“We fear no one:” Ukrainians raise flags to defy Russia invasion fear – Reuters
I’ve seen enough death and dying over the course of my lifetime to know that I’ll always try to find a peaceful path out of any situation, regardless of what it is. Violence is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways, and if I was a world leader, going to war would always be the last resort.
The victors of wars may reap some sort of reward in the aftermath, but the citizens of both countries always lose.
People and nations would be better off learning to simply cooperate with one another to acquire their needs, rather than always strive to gain more, far beyond their needs, simply because they have the might behind them to take what they want. The whole world would be best served if everyone actually followed the Golden Rule and adopted a live and let live way of life.
But that is evidently too simple a truth for too many people to fully grasp. Far too many are bound by their greed, and it ultimately eats them alive and drives them to the dark side, embracing the most evil things imaginable.
However Ukraine is finally resolved, I just hope and pray it’s end results in a free Ukraine, without us bearing witness to atomic mushroom clouds over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Monarch, Montana, Cheyenne, Wyoming, Garrison, North Dakota and other U.S towns and cities – go ahead and take D.C. tho’. And likewise, I wouldn’t want to see Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities obliterated. Likewise, just because I know Putin and his top brass to be an enemy of freedom everywhere, I wouldn’t wish a nuclear death on the good people of Russia, especially with so many currently protesting Putin’s invasion and placing their lives and liberty at risk in the process.
Nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Many may say that it is simple. We just stay out of the fight altogether and let Ukraine fight on to victory or surrender on its own. But when tyrants go on the march, neutrality isn’t a luxury they allow, and ultimately, any war of any real size has a ripple effect and touches every other nation, far and wide, especially in light of the incredible technological advancements that have been made in numerous armaments and guidance and delivery systems and the means to counter the same.
Reagan should have given the green light on Star Wars and sent Russia and China a big “Phluock You“. Trump had the right idea too, when he started the Space Force.
How this ends is anybody’s guess, but everyone should really be made to understand that lasting peace only comes through an exhibition of Real Strength. And seeing what we have as our Commander-in-Chief should scare the shit out of any sane American. We’re deep in the muck.
No one wants to die in an orange atomic burst, but no one wants to die a serf, subjugated and conquered by a foreign enemy.
It’s the degree and the depth of a nation’s commitment to freedom all across the globe that determines how long it will remain a free nation.
March 6, 2023
Justin O. Smith ~ Author
~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.
we don’t ever hear much about the men behind the curtain that are responsible for this. these are the trilateral commision, council of foreign relations and of course their cia. these are just a few of the top dogs.
the military industrial complex needs to justify the billions of dollars in grants yearly. they need wars to justify their actions.
we also should not forget the many bio weapon labs in ukrain that were financed by the u.s. govt.
lastly, the evidence is out that the u.s. govt under biden is responsible for blowing up the norstream pipeline.
sad to say, but the devil is in our house.
Dear Veteran,
I respect Your line of thought, however, some of what You assert is not entirely accurate and is based on fallacy.
You’re right about many of the players in this mess, when You mention the Trilateral Commission and the Council of Foreign Relations. But there are many others, all striving to advance the new world order, and the fight is multifaceted, since one side simply wants to maintain U.S. financial hegemony over the globe by way of its currency’s status as the global reserve currency, and the other side seeks total control over all the nations of the world — their land, people and resources and wealth — in a drive to end all nations’ sovereignty and usher in a new age with their utopian vision of a new world order.
This is a financial war in every way one might imagine as well as a bloody, destructive physical war that has taken a heavy toll already on both sides.
i agree that the MID Complex is absolutely loving this and eating it up in fact, looking to run out a whole new string of armaments.
However, the biolabs You reference are biological warfare labs that pre-existed Putin’s modern day Russia and were built and operated by the old Soviet Union. After the fall of the USSR, the U.S. went in and stabilized these labs to ensure there wouldn’t be any catastrophic leaks that would wipe out entire populations. This is a fact — research a bit deeper and You will find the veracity of this.
