Ukraine Conflict - Alle Dinge unterliegen Interpretation je nachdem, was Interpretation zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt herrscht, ist eine Funktion der Macht und nicht die Wahrheit

[Elerond]

1 hour ago, Darkpriest said:

@Elerondi believe that US itself killed the Memorandom as not legally biding, but more of a political commitment way before 2014 as it was justifying actions against Belarus. 

Although the Memorandum is not legally binding, we take these political commitments seriously and do not believe any U.S. sanctions, whether imposed because of human rights or non-proliferation concerns, are inconsistent with our commitments to Belarus under the Memorandum or undermine them

 

I can't comment on the UN part and any other agreements, as I have no knowledge on those and really no time to look for some well composed summary of those. 

 

US uses often same approach towards international agreements as Russia, meaning that if they don't like one they don't follow it.

Countries could complain to UN where US and Russia use their veto powers to kill such complaints.

EDIT:  There is no police which enforces international law, it gets enforced only when other countries decide to enforce it. Same goes to all international agreements.

“Where is the security that the security council needs to guarantee? It’s not there, although there is a security council. So where is the peace? Where are those guarantees that the United Nations needs to guarantee?

It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.” -Zelenskiy

Edited April 28, 2022 by Elerond

[Zoraptor]

4 hours ago, Malcador said:

Would be interesting to see what non-unilateral sanctions look like.

UN sanctions aren't unilateral since- at least in theory- the sanctioned party is obligated to obey them as well.

4 hours ago, Elerond said:

US and EU acted according to Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances which Russia has also signed

Sigh. Haven't we done this exact same thing before?

(0) it's not a treaty and no one has treated it as if it were (1) even if it were a treaty the EU is not a signatory and (2) the US (and UK, ie the actual western signatories) abrogated the memorandum as well, to whit parties should "Refrain from using economic pressure on Belarus, Kazakhstan or Ukraine to influence their politics"

Just say it's against the UN Charter, using the Budapest Memorandum  as if it means anything is reddit tier.

And really, I'm going to have to start charging people for reading international agreements and correcting them.

2 hours ago, 213374U said:

Daily reminder that "US officials assert" =/= evidence.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-using-declassified-intel-fight-info-war-russia-even-intel-isnt-rock-rcna23014

Nice easy way to tell if you're being fed propaganda: if you replaced 'unnamed US official' with 'unnamed Russian official' how much weight would be given to it? If you're not even willing to put your name to something it's 90% chance it's bollocks. Especially when they're mutually contradictory at least half the time:

(1) US officials insist Russia is running out of precision munitions like cruise missiles, since week 1 (2) Russia is also using cruise missiles to indiscriminately but specifically target non military targets just to cause civilian casualties.

You can believe one, or the other, or neither; but not both.

Though there's a kind of amusement watching the sort of people who think all Russians are braindead and lack critical reasoning proceeding to believe and repeat without question everything they're told by their governmental officials.

[xzar_monty]

7 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

Though there's a kind of amusement watching the sort of people who think all Russians are braindead and lack critical reasoning proceeding to believe and repeat without question everything they're told by their governmental officials.

Do you see this happening, though? Where have you seen unquestioning acceptance of any government officials?

[BruceVC]

16 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Do you see this happening, though? Where have you seen unquestioning acceptance of any government officials?

@Zoraptor

Yes, I agree with Monty. Have you seen this happening? 

[bugarup]

Also, if unnamed American official tells me that orc horde is murdering soldiers who try to surrender, you bet I'm gonna fully ****ing believe it, and it has nothing to do with anonymity of American or whatever other country's official, but because of previous behaviour of the horde. 

[Lexx]

More bomb traps: https://tsn.ua/en/ato/boobytrapped-milk-carton-primed-with-bomb-was-given-to-grandmother-by-russian-soldier-in-kherson-the-woman-miraculously-survived-photo-2048860.html

Edited April 29, 2022 by Lexx

[xzar_monty]

28 minutes ago, Lexx said:

More bomb traps: https://tsn.ua/en/ato/boobytrapped-milk-carton-primed-with-bomb-was-given-to-grandmother-by-russian-soldier-in-kherson-the-woman-miraculously-survived-photo-2048860.html

There is no limit. Here's an earlier and a more wide-scale example. There can be no trust in the Russians.

