Current Affairs Ukraine
- Thread starter Mutzo Nutzo
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Is slightly strange, as the only actual quotes in that paragraph are “behaved well”, “very grateful”, “good story” and “drive these people into a corner”. The rest of the paragraph content setting out the ‘risk in own backyard’ argument is written by the economist journalist.
I listened to the full interview on the podcast by the economist, and those quotes above weren’t in it, but all the other quotes in the article were. Maybe were edited out of the podcast.
Podcast is here, maybe I missed.
Kev The Rat
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I’ve listened to the podcast and read the transcript from multiple sources but nowhere did I come across the same verbage quoted by Kev other than the original article posted by the Hindustan times that has since disappeared.
I smell a rat and it’s not Kev
My missus' Auntie has taken in a Ukrainian refugee and her son as all her kids have grown up and left home. TBH the Ukrainian mum is a milf! Defo would.. There are some upsides to all this!
Kev The Rat
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If someone had a subscription to the economist this could be clarified
But the link I posted seems to work for everyone but you for some reason ?
It’s possible it’s been scrubbed from the website too, of course
Wouldn’t surprise me
The other interesting thing to note is that none of the Russian sites are pushing this story either
Kev The Rat
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Komsomolskaya Pravda is
If they were trying to cover it up, seems strange that they’d include it in the article. Particularly the actual quotes which are devoid of any context.
Spadge Vernacular
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Putin has in a matter of months erased 30 years of investment and improvements in Russia from FDI and wiped out 40% of their GDP in the process. China's already buying Russia's gas at a huge discount as Putin has put Russia in to a very weak bargaining position against a monopolistic China, who will continue to look to pick up more big bargains later. Who can blame them?
Page not Found | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Once Putin is sufficiently desperate China will no doubt look to factor historically disputed lands into future deals. Russia has previously ceded land to China and I have no doubt that they will have to again as a direct result of Putin's folly. They'll be picking off Russian military technology too, further cementing the shift in the Sino-Russian power balance toward China. Putin will go down in history, not only as a monstrous criminal but also a fool.
https://www.noemamag.com/putins-revanchism-opens-a-door-in-the-far-east-for-china/
This is worth a read, too.
China stands to gain from a weakened Russia. The West should prepare now.
A protracted war of attrition in Ukraine serves Beijing’s interests in that it could shift the Sino-Russian power balance in China’s favor.
www.atlanticcouncil.org
Kev The Rat
Player Valuation: £70m
More fantasising, Russia has taken land from China as well in the past, but unfortunately for you, all these dynastical maps that you keep referring to were drawn up in a time well before the existance of nuclear weapons.Putin has in a matter of months erased 30 years of investment and improvements in Russia from FDI and wiped out 40% of their GDP in the process. China's already buying Russia's gas at a huge discount as Putin has put Russia in to a very weak bargaining position against a monopolistic China, who will continue to look to pick up more big bargains later. Who can blame them?
Page not Found | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Carnegie Endowment for International Peacecarnegieendowment.org
Once Putin is sufficiently desperate China will no doubt look to factor historically disputed lands into future deals. Russia has previously ceded land to China and I have no doubt that they will have to again as a direct result of Putin's folly. They'll be picking off Russian military technology too, further cementing the shift in the Sino-Russian power balance toward China. Putin will go down in history, not only as a monstrous criminal but also a fool.
https://www.noemamag.com/putins-revanchism-opens-a-door-in-the-far-east-for-china/
This is worth a read, too.
China stands to gain from a weakened Russia. The West should prepare now.
A protracted war of attrition in Ukraine serves Beijing’s interests in that it could shift the Sino-Russian power balance in China’s favor.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
The Guardian in particular is barely readable. It's war porn pure and simple.
They've never been the same since MI6 made them get on their knees and take an angle grinder and drill to their own hard drives in front of them.
davek
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It's the Economist.
