Play Nice The NM Devils Chessboard thread.

[Eggs11]

It would work it you’re talking corporate business, but this is another level.

Think of it more like how gangsters operate.

Well I guess I’m assuming all parties want this to end. This conflict is also devastating for Russia and even if Vlad does end up with some part of Ukraine, then without a peace deal the continuation of sanctions will ensure the Russian state continues to decline into a 2nd world despot. But maybe Vlad doesn’t give a farq about that.

 

[ferball]

Nothing that Antony Blinken said is incorrect, and it's being used by pro-Russian shills to try and show that the US is "warmongering" or something, conveniently forgetting that it was Russia who invaded a sovereign nation, unprovoked and unthreatened.

Any 'ceasefire' that doesn't include Russian forces falling back behind their own borders and leaving the sovereign territory of Ukraine would mean that you still have hostile forces occupying foreign lands - a clear violation of United Nations conventions as Secretary Blinken points out.

It is strategically advantageous to Russia and only Russia, so of course that's where the pro-Russian talking points are going.

No one wants an escalation of this conflict, so I don't begrudge people who are (literally) gun-shy and are looking for the quickest and easiest route to a cessation of hostilities.

But the simple fact remains - if this ends with Russia holding sovereign territory that was once Ukranian, then the world as a whole has utterly failed, and it will demonstrate that the fear of escalating conflicts outweighs the risk of aggressor hostility. This has huge ramifications for places such as Taiwan, Kashmir, etc.

Russia said for 20 years that Ukraine joining NATO would be war and they saw it as a threat and as provocation, he never changed that position. US involvement in Ukraine since 2010 had seen the Ukrainian ar,my integrating with NATO systems. That's a threat to Russia as far as Russia is concerned.

There are public US security think tank briefing papers posted in this thread from before the war that recommend ongoing provision of lethal aid to Ukraine as a way to provoke Russia and pressure it but they also acknowledge the risk of war that this strategy entailed. They are public briefing papers not classified ones. They are probably more hawkish if the 20th century is anything to go on.

And before you saw Russia wasn't provoked or thretened that is exactly what all of those Russian propaganda outlets like RT were saying during the Obama presidency. Unless you expect us to believe that when Russian propaganda outlets say that Russia feels threatened they aren't speaking for the Russian leadership.

 

[Chadwiko]

Russia said for 20 years that Ukraine joining NATO would be war

Is Ukraine in NATO?
Were they on the verge of joining NATO when Russia invaded?
Was Russia's invasion warranted?

The answer to all three of these questions is the same.

There are public US security think tank briefing papers posted in this thread from before the war that recommend ongoing provision of lethal aid to Ukraine as a way to provoke Russia

Non-government think-tanks. Cmon.

Justifying Russia's invasion is weird AF.

 

[Val Keating]

Is Ukraine in NATO?
Were they on the verge of joining NATO when Russia invaded?
Was Russia's invasion warranted?

The answer to all three of these questions is the same.



Non-government think-tanks. Cmon.

Justifying Russia's invasion is weird AF.

No one is justifying Russias invasion. It’s ******* terrible.

This thread is called the devils chessboard for a reason. It’s about looking at what’s happening and discussing why the ‘players’ are making the moves.

 

[DesertRoo]

The late Robert Parry, talks Ukraine in 2014

Spoiler

If you wonder how the world could stumble into World War III much as it did into World War I a century ago all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire U.S. political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats vs. black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.

The original lie behind Official Washington’s latest “group think” was that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis in Ukraine as part of some diabolical scheme to reclaim the territory of the defunct Soviet Union, including Estonia and other Baltic states. Though not a shred of U.S. intelligence supported this scenario, all the “smart people” of Washington just “knew” it to be true.


