Russian invasion of Ukraine

"As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy.... Russia is no more in a position to invade Western Europe than NATO countries are to send conscripts to fight Russia..."

"Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy. A Ukrainian victory would confirm the principle of self-rule, allow the integration of Europe to proceed, and empower people of goodwill to return reinvigorated to other global challenges. A Russian victory, by contrast, would extend genocidal policies in Ukraine, subordinate Europeans, and render any vision of a geopolitical European Union obsolete."

"Kazakhstan is to discuss an influx of Russians to the country following President Putin’s partial military mobilization last week [announced September 21, 2022]. President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev told Russian news agency Interfax ... "In recent days, many people from Russia have been coming to us. Most of them are forced to leave due to the current hopeless situation. We must take care of them and provide their security. This is a political and humanitarian issue. I instructed the government to take the necessary measures.""

"[Nuclear war] would mean the end of civilization...Incidentally, the argument here that this [supporting Ukraine's resistance in the face of Russian threats to use tactical nuclear weapons] is necessary because it’s up to the Ukrainians — at this point, what is the first country that would be completely destroyed? Has anyone thought of asking ordinary Ukrainians if that is a price they think worth paying?"

"Sweden avoided World War II, sparing itself the German occupation that Norway endured and the Soviet invasion suffered by the Finns. During the Cold War, Sweden continued its neutral path...[and] declined to join NATO. And then Feb. 24, 2022, happened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought into sharp relief the limitations of being in Europe but not having the security guarantees of NATO’s collective defense pact. The Finns — dragging the Swedes with them — applied for membership in the alliance."

"I was in Kyiv myself in October, having travelled to Ukraine to support and train doctors providing palliative care to patients approaching the end of their lives. My trip was curtailed by Putin’s brazen desire to rain terror on civilians. As our night train pulled into Kyiv central station, the buildings reverberated with the impact of missiles timed to maximise rush-hour bloodshed. One victim was a young children's cancer doctor. Her car was incinerated as she drove home from her hospital night shift, making an orphan of her son, aged five. Another missile left a 30-foot crater in a children’s playground – as though roundabouts and sandpits have a shred of strategic value."

"Taking a step back, the information environment had changed dramatically since 2014. One, there’s a ton of commercially available satellite imagery, open source, and anyone with access to those images could see for themselves what Russia was doing on Ukraine’s borders. Second, there had been just an explosion in citizen journalism in the use of social media to show in real time what people were actually seeing, and this is coming from both Russian and Ukrainian sources. It was out there on Twitter, it was out there on TikTok. People could see for themselves, what these troops were doing — in some cases where they were. Then third, you have a general public that has a fundamentally different understanding of disinformation and misinformation — those terms are in people’s vocabularies in a way that they weren’t in 2014."

"They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part - the Russian Federation"

"There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness."

"We came in boorishly, trampling all over Ukraine's territory in search of Nazis. And while we searched for Nazis, we ****** up everyone we could. We came up to Kyiv and — I’ll put it in plain Russian — **** the bed and retreated. Then on to Kherson — we **** the bed and retreated. And somehow things aren't working out for us."

"The special military operation was done for the purpose of "denazification," while we've made Ukraine into a nation that's known throughout the world. They're like the Greeks or the Romans at their peaks. And as far as "demilitarization," if they had some 500 tanks at the start of the special military operation, now they have 5,000. If they had 20,000 capable fighters before, now they have 400,000. What kind of demilitarization is that? Now it looks more like we did the opposite, somehow or other, and militarized Ukraine."

"We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia...We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately … must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition...Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders … and work hard...My advice to the Russian elites — get your lads, send them to war, and when you go to the funeral, when you start burying them, people will say that now everything is fair."

"This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution - first the soldiers will stand up, and after that - their loved ones will rise up. There are already tens of thousands of them - relatives of those killed - and there will probably be hundreds of thousands."

"Get your asses out of the offices you've been put in to defend this country. You are the Defense Ministry...As a citizen, I am deeply indignant that these scum are sitting quietly and wearing out their seats with their fat asses smeared with expensive creams."

"We'd have to nuke them if Ukrainian offensive was a success."

"[Suggesting Ukraine surrender in the war against Russia] I think that the strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates."

"We're waging a proxy war , but we're not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we've been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel."

"Our efforts to secure a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine are now, hopefully, underway. It’s so important to get that done. That is an absolute killing field. Millions of soldiers are being killed. Nobody has seen anything like it since World War II. They’re laying dead all over the flat fields. It’s a flat field — farmland, and there’s millions of Russians and millions of Ukrainians. Nobody’s seen anything like it since World War II. It’s time to end it."

"When this war started, I would not have thought that it would last three years. I believe it could have ended earlier if Ukraine had been helped more courageously and less hesitantly."

"[The Russo-Ukrainian war] It's a proxy war between nuclear powers – the United States, helping Ukraine, and Russia – and it needs to come to an end."

"Vladimir Putin has achieved what many old men dream of but few accomplish – to bend the modern world into looking exactly like it did when they were young. Yesterday on Moscow’s Red Square the illusion that Russia has gone back to the future was nearly complete. Serried rows of tanks and soldiers, so immaculate that from a distance they look computer generated, paraded in perfect order. Five-storey-high scarlet banners featuring Soviet emblems and chiselled military heroes were draped over the GUM department store and the State Historical Museum. And on the leaders’ podium a line-up of slab-faced old apparatchiks worthy of the 1980s lined up alongside the diminutive Putin, the star of his own show."

