Does the cost of the war in Ukraine exceed the benefits?

Genocide? Are you in the right thread?

 

Mike, people who listen to the news say all kinds of weird things.

 

I dunno... in all my long life I've cannot recall a single instance of where or when Ukraine ever did anything of measurable benefit to the United States. To be honest, there are at least a couple of dozen countries around the planet that just honestly don't mean much of a damn thing to me, and Ukraine is one of them. I have nothing against Ukraine, or any of the rest of them, but, honestly they're of no importance to me, a taxpaying citizen of the United States....

Now... if Russia ever threatens NATO countries, we can counter that fairly well. We can blockade the Gulf of Finland going into St. Petersburg, and, we can blockade the Bosporus Straits (cutting off the Black Sea from the Mediterranean Sea). We can blockade Murmansk by cutting off shipping to it through the Barents Sea

And Vladivostok? It's thousands of miles away from Moscow, way over on the Pacific coast with no connection to the rest of Russia but a very long, very vulnerable railway. No... Russia doesn't want to even think about ****ing with NATO. And, in all honesty, I don't think their 'beef' with Ukraine was ever really about NATO in the first place.

So... hopefully this quarrel between oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine can come to a conclusion -- SOON.

 

Here's the bit people who started tracking the Ukraine conflict on Feb 24 2022
or after don't believe, not only did the conflict begin in Feb 2014,
but it was started by the US.

 

But if you watch the main stream news you'll get confused.
I don't watch the news per se but clips come up in the Left column of my screen
and here are two I just saw a minute ago:

The Irish times claiming Putin was alarmed by something a Ukrainian diplomat said,
and one by an English paper stating Russia would destroy Ukraine.

How can they both be true? This is why I ignore the news feeds.

 

Aha , so now, you don’t agree with your own post #272. In that post you said because the West violated “ minks agreement” , Putin attacked Ukraine.

Now it is not about Minsk agreement but some Black Sea port since 1783 and “maidan revolution”.

Yea, I got it, Putin just find excuse to attack the west and Trump and his minion want to bow before Putin the Great.

“this is not our problem”. yea , American said the same thing in 1939 When Germany attacked Poland, American said the same thing when Germany attacked Czechoslovakia.

Just because you don’t know the name of the President of Romania doesn’t mean Romania is insignificant. It’s says your world is much smaller then rest of us.

 

well ....

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

it seems like some American no longer lives in ""Land of the Free, Home of the Brave"".

 

What are some of the differences you see between the 2 parties in governing the nation?

 

Google: Russia genocide Ukraine

Ukrainians know what will happen if they surrender.

 

The limits of Russian nihilism are being tested.

Macron Vows Troops If "Ukraine Requests Or Front Breaks ...
News18
15 minutes ago
https://www.news18.com/videos/world...advance-rattles-french-president-8876811.html

 

Is Macron-led France an example of a paper tiger?

 

Your inaccuracy in recalling the relevant chronology of events is concerning... Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 AFTER the "Maidan Revolution", although, as I have since pointed out, it had a standing agreement with Ukraine to keep the Russian Black Sea Navy Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042. The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015 would have ameliorated the mounting tensions between all concerned parties, but, in retrospect it has been revealed that we in "the West" never intended to honor the negotiated terms and conditions of those agreements at all. As former German Chairman, Angela Merkel guilelessly let slip in December 2022, "the West" was just buying time for Ukraine to prepare for war! Link: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html

Now, you want to 'shift gears' and: fast-forward to today? Fine! I'll repeat what I asked before in my Post #261... that prior to 2014, Ukraine was of no importance or significance to the United States at all. You may believe that all this post-Maidan "altruistic sentiment" is worth an unending flow of billions upon billions of American dollars' worth of weapons, ammunition, and dozens of other kinds of "stuff", but many of us do not share that view....

Lastly, I say again that Russia is not threat to NATO, and surely nobody knows that better than Vladimir Putin! Re-read my Post #303 and you'll get a glimpse of why that is, including the fact that now NATO also includes both Sweden and FINLAND (which has an 830-mile-long border with its arch-enemy, Russia).

Russia is conspicuously vulnerable in the areas I mentioned, but it has a commanding logistics advantage in Ukraine, specifically! It will eventually take over nearly every part of Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, but it won't 'attack NATO'.

 

I know you don’t see difference between the two party , so I won’t waste my time telling you.

 

You say Russia is no threat to NATO.

Yea , I will take your word over last 80 years US foreign policy.

You just hold your breath, I am going to agree with you soon.

 

I'm not sure I would call it cowardice for someone to be skeptical of dying in nuclear hellfire for a cause, and country, that is not their own.

 

I'm not going to bother to Google something so stupid.

 

The Soviet Union was definitely a threat to NATO prior to about 1990, but primarily due to Reagan's innovative exercise of power, massive amounts of spending to get the U. S. out of the "post-Vietnam" doldrums, and amazing recovery of our economy from the "Stagflation" decade, the Soviet Union literally imploded shortly after Ronald Reagan's final term as our president.