Yet, the once-acknowledged though soon forgotten reality was that the crisis was provoked last year by the European Union proposing an association agreement with Ukraine while U.S. neocons and other hawkish politicos and pundits envisioned using the Ukraine gambit as a way to undermine Putin inside Russia.
The plan was even announced by U.S. neocons such as National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman who took to the op-ed page of The Washington Post nearly a year ago to call Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward eventually toppling Putin in Russia.
Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, wrote:

“Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In other words, from the start, Putin was the target of the Ukraine initiative, not the instigator. But even if you choose to ignore Gershman’s clear intent, you would have to concoct a bizarre conspiracy theory to support the conventional wisdom about Putin’s grand plan.
To believe that Putin was indeed the mastermind of the crisis, you would have to think that he somehow arranged to have the EU offer the association agreement last year, then got the International Monetary Fund to attach such draconian “reforms” that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych backed away from the deal.
Then, Putin had to organize mass demonstrations at Kiev’s Maidan square against Yanukovych while readying neo-Nazi militias to act as the muscle to finally overthrow the elected president and replace him with a regime dominated by far-right Ukrainian nationalists and U.S.-favored technocrats. Next, Putin had to get the new government to take provocative actions against ethnic Russians in the east, including threatening to outlaw Russian as an official language.
And throw into this storyline that Putin all the while was acting like he was trying to help Yanukovych defuse the crisis and even acquiesced to Yanukovych agreeing on Feb. 21 to accept an agreement brokered by three European countries calling for early Ukrainian elections that could vote him out of office. Instead, Putin was supposedly ordering neo-Nazi militias to oust Yanukovych in a Feb. 22 putsch, all the better to create the current crisis.
While such a fanciful scenario would make the most extreme conspiracy theorist blush, this narrative was embraced by prominent U.S. politicians, including ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and “journalists” from The New York Times to CNN. They all agreed that Putin was a madman on a mission of unchecked aggression against his neighbors with the goal of reconstituting the Russian Empire. Clinton even compared him to Adolf Hitler.
This founding false narrative was then embroidered by a consistent pattern of distorted U.S. reporting as the crisis unfolded. Indeed, for the past eight months, we have seen arguably the most one-sided coverage of a major international crisis in memory, although there were other crazed MSM stampedes, such as Iraq’s non-existent WMD in 2002-03, Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb project for most of the past decade, Libya’s “humanitarian crisis” of 2011, and Syria’s sarin gas attack in 2013.
But the hysteria over Ukraine with U.S. officials and editorialists now trying to rally a NATO military response to Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine raises the prospect of a nuclear confrontation that could end all life on the planet.
The ‘Big Lie’ of the ‘Big Lie
This madness reached new heights with a Sept. 1 (2014) editorial in the neoconservative Washington Post, which led many of the earlier misguided stampedes and was famously wrong in asserting that Iraq’s concealment of WMD was a “flat fact.”In its new editorial, the Post reprised many of the key elements of the false Ukraine narrative in the Orwellian context of accusing Russia of deceiving its own people.

The “through-the-looking-glass” quality of the Post’s editorial was to tell the “Big Lie” while accusing Putin of telling the “Big Lie.” The editorial began with the original myth about the aggression waged by Putin whose

“bitter resentment at the Soviet empire’s collapse metastasized into seething Russian nationalism.
“In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, he has also resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark, or profoundly misinformed, about events in their neighbor to the west.
“In support of those Russian-sponsored militias in eastern Ukraine, now backed by growing ranks of Russian troops and weapons, Moscow has created a fantasy that plays on Russian victimization. By this rendering, the forces backing Ukraine’s government in Kiev are fascists and neo-Nazis, a portrayal that Mr. Putin personally advanced on Friday, when he likened the Ukrainian army’s attempts to regain its own territory to the Nazi siege of Leningrad in World War II, an appeal meant to inflame Russians’ already overheated nationalist emotions.”

The Post continued:

“Against the extensive propaganda instruments available to Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime, the West can promote a fair and factual version of events, but there’s little it can do to make ordinary Russians believe it. Even in a country with relatively unfettered access to the Internet, the monopolistic power of state-controlled media is a potent weapon in the hands of a tyrant.
Mr. Putin’s Big Lie shows why it is important to support a free press where it still exists and outlets like Radio Free Europe that bring the truth to people who need it.”

