Ukrainians aren’t the only ones worried about giving up too much in peace talks.
Putative talks over a potential peace deal between the two countries led to an outcry among a vocal core of Russians against anything other than Ukraine’s unconditional surrender.
When you drink so much of your own Kool-Aid that your teeth rot and fall out.
Kind of an apt metaphor.
Knee jerk reaction is to mutter under my breath “Republican.”
From the article at the Beast:
Even as Putin signed the decree on Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released an intercepted call said to capture a Russian soldier railing against the incompetence of his own army.
“Our brigade has totally shit themselves. There are losses, many wounded,” he tells his wife.
Asked if the losses are a result of someone screwing up, he offers a blunt response: “The whole army with us is stupid morons.”
“It’s unclear why we are even here,” he says.
Another recording shared by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, captures a man identified as a Russian soldier named Maksim asking his mother what is being shown on Russian television, and if there are reports “they’re saying they will change anything.”
“Everything’s bad, almost no one among us is left. They said we will keep going until the very end, until everyone is killed,” he tells his mother.
Asked if his senior officer was still with the unit, he replies: “No, he dumped us yesterday. We’re all dead in the water if he left.”
[Strelkov quote] “I express doubt that, having lost the golden month, the first month, our forces will be able to encircle and destroy the Donetsk grouping of forces,” he added.
Wait, is he … discrediting the Russian armed forces??. Ain’t there a new law about that?
[Korotchenko quote] And a new Nuremburg trial for the main Ukrainian war criminals.
Proposal accepted. But not the way you think, bucko.
Time to mobilize the pundits and pensioners brigade. Don’t forget the sunflower seeds!
These people would make great Republicans; they believe any lie they are told.
Unwilling to compromise? Gee, that sounds awfully familiar!
Have you noticed you never see Igor Strelkov and Tucker Carlson in the same room at the same time?
I guess the ultra nationalist types are always willing to fight to last conscript as long as he isn’t their kid.
Let’s face it, the Russian Army is getting its head handed to it because it just isn’t very good at modern war. Oh sure, they can bomb civilians but an actual battle requires a whole lot of coordination and leadership that is simply beyond the Russian military. As long as the west continues feeding weapons to the Ukrainians the war will continue to be a meat grinder for Russian kids.
Juliane Fürst is the head of the Communism and Society department at the Centre of Contemporary History at Potsdam
Excerpts:
At the heart of the crisis in Russia, both then and now, is a profound generational conflict. An older elite, with values rooted in the past, has been pitched against a younger demographic keen to advance a different national identity. Putin’s regime will not be toppled by the young, just as the Soviet Union did not collapse because of Beatlemania. But young Russians are already hollowing out the very ground on which he stands.
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During the first decade of the 2000s, young people flocked to Putin, the Orthodox Church and regime-conformist youth organisations such as Nashi in an attempt to find an alternative to the dominance of western commercial culture. Since 2011, young people have made up the backbone of protest movements that follow the strategies of Soviet dissent, relying on performances and happenings (most famous among them Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin prayer), art, music and media creations, and the carving out of personal pockets of freedom.
Right now, the state’s repressive pressure is so high that mass demonstrations have virtually ceased to take place. In official opinion polls, about half of under-30s in Russia are opposed to the war, with many others avoiding the question. The escapism of the late Soviet period has translated into an exodus of many young Russian intellectuals to the west and neighbouring countries.
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Young feminist women have emerged as one of the driving forces of organised resistance. Young IT workers are building up new businesses in former Soviet republics. Young journalists are writing out of Riga, Tallinn and Berlin. When Putin’s regime eventually does end, a small alternative Russian world will already exist. And then historians will write about the kernels of change that were first detected at the height of Putin’s rule.
Exactly!
Nationalists are all insane, because they always value imaginary goods over human lives.
That said, these psychos are especially ripe because their argument is basically, “we’ve committed such atrocious war crimes that we can’t possibly allow any part of Ukraine to continue to exist, because it will become the basis of a motivated anti-Russian resistance.”
In other words, “our crimes are too motivating to stop criming.”
Heard a scrap of economic news on the radio last night, heading home. Said that the Black Sea region, so mostly Ukraine and Russia, accounts for about 80% of the world’s sunfower oil production.
So guess what else is about to get more expensive…
Getting a lot of russian fertilizer, should be a bumper crop this year.
No good if you can’t harvest, process, or export it. A lot of that went by ship.
I sold everything that ran on sunflower oil a few years ago.
I guess I was too clever… Was meaning russians as fertilizer.
I know. But even in the most ghoulish “bumper crop” scenario, if your crops are rotting in the field right alongside the dead conscripts, then the only winner is entropy. (Narrator: “It always is.”)