One of the special operation’s goals is to neutralize these Ukrainian terrorist threats to civilians that Russia long foresaw but was unable to preemptively avert through diplomatic means.
Messrs. Kashin, Bordachev, and Lukyanov would do well to consider that before spouting their nonsense worthy of the Enchanted Manege. That's what gets me when I read those bastards. They talk as if Russia were not being attacked and harassed to death from all sides. Those bastards, in May 1941, would have learnedly demonstrated the wisdom of reaching an agreement with 'good Mr. Hitler.' These kinds of people — at best, reckless fools; at worst, outright traitors — have already nearly succeeded in destroying Russia with Gorbachev. Is Putin crazy enough to let them finish the job?
You'd think these people aren't doing strategic analyses but are publicly offering their services to those who will run the country tomorrow... from Washington, London, and Berlin."
The Russians & Ukrains are IDENTCAL peoplee. How & why this crazeness persits can not be explanied. ALL the priests in Ukraine & Russia should move to the border and take all the necessary stepts to halt rthis madness. Half the Russians priests can remain in Ukraine Half the Ukrainian priests can remain in Russia. Who control this maddensss who can & will do the job?? My parents are rolling over in their graveds.
First of all, let's cut through the crap and state openly that it is and has been the UK, France, and Germany, with US support that carried out these three attacks with, what American experts are calling missiles, and that they are directly behind the planning, firing, and guiding these missiles with US satelitte cooridnates. This was NOT A MISCALCULATION!
Second, "What this means in practice is that the special operation will either continue till its military goals are met in full, namely Ukraine’s demilitarization..." There will be no compromise that will satisfy and guarantee Russia's security! Furthermore, the other main SMO goals are the denazification of Ukraine, and the complete neutrality of Ukraine. The former will take generations to eliminate the evil seed.
Finally, Russia has been insisting that the "root cause" of this situation goes back to 1991-92, when the US lied to Russia that NATO would not move one inch East towards the Soviet Union/Russia. There was no need at all for NATO with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany. Yet, the US continued to expand NATO with military bases all across Europe and into newly acquired members from former Soviet Republics. Add to that the decades of annual, ever-expanding military exercises all along Russia's borders with tens of thousands of troops and military hardware...all gaming a first strike attack on Russia!
None of this can be forgotten, and for these reasons I do not believe that Russian can compromise on ANYTHING, EVER.
This is not just a war against Russia using Ukraine as fodder, it is a war that goes back centuries to Balkanize Russia and to steal its resources, and it is a spiritual war of good against evil. Let me repeat, this is a war of good against evil.
«There was no need at all for NATO with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany.»
What about the attack and invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999? It was a NATO operation and without NATO it would have been more difficult to coordinate. Same for the ukrainian attack and invasion of the Donbas in 2014. The "O" really means "Organization"; NATO is the transmission belt of USA military policy to Europe.
«Yet, the US continued to expand NATO with military bases all across Europe and into newly acquired members from former Soviet Republics.»
The best time to expand is precisely when the enemy is at its weakest point.
Stomach churning to see western media ignore the attack or claim it was on ‘infrastructure’. Even more stomach churning was wearer presstitutes refusing to visit the scene.
Why do you adopt the apparently harebrained idea that this was an accident of any sort? The murder of those girls was fully in line with a country that has long ago adopted terrorism and repeatedly bragged about it. Russia will not be safe until, at a minimum, Ukraine is fully neutralized if not destroyed.
Zelensky, his compatriots and also the pro-NAZI influencers should all now be concerned that they can targeted individually in "decapitation" strikes. Maybe that will release non-combatant Ukrainian citizens to freely express their wishes to end this needless war and seek rapprochement with their ethnically and historically related neighbour.
They are convinced that Russia does not have the stones. Russian reprisals so far arecthe equivalent of kicking your enemy'd dog that he doesn't even like very much.
Mostly, all that does is convince Russia's enemies of Russian weakness and indecision.
