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Originally Posted by SEAandATL
That's why I miss when Reagan was president. During the Cold War Gorbachev feared Reagan much more than Reagan feared Gorbachev.
Trust me, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is infinitely superior a good one compared to Putin the first real terrible. Gorbachev actually did create the stable new country of Ukraine back in 1991. And tried to abolish oppressive forms of Communism. Even when he was the one in power. Russia really did feel this redeeming even with the roughness up to this year. Too bad the tides have turned.
Reputation, admiration of Russia has reached entirely rotten. A lot of people are going to hate not respect Russia for now on since the last week of February 2022.
It is just too bad that the rabid rat of Kremlin is more than willing to send his nazi troopers to fight. Joe is pathetic on this and he acts like a salesman. He could have prevented this war by preemtively escalating before the Russians attacked, instead the old fool was running around with "the price" tags for Putin aggression. What's the point of having bloated military and be afraid of upsetting Vlad? Why Vlad is not afraid of Joe escalating? To spend that much money on military and be afraid of Vlad escalating makes sense not. If USA admits defeat and let Vlad kill as much as he wants, military spending must be cut, there is no point for that much military if the leadership is reactive, fearful and has no balls.
While I agree the sanctions should have been much more severe and immediate (rather than doling them out over days and weeks), if by escalation you mean pre-emptively attack Russia, I do think that would have been a fatal mistake. It's like playing chicken...who will blink first? Who will push the red button first? Probably not Biden, because he knows the cost of nuclear war. But Putin? If the reports from other world leaders are to be believed, something has changed with him; he is not well mentally...he is making irrational decisions. You don't escalate like that with someone that is suicidal.
What is happening in Ukraine is a massive tragedy, and I wish all the countries involved with sanctions and supporting Ukraine had acted sooner and more swiftly. But the way they are going about it...isolation, economic suffocation...I think is the only way you can deal with a madman like Putin. He will eventually lose support of the Russian population, and when that happens his power is gone.
"Pfizer on Monday said it will donate all the profits from its Russian subsidiary to programs that provide direct humanitarian support to the people of Ukraine. "
That's why I miss when Reagan was president. During the Cold War Gorbachev feared Reagan much more than Reagan feared Gorbachev.
It's not an accurate comparison.
During Gorbachev's term, the USSR began falling apart. Russia was an out of control train wreck. It was at brink of society and economic breakdown - far worse the the 1929 USA Depression. Gorbachev didn't need any outside pressure from Reagan.
In the 1980's, President Biden would have scared Gorbachev as much as Reagan did.
Last edited by YorktownGal; 03-14-2022 at 09:00 PM..
What's the point of having bloated military and be afraid of upsetting Vlad? Why Vlad is not afraid of Joe escalating? To spend that much money on military and be afraid of Vlad escalating makes sense not. If USA admits defeat and let Vlad kill as much as he wants, military spending must be cut, there is no point for that much military if the leadership is reactive, fearful and has no balls.
Who wants an an escalating war which will go nuclear?
Quote:
Mar 14 - As the Russian invasion of Ukraine moves past its third week, there are slight hopes that negotiations between the two sides may soon produce a ceasefire. But with the shrill warmongering talk in Washington, it almost seems like the US government would hate to see that happen.
Congress and the US Administration seem determined to drag the United States into a war with Russia over Ukraine. Senator Lindsay Graham is openly calling for someone to kill the Russian president and many in the US House have demanded that the Administration establish a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine.
Are they insane? A no-fly zone means you destroy anything and everything that can prevent total US air dominance. That means an attack on Russian missile and air defense systems within Russia. In other words, World War III.
We can all feel disgust at the destruction in Ukraine, but is it really necessary for us to gamble with our own nuclear annihilation?
. . . . .DROP DOWN TO . . . . .
The constant flow of US and allied weapons into Ukraine and talk of supporting an extended insurgency does not seem designed to give Ukraine a victory on the battlefield but rather to hand Russia what Secretary of State Blinken called “a strategic defeat.”
It sounds an awful lot like the Biden Administration intends to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. The only solution for the US is to get out. Let the Russians and Ukrainians reach an agreement. That means no NATO for Ukraine and no US missiles on Russia’s borders? So what! End the war then end NATO.
If you are an Eastern European, it must feel terrible to see Ukraine used in a proxy war. All the destruction and death of Ukrainians. All this to rattle the Russian Bear!
Do you think that the entire Ukraine should be part of Russia?
Back in 2014, the way the situation should have been handled ( the way I see it) - the whole South-East should have been adjoined to Russia, the rest could do whatever they were pleased.
Now it's already hard to tell what to do in this situation.
At this point Ukraine probably should be Federalized ( if not broken in half,) and this government should be gone of course.
But do they have to become part of Russia?
I think they should not.
Quote:
Unfortunately, any deal is a mute point, and not acceptable to Ukraine,
as I think Putin has always had his eyes on taking
all of Ukraine...not just the Russian majority areas in the east.
Putin wants his Russian Empire back. Putin can not be trusted.
I think you don't understand Putin's mind and how it works.
I repeat again; Putin and Co didn't want Ukraine AT ALL as part of the Russian Federation.
