Is an armed citizen a soldier ?

[JohnnyGleet]

Originally Posted by 1blackman1

That article doesn’t really support your hypotheses. In fact just the opposite. It basically admits that Putin wants the empire back and considerable losses of former Russian territories drove Putin to paranoia.

That’s not a provocation.

"Among others, Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995. "

"When President Bill Clinton’s administration moved to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.”

" In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Need more ?

[LexusLover]

Some must justify their inhumanity and violence as someone else's fault.

[the_real_Barleycorn]

Originally Posted by texassapper

If you are shooting at armed forces and don't have some kind of identifying colors, you are an armed irregular and can be executed in the field no questions asked. The video that Azv posted from Bucha a few days ago had a guy asking can we shoot if they don't have blue arm bands the answer was yes. I suspect that is who killed the citizens of Bucha... Ukrainian Azov Battalion members.. then they figured out we better stage it and blame the Russians because the days prior there were videos of the Police coming into Bucha and no bodies... even the initial Azov tweets which have been removed didn't mention any civilian war crimes...

So likely its all propaganda and not to be trusted.

Yeah, all the libs are not cheering on neo nazis... it's too funny. We went from punch them to support them overnight.

What dirty work would the Russians be doing for the West?

No, this is nothing like Hungary...

Except there were drone photos of bodies on the ground, in the street, as the Russians were pulling out. I guess you have to hand it to those "crisis" actors. They are dedicated to the role.

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

I don't mean to sound harsh, just cautionary

Where your hearts bleeding for them more than six weeks ago when we were bleeding them dry and plundering their resources and wealth for years and setting up the yellow brick road for the Ruskies to drive on? Thought not. So quite your Monday morning QB bullshit. memory holing, colonialism and hypocrisy.

Were you also on team open borders in the US? Just let everyone the hell in because their own governments are PoSs? Maybe they voted for them and maybe they didn't. Or are you also the ones that think we should borrow billions of dollars to send to every "shithole" country? You can always send your personal donation instead.

Perhaps another Orange revolution here, there and everywhere? Colonialism for everyone, whether they like it or not. Maybe ya'lls memory has gone Biden. Turns out other countries don't cotton much to us plundering their wealth and installing our hand picked dictator de jour on someone else's doorstep. Shaw of Iran ring any bells?

• Obama told you they were not strategic.
• Kissinger told you they were a hot mess.
• Hillary was raking in ~$8M from Victor Pinchuk, I believe, in donations.
• Hillary was SoS during Obama, then Presidential dreaming?
• Biden was praising Putin for being one of the greats (Peter) in 2011
• Biden was point man on Ukraine for 8 years under Obama. Remember withholding $$ unless they fired their prosecutor?
• Biden, Kerry, Romney, Pelosi all had a son working on Ukraine energy company boards
• Ihor Kolomoysky funded both Hunter Biden and Zelensky's run to power
• Ihor Kolomoysky was essentially the owner of Burisma
• Don't know if Victoria Nuland (Under SoS) is a tranny, but she's had a hard on for Russia for Decades, much like Hillary.
• Petro Porosheko was our puppet/pet/gateway, similar to the Shaw of Iran
• Paul Manafort was involved in the money hustle when he was a member of their club
• How many biolabs did we set up over there and how many did Hunter Biden direct funding to?
• Just how big is our CIA and military presence there?
• Anyone else recall the crap-fest known as the Cuban Missile crisis. We got kinda pissy when another country set up shop next to our house.

We've been playing RISK and CLUE with their country for a very long time and Biden's fecklessness, ineptitude, malleability, what ever - was like opening up the gates and rolling out the red carpet to Putin, after of course we had fed at the trough.

It's one thing to jack around in another country's politics. It's an entirely different thing when you do so for fun and personal profit. Regardless, an anticipated prospect of either is that some other player on the board will also exploit the opportunity.

I'll stop here for now with this summary and a URL:

We may not be the good guys in this venture.
We (USA and others) signed those death certificates a long time ago.

The rabbit hole: ClintonFoundationTimeline (Petro Poroshenko page)
Tons of links to people and events involved. Most everything on that page is a link (bubble). Most pages have links (bubbles) at the bottom too.

[HedonistForever]

Originally Posted by LexusLover

So, a country that has "corruption" may be invaded with impunity?

