von Koehler
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Indeed. It is no simple matter to destroy a bridge at great distances. You need very accurate weapons capable of delivering a sufficient size payload.
ALERT RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE - Consolidated Thread
- Thread starter danielboon
- Start date
Indeed. It is no simple matter to destroy a bridge at great distances. You need very accurate weapons capable of delivering a sufficient size payload.
Ukraine anti-tank missile teams in action.
Runtime 4:21
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Made In Ukraine: Anti-Tank Missiles Take On Russian Armored Units
View: https://youtu.be/Le8hjE3QZLQ
Runtime 4:21
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is funded in whole or in part by the American government. Wikipedia
Made In Ukraine: Anti-Tank Missiles Take On Russian Armored Units
jward
passin' thru
Faytuks News Δ
@Faytuks
2h
The Russian war against Ukraine must end with the liberation of Crimea, Zelensky says
@Faytuks
2h
The Russian war against Ukraine must end with the liberation of Crimea, Zelensky says
TheChrome
Contributing Member
I don't buy that this is a detonation of ammo dumps. This is an attack by Ukraine. Eye witnesses say there were 12 explosions. At least one SU-25 was destroyed along with vehicles. The question is, by what means? Some say this attack may have been by modified Neptune missiles. In one of the videos, the dude says it's the 5th explosion. The other video on the beach the Mom wants to go home. One thing is clear by looking at the video, this certainly is a targeted attack.
Compilation Video
Destroyed SU-24
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I can vouch for the truth of this assertion (partially). Several years back I was working in the UAE (Dubai, the playground of the Gulf). We had apartments in a very nice hotel not far from the Burj Khalifa. (Many of) the high-priced working girls were living in the hotel next to ours, no doubt making it easier for the police to keep an eye on them. It was quiet during the day and got busy when the girls went out shopping or to "work".
I had the habit of getting to the office early to get a start on the day while waiting for the morning reports to come in, so I'd leave our hotel about 4:30 usually. Inevitably, there'd be several luxury cars pulled into the circle next door (Bentleys, Aston-Martins, Lamborghinis, those kind of cars) and the girls getting out of the cars to go home for the day were incredibly beautiful. They were predominantly blonde, fair-skinned and leggy and definitely knew how to dress up.
One of the valets at our hotel told me that the blondes were the most desirable for Arab men, and that most of the girls were from the Ukraine, although he did say there were ladies from all over the world there as well. I never did see any children over there, not that I would've expected to. I didn't get the impression that these women were slaves; they seemed to be under no restrictions of movement or anything like that.
TheChrome
Contributing Member
12 explosions from eyewitnesses makes me think this assessment is nonsense. This is nonsense.
Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
Putin moves slow in the grind mode because he is playing chess and not checkers.
Putin is coordinating with allies-China and North Korea. Putin moves slow since he is just one phase of a coordinated attack on conus. He is draining troops and supplies from conus.
He has stripped conus of troops etc etc See many us troops and supplies? Are they any where near conus?
And WHEN we get a COOR
DINATED Attack by Russia, China, North Korea and the 7 marxist south american countries: columbia, peru, chile, venezula, ortega etc WE WILL BE NAKED TO OUR ENEMIES. no ammo no nothing.
Oh, the west is too STUPID TO LAST MUCH LONGER.
Putin will grind to the Dniepper river. Stop and then the usa TREASON will be unleashed here in conus.
The usa is a joke, a farce and will not last 15 minutes when ALL of them come at us at once.
The USA is laughable now. If one carrier tries to run the Taiwan strait we will find out how pathetic we are and how lethal a COMBINED CHINA, RUSSIA ET AL truly are. Feral anybody?
All of this has been about taking down the USA here in conus. Always has been.
Putin is coordinating with allies-China and North Korea. Putin moves slow since he is just one phase of a coordinated attack on conus. He is draining troops and supplies from conus.
He has stripped conus of troops etc etc See many us troops and supplies? Are they any where near conus?
And WHEN we get a COOR
DINATED Attack by Russia, China, North Korea and the 7 marxist south american countries: columbia, peru, chile, venezula, ortega etc WE WILL BE NAKED TO OUR ENEMIES. no ammo no nothing.
Oh, the west is too STUPID TO LAST MUCH LONGER.
Putin will grind to the Dniepper river. Stop and then the usa TREASON will be unleashed here in conus.
The usa is a joke, a farce and will not last 15 minutes when ALL of them come at us at once.
The USA is laughable now. If one carrier tries to run the Taiwan strait we will find out how pathetic we are and how lethal a COMBINED CHINA, RUSSIA ET AL truly are. Feral anybody?
All of this has been about taking down the USA here in conus. Always has been.
So Putin is deliberately losing more men and material to coordinate with China? What happened to he will have it all by Easter? Did he change his mind?
THere are hundreds of thousands of troops in the US. The numbers that have actually been deployed to Europe outside the normal rotations and permanently station is small. Same with the aircraft deployed. Nothing that I have found has been moved from the Pacific. Are you seeing different?
Tex88
Veteran Member
And Easter is coming!!!
Good observations.
Very interesting.
von Koehler
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Actually I am more concerned that Russian weaponry, some of which goes back to the Soviet era, is proving grossly inferior to NATO weapons.
The initial Russian advances were largely due to having huge numbers of Soviet era equipment and the willingness to expend their troops lives.
Basically Russian military doctrine hasn't changed much from WWII while the Ukainians have rapidly mastered current NATO equipment. While the Russians fire hundreds of dumb shells and hope they hit something, the Ukainians are preforming precision hits.
What happens when Putin runs out of Generals and cannon fodder? His military assets destroyed?
The only real option that could be a game changer is the nuclear one.
Either that or retreat.
The initial Russian advances were largely due to having huge numbers of Soviet era equipment and the willingness to expend their troops lives.
Basically Russian military doctrine hasn't changed much from WWII while the Ukainians have rapidly mastered current NATO equipment. While the Russians fire hundreds of dumb shells and hope they hit something, the Ukainians are preforming precision hits.
What happens when Putin runs out of Generals and cannon fodder? His military assets destroyed?
