- 26 Δεκ 2023, 15:16 #850298 Η λεπτομέρεια που σκοτώνει είναι ότι η πυραυλική επίθεση ήρθε μετά από 2-3 ημέρες καταστολής της ρωσικής αεροπορίας στο νότο, εκεί γύρω δηλαδή.
Οπότε ναι οι Ουκρανοί μπόρεσαν να σηκώσουν αεροσκάφη (που πλησιασαν πιο κοντά στα συνορα) με τους cruise που χτύπησαν εν τέλει το εν λόγω λιμάνι δίπλα στη μεγάλη γέφυρα της Κριμαίας.

Και μόλις βγήκε και πρωινή φώτο.
Επάνω το καράβι στις δόξες του και κάτω ότι απέμεινε, έχει βυθιστεί στο λιμένα του.

- 26 Δεκ 2023, 16:44 #850304 Μάλλον δεν κόβει το μάτι μου, αλλά αυτά που είναι ανάμεσα στα ορθογώνια, δεν μπορώ να τα διακρίνω πως είναι στην κάτω φωτογραφία.
ΥΓ: Δεν λέω πως δεν το βύθισαν, ίσα ίσα, μια χαρά του έκαναν. Απλώς δεν διακρίνω αυτό που δείχνουν οι φωτογραφίες.

- 26 Δεκ 2023, 17:35 #850305 και δε γίνεται με τέτοια συντρίμια στο νερό να υπάρχουν όρθια κτήρια στην ακτή 10 μέτρα πιο μέσα.

Άμπερ αλέρτ . Αγνοείται εισαγγελέας.

- 26 Δεκ 2023, 17:46 #850307 Εδώ είναι ολόκληρη η φωτό που ανέβασε το Υπουργείο Άμυνας της Ουκρανίας.
https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/173 ... 17/photo/1
Οι τοίχοι και η προκυμαία εκεί τριγύρω φαίνονται μπαρουτοκαπνισμένοι....από 'κει και πέρα....περί ορέξεως (Photoshop could be our friend)

- 26 Δεκ 2023, 17:52 #850308
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... p-feodosia

Russia confirms navy vessel hit
One person was killed, two injured and a large landing ship called Novocherkassk was damaged in an overnight Ukrainian attack on the Crimean port city of Feodosia, Russia’s defence ministry and officials said.

The Interfax news agency cited the Russian defence ministry as saying that Ukraine had used guided missiles launched by aircraft to attack Feodosia.

Reuters reported that the Russia-installed governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, said on the Telegram messaging app that one person had been killed and two injured as a result of the attack.

There was no immediate report of how badly the ship was damaged, but videos circulating on Ukrainian channels showed an extensive fire in the port area.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance.

- 26 Δεκ 2023, 19:31 #850314

και δε γίνεται με τέτοια συντρίμια στο νερό να υπάρχουν όρθια κτήρια στην ακτή 10 μέτρα πιο μέσα.

Τα τοπικά κανάλια δείχνουν κομμάτια του πλοίου μέσα στην πόλη...

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1739641294815707466

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 00:15 #850337 Πάντως, αν κάποιος κερδίζει σίγουρα σε αυτό τον πόλεμο, είναι η προπαγάνδα. Την ίδια στιγμή που η Ρωσία χάνει ένα πλοίο, η Ουκρανία χάνει μια πόλη προγεφύρωμα.
Άντε βγάλε άκρη.
Το Κίεβο παραδέχεται τώρα την απόσυρση του ουκρανικού στρατού από τη Μαρίνκα
https://www.efsyn.gr/kosmos/eyropi/4165 ... ti-marinka

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 08:13 #850347 Κι εδώ βλέπουμε χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα προπαγάνδας.
Βασικά αυτή η παράγραφος-κατακλείδα ήταν ο μοναδικός λόγος που γράφτηκε το άρθρο από την ΕΦΣΥΝ.



< >

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 22:53 #850457 Ένας απίστευτος πόλεμος φθοράς.

