I have no idea how the war is going in Ukraine — it seems to be turning into a hard slog of urban warfare, with Putin committed to saving face by throwing everything he’s got at a couple of cities. He has turned his vicious elite Chechen units on the country. I’m going to take solace in the little victories, at least.
That bearded guy to the right is Magomed Tushaev, a monster who committed atrocities against LGBT people. He’s dead now.
A despotic general who ruthlessly rounded up and killed LGBT+ people in an act that became known as the “gay purge” has been killed in the fighting in Ukraine.
Magomed Tushayev, who was a military boss under the command of hardman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was killed in fighting at the Hostomel Airport, a key Russian target not far northwest of Kyiv.
Tushayev previously led the 141 motorised regiment of the Checnyan National Guard and his death was confirmed by a spokesperson for Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky.
Anti-LGBT+ purges were first reported in the southern Russian republic back in 2017 and reportedly involved kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings.
Under the leadership of the infamous Kadyrov, who recently said Vlaidimir Putin needed harsher tactics in Ukraine, Tushayev was key in the persecution of LGBT+ people.
Am I a bad person if I say, “Good!”?
It’s a worrying sign for the Russians that generals are getting killed. Usually it’s just the grunts on the front.
I don’t think so, no. So it goes.
Am I a bad person if I say, “Good!”?
Nope. Sadly, I don’t get to say it often enough.
That guy would fit right in with any white supremacist mob.
Nope!
Play fascist games. Win fascist prizes.
The difference is, while a lot of White supremacists would love the uniform and the power to hurt the “other” most would leave in a hurry if there were people shooting back.
My guess is Kadyrov wanted to ingratiate himself by sending the local blackshirt volunteers and they did as badly in real combat as similar ideologically motivated militias from Italy did alongside regular troops in the Western Desert.
@ 3
They do tend to go together; racism and homophobia/transphobia, that is.
@Matt G. he would have had one big problem, he was Muslim.
And the world is an undeniably better place with his corpse taking the place of the man.
timgueguen @7
He wasn’t brown though so he would’ve likely been accepted. On Stormfront, those wannabe Nazis, occasionally, express support for Palestinians since they believe any wrongdoing by Israel justifies their anti-Semitism.
I’ve heard of him before this conflict. He’s a fan of combat sports and invited famous American fighters, including Floyd Mayweather, to Chechnya a few years ago. They accepted which rightfully received backlash since he’s a human rights abuser.
I was just wondering what to listen to this morning. Dark Side of the Moon is a great choice. I think Floyd’s Final Cut will hit a little too close to reality right now, but it is a great anti-war album.
“We will bury you” – Some Ukrainian Guy
Did Tushaev have sunflower seeds in his pocket?
For years, I heard the lines
“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words
The poster bearer cried”
as
“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words
And most of them are lies”
I like that more
As I posted elsewhere them Ukrainians are good at killing Generals.
I don’t usually post links here, but I just finished this article on Politico. It’s an interview with Fiona Hill (you might remember her from Trump’s impeachment hearings.) I urge everyone to read it. If you thought the war in Ukraine was not going to affect you beyond gas prices, think again. I know this sounds alarmist, but according to Hill WW3 has already begun. She makes a strong case. I hope she is as wrong as anyone can possibly be.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Why should I read something like that.
IF WW III is starting, I need to sort through my Doomsday prepper supplies and buy a few years supply of cat food. At least I won’t have to return my library books.
Shrug. It is possible we are starting a new Cold War with Russia.
Sure looks like it right now.
But Putin should think about one obvious fact.
How well did the last Cold War go for the USSR?
I’ll even give him a hint. The USSR doesn’t even exist anymore because it collapsed. They lost.
I’m old enough to remember the last Cold War.
In fact, while I lived through it, people I knew did not, dead in Vietnam.
I even remember the Duck and Cover drill days of the 1950s, when we were all going to be vaporized in a Soviet nuclear strike because we didn’t have a backyard Fallout shelter.
A new Cold War isn’t going to do Russia much good.
Because Russia is basically repeating the mistakes of the old USSR.
.1. That empire thing didn’t work. They were constantly having to put down revolts by non-Russians.
.2. Their economic system doesn’t work. It is the typical Third World model.
It is called a “Limited Access economy”.
This means you have to be somebodies buddy in the power structure to participate in it. If you start a company and it is successful, you will either be stomped on or bought out by more powerful competitors.
Limited access economies can be stable.
They don’t go anywhere though. They aren’t all that efficient so they just sort of creep along.
