Congratulations people of Crimea

[Pope Joan]

Tomorrow is the birthday of Viktor Chernomyrdin. RIP.

The guy was grumpy but well respected by a wide spectrum of people. He is responcible for so many Russian bushisms such as You got to think what to understand.

In other news, Khabarovsk now wants to follow Crimea and join Russia:
http://www.interpretermag.com/activists-in-russian-regions-want-moscow-to-join-their-regions-to-russia-by-sending-in-the-army-crimea-style/

[Qwert]

Donetsk want out from Ukraine!
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/08/world ... ?hpt=hp_t2
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's very important for us to remain strong and united about the sanctions that we have implemented against individuals in Russia and Crimea, and to prepare more far-reaching measures if they become necessary," BFS William HAgue
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/20 ... 67608.html
--------------------------------------------------
Ukrainian parliament trades punches
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wor ... s-punches/
-------------------------------------------------------
“The UK economy facing a double-dip recession? He had an opinion. Government inaction about the flooding? He had an opinion. But over Crimea’s secession from the Ukraine he is absolutely silent. It’s chilling.”
http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/03/18/sit ... n-opinion/

[GoranZ]

OSCE was right to refuse to monitor the referendum because a 10-day period is too short for both sides to argue their case. The referendum on Scottish independence is in 6 months, and the debate is going for over year already: this is how the referendums should be conducted.

And 8 days after your post... the truth come out to the surface. The pressure against the referendum of independence is building up. And there are few more months till the referendum itself, who knows what else will happen.
Western "democracy" is always interesting

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-sco ... s-26933998

What is your point? This is called a debate. The squash man (Robertson) is entitled to his opinion and to express its freely, even if it is narrow and misinformed. The fishy brothers (Salmon-Sturgeon) are entitle to call him a scaremongering twat in return.

If it was part of a debate why he didn't said that 6 months ago? Or back then there was no issue with Ukraine or Crimea so his words would have meant nothing. Sorry but "Don't vote for independence of Scotland because that might make problems for NATO interests or other NATO members" is not debating... its pure pressure any way you turn it. Its a pressure to the Scottish voters that they must think about problems that are by no means directly connected to Scotland.

Interesting Analogy...

[AslanTheKing]

soon we´ll have pictures like this one,
the difference will be a ukrainian guy on the pic holding a message saying

edited: not for little kids ears, eyes

[Qwert]

small mistake Goranz with Iraq pictures,, last picture also need to say>>we must find him

[mrswdk]

I see Juan Bottom managed to get his placard into frame in the final photo of GoranZ's montage.

[Qwert]

Kiev ready for Ukraine Federalization?
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/20 ... 03211.html

[saxitoxin]

As Hillary Clinton, one of the architects of U.S. warmongering, was speaking at a luxury hotel (she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Institute of Scrap Recycling - the lobbying group of landfill corporations- to whore herself), a peace activist who sneaked into the room threw a shoe at her in protest of the U.S.' wars of genocide.

Clinton cowered in the kind of terror she has inflicted on so many millions, before recovering and beginning to screech humorless one liners in an attempt to demonstrate poise with a voice that could shatter glass.

[patches70]

The hilarity continues. Putin plays the EU like a fiddle. Ukraine is in the arrears to Russia to the tune of billions for natgas. Not only that, but Ukraine has no money. Natgas flowing from Russia to the EU flows through Ukraine. Russia said the Ukraine must have a stockpile of natgas so that they won't siphon off gas bound for Europe proper, to the tune of about $5 billion worth. And Ukarine doesn't have a penny to pay.

Enter the EU-

European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger is working on a plan to help Ukraine pay some of its gas bills to Russia, he told Austria's ORF radio on Friday, saying there was "no reason to panic" about Russian gas supplies to Europe.

"We are in close contact with Ukraine and its gas company to ensure that Ukraine remains able to pay and the debts that the gas company has to Gazprom do not rise further," he said, adding he would meet Ukraine's energy and foreign ministers on Monday.

"I am preparing a solution that is part of the aid package that the IMF, the European Union and the World Bank is giving to Ukraine and from which payment for open bills will be possible."


The hilarity is that Russia takes the Crimea and then makes the EU pay them ! Hahahaha.

