[narduch]

So Ukrainians are committing war crimes now defending their homeland?

Honestly haven't followed that war close enough to say.

But why else would you want to train with the current most villainous army around

 

[kEiThZ]

Honestly haven't followed that war close enough to say.

Then you should avoid commenting..

You're doing a great job promoting the Palestinian cause by labeling Ukrainians training to defend their homeland, and the Brits teaching them as villainous war criminals.

Curious. I serve in the CAF. Am I villain simply for serving in a Western military?

 

[T3G]

Seems to be the Palestinian logic in justifying attacks on civilians in Israel (including several foreign nationals Hamas took hostage).

But really this isn't even about Palestine. This is about pro-Palestinian groups being useful idiots for adversarial foreign powers.

I agree, that, too, was an atrocity. But the Palestinian people are no more collectively responsible for that than the Israelis are for what their government has done, and at some point someone has to be the bigger person and exercise some restraint/respect for international law. An eye for an eye will leave us all dead.

I just don't see the relevance in bringing up your tweets as proof of why people feel more sympathy for Ukraine. A freshly unearthed conspiracy doesn't explain years of blind western support for Israel.

 

[kEiThZ]

I just don't see the relevance in bringing up your tweets as proof of why people feel more sympathy for Ukraine. A freshly unearthed conspiracy doesn't explain years of blind western support for Israel.

Nobody suggested that "blind Western support for Israel" is justified.

I would say that these attacks are revealing where these pro-Palestinian groups are increasingly just anti-Western fronts targeting governments and infrastructure in the West, using the Palestinian cause as a fig leaf. None of the bases they planned on attacking have anything to even do with Israel. Indeed, the recent attack on a British refueller was on a platform that is literally not equipped to support any Israeli aircraft. Yet, now that these groups are facing domestic terrorism sanctions, they are complaining that this is suppression of the Palestinian cause.

Broadly, these Palestinian groups have also been highly susceptible to Russian propaganda (heck you can see it in this thread where apparently simply serving in a Western military makes you evil) and have come to see Russian aggression in Ukraine as somehow justifiable simply because this is the anti-West position.

 

[jje1000]

Zelensky's recent moves against NABU and SAP are excellent off-ramps for the US and the EU in regards to cutting Ukraine aid.

The E.U.’s decision capped a tumultuous week for Mr. Zelensky, who first pushed a measure through Parliament that stripped the independence of two anticorruption agencies, raising protests from foreign leaders as well as the Ukrainian people.

He then reversed course, submitting a new bill to Parliament to restore the agencies’ independence. That calmed the street protests, but could not head off the E.U.’s aid cut, which had already been decided on the basis of longstanding guidelines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/europe/eu-ukraine-corruption-aid.html

 

[Collingwoodbuildinglover]

Zelensky's recent moves against NABU and SAP are excellent off-ramps for the US and the EU in regards to cutting Ukraine aid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/europe/eu-ukraine-corruption-aid.html

They were good off-ramps but turned into proof that the ukrainians will defend their ideals and their path towards being a strong civil society till the end wish that our governments would respond to protests the way that this was done no one was hurt The point got across and changes are being made if that happened in the US right now with the way they are going after anti-corruption agencies they probably would have deported everyone that participated

 

[Monarch Butterfly]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1954927298240508125

 

[Towered]

Joking aside, I do like that Trump is getting Putin to meet in Alaska of all places - that's a major fuck you to him considering its history as former Russian territory

 

[Admiral Beez]

Russia’s staggering losses—which far exceed those it suffered in all its wars since the second world war—are a testament to Ukraine’s stubborn defence against a far stronger power. Yet Russia’s ability to shrug them off and to keep recruiting men to throw into meat-grinder attacks ought to also pose sobering questions for NATO’s European members: how can democracies that value the individual deter an adversary so unconcerned about the lives of its soldiers that it will sacrifice them, year after year, in a punishing war of attrition?

......

