Russia invades Ukraine again?

[Brian Peacock]

You is what you am.
A cow don't make ham.

[Svartalf]

Oink?

[laklak]

A cow don't make ham.

Macon. Just sayin.

[Brian Peacock]

Dmitry Glukhovsk in The Guardian...

Ordinary Russians did not want this war, but Putin is trying to make us all complicit

Why did the Kremlin tell us to call this war a special operation? Because no one in Russia wanted war.

Everyone was afraid of war. War is real people leaving their homes and returning in zinc coffins. It’s smoking ruins where flourishing cities once stood. It’s ever-present fear. It’s poverty, starvation, collective insanity.

This war was not wanted by the ordinary people who are going to pay for it. Nor by the businesses that will collapse as a result, nor the so-called elites who will be cut off from the world and deprived of their usual feeding troughs. Since the war began, normal life ended for everyone in Russia, and life under martial law began.

Vladimir Putin personally declared the war in Ukraine. For an hour, across every TV channel, he tried to explain why war was essential – because Ukraine is a non-state that in principle does not deserve to exist. The invasion was founded on Putin’s personal hatred. He wanted the glory that he hoped a war would crown him with. He was counting on a Blitzkrieg: on the day the war began, TV stations ecstatically promised Kyiv’s capture by noon.

In Mykolaiv, a city awaiting a siege, it’s clear that all Ukrainians are now people of war | Nataliya Gumenyuk
But Putin was not prepared to take for this alone. And so, before the invasion began, he assembled the Russian security council – everyone who might later be able to say “I didn’t know” – and presented them with the facts. He smeared everyone who might have attempted to separately broker agreements that would avoid this descent into war. It isn’t me, Putin told the world. It’s us – everyone who is truly at Russia’s helm.

The west has no one to negotiate with here. So if a case is one day heard in The Hague about the war in Ukraine, its defendants will be an entire group. Each person in this group surely keeps this prospect in mind.

They, too, were frightened by this responsibility. It’s all there in the February video of the security council session gathered at the Kremlin. Apparently, they hadn’t even been told in advance of Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine.

And in order to alleviate their fear, Putin then decided to smear responsibility for the war across his entire regime. The state Duma deputies and Federation Council members were also called in and presented with the facts. And resting on the theatrical consensus of the security council, the deputies and senators had to publicly support Putin. Russian MPs have been drilled to vote unanimously for whatever atrocious bill Putin may send them for approval.

Even so, they only gave their consent to use the Russian army in Donetsk and Luhansk. But our tanks did not go to Donetsk. They went to Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Kherson. A week later it became clear that instead of a Blitzkrieg against mythical Nazi battalions, the country was facing a major war against the entire Ukrainian army and the country’s people. The Russian armed forces, for some bizarre reason branded with the Roman letter Z, got stuck in the mud. Our death toll has climbed into the hundreds. Our artillery started firing blindly, destroying Ukrainian housing blocks. When Russian forces bombed a maternity and children’s hospital, it became clear that we might be talking about war crimes.

Putin’s regime is now attempting to make its crimes into those of the entire Russian people. To make us complicit. To brand the forehead of every Russian with the letter Z. Putin needs to do this in order to shift responsibility away from his regime and towards ordinary people; to convince the west that Russia is not destroying peace in Europe simply because of the whims of a group of madmen, but because of the will of all of Russia. He needs to convince Russian people that this war is being waged in the name of their survival...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -complicit

[Tero]

Ukrainian drones
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/are- ... m=news_tab

[macdoc]

Love it

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as ... -1.6384526

[rainbow]

A cow don't make ham.

Macon. Just sayin.

Leave the French President out of this

[laklak]

Macon ain't just a city in Georgia, you know.

[macdoc]

The irony

A Russian oligarch's superyacht is stuck in Norway because no one will sell it fuel
March 16, 202212:06 PM ET

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/16/10868968 ... cht-norway

[Brian Peacock]

Former SNP MP Alex Salmond and former Labour/independent MP George Galloway have been cancelled as Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, revokes Russian-backed television channel RT’s licence to broadcast in the UK with immediate effect.

[JimC]

Some of the oligarchs mega yachts have been seized, but apparently a whole lot are swanning around in the Maldives, due to its absence of extradition treaties. I know it's like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, but it would not be difficult for Navy Seal teams to covertly board them, put the crews ashore and sail them to a port (in Oz, perhaps) as collateral for funds for the restoration of Ukraine...

[macdoc]

hard to hold russia to account while advocating piracy

[JimC]

Stealing from evil oligarchs is a moral imperative...

[L'Emmerdeur]

Canadian diplomats trolling Russian diplomats. Childish and 'Russophobic'!!

Thank you @RussiaUN for your letter dated March 16.

Please see our suggested edits below.

#StandWithUkraine #RespectTheCharter









- Canada Mission UN #StandWithUkraine · Mar 17, 2022

[JimC]

Diplomacy 2.0...