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Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth So true. The statement "The ruble has gone up in worth" really puzzled me. It's always been worthless, except for when you're in Russia and need to exchange your money for rubles. Then you're stuck paying whatever they say it's worth while you're there.
Ignorance again. Back in time, on my memory, you could exchange 1 rouble for one gram of gold. Gold equivalent was WRITTEN on rouble note. Not entire gram but almost. Saying "always" is just ignorant statement.
Also, "strong" rouble is disaster for Russian economy and, by real economists there, is considered sabotage of Russian economy. The stronger the rouble is, the lower GDP value is same time. Elvira Shakhipzadovna Nabiulina is, pretty much, a paid for hired hand to ruin economy, guided by the West.
How far back in time? Tsarist times? Yes, I guess if you go back that far, my "always" statement was misleading. In the Soviet period, the regime put an artificial value on the currency. In the few exchange offices in the West that had it, they were practically giving it away, at a small fraction of the worth the regime placed on it.
Republicans are not necessarily supporting Russia. They are just being partisan. If Trump was President and doing exactly what Biden is doing for Ukraine, most democrats would be against him and appear to be pro-Russia. Republicans, on the hand, would support him and by thereby support Ukraine.
I see it differently.
Republicans would naturally be very supportive of Ukraine before the advent of Trump. Conflict like that is very good for investors in defense stocks and the Republican party has been neck deep into the military industrial complex for decades. The strong ties between the defense industry, the gun lobby and the RNC has never really changed.
Plus, Republicans before Trump did have a patriotic sense of noblesse oblige, to carry the standard forward for freedom (and profit making opportunities) across the globe.
But Trump would never have supported Ukraine like this, he was literally gleeful and admiring of Putin when he first learned of the invasion so no analogy like yours is possible.
Quote:
"I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, 'This is genius.' Putin declares a big portion ... of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent, I said, 'How smart is that?' "
and
"He's taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I'd say that's pretty smart. It is a vast, vast location, a piece of land with lot of people and just walking right in."
Trump was also well aware that Putin desired to take over Ukraine.
Quote:
“I knew that he always wanted Ukraine. I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.’ But I could see that he wanted it,”
After Trump gained the nomination in 2015/2016 his team made sure to eradicate any support for Ukraine from the Republican party platform. This is a well known fact.
NOTE: support for Ukraine was so strong among Republicans after the 2014 invasion that Republicans had actually written a plank for their party platform in support, but Trump and Manafort had it ripped out.
Trump's professed admiration of Putin from that time on and for all the years he was in office shocked many Republicans but did eventually change the attitudes of many Republicans, or possibly influenced the new members in the party who did not share the traditional values of Republicans. Eventually many grew to admire Putin, for all the wrong reasons.
Putin has never ceased to be a thug, an exploiter, a criminal and a murderer. The invasions of Georgia and Ukraine (twice) are true to type for him.
Democrats dislike the bloated defense department budget so they need to have a good reason to support a party to conflict before they would support any increased military spending. Democrats typically favor democracies and loathe autocrats, they also sympathize with the underdog (poor little Belgium, and all that). Thus Ukraine checks all the boxes regardless of who is president. Even Reagan or Bush or Trump could have gotten support for Ukraine from Democrats under these circumstances.
The Republicans are mostly supporting Ukraine. The ones who are not are from the libertarian/isolationist wing of the party and many are very suspicious of anything DC and the military want. Some like Rand Paul are also fiscal conservatives. He is very principled and consistent. We are just adding these contributions to the national debt.
You people need to keep up. Everyone admits the Russia collusion hoax was simply a Hillary dirty campaign trick peddled by her friends in the MSM, FBI and CIA for 4 years.
Who is this "everyone"? To the contrary, the dirty campaign trick was Russia's troll complex defaming Hillary all over the internet, including in this sub-forum. By convenient coincidence, this benefitted the opposing candidate.
We have no idea what the Republicans would be doing, if DJT were in office still (which was the hypothetical scenario to which I was responding earlier.) He'd written off Ukraine, so it's doubtful his Party would have supported Ukraine. Perhaps the Party would have split over the issue. How refreshing to see some bipartisanship happening...
I agree, there was no Russia collusion at all. It was all just Clinton's team inventing that.
