Putin Recognizes Donbass Republics, Sends Russian Military to 'Denazify' Ukraine

Russia is banned from SWIFT.

Except for gas payments from Germany.

It's not a total SWIFT ban other than gas. There are lot of other Russian commodities that are essential to the West. It's basically a SWIFT ban on certain banks, preventing them from raising capital in the international markets, i.e. financial investment.
No he's not.

It may well be that he's misinterpreting propaganda, however.

Nope, he's definitely making stuff up.

3.37 "just NATO alone has 3 times more nukes than Russia"

3.57 "I've literally watched hundreds of clips of actual combat [between Russian and Ukrainian forces is implied].

4.55 "All Russian soldiers are 5ft 9, no muscle tone, chubby cheeks, scared, crying, and they're just getting clapped, everywhere, then they send in the spetznaz, and they get killed. This is just a demoralised, defunded military. [...] It's the shittiest conscript army you could ever think of".

7.23 The Russian airforce is getting "swatted out of the sky".

7.50 Russia thought it was going to take over a "well funded military/country, just because they nibbled off Crimea".

8.40 Complains about Western media saying the East of Ukraine is loyal to Russia, then claims that "literally, it just a couple of kms of East Ukraine that is loyal to Russia".

I could go on, but it's pretty clear the guy has no understanding of what he is talking about.
 
He also a Telegram channel:

His YT video "I’m Here In Kiev, Ukraine" had around 280k views and 5.7k comments yesterday morning. Yesterday midday, suddenly, the views and the comments got sliced to 130k and 1.7k respectively. Now they are slowly climbing back up again. :whistle:

If you think about it, this guy, an American married to a Ukrainian woman with two kids, stuck in Kiev in a hotel, is telling the Western world that there is another side to the story. Can't let this guy get on YT's front page! :lol:
 
In the latest news you just can't make up: Ukraine’s National Guard publicly praised its neo-Nazi fighters from the white-supremacist Azov movement for greasing bullets with pig fat to kill Russian Muslims, demonizing them as “orcs.”



Ukraine-National-Guard-Azov-Nazi-lard-bullets-Muslims.jpg
 
The over the top Ukrainian/Western propaganda with its cartoon heroes and all the rhetoric reminds me of similar tales from the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan and the Iraqi army during the 91 war. As kids we used to laugh at those tales but now, huge swarms of adult westerners seem to believe and swallow anything from institutions they know that they've been systematically lying about everything for ever. The general intellectual level (the lack of) is mind-boggling.
 
If you think about it, this guy, an American married to a Ukrainian woman with two kids, stuck in Kiev in a hotel, is telling the Western world that there is another side to the story. Can't let this guy get on YT's front page! :lol:

The propaganda efforts are insane. I get a fat warning message on Twitter whenever someone posts a link to RT, Sputnik etc., and when I want to like it, there is a popup warning me again, telling me to "keep information reliable" and asking if I'm really sure I want to like that post, where the post "like it anyway" option is super small. Is that new?

TransferWise has disabled the option of trading/transferring funds in Ruble.

Now RT and Sputnik are banned in many countries, and from Social Media.

The internet is acting dodgy, not just for the "forbidden" sites, but sometimes Twitter doesn't load, and other big websites as well. I think someone is tampering big time with the digital infrastructure.

As Niall posted above, some countries are thinking about jailing people who "spread justifications for the war"!

This is worse than during Covid times!

In other news, NordStream 2 lays off 140 employees in Switzerland. Germany "thinks of maybe perhaps not shutting down nuclear power after all" LOL. The sanctions war has escalated to a kind of insane "see who will be last man standing" game. This really feels like some sort of end game and who the heck knows what the myriad consequences of all this will be!
 


Since 2010 the Tusk has never mentioned nuclear war. I have presented thousands of pages of evidence for an equally destructive, and oddly similar, form of sudden global annihilation and ecological destruction — cosmic impact. But war and bombs are not my gig.

That said, if you asked me a year ago which threat I thought was a more likely end day villian for global society, I would have said without hesitation a nuclear war, not an impact. I am a catastrophist across the board, and pay no favor to the odds of my favorite subject.

