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re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 10:07 am to Coeur du Tigre
Posted on 4/4/26 at 10:07 am to Coeur du Tigre
A biz friend who had served at the front from 2014 and as a drone operator in 2020/21 but his company moved him to the US in 2024 told me several of his fellow soldiers have been in Libya working with Turkey since 2023. Ukraine is not new to Libya. This might be the Turks as much as Ukrainians.
Drone boats are OLD tech The USN used them as targets for surface to surface missiles as well as gunnery or at least 50 years now
Drone boats are OLD tech The USN used them as targets for surface to surface missiles as well as gunnery or at least 50 years now
This post was edited on 4/4/26 at 10:09 am
2
Posted on 4/4/26 at 10:25 am to VolSquatch
quote:
They seem to do that a lot
Yes, that’s been true on both sides.
I have a good system of rooting out the noise. I discount everything Russia says and hope everything Ukraine says is true.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 10:52 am to CitizenK
quote:
Drone boats are OLD tech The USN used them as targets for surface to surface missiles as well as gunnery or at least 50 years now
It's not OLD tech for the Libyian regime.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 10:56 am to Coeur du Tigre
Eleven drone hits in this video.
quote:
The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), working with the Unmanned Systems Forces, has struck Alchevsk Iron and Steel Works in Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast for the second time in a month, stopping the plant's operations.
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If tweet fails to load, click here. 
Posted on 4/4/26 at 11:05 am to CitizenK
quote:
Drone boats are OLD tech The USN used them as targets for surface to surface missiles as well as gunnery or at least 50 years now
Yeah, but they didn't have HD and 4K video for the remote pilot to see for targeting.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 11:06 am to cypher
Posted on 4/4/26 at 11:26 am to Coeur du Tigre
Orban's having a tough time on the speaking circuit. They're waiting for him at each stop.
In Hungary, a striking scene: during Viktor Orbán’s campaign stop in Szombathely, citizens gathered not in applause but in protest, chanting “Russians go home” [in many places, the chant is more NSFW]. It’s more than a moment of dissent—it reflects a deeper European divide between those who stand for democratic sovereignty and those who flirt with authoritarian influence. Europe must remain firm: our future cannot be shaped by fear, nor by those who look East for inspiration instead of forward for progress.
Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here. In Hungary, a striking scene: during Viktor Orbán’s campaign stop in Szombathely, citizens gathered not in applause but in protest, chanting “Russians go home” [in many places, the chant is more NSFW]. It’s more than a moment of dissent—it reflects a deeper European divide between those who stand for democratic sovereignty and those who flirt with authoritarian influence. Europe must remain firm: our future cannot be shaped by fear, nor by those who look East for inspiration instead of forward for progress.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 11:53 am to doubleb
quote:
Something had to be done, NATO was becoming a big welfare alliance with the US doing all the heavy lifting.
We endlessly repeat ourselves, here...
But NATO was not "becoming" anything... it was exactly what the U.S. wanted it to be, and the way that the U.S. wanted it to be...
WE set it all up. Europe was in no position to make any demands at the time... they were shocked we weren't colonizing them, as was the practice with powers that won wars up to that time.
We wanted them weak and dependent on us, but "free"... so they wouldn't fight the arrangement and rebel against us in any meaningful way, or fight with one another as they had done for most of their recorded history. We wanted them to have the money to fund socialist programs so their native Communist political parties were offering nothing they didn't already have, except the loss of freedoms (look into how Eastern Europe became Communist in the wake of WWII... it was mostly through Communist governments being democratically elected, without the US involvement like in Western Europe... people chose ideas like guaranteed employment over personal freedoms*).
We wanted to be THE BOSS. The hegemonic power.
NATO was not devised to protect Western Europe... it was devised and set up to protect the United States by making Western Europe into a giant buffer zone against the Soviets.
Even after the development of ICBMs by the Soviets, the time until impact mattered, keeping them as far away as possible mattered.
And that brings us to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we now know was the result of the US placing missiles in Turkey and Italy, unknown to the public but known to the U.S.S.R., and Cuba being tit for tat... and instead of Krushev folding to the U.S. as we believed, he cancelled the deployment in exchange for the U.S. removing those secret missiles... detente.
NATO put the US in control... there's a cost to being the boss.
