Russian Invasion of Ukraine Megathread

[sneedpest]

Look at this beast/monstruosity :

View attachment 3330081

It's a Ukrainian DShKM machine gun

EDIT : btw, there's reports that Severodonetsk has fallen but take the reports with a grain of salt.

DShKs are massive machine guns and same with the Kord both use 12.7mm rounds

 

[Hell on Earth]

Too many. Lots of Russians died to my namesake's ego. Lots of Ukrainians. Lots of Soviet people, period.

And how many times did public opinion had any kind of weight to end these egoistic wars?

two times? (Afghanistan and WW1)

Russians and Russia are just a different kind of animal, just like how the Japanese were a another kind of animal in WW2.

Maybe they lost that distinction but let's see if that's really true.

 

[Napoleon Bonerfart]

You will do it extra hard this time

Why are none of the McDonalds milkshake machines in Russia working or something?

 

[UVB-76]

The territorial gains Russia will receive are strategic and not economic

Okay, my point is still that those regions are devastated, people have left... they're an economic hand grenade with the pin out and Russia decided to throw its body on top of it.

creating more territorial buffers between Moscow and the borders of NATO.

This is completely worthless. The "territorial buffer" is several thousand nuclear warheads.

As for China, I am not trying to build them up. The Chinese would serve as a hub for which the Russians could sell to the world, receive goods and basically go around Western Embargos.

Whenever you go through middlemen, they take a cut.
I don't know how it works with other goods because there's many that can't be traced, but for example weapons from Russia have to spend X amount of years in another country before they can be imported into the US. So Canadians actually have access to cheaper Russian weapon imports because companies that handle foreign imports can bring them to Canada but not the US. I assume that if they try to go around embargos their products will have some bullshit arbitrary measure that's meant to prevent it from being exported out of middlemen.

As for the lockdowns in China and the civilian economy, China isn't a free market nation.

I really don't care for this bullshit argument, you can't create wealth when people are stuck at home not doing anything.
The West might be giving away weapons, but Chinese factory workers under lockdown aren't manufacturing new ones either.
You're giving me the usual spiel about how the Chinese are submissive bugmen and don't desire freedom, yadda yadda yadda but that's completely unrelated. It also doesn't matter what particular flavor of economic system they've picked. Even if you're not a free market - you play by the free market's rules. It's like flat earthers and gravity. They can argue all day that gravity doesn't exist, but they know that if they jump off a building they'll splatter on the ground.
The West, for whatever reason that completely escapes me, took a 12 gauge and decided to fire it at its foot during the coof - but now is trying to move on and forget about it. China seems to be reaching for the rocket launcher. And people tell me "it's okay they don't want freedom" my brother in Christ we're talking about the economy?????

 

[kuuu]

Interesting. Also, notable.

https://www.rt.com/news/555989-eu-russia-embargo-explained/

The TV host wondered if a full embargo on oil trade with Russia would be “the most effective way to impose upon [Putin] that he has committed a strategic failure”. Von der Leyen said the EU had to find “the right balance” between hurting Putin with sanctions and not hurting itself too much in the process.

“If we immediately cut – as of today – off the oil, he might be able to take the oil that he does not sell to the European Union to the world market, where the prices will increase, and sell it for more, and fill his war chest,” von der Leyen explained.

She acknowledged that “the rest of the world” had to join the US and its allies in shunning Russia for the same scenario not to work in the future. So far, a large portion of the global economy, including big energy consumers like China and India, refused to support anti-Russian sanctions.

 

[JosephStalin]

Fixing demographic issues has never been done to my knowledge and letting demographic crisis pass will take generations.
China used to downplay that problem, until it was finally forced to scrap one child policy in favor of two child policy in 2015. That was then replaced by three child policy in 2021. Russia was debating commie era childlessness tax and offering incentives, but noting was done yet to my knowledge.
China's and Russia's rapidly growing elderly populations will become drains on resources. Both countries won't have enough young people to pay taxes needed to fund healthcare and retirement funds. Deficit of working taxpayers will lead to a lack funding in other areas and fewer workers to bolster economies. People will flee abroad due to bad economy, that will further shrink the pool of taxpayers, and cause a brain drain. That leads to a self-perpetuating downward spiral. China and Russia have to do something quick, and it will take decades to see if their fixes even worked.
Demographics alone is one existential iceberg China and Russia are heading towards but Americans do not have to deal with.

What makes you think that the U.S. won't fix its issues by implementing necessary reforms like they did in past?
America was in a similar situation back in 1860s and 1910-1930s. Despite prediction of American collapse back then, USA came back stronger than before each time. China and Russia head towards internal unrest too, and they both ended up with communism last time.

Adding some amplification, if I could.

As I understand it, Russia has a rudimentary national Social Security system, supplemented by individuals' pensions, from whatever source. China has no national Social Security system. The adult child/children are the aged parents' primary source of support, again supplemented by pensions, from whatever source.

