darkcalling @ darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml

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5 yr. ago

Not actually true. A lot of Russian arms sales, especially for more advanced stuff beyond guns and simple rockets (e.g. s-300, vehicles and craft) come with a written contract not to transfer to another party without authorization from Russia.

I know this because Russia was howling about some Latin American country recently (Ecuador) which had a bunch of Russian equipment considering sending it to the US where it would then be sent on to Ukraine in exchange for some US equipment and Russia was claiming it was a violation but of course they were pretty powerless to stop it. The most Russia can do in most cases of violation is simply refuse to sell to those people again but if you're already taking US arms and stuff and maybe siding with the evil empire then that doesn't matter much to you or your growing bank account with CIA deposits as a leader.

Link: https://www.rt.com/news/592712-ecuador-reverses-ukraine-arms/

Moscow had slammed the plan, saying that it would be a violation of contracts to transfer military equipment to a third party without Russia’s consent. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Ecuadorian media that Quito had made “a rash decision” under outside pressure.

Global south buys from Russia because Russia and formerly the Soviet Union has been their friend while the US and Europe their oppressors. Russia also offers better value.

We still need to take bets on when the first real mainstream use of the word "tankie" happens and in what context. Will Trump or one of his surrogates decry Biden as a tankie? Will some lamestream media person CNN say it on primetime about either real communists, liberals, or even the more reactionary elements? Perhaps some blithering liberal tool will call Trump one. Or perhaps some zionist shill will accuse all of the pro-palestine marchers of being tankies. In fact the last one seems slightly more probable to my mind though it'll likely occur on a more reactionary network like Fox because CNN and such like to pretend there are no marches or support for Palestine while Fox has an interest in hyping the idea of domestic Hamas because their audience is incredibly naive and credulous and will believe they're coming over the southern border.

They're a vassal. One that likes to pretend to be more progressive than the US. And this is probably happening because the US realizes they can't keep a lid on the situation. With that British ship attacked and put in danger of sinking things are getting beyond the point they find acceptable so in go the vassals.

This Gaza situation is probably the most valuable opportunity of our lifetimes to show that all bourgeois democracy is a sham, that despite the people of Europe not wanting a genocide, not wanting to support Europe and the same with Democratic voters not wanting a US Democratic admin to support it, they're doing so anyways with paper thin excuses.

"Future" being the key word. All this is telling the Russians is that they have to finish this. Even if they just keep shelling an enemy that's otherwise given up the conflict must legally continue forever or until Russia's security is satisfied.

In my opinion these treaties are little but a way to attempt to delude the Ukrainians into thinking they'll actually get into NATO and that the west actually cares about them so they continue to throw bodies against the Russians as fodder.

Anyways this says nothing. Military assistance as deemed proper basically is what it says, it says they get a conference with these nations and the nations may if they deem it appropriate give them military gear, intelligence sharing, slap sanctions on Russia basically everything they've been doing so far but again at a future date. It offers no iron-clad commitments that they'll pour troops into Ukraine. That's certainly the threat and they -could- end up doing that in future based off this given Ukraine couldn't win on its own. Then again they could ignore it, send token assistance, or back down and run away.

There's no issue in that instance but he doesn't approach it from a Marxist point of view clearly. It's good he didn't shit on the USSR there yes but we shouldn't misunderstand what type of a person he is and his political philosophy. He started his political life very naive and to some extent he still is compared to even your average poster here who understands deeply the irredeemable and uncompromising nature of the white supremacist capitalist west and it's imperialist system and how it cannot be reasoned with, bargained, with and under what principles it operates and what it operates in service to.

I was just stating how I think he views it and is trying to sell it and probably how Tucker perceives it.

Putin is a clever, intelligent person. He know who Tucker's audience is, he knows he's not speaking to some vast movement of communists in the west but to isolationist reactionaries, paleoconservatives, etc and he's tailored his messaging for this. It's not that different from his own base of traditionalist reactionary conservatives in Russia so it's not that hard.

Putin is not a communist and even if he were, his job in an interview like this would not be best served by defending the image of the USSR. I did find it interesting he mentioned at one point in his historical monologue at the start (first 30 minutes) how he'd looked in the Soviet archives and found the communist party was sincere and honest in its approach to other nations in the period around the Great Patriotic War (WW2). He omits bothering to speculate (or chooses not to for the sake of his audience) on motives of the USSR multiple times, simply putting it down as Lenin did this for reasons and Stalin did this for reasons and so on.

