https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61879539
Ben Stiller: Actor speaks about 'distressing' scenes on visit to Ukraine
Ben Stiller: Actor speaks about 'distressing' scenes on visit to Ukraine
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
- Thread starter Wednesday at Stoke
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Dogs are the best
Seems like Russia are winning this war, slowly but surely taking over Ukraine.
(Despite the impression that the Western propaganda tries to show)
(Despite the impression that the Western propaganda tries to show)
Local tactical success is not the same as strategic success. Ukraine is a huge country and Russia has already failed on its original war aims. Russian propaganda is promoting the view that they are winning as well.
Interactive Map: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (arcgis.com)
Russia are slowly coming through from the East but it looks like it's at the cost of the Kherson/Kharkiv ends of the front line. I can't see Russia not eventually taking the full Donbas region, what will be telling is what happens next.
They’re having an upper hand in this phase of the war, there’s a world of difference between this and “winning the war”. And strategically it’s at least debatable if time works for Russia in this case, Ukraine has more to look forward to in terms of potential weapon supplies & personnel.
You think a free press and journalists reporting what they see on the ground are “western propaganda” ? Interesting.
Confused. What makes you believe the Russian propaganda?
I think This was always going to be the case. They’re just too powerful for Ukraine. I really want Ukraine to win and they’ve far exceeded most peoples expectations but Russia is just too big. It seems they can lose men and equipment at will and still they come. Ukraine doesn’t have that luxury.
Totally off topic, but why do I sometimes see Lukashenko and other times Lukashenka?
Ukraine has 1/3 the population of Russia and if supplied with modern Western weapons, they have enough resilience to at least fight this to a stalemate. The west on the other hand should either throw its complete backing behind Ukraine or back out so that Ukrainians know they can't win this and surrender. The current tactic of supplying just enough weapons so that the war is prolonged, Russia is hurt long term and Ukrainians lose their lives in the thousands is really immoral IMO.
It seems like Biden and EU leaders haven’t quite grasped this, they sort of still hoping it just magically goes away. Define war objectives clearly (Ukrainian victory) and adhere to it, currently the aims in the white house are still very vague.
Its not that they are supplying "just enough" to prolong the war. Its that they don't want to incentivize Putin to escalate and use more destructive weapons, which will put the west in a bind, since they will then be under pressure to escalate militarily. Nobody wants that. The slow grind strategy alongside supplying Ukraine with high tech western weapons, is therefore the appropriate thing to do.
I suspect it’s very easy for us to say ‘send more’ versus the reality of getting it safely into Ukraine undetected, training soldiers and putting it to use. It’s also a very precarious situation for Ukraine, they have to protect the new artillery systems beyond almost anything else as can you imagine how quickly the aid would dry up if we saw some pictures of a load of blown up or, worse yet, captured NATO artillery.
You make a very good point there about the West just prolonging it - whether intentionally or not, Id not really considered that. Some more food for thought.
What do you mean by that?
You think Ukraine would surrender if the West backed out? Do you perhaps think this is a war between Russia and 'The West'?
Even if the US backed out cos they voted in another nutjob or something, Poland, Lithuania etc never ever would. Those that know the harsh reality of Russian imperialism in their not too distant past.
So as opposed to Western propaganda Russian propaganda is trying to show they're winning?
Finally
Do you mean direct military intervention or France and Germany not dragging it's feet in sending heavy weapons?
100%. Super easy to say throw everything behind Ukraine.
Not so easy to realise that they need to be trained in the use of this weaponry, need to be trained to use them well to minimise losses and capture of equipment and to integrate them best into the armed forces. Needs to get into Ukraine, needs to come out of existing armed forces supplies and needs to be paid for at some point.
Hoping that some of the stuff pledged early on is going to make it to the front lines soon enough.
The Ukrainians are getting trained across the borders of Bulgaria, Romania, and one or two other places. Many of the systems require at least a couple of weeks of familiarization, which can be done by rotating troops in and out of these countries before they deploy the weapons to frontlines.
Also not sure if 'western propaganda' is the correct phrasing in this instance but the reporting has certainly helped share perceptions.
Only a buffoon would say Russia has won or is 'winning' this war. Compared to their initial aims, they've clearly failed. It will be interesting to see in the future just how close they were to actually taking Kiev in the first few days.
Regardless, with the constant stream of (admittedly at times funny) Mr Bean esque gaffes of the Russian armed forces, it's easy to think they're totally failing but the destruction they've wrought on the east and south of Ukraine is horrendous. We need to not lose sight of that as we post tweets showing farmers driving tanks or whatever. Certainly there seem to have been a lot of predictions of the Russian army / economy collapsing imminently.
Only a buffoon would say Russia has won or is 'winning' this war. Compared to their initial aims, they've clearly failed. It will be interesting to see in the future just how close they were to actually taking Kiev in the first few days.
