Putin is planning on undermining and invading another country. His planned offense will start by seizing the country's main airport near the capital. Nearly every day we see vatniks posting on here claiming that Putin has no plans to invade other countries, he is merely "de-nazifying" Ukraine. The Russian plans to invade other countries -- many times blocked by preventative measures -- demonstrate his brutal plans to re-create the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Tensions in Moldova rise as intelligence suggests Putin is plotting to take control of main airport https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/worl...ontrol-of-main-airport/ar-AA17NtDq?li=BBoPRmx Fears are growing that Vladimir Putin is plotting to open a western front in the war in Ukraine by backing a coup in Moldova that would allow Russia to take control of country’s main airport. Tensions in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau are mounting after Putin revoked on a 2012 decree that underpinned the nation’s sovereignty on Tuesday. It is understood that Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has passed on intelligence to his Moldovan counterpart, President Maia Sandu, that showed the Kremlin was planning to back a coup in her country and fly in Russian forces into the Chisinau airport, just 13 miles from the centre of the capital and within easy range of Ukraine’s western border. The UK and US are also watching the situation in Moldova “very carefully”, according to Western officials. In a meeting with President Sandu during his visit to Poland on Tuesday, US President, Joe Biden, pledge “strong US support” for Moldova in an indication that the West could provide defensive weapons to one of Europe’s poorest states. Wedged between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova is one of Europe’s poorest countries and became a candidate for EU membership last summer. The country of 2.6 million people already faces tensions with Transnistria, a breakaway pro-Moscow region along the Ukrainian border where around 1,500 Russian troops are based. Putin’s order revoking the 2012 Moldovan decree was published on the Kremlin’s website and states that the decision was taken to “ensure the national interests of Russia in connection with the profound changes taking place in international relations”. The decree committed Russia to seeking ways to resolve the separatist issue in Transnistria “based on respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and neutral status of the Republic of Moldova in determining the special status of Transnistria”. Putin’s ripping up of the 2012 agreement with Moldova is reminiscent of Putin’s revocation of the Minsk agreement with Ukraine just two days before launching his invasion almost a year ago. Reports coming out of Moldova suggest Putin may use its air base in Sevastopol in Crimea to fly troops and jets into Chisinau. Such a tactic would avoid the airspace over any Nato member, but would have to fly over the south-west of Ukraine, thereby risking attack from Kyiv. In a statement following the meeting between presidents Biden and Sandu, the White House said: “President Biden reaffirmed strong US support for Moldova’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” One UK official said recently: “Russians have been very clear that they have nothing to do with what’s happening in Moldova. I think from a British Government perspective, this is something that is being watched very carefully, and I think I would give more weight to what one party is saying than the other.” Earlier this month, the Moldovan government collapsed with President Sandu accusing Russia of plotting to use foreign “saboteurs” to overthrow her and her new pro-EU government. President Sandu appointed Dorin Recean as the nation’s new prime minister as she warned that Russia was behind a continuing “plot” by pro-Putin figures to gain control of the country. Mr Recean, who is pro-EU like his predecessor Natalia Gavrilita, told local reporters: “There were and are several scenarios of destabilisation. They include several elements, in particular those that President Zelensky mentioned. But our institutions are ready for such challenges.” Pro-Russian protests in Chisinau have intensified in recent weeks, with more expected over the next few days. President Sandu has said that the planned coup would involve citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus and Serbia entering Moldova.
China is a tougher nut to crack than Russia. For one thing, they will be at their country and will be brutal if they end up fighting US forces. And the US aircraft carriers? They cannot come near the Taiwan straight because Chinese anti-ship missiles are plentiful and will destroy the US carriers if they are hit. Logistically, it would be a huge problem with the US to supply US forces so far from home. That alone will guarantee a US defeat. A US admiral on You Tube predicted 900 US combat pilots dead if we get into a war with China. Let that sink in. While, the US has the advanced F35 fighter jets, the Chinese have clones and imagine fighting 5-10 jets all at once, for US pilots? You do not have to be a genius to see that numerical quantities will beat quality at some point. That is not counting Chinese anti-aircraft missiles which would make flying even an F35 fighter jet very perilous. Biden is an idiot of the highest order for escalating war with Russia to get US forces killed in Ukraine needlessly. That is coming soon as plan B per reports is Poland to be the next proxy with US and possibly Romanian troops joining in. Now, he wants war with China too? Dumb times 100. That is how dumb, Biden is.
Russia's Medvedev floats idea of committing Russian national suicide by NATO Article 5. Russia’s Medvedev floats idea of pushing back Poland’s borders Putin’s ally says Russia will be victorious in Ukraine and is ready to fight until the Polish border to counter ‘threats’. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023...borders-back-as-far-as-possible-says-medvedev
Cabin Boy will find that the troops he wants to use to push Poland's borders back will be needed just to hold on to Crimea. And it will not cost the Ukrainians any troops to defend Poland's borders. Nato will do that. Actually Zelenski would be in favor of Cabin Boys plan too. He would love to have Nato come in and take care of bidness. Cabin Boy is a snake. He sees the hardliners snaking around to depose or weaken Putin so he feels he needs to lick their boots to survive if there is a shuffle. The article suggests that he is doing that because Vlad may pick him as a successor. Nope. He is doing that because someone might pick him as successor but not necessarily Vlad doing the picking.