It is interesting as he mentions Stalin he says claims of crimes under him rather than just straight up saying crimes but there is something to be said that Stalin is very popular in Russia even today and bad-mouthing him, even in a foreign media press may go against ingrained instincts he's since developed. Still, more fair to Stalin than just about anyone in the west could be.

As to the OP mentioning, "I like how Putin clarified that Soviet Ukrainianization and indigenization of other areas of the USSR was not a bad policy in principle" I think this is best read as reactionary nationalist stuff. Basically that people of a culture should stick together, that there's a duty to blood there, to preserving culture, to a commonality. You hear the same stuff from many reactionary thinkers.

Edit: At about 38 minutes mark Tucker asks Putin about how US presidents seemed to be open to something then after talking to their cabinets and CIA, changed their tune, Tucker asking if this means basically that the elected US presidents aren't really running the show (deep state narrative) and Putin agrees cautiously with this and then moves on.

Edit2: At 1hour, 23minutes he tells Tucker that it is to his own detriment (US detriment) that they are limiting cooperation with China.

Edit3 At around 1h 32minutes Putin mentions a hypothesis that power centers/think tanks that specialized on the Soviet Union after it's break-up continued their jobs, he mentions specifically their desire to engineer the break-up of Russia and subjugation of its component pieces in order to use their resources against China.

Also just to get back to the very start of the interview, he tells Tucker he's going to give some background and tells him it will take a minute, 90 seconds and proceeds to talk about it for half an hour, lmao. I guess it is nice they didn't cut that.

While I assume they probably won't do anything, I genuinely am worried this time might be different and they might push into western Ukraine and sit rear-guard between Russia and Kiev which is an escalation, and declaration of war on Russia but one that invites Russia to fire the first bullet against them while they get to claim they were just sitting there peacefully.

Because in truth, growing up in the US and even becoming a Marxist for some time I was kind of ignorant of the full meaning and scope of these war games. I assumed them to just be posturing and a way for the defense industry to get paid for munitions in peacetime, but in reality in many places like occupied Korea, they are literally moments, an order away from crossing the line into a full on attack and invasion if intelligence suggests the enemy is no longer paying full attention and they think they have a good chance of killing the leadership and cutting off communications.

But I really do tend to doubt they will escalate at this point with the situation elsewhere unless they're really gunning for a new world war.

Oh sorry. But someone here did say it is not what they want to be called. So it’s a kind of disrespectful way of addressing them.

I wonder if they'll just call them Houthis in the document and people can get around it by pointing out they donated to Ansar Allah not this non-existent figment of the west's imagination.

Curious how ISIL changes its name to ISIS and the western media obediently complies with correctly naming it within months yet how long have they been in power and the media insist on using a slur for them? Almost like maybe they're not a tool of western power while ISIS is....

Fuckers. Murderous thugs. I hope they are able to defend themselves. Down with the zionist occupation! May genocide Joe suffer utter humiliation.

This post is bad. The way it's phrased might lead some liberals and others to assume Ukraine isn't fascist when in fact it is ruled by a fascist government that worships Hitlerite collaborators.

He was not killed for what you claim. He was killed because he was one of the few westerners in the country telling the truth about it, about its military failures, corruption, and making negative predictions about it. He was denied consular services or assistance by the US that would have saved him not because he was a fascist and the US state department detests those, but because Victoria Nuland is a monster and wanted him shut up permanently for undermining their narratives among especially the global right about how great Ukraine was.

Happy birthday comrade!

Russia has vowed punishment for the western actors who helped plan or supply weapons for this act.

Escalation danger continues to exist and I worry what the neo-cons puppeting Biden around will do if faced with any kind of slap to the face or humiliation as they're already freaking out about losing Ukraine in an election year.

Also we should be careful and not quick to accept western bourgeois propaganda press and their version of events. Let us not forget how dishonest they are and this is their dishonesty plus the plausible deniability of just repeating whatever the Kiev regime says, so if later it comes out that it isn't true, they're off the hook completely.