As for the destruction of the Nord Stream, there really isn’t any definitive proof, as of yet, as to who really is responsible. Friday’s March 10th] Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/nord-stream-blast-probe-in-germany-centers-on-sail-boat-crew-70380645 story, ‘Nord Stream Blast Probe Turns Focus to Sailboat, Crew’, suggests that a recent report prepared for the German government states there are several other possibilities.
The sailboat was rented in northern Germany and seen near the sabotaged area in question. It supposedly carried six crew who were thought to be Ukrainians, but the report also states that some of the evidence seeking to blame Ukraine appears to be planted. And the only one’s who benefit from this is Russia, if it gets Germany to abandon Ukraine and the U.S. aid effort as well.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned against drawing conclusions about the identities of the crew or its backers, on Wednesday the 8th. The investigators also stated they had found no evidence the crew of the boat had planted the explosives and that it more than likely would have taken more than six people to plant the 500 kilograms of TNT that damaged three pipelines.
At over 80 meters of depth any team of divers would have needed to have a special mixture of oxygen and the conditions they would have experienced would also have required a lengthy decompression period on an extremely well-equipped ship.
All of this is not to say that the U.S. absolutely didn’t blow it, only that Russia actually had a good reason to do so, too. And as of yet, nothing has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The administrator of Christianso said that he had received a request from Danish police for any records of boats that had entered the main harbor between September 16th & 18th, a little over a week before the pipeline blew up.
The Ukrainians really are fighting for their freedom and liberty, but while there may be a good many in the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department who also believe this, there is an even larger contingent who saw opportunity and pushed an initially reluctant Biden to dive in deeper to execute a proxy war to weaken and neutralize Russia. Many in the U.S. government understand the interest in seeing Ukraine win and preventing Putin from reconstituting the Russian Empire, and even more see it as an opportunity to degrade Russia’s military and weaken Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
Despite the international political dynamics and schemes at play, it still remains a righteous cause to help a people who truly want nothing more than to remain free of Russia’s control and tyranny, especially when one recalls the genocide executed against Ukrainians by Russians of past eras, especially under Stalin.
With that said, there’s no doubt in my own military mind that “the devil is in our house” for any number of reasons, But sometimes right is right, even if it’s our own domestic enemy pursuing its ends to a cross-purpose.
There are many ways for a state to project power and weaken adversaries, and a proxy war such as we see in Ukraine is a proxy war in the works in the most cynical manner, as Ukraine is being decimated and devoured, all the while the West purports to be defending it. Many nations are currently involved, each working at cross-purposes to the other to fight for their own geopolitical goals and interests, and even contradicting themselves at times by fighting for outcomes that really do not serve their interests properly in the end.
And then there is a recent statement by Biden, during his visit to Kyiv, Ukraine:
“… the whole world faced a test for the ages. Europe was being tested. America was being tested. Nato was being tested. All democracies were being tested.”
I hate to agree with the Rat Bastard, but whether his support of the Ukrainians freedom is coming from any place of sincerity or not, the statement itself rings with truth. However, the American people themselves will ultimately have to decide how, if and why the fight in Ukraine is important to America.
The above article was actually an opening email to a much longer article that wasn’t published. In it, I entered into a good bit of detail in those items that should make people see the Ukrainian people’s fight as a worthy cause to support. Maybe Jeff Bennett, the publisher and editor of The Federal Observer, will see fit to eventually release it.
As I noted in my closing:
“No one wants to die in an orange atomic burst, but no one wants to die a serf, subjugated and conquered by a foreign enemy.
It’s the degree and the depth of a nation’s commitment to freedom all across the globe that determines how long it will remain a free nation.”
I would simply add, we should not turn away from helping Ukraine, for the struggle here is not right versus left, it is right versus wrong.
This still may end badly and in defeat for Ukraine, but I hope and pray it won’t be from a lack of trying on the part of America or the West, or due to being betrayed by both.
Unfortunately, if history is any indication, betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars.
