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Thank you EU for making Ukraine the seat of all of your criminal enterprises, and then throwing them into the furnace of war while you sit in your Swiss castles and chalets unfazed and unharmed, with your go bags ready for Argentina and Australia.
Russian authorities have denied mobilization 15 times--- Moscow Times
Officials, including the president, have denied mobilization plans 15 times since the start of the war with Ukraine, according to The Moscow Times.
There were three denials a week before.
March 8, President Vladimir Putin: "There will be no additional call-up of reservists from the reserve."
March 25, Andrey Klishas, head of the constitutional committee of the Federation Council: “Mobilization is not envisaged. A complete travel ban for all Russians or groups of the population is also not.”
May 4, press secretary of President Peskov: "This is not true, this is nonsense."
May 5, Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin: “No. No. I will tell you on the air and without the air” (to the question about mobilization).
May 5, Deputy Chairman of the Duma Committee on Defense Yuri Shvytkin: "Rumors appear with reference to foreign sources in order to sow some confusion, panic among the population."
May 6, Ministry of Culture: “This is a fake” (about armor from mobilization for cultural workers).
May 20, Andrey Gurulev, a member of the Duma Defense Committee: “The bill on lifting the age limit for contract servicemen cannot be considered any form of mobilization.”
June 14, the head of the Federation Council Committee on Defense Viktor Bondarev: "An additional conscription into the Russian army in the light of the special operation will not be required."
June 16, Peskov: "These are false informational stuffing"
June 21, Peskov: "These are pure fakes"
July 26, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation: "A number of foreign media disseminate unreliable information about allegedly some kind of mobilization activities."
September 12, Senator Andrei Klimov: “There is no need to introduce mobilization. The enemy would very much like mobilization to begin in Russia, then the people would begin to seethe and they would get the main thing.
September 11, State Duma deputy Andrey Gurulev: "Today there is no such need."
September 13, the head of the Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky: "There is no need to be afraid of stuffing about mobilization."
September 13, Peskov: "At the moment, no, this is out of the question."
Russian authorities have denied mobilization 15 times
Neau-Russia:
And then Ukraine's shelling of the breakaway regions will then be shelling Russia.
I think someone is bucking for the toaster…
Vladimir Putin has said the threat of a nuclear war was rising, but insisted Russia had not "gone mad" and would not use its nuclear weapons first.
....he asserted that Russia would "under no circumstances" use the weapons first, and would not threaten anyone with its nuclear arsenal.
"We have not gone mad, we are aware of what nuclear weapons are," he said, adding: "We aren't about to run around the world brandishing this weapon like a razor."
He was referring to strategic nuclear weapons, not tactical.
Will Pukin nuke Rostov now? How about Voronezh? Both?
How many more shittests will Pukin fail?
One stated goal of our Ukraine war with Russia is to weaken their military. Another stated goal is to break up the Russian nation.
There is no formal US policy to break up Russia.
Once Russia stops illegally invading their sovereign neighbor the killing and threat of nuclear war goes away overnight.
There is no formal US policy to break up Russia. You sound like the bonkers paranoid Russian apparatchiks on RT.
A U.S. government body held a Congressional briefing plotting ways to break up Russia as a country, in the name of supposed “decolonization.”
Titled “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” the June 23 briefing was organized by the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), known more commonly as the Helsinki Commission.
This commission claims to be “independent,” but it is a U.S. government agency created and overseen by Congress.
This “Decolonizing Russia” briefing is one of a growing number of examples of the U.S. government co-opting left-wing rhetoric in order to advance its imperial interests.
Ukey Bullshit Counter-offensive Paid By You And Me.
We were promised that they would be at the Sea of Azov MONTHS ago.
There is no formal US policy to break up Russia.
Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan called for detonating a nuclear bomb over Siberia.
She said that if a thermonuclear explosion is carried out over Siberia, then supposedly “there will be no nuclear winter, and no one will die from cancer, but all radio electronics and all satellites will be disabled.”
According to the editor-in-chief of the propaganda publication RT, then “we will return to something like ’93 – with wired telephones.”
“We lived wonderfully, and she will even be happy, because then I won’t have to explain to the children why everyone has gadgets and they don’t,” she said.
According to her, this option remains, and it is “the most humane, the most herbivorous.”
Then why do they want to weaken Russia's military?
To stop it from attacking its neighbor thus fulfilling our (ant their, btw) obligations under Budapest Memorandum of 1994, duh.
Russian state run media is reporting Friday that the Kremlin is closely monitoring a high-explosive experiment that the U.S. carried out this week at a nuclear test site in Nevada.-- Fox
Wednesday's test used chemicals and radioisotopes to "validate new predictive explosion models" that can help detect atomic blasts in other countries, Bloomberg reported, citing the Department of Energy.
The Interfax News Agency said Friday that Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters at a briefing that Russia is now closely monitoring the situation.