https://www.newsweek.com/evacuation-route-offered-fleeing-ukrainians-mined-1685418

[BruceVC]

https://europeanwesternbalkans.com/2022/04/28/putin-stabbed-a-knife-into-serbias-back-tabloids-turn-against-russian-president-for-the-first-time/

@Sarex It looks like Mother Russia has betrayed Serbia, it was inevitable so dont feel bad 

Hopefully this will end these pro-Russia protests that concern me immensely that I have been seeing in Belgrade. Its not a good way to join the EU to support Putins War 

 

[xzar_monty]

24 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

Hopefully this will end these pro-Russia protests that concern me immensely that I have been seeing in Belgrade. Its not a good way to join the EU to support Putins War

Essentially it will come down to a choice between Russia and the EU for Serbia. And therein lies a problem of sorts: if Serbia wants Russia, it will be very happily accepted, but if it chooses the EU, there's no certainty that it will be accepted.

[Zoraptor]

3 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Do you see this happening, though? Where have you seen unquestioning acceptance of any government officials?

When it comes to Ukraine it happens pretty much everywhere, and for everything.

The US even admitted that it was releasing low confidence intelligence- ie stuff they either suspect or know is garbage- and it still gets repeated acritically (I mean, that's literally in the article numbersman linked). But hey, I'm sure those 2 Il76s Marco Rubio swore were full of paratroops and got shot down really did, despite there being literally no evidence of them for 2 months and all the others being brought in by helicopter...

(I gave the example of the cruise missiles but of course I only used two parts of that and there actually is a 3rd- their failure rate is super duper high. So not only have they run out of them yet are shooting them at homes for orphaned bunny rabbits but the Russians have managed to selectively fire working ones at said kitten hospitals. Extra bonus if the evidence for the high failure rate provided is... a smersh rocket engine, which isn't meant to explode)

Edited April 29, 2022 by Zoraptor

[xzar_monty]

2 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

When it comes to Ukraine it happens pretty much everywhere, and for everything.

The US even admitted that it was releasing low confidence intelligence- ie stuff they either suspect or know is garbage- and it still gets repeated acritically (I mean, that's literally in the article numbersman linked).

What you say here does not sound convincing. You originally spoke about "the sort of people who think all Russians are braindead and lack critical reasoning proceeding to believe and repeat without question" the stuff presented by their own government officials.

When certain media publish this stuff, it does not imply belief, although I do agree that simple repetition of it does not look very convincing, either. But we are talking about certain media, we are not talking about "everywhere" and "for everything". Interestingly, the war has highlighted the quality of various media outlets and the lack of quality in various other media outlets. Your original point that I objected to, the one that gets repeated in the paragraph above, may carry some weight in the sense that there probably are people like that (there are all kinds of people), but I haven't seen evidence of this phenomenon being noticeable.

[BruceVC]

19 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

When it comes to Ukraine it happens pretty much everywhere, and for everything.

The US even admitted that it was releasing low confidence intelligence- ie stuff they either suspect or know is garbage- and it still gets repeated acritically (I mean, that's literally in the article numbersman linked). But hey, I'm sure those 2 Il76s Marco Rubio swore were full of paratroops and got shot down really did, despite there being literally no evidence of them for 2 months and all the others being brought in by helicopter...

(I gave the example of the cruise missiles but of course I only used two parts of that and there actually is a 3rd- their failure rate is super duper high. So not only have they run out of them yet are shooting them at homes for orphaned bunny rabbits but the Russians have managed to selectively fire working ones at said kitten hospitals. Extra bonus if the evidence for the high failure rate provided is... a smersh rocket engine, which isn't meant to explode)

Nah, Im not convinced either. Basically you dismissing accurate and credible Western\Global reporting because of some misinformation

This use to be good way of handwaving Russia war crimes and military ineptitude before Putins War but no one really believes that anymore or takes it seriously. We see the truth everyday 

 

[Mamoulian War]