~ Justin O Smith
Veteran,
Here is the article I was referencing, the one that remains unpublished. I wrote the following on February 28th 2023:
Keep right on appeasing tyrants, genuflecting and kissing their hands and feet in fear, and you soon will fall prey to their machinations and conquests, whether they bring a country to submission by way of rifles, tanks and missiles or hammers and sickles. Tremble in fear and give way under the threat of the day, no matter it’s potential destruction, and one dooms their country to soon be invaded and sets the stage for tyranny to flourish and advance across the globe unabated.
Intelligent people understand the cost of appeasement, as viewed through the prism of history. We’ve seen its consequences throughout the 20th century, with Germany, the Soviet Union and China, and we are about to reap even harsher consequences if we don’t stand firm with Ukraine and bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to understand that America will not tolerate a world order in which innocent, peaceful nations can be invaded at will by tyrants, such as Putin, to further their own geopolitical goals, simply because they have they economic and military might to do so.
As much as it pains me to say so, Joe Biden and his regime are right to support Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion, even if they are facilitating the defense in a much-flawed manner, due to the many inept, incompetent generals and command officers who were largely political appointments made during the Obama administration. But overall, Biden is moving in the right direction in the same manner that a broken clock is right twice a day.
Democrats wave the Ukrainian Flag and cheer, while trampling and pissing on the American Flag, or burning it, and the irony isn’t lost on most Americans that the Biden regime has sent over $100 billion to Ukraine’s war machine, while ignoring the very real crises here at home, such as we recently witnessed in East Palestine. I’m not a big fan of war or spending massive sums on war in any manner that’s unaccountable and poorly defined without a real plan or any real idea of the concrete objectives. And most of us don’t want another forever war with our boys and girls putting boots on the ground only to be returned home horribly maimed or in body bags.
Much of the corruption that so many try to link to Ukrainian President Zelensky is the residual left over from the era of Yanukovych, and Zelensky has made great strides in ferreting out and squashing corruption on all levels of government. Please note that he came to power as a self-made millionaire, unlike his predecessors.
And yes, by all means, we must always put America first. As we wage our own battle against a federal government that grows ever more tyrannical under Democratic Party guidance, it doesn’t mean that we should throw our international concerns and U.S. foreign interests completely aside in some fit of a new isolationist movement that will ultimately only bring greater danger and harm to our country in the end. We fight both fights, as we move to seat a government that truly has the ability to govern the people in an effective and righteous manner.
Many Americans take the stance that there isn’t any vital security interest or existential threat to America seen in the war between Ukraine and Russia, but they couldn’t be more wrong. This view is overly simplistic and fails to take a vast array of geopolitical concerns into account, especially regarding resources and the history of the area. More than this, it’s right to help a people remain free against a tyrannical onslaught.
Pundits and writers, such as Tucker Carlson at Fox News or Lex Greene at NewsWithViews, would have us believe that it’s “insane” to support Ukraine against a heavily nuclear armed Russia. Both men say that anyone supporting Ukraine must be “ignorant of history”, as they go on to offer up their own erroneous, deeply fallacious historical revisions regarding Ukraine and it’s right to claim its sovereignty as a nation.
Just for a little perspective, the U.S. spent $116 billion in seven months in the Persian Gulf War, nearly the equivalent of $382 billion during nineteen months of U.S. involvement in WWI, the equivalent of $390 billion over thirty-seven months of the Korean War, $844 billion dollars in Vietnam over a span of 17 years and nine months, $911 billion in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2022, one trillion dollars over the course of the Iraq War and the equivalent of $4.7 trillion dollars during three years and nine months of fighting during WWII.
The cost of these wars was much higher in blood and the bodies of loved ones who died, no matter their color, religion or position on the right or wrong of each respective war. Dead is dead and the pain and grief it brings to families is a hurt one hopes never to know.
So what is the answer? Are we simply to allow any nuclear armed nation to invade another on any pretense, because we fear any direct confrontation to stop them will unleash a nuclear war? If so, the U.S. might as well go ahead and surrender to Xi Jingping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia and the Ayatollah of Iran now, and sit back and watch as one nation after the other falls to these three power crazed tyrants sweep across the globe.
