LaxPower Back-Up Stick

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:05 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:54 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 4:51 pm

a fan wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:50 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:47 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:42 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:38 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:25 pm Where do you consider beyond the Soviet Union?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ma ... _names.svg

I don't interpret it as meaning this :

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/m ... mpire-1914

but your and my opinion don't matter a hill of beans.

It's whatever Putin chooses to pretend he believes.

You guys need to think like Putin. That's why we're in this mess.

What do you think I've been doing ?

What are Putin's territorial ambitions ? imho -- to recover control over as much of the former USSR as he can.

I'll go out on a limb & predict that Putin would be satisfied with a puppet regime in Kyiv, like he has in Minsk, & to then bring Russia, Belarus & Ukraine together via the Union process already in place. He might eventually try to unite them in a Greater Russian Confederation. He could name it Rodina.

imho -- no NATO nations are at risk, nor are Finland & Sweden. Georgia may be a target again in the future, if they push for NATO membership again.

Now turn over the RISK game board.

And that means we may as well give up on China deciding it wants to annex not just Taiwan but any country with ancient Chinese at its root.

Authoritarians should be able to just decide to do what they want. We should just shut up.

...ancient China ? Putin's just going back to 1991 when the USSR came apart.

Ukraine has been a part of that and starting in 2010, Paul Manafort was useful to giving his puppets the patina of legitimacy. After Viktor Yanukovych’s ouster, Ukraine was useful as a testing ground for various kinds of hybrid warfare, most spectacularly with the NotPetya attack in 2018.

Ukraine — the partnership of Konstantin Kilimnik and Oleg Deripaska, along with their leverage over Paul Manafort — was also whence Russian launched its 2016 attack (I need to find the reference, but they knew they could place Manafort as campaign manager before the end of 2015). As I have written (in a piece on my understanding of the role of using the Steele dossier as a vehicle for disinformation), Russia’s interference in 2016 is best understood as a win-win. If Hillary won, Roger Stone would have rolled out the same Stop the Steal plan that was used in 2020 back in 2016. Trump’s win was an unexpected bonus.

As part of the 2016 operation, Russia also did unprecedented damage to the NSA (through the Shadow Brokers operation) and the CIA (in the way that WikiLeaks rolled out the Vault 7 release).The failure of Russia’s attempt to blame its interference on a false flag thwarted Russia’s best laid plans — which would have involved Kilimnik calling in the quid pro quo made with Manafort on August 2, 2016 and getting Trump to help carve up Ukraine in the same way Russia is currently doing with tanks.

Even still, the Russian investigation paid huge dividends and, given Putin’s long game, to date has surely more than worth it. That’s because the FBI-led investigation into Trump’s cooperation with Russia, over time, came to train Republicans to trust Putin more than they trust Democrats.

Republicans genuinely believe, falsely, that the FBI deliberately attempted to take Trump out (entirely memory holing Jim Comey’s role in getting Trump elected, much less that the FBI Agents running informants on the Clinton Foundation during the election were explicitly anti-Hillary). The dossier disinformation project proved so wildly successful that most Republicans genuinely believe, falsely, that there wasn’t abundant proof of cooperation between Trump and Russia, including communications directly with the Kremlin during the election that Michael Cohen lied to hide. Republican members of Congress genuinely came to believe — because they had to! — that Trump’s refusal to spend the money in support of Ukraine they had appropriated was just another Democratic attack on Trump and not an attempt to save the integrity of American democracy. All this culminated in Stop the Steal 2.0, a literal attack on American democracy; Republican fealty to Trump forced them — more reluctantly at first and driven in large part by real terror — to defend an assault on Congress.

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:15 pm nope, he went further back...you aren't, but he is. And does it matter what year Russia committed to assurances that various independent states would be sovereign and be permanently recognized as such?

I read the entire transcript of his speech yesterday & his entire op-ed of July 21.
Lengthy, detailed, slow going. Lots of historical context, but no specific territorial aspirations stated or implied.
His most specific grievances are with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR & NATO expansion.
What do you predict that he will try beyond controlling Ukraine & uniting with Belarus ?

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828

I read that quite differently from your summary.

Lots of historical discourse, justifying the reclaiming of what was "historically Russia" which he is very broad in describing.

He differentiates this "historically Russia" from specifically during the Soviet Union, blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, all making "mistakes" and then of course the "mistakes" in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the claim, both explicit and implicit, is that Russia has a right to any and all of the territories that are "historically Russian", which is in reality anything he says it is. Including whatever the prior reach of the Russian Empire was, at a minimum. There's really no limit to what could be claimed under this ideology as it's entirely subject to Orwellian propaganda.

F the international order and rule of law.

