2020s In Europe

"We see what’s at stake in this war. We see what we are defending. There are standards of the Ukrainian army - moral and professional. And it is not our army that has to adjust now. These are many other armies that should learn from our military. And there are standards of the Ukrainian people. And there are standards of the Russian occupiers. This is good and evil. This is Europe and a black hole that wants to tear it all apart and absorb."

"I am sure the time will come and the whole line of the state border of Ukraine will be restored. And for this to happen sooner, we must all be focused, ready to boldly face evil and respond to every criminal act against Ukraine, against our people, against our freedom. Evil will be punished. Glory to Ukraine!"

"From the very beginning it has been clear that this is nothing else but yet another staged provocation aimed at discrediting and dehumanizing of the Russian military and levelling political pressure on Russia. Not many of you know about the Russian military, but I assure you that Russian military is nothing that it is being accused of, in particular what regards “cruel atrocities” against civil population. It is not the case. It never was, and will never be."

"During the time that the town has been under the control of the Russian armed forces, not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action."

"Four days after the Russian military left the city of Bucha there was not a single sign of any “atrocities”. I repeat – not a single reference to it, anywhere. The infamous video depicting bodies on the city roads only appeared on April 3rd. It is full of discrepancies and blatant lies. According to its authors, the bodies were lying on the streets for at least 4 days by the time the video was filmed. However, the bodies are not stiffened. How is that possible? It is against the law of biology. The bodies do not have signs of decomposition known to forensic experts, including cadaver stains. The wounds contain no blood. What happened in Bucha is exactly a false flag attack by the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors. The possible goal of this provocation is horrifying and brings back the nightmares of the Nazi crimes during the Second World War."

"Vladimir Zelensky, once he arrived in Bucha, hinted that this “incident” justifies any “uncivilized response”. By this basically he confirmed that the Kiev regime considers genocide as a method of warfare. Now the nationalists have a pretext to commit a real massacre of innocent Ukrainian people executing them as “traitors”. We want the world to stay alert and we call on the Council not to let these horrific cleansing to happen."

"Now, to what you see in the streets of Bucha. The corpses had never existed before the departure of Russian troops, and then suddenly appeared in the streets, lying on the road one by one, right and left. If you look carefully, you will see that some of them are moving. Some of them are showing signs of life. You cannot escape from an understanding that this is staged, that it is a fake and a provocation. Because, as you all know, besides the warfare, we have a raging information war. And we have evidence that it was premeditated and arranged by the Ukrainian information warfare machine."

"Q: Would Russia, for example, welcome an independent investigation? You talk about the misinformation wars, the fog of war. It's difficult to understand who's giving you facts and who's not. Right. So would you agree to an independent mechanism to investigate the atrocities that we both can agree are happening in Ukraine? And then a second part, what is so egregious about the 24 hours delay? To help us understand, this meeting that you requested for today is happening tomorrow. So what is so outrageous about this delay?"

"A satellite image of Bucha in Ukraine appears to show bodies lying in the street nearly two weeks before the Russians left the town. The image from 19 March, first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by the BBC, directly contradicts Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's claim that footage of bodies in Bucha, that has emerged in recent days, was "staged" after the Russians withdrew....The Russian defence ministry claimed that while Bucha was under Russian control "not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action". This claim, however, contradicts numerous eyewitness accounts from residents."

"We are dealing with the full-fledged invasion, on several fronts, of one Member State of the United Nations, Ukraine, by another, the Russian Federation — a Permanent Member of the Security Council — in violation of the United Nations Charter, and with several aims, including redrawing the internationally-recognized borders between the two countries. The war has led to senseless loss of life, massive devastation in urban centres, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. I will never forget the horrifying images of . I immediately called for an independent investigation to guarantee effective accountability."

