An Update on Ukraine

Published by

Clarissa

February 17, 2015

A fierce battle is under way around the Ukrainian city of Debaltseve in spite of the “ceasefire” brokered by Obama and Merkel. Even as the agreement was being signed, Russian troops and weaponry kept flowing across the border.

The US State Department keeps expressing “grave concern”, which Russians find extremely funny. They welcome these impotent statements as a sign of the West’s weakness. And it’s hard to disagree with them here.

Obama still has almost 2 years in office. And there’s no way Ukraine can resist for as long as that. It’s an absolute miracle that the country has managed to beat the invaders back for an entire year.

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17 responses to “An Update on Ukraine”

cliff arroyo

February 17, 2015

How was Obama involved? All the coverage I saw was portraying this as a Merkel/ Hollande enterprise (and therefore bound to fail before it was even over which most of the press is too stupid or complicit to realize).

I have the horrible idea that Obama would probably personally support his bully Putin* rather than the Ukrainians, especially if the EU is involved. He wrote in one of his books how awful he felt while visiting Europe and Putin’s CCCP successor Russia seems more like his cup of tea.

*if only to maintain his dillusional self-image that he isn’t bullied by Putin.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 17, 2015
  
  The only reason why Ukraine even agreed to this whole silly farce of a cease-fire is because this is what Obama is demanding before giving weapons. Merkel and especially Hollande are entirely insignificant.
  
  The Ukrainians did observe the ceasefire. But the Russians have used it to ship in more forces and deliver a massive attack on the critical juncture of Debaltseve.
  
  I’m trying not to think that Obama is playing into the Russians’ hands consciously but that’s getting hard. Everything is being done to make conquest and destruction of Ukraine easier for the Russians, everything.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    February 18, 2015
    
    “silly farce of a cease-fire is because this is what Obama is demanding before giving weapons”
    
    What precisely are his conditions? Surely they don’t include a lasting ceasefire? Surely Obama is not that stupid?
    
    If a lasting ceasefire is a condition for aid then all Russia has to do is keep breaking the ceasefire to prevent Ukraine from defending itself. Surely Obama realizes that (if he doesn’t he’s stupid or evil).
    
    It’s overwhelmingly obvious that the Russian forces are the ones who broke the Minsk farce.
    
    Ukraine has made more than enough good faith efforts to obtain a lasting ceasefire, surely that’s enough.
    
    Or again, Obama is stupid or evil.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 18, 2015
      
      It seems like Obama just wants this to go away so he’s demanding “peace.” He doesn’t seem to want to recognize that not every conflict can be talked away.
      
      The Russians threw enormous forces into Debaltseve in the past two days. The railroad they were supposedly fighting for has been razed to the ground. But the Ukrainian soldiers seem to have done the impossible and broken out of the encirclement by the Russians. There wasn’t even an army in Ukraine just a year ago, and now there is a really great one, completely supplied by volunteers. If there are people who deserve to be helped out, these are the ones.
      
      Putin is not stopping. He’s laughing at peace accords.
      
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2. el
  
  February 17, 2015
  
  \ He wrote in one of his books how awful he felt while visiting Europe
  
  Why? Is it connected to being black? What was so awful in Europe, especially compared to America where black people like him used to be slaves?
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    February 17, 2015
    
    A couple of quotes:
    
    “And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I‘d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I‘d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.”
    
    “I felt as if I were living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. ”
    
    Which is fairly funny if you stop to think that Obama is actuall just over half white (mothers supply slightly more dna than do fathers).
    
    Basically he was obsessing about the father who’d blithely abandoned his mother and him and never really looked back.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      February 17, 2015
      
      “Basically he was obsessing about the father who’d blithely abandoned his mother and him and never really looked back.”
      
      Freud rules. 🙂 Europe is an American’s (and I refer to both Americas) metaphorical father.
      
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      1. el
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        \ Freud rules. 🙂 Europe is an American’s (and I refer to both Americas) metaphorical father.
        
        Do you mean that he transferred / projected feelings about his biological father to Europe? Despite his mother being from Europe? Weird.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        “Do you mean that he transferred / projected feelings about his biological father to Europe? Despite his mother being from Europe? Weird.”
        