That's the exact opposite of what I said. I'm saying that no matter how corrupt Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government may have been, they did not attack Russia, Russia attacked them without provocation and more importantly committed atrocious war crimes doing so..


Now, it can be reasonably argued that Ukraine becoming part of NATO, provoked Putin except for the fact that Ukraine was not even being considered to join NATO for many years if ever and YES, it was in hindsight a mistake to even mention this but nothing, NOTHING can possibly justify what Russia has done, period.

[HedonistForever]

Originally Posted by 1blackman1

That article doesn’t really support your hypotheses. In fact just the opposite. It basically admits that Putin wants the empire back and considerable losses of former Russian territories drove Putin to paranoia.

That’s not a provocation.

Damn, that's 2 now, hell has definitely frozen over.


Putin has wanted Ukraine back for 30 years now. Why he chose this moment in time we can all speculate about. Was it Biden's weakness, internal pressure in the Kremlin, who the fuck knows but again, nothing Ukraine did required Russia to respond this way. He had Crimea, he had effective control of the Donbass though fighting still existed but Putin wanted Kyiv and he didn't care if he had to destroy every building and kill every man woman and child to get it.

[HedonistForever]

Originally Posted by JohnnyGleet

"Among others, Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995. "

"When President Bill Clinton’s administration moved to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.”

" In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Need more ?

What was being said about Ukraine joining NATO before this invasion?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/us/politics/nato-ukraine.html

NATO Won’t Let Ukraine Join Soon. Here’s Why.

As the Russian military decimates cities across Ukraine, kills thousands of civilians and displaces millions, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has acknowledged that his country will not be joining NATO anytime soon.


In his first speech to Congress, on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky said the world needed “new institutions, new alliances” and called for “a union of responsible countries that have the strength and consciousness to stop conflicts immediately.”


Even in January, a month before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began his full-scale invasion, tense talks among the United States, Russia and European members of NATO made one thing clear: While the Biden administration insists it will not allow Moscow to quash Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO, it has no immediate plans to help bring the former Soviet republic into the alliance. Mr. Putin’s insistence that he needed to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO appeared to be a pretext for war, a stated rationale without substance.
If Ukraine were a NATO member, the alliance would be obligated to defend it against Russia and other adversaries. U.S. officials say they will not appease Mr. Putin by undermining a policy enshrined in NATO’s original 1949 treaty that grants any European nation the right to ask to join.

“Together, the United States and our NATO allies made clear we will not slam the door shut on NATO’s open door policy — a policy that has always been central to the NATO alliance,” Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, said on Jan. 12.
But France and Germany have in the past opposed Ukraine’s inclusion, and other European members are wary — a deal breaker for an alliance that grants membership only by unanimous consent. American and Russian leaders know this. As Russian troops continued to amass on Ukraine’s eastern border in January, current and former American and European officials said Mr. Putin was raising the NATO issue to lay the rhetorical groundwork for an invasion, even if it had little basis in reality.


Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, suggested that Mr. Putin was trying to distract from more urgent matters. “Everybody’s talking about NATO expansion,” Mr. McFaul said on a podcast by the Center for a New American Security that was released on Jan. 11. “Suddenly, we’re debating this issue that wasn’t even an issue. That’s a great advantage to him.”
Like European leaders, President Biden remains uninterested in Ukrainian membership in NATO. Here are four reasons.
Biden has grown skeptical of expanding U.S. military commitments.

And Putin had to know that

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Biden successfully urged NATO to accept Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as member states in the late 1990s. The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Mr. Biden said that turning the former Cold War adversaries into allies would mark the “beginning of another 50 years of peace” for Europe. He added that the move would right a “historical injustice” perpetrated by Stalin.

But over the course of two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, experts said, Mr. Biden’s fervor for expanding NATO cooled considerably. In 2004, seven Eastern European countries joined the alliance, and in 2008, President George W. Bush pushed NATO to issue a declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would become members in the future despite reservations from U.S. intelligence agencies. However, the alliance has never offered either country a formal action plan to join, a necessary step for them to do so.