The only real option that could be a game changer is the nuclear one.
Either that or retreat.
danielboon
TB Fanatic
They want them intact if possible.Putin does have a strange game plan and we are not seeing all of the pieces. they almost seem they are waiting for something
If he takes it he is getting a huge influx of cannon fodder from North Korea. That is a huge boost. The question is what is he getting? Their top notch troops or a bunch of raw recruits? The advantage with the Norks is they are used to old Soviet equipment. The Russians can pull a ton of stuff out of mothballs and have to do very little training. It will also let the Russians rest and recover.
I dont think the Ukrainians have "Rapidly mastered" anything. I think they were taught the bare minimum and the West is doing the rest. They are told what coordinates to punch into the targeting system and how to hit the launch button. All the intel and coordinates are coming from the West. Any repairs are being done by Western "contractors".
Good point.
All of those Western Wunderwaffen require an extensive maintenance and support network to keep them fighting.
Any malfunction or parts breakage will require a robust supply chain to source the spare parts and the personnel skilled in effecting the repair. Now do all of that in a real world combat environment.
CaryC
Has No Life - Lives on TB
May not understand history, that one.
Cuz like BTDT called the Crimean War. Britain, BRITIAN, and Turkey against Russia. Russia won, and out of that came the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" so like really? Not going to happen.
Need a few more billion?
I think a better analogy (Chess vs Checkers) is baseball vs football. With Russia, there are 10 linemen advancing 10 yards at a time. With Ukraine, any time a batter hits a ball, its a home run and the crowd does a wave in the stands if they hit a quarterback.
Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea
While careful not to confirm — or deny — that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the explosions that rocked a Russian airbase, two government officials said the blast marks the start of a major …
www.politico.eu
Ukraine’s long-awaited southern counteroffensive begins with a bang in Crimea
While careful not to confirm — or deny — that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the explosions that rocked a Russian airbase, two government officials said the blast marks the start of a major counterattack.
Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft were targeted in Crimea on Tuesday | U.S. Navy via Getty Images
KYIV — Blasts that rocked a Russian military airfield in forcibly annexed Crimea signal the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south and a critical new phase of the war that could shape its ultimate outcome, two Ukrainian officials told POLITICO.
The series of explosions Tuesday sent huge fireballs and mushroom clouds of black smoke into the sky, scattering terrified Russian vacationers who were seen in videos shared on social media scrambling for safety on a beach and fleeing by car over the Crimea bridge to Russia.
Moscow downplayed the blasts, saying they were caused by ammunition that had accidentally detonated at the airfield, where satellite images showed several military planes had been parked.
Ukraine’s defense ministry coyly denied responsibility while warning about the dangers of smoking around explosives, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “this Russian war against Ukraine and against all of free Europe began with Crimea and must end with Crimea — with its liberation. … I know that we will return to the Ukrainian Crimea.”
But two Ukrainian officials who spoke to POLITICO suggested more directly that Kyiv was behind the explosions. While Ukrainian forces have in recent weeks been pushing to claw back ground toward the southern city of Kherson — which fell to the Russians in the early days of the invasion — the two officials said the explosions at the airfield indicated that this counterattack was now beginning in earnest.
A successful strike against a military target far behind Russian lines, and especially on the Crimean Peninsula, a place of great significance to the Kremlin that has largely avoided the intense fighting taking place on Ukraine’s mainland, would be deeply embarrassing for President Vladimir Putin who would likely view it as a dramatic escalation and a blow to his troops’ morale.
“The Kremlin has little incentive to accuse Ukraine of conducting strikes that caused the damage since such strikes would demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Russian air defense systems, which the Ukrainian sinking of the [Russian flagship] Moskva had already revealed,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank that tracks the conflict.
Asked by POLITICO whether the blasts can be viewed as the start of Ukraine’s counterattack in the country’s south, a Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to reporters on the record, responded in the affirmative.
“You can say this is it,” the official said.
A second Ukrainian official, who also spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the media, told POLITICO that August and September will be “very important” months from a military perspective, which would likely shape the ultimate outcome of the war.
The official warned that the intensity of the fighting in August and September could “look like February” but declined to elaborate on that assessment, citing military secrecy.
The official said that the airfield blasts were a message to Russia that they “are safe nowhere.”
The official warned that the intensity of the fighting in August and September could “look like February” but declined to elaborate on that assessment, citing military secrecy | Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images
“Let them know how it feels,” the official added, referring to the fear and uncertainty that has spread across Ukraine, where Russia has fired more than 3,000 missiles since February 24.
The Washington Post, citing a Ukrainian government official, reported the attack was carried out by special forces.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ignat said in an interview on Ukrainian state TV that the Saki airfield in the town of Novofedorivka, as well as other Crimean military airfields, was home to Russian jets that carried out airstrikes on Ukraine, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.
“That’s why putting any airfield out of order is a very good thing,” he said, without explicitly confirming Ukraine was responsible.
The air force reported on its Facebook page that nine Russian aircraft had been destroyed.
The full extent of the damage caused by explosions at the Crimea airfield remains unclear. But any number of military planes destroyed would make a dent in Russia’s air forces that have been attacking targets in Ukraine.
Satellite imagery taken by Planet Lab four hours before the blasts and published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian investigative desk Schemes showed more than 20 military planes parked at the airfield.
A one-second video published on social media that could not be independently verified by POLITICO appeared to show at least one Russian jet completely destroyed and a firefighter hosing down an area of the damaged airfield.
Tweeting another video that seemed to show the aftermath of the blast, Anton Gerashenko, a Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser, wrote: “Seems like no chance that a single plane remained intact.”
“The impact of yesterday’s explosion is no less than the destruction of the cruiser Moskva,” he added, referring to the Russian cruiser that was the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet until it was destroyed by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles in April. “Dozens of warplanes will no longer be able to drop bombs and missiles on us.”