Regardless, with the constant stream of (admittedly at times funny) Mr Bean esque gaffes of the Russian armed forces, it's easy to think they're totally failing but the destruction they've wrought on the east and south of Ukraine is horrendous. We need to not lose sight of that as we post tweets showing farmers driving tanks or whatever. Certainly there seem to have been a lot of predictions of the Russian army / economy collapsing imminently.
One of the impressive things so far is that Russia has absorbed significant losses of manpower and equipment, and that they're still fighting. It's not unreasonable to think that if a NATO military took casualties in the tens of thousands within a few months, that they wouldn't just call a complete pause of any offensive action. It's not something to be dismissed, it means that to defeat the Russian army it takes several times more damage than it would others.
It's because Russia unlike most western countries don't value the life of their soldiers to the same degree. In recent times the death of western soldiers becomes real stories and tragdedies. In Russia it's more a statistic on a political level.
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I have seen that Polish Krabs have been used en masse in the defence of Severdonetsk and reportedly been incredible. I guess we wouldn't see the pro Ukrainian press saying they've been crap but Severdonetsk looked like it was done for a week ago and is still contested so might be some truth in it.
1. Do Russian citizens know how many Russian soldiers have died?
2. Do they care?
3. If they care, can they do anything about it?
Russian (-o) and Belarussian (-a) spelling. Same thing as with Kiev (Rus) / Kyiv (Ukr) etc. — since Russian language was the first official language of all USSR republics, a lot of things and that includes Russian-To-English transliterations are still very common in ex-Soviet territories. Although I expect that for Ukraine, at least, it’s going to change very soon.
I don't know but the Russian and Soviet governments disregard of the lives of its own soldiers and citizens is well known. As far as I have read Putin's government is trying to cover up a significant part of its casualties, by burning bodies rather than sending their soldiers bodies back to their families.
- No, not even remotely
- Not as much as they should, aside from those who are directly involved in it (relatives of dead or “missing” soldiers), but even they often have a very weird defensive reaction about it — chances are they’re as ignorant about the true nature of the conflict and it’s obviously easier to imagine your deceased son/husband as a hero rather than as a pointless victim (and, well, a perpetrator) of inhumane and criminal aggression against a neighboring country. It’s really weird because a way lesser (in a similar time span) amount of deaths caused a very serious anti-governmental sentiment from their relatives during both the Afghan war and both of the Chechen wars
- In theory yes, but in reality…
Maybe you should take this "moral crusade" to those that caused it, i.e., Putler in the Kremlin.
Whilst you're there, ask him why he won't allow food to be exported. The only disgusting thing is Russian behaviour, not anything caused by "The West".
You're the one on a moral crusade here. Which is fine, of course, go ahead, but it's pretty weird to use it as an attack while you're at it.
Indeed. All complaints should be directed at the person who initiated all of this.
They'll go unanswered. Then what, let them all die?
Go back to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. It was a result of the Syrian civil war, so put the blame on a combination of the Syrian government and ISIS, in whatever proportion you want. More than a million people had to flee. Complaining to either Assad or ISIS would have achieved nothing, and if we ended it there all those people would have gotten their asylum claims rejected.
Or, we can stay with this war. A lot of Ukranians have had to flee their country. It's Putin's fault, no one else's. It's not Poland's fault, it's not Lithuania's, it's not Germany's. We can tell the refugees to go to Russia and complain, or we can help them.
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(This isn’t for your benefit, your know this already, but for @maniak)
In Russian -o is pronounced as -a when the vowel is not in the stressed syllable.
For example the word хорошо (meaning ”good”) is made up of 3 syllables (хо-ро-шо). In this case it is the last syllable that is stressed (шо). The English transliteration would be kharashO (uppercase to show the stressed vowel). The first two -o are pronounced as -a. Because they are not stressed.
By this rule the name Лукашенко is prounounced LukashEnka in Russian (stress on the E). In Belarusian things are more simplified. Where they pronounce -a they also write -a. So the name is written as Лукашенка in Belarusian.
In both Russian and Belarusian it’s pronounced the same, with -a at the end. But since in Russian it’s written with an -o at the end, sometimes people write it as Lukashenko in English. But closest correct pronunciation is Lukashenka.
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Thanks guys, I think I got it.
I was confused because I know a russian girl whose surname is kozlova and her brother is kozlov, so I thought it was a gender thing. In this case it has to do with the translation.
Correct. In this case it’s not a gender -a, but the ending -enko which is mostly of Ukrainian origin and means “son of”. In this case, Лукашенко is son of Lukas.
Generally, for reasons unbeknownst to me, Russian and Slavic names always get butchered when they get transliterated to English. Take the last USSR president Gorbachev, for example. His name is actually written in Russian as Горбачёв and the closest pronunciation for that would be Garbachyóv. So I don’t know why we don’t write names closer to their sound.