Maybe they're working for Putin in between pushing a neo-con agenda? lol
Donald Trump will “never” support Putin, says Volodymyr Zelensky
But Ukraine’s president fears that some of his country’s Western backers are losing faith
Sep 10th 2023 | KYIV
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Volodymyr zelensky does not want to think about a long war, let alone talk about the possibility to Ukrainians, many of whom still dream of winning fast. But that is precisely what he is preparing for. “I have to be ready, my team has to be ready for the long war, and emotionally I am ready,” Ukraine’s president says in an interview with The Economist. Speaking on the margins of the yes conference, an international pow-wow in Kyiv, he is calm, composed and sombre. At the same setting a year ago, the mood was electric and euphoric; news of Ukrainian forces’ success in pushing Russia back from the Kharkiv region was pinging on every smartphone in the room.
This year, the atmosphere is very different. Three months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has made only modest progress along the all-important southern axis in the Zaporizhia region, where it is trying to sever Vladimir Putin’s “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea. The question of how long that will take, or whether it will succeed, weighs on the minds of Western leaders. They still talk the good talk, pledging that they will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes”. But Mr Zelensky, a former television actor with an acute sense of his audience, has detected a change of mood among some of his partners. “I have this intuition, reading, hearing and seeing their eyes [when they say] ‘we’ll be always with you,’” he says, speaking in English (a language in which he is increasingly fluent). “But I see that he or she is not here, not with us.”
He opens his hands in a gesture of frustration. Some partners might see Ukraine’s recent difficulties on the battlefield as a reason to force it into negotiations with Russia. But “this is a bad moment, since Putin sees the same.”
Having failed to overwhelm Ukraine quickly, Mr Putin seems determined to exhaust the country and to wear out its partners’ resolve to keep funding and supplying it with arms. He aims to make Ukraine a dysfunctional, depopulated state whose refugees cause problems in Europe. But Mr Zelensky says Russia itself is fragile. Mr Putin “does not understand that in the long war, he will lose. Because it does not matter that 60% or 70% [of Russians] support him. No, his economy will lose.” As Ukraine increases its strikes inside Russia, Russians will start asking awkward questions about their army’s inability to protect them, “because our drones will land”. The Russian president’s authority was weakened by the mutiny in June of Yevgeny Prighozhin, boss of the Wagner mercenary group, who was subsequently assassinated. It will be weakened further, Mr Zelensky thinks.
At the same time, Ukraine’s president is keenly aware of the risks to his country if the West starts to withdraw its economic support. That would damage not just Ukraine’s economy, but its war effort, too. He puts it in stark terms. “If you are not with Ukraine, you are with Russia, and if you are not with Russia, you are with Ukraine. And if partners do not help us, it means they will help Russia to win. That is it.” With several of his Western allies (including America) holding elections next year, Mr Zelensky knows that sustaining support will be difficult, especially in the absence of significant progress at the front.
Ukraine’s president has excelled at appealing to Western publics, often over the heads of their politicians. He still believes that the best way “to convince governments, [to make them] believe they are on the right side, is by pushing them via the media. People read, people discuss, people make up their minds and people push,” he says. It was public opinion that drove politicians to increase arms supplies to Ukraine in the early days of the war. Scaling down that help, he argues, may anger not just Ukrainians but Western voters. They will start asking what the whole effort was for. “People will not forgive [their leaders] if they lose Ukraine.”
If Mr Putin hopes that a victory by Donald Trump in America’s presidential election in 2024 would deliver him victory, he is mistaken. Trump would “never” support Vladimir Putin. “That isn’t what strong Americans do.” He expects Joe Biden will stay the course if he is re-elected. (“Do they want Afghanistan, part two?”) And he hopes that the European Union will not only keep supplying aid, but will open negotiations over the accession process for Ukraine this year. (That move is widely expected to happen at a summit in December.) “It will support morale in Ukraine. It will give this energy to people.”
Keeping morale high is crucial. This is why, Mr Zelensky says, even limited progress on the front line is essential. “Now we have movement. It’s important.” After heavy initial losses, and hastily adapted tactics, Ukrainian soldiers have finally pierced the first of Russia’s three main defensive lines in the Zaporizhia region. A big breakthrough can still come, Mr Zelensky insists: “If we push them from the south, they will run.”