Ukraine has been methodically preparing for its southern counteroffensive in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions since May.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted critical infrastructure in and near Kherson, which Russia relies on to reinforce and resupply its army. Aiding the Ukrainians are western weapons, in particular, the U.S.-supplied HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, which Kyiv’s forces have used to take out the important Antonivskyi bridge, forcing Russian troops to ferry supplies across the broad Dnipro river.
Ukraine has also trained fresh brigades and deployed them to the south where they have slowly recaptured dozens of small towns and villages.
Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were overrun and captured by Russian forces early in the invasion due in large part to internal security failures, local collaborators and weak defenses. The regions are economically significant and of strategic importance due to their location. Together with the southern Donetsk region, the three regions form a land bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea, and cut Ukraine off from vital access to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s focus on Kherson and Zaporizhzhia now stems largely from concern over the Kremlin’s plans to cement control over the regions and thus the land bridge connecting Russia to Crimea.
Russia has also distributed passports to Ukrainians in Kherson and introduced the ruble as the currency.
The two Ukrainian officials, plus a third close to Zelenskyy with knowledge of the counteroffensive, told POLITICO that they are certain Russia will use its hand-picked proxies and local collaborators to hold illegal referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories on or around September 11.
What is unclear, one of the officials said, is whether the referendums will be conducted in the “Crimean style” or the “Donbas style.”
The Russian-orchestrated vote in Crimea in April 2014 asked residents of the peninsula whether they wanted to join Russia, while the votes in the Moscow-controlled areas of eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions in May that year sought to legitimize the “independence” of those areas and “people’s republics.” Both referendums were condemned by the international community and have largely not been recognized, except by Russia and various breakaway statelets.
Explaining the urgency for the military to counterattack now, the official close to Zelenskyy said they believed momentum is in Ukraine’s favor. Russian forces haven’t made much progress in the eastern Donbas region since the battles for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, from which Ukraine made tactical retreats in June and July, respectively. And Russian morale is low, the official said.
Moreover, recapturing the south, the official said, would allow Ukraine to negotiate from a stronger position if or when talks between Kyiv and Moscow resume.
Also, the official added, Ukrainians trapped in Russian-occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are waiting to see whether Kyiv will be able to “liberate” them or if they’ll remain stuck under the Kremlin’s control.
“The longer that our people are stuck under Russian occupation, the more we risk losing them,” the official said.
northern watch
TB Fanatic
Runtime 3:54
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is funded in whole or in part by the American government.
Ukrainian Troops Dig Deep As Russian Fire Rains Down
Aug 10, 2022
View: https://youtu.be/TADKEHBA-J4
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is funded in whole or in part by the American government.
Ukrainian Troops Dig Deep As Russian Fire Rains Down
Aug 10, 2022
vector7
Dot Collector
China calls U.S. 'main instigator' of Ukraine crisis
View: https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1557396582701596673?s=20&t=uD76eY3bernMhvYrPnTqcw
View: https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1557396582701596673?s=20&t=uD76eY3bernMhvYrPnTqcw
yes, it is The Atlantic, but this is what i am seeing where i am too.
there is no way these people are going to be defeated.
www.theatlantic.com
Anna Bondarenko, who founded the Ukrainian Volunteer Service in Odesa.
THE OTHER UKRAINIAN ARMY
History has turning points, moments when events shift and the future seems suddenly clear. But history also has in-between points, days and weeks when everything seems impermanent and nobody knows what will happen next. Odesa in the summer of 2022 is like that—a city suspended between great events. The panic that swept the city in February, when it seemed the Russian invaders might win quickly, already feels like a long time ago. Now the city is hot, half empty, and bracing itself for what comes next.
Some are preparing for the worst. Odesa endured a 10-week German and Romanian siege during the Second World War, then a three-year occupation; the current mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, told me that the city is now filling warehouses with food and medicine, in case history repeats itself. On July 11, Ukrainian security services caught a Russian spy scouting potential targets in the city. The beautiful waterfront, where the Potemkin Stairs lead down to the Black Sea, remains blocked by a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire. Russian-occupied Kherson, where you can be interrogated just for speaking Ukrainian, is just a few hours’ drive away.
In the meantime, pedestrians stroll past the Italian facades in Odesa’s historic center and drink coffee beneath umbrellas. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov recently wrote that “I used to pay a lot of attention to time, using it as effectively as possible.” Now, instead, “I pay attention to the war.” In Odesa, people also pay attention to the war, obsessive attention; some of those I met have installed apps on their phones that echo the air-raid sirens. But then they switch off the sound when their phones start to howl. Fear becomes normalized, until eventually it becomes another part of the background noise. My hotel had an air-raid shelter, a windowless room, but no one went there during air raids.
Odesa’s city garden.
For the languor of Odesa is the backdrop, not the story: Not everyone there is afflicted with apathy, anxiety, or the fear of losing. On the contrary, even in this strange moment, when time doesn’t seem worth measuring, some people are intensely busy. Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri, and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well, why a decade-long Russian attempt to co-opt the Ukrainian state mostly failed, even (or maybe especially) in Russian-speaking Odesa.
In a paralyzed landscape, in a stalled economy, in a city where no one can plan anything, the volonteri are creating the future. They aren’t afraid of loss, siege, or occupation, because they think they are going to win.
Out of almost nothing—out of a beat-up apartment building at the back of an empty courtyard—Anna Bondarenko has already created a community, a refuge from the war. The offices of her Ukrainian Volunteer Service (UVS) are in old rooms with high ceilings; the largest, lined with desks, has the words a good deed has great power painted on one of the walls. Bondarenko told me that at age 15, she spent a year as an exchange student at an American high school, where she found herself for the first time having to explain where Ukraine is, and what it is, and, though she came from a Russian-speaking family, she discovered that she liked the idea of being Ukrainian.
She came home wanting to continue volunteering and signed up to work on a couple of festivals, including one marking Ukraine’s independence day. But in between festivals, she and her friends couldn’t find organizations that inspired them. Eventually, she set up the UVS, an organization designed to solve that problem, matching people who want to volunteer with other people who need help....
Then the war started. Demand exploded.
