Ukraine / Russia

[VikingsGuy]

I assumed the peace talks were only a public ploy for Putin, but this is bizarre.

Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian Peace Negotiators Suffer Suspected Poisoning

The Russian oligarch and at least two senior members of the Ukrainian team developed symptoms that people familiar with the matter blamed on hard-liners in Moscow who they said wanted to sabotage talks to end the war.

www.wsj.com

 

[OntarioHunter]

A Ukranian client came by to pick up a bear skull last week. He's an engineer and emigrated three years ago. He has also worked in Russia. According to him there is a world of difference between the two countries. Once you get outside Moscow the living conditions are very primitive. Infrastructure is very poor and no maintenance. Even good sized towns have only one phone in the centre and it has only three buttons: one for police, one for ambulance, one for fire dept. Roads are a mess. People are only linked to the rest of the world through their TV and it's very easily controlled by the thugs in Moscow. One only has to look at the refugees from Ukraine to understand they must enjoy a pretty decent standard of living. I watch hunting videos of rural Russia and those folks live in appalling poverty. There's obviously a lot worth fighting for in Ukraine.

A prof at our War College hit the nail on the head today. He said it my take a while for horrendous casualties (already estimated at 7K to 15K dead) to make an impression on Russian society. The average Russian lives every day with so much adversity and hardship. They have for hundreds of years. War is just more of the same. Thirty million Russians died during WWII (dwarfs the Holocaust!) and before that untold millions during Stalin's Great Purge. Oh and I almost forgot the three million Ukranians who were purposely starved to death by Soviet authorities during the thirties. No surprise that many Ukranians took up arms with the Nazis, initially anyway. Russia never got into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. Crushing their economy may be the most efficient way to bring these hardened uninformed peasants into reality. When the rising middle class in the urban centers sees their business and savings evaporate overnight, their aspirations will collapse, creating a Davies J-curve situation ripe for revolution. The peasants in the countryside may be able to accept the loss of their youth to war for quite a while ... but when they can't buy food, things can change in a hurry ... if they understand what needs to change. And therein lies the problem.

I think if this can degenerate into a ground war of attrition, the Russians will lose and badly. Eventually they will run out of missiles and no way to buy more or buy the materials to make more or pay the labour to make them. Their ground troops are by all accounts very poorly led and trained. When they have to slog it out with the Ukranians face to face on the ground, they lose. And those poorly trained and inadequately led ground troops will become demoralized if casualties keep piling up like this (e.g. satellites are detecting no military ambulances for Russian wounded ... that's gotta be demoralizing). I think the smartest thing the Ukranian forces can do right now is haul their green Russian prisoners through the destruction to Polish border and just dump them off. They will be free to talk to the media there. Let the folks back home know what they have seen, what a mess they're in. Pretty hard to ignore your own troops if they are speaking on neutral ground. Easy to ignore them if Ukranians are standing in the background.

 

[Irrelevant]

Most of us on this thread agree with the sentiment - but what a dumb thing for a POTUS to say at this stage of things.

I've been thinking about this a fair bit esp after reading the two WSJ opinion pieces yesterday. I think there's both truth and hypocrisy there. He clearly isn't a public speaker, but we all knew that, and it appears he's slipping mentally.

But for the last how many presidents has the argument been, "but look at his policies". I mean GW never completed a sentence. Obama was prone to dogging 1/2 the country whenever he went off script (at least if you ask that 1/2), Mr. Orange wore our press sec with all their damage control and "he didn't mean what he said". Again, I agree this is a much more important topic and time, but there's a lot of faux outrage from people with very short memories.

 

[hank4elk]

and I must admit we are not saints here. Yemen. I could fill the page with names...and I lived through one.

 

[hank4elk]

Can't get a road built right or a bridge here, but they are pumping a bloated defense racket budget again and laughing at us.

 

[OntarioHunter]

I've been thinking about this a fair bit esp after reading the two WSJ opinion pieces yesterday. I think there's both truth and hypocrisy there. He clearly isn't a public speaker, but we all knew that, and it appears he's slipping mentally.