Europe's problem is that the natgas has to go through Ukraine, and the Ukraine having no money and needs energy, will just siphon off gas (in other words, steal it). So the EU has to step up and pay Ukraine's energy bills if they want to make sure that they don't get shafted themselves and have their own energy supplies interrupted.





http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/ ... PO20140411


If only Europe had another route to get it's natgas from, say, like through Turkey via Syria. But that' ain't gonna happen anytime soon......

Yes, Putin is playing Chess while the EU is still reading the directions on how to play checkers.

[mrswdk]

Brute force and bully tactics cannot really be described as 'chess'.

[patches70]

Brute force and bully tactics cannot really be described as 'chess'.

Oh my, brute force and bullying are tactics in chess and you are kidding yourself if you don't think the Ukraine is just another cog in the geopolitical game that can certainly be described as chess. And Putin, whatever his faults or what one has against him, is a far better player at the game than most others.

How it plays out remains yet to be seen, but at the moment the ones sitting on the other side of the table are playing defense as Putin keeps countering every move made against him.

Yes, it's chess all right, and we regular people are the pawns. We don't even have the option of not playing the game. Mayhap Putin's gambit will fall apart, but considering the caliber of his foes, I am not surprised at how badly it's going for Putin's opponents.

Just because you don't like your opponent doesn't mean you can't lose the game.

[Qwert]

SCandal!!!
Rusian Invaders build up and army on russian soil. Nato demand that russia withdraw army to...........(somewhere?)

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26940375

[Qwert]

Brute force and bully tactics cannot really be described as 'chess'.

Oh my, brute force and bullying are tactics in chess and you are kidding yourself if you don't think the Ukraine is just another cog in the geopolitical game that can certainly be described as chess. And Putin, whatever his faults or what one has against him, is a far better player at the game than most others.

How it plays out remains yet to be seen, but at the moment the ones sitting on the other side of the table are playing defense as Putin keeps countering every move made against him.

Yes, it's chess all right, and we regular people are the pawns. We don't even have the option of not playing the game. Mayhap Putin's gambit will fall apart, but considering the caliber of his foes, I am not surprised at how badly it's going for Putin's opponents.

Just because you don't like your opponent doesn't mean you can't lose the game.

i think that Putin make good preparation, from previous situation.
-Yugoslavia bombardment (78 days)(ceasefire -kumanovo agreement- Yugoslav army minor damages)
-Iraq Invasion and occupation (over 10 years)(overthrow of Sadam)
-Afghanistan Invasion and occupation (still ongoing)
-Libya bombardment ( 7 month) (overthrow of Guadafy)

He take notes and observe how US and NAto behave in all this situations, and he try to improve this, first that action be fast,and second that casualty be almost zero.
Also he notice that US and Nato only attack small and weak countries, and he know that US will not get support from other NAto members, who are not ready to attack Russia( and they also not capable for this). Also big advantage for Putin its that Ukraine its neighbor country and army and logistic could be very easy to deploy, from other side US and Nato are not in this position.

[saxitoxin]

I knew JB's earlier comments on Vietnam sounded familiar. Mark Rupert, the political scientist at Syracuse University, described the JB phenomenon in a paper on how western government propaganda is used to whip their people into war hysteria and create militant national cultures -

It is against this backdrop that the current commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, himself embraced America’s Vietnam War mythology and the ideology of populist militarism.

The thesis of this paper is that a great deal of cultural energy has been, and continues to be, devoted to the cause of re-narrating America’s Vietnam War so that it can be comfortably accommodated within the familiar narrative of the intrinsic righteousness of American power. The historical structures supporting American global power depend for their coherence upon this assimilation. Further, the particular ways in which this re-narration has been constructed -- in terms of a mythology of Victory Betrayed in Vietnam -- lends itself to articulations of populism and militarism.14 This ideological construction, which I am calling populist militarism, situates “the people” on the side of the military and “the troops” -- represented as avatars of the people in arms and champions of their intrinsic righteousness -- and positions critics of militarism as betrayers of the American people and their values.

http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/merupert ... tarism.pdf

[muy_thaiguy]

Brute force and bully tactics cannot really be described as 'chess'.

