Moonbox

They've always been geographically close to Russia. The Kievan Rus that you refer to as the "start" of Russia was from close to 1000 years ago, lasted a few hundreds years and then collapsed after the Mongols. Ukraine spent as much time after that as part of Poland until it revolted and then Russia took over most of its territory. From then on, they were revolting against Imperial Russia (and were often violently suppressed). They declared independence in 1917, warred with and then were subjugated by the Soviet Union, starved in the millions under Stalin (a good reason why so many of them welcomed the Wehrmacht) and then broke away as soon as they could when the Soviet Union dissolved. Soo...no. They didn't really choose to be part of Russia. Except paraphrasing Putin's speeches doesn't count as "knowing" something. Go read a book.

Which is why they wanted to shift their focus to the West. Look where it got them living under the Russian yoke.

The junior nature of Ukraine's partnership with Europe/NATO is understood, I think, by everyone. I'm not sure what you think you're getting at here. All of this started, of course, when Ukraine decided it no longer wanted to be a puppet of shithole Russia, a country of something like 140 million people, more natural resources than anyone, but a GDP equivalent to 'mighty' Spain.

The beloved Chechen warlord sent 2-3 battalions to Ukraine, they got mauled, and he's refusing to send any more. Raddy and Wagner will totally turn the tide here. ?

/cringe ?

Better for Putin, no doubt. This was back when Ukraine still thought Russia had a competent military. Putin, his cronies, the losers in the manosphere raging and coping with how Russia's macho image has been shattered by the weak and the effeminate ??.

like the truth of "annexing" territory you don't control, or that you're about to lose. Smurt!

So a social benefit. Problem with "socialism" is that it's become a bogeyman term for fools to throw around, with it essentially meaning an out-co-control welfare state. CPP, worker's comp, OAS, public healthcare, municipal transit, publicly funded educated etc are all socialism. The word doesn't actually mean what all of the clowns figure it does.

Truly special stuff. The TLDR of this entire conflict: Putin invades miscalculates horrifically with a doomed invasion of Ukraine, sending confused troops who don't know why they're there, nor want to be, who subsequently drag their heels and retreat/desert en masse.

but you're lying to us, and to yourself. You didn't care about peace in Ukraine when Putin first invaded. You weren't calling for an end to the invasion then. You were spending your time telling everyone why it was necessary and why Putin was "forced" into it. Also, if you're going to call someone a liar, try and make sure you can actually highlight an example of it, otherwise you're just screaming into your pillow...like a "complete fool". which is the M.O. of conspiracy clowns everywhere. When your predictions and hyperbole fail to materialize, over and over, you continue full-steam ahead to the next batshit scenario. Your capacity for forgetfulness and self-delusion is your superpower. Says the Putin lickspittle. Such a good boy. *headpat*

You see what you want to see, and literally nothing but. Putin is the good guy...yup yup. ? Nothing hypocritical about it. The fact that you can't differentiate it is a testament to your poor reasoning skills. They were denied entry for a lot of reasons, the most important of which was that NATO figured Ukraine was a likely target for Russia and didn't want to make guarantees to a nation in imminent danger of invasion. Turns out they were right! Ukrainians aren't Russians, nor do they want to be. They have hundreds of years of separate history and if you exerted yourself to reading anything outside of Kremlin telegram feeds, you'd know that. The fact that you're sitting here all upset and paraphrasing nothing but Kremlin commentary tells us everything we need to know where you're getting your information from. Little Vlad can rage and threaten all he wants. If "LET US DO WHAT WE WANT OR WE NUKE" is his strategy, it's going to fail. There are enough Russians with families that won't sign on for nuclear apocalypse just to support their delusional dictator. You can cry and carry on all you like about it, but nobody's fooled by what you're saying. You're a Putin lickspittle and that's what really matters to you here. You just can't cope with how horrifically he's faceplanted here.

