"All of Vlad's forces and all of Vlad's men, are out to put Humpty together again." (2 Viewers)

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To you and me, but not to the Czar and those willing to listen to him.

You already forgot these mowed down convoys including hundreds of civilian vehicles? And I am sure that many civilian occupied vehicles were being shot at by Coalition forces
that were simply afraid of maybe getting blown up by some suicide bomber. In any film footage one can see dozens of burned out and shot up civilian vehicles in front of check-points
and military installations.

Regards
Jagdflieger

Hundreds of civilian vehicles being mowed down?

Hundreds?

lol

Sorry, but that is full of crap. I spent 14 months there, did you? I can tell you that no coalition force indiscriminately mowed down any civilian vehicles.

How do I know this?

There were not hundreds of piled up vehicles in front of our gates. Each camp had signs up telling drivers to slow there vehicle and not approach until called upon.

The only vehicles fired upon were those that ignored the signs and drove at high speed toward the gate. Why were they driving at high speed toward the gate? Because they were insurgents aka the enemy. An insurgent is considered a combative, and as such is not a civilian. Think about it, and lay off the kool-aid a bit.

The US and the Coalition had strict rules of engagement to prevent civilian casualties. Does it prevent all? No, unfortunately not. In many ways it forced us to fight with our hands behind our backs, and many US and coalition troops died because they waited too late to open fire because they thought the insurgents were civilians.

I had a child point a PVC pipe at my helicopter as if it were a MANPAD. At a distance it looked like one. I hesitate a second longer before shooting at him, and thankfully realized it was a PVC pipe and not a MANPAD. If it had been one, that second of hesitation would have likely killed our entire crew. Fortunately for everyone involved, I did not fire on him and we all lived another day.

But if you cannot see the difference between the USA and NATO and what Russia is doing then it is you who has a problem.
 
If you prefer to shut your eyes towards actual occurrences and hundreds of interviews and articles by our "free Western press" - up to you.

Regards
Iagdflieger

I guess my eyes were closed the entire time I was there.

Show me pics of hundreds of massacred Iraqi Civilians and cars. Lets see the the bodies piling up. Where are these actual occurrences of coalition troops "mowing down" hundreds of civilians?
 
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I find it highly offensive that anyone would compare what the Russians are doing to what any western NATO nation has done regarding civilian casualties.

Civilian's are the ones who suffer the most in any war, however, one side takes care to limit civilian pain and suffering. The other takes great care to cause it.
 
Go back and replay the videos in posts #s 3695 and 3708. They cover these ideas in ways that us folks "contaminated" with western concepts of human rights can hopefully understand.
Essentially it's the relationship between the individual and the nation/state. We see the state as existing to preserve and protect the political rights and freedoms of every individual person. Political diversity and freedom of expression reign over our value system. This is so deeply ingrained in us that we have trouble wrapping our heads around the idea that most of the world, especially those with ethnic axes to grind, have a different hierarchy of values. For these people, freedom from fear and freedom from want are viewed as requiring unity in support of a powerful government that can protect them from their ethnic rivals and the vicissitudes of global geopolitics, as well as domestic "terrorists" who might have different (and unsettling) ideas. "Freedom" for these people has an economic and social dimension that is missing from our purely political version, and tends to value social order and planned economy more highly than the extreme levels of freedom of expression we enshrine.
To them, we look decadent, self indulgent, chaotic, and lacking the political discipline to rein in dissent and forge an economically efficient society. Due to our resource-rich continent and the cumulative wealth it's given us, we've never had to, and the ocean barriers have largely protected us from existential threats.
Implicit in this is the evolutionary dichotomy between the the sea power state with its broader horizons and multicultural exposure with resulting more progressive outlook, vs the continental power state with its ethnic homogeneity, history of invasions and empire, and more or less continuous existential threat, whether actual or perceived, resulting in a more conservative and authoritarian culture. Each mindset in this dichotomy has great difficulty in understanding and relating to the other, guaranteeing a turbulent past, present, and future.
Ukraine's history has been largely as a subset of one continental empire or another, and yet in each case it has served as a crossroads and a frontier of these powers, so becoming more culturally akin to a seagoing state than the empires it served. The Kievan Russ of a millennium ago were landlocked norsemen who had voyaged the rivers from Scandinavia and established a cosmopolitan culture that had predated and outshown the rise of Moscow and St Petersburg and The Russian Empire. No wonder they bailed out of the Russian orbit the minute they got a chance. And they're not looking back. Russians can't understand this.

Well-written ... this could be the conclusion of a good passing thesis, in that it wraps up several different trends and strands of history to help explain this current situation. Bravo Zulu.
 