Even so, it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses (it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines). To put them into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war. They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today. The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses are also about ten times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Whereas Ukraine is fighting a war of national survival, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president has choices. Yet he appears to be under little domestic pressure to call it a day. Having lost most of the mainly professional army that set out to defeat Ukraine over three years ago, the Kremlin has come up with an almost entirely novel way of replenishing manpower at the front without risking social destabilisation. It combines the ideological militarisation of society, by convincing most Russians that they are engaged in a war against an imperialistic NATO and that there is glory in death, with increasingly lavish contracts for those willing to sign up.

“Putin believes that the Afghan War is one of the main reasons that the Soviet Union collapsed,” says Aleksandr Golts of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He has come up with a revolution in Russian military thinking. I call it ‘market mobilisation’, others have called it ‘deathonomics.’”

The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their thirties and forties, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist who is now a researcher at Oxford University, the signing on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), while the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.

For now, believes Ms Racheva, Russian society accepts that the system is an alternative to full mobilisation. There is 88% approval of contract soldiers receiving money and benefits for going to war “instead of us”. For the families of the dead and injured, huge payouts “alleviate…their grief, such as feelings of injustice … and allow society to avoid moral responsibility for the casualties and injuries they endure,” Ms Racheva wrote. In other words, the contract is not just between the soldier and the state. The question which nobody can answer is how long that contract will hold.

A brilliant move by Putin was to offer huge signing bonuses to join the army, thus enabling a massive troop expansion without another call up. And since these new troops are essentially mercenaries signing up for life-changingly large cash incentives, there's a lot less societal protest when they die or are wounded vs. conscripts pulled off the street. Through this, notwithstanding one million casualties so far, Putin is able to field an army today that's larger (in troops, not AFVs) than that of Feb 2022, enabling Russia to continue incremental territorial gains throughout 2025. Meanwhile Ukraine is fighting with essentially the same exact men from 2023 to today, which must be exhausting. Of course Putin is ripping the demographic and economic heart out of Russia's future.

 

[Full Metal Junkie]

A brilliant move by Putin was to offer huge signing bonuses to join the army,... there's a lot less societal protest when they die or are wounded vs. conscripts pulled off the street.

1) I wouldn't call anything Putin does as brilliant. Shrewd? Maybe, but even that's a stretch. Buying loyalty with money, because everyone has a price - a typical thug mentality that permeates everything Putin does. He grew up as a thug, he never stopped being one.
2) The large Russian soldiers' salaries are reportedly mostly eaten up by their day-to-day expenses. They have to buy their own uniforms, combat gear, food, water, generators, fuel, etc. Because if you thought that Russian MoD would provide all that to their soldiers, you would be as mistaken as those soldiers who signed up to serve.
3) Families of those unfortunate enough to sign up usually get to keep the following:
a. Initial signup bonus of anywhere between $5K to $20K (depending on when they signed up and in what region)
b. Death benefits that can be as high as $50K to $70K depending on the region. One caveat - MoD has to actually officially admit the fallen soldier is KiA. There is huge financial inventive for them to just leave the fallen soldiers to rot on the battlefield and then write them off as "missing", foregoing the payouts.

These payouts, as insignificant as they are by developed country standards, are life-changing for the families of KiA soldiers in Russia. Enough to buy a house, a car and other once-in-a-lifetime big ticket items. Enough to keep the families pacified. A perfect system to pray on the poorest segments of Russian population that would otherwise have had no chance to lift themselves out of poverty. And the rest of the Russian society? What war? We have nothing to do with it, it has nothing to do with us, everything is absolutely fine...

Of course Putin is ripping the demographic and economic heart out of Russia's future.

Setting the demographic situation aside, Russia is about to run out of money in its sovereign wealth fund. You know, the gold pot that was funded by all of those oil revenues for the 20 years prior to the war. The rainy day slush fund that was depleted in less than 4 years of war. The wealth fund that was created with the promise to bring prosperity to the future generations of Russians. The piggy bank that Kremlin used to fund its war and keep Russian economy from collapsing. Can't wait to see how quickly Putin changes his tune once the Russian economy implodes and he can't fund his war machine any longer.