But for the last how many presidents has the argument been, "but look at his policies". I mean GW never completed a sentence. Obama was prone to dogging 1/2 the country whenever he went off script (at least if you ask that 1/2), Mr. Orange wore our press sec with all their damage control and "he didn't mean what he said". Again, I agree this is a much more important topic and time, but there's a lot of faux outrage from people with very short memories.

You got that right! One bungled offhand remark in two years. The last president couldn't make it through the day every single day without shoving his foot in his mouth (or keyboard) at least once. I shudder to think what a terrible mess he would have made of this crisis. Half the world would be incinerated by now and the rest would be glowing in the dark for the next 20K years.

 

[RobertD]

Hopefully I don't get in trouble but I want to share this guy with the HT community. He is Kristaps Andrejsons, a Latvian journalist. His podcast is called The Eastern Border.

Website: theeasternborder (add .lv to the end in your browser)
Or Twitter @Eastern_Border

He's putting up content on the current conflict basically every day. His perspective as a Latvian who speaks Russian (and English obviously) and knows a lot of the history behind the events gives him an ability to report on this stuff that 99% of Western reporters just can't match. Maybe someone here will find his reporting useful!

 

[LousyResident]

You got that right! One bungled offhand remark in two years. The last president couldn't make it through the day every single day without shoving his foot in his mouth (or keyboard) at least once. I shudder to think what a terrible mess he would have made of this crisis. Half the world would be incinerated by now and the rest would be glowing in the dark for the next 20K years.

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[jabber]

You got that right! One bungled offhand remark in two years. The last president couldn't make it through the day every single day without shoving his foot in his mouth (or keyboard) at least once. I shudder to think what a terrible mess he would have made of this crisis. Half the world would be incinerated by now and the rest would be glowing in the dark for the next 20K years.

Here is just the last few days.

Gaffe #1, March 25:

"You're going to see when you're there [in Ukraine], and some of you have been there, you're gonna see - you're gonna see women, young people standing in the middle in front of a damned tank just saying, 'I'm not leaving, I'm holding my ground,'" Biden said to members of the U.S. Air Force's 82nd Airborne Division last week.

So, wait: Did Biden say that at some point U.S. ground troops will be going into Ukraine to battle the Russians? Wouldn't that possibly spur a nuclear response from Russian President Vladimir Putin?

"The president has been clear we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position," a White House spokesperson later clarified.

Gaffe #2, March 25:

During a press conference in Brussels on March 24, Biden was asked what would happen if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine.

Reporter: "On chemical weapons: If chemical weapons were used in Ukraine, would that trigger a military response from NATO?"

Biden: "It would re--- it would trigger a response in kind, whether or not - you're asking whether NATO would cross; we'd make that decision at the time."

There's no other way to interpret the president's remarks: If Putin uses chemical weapons in Ukraine, the U.S. would use chemical weapons against Russia. Yikes.

Enter national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

"The United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstance," Sullivan clarified when speaking with reporters on Air Force One later that day.

"I will just say, with respect to any use of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical, biological - Russia would pay a severe price," Sullivan later added without being specific about what that "severe price" would be.

Gaffe #3, March 27:

"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said of Putin during a speech in Warsaw.

But was this a gaffe? Or did Biden really mean it?

If it was a gaffe, it was a bad one. If he meant it, that might be even worse. Because regime change in a large (nuclear) country could have severe consequences.

Biden was asked about his Putin "cannot remain in power" remark several times while taking questions from reporters, first from NBC's Kelly O'Donnell.

O'Donnell: "Do you believe what you said - that Putin can't remain in power? Or do you now regret saying that? Because your government has been trying to walk that back. Did your words complicate matters?

Biden: "Number one, I'm not walking anything back. The fact of the matter is I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the way Putin is dealing, and the actions of this man - just - just the brutality of it."

The president added that he wasn't "articulating a policy change."

