Interview with a Ukrainian pilot as to how things are going Air Force wise.

https://video.snapstream.net/Play/3S...n=k62r5qbojafo

And America's excuse for invading North Korea.

And America's excuse for invading Vietnam.

And America's excuse for invading Panama.

And America's excuse for invading Grenada.

And America's excuse for invading Iraq.

And America's excuse for invading Afghanistan.

There's always an excuse. Usually the same one.

Ah, dear Prunus Dessicatus (may I call you Pru?) Please get your history right. North Korea invaded S. Korea, and nearly overran Seoul before the UNITED NATIONS forces pushed the dictator Kim family beck where they belonged.
Please get your history right. N.Vietnam started to try to impose their version of Marxist-Leninism on their southern neighbours (a corrupt lot, but that's no excuse) The legitimate government invited the US in as advisers, and it escalated from there. There was no invasion, US soldiers didn't set foot in N. Vietman Arguable. Did they pack up and leave after the operation?
Same again
I'll give you that one. Not that Saddam didn't deserve it, blatantly ignoring several UN resolutions. The gross error was going in with no 'what next' plan.
The excuse was 3,000 dead in the WTC destruction, and the Afghans happily sheltering the guys who planned it, and planned lots more. Mind you, they could have taken lessons from history and said 'Now what' before going in. Identifying and bombing the training camps, and staying out might have been a cheaper long term plan. As above. Different ones each time. Maybe similar outcomes.

So called whataboutism. By doing it he tries to make unwelcome to him parts of the debate disappear faster.

Can anyone with fewer than 10 posts, chipping in on this or similar threads, be assumed to be a Putin factory troll?

I guess their plans for domination of the Arctic's natural resources have taken a bit of a hit too, given that no-ones going to afraid of them now.

Many here have been saying that all along i.e. Russia is looking in diametrically the wrong direction regarding the most pressing threat to its existence. Putin may be playing chess (badly, as it turns out), but Xi is playing Go.

So, if Russians get out of Ukraine we call it a game?

Should we also invade USA for harboring hundreds of Nazi's after WWII (and a host of other countries for that matter, Russia included)? And before you go about "those were only scientist and forced to work for Nazi's" that's a bull. Lets not forget bunch of big USA companies working with Nazi Germany before and during the War

Ad hominem comments really expose the weakness of your arguments.

Yeah, I know they are weak, just because I don't allign with you.
BTW, I was doing the same thing that he did in his response to a post that didn't allign with his views of good and wrong.

I'm afraid that these days you need to raise the bar to 50-60 posts and 5-6 years. Regrettably the troll factory has been curating a lot of accounts all over the internet for many years.

Whew... I'm safe comrade..

It's not a question of aligning. It's a question of relevance and relativism. The discussion is about the morality and ethics of Russia and its armed forces and nothing else.

1. Ukraine has beaten Russia at every turn so far, and has a better long-term outlook than Russia has. The tech and financial sanctions have yet to fully impact Russia, and that will impact their capacity to prosecute a war. I wouldn't be writing the requiem as yet, it may be for the wrong party.
2. Putin oversees a controlled media and polls have the same value as a Putin promise. Probably good for feeding dandilions. Has Putin told the truth to his citizens? If he had, and they were still cheering, then maybe your comment would hold water, but there is no credible uncompromised source that suggests Putin is popular. He is utterly linked to Ukraine, so a defeat or an extended conflict causing damage on the Russian economy is owned by him, and his minions will have a fair amount of distance to set between themselves and the coming anger of the population.
3. Sanctions are a part solution, and they are causing problems to Russia.
4. So Russia moving borders to NATO is different from NATO moving a border to Russia, how?
5. Nor is there a risk of a NATO country attacking Russia. Russia is well equipped to continue living the dream of own goals that have been part of Russian heritage since Olaf the Hairy was looking wistfully at the Varangian maidens.... back in 862.

Russia doesn't need help from others in making a mess of things, they are eminently capable of messing up their own playpen in solitude. Lots of plots for Checkov and Tolstoy, the trouble usually is that every Russian story starts horribly, gets progressively worse, and the ending makes you wistful for the happier character of Dante Alighieri, at least Dante kept warm in winter.