These two subjects for the Tusk are lasting impressions from the 70’s and 80’s. I was transfixed by the work of Alvarez and Company to explain the end of the dinosaurs, and glued to my seat like everyone in 1983 watching The Day After, which remains one of the most widely viewed broadcasts of all time. That shit scared me, like it did most people. And I was already scared in the 70’s! The comet impact into the lizards wasn’t scary at all, but it sure was cool. And the resistance and opposition it encountered despite all the evidence made it even cooler.

But then, thank god, the Wall fell, I cheered like hell at the TV with millions, and even had the pleasure the next spring to visit Berlin. I picked up a beautiful spray painted fragment of that monstrosity which I still have.
But I always stayed fearful.

My problem today, and for many years, is that so few others seem appropriately fearful of nukes, relative to the old days. This is not a unique take on the situation, by far, but I join the small band of people that believe that we need to treat Putin with appropriate respect — simply based on a rational and visceral fear of nuclear war. If that kind of ‘dictator love’ troubles you, realize that the respect is ultimately being paid to the “button,” not the man. Sorry, but Trump got this…and I am not particularly a fan of his.

Don’t call Putin a “monster,” “war criminal,” “mad man,” or compare him to Hitler. Do not fight him ad hominem whatsoever. When some thug holds hostages in a bank, the police do not howl to him through the bullhorn how evil he is. This is an excellent, but not perfect analogy, since the guy with the horn and his family get killed too if the bank robber has a nuke.

I’m not sure my kids, 19 and 16, have even felt that pit in your stomach when you are presented with the graphic results of an intercontinental nuclear exchange, and the freakish ease with which it can occur as a result of an escalating modern war in Europe, like I’m watching right now below my Tusk. Sure, I played a role by not scaring them, but why would they they not otherwise learn that fear from our culture? It’s never, ever discussed, much less taught, while other common threats are downright propagandized. To make matters even worse, many of their elders, like former Secretary of State John Kerry, reminded us this week there is a roughly equal global danger. A relatively silly subject he mentioned in the company of nuclear fucking war.

Kids much older than mine, some in their forties, run the country. The dirty little secret of Washington is the power it grants youth. So I wonder as well if Congressional and White House staffers feel the proper sized pit in their stomach this week. I worked for years in a cube at 404 Dirksen Senate Building, immediately down the hall from the Foreign Relations Committee. If I still could, I’d see if my fellow 20-somethings seemed queasy in the bathroom, and feel relieved if so.

America must not be sucked into this war by punks and posers, left and right. It is not in America’s interest. No air cover, and god knows no troops or special ops. Go along with the sanctions — and pray the lights don’t go out. And if he pops off two tactical nukes on a Ukrainian battlefield this week, do not overreact, and hold him at the Polish line, et al. But, above all, treat that man with the respect he deserves.
 
No he's not.

It may well be that he's misinterpreting propaganda, however.

I'm not speaking for Joe here but I think he means the guy is just swinging from his 'America' hip and therefore his biases come through loud and clear clouding everything he thinks and says. I have to admit Woodsman I started to listen to the link on your suggestion but turned off after 20 mins with a bad taste in my mouth. He clearly only understands the benchmark of a tactically well fought war as a smash and destroy all before you, where only the rightful master USA shows the world how to do it 'proper' - by pulverizing countries infrastructure and killing millions so as to bring democracy. The low collateral damage, high risk based model being followed by Russia he just doesn't get and his contempt for Russian forces based on a tactic he just cannot grasp plus his obvious falling for Ukraine/western propaganda about the quality of troops/hardware on the ground defies logic. I thought it was basically BS from first to last, especially his claims about his ability to interpret genuine from fake vids which he clearly can't by how he chooses to selective interpret so many indicators. Intrigued to know what you hear that I don't? :-)
 

Ukrainian activist close to tears as she berates Boris Johnson over failure to do more;​

During a press conference while visiting Poland, Boris Johnson was confronted by the Ukrainian activist Daria Kaleniuk on the west's failure to do more for Ukraine, nearly a week after Russia's bloody invasion. Towards the end of her question, Kaleniuk appears to fight back tears. The UK prime minister admitted the government cannot do enough, saying if the UK were to impose a no-fly zone that would lead to direct combat with Russia. 'The consequences would be very hard to control,' Johnson added
(4 min. video)
 
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