"The war in Ukraine must stop — now. We need serious negotiations for peace, based on the principles of the United Nations Charter. This Council is charged with maintaining peace — and doing so in solidarity. I deeply regret the divisions that have prevented the Security Council from acting not only on Ukraine, but on other threats to peace and security around the world. I urge the Council to do everything in its power to end the war and to mitigate its impact, both on the suffering people of Ukraine, and on vulnerable people and developing countries around the world."

"It’s demonstrably obvious now that there was a combination of people not telling him [Putin] what he needed to hear and him not listening when they did tell him stuff that he didn’t want to hear."

"So what if [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky is Jewish? The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood. It means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people said that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews. Every family has its black sheep, as we say."

"The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer."

"At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”"

"Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries? Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield."

"NATO is a defensive alliance and the war is President Putin's war. This is a war that he has decided to conduct against an independent sovereign nation."

"The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement."

"With each day, the war crimes mount. Rape. Torture. Extrajudicial executions. Disappearances. Forced deportations. Attacks on schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, grain silos, water and gas facilities...[the atrocities are] not the acts of rogue units. They fit a clear pattern, across every part of Ukraine touched by Russian forces. And they fit a clear pattern with Russia’s previous actions in conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine starting in 2014.""

"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."

"This comes as violence has erupted in Ukraine over the last week, killing 82 protesters who were upset that former President Viktor Yanukovych blocked the country from joining the European Union amidst pressure from Russia. "They protested peacefully, and they were met by violence," Rice said."

"Russia feels bound by no international legal constraints on its actions in Ukraine, least of all the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, by which Russia and western states pledged to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity in return for Kiev's surrender of its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. Putin dispensed with that particular piece of paper in a couple of lines."

"That in turn brought up the burning question of whether the ambition of current military options ranged further than Crimea to the largely pro-Moscow, Russian-speaking industrial east, potentially slicing Ukraine in two. Putin clearly, very deliberately, left the option open."

"Speaking of the sanctions, they are not just a knee-jerk reaction on behalf of the United States or its allies to our position regarding the events and the coup in Ukraine, or even the so-called Crimean Spring. I’m sure that if these events had never happened... they would have come up with some other excuse to try to contain Russia’s growing capabilities, affect our country in some way, or even take advantage of it... However, in this case I would like to speak about the most serious and sensitive issue: international security. Since 2002, after the US unilaterally pulled out of the ABM Treaty, which was absolutely a cornerstone of international security, a strategic balance of forces and stability, the US has been working relentlessly to create a global missile defense system, including in Europe. This poses a threat not only to Russia, but to the world as a whole – precisely due to the possible disruption of this strategic balance of forces."

"The 2014 invasion [of Crimea] marked the start of the Russian war on Ukraine; the subsequent annexation warned Ukrainians that the international legal system would not protect them."

"Our problem is that we do not fully understand Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further."

"The Revolution of Dignity and the war brought about a geopolitical reorientation of Ukrainian society. The proportion of those with positive attitudes toward Russia decreased from 80 percent in January 2014 to under 50 percent in September of the same year. In November 2014, 64 percent of those polled supported Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (that figure had stood at 39 percent in November 2013). In April 2014, only a third of Ukrainians had wanted their country to join NATO; in November 2014, more than half supported that course. There can be little doubt that the experience of war not only united most Ukrainians but also turned the country’s sympathies westward."

"The significance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and the at least tacit official U.S support or tolerance for it should be clearly understood."

"In 2010 the pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, opposed any move to take the country closer to NATO or the EU, but within four years he was ousted by pro-western parties in Kiev, precipitating an open civil war in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces, the latter supported by Moscow. Tension was further increased when in 2014 Putin annexed the formerly Russian territory of Crimea, granted to Ukraine in the 1950s. Europe replied with a barrage of economic sanctions, which had no political effect beyond entrenching Russia’s siege economy and bringing Putin closer to his oligarchic associates. The economy switched to import substitution, including the manufacture of domestic mozzarella and camembert. NATO reopened its invitation to Ukraine and conducted military exercises in the Baltic countries. Russia did likewise. Europe slid back into brinkmanship mode. Misjudging Moscow had long been the occupational disease of European diplomacy. It cursed alike Swedes, Poles, Napoleon and Hitler. It now blighted a western alliance divided on how to respond to this newly aggressive Russia."

