"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Lots of things piss off Puto, but the thought of Finland (and anyone else) giving him the finger and joining NATO has got to send his blood pressure to near-catastrophic levels.

More at the link.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-oliver-ukraine-applebees-ad_n_621cf679e4b03d0c803cbb67

I've always thought it would make a good opening for a James Bond movie to show a shadowy boiler room full of hackers in hoodies going about their normal work of extorting money out of businesses and governments then suddenly getting massacred by a hit team. I wouldn't be surprised if some outfit like Chevron or BP might have considered putting together a special ops team for that kind of mission. Those guys think they're real smart and safe because they're operating under Puto's approval, but one of these days they're either going to go too far or their patron Vlad may suddenly have a "health crisis"...

They are all just anecdotes but there seem to be an awful lot of videos of working but abandoned Russian equipment.

Apparently the Russian army largely consists of conscripts on 1 year enlistments with a very poor standard of training. Not a recipe for good morale. Also I've seen anecdotal reports that some of the troops were so ill-informed that they thought they were in Belarus instead of Ukraine. Every fighting force is indoctrinated to some extent, but when demoralized, poorly trained troops find out they've been lied to about...well...everything, that's another recipe for poor fighting spirit. Also some of the military experts are saying that Russia has a history of poor coordination of forces and has never been worth a shit at logistics. I think it was Omar Bradley who said "Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics." Of course, the downside is that Russia has potentially overwhelming numbers and Vlad might choose to drown the Ukrainians in blood the way Stalin did with Finland in WW II. None of this is guaranteed. I agree with Mark Twain that while history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme and there's definitely a lot of ugly echoes of the past going on with this one.

Yes. I posted it earlier but 9th Company / 9 Rota is a joint Ukrainian/Russian war film set during their Afghan war.

Really good stuff. And not much has changed on the Russian side.

There have to be a fair number of Russian military who know more than how to march in a straight line, right? I mean, aren't planes and tanks hard to fly?

Tanks not so much.

Rumor is that US will backfill with F-16s.

I would have thought so as well, but there are some big problems showing up in the early going. One short video I came across on Youtube claimed that among the problems for the Russian Air Force is that whilst the hardware is world-class the pilots don't get nearly enough flight time to keep their skills up to anywhere near the level of, say, the U.S. It's basic tank warfare doctrine that tanks need infantry support and apparently there are plenty of indications that tanks are going in alone. There are also some fundamental problems with the way Russian troops are trained: the command structure (starting with Vlad the Invader) doesn't tolerate individual initiative and tolerates no deviances from plans ("Russians don't take a dump without a plan, son!). Reportedly, the Russkis took a Ukrainian air base, but before the Russians could solidify their hold on it, the Ukrainians took it back. Since there wasn't a Plan B and nobody had the guts or savvy to improvise, Russians tried to keep landing their anyway and...hilarity ensued. As yet another expert pointed out, it can take time for even top-notch forces to get rolling once the real bullets start flying and there's no guarantee that Team Vlad won't get it's act together. However, one thing that interests me is the pictures of Vlad meeting with his military "brain trust" separated by who knows how many feet along a conference table. It gives me the impression that for all their stars and decorations they aren't in any hurry to tell that asshole anything he doesn't want to hear.

It occurs to me

If Putin deep down genuinely believes that part of Ukraine is properly Russian historically

Then he actually thought it was a good idea to invade Russia in winter.

Speaking of Finland, this whole Ukraine "Military Action" is like the Winter War all over again.

Coincidentally, I just listened to a pair of podcasts that both had put out multi-part episodes on different parts of Russian history (these were done before the invasion started last week).

One was on Czar Nicholas II. The thing that stuck out in my mind (and seems relevant for this incident) is that from the time the Romanovs ascended the throne in Russia (1600s, I think) until Nicky got to catch some bullets in a basement, the Czars continually expanded the territory they controlled. (Nicky didn't do so well at this.) The Soviet Union attempted to follow in this tradition, with mixed results (Ukraine first tried to make a break for independence in 1918). If Pootie-Poot thought that he was the heir to the Czars, then expanding Russia would have been a big deal to him, in addition to trying to restore the borders of the Soviet Union.

The other was on the Battle of Kursk, which I guess was one of the biggest battles of WWII that's not well-known outside of Russia. It was one of those battles where Stalin felt that quantity could triumph over quality, and that's somewhat true. A total of something 2 million soldiers died during the battle, and it was partially due to the Soviets being willing to just throw people into a meat grinder, along with Hitler being a total fuck up, that enabled the Soviets to win. The Germans had the better gear, but they didn't have experienced crews to operate it, they also had a slightly more controlling leader than the Soviets did. The Soviets also had more time to prepare, so they basically turned the area the Germans had to traverse into a maze of deathtraps. The shit we're hearing out of Ukraine makes it sound like the Russians haven't learned the right lessons from the Battle of Kursk, and this time, they're the Germans, while the Ukrainians are the Soviets, only better. Some fucking insane shit happened during that battle. For example, the tank traps the Soviets built to stop the German tanks were such that not only did they capture German tanks, but the Soviet tanks that stumbled upon them during the fog of war also got trapped. The Soviet tanks had fuel bladders strapped to the outside of them, and these promptly caught fire. The Soviets, needing to get to the other side of the traps, just kept sending tank after tank into them, until they had enough piled up that they could drive over them. Imagine that. You're chasing after German tanks, and driving across flaming piles of tanks driven by people you probably knew. The amount of PTSD those folks must have suffered had to be incredible.

Part one of the podcast on Czar Nicolas II can be found here.

Part one of the Battle of Kursk podcast can be found here.

Does being a pedo necessarily make him wrong about the unlawful combatant thing?

I would think it makes a difference that they're defending their own soil and that the president of their country has issued a call for everyone to fight, but international law is one of many subjects on which I am not an expert.

This is from 2021.

He was right about no WMDs, too.

But

I saw on another board that anyone who's trying to sign on with a Russian IP address is getting a message saying that the content is blocked along with a Ukrainian flag and a message of support for Ukraine. I'm not sure which is more shocking: the Swiss, who didn't blink when it came to hiding Nazi fortunes turning away from Russia or the world's leading smut purveyor telling them to beat off somewhere else.

The idea that a citizen of any country doesn't have the unlimited right to defend their country against illegal military invasions is fucking preposterous.

But of course the pedophile opposes the right of ordinary people to resist illegal acts committed against them.

Unlawful Combatant doesn't really seem to be an actual thing. You're either a civilian or a prisoner of war.

IIRC GWB's flunkies came up with that term to justify letting accused terrorists rot in Guantamo without trial. I don't know if they invented it out of whole cloth or tried to say it was "implied" somehow in international law.

I don't think anyone contends the moral right of people to defend themselves and their country. What Ritter is getting at, I imagine, is that people shooting at Russian troops will lose their protected status as civilians, under the Geneva Convention or whatever. I don't know if Ritter is correct about that, but I do know that his being a pedophile has nothing to do with the question.