[JohnRawls]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqSIqnsXv1c



Not sure how posting live footage that someone recorded showing Western taxpayers money going up in flames amounts to "fake news", but okay. Here's the Ukrainian woman who recorded the footage, who was forced to apologise for it after it destroyed the kind of propaganda you promote, which ranges from "it didn't happen" to "it's not a big deal anyway"

She got visited because she is showing launch sites and other sensitive information. It doesn't show patriot getting hit though. As usually you suck Putins dick just because you dislike the West and think that even a million deaths of innocent people is worth it for even a grain of damage to the West or well Ukraine for the matter right now.

My advise, if you want to change something then find a better system to build a society. Russian model ain't it. The West is on top is because the Western model is just superiors for a human to what the Russians offer or anybody else for that matter right now.

[skinster]

British warmongering is driving Europe towards catastrophe in Ukraine
From lobbying for fighter jets to supplying depleted uranium, the UK is making sure escalation is the only way forward

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia.

What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.

Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow.

At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.

Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.

British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory.

And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.

Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too.

A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.

Lip service
Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.

During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets.

Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.

Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine.

After a highly staged “surprise” visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said he had been given a “flat reassurance” that the jets would not attack Russian territory.

British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks.

‘Rightful place is in Nato’
No 10 has made clear that Sunak’s purpose is to build “a new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets” and that the prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”.

These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out against Nato’s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.

It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia’s neighbour.

Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base that first set Moscow on course to invade.

At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine.

This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record £8.5bn, more than double last year’s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.

Risk to health
Europe’s weapons largesse is, we are told, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise “Ukraine will fall in a matter of days”, he said.

Borrell’s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine’s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.

And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on – among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia’s borders too – may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.

In March, Declassified broke the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kyiv are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants.

Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party has said it “fully supports” the UK government’s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.

DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified that the ammunition produces “chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people”.

Nonetheless, British ministers insist the threat to human health is low – and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks.

Cancer deaths
As Declassified has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.

Italian courts have upheld compensation claims against the country’s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU.

Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.

In 2001 Tony Blair’s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy’s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a “moral obligation” to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.

The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.

Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.

The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported to suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs.

In 2018 the British government reclassified a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier.

Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.

But as Weir told Declassified in March: “None of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.”

In other words, they simply don’t know – and possibly don’t care to find out.

Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.

British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe – as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.

However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson told Declassified that, despite the British government’s assertions, DU was no longer an “active area of policy research”.

Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian that soldiers and civilians in Iraq “were in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.”

At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society’s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.

Voices silenced
By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.

First, it is driving the war’s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.

Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a “dirty bomb”.

In March Putin responded to the UK’s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move “tactical” nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said it put the world “fewer and fewer steps” away from “nuclear collision”.

But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.

Russia struck a military ammunition depot in western Ukraine, creating a giant fireball. Rumours suggested the site may have included British DU shells.

Whether true or not, it is a reminder that Moscow could hit such a storage site, intentionally or accidentally, spreading contamination widely over a built-up area.

With Ukraine soon to be in possession of a full array of offensive weapons, largely courtesy of the UK – not only long-range drones, cruise missiles and tanks but fighter jets – it is not hard to imagine terrifying scenarios that could quickly bring Europe to the brink of nuclear conflict.

Moscow hits a DU ammunition depot, exposing a large civilian population to toxic contamination. Ukraine retaliates with air strikes deep inside Russia. The path to a nuclear exchange in Europe has never looked closer.

Those who warned that peace talks were urgently needed rather than an arms race in Ukraine are looking more prescient by the day. For how much longer can their voices continue to be silenced, not only by western leaders but by the western media too?
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/bri ... ing-europe

[Godstud]

The West is not working towards a peaceful resolution. They only want to ramp up the war. The money's too good. Ukraine/Russia will be utterly destroyed before this ends. That's the goal.