No doubt. Yeah my friend's dad was the owner of Kodiak, but from hearing him tell he went through hell trying to get a better/cheaper and more modern boot as the standard and it was like talking to walls. That's unfortunate, given western soldiers are trained to be flexible, innovative and resilient. Imagine thinking that people trained to make decisions and solve problems in literally the harshest and most dangerous conditions are "too rigid'. Makes you want to slap someone.

I am usually supportive of efforts to include minorities, but not at the expense of the overall objective. Making sure the armed forces is safe for women or gays or whatever is fine, but as in most cases I imagine it goes too far in CAF and the bureaucracy forgets that the overall objective is to maintain combat capability/readiness rather than massage hurt feelings and make sure you have a pinked haired trans person of at least Bgen rank. I've a friend who's father used to own a major footwear company and he worked for years trying to secure a contract to supply army boots to the Canadian military. Perhaps you could attest, but from what I understood the CAF army boot was at the time an ancient, uncomfortable and outdated design. A more comfortable, more durable, more effective , more customizable and cheaper boot was available, but the archaic and nonsensical design specs for an army mired any attempt to improve it in years of red tape. They apparently spent years providing reimbursements and orthodics so soldiers could source their own boots and not be trudging around with what they called "hockey pucks taped to your sole". You would know better than me. I was just reading from the CAF website what the starting salary is for recruits . I just know that here in SW Ontario you could go years without speaking to or even knowing someone (or of someone) in the military. My friend whose foot was run over by the artillery piece immediately got a job as a supervisor building wind/solar farms in Northern Ontario and Alberta making $120k+ a year. The company had such great experience with ex-military that he was asked to recruit any friends or colleagues he knew that had recently left the force as well.

Yes, but they have to last through winter and hold what they have, and that seems unlikely without reinforcements. Many of these recruits are going to be exactly what everyone is calling them - cannon fodder. Russia doesn't have the capacity to properly train 300,000 or more recruits even over the winter. Come March they will still be substandard in training and equipment. There's almost no way these units aren't vastly inferior to the units Russia already lost. Likely. Winter is a great equalizer. First you have the wet and muddy season where vehicles get stuck and troops are wet and uncomfortable at all times. Next it all freezes and you can no longer dig trenches or foxholes, your extremities freeze (along with your equipment and vehicles) and you're just generally cold and miserable. I don't think time is on Russia's side, however. By March 2023, Ukraine's army will still be highly motivated and experienced and substantially better equipped than when this started. In the meantime, Russian bodybags will continue coming home, an obvious challenge to Kremlin propaganda that will continue to fray Putin's narrative about things going well.

I think that's a bit naive. Not only would it require people to deeply research the companies whose products and services they buy, we're also supposing they'll pay more when we have 60-70 years to prove how much they care their clothes come from sweatshops. Unless I misunderstood, I think Moonlight is actually right on this one. Our tax system is absurd and a lot of our problems could be solved by making sure that upper middle class people don't pay proportionally more in taxes than the absurdly wealthy. Canada's better than some places in that regard, but tax codes around the world are full of loopholes that don't need to exist.

The massive increase in Russian troops will not yield much. Poorly motivated conscripts will not turn the tide, especially considering the quality and cohesiveness of their standing professional forces has proven itself lacking. These conscripts will be an order of magnitude worse. If we suppose they go through proper training (which will take several months, rather than weeks), they'll trickle in because Russia at present doesn't have the infrastructure and institutions to maintain or train large battle-ready reserves. I suspect the strategy here is to throw these conscripts into the conflict zones with minimal training in the hopes of gumming up the Ukrainian offensive and buying Russia time for winter or for larger strategic adjustments to Putin's mobilization efforts.

