Russia - Ukraine war

[Wonderfulspam]

So, is anyone here still supporting the UkraNazis?

Are we glad our tax money is spent on advanced military equipment for use by White Supremacists?

(But we're the good guys remember)

[Vertigo Swirl]

I think we can all agree that the Ukranian people are suffering terribly as a direct result of Russia's actions. Clearly Russia is directly responsible for those actions. It's not so clear who might be indirectly responsible for Russia's decisions however.

My sincerest wish is for Putin to have a fatal heart attack, hopefully within the next few days.  I'd also be quite happy to hear that he has been assassinated, or even that he has fallen off a sofa after od'ing on Vodka flavoured Calpol.  Anything so long as he gets his comeuppance, which in my opinion is now long overdue.

[Erngath]

My sincerest wish is for Putin to have a fatal heart attack, hopefully within the next few days.  I'd also be quite happy to hear that he has been assassinated, or even that he has fallen off a sofa after od'ing on Vodka flavoured Calpol.  Anything so long as he gets his comeuppance, which in my opinion is now long overdue.

I imagine the good folk of Salisbury share your wish.

[Wonderfulspam]

My sincerest wish is for Putin to have a fatal heart attack, hopefully within the next few days.  I'd also be quite happy to hear that he has been assassinated, or even that he has fallen off a sofa after od'ing on Vodka flavoured Calpol.  Anything so long as he gets his comeuppance, which in my opinion is now long overdue.

This is disgusting, what has Putin ever done to you to warrant such bile & hatred?

[Vertigo Swirl]

I imagine the good folk of Salisbury share your wish.

I have friends in Salisbury who say life still isn’t back to how it was before that terrible incident, the one Putrid claims was nothing to do with him. 

[Vertigo Swirl]

From a much longer article, written by a Ukranian who presumably knows a bit more about his country than Hitchens, Starkey or any of the “sages” on this forum:

“Journalists from different countries call me and they all ask the same question: “What is the reason for this war?” The answer is both very simple and quite complex.

Putin has been repeating the mantra for 20 years: “Ukrainians and Russians are one people.” What he actually means is “Ukrainians belong to Russia”. The Ukrainians do not agree with this. He has also publicly said many times that his greatest personal tragedy is the collapse of the Soviet Union. But for most Ukrainians, this was not a tragedy. This was a historical chance to become a European country and regain independence from the Russian empire.

Now that President Putin has aged dramatically in self-imposed isolation during the pandemic, he has decided that he wants to live on in Russian school history books as the leader who was able to re-create the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire, within its former borders. He has no other ambitions. He does not need money — there are no currency exchange offices or expensive restaurants in the afterlife.

He needs Ukraine, Belarus and, I think, other territories that were previously part of the USSR or of the Russian empire. He wanted Russia to be feared and he achieved this. He wanted total political control over the Russian Federation, and he succeeded. A huge country with a one-party system and a destroyed opposition. Like the Soviet Union. Now he denies that Ukrainians are a separate people.

The Ukrainians never had a tsar and were never ready to obey any. The Russians, who lived for centuries in a monarchy, on the contrary, loved their tsars. Sometimes they killed a tsar, but then they would adore the next one. Loyalty to a new monarchy remained in the Soviet era. Of the six general secretaries of the Communist Party of the USSR, only one was fired — Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian. Mikhail Gorbachev aside, the others remained leaders of the Soviet state until the day of their death. In the time that Putin has ruled Russia, Ukraine has had five presidents.


Ukrainians are individualists, egoists, anarchists who do not like government or authority. They think they know how to organise their lives, regardless of which party or force is in power in the country. If they do not like the actions of the authorities, they go out to protest. Therefore, any government in Ukraine is afraid of the street; afraid of its people.

Russians loyal to their authority are afraid to protest and are willing to obey any rules the Kremlin creates. Now they are cut off from information, from Facebook and Twitter. But even before they believed the official TV channels more than the news from the internet.

In Ukraine, about 400 political parties are registered with the Ministry of Justice. This only once again proves the individualism of Ukrainians. Not a single nationalist party is represented in the Ukrainian parliament. Ukrainians do not like to vote for either the extreme left or the extreme right. Basically, they are liberals at heart.

In the 1920s and 1930s peasants were sent to Siberia and the Far East as a punishment for not wanting to join collective farms. Ukrainians are not collective, everyone wants to be the owner of his own land, his own cow, his own crop. Looking at this history, they can safely say: “We and the Russians are two different peoples!”

Now, the Ukrainian army is successfully defending the country. Ukrainians are accustomed to freedom and value it more than stability. For Russians, stability is more important than freedom.

Ukrainians have never accepted censorship. They have always wanted to say and write what they thought. That is why almost all Ukrainian writers and poets of the 1920s and the 1930s were shot by the Soviet authorities. A whole generation of writers of that time is now called the “executed revival”.