Putin is like Bush in that he is attempting to win “hearts and minds” because Ukraine didn’t pose an existential threat to Russia. So both America and Russia have nuclear weapons that could annihilate an enemy that poses an existential threat.
In 2003 Bush needed Iraqis to rebuild their oil industry and increase exports so the global economy could continue expanding…and Bush’s Iraq failure is what produced the 2008 Great Recession as the price of oil eroded disposable income. Putin needs Ukrainians to purchase Russian value added exports because Putin wants the Russian economy to be diversified from oil and gas production…if Ukrainians despise Putin they aren’t going to buy any Russian products.
You reminded me of one of the plot points of Moscow 2042, where (in future year 2042) the CIA is fully run by Russians, and the KGB by Americans...and nobody knows how to untangle the situation.
«Russia will never accept a future where its people are regularly targeted by Ukrainian terrorist attacks of any kind»
But that is the likely future for the next several decades: the original Bandera insurgents killed 20,000-40,000 soviet officials and soldiers in western Ukraine just between 1945 and 1954 (and the survivors after 2004 got military pensions to reward them) and that was while it was difficult for NATO to support them because there were many hundred kms of USSR "friendly" countries between NATO and western Ukraine.
Now there are *huge* contiguous borders between western Ukraine and NATO and it will be much easier for NATO to support the banderists indefinitely. "Prometheism" will never stop.
«The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials [...] “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.” [...] the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion. [...] “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years [...]”. [...] If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official [...] “All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.”»
«ensure that Ukraine is made aware that such attacks would instantly trigger outsized retaliation.»
That is a good example why the continuing use of indefinite terms like “Ukraine” by our author is not good and being more pedantic would help: transparently the aim of both the massacre that started the ATO and every subsequent atrocity by the ukrainian fascist minority is to provoke retaliation on "Ukraine" in order to both solidify "ukrainian home front" and "sponsors home front" support for the war of aggression against the Donbas.
So both for the ukrainian fascist minority and their "sponsors" such “outsized retaliation” against ordinary ukrainians would be quite a win, an incentive for more atrocities against russians rather than provide dissuasion for them.
Note: there is precedent: many historians now recognize that the bombing raids ordered by Churchill against Germany that ended the "phoney war" period had the purpose to provoke retaliation (the Blitz) for the very same aims (the majority of english and USA public did not understand why the english government had started the war against Germany over Poland).
It would be different if retaliation were not "outsized" but narrowly targeted at the ukrainian fascist minority but that would mean an assassination campaign israeli (and ukrainian) style because on their turf they are well protected in soviet-era bunkers and missile+drone attacks on the overground (empty) buildings would be largely symbolic.
Also before WW2 reprisals for war crimes were considered legitimate, but after WW2 the Allies retroactively made reprisals a war crime too (unless committed by them of course) so any "outsize retaliation" would be used against the RF government, while the original atrocities would not be spoken about and those responsible for them would live in luxury in the USA.
The best option is use the military resources that might have been used for “oversized retaliation” on the front-line to downsize the ukrainian army and in particular their logistical support.
«Whether Ukraine deliberately targeted the dormitory like Russia claims given its track record of terrorist attacks since the special operation»
Perhaps not just "since the special operation" but since the May 9th 2014 Mariupol massacre that started of the sarcastically named "anti terrorist operation" by the ukrainian fascists:
«April 6, 2015 [...] In several shelters in and around Donetsk we saw scores of children — some as young as three days old — and their mothers (and many cases their grandmothers) living in cramped, dirty hovels with limited access to electricity, food and water. [...] The deep anger toward both Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (I was told by one young woman, a native of Donetsk, that “this is Poroshenko’s war”) and an equally deep sense of alienation from the Ukrainian state in Kiev are equally unmistakable.