I know a few people who've recently left the Army. One some sort of artillery piece run over his foot (he recovered and then left a year later) and the other was a logistics officer. Neither of them had very positive things to say about their experiences, with most of the criticism focusing on a bloated and out-of-touch bureaucracy. I looked into it in my 20's and decided against it. What is asked/expected out of you versus what you earn and the risks associated didn't make a lot of sense. Why would an infantry recruit want to join and make $30-40k per year in some backwater base when they could literally make that as a shift supervisor at Tim Hortons, or as a low-skill labourer at a factory? I know it's not all about the money, but if it's not at least substantially better than low-skill minimum wage, you're only going to attract a small niche of adventurous patriots or the desperate and unemployed. This permeates up the chain as well, with cream-of-the-crop airforce pilots being heavily outpaid by basic private sector positions.

Wow. Talk about projecting your own failures on others. If you can't see the parallel between Hitler and Czechoslovakia, and then Putin and the Donbass, you're a special little boy. and all of the other sources in Europe, the middle east, south-east asia, south america etc. Getting your news from Telegram is so much better ? This is a funny coping mechanism. Poor little Nationalist. Everything he thought he knew about Stronk Putin the hero of conspiracy clowns everywhere, is being proven wrong.

Dental care is a type of health care. The same arguments apply to both. Having rotten teeth because your parents are poor will probably ensure that you remain poor, because nobody wants to hire what they'll perceive as a low-class slob who doesn't brush their teeth. There's also the added benefit of teeth-health having a strong correlation with cardio-vascular health. I'm generally strongly against government spending, but this is a program I can support and we'd be way better off spending our energy tackling our bloated public sector bureaucracy and their absurd compensation and benefits.

Weak, effeminate Neville Chamberlain ?

By the same logic, you should go join Russia's army and support their invasion, since that's what you're doing here. Father Putin will be so pleased with you. Good doggy.

Yes. That's the chronology of how the events unfolded. Johnson came to Ukraine and then afterwards the deal was scrapped. The deal was not scrapped solely because Johnson came to Ukraine. As the articles YOU LINKED and referred to pointed out, the massacre at Bucha and Russia's newly discovered weakness entirely changed the math around whatever the deal was. It will make what obvious?

Yap Yap Yap ? Okay? Here's what was included in the article: “According to multiple former senior US officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement.” But two things happened, after which a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Mykhailo Podoliak, had to openly admit that it was "not the time" for the meeting of the presidents. The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, massacres, looting, indiscriminate bombings and hundreds and thousands of other war crimes committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories… The second "obstacle" to agreements with the Russians arrived in Kyiv on 9 April." (Boris Johnson's arrival). So three things happened here that apparently scuttled whatever outlined and tentative deal was discussed: 1) The Bucha massacre was revealed 2) The Russians fled from Ukraine with their tails between their legs (changing all of the calculus) 3) Boris Johnson explained Putin/Russian weakness to Zelensky and encouraged them to not to accept their demands. All three of these things are ample reason for the Ukrainians to want to continue fighting. Or the Russians, who've made clear that energy is a weapon they'll use to retaliate against sanctions. Putin will never have more leverage in this regard than he does right now. Europe's dependence on Russian gas will only diminish from here. He's already a pariah and those pipelines will be worthless hunks of metal in a year or two if he's still in power. He has nothing to lose from sabotaging them and it's another way of blackmailing Europe and causing general chaos and confusion.

Don't you ever tired of stringing words together that don't make any sense? What, exactly, do you figure people were wrong about here? ? "According to Ukrainska Pravda, the other factor that scuttled peace talks was the discovery of massacred civilians in Bucha and other areas near Kyiv that Russia withdrew from around the time negotiations were being held." The thing about clowns like this is that they don't actually read the stuff they try to cite, and even when they do, they're not doing so with any sort of critical lens.

Not as okay as you seem to be with Putin's full-scale invasion. No doubt you thought you had an intelligent point to make here, but the logic unfortunately isn't there. So...yes. I'm absolutely okay with the West providing material support to the Ukrainians so they can fight off a megalomaniacal ex-KGB colonel with delusions of Empire.