Yes, I've seen a lot of bollocks in Western media as well, but comparing it to Russian media bollocks is like comparing sex with your partner, with sex with your hand... Some of you really are forgetting, there here on this forums are people who lived during the Soviet Occupation of some Eastern European countries, and that we have experience with Soviet/Russian soldiers and propaganda from the first hand. So we kind of know, what is bull**** and what is true. And yes, this also means we can see through the Western **** as well. My family for example was since 1950s on the blacklist of Communists and Soviet collaborators. If someone says, that Russia is forcefully evicting Ukrainians from their homes, I know it is highly plausible, because my own family was forcefully evicted from Eastern Slovakia to Czech Republic by them, because my grandad refused to convert his religion from Greek Catholic to Russian Orthodox. He ended up in jail, and died very soon after his release, with autopsy report showing the signs of manipulation... Members of my family, because of that were not allowed to study on Universities for decades, and some of them were forced to work in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_auxiliary_battalion  , therefore the reports of Russians trying to forcefully conscript Ukrainian men into Russian army are also very highly plausible... And I could continue with more and more real life examples from my own family, to further prove my point... Yes, I understand, why you all might doubt some reports against Russian behaviour, because you're lucky to never experienced anything similar before, but some of us unfortunately had the bad luck of having that experience, and from the talks with some of our Russian colleagues at work, when they get some courage to speak out, after few shots of vodka, the things in Russia had not changed much, since Stalin's death...

[Chilloutman]

Yea I am from kulak family so I know

[xzar_monty]

Here's a salient and worrying point: some of the anti-western attitude in the west comes from the fact that people have had it too easy and don't know of anything else. It is an interesting fact of life that if everything is too comfortable, people can turn into whiners who lose perspective. Not pointing this at anyone on this forum, but the phenomenon is there.

Once you've had experience of a society where dissidents are actually and actively hunted and killed, or where people are randomly carried away and never seen again, you get to appreciate the divide between such a society and "the west" a lot more. (And yes, this has recently happened in Argentina, Chile, Spain and other places, too, not just Russia. But Russia has a particularly long history of it, and it still goes on.)

[BruceVC]

@Mamoulian War and @Chilloutman

Mamie and Chill do you guys speak the same language? And then because you use to  be one country do you have strong cultural  and historical ties?

 

Edited April 29, 2022 by BruceVC

[Chilloutman]

Slovaks are product of Hungarians shagging monkey...

[BruceVC]

4 minutes ago, Chilloutman said:

Slovaks are product of Hungarians shagging monkey...

Somehow I find that hard to believe 

[Mamoulian War]

49 minutes ago, BruceVC said:

@Mamoulian War and @Chilloutman

Mamie and Chill do you guys speak the same language? And then because you use to  be one country do you have strong cultural  and historical ties?

 

We do not speak same language, but most Czech and Slovaks can understand each other, if they try The language is similar, but if you try, it can be said about most of the Slavic languages. Our strongest ties are based on the times, when we were a single country, but before WW1, we had completely different history. Czechs were part of Austria and Slovaks were part of Hungary during Austria-Hungary monarchy. I think, the closest to each other were Czech and Slovak intellectuals during these times, and thus they managed to convince Entente, that Czechoslovakia is a good thing. I have absolutely no clue, how a common people were thinking about this union of two somehow different nations.

46 minutes ago, Chilloutman said:

Slovaks are product of Hungarians shagging monkey...

Shoot, and I thought, our secret is safe

[Gorth]

Thinking back to the 80's (when the cold war was hot), I mostly remember Czechoslovakia as the source of Skoda and Ice Hockey players

 

[majestic]

My great-grandmother used to tell tales of how it was being caught between the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and Tito's Partisans way back in World War 2. My grandmother and her brother (the latter who is still alive) also told tales of their wonderful childhood. Starvation, death camps, watching former neighbours shooting each other because they were the wrong ethnicity. People losing their livelihood and their life's work over being not German enough, or too German... fun stuff, all in all. Special military operations certainly bring out the best in people.

[Malcador]

4 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

What you say here does not sound convincing. You originally spoke about "the sort of people who think all Russians are braindead and lack critical reasoning proceeding to believe and repeat without question" the stuff presented by their own government officials.

When certain media publish this stuff, it does not imply belief, although I do agree that simple repetition of it does not look very convincing, either. But we are talking about certain media, we are not talking about "everywhere" and "for everything". Interestingly, the war has highlighted the quality of various media outlets and the lack of quality in various other media outlets. Your original point that I objected to, the one that gets repeated in the paragraph above, may carry some weight in the sense that there probably are people like that (there are all kinds of people), but I haven't seen evidence of this phenomenon being noticeable.

