Go back 600 years and one of those countries is Muscovy and the other one is Ruthenia. What on earth is this âhistorical right to existâ bullshit?
lol, between NAFO and Russia, thereâs so much trolling and propaganda that itâs impossible to say whatâs going on. Looks like these guys are going to do guerilla raids but not try to engage Russiaâs main forces.
big âsharpie on the map of alabamaâ energy
This is what a Republican presidential candidate looked like in the past. You can disagree with McCain all you want, even despise him, but at least he understood basic facts about the world and had a grasp of geopolitics.
Now itâs just the dumbest of the dumb complaining about CRT (which they donât understand) or wokeness (which they donât understand either).
Whatâs wild is the mccain/obama election swayed me to vote democrat in my first presidential election I could vote in. the idea that mccain would be president horrified me. itâs almost quaint, looking back now, how far things have shifted.
I think the difference between then and now is the old republican guard was willing to work in good faith to do the things the country needed to do (or believed it was needed). the mitch mcconnel era destroyed that but maybe it started earlier.
The continued Overton window shift where every Republican president is just exponentially worse than his predecessor is really incredible. I mean, George W. Bush was an incredibly phenomenally terrible president, and he was fucking light years better than Trump (with an arguably lower global body count too given how Covid turned out).
Mccain didnât see it before 2014 either, even though he was already paying attention to ukraine in a weird coincidence. it wasnât a big window to catch putin grabbing lifetime power, he had vacated the presidency in 2008, and his re-election in 2012 was almost a technicality. a lot of people missed it.
I think itâs fair to say that most serious people understood what Putinâs intent and cost tolerance was during/after the seizure of Crimea. McCain looks ok in hindsight criticizing the lack of a more robust response from Obama and Europe, but 8 years changed a lot, and what was inconceivable then is more conceivable now. Hell I remember when Chris Hayes was reporting that the Russian military invasion of Eastern Ukraine was imminent in 2014, and who knows maybe they would have seen more success if they went then than theyâre seeing now.
I mean 2014 did shatter a bunch of illusions, that Putin would be deterred by not being a G8 member anymore for example, lol.
of course some people deserve credit for speaking out earlier than others. on the one hand, it is on obama/merkel for being surprised by the maidan revolution and the annexation of crimea and a violent uprising in donbass. it is also on them that they didnât call putinâs bluff on a nato peacekeeping force.
on the other hand it is also telling that they virtually stopped putinâs advance from going into odessa and kharkiv in 2014 with minimal military aid at the time. it wasnât enough to prevent putin from meddling with the west in 2016 and since, and an invasion in 2022. but itâs important to point out that the pro-ru propaganda is currently in a major coping episode that they didnât annex all of ukraine following maidan.
Iâve seen that⊠wondered if it was real or a troll
That canât possibly be real. Can it?
Seems fake right?
Certainly fishy, given all the success Ukrainian drones have had in e.g. Crimea. But these are 100 percent shot down?
Sounds like â100 percent shot downâ might not mean what we think it means, as there was apparently damage to Russian infrastructure.