Ukraine War Watch Thread

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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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ICC judges issue arrest warrant for Putin over war crimes in Ukraine
Putin too.
Pinochet almost.
Any war crimes in any other "criminal and illegal invasion"?

I don't know about Justice, but it doesn't look like fair-play.
In the spring of 1961 (W. W.) Rostow had characterized “the sending of men and arms across international boundaries and the direction of guerrilla war from outside a sovereign nation” as a new form of aggression, calling for unilateral retaliation against the “ultimate source of aggression” in the absence of international action. (Apparently the major lesson Rostow had learned from the Bay of Pigs operation was that Castro, or Khrushchev, had had the right to bomb Florida and Washington.)
D. Ellsberg.
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funkervogt
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Ukrainian commander demoted after admitting to high losses and other problems facing his unit.
The battalion commander, known by his call sign Kupol, gave an unusually frank assessment of Ukrainian losses in an interview from the front lines earlier this week.

He revealed that all of the original 500 soldiers in his unit had either been killed or injured, a rare acknowledgement from inside the Ukrainian ranks, where losses are kept strictly confidential.

The Ukrainian high command is at pains to present a positive spin on the increasingly bloody defence of the east of the country. US officials have estimated that the Ukrainian army may have taken 120,000 casualties compared with 200,000 by the Russian army.

Kupol told the Washington Post this week that the Ukrainian army training was often poor and that some of the rookie replacements didn’t know how to throw a hand grenade or fire a rifle.

Others had abandoned their positions shortly after arriving at the front line, he said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-co ... 52957.html

This makes me wonder how biased our view of the Ukraine War is in the West thanks to not being told about Ukraine's problems and losses.
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caltrek
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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ibm9000 wrote: Sat Mar 18, 2023 2:06 pm
ICC judges issue arrest warrant for Putin over war crimes in Ukraine
Putin too.
Pinochet almost.
Any war crimes in any other "criminal and illegal invasion"?

I don't know about Justice, but it doesn't look like fair-play.
...
Since you asked, here is a list of 31 cases of "war crimes" pursued by the ICC (see link provided below). Presumably, many, if not all, of these cases may have involved civil wars rather than invasion. Remember, the court was established in 1989. There have not been a whole lot of "invasions" since that year, hence the low or nonexistent number of war crimes involving "invasions".

https://www.icc-cpi.int/cases?cases_ful ... All&page=0
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Maybe we (NATO) are training them, because they don't have enough people to provide that training.
*A necessary truth that Ukrainian leaders are unwilling to hear.
...
*The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered (or supposed) a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive.
...
*An influx of inexperienced draftees has changed the profile of the Ukrainian force, which is also suffering from basic shortages of ammunition, including artillery shells and mortar bombs, according to military personnel in the field.
...
*One senior Ukrainian government official called the number of tanks promised by the West a “symbolic” amount. Others privately voiced pessimism that promised supplies would even reach the battlefield in time. “If you have more resources, you more actively attack, if you have fewer resources, you defend more. We’re going to defend. That’s why if you ask me personally, I don’t believe in a big counteroffensive for us. I’d like to believe in it, but I’m looking at the resources and asking, ‘With what?’ Maybe we’ll have some localized breakthroughs.”
...
*Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers in units fighting alongside his (Kupol) battalion simply abandoned their positions.
...
*Despite reports of untrained mobilized Russian fighters being thrown into battle, those now arriving are well-prepared.
...
*U.S. military officials consider Ukraine’s force insufficient to attack all along the giant front, where Russia has erected substantive defenses, so troops are being trained to probe for weak points that allow them to break through with tanks and armored vehicles. (They just discovered WW2!).
The Washington Post. (Obviously working for Russia).

By the way...
Not even 400 (155) rounds a day, for the whole front!
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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Remember, the court was established in 1989.
Including Bush & Blair, of course... No, wait, they were not responsible of anything, anything at all.

P. S. Please let me know if you need more of my words to imagine what I mean with these words.
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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Wait... now that I read my own words...
I was asking about "any other criminal and illegal invasion", correct?