"We see that our colleagues from the NATO countries are pursuing a policy of containing Russia, increasing their military activity on our borders, creating a military infrastructure on the “eastern front”, as they say, and resorting to unsubstantiated accusations instead of diplomatic methods..."

"In 2014, our Western colleagues “swallowed” the anti-constitutional armed coup in Ukraine, and since then they’ve been unable to hold that government accountable, although they have long since understood who they are dealing with. Having once branded them democrats and partners, they cannot publicly criticise them now. That's the problem."

"I would like you to do us a favor though."

"We ‪assess that Russia does not want a direct conflict with US forces. Russian officials have long believed that the United States is conducting its own ‘influence campaigns’ to undermine Russia, weaken President Vladimir Putin, and install Western-friendly regimes in the states of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. Russia seeks an accommodation with the United States on mutual noninterference in both countries’ domestic affairs and US recognition of Russia’s claimed sphere of influence over much of the former Soviet Union."

"It may just be grandstanding for domestic purposes, but the effort poses grave implications for American and international security... No politician or member of the U.S. foreign and security establishment has ever even attempted to explain why Russian involvement in Ukraine — with its territorial issues, its huge Russian minority, and deep historic, cultural, and emotional ties to one another — somehow implies Moscow’s desire to attack Poland or Romania, which contain no Russian minorities or territorial disputes."

"Moreover, as far as Ukraine itself is concerned, the suggestion of a resemblance between U.S. “deterrence” there and deterrence in Poland and Romania is based on a very dangerous misconception. Romania, Poland, and the Baltic States are NATO members, covered by the Article 5 guarantee in the NATO Treaty whereby the United State is legally obliged to fight for them if they are attacked. Ukraine is not a NATO member, and even if a U.S. administration were willing to make an immediate offer of membership, this would certainly be blocked by the other European NATO partners... A promise of U.S. “deterrence” in Ukraine is therefore essentially a lie — and a very dangerous one, if a Ukrainian government were to believe it and act accordingly."

"The GOP senator has swapped his hold on Biden’s ambassadors for a vote on more sanctions for Russia over Nord Stream 2. Both Senator Ted Cruz’s bill to sanction the Russia-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline and the process by which it has been introduced are poster-children for the dysfunctionality of America’s present system of government when it comes to the formulation of foreign policy. Senator Cruz’s bill, which is to be introduced to the Senate in early January and is considered likely to pass with bipartisan support, would place sanctions on Russia and on companies involved in the construction and management of the pipeline, which is designed to carry gas under the North Sea from Russia to Germany and Western Europe. This pipeline would partly replace existing pipelines from Russia to Germany and the European Union across Ukraine. In the past, Russian attempts to pressure Ukraine either to pay its unpaid gas debts or to ally with Russia by cutting off Ukrainian gas led to Ukraine taking gas bound for the EU for itself, thereby disrupting supplies to Western Europe."

"Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned on Friday that the Kremlin perceives the United States and its allies as stoking the war in eastern Ukraine... “The civil war in Ukraine, ongoing for eight years, is far from over,” Mr. Lavrov said, in remarks carried by the Russian Information Agency. “The country’s (Ukraine's) authorities don’t intend to resolve the conflict” through diplomacy, he added. “Unfortunately, we see the United States and other NATO nations supporting the militaristic intentions of Kyiv, provisioning Ukraine with weapons and sending military specialists,” Mr. Lavrov said. After Russian troops massed near the Ukrainian border over the fall, officials in Moscow repeatedly characterized the eastern Ukraine conflict as a pressing security concern for Russia, though it has been simmering for eight years now between Ukraine’s central government and Russia-backed separatists."