Stupid Shit in Kyiv

[Paulie97]

"Every day I ask God for forgiveness for helping him come to power. " Mendel called Zelensky an abomination.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's former press secretary, Yulia Mendel, continues to harshly criticize the president. In a new interview, she called him "a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty" and "an instrument of the Ukrainian nation's suicide. ".

The statements were made in a conversation with blogger Lilia Bagirova. The interview with Mendel appeared on her YouTube channel yesterday evening.

"I think Volodymyr Zelenskyy today is a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty, a threat to Ukrainian existence in general. We are now about to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Ukrainian independence. As a Ukrainian, I ask myself: will there be another 35 years? Our nation is perishing. We simply have no future. The status quo is impossible. Do you understand that there may not be another 35 years? We simply don't have the people. I ask God for forgiveness every day for helping this abomination come to power, to remain in power. Zelenskyy is an abomination," she said.

According to her, Zelenskyy came to power "on promises of peace, but now he's waging the largest war in Europe and constantly finding reasons why it can't be ended. " Mendel claims that it was Zelenskyy who repeatedly insisted on continuing the war, despite opportunities for negotiations.

"There were about seven attempts to end the war. But Zelenskyy's position was the same: the war must continue. The fact that Zelenskyy insisted that the war must continue in 2022 is 100%. Twice. And in 2024," she said..

Notice you haven't addressed a single point of my rebuttal to the article of hers that you posted. You just dumped more emotional quotes from her. Meanwhile she just got banned from a European Parliament event and was sanctioned by her own government a week ago. She has about as much credibility as Laura Loomer. Come back when you're ready to engage point by point with my rebuttal. It's from today, currently post number 4522 and is linked here:

Here's my response to the Iuliia Mendel article recently posted by Questner. It's linked again above.

[Questner]

"Every day I ask God for forgiveness for helping him come to power. " Mendel called Zelensky an abomination.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's former press secretary, Yulia Mendel, continues to harshly criticize the president. In a new interview, she called him "a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty" and "an instrument of the Ukrainian nation's suicide. ".

The statements were made in a conversation with blogger Lilia Bagirova. The interview with Mendel appeared on her YouTube channel yesterday evening.

"I think Volodymyr Zelenskyy today is a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty, a threat to Ukrainian existence in general. We are now about to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Ukrainian independence. As a Ukrainian, I ask myself: will there be another 35 years? Our nation is perishing. We simply have no future. The status quo is impossible. Do you understand that there may not be another 35 years? We simply don't have the people. I ask God for forgiveness every day for helping this abomination come to power, to remain in power. Zelenskyy is an abomination," she said.

According to her, Zelenskyy came to power "on promises of peace, but now he's waging the largest war in Europe and constantly finding reasons why it can't be ended. " Mendel claims that it was Zelenskyy who repeatedly insisted on continuing the war, despite opportunities for negotiations.

"There were about seven attempts to end the war. But Zelenskyy's position was the same: the war must continue. The fact that Zelenskyy insisted that the war must continue in 2022 is 100%. Twice. And in 2024," she said.

Reflecting on the consequences of the war, Mendel stated: "Strategically, we've already lost. We've lost people. And we're losing them every day. And territory, too. And yet they continue to brainwash us, telling us about some kind of resilience: we're all unbreakable, we're all invincible. This is simply populism of the highest order."

She is confident that the Kremlin is certainly to blame for the current situation.

"Putin is a real asshole. But Putin isn't to blame for Ukrainian corruption. Putin isn't to blame for the buildings being built near Kyiv. Putin isn't to blame for the scandals that are happening. Putin is destroying the Ukrainian nation. And which one is Zelensky destroying? Tell me," she added.

Mendel also reported that Zelenskyy's "half of his phone (that is, contacts in his address book) are Russians"—people who are in Russia or have ties to the Kremlin.

"For me, he is a traitor," Mendel said.

Also yesterday, Mendel was barred from entering the European Parliament for the German party Alternative for Germany's event " Ukraine: Dare for Peace. Diplomacy Instead of Escalation," where she was scheduled to speak.

[Paulie97]

But Ukrainians dont want to be under dictator Putin, when many Russians leave Russia because of Putin.

You cut right to the chase. Ukraine is inflicting significant pain on Russia. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want to continue doing so with the aim of reaching concessions that preserve their statehood and military capabilities.

[Paulie97]

https://spectator.com/article/zelens...de/?edition=us

Here's my response to the Iuliia Mendel article recently posted by Questner. It's linked again above.

The absurdity of her piece is seen in that she refuses to acknowledge the difference between a "peace deal" and capitulation. Russia has never offered anything less than demilitarization, neutrality, recognition of annexed territory, and army caps that would leave Ukraine unable to defend itself. That's not a border adjustment. It's handing Putin the keys and hoping he doesn't come back for the furniture. I could stop right there but will unravel some of the same arguments Moscow's been making for years, but this time from Mendel, a faux insider with a Ukrainian passport, who stepped down from her post in 2021 before a shot was fired.

She admits Russia started the war, then argues Ukraine should surrender anyway. That's not analysis. That's the invader's script with a press badge. That's while her predictions are tired. The air defense gap is real, but "not enough interceptors" has been the headline for three years and running, and the grid's still up.