No one on Bondarenko’s UVS team is over the age of 30, and some are under 20. Bondarenko, at 26, is one of the oldest people in the room. Nevertheless, since the early hours of the morning of February 24, UVS has fielded thousands of requests, creating a set of websites, chat sites, and chatbots that eventually matched more than 100,000 people—accountants, drivers, medics—with more than 900 organizations across the country. Ukrainians find UVS via Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok; when you type I want to volunteer into a Ukrainian Google search, UVS is the first organization to come up. Bondarenko’s team has sent volunteers to help distribute food packages to people who lost their homes, clean up rubble after bombing raids, and, for those willing to take real risks, to drive cars or buses into war zones and pull people out. People wrote to them for advice:
Sometimes they rescue their own colleagues. Lisa is a UVS team member from Melitopol, a Ukrainian city occupied during the first part of the war. I am withholding Lisa’s surname because her parents remain in a Russian-controlled village in southern Ukraine, but I can tell you that Lisa has long reddish hair, white fingernail polish, and a sheaf of wheat, a Ukrainian patriotic symbol, tattooed on her forearm. When she was still in occupied Melitopol, Russian patrols would stop her and ask her, as they ask everyone, to show them her tattoos. She kept the wheat sheaf hidden beneath long-sleeved shirts, but every time this happened, she was terrified. Still, she was responsible for distributing food in a part of the city cut off from the center, and so she stayed until someone from a partner organization called Bondarenko to warn her that Lisa was on a list to be arrested or kidnapped. UVS helped Lisa leave within hours.
Lisa now coordinates volunteers in the occupied territories using encrypted-messaging apps and Telegram channels. ... medicine, and distributed it to people who had lost houses and jobs. The volunteers in the town tried to protect themselves by wearing red crosses on their arms, but doing so had the opposite effect: The symbols attracted the attention of Russian soldiers, who stopped anyone wearing them for questioning and sometimes arrest. By the time Vorontsov escaped Nova Kakhovka, volunteers had learned to wipe their phones clean every day before leaving the house and to have carefully prepared answers for the Russian soldiers who stopped them constantly. I spoke with Vorontsov by video link; he is now living in Georgia. “People are leaving all the time,” he told me. “Pretty soon there will be no one left to help.”
The main reception and humanitarian aid point for internally displaced people in Odesa.
In one sense, the Russian suspicion of people like Vorontsov and Lisa is well founded. Although most of the volunteers on the ground are engaged in purely humanitarian work, there really is a link between participation in public life—any kind of participation in public life—and Ukrainian patriotism. This link is not new.
Whatever it was that motivated people to contribute their time to their communities before the war, whether in the name of music, art, or animal shelters, the same impulse pushes them toward an idea, perhaps an ideal, of democratic Ukraine, and makes them want to help the war effort now. Serhiy Lukachko, who also works out of the UVS office, runs a website called My City, which was once dedicated to supporting cultural events and other projects in Odesa. Now he and a colleague have put their fundraising talents to the aid of a Ukrainian army brigade. Through crowdfunding, they purchase body armor, extra uniforms, and the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are in such high demand at the front. “We talk once a week,” Lukachko told me. “They give me a checklist.”
It could be a gloomy place, this building full of very young people, some of whom are still going through the trauma of displacement and all of whom have friends or relatives in grave danger. Lisa has an arranged time to speak for a few seconds with her parents every day, just to make sure they are ok. Bondarenko has a boyfriend in the army. Later, over dinner at a Crimean Tartar restaurant, Bondarenko told me that she has already lost friends to the war. The first time she learned of such a death, she spent the evening weeping. The second time it happened, she resolved to mourn everybody at the end, when the war is over, “after we have won.”
Right now, she is busy. So is everyone else in her immediate vicinity, and that energy creates its own momentum, becomes its own inspiration. Nobody in the world of Odesa community organizations is competing for funding anymore. Nobody is jockeying for position or worrying about prestige. “Everybody just kind of tries to help each other,” Bondarenko said, “and it feels really different.” And that is what she wants Odesa, and Ukraine, to be like in the future.
Bondarenko and her team were inspired by American practices of community service—well-designed websites, clever social-media posts—but other cultural influences are at work in Odesa too. One of them is toloka, an old word used in Ukrainian, Russian, and certain Baltic languages to describe spontaneous community projects. When someone’s house burns down, the village gets together to rebuild it. ... Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist, has defined toloka as “community work for the common good,” and it helps explain why so many people have given up so much to pitch in.
Dmytro Milyutin
Dmytro Milyutin, for example, lives in a world that bears no resemblance to an old-fashioned Ukrainian village. He runs a parfumerie, a shop in central Odesa where he sells famous perfumes as well as oddities, bottles containing the scent of smoke or of apple pie. He designs fragrances for individuals and says he considers himself a connoisseur “not just of scents but of emotions.” But since the war began, he has sold a fifth of his perfume collection and taken out a loan to provide sophisticated military clothing to Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Odesa. The Ukrainian army distributes basic uniforms, but not the pocketed vests specially designed to carry guns and first-aid kits, or the light backpacks that American soldiers take for granted. Milyutin got a local fashion designer to put aside his dressmaking business and start sewing together canvas and velcro strips to make things easier for soldiers on the move. He too keeps in touch directly with commanders.
While Milyutin and I speak, two women in heels and full makeup come in to buy perfume [LoL]. They spray different scents onto little sticks and wave them in front of their nose as Milyutin keeps talking about the design of the backpacks that are gathered on the floor beneath the bottles. The ladies don’t mind the backpacks, because that kind of thing, like the air-raid sirens, is normal now too.
Around the corner from Milyutin’s shop, Olexander Babich’s office also now contains piles of sleeping bags, ground mats, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, bought using donations, now being sorted for distribution. Babich is a well-known historian and the author of Odessa 1941–1944, a book about daily life under the fascist occupation,
When the war began, he drove his family across the border, came home, and began to prepare to oppose the new enemy. He and some historians from Kherson, now living in his apartment, track down, import, and distribute the equipment that is now stacked up against the bookshelves.
They go to shooting ranges themselves, too, just to keep in practice.