P. S. I am sure that you know exactly what I meant.
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Ukraine using the "shahid", an updated version of the WW2 German Goliath, a video of an Ukainian MRL hit by a drone... These things affect the war? No, just anecdotes.
Repeating Bakhmut at Avdiivka could, attrition for both sides and another active front for Ukraine. Meaning a huge expenditure of replacements, missiles, artillery, tanks... and U. is the side without "le gros bataillons".
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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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The Guardian view on the forgotten Rohingya refugees: lives without futures.
(Bad lack for the baby-seals, this is the 'Save the dolphins' year).
It goes beyond hypocrisy. It’s an assault on memory. Gordon Brown, calling for a special tribunal to punish the Russian government, correctly states that an act of aggression – invading another nation – was identified by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime”. It is, he wrote in the Guardian, not just Vladimir Putin who should be prosecuted, but also his “henchmen”. These include members of the Russian and perhaps Belarusian national security councils, and a range of political and military leaders. All should be held to account for this “manifestly illegal war”, he wrote on his website.
Condoleezza Rice, who was George W Bush’s national security adviser, was asked of Russia’s aggression on Fox News, “when you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime?” She replied: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.”
Brown and Rice are right about Russia. Its government, in invading Ukraine, has clearly committed the crime of aggression, a crime in which, as Brown points out, its senior officials are complicit. The same applies to the US and UK governments, which invaded Iraq 20 years ago today. Among the most senior perpetrators were Rice and Brown.
The seventh of the Nuremberg Principles, which Brown cites in calling for Russian prosecutions, points out that “complicity” in a war of aggression “is a crime under international law”. Both officials would clearly qualify as complicit. Rice was one of the architects of the war. Brown, as a cabinet member, was party to the decision. As chancellor of the exchequer, he financed the war.
No one can credibly deny that the invasion of Iraq met the Nuremberg definition. The Chilcot inquiry, whose terms were set by Brown when he was prime minister, was forbidden to pronounce on the legality of the war. But it concluded that “the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.” In other words, it failed to meet the UN charter’s criteria for legal warfare. The former law lord, Lord Steyn, came to the same conclusion: “In the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal”. The former lord chief justice, Lord Bingham, called the Iraq war “a serious violation of international law”. A Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”.
The attackers went out of their way to eliminate peaceful alternatives. Saddam Hussein desperately sought to negotiate, eventually offering everything the US and UK governments said they wanted, but they slapped his hand away, then lied to us about it. When the UN sought diplomatic solutions, US officials went into what they called “thwart mode”, sabotaging negotiations.
When the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, José Bustani, offered to resolve the impasse over weapons inspections in Iraq, the US government illegally ousted him. The first government to support his sacking was the United Kingdom’s.
The government in which Brown was chancellor was repeatedly warned that its planned invasion would be illegal. A year before the war, the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, explained that for a war to be legal, “i) There must be an armed attack upon a State or such an attack must be imminent; ii) The use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) The acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack”. None of these conditions applied. The Foreign Office, according to its deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, consistently counselled that an invasion would be unlawful without a new UN resolution. She explained that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”. A Cabinet Office memo warned: “A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”
As for “law officers’ advice”, the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned that there were only three ways in which an invasion could be legally justified. They were “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [UN security council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” The government failed to obtain UN security council authorisation. At the Chilcot inquiry, Lord Goldsmith testified that, after he gave advice Tony Blair didn’t want to hear, the prime minister stopped asking. Just before the war, though the facts had not changed, Goldsmith changed his mind.
There is another way of saying “crime of aggression”: an act of mass murder. The invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people. We cannot be more precise than that, as the invading forces refused to measure the carnage. But it is almost certainly the greatest crime against humanity so far this century. Blair, Brown, Bush and Rice are as guilty of a “manifestly illegal war” as Putin and his close advisers.
But who gets prosecuted is a matter of victors’ justice. For example, until it issued a warrant last week on another charge for the arrest of Putin and one of his officials, there had been 31 cases brought before the international criminal court. Every one of the defendants in these cases is African. Is this because Africa is the only continent where crimes against humanity had occurred? No. It’s because Africans accused of such crimes do not enjoy the political protections afforded to the western leaders who perpetrate even greater atrocities.
Instead of facing justice, the killers walk among us, respected, revered, treated as the elder statesmen to whom media and governments turn for counsel. Brown can pose as an august humanitarian. Alastair Campbell, who oversaw the compilation of the “dodgy dossier”, which provided a false case for war, and is therefore as complicit as any of Putin’s “henchmen”, has been thoroughly screenwashed: in other words, rehabilitated, like other grim political figures, by television. He is now treated as a kind of national agony uncle.
There has been no reckoning and nor will there be. This greatest of crimes has been so thoroughly airbrushed that its perpetrators can anoint themselves the avenging angels of other people’s atrocities. To quote King Lear: “Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.”
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist.

Ukraine needs to launch a major counteroffensive within the next few months.
"The window of opportunity is open this year. After next winter, it will be extremely difficult to maintain the current level of assistance, war fatigue is not only the exhaustion of human resources and equipment, the destruction of infrastructure in Ukraine, but also fatigue in the countries that provide aid." Many countries expect "some progress" this year.
"I think Ukraine will have only one attempt to carry out a major counteroffensive, therefore, if (Ukraine) decides to launch a counteroffensive and it fails, it will be extremely difficult to get funding for the next one."
Czech President Petr Pavel.
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caltrek
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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Ok, that cuts it. I am so tired of the same "what-about" effort to derail this thread and talk about anything but the war in Ukraine. I am also tired of my suggestion to start a thread on the topic of the Iraq invasion under Bush and company being ignored. So, I have started a thread on that invasion. Provisionally, I have nothing further to say on the comparison between the two made in this thread. That theme has been beaten to death and beyond.
I am more interested in understanding this war and the consequences for Ukrainians and Europeans. Talking about Iraq simply does not address that concern. Discussing the invasion of Iraq is a valid topic. Hence my dedicating a thread to that discussion.

https://www.futuretimeline.net/forum/vi ... 103#p34103
Don't mourn, organize.

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ibm9000
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Re: Ukraine War Watch Thread

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I am more interested in understanding this war and the consequences for...
To understand this war, you have to understand war. To understand consequences, I think it is a good idea to have a look at past consequences of war, any war.
(and the Rohingya, let's not forget them; as refugees, as a consequence of war).
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