As stated here more than once, you're running into situations where the son of a Chinese one-child family marries the daughter of a one-child family, and that son may need to be able to support as many as four parents and parents-in-law, besides himself, his wife, and any child/children they may have. Granted, some of these aged relatives may have pensions, but those pensions may not be enough. China got old before it got rich.

Japan is also in the same fix, but it got rich before getting old, and the impact of the rapidly aging population is rather more manageable. South Korea is also getting into this situation.

What is one thing Japan, South Korea, Russia, and China have in common? Very low immigration into the country.

The USA, by comparison, gets a lot of immigrants, both legal and illegal. This keeps the overall age of the American population lower than China, Japan, South Korea, or Russia. Ensures X number of workers to support each retiree.

 

[DumbDude42]

What makes you think that the U.S. won't fix its issues by implementing necessary reforms like they did in past?

no reform will un-immigrate dozens of millions of hostile foreigners.
you'd have to do large scale mass deportations to fix this situation, which is not possible in a liberal democracy.

 

[UVB-76]

Is a regurgitated Ronald Reagan and his Afghan Freedom Fighter's speech? Because those niggers turned on us after they were done with the USSR

The Mujahideen aren't necessarily Taliban. Many of them opposed them while others joined.
The Taliban aren't Al Qaeda.

As stated here more than once, you're running into situations where the son of a Chinese one-child family marries the daughter of a one-child family, and that son may need to be able to support as many as four parents and parents-in-law, besides himself, his wife, and any child/children they may have. Granted, some of these aged relatives may have pensions, but those pensions may not be enough. China got old before it got rich.

An aggravating factor is that graduating from an university and getting established in a respected field takes a good chunk of one's 20s, delaying the age at which a couple has kids.
China may have to stop bragging about the 6 gorillion engineering graduates per year, and slow down their technical development to halt the demographic crisis.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

The Mujahideen aren't necessarily Taliban. Many of them opposed them while others joined.
The Taliban aren't Al Qaeda.

The Mujaheddin were mostly Taliban, Mullah Omar being the most famous during the Soviet occupation, the others were almost all warlords like the Haqqani. If you're referring to Ahmed Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance the Taliban confined them to the Panjshir Valley and Mazar i Sharif/Iranian border long before we dropped in a SFOD-A team right after 9-11. The fighting intensified after the USSR left in 1989, thanks to the huge amount of materiel we gifted them. The Soviet forces were they only thing keeping the place blowing itself up, which it did right after they left. I'm not going to sperg about the various factions and battles that took place right after the Soviet withdrawal, not because I can't but because it would derail the thread.

 

[UVB-76]

it would derail the thread.

Okay. We supported a destabilization force in Afghanistan to topple the True and Honest Afghan government.
We're now supporting the True and Honest Ukrainian government.
Why exactly are pissed off Ukrainian loyalists going to strike America?

 

[mindlessobserver]

Interesting. Also, notable.

https://www.rt.com/news/555989-eu-russia-embargo-explained/

The hilarious thing is Trump warned the EU and Germany specifically about this very issue.

 

[GoPro]

no reform will un-immigrate dozens of millions of hostile foreigners.
you'd have to do large scale mass deportations to fix this situation, which is not possible in a liberal democracy.

The U.S. has always been a melting pot of different people. People were screaming about Catholics, Spaniards, French, Italians, Japanese and others as hostile forces that will doom the U.S. and yet it is still standing. Meanwhile, these problematic groups' identities were incorporated into the American one. I am not sure what do you mean exactly by hostile foreigners. Out of immigrants, Latin Americans are the largest group but they are assimilating very fast. More than a half of them speaks English as their primary language, and they are the most likely to marry outside of their minority group.

Russia and China have to deal with that issue too.
Russian minorities are Muslim, have expressed separatist sentiments, and some of them have a history of statehood. One of them even fought several wars to gain independence. Russians republics and administrative districts are drawn to dilute influence of Muslims in the south of the country as much as possible. Most of immigration Russia receives are Muslims from Middle East and Caucasus, and they are the only group that has high fertility while European Russians are in decline. If hostile foreigners are a problem, then Russia has it worse than the U.S.
China appears to be extremely worried about any minorities within its borders. Inner Mongolia and Western regions have heavy military presence and propaganda dominating there is aimed at limiting terrorist and separatist activities. Xinjiang has it the worst with brutal measures Chinese take against Turkic Muslim over there. China's CCP is so paranoid that they targeted a spiritual movement Falun Gong. Ironically, Chinese prosecution turned what was once a harmless middle aged people doing breathing exercises in parks into one of the better organized homegrown groups opposing CCP. Then there are people of Hong Kong who are still upset about losing their freedom guarantees after "One Country Two Systems" program was scrapped and Chinese police and military marched in. China is involved in Africa too. Sooner or later they will have to face issues that come with it that countries like France are still dealing with today.