Yet the truth is that the U.S. mainstream news media’s distortion of the Ukraine crisis is something that a real totalitarian could only dream about. Virtually absent from major U.S. news outlets across the political spectrum has been any significant effort to tell the other side of the story or to point out the many times when the West’s “fair and factual version of events” has been false or deceptive, starting with the issue of who started this crisis.

Blinded to Neo-Nazis
In another example, the Post and other mainstream U.S. outlets have ridiculed the idea that neo-Nazis played any significant role in the putsch that ousted Yanukovych on Feb. 22 or in the Kiev regime’s brutal offensive against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.

However, occasionally, the inconvenient truth has slipped through. For instance, shortly after the February coup, the BBC described how the neo-Nazis spearheaded the violent seizure of government buildings to drive Yanukovych from power and were then rewarded with four ministries in the regime that was cobbled together in the coup’s aftermath.

When ethnic Russians in the south and east resisted the edicts from the new powers in Kiev, some neo-Nazi militias were incorporated into the National Guard and dispatched to the front lines as storm troopers eager to fight and kill people whom some considered “Untermenschen” or sub-human.

Even The New York Times, which has been among the most egregious violators of journalistic ethics in covering the Ukraine crisis, took note of Kiev’s neo-Nazi militias carrying Nazi banners while leading attacks on eastern cities albeit with this embarrassing reality consigned to the last three paragraphs of a long Timesstory on a different topic. [See Consortium News’s “NYT Discovers Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis at War.”]

Later, the conservative London Daily Telegraph wrote a much more detailed story about how the Kiev regime had consciously recruited these dedicated storm troopers, who carried the Wolfsangel symbol favored by Hitler’s SS, to lead street fighting in eastern cities that were first softened up by army artillery. [See Consortium News‘s “Ignoring Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]

You might think that unleashing Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II would be a big story given how much coverage is given to far less significant eruptions of neo-Nazi sentiment in Europe but this ugly reality in Ukraine disappeared quickly into the U.S. media’s memory hole. It didn’t fit the preferred good guy/bad guy narrative, with the Kiev regime the good guys and Putin the bad guy.

Now, The Washington Post has gone a step further dismissing Putin’s reference to the nasty violence inflicted by Kiev’s neo-Nazi battalions as part of Putin’s “Big Lie.” The Post is telling its readers that any reference to these neo-Nazis is just a “fantasy.”

Even more disturbing, the mainstream U.S. news media and Washington’s entire political class continue to ignore the Kiev government’s killing of thousands of ethnic Russians, including children and other non-combatants. The “responsibility to protect” crowd has suddenly lost its voice. Or, all the deaths are somehow blamed on Putin for supposedly having provoked the Ukraine crisis in the first place.

A Mysterious ‘Invasion’

And now there’s the curious case of Russia’s alleged “invasion” of Ukraine, another alarmist claim trumpeted by the Kiev regime and echoed by NATO hardliners and the MSM.

While I’m told that Russia did provide some light weapons to the rebels early in the struggle so they could defend themselves and their territory and a number of Russian nationalists have crossed the border to join the fight, the claims of an overt “invasion” with tanks, artillery and truck convoys have been backed up by scant intelligence.

One former U.S. intelligence official who has examined the evidence said the intelligence to support the claims of a significant Russian invasion amounted to “virtually nothing.” Instead, it appears that the ethnic Russian rebels may have evolved into a more effective fighting force than many in the West thought. They are, after all, fighting on their home turf for their futures.

Concerned about the latest rush to judgment about the “invasion,” the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former U.S. intelligence officials and analysts, took the unusual step of sending a memo to German Chancellor Angela Merkel warning her of a possible replay of the false claims that led to the Iraq War.

“You need to know,” the group wrote, “that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”

But these doubts and concerns are not reflected in the Post’s editorial or other MSM accounts of the dangerous Ukraine crisis. Indeed, Americans who rely on these powerful news outlets for their information are as sheltered from reality as anyone living in a totalitarian society.

ROBERT PARRY: Who's Telling the 'Big Lie' on Ukraine?