Alexander Babych
In his elegant gallery in the city center, Mikhail Reva, a renowned Ukrainian sculptor who designed several notable monuments around Odesa, has also been seized by the spirit of toloka. His Reva Foundation, originally created to fund artistic education and urban design in Ukraine, has been redirected to purchase first-aid kits for soldiers. The various international contacts Reva has accumulated over years—a friend in San Diego who used to live in Odesa, other artists and designers around the world—have also helped him pay for a training program designed to teach soldiers how to use the first-aid kits, especially the tourniquets that can stop someone from dying in the field.
The scale of these efforts surprises outsiders, but it shouldn’t. ... our definition of civil society is cramped and narrow. It can look like the two chic Kyiv restaurants from which Slava Balbek started a food kitchen for the territorial army during the first days of the war, eventually organizing 25 restaurants and two bakeries into a cooperative that cooked thousands of meals every day.
There is a darker side to this story. If the Ukrainian army were better equipped, after all, or if Ukraine were a wealthier or better-run country, or if so many Ukrainians had not wasted so much time over the past 30 years creating corrupt schemes or battling them, then maybe this enormous social movement would not be necessary. The volunteers emerged precisely because Ukrainian soldiers don’t have first-aid kits, Ukrainian snipers don’t have the right uniforms and the Ukrainian state doesn’t have the capability to distribute these things either.
But even if it was inspired by the deficits of the Ukrainian state, many hope this wave of activism will wind up reshaping that state, just as popular activism during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14 also changed Ukraine. Precisely because Odesa is a Russian-speaking city with a cosmopolitan history, precisely because Odesa has a living memory of occupation, the volunteer movement here will jolt many of the city’s inhabitants abruptly in the direction of “Ukrainianness,” as well as in the direction of the things that term now represents: democracy, openness, and European identity.
In Odesa, this process has begun. Bogachenko, the activist who runs the refugee-aid center, told me that she speaks Russian but has no doubt about who she is: “Greek, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian—if you have a Ukrainian passport, you are Ukrainian.” Reva, the sculptor, went to art school in Russia (in what was then Soviet Leningrad) but describes today’s war as a contest between good and evil, in which choosing sides is not remotely hard. The Russians, he says, among them many former friends and colleagues, “want to destroy everything and make us slaves.” Trukhanov, the mayor, who has been accused of secretly holding a Russian passport and maintaining deep Russian connections, spent a good part of our conversation denying vociferously that this is the case, even though I didn’t ask him about it. He has now made a clear choice, for Ukraine and against Russia, and he wants everyone to know it.
Natalia Bogachenko, who runs a collection point for humanitarian aid.
The life experiences of these Ukrainians have already created a wide gap between them and their Russian neighbors. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, likes to talk about how Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation, the same people. But Ukraine’s civic and military mobilization around the war is the best possible illustration of how much and how quickly nations and people can diverge. For although a few online efforts to raise money for the military in Russia are under way, there is nothing on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine, no mass civic mobilization, no teams of volunteers, no equivalent to the Kalush Orchestra—the Ukrainian band that won the Eurovision Song Contest this year, auctioned off its trophy for $900,000, and used the money to buy three PD-2 drones for the army.
Ukraine is not a nation of saints. Not everyone with a Ukrainian passport is fighting for the country, or even planning to remain in the country. Not everyone is active, brave, or optimistic. On the train from Warsaw to Kyiv, I met a woman returning home from exile whose skepticism about Ukraine’s leaders led her in the direction of various conspiracy theories: How come my apartment was damaged but the houses of the rich were spared?
But what matters is what comes next, and voices like those will not be the decisive ones in postwar Ukraine. That role will go to those who stayed, those who volunteered, those who built the ad hoc organizations that became real ones, who made the effort to link bakers and taxi drivers and medics to the war effort. The volonteri will create Ukraine’s postwar culture, rebuild the cities and run the country in the future. They will resist Russian influence, Russian corruption, and Russian occupation because the modern Russian state threatens not just their lives and property but their very identity. They have defined themselves against a Russian autocracy that suppresses spontaneity and creativity, and they will go on doing so long after the war is over.
Odesa remains a city suspended between great events. As I write this, I don’t know what will happen next. All I can tell is that the activists and the volunteers, in Odesa and across the country, believe that the next great event will be not another calamity, but a Ukrainian victory.
there is no way these people are going to be defeated.
The Other Ukrainian Army
Imperiled by Russian invaders, private citizens are stepping forward to do what Ukraine’s government cannot.
www.theatlantic.com
Anna Bondarenko, who founded the Ukrainian Volunteer Service in Odesa.
THE OTHER UKRAINIAN ARMY
History has turning points, moments when events shift and the future seems suddenly clear. But history also has in-between points, days and weeks when everything seems impermanent and nobody knows what will happen next. Odesa in the summer of 2022 is like that—a city suspended between great events. The panic that swept the city in February, when it seemed the Russian invaders might win quickly, already feels like a long time ago. Now the city is hot, half empty, and bracing itself for what comes next.
Some are preparing for the worst. Odesa endured a 10-week German and Romanian siege during the Second World War, then a three-year occupation; the current mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, told me that the city is now filling warehouses with food and medicine, in case history repeats itself. On July 11, Ukrainian security services caught a Russian spy scouting potential targets in the city. The beautiful waterfront, where the Potemkin Stairs lead down to the Black Sea, remains blocked by a maze of concrete barriers and barbed wire. Russian-occupied Kherson, where you can be interrogated just for speaking Ukrainian, is just a few hours’ drive away.
In the meantime, pedestrians stroll past the Italian facades in Odesa’s historic center and drink coffee beneath umbrellas. The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov recently wrote that “I used to pay a lot of attention to time, using it as effectively as possible.” Now, instead, “I pay attention to the war.” In Odesa, people also pay attention to the war, obsessive attention; some of those I met have installed apps on their phones that echo the air-raid sirens. But then they switch off the sound when their phones start to howl. Fear becomes normalized, until eventually it becomes another part of the background noise. My hotel had an air-raid shelter, a windowless room, but no one went there during air raids.