Oh my, brute force and bullying are tactics in chess and you are kidding yourself if you don't think the Ukraine is just another cog in the geopolitical game that can certainly be described as chess. And Putin, whatever his faults or what one has against him, is a far better player at the game than most others.

How it plays out remains yet to be seen, but at the moment the ones sitting on the other side of the table are playing defense as Putin keeps countering every move made against him.

Yes, it's chess all right, and we regular people are the pawns. We don't even have the option of not playing the game. Mayhap Putin's gambit will fall apart, but considering the caliber of his foes, I am not surprised at how badly it's going for Putin's opponents.

Just because you don't like your opponent doesn't mean you can't lose the game.

i think that Putin make good preparation, from previous situation.
-Yugoslavia bombardment (78 days)(ceasefire -kumanovo agreement- Yugoslav army minor damages)
-Iraq Invasion and occupation (over 10 years)(overthrow of Sadam)
-Afghanistan Invasion and occupation (still ongoing)
-Libya bombardment ( 7 month) (overthrow of Guadafy)

He take notes and observe how US and NAto behave in all this situations, and he try to improve this, first that action be fast,and second that casualty be almost zero.
Also he notice that US and Nato only attack small and weak countries, and he know that US will not get support from other NAto members, who are not ready to attack Russia( and they also not capable for this). Also big advantage for Putin its that Ukraine its neighbor country and army and logistic could be very easy to deploy, from other side US and Nato are not in this position.

I could be interpreting this wrong, but are you condeming US and other NATO countries attacking countries while at the sametime approving (or even encouraging) Russia do the exact samething in regards to Ukraine?

[GoranZ]

Brute force and bully tactics cannot really be described as 'chess'.

Oh my, brute force and bullying are tactics in chess and you are kidding yourself if you don't think the Ukraine is just another cog in the geopolitical game that can certainly be described as chess. And Putin, whatever his faults or what one has against him, is a far better player at the game than most others.

How it plays out remains yet to be seen, but at the moment the ones sitting on the other side of the table are playing defense as Putin keeps countering every move made against him.

Yes, it's chess all right, and we regular people are the pawns. We don't even have the option of not playing the game. Mayhap Putin's gambit will fall apart, but considering the caliber of his foes, I am not surprised at how badly it's going for Putin's opponents.

Just because you don't like your opponent doesn't mean you can't lose the game.

i think that Putin make good preparation, from previous situation.
-Yugoslavia bombardment (78 days)(ceasefire -kumanovo agreement- Yugoslav army minor damages)
-Iraq Invasion and occupation (over 10 years)(overthrow of Sadam)
-Afghanistan Invasion and occupation (still ongoing)
-Libya bombardment ( 7 month) (overthrow of Guadafy)

He take notes and observe how US and NAto behave in all this situations, and he try to improve this, first that action be fast,and second that casualty be almost zero.
Also he notice that US and Nato only attack small and weak countries, and he know that US will not get support from other NAto members, who are not ready to attack Russia( and they also not capable for this). Also big advantage for Putin its that Ukraine its neighbor country and army and logistic could be very easy to deploy, from other side US and Nato are not in this position.

I could be interpreting this wrong, but are you condeming US and other NATO countries attacking countries while at the sametime approving (or even encouraging) Russia do the exact samething in regards to Ukraine?

If you read carefully you can conclude that you are wrong... What Qwert said is that Putin(Russians) did analyze American actions and implemented them as best as they could in areas they like.

Funny but the new Ukrainian prime minister(His name is irrelevant, he will be remembered as the one that lost Crimea to the Russians) ordered antiterrorist operation in a little town of Slovjansk, and expects to solve the problems in eastern Ukraine by negotiations. What a incompetent politician

[mrswdk]

[Baron Von PWN]

The Ukrainian "counter terrorist" operation is meeting with some mixed results. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27052028
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27053500

[saxitoxin]

The Ukrainian "counter terrorist" operation is meeting with some mixed results. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27052028
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27053500

LMAO!

NATO and Kiev outclassed, outsmarted, outgunned, and outmaneuvered at every turn

Russia is a government of people trained as strategists, the west are governments of people trained as actors. When an option of brute force isn't available, the west will always lose.