One young mother told us “there is no ‘back’ to Ukraine for Donbas.” If Poroshenko and his cheerleaders in the Obama administration and the US Congress believe that an economic blockade, Kiev’s deployment of snipers, the shelling of Donbas’s civilians and a proposal to send American weapons with which to facilitate the shelling is the recipe for winning eastern Ukrainian “hearts and minds” they couldn’t be more wrong.
Yet, tellingly, this is the strategy Poroshenko himself laid out last November in a speech in which he declared: “Our children will go to schools and kindergartens, theirs will be holed up in the basements. Because they are not able to do a thing. This is exactly how we will win this war!” Well, he may have half the job done. The little children we saw are indeed cowering in filthy conditions in underground Soviet-era bomb shelters.»
Unfortunately Russia has accepted it already with the underwhelming response even using Oreshnik to portray seriousness but still reticence is paramount from risk averse VVP, one can only hope he has a metamorphosis or he is seen off into the sunset with a poor legacy; the last nigh on 5 years has wrought on Russia's populace and reputation with no likely improvement whilst he remains intransigent to the required level of not response but outright initiative in the face of yet another devastating hit on the Russia citizen.
The only opinion that matters now is Russia’s and it has ample evidence that the attack was deliberate. The faulty intel line is from the same playbook the U.S. used for killing the schoolchildren in Iran. It’s getting stale. The difference here though is that Russia has the ability to make the perpetrators pay and pay they will.
"The Starobelsk Dormitory Bombing Reflects Horribly On Ukraine & Its Western Patrons"
----
Say what? Does Russia's continued targeting of non-military apartments, retail units and schools in Ukraine over the past 4 years reflect poorly on Putin and Russia in your eyes?
Or are you contending that Ukraine should be held to a different set of standards?
During the first year of the war, maybe including the second year, western MSM reported extensively about such attacks. Supermarkets and warehouses in particular, were hit by missiles. Russian MOD explanation was that their investigation showed these targets were actually used by the Ukrainian military. I remembered that one video segment showed a bombed supermarket that produced huge secondary explosions. Casualties were certainly there. But if there were large civilian casualties, I bet that western MSM would not ignore them.
It is war. War crimes and mistakes do happen. If one wants to compare, then one should compare civilian casualties versus military casualties. I don't think the Russian MOD dares to declare that they have never killed a single Ukrainian civilian. German invasion of Russia and the Japanese invasion of China during WW2 were frequently used as examples to talk about war crimes, not just because war crimes happened there and then, but also because Russia and China suffered much more civilian casualties than military casualties.
That said, I believe the issue is battleground reconnaissance. I think the Russian GRU and underground have done a good job of pinpointing military targets. For example, Russian precision strike on a restaurant in Odessa when senior commanders and NATO officers visited there. On the Ukraine side, I guess they don't do as much recce except when assassinating Russian generals and Lugansk/Donetsk local officials. When Dubai's luxury hotels were attacked by Iranian drones, guests had long gone before the attacks, and Iranian drones did not even bother to smash into every window. Again, If there were any western guests hurt in that attack, you bet Western MSM will loudly report that even if Ukraine has morphed into an ugly duckling right now.
«When Dubai's luxury hotels were attacked by Iranian drones, guests had long gone before the attacks, and Iranian drones did not even bother to smash into every window.»
There is quite an important story about that and related missile attacks: before the "defensive" attack on Iran the USA bases in the Gulf were evacuated and USA soldiers were dispersed and hidden into hotels and other civilian buildings (putting military targets in the middle of civilian ones is the war crime of "using civilians as shield" and seems to be a favourite of ukranian fascists for example). So the attacks on those hotels were actually attacks on what had become temporary USA barracks and bases.
Messrs. Kashin, Bordachev, and Lukyanov would do well to consider that before spouting their nonsense worthy of the Enchanted Manege. That's what gets me when I read those bastards. They talk as if Russia were not being attacked and harassed to death from all sides. Those bastards, in May 1941, would have learnedly demonstrated the wisdom of reaching an agreement with 'good Mr. Hitler.' These kinds of people — at best, reckless fools; at worst, outright traitors — have already nearly succeeded in destroying Russia with Gorbachev. Is Putin crazy enough to let them finish the job?
