PhilipTheBucket

Yeah. I'm just talking about his character on a personal level, not about the danger he represents on a factual level. Other people who have much stronger character set up solid systems which are terrifyingly effective, and now this brain damaged child is in charge of a lot of them. It's not a good situation.

Yeah. It's a fucking disgrace.

Read "Sky Over Kharkiv" for some generally excellent picture of the war from the Ukraine perspective, with some occasional bitterness about the cowardice and apathy of all the Western allies about helping Ukraine to any pivotal extent.

Dan Ellsberg also had some great writing about how this all functions from the POV inside the Western military machine. He called it "the stalemate machine": We're motivated enough to help you not lose, but not motivated enough to let you win. And so, you just keep dying, month after month and year after year.

Yeah, I'm just coming in this thread and saying totally weird counterfactual nonsense, just kind of anything that serves the narrative I am trying to portray. It doesn't even have to make sense.

Ukrainians are mostly killing foreign mercenaries, prison conscripts, and the elderly surplus population?

Yeah! That's in "The Art of War," right? You're supposed to send your "elderly" and other random dregs you can dig up first to fight a critical war. And then, once you've depended on all those "surplus" people for several years, you move on to your trained troops, the actual military. Obviously. It's just part of the Russian mastery of military strategy that meant they ~~took over the country in three days~~ ~~slowly pushed forward and got the mission accomplished and went home in a few months~~ ~~fought a Pyrrhic victory over the space of a year and a half and then negotiated a partition and then started rebuilding and preparing for next random invasion of some neighbor country~~ got stuck at the border for years, ruined their economy and any respect their military or kit might have had on the world stage, and are now scrounging around for any possible military-age males they can lay hands on to keep feeding into the grinder, hoping that if they keep it up long enough, it'll work.

I have more to say about the rest of your ridiculous message, but I don't think it's really necessary.

Unfortunately, they're outnumbered by more than an order of magnitude. They're getting ground down as time goes on, and for all its stupidity the Russian military is not small or fragile. Basically, the Russians only have to win once to win, Ukraine has to survive every month that goes by, time after time.

The good guys don't always win. Just ask the Palestinians.

Unlike in Vietnam, I'd say "they're trying to kill us all and take our home, but we're killing them instead" is a pretty good model of success for the Ukrainians.

It would be great if they had other options. Hanging Putin and demobilizing everyone, and rebuilding both countries, would be a great start.

Yeah, Reddit is super weird. There are a bunch of rabidly pro-Israel people who have infiltrated its world news communities in exactly the way that some Lemmy people love to imagine that they have done on Lemmy.

They've killed about a million Russians so far, and held the invasion a few hundred km from their border. I'd call that something they can do about it.

They have the luck ("luck") of the entire first world funding them to defend against Russia, instead of Gaza where it's 100% the opposite, so they're not in the horrifying situation the Palestinians are in. Which I'm sure frustrates Russia to no end.

For the Israelis, it's working out great. They allow just enough violence to happen to justify "retaliation," i.e. doing what they wanted to do anyway, which is seize land and kill Palestinians.

I highly doubt that it would work well for Russia though. I mean, the Ukrainians will never agree to anything like this, the only reason it even works in Palestine is that Israel has tons of money/technology support from the first world to do whatever they want on the ground and the Palestinians have 0. In Ukraine the equation is 100% the opposite.

It's pretty clear that this is normal Russian strategy of talking gibberish with a straight face to distract and cause commotion. No one aside from a few dozen idiots on Lemmy actually believes that rejecting imaginary deals like this makes it Ukraine's "fault" that this is happening because Russia "wants peace." I think the whole point is just to degrade the concept of diplomacy as a useful activity, in favor of bullets and bombs which are more Russia's wheelhouse historically.

Yeah, you broke the code.

Can't imagine why any Ukrainian person wouldn't be on board for that. "Peace!" That sounds great, why don't you like peace?

(Actually they pretty much did that in 2014 already. The details were a little different, but absolutely they were organizing ethnic Russians trying to violently seize control of the government in Ukrainian areas, and then they sent the Russian army to "protect" them when the Ukrainians started objecting and shooting back.)

He is absolutely weak. "When small men cast long shadows" type of thing. ☹️ Like I said, it doesn't mean he's not very very dangerous...

On the other hand, he's an absolute fucking moron.

Trump is the fascism vaccine: He is the weakened form, so the system can learn about it, recognize it, and respond with no fuckin' around when it happens for real.

I'm not saying he is not dangerous. The camps are going up right now, and people packing into them every day. I'm just saying compared to what he could have been, we might have some kind of chance. Or I hope so at least.