"Earlier, the Federation Council [of the Federal Assembly of Russia] stated that the underground tests on October 18 in Nevada should be given an international legal assessment, since the United States is a signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and is obliged to refrain from violating this agreement," Interfax also reported.
Corey Hinderstein, deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a statement, "These experiments advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals."
"They will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests," he added.
The U.S. test is notable because of its timing. Russian lawmakers have announced their intention to revoke their ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
A bill will go to the Russian upper house, the Federation Council, which will consider it next week. Federation Council lawmakers have already said they will support the bill.
The treaty, adopted in 1996, bans all nuclear explosions anywhere in the world, although it has never fully entered into force. In addition to the U.S., it is yet to be ratified by China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, Iran and Egypt.
Don't pretent you didn't know about that little detail - that's Cucker Tarlson shtick and you wouldn't want to take food out of his kids mouths, would you?
Eric Holder says
Don't pretent you didn't know about that little detail - that's Cucker Tarlson shtick and you wouldn't want to take food out of his kids mouths, would you?
Hunter is not hungry.
Why do you suppose US politician's children get paid huge sums of money from Ukraine? What did Hunter actually do for Burisma? Why don't we investigate?
Not expecting cogent answers.
And boy oh boy the target environment is RICH:
Eric Holder says
And boy oh boy the target environment is RICH:
Yeah. To increase the likelyhood of use of the nukes. You obviously have never heard of 'use it or lose it'.
Last month, with little fanfare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made the stakes of the ongoing war in Ukraine as clear as possible. With Russian troops bearing down on Ukraine’s east, and with Western support continuing to flag, Zelensky clarified the potential outcomes of the war. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said. “Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances.”
It was the first time the Ukrainian president had revealed an outcome that has become, for the war’s observers, increasingly inescapable. In this war for Ukraine’s survival, with Kyiv facing both declining men and materiel, the only surefire way of preventing Ukraine’s ongoing destruction is NATO membership—a reality that has gained more supporters since the war’s beginning but still remains years away. Barring such an outcome, as Zelensky outlined, only one option remains: developing Ukraine’s own nuclear arsenal and returning it to the role of a nuclear power that it gave up some three decades ago.
For Western interlocutors, Zelensky’s revelation may have come as a shock. But for anyone paying attention to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accelerating designs, the revelation that Kyiv may pursue its own nuclear arsenal is anything but. Putin, after all, has only grown increasingly messianic and monomaniacal in his efforts to shatter Ukraine. Previous designs on simply toppling Kyiv have given way to outright efforts to “destroy Ukrainian statehood,” especially following Ukraine’s successful occupation in Russia’s Kursk region, as the Moscow Times recently reported. With Ukrainian statehood—and even Ukrainian identity, given Russia’s genocidal efforts—at stake, any nation would understandably pursue any option available for survival.
Perhaps more importantly, Zelensky is resurfacing an important part of Ukrainian history that many in the West seem to have forgotten but that the West bears significant responsibility for. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Ukraine emerged as one of a handful of nations to claim a segment of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. And almost immediately, the United States and Russia led a joint effort to strip Ukraine of its new weapons, succeeding in 1994 via the now infamous Budapest Memorandum. It was a move that, at the time, resulted in rounds of condescending self-congratulation around Washington—and that, in time, set the stage for Russia’s later invasion of Ukraine. Now, as Zelensky has made clear, that bill is coming due—and the West now faces the option of finally welcoming Ukraine into NATO’s ranks or risking it becoming a nuclear power once more.
WHEN THE SOVIET UNION IMPLODED in 1991—undone, in large part, via anti-colonial, pro-independence efforts from Ukrainians—the Soviet nuclear arsenal was split among a number of new nations, including Ukraine. And almost immediately, U.S. officials decided that Kyiv could not, and should not, be trusted to maintain its own nuclear arsenal.
This reality has been made blindingly clear by recent archival work from a number of scholars, poring through overlooked U.S. and Ukrainian documents. For instance, Columbia University’s George Bogden has recently published extensively on the internal debates in both the United States and Ukraine surrounding Kyiv’s post-Soviet arsenal. In so doing, the documents have revealed not only the arrogance of U.S. officials, who prioritized relations with Moscow over all else, but also the clear consternation, and clear warnings, of officials in Ukraine who realized what they were giving up.
In both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, U.S. officials placed continued emphasis on reassuring Russia that Moscow could have regional primacy—and that the United States was not trying to take advantage of the power vacuum emerging in the Soviet rubble. And part of that was giving in to Moscow’s demands that all of the Soviet nuclear weaponry be returned to Russia. That is, while Russia would be allowed to retain its status as a nuclear power, countries such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—those brutally colonized, decimated, and victimized by generations of Kremlin colonialism—would have to divest themselves of their post-Soviet nuclear arsenal.