On the counter-offensive’s secondary front, near the eastern town of Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces are also slowly taking back territory. “During the first days of the full-scale war, we kept being pushed back. Each day. They took some cities, hundreds of villages,” he says. Now, Ukrainian forces are crawling forward. But troops face a Herculean task to turn advances along either axis into a strategic breakthrough.
In answer to Western complaints about the offensive’s slowness, Mr Zelensky says it reflects the extreme level of danger. Winning back territory needs to be balanced with preserving as many lives as possible. Soldiers need to reduce the risks: to carry out reconnaissance, to use drones, to avoid direct clashes. Ukraine would have lost “thousands” had it followed advice to commit many more troops, he says. This is not the sort of war where “the leader of a country says the price doesn’t matter.” That is the difference between him and Vladimir Putin. “For him, life is nothing.”
After months of building up expectations for the counter-offensive, Mr Zelensky is carefully adjusting his message to reality. Victory will not come “tomorrow or the day after tomorrow”, he says. But it is not some fantastical dream. Ukraine deserves to win, and the West should back it. The Russian army is losing “lots of people’‘ and redeploying its reserves to stop the Ukrainian advance, he says: “It means they lose.”
Tapping loudly on the table, Mr Zelensky rejects outright the idea of compromise with Vladimir Putin. War will continue for “as long as Russia remains on Ukrainian territory”, he says. A negotiated deal would not be permanent. The Russian president has a habit of creating “frozen conflicts” on Russia’s borders (in Georgia, for example), not as ends in themselves but because his goal is to “restore the Soviet Union”. Those who choose to talk to the man in the Kremlin are “tricking themselves”, much like the Western leaders who signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 only to watch him invade Czechoslovakia. “The mistake is not diplomacy. The mistake is diplomacy with Putin. He negotiates only with himself.”
Curtailing aid to Ukraine will only prolong the war, Mr Zelensky argues. And it would create risks for the West in its own backyard. There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned. Ukrainians have generally “behaved well” and are “very grateful” to those who sheltered them. They will not forget that generosity. But it would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people into a corner”.
Meanwhile, a long war of attrition would mean a fork in the road for Ukraine. The country would lose even more people, both on the front lines and to emigration. It would require a “totally militarised economy”. The government would have to put that prospect to its citizens, Mr Zelensky says, without specifying how; a new social contract could not be the decision of one person. Almost 19 months into the war, the president says he is “morally” ready for the switch. But he will only broach the idea with his people if the weakness in the eyes of his Western backers becomes a “trend”. Has that moment come? No, not yet, he says. “Thank God.” ■
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davek
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lollollol
Spadge Vernacular
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Some insight into Russian disinformation campaigns.
www.rand.org
www.disinfo.eu
www.consilium.europa.eu
www.sgdsn.gouv.fr
thehill.com
Russia's “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model
Russia's propaganda model is high-volume and multichannel, and it disseminates messages without regard for the truth. It is rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it does not commit to consistency.
www.rand.org
Doppelganger - Media clones serving Russian propaganda - EU DisinfoLab
How Doppelganger, an operation linked to Russian-based actors, cloned legitimate media outlets from multiple European countries to spread disinformation designed to undermine the support to Ukraine.
www.disinfo.eu
Information manipulation in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine: EU lists seven individuals and five entities
The Council imposed restrictive measures against seven Russian individuals and five entities responsible for a digital information manipulation campaign aimed at distorting information and disseminating propaganda in support of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
www.consilium.europa.eu
[MàJ - 19/06/2023] RRN : une campagne numérique de manipulation de l’information complexe et persistante | SGDSN
Le service de vigilance et de protection contre les ingérences numériques étrangères (VIGINUM) a identifié une campagne numérique de manipulation de l’information ayant visé plusieurs États européens depuis septembre 2022, dont la France.
Thanks to AI, the Wagner mutiny will only briefly hamper Russian disinformation
Although the turbulence within Russia could limit its disinformation activities temporarily, we should consider it a reprieve rather than a victory.
thehill.com
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