About war in Ukraine

[player1772]

* removed for being off-topic

[player1772]

* removed for being off-topic

[DrAlexandr]

Hello, can you tell me if there were discounts for the premium for Ukrainians? All my friends are scattered around the world and we can't play board games together. Maybe there is a discount for the first month of premium to see if this game format suits us. Thank you.

[NickWitucki]

I wonder how many sites banned American and British flags in 2003? It has been a while, but the best I remember, it was "zero." I know none of them banned American or British IP addresses. . .

Anyway, good on BGA for refusing to censor their players' freedoms of expression and association. And good on them for refusing to discriminate on the basis of national origin. For all of America's flaws (like the one I noted above), these are some of the bedrocks of the USA.

And while BGA is not an American company, I appreciate their their commitment to American values

[player1772]

What baffles me most about this situation is how nonchalant people are about it. This is especially true among the younger crowd. Many of the older people I have spoken with are against escalating the war because they are aware of the consequences that would follow.

The longer this war drags on, and the more brazen Ukraine/NATO troops get, the greater the likelihood for nuclear warfare. No thanks, I got enough problems as it is. Ukraine and Russia need to diplomatically resolve their problems without any more bloodshed. I can't blame Ukraine for wanting their land back, but I also don't want the world to get blown up either. And let's face it - if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Russia would've been colonized decades ago. But they DO have nuclear weapons, and that means war is NOT an option. It's really that simple. If you value your life and those around you, then you will realize this.

[robinzig]

While I of course have sympathy with a fear of nuclear escalation, this fear plays into Putin's hand. Why else does he raise the nuclear rhetoric when things are going badly for him?

Unfortunately the logical outcome of giving in to such fears is that every state which has access to nuclear weapons gets to do whatever they want to the others. Maybe you think this "law of the jungle" is just the way it has to be, but someone has to make a stand for the right of smaller nations to live the way they want without bullying. (And yes, I know the US does not exactly have a perfect record here, so please let's not start any whataboutery. I'm just saying, "better let them have whatever they want, they've got nukes" is not a recipe for long-term peace but actually quite the opposite. This should be obvious to any intelligent person.)

[NickWitucki]

What baffles me most about this situation is how nonchalant people are about it. This is especially true among the younger crowd. Many of the older people I have spoken with are against escalating the war because they are aware of the consequences that would follow.

The longer this war drags on, and the more brazen Ukraine/NATO troops get, the greater the likelihood for nuclear warfare. No thanks, I got enough problems as it is. Ukraine and Russia need to diplomatically resolve their problems without any more bloodshed. I can't blame Ukraine for wanting their land back, but I also don't want the world to get blown up either. And let's face it - if Russia didn't have nuclear weapons, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. Russia would've been colonized decades ago. But they DO have nuclear weapons, and that means war is NOT an option. It's really that simple. If you value your life and those around you, then you will realize this.

Unfortunately for all of us, this war is good for the bottom line of the DC donor class and thus will continue indefinitely https://www.analystnews.org/posts/as-th ... he-profits

Or at least until it's time for Blackrock and JP Morgan to make their money on the Ukraine reconstruction https://news.antiwar.com/2022/12/28/zel ... struction/

That's why when it looked like peace might have broken out in the Spring of 2022, Boris Johnson (under direction from Washington DC, no doubt) scuttled the negotiations https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/ ... n-ukraine/

Now back to work, peasant. Those tax dollars DC's gonna funnel to their friends won't raise themselves!

[NickWitucki]

While I of course have sympathy with a fear of nuclear escalation, this fear plays into Putin's hand. Why else does he raise the nuclear rhetoric when things are going badly for him?

Unfortunately the logical outcome of giving in to such fears is that every state which has access to nuclear weapons gets to do whatever they want to the others. Maybe you think this "law of the jungle" is just the way it has to be, but someone has to make a stand for the right of smaller nations to live the way they want without bullying. (And yes, I know the US does not exactly have a perfect record here, so please let's not start any whataboutery. I'm just saying, "better let them have whatever they want, they've got nukes" is not a recipe for long-term peace but actually quite the opposite. This should be obvious to any intelligent person.)

