Putin Recognizes Donbass Republics, Sends Russian Military to 'Denazify' Ukraine
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PabloAngello
Jedi Master
India's perspective of the situation
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Ukraine's dalliance with neo-Nazi forces: What the US and NATO do not want to talk about
Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist organisation, is an integral part of the National Guard of Ukraine | OpIndia News
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Here is Pepe Escobar's latest installment: Escobar: Follow the Money - How Russia will bypass Western economic warfare -- Sott.net
As if right on cue, from the NEW STATESMAN the most hysterical lib-tard love in (if it wasn't truly terrifying in its implications of institutionalized psychosis, especially in the media) on the world's greatest statesman. Sit back and laugh (but watch out when you jaw hits the floor...)
The exemplary resilience of Volodymyr Zelensky
Ukrainians are showing Vladimir Putin, and the world, what nationhood should mean.
By Jeremy Cliffe
President Volodymyr Zelensky's address to Russians, 24 February. (Photo: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/Sipa)
It is still hard to believe that Volodymyr Zelensky, the man leading his country through Europe’s biggest war since 1945, was as recently as four years ago just a comic actor – known for romantic comedies and most recently Servant of the People, a political satire in which he played a schoolteacher unexpectedly elected Ukraine’s president. He set up his political party, also called Servant of the People, with staff of the TV production company behind the show and only a year later, in 2019, was himself unexpectedly elected Ukraine’s president. Even then the unusual meta-narrative struck international observers as an eccentric parable of our turbulent times. Today, in retrospect, it looks novel-worthy.
Zelensky’s record as president up until Russia’s pre-invasion military build-up had been mixed. But to grasp the scale of his transformation in recent days, confronted with an all-out attack by the murderous regime that happens to possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, try imagining a Hugh Grant or a Stephen Colbert transforming into a Winston Churchill or a Charles de Gaulle.
President Volodymyr Zelensky visits the positions of Ukrainian servicemen on the front line of defence, where intense shelling continues. (Photo by Ukrainian President’s Office/ZUMA Press Wire Service.)
Whatever happens over the next days and weeks, the Ukrainian president’s last-ditch appeal to the Russian people early on the morning of 24 February will go down in history as a direct hit on Vladimir Putin’s nonsense pretexts for Russia’s unprovoked attack on a democratic country. But that appeal will also stand as an emphatic rhetorical contrast with the Russian president — a human, dignified counterpoint to the snarling, rambling rants emanating from the Kremlin.
Zelensky movingly invoked the close links between Russians and Ukrainians: “Lots of you have relatives in Ukraine, you studied at Ukrainian universities, you have Ukrainian friends. You know our character, our principles, what matters to us… The people of Ukraine want peace.” He showed much more respect for the Russian people’s capacity for decency and intelligence than Putin has ever done. “You are told we hate Russian culture. How can one hate a culture? […] Neighbours always enrich each other culturally. But that does not make them a single whole. It does not dissolve us into you. We are different, but that is not a reason to be enemies.”
“We will defend ourselves,” the Ukrainian president said in that address, hours before the invasion began. “When you attack, you will see our faces, not our backs.” Since then he has been as good as his word: his social media addresses to his people showing that he remains in Kyiv, leading his country’s unexpectedly resilient response during these first days of the invasion. Last night (25 February) he appeared above ground in the capital, flanked by other senior government figures: “We are all here, our soldiers are here […] we are defending our independence.” He did so again the following morning.
Ukraine’s president understands the danger he faces; when speaking to EU leaders on 24 February he said, “this might be the last time you see me alive”. And yet, to an American offer of evacuation the following day, he reportedly replied: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” They were the words of a leader rapidly becoming a global icon of dignity and stoicism in the face of an unimaginable onslaught. This courage, too, contrasts favourably with Putin, bunkered away in some undisclosed location, paranoid about catching Covid-19 and seemingly in contact only with a small circle of minions.