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 23:20 #850461

Κι εδώ βλέπουμε χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα προπαγάνδας.
Βασικά αυτή η παράγραφος-κατακλείδα ήταν ο μοναδικός λόγος που γράφτηκε το άρθρο από την ΕΦΣΥΝ.



< >

Ναι, είναι πουτινάκια στην ΕφΣυν ως γνωστόν, από την άλλη και αλλού διαβάζεις περίπου τα ίδια.
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/putin- ... 218-p5esaf

Προφανώς, το πρώτο που θα ενδιαφέρει έναν εξωτερικό παρατηρητή, είναι να μάθει τι διάβολο συμβαίνει, ποιος κερδίζει και ποιος χάνει. Μάλλον αυτό δεν θα το μάθουμε με σιγουριά μέχρι το τέλος, και μέχρι κάποιος να πετάξει λευκή πετσέτα.
Προς το παρόν, πέρα από αρκετές ηρωικές φωτοβολίδες, η Ουκρανία δεν έχει κατορθώσει να πάρει πίσω σοβαρά εδάφη, κι αυτό μόνον υπέρ της Ρωσίας θα καταλήξει στο τέλος φοβάμαι.
Οι δυτικοί ψάχνουν δικαιολογία να σταματήσουν την βοηθεια προς την Ουκρανία, η οποία μόνη της δεν γίνεται να αντιμετωπίσει την Ρωσία.

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 23:25 #850463 HF είναι behind paywall το άρθρο που έβαλες.

- 27 Δεκ 2023, 23:32 #850465 Περίεργο, εγώ το διαβάζω κανονικά.
Putin could have the last laugh in Ukraine

Putin could have the last laugh in Ukraine
The cards are stacked against Ukraine going into 2024, and the war’s outcome is more likely to be decided in America than Europe.

Hans van LeeuwenEurope correspondent

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and his Russian nemesis Vladimir Putin both held televised press conferences just before Christmas. If there was one thing these two exercises had in common, it was this: both men said their side will win the war.

Zelensky was asked directly if Ukraine would lose the battle raging inside its borders. His single-word answer: “No.”

As for Putin, he seemed more upbeat than at any time since the invasion began in February 2022. “Our armed forces are improving their position almost along the entire line of contact … I am certain that victory will be ours,” he said. He even started to make menacing noises towards Finland, now a NATO member.


Russian President Vladimir Putin manages to crack a smile during a press conference in Moscow. AP

Putin certainly seems the man with more reasons to be cheerful. Ukraine’s counter-offensive this year had its moments, but it did not land a decisive blow. A sense of demoralisation is starting to seep into the edges of Ukrainian politics and society, fraying unity and chipping away at Zelensky’s authority.

The war may be claiming hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers’ lives, but Putin’s home front is solid. The economy is weakened, but it is pump-primed by its war footing.

Most Putin-pleasing of all, and most frustratingly for Zelensky, the West’s resolve shows signs of wearing thin. Without the money and munitions that the US and Europe are now failing to deliver, Ukraine’s cause is surely all but lost.

And that’s even before the potential resurrection of US president Donald Trump, who will – at the very least – turn his back on the Ukrainians and their fight for national survival.

“During the initial stages of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, there was something approaching an international consensus that Vladimir Putin had made a colossal blunder … [he] appeared to have isolated his country and inadvertently unified the entire Western world against him,” Peter Dickinson, editor of Ukraine Business magazine, wrote on the Atlantic Council website.

“As Russia’s invasion approaches the two-year mark, the picture is now far more complex and significantly darker … Putin is now more confident than ever that he can outlast the West in Ukraine.”

But the war is not yet won, or lost. The two sides are still locked in a battlefield stalemate, and neither side feels the desire nor the necessity to sue for peace.

A year of grim, pre-Trump stalemate beckons, unless someone, somehow, finds a circuit-breaker and flips the switch.

Zelensky hunts a breakthrough
Zelensky’s quest is the more difficult of the two. He is waiting for a US military aid package worth $US61 billion ($90 billion), but will it ever come? Republicans in Congress have tied these funds to a deal on curbing migration from Mexico, which the White House won’t countenance.

