Russia is now bombing Ukraine

[chenGOD]

6 hours ago, brian trageskin said:

penis

ca c'est le brassage de marde fantastique.

[prdctvsm]

A poster in front of the Russian embassy in Riga :

[zkom]

18 hours ago, ilqx hermolia xpli said:

are you really saying NATO is funding Nazis to get the country back on track?  What are you saying exactly?  Communist "regime"?  LMAO.  Talk about historical ignorance.

lol ok

6 hours ago, prdctvsm said:

A poster in front of the Russian embassy in Riga :

I'm in Tallinn now and there's Ukrainian flags everywhere.

[Rubin Farr]

the Ruble is now worth less than the Yen, ouch 

[chenGOD]

1 hour ago, Rubin Farr said:

the Ruble is now worth less than the Yen, ouch 

Lol the chart for the exchange rate really puts it in perspective:

 

[Soloman Tump]

News that Russia have bombed a childrens hospital, including maternity ward.

This is getting very, very dark. 

[Nebraska]

amazon bails out of .ru

[ignatius]

14 minutes ago, Nebraska said:

amazon bails out of .ru

someone must have explained tot he bezos data machine how the bad press would effect the bottom line eventually. 

48 minutes ago, Soloman Tump said:

News that Russia have bombed a childrens hospital, including maternity ward.

This is getting very, very dark. 

putin directing military to attack everything is what many predicted as the invasion stalls. it's his way of 'doubling down' and is obviously based on his previous behavior in syria and chechnya

[zkom]

10 minutes ago, ignatius said:

someone must have explained tot he bezos data machine how the bad press would effect the bottom line eventually. 

putin directing military to attack everything is what many predicted as the invasion stalls. it's his way of 'doubling down' and is obviously based on his previous behavior in syria and chechnya

Terror bombing Ukraine to submission seems like the likely strategy..

The evacuation of women and children from the sieges is going like shit:

Russian forces shelling the evacuation route https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/ukraine-war-civilians-sumy-irpin-refugees-russia

Mining the evacuation routes also https://www.businessinsider.com/land-mines-proposed-ukraine-evacuations-humanitarian-corridor-red-cross-2022-3

Evacuation routes proposed by Russia lead directly to Russia and Belarus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/russia-humanitarian-corridors-ukraine-war-mariupol-kyiv

[Satans Little Helper]

I'm sure there were many nazis hiding in that childrens hospital 

/sarcasm

[Alcofribas]

26 minutes ago, Satans Little Helper said:

I'm sure there were many nazis hiding in that childrens hospital 

/sarcasm

/Israel

[Enthusiast]

2 hours ago, Soloman Tump said:

News that Russia have bombed a childrens hospital, including maternity ward.

This is getting very, very dark. 

Russians like to bomb hospitals as they don't fight back. 

[marf]

I just can't shake the feeling that there is so much attention and support for Ukraine because it's a full of white people

[usagi]

no need to shake the feeling because it's true. or at the very least, it's a big part of the reason.

nobody should be surprised at any level of barbarity the Russians stoop to like bombing a maternity ward, because it's straight out of the old playbook. 

I didn't even have to google that hard to find this story. I guess it didn't matter to people so much back then.

Edited March 10, 2022 by usagi

[usagi]

34 minutes ago, usagi said:

straight out of the old playbook

the article in full for paywalled nibbas:

Spoiler

Published Oct. 13, 2019Updated May 4, 2020

The Russian Air Force has repeatedly bombed hospitals in Syria in order to crush the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

An analysis of previously unpublished Russian Air Force radio recordings, plane spotter logs and witness accounts allowed The Times to trace bombings of four hospitals in just 12 hours in May and tie Russian pilots to each one.

The 12-hour period beginning on May 5 represents a small slice of the air war in Syria, but it is a microcosm of Russia’s four-year military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A new front in the conflict opened this week, when Turkish forces crossed the border as part of a campaign against a Kurdish-led militia.

Russia has long been accused of carrying out systematic attacks against hospitals and clinics in rebel-held areas as part of a strategy to help Mr. Assad secure victory in the eight-year-old war.

Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that tracks attacks on medical workers in Syria, has documented at least 583 such attacks since 2011, 266 of them since Russia intervened in September 2015. At least 916 medical workers have been killed since 2011.

The Times assembled a large body of evidence to analyze the hospital bombings on May 5 and 6.

