If that was a joke, it was incredibly unfunny.

Didn't Trump actually deny aid to Ukraine due to Zelensky refusing to dig up dirt about Biden during the elections or something?

Yup.

Obama declined to send lethal aid, overriding most of his NatSec team (which got him a lot of flack from warhawks like McCain), though he did send humanitarian aid and night vision goggles, body armor and training. Trump sent a number of lethal aid packages, including the congressionally appointed $400 million that landed him in hot water.

"I would like you to do us a favor, though..."

We're still talking about Obama?

His tan suit is still a topic of conversation of many Americans.

The point is that even Obama, darling of the Democratic establishment, actively sought to prevent the arming of Ukraine.

And for good reason, drowning Ukraine in arms is and always has been idiotic, as the Quincy Institute has been rigorously detailing.

LOL, completely took us by surprise here.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60709952

Terrible. Will Ukraine surrender eventually? Will Putin commit massive war crimes first? Will it spread to other countries? Who knows. A quarter of Ukraine's population has been driven away from their homes already because of this botoxed up madman.

A lot of people are going to die in what will ultimately be a long and brutal occupation.

Mariupol... I wonder if there's one house intact now... How many civilians lost, makes one wonder.

Putin committed a war crime the second he marched troops into another country, but I see an occupation as not only untenable but virtually impossible. Same goes for marching into other countries, particularly NATO countries or Finland; not gonna happen.

What will compel Putin to leave?

For Russia to leave this instant, Ukraine needs only to: agree to never join NATO, recognize the DPR and the LPR as independent and recognize Crimea as Russian. The second will likely never happen (something which, personally as someone who supports territorial self-determination, upsets me). But as long as Russia keeps bleeding like a stuck pig with this hilariously incompetent invasion, I think Putin would be happy with 2 outta 3. Although the US and allies could expedite this process by offering to lift the most severe sanctions as soon as Russia pulls out, but pigs would fly first.

Lots of talk about planned use of chemical weapons now. Humans just don't learn/change. So pointless.

So what I think you're saying is that 1) their demands aren't genuine 2) Ukraine has no actual bargaining chips.

By Russia? I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

There's a grown man at my work ranting about how we (U.S.) NEED to start bombing Russia to fix this.

Yeah, wason the news here. Even had some guy on who published a book on how to survive chemical attacks which he will make available.

This doesn't sound so bad though, so hopefully it won't happen
https://www.reuters.com/world/no-indica ... 022-03-22/

I'm involved in a hobby that is mostly older guys, and a majority percentage are veterans. I don't believe I've heard a single one of them, veteran or not, not calling for direct conflict. They don't like what they're seeing, and they feel like we're making a mistake by not getting our military involved. I've been surprised. People talk about the US not having an appetite for war right now, but that's not entirely true. Of course, their tune would likely change when their retirement funds were hit hard.

I doubt that will happen, at least for a long time. Zelenskyy has drawn a line in the sand and his rhetoric strongly suggest he would rather turn Ukraine in an occupied state with insurgencies and street fighting than to capitulate. Ideally they only need to last long enough for the sanctions to cripple the Russian economy, but that could also make Putin more desperate and cross some lines that would enrage the world even more.

I don't know what to make of it, honestly. Some say Russia will be fine, and they can rely on their own food production and alternative to European trade, others say the sanctions are the biggest in history and will cause unrest and famines within Russia. Morally I'm on the side of Ukraine, as my heart is always with those defending their homelands from invasion, but national sovereignty is not my highest ideal. Nuclear escalation and possible world wars are worse than one country losing its independence. Every option in this decision tree is awful.

This should surprise no one. Old men live for their shows which they're convinced have been infiltrated by woke cultural marxists, so there's nothing new that's good on TV anymore. But having a war to watch comfortably in their recliner as they sneer at the baddies and cheer for their Brave Boys sounds like paradise, especially since they're far too old to be drafted themselves.

Russia won't be fine (it hasn't been, for quite some time), but neither will Ukraine and I think that's mostly the point, for Putin.

This war has been so upsetting to see. There's so much pointless death and destruction going on over there right now. Europe needs to do more to support Ukrainians fleeing from this awful conflict.

The self-styled leader of the 'Luhansk People's Republic' has announced that there will most likely be a referendum on joining Russia soon.

That didn't take long.

It's baffling how a population that is 45% ethnically Russian, 70% russophone, voted more than 90% for the pro-Russian candidates in Ukrainian elections and has generally been treated with compassion by Russia while Ukraine bombs its citizens while assuring the international community they're really just targeting separatists, could possibly vote to become part of Russia.

Jack Crosbie visited the independent regions for Rolling Stone and, despite him being resolutely anti-Russian (understandably so), stated that generally the civilians don't really care who rules them right now, they would just like the bombing to stop.

It's baffling how people might be suspicious of a referendum in an area where pretty much everybody who professes fealty to or support for Ukraine has been driven out by a campaign of repression, where the previous referendum was denounced as illegitimate and undemocratic by virtually every nation and organization that isn't Russia or Belarus, and where the entire state apparatus is effectively an extension of Russia's.

'Treated with compassion by Russia', get real. Russia uses the region and its people as pawns in its bid to bully and subjugate Ukraine. In the process, it is propping up two regimes that are brutally oppressive, regularly abduct, torture, and murder critics, and think the LGBT community needs to be wiped out. Regarding Russia's treatment of the people in these regions as 'compassionate' is delusional.