To really understand the war and Russia and Ukraine and NATO's motivations it's important to remember that the current war didn't start in 2022 but 2014. And the lead up to the war began with the expansion of NATO to eastern Europe in the 1990's and then parts of the USSR in the early 2000's, including the floating of the idea for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/0 ... 0403h.html.

The documentary Ukraine on Fire (which came out in 2017) sheds some light on those events that most in the mainstream media have conveniently forgotten. https://rumble.com/vwxxi8-ukraine-on-fire.html

Bottom line is, the ethnic Russian parts of eastern Ukraine have been fighting a civil war against Kiev for almost 10 years. That civil war included fighters for Kiev that gave western governments some grave concern and for good reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG ... annel=TIME. And if they gave the West some concern, you can bet they gave the ethnic Russians of the Donbas a whole lot of concern of what would happen if they won.

The bottom line is, unless people get away from the cartoonish version of the Ukraine war the mainstream media has been pushing for the last 18 months of Russia = Bad, Ukraine = Good, Putin = Bad, Zelensky = Good, NATO = very good, and Ukraine = 1 Unified Nation from Lviv to Mariupol, Kiev to Crimea, they will never understand the conflict and therefore never solve the conflict.

And that's A-OK for the bottom line of those making bumper profits from the war https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/ ... raine-war/

[robinzig]

While I of course have sympathy with a fear of nuclear escalation, this fear plays into Putin's hand. Why else does he raise the nuclear rhetoric when things are going badly for him?

Unfortunately the logical outcome of giving in to such fears is that every state which has access to nuclear weapons gets to do whatever they want to the others. Maybe you think this "law of the jungle" is just the way it has to be, but someone has to make a stand for the right of smaller nations to live the way they want without bullying. (And yes, I know the US does not exactly have a perfect record here, so please let's not start any whataboutery. I'm just saying, "better let them have whatever they want, they've got nukes" is not a recipe for long-term peace but actually quite the opposite. This should be obvious to any intelligent person.)

To really understand the war and Russia and Ukraine and NATO's motivations it's important to remember that the current war didn't start in 2022 but 2014. And the lead up to the war began with the expansion of NATO to eastern Europe in the 1990's and then parts of the USSR in the early 2000's, including the floating of the idea for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/0 ... 0403h.html.

The documentary Ukraine on Fire (which came out in 2017) sheds some light on those events that most in the mainstream media have conveniently forgotten. https://rumble.com/vwxxi8-ukraine-on-fire.html

Bottom line is, the ethnic Russian parts of eastern Ukraine have been fighting a civil war against Kiev for almost 10 years. That civil war included fighters for Kiev that gave western governments some grave concern and for good reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG ... annel=TIME. And if they gave the West some concern, you can bet they gave the ethnic Russians of the Donbas a whole lot of concern of what would happen if they won.

The bottom line is, unless people get away from the cartoonish version of the Ukraine war the mainstream media has been pushing for the last 18 months of Russia = Bad, Ukraine = Good, Putin = Bad, Zelensky = Good, NATO = very good, and Ukraine = 1 Unified Nation from Lviv to Mariupol, Kiev to Crimea, they will never understand the conflict and therefore never solve the conflict.

And that's A-OK for the bottom line of those making bumper profits from the war https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/ ... raine-war/

Yes, I'm aware of all this history, thank you. But I disagree with your spin on it (and no, I'm not going to go and watch random youtube videos on it, which are doubtless little more than propaganda for a particular viewpoint). [Your very use of the old Russian spelling Kiev for Ukraine's capital, rather than the Ukrainian language Kyiv which has now become accepted in the West - because it is how Ukrainians prefer to refer to it - itself seems to imply something.]