Go browse Reddit or Twitter, you'll see lots.  Or maybe just people that only watch stuff like CNN or MSNBC, etc.

[Mamoulian War]

A week or two old interview with ukrainian soldier at Dnipro, unfortunately I am not able to find the link anymore, but it is somewhere at the Twitter of the author. Because of that, it is a google translation from transcript of the interview in Czech language.

 

 

"British military author David Patrikarakos had a short interview with Dima, a Ukrainian soldier at Dnipro. 
It's like World War II, just with modern technology. 2014 was compared to this playground.
Our biggest ally is corruption in the Russian army and their military nature. A Russian soldier reports to his superior, "It's not good, but we're sticking." He, in turn, reports to his superior "we are holding on." he will say to his superior "it's going well!" And that's exactly how Putin doesn't know what it really looks like.
No one believed that war would really break out. Because you need a numerical renumbering of at least 2: 1 for an offensive operation. Today, everyone sees that they do not have a numerical advantage. It's a complete madhouse. Sometimes you play poker with the wrong cards, but Russia plays completely without cards.
What shocked me the most is the lack of interest of Russian soldiers in their friends. In Mariupol, Russian soldiers have lunch in ruins just a few meters from the decomposing bodies of their comrades, and they are not bothered at all. After all, the bodies of dead comrades are thrown into a trench and sometimes they don't even bury them. We once found a mass grave of fifteen Russian soldiers that was covered with only a few inches of clay. How can they respect civilians when they have no respect for each other. That's unbelievable.
Nobody understands their tactics. There is a small military airport in Chernobayivka, which the Russians have tried to conquer seventeen times, but we have always repulsed them, and they are still coming in the same numbers in the same direction! A friend asked me if they were really that stupid and I said no, they just had incompetent leadership and were unable to think individually. They just obey orders, no matter how crazy they are.
Chechens? Ha-Ha! We call them TikTok Soldiers! They're still filming on social networks. They were given top equipment to look good in photos and videos, but they don't play much in the fights. We once captured a wounded Chechen and he took a selfie instead of trying to fight. Absolutely bizarre!
Their job is not primarily to engage in combat, but to catch Russian conscripts who do not want to fight. As in the Soviet Union.
One thing I have to say. Musk's Starlink is what tilted the scales in favor of us. From the beginning of the invasion, the Russians largely paralyzed our Internet, which they can no longer do. Starlink works even under the sharpest artillery fire and works even in Mariupol.
They still use Soviet doctrine, which was obsolete thirty years ago. But the modern battlefield has changed, we have studied a lot of NATO's military operations in Afghanistan and Israel's military tactics.
The Russians are still trying to attack on a mass scale, and our job is so simple: to destroy as many targets as possible. But we have limited resources, so we must be creative.
It is quite easy to recognize the guerrilla action and the Russian operation under a false flag (false flag operation). The guerrillas are attacking critical infrastructure, the Russians are simply bombing something unimportant to them. would they attack important targets for them? Not in a million years.
I know you British have complicated relationships with your Prime Minister Johnson, but here Boris Johnson is something of a national hero.
NLAW missiles are clearly the best. They are easy to use, you just aim to shoot and destroy. Without them, we would not destroy so many Russian tanks. And speaking of tanks, we've captured more than 100, so we have more tanks than at the beginning of the invasion. We in the unit have one joke that Russia is our largest arms supplier."

https://twitter.com/dpatrikarakos

 

Edited April 29, 2022 by Mamoulian War

[Malcador]

2 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Here's a salient and worrying point: some of the anti-western attitude in the west comes from the fact that people have had it too easy and don't know of anything else. It is an interesting fact of life that if everything is too comfortable, people can turn into whiners who lose perspective. Not pointing this at anyone on this forum, but the phenomenon is there.

Ah, more psychology and passive aggressiveness.  What's worrying about this, though? Considering how nebulous "anti-West" can be, they might have a point. 

 

4 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

but here Boris Johnson is something of a national hero.

For this, Russia must triumph.

[BruceVC]

15 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Go browse Reddit or Twitter, you'll see lots.  Or maybe just people that only watch stuff like CNN or MSNBC, etc.

Malc you mustn't consider either Reddit or Twitter to be credible sources of information for most topics

They tend to become ideological battlegrounds for the radical left, far-right and other extremist  groups. Of course their is always some truth in these platforms but its inconsistent and should rather be avoided