So if you use this justification for the war then Russia’s goal is to conquer “friendly” territory and to create a buffer zone since Ukies love shelling everything. This has not been achieved. You can double down here and say they first need to deplete Ukie military potential to the last man. Not inspiring and indicative of incompetence.
The second narrative is NATO encroachment. Finland joined NATO. Ukraine is as hostile as it’s ever been. Russia has done nothing to deter NATO.
The third vague narrative is one that guys like Medvedev vaguely allure to. This is the one where Russia has willingly entered into a civilizational war with the west, has restored the Empire and is spanking Ukraine back into line. Aside from them making some light anti-LGBT progress there is zero indication, evidence or stated goals that such a thing is happening.
This is all stuff we all know and agree on. A lot of these are pretty obvious observations that were posted back in 2022. Ukraine On Fire from 2016 revealed that Ukraine was shelling its own people (funny how that doesn't have the same impact on the west that "gas" does) and yes, Russia intervened when it had finally had enough of thousands of Russian speakers getting killed (much as the US would probably invade Mexico if there were thousands of American speakers getting killed (there was a big story about a large Mormon family being killed in northern Mexico a year or two ago).
None of the above is false. It's just that everyone accepts these premises, even the NAFO shills, at this point.
Yes, it's obvious the full criteria of the SMO have not been achieved yet; that is why it is still ongoing.
Russia has done nothing to deter NATO? It has been trying to negotiate with the west for years on precisely this point. The SMO in itself hasn't collapsed NATO (though many argue it has been weakened), but that was never an aim of the SMO. So why bring it up?
Russia is making "light-Anti-LGBT progress"? In comparison to whom?
What first world nation has ANY anti-LGBT policies? In Russia gay pride parades are banned. You cannot do drag time story hours to children. And most importantly, gays are not seen as the elite class to be pridefully venerated, but instead something to be ashamed of.
This is bad because... they are not throwing gays off buildings or something?
That's just a weird complaint. The same way about the only real criticism we see of Russia is "they aren't winning fast enough tho."
Fast enough compared to what?
Russia is operating under their own timetable, not that of internet bloggers.
And there is a lot of evidence that the longer Russia drags this out, the better it is for BRICS, and the global geopolitics of a declining America/NATO (the Ukraine position is very unpopular outside the Anglo-American vassal states and we are seeing independent nations waving Russian flags in the streets, the same way you would see people wave American flags as a symbol of freedom in the days of Communism).
New evidence here:
British Airways described London-Beijing as “one of our most important routes”.
From October to at least November 2025 the carrier will not fly to the capital of China.
European carriers are not currently able to enter Russian airspace which makes flying to China more challenging as it takes a few hours longer than it used to.
It is one of many Western airlines avoiding Russian airspace, which is adding to their flight times, fuel costs and complexity over how they deploy crew and aircraft.
and here:
The lack of orders and falling exports put Germany at the bottom of the list in terms of growth rates, <strong> Azernews </strong> reports.</
menafn.com
Large corporations such as BASF are closing factories because management no longer believes it can efficiently produce essential chemicals. There is a trend of deindustrialization.
Anyway, the US waged war against the Afghanis for 20 years, before losing to them. Saying Russia should "hurry up" and fix a demographic problem that has existed for many decades along its border, when it is 2 years into solving this problem, is rather silly.
The social and practical reasons for this slow grind have been discussed in this thread already. But, playing Devil's Advocate, even if Russia wanted to do things faster, and they just can't, so what? They are still winning, and Ukraine has no path to victory, where they arguably did a year ago.
There are huge social, moral, and economic costs to having a behemoth military like America does. Should Russians make those sacrifices so they can defeat the Hohols faster? Why? So they could end up more like America?
The Kursk incursion seems to have been finally stopped (after several premature announcements by the Russians).
The few photos of Ukrainian flags right across Russia's border turned out to be not much of a PR victory.. even western establishment media is pretty negative of the situation:
The hospital ward reeks of the sacrifice: soil, blood, and stale sweat. Foil burn-dressings line the corridor. In the yard, the patients, some wrapped like mummies from head to toe in bandages, smoke furiously. Angol, a 28-year-old paratrooper with the 33rd brigade, looks like a Christmas tree. His left arm is immobilised in a fixation device. Tubes, bags and wires protrude from his body. He was also about 30km into Russia when his luck ran out. He isn’t sure if it was artillery or a bomb that hit him. Maybe it was friendly fire; there was a lot of that.
This puts into perspective the large front Russia must defend; it is simply not practical to cover thousands of km of territory, and incursions like this are possible in any nation, as border checkpoints are sparse and not militarized. Nor should we want them to be.
The current front line in Ukraine is over 1,200 km long, the border between Ukraine and Russia proper adds 2,295 kms of frontier to active combat frontlines, to defend its entire length in depth is essentially impossible while fighting an advancing assault in the East.
This sort of incursion could easily happen in the middle of nowhere along one of America's borders, if a crazy gay Jewish dictator wanted to send a thousand armed Mexican military men to cause havoc and mayhem randomly among the population of a small border town. Russia can be criticized for taking 6 days to quell the invasion, I suppose, but war is full of these types of operations. Even in Iraq and Afghanistan where Americans had large multiples of manpower advantages, and air supremacy, there were still incidents where the locals ambushed and pushed back American forces.
Anyway, one only has to look at the Ukraine News and Battle Reports thread to see the large gains Russia has been making militarily while the Ukies try to shoot at passenger cars and run around like crazies before they get killed in this pointless stunt. And they wasted 3 brigades on this, two of them elite brigades trained in Britain and Germany for weeks.
In the coming days, Russia will take New York, Chasiv Yar, and Toretsk. And this incursion into Kursk will be totally forgotten.
thespectator.com