And you are overlooking quite a few important things.The first is that those civil wars which you correctly pointed out have been going on since 2014, were pretty much instigated, or at least heavily inflamed, by Putin. What happened, as I understand it, was that there was a genuine popular uprising in Kyiv against the then-president, who was a pro-Russian figure and, on being pressured by Putin, refused to sign an agreement with the EU, having previously promised he would. As a result of a massive and unexpected (and non-armed) uprising, this president ended up fleeing to Russia. (Putin likes to refer to this as some sort of US-instigated coup, and maybe he even believes that - but while it's true that the US backed the Ukraininian people's right to self-determination, to imply that they were somehow the instigators is absurd.)

Following that was when Putin, horrified that the country which he had always seen as little more than an outer satellite of Russia, and was happy to tolerate the independence of provided that (like Belarus) its leadership dances to his tune when he needed it to, decided to claim Crimea as a part of Russia, and pour arms into eastern Ukraine to start the civil war we're talking about. Of course, there were genuine grievances on the part of some people there, and doubtless a fair number of them would have rather been part of Russia than of a Western-leaning Ukraine. I'd be the first to accept that the history of this part of Europe is rather complex and the borders of the modern state of Ukraine have arisen as a result of many historical accidents. But it was purely Putin who quite deliberately inflamed this from fairly inconsequential hostility to an actual armed conflict (one in which, I remind you, a completely innocent civilian passenger airline, whose passengers were not Russian or Ukrainian and had nothing to do with this, was shot down by the pro-Russian rebels, using a Russian-supplied weapon - something which of course Putin denies but there is no other explanation, and detailed investigations have reached that obvious conclusion).

Of course, those people in eastern Ukraine who speak the Russian language as their mother tongue and might have thought of themselves as pro-Russian, are now pretty much united in rejecting Russian barbarity and turning towards the West - because there's nothing like having the sh*t bombed out of your country, and many of your friends and family killed, for no good reason to make you turn against something.

We can argue about the rights and wrongs of many things (I am sympathetic with the viewpoint that NATO shouldn't have been so quick to expand to the ex-Soviet territories - although mostly Putin uses this as an excuse when what he really hates is countries that he thinks of as close to, if not even "really part of" Russia in his view, experiencing real democracy), but in the only aspect that really matters here - certainly the only one that matters right now to the people of Ukraine - namely which country starting bombing and otherwise military assaulting a peaceful neighbour who posed zero military threat to it - this is 100% a case of "Russia = Bad, Ukraine = Good". Yes history is complicated, so are human motivations, but some things, or at least the most important aspects of them, really are as black and white as that.

[NickWitucki]

While I of course have sympathy with a fear of nuclear escalation, this fear plays into Putin's hand. Why else does he raise the nuclear rhetoric when things are going badly for him?

Unfortunately the logical outcome of giving in to such fears is that every state which has access to nuclear weapons gets to do whatever they want to the others. Maybe you think this "law of the jungle" is just the way it has to be, but someone has to make a stand for the right of smaller nations to live the way they want without bullying. (And yes, I know the US does not exactly have a perfect record here, so please let's not start any whataboutery. I'm just saying, "better let them have whatever they want, they've got nukes" is not a recipe for long-term peace but actually quite the opposite. This should be obvious to any intelligent person.)

To really understand the war and Russia and Ukraine and NATO's motivations it's important to remember that the current war didn't start in 2022 but 2014. And the lead up to the war began with the expansion of NATO to eastern Europe in the 1990's and then parts of the USSR in the early 2000's, including the floating of the idea for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/0 ... 0403h.html.

The documentary Ukraine on Fire (which came out in 2017) sheds some light on those events that most in the mainstream media have conveniently forgotten. https://rumble.com/vwxxi8-ukraine-on-fire.html

Bottom line is, the ethnic Russian parts of eastern Ukraine have been fighting a civil war against Kiev for almost 10 years. That civil war included fighters for Kiev that gave western governments some grave concern and for good reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG ... annel=TIME. And if they gave the West some concern, you can bet they gave the ethnic Russians of the Donbas a whole lot of concern of what would happen if they won.

The bottom line is, unless people get away from the cartoonish version of the Ukraine war the mainstream media has been pushing for the last 18 months of Russia = Bad, Ukraine = Good, Putin = Bad, Zelensky = Good, NATO = very good, and Ukraine = 1 Unified Nation from Lviv to Mariupol, Kiev to Crimea, they will never understand the conflict and therefore never solve the conflict.