There are no easy answers, but one can be certain that not stopping Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and Eastern and Central Europe and elsewhere — not stopping China’s similar aggressions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Theater — and allowing Ukraine to fall, sets in motion years of future nuclear blackmail by any and all tyrannical-minded rogue nations motivated to force peaceful freedom-minded nations to submit to their demands and their will.
There isn’t any nation on the face of the planet that has the right or authority to invade and take, essentially forcefully annex, territory from another nation, simply because a large contingent of its ethnically related people reside there. However, this is precisely the excuse used by Russia, when it invaded Georgia in 2008, again with Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, and again a year ago as it rolled into eastern Ukraine.
Far too many throw out red-herring arguments that suggest there was a color revolution in Ukraine in 2014 that helped install a government friendly to the U.S. and Europe, that was opposed to any continued Russian interference in their nation, as if this justifies Putin’s invasion. The truth remains that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was a Russian puppet, installed by heavy Russian involvement in the election, and his forced ouster was due to his government’s massive corruption and a policy that kept Ukraine under the heavy hand of Putin.
Putin was angered that Ukrainians rejected membership in a newly created Russian economic group in order to pursue membership in the European Economic Union, as was their right as sovereign people of a sovereign, independent and free country.
Everybody seems to forget that Ukraine became a free and independent nation in August of 1991. They also seem to forget that the Free World and the Soviet leaders GUARANTEED Ukraine’s border security and rights under international law as a sovereign nation in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that also required Ukraine to relinquish thousands of nuclear missiles. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now, if Ukraine had refused to disarm.
Aside from this, any factual reading of history reveals a much more complex and nuanced story of Kievan Rus and its earliest co-mingling of people, its wars and subsequent defeats and the dynamics from the year 882 A.D to 1187 A.D. when the name “Ukraine” was first used to identify the region, and on to the present and the ascendancy of modern day Ukraine. Throughought all the centuries of brief spells of independence and subjugations under other countries, the people now known as Ukrainians held onto their own unique culture and a language and religion that is in fact separate from that of the Russian people.
Although Kievan Rus is considered the joint ancestral homeland that laid the foundations for both modern Ukraine and Russia, a distinct Ukrainian language had already sprung to life in the dying days of the Kievan Rus dynasty, despite Putin’s erroneous claim that “the first linguistic differences between Ukrainians and Russians appeared only around the 16th century”. The religious differences that grew in the Eastern Orthodox Churches in Moscow and Kiev formed from the mid-15th to the late 17th centuries, and these churches became separate entities that would later see new schisms form.
Putin engages in a great deal of false piety and never misses an opportunity to manipulate the Church for his own designs.
So just what “history” does Lex Greene want us to understand?
Greene certainly doesn’t want us mentioning recent history or acknowledging the current war crimes committed by Putin and his armies. His army seems intent on drawing from some of the other most barbaric epochs in human history. Bodies of Ukrainian women were recently found in a mass grave, naked and branded with swastikas, while others report numerous indiscriminate rapes by Russian soldiers, sparing none, not even mothers with small children. And tortured and mutilated corpses of men, women and children have been found in forests, cellars, on the floors of homes and in the streets, after Russians have engaged in their “denazification” of a Ukrainian town.
Just like the good old days of the Soviet Union.
Maybe we should refuse to acknowledge that Ukraine had a brief independence, if hard fought, between 1917 and 1922, during the aftermath of the fall of Czar Nicholas. Never mind that over the course of the 20th century, Ukrainians consistently formed resistance groups that fought Russian regulars. Ukrainians were so intent and desperate to be free of the Soviets that a large segment of their population even fought the Russians alongside the German National Socialists.
Perhaps Greene wants Americans to never hear of Stalin’s mass murders in the Grasny Bor Forest from 1937to 1938. Just forget about a decade of terror and genocide waged by Russians against ethnic Ukrainians between 1929 and 1939 in an attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian culture. He doesn’t want anyone to hear of the atrocities committed against Ukrainians at Solovki Special Purpose camp or Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp. Just forget the Holodomor that took the property and the lives of nearly 10 million Ukrainians. And for God’s sake, don’t recall that “Away from Moscow” was the most popular phrase and sentiment among Ukrainians throughout the 1930s and on to the present.