All of that historical discourse is focused on the Ukraine -- to establish that the Ukraine is a part of the 'original" Russia.
It is not to lay a predicate to regain every bit of land that was ever a part of the Russian Empire.

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:25 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:15 pm nope, he went further back...you aren't, but he is. And does it matter what year Russia committed to assurances that various independent states would be sovereign and be permanently recognized as such?

I read the entire transcript of his speech yesterday & his entire op-ed of July 21.
Lengthy, detailed, slow going. Lots of historical context, but no specific territorial aspirations stated or implied.
His most specific grievances are with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR & NATO expansion.
What do you predict that he will try beyond controlling Ukraine & uniting with Belarus ?

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828

I read that quite differently from your summary.

Lots of historical discourse, justifying the reclaiming of what was "historically Russia" which he is very broad in describing.

He differentiates this "historically Russia" from specifically during the Soviet Union, blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, all making "mistakes" and then of course the "mistakes" in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the claim, both explicit and implicit, is that Russia has a right to any and all of the territories that are "historically Russian", which is in reality anything he says it is. Including whatever the prior reach of the Russian Empire was, at a minimum. There's really no limit to what could be claimed under this ideology as it's entirely subject to Orwellian propaganda.

F the international order and rule of law.

All of that historical discourse is focused on the Ukraine -- to establish that the Ukraine is a part of the 'original" Russia.
It is not to lay a predicate to regain every bit of land that was ever a part of the Russian Empire.

It is “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”. And yes, that distinction is important.

DocBarrister

CU88 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 5:33 am So 1991 is The Year that all nation boundaries were made Official?

Thanks for letting us all know is Fact, you sure could have saved a lot of lives around the world if you had told us sooner.

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:46 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:25 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:15 pm nope, he went further back...you aren't, but he is. And does it matter what year Russia committed to assurances that various independent states would be sovereign and be permanently recognized as such?

I read the entire transcript of his speech yesterday & his entire op-ed of July 21.
Lengthy, detailed, slow going. Lots of historical context, but no specific territorial aspirations stated or implied.
His most specific grievances are with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR & NATO expansion.
What do you predict that he will try beyond controlling Ukraine & uniting with Belarus ?

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828

I read that quite differently from your summary.

Lots of historical discourse, justifying the reclaiming of what was "historically Russia" which he is very broad in describing.

He differentiates this "historically Russia" from specifically during the Soviet Union, blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, all making "mistakes" and then of course the "mistakes" in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the claim, both explicit and implicit, is that Russia has a right to any and all of the territories that are "historically Russian", which is in reality anything he says it is. Including whatever the prior reach of the Russian Empire was, at a minimum. There's really no limit to what could be claimed under this ideology as it's entirely subject to Orwellian propaganda.

F the international order and rule of law.

All of that historical discourse is focused on the Ukraine -- to establish that the Ukraine is a part of the 'original" Russia.
It is not to lay a predicate to regain every bit of land that was ever a part of the Russian Empire.

It is “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”. And yes, that distinction is important.

DocBarrister

It is, but many of Salty's generation struggle with it; I think Panetta in an interview today slipped on it if I'm not mistaken (interestingly, Trump did so, then caught himself obviously remembering prior scoldings)...that said, we've commented previously on this and it at least seems to be a choice now to flip the bird by inference. Subtle.

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:46 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:25 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:15 pm nope, he went further back...you aren't, but he is. And does it matter what year Russia committed to assurances that various independent states would be sovereign and be permanently recognized as such?

I read the entire transcript of his speech yesterday & his entire op-ed of July 21.
Lengthy, detailed, slow going. Lots of historical context, but no specific territorial aspirations stated or implied.
His most specific grievances are with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR & NATO expansion.
What do you predict that he will try beyond controlling Ukraine & uniting with Belarus ?

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828

I read that quite differently from your summary.

Lots of historical discourse, justifying the reclaiming of what was "historically Russia" which he is very broad in describing.

He differentiates this "historically Russia" from specifically during the Soviet Union, blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, all making "mistakes" and then of course the "mistakes" in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the claim, both explicit and implicit, is that Russia has a right to any and all of the territories that are "historically Russian", which is in reality anything he says it is. Including whatever the prior reach of the Russian Empire was, at a minimum. There's really no limit to what could be claimed under this ideology as it's entirely subject to Orwellian propaganda.

F the international order and rule of law.

All of that historical discourse is focused on the Ukraine -- to establish that the Ukraine is a part of the 'original" Russia.
It is not to lay a predicate to regain every bit of land that was ever a part of the Russian Empire.

It is “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”. And yes, that distinction is important.