Note: Biden read part of his answers directly from a notecard titled "Tough Putin Q&A Talking Points." A photo of the notecard was taken by the European Pressphoto Agency.

Biden made several statements during his trip to Brussels and Poland amid the Russia-Ukraine war. Each time, a White House spokesperson or Cabinet member later "clarified" his remarks.

And then the president insisted nothing had been walked back even though it had.

Will his aides be forced to walk back his dismissal of a walk back?

Regardless, the president's words have consequences. And not just with our allies and adversaries, but also politically back home.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that Biden's statement was "certainly alarming" and that the Kremlin will "continue to track" statements from the U.S. president, according to Reuters.

"This speech - and the passages which concern Russia - is astounding, to use polite words," Peskov added. "He doesn't understand that the world is not limited to the United States and most of Europe."

Back home, an NBC News poll released Sunday shows an overwhelming number of Americans, 82 percent, are concerned that Russia-Ukraine will result in the use of nuclear weapons, while nearly three in four say they fear the U.S. military will end up fighting in Ukraine. And Biden telling U.S. troops they will be in Ukraine one day or saying we'll use chemical weapons or appearing to argue for Russian regime change only fuels the public's fears.

The same NBC poll found that a startling seven in 10 Americans don't have confidence in the president's "ability to deal with Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

His performance in Brussels and Poland didn't help. And all the cleanups by his lieutenants isn't going to change a growing perception: that this president simply doesn't have the competence or mental sharpness to lead this country, particularly at this moment when every word he utters is parsed for meaning.

Of course, maybe that competence, especially on foreign policy, has never been there.

"I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden in his book, "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War" in 2014 while Biden was vice president.

Biden voted against the first Gulf War, which was successful and just (removing Saddam Hussein's military from Kuwait). He voted for the second Gulf War, which was largely unsuccessful and unjust (weapons of mass destruction were never found). And when President Obama asked if a raid to take out Osama Bin Laden should be carried out, Biden said no.

The commander in chief needs to step up his game. He needs to measure his words more carefully. But if 50 years in the public eye are any indication, don't bet on that happening.

 

[Nick87]

You got that right! One bungled offhand remark in two years.

 

[BigHornRam]

Listening to Joe's potential replacement.......Joe's doing a swell job, and I wish him good health for the next 2 plus years.

 

[VikingsGuy]

Listening to Joe's potential replacement.......Joe's doing a swell job, and I wish him good health for the next 2 plus years.

The root of the WSJ OpEd posted yesterday for those that got hit by the paywall.

 

[Nick87]

without shoving his foot in his mouth (or keyboard) at least once

Not to repeat myself but....ohhh the irony.

 

[BigHornRam]

The root of the WSJ OpEd posted yesterday for those that got hit by the paywall.

My OpEd was free of charge and equally as enlightning!

 

[VikingsGuy]

My OpEd was free of charge and equally as enlightning!

That and the Economist are my last paid subscriptions, are you suggesting I drop those now two?

 

[BigHornRam]

That and the Economist are my last paid subscriptions, are you suggesting I drop those now two?

All my economic OpEd's are gloom and doom, and no fun to read. Keep the Economist subscription for sanity sake.

 

[Irrelevant]

That and the Economist are my last paid subscriptions, are you suggesting I drop those now two?

I just picked up WSJ but was waffling between those two.

 

[Sytes]

Listening to Joe's potential replacement.......Joe's doing a swell job, and I wish him good health for the next 2 plus years.

I was going to give a laugh symbol however - not much to laugh about. Had it been Pence, I would not mind one bit... However, Biden's VP, Biden is a lesser of two evils in that scenario, and that doesn't say much. In layman terms... WOW!

 

[Irrelevant]

Listening to Joe's potential replacement.......Joe's doing a swell job, and I wish him good health for the next 2 plus years.

Looking at those lining up against him I'm wishing him well for the next 6 years. I mean you can lead from a death bed right?

 

[Irrelevant]

How to spot disinformation around the war in Ukraine

As Russia continues its invasion in Ukraine, so does the battle against misinformation.

thehill.com