Social media posts from Syria, interviews with witnesses, and records from charities that supported the four hospitals provided the approximate time of each strike. The Times obtained logs kept by flight spotters on the ground who warn civilians about incoming airstrikes and crosschecked the time of each strike to confirm that Russian warplanes were overhead. We then listened to and deciphered thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions, which recorded months’ worth of pilot activities in the skies above northwestern Syria. The recordings were provided to The Times by a network of observers who insisted on anonymity for their safety.

The spotter logs from May 5 and 6 put Russian pilots above each hospital at the time they were struck, and the Air Force audio recordings from that day feature Russian pilots confirming each bombing. Videos obtained from witnesses and verified by The Times confirmed three of the strikes.

Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof.

Russia’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has shielded it from scrutiny and made United Nations agencies reluctant to accuse the Russian Air Force of responsibility.

“The attacks on health in Syria, as well as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian facilities, are definitely war crimes, and they should be prosecuted at the level of the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of policy at Physicians for Human Rights. But Russia and China “shamefully” vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have referred those and other crimes in Syria to the court, she said.

The Russian government did not directly respond to questions about the four hospital bombings. Instead, a Foreign Ministry spokesman pointed to past statements saying that the Russian Air Force carries out precision strikes only on “accurately researched targets.”

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, opened an investigation into the hospital bombings in August. The investigation, still going on, is meant in part to determine why hospitals that voluntarily added their locations to a United Nations-sponsored deconfliction list, which was provided to Russia and other combatants to prevent them from being attacked, nevertheless came under attack.

Syrian health care workers said they believed that the United Nations list actually became a target menu for the Russian and Syrian air forces.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the secretary general, said in September that the investigation — an internal board of inquiry — would not produce a public report or identify “legal responsibility.” Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian permanent representative to the United Nations, cast doubt on the process shortly after it was announced, saying he hoped the inquiry would not investigate perpetrators but rather what he said was the United Nations’ use of false information in its deconfliction process.

From April 29 to mid-September, as Russian and Syrian government forces assaulted the last rebel pocket in the northwest, 54 hospitals and clinics in opposition territory were attacked, the United Nations human rights office said. At least seven had tried to protect themselves by adding their location to the deconfliction list, according to the World Health Organization.

On May 5 and 6, Russia attacked four. All were on the list.

The first was Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital, a major underground trauma center in southern Idlib Province serving about 200,000 people. The hospital performed on average around 500 operations and saw more than 5,000 patients a month, according to Syria Relief and Development, the United States-based charity that supported it.

Nabad al Hayat had been attacked three times since it opened in 2013 and had recently relocated to an underground complex on agricultural land, hoping to be protected from airstrikes.

At 2:32 p.m. on May 5, a Russian ground control officer can be heard in an Air Force transmission providing a pilot with a longitude and latitude that correspond to Nabad al Hayat’s exact location.

At 2:38 p.m., the pilot reports that he can see the target and has the “correction,” code for locking the target on a screen in his cockpit. Ground control responds with the green light for the strike, saying, “Three sevens.”

At the same moment, a flight spotter on the ground logs a Russian jet circling in the area.

At 2:40 p.m., the same time the charity said that Nabad al Hayat was struck, the pilot confirms the release of his weapons, saying, “Worked it.” Seconds later, local journalists filming the hospital in anticipation of an attack record three precision bombs penetrating the roof of the hospital and blowing it out from the inside in geysers of dirt and concrete.

The staff of Nabad al Hayat had evacuated three days earlier after receiving warnings and anticipating a bombing, but Kafr Nabl Surgical Hospital, three miles northwest, was not as lucky.

A doctor who worked there said that the hospital was struck four times, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The strikes landed about five minutes apart, without warning, he said, killing a man who was standing outside and forcing patients and members of the medical staff to use oxygen tanks to breathe through the choking dust.

A spotter logged a Russian jet circling above at the time of the strike, and in another Russian Air Force transmission, a pilot reports that he has “worked” his target at 5:30 p.m., the time of the strike. He then reports three more strikes, each about five minutes apart, matching the doctor’s chronology.

Russian pilots bombed two other hospitals in the same 12-hour span: Kafr Zita Cave Hospital and Al Amal Orthopedic Hospital. In both cases, spotters recorded Russian Air Force jets in the skies at the time of the strike, and Russian pilots can be heard in radio transmissions “working” their targets at the times the strikes were reported.

Since May 5, at least two dozen hospitals and clinics in the rebel-held northwest have been hit by airstrikes. Syrian medical workers said they expected hospital bombings to continue, given the inability of the United Nations and other countries to find a way to hold Russia to account.

