“No one can beat us. We are strong. We are Ukrainians.”

SATURDAY 28 MAY 2022

On Twitter @cjjohns1951

UKRAINE UPDATE

UKRAINE WORLD: Twitter

  • This is day 94 of the was against Ukraine.
  • U.S. to send long-range rocket launchers to Ukraine.
  • Excerpts from Russian TV, political discussion show.  (Talking about Germany’s Chancellor saying that Russia can’t dictate the terms)”Do you think we will accept your terms? Think again.  If you can’t accept our terms, then we’ll force you.”  “…if you force us to use nuclear weapons we’ll have no other choice.” 
  • Belarusian troops have become more active on its southern border.

UTube from Ukraine World

  • Stalemate on the frontline in Donbas.
  • The entire of Ukraine is being attacked, missiles attack interior regions.
  • 90% of Luhansk has been occupied by Russia.
  • Russians are retreating from Kharkiv.  They are focusing on Luhansk oblast.
  • Even though they have taken Mariupol they have not taken the rest of the Donetsk oblast.
  • Ukraine needs these long-range weapons.  The delivery is slow.
  • In two or three months we may see the counter offensive.  The weapons have to arrive and people have to be trained.
  • The war is going off the radar of the international media.  There is a fatigue on their part.  Russia attacked from territories they occupied from 2014.
  • Civilians are not let out of Kherson.  Russians shelled a caravan of leaving cars.  Civilians form a human shield against the Ukrainians.  Russians try to mobilize these civilians into the army.  Third, they want to orchestrate a referendum with these people to join Russia.
  • Belarus. The attack on Kyiv was made from Belarus.  Missiles are launched against Ukraine from Belarus.
  • The war against Ukraine is very unpopular in Belarus.  It is also unpopular among the defense establishment.  He Lukashenko could lose power if he assists openly in an invasion. 
  • Sanctions: Gas and oil exports are even more lucrative for the Russians since the war began. 

KYIV INDEPENDENT

  • There are repeated demands from Russia to lift sanctions in order to “increase food and fertilized exports.”
  • Russian Orthodox Church denies claims that its Ukrainian branch became independent. 

We are about to fact a reality test in Ukraine

@cjjohns1951

FRIDAY 27 MAY 2022

UKRAINE: THE LATEST, PODCAST FROM THE TELEGRAPH

CONTRIBUTORS: David Knowles, Dom Nichols, Venetia Rainey, Mutaz Ahmed, Alex Ostrovskyy

Nicholls

  • Russia is still pushing west. 
  • Ukraine is calling for heavier weapons. 

Rainey

  • It’s not going as well for Ukraine in the Donbas as it has previously in the war. 
  • Russia is trying to reduce the area into ashes.
  • Soldiers are being deployed from Mariupol.
  • Russia is throwing everything it has into this fight for the Donbas.
  • We have been hearing rumors that National Guard members have refused to go to Ukraine.  Some of them have been fired.  Official Russian sources have now confirmed 150 national guards are being sacked for refusing to fight in Ukraine. 

Ahmed

  • The Russian successes in the Donbas are coming as a surprise in many of the European capitals.
  • They have had the comfort that the Ukrainians were succeeding before this.
  • This fact glossed over divisions in the alliance.
  • In the Donbas this is evolving badly for the Ukrainians.  Macron and Kissinger speaking the appeasement line.
  • The disagreements will become angrier, calls to do more.

Rainey

  • Trials of Russian soldiers.  The “just following orders” defense is being used in those cases.

Nicholls

  • Zelensky is talking about the genocide of the region.  This level of honesty is to be applauded.  The operations in the Donbas are not successes.
  • You can undermine your case to be unrelentingly optimistic.
  • Where the Russians are not succeeding, they are causing untold damage.
  • People need to be prepared for setbacks.

Ahmed

  • Morale is high in Ukraine and so the government has leeway to be honest about setbacks.
  • Russia is making progress and there is a possibility that Putin may be able to declare a kind of victory.
  • The West needs to double down on the equipment. 
  • If Putin is able to declare any kind of victory it will be a victory for brute force and any victory for brute force will be an invitation for more brute force.  Paraphrase of Zelensky statement.
  • There is a lot of thought going into the food crisis and inflation.
  • There is frustration with comments from people like Kissinger in the UK.
  • Western leaders don’t need to be projecting how the end of the war should go.

Nicholls:

  • In the Kharkiv region, the Russians took losses.  It’s only with these small tactical successes in the Donbas.
  • There has been intelligence that Putin has been meddling way down the chain of command in the military.  After the defeats around Kyiv, the Russians moved to the Donbas and military analysts were wondering whether they would take a pause to reconstitute.  It is thought that Putin forced them to just jump right into the Donbas fight.
  • If Putin claims a victory after securing parts of the Donbas, it will be interesting to see whether Putin forces the military to push onward, toward Odesa for example, or if they will take that needed break.

Ahmed

  • Western leaders thought they could absorb the economic disjuncture of a war in Ukraine.  This has proved to be more difficult than they thought.
  • We are facing famine in the third world which will mean migration. 
  • Just how long Western countries are going to stay supportive is a question.

Nicholls

  • We are about to face a reality shock.  We will find out who is in this for the long haul.  (Note: This feeling that the war is over is bolstered by the US corporate press which has stopped covering the war.)
  • We are about to enter the real test. 

UKRAINE UPDATE: HEAVY FIGHTING IN THE DONBAS

Nobody’s going to break us, we’re strong.  We are Ukrainians. 