“We definitely want to help them,” Republican Senator Dan Sullivan said. “There’s no doubt. We just have to have a serious border deal, we’re not budging on it.”

US President Joe Biden is similarly standing firm, even though he knows what’s at stake. “Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine,” he said in mid-December. “We must, we must, we must prove him wrong.”

Without Congress’s funding authority, the Pentagon will largely have to stop supplying Ukraine from the year’s end.

The American public are also going cool on the war. An FT-Michigan Ross poll found that 48 per cent of US voters, and 65 per cent of Republicans, think the US is spending too much on military and financial aid to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Putin’s ally Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, blocked a €50 billion ($81 billion) non-military aid package.

And even if the likes of Germany and France can still divert the money around the sides of this veto, that’s not the main problem: the EU has promised a million artillery shells to Ukraine by March, but has managed to rustle up less than half of that.

That has already prompted Ukraine to scale back its battlefield operations, General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told Reuters. “The volumes we have are not sufficient, given our needs,” he said.

“So, we’re redistributing it. We’re re-planning tasks that we had set for ourselves and making them smaller, because we need to provide for them … In some areas we moved to defence, and in some we continue our offensive actions.”

All this left Putin crowing to journalists: “Ukraine produces almost nothing today, everything is coming from the West. But the free stuff is going to run out some day. And it seems it already is.”

Digging deep from within
There are a couple of internal resources Zelensky can draw upon. One is drones: he claimed at his pre-Christmas press briefing that Ukraine would produce a million next year.

These can be used to strike Russia inside its own territory, in the hope of sowing discontent with Putin and the war. And they have been remarkably effective in disabling Russia’s navy – the one genuine Ukrainian military breakthrough of the past six months.

In the latest encounters, videos of an enormous explosion in the Crimean port city of Feodosia support the claim by Ukraine’s air force that it destroyed another ship from the Russian Black Sea fleet. For its part, Russia claims it destroyed two Ukrainian Su-24 bombers involved in the attack.


Ukrainian troops training with a tank in the wintry conditions. AP

Zelensky’s other resource, in theory, is manpower. He told reporters he might approve the Ukrainian military’s request to mobilise half a million more men this coming year.

This would be a tall order in a country of just 40-odd million people. Many Ukrainians are resisting the demands for further mobilisation, and up to 15,000 soldiers have gone missing in action.

But the long-serving front-line troops are in urgent need of relief. Many are exhausted after up to 18 months in the trenches, and 70,000 have been killed.

That is a fraction of the Western-estimated 315,000 troops Putin has expended on his war so far – a death toll equating to 90 per cent of the force he originally committed.

But he says he is recruiting another 1500 volunteers a day. He will always be able to throw more men into the meat grinder than Zelensky can.

Neither side has much to show for all this sacrifice since the middle of the year. Ukraine can point to having made it across the Dnieper River in the south, but both sides are dug in.

In the Donbas region to the east – the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are the bare minimum Putin needs to seize if he is to claim success for his “special military operation” – the opposing forces are locked in protracted, utterly destructive struggles to seize this town or that hill or highway.

Over the northern winter, Putin will likely return to his campaign of bombing or hacking civilian infrastructure, hoping to sap the morale of a Ukrainian population that is significantly more war-weary than when he last tried and failed at this.


An image of the utterly destroyed village of Stepove, in the Donbas region. AP

The proportion of Ukrainians who say they are willing to accept territorial concessions to end the war has increased from 10 per cent to 19 per cent.

Unready to lay down arms
Zelensky himself admitted to reporters that his administration was preparing proposals to end the war peacefully. But these were still predicated on Russia pulling back to the pre-2014 borders.

“The strategy cannot be changed,” he said. “According to our constitution, these are all our territories.”

Whatever authority and command Putin has regained since the Wagner Group insurrection, and despite him being on course to win a presidential election in March, he is in no position to accept that Ukrainian demand.

He must be seen to win, and that means consolidating Russia’s hold on the four Ukrainian provinces Moscow has annexed, and getting some kind of undertaking of neutrality out of Kyiv.