“The argument by the Russians or the regime is always that hospitals are run by terrorists,” said Nabad al Hayat’s head nurse, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared being targeted. “Is it really possible that all the people are terrorists?”

“The truth is that after hospitals are hit, and in areas like this where there is just one hospital, our houses have become hospitals.”

 

[ignatius]

52 minutes ago, marf said:

I just can't shake the feeling that there is so much attention and support for Ukraine because it's a full of white people

it might seem that way because social media. and there may be some amount of truth to that but if social media was around in the 90s i think africa might've gotten more attention. rwanda genocide etc. but it did get press. 

russia's invasion is easier to package by the media because people can easily understand what's happening in general. far off complicated struggles are a tougher sell at least here in america. 

but also, russia is a nuclear state and europe feels on the brink for a lot of people so the stakes are high, potentially. someone smarter than me can do an analysis of the who what why etc but the world is a different place. we have 24 hour news in our hands every day. and people can take some small active measure to show solidarity and contribute so people are engaged. 

idk. i'm tired. 

[usagi]

^ I just hear a lot of equivocation and handwaving from this kind of reasoning tbh. generalising here so as not to criticise you personally.

it's hard for most people to admit that conflict/death only matters to them when it's 'closer' to them, either geographically or ideologically. everyone is susceptible to this flaw, not just white people. which is why a large portion of the non-white world doesn't care as much as the west about Ukraine rn. is that ok then? clearly it isn't, if the Bangladeshis attempt to take a neutral stance and get punished for it. nb: not saying Bangladesh shouldn't have taken a stand, just pointing out the double standard here when it comes to who should care about what.

the fact that "far off complicated struggles are a tougher sell" is an indictment of the general carelessness and self-absorbedness of human beings, not an acceptable excuse for not caring. this kind of attitude should be fought against.

Edited March 10, 2022 by usagi

[chenGOD]

1 hour ago, marf said:

I just can't shake the feeling that there is so much attention and support for Ukraine because it's a full of white people

Not wrong - the Conservative party here suddenly voted along with other parties to remove barriers for Ukrainian refugees:

https://www.lakelandtoday.ca/beyond-local/canadas-ukraine-refugee-plan-praised-but-questions-raised-about-other-war-escapees-5126789

Compare that to the Conservative response to the Syrian crisis (they had a majority government at the time): https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-conservatives-message-syrian-refugees-1.3226039

And more recently, our approach to the Afghan refugees after the Taliban took over (better than Syria, but still not great): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-continues-welcome-more-afghan-224200987.html

To add on that, because our Immigration branch is so short staffed (like virtually all federal government departments here), the delays are going to be huge: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/petawawa-ont-group-worried-syrian-refugee-family-will-take-back-seat-to-ukrainian-immigration-1.5813060

[zlemflolia]

2 hours ago, marf said:

I just can't shake the feeling that there is so much attention and support for Ukraine because it's a full of white people

https://imgur.com/a/Dckl6cz

9 hours ago, Satans Little Helper said:

I'm sure there were many nazis hiding in that childrens hospital 

/sarcasm

would it surprise you? they are nazis, they have no problem using human shields.  i can't find it but I saw a picture of azov hiding in a kindergarten or preschool or something (had some childrens animal mural painted on the wall).

[zlemflolia]

-

one of countless examples:

https://www.axios.com/africans-in-ukraine-racism-81bf8ebd-2d03-4373-bdeb-b5de9db7ec91.html

[ignatius]

1 hour ago, usagi said:

^ I just hear a lot of equivocation and handwaving from this kind of reasoning tbh. generalising here so as not to criticise you personally.

it's hard for most people to admit that conflict/death only matters to them when it's 'closer' to them, either geographically or ideologically. everyone is susceptible to this flaw, not just white people. which is why a large portion of the non-white world doesn't care as much as the west about Ukraine rn. is that ok then? clearly it isn't, if the Bangladeshis attempt to take a neutral stance and get punished for it. nb: not saying Bangladesh shouldn't have taken a stand, just pointing out the double standard here when it comes to who should care about what.

the fact that "far off complicated struggles are a tougher sell" is an indictment of the general carelessness and self-absorbedness of human beings, not an acceptable excuse for not caring. this kind of attitude should be fought against.

that's kinda what i said a little? 

