Can't help laughing threaten Finland and Sweden. The Russian army have clearly shown how effective they are and how well their equipment is working................not.

Markus

Russia has warned Finland and Sweden against joining Nato, arguing the move would not bring stability to Europe.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that "the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation".

It comes as US defence officials said Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has been a "massive strategic blunder" which is likely to bring Nato enlargement.

US officials expect the Nordic neighbours to bid for membership of the alliance, potentially as early as June.

Washington is believed to support the move which would see the Western alliance grow to 32 members. US State Department officials said last week that discussions had taken place between Nato leaders and foreign ministers from Helsinki and Stockholm.

Before it launched its invasion, Russia demanded that the alliance agree to halt any future enlargement, but the war has led to the deployment of more Nato troops on its eastern flank and a rise in public support for Swedish and Finnish membership.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61066503

It is always a better idea not to escalate too far, withdraw all channels of diplomacy and perpetrate too much atrocities, commit warcrimes, until it is too late and one is unable to look the adversary in the eye when it is all over.

Unless you win. Then all is forgotten ..

Tried get a confirmation on following

Azov regiment says Russian troops used kind of chemical dropped from a drone, those impacted have respiratory failure, vestibulo-atactic syndrome

This should have happen in the outskirt of Kharkiv

Edit
It should have happened in Mariupol
Here what it says on liveuamap
"Azov regiment says Russian troops used kind of chemical dropped from a drone, those impacted have respiratory failure, vestibulo-atactic syndrome"
End edit

Markus

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city, rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.

Neville Chamberlain


:hmmm:

Russia as result of his war in Ukraine will have more NATO at his border, threatening Finland and Sweden will only make their population go to NATO membership. Putin gamble has backfired, he lost this game at the moment he stepped over the border of Ukraine. Russia is weak military their economy will fall back decades losers can not even power regional it draws all troops from other regions where in good Russian tradition factions will try to seize power away from Russia if they can.

With this new general, no surprise he has done it in Syria

Fall Mariupol is coming hours/day, it has had a good fight and will still be dangerous to the occupier. The defenders will booby-trap anything they can. If you enter a destroyed house to entrench yourself, and you pull open a door or a closet, an explosive will go off. Trip wires are stretched everywhere you walk with a hand grenade pin at the end. If you don't pay attention for a moment, the hand grenade goes off. So for the attacking units, you have to be incredibly careful.

In addition, a large part of the Russian army is not very motivated; as a conscripted soldier, you have only one thing on your mind. How do I survive my military service?

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/...14602512314369

It has not yet been officially confirmed that the substance used in Mariupol by the Russian troops was a chemical warfare agent. However, earlier Russian occupation authorities threatened to use chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops in Mariupol:

Thank you Dargo
No wonder our news channel hasn't gone breaking since it's not confirmed yet.

Markus

Gunnar Heinsohn writes:

Putin's second genocide

Putin is the first genocidal leader in history - in Chechnya from 1999 to 2009 - to launch his second genocide under the inherently noble pretext of stopping a supposed genocide - of Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Putin asks his lawyers if there is a legal reason for a war of aggression. They can only give him the UN Genocide Convention, whose signatory states - with Russia there are 147 - are obligated under Article 1 to prevent genocide, i.e. not just to punish it. Already for the prevention of, say, a conventional civil war, there is no right. Putin's absurd genocide accusation against Ukraine as well as his strict avoidance of the terms war or invasion can be explained by his search for a pretext to attack.

Genocide, like any murder, requires intent and planning. An unplanned massacre may kill 1,000 people, but is legally mass manslaughter. A planned genocide can be stopped after 100 deaths, and yet those 100 are genocide victims. They cannot take comfort in not being a massacre victim, but legally the difference is important.

Genocide exists even if only a portion of the affected group is to be killed. Rafael Lemkin, a Pole of Jewish origin, as the author of the Genocide Convention, deliberately wrote the "part" into the law because he personally experienced two examples. The murder - 22 months before the beginning of the Holocaust - of the Polish educated classes ("Intelligenzaktion") by Germans from September 1939 and the murder of Polish officers and officials by Russians in 1940 (Katyn). Both murder actions were intended to destroy the culture so that the remaining population could be enslaved or Germanized or Russified. As a result, the people disappeared. One of the signers of the Katyn murder order, Mikhail Kalinin, is honored by Russia to this day as the namesake of the once German Königsberg.

Why and how has Putin been committing genocide since the Second Chechen War? He wants to spare the Russian Empire the fate of the Western empires. Spaniards, Dutch, Belgians, French and British had also tried to maintain their empires by force, but lost all wars in the colonies after 1945. They also commit massacres and destroy cultural assets. In 1974, they were finished with the fall of the Portuguese empire.

Why these failed attempts to save the empire? The Europeans do not understand why they first subjugate 90 percent of the earth and why they now lose. By punishing birth control, they permanently have more people for 450 years at 6 to 8 children per woman than they lose conquering and settling on other continents. From the 1960s, however, they have only two children per woman, while the subjugated have 6 to 8. From 1970 - first in Germany - Europe falls below two children per woman's life.

Russia experiences the same fate and makes the same mistake in the 1st Chechen War (1994 to 1996). Yeltsin loses many soldiers and the war because Chechen women lose at least two in battle for every 3 or 4 sons, yet families can continue to live.

Yeltsin's successor Putin combines two genocidal methods from 1999. He continues to kill the Chechen educated classes and politicians, thus following the Soviet Russian model of exterminating Poles. At the same time, he learns from the Guerra sucia (Dirty War) of the Argentine junta of 1976-1983, which kidnaps and murders at least 9,000 activists of the leftist revolt. This ends the militant student movement.

Putin kidnaps about 5,000 Chechen youths who are not even fighting yet, murders them and hides the bodies. In terms of the population of Austria and Switzerland, that would be 40,000, and in terms of Germany, 400,000 youths. The birth advantage of the independence fighters is thus eliminated. Such a well thought-out and executed genocide is unique in the 21st century and makes Putin the first European victor in the wars of decolonization after 1945. His arguments of alleged NATO threat or Slavic brothers do not play any role. It is quite undisguisedly about the violent retention of tsarist conquests.

The genocidal double blow in the Caucasus brings the dictator in Moscow a race for his favor from almost all Western politicians of rank. The Russian national feeling of being not only invincible but also unpunishable reaches a new peak.

In Ukraine - like Russia a senescent nation - Putin's genocide - notwithstanding the massacres and rapes by his soldateska - targets mainly the educated classes. He is repeating the Hitler-Stalin variants of 1939 and 1940, so mayors and their families are being deported and killed. Again, the criterion for genocide is not the number of murdered, but the declared intention to eliminate the Ukrainian cultural bearers in order to be able to subjugate the rest of the people to a dictatorship and to russify, i.e. to exterminate them.



Gunnar Heinsohn (*1943; emer. Prof. Dr. phil. Dr. rer. pol.) founded the Rafael Lemkin Institute at the University of Bremen in 1993 as Europe's first institution for comparative genocide research and directed it until 2009.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


Heinsohn also taught Demographic Warfare at NATO Defence College in Rome and is author of the Youth Bulge theory and the War Index.

A girl I know in Ukraine sent me a picture not much left of a child and a short movie but it really graphic it phone not sure even if I can post it or mods here would even allow it