Greene and Carlson simply choose to ignore the vile, evil words of so many Russians, who see Ukrainians as less than human, such as Russian propagandist and war correspondent Dmitry Steshin. They also refuse to see the realpolitik of letting Russia have its way in this unhinged and unwarranted invasion.
Steshin recently wrote:
“You can’t consider them [the Ukrainians] as people with full-fledged morality and normal mental apparatus. We need to take what’s ours and make it so that they’re afraid to even think about so much as to breathe the wrong way towards Russia …. We’ll see what kind of a beautiful life we’ll create for them and how they’ll want to rethink their identity.”
In other words, he’s calling for another extermination of the Ukrainian culture, “their identity”, and another genocide for all who refuse to submit. Look at the numerous newscasts of the crimes against humanity from Bucha, Kherson, Dnipro and Kramatorsk, if your constitution and conscience can confront it without puking, and you will see the truth of the matter.
We hear Sergey Aksyonov, head of the Crimean occupation authority, saying that the Ukrainians must be forced to “[crawl] on their knees into captivity and then under the tribunal or into hell”, adding, “There are no other scenarios for them and cannot be”.
And as if it couldn’t get any worse, Anton Krasovsky, of state-funded RT, has suggested the murder of Ukrainian children by drowning — “you throw them in the river with a strong undercurrent …. Shove them right into their huts and burn them.”
Is it any wonder that every adult Ukrainian, and many young teens too, are now fighting to the death to stop the complete conquest of their beloved country?
Putin has invaded Ukraine in a fit of revanchism, determined to restore Russia’s former glory and the Empire, on the flimsiest of false premises and excuses, from saber-rattling against NATO to supposedly protecting the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas, who have been killed by the thousands by advancing Russian forces and Ukrainian forces targeting the separatists, to railing against George Soros funded Jewish Banderite Nazis in another distortion How Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim distorts history, according to scholars : NPR of history, as he lumps Ukraine, the West and America into the same immoral pile over the LGBTQ mess that is flourishing in their societies and calling it a threat to Russian society. And although Zelensky has done exceptionally well in leading his nation through these terrible and deadly days, it disgusts one to the core to learn that he once glorified them in comedic skits on live television.
On that last score, Putin’s right. The LGBTQ Movement is a threat to all societies worldwide, in one fashion or another on multiple levels, but they too have a right to life.
Please recall that the old Soviet Union was extremely active in Mexico during the 1930s, and the U.S. wasn’t threatening to go to war or bomb them into oblivion over their subversive activity. However, America’s allies, Britain and France, did go to war with Germany on September 3rd 1939 — because Hitler thought he could invade countries at will without any consequences; and if Hitler hadn’t betrayed Stalin, his ally at the time, his conquest of all Europe may have come to fruition and still be a standing monument to the evil that inspired it.
The Ukrainians have fought back fiercely and held the line in an untold number of battles, retaking a good amount of lost territory in many instances, largely due to the aid they’ve received from America and Europe. They’ve certainly been handed extra motivation to stop Putin, when they learn that last year, he basically said that Russia would rape the dead corpse of Ukraine. Thankfully, Ukrainians have thwarted Putin’s plans at every turn in the road.
These are incredibly dangerous times for the entire free world, with “experts” moving the nuclear clock to 90 seconds to Armageddon. It’s a dangerous dance across the tightrope, as America’s current poor excuses for “leaders” attempt to maintain a superior military and economic position, much of which hinges on our ability to keep the U.S. dollar as the International Monetary Fund’s global reserve currency — a status currently under attack by China and Russia and their BRIC nation allies and the alternative monetary system they are promoting.
The war in Ukraine has been turned into a proxy-war between the superpowers of the world and their respective allied nations. It’s as much a war for economic preeminence as it is for military and geopolitical superiority. Failure for the U.S. and the West will result in a quick economic collapse that won’t see a recovery for generations, a collapse that quite likely ends in civil strife and civil war.