But Zelensky can’t cop this: if NATO doesn’t in some way have his back – through some kind of security guarantee – it will only be a matter of time before Russia swallows this neutral Ukrainian state, much as it has done to Belarus.

So Zelensky can’t offer his people peace, and is barely even able to offer them hope. Little wonder that his popularity has dropped – from 84 per cent to 62 per cent, according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll.

Gallingly for the president, his plain-speaking military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi has the trust of 88 per cent of Ukrainians. The general recently told The Economist magazine that the war was at a stalemate, sparking reports of a rift with Zelensky that neither side has fully denied.

King’s College professor and military sage Lawrence Freedman counsels against reading too much into this, saying elite fissures “are not unusual for countries facing stressful times”.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is struggling to keep the West’s attention. AP

“A degree of tension in civil-military relations is also natural and can be a good thing,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

“But if infighting becomes chronic and decision-making starts to get paralysed with strategies not subjected to criticism and scrutiny, the tensions can soon become harmful.”

The Trump factor
Zelensky’s position will only worsen if Trump retains his poll lead going into the US presidential election this coming November. Trump has quoted Putin’s views approvingly, and has also suggested he would force Ukraine to the negotiating table – doubtless under pressure to make concessions.

At his pre-Christmas press conference, Zelensky was forced to address this head-on.

“If the policies of the next president, whoever he or she might be, are different, are colder, more inward-looking, or more frugal, I think those signals will have a very big impact on the course of the war in Ukraine,” he said.

“Because that’s how the whole world works. If one strong part falls out, the mechanism starts to fall apart.”

But the impact of this would ripple beyond Ukraine, warns hawkish Czech president Petr Pavel. He told a local news website in mid-December that Trump could push Europe off the negotiating table, and embolden Putin to dream big.

“Putin has made it quite clear that there can be no discussion of any peace talks until the outcome of the election in the United States. He has thus made it clear that for him, the partner for possible negotiations is none other than the United States. Not any of the major European countries,” Pavel said.

If Trump returns to office as NATO-sceptic as he was during his previous term, Putin’s deployment of forces to Russia’s border with Finland begins to look more sinister.


US presidential candidate Donald Trump has quoted Putin approvingly. AP

Putin told the state TV channel Rossiya 1 at the weekend that Finland’s accession to NATO had changed the game on that frontier. “There were no problems [with Finland],” he said. “Now there will be.”

Without the US umbrella, Europe may not have the military capacity to resist a gradual Russian escalation in either Finland or the Baltics. Some European countries may decide that their only option is to accommodate Putin’s violent revisionism.

Even as the world seems increasingly ready to cut Zelensky loose, or at least increasingly unable to prevent that from happening, Europe’s own security could lie in the balance.

But all this still sits in a yet-to-be-realised future. As the Financial Times pointed out, Russia remains a long way short of this.

“Each of Putin’s objectives remains out of reach,” the paper observed. “Although Russia occupies about 17.5 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, it hasn’t succeeded in annihilating the nation’s independence, identity and desire to integrate with the West.”

Russia is also a smaller economy than its foes, with less military firepower. It is only the question of resolve that separates the West from Moscow – and this could end up being decisive.

The Ukrainians, too, still largely have that resolve. But they can’t do it alone. Until Washington and Brussels can unlock support, Ukraine will be limited mostly to drone sorties against Russia to try and hit morale, and defensive operations in the Donbas.

This is the road not to victory, but at best to a frozen conflict – one that drains Ukraine’s economy and wears down its society, as the West increasingly looks the other way.

This is not a certain outcome. But Putin has reasons to break out his Cheshire cat smile. As Spectator journalist Svitlana Morenets observes: “These are dark times for Ukraine”Menu

World
Europe
Russia-Ukraine war
Putin could have the last laugh in Ukraine
The cards are stacked against Ukraine going into 2024, and the war’s outcome is more likely to be decided in America than Europe.

Hans van LeeuwenEurope correspondent
Dec 27, 2023 – 9.42am

Save

Share

Listen to this article
12 min
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and his Russian nemesis Vladimir Putin both held televised press conferences just before Christmas. If there was one thing these two exercises had in common, it was this: both men said their side will win the war.