If Russia succeeds, another executed generation of Ukrainian writers and politicians, philosophers and philologists may appear, all those for whom life without a free Ukraine does not make sense. I consider myself one of these people, as are many of my friends.


It is scary to write the following words, but I will write them anyway: Ukraine will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all. Then they will write about it in European history books, shamefacedly hiding the fact that the destruction of Ukraine was possible only with the tacit consent of Europe and the entire civilised world”.

Andrey Kurkov is the author of Death and the Penguin. His most recent novel is Grey Bees (Quercus)

[Wonderfulspam]

PETER HITCHENS: I keep telling you that Russia isn't strong. This stupid, brutal war has proved it.

I shall never see it again now but I always loved a particular quiet, modest street in southern Moscow.

For once, there were no gigantic buildings or tower blocks, just low, graceful old houses, trees and churches, especially one movingly called ‘The Consolation of All Sorrows’ which, I expect, is pretty full just now.

There, you could – just – believe that the old, kindly Russia, raped and murdered by Communists, might one day come back. How I wish it could have done.

That belief is all gone now.

Yet for years, I thought I owed that hope to the people I had known and liked in Russia, where I spent two of the most astonishing years of my life.

Living in a foreign country, especially a remote and exotic nation, is a great gift. For the rest of your life it informs everything else you ever see or feel. I am stuck with that now. I am forced to care about Russia and the Russians.

I don’t ask you to do the same, only to understand that it is, to me, a duty. And if you think, as some spiteful people do, and have said, that I do all this because I am in Russian pay, or a Putin supporter, or because I am not a British patriot, then you are terribly mistaken.

Generations of my family have faced real danger in the Armed Forces. My father (who hated Stalin and all his works) ferried tanks to the Soviet Union on the terrible Murmansk convoys, pausing on the way to help sink a German battlecruiser.

My daughter served with the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards as an Intelligence officer, in a forward base in Helmand, in Afghanistan. Her husband, my son-in-law, fought the Taliban face-to-face and was wounded in combat. I am impossibly proud of them all.

The truth about patriotism, by the way, is that you feel it far more intensely if you have lived abroad than you do if you have not. And I find the thing about those who have actually faced danger is that they are the least noisy, and the most genuine, about their love of country.

I say what I say about this conflict – especially that Western stupidity helped to bring it about – because I believe it to be true.

I also say it because my forebears fought, among other things, for my freedom to say what is unpopular. So I would be betraying their legacy if I did not use that freedom.

I will not dwell on it. The important thing at the moment is to stand against the wild hysteria that is raging among us.

It is almost funny that music by Peter Tchaikovsky has been removed from a concert because he was Russian. But it is not funny when individual Russians are shunned, as one hears they have been.

It is genuinely tragic when sanctions are imposed which will, as usual, ruin the lives of the poor while doing little to harm powerful villains. And it is deadly serious when unthinking hysteria grips politics and the media.

Too many people think that it is somehow noble and good to call for more war, more weapons and more fighting. Have they seen war? This conflict must end at some point. For those caught up in it, the sooner it ends the better.

I had the bizarre experience last week of being attacked for not being compassionate enough, by one Kelvin Mackenzie, who was the editor of The Sun newspaper during its not-very-compassionate ‘Gotcha’ period. Too many people seem to find war attractive.

More serious still are continuing calls to widen the war with ‘no-fly zones’ and other unhinged follies. If your concern is (as it should be) for the innocent Ukrainian victims of the war, give and do all you can to help them.

But do nothing to extend or prolong war, for the longer and deeper the war is, the more people will die and be maimed.

Do not forget the most basic rules, that the first casualty of war is truth and that the only mercy in war is that it ends quickly. Resist attempts to get you to stop thinking.

Perhaps the single biggest thing we have learned from this attack is that Russia is (as I have long argued) not very big, not very rich and not very strong. Its army cannot achieve its aims.

Putin has, without meaning to, destroyed the Russian bogeyman which we have been told to fear for so long. It would be good if somebody learned something from that, but I don’t suppose they will.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10606263/PETER-HITCHENS-telling-Russia-isnt-strong-stupid-brutal-war-proved-it.html

[Wonderfulspam]

From a much longer article, written by a Ukranian who presumably knows a bit more about his country than Hitchens, Starkey or any of the “sages” on this forum:

“Journalists from different countries call me and they all ask the same question: “What is the reason for this war?” The answer is both very simple and quite complex.

Putin has been repeating the mantra for 20 years: “Ukrainians and Russians are one people.” What he actually means is “Ukrainians belong to Russia”. The Ukrainians do not agree with this. He has also publicly said many times that his greatest personal tragedy is the collapse of the Soviet Union. But for most Ukrainians, this was not a tragedy. This was a historical chance to become a European country and regain independence from the Russian empire.

