14, 15, 16 ? Ramzan Kadyrov is openly calling for "radical measures", including nuclear ones, to crush Zelensky and his resistant army once and for all and take Kiev by any means necessary. To further deepen the tension, Kadyrov announced that three of his underage sons (aged 14, 15 and 16) will go to Ukraine to the most difficult sections.
We live in the here and now. Or as Abba Eban said many years ago, clocks only go one direction. If you want to discuss former actions of countries in an historical context then do so elsewhere. This thread is about current reality.
Once again, K-stan makes it clear to Putin that they are not necessarily owned by him anymore. Realistically, there will be significant workarounds on this trucking thing via the usual bribes and corruption- but the public face of it is that K-stan is not sending the troops Putin repeatedly requested, is allowing Russian draft dodgers by tens of thousands, is exporting oil to western countries, and otherwise doing whatever it takes to avoid sanctions. Each day they fall out of Putin's orbit more and more. Arguably they are falling more into China's orbit but they are also falling more into the western orbit. Some argue that they are just coming out of the dark ages and functioning as an independent country doing deals with everyone. We shall see. Clearly though, Vlad is not the winner here. Ditto for Uzebekistan and Azerbaijan . Kazakhstan Closes Trucking Loophole Which Allowed Russia To Dodge Sanctions https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-...-Which-Allowed-Russia-To-Dodge-Sanctions.html
Let's take a look at the recent updates... So Putin has appointed a new overall commander whose nickname is 'General Armageddon' -- primarily because he relentless targets civilians with missiles and artillery. Something the vatniks are cheering on wildly and want quick results -- which of course amounted to an immediate cruise missile attack targeting civilians. Of course, the new commander has a harsh reality to deal with. The Russian forces will soon be down to its last fuel supplies and totally immobile after the Kerch bridge attack. All the while Putin is running out of trained troops and weapons. In reality the Russian army in Ukraine appears to be on the verge of total collapse with no supplies, no food, and low morale. Of course the intent of Putin's war is not only ethnic cleansing in Ukraine. His overall intent includes the ethnic cleansing of the Asian minorities in Russia aligned with the country's brutal history of colonization and abuse. At this point even famous financial managers who are good at predicting the future believe the end of Putin will not be pretty. Ukraine: Russian hawks cheer as ‘General Armageddon’ takes charge https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europ...awks-cheer-as-general-armageddon-takes-charge Russian commander Surovikin wants to show Putin "quick results" by shelling Ukraine, this is his "style" – Ukrainian Intelligence https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/10/10/7371259/ Russian forces will soon be down to last supplies of fuel after Kerch Bridge attack https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-...er-kerch-bridge-attack-analysts-say-12717563# Desperate Vladimir Putin ‘is running out of weapons, friends and troops’ https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/11/ukra...n-running-out-of-weapons-and-troops-17540300/ Putin’s army on verge of TOTAL COLLAPSE in worst military disaster in 100yrs despite missile blitz, says ex-NATO chief https://www.the-sun.com/news/6414701/putin-disaster-100-years-nato-commander/ The War in Ukraine Is Decimating Russia’s Asian Minorities Putin’s “partial mobilization” is continuing a brutal legacy of colonization – as well as resistance – among the country’s minority groups. https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/the-war-in-ukraine-is-decimating-russias-asian-minorities/ Paul Tudor Jones Says Russia-Ukraine War Likely To End With 'Violent Death' Of Putin https://www.benzinga.com/trading-id...kely-to-end-with-violent-death-of-putin-heres
In the short run, it is the Russian cannon fodder that will suffer. All of these clowns being brought in such as Kadyrov (just made a general too) and the Syrian butcher have sworn in blood that they will allow ZERO retreat. Meanwhile, there are 15 to 20 thousand Russians trapped in Kherson. There are a couple escape routes that have not been closed yet and Ukraine is somewhat okay with it because so many troops are escaping which is fine. But their escape routes are very much going to cut off soon- not by the Ukrainians (although that is happening) but by the Russians. Ukraine wants Kherson. If all of those soldiers fled, that would be fine. Can catch up with them later as their condition weakens. But taking the city is the goal.
"We're trying to convince Ukrainians that they're Russians. But if they are not willing to be convinced, we will kill them. 1 million, 5 million, even all of them, whatever it takes."
Unfortunately, Krill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church promotes this same garbage- ie. that the Ukrainians are all possessed by the devil and that if the soldiers "die fighting them that all their sins will be cleanses." His frigging words, not mine. The Russian Orthodox Church is another dimension to this whole picture that Putin has totally trashed- an area that originally was one of the cornerstones of his vision of the "Russian World". Then he and Partriarch Krill weaponized it to the point where most normal people would puke. First, the rejection came in the form of the Ukrainians splitting off and going with the jurisdiction of the Patriarch in Constantinople. And now the hardliners in Ukraine who stayed with the Moscow Patriarch are dropping out like flies. The warmongering by the church is just too repugnant. I know that you know all this - just showing my disgust for all this demon talk. That kind of talk is where clowns like the one in the video get their talking points- filtered down through the chain of command.