Thankfully Ukraine sent their best emissaries of LBGTQ+ peace armed only with "Compelling Legitimate Arguments." (Fun fact: this collective murdered the Ukrainian author Oles Buzina, which was then covered up and buried by Ukrainian authorities, and it's the main reason I became interested in the weird battle between liberal pro-EU Ukrainian Nazis and conservative pro-Russia Ukrainian Soviets. I only took a couple years of Russian at university but somehow I stumbled on his books in that period and loved the prose, even if I had to Google some of it, so his murder shocked me.)

The LPR and DPR are fake countries run by mobsters but the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk really are filled with people who love Russia. I know it's hard to understand how anyone not in Putin's orbit could love what Russia has become, but just like Trump's contingent of non-Cuban male Hispanic voters, they're not just outliers. And they saw Maidan as illegitimate and didn't like the violence at their "anti-coup" protests that they believed to have been perpetrated by pro-West forces. So they did a stupid. And Ukraine responded in probably an even more stupid.

So it seems Russian soldiers have entered the Red Forest and dug trenches there. The Red Forest happens to be one of the most contaminated areas within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and now hundreds of them have come down with Acute Radiation Sickness and are being sent via buses to Belarus for treatment. This is the same thing that killed the workers and firefighters in the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster and caused downright horrific side effects to those who had it.

Were the soldiers just that clueless and incompetent that they would try to set up in a highly radioactive area, or were they sent there by Putin in what amounts to a suicide mission?

I read about that yesterday, it sounds crazy. One of the workers said it was the most radioactive palce on the surface, and that some of the Russian soldiers had never heard to the Chernobyl catastrophe. They suspect they didn't even know they were attacking a nuclear plant when they bombed it at the beginning of the war - you know, the world's most famous nuclear power plant? I thought it was partly Ukrainian propaganda, but seeing Russian soldiers being sent back because of radiation poisoning... Like wow. Russia is truly using the good old Zapp Brannigan tactic here, uh? Throw bodies wave after wave. Nevermind the radioactive forest, guys! There's more of you where you came from!

I jest, but this is sickening, such a disregard for human life.

NSBM had its minute of glory in The Times.

Lol, "We're not Nazis" says the guy with an NSBM shirt. Way to "challenge its far right reputation".

To be fair, I doubt that 99% of the people reading that article would realize that the shirt that guy is wearing is from a NSBM band. With that said, M8L8TH is easily the worst of the worst along with Der Stürmer and Aryan Blood when it comes to this type of music, and the sooner we ignore this cringy band, the better.

Not only that, the guy is actually well known. "Convicted Russian nazi and Azov fighter Levkin, also leader of nazi organisation Wotanjugend".

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and- ... aine-home/

(Just to be clear, I'm in no way justifying this war, it's just kind of ironic that a well known nazi organization most people into extreme metal should be aware of is being whitewashed by western media)

The Finnish national broadcasting company (Yle) made an article about Azov, and the headline basically challenged whether they are even nazis or far-right. Apparently, due to some organisational technicality, the Azov battalion - the military unit - is no longer the same entity as the original far-right militia. They interviewed some researcher who was quite certain that Azov the military unit is totally different from Azov the political militia. The fact that they use nazi symbols is just to troll Russians, etc. etc.

Similarly, Bellingcat wrote about a Russian nazi movement called the Male State. They are, according to that article, "not explicitly neo-nazi" either, although they use nazi symbols, nazi slogans, and propagate nazi policy. I guess in order to be technically a Nazi you have to go back in time to 1930 and apply for the party membership of NSDAP.

It kinda comes off as ''I'm not racist... *but*..''

Let's not forget when the Ukrainian National Guard posted this to Twitter from their "totally not Nazi" battalion.

Russia's Nazi problem is considerable too, Putin using the justification of "denazification of Ukraine" to invade a sovereign country should simply be dismissed as the war propaganda it is. Anyone with a working brain can see this invasion will only grow and empower the already concerning number of Nazi paramilitaries in operation.

This is what happens when two views of black and white collide. On the one hand people calling others "nazis" are done all the time (even though people are not actually national socialist). Then there is a new conflict where Russia is seen as the big bad evil and Ukraine as the underdog fighting for freedom and human rights. When Russian then speaks on denazification people don't know how to react because they've been saying "Putin is a nazi".

Why not just be truthful. Putin is certainly not a national socialist but he is authoritarian and imperialist. Azov certainly are far right, maybe even national socialist in part, and yes they do fight for Ukraine. Just realize that they don't stand for all of Ukraine.

There was actually quite a few people from the Swedish far right who went down to fight on the side of Ukraine in 2014 because they saw the far right militias as the driving force. Some said they hoped for a new March on Rome type deal. However I've also heard reports from one of these people, Mikael Skillt, who went to Ukraine to fight with Azov but left the far right because he claimed that he fought side by side with jews and non-europeans and found a respect for other people he didn't have before. Take that for what it's worth, one mans perspective.

There have been some conspiracies that Putin is terminally ill, so he's deciding to just cause mayhem before he dies. I'm sceptical on this since it sounds stupid, but really there isn't a rational reason for this occupation since everyone knows it isn't going to work, and the fact that it will backfire massively makes this conspiracy believable.