It is one thing to wrongly assert that the U.S. has little strategic interest in Russia’s bloody effort to forcibly restore and rebuild the old Soviet Empire, but it’s quite another for Putin’s propagandists to buttress their argument through false claims that Ukraine is a tyranny ruled by a corrupt elite, as a means to cast Ukraine as unworthy of America’s support — or worse, to suggest that Ukraine never had a nation or a cultural identity separate from Russia.
As America proceeds to conduct this campaign for the defense of Ukraine, we must help them fight smart, in a way that restores their borders and pushes the Russians out and ensures no such invasions will occur in the future. No, we shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, or foot the entire bill, but neither should we stand idly by and watch evil and tyranny grow uncontrollable across the entire world.
Isolation and appeasement, if applied as policy for any extensive period, only makes it more certain that should our country ever face an invasion under any set of circumstances one day in the near or distant future, our people and our government may face it alone, because we let all our allies be conquered.
Would we even be a nation today, if not for France’s much appreciated aid to us during our own War for Independence?
The deaths on both sides of this war between the Ukrainian Army and Russian separatists agitated by Russian Spetsnaz, and now the Russian Army too, run through the history of the region, criss-crossing the plains and leaving the carcasses littering the golden fields of Ukraine and the streets of every town and city, and most of the world, with the exception of China, Iran, North Korea and other several other countries, has denounced Russia’s actions. And as much as Russia’s political top brass and Putin and a large number of ordinary Russian people want to push the myth that Ukraine has never been “a real country”, a glance into Ukrainian history reveals this assertion to be based on a dangerously distorted reading of the past. All Putin’s invasion has succeeded in accomplishing to date is to have galvanized nearly all Ukrainians in their aversion to Russia and heavily demarcated the perceived differences between Ukrainians and Russians more clearly than ever before, making Putin and Russia a pariah to the Europe of which he has longingly sought its acceptance.
We saw Russia and the U.S. fight a proxy war in Vietnam, when both were nuclear armed. Mutually assured destruction and the geography of the war kept the risks low, but now the West is knocking on Russia’s back door, and the fact that Putin started these hostilities offers little comfort. Regardless of who is right and wrong, rest assured that Putin intends to make this as painful as possible for the West, and he’s receiving considerable backing from China and Iran at the moment.
No one really wants to see Ukraine sacrificed to Putin, and no one wants to see this end in WWIII. But that’s just where we’re headed if Putin isn’t held at bay, until a new, strong conservative U.S. president can be put in the Oval office, who has the intelligence to guide this to a suitable peace agreement. But if Putin insists on staying the course of war, Ukraine must be given the tools of war sufficient enough to hurt Putin’s forces inside Russia proper and take the war to Putin in the same manner Putin has executed against them.
That’s the cold hard truth of the matter. Accept it. Or accept the end of the U.S. as a superpower, a new list of former countries reduced to vassal states of Russia once more, and the death of freedom in every country touched by Russia and China from this day forth.
Weakness invites war and conquest.
It’s just too bad that FDR didn’t loose General George Patton on Russia, when he was raring to keep going with his tanks, right on to Moscow. He knew that Russia was forever to be a thorn in America’s side.
by Justin O Smith
Maybe Germany joining axis with Russia and China is what the USA needed to stop. A pipeline Selling Russian natural gas to Germany, which circumvented under Ukraine, was about to open when this war broke out.
Pale of Settlement is to blame. Where communism/Zionism started and khazars of old ended up.
FDR wouldn’t have a decision to make, if Pale of Settlement peoples didn’t murder Alexander 2 when he turned on them or Nick 2 , the last white leader of this world.
IMF sits at the top of the pyramid. Political Zionism is the the 2nd level the IMF sits upon. Know the enemy for Christ’s sake. Braid the whip
I throughly enjoyed this writing over the piece everyone attacked before. These viewpoints and face value commentary on Ukraine is something more I can stand behind. This country is fucked into a situation with no good answerers but to survive, which unfortunately is at a world level.