Good stuff. govinfo

My guess is the Russians will begin their new offensive against eastern Ukraine and especially Mariupol within the fortnight. How quickly can arms get to the Ukrainian forces? It is interesting that Russia hasn't hit the Ukrainian railways or interior bridges and highways - they have to know that's the route the new weapons come by.
They did hit them. Just not so often as other targets. Earlier today they have attacked a railway in the Donetsk region and three evacuation trains with civilians were stuck.
 
But Putin keeps saying he's liberating the Ukrainian people from those enemies. You can't liberate people by killing them. The fundamental problem here is not different views of society. It's about aggressive narcissists in positions of power who refuse to accept ANY view except their own.
You can't refuse OR accept a view that you can't understand, and it's not just those in power who are thus afflicted, it's the general population, who are fed "information" of a bias confirming sort that narrows their vision.
Our boy Putin is a "true believer" in the Eric Hoffer sense, an unreconstructed soviet with a 21st century sheen on his hammer and sickle. Even his skeptical classmates from school days say he always was a dedicated communist from the get-go. His first duty station out of KGB school was with GDR internal security, where a particularly harsh version of communism was practiced, and even they found him a bit hard to take.
I think his sense of "blood and soil" kinship to his fellow ethnic slavs, the Ukrainians, blinded him to the rapid shift in their deeply held allegiances in the last decade. His image of pre-2008 Ukraine hasn't been updated, and he thinks the separatists are representative of Ukrainians as a whole. I think he sincerely believed he was offering them liberation from a poorly understood "puppet statehood" to the west. Remember, he was raised by a generation whose personal experience of the west was limited to the nazis. Small wonder.
Once his attempt at a swift "bloodless" coup bogged down and failed, his generals followed their cold war style playbooks for reducing resistance and pacifying conquered territories, using an army designed for a nuclear WWIII and not suited for asymmetric urban warfare. Meanwhile, the mouthpieces rumbled on, oblivious to The Emperor's nudity.
Anyone who's paid attention to Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria knows how that playbook goes. Only now it's being applied to blue eyed, blond, eloquent, white people, and we're sitting up and taking notice.
 
The "troops" who are committing atrocities are either untrained conscripts or mercenaries.
Young and untrained, led by incompetent officers, and being mowed down left and right. They are more a mob than soldiers. Forced to scavenge and becoming animals. No training, no discipline. This is what Field Marshal Kaputin fielded.
Being a gifted KGB officer, he brought out his correct political thought team, Wagner Group, when folks resisted liberation.
My two cents.
 
To you and me, but not to the Czar and those willing to listen to him.
We don't need to care what Putin thinks nor what the Russian people think. This war isn't going to end by winning over the hearts and minds of the Russian people or enciting regime change. Putin and the Russian people have played their hand. This war will end when the Russians are defeated in the field and pushed out of Ukraine and when Ukraine is strong enough to prevent future Russian attacks. After that Russians can sit in their now sanctioned and boycotted sh#thole of a failed state and rot. Our job in the West is to expedite the above.
 
Murdered civilians near coalition installations during the Iraq war. Huh? I don't remember any of that happening while I was there? Hmmm…
I do. Numerous Coalition checkpoints and installations were targeted by suicide bombers. They usually attacked at times calculated to cause maximum carnage among the civilians waiting to get in or out. Same thing happened in Afghanistan. 13 Marines died during the evacuation, but hundreds of Afghan civilians, attempting to flee for their lives, perished.
That the US followed up with a poorly executed drone strike that killed a carload of friendlies is just the icing on the cake of that debacle.
 
I do. Numerous Coalition checkpoints and installations were targeted by suicide bombers. They usually attacked at times calculated to cause maximum carnage among the civilians waiting to get in or out. Same thing happened in Afghanistan. 13 Marines died during the evacuation, but hundreds of Afghan civilians, attempting to flee for their lives, perished.
That the US followed up with a poorly executed drone strike that killed a carload of friendlies is just the icing on the cake of that debacle.

What you describe is not the "mowing down" and murdering of civilians that he claimed.

Did you run around shooting at civilians for sport? Where you ordered to? If so, lets put your ass in jail. Of course I know you did not. Why? Because we don't have a policy of doing those things. Because we place a value on human life. We try and mitigate civilian casualties. That is a fact.
 
The "troops" who are committing atrocities are either untrained conscripts or mercenaries.

I think it's far too early to draw that conclusion.

There have been dozens (at least) of document atrocities across occupied areas of Ukraine. Including plenty in areas where elite and professional Russian army forces are the primary operating forces.
 
What you describe is not the "mowing down" and murdering of civilians that he claimed.

Did you run around shooting at civilians for sport? Where you ordered to? If so, lets put your ass in jail. Of course I know you did not. Why? Because we don't have a policy of doing those things. Because we place a value on human life. We try and mitigate civilian casualties. That is a fact.
Correct. Methinks he is channeling his "Full Metal Jacket" flashbacks.
 

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