Official Russia vs Ukraine War Thread

For those not interested in listening to the clip, it's another extended riff on the "NATO promised Gorbachev it wouldn't expand" during negotiations around German reunification. The argument is misleading at best, and mostly wrong, for all the same reasons as when it has been raised previously. Mostly because it's not written down in any treaty and even if it were the context was missiles in East Germany, not NATO expansion.

In any case, today marks the 1000th day of Russia's "special military operation". Alternately, the 200th anniversary of "5 days maximum".

Trump needs to punish Putin.

yahoo.com

Opinion - Putin is sending a not-so-friendly message to Trump

@YahooNews

Russia’s prime-time “60 Minutes” program congratulated Melania Trump on her husband’s electoral victory by displaying on air a handful of nude photographs of future first lady.

Link:www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-putin-sendi...

Putin is dominating him.

He is probably compromised by Putin and now does his bidding.

Yeah. Don't listen to Professor Sachs. Listen to the characterization of Professor Sachs by "Monkeys Skyping."

Lol

Trump is an appeaser. He walks backwards when it comes to enemies of America. He negotiates deals with (i.e., capitulates to) Islamic terrorists, ffs. He'll do whatever Russia tells him is a good idea.

Did he characterize it wrong? I don't think so. I doubt you do either. I went back and listened to Sachs and it's pretty much that "blame America first" stuff starting with that well-known non-existent agreement back in the 90s. So unfortunately Monkey Skype's summary didn't save me any time from reading redundant garbage, but it may save others.

You keep talking about Sachs as if this gives credibility to your argument. No one cares whether or not he is a Trump supporter. He is anti-Western civilization. He wants the most successful and civilized countries to fail and see the ones led by tyrants rise to greater power. The far right and far left both share the trait of being easily influenced by the propaganda pumped out by our adversaries.

Sachs is a liberal economist who rose to fame with high profile anti-poverty NGOs, WHO and the UN in the early 2000s. The anti-poverty programs he worked on in Africa and other third world nations moved around a lot of money and had Sachs hobnobbing with celebs like Bono and Matt Damon. But their efficacy was questionable.

I think Sachs fell in love with the spot light and turned to political punditry to keep himself in the media. He has been more comfortable in progressive circles and worked with Mark Weisbrot at CPRC on the impact of Venezuelan sanctions. But he has also drifted into more of a horseshoe range with dark web right wingers with odd positions on the Uyghur genocide in China and then most recently adopting his very flawed analysis of the war in Ukraine based on an amalgam of progressive and right wing anti-western imperialism riffs.

His theory is basically that the West sought to destroy Russia in the post-soviet era through NATO expansion and unfair monetary integration procedures that badly tanked Russia's economy after the fall of the USSR.

The "not one inch further" to the west quote is a very dishonest argument. First, it was never memorialized into a treaty. Gorbachev was a career politico and his diplomatic team were some of the most experienced negotiators on the planet. They knew full well that anything said off the record wasn't worth diddly squat. The Soviets could have negotiated to include a deal to prohibit NATO expansion westward in part of the deal to reunify Germany but didn't do so because the Soviet satellites were draining Russia of resources. The USSR needed to dump expensive satellites like E. Germany to try to buy itself some time before the economy collapsed and people stormed the Duma in revolt.

Also, Sachs never talks about Russia's 1992 agreement with Ukraine in which Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for territorial guarantees. And Sachs never talks about Russia's post-Soviet aggression in Georgia, Chechnya, etc. that had the former satellite states shaking in their boots and begging to join NATO.

Reportedly the first ATACMs strike in Russian territory was against an ammunition depot in the Bryansk Oblast.

So those who have been fretting that munitions introduced to the conflict would cause more needless deaths will be ecstatic that Russia now has less munitions than they did yesterday.

Today is the 1,000th day of Russia’s full scale invasion, not including their covert invasion in 2014.

1,000 days of

“48 hours to kyiv”

“Ukrainian lines are collapsing”

”they’re running out of men, war ends next month”

”war is already over”

”they’ll never hold Kursk”

The fighters of Ukraine will be valuable allies once this is over- they have used American weapon systems in total war more than we have, and have so far held against overwhelming odds. Their skills in battle are excellent. I’d put a ukrainian special forces team toe to toe with any on the planet at this point, including ours.

It's not a theory he was and advisor to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin during the 90s and saw what the west was doing

First ICBM ever used in war, in retaliation for Ukraine firing US ATACMS and British Storm Shadows into Russia.

Great job with the escalation Biden-Harris. You are on your way to the ash heap of history in two months and Ukraine has already lost the war, but let's needlessly escalate and tempt nuclear war. These people are war criminals.

There are at least two problems with this narrative.

First Ukraine striking military targets in Russian territory is precisely what Russia has been doing in Ukraine since the beginning of the war. It's kind of a convoluted notion of war-making to self deter from doing what the other side has been doing all along.

Second, Russia has recently increased the urgency of its offensive operations because the apparent deadline for negotiations set by Trump, as each side is jockeying to be in the best possible situation should such negotiations occur. So the "but Biden" bit is a naive interpretation of complex international dynamics.

Not clear yet whether the missile actually was an ICBM or was just a long range missile (ICBMs can be modified to be long range missile to carry heavier non-nuclear payloads).

While the conventional wisdom is that this is an escalation by Russia and a warning to the world that Russia will nuke Ukraine, what is really happening is that Russia is having to launch missiles from further inside Russia because Ukraine now has the ability to target Russian missile launchers and guidance systems within Russia now that the US and UK have lifted bans on using ATACMs and storm shadow missiles inside Russia.

The speculation* is that this was an RS-26 which is a borderline ICBM / long-intermediate range ballistic missile. The missile has sufficient range to reach most of Europe with conventional or nuclear warheads. If this is what was used, one could surmise that the strike was intended remind Ukraine's allies that Russia has that capability as a plausible deterrent to Ukrainian support.

I agree with what you term "the conventional wisdom" that this is intended to send a signal rather than a meaningful change in tactics due to a change in Ukraine's strike capability. Russia would use more long range strike capability for targets in Ukraine if they had it, but this isn't a cost effective way to do it.

* - NATO likely has sufficient tracking data on this sort of weapon launch to know what it was but probably wouldn't confirm the type of device publicly.

The beauty of this thread is that it documents all the liars for three years running.

Next year when the war is over and Russia gets substantial portions of Ukraine (the definition of winning a war), it will be hilarious to come back here for the lulz.

1,000 days in and you still have no idea what's happening.

The was is over whether you understand it or not.

Ukraine is slowly being crushed and the fighters you're all excited about will probably all be dead before Ukraine give up.

And if you think Ukrainian special forces are on par with US special forces you're delusional.