re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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It would be more accurate if he said “sacrificing relatively less”.

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Still irrelevant. We shouldn't be sacrificing anything at all.

Well now you’re just being a retard

Gubarev

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My time in Ukrainian media and politics were the heyday of the Donbass’ influence in Ukraine. It was the oligarch Ahmetov and his nominee Yanukovich who ran things. Yanukovich had been President Kuchma’s prime minister and later failed successor. After losing the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, Yanukovich was nonetheless made prime minister under his rival Yushenko before his successful election as president in 2010. I know creatures like him well.

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Yanukovich was the creature of primitive gangsters, and had been ever since his governorship of Donetsk. It is no wonder that such a lazy and unintelligent man had caused a crisis and lost power. He was short sighted, had a limited mind, and was incapable of thinking on a grand scale. His sole drives were greed and envy. A randomly picked “regionalist” could have done a better job at running Ukraine than Yanukovich. He was the fruit of a systematic problem where power was in the hands of looters. Power was merely for redirecting budget flows to their liking and seizing property. Was it really surprising that his clan was losing ground to even poor Galicia? It later turned out that not only was his clan squashing the Russian organizations of the southeast, but also nurturing neo-Banderist forces. They funded Tyagibokov’s nationalist “Freedom” organization, allowing it to build training camps and arming militants.

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The question of national ideology had been raised in Ukraine prior to 1991. There was only one candidate for it – Ukrainian integral nationalism. It was a purely Galician phenomenon, a product of the peasant agrarian system in some parts of western Ukraine. The ideology had several points. The first was that Ukrainians are a great European nation with a thousand year history of struggle for independence from Moscow’s Asiatic yoke. The second is that Ukrainians are united with Europe by their European culture and a shared hatred against the Muscovites, Asiatics, and Soviet nostalgics. The third was that the struggle against the Muscovites for reunification with Europe is unceasing and has entered a stage of armed struggle. The fourth is that Ukrainians must win the struggle to reunite with Europe to live happily forever after in European civilization.

There was no other ideology in post-Soviet Ukraine. When outside forces staged the “EuroMaydan” against the Donetsk criminals who had been in power, the Dnepropetrovsk oligarchic clan (Poroshenko, Kolomoysky, and others) had no alternative ideology than that Galician nationalism to justify their move for power. The elites of the Donbass and New Russia as a whole could not and did not seek to create a political ideology. The interests of the Ukrainian oligarchy (from Bogdan Hmelnitsky to Petro Poroshenko) coincide with the interests of the independentists and clear-sighted nationalists in their protection of Western capitalists and from Russian competition. The oligarchs have always been primarily concerned with closing the path into their class through wealth inequality, the suppression of economic opportunity, and the granting of elite privileges. Examples of the coincidence of interests are the nationalist battalions, which have evolved into mercenary armies used like chained-dogs by the oligarchs.

That is why the Galicians were the actual ideological and political elite (in the sense of bearing the national ideology) of Ukraine after 1991, regardless of who held the offices of president and prime minister. Politicians ruled the people, but the Galicians ruled their souls. The Yanukovich clan didn’t understand that. Their psychology was primitive. They believed that since they controlled the courts, the budgets, and political offices that they truly dominated Ukraine. They saw ideas as worthless, something that could be faked at the snap of a finger. They were never a political elite. The real elite, full of the passion and intelligence that the Party of Regions lacked, animated Maydan. The gangster government had strangled political life in the Donbass, and the Party of Regions had no substance behind it.

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He writes at length about the corruption in the ruling class, and the failure of Russian soft power, it didn’t exist, versus the influence of American soft power.

LINK

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PROMISED AID

NOT REAL AID.

TWO SEPARATE THINGS.

Most of that aid will be funneled back to businesses and their countries.

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Are you truly unaware that something like 75% of the dollars in US aid to Ukraine do not leave the United States? It's either new equipment contracted from US weapons manufacturers, or we're sending old us equipment that the Pentagon then replaces with new stuff ... from US weapons manufacturers.

The country donating "aid" that is funneled back to businesses in its own country is the United States.

Europe is giving Ukraine far, far more cash, which Ukraine is using for stuff like paying the salaries of postal workers and railroad employees.

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France will transfer to Ukraine:
- 8 EFA self-propelled ferries,
- 6 Caesar self-propelled guns,
- 8 SDZ engineering robots

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LINK

Both sides take horrendous losses so what’s your point? Russia has visually taken much more than Ukraine that’s not even disputable at this point but Ukraine still has suffered huge losses. When a Russian BMP takes a hit people always die. When an American Bradley or even just armored Humvees take hits, most or all of the soldiers usually survive. If anything that picture represents to me the shitty quality of Russian military armored vehicles and their utter disregard for their own troop’s lives when they made these vehicles.

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Ukrainians are suffering terrible losses not justifiable by the "gains" of few villages and fields they made over the summer. They're making no gains now, but Ukrainian leadership says they'll focus more on infantry attack and less on armor. Wonderful plan. /s

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Yea man. They should probably just go ahead and surrender their entire country to Russia now.

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by SlimCharles

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Certified nazi hunter

What if they don’t consent to submitting to Putin’s rule? How dare they fight back, right? If you’re not a Russian you sure as shite suck Russian cock.

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Comparing future EU "financial commitments" to what the US has actually supplied is not the same thing.

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So what are the “real” numbers?