The biggest problem in the US is the same old story... greed. The post-war "globalism" made America the richest society on earth... but the people at the top and corporations became more concerned with hoarding their wealth (and power) than sharing it with the rest of the population (and if you redistribute wealth to the bottom of our society, it goes right back up the ladder to the top, who are the rentiers... the poor do not stash it all in Cayman Island accounts). So, American workers are right to be angry... they're directing that anger in the wrong places, as usual. And we can't say the rise of Japan, Germany, South Korea and others as strong rival competitors to out manufacturing was the result of some nefarious machinations... they just kicked our asses in certain areas, also due to corporate greed and corner-cutting. I have faint memories of the family Fords in the 1970s... getting 3 or 4 years of light local use out of them was miraculous. The Nissan that replaced one of them in the early 80s was still being passed down around the family 15 years later. China is a different story, but you can blame Kissinger and Nixon for that one, and at the same time, you have to give them a lot of credit for weakening the U.S.S.R. with it and playing a part in their demise.
In 1987, Trump visited Moscow, in Soviet Russia, and returned and started his "NATO is a rip off!!!!" campaign. At the time, people just thought he was a nutcase.
Fast forward to now, and you all have come to believe him.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 12:08 pm to Lee B
* (answering above)
Francis Fukuyama, author of "The End of History (How Capitalism defesat COmmunism)" and a leading Neo-Conservative thinker admitted his, and our, fatal mistake in the wake of the War in Iraq.
(Paraphrasing from a speech I heard him deliver)
"America's foundational idea is 'give me Liberty, or give me death!' And we assume everyone else on the planet agrees with that conviction, that they will fight to the death for the abstract idea of Liberty. What we don't consider is that our founders were wealthy men at the time, not in material need, and that allowed them to prioritize self-rule. What we're seeing around the world, and what we have ignored for decades, is that when the choice is between the abstract possibility of representational Democracy vs. food tonight, most populations choose food tonight. We haven't been able to understand how these populations would support, or tacitly allow, groups like the 28th of July Movement or the Viet Cong or Hamas or ISIS or others taking power, but, in every instance, if you look, they offer things like food immediately to get control. They are there, on the streets, and they know that it will work. We are on the other side of the world, expecting people to have the mindset we developed among unprecedented material abundance."
Francis Fukuyama, author of "The End of History (How Capitalism defesat COmmunism)" and a leading Neo-Conservative thinker admitted his, and our, fatal mistake in the wake of the War in Iraq.
(Paraphrasing from a speech I heard him deliver)
"America's foundational idea is 'give me Liberty, or give me death!' And we assume everyone else on the planet agrees with that conviction, that they will fight to the death for the abstract idea of Liberty. What we don't consider is that our founders were wealthy men at the time, not in material need, and that allowed them to prioritize self-rule. What we're seeing around the world, and what we have ignored for decades, is that when the choice is between the abstract possibility of representational Democracy vs. food tonight, most populations choose food tonight. We haven't been able to understand how these populations would support, or tacitly allow, groups like the 28th of July Movement or the Viet Cong or Hamas or ISIS or others taking power, but, in every instance, if you look, they offer things like food immediately to get control. They are there, on the streets, and they know that it will work. We are on the other side of the world, expecting people to have the mindset we developed among unprecedented material abundance."
Posted on 4/4/26 at 12:31 pm to doubleb
quote:
I have a good system of rooting out the noise. I discount everything Russia says and hope everything Ukraine says is true.
That's probably about as close to the truth as you can get
Posted on 4/4/26 at 12:33 pm to Lee B
quote:
(look into how Eastern Europe became Communist in the wake of WWII... it was mostly through Communist governments being democratically elected
Huh????
Posted on 4/4/26 at 1:35 pm to Leopold
quote:
It's clear to me, especially when you look at Trump's BS 'Board of Peace' that Trump envisions a multi-polar world with him, his family, Russia, and possibly China and North Korea acting as an axis with the rest of the world left out of the loop and those
Trump is setting himself and his family up to be Oligarchs,and apparently Oligarchs with control over other countries' oil supplies. We'll see how that works out for them. This site rationalizes it all endlessly.
quote:
NATO doesn't need the US
We've discussed this here for years.
Did NATO need the US to combat a strong U.S.S.R. and a strong Russia?
Yes.
Do either of those exist any longer?
No.
So can NATO without the US protect itself from Russia in its actual condition at the present?
Probably...