Anyway, I just read an interesting, albeit it very long article on who the West is supporting in Ukraine. I will quote just a small part of it. The guy quoted within my quote, Arestovych, is Zelensky's right hand...
Quote:
Speaking to the Washington Post in March 2022 about the Ukrainian tactic of placing its military assets in civilian neighbourhoods, Arestovych referred to the Verkhovna Rada’s approved policy of “Total Defense.”
This is a policy commitment to create long-term resistance efforts against an “occupying army.” It assumes Russian victory on the battlefiled and subsequent occupation.
Passed into Ukrainian law in June 2021, its primary objective is to allow the Ukrainian government to continue operating via covert means. First and foremost, it protects the “line of succession” for the regime itself. This is referred to as the continuity of government program, and it places a duty upon the occupied population to die in the defence of a government which, in order for it to stay safe, may well be in exile overseas.
It is a long-term plan for prolonged guerrilla warfare. Total Defense aims to embroil the entire Ukrainian population—and all sectors of its economy and institutions—in a life-or-death struggle as they fight to maintain the claimed sovereignty of a defeated political hierarchy.
Arestovych suggested that Total Defense meant that Ukrainian forces didn’t need to bother with annoying humanitarian principles, such as those outlined in the Geneva Conventions, and that the war with Russia was not “a competition of European armies according to established rules.”
Arestovych is an admirer of Islamist extremist terrorist organisations and is particularly impressed by Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL). Speaking on Ukrainian TV, which under his close friend Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become a single, cohesive propaganda operation, he has praised ISIS’ use of terror on a number of occasions. For example:
Quote:
The commanders of ISIL are considered some of the more wise and successful commanders that there are currently. Everything is thought through in detail, even the degree of cruelty. Cruelty for show – it is inhumane, but it is of a very high level, a wise strategy, taking their particular interests into account.
And:
Quote:
They are acting very correctly, I even have a notebook where I analyse ISIL in great detail, the best practices of running their business, the way they govern. Those methods, the world needs them, even though this means terrorism, medieval levels of cruelty, burning people alive, shooting them or cutting off their heads, etc. This is absolutely the way of the future.
Fighters from Islamic State, al Qaeda and other “former” Islamist terrorists have been fighting alongside the Nazis in Ukraine since at least 2014. The Sheikh Mansur battalion, led by Muslim Cheberloevsky and the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion, apparently commanded by Adam Osmayev, are the most well-known.
The Right Sector, under Yarosh, was tasked with overseeing and coordinating joint operations with the Islamists throughout the Donbas War.
When Zelenskyy announced that 16,000 foreign fighters were to form a Ukrainian foreign legion, it was widely acknowledged that many of them were Islamist extremists. Combat veterans from Chechya, Ingushetia, Daghestan and South Ossetia occupied the Ukrainian frontlines alongside the Azov, Dnepr and Aydar regiments, all subsequently rebranded as Ukrainian national guards.
THE TOTAL DEFENSE DECEPTION
Arestovych’s ideas have apparently become popular with the Ukrainian forces, and certainly among the “volunteer battalions.” They have filmed themselves torturing and murdering captured Russian troops, Ukrainian Jews and others on many occasions. Condemnation from the Western powers has been notable solely for its absence.
For Russian-speaking Ukrainians, ethnic Russian Ukrainians, Poles, Tartars, Armenians, Roma and Jewish Ukrainians, especially those living in the eastern and southern oblasts, the militarisation of the Nazis by NATO and the Kyiv regime presented an existential threat.
The idea that Total Defense is intended to protect all Ukrainians against foreign “occupation” is a deception. It is a policy enabling some Ukrainians to continue to wage war against other Ukrainians.
In 2014, during a national televised broadcast on Hromadske TV, alleged journalist Bogdan Butkevich openly advocated killing million of Ukrainians because they didn’t subscribe to the ultranationalist’s agenda:
Quote:
Donbass, in general, is not simply a region in a very depressed condition, it has a whole bunch of problems, biggest of which is it is severely overpopulated with people nobody has any use for. [. . .] If we take, for example, just Donetsk oblast, there are approximately 4 million inhabitants at least 1.5 million of them are superfluous. [. . .] We don’t need to “understand” Donbass, we need to understand Ukrainian national interests. Donbass must be exploited as a resource, which it is. [. . .] The most important thing that must be done, there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.