Zelensky’s courage is one prominent element of much wider story: that of the dignity and stoicism of the Ukrainian people at large. When I visited Kyiv last month I heard often that Russia was underestimating the sheer will to resist of the country’s army and citizenry – eight years of war following Russia’s first assault on Ukraine in 2014 had hardened its armed forces and stiffened the nation’s sinews, I was told. I have to admit that at the time I wondered how much of this was just blithe bombast. Little-to-none, is the incontrovertible lesson of the past days.
Admittedly, we are only two days deep in a conflict that may last months, and Russia’s capacity (and Putin’s homicidal willingness) to crush resistance with the most brutal imaginable means should not be underestimated. But military experts and Western governments seem now to be widely of the view that the invasion is proving slower and more difficult than the Russian president anticipated.
This resilience goes well beyond mere casualties inflicted. Many are the examples of Ukrainians’ gutsy fortitude that have captured the world’s imagination. There was the woman caught on camera confronting a heavily-armed Russian soldier with the unforgettable line: “You should put sunflower seeds in your pockets so that they will grow on Ukrainian land after you die.” There were the 13 defenders of Snake Island in the Black Sea, killed after they responded to the crew of a Russian warship ordering them to surrender with a blunt entreaty to “go fuck yourself”. There were the many reels of footage of brave Ukrainians, young and old, from all walks of life, queuing up to volunteer to fight or collect weapons from the government.
Some of these instances are bombastic and martial, like the urban legend of the “ghost of Kyiv”, an unconfirmed MiG-29 ace credited with shooting down six Russian planes on 24 February; or the burly Klitschko brothers, both former heavyweight boxing champions and one now the mayor of Kyiv, vowing to take up arms. But other powerful cases are non-combatant.
Oxana Shevel, a professor at Tufts University, yesterday shared on Twitter news of friends sheltering in a village near Kyiv: “The village residents and their datcha community self-organised and now hold regular meetings. They look after each others’ needs and now go on regular patrols together.” Another such example has been the communal spirit of Kyivans sheltering in metro stations – photos emerged last night of a large screen erected in one so that children could watch films while the bombs and shells rained down. In the early hours of Saturday morning, Olexander Scherba, a Ukrainian diplomat, shared footage of a deserted street in Kyiv’s outskirts, the silence broken by an unseen trumpeter playing the national anthem, which elicited an equally unseen chorus of “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine!) from neighbours all down the street.
A Ukrainian service member patrols the empty road on the west side of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the morning of February 26, 2022. (Photo by Daniel Leal / AFP.)
Some may be tempted to dismiss such cases as sentimental symbolism, especially if Putin – as some Western governments fear – now moves to crush this unexpectedly spirited Ukrainian response with a horrific, indiscriminate escalation of his attack. Yet that dismissal would be a mistake.
First, because symbolism matters a great deal in war. It is primarily for this reason that Zelensky truly deserves the tentative comparison to Churchill and to De Gaulle that would until recently have been preposterous. Both historical leaders understood the morale-boosting power of resolute, stirring language and inspiring individual acts in moments of profound darkness. So, it seems, does Zelensky – truly a “servant of the people”.
The second reason why dismissing all this would be a mistake is that underestimating this Ukrainian sense of self and the country’s spirit of resilience may well have played a role in Putin’s military miscalculations. The Russian president has made it repeatedly clear in his garbled discourses that he considers Ukrainian nationhood an empty and malign artifice. As the military expert and New Statesman contributor Lawrence Freedman puts it: “If it is the case, as Putin has consistently claimed, that Ukraine is a non-state, an artificial creation, with a government that is illegitimate and controlled by Nazis, then it would not be surprising if he also supposed that ordinary Ukrainians would not fight hard for such an entity.” It would indeed be hard, in such a state of mind, to understand what might hold such a nation together; what might give its people the courage and motivation to fight back.