Andreas Kluth Putin Is Already Attacking NATO, Just Not All At Once First the Baltic pipelines, now German trains: So much apparent sabotage puts us in a liminal state between peace and war. He who must not be named. Photographer: Pavel Bednyakov/AFP via Getty Images By Andreas Kluth 11 October 2022 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...lties-and-the-west-is-under-assault#xj4y7vzkg Russian President Vladimir Putin can wage war everywhere and in every way, and he wants all of us in the West to know it. That’s why he’s not just blowing up parts of Kyiv again. He’s also threatening Ukraine, the European Union and NATO with nuclear escalation while simultaneously ramping up the hybrid warfare that he, as a KGB-trained warlord, has spent decades mastering. Technically, the Western countries he attacks can’t always prove right away that Putin is personally responsible for a specific act of aggression. That’s in the nature of hybrid warfare, which deliberately blurs the boundaries between military, technological, psychological and other kinds of combat and dodges easy attribution. But experts are picking up that signature whiff. Over the weekend, rail traffic in northern Germany came to a screeching halt for several hours. Two separate radio cables had been severed concurrently, one acting as backup for the other, hundreds of miles away. Investigations are underway. But the consensus is that this was professional, and highly sophisticated, sabotage. That outage followed suspiciously choreographed explosions deep under the Baltic Sea the other week. Those detonations damaged two pipelines meant to pump natural gas from Russia to Germany — which Putin wants to blackmail into submission via energy starvation. The giant Baltic methane bubble reminded the entire Western alliance that it has hundreds of other vulnerable links on the ocean floors, carrying everything from gas to electricity and internet data. With every such act of sabotage and provocation — this week, there’ve also been cyberattacks against several US airports — an interesting dynamic unfolds in some Western countries. The cognoscenti immediately point to Putin as the likeliest perpetrator. But others, upon hearing the name, react as though somebody had just shouted “Voldemort.” Right on cue, they dredge up conspiracy theories from the nether regions of the Kremlin’s propaganda swamp. Maybe it was the Yanks, maybe it was us, maybe it didn’t even happen at all. And that, too, is what Putin wants. He needs Americans, Germans, Italians, Hungarians and others to fight with — and even to start hating — their own compatriots. He wants us to start believing, as the author Peter Pomerantsev has put it, that “nothing is true and everything is possible.” He wants to gaslight us into doubting reality — good and evil, victim and aggressor, self-defense and escalation. This way, Putin knows, many of us will be even more frightened of him. Of course we’re scared that he might drop nukes. But now we also worry that he could take out our power and water supply, our telecommunications and hospitals, or that he could otherwise mess with our lives, wherever we happen to be. As a top brass in Germany’s army told a newspaper, we’re in a state of being no longer fully at peace and not yet really at war. Contemplating all these theaters of war in their entirety, we must give Putin a certain kind of credit. He’s probably long been laughing at the arbitrary distinctions Western military analysts have drawn, which have become silos in our minds, and therefore in our preparations to defend ourselves — against him. That starts with the term “hybrid warfare.” The underlying idea — of strategic ambiguity in fighting, basically — is as old as war, and therefore humanity. But the term was coined only in 2007 — by Frank Hoffman, an American military think-tanker — to describe what Putin was already well on his way to practicing. The same applies to the so-called “domains” of war. Originally, these were land and sea, later joined by air, then space and then cyberspace. These distinctions may have made sense to logistics planners in defense ministries, which could assign a service — army, navy, air force — to each domain. But they’re irrelevant to an enemy like Putin, who intuitively mixes all the means provided by the physical and psychological universe to manipulate, blackmail and violate his adversaries. He has already used migrants, hydrocarbons, wheat, Novichok, Manchurian candidates, conspiracy theories and much else. He’d just as gladly avail himself of viruses, radiation and whatever else comes along. We must expect more cables to be cut, and more pipes to explode. We should get ready for factories to turn dark without warning, satellites to behave strangely, navigation systems to crash and cash dispensers to deny our PINs. And every time, we’ll see more of Putin’s “useful idiots” — his sock puppets in Western politics and media — telling us not to believe whatever is happening. That German general is right: We’re in a liminal place somewhere between peace and war, and that’s a new and uncomfortable experience. But we better get used to it fast — and show Putin that we know his vulnerabilities too.