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Ukraine III

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Rosewind said:
gx502

"Fishy" - do tell and present your sources.
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Well Victoria Nuland for one. I recall at the time seasoned journalists in White House press briefing (Matt Lee AP) discussing Nuland’s leaked phone conversation when she says using strong language who the state department want as Ukraines next PM. I recall the journalists in a state of shock asking surely the Ukrainian people get to pick their next PM?

jen Psaki (WH Spox) replied that these are just discussions and there’s nothing to see here.

Then sure enough Nulands man, Yats gets made the new PM.
 
gx502 said:
I’m not buying the overall narrative that Putin is a comic book villain launching an aggressive invasion of the Ukraine. I don’t think its so simple.
The whole colour revolution in Ukraine, back in 2014 was extremely fishy.
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It's one thing not to buy the comic book villain narrative, it's quite another to confuse basic facts. The Orange Revolution was in 2004. The 'Revolution of Dignity' a.k.a. Maidan uprising was in 2014. Which one was fishy and why?
 
paulfromcamden said:
I read the AP report this morning that this poor woman realised she was losing her baby and asked the doctors to kill her and save the child.

It's pathetic I know but I wept for her sitting on a bus bus this morning stuck in South London rush hour traffic.

A Dutch Russian Embassy spokesman was still repeating the claim today that she was an actress. Just obscene.
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It's not pathetic at all.

If we don't weep in the face of such senseless tragedy, what the hell have we become?

Compassion is the emblem of humanity. Wear it proudly.
 
laughingboy said:
It's one thing not to buy the comic book villain narrative, it's quite another to confuse basic facts. The Orange Revolution was in 2004. The 'Revolution of Dignity' a.k.a. Maidan uprising was in 2014. Which one was fishy and why?
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Excuse me. I didn’t say Orange Revolution, did I ?

i was referring to 2014 as a generic colour revolution where protests/uprising lead to change in government.
 
MikeMA said:
The Russian shopping list presented to China apparently includes ammunition and military ration packs. Do we conclude then that the mighty Russians army is already running out of food and ammunition after a limited military operation right on their doorstep which, as they keep telling us, isn't actually a war at all? I imagine the Russian general staff must be s*******g themselves at the prospect of ever going to war with a bigger and technically superior NATO force. And yes I know all about the nuclear issue.....
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Article in todays Times suggests that at the published rate of attrition of tanks in this conflict the entire U.K. tank force of 150 would last a week.
 
Country has protests because their democratic agreement to link with the EU is overturned by Russia’s client Yanukovych. Russia doesn’t like it , their client flees to Russia and a new government is formed. Russia invades country three times, current invasion destroying country.
 
Bob McC said:
Article in todays Times suggests that at the published rate of attrition of tanks in this conflict the entire U.K. tank force of 150 would last a week.
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I’m really clueless about the role of tank warfare in the 21st century. They appear to be horribly vulnerable to ground fire and aerial attack
 
TheDecameron said:
I’m really clueless about the role of tank warfare in the 21st century. They appear to be horribly vulnerable to ground fire and aerial attack
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They have been at least since WW2: the Allies wiped out the Germans' superior tanks in Normandy thanks to air superiority (rocket-firing Typhoons and Thunderbolts). Plus the new generation hand-held missiles have longer range than the old Bazookas/Panzerfaust and seem to negate the massive frontal armour of modern tanks by using a curved trajectory to drop from above.
 
TheDecameron said:
I’m really clueless about the role of tank warfare in the 21st century. They appear to be horribly vulnerable to ground fire and aerial attack
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I'm no more of an expert than you but I think they need to be operating with a degree of air support which doesn't seem to be present..............

Regards

Richard
 
TheDecameron said:
I’m really clueless about the role of tank warfare in the 21st century. They appear to be horribly vulnerable to ground fire and aerial attack
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I agree, but they do seem to still have a heavy symbolism. Echoes of Hungary 1956, the Prague Spring of '68 and Beijing Tiananmen Square.
 
laughingboy said:
Fair enough. And here's Nuland's conversation, which was reported at the time (BBC).
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My take on the leaked Nuland conversation from 2014 is, for what it's worth, that the US anticipated the possibility of a change of government, and wanted it to be democratic and stable. In the leaked conversation, they said "we want to keep the moderate democrats together." That seems to have been the aim.

Given the aim, the US was looking to broker an agreement between the relevant opposition leaders as to who would be Prime Minister in a kind of Government of National Unity with all three moderate democratic leaders involved. Nuland suggested that Arseniy Yatseniuk had the experience, and that if Vitaly Klitschko (then mayor of Kyiv) tried to do it, he would essentially be deferring to Yatseniuk anyway. So, they were hoping to get Yatseniuk as nominal leader, to agree to work closely alongside Klitschko and Eloh Tyahnybok.

The rest of the conversation is about trying to confer authority on this arrangement. "I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it."

"we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast."

So, it's fishy in the sense that the US was trying to guarantee a stable transition of power. Which to my way of thinking is just pragmatic statecraft.
 
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