Here is RT on the incident, no less credible:

https://www.rt.com/russia/589951-ukraine-kill-civilians-un/

Ukrainian air defenses kill civilians – Moscow

*Rather than intercepting Russian missiles, Kiev’s Western-provided systems hit apartment blocks, Russia’s envoy to the UN said *

Ukrainian air defense missiles were responsible for civilian casualties during Russia’s recent bombardment of Ukrainian military sites, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, claimed on Friday. Were it not for the “Nazi regime’s” malfunctioning missiles, there would have been no civilian deaths, Nebenzia added.

Russia unleashed a wave of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine in the early hours of Friday morning. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the “massive” barrage targeted defense industry sites, military airfields, arms depots, and troop positions, including concentrations of foreign mercenaries.

Ukraine claimed that 30 civilians were killed and 160 wounded in the attacks, and Kiev called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council in response. During the meeting, Britain’s permanent representative to the UN, Barbara Woodward, accused Russia of targeting civilians and stated that there would have been fewer casualties if Ukraine had more air defense systems.

“It is hard to imagine greater cynicism,” Nebenzia responded. “But for the work of Ukrainian air defenses, there would have been simply no civilian casualties.”

Nebenzia showed the Security Council video footage of a burning missile falling onto an apartment block in Kiev. “An impact missile does not fly at such a speed and along such a trajectory,” he explained. “Obviously, this is the consequence of the work of Ukrainian air defense.”

Another photo shared by Nebenzia showed a residential building in Lviv peppered with small craters, caused by the submunitions that air defense missiles – when working properly – expel in order to detonate incoming missiles mid-flight.

“The Nazi regime is ready to kill not only the inhabitants of Donbas with Western weapons and the same air defense missiles, but also kill its own citizens in their homes,” he declared.

Ukraine’s air defense batteries – a mix of Soviet-era and Western-provided systems – have malfunctioned in this manner on countless occasions during the conflict, most notably when a Ukrainian missile veered off course into eastern Poland last November and killed two farmers.

Ukraine responded to Friday’s barrage by firing banned cluster munitions at civilian targets in the Russian city of Belgorod on Saturday, killing at least 18 people, including two children. Russia has called an emergency meeting of the security council, and has insisted that the Czech representative attend, as Czech rockets were allegedly used to deliver the deadly munitions.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that the “criminal” attack on Belgorod “will not go unpunished.”

Interestingly enough I remember earlier in the conflict someone did an analysis that showed a Ukrainian apartment block they claimed Russia hit could only have been hit by Ukrainian air defenses so this would not be the first time. We must also remember the Polish provocation where two Poles in Poland died after a munition landed, Ukraine immediately blamed Russia and hopped up and down for Article 5 and Poland responding but it turned out it was one of their own anti-air missiles and it was swept under the rug there-after.

Almost like Hamas has legitimate grievances against invading fascist settlers as do the Russians. Almost like Hamas' situation being put in a small, very dense urban area with no choice but to fight out of it is different from the choices the Ukrainians make in where to locate their air defenses and other strategically important things. Almost like every accusation a confession from the west and their pawns.

Shameful for a user on this site to take this kind of ignorant stance. Do better.

I'd point out Ukraine already kills Russian civilians. Already conducts terrorist attacks and feels fully justified in doing so because they are blood-thirsty, monstrous fascists being pushed to do something for the even stronger fascists their US masters. You have liberals in the US calling all Russians orcs, celebrating Russian tourists being killed in shark attacks. Ukraine is already fully unhinged, fully committed to terror tactics and will grow so even more so as their conventional forces fail and evaporate as the US demands punishment on Russian bodies and they don't give a fuck if those bodies are civilians or not. The propaganda for dehumanizing Russians has already reached its zenith, it can't go higher. They've staged false flag massacres, claimed all kinds of atrocities committed by Russians in areas they briefly occupied, and the western imagination does the rest.

More propaganda is not needed. If civilians were not incidentally killed, they would stage fake massacres as in 'Bucha' (sp?) or wherever that was. It's in other words irrelevant to propaganda.

Stop spewing liberal propaganda. You'd think people here would know better by now. There is no evidence Russia deliberately targeted civilians.

We know from the past that Ukrainians deliberately park military assets near civilian infrastructure like schools, malls, etc so even if the maternity center and kindergarten aren't lies it's very likely they were hit incidentally after the Ukro-nazis used them as shields with the deliberate intent of making sure Russians killed civilians so they could sob about it.

The whole war is a bad thing. Fascists seizing power in 2014 is a bad thing, the break-up of the Soviet Union was a bad thing, etc.