i mean.. everything gets more attention now though doesn't it?  remember kony 2012, what about K-pop fans blocking up websites in the USA to fuck with republicans and support BLM and all kinds of stuff.. 

the world is unquestionably different in some ways. social media can bring attention to and also cause massacres and genocides. 

but yeah.. totally agree.. that geographical location etc makes things different and always has.. that's part of it being 'easier to package' and digest over here. 

also, sometimes other things get suppressed. for a good while yemen was getting coverage here but mostly people shrugged and moved on because the middle east is "supposed to be that way" or something.  also, usa sold arms to saudi who were bombing everything to death over there in the midst of the biggest humanitarian crisis etc etc.. proxy war between iran and saudi or whatever. also people are burned out on middle politics and all that and i think a lot of people have shrugged it off and glazed over thinking it's just 'too complicated' and no one can solve it and yada yada yada. 

idk.. mostly when i see all the atrocities happening in ukraine perpetrated by russia i think about iraq and afghanistan and it's a really complicated feeling.  we (americans) knew we were lied to (many of us did anyways) and knew it was a bullshit war to invade iraq. it was immediately obvious. and anyone who looks even a little bit knows we littered the desert w/uranium depleted rounds causing a generation of birth defects and killed countless civilians... afghanistan obviously doesn't even need explaining as to how any progress there was temporary and how fucked up it is now.. ... 

so, i see russia doing what it's doing and it makes me think "Fuck.. they're doing an america on ukraine" but didn't even have the nerve to go make a case at the UN and lie about white powder and mushroom clouds. 

it sucks. we're at the mercy of psychopaths. 

edit: and obviously iraw and ukraine aren't coparable countries. ukraine is a burgeoning democracy and sadam was a fuckin gbrutal murderous dictator

Edited March 10, 2022 by ignatius

[ignatius]

31 minutes ago, ilqx hermolia xpli said:

-

one of countless examples:

https://www.axios.com/africans-in-ukraine-racism-81bf8ebd-2d03-4373-bdeb-b5de9db7ec91.html

yeah. it's bullshit that the african students are stuck in limbo like that. so fucked. 

[zlemflolia]

8 minutes ago, ignatius said:

edit: and obviously iraw and ukraine aren't coparable countries. ukraine is a burgeoning democracy and sadam was a fuckin gbrutal murderous dictator

this is just western racism cloaked in ideology.  ukraine isnt a "burgeoning democracy" it's a dictatorship of the bourgeois with nazi apologizing leaders, far right nationalistic tendencies, and nazi infested military endorsed by that same state

[ignatius]

8 minutes ago, ilqx hermolia xpli said:

this is just western racism cloaked in ideology.  ukraine isnt a "burgeoning democracy" it's a dictatorship of the bourgeois with nazi apologizing leaders, far right nationalistic tendencies, and nazi infested military endorsed by that same state

so sadam didn't gas his own people? his sons didn't have 'rape rooms'?  ukraine had several elections to choose their presidents.. that's a burgeoning democracy isn't it?  i know you see a nazi under every rock there but it simply isn't true. 

you can characterize them as you like. i don't know how saying sadam hussein was a dictator makes me a racist about iraq.  btw sadam wasn't a communist so you don't have to defend him. 

and yes i know USA and the coalition wrecked iraq and gave birth to extremists but still.. 

so maybe it would've been more accurate to say the governments of iraq and ukraine aren't comparable? is that better for you?

[zlemflolia]

6 minutes ago, ignatius said:

so sadam didn't gas his own people? his sons didn't have 'rape rooms'?  ukraine had several elections to choose their presidents.. that's a burgeoning democracy isn't it?  i know you see a nazi under every rock there but it simply isn't true. 

you can characterize them as you like. i don't know how saying sadam hussein was a dictator makes me a racist about iraq.  btw sadam wasn't a communist so you don't have to defend him. 

and yes i know USA and the coalition wrecked iraq and gave birth to extremists but still.. 

so maybe it would've been more accurate to say the governments of iraq and ukraine aren't comparable? is that better for you?

i didnt in any way defend sadam, only attacked defenses of ukraine's supposed democracy.  if we want to start death counts as some sort of justification to compare countrys' deservingness to have wars started against them let's start with mcdonalds and chevron, nobody's going to endorse a war against them though

nazis arent under every rock, that is true, they wouldn't fit under most rocks, but somehow western media can't take a single picture of ukrainian soldiers without random nazis accidentally getting in the picture, its happening over and over again

Edited March 10, 2022 by ilqx hermolia xpli