 

[mindlessobserver]

The U.S. has always been a melting pot of different people. People were screaming about Catholics, Spaniards, French, Italians, Japanese and others as hostile forces that will doom the U.S. and yet it is still standing. Meanwhile, these problematic groups' identities were incorporated into the American one. I am not sure what do you mean exactly by hostile foreigners. Out of immigrants, Latin Americans are the largest group but they are assimilating very fast. More than a half of them speaks English as their primary language, and they are the most likely to marry outside of their minority group.

Russia and China have to deal with that issue too.
Russian minorities are Muslim, have expressed separatist sentiments, and some of them have a history of statehood. One of them even fought several wars to gain independence. Russians republics and administrative districts are drawn to dilute influence of Muslims in the south of the country as much as possible. Most of immigration Russia receives are Muslims from Middle East and Caucasus, and they are the only group that has high fertility while European Russians are in decline. If hostile foreigners are a problem, then Russia has it worse than the U.S.
China appears to be extremely worried about any minorities within its borders. Inner Mongolia and Western regions have heavy military presence and propaganda dominating there is aimed at limiting terrorist and separatist activities. Xinjiang has it the worst with brutal measures Chinese take against Turkic Muslim over there. China's CCP is so paranoid that they targeted a spiritual movement Falun Gong. Ironically, Chinese prosecution turned what was once a harmless middle aged people doing breathing exercises in parks into one of the better organized homegrown groups opposing CCP. Then there are people of Hong Kong who are still upset about losing their freedom guarantees after "One Country Two Systems" program was scrapped and Chinese police and military marched in. China is involved in Africa too. Sooner or later they will have to face issues that come with it that countries like France are still dealing with today.

More importantly the US System of government more then anything else actually has levers built into it to pull the breaks. Alot of people don't know this, even Americans, but we actually even have an ability to shut the entire system of government down legally via Article 5 of the US Constitution.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

What this essentially says is that if 3/4th of the State legislatures invoke Article 5, a Constitutional Convention is declared and the US Federal Government is formally dissolved. The Article V convention is then empowered to draft a new constitution without any Federal approval from either the Congress or the President and submit it back to the State Legislatures for approval.

I can't think of any other country in the world that has a legal kill switch built into its law. Its also pretty obvious why none of the powers that be even dare talk about this part of the US Constitution.

America has gone through alot of shit over the years. Our obituary has been written many times over. Still here.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

Okay. We supported a destabilization force in Afghanistan to topple the True and Honest Afghan government.
We're now supporting the True and Honest Ukrainian government.
Why exactly are pissed off Ukrainian loyalists going to strike America?

Are you saying it's impossible? Never say never.

 

[Aidan]

Was skimming an old image directory and saw this.


Has a different, and real, meaning now.

ps if you don't know, it's a well known pic from Euromaidan

 

[DumbDude42]

The U.S. has always been a melting pot of different people. People were screaming about Catholics, Spaniards, French, Italians, Japanese and others as hostile forces that will doom the U.S. and yet it is still standing. Meanwhile, these problematic groups' identities were incorporated into the American one.

melting pot is civnat boomer cope for people who want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend all is well instead of acknowledge how fucked the situation is.
like, if you unironically equate the intermingling of different white european settlers in the 1700s with the mass import of somalis and pakis today, then you're already way too far gone to even have a serious conversation about this anyway

 

[Marley Rathbone]

America has gone through alot of shit over the years. Our obituary has been written many times over. Still here.

No one listens to rock anymore, therefore America is indeed dead. Like, dead dead.

 

[Aidan]

Modern America is an empire of lies. It doesn't mean anyone else (Russia) is any better or worse, it just is. It's a problem we as Americans need to stay on top of. Ukraine isn't an American people problem, it's an American elite problem.

edit: @mindlessobserver just use the edit button next time

 

[mindlessobserver]

I would add however that equating America's internal political matters with Russias imperial ambitions is also a mistake. America has to sort out its internal political dramas yes, but while we do that we cannot be blind to the actions of Russia and China to challenge our empire.

Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it needs to be said because Putin himself said it. He declared the American Empire to be an Empire of Lies and then launched the largest war in Europe since 1939. The Yugoslavia breakup doesn't even hold a candle to this fiasco at this point.

While we have a senile idiot in charge China is signing security deals with Pacific Island shit holes who by rights are OUR Pawns. And for almost a century all those shit holes have enjoyed a very comfortable and cushy existence as independent shitholes with UN membership. Solely due to America suffering it.

This entire war is just an extension of this belief that America is in decline. It's not. We have always had our internal squabbles. Politics in America is a full contact sport. But it is a massive mistake to assume America is weak simply because it's passive and internally preoccupied.

America is going to bleed Russia white in Ukraine because Putin himself said this war is ultimately about us. Good luck.

 

[Aidan]

Til the last hohol indeed, as long as it bleeds Russia white.
Slava Ukraini!