You'd think these people aren't doing strategic analyses but are publicly offering their services to those who will run the country tomorrow... from Washington, London, and Berlin."
The Russians & Ukrains are IDENTCAL peoplee. How & why this crazeness persits can not be explanied. ALL the priests in Ukraine & Russia should move to the border and take all the necessary stepts to halt rthis madness. Half the Russians priests can remain in Ukraine Half the Ukrainian priests can remain in Russia. Who control this maddensss who can & will do the job?? My parents are rolling over in their graveds.
‘The Russians & Ukrains are IDENTCAL peoplee.’
Zelensky, his close associates and their enablers are neither Russians nor Ukrainians and this is clearly reflected in their acts.
Nobody in Washington, nobody in Brussels, nobody in Kiev cares.
Moral arguments are wasted on sociopaths.
First of all, let's cut through the crap and state openly that it is and has been the UK, France, and Germany, with US support that carried out these three attacks with, what American experts are calling missiles, and that they are directly behind the planning, firing, and guiding these missiles with US satelitte cooridnates. This was NOT A MISCALCULATION!
Second, "What this means in practice is that the special operation will either continue till its military goals are met in full, namely Ukraine’s demilitarization..." There will be no compromise that will satisfy and guarantee Russia's security! Furthermore, the other main SMO goals are the denazification of Ukraine, and the complete neutrality of Ukraine. The former will take generations to eliminate the evil seed.
Finally, Russia has been insisting that the "root cause" of this situation goes back to 1991-92, when the US lied to Russia that NATO would not move one inch East towards the Soviet Union/Russia. There was no need at all for NATO with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany. Yet, the US continued to expand NATO with military bases all across Europe and into newly acquired members from former Soviet Republics. Add to that the decades of annual, ever-expanding military exercises all along Russia's borders with tens of thousands of troops and military hardware...all gaming a first strike attack on Russia!
None of this can be forgotten, and for these reasons I do not believe that Russian can compromise on ANYTHING, EVER.
This is not just a war against Russia using Ukraine as fodder, it is a war that goes back centuries to Balkanize Russia and to steal its resources, and it is a spiritual war of good against evil. Let me repeat, this is a war of good against evil.
«There was no need at all for NATO with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany.»
What about the attack and invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999? It was a NATO operation and without NATO it would have been more difficult to coordinate. Same for the ukrainian attack and invasion of the Donbas in 2014. The "O" really means "Organization"; NATO is the transmission belt of USA military policy to Europe.
«Yet, the US continued to expand NATO with military bases all across Europe and into newly acquired members from former Soviet Republics.»
The best time to expand is precisely when the enemy is at its weakest point.
Stomach churning to see western media ignore the attack or claim it was on ‘infrastructure’. Even more stomach churning was wearer presstitutes refusing to visit the scene.
Why do you adopt the apparently harebrained idea that this was an accident of any sort? The murder of those girls was fully in line with a country that has long ago adopted terrorism and repeatedly bragged about it. Russia will not be safe until, at a minimum, Ukraine is fully neutralized if not destroyed.
Andrew, it's not only CNN and BBC. Absolutely no french media said a word about this tragedy.
It is de rigueur Darras, did you expect any different, surely not.
Zelensky, his compatriots and also the pro-NAZI influencers should all now be concerned that they can targeted individually in "decapitation" strikes. Maybe that will release non-combatant Ukrainian citizens to freely express their wishes to end this needless war and seek rapprochement with their ethnically and historically related neighbour.
They are convinced that Russia does not have the stones. Russian reprisals so far arecthe equivalent of kicking your enemy'd dog that he doesn't even like very much.
Mostly, all that does is convince Russia's enemies of Russian weakness and indecision.