Zelensky was asked directly if Ukraine would lose the battle raging inside its borders. His single-word answer: “No.”

As for Putin, he seemed more upbeat than at any time since the invasion began in February 2022. “Our armed forces are improving their position almost along the entire line of contact … I am certain that victory will be ours,” he said. He even started to make menacing noises towards Finland, now a NATO member.


Russian President Vladimir Putin manages to crack a smile during a press conference in Moscow. AP

Putin certainly seems the man with more reasons to be cheerful. Ukraine’s counter-offensive this year had its moments, but it did not land a decisive blow. A sense of demoralisation is starting to seep into the edges of Ukrainian politics and society, fraying unity and chipping away at Zelensky’s authority.

The war may be claiming hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers’ lives, but Putin’s home front is solid. The economy is weakened, but it is pump-primed by its war footing.

Most Putin-pleasing of all, and most frustratingly for Zelensky, the West’s resolve shows signs of wearing thin. Without the money and munitions that the US and Europe are now failing to deliver, Ukraine’s cause is surely all but lost.

And that’s even before the potential resurrection of US president Donald Trump, who will – at the very least – turn his back on the Ukrainians and their fight for national survival.

“During the initial stages of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, there was something approaching an international consensus that Vladimir Putin had made a colossal blunder … [he] appeared to have isolated his country and inadvertently unified the entire Western world against him,” Peter Dickinson, editor of Ukraine Business magazine, wrote on the Atlantic Council website.

“As Russia’s invasion approaches the two-year mark, the picture is now far more complex and significantly darker … Putin is now more confident than ever that he can outlast the West in Ukraine.”

But the war is not yet won, or lost. The two sides are still locked in a battlefield stalemate, and neither side feels the desire nor the necessity to sue for peace.

A year of grim, pre-Trump stalemate beckons, unless someone, somehow, finds a circuit-breaker and flips the switch.

Zelensky hunts a breakthrough
Zelensky’s quest is the more difficult of the two. He is waiting for a US military aid package worth $US61 billion ($90 billion), but will it ever come? Republicans in Congress have tied these funds to a deal on curbing migration from Mexico, which the White House won’t countenance.

“We definitely want to help them,” Republican Senator Dan Sullivan said. “There’s no doubt. We just have to have a serious border deal, we’re not budging on it.”

US President Joe Biden is similarly standing firm, even though he knows what’s at stake. “Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine,” he said in mid-December. “We must, we must, we must prove him wrong.”

Without Congress’s funding authority, the Pentagon will largely have to stop supplying Ukraine from the year’s end.

The American public are also going cool on the war. An FT-Michigan Ross poll found that 48 per cent of US voters, and 65 per cent of Republicans, think the US is spending too much on military and financial aid to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Putin’s ally Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, blocked a €50 billion ($81 billion) non-military aid package.

And even if the likes of Germany and France can still divert the money around the sides of this veto, that’s not the main problem: the EU has promised a million artillery shells to Ukraine by March, but has managed to rustle up less than half of that.

That has already prompted Ukraine to scale back its battlefield operations, General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi told Reuters. “The volumes we have are not sufficient, given our needs,” he said.

“So, we’re redistributing it. We’re re-planning tasks that we had set for ourselves and making them smaller, because we need to provide for them … In some areas we moved to defence, and in some we continue our offensive actions.”

All this left Putin crowing to journalists: “Ukraine produces almost nothing today, everything is coming from the West. But the free stuff is going to run out some day. And it seems it already is.”

Digging deep from within
There are a couple of internal resources Zelensky can draw upon. One is drones: he claimed at his pre-Christmas press briefing that Ukraine would produce a million next year.

These can be used to strike Russia inside its own territory, in the hope of sowing discontent with Putin and the war. And they have been remarkably effective in disabling Russia’s navy – the one genuine Ukrainian military breakthrough of the past six months.

