The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was never discussed; it was not raised in those years. I am saying this with a full sense of responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country brought up the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist in 1991. – Gorbachev
So yeah this is another case of russia bending history to fuel their victim complex.
The moment putin tries to do nuclear attack, he’s dead. Zelensky said it well, that putin spent most of the invasion in some bunker, before that he had this thing with ridiculously long tables being super paranoid about covid. He’s clearly not planning to die.
Also I think it helps to imagine the details. How would the nuclear attack look like? How would it prevent Crimea “falling”? What would be the breaking point? It’s not like there would be some clear change from Ukraine not touching Crimea to full on liberation. Ukraine is bombing military targets in Crimea even now. They are even conducting operations on Crimean soil right now. They hit the Kerch bridge multiple times already. Why press the button after 4th or 7th bridge hit and not after first?
Also it’s not like he can’t sell this defeat as victory. The way things are going there’s probably a lot of people in russia prepared to pretend that there was glorious victory after heroic attack towards russian border. There will be interviews in the Moscow streets with people praising the successful special military operation, because they know that if it continued few more months, there would be conscription in Moscow.
How many do they have and what would be the plan after they fired all 15?
In what way she became a fanatic?
If you look at liberated territory as your only measure of success, you’re going to end up in the “basically wishful thinking/propaganda” space. This war is more complex the more you zoom in. Reducing it to kilometers squared liberated is effectively boiling it down to single somewhat meaningless number. (It is not meaningless for people living under occupation, but it often does not show actual progress)
To provide some specific example, the fact that crimean bridge was damaged (again) did not directly liberate any area. Looking at this single number would make you think it had no impact whatsoever on the battlefield. Same for Antonovsky bridge during the Kherson counteroffensive. How many times have they bombed it (and then also the pontoon bridges russia built)? If you looked just at kilometers squared at the time, well it was kind of stalled or at best very slow progress.
You’re right about discounting war reports. Or at the very least understand that they are not going to reflect any sort of global status and are at best approximations of certain reality of the counteroffensive. If you try to amplify these to aproximate success rate or predict end result, you’re going to get more noise than useful signal.
I agree it’s bad idea to do this, but it looks like most people didn’t read the article past the headline and assume Kyiv is used as metonym for Ukraine. (In the same way as when Kremlin is used instead of russian government) Which is not the case here, it’s literary just Kyiv city council doing this.
You’re discussing with someone that is part of the botnet mentioned in the article. Just look at their history. Just report as off-topic and move on. No point talking to propaganda mouthpiece.
They were using cluster munition from very beginning. There were videos of cluster munition being used in cities with civilians. In the infamous Kramatorsk railway station attack russia used cluster munition for example. Which is what makes putin’s statement quite misleading. It’s effectively lying by omission.
The working in the article is a bit confusing:
To me this sounds like he was charged with justifying terrorism, not for refusing to plead guilty. Reading further the charge is based on “conversations with other inmates during which Miftakhov allegedly expressed support for a 2018 attack on a regional office of Russia’s Federal Security Service”. In reasonable legal system it would stand on very shaky legs given the other inmates have every reason to say whatever FSB told them to say otherwise they will be tortured as well. But this is russia.
Which is to say he wasn’t really charged for refusing to plead guilty, but in practice the FSB can just keep making up false charges and torturing him until he pleads guilty, so there’s very little difference. It might as well be an offense as you implied.