Putin is like Bush in that he is attempting to win “hearts and minds” because Ukraine didn’t pose an existential threat to Russia. So both America and Russia have nuclear weapons that could annihilate an enemy that poses an existential threat.
In 2003 Bush needed Iraqis to rebuild their oil industry and increase exports so the global economy could continue expanding…and Bush’s Iraq failure is what produced the 2008 Great Recession as the price of oil eroded disposable income. Putin needs Ukrainians to purchase Russian value added exports because Putin wants the Russian economy to be diversified from oil and gas production…if Ukrainians despise Putin they aren’t going to buy any Russian products.
I don't think so. Shooting ukrainian high ranking officials, it's risking killing those among their entourage who actually work for Russia.
Agree. Shooting Ukrainian high ranking officials shall not achieve anything only make martyrs. The real bosses are not in Ukraine.
You reminded me of one of the plot points of Moscow 2042, where (in future year 2042) the CIA is fully run by Russians, and the KGB by Americans...and nobody knows how to untangle the situation.
«Russia will never accept a future where its people are regularly targeted by Ukrainian terrorist attacks of any kind»
But that is the likely future for the next several decades: the original Bandera insurgents killed 20,000-40,000 soviet officials and soldiers in western Ukraine just between 1945 and 1954 (and the survivors after 2004 got military pensions to reward them) and that was while it was difficult for NATO to support them because there were many hundred kms of USSR "friendly" countries between NATO and western Ukraine.
Now there are *huge* contiguous borders between western Ukraine and NATO and it will be much easier for NATO to support the banderists indefinitely. "Prometheism" will never stop.
https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html
«The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials [...] “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.” [...] the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion. [...] “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years [...]”. [...] If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official [...] “All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.”»
«ensure that Ukraine is made aware that such attacks would instantly trigger outsized retaliation.»
That is a good example why the continuing use of indefinite terms like “Ukraine” by our author is not good and being more pedantic would help: transparently the aim of both the massacre that started the ATO and every subsequent atrocity by the ukrainian fascist minority is to provoke retaliation on "Ukraine" in order to both solidify "ukrainian home front" and "sponsors home front" support for the war of aggression against the Donbas.
So both for the ukrainian fascist minority and their "sponsors" such “outsized retaliation” against ordinary ukrainians would be quite a win, an incentive for more atrocities against russians rather than provide dissuasion for them.
Note: there is precedent: many historians now recognize that the bombing raids ordered by Churchill against Germany that ended the "phoney war" period had the purpose to provoke retaliation (the Blitz) for the very same aims (the majority of english and USA public did not understand why the english government had started the war against Germany over Poland).
It would be different if retaliation were not "outsized" but narrowly targeted at the ukrainian fascist minority but that would mean an assassination campaign israeli (and ukrainian) style because on their turf they are well protected in soviet-era bunkers and missile+drone attacks on the overground (empty) buildings would be largely symbolic.
Also before WW2 reprisals for war crimes were considered legitimate, but after WW2 the Allies retroactively made reprisals a war crime too (unless committed by them of course) so any "outsize retaliation" would be used against the RF government, while the original atrocities would not be spoken about and those responsible for them would live in luxury in the USA.
The best option is use the military resources that might have been used for “oversized retaliation” on the front-line to downsize the ukrainian army and in particular their logistical support.
«Whether Ukraine deliberately targeted the dormitory like Russia claims given its track record of terrorist attacks since the special operation»
Perhaps not just "since the special operation" but since the May 9th 2014 Mariupol massacre that started of the sarcastically named "anti terrorist operation" by the ukrainian fascists:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/least-among-us-war-donbas-terrorizing-ukraines-most-vulnerable-citizens/
«April 6, 2015 [...] In several shelters in and around Donetsk we saw scores of children — some as young as three days old — and their mothers (and many cases their grandmothers) living in cramped, dirty hovels with limited access to electricity, food and water. [...] The deep anger toward both Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (I was told by one young woman, a native of Donetsk, that “this is Poroshenko’s war”) and an equally deep sense of alienation from the Ukrainian state in Kiev are equally unmistakable.