At first glance this seems paradoxical. Putin is a nationalist, obsessed with notions of national pride, history and destiny. How could he not recognise the unifying and cohesive forces of nationhood in a country as close to Russia, and dominant in his own dyspeptic brooding, as Ukraine?
The answer surely, is that there is more than one way of recognising and valuing nationhood and the nation state. For much as recent Western political discourse has often divided the world into open and closed, nationalists and globalists, citizens of somewhere and citizens of no-where, the truth is that the politics of nation and nationhood is not a binary. In truth, it is a spectrum.
Let us imagine that spectrum between two poles. At one end is what we might call “hollowed-out nationhood” and on the other “fleshed-out nationhood” (here I am borrowing from the political scientist Mark Garnett’s distinction between two forms of liberalism).
Putin’s understanding of nationhood might be considered closest to the “hollowed-out” pole. It imagines the nation as a framework for a politics of “them and us”, of fear and suspicion; exclusion, purism and walls; all of it sustained by regular bouts of communal hate at whichever “other” is currently being scapegoated for the misgovernment and failures of a venal elite. Such a vision of nationhood provides cover for the insidious forces of sectarianism, greed and megalomania. In today’s Russia it is an instrument of private opulence and public squalor.
On the other hand, very much of what we have seen from Ukrainians in the past days corresponds to the “fleshed-out” end of the nationhood spectrum. This is the nation as an expansive, generous and civic entity; of community and inclusive constitutional order; as something not just to die for but something, fundamentally, to live for too.
Such nationhoods are open and confident enough both to belong to something bigger and to encompass multitudes themselves – politically, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. To witness Zelensky, a Jewish native Russian speaker, delivering his stirring addresses, switching easily between Russian and Ukrainian, to his primarily Christian Orthodox and Ukrainian-speaking people, is to see that fleshed-out form of nationhood take life. It refutes Putin’s narrow blood-and-soil vision, insisting as it does that Ukraine and Russia cannot possibly be distinct because they share certain ethno-religious roots.
The battles of its pro-democracy Orange Revolution (2003) and Maidan protests (2014) and now its noble resistance to the Russian attack have helped burnish Ukraine as a heroic example of this sort of nationhood. Conflict and especially wars do that to a nation. Entirely by chance, I am filing this article from Courseulles-sur-Mer, the small town on France’s northern coast where De Gaulle first returned to French soil in June 1944 after his long exile in London. Looming above the beach is a towering Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of his Free French and with it a universalist and sovereign France. It is also tempting to see a certain kinship between Zelensky and Giuseppe Garibaldi, and indeed the wider generation of 1848 radical and liberal nationalists. “Fleshed-out nationhood”, if we want to call it that, has a deep heritage indeed.
The Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of France Libre, Free French Forces during WWII, in Normandy, France. (Photo by Jeremy Cliffe.)
And it can surge forth everywhere. We have seen that in Russia itself in recent days, in the remarkable bravery of the thousands who have protested in the country’s cities in the past nights at enormous personal peril. Putin is not Russia, a point that Zelensky has made repeatedly in his addresses, most recently thanking notable Russian public figures who have spoken out. “Your conscience has been heard, and it’s been heard loudly,” he told them the morning of 26 February.
We are, to reiterate, in the early days of this war. But it is well known that support for Putin has fallen in Russia in recent years as economic mismanagement and corruption have taken their toll. He has taken an enormous domestic gamble by launching this war. A certain proportion of young Russians in particular, who grew up not in the Soviet Union but in an age of social media exposing them to alternative models of society and politics, seem to be bridling at this (a reality that the opposition leader Alexei Navalny harnessed with his anti-corruption YouTube videos, a service to the nation for which he was poisoned and now languishes in a penal colony).
Might there now in Russia too be something stirring, below the stultifying layers of autocracy and repression, like the wisps of breath from some deep volcanic force rising through cracks in the earth? We will see. Recent world history should inoculate us all against everything but the most realistic and sober interpretations of events, let alone optimism.
