a western army- the top weapons, and functioning supply chains. 
 
But, here we are. Two years in, and nobody in the west has gone into wartime production of artillery shells. They have been given various defunct missile systems, and they are running out. Frankly, the western governments are not acting seriously. We act as if it is a strategy to give them three different tank systems, in various states of disrepair, and say, “MacGyver this into a victory”. 

I read the article when you posted it last night so I may get some facts wrong but as I remember it, the article that you posted said that they need a draft to make 17 year olds to 27 year olds enlist. No one wants to volunteer. And the government won't change to a draft and lower the age because there is no support for it.

If it truly is an existential war for survival, the lack of support internally is extremely alarming. Maybe that is how all wars go, but like I said it runs counter to how I think. Maybe, in the end, people in today's world would rather lose their home and their country than run the risk of dying. If that is the case, why prolong the inevitable and have volunteers die for a cause others aren't willing to sacrifice for?

[statsman 5472]

I think a big part of their problem is that their soldiers get sent to the front, and rarely get rotated out. There is corruption; men can bribe their way out of the draft, or bribe their way to better assignments. 
 
Now that they are being driven backwards, and rationing bullets and shells, being a Ukrainian soldier looks like a pretty awful option. 

[Bevo 13579]

14 minutes ago, statsman said:

 
Now that they are being driven backwards, and rationing bullets and shells, being a Ukrainian soldier looks like a pretty awful option. 

 

I hope that is what it is and not simply the lack of desire to fight Russia. But, even if it is true that soldiers don't want to fight because of the lack of weapons, it then becomes a chicken or the egg argument. I don't want to spend a lot of money and pay high oil prices, to a nation who doesn't want to fight for its independence. If the support inside Ukraine is there to fight for its independence from Russia, I'll support it, though.

[General Specific 3262]

Not sure if you can hear it after they cut off your ear and try to feed it to you 

[Schulz2.0 28960]

 

[Schulz2.0 28960]

 

 

[statsman 5472]

3 hours ago, Bevo said:

 

I hope that is what it is and not simply the lack of desire to fight Russia. But, even if it is true that soldiers don't want to fight because of the lack of weapons, it then becomes a chicken or the egg argument. I don't want to spend a lot of money and pay high oil prices, to a nation who doesn't want to fight for its independence. If the support inside Ukraine is there to fight for its independence from Russia, I'll support it, though.

This may or may not add perspective-

My dad was a career, 26 years enlisted man in the U.S. Army. He was proud of serving and proud of his country. He went to Vietnam in 1969, a  32 years old SFC, with a wife and three kids back home. 
 
He had a tough duty, running a sniper school in the Mekong Delta, and getting plenty of duty in the field, as well (and sometimes the CIA would pick him up because they got info and needed him for a “shoot”). He told me recently that in his tour over there, about halfway through, he and his peers realized that we (the U.S.) weren’t fighting to win, and thus, weren’t going to win. He says that his attitude and approach changed with that revelation, and he became much less willing to take on risks to further the mission. He said, “No one wanted to be the last one to die for a mistake” (the ‘mistake’ being the war). 
 
Ukraine is on track to lose this war, at best losing the areas Russia claims, at worst losing more. It didn’t have to be that way, but that’s where it’s heading because Russia is on a wartime production footing and Ukraine can’t match it. The west could match it, but “we” hoped instead to support Ukraine the cheap and easy way, giving them a bunch of old and not very functional (talking about the French here) ordnance. 
 
I posted on this thread a year and a half ago, that we could give Ukraine all we have to spare, or we could give them what they need to win. We chose the former. 
 
More people are going to suggest that Ukraine negotiate a new border. Once that starts, the western politicians will jump on that opportunity to stop worrying about paying for guns instead of butter, and it really will be all over for Ukraine. 

[Schulz2.0 28960]