One rather distasteful act by the Americans however was convincing the guys in charge of South Vietnam (names escape me) to allow the Americans to impose their own leaders in exchange for a life in America.
When they agreed America promptly had them shot, washing their hands of the affair of course.
As for the war in Vietnam (and the French didn't exactly have a blameless occupation either what with heads on spikes and the like) wasn't the Gulf of Tonkin incident just an excuse for the Americans to put boots on the ground?

The sad truth is if Ukraine hadn't resisted we wouldn't have given a damn about Putin. Unfortunately for us they didn't. Morality rarely comes into war until it suits the politics.

lol - Ukraine is already winning the war

Popping down to your local Careers Information Centre aka Military Enlistment Centre, Russian style.... :E Love it..

There were already thousands of Americans in Viet Nam, had been a slowly growing presence since around 1960. JFK's "bear any burden" was a change in policy from Ike's "not worth major military ops, don't go there, stick to advise and assist" policy. I've got an old friend who flew Marine H-34's (helicopters)(<== look, aviation content!) in Viet Nam before 1964. Before Ap Bac. Before Diem went bye bye. To give you an idea of scope and scale: there were over 16,000 US troops in South Viet Nam in 1963. What Gulf of Tonkin did was give LBJ the political leverage to increase that amount by an order of magnitude. The rest, as they say, is history.
You should have stopped there, I think.
There is not the political will to do that in any of the Western capitals, not to mention you create your own problems, a la Iraq 2003 - 2010, if you try that. Dietary Suggestion: stop spiking your tea with gin. :}
Once again, invading Belarus? No political will in Europe nor in NATO to do that. Further dietary advice: also stop spiking your tea with vodka, I saw what you did there after you put the gin bottle away! :}
His health may fail, but any assassination attempt need not be sponsored in the West. He has his own problems within, leave it to them.
On this aspect, how much power he has centralized in his own person (the modern day Tsar Vladimir, you might say) seems to be true, which will make for chaos once he's ousted or offed, and we saw how that played out as USSR fell apart. (heck, when Saddam was removed, the civil war in Iraq started and it went on for some years despite coalition efforts to arrest it).
That chaos, when Vlad goes away, might happen again or a leader who can prevent that may arise. Sometimes, 'cometh the hour cometh the man' takes some surprising forms. No idea who that might be, but I do not doubt that there are some candidates lurking.

For admikar: dietary advice is to consider not spiking the borscht with vodka. :}

For mahogany bob: even though iced tea and some whiskies are similar in color, the taste should be an indicator of which is which. Dietary tip here is that drinking a tall glass (a pint or so) of iced tea is fine, drinking that same pint of whiskey not as fine. :}

To win a land war you have to be in a position to take land and then hold on to it. So far Putin's men have managed to take some land, most of it an area where they have been fermenting a separatist movement for years, but they have taken ground beyond that region. The price, however, has been a high one in terms of men and equipment and the loss rate in some aspects has been unsustainable. Most of this has been achieved before many of the new weapon systems Ukraine has acquired have been brought to bear. Things are not going to get easier for the Russian Forces. A full mobilisation in Russia will generate more cannon meat, to use the Russian expression, but what fresh equipment does Russia have to bring to the front? The good equipment has not fared well and the old will not do any better.

Putting all that aside, even if Russia did manage to fight to the western edge of Ukraine, how are they going to cope with the resistance movement that will almost certainly be kept supplied by the West. Just how many troops would be need to garrison the country and to make good the losses? Russia pulled out of Afghanistan when their losses reached 10,000. Now they are well over that, possibly double and to coin a phrase, you ain't seen nothing yet.

From a Ukrainian perspective the war is winnable, from a Russian perspective, you cannot get there from here.

And I totally agree with you that it is not moral. All I am asking here is, can West be the one pointing the finger considering their moral blunders over the years?

USSR leaving Afghanistan was a different sort of political and cultural thing than 'restoring Russian lands/borders/people to Russia.' The Russians might be willing to pay a higher price to 'get some of their land back into Russia' which looks to be a discrete and well supported (by the Russian political rhetoric, I mean) war aim.
Depends on what victory conditions are. Keeping, or getting back, Mariupol would seem to me to be a Ukraine victory condition. Land bridge to Crimea and annex parts of Eastern Ukraine seems to be a Russian victory condition...but I am estimating here. There may be lesser included cases inside Russian or Ukrainian policy circles that don't look anything like that.
Short answer: yes. Welcome to the world of politics, which is the parent of war.