DocBarrister

It is, but many of Salty's generation struggle with it; I think Panetta in an interview today slipped on it if I'm not mistaken (interestingly, Trump did so, then caught himself obviously remembering prior scoldings)...that said, we've commented previously on this and it at least seems to be a choice now to flip the bird by inference. Subtle.

It is accurate to refer to it as THE Ukraine before independence, which is the time frame Putin was writing about.
It is a way to distinguish the region & the Soviet Republic from the independent nation (since 1991).

Leon Panetta (several times), Bob Gates & other fellow cold warriors still use that accurate terminology.

Do you have any preferred pronouns for the Ukrainians ?
Thanks for focusing on substance.

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:46 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 1:25 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:58 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:39 pm

old salt wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:27 pm

MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 5:15 pm nope, he went further back...you aren't, but he is. And does it matter what year Russia committed to assurances that various independent states would be sovereign and be permanently recognized as such?

I read the entire transcript of his speech yesterday & his entire op-ed of July 21.
Lengthy, detailed, slow going. Lots of historical context, but no specific territorial aspirations stated or implied.
His most specific grievances are with the 1991 dissolution of the USSR & NATO expansion.
What do you predict that he will try beyond controlling Ukraine & uniting with Belarus ?

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828

I read that quite differently from your summary.

Lots of historical discourse, justifying the reclaiming of what was "historically Russia" which he is very broad in describing.

He differentiates this "historically Russia" from specifically during the Soviet Union, blames the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, all making "mistakes" and then of course the "mistakes" in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the claim, both explicit and implicit, is that Russia has a right to any and all of the territories that are "historically Russian", which is in reality anything he says it is. Including whatever the prior reach of the Russian Empire was, at a minimum. There's really no limit to what could be claimed under this ideology as it's entirely subject to Orwellian propaganda.

F the international order and rule of law.

All of that historical discourse is focused on the Ukraine -- to establish that the Ukraine is a part of the 'original" Russia.
It is not to lay a predicate to regain every bit of land that was ever a part of the Russian Empire.

It is “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”. And yes, that distinction is important.

DocBarrister

It is, but many of Salty's generation struggle with it; I think Panetta in an interview today slipped on it if I'm not mistaken (interestingly, Trump did so, then caught himself obviously remembering prior scoldings)...that said, we've commented previously on this and it at least seems to be a choice now to flip the bird by inference. Subtle.

It is accurate to refer to it as THE Ukraine before independence, which is the time frame Putin was writing about.
It is a way to distinguish the region & the Soviet Republic from the independent nation (since 1991).

Leon Panetta (several times), Bob Gates & other fellow cold warriors still use that accurate terminology.

Do you have any preferred pronouns for the Ukrainians ?
Thanks for focusing on substance.

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:06 pm I've been referring to the region & the Soviet Republic as THE Ukraine since my undergrad courses on Russian & Soviet history, as did my professors & classmates. That was followed by 20 years of reading about THE Ukraine in intel reports & tactical documents.
When we targeted Sevastopol & Odessa, we did not refer to them as part of "Ukraine".
I plan to continue to use THE Ukraine to make the distinction to which I am referring.

Brooklyn wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:35 pm Ukraine Declares State of Emergency for 30 days Over Russian Threat


https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politi ... hreat.html


Ukraine has declared a state of emergency for 30 days from midnight tonight. The Ukrainian Parliament adopted the relevant presidential decree this evening, with 335 MPs voting in favor in the 450-seat house.

The reason for the state of emergency is Russian aggression against the country and the possibility of invasion.

Restrictions on the population will not be introduced immediately, but will depend on specific situations and necessity, local media outlets reported.

It introduces personal document checks and gives the government power to impose a curfew if needed.

And it means military reservists will not be allowed to leave the country.

The declaration affects all of Ukraine apart from the two eastern regions which have been in a state of emergency since 2014.







Now watch for all those draft dodgers from both countries drifting into NYC.

Brooklyn wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:35 pm Now watch for all those draft dodgers from both countries drifting into NYC.

old salt wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:06 pm I've been referring to the region & the Soviet Republic as THE Ukraine since my undergrad courses on Russian & Soviet history, as did my professors & classmates. That was followed by 20 years of reading about THE Ukraine in intel reports & tactical documents.
When we targeted Sevastopol & Odessa, we did not refer to them as part of "Ukraine".
I plan to continue to use THE Ukraine to make the distinction to which I am referring.

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:44 pm
You know, isolationism kind of went out of vogue with WWII.

DocBarrister

Brooklyn wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 4:04 pm

DocBarrister wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:44 pm
You know, isolationism kind of went out of vogue with WWII.

DocBarrister

Well, you know what they say, when it comes to war, the profit motive is always the best motive.