Now that President Putin has aged dramatically in self-imposed isolation during the pandemic, he has decided that he wants to live on in Russian school history books as the leader who was able to re-create the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire, within its former borders. He has no other ambitions. He does not need money — there are no currency exchange offices or expensive restaurants in the afterlife.

He needs Ukraine, Belarus and, I think, other territories that were previously part of the USSR or of the Russian empire. He wanted Russia to be feared and he achieved this. He wanted total political control over the Russian Federation, and he succeeded. A huge country with a one-party system and a destroyed opposition. Like the Soviet Union. Now he denies that Ukrainians are a separate people.

The Ukrainians never had a tsar and were never ready to obey any. The Russians, who lived for centuries in a monarchy, on the contrary, loved their tsars. Sometimes they killed a tsar, but then they would adore the next one. Loyalty to a new monarchy remained in the Soviet era. Of the six general secretaries of the Communist Party of the USSR, only one was fired — Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian. Mikhail Gorbachev aside, the others remained leaders of the Soviet state until the day of their death. In the time that Putin has ruled Russia, Ukraine has had five presidents.


Ukrainians are individualists, egoists, anarchists who do not like government or authority. They think they know how to organise their lives, regardless of which party or force is in power in the country. If they do not like the actions of the authorities, they go out to protest. Therefore, any government in Ukraine is afraid of the street; afraid of its people.

Russians loyal to their authority are afraid to protest and are willing to obey any rules the Kremlin creates. Now they are cut off from information, from Facebook and Twitter. But even before they believed the official TV channels more than the news from the internet.

In Ukraine, about 400 political parties are registered with the Ministry of Justice. This only once again proves the individualism of Ukrainians. Not a single nationalist party is represented in the Ukrainian parliament. Ukrainians do not like to vote for either the extreme left or the extreme right. Basically, they are liberals at heart.

In the 1920s and 1930s peasants were sent to Siberia and the Far East as a punishment for not wanting to join collective farms. Ukrainians are not collective, everyone wants to be the owner of his own land, his own cow, his own crop. Looking at this history, they can safely say: “We and the Russians are two different peoples!”

Now, the Ukrainian army is successfully defending the country. Ukrainians are accustomed to freedom and value it more than stability. For Russians, stability is more important than freedom.

Ukrainians have never accepted censorship. They have always wanted to say and write what they thought. That is why almost all Ukrainian writers and poets of the 1920s and the 1930s were shot by the Soviet authorities. A whole generation of writers of that time is now called the “executed revival”.

If Russia succeeds, another executed generation of Ukrainian writers and politicians, philosophers and philologists may appear, all those for whom life without a free Ukraine does not make sense. I consider myself one of these people, as are many of my friends.


It is scary to write the following words, but I will write them anyway: Ukraine will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all. Then they will write about it in European history books, shamefacedly hiding the fact that the destruction of Ukraine was possible only with the tacit consent of Europe and the entire civilised world”.

Andrey Kurkov is the author of Death and the Penguin. His most recent novel is Grey Bees (Quercus)

I wonder if he thinks they'll be taking Crimea & the eastern regions back any time soon?

Those are Zelenskeys stated aims.  Could be a slight problem with that, might well lead to the 'not existing at all' scenario, failing surrender by Russia it's WW3.

I don't think it will come to that, at least I hope not.

But there's going to need to be a compromise somewhere. Like I said before, short of splitting the country down it's eastern side, it's going to be protracted war.

What a lovely time to be alive.

[Vertigo Swirl]

I expect supporters of the Russian military invasion must be delighted at the prospect of 100,000 or more refugees arriving in this country any day now.  This is Putin's gift to you and your country, more refugees for you to moan about and despise. 

[Wonderfulspam]

I expect supporters of the Russian military invasion must be delighted at the prospect of 100,000 or more refugees arriving in this country any day now.  This is Putin's gift to you and your country, more refugees for you to moan about and despise.

I know, not more bloody foreigners, but at least they are white, so that's one positive I suppose.

[G-Unit]

From a much longer article, written by a Ukranian who presumably knows a bit more about his country than Hitchens, Starkey or any of the “sages” on this forum:

“Journalists from different countries call me and they all ask the same question: “What is the reason for this war?” The answer is both very simple and quite complex.

Putin has been repeating the mantra for 20 years: “Ukrainians and Russians are one people.” What he actually means is “Ukrainians belong to Russia”. The Ukrainians do not agree with this. He has also publicly said many times that his greatest personal tragedy is the collapse of the Soviet Union. But for most Ukrainians, this was not a tragedy. This was a historical chance to become a European country and regain independence from the Russian empire.

Now that President Putin has aged dramatically in self-imposed isolation during the pandemic, he has decided that he wants to live on in Russian school history books as the leader who was able to re-create the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire, within its former borders. He has no other ambitions. He does not need money — there are no currency exchange offices or expensive restaurants in the afterlife.