It's laughable. These Russian clowns think they are going to seize all the countries in eastern Europe. Sorry, the Soviet Union will not be re-united. Not now, not ever.
The vatniks keep trying to claim it is NATO attacking Russia -- a laughable assertion in view of Putin's plans to conquer many countries and re-unite the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact under his authoritarian dictatorship. It’s not NATO — Putin always has had expansionist designs https://thehill.com/opinion/interna...to-putin-always-has-had-expansionist-designs/ Who would you believe about Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s intentions: a distinguished American political scientist or an equally distinguished Russian sociologist? The American political scientist is John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. The Russian sociologist is Grigory Yudin of the Higher School of Economics and the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences. Mearsheimer is known for having argued consistently that NATO enlargement was primarily responsible for deteriorating the West’s relations with Russia and, ultimately, producing the Russo-Ukrainian War. Yudin puts the blame squarely on Putin, arguing two days before the Russian invasion that Putin was “about to start the most senseless war in history.” One year after the war began, both men appear to have stuck to their guns. Most recently, Mearsheimer told CGTN, a Chinese television station, that the conventional wisdom in the West has been that Putin was an imperialist and he was determined to conquer Ukraine and make it part of a greater Russia or he was interested in recreating the Soviet Union. There is no evidence to support that, he argues, and all the evidence indicates that Putin was fearful the West was trying to make Ukraine a western bulwark on Russia’s border. And the principal element of the West’s strategy was NATO expansion into Ukraine. Putin and his advisers made it clear for many years that this was simply unacceptable, Mearsheimer’s argument goes, and if the West continued to push NATO eastward into Ukraine there would be serious trouble — and, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Now here’s Yudin’s argument, in a recent interview: “[T]he war is now forever. It has no goals that can be achieved and lead to its end. It continues simply because [in Putin’s imagination], they are enemies and they want to kill us, and we want to kill them. For Putin, it’s an existential clash with an enemy set on destroying him. “There should be no illusions: while Putin is in the Kremlin, the war will not end. It will only expand… . “Putin definitely intends to restore the Warsaw Pact zone [the former Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet influence]. “I often hear, ‘It’s irrational. It’s senseless. There’s no possibility of this happening!’ Not long ago, people said exactly the same thing about Ukraine. They said the same thing even more recently about Moldova, and now we’re hearing that the leadership of Moldova, Ukraine and the U.S. believe that Moldova is in grave danger… . “Russia’s general strategy is something like this: Let’s bite off a piece; then that piece will be recognized as legitimate and, in the next phase, on the basis of that recognition, we can take something else.” So, who’s right — Mearsheimer or Yudin? I vote for Yudin. (Surprise!) For starters, he really knows Russia and its people. For another, unlike Mearsheimer, he’s not wedded to some theory that validates his work as a scholar. But there are more important reasons for doubting Mearsheimer’s arguments. First, the notion that the West was going to “push NATO eastward into Ukraine” had absolutely no basis in reality. The Russians, Europeans, Americans and Ukrainians knew that Ukraine’s membership was wishful thinking and wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, if at all. Second, the fact that Sweden’s and Finland’s choice to join NATO has elicited no Russian saber-rattling shows that the problem wasn’t NATO enlargement; it is Ukraine, which, in Putin’s mind, has no right to exist. Third, the national armies of NATO countries were in dreadful shape, for the most part, as NATO documents and Russian spies could have told Putin and his advisers. NATO posed no threat to a huge country with what was supposed to be the second most powerful army in the world. Fourth, there are piles of evidence demonstrating that Putin has had expansionist designs from his first days in office. Just ask the Chechens, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Georgians and Ukrainians. Read Putin’s texts, in which he bemoans the USSR’s collapse and denies the legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence. Listen to his advisers who have openly called for the destruction of Ukraine and its people. Read Yudin and scores of Russian analysts who think just like him. Fifth, even if we assume that NATO’s long-term plans were nefarious, it is impossible to claim that Putin’s decision to launch a total war against all of Ukraine, and then to embark on genocide, could possibly be the consequence of Russian pique at Western indifference to its security needs. Mearsheimer might have been right had Putin limited his “special military operation” to the Donbas, but no amount of pique could explain an all-out assault and mass murder. Sixth, Mearsheimer might counter by saying that Putin’s perceptions were such as to lead him to believe that NATO and Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia. But that argument is contradictory because it shifts the causes of the war from what NATO did or did not objectively do to how Putin did or did not subjectively view NATO and Ukraine. Yudin surely would endorse such a strategy. Finally, Mearsheimer’s realist theory compels one to ignore domestic factors and focus only on the interaction of states. That is akin to arguing that Adolf Hitler’s designs had no bearing on Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, initiation of World War II, and extermination of Jews. Geopolitics also played a role in Hitler’s decision-making, but surely Nazism played some role too. In a word, the NATO argument is dead wrong on so many counts that arguing against it is a bit like trying to convince members of the Flat Earth Society that they might be out of step with reality. Yet some are wedded to theoretical schemes and nothing can affect their beliefs. So, read Mearsheimer for a theoretical appreciation of the geopolitical interests at stake in any war — for the framework. But then read people like Yudin for knowledge about the facts on the ground. Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”