Odesa’s city garden.
For the languor of Odesa is the backdrop, not the story: Not everyone there is afflicted with apathy, anxiety, or the fear of losing. On the contrary, even in this strange moment, when time doesn’t seem worth measuring, some people are intensely busy. Across the city, students, accountants, hairdressers, and every other conceivable profession have joined what can only be described as an unprecedented social movement. They call themselves volonteri, and their organizations, their crowdfunding campaigns, and their activism help explain why the Ukrainian army has fought so hard and so well, why a decade-long Russian attempt to co-opt the Ukrainian state mostly failed, even (or maybe especially) in Russian-speaking Odesa.
In a paralyzed landscape, in a stalled economy, in a city where no one can plan anything, the volonteri are creating the future. They aren’t afraid of loss, siege, or occupation, because they think they are going to win.
Out of almost nothing—out of a beat-up apartment building at the back of an empty courtyard—Anna Bondarenko has already created a community, a refuge from the war. The offices of her Ukrainian Volunteer Service (UVS) are in old rooms with high ceilings; the largest, lined with desks, has the words a good deed has great power painted on one of the walls. Bondarenko told me that at age 15, she spent a year as an exchange student at an American high school, where she found herself for the first time having to explain where Ukraine is, and what it is, and, though she came from a Russian-speaking family, she discovered that she liked the idea of being Ukrainian.
She came home wanting to continue volunteering and signed up to work on a couple of festivals, including one marking Ukraine’s independence day. But in between festivals, she and her friends couldn’t find organizations that inspired them. Eventually, she set up the UVS, an organization designed to solve that problem, matching people who want to volunteer with other people who need help....
Then the war started. Demand exploded.
No one on Bondarenko’s UVS team is over the age of 30, and some are under 20. Bondarenko, at 26, is one of the oldest people in the room. Nevertheless, since the early hours of the morning of February 24, UVS has fielded thousands of requests, creating a set of websites, chat sites, and chatbots that eventually matched more than 100,000 people—accountants, drivers, medics—with more than 900 organizations across the country. Ukrainians find UVS via Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok; when you type I want to volunteer into a Ukrainian Google search, UVS is the first organization to come up. Bondarenko’s team has sent volunteers to help distribute food packages to people who lost their homes, clean up rubble after bombing raids, and, for those willing to take real risks, to drive cars or buses into war zones and pull people out. People wrote to them for advice:
Sometimes they rescue their own colleagues. Lisa is a UVS team member from Melitopol, a Ukrainian city occupied during the first part of the war. I am withholding Lisa’s surname because her parents remain in a Russian-controlled village in southern Ukraine, but I can tell you that Lisa has long reddish hair, white fingernail polish, and a sheaf of wheat, a Ukrainian patriotic symbol, tattooed on her forearm. When she was still in occupied Melitopol, Russian patrols would stop her and ask her, as they ask everyone, to show them her tattoos. She kept the wheat sheaf hidden beneath long-sleeved shirts, but every time this happened, she was terrified. Still, she was responsible for distributing food in a part of the city cut off from the center, and so she stayed until someone from a partner organization called Bondarenko to warn her that Lisa was on a list to be arrested or kidnapped. UVS helped Lisa leave within hours.
Lisa now coordinates volunteers in the occupied territories using encrypted-messaging apps and Telegram channels. ... medicine, and distributed it to people who had lost houses and jobs. The volunteers in the town tried to protect themselves by wearing red crosses on their arms, but doing so had the opposite effect: The symbols attracted the attention of Russian soldiers, who stopped anyone wearing them for questioning and sometimes arrest. By the time Vorontsov escaped Nova Kakhovka, volunteers had learned to wipe their phones clean every day before leaving the house and to have carefully prepared answers for the Russian soldiers who stopped them constantly. I spoke with Vorontsov by video link; he is now living in Georgia. “People are leaving all the time,” he told me. “Pretty soon there will be no one left to help.”
The main reception and humanitarian aid point for internally displaced people in Odesa.
In one sense, the Russian suspicion of people like Vorontsov and Lisa is well founded. Although most of the volunteers on the ground are engaged in purely humanitarian work, there really is a link between participation in public life—any kind of participation in public life—and Ukrainian patriotism. This link is not new.
Whatever it was that motivated people to contribute their time to their communities before the war, whether in the name of music, art, or animal shelters, the same impulse pushes them toward an idea, perhaps an ideal, of democratic Ukraine, and makes them want to help the war effort now. Serhiy Lukachko, who also works out of the UVS office, runs a website called My City, which was once dedicated to supporting cultural events and other projects in Odesa. Now he and a colleague have put their fundraising talents to the aid of a Ukrainian army brigade. Through crowdfunding, they purchase body armor, extra uniforms, and the four-wheel-drive SUVs that are in such high demand at the front. “We talk once a week,” Lukachko told me. “They give me a checklist.”
It could be a gloomy place, this building full of very young people, some of whom are still going through the trauma of displacement and all of whom have friends or relatives in grave danger. Lisa has an arranged time to speak for a few seconds with her parents every day, just to make sure they are ok. Bondarenko has a boyfriend in the army. Later, over dinner at a Crimean Tartar restaurant, Bondarenko told me that she has already lost friends to the war. The first time she learned of such a death, she spent the evening weeping. The second time it happened, she resolved to mourn everybody at the end, when the war is over, “after we have won.”
Right now, she is busy. So is everyone else in her immediate vicinity, and that energy creates its own momentum, becomes its own inspiration. Nobody in the world of Odesa community organizations is competing for funding anymore. Nobody is jockeying for position or worrying about prestige. “Everybody just kind of tries to help each other,” Bondarenko said, “and it feels really different.” And that is what she wants Odesa, and Ukraine, to be like in the future.
Bondarenko and her team were inspired by American practices of community service—well-designed websites, clever social-media posts—but other cultural influences are at work in Odesa too. One of them is toloka, an old word used in Ukrainian, Russian, and certain Baltic languages to describe spontaneous community projects. When someone’s house burns down, the village gets together to rebuild it. ... Kurkov, the Ukrainian novelist, has defined toloka as “community work for the common good,” and it helps explain why so many people have given up so much to pitch in.
