Been offline a while, just got bored of Diablo and VPNing to Asia to play PUBG and barely turned the PC on.
Where's Lvivz? Did Ukraine finally resort to conscripting obese people and send his Nazi ass into a trench in Bakhmut?
Not much discussion of things in the past ten or so pages, so short recap of things I think are relevant to the war:
1
The whole situation around Merkel claiming that Minsk was hashed out only to buy time for Ukraine to tool up deserves a lot of attention, for a lot of reasons.
First off, she's lying - she's not half that cunning or devious. What happened is that she, like every other European politician and liberal, thought that America would honour Minsk (preposterous) and that Ukraine had the sovereignty available to act in it's own best interest. The latter is an obvious blind spot, because all of Europe is in the same situation, finding itself perpetually unable to act in their own best interests, or even rhetorically defend themselves when their Wonderful Ally America bombs their pipelines. Once you understand the depth of ideological capture by America, you can understand their inability to understand Ukraine's own relation to sovereignty.
Second, the paucity of reporting on this in Western media is amazing. If you look through google news for articles on the topic, there was almost no reporting among the biggest outfits until Putin responded to the comments, which obviously opens up the avenue to something wholesome and reflexive for Western media, which is relentless poisoning of the well of Russia. Even then, pieces on it are very few. NYT hasn't mentioned it, WaPo hasn't mentioned it, etc. Meanwhile, the story is wild on foreign press. Another example of the complete disconnect between Western leaders and Western 'journalists' and the rest of the world.
2
The IAEA still refuses to admit that Ukraine is the party shelling the ZNPP. Minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but yet another example of how thoroughly compromised all Western-based institutions are. IAEA, the UN, even the fucking World Cup are too immature and petty to just act like the people they're talking to aren't baby-brained morons.
3
With the dramatic withdrawal of Kherson done and in the rear view, I'd say we're back to the story of the rest of the war, which is Russia just methodically destroying the Ukrainian/NATO army. But that's not quite true, because even Western accounts of what's been happening over the past couple weeks are starting to prep the ground for things such as the fall of Bakhmut, and giving 20% honest accounts of what's been happening there, which is when you know things are going pretty bad for the side sporting wolfsangels and sonnengrads. Hospitals are overflowing with wounded AFU, schools are being turned into hospitals and those are overflowing. Very likely we see 15,000 dead soldiers for this city, which we're already starting to see some Western 'experts' describe as strategically unimportant (again, that's how you know they're losing very badly).
It's not just Bakhmut, though. Last time I was on this site, Lvivz was posting about the imminent fall of the Russian line in the Kreminna-Svatovo direction, but now Russia is pushing back in that direction. Also making small territorial advances around Marinka and Vremivka.
4
Oil price cap. What's there to say? Europe never learns. If the first dozen rounds of sanctions didn't work, maybe lucky 13 will do it, yeah?
Ridiculous hare-brained scheme that will not possibly work out, can't wait to see exactly how the backfire will manifest but here's my prediction: America gets richer, Europe gets poorer, Russia does just fine. Like everything else that's happened.
This post was edited by kusotarre1 on Dec 11 2022 08:55pm