@16: On the other hand Stalin never managed to get his candidat elected president of the US…
But here’s what I found interesting: Tushaev and the Kadyrovites were in there as an assassination squad aimed at Zelensky. According to the news reports I read, the Urkrainians were able to stop them because they had been tipped off by factions within the Russian security service who do not agree with Putin’s invasion. So, watch your back, Vlodya, you may not be presenting as solid a front as you think you are.
Putin may be reckless enough to break out the nukes. Or one of his sidekicks may be reckless enough to defenestrate Putin and break them out himself. Mutually assured destruction as a deterrent only has to fail once.
R. L. Foster —I read that interview with Hill. She was informative (I’m not wasting time with a Doomsday supplies) and made a convincing case. As for “WW3”, I suppose it depends on what constitutes a world war. Depending on that, someone might say we’re in world war 12 or 14. Or we’re in the same world war we’ve been in since the early 18th century (at least). I sometimes can’t tell. In any case, saying the world war has already begun is a no brainer. And as a child of 50s dystopia not particularly alarming.
@19
here’s the ukrainian source
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/03/1/7327224/
no idea whether it’s true
That’s not the only good news.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/02/ukrainian-lgbtq-activists-fought-captured-group-russian-soldiers/
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
If this new Cold War ends up with a nuclear exchange, which is now on the table again, who will win?
The official military doctrine has always been MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. That would be the end of Russia as a nation and a problem. It wouldn’t make Russia Great Again, it would make Russia Dead for once and forever. It would also mean the end of the USA and Europe as any place anyone wants to live.
The big winner would be China. As the only other superpower left standing.
Maybe India and Africa as well.
@16 great scoop!
I repost the link
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340?utm_source=pocket-newtab
it’s exactly what central european countries were trying to tell EU and NATO for last 8 years and were always called hysterical by Germany, who decided that the best way to decarbonize their economy was to close down atomic power plants and build gas power plants and gas pipelines to Russia.
I didn’t spot anything wrong with that take (maybe it should point out that unilateral invasion of Iraq based on lie contributed), but it omits quite a lot – sabotage, hacking and cyberwarfare, meddling in foreign elections/brexit referendum and financing of all right wing parties from Spain and France to Hungary and Poland.
Putin’s regime cant survive if Ukraine joins EU and is prosperous, too many friends and families on both sides of the border.
At the moment polish social media are flooded by fake news about crimes commited by refugees – mostly middle easterners, but Ukrainians too and they are spreaded by the same accounts that were most active spreading antivax misinformation. And there are already cases of people being hurt (thanks whatever for strict anti gun laws).
We are in the middle of WW3 and there is a chance we as the West can win it with sanctions. Maybe.
Ukraine already suffers.
In Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary people are riding high at the moment with compassion to refugees and outrage towards Putin, but when war will not be news anymore and economic issues hit, it will get ugly too.
Oh about nuclear war – Warsaw was always first target of nukes. In cold war US planned to nuke Warsaw to stop soviet supplies, today Russia plans to do exactly the same. Maybe I should move.
They might as well install an outhouse on his grave to keep the mess localized.
My grandmother taught me to never speak ill of the dead.
Grandma: “If you say something about a dead person, say something nice!”
Me: (thinks for a moment….) “Magomed Tushaev is dead. Isn’t that nice!
the cold war , the “new cold war” WWIII. as was said above please show me the time when we humans have not been at war with each other for any appreciable time
My take on the last cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union was the collapse was precipitated besides the disaster of the Afghanistan adventure by the economic failure of the economy and the lack of credit The U.S. had economic crises all through the period after WWII and still does what we still have is credit the “free countries” can and do issue bonds all the time.
Putin is now dependent on the rest of the worlds economy and the world market Russia can not go back to being a mostly insular country and Putin’s actions are making it impossible to be anything else
what a mess
wars kill the good with the bad Ukraine ‘s soil has been soaked with the blood of war a thousand times but the people remain
Not to forget the cheery end to the song:
The official military doctrine has always been MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction.
Actually, no, MAD was never a “doctrine,” let alone an “official military doctrine.” It is, or at least was, a situation that came about as a cumulative result of decisions made and weapons built over time.
For anyone who wants to see what my childhood was like, here is what Wikipedia says about MAD.
We lived near a Trident nuclear submarine base, near an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) manufacturing plant, and not too far from a Plutonium producing reactor complex. We knew if there was a nuclear war, we were going to get hit hard. All the roads going away were marked as “evacuation routes”.