He needs Ukraine, Belarus and, I think, other territories that were previously part of the USSR or of the Russian empire. He wanted Russia to be feared and he achieved this. He wanted total political control over the Russian Federation, and he succeeded. A huge country with a one-party system and a destroyed opposition. Like the Soviet Union. Now he denies that Ukrainians are a separate people.

The Ukrainians never had a tsar and were never ready to obey any. The Russians, who lived for centuries in a monarchy, on the contrary, loved their tsars. Sometimes they killed a tsar, but then they would adore the next one. Loyalty to a new monarchy remained in the Soviet era. Of the six general secretaries of the Communist Party of the USSR, only one was fired — Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian. Mikhail Gorbachev aside, the others remained leaders of the Soviet state until the day of their death. In the time that Putin has ruled Russia, Ukraine has had five presidents.


Ukrainians are individualists, egoists, anarchists who do not like government or authority. They think they know how to organise their lives, regardless of which party or force is in power in the country. If they do not like the actions of the authorities, they go out to protest. Therefore, any government in Ukraine is afraid of the street; afraid of its people.

Russians loyal to their authority are afraid to protest and are willing to obey any rules the Kremlin creates. Now they are cut off from information, from Facebook and Twitter. But even before they believed the official TV channels more than the news from the internet.

In Ukraine, about 400 political parties are registered with the Ministry of Justice. This only once again proves the individualism of Ukrainians. Not a single nationalist party is represented in the Ukrainian parliament. Ukrainians do not like to vote for either the extreme left or the extreme right. Basically, they are liberals at heart.

In the 1920s and 1930s peasants were sent to Siberia and the Far East as a punishment for not wanting to join collective farms. Ukrainians are not collective, everyone wants to be the owner of his own land, his own cow, his own crop. Looking at this history, they can safely say: “We and the Russians are two different peoples!”

Now, the Ukrainian army is successfully defending the country. Ukrainians are accustomed to freedom and value it more than stability. For Russians, stability is more important than freedom.

Ukrainians have never accepted censorship. They have always wanted to say and write what they thought. That is why almost all Ukrainian writers and poets of the 1920s and the 1930s were shot by the Soviet authorities. A whole generation of writers of that time is now called the “executed revival”.

If Russia succeeds, another executed generation of Ukrainian writers and politicians, philosophers and philologists may appear, all those for whom life without a free Ukraine does not make sense. I consider myself one of these people, as are many of my friends.


It is scary to write the following words, but I will write them anyway: Ukraine will either be free, independent and European, or it will not exist at all. Then they will write about it in European history books, shamefacedly hiding the fact that the destruction of Ukraine was possible only with the tacit consent of Europe and the entire civilised world”.

Andrey Kurkov is the author of Death and the Penguin. His most recent novel is Grey Bees (Quercus)

Is it simply a case of choosing who you think knows the most and adopting their perspective? I think it's more a case of examining all the information you can from many different sources and forming your opinion from all that.

The Ukranians may not have had a tsar, but they are Cossacks and at times they fought for the tsars of Russia. Their warlike history and their pride in it perhaps explains the men's willingness to fight.

[Vertigo Swirl]

Is it simply a case of choosing who you think knows the most and adopting their perspective? I think it's more a case of examining all the information you can from many different sources and forming your opinion from all that.

The Ukranians may not have had a tsar, but they are Cossacks and at times they fought for the tsars of Russia. Their warlike history and their pride in it perhaps explains the men's willingness to fight.

The simple fact of the matter is that 80+% of the people of Ukraine do not wish to be ruled by Russia, or to have their country destroyed by them.  As you are a supporter of Brexit and the democratic process you should be firmly on the side of the people of Ukraine and their government but still I get the sense that you are sympathetic to the Russian position?  Once again I find your logic and thought processes inconsistent and somewhat baffling.  It's almost as if being a contrarian and adopting a view contrary especially towards those you have developed an antipathy about on this forum directs your opinions on this and other matters.   That's the impression I get anyway. 

[Wonderfulspam]

You're right, they want independence.
Although they don't actually get independence.
What they really get is absorbed into the US sphere of influence.
Which means being an existential threat to Russia (from the Russian perspective).
So, it's either genuine neutrality with no EU or Nato involvement, or war.

If they hadn't rushed to throw Yanukovich out of office when he'd already agreed to leave there might have been room for diplomacy 8 years ago.

But now we are where we are.

[Vertigo Swirl]

So it looks like Putin is going out of his way to provoke NATO into joining the war.  We are all doomed. 

[G-Unit]

So it looks like Putin is going out of his way to provoke NATO into joining the war.  We are all doomed.

No matter what Putin says, the only way NATO will join in is if Russia attacks a NATO country imo.