But I'd like to point out that with Ukraine's "fall of Berlin" level of mass conscription, Russian soldiers firing on Ukrainian soldiers is killing people who were only recently civilians and didn't choose to be on the front lines but were kidnapped and put there with Neo-Nazi blocking units (and US supplied intelligence and overwatch) preventing them from fleeing their posts. And these are people who have for months, a year been prevented from fleeing the conflict zone by their own government desperate to keep canon fodder around by shutting the borders, thus placing them in danger. Obviously you probably wouldn't say that's as wrong as civilians being incidentally killed in missile strikes but both were chosen by the Ukrainians not the Russians who desperately, with all their might and vigor tried to find peace out of this even if it meant not getting all their goals repeatedly but were rejected in favor of being bled in an attempt to destroy and humiliate Russia and its people.

The blood of any dead Ukrainian civilians (including those pressed into uniform for use as canon fodder) is not the fault of Russia but of the US and the fascist puppet leadership in Kiev and I will continually point this out and scream about this mischaracterization which is in fact regurgitating western propaganda. The blood is entirely on their not Russian hands. In a strategy where the flailing puppet regime is demanded by it's American masters to fight to the last Ukrainian it's an unusual situation.

I feel badly for the Russian soldiers who've died and I feel badly for the Ukrainian conscripts (to a lesser degree given they watched fascism rise and did nothing or abetted it), but this happens in war against these types. A war Russia did not choose. A war they gave multiple off-ramps to. A defensive war against imperialist aggression and encroachment by swastika and SS symbol sporting fascists as the tip of the NATO spear aimed at Russia's belly.

Important to note these people technically are not CIA agents (they wouldn't get a star on Langley's wall after death) they're ASSETS. Basically Chinese who have betrayed their own people, are not formal employees of the CIA but may be paid money (including very large sums) or given/promised favors, blackmailed, or recruited to pass secrets on the basis of ideological (anti-communist) or more often personal grudge grounds (a belief they've been unfairly passed over for promotion, a belief their talents aren't recognized enough by what they see as incompetent people above them).

Still good they were shot in full view as an example but these were just recruited traitors, they received some training most likely but assuming there are no issues with supply of greedy/resentful people and no counter-espionage problems, they are the type who could be fully replaced by anyone else in their position to have access to classified or sensitive info within months instead of the years it takes for agents who are far more valuable.

Some of them may have been handlers for others and even fairly important as jumping-off points for networks of people they drew info from but I doubt they put any stars on their wall over this. (Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong but the CIA tends to use native peoples as disposable and doesn't consider them worth mourning as anything but an annoyance to having to replace their cog function in the machinery)

Rooting them out like that is good on China, as or more important is making sure replacements cannot be recruited. Unfortunately the US uses very powerful technical means of surveillance (electronic espionage, bugs, tempest attack type stuff, plus of course their vast global communications intercept net, hardware implants put into strategic network and computer devices, and advanced malware and hacking campaigns to lurk and spy) so they likely still have some great deal of insight and I personally believe they're intentionally over-hyping the damage lack of human-int sources in China has had on intelligence gathering.. Sure it's probably had an impact, it probably limits their ability to spy on Xi and other top officials and know their movements, inner thoughts, best classified plans, etc, but I'm sure there are still plenty of holes as though Xi's anti-corruption drive has been tough and thorough I doubt it's gotten all the rats.

What they may be really upset about is their ability to have chances to color revolution/coup China by using insiders they control has greatly diminished. And that was always the highest threat of these types. CIA maneuvering to get liberal counter-revolutionaries into high party positions and to steer the country to letting go of the commanding heights, to allowing more liberalization, to letting western propaganda in, to making missteps, etc which over time would rot at the foundations and lead to a crisis that could be exploited as happened with Yeltsin.

What's great about that is they also have the gall to insult and roll their eyes at Republicans screaming about "stolen elections" which is just the flip side of their "Russian/Chinese disinfo altered the election" coin. And of course if you dig into the Republican claim, part of it is usually predicated on "Dems used massive amount of undocumented immigrants to swing the vote" which is just another kind of racist "foreigners are changing our elections" in the exact same vein where it matters as the Dem's Russophobia and Sinophobia.

But please ignore the zionist lobby's open interference including candidates openly thanking them for their endorsements and openly pledging as a platform plank their support for the apartheid state.