UKRAINE: THE LATEST

Guests: Don Nicholls, Louis Ashworth and Roland Oliphant.  Host David Knowles

Fighting in the Donbas.  Oliphant

  • Ukrainian fighters are outnumbered.
  • This is a battle of encirclement.  The Russians are making progress.  Fighting for Sieverodonetsk.  If Ukrainians stay and wind up in an encirclement like Mariupol.
  • Also, heavy artillery battle in Lyman.  Russians are moving towards Bakhmut.
  • These battles are important for Russians.  They will claim they have liberated the Luhansk. 
  • It’s important for moral terms for the Ukrainians.  They are trading space for time right now.  They are trying for attrition of the Russians.
  • There are parts of the Donbas where Ukrainians are outnumbered 7 to 1.
  • There are several areas where Ukrainians are trying to keep the Russians from breaking through. 
  • The Russians have taken about half of Lyman and are doing house-to-house searches.  Intense fighting.

Outside of Ukraine

  • World Economic Forum, Kissinger has made statements about ceding territory by Ukraine. 
  • Zelensky has said that Kissinger had to flee from Germany before the second world war.  This is appeasement and Kissinger probably wouldn’t have been advocating ceding territory to Nazi Germany.
  • The German Chancellor says that Russia can’t dictate the peace.

Economics

  • Russia may fail to make payments on its foreign debt for the first time in a century.  This may happen within a couple of months.

Food Supply

  • Food products not being able to leave Ukraine.  Has had an effect on India.
  • Food had been destroyed, been rendered inaccessible and also not able to get out of the ports.
  • The Russians have offered to open food corridors to get the food out, but only if there is relief on sanctions.
  • The blockade is not the result of a direct threat, but the presence of the Russian ships in the Black Sea area.
  • The ruble has taken a dive but then recovered.

Blame Republicans for Uvalde? Yes, but Also Blame the Supreme Court. | The Nation

As long as conservative justices are empowered to misinterpret the Constitution, we will have more mass shootings, we will have more street shootings, and we will have more school shootings.
— Read on www.thenation.com/article/society/uvalde-supreme-court-case/

Moaning, lamenting and hand-wringing will change nothing. It’s time to start misbehaving.

THURSDAY 26 MAY 2022

@cjjohns1951

GUNS

As long as we allow politicians to sell themselves to the highest bidder, politicians will sell themselves to the highest bidder.  We must expand the Supreme Court and decrease the influence of money on the political system.  Look at the figures showing how much congresspeople make while in office.  Politics in this country is a racket.  Politics attracts not the dedicated, but the scam artist looking for the main chance.  The dedicated, the change makers, are systematically eliminated from public life.  The Democratic Party invests in destroying progressive candidates and in Texas, is now supporting a man who has had his premises raided by the FBI.

The grief orgy now being orchestrated by the corporate media over the murder of children in Texas is a distraction, ghoulish, and an empty exercise.  Grief by itself changes nothing.  The corporate media will spend the next few days showing photographs of dead children and talking about how precious they were.  The anchors will compete to make the most eloquent emotional statements.  They will cry on camera.  But, this changes nothing.

Senator Chris Murphy went on the floor of the Senate and begged, begged, Republicans to join him in doing something about reform of gun laws.  Begging (especially Republicans) is useless.  Chuck Schumer backed off on introducing a background check piece of legislation in the Senate because, he said, it could not win.  So he refused to make the Republicans vote against the bill in the face of the deaths in Texas.  Schumer and the rest of them will moan and lament and wring their hands.  Moaning, lamenting, wringing hands, does nothing, accomplishes nothing.

Mitt Romney lamented and moaned about the deaths in Texas.  But Mitt Romney is one of the legislators who has taken the most money from the NRA, over $13 million during his career.  Others big recipients of NRA money are Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Thom Tillis and Cory Gardner. 

This is a country in which public policy is determined by the people who have enough money to buy it.  Over 90% of the population supports background checks for gun purchases.  But the NRA has money.  No amount of hand-wringing is going to change that fact.

And, we should not forget that the international crime syndicate of authoritarians (including the Republican Party) thrives in political systems that are for sale.  Russian plant Maria Butina along with her recruited boyfriend infiltrated the NRA with money favors to push a Russian agenda.  They actively worked to use the NRA to make contacts and influence policy decisions of congress and the future president.  Butina was backed by Russian banker Alexander Torshin.  Sentenced to 18 months, Butina was allowed to return to Russia where she was welcomed as a hero.

The NRA is, as Richard Painter has recently described it, a “protection racket for politicians.”  The NRA funnels money to these politicians like Romney in exchange for their support on gun-control legislation. 

Until we change the political system, nothing will change.  Until we stop moaning and lamenting and grieving and wringing our collective hands and crying nothing will change.  Until we stop sitting politely and behaving ourselves while scam artists like Greg Abbott orchestrate a coverup, nothing will change.  It’s time to start misbehaving.

Kuleba and Podolyak respond to Russia’s ‘blackmail’ proposal for corridor for grain exports / The New Voice of Ukraine

Russia is now blackmailing the world by demanding the lifting of sanctions in exchange for them unblocking Ukraine’s food exports, say Ukrai
— Read on english.nv.ua/nation/kuleba-and-podolyak-respond-to-russia-s-blackmail-proposal-for-corridor-for-grain-exports-50245171.html

The appeasement narrative. Europe should not look for ways to save Putin’s face, EP President says / The New Voice of Ukraine

Every effort should be made to help Ukraine stand up against the Russian invasion, EP President says
— Read on english.nv.ua/nation/europe-should-not-look-for-ways-to-save-putin-s-face-ep-president-says-50245173.html

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