Ukraine Crisis

[Sculptor]

Putin is not bluffing, the United States should remember the debt it owes to Russia and its peoples for saving their asses during world war two. The Monster German/Nazi war machine was crushed by Russia and chased all the way back to Berlin. Do you really think they are going to bow down now to the Monster American war machine. Remember Vietnam, victory to Russia and its peoples!!! Down with the American Empire!!

Well, that's really not what happened. Hitler nearly destroyed the Russians, who were ill-equipped, poorly trained and disorganized at the start of the war, essentially only being arrested by the Russian winter, at Stalingrad, at immense cost to the Russians. Still, had Hitler only had a one-front war, he might well have been able to dispatch the USSR outright. On two fronts, however, it was only a matter of time until he lost.

Your beloved Fuhrer was, just like you a complete megalomaniac.
He would never have conquered Russia. When he had all the advantages and reached Moscow he was totally spent, and Stalingrad was the worst military disaster for any army since the dawn of time - for Germany.
What Russia had was the knowledge of how to be cold and survive.
By the time Germany started to pull back from Moscow the writing was on the wall for Hitler.
In the time that followed German defeat, Russia built to world's largest army ever assembled before or since and Finally turned the tide at Kursk which remains the biggest clash of troops ever; making D-Day look like a duck shoot at a county fair.
Russia beat the Germans; contributed more; killed more of them.
Why don't you inform yourself rather than what you always do- spout US propaganda.
Look at the number assembled at Kurk and compare them with D-Day.

[Sculptor]

Kursk in Numbers (wiki)

Operation Citadel:
780,900 men[1]
2,928 tanks[1]
9,966 guns and mortars[2]
Soviet counter-offensive phase:
940,900 men[1]
3,253 tanks[1]
9,467 guns and mortars[3]
2,110 aircraft[4]
Operation Citadel:
1,910,361 men (including 1,426,352 actual combat soldiers)[5]
5,128 tanks[5]
25,013 guns and mortars[2]
Soviet counter-offensive phase:
2,500,000 men[5]
7,360 tanks[5]
47,416 guns and mortars[3]
2,792[6] to 3,549[7][c] aircraft

[Immanuel Can]

Your beloved Fuhrer...

What a cheapshot. That's low, even for you. I guess some people have no shame at all.

That doesn't even deserve a response. I'm not wasting another second on you.

[Sculptor]

Your beloved Fuhrer...

What a cheapshot. That's low, even for you. I guess some people have no shame at all.

That doesn't even deserve a response. I'm not wasting another second on you.

Thanks for your response - predictable

[iambiguous]

From the New York Times:

United States and Allies Vow Long-Term Support for Ukraine

In the wake of widespread missile attacks by Russia, defense officials from more than 50 countries met to discuss Kyiv’s weapons requests. Germany delivered a new, ultramodern air-defense system and the Netherlands promised $14.5 million in missiles.

Will this be the button that pushes Putin to push a few nuclear buttons of his own?

Me, I'm sticking with this entirely personal assessment:

Now, my own particular existential bias in regard to the Ukraine war is still the same. I don't believe in an afterlife. And, in the event of a nuclear war, living about 30 miles from Washington D.C., I stand a good chance of being vaporized. So, from my frame of mind, let Putin seize Ukraine. In fact let him seize all of those new nations that came into being only as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union. In other words, this assumes that he is not another Hitler, hell bent on gobbling up the entire globe and sending me to a death camp if I don't think exactly like he does.

Of course, here's the thing with those like Biden and the government officials in Europe hell bent on taking us to the brink of mutually assured destruction.

In the event of a nuclear war, they and their loved ones will no doubt be whisked away to some secret underground bunker...a bunker that will be will stocked with all the luxuries they are used to now.

Think Dr. Strangelove on steroids.

[iambiguous]

George Will in a Washington Post column comparing the Cuban Missile Crisis and the one we confront today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... le-crisis/

Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal is immensely more varied and formidable than Khrushchev’s. And Putin’s frenzy intensifies as his Ukraine blunder reveals the hollowness of the great-power strutting it was intended to validate. In contrast, Khrushchev quickly recognized that he needed what Kennedy ultimately provided — an escape from the strategic cul-de-sac into which his impulsiveness had driven him. Putin validates nostalgia for Khrushchev: The world today might be closer to a use of a nuclear weapon than it was then.

Putin's "frenzy". Enough said?

Today, Hastings writes, the delicate military and diplomatic task is to counter “Putin’s obsessive resentment, his craving for respect and willingness to take huge risks and to initiate hideous atrocities around Russia’s borders in pursuit of a pan-Slav fantasy.” So, “the scope for a catastrophic miscalculation is as great now as it was in 1914 Europe or in the 1962 Caribbean.”