I don’t really completely believe this.
.1. What extensive civil defense planning in the USSR. It was almost nonexistent. Same with the USA. We just put civil defense signs on building basements and stored a few barrels of water and crackers.
Plus the Duck and Cover drills in grade school.**
.2. In a major nuclear exchange, there wouldn’t be a followup conventional war. There wouldn’t be enough left to bother fighting over and radiation levels would be too high. The few people left would be too busy just trying to stay alive.
** We were also given written handouts of what to stockpile and gather in case of a nuclear strike. We were supposed to go home and wait for our parents to come home from work, take the camping gear and food, and head for the mountains to wait until we restart civilization. There were no plans for if our parents were vaporized in the nuclear strike.
I used to nag my parents about getting our nuclear war survival supplies together but they never seemed to have time for that.
having always lived in south west Los Angeles knowing the size of the weapons involved
With a major port and a lot of major defense contractors in the area I am within the dead zones of any of them and all the mountains are on the other side of 10 million people and usually down wind of everything to quote a carpenter i worked with one time when the air raid sirens go off he was going to just bend over and grad his ankles and give his ass to god seemed like a reasonable thing to do in the circumstances.
@timgueguen, #7:
Well, he’s more Caucasian than many of the white supremacist mob.
Just for reference – Hiroshima bomb yeild was 13ktons.
Russian Satan 6 icbm has 10 MIRVs, each with a yield of 500 -700 Ktons.
Sorry, but the thought of Vlad getting a stiffy over that keeps me awake.
Last thursday, when this hell broke all loose, I told my friends and relatives that this was a sign of weakness from Moscow rather than a show of strength. Why? Because wars mean chaos and chaos, unlike what some characters from a once popular TV show might say, isn’t a ladder, it’s an all-consuming maelstrom. Putin entered a huge gamble when he ordered the invasion. If he had succeeded in his initial plans which would have seen Ukraine crumble and surrender after only three days with Seleknskiy either capture or fled, he’d have dealt another massive blow to the west, who could only react helplessly in this face of naked aggression. The various right-wing Quislings in his employ world-wide would have reared the drums for the strongman Putin even harder and any response, bei it sanctions or otherwise would have been muted as there would have been little hope it would do anything. On February 24th, Putin reached the absolute zenith of his rule.
But then the gamble didn’t pay off, the Ukrainians resisted and Putin’s forces, which had apparently only been supplied for a quick crash and grab got stuck. The delay was long enough to motivate the west to finally draw a line and nations that were previously weary of joining NATO now are closer than ever to do so, if only because they’d rather be in NATO than under the Russian heel. Putin himself has become toxic and a lot (though not all) of his Quislings had to hastily backpedal as hitching yourself to a struggling internationally condemned war-criminal who’s threatened your countries with nuclear annihilation isn’t sexy any more. Even if the Russians overwhelm the regular defense of Ukraine, they’re looking forward to yet another quagmire right on their doorstep and let’s not forget they already struggled in what should have been the “easy” phase of imperialist aggression, who knows what price they’ll have to pay in the occupation phase.
Russia cannot afford another cold war. The Soviet Union had more resources and manpower to draw from than Russia does today and it lost anyway. If Putin looks to the Chinese for help as some of the remaining RTrolls keep blaring, they’ll rob him blind for any help they offer because it’s not like he’d have anyone else to turn to. They might even decide for some irredentism of their own and tear chunks out of Russia’s east.
If there’s one upside in these dark times, it’s that Putin’s role as the grand patron of international fascism has received a mighty and wholly self-inflicted blow. He’s reeling, we should make sure he topples all the way down.
I apologize for the lack of paragraphs, it didn’t look as text-wally when I had it in the comment parser.
One never knows which source to trust, but generals commenting on MSNBC say Putin has NOT used his elite troops. He’s using inexperienced conscripts, which is why that column of tanks has come to a standstill. They were told they would be greeted as liberating heroes, but instead are being blocked by unarmed, Russian-speaking Ukrainians begging them to turn around.
Ukraine is heavily interrelated with Russia.
30% of the people in Ukraine are native Russian speakers. Including the guy heading the country right now, Zelensky.
A lot of those native Russian speakers identify as…Ukrainians.
And a lot of those Russian speaking Russians in Ukraine are ethnic Russians who favor Ukraine over Russia.
littlejohn @39:
I think they have used their elite troops in some actions (for example). They’ve just used them badly.
https://www.vox.com/22954833/russia-ukraine-invasion-strategy-putin-kyiv