In the latest encounters, videos of an enormous explosion in the Crimean port city of Feodosia support the claim by Ukraine’s air force that it destroyed another ship from the Russian Black Sea fleet. For its part, Russia claims it destroyed two Ukrainian Su-24 bombers involved in the attack.


Ukrainian troops training with a tank in the wintry conditions. AP

Zelensky’s other resource, in theory, is manpower. He told reporters he might approve the Ukrainian military’s request to mobilise half a million more men this coming year.

This would be a tall order in a country of just 40-odd million people. Many Ukrainians are resisting the demands for further mobilisation, and up to 15,000 soldiers have gone missing in action.

But the long-serving front-line troops are in urgent need of relief. Many are exhausted after up to 18 months in the trenches, and 70,000 have been killed.

That is a fraction of the Western-estimated 315,000 troops Putin has expended on his war so far – a death toll equating to 90 per cent of the force he originally committed.

But he says he is recruiting another 1500 volunteers a day. He will always be able to throw more men into the meat grinder than Zelensky can.

Neither side has much to show for all this sacrifice since the middle of the year. Ukraine can point to having made it across the Dnieper River in the south, but both sides are dug in.

In the Donbas region to the east – the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are the bare minimum Putin needs to seize if he is to claim success for his “special military operation” – the opposing forces are locked in protracted, utterly destructive struggles to seize this town or that hill or highway.

Over the northern winter, Putin will likely return to his campaign of bombing or hacking civilian infrastructure, hoping to sap the morale of a Ukrainian population that is significantly more war-weary than when he last tried and failed at this.


An image of the utterly destroyed village of Stepove, in the Donbas region. AP

The proportion of Ukrainians who say they are willing to accept territorial concessions to end the war has increased from 10 per cent to 19 per cent.

Unready to lay down arms
Zelensky himself admitted to reporters that his administration was preparing proposals to end the war peacefully. But these were still predicated on Russia pulling back to the pre-2014 borders.

“The strategy cannot be changed,” he said. “According to our constitution, these are all our territories.”

Whatever authority and command Putin has regained since the Wagner Group insurrection, and despite him being on course to win a presidential election in March, he is in no position to accept that Ukrainian demand.

He must be seen to win, and that means consolidating Russia’s hold on the four Ukrainian provinces Moscow has annexed, and getting some kind of undertaking of neutrality out of Kyiv.

But Zelensky can’t cop this: if NATO doesn’t in some way have his back – through some kind of security guarantee – it will only be a matter of time before Russia swallows this neutral Ukrainian state, much as it has done to Belarus.

So Zelensky can’t offer his people peace, and is barely even able to offer them hope. Little wonder that his popularity has dropped – from 84 per cent to 62 per cent, according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll.

Gallingly for the president, his plain-speaking military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi has the trust of 88 per cent of Ukrainians. The general recently told The Economist magazine that the war was at a stalemate, sparking reports of a rift with Zelensky that neither side has fully denied.

King’s College professor and military sage Lawrence Freedman counsels against reading too much into this, saying elite fissures “are not unusual for countries facing stressful times”.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is struggling to keep the West’s attention. AP

“A degree of tension in civil-military relations is also natural and can be a good thing,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

“But if infighting becomes chronic and decision-making starts to get paralysed with strategies not subjected to criticism and scrutiny, the tensions can soon become harmful.”

The Trump factor
Zelensky’s position will only worsen if Trump retains his poll lead going into the US presidential election this coming November. Trump has quoted Putin’s views approvingly, and has also suggested he would force Ukraine to the negotiating table – doubtless under pressure to make concessions.

At his pre-Christmas press conference, Zelensky was forced to address this head-on.

“If the policies of the next president, whoever he or she might be, are different, are colder, more inward-looking, or more frugal, I think those signals will have a very big impact on the course of the war in Ukraine,” he said.

“Because that’s how the whole world works. If one strong part falls out, the mechanism starts to fall apart.”

But the impact of this would ripple beyond Ukraine, warns hawkish Czech president Petr Pavel. He told a local news website in mid-December that Trump could push Europe off the negotiating table, and embolden Putin to dream big.