A screengrab shows emergency service workers carrying a person at the site of a damaged multi-storey residential building in an aftermath of shelling, after Russia launched a massive military operation against Ukraine, in south-west of Kyiv, February 26, 2022. (Reuters TV)
As for Ukraine, the spirited displays of fleshed-out nationhood do not change the fact that the country’s horizon looks extremely dark. It may emerge from this as a merely weakened and bombed version of its former self; or as a smouldering, rubble-strewn vassal of Putin’s Russia; or as a chaotic rump state comprising just the western parts of what is now Ukraine; or even as a post-geographic diaspora state strewn across its current territory, Poland, Germany, the US and elsewhere. Extremely little is certain now. But one thing on which I would bet a lot is that its sense of nationhood will be strengthened enormously by this experience.
Zelensky has at once crafted a narrative and channelled one emerging organically from his people: one of defiance, resilience and survival. The stories that nations tell themselves and others can be the last thing to die. There is no scenario, however grim, in which those now being written in the shelled and traumatised streets of Ukraine will go forgotten. Sunflowers will grow, somewhere. Bright yellow sunflowers against a deep blue sky.
ApotheosisMMC.
Jedi Council Member
PabloAngello
Jedi Master
Thank you for this. People read it!!
Polish top-level DNS registrar started to fight disinformation. They started a list of profiles that are spreading false information:
Their Twitter profile is also posting infographics with posts marked as disinformation. For example, the one below is more or less a statement made by Putin when the operation started. RT and Sputnik seem to be banned on DNS level by my network provider (workaround is to use CloudFlare), RT disappeared from the cable TV.
Their Twitter profile is also posting infographics with posts marked as disinformation. For example, the one below is more or less a statement made by Putin when the operation started. RT and Sputnik seem to be banned on DNS level by my network provider (workaround is to use CloudFlare), RT disappeared from the cable TV.
CNN's Christiane Amanpour interviews François Heisbourg (senior advisor for Europe) and Former President of the Republic of Lithuania
Dalia Grybauskaitė. When all else fails attack Putin's military strategies and metal competence.
The Netherlands sends a shipment of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. But will the weapons find their mark is in question.
Dalia Grybauskaitė. When all else fails attack Putin's military strategies and metal competence.
The Netherlands sends a shipment of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. But will the weapons find their mark is in question.
Ina
The Living Force
Watched the video with the sound off. The attitude and gestures were like.... (angry) You said this and that, or promissed this and that. Look at the situation I am in. What do you want me to do? Big pause. (disappointed or passive agressive) I asked you something. If I don't get it, it is going to be your business, pause and you won't like it.
Funny enough, it is a very bad frame designed for the flag rather.
Not sure if this has been shared already but I found the latest post by The Saker to be very insightful in that it explains the difference in mentality between the Russians and Westerners and why the current situation presents an opportunity to completely re-structure the Russian economy. The transcript that The Saker quotes is from Andrei Bezrukov, one of the Russian spies that was expelled from the US together with Anna Chapman, that has since been teaching and appearing on Russian TV.
In 2014, when the Ukie and neo-Nazi affiliates committed war crime after war crime in Donbas, activists could not care less ...
ApotheosisMMC.
Jedi Council Member
En broma y solo para advertir, el video de los muertos en bolsas es una representación actuada de futuras muertes por el calentamiento global, también fue utilizado como una burla a las muertes por Covid.
Al parecer los del batallón Azov publicaron en redes que reclutarían gente en un horario determinado, los rusos como se ve fueron muy puntuales.
https://twitter.com/BruceTh48823876/status/1498642001407123459?s=20&t=U5X33VR0E31vS287iYFlag
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Hi_Henry
The Living Force
Apparently Polish president is not going to send planes to Ukraine. Interesting order from his bosses in US.