It was not FINANCIALLY VIABLE country for them. They felt that they would lose financially if they'd incorporate it into Russia.
So they liked Ukraine as it was, to be a buffer zone, a separate entity.
That's how their mind works or rather used to work, until these last seven years became the major eye opener.
NOW they realized that it can't be all about money, because while they were concentrated on money, Ukraine was turned into the major geopolitical threat to Russia.
So now Putin obviously dropped the "money first" approach, and instead of listening to his economic advisers, ( as it was back in 2014,) he listens to his military advisers first and utmost.
After all, they finally understood that Ukraine became a serious issue for Russia's security.
I think you don't understand Putin's mind and how it works.
I repeat again; Putin and Co didn't want Ukraine AT ALL as part of the Russian Federation.
It was not FINANCIALLY VIABLE country for them. They felt that they would lose financially if they'd incorporate it into Russia.
So they liked Ukraine as it was, to be a buffer zone, a separate entity.
That's how their mind works or rather used to work, until these last seven years became the major eye opener.
NOW they realized that it can't be all about money, because while they were concentrated on money, Ukraine was turned into the major geopolitical threat to Russia.
So now Putin obviously dropped the "money first" approach, and instead of listening to his economic advisers, ( as it was back in 2014,) he listens to his military advisers first and utmost.
After all, they finally understood that Ukraine became a serious issue for Russia's security.
Quote:
Much of what is happening in Ukraine can be traced back to the Obama Administration. State Department officials like Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken planned and executed the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. This is what set us on this path to conflict, as the government put in place after the coup began demanding NATO membership.
Blinken, Nuland, and the others responsible for this heinous act returned to government in more senior positions under President Biden and they have continued to push their Ukraine agenda.
Last week Secretary of State Blinken - our top diplomat – sought to send Soviet-era Polish fighter jets into Ukraine to shoot Russians. When the Poles said they’d be happy to ship the planes to a US base in Germany and let the Pentagon transfer them to Ukraine, the Pentagon finally stepped in to quash an extraordinarily high-risk move that even the Pentagon said would have no real effect on the outcome of the war.
"from Stephen Kotkin is one of our most profound and prodigious scholars of Russian history. His masterwork is a biography of Joseph Stalin. So far he has published two volumes—“Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.” A third volume will take the story through the Second World War; Stalin’s death, in 1953; and the totalitarian legacy that shaped the remainder of the Soviet experience"
Quote:
Russia has a lot of weapons that they haven’t used yet, but there are a couple of factors here.
First of all, Ukraine is winning this war only on Twitter, not on the battlefield. They’re not winning this war
Russia is advancing very well in the south, which is an extremely valuable place because of the Black Sea littoral and the ports. They are advancing in the east. If the southern and eastern advances meet up, they will encircle and cut off the main forces of the Ukrainian Army. What’s failed so far is the Russian attempt to take Kyiv in a lightning advance. Otherwise, their war is unfolding well. It’s only a couple of weeks in; wars last much longer.
. . . . .BIG JUMP DOWN . . . .
Do you think that’s the case with this nuclear threat?
I think there’s no doubt that this is what he’s trying to do. The problem is, we can’t assume it’s a bluff. We can’t assume it’s a pose of being crazy, because he has the capability; he can push the button.
Steve, Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war, wrote that you must always build your opponent a “golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. Can the United States and nato help build a way for Russia to end this horrific and murderous invasion before it grows even worse?
You hit the nail on the head. That’s a brilliant quote. We have some options here. One option is he shatters Ukraine: if I can’t have it, nobody can have it, and he does to Ukraine what he did to Grozny or Syria. That would be an unbelievable, tragic outcome. That’s the pathway we’re on now.
We don’t know yet how the sanctions are going to work. The sanctions often inflict the greatest pain on the civilian population. Regimes can sometimes survive sanctions because they can just steal more internally. If you expropriate somebody’s bank account in London or Frankfurt or New York, well, there’s a source where that came from originally, and they can go back inside Russia and tap that source again, unfortunately. Putin doesn’t have money abroad that we can just sanction or expropriate. Putin’s money is the entire Russian economy. He doesn’t need to have a separate bank account, and he certainly wouldn’t keep it vulnerable in some Western country.
. . . . .JUMP DOWN . . .
Even if the Ukrainians succeed in their insurgency, in their resistance, there will be countless deaths and destruction. We need a way to avoid that kind of outcome. That would mean catalyzing a process to engage Putin in discussion with, say, the President of Finland, whom he respects and knows well, or the Israeli Prime Minister, who has been in contact with him; less probably, with the Chinese leadership, with Xi Jinping. Someone to engage him in some type of process where he doesn’t have maximalist demands and it stalls for time, for things to happen on the ground, that rearrange the picture of what he can do.
If you are an Eastern European, it must feel terrible to see Ukraine used in a proxy war. All the destruction and death of Ukrainians. All this to rattle the Russian Bear!
Nice parroting of the Russian propaganda talking points and its conspiracy sphere offshoots. You are like a looping Russian nazi boombox. Looping and repeating the same propaganda bs over, over and over. You and the rest of the looping Russian nazi regulars in this thread.
This brave woman may never be seen again, wishing the best for her.
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