Khrushchev was fond of a quote that Vladimir Lenin attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “On s’engage et puis on voit” — more or less, “Start something, then see what happens.” Putin has seen what happened after he started something in Ukraine — NATO energized, Russian power revealed as suited only for war crimes. What happens next, or doesn’t, will depend on the sort of skill and luck seen 60 Octobers ago.

It all comes down to whatever the fuck is going on inside Putin's head. And in Biden's. That's what makes it all ominously unpredictable.

[Gary Childress]

The people pulling the strings on the Democrat party will all suffer from a nuclear war. Whether they can even wrap their heads around more than just pure greed is another thing altogether.

[popeye1945]

The people pulling the strings on the Democrat party will all suffer from a nuclear war. Whether they can even wrap their heads around more than just pure greed is another thing altogether.

Gary,

I think you don't get it, it is not the Democrats nor the Republicans it is the psychopaths of the power elite that run the show. They really couldn't care less what party is in power. The industrial military complex is about business and business is about war, America's cottage industry. It's feeding time for the empire and the empire is the power elite/military-industrial complex. It is not a democracy, the people are not in control here and their war machine is going to drag us all into the abyss.

[popeye1945]

Putin is not bluffing, the United States should remember the debt it owes to Russia and its peoples for saving their asses during world war two. The Monster German/Nazi war machine was crushed by Russia and chased all the way back to Berlin. Do you really think they are going to bow down now to the Monster American war machine. Remember Vietnam, victory to Russia and its peoples!!! Down with the American Empire!!

Well, that's really not what happened. Hitler nearly destroyed the Russians, who were ill-equipped, poorly trained and disorganized at the start of the war, essentially only being arrested by the Russian winter, at Stalingrad, at immense cost to the Russians. Still, had Hitler only had a one-front war, he might well have been able to dispatch the USSR outright. On two fronts, however, it was only a matter of time until he lost.

The Berlin wall wasn't put up to keep free people from escaping into the Iron Curtain. It was made to turn the East into world's largest gulag. Then Stalin killed at least 24 million of his own people, just in order to secure his own power and to eliminate anybody he saw as a political threat. Then a series of Communist governments brought the USSR into complete economic ruin, the wall fell, Russia turned into "The Wild East," run by gangs and oligarchs, and presided over by a dictator.

Is there any of that you're recommending?

Yes, and Americans invented gun powder and a round world. I didn't say that the Russians independently won the war, no one independently won the war. including the Americans, despite what their propaganda might indicate. At the point of lend-lease all hope of winning the war depended upon keeping the Russians in the war. With the defeat of the German/Nazi war machine at Stalingrad and then at the battle of Kursk, from then on the Germans were fighting a retreat back to Germany. If the Germans had defeated the Russians even America's industrial power would have been overmatched by the resources now available to them in a conquered Russia. The cost in people lost to that war for America was about half a million souls and about the same for Britain, the cost in Russian lives was twenty-seven million. American propaganda has been very successful, like many people for most of my life I had thought that America was the most significant agent in the winning of that war. The peoples of the world owe a great debt to Russia and its peoples for it is they who turn the fortunes of the war in Favour of the allied forces. Hats off to Mother Russia!!

[promethean75]

Two words. Turing cracking enigma. Three words, rather.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Your beloved Fuhrer...

What a cheapshot. That's low, even for you. I guess some people have no shame at all.

That doesn't even deserve a response. I'm not wasting another second on you.

What about his 'beloved Stalin'

[Gary Childress]

The people pulling the strings on the Democrat party will all suffer from a nuclear war. Whether they can even wrap their heads around more than just pure greed is another thing altogether.

Gary,

I think you don't get it, it is not the Democrats nor the Republicans it is the psychopaths of the power elite that run the show. They really couldn't care less what party is in power. The industrial military complex is about business and business is about war, America's cottage industry. It's feeding time for the empire and the empire is the power elite/military-industrial complex. It is not a democracy, the people are not in control here and their war machine is going to drag us all into the abyss.

It takes two to tango. Putin is every bit as culpable in this mess as Biden. You're naive if you think otherwise.

[promethean75]

"it takes two to tango"

i think you should have a look at this, Gary.

in any case, we should remember that the tango wuz at one time reputed to be a dance of unbridled passion...

[Gary Childress]

"it takes two to tango"

i think you should have a look at this, Gary.

in any case, we should remember that the tango wuz at one time reputed to be a dance of unbridled passion...

What does that have to do with anything????

[promethean75]

Nuthin man. I'm just smoking a bowl of some headies and decided to troll u.