When the Donbas War began, Nazi military leaders and politicians, like Dmytro Yarosh, Andriy Biletsky, Oleh Lyachenko and Vadym Troyan, set about that extermination. Russian officials correctly assessed Ukraine’s military operation, and the corresponding likelihood of further NATO enlargement, as more than just a threat to Russian strategic interests and its national security. It was also a dire threat to the lives of people living in Crimea, Odessa, the DPR and the LPR.
The three quotes confirm Russia's wildest accusations, straight out of the mouth of Ukrainian leaders...
And the republicans/wingnuts are supporting Russia. What ever happened to better dead than red?
If you mean red as in communist, there is nothing communist about Russia today...
Russia is a somewhat conservative country, which is why some conservative people in the West support it. A lot of conservative Americans have much more in common with Russians than with other Americans...
Supporting more weapons being sent to Ukraine is the opposite of supporting Ukraine. The US is just getting more Ukrainians killed and more of their country destroyed for the sole purpose of politicians collecting bribery money from anyone that they send this money to.
Just take a look at what happens when the US gets involved in another country's affairs. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Look at what the US did to these countries. US involvement is a curse not a blessing.
Who is this "everyone"? To the contrary, the dirty campaign trick was Russia's troll complex defaming Hillary all over the internet, including in this sub-forum. By convenient coincidence, this benefitted the opposing candidate.
We have no idea what the Republicans would be doing, if DJT were in office still (which was the hypothetical scenario to which I was responding earlier.) He'd written off Ukraine, so it's doubtful his Party would have supported Ukraine. Perhaps the Party would have split over the issue. How refreshing to see some bipartisanship happening...
It would have more than likely split and the GOP congress would have put alot of pressure on Trump to support Ukraine. The majority of the GOP congress are Russian hawks...to the bone. You do have a small paleoconservative contingent in the GOP that like to play footsies with Putin...the rest want him out of power.
And yes it is heart warming to see the bipartisanship occurring over this issue...maybe it can lead us to not hate each other so much. This war seems to strike at the nerve of what it is to be American for both sides.
Supporting more weapons being sent to Ukraine is the opposite of supporting Ukraine. The US is just getting more Ukrainians killed and more of their country destroyed for the sole purpose of politicians collecting bribery money from anyone that they send this money to.
Just take a look at what happens when the US gets involved in another country's affairs. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Look at what the US did to these countries. US involvement is a curse not a blessing.
I disagree. This is not Afghanistan or Iraq...there are no US boots on the ground outside of volunteers. The Ukrainians have demonstrated their steely determinization to carry out this fight on their own.....as long as these people are fighting for their independence the people of the US will support them...and mainly on moral grounds. There is simply no ambiguity concerning this war. This is naked aggression by an imperialist power on a sovereign nation.
Not surprisingly given the demonstrated willingness of the Ukrainians to fight fiercely for their homeland, coupled with their insistence that they are the ones to carry out the resistance, support for American assistance remains broad and bi-partisan. Overall, 54% of U.S. citizens polled agree strongly or somewhat that assistance to Ukraine should be open-ended—a remarkable majority for a population that is generally considered to be war-weary and focused on domestic fiscal issues. Only 22% disagree (strongly or somewhat strongly) that support should be unlimited, and even that group did not appear to believe that there should be no support at all.
An incredible story from the spokesman and public relations officer at Zaporozhzhya NPP (Nuclear Power Plant), Andriy Tuz.
The information about the Russian shelling of the nuclear power plant in Energodar was thrown in at the behest of the BBC and on the orders of the plant's director general, he said.
And the rallies in the city were also coordinated and took place away from the NPP.
In the recent past, Tuz was an active participant in anti-Russian rallies, contributing to roadblocks for Russian convoys at the entrance to Energodar, and now he has found himself in the Russian city of Sochi - going on holiday and admitting to having deceived the public.
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In the Soviet period, the regime put an artificial value on the currency. In the few exchange offices in the West that had it, they were practically giving it away, at a small fraction of the worth the regime placed on it.