“Putin has made it quite clear that there can be no discussion of any peace talks until the outcome of the election in the United States. He has thus made it clear that for him, the partner for possible negotiations is none other than the United States. Not any of the major European countries,” Pavel said.

If Trump returns to office as NATO-sceptic as he was during his previous term, Putin’s deployment of forces to Russia’s border with Finland begins to look more sinister.


US presidential candidate Donald Trump has quoted Putin approvingly. AP

Putin told the state TV channel Rossiya 1 at the weekend that Finland’s accession to NATO had changed the game on that frontier. “There were no problems [with Finland],” he said. “Now there will be.”

Without the US umbrella, Europe may not have the military capacity to resist a gradual Russian escalation in either Finland or the Baltics. Some European countries may decide that their only option is to accommodate Putin’s violent revisionism.

Even as the world seems increasingly ready to cut Zelensky loose, or at least increasingly unable to prevent that from happening, Europe’s own security could lie in the balance.

But all this still sits in a yet-to-be-realised future. As the Financial Times pointed out, Russia remains a long way short of this.

“Each of Putin’s objectives remains out of reach,” the paper observed. “Although Russia occupies about 17.5 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, it hasn’t succeeded in annihilating the nation’s independence, identity and desire to integrate with the West.”

Russia is also a smaller economy than its foes, with less military firepower. It is only the question of resolve that separates the West from Moscow – and this could end up being decisive.

The Ukrainians, too, still largely have that resolve. But they can’t do it alone. Until Washington and Brussels can unlock support, Ukraine will be limited mostly to drone sorties against Russia to try and hit morale, and defensive operations in the Donbas.

This is the road not to victory, but at best to a frozen conflict – one that drains Ukraine’s economy and wears down its society, as the West increasingly looks the other way.

This is not a certain outcome. But Putin has reasons to break out his Cheshire cat smile. As Spectator journalist Svitlana Morenets observes: “These are dark times for Ukraine”

- 28 Δεκ 2023, 09:18 #850490

Κι εδώ βλέπουμε χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα προπαγάνδας.
Βασικά αυτή η παράγραφος-κατακλείδα ήταν ο μοναδικός λόγος που γράφτηκε το άρθρο από την ΕΦΣΥΝ.



< >

Ναι, είναι πουτινάκια στην ΕφΣυν ως γνωστόν, από την άλλη και αλλού διαβάζεις περίπου τα ίδια.
https://www.afr.com/world/europe/putin- ... 218-p5esaf

Προφανώς, το πρώτο που θα ενδιαφέρει έναν εξωτερικό παρατηρητή, είναι να μάθει τι διάβολο συμβαίνει, ποιος κερδίζει και ποιος χάνει. Μάλλον αυτό δεν θα το μάθουμε με σιγουριά μέχρι το τέλος, και μέχρι κάποιος να πετάξει λευκή πετσέτα.
Προς το παρόν, πέρα από αρκετές ηρωικές φωτοβολίδες, η Ουκρανία δεν έχει κατορθώσει να πάρει πίσω σοβαρά εδάφη, κι αυτό μόνον υπέρ της Ρωσίας θα καταλήξει στο τέλος φοβάμαι.
Οι δυτικοί ψάχνουν δικαιολογία να σταματήσουν την βοηθεια προς την Ουκρανία, η οποία μόνη της δεν γίνεται να αντιμετωπίσει την Ρωσία.

Καλά χρηματοδοτούμενα από την πίσω πόρτα πουτινάκια βρίσκεις παντού πλέον, έχει βουίξει η Ευρώπη.

Από την άλλη την απελευθέρωση του Χάρκοβο και τις Χερσώνας δεν τα λες πυροτεχνήματα ούτε μη σοβαρά εδάφη.
Ναι οκ δεν συνεχίστηκε η επέλαση και φέτος αλλά δεν είναι πάντα όλα ρόδινα στον πόλεμο αλλά αν μη τι άλλο η ουκρανία δείχνει μια επιμονή και μεθοδικότητα και αυτά που φαίνονται ως πυροτεχνήματα έχουν λογική-στρατηγική από πίσω, πχ τα πλοία κλάσης Robucha χρησιμοποιούνται κατα κόρον για ανεφοδιασμό και είναι απειλή για πιθανή απόβαση σε ουκρανικό έδαφος.