It was a reality that few in Washington appeared to question. “Ukraine could not keep nuclear weapons,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, later said. “No one in the U.S. government questioned [this reality].” That’s not quite accurate; dissenting voices such as former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney argued against forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, and even Henry Kissinger flagged that places such as Ukraine were “puzzled by [the U.S.] passion” to get Kyiv to give up its nuclear weaponry. But such concerns crumbled in the face of the supposed comity emerging between Washington and Moscow—and the United States’ expanding willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to Russia, time and again.
Indeed, the U.S. push to get Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal is that much more puzzling given that, even by the mid-1990s, Russian leadership was showing clear signs of the kind of revanchism that would later take root under Putin. While the United States was pressuring Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, the Russian military was still backing pro-Russian separatists in Moldova and had already launched a program of armed meddling in northern Georgia—as well as finalized plans for an invasion of Chechnya after that colony had the temerity to vote for independence from Moscow. Moreover, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had already “threaten[ed] Ukraine and Kazakhstan with revision of borders … if they insisted on independence,” as historian Serhii Plokhy noted, with Yeltsin’s office pointing specifically to Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions as areas for potential “revision.” All of this while luminaries such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publicly called for Russia to reclaim swaths of eastern Ukraine—calls that found broad appeal across Russia.
None of that, however, seemed to matter to U.S. officials. Indeed, when Ukrainian counterparts raised concerns about Russian revanchism with U.S. partners, they were viewed as “whiners,” according to a former member of the White House National Security Council. Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor, even “ridiculed Ukraine’s trepidation in giving up” its nuclear capabilities, Bogden found, adding that “Kyiv didn’t understand its true ‘long-term interest,’ Mr. Lake insisted; only he and his colleagues did.” (Ironically, former Soviet officials had a far better understanding of Ukraine’s security concerns than the Americans; as outgoing Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze said, just “one nuclear missile” in Ukraine could serve as a deterrent against Moscow.)
Eventually, the Americans got their way, steamrolling Kyiv’s concerns about Russian imperialism. The resulting Budapest Memorandum pledged nebulous “security assurances” for Kyiv, with the Kremlin declaring it would never push any “threat or use of force” against Ukraine. In return, Kyiv gave up its remaining nuclear arsenal—a move that is now not only seen by many Ukrainians as a clear misstep but that left a lingering distaste in the mouth of Ukrainian officials about America’s role in the region and even trustworthiness as a partner. “I would understand Russia’s nastiness,” then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk said, as Bogden discovered. “But Americans are even worse—they do not listen to our arguments.”
Decades on, America’s insistence that Ukraine divest its nuclear weapons—and give them all to Russia—is now seen as a blunder of historic proportions. Even Clinton himself has expressed regret at the move. And now, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians dead and Europe destabilized to a greater extent than we’ve seen in decades, the price of Washington’s push to strip Ukraine of nuclear status has become clear.
Which brings us back to Trump’s reelection and Zelensky’s recent comments. In revealing that Kyiv could pursue nuclear weapons if it doesn’t join NATO, the Ukrainian president is simply saying the quiet part out loud—all the more now that Trump will replace Biden. After all, it’s not as if Ukraine doesn’t have the history, or the technical know-how, to develop its own nuclear arsenal. If a nation such as North Korea—one now participating in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, no less—can develop its own nuclear systems, then a country such as Ukraine should have a far easier path forward. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if NATO keeps closing the door to Ukrainian membership—and to the U.S. nuclear umbrella—then a nuclearized Kyiv would be the only logical outcome remaining.
Indeed, this was part of the impetus for NATO expansion in the post-Cold War period in the first place. As one U.S. interlocutor recently recalled, around the time the United States was forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, Polish officials were making noise about jump-starting their own domestic nuclear program—regardless of U.S. wishes. “We talked to the Poles,” the official remembered, “and they said: ‘If you don’t let us into NATO, we’re getting nuclear weapons. We don’t trust the Russians.’” NATO, of course, expanded to include Poland in 1999, abrogating the need for a Polish nuclear arsenal—one of the welcome, and completely unappreciated, advantages to expanding NATO in Europe.
But Ukraine no longer has the luxury of waiting for NATO membership. With every passing day, and especially with the reelection of Trump, the reality increasingly dawns that if we’re to guarantee Ukrainian statehood, the West must welcome Ukraine into NATO—or it must start getting ready for Ukraine to rejoin the same nuclear club it was once a part of all those years ago.
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Ppl will fucking PANIC like it is May (or was it March?) 18th 2020 again.
The fools (majority) will swarm COSTCO to buy up all the water and toilet paper.
The (few) smart ppl will get straight into their cars and floor it out of Dodge, period. The freeways will still jam up because of all the accidents caused by these peeps tho.
The Survivalists will throw out all the wife's crap that has accumulated in their bunker and button up tight.
But if Russia uses chemical weapons, ppl won't care.
Such is the Power of Nukes of any size.