Today, Russia has one main asset to guarantee its survival -- nuclear weapons. But, as I said, it has a LOT of vulnerabilities which could be surprisingly easy for a powerful adversary to exploit.

Afterthought: even if the Kiev oligarchs just gave Putin the eastern half of Ukraine, it would be a huge drain on the Russian economy to get that "Donbass" sector back in a productive, 'normal' state again. Indeed, doing that would probably hurt Russia far more than all these "sanctions" we've put on Putin's government for all these years since 2014....

. Here ya go, Vlad -- it's all YOURS!

 

I am not naive enough to think Vlad will be content with Ukraine. If we let him have Ukraine without a fight, he would want to park his tank next to Eiffel tower.

 

That's the Putin = Napoleon scam. US govt tested it on audiences and found they understood it
and liked it and believed it.

It belongs with the Scopes Trial
Scopes Trial, also called the ‘Monkey Trial,’ highly publicized trial that took place July 10–21, 1925, during which a Dayton, Tennessee, high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, was charged with violating state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

 

I would never ask you to research something that was not relevant to the issue at hand. You should know that respect your input and always look forward to reading your posts even on the few occasions when I disagree with you.

"The Ukrainian Genocide
"In the case of the Holodomor, this was the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were producers of food of their nourishment (for survival). What is especially horrific is that the withholding of food was used as a weapon of genocide and that it was done in a region of the world known as the ‘breadbasket of Europe’.” – Prof. Andrea Graziosi, University of Naples.

An Introduction
In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher)."
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor

This why Ukrainians will not surrender to Russian occupation.
Does this mean that your concerns about corruption, war profiteering and the risk of a nuclear exchange are invalid? No.

 

The Russian Federation formed in 1991 when it took it's independence
from the USSR, the same month as Ukraine left the USSR.

 

You're talking about the Holodomor? That has zero to do with the current war. Now are you claiming that Russia is trying to commit genocide now? If not, how does the Holodomor relate to this topic?

 

Russia's genocide in Ukraine has everything to do with the Ukrainian reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

1. https://www.bbc.com › news › world-europe-66031337
   Ukraine war: Russia executed 77 civilians detained by its forces ... - BBC
   Jun 27, 2023Russian forces summarily executed 77 civilians they had arbitrarily detained during Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, a UN report says. Another male detainee died from torture, inhumane conditions and ...
   • A mass grave was found outside a church in Bucha. Ukraine has started a war crimes investigation after bodies of civilians were found strewn on the streets as Russian troops pulled out of areas ... A satellite image of Bucha in Ukraine appears to show bodies lying in the street nearly two weeks before the Russians left the town. The image from 19 March, first reported by the New York Times ...
2. https://www.ohchr.org › en › press-releases › 2022 › 12 › un-report-details-summary-executions-civilians-russian-troops-northern
   UN report details summary executions of civilians by Russian ... - OHCHR
   Dec 7, 2022UN report details summary executions and attacks on individual civilians by Russian troops in northern Ukraine from February to April. KYIV (7 December 2022) - In the initial weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian armed forces summarily executed or carried out attacks on individuals leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, the Head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in ...
   
   
3. https://www.cnbc.com › 2022 › 10 › 28 › russia-ukraine-war-un-report-details-accounts-of-rape-torture-and-executions.html
   UN report: Accounts of rape, torture and executions by Russian troops
   Oct 28, 2022UNITED NATIONS — A report commissioned by the United Nations this month found Russian forces in Ukraine committed an array of war crimes, including summary executions, torture, rape and other ...
   
   
4. https://www.nytimes.com › 2022 › 05 › 19 › world › europe › russia-bucha-ukraine-executions.html
   New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers Executed Men in Bucha
   May 19, 2022A courtyard execution. Two Russian soldiers took Mr. Skyba and the remaining captives to a courtyard on the side of the building, where the body of another dead man was already lying, Mr. Skyba ...
   
   
5. https://apnews.com › article › un-human-rights-torture-civilians-russia-ukraine-29e238cf0ec6a2e6a25bfd260bf5e93b
   UN report finds Russia tortured, executed civilians in Ukraine; Kyiv ...
   Jun 27, 2023BERLIN (AP) — Russian forces carried out widespread and systematic torture of civilians who were detained in connection with its attack on Ukraine, summarily executing dozens of them, the United Nations human rights office said Tuesday. The global body interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of ...

 

"Russia's genocide in Ukraine has everything to do with the Ukrainian reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "

None of your new stories have anything to do with the Holodomor or any current "Genocide." Nor, do they have anything to do with "the Ukrainian reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

If that is supposed to be proof that Russia is currently committing genocide in Ukraine, I would say it's a failure.

 

They did it once, and they are conducting mass executions of civilians and POWs now.
Proof that Ukrainian fear of genocide are fully justified.