"The memory of the Soviet struggle against Hitler has been appropriated to justify Putin’s war on Ukraine. Kremlin propagandists claim that Volodomyr Zelensky and his government are modern-day fascists – despite Zelensky’s Jewish heritage – and that Putin launched the invasion to save the suffering and downtrodden Russians of Ukraine from genocidal attack from the Kyiv government. Thus has Putin’s colonial-style land grab been transformed, in the minds of many Russians, into a war of national defence and solidarity with the oppressed. At the same time Russian schoolchildren and students have been corralled into paramilitary youth groups, complete with uniforms, parades and rallies, that take the preservation of the legacy of World War Two as their ideological base."

"Conflating modern Ukraine with Nazi Germany is absurd, of course. Especially so for the families of the seven million Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army – including Zelensky’s own grandfather, who as a young infantry officer participated in the Battle of Berlin. Can it be possible that Russians actually believe it? Yes and no. Modern Russians have retained one psychological peculiarity from their Soviet forebears, and that’s the habit of apparently believing two completely paradoxical things at the same time. Which, of course, was George Orwell’s definition of the totalitarian mindset he called Doublethink. Young Russians can simultaneously enjoy Hollywood films and American computer games, lament the departure of Ikea and McDonalds, and dream of studying in Europe while at the same time claiming to believe that their country is under Nazi attack. But it’s really all cosplay."

"As he stands beside Xi, Putin is merely posing as a superpower leader. True, he has a nuclear arsenal. But Russia’s only remaining international allies are rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. China, whom Putin claims as a strategic partner, has refused to send weapons and offers only the most guarded of diplomatic support to the war. Russia’s economy is smaller than Spain’s, and is in increasing trouble as world energy prices sink. And the army fighting Putin’s war – which in Russia is officially not a war but a “special military operation” – is composed of expendables recruited from the country’s prisons and poorest regions. Putin and the elderly KGB men who form his inner circle may believe that they have restored Russia to the prestige of the USSR at the height of its power. But all they are really demonstrating is how far Russia has fallen from those glory days, no longer a world power but rather a vassal to the true superpower of China."

"Everyone except the US military believes the Russian air force has suffered very heavy losses in Ukraine. The number of troops, tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, etc., has been staggering. And they have lost at least 100 fixed wing combat aircraft. The Ukrainians believe that number is even higher. And it isn’t all old airframes that are being shot up over Ukrainian skies. It is their top of the line stuff, Su-35s, MiG-35s, and Su-27s. Surprisingly, Moscow’s Su-57 fifth-generation fighter series has not played a particularly large role in the Ukrainian war to date. Despite its much ballyhooed capabilities by Russia, It has been a ghost during the war. Perhaps this platform isn’t quite what is cracked up to be. Would Russia exaggerate? Say it ain’t so."

"We’ve heard rumors of the Russians having designs on Moldova, and massing on the border to the Baltic Nations (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia) and against Finland. Still, with its force aging, anything other than a lightning-quick operation would be out of the question. The arrival of F-16s from the US has boosted Ukraine’s defenses. Russian military bloggers were lamenting the shooting down of an SU-34 Fullback by an F-16 encounter in October. It is also a way to stir up sentiment against the US. Russian aircraft have a service life of between 2,200 and 2,500 hours. American-built aircraft have much longer service lives of 8,000 flight hours, extended to 12,000 (F-16 Block 70s also come with an expected 12,000 flight hours). But the bottom line is that the Russian VKS can’t afford to suffer this kind of loss for much longer; it will not be able to replace the aircraft it has already lost. Getting smashed in the skies above Ukraine will eventually create some serious problems for Putin."

"He [Vladimir Putin] considers this a proxy war by NATO as well right now, and frankly, in a way, it is."

"Vladimir Putin's "colossal error" in Ukraine is setting the stage for a potential collapse of the Russian Federation, mirroring the Soviet Union's decline after its disastrous war in Afghanistan. According to the author and analysts like retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, Putin's refusal to compromise is driven by "petulance," not strategy. This obstinacy is leading to a catastrophic loss of global influence, the alienation of key allies, and a looming economic meltdown fueled by a massive fiscal deficit and plummeting oil prices. With Russian public support for the war dwindling, Putin's obsession with Ukraine may prove to be his— and Russia's— undoing."

"“Putin’s refusal to compromise on Ukraine, analysts say, is a colossal error costing Russia regional influence, lucrative energy markets and its place in the world,” reads the opening line to a recent article in the US newspaper, the Washington Post. The subtext of the message being delivered by different analysts is that the refusal of the Russian President, former KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, to change strategy or brook any compromise on the future course of his war in Ukraine is causing irreparable damage to his country."

"Russian officials today explain Putin’s determination to prosecute the war as a necessary, strategic imperative and that this is the only way to “save Russia from NATO aggression” and “Ukrainian Nazis.” However, most Western analysts view his continued petulance in continuing the war without regard for its effects on the nation and his refusal to compromise on any of his maximalist demands for a peace agreement as fatal, strategic errors. The ultimate price will be a near-complete loss of Russia’s global influence, its few allies deciding to decouple from Moscow, and a loss of the energy export markets keeping the economy alive is the likely outcome. Putin, writes the UK Independent correspondent Owen Matthews today, “is living on borrowed time.”"

"One might expect Putin to have the foresight to understand the perils of continuing to pursue a course of action that has led his country to the brink of instability. But there is very little evidence to suggest that he is willing to do so, which could very well be his – as well as Russia’s - undoing."

"Macron gave me the Legion of Honour and privately told me what he does not say in public: the war [in Ukraine 2022] is NATO's fault."

"Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced countless tragedies. Among them is this quieter, slower violence: the persecution of clergy whose only weapon is [the moral compass of] conscience. These priests refuse to bless the war. And for that, the state has declared war on them."