As recently as June, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told senators that “we support Ukraine membership in NATO.” Mr. Biden, however, has been far more circumspect in his public comments and “has soft-pedaled talk of extending NATO membership to Ukraine,” two foreign policy scholars, Joshua Shifrinson and Stephen Wertheim, wrote in September in Foreign Affairs.
In 2014, as vice president, Mr. Biden told officials in Ukraine during a visit there that any U.S. military support would be small, if given at all, according to a biography of Mr. Biden by Evan Osnos, a New Yorker writer who was on the trip. Russia had just invaded and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and Ukrainian officials were unhappy with Mr. Biden’s message.
“We no longer think in Cold War terms,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Osnos, adding that “there is nothing that Putin can do militarily to fundamentally alter American interests.”
Last June, Mr. Biden told journalists at NATO headquarters in Brussels that “school is out on that question” when asked whether Ukraine could join the alliance.


Biden wants Ukraine to improve its political and legal systems.

To meet one of the three main criteria for entry into NATO, a European nation must demonstrate a commitment to democracy, individual liberty and support for the rule of law. While Ukrainian leaders say they have met that threshold, some American and European officials argue otherwise.
In a 2020 analysis, Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, ranked Ukraine 117th out of 180 countries on its corruption index, lower than any NATO nation.

Officials in European nations with stronger liberal governance — notably in Sweden and Finland — have also floated the possibility of joining NATO, despite years of determined nonalignment. That is a discussion “we are ready to do,” Victoria J. Nuland, the State Department’s under secretary for political affairs, told journalists on Tuesday. “Obviously, they are longtime, established, stable democracies.”
She signaled that might not be the case with Ukraine. “That conversation would be slightly different than it is with countries that are making the transition to democratic systems and dealing with intensive problems of corruption and economic reform and democratic stability, etc.,” Ms. Nuland said.


Her comments echoed those of Mr. Biden on his 2014 visit to Ukraine. “To be very blunt about it, and this is a delicate thing to say to a group of leaders in their house of parliament, but you have to fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in your system right now,” Mr. Biden told Ukrainian officials then.
Some Western officials also question whether Ukraine could meet a second set of criteria: contributing to the collective defense of NATO nations. But Ukraine sent troops to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


“There are steps that Ukraine needs to take,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in September after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met with Mr. Biden in the Oval Office. “They’re very familiar with these: efforts to advance rule of law reforms, modernize its defense sector and expand economic growth.”


NATO wants to avoid greater Russian hostility.

After annexing Crimea, Mr. Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and gave military aid to a separatist insurgency there. He did something similar in Georgia in 2008. The message has been clear: If these two nations join NATO, the United States and European countries will have to grapple directly with ongoing Russian-fueled conflicts.

Russia could also impose other costs on Europe, such as withholding gas exports. And Germany and many other NATO nations prefer to choose their battles with Russia, given its proximity and Mr. Putin’s aggressive nature. They know he and other Russian officials are obsessed with Ukraine.

Given all that, Ukraine would almost certainly be unable to meet the third main criterion to join NATO: approval from all 30 members.
“The principal objection would be: Does such a move actually contribute to the stability in Europe, or would it contribute to destabilization?” said Douglas E. Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO. “I think it’s indisputable there wouldn’t be consensus among the 30 members, even though all allies agree that Ukraine has the right to aspire to become a NATO member.”
Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, said that even in the 1990s, when NATO enlargement was first proposed, many prominent American strategists, most notably George F. Kennan, opposed it for this reason. “That was the concern all along — it wouldn’t be easy to do this in a way that wouldn’t threaten Russia,” he said.


Ukrainian leaders have waffled on NATO membership.

Ukrainian leaders have not always pushed hard to join NATO, and that has shaped the American approach.
Former President Viktor Yushchenko wanted entry into the alliance, but Ukrainians became more reluctant after Russia invaded Georgia. His successor, Viktor Yanukovych, dropped any drive for membership and promoted closer ties with Russia, even agreeing to allow Moscow to continue leasing a Black Sea naval port in Crimea.
During the Obama administration, American officials encouraged Ukraine to sign a formal association agreement with the European Union rather than try to join NATO. Mr. Putin pressured Mr. Yanukovych to reject the agreement, which led to the Euromaidan protests starting in 2013 that eventually ousted Mr. Yanukovych.

“A lot of the U.S. policy has been quite reactive due to circumstances,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution who was a senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council under President Donald J. Trump. “It has also changed due to changes in Ukraine itself toward this.”
“By now, you’ve got much more sentiment in Ukraine for joining NATO,” she added.