        It isn’t weird. It is the foundation of identity building in both Americas. E.g. Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude on the Mexican identity.
        
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    2. el
      
      February 17, 2015
      
      “It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I‘d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.”
      
      To me, a kind of funny / strange thing is that this was written by … an American. I thought Americans were proud to be non-European and loved to stress the difference (and American superiority) between them and the Old World at every opportunity.
      
      He has America, shouldn’t that be enough, letting one simply enjoy Europe?
      
      What is the book’s name, btw?
      
      //Basically he was obsessing about the father who’d blithely abandoned his mother and him and never really looked back.
      
      I think American racism is to blame.
      
      But, in his mother’s place, I would’ve felt hurt at my child not feeling connection to my legacy / roots, anyway.
      
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      1. cliff arroyo
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        The book is “Dreams of my Father” (a bestseller which probably most people didn’t really read because the style is …… exhausting).
        
        “in his mother’s place, I would’ve felt hurt at my child not feeling connection to my legacy / roots, anyway”
        
        Steve Sailer’s theory (and he did read the book) was that his blackness is a product of his mother who created it for him for her own reasons (partly connected to her unhappiness at her second marriage to an Indonesian).
        
        His mother also essentially abandoned him to her parents so she could do research on Indonesian blacksmiths.
        
        “I think American racism is to blame.”
        
        Kind of an empty statement. His US experience was in Hawaii which was probably had the lowest degree of racial anomosity in the US.
        
        My impression of him was that his Black identity was carefully acquired in adolescence and young adulthood and his relation to the black community in the US (which he had almost no connection with until after high school) was similar to Americans who go to Europe to connect with their roots and try to out native the natives.
        
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        Z
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        This is an interesting analysis.
        
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      2. TomW
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        //To me, a kind of funny / strange thing is that this was written by … an American. I thought Americans were proud to be non-European and loved to stress the difference (and American superiority) between them and the Old World at every opportunity.
        
        You are correct that many Americans love to stress the differences with Europe, the thing is that they care about those differences and they care what Europeans think about America and Americans. The vast majority don’t care even a little bit about differences with other parts of the world or what other parts of the world think of the US.
        
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      3. Clarissa
        
        February 17, 2015
        
        “//Basically he was obsessing about the father who’d blithely abandoned his mother and him and never really looked back. I think American racism is to blame.”
        
        The hurt at being abandoned by one’s parent(s) knows no racial boundaries.
        
        “But, in his mother’s place, I would’ve felt hurt at my child not feeling connection to my legacy / roots, anyway.”
        
        Children are not parents’ body parts. They are separate human beings.
        
        “I thought Americans were proud to be non-European and loved to stress the difference (and American superiority) between them and the Old World at every opportunity.”
        
        Only extremely low-cultured, illiterate people.
        
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        cliff arroyo
        
        February 18, 2015
        
        ““I thought Americans were proud to be non-European and loved to stress the difference (and American superiority) between them and the Old World at every opportunity.”
        
        Only extremely low-cultured, illiterate people. "
        
        Well it’s not exactly like there’s a shortage of those in the US…..
        
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Jones

February 24, 2015

BTW, there are American M4 carbines circulating in Ukraine, some of which were found at Donetsk airport …

https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12zz1vjpofoezkaf04cjt5ahti2cj3odwc0k

Of course, they came with the Russians who had been issued them after they’d been taken from the Georgian Army, and the NATO observers who supposedly saw them at the Donetsk airport did not actually go there to observe anything …

(From left, a more or less standard M4, a Remington 700 modified for military sniper use (aka M24 Sniper Weapon System), some kind of suppressed rifle I don’t recognise off-hand that’s in somewhat abused shape, a Glock pistol, a FN or Browning High Power pistol, and what looks like a bull-pup configuration of a machine gun that I can’t immediately identify, but may be a variation of the M249.)

Ria Novosti tried to make a big deal of this a while back, but of course they neglected to mention how those “evil” American and Belgian small arms made their way into Ukraine in the first place …

Someone tonight reminded me of the “discovery” of M4 carbines in Ukraine and I figured I’d see what that was really about, since I did not hold the idea that they’d been “Berlin airlifted” into Ukraine in much regard.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 24, 2015
  
  Great comment, thank you!!!
  
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