Οι δυτικοί σίγουρα δεν θα ήθελαν να πληρώνουν για έναν πόλεμο αλλά βλέπουν παράλληλα τις επιπτώσεις από μια "ρωσική" Ουκρανία.

- 28 Δεκ 2023, 21:57 #850566 Επίσης για κάποιο λόγο που δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω ( δε νομίζω ότι τα παίρνουν από τον Πούτιν αλλά ποτέ δε ξέρεις) η Εφσυν από την αρχή του πολέμου έχει χάσει κάθε έννοια αντικειμενικότητας.

Πχ. Στο άρθρο που επισυνάπτει ο HF κάνει λόγο μονο για βαριές και συντριπτικές απώλειες από τη μεριά των Ουκρανών τη στιγμή που ξέρουμε ότι τουλάχιστον τα μεγέθη είναι ισορροπημένα αναλογικά με πληθυσμό στρατιωτική πρωτοβουλία κλπ. Ένας καχύποπτος αναγνώστης θα εκτιμούσε ότι ο αρθρογράφος υπαινίσσεται την ανόητη και ανούσια επιμονή των Ουκρανών να αμύνονται ενάντια στην ανίκητη αρμάδα των Ρώσων. Κάτι που φυσικά δεν ισχύει.

Έστω ότι τα κίνητρα των Ουκρανών δεν είναι αγνά εθνικο-απελευθερωτικα σα των βόρειο-βιετναμεζων πχ. και ο ζελεζνι είναι μαριονέτα νατοϊκή, ο πόλεμος των τελευταίων 2 ετών έχει χτίσει μια πολύ διαφορετική εθνική ταυτότητα για κάθε Ουκρανό. Όπως δλδ η Ρήγα στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα ήταν μια Ρωσική μητρόπολη δεύτερη μόνο του Λένινγκραντ και τώρα είναι πρωτεύουσα χώρας μέλους του ΝΑΤΟ έτσι και το Κίεβο πλέον είναι ξεκάθαρα πολιτισμικά κοινωνικά πολιτικά οικονομικά έτη φωτός μακριά από τη Μόσχα χάσει κερδίσει τον πόλεμο και τις 2-3 επαρχίες του ο μυωψ Πούτιν. Ακόμα και να κατακτήσει όλη την Ουκρανία , το Κίεβο θα είναι μια Βαρσοβία που θα περιμένει μια νέα ιστορική συγκυρία για την ανεξαρτητοποίηση.

Ο πόλεμος ουσιαστικά από τώρα και στο εξής δεν έχει κανένα στρατηγικό διακυβευμα. Το στρατιωτικό Μπρα ντε φερ μετά την απελευθέρωση της Χερσωνας είναι ένας αγώνας πάνω σε πολιτικά στοιχήματα για την πολιτική ηγεσία των Ουκρανών-δυτικων και των Ρώσων σε βάθος 20ετιας. ( Οι δυτικοί να συνεχίσουν την αιμορραγία της Ρωσίας με μικρο σχετικα κόστος - σύγκριση με πολέμους σε Αφγανιστάν Ιράκ πχ.- ο δε Πούτιν να σερβίρει μια στρατιωτική νίκη και να δικαιολογήσει το αντίστοιχο κόστος της επιχείρησης και οι Ουκρανοί να κατοχυρώσουν κάθε δυνατό δικαίωμα ευρωπαϊκής προοπτικής). Σε ένα χρόνο όλοι θα πανηγυρίσουν εκτός από τις χαροκαμμενες οικογένειες.

- 28 Δεκ 2023, 22:49 #850567 Την πορεία του πολέμου παρακολουθεί με μεγάλο ενδιαφέρον και η Μολδαβία, που νιώθει την ανάσα της αρκούδας πάνω στον σβέρκο της. Το διακύβευμα δεν είναι μόνο η Ουκρανία.