And that's A-OK for the bottom line of those making bumper profits from the war https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/ ... raine-war/

Yes, I'm aware of all this history, thank you. But I disagree with your spin on it (and no, I'm not going to go and watch random youtube videos on it, which are doubtless little more than propaganda for a particular viewpoint). [Your very use of the old Russian spelling Kiev for Ukraine's capital, rather than the Ukrainian language Kyiv which has now become accepted in the West - because it is how Ukrainians prefer to refer to it - itself seems to imply something.]

And you are overlooking quite a few important things.The first is that those civil wars which you correctly pointed out have been going on since 2014, were pretty much instigated, or at least heavily inflamed, by Putin. What happened, as I understand it, was that there was a genuine popular uprising in Kyiv against the then-president, who was a pro-Russian figure and, on being pressured by Putin, refused to sign an agreement with the EU, having previously promised he would. As a result of a massive and unexpected (and non-armed) uprising, this president ended up fleeing to Russia. (Putin likes to refer to this as some sort of US-instigated coup, and maybe he even believes that - but while it's true that the US backed the Ukraininian people's right to self-determination, to imply that they were somehow the instigators is absurd.)

Following that was when Putin, horrified that the country which he had always seen as little more than an outer satellite of Russia, and was happy to tolerate the independence of provided that (like Belarus) its leadership dances to his tune when he needed it to, decided to claim Crimea as a part of Russia, and pour arms into eastern Ukraine to start the civil war we're talking about. Of course, there were genuine grievances on the part of some people there, and doubtless a fair number of them would have rather been part of Russia than of a Western-leaning Ukraine. I'd be the first to accept that the history of this part of Europe is rather complex and the borders of the modern state of Ukraine have arisen as a result of many historical accidents. But it was purely Putin who quite deliberately inflamed this from fairly inconsequential hostility to an actual armed conflict (one in which, I remind you, a completely innocent civilian passenger airline, whose passengers were not Russian or Ukrainian and had nothing to do with this, was shot down by the pro-Russian rebels, using a Russian-supplied weapon - something which of course Putin denies but there is no other explanation, and detailed investigations have reached that obvious conclusion).

Of course, those people in eastern Ukraine who speak the Russian language as their mother tongue and might have thought of themselves as pro-Russian, are now pretty much united in rejecting Russian barbarity and turning towards the West - because there's nothing like having the sh*t bombed out of your country, and many of your friends and family killed, for no good reason to make you turn against something.

We can argue about the rights and wrongs of many things (I am sympathetic with the viewpoint that NATO shouldn't have been so quick to expand to the ex-Soviet territories - although mostly Putin uses this as an excuse when what he really hates is countries that he thinks of as close to, if not even "really part of" Russia in his view, experiencing real democracy), but in the only aspect that really matters here - certainly the only one that matters right now to the people of Ukraine - namely which country starting bombing and otherwise military assaulting a peaceful neighbour who posed zero military threat to it - this is 100% a case of "Russia = Bad, Ukraine = Good". Yes history is complicated, so are human motivations, but some things, or at least the most important aspects of them, really are as black and white as that.

I use the spelling "Kiev" because I figure if it was good enough for Reuters, the BBC, and NATO circa 2015, its good enough for me in 2023. I'm not going to adopt Newspeak just because it happens to be politically popular at the moment.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukra ... X020150713

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34112881

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_122690.htm

As for youtube propaganda, the youtube video I linked was from TIME Magazine. I guess they do spread a lot of propaganda, but less so in 2021 when that video was made. But if you would rather read than watch, the article is here https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right ... -facebook/

I don't actually think the war will end with nuclear escalation, though. Rather the US and NATO will eventually run out of money (or the dollar will lose enough value that it will have the same effect) and Ukraine will go the way of Afghanistan, but hopefully with Russia only in the Donbas and the nation only suffering economic collapse instead of a complete societal breakdown.