The U.S. group think still driving the Ukraine crisis began at least eight years ago, as detailed in this article by Robert Parry on Sept. 2, 2014. Exclusive: Official Washington draws the Ukraine crisis in black-and-white colors with Putin the bad guy and the U.S.-backed leaders in Kiev the good

consortiumnews.com

 

[ferball]

Is Ukraine in NATO?
Were they on the verge of joining NATO when Russia invaded?
Was Russia's invasion warranted?

The answer to all three of these questions is the same.



Non-government think-tanks. Cmon.

Justifying Russia's invasion is weird AF.

Doesn't matter. They were integrating their forces into NATO systems and had US personnel training them.

You might say wtte of "Technically they weren't in NATO (yet)" but no Russian military analyst is gonna take that sort of comment seriously. They're gonna look at what the potential is on the ground regardless of what treaties or paperwork might say.

I don't care either way. Two racist shitholes on the other side of the world, at war with each other. That means nothing to me. Its just another stupid war. But US bullshit about stealing other countries sovereign territory means * all when most of the west and south west USA and all of the pacific and Carribbean US territories were once sovereign to someone else as well. In fact the entire US was and its exists because of a history of theft and broken treaties.

The beach Paul Roos is kicking back on is no less stolen than Crimea.

If anything its more stolen cos the Russians "liberated" Crimea from the Ottomans over 200 years ago, its Russian speaking and they have fought to keep repeatedly since. Hawaii had no relationship like that with the US, its a state cos a bunch of businessmen decided they wanted to steal all that land and grow fruit and Australian nuts.

BTW It was the 20th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq a couple of days ago. That joint is still ****ed and so is the entire surrounding area because of an invasion of sovereign territory that we in Australia assisted in. Maybe if we hadn't we might have the sort of moral authority other people in the world might listen to ... but we don't any more. We're just part of another groady, corrupt empire taking people's s**t and blowing things up, just like Putin.

As for the implications of for Taiwan and ... *en Kashmir (wtf are you on about with that btw? are you talking about Ladakh?)

Tibet was a sovereign state not all that long ago. No one's done jack s**t about that. Most of western china is populated by Russian speakers and Mongolians. Where's their sovereignty. This war in ukraine has no more implications for the rest of the world than anything else that's happened this century. People are only pushing that to try and create an artificial distinction between this violation of national sovereignty and all the other ones that we've seen this century.

 

[DesertRoo]

Listen to the smears for an anti war party.

Far-right lawmakers walk out of Zelenskiy speech to Austrian parliament

Lawmakers from the pro-Russia, far-right Freedom Party walked out of the lower house of Austria's parliament on Thursday during a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, protesting that it violated Austria's neutrality.

www.reuters.com

 

[ferball]

Listen to the smears for an anti war party.

Far-right lawmakers walk out of Zelenskiy speech to Austrian parliament

Lawmakers from the pro-Russia, far-right Freedom Party walked out of the lower house of Austria's parliament on Thursday during a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, protesting that it violated Austria's neutrality.

www.reuters.com

I'm, not in favour of this war obviously but that political party is sus and was started by an ex Nazi nearly 70 years ago.

They're part of a Europe wide political movement that heard this song and wet itself decades ago.



The same people who trained Anders Breviek and Brenton Tarrant pull the strings on that movement.

 

[Val Keating]

s**t getting pretty hot in Sudan right now.

 

[ferball]

There were rumours of Wagner group being involved in one of those Sudanese factions but I'd have thought they were all a bit busy elsewhere right now.

 

[Val Keating]

There were rumours of Wagner group being involved in one of those Sudanese factions but I'd have thought they were all a bit busy elsewhere right now.

It’s interesting that this has happened after US warned Sudan not to let Russia build a base there and Sudan told them to get stuffed.

I know it’s a tumultuous country anyway, but knowing history you have to wonder..

 

[ferball]

It’s interesting that this has happened after US warned Sudan not to let Russia build a base there and Sudan told them to get stuffed.

I know it’s a tumultuous country anyway, but knowing history you have to wonder..