Dmytro Milyutin, for example, lives in a world that bears no resemblance to an old-fashioned Ukrainian village. He runs a parfumerie, a shop in central Odesa where he sells famous perfumes as well as oddities, bottles containing the scent of smoke or of apple pie. He designs fragrances for individuals and says he considers himself a connoisseur “not just of scents but of emotions.” But since the war began, he has sold a fifth of his perfume collection and taken out a loan to provide sophisticated military clothing to Ukrainian soldiers fighting near Odesa. The Ukrainian army distributes basic uniforms, but not the pocketed vests specially designed to carry guns and first-aid kits, or the light backpacks that American soldiers take for granted. Milyutin got a local fashion designer to put aside his dressmaking business and start sewing together canvas and velcro strips to make things easier for soldiers on the move. He too keeps in touch directly with commanders.
While Milyutin and I speak, two women in heels and full makeup come in to buy perfume [LoL]. They spray different scents onto little sticks and wave them in front of their nose as Milyutin keeps talking about the design of the backpacks that are gathered on the floor beneath the bottles. The ladies don’t mind the backpacks, because that kind of thing, like the air-raid sirens, is normal now too.
Around the corner from Milyutin’s shop, Olexander Babich’s office also now contains piles of sleeping bags, ground mats, binoculars, and night-vision goggles, bought using donations, now being sorted for distribution. Babich is a well-known historian and the author of Odessa 1941–1944, a book about daily life under the fascist occupation,
When the war began, he drove his family across the border, came home, and began to prepare to oppose the new enemy. He and some historians from Kherson, now living in his apartment, track down, import, and distribute the equipment that is now stacked up against the bookshelves.
They go to shooting ranges themselves, too, just to keep in practice.
In his elegant gallery in the city center, Mikhail Reva, a renowned Ukrainian sculptor who designed several notable monuments around Odesa, has also been seized by the spirit of toloka. His Reva Foundation, originally created to fund artistic education and urban design in Ukraine, has been redirected to purchase first-aid kits for soldiers. The various international contacts Reva has accumulated over years—a friend in San Diego who used to live in Odesa, other artists and designers around the world—have also helped him pay for a training program designed to teach soldiers how to use the first-aid kits, especially the tourniquets that can stop someone from dying in the field.
The scale of these efforts surprises outsiders, but it shouldn’t. ... our definition of civil society is cramped and narrow. It can look like the two chic Kyiv restaurants from which Slava Balbek started a food kitchen for the territorial army during the first days of the war, eventually organizing 25 restaurants and two bakeries into a cooperative that cooked thousands of meals every day.
There is a darker side to this story. If the Ukrainian army were better equipped, after all, or if Ukraine were a wealthier or better-run country, or if so many Ukrainians had not wasted so much time over the past 30 years creating corrupt schemes or battling them, then maybe this enormous social movement would not be necessary. The volunteers emerged precisely because Ukrainian soldiers don’t have first-aid kits, Ukrainian snipers don’t have the right uniforms and the Ukrainian state doesn’t have the capability to distribute these things either.
But even if it was inspired by the deficits of the Ukrainian state, many hope this wave of activism will wind up reshaping that state, just as popular activism during the Orange Revolution in 2004–05 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14 also changed Ukraine. Precisely because Odesa is a Russian-speaking city with a cosmopolitan history, precisely because Odesa has a living memory of occupation, the volunteer movement here will jolt many of the city’s inhabitants abruptly in the direction of “Ukrainianness,” as well as in the direction of the things that term now represents: democracy, openness, and European identity.
In Odesa, this process has begun. Bogachenko, the activist who runs the refugee-aid center, told me that she speaks Russian but has no doubt about who she is: “Greek, Jewish, Russian, Ukrainian—if you have a Ukrainian passport, you are Ukrainian.” Reva, the sculptor, went to art school in Russia (in what was then Soviet Leningrad) but describes today’s war as a contest between good and evil, in which choosing sides is not remotely hard. The Russians, he says, among them many former friends and colleagues, “want to destroy everything and make us slaves.” Trukhanov, the mayor, who has been accused of secretly holding a Russian passport and maintaining deep Russian connections, spent a good part of our conversation denying vociferously that this is the case, even though I didn’t ask him about it. He has now made a clear choice, for Ukraine and against Russia, and he wants everyone to know it.
The life experiences of these Ukrainians have already created a wide gap between them and their Russian neighbors. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, likes to talk about how Russians and Ukrainians are the same nation, the same people. But Ukraine’s civic and military mobilization around the war is the best possible illustration of how much and how quickly nations and people can diverge. For although a few online efforts to raise money for the military in Russia are under way, there is nothing on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine, no mass civic mobilization, no teams of volunteers, no equivalent to the Kalush Orchestra—the Ukrainian band that won the Eurovision Song Contest this year, auctioned off its trophy for $900,000, and used the money to buy three PD-2 drones for the army.
Ukraine is not a nation of saints. Not everyone with a Ukrainian passport is fighting for the country, or even planning to remain in the country. Not everyone is active, brave, or optimistic. On the train from Warsaw to Kyiv, I met a woman returning home from exile whose skepticism about Ukraine’s leaders led her in the direction of various conspiracy theories: How come my apartment was damaged but the houses of the rich were spared?
But what matters is what comes next, and voices like those will not be the decisive ones in postwar Ukraine. That role will go to those who stayed, those who volunteered, those who built the ad hoc organizations that became real ones, who made the effort to link bakers and taxi drivers and medics to the war effort. The volonteri will create Ukraine’s postwar culture, rebuild the cities and run the country in the future. They will resist Russian influence, Russian corruption, and Russian occupation because the modern Russian state threatens not just their lives and property but their very identity. They have defined themselves against a Russian autocracy that suppresses spontaneity and creativity, and they will go on doing so long after the war is over.