View attachment 55766
Prezydent Duda: Nie wysyłamy naszych samolotów na Ukrainę. NATO nie jest stroną tego konfliktu
- Nie wysyłamy naszych samolotów, ponieważ to oznaczałoby ingerencję militarną w konflikt, który toczy się na Ukrainie, włączenie się tym samym NATO w konfliktwww.rp.pl
View attachment 55767
If they did or the Ukrainians were flying from Polish bases as home, then it is almost certain that Russia would have hit these bases. What would NATO do ? My guess, talk and posture.
The current situation is not a existential danger for EU, but for Russia it is. Back down for Russia is not an option. Not neutralizing Ukraine (neutral country under Russian wing) and US/NATO enters and the cycle of BS repeats.
I'm pulling this info from a comment here,
Talk about US nukes in Europe.
I'd say that's more than enough reasons to get extremely serious with the US and the EU.
Russia has reached the point where niceties are gone. Lavrov's demand that US's nucks leave Europe is a clear signal Russia is all in, va banque.
Russian FM Lavrov says time for US to remove nuclear weapons from Europe
The West must not build military facilities in any countries of the former Soviet Union, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on
Lukasz
Jedi Master
Polska spodziewa siÄ miliona uchodźców. Do tej pory przybyÅo 400 tys. UkraiÅców
- Każdy uchodźca, który pojawi siÄ na granicy polsko-ukraiÅskiej zostanie przyjÄty, liczymy siÄ z możliwoÅciÄ powiÄkszenia liczymy uchodźców z Ukrainy do 1 mln - powiedziaÅ w Åodzi szef MSZ Zbigniew Rau po spotkaniu z ministrami spraw zagranicznych Francji i Niemiec. W Polsce jest praca...
"Poland is expecting a million refugees. So far, 400,000 Ukrainians have arrived."
What an irony that in a country that protested so strongly against accepting refugees, hundreds of thousands of them suddenly appeared within just a few days.
But the story gets even more interesting:
Uchodźcy z Ukrainy nie muszą się rejestrować w punktach recepcyjnych
Uchodźcy z Ukrainy granicę mogą przekroczyć nawet nie mając jakiegokolwiek dokumentu tożsamości. Nie muszą się rejestrować się w punktach recepcyjnych ani martwić się o formalności. PKP uruchomiła dla nich darmowe przejazdy. Ukraińcy są zwolnieni z kwarantanny, mogą też liczyć na bezpłatne...
www.prawo.pl
In short, refugees from Ukraine can cross the border without any identity papers. They do not have to register at reception points or worry about formalities. Polish railroads has launched free travel for them. Ukrainians are also exempt from quarantine, and they can count on free medical treatment. Moreover, Ukrainian citizens who are already in Poland do not have to leave the country if their residence documents expire.
Interestingly, a significant number of these refugees are not Ukrainians. According to the communication from the ministry of internal affairs and administration:
Here you can see 'Ukrainian' refugees at the Przemysl railway station, waiting for a train to somewhere in Poland:
And here is something that I was not able to verify but it seems probable. Allegedly some Muslims use knife to block entry to the train from Ukraine to Poland:
But leaving aside the extremists who probably get across the border among the real refugees, I think that many of the so called refugees don't really escape from the war. They probably just take the opportunity to go to the better world, where they are now suddenly very welcomed.
I mean it seems all you have to do now is to declare at the border that you are from Ukraine and you can get almost any service you want for free. You can go for free to the destination of your choice, where you have a chance to be provided with a free accommodation and a fridge full of free meal. You will be eligible for free phone calls, free public transport etc.
I can't help thinking that the territory of Ukraine has already been agreed to be transferred under the Russian influence and, at the same time, the operation to transform Poland into what Ukraine has been for the West lately is underway. They have just created a large, highly privileged group of people and put it where it was not very welcomed just a few days ago. In my opinion it cannot end well.