Mr. Zelensky has pressed Mr. Biden repeatedly on membership, including during his visit to the White House in September. “I would like to discuss with President Biden here his vision, his government’s vision of Ukraine’s chances to join NATO and the time frame for this accession, if it is possible,” he said as he sat next to Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden blew past those comments without responding.

So Putin had no reasonable expectations that Ukraine would be joining any time soon or at all but he used it as an excuse to attack

[reddog1951]

And I thought this thread was about the question as to whether an armed citizen was a soldier...seems many here are unable to keep on track....why is that?

[eccieuser9500]

Originally Posted by reddog1951

And I thought this thread was about the question as to whether an armed citizen was a soldier...seems many here are unable to keep on track....why is that?

Agenda.

[JohnnyGleet]

Originally Posted by texassapper

If you are shooting at armed forces and don't have some kind of identifying colors, you are an armed irregular and can be executed in the field no questions asked.

This gets more to what I was asking.
News on Bucha are playing up the unarmed citizens angle to make the case for war crimes and the general narrative of the West.
texassapper kind of cleared up for me the rules of engagement for such situations. I assume they would be similar for our armed forces.

[JohnnyGleet]

Originally Posted by reddog1951

And I thought this thread was about the question as to whether an armed citizen was a soldier...seems many here are unable to keep on track....why is that?

In the OP I also made reference to the Azov battalion and what they're about as well as how the narrative on them has changed. Part of Putins stated reason for military action was getting rid of neo-Nazis, an assertion the West categorically denies even though the same news channels were ringing the alarms over the same group for the last 6 years.
This also raises questions about wether Azov as well as the Wagner group may be staging atrocities themselves .

[Jackie S]

Originally Posted by JohnnyGleet

In the OP I also made reference to the Azov battalion and what they're about as well as how the narrative on them has changed. Part of Putins stated reason for military action was getting rid of neo-Nazis, an assertion the West categorically denies even though the same news channels were ringing the alarms over the same group for the last 6 years.
This also raises questions about wether Azov as well as the Wagner group may be staging atrocities themselves .

How any of the American Left throw the word “NAZI” around when somebody is agrees with their Progressive/Socialist agenda.

I guess Putin learned well. Just throw the word “NAZI” at the Ukrainians and everybody reals in horror.

The Azov Battalion might not fit into our definition of what a soldiers conduct should be, but or thing is fact.

They fight.

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by LexusLover

So, a country that has "corruption" may be invaded with impunity?

Judging by our Southern border, yes. Yes it may.

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by JohnnyGleet

This gets more to what I was asking.
News on Bucha are playing up the unarmed citizens angle to make the case for war crimes and the general narrative of the West.
texassapper kind of cleared up for me the rules of engagement for such situations. I assume they would be similar for our armed forces.

They are the same laws most of which are codified in the Geneva Conventions of land warfare. Non uniformed combatants can be executed at will. By rights every towel head in Gitmo could have been executed after interrogation.

The Russians and Ukraine forces are uniformed and cannot be killed post surrender. The videos of the Ukraines knee capping Russians is a war crime that if committed by US troops today would result in a death sentence.

Not all forces follow the convention a the same but the Officer corps spends at lesser a years worth of classes on the subject.

My Lai hangover.

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by the_real_Barleycorn

Except there were drone photos of bodies on the ground, in the street, as the Russians were pulling out. I guess you have to hand it to those "crisis" actors. They are dedicated to the role.

I love seen the videos… 6-7 bodies at regular intervals on the street… no context as to when they were taken. I am only saying that the Ukraine police forces entered the city two days before the war crimes were publicized and didn’t report any such findings. I’ve also seen the video of the Azov unit on their own Twitter feed showing one asking if he can shoot people without arm bands. The answer YES. I understood the yea clearly I relied on interpretation for the question but given that nobody claimed it to be interpreted wrongly, I can only assume it’s accuracy.

The simple fact is the media is not to be trusted because they aren’t reporters they simply parrot the government propaganda. There are too many kleptocrats standing by to make money if only we could expand the conflict. The democrats want a war to take attention off the cratering economy and the looming food crisis.

They will probably try to reimpose lockdowns to try and control the populace.

Nope. There are too many red flags on this for the US to get involved. Too many people screaming to send in the troops or ship them F-15s.

You’d think after 20 years in Astan the American populace would know better. But apparently there are more sheep than I thought possible.