[saxitoxin]

The funniest part from BvP's links was this picture ...



That plane is painted in a demonstration livery! Where did it just fly in from, the Mexico City Air Show? Pretty funny Kiev's elite "anti terrorist operations" have to rely on circus planes for air support.

[DoomYoshi]

Russia is a government of people trained as strategists.

I could beat them at an assdoodle any day.

[Juan_Bottom]

Possible confirmation of Russian military agents in Eastern Ukraine. Skip to the end of the video (6:40) if you don't want to see Ukrainian Russians attacking the police.

[saxitoxin]

Within minutes the Ukrainian soldiers gave up. Without a shot being fired they abandoned their vehicles. The pro-Russian gunmen grabbed them. They raised a Russian tricolour. They sat on top and went for a victory spin.

In theory this was happening in Ukraine, under the control of a pro-western government in Kiev, and several hundred kilometres from the Russian border. In reality large chunks of the east of the country are now in open revolt. Ukraine is rapidly vanishing as a sovereign state. Its army is falling apart. What happens next is unclear. But the Kremlin can either annex the east, as it did Crimea, again shrugging off western outrage. Or it can pull the strings of a new post-Kiev puppet entity.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/a ... y-vehicles

The Ukraine state is done. It is vanished from the maps and relegated to the junk pile of history, where it belongs. And there was nothing the west could do to stop it. Within three months the "sanctions" will be lifted and forgot. Russia has ample foreign currency reserves to survive ad infinitum, while the U.S. has $0 in currency reserves.

Brilliant David vs. Goliath courage by the protesters in eastern Ukraine against the Kiev regime. This is straight out of Vo Nguyen Giap's playbook. PBS interviewed Vo some years ago and what he said was as true than as today -

From the point of view of strategy as well as from the point of view of tactics, our military science combines all the forms of struggle. It combines military struggle with political struggle.—As I have told you, for us, there is no strictly military strategy. Our strategy can only be a general strategy, an integrated strategy. And that is the source of strength of our military science. Vietnamese military science, from the point of view of strategy as well as from the point of view of tactics, is also deeply imbued with the spirit of being on the offensive, although there can be a defensive and an offensive form in battle. We have to always hold the initiative, initiative, always initiative, on the basis of a good knowledge of our own forces, of the forces of our adversary, and on the basis of a knowledge of the laws of war, a war which is always changing.

It seems to me that even today the Pentagon and Washington and the White House are far from having learned the necessary lessons. In the classroom of History the imperialists are really poor students. And it is the same for the reactionary of all stripes, including the expansionists of Peking.

http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/vietn ... guyen-giap

[GoranZ]

Russia is a government of people trained as strategists.

I could beat them at an assdoodle any day.

Considering your rank you will statistically lose

Possible confirmation of Russian military agents in Eastern Ukraine. Skip to the end of the video (6:40) if you don't want to see Ukrainian Russians attacking the police.

Both me and saxy are Generals in the Russian Army. Does that mean that Russia already occupied Macedonia and United States?

[saxitoxin]

People's Power Triumphs Over Greed and Incompetence!

"It was a mistake to launch an 'anti-terrorist operation' in the Donbass where the overwhelming majority is against the government." said a Ukrainian political analyst, Volodymyr Fesenko.

http://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-armys-hum ... 06122.html

Russia can't rest on its laurels. It needs to (a) impose a peaceful, disarmed, client government on the remnants of Ukraine, and, (b) use Active Measures to neutralize Finland before it tries to make a break for NATO's skirt. The old USSR was able to impose a puppet regime on Finland under Kekkonen so I think there are opportunities to do that again, especially as the U.S. leads NATO into more unpopular wars like Libya, Iraq, etc., which makes U.S. increasingly unpopular among Europeans.

In the long-run Russia needs to establish a land-bridge to fellow Slavic peoples in Serbia and Macedonia to protect them from the U.S. So either Romania, Hungary, or Bulgaria need a baseball bat to their knees. That may be impossible, however. (Unless the Nazi movements in Hungary spin out of control and get into government, then NATO may need to impose a cordon sanitaire on Hungary which would be an opportunity for Russia to strike.)