The UK and France are nuclear states, I can't remember at the moment who actually "owns" the nukes stationed in Turkey and Italy and Germany, etc.,, on behalf of NATO. If it is the U.S., and those are withdrawn... there's speculation that Russia has not been able to afford to maintain the majority of its nuclear arsenal, and also that maybe they exaggerated their numbers to begin with... so maybe the umbrella of the UK and France would be enough?
Conventional ground forces? Russia has the numbers to overwhelm specific individual states or groups of states... but Ukraine has pioneered using drones to neutralize that advantage. The Russian army is a very good artillery division and a very lacking everything else. Without the chance to mobilize ground forces, would NATO instantly achieve air supremacy, and then the ability to eliminate Russian artillery?
NATO has war-gamed invasions of the Baltics, etc., and NATO lost the war games. The major caveat, though, is "the NATO commanders acting as the Russians are so much smarter and better than the actual Russians."
Trump does not want the US to leave NATO... he wants NATO handicapped and dismantled. That will not happen if the US leaves it, now... he will just have absolutely no control over it, so he will threaten to leave (and it will be less newsworthy every time) and try to bully it for as long as he has left in power.
This post was edited on 4/4/26 at 1:57 pm
Posted on 4/4/26 at 1:47 pm to doubleb
quote:
quote:
(look into how Eastern Europe became Communist in the wake of WWII... it was mostly through Communist governments being democratically elected
Huh????
I shouldn't have typed "mostly"... multi-tasking... but in some cases... or rather, in some cases where the elections were not directly manipulated.
Timeline: Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe
Albania - 1945 - A communist government took power at the end of World War Two.
East Germany - 1945 - East Germany was part of the Soviet zone of occupation as agreed at the Yalta Conference and in 1945 the Soviets set up a communist regime there.
Romania 1945 - In the 1945 elections, a communist-led coalition government was elected. The communists gradually removed their coalition partners.
Bulgaria 1946 - In 1946 the Bulgarian monarchy was abolished. Later that year, a communist government was elected.
Poland - 1947 - In 1947, Stalin invited 16 non-communist politicians to Moscow, where they were arrested. With their political opponents removed, the Polish communists won the election.
Hungary -1948 -Stalin allowed elections, in which the non-communists won a big majority. However, communist politician, Rakosi, hinted that the Russians would take over if need be. Then he got control of the police, and started to arrest his opponents. He set up a brutal secret police unit, the AVO. By 1947, Rakosi had complete control. The gradual takeover by the communists was completed on 18 August 1949, when Hungary became the People's Republic of Hungary.
Czechoslovakia -1948 - At elections in 1948, only communists were allowed to stand and a communist government was elected.
source: BBC - Emerging superpower rivalry and its consequences, 1945-49 - CCEA
Posted on 4/4/26 at 2:07 pm to doubleb
quote:
If you call having major wars every few decades surviving then you are correct.
Do you think that would happen today?
Without Monarchies who decide actions unilaterally... and without actual reasons based on either security or need for resources?
You believe that, say, Germany is going to conclude invading a country is less costly than trading with them for whatever it is they need?
Posted on 4/4/26 at 2:59 pm to Lee B
quote:
You believe that, say, Germany is going to conclude invading a country is less costly than trading with them for whatever it is they need?
What do these countries look like when migrants and/or their descendents are calling the shots?
Posted on 4/4/26 at 4:10 pm to Lee B
quote:
Trump is setting himself and his family up to be Oligarchs
Bernie Sanders had entered the thread...
Posted on 4/4/26 at 4:43 pm to VolSquatch
quote:
What do these countries look like when migrants and/or their descendents are calling the shots?
Germany came close to this in the 1970s. It had imported Turks to replace the men lost in WWII for its economy. They were not given citizenship and neither were their children. They have recently began mass deportation..
Posted on 4/4/26 at 6:35 pm to Lee B
Any election held under Stalin’s control was not a Democrat election. The Commies counted the ballots buddy.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 6:38 pm to Lee B
quote:
Do you think that would happen today? Without Monarchies who decide actions unilaterally... and without actual reasons based on either security or need for resources? You believe that, say, Germany is going to conclude invading a country is less costly than trading with them for whatever it is they need?
Not today. Dissolve NATO and it would likely happen.
Posted on 4/4/26 at 7:28 pm to VolSquatch
quote:
What do these countries look like when migrants and/or their descendents are calling the shots?
I guess sometime when you and I are both dead, that question will be answered.
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