[JohnRawls]

The West is not working towards a peaceful resolution. They only want to ramp up the war. The money's too good. Ukraine/Russia will be utterly destroyed before this ends. That's the goal.

We will achieve a peaceful resolution by force since Russia doesn't understand any other way. You also trying to blame the West which is nuts. Russia attacked Ukraine and West didn't attack Ukraine.

[Rugoz]

The West is not working towards a peaceful resolution. They only want to ramp up the war. The money's too good. Ukraine/Russia will be utterly destroyed before this ends. That's the goal.

Maybe you should ask yourself what Ukraine wants you fuckwit.

[Godstud]

@Rugoz I am sure Ukraine wants the war to end and them to retain their country. I said nothing to the contrary, that would warrant childish insults. At what point is Ukraine destroyed so much that the only thing that matters is peace? I see the loss of life matters nothing to you.

[Rugoz]

@Rugoz I am sure Ukraine wants the war to end and them to retain their country. I said nothing to the contrary, that would warrant childish insults. At what point is Ukraine destroyed so much that the only thing that matters is peace? I see the loss of life matters nothing to you.

Ukrainians know very well that if they want to retain their country, they have to defeat Russia militarily. If they think the loss of life is not worth it, that's their decision, certainly not mine or yours. Our lives are not on the line.

[ingliz]

Maybe you should ask yourself what Ukraine wants you fuckwit.

Why, when the lesser powers do not decide such things?

Anyway, a poll...

Country
1.
2.
3.

1. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine needs to stop as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine giving control of areas to Russia

2. Western dominance of the world needs to be pushed back, even if it means accepting Russian territorial aggression against Ukraine

3. Ukraine needs to regain all its territory, even if it means a longer war or more Ukrainians being killed and displaced


India
54
12
30

Turkiye
48
8
27

Russia
44
29
5

China
42
12
23

EU9
30
5
38

Great Britain
22
4
44

United States
21
6
34


The remainder of respondents answered "None of the above," "Don't know," or provided no answer to the question.
Source: Datapraxis and YouGov (DK, FR, DE, GB, IT, PL, PT, RO, ES), Datapraxis and Norstat (EE), Gallup International Association (US, CN, TR, RU, IN), December 2022/January 2023.

— ECFR, United West, divided from the rest: Global public opinion one year into Russia’s war on Ukraine

[Rugoz]

Why, when the lesser powers do not decide such things?

Ukraine absolutely does decide whether to continue to fight or not.

Stupid weasel.

Anyway, a poll...

The poll is shit because the options are made-up garbage. Ceding territory will only invite more aggression.

[ingliz]

Ukraine absolutely does decide whether to continue to fight or not.

Without Western aid, Ukraine is fucked.

China, Saudi Arabia, The Pope, etc. are pushing for a peace deal.

Trump has already said he will turn off the tap.

Europe is dithering under a cost-of-living crisis (Big words and fuck all else).

The UK does what it's told.

[Rugoz]

Without Western aid, Ukraine is fucked.

It still decides whether to stop fighting or not. The West can make the decision to stop too, but it should not.

As I've already said, Admin Edit: Rule 2 Violation

Europe is dithering under a cost-of-living crisis.

Yeah totally. I live in Europe. What a crisis.

[ingliz]

I live in Europe

The European Union's annual inflation rate was 8.1% in April 2023.

The UK's, 8.7%.

[litwin]

[Beren]

Don't worry guys, sooner or later there'll be peace again and we'll have a good old-fashioned cold war the Russians will definitely win as usual, especially with Putin and his lackeys' superb leadership you can never get tired of.

[JohnRawls]

Without Western aid, Ukraine is fucked.

China, Saudi Arabia, The Pope, etc. are pushing for a peace deal.

Trump has already said he will turn off the tap.

Europe is dithering under a cost-of-living crisis (Big words and fuck all else).

The UK does what it's told.

