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Showing posts from February, 2023

Opinion You can’t understand the war in Ukraine without knowing history

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/22/timothy-snyder-ukraine-russia-war-history/   Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent . And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.   We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with

McMaster Gives a Belated Russian Lesson

  https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/23/mcmaster-and-maskirovka/ It's time for Americans to add a new Russian word to their strategic lexicon. In the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and ever since, thousands of English words written by Russians pretending to be Americans have infiltrated social media in the United States. But very few Russian words — that is, words originating in Cyrillic — have made it into the national conversation.   Kompromat   is one of the few Americans might recognize. That’s the word for compromising material, like salacious videos or proof of dodgy financial transactions, which were used in the past by the KGB (and continue to be used today by Vladimir Putin’s intelligence agencies) to blackmail or influence implicated parties. Another is   polezny durak   — useful idiot — a Soviet term that has long since slipped into the English dictionary. But just because we don’t know that many   poleznye — useful — Russian words doesn’t mean they’re no

you cannot understand war in ukraine without knowing history

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/22/timothy-snyder-ukraine-russia-war-history/ Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent . And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.   We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with c

A year in the trenches has hardened Ukraine’s president

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/22/volodymyr-zelensky-president-war-ukraine/ A year in the trenches has hardened Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky came into office thinking peace with Putin was possible. He now believes victory is the only answer. Not long after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a year ago this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky found himself in a safe room beneath Kyiv’s government complex with the voice of the Belarusian president booming over the phone. Alexander Lukashenko, one of the Kremlin’s key allies, was inviting a delegation of officials to Minsk to negotiate an end to the war that Russia had launched just three days earlier, according to Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, who was in the room for the call. Zelensky was incensed at the invitation to another negotiation — recalling talks over the conflict in Ukraine’s east, known as “Minsk 1” and “Minsk 2,” that took place in the Belarusian capi

Opinion: Why Ukraine will win the war

Opinion: Why Ukraine will win the war https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/20/ukraine-military-strategy-adaptation-victory/ Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling commanded the 1st Armored Division during the Iraq surge and later commanded U.S. Army Europe. Looks have always been deceiving when it comes to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. From the start, Russia’s capacities were overestimated. Both the size of its army, and the modernization it had supposedly undergone indicated to many observers that Russia would triumph easily. But since the invasion began, the Russian military has failed to adapt its strategy and operational objectives to battle conditions and circumstances. Today, ahead of the one-year anniversary of the conflict, coverage of the war’s battles mostly focuses on the fighting along the central and southern front, with cities such as Bakhmut and Vuhledar dominating headlines. Russia has been making small gains at great human cost to its troops around

Leluhur semua raja Eropa

Semua raja Eropa adalah keturunan dari King George II    https://www.insider.com/how-europe-royal-families-related-2018-10