One young mother told us “there is no ‘back’ to Ukraine for Donbas.” If Poroshenko and his cheerleaders in the Obama administration and the US Congress believe that an economic blockade, Kiev’s deployment of snipers, the shelling of Donbas’s civilians and a proposal to send American weapons with which to facilitate the shelling is the recipe for winning eastern Ukrainian “hearts and minds” they couldn’t be more wrong.
Yet, tellingly, this is the strategy Poroshenko himself laid out last November in a speech in which he declared: “Our children will go to schools and kindergartens, theirs will be holed up in the basements. Because they are not able to do a thing. This is exactly how we will win this war!” Well, he may have half the job done. The little children we saw are indeed cowering in filthy conditions in underground Soviet-era bomb shelters.»
Unfortunately Russia has accepted it already with the underwhelming response even using Oreshnik to portray seriousness but still reticence is paramount from risk averse VVP, one can only hope he has a metamorphosis or he is seen off into the sunset with a poor legacy; the last nigh on 5 years has wrought on Russia's populace and reputation with no likely improvement whilst he remains intransigent to the required level of not response but outright initiative in the face of yet another devastating hit on the Russia citizen.
The only opinion that matters now is Russia’s and it has ample evidence that the attack was deliberate. The faulty intel line is from the same playbook the U.S. used for killing the schoolchildren in Iran. It’s getting stale. The difference here though is that Russia has the ability to make the perpetrators pay and pay they will.
"The Starobelsk Dormitory Bombing Reflects Horribly On Ukraine & Its Western Patrons"
----
Say what? Does Russia's continued targeting of non-military apartments, retail units and schools in Ukraine over the past 4 years reflect poorly on Putin and Russia in your eyes?
Or are you contending that Ukraine should be held to a different set of standards?
During the first year of the war, maybe including the second year, western MSM reported extensively about such attacks. Supermarkets and warehouses in particular, were hit by missiles. Russian MOD explanation was that their investigation showed these targets were actually used by the Ukrainian military. I remembered that one video segment showed a bombed supermarket that produced huge secondary explosions. Casualties were certainly there. But if there were large civilian casualties, I bet that western MSM would not ignore them.
It is war. War crimes and mistakes do happen. If one wants to compare, then one should compare civilian casualties versus military casualties. I don't think the Russian MOD dares to declare that they have never killed a single Ukrainian civilian. German invasion of Russia and the Japanese invasion of China during WW2 were frequently used as examples to talk about war crimes, not just because war crimes happened there and then, but also because Russia and China suffered much more civilian casualties than military casualties.
That said, I believe the issue is battleground reconnaissance. I think the Russian GRU and underground have done a good job of pinpointing military targets. For example, Russian precision strike on a restaurant in Odessa when senior commanders and NATO officers visited there. On the Ukraine side, I guess they don't do as much recce except when assassinating Russian generals and Lugansk/Donetsk local officials. When Dubai's luxury hotels were attacked by Iranian drones, guests had long gone before the attacks, and Iranian drones did not even bother to smash into every window. Again, If there were any western guests hurt in that attack, you bet Western MSM will loudly report that even if Ukraine has morphed into an ugly duckling right now.
«When Dubai's luxury hotels were attacked by Iranian drones, guests had long gone before the attacks, and Iranian drones did not even bother to smash into every window.»
There is quite an important story about that and related missile attacks: before the "defensive" attack on Iran the USA bases in the Gulf were evacuated and USA soldiers were dispersed and hidden into hotels and other civilian buildings (putting military targets in the middle of civilian ones is the war crime of "using civilians as shield" and seems to be a favourite of ukranian fascists for example). So the attacks on those hotels were actually attacks on what had become temporary USA barracks and bases.