Sudan military finishes review of Russian Red Sea base deal

CAIRO (AP) — Sudan’s ruling military concluded a review of an agreement with Russia to build a navy base on the Red Sea in the African country, two Sudanese officials said Saturday.

apnews.com

That's the base you're talking about yeah? It basically gives Russia access to the Indian Ocean (including the WA coastline.)

Team America is no longer the world police it seems.

 

[DesertRoo]

 

[DesertRoo]

Worth a watch for any readers of this thread. Talks a lot about geopolitics

 

[Val Keating]

Worth a watch for any readers of this thread. Talks a lot about geopolitics

I can’t take a full blown antivaxxer seriously tbh. He’s not just anti covid vax, he’s anti all vaxx.

 

[DesertRoo]

I can’t take a full blown antivaxxer seriously tbh. He’s not just anti covid vax, he’s anti all vaxx.

They only touch on it at the start, covers everything else.
Btw he ain’t anti vax, he’s anti reg capture.

 

[Val Keating]

They only touch on it at the start, covers everything else.
Btw he ain’t anti vax, he’s anti reg capture.

Reg capture? What is that?

 

[DesertRoo]

Reg capture? What is that?

He is an environmental lawyer, mainly going after companies for water contamination etc, found out that the government regulators were sponsored and working for large companies, not the environment.
It’s called regulation capture.

But the above video is mainly about geopolitics and America. A lot of what we talk about in here. Not much to do with vaccines apart from the first 5 or so minutes, they cover it because they have too.

 

[ferball]

I can’t take a full blown antivaxxer seriously tbh. He’s not just anti covid vax, he’s anti all vaxx.

And yet he says this:

The most crucial aspect of the immigration crisis is rarely discussed: Why are so many people so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and countries behind for an uncertain future? The answer is uncomfortable. In large part, it is U.S. policies that create desperate conditions south of the border. The War on Drugs is one. U.S.-funded dictators, juntas, paramilitaries, and death squads. Neoliberal extraction of resources. Unpayable debts. It is inhumane and hypocritical to deny immigration while creating the conditions that drive immigration. As President, I will change these policies. That’s the only long-term solution to the border crisis.

I'm pretty sure he used to be a junkie. Understandable given what happened to his father and uncle. You can say what you like about his anti vax stance but if you use that as a reason to ignore this stuff when every other president and 90% of candidates ignore it as well then who is really more cooked?

What's more important?

 

[Val Keating]

And yet he says this:

The most crucial aspect of the immigration crisis is rarely discussed: Why are so many people so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and countries behind for an uncertain future? The answer is uncomfortable. In large part, it is U.S. policies that create desperate conditions south of the border. The War on Drugs is one. U.S.-funded dictators, juntas, paramilitaries, and death squads. Neoliberal extraction of resources. Unpayable debts. It is inhumane and hypocritical to deny immigration while creating the conditions that drive immigration. As President, I will change these policies. That’s the only long-term solution to the border crisis.

I'm pretty sure he used to be a junkie. Understandable given what happened to his father and uncle. You can say what you like about his anti vax stance but if you use that as a reason to ignore this stuff when every other president and 90% of candidates ignore it as well then who is really more cooked?

What's more important?

He wants to run against Biden for the Democrats but the Democrats want let Biden debate, which is ******* hilarious.

 

[DesertRoo]

He wants to run against Biden for the Democrats but the Democrats want let Biden debate, which is ******* hilarious.

He has 20% of the democratic primary and news orgs have outright censored him.

It’s wild, can you imagine if they censored all politicians who lie? We’d litterally have black to air.

 

[Val Keating]

He has 20% of the democratic primary and news orgs have outright censored him.

It’s wild, can you imagine if they censored all politicians who lie? We’d litterally have black to air.

It’s certainly not very democratic of the Democrats.

 

[Val Keating]

Things are really heating up between Prizohin & Shoigu

Warning graphic video.

 

[Val Keating]

Now Prizohin is saying he’s going to pull the Wagner group out.

 

[DesertRoo]

In terms of danger rating this is up there with bathing in kerosine by candlelight.

Former Pakistani PM Imran Khan arrested at Islamabad court

Protests after former prime minister is arrested over corruption allegations during court appearance in the capital.

www.aljazeera.com