Odesa remains a city suspended between great events. As I write this, I don’t know what will happen next. All I can tell is that the activists and the volunteers, in Odesa and across the country, believe that the next great event will be not another calamity, but a Ukrainian victory.
jward
passin' thru
Liveuamap
@Liveuamap
6m
Ammonia leak reported as result of explosion at Donetsk brewery https://liveuamap.com/en/2022/10-august-ammonia-leak-reported-as-result-of-explosion-at
#Ukraine
View: https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1557454492353847297?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
jward
passin' thru
EndGameWW3
@EndGameWW3
46m
Special forces carried out raid on Russian air base in Crimea - 200km behind the front lines - Ukraine says
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1557444912504766466?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
Ukrainian special forces 'could launch more attacks in coming days' on occupied Crimea https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/10/ukraine-russia-news-latest-updates-nuclear-plant-oil-crimea/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw via
@Telegraph
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1557444793780899841?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
@EndGameWW3
46m
Special forces carried out raid on Russian air base in Crimea - 200km behind the front lines - Ukraine says
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1557444912504766466?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
Ukrainian special forces 'could launch more attacks in coming days' on occupied Crimea https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/10/ukraine-russia-news-latest-updates-nuclear-plant-oil-crimea/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw via
@Telegraph
View: https://twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1557444793780899841?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
Liveuamap
@Liveuamap
6m
Ammonia leak reported as result of explosion at Donetsk brewery https://liveuamap.com/en/2022/10-august-ammonia-leak-reported-as-result-of-explosion-at
#Ukraine
View: https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1557454492353847297?s=20&t=q-jGX4_EhyvkqGaTXomtNA
Isn't ammonia used in industrial refrigeration systems?
jward
passin' thru
Samuel Ramani
@SamRamani2
5m
BREAKING: Estonia summons Russia's ambassador over airspace violations
Show this thread
jward
passin' thru
hmm.
Faytuks News Δ
@Faytuks
#INITIAL - I am currently seeing unconfirmed telegram reports of explosions heard and multiple visible flashes in the vicinity of the Zyabrovka airfield in Belarus.
hmm.
Faytuks News Δ
@Faytuks
#INITIAL - I am currently seeing unconfirmed telegram reports of explosions heard and multiple visible flashes in the vicinity of the Zyabrovka airfield in Belarus.
Current travel safety evaluation for Belarus in Eastern Europe
Safety Score: 4,9 of 5.0 based on data from 9 authorites. Meaning it is not safe to travel Belarus.
Travel warnings are updated daily. Source: Travel Warning Belarus. Last Update: 2022-08-10 08:12:05
-------------------
Delve into Zyabrawka
Zyabrawka in Gomel Oblast is located in Belarus about 185 mi (or 298 km) south-east of Minsk, the country's capital town.
Current time in Zyabrawka is now 01:42 AM (Thursday). The local timezone is named Europe / Minsk with an UTC offset of 3 hours. We know of 6 airports close to Zyabrawka, of which one is a larger airport. The closest airport in Belarus is Gomel Airport in a distance of 16 mi (or 25 km), North-West. Besides the airports, there are other travel options available (check left side).
While being here, you might want to pay a visit to some of the following locations: Dobrush, Vyetka, Gomel, Ripky and Loyew. To further explore this place, just scroll down and browse the available info.
Pribytki
Pribytki (also Zyabrovka) is an air base in Belarus located in Homiel Voblast, 16 km southeast of Gomel. In the early 1960s it was flying Tupolev Tu-16R aircraft. The airfield was renovated in 1963. It received the Tu-22R around 1966, and by 1967 had 24 based there. The reconnaissance aircraft were tasked with operations in the Baltic and northern Europe. From 1973 into the 1980s pilots from Libya and Iraq trained in the Tu-22 here.
Destination Guide: Zyabrawka (Gomel Oblast) in Belarus | Tripmondo
Touring Zyabrawka in Gomel Oblast (Belarus). Travel ideas and destination guide for your next trip to Europe. Events, Webcams and more. Lat/Lng: 52.326, 31.186.
Artificially Intelli
Senior Member
I think if the Russians see enough damage from weapons supplied by the west, the gloves are gonna come off. Power plants, water plants, cell towers and rail will be taken out. There is a point where it's gonna be no more Mr Nice Guy
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Video from the "event" in Crimea,
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Runtime 3:03
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is funded in whole or in part by the American government. Wikipedia
Speculation Swirls Around Explosions At Russian Military Base In Occupied Crimea
98,893 viewsAug 10, 2022
View: https://youtu.be/BLn9e9ust14?list=PLiE2CJKxmY0dEvF-dE1B-pBmfebnyBWqB
-------------
Runtime 3:03
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is funded in whole or in part by the American government. Wikipedia
Speculation Swirls Around Explosions At Russian Military Base In Occupied Crimea
98,893 viewsAug 10, 2022
northern watch
TB Fanatic
jward
passin' thru
still a thing a few hours later. . .Belarus going to be entering the war officially if this keeps up??
Fuat
@lilygrutcher
8 blasts in Belarusian Zyabrovka airfield reported, 40 km away from Ukrainian border, the place used by Russians as an airbase.
5:22 PM · Aug 10, 2022·Twitter Web App
Fuat
@lilygrutcher
8 blasts in Belarusian Zyabrovka airfield reported, 40 km away from Ukrainian border, the place used by Russians as an airbase.
5:22 PM · Aug 10, 2022·Twitter Web App
hmm.
Faytuks News Δ
@Faytuks
#INITIAL - I am currently seeing unconfirmed telegram reports of explosions heard and multiple visible flashes in the vicinity of the Zyabrovka airfield in Belarus.
blueinterceptor
Veteran Member
I think Russia may not have the ability to rebuild the Ukraine. Further should Russia win, they don’t want to fight a never ending insurgency. the longer the people suffer post war, the longer the people will support that insurgency. And then there is the economics. Everything that the Ukraine was selling to Europe and the rest of the world, food power gas etc could now be sold by Russia should those abilities remain intact.
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danielboon
TB Fanatic
Norad tracks 2 Russian planes entering Alaskan defensezone
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1557515415479271424?cxt=HHwWgICy_ZWBtJ0rAAAA