Pretty big cohort of bootlickers that can now bray on about how the atrocities are actually Totally Legal. THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE RESISTED!
I read on Twitter that martial law entails a prohibition to leave the country but that was yesterday when the rumor was that martial law will be announced nationwide.
Putin doesn’t like to commit himself. Not a war, a special military operation. Not a general mobilization, just partial mobilization. Not nationwide martial law, just regional martial law. Not ICBMs, just tactical nukes. I could go on.
It’s probably a good approach for him considering how often and how badly he fucks up. Gotta be able to bail.
Who cares what The Coward Of Afghanistan did? LET’S GO BRANDON!
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No difference. The occupied parts were already under martial law. He only had to officially announce it now that they are annexed and parts of Russia. Don’t want to give those new Russian citizens whatever rights they might have without martial law.
I’m saying he’s afraid to go all-in. He also procrastinates. He has people poisoned and thrown out of windows rather than making public examples of them and making it clear he’s responsible. He terrorizes whole populations but denies it. He destroyed Nord Stream to further his blackmail of Europe but denies that too. For someone whose ambition is to be an unquestioned dictator, he’s kind of a chicken shit.
He’s landed in no-man’s-land. Not sufficiently commited and viscous enough to maximize his chances while having gone so far he’s fucked if he loses.
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Untrue. The US is still at war with an abstract noun.
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I deleted the first paragraph. Idk if that makes it more or less bizarre.
That’s a nice string of questions you’re just asking.
Putin initiated an imperialist, land stealing war against a country that never attacked Russia. He, his troops, and his propagandists are engaged in genocide against Ukranians; it may not be industrial scale WW2 genocide, but it’s plenty bad, and it’s just weird that people who despise US foreign policy (appropriately so in almost all cases!) are doing the whatabout thing instead of condemning Putin with the same intensity as they condemned W.
P.S. he publicly murders his enemies because Russia is a mafia state and that’s how he sends a message to various groups in the country.
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Ok I’m grunching so my fault if I missed something, but I’d think the relevant context here is that it’s currently illegal for normal Russians to describe the events in Ukraine as a war, so it’s odd to interpret Putin’s reticence to call it a war as of the same kind as a Western leader.
The number of casualties the Russians are suffering are at least one order of magnitude greater than any suffered by Western peoples in those cases when their leaders chose to minimize their military interventions by not calling them wars (obviously you have Korea and Vietnam, but these were all called wars). Like sure, it is obviously sometimes convenient for Western politicians to not call their interventions proper wars, and if a handful of special ops die here and there the pretense may hold, but when is the last time a Western leader’s army suffered 30k+ causalities in a foreign land and it was not widely called a war?
So brave
Thank you for being the one light of sanity in this thread
You ask a lot of questions. If we’re using scare quotes, I obviously don’t “know” these things. From from what little I do know of history, the most successful would-be tyrants were particularly brutal. Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great. He sees himself in that tradition. And the Tsar is not the Tsar if he’s not willing to be ruthless and cruel. Everything else follows.
Maybe it’s unfair to say he’s a chickenshit. Maybe it’s just FPS. Either way, he’s fucked himself. Ofc he’s not doing anybody else any good either.
It’s bizarre to me this is what you took away from my post. Our problem is that he is ruthless and cruel. His problem is he isn’t good enough at it.
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Russian forces and others operating under their command routinely tortured detainees during their six-month occupation of Izium, a city in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine, Human Rights Watch said today.
Survivors described being subjected to electric shock, waterboarding, severe beatings, threats at gunpoint, and being forced to hold stress positions for extended periods. They identified at least seven locations in the city, including two schools, where they said soldiers had detained and abused them.
“The cruel violence and abuse in Izium were not random incidents,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Multiple victims shared credible accounts with us of similar experiences of torture during interrogation in facilities under the control of Russian forces and their subordinates, indicating this treatment was part of a policy and plan.”
In late September and early October, Human Rights Watch spoke with over 100 people in Izium who were there during the Russian occupation of the city, from March to early September 2022. Almost all said that they had a family member or friend who had been tortured, and fifteen people, fourteen men and one woman, described being tortured themselves. One of the men had ties to the armed forces but the rest were civilians. The families and friends of two other men who were detained and tortured said the men killed themselves within days their release.
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