1) Ukraine would fight anyways without Western Aid.
2) USA is not planning to turn the tap off even if a Republican gets elected. Only like 1/5th of the Republican party is for that. The other 4/5ths are pro arming Ukraine.
3) Even if, by some magic miracle, all countries besides Eastern Europe, Baltics and Northern Europe abandon Ukraine then our economy and capability is still larger than Russias. Long Story short, we have more money and resources compared to Russia. And Eastern Europpe, Baltic states and Northern Europe will not abandon the support under ANY circumstances. I would add Belgium and Netherlands here also. (Russian shouldn't have destroyed that plane)

[skinster]

We will achieve a peaceful resolution by force since Russia doesn't understand any other way.

This comment is not rooted in reality. This could possibly occur if NATO/US put armies on the ground but they're more into Ukrainians losing their lives for the war orchestrated by the US.

You also trying to blame the West which is nuts. Russia attacked Ukraine and West didn't attack Ukraine.

Incorrect. Watch and learn:

Maybe you should ask yourself what Ukraine wants you fuckwit.

US/NATO don't care about what Ukrainians want. I imagine about close to 100% of Ukrainians in the parts where war is happening want the war to end immediately. But "to the last Ukrainian" is the MO of US/NATO.

Also, calling people names who disagree with you is quite childish. If you're having this kind of emotional response from people who aren't warmongers like you, maybe you should get offline until you feel better.

Ukraine absolutely does decide whether to continue to fight or not.

Stupid weasel.

Ukraine does not. The US and NATO are running the show and making the decisions. Zelenskyy isn't running the show in Ukraine either, if anyone is before him in Ukraine is, it's neonazi gangs who threatened him against ending the war in his own country. Remember, he ran for election as president who was going to have good relations with Russia.

Yeah totally. I live in Europe. What a crisis.

Yes, it is a massive crisis. Heating bills increased so much that people were choosing between heating or eating last winter, and they increased because of this war. You might be comfortable though, so good luck with that, maybe complain less given those circumstances.

[JohnRawls]

This comment is not rooted in reality. This could possibly occur if NATO/US put armies on the ground but they're more into Ukrainians losing their lives for the war orchestrated by the US.



Incorrect. Watch and learn:

US/NATO don't care about what Ukrainians want. I imagine about close to 100% of Ukrainians in the parts where war is happening want the war to end immediately. But "to the last Ukrainian" is the MO of US/NATO.

Also, calling people names who disagree with you is quite childish. If you're having this kind of emotional response from people who aren't warmongers like you, maybe you should get offline until you feel better.



Ukraine does not. The US and NATO are running the show and making the decisions. Zelenskyy isn't running the show in Ukraine either, if anyone is before him in Ukraine is, it's neonazi gangs who threatened him against ending the war in his own country. Remember, he ran for election as president who was going to have good relations with Russia.



Yes, it is a massive crisis. Heating bills increased so much that people were choosing between heating or eating last winter, and they increased because of this war. You might be comfortable though, so good luck with that, maybe complain less given those circumstances.

Like most social economic professors says, Mersheimar it is easy to say and suggest what he says living in Chicago I believe and not Helsinky, Kiev, Warshaw, Tallinn.... So fuck Mersheimer delusions and fuck his idiotic ideas.

[skinster]

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

[Beren]

I'm actually surprised that that video wasn't posted earlier. If my understanding is correct he basically says great powers virtually do and should be allowed to do as they wish in their neighbourhood, so it just sucks to be in their neighbourhood and it's Ukraine's turn now as it was Georgia's, Cuba's, etc. earlier.

[noemon]

I'm actually surprised that that video wasn't posted earlier. If my understanding is correct he basically says great powers virtually do and should be allowed to do as they wish in their neighbourhood, so it just sucks to be in their neighbourhood and it's Ukraine's turn now as it was Georgia's, Cuba's, etc. earlier.

It has been posted before and pretty much that basically.