The ninety percent figure is real but narrower than she makes it sound. Ukraine's agriculture minister said Russia destroyed about ninety percent of the modern logistics used by food retail chains — the big distribution centers that supply supermarkets. Total Class A and be warehouse space is down roughly fifty percent, not ninety. The rest of the country still has about two point nine million square meters operating. The energy system is damaged, not torn apart. Russia has hit generation and substations hard, and the UN is warning this could be the toughest winter yet. But as of mid-September there are no scheduled outages, gas storage is being filled, and the grid is still running. "Humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow" is a prediction, not a fact. The "state's offer is simply leave" line is the emotional closer. Evacuation is offered in the worst-hit zones, and people do leave. That is not the same as the government telling civilians to abandon the country. She's turning a real logistics and energy crisis into proof that surrender is the only option.

The paragraph she devoted to try and downplay the Ukrainian drone attacks is by far the weakest in her piece. The forty-day campaign was real — Zelenskyy announced it in late June twenty twenty-six as an influence operation to pressure Moscow. But the claim that Ukrainians suffered the most is a distortion. The strikes hit Russian oil refineries, airfields, and logistics deep inside Russia. Ukraine hit all eleven of Russia's largest oil refineries with industry loses estimated at 13.5 billion dollars. Refining capacity dropped sharply. Fuel shortages hit dozens of regions. Russia's own fuel exports fell. The damage was real and it was on Russian soil. Russia did escalate its strikes on Ukraine in response, but that's not evidence the campaign failed. It's evidence it worked. You don't escalate against a strategy that's having little effect. And the "none of the negotiations" line is wrong. The strikes were designed to force the Kremlin back to the table by raising the cost of continuing. Calling that a failure because Putin didn't immediately fold is setting an impossible standard. Meanwhile the drones keep coming.

The Afghanistan analogy is a false one. It was a nation building project in a country that had little precedent in the local culture. Ukraine is a sovereign state defending it's own territory from an invasion.

The censorship point is also lazy. Western media did criticize the Afghan war for years, the SIGAR reports, the waste, the corruption. It wasn't a propaganda monolith. She's flattening a messy, debated conflict into a clean cautionary tale so she can say "see Ukraine will end the same way. " It won't because the situations aren't the same.

The numbers she leans on in her economy paragraph are already stale. Russia's military spending hit a record forty-four percent of the federal budget in the first half of twenty twenty-six — over ten point seven trillion rubles, roughly one hundred twenty-five billion dollars. That's more than half of every ruble the government collects. The deficit has already blown past the full-year target. Regions are slashing signing bonuses and, in places like Yakutia, freezing payments to soldiers outright because the money ran out. This isn't a stronger fiscal position. It's a war economy eating itself. Growth has collapsed to under one percent, inflation is still biting, and the civilian sector is being hollowed out to feed the front. Ukraine's debt is high, but it's mostly concessional aid from allies who have a reason to keep it solvent. Russia's "strength" is extraction — oil revenue, forced labor, and a shrinking workforce — with no off-ramp. She's comparing a country fighting for survival to one that chose this war and is now paying for it by cannibalizing its own budget.

On the abuses, corruption, and other challenges with mobilization, the paragraph's real move is the last line: "I do not blame my people for refusing to fight. " That's not analysis, that's a verdict on the war itself, dressed up as sympathy. Every invaded country in history has had a broken mobilization system. France in nineteen forty, the Soviet Union in nineteen forty-one — both had desertion, corruption, men hiding from recruiters. The existence of a broken system doesn't answer the question of whether the fight is worth having. She's using real suffering to smuggle in a surrender argument.

Regarding Russian mobilization, UN special rapporteur put desertions at over fifty thousand since twenty twenty-two — nearly ten percent of the force deployed in Ukraine. Courts have convicted tens of thousands for going AWOL or deserting, and independent estimates put the true number higher, with some projecting up to seventy thousand in twenty twenty-six alone. Corruption is just as entrenched. Men buy medical deferments, fake Category G exemptions, and even full exits for a million rubles or more. Recruiters get bonuses for delivering bodies, and police have been caught planting drugs or threatening charges to force contracts. In the range of one million Russian men fled the country in the opening months of the war.

And the street hunting is real too. In places like Penza this summer, police and plainclothes teams were grabbing men off buses, at checkpoints, and outside workplaces — sometimes with wives screaming from the vans — then dragging them to enlistment offices to sign under threat. Men are now staying indoors, carrying pepper spray, and organizing self-defense groups to avoid it.

Same broken machine, different flavor.

Mendel's credibility is shot. She left the administration in twenty twenty-one, before the full-scale invasion reshaped everything she claims to understand. Her later claims rest on unnamed sources that fact-checkers have flagged as misleading. The Tucker Carlson circuit and the sudden convergence with Moscow's talking points aren't journalism — they're mostly the same script Russia has run for years.

Her casualty math has some accuracy but is incomplete. That while she's recycling the same Russian talking point that's been wrong since 2022, that Ukraine's been running out of men, while the front is still holding. Ukraine's pool of conscription-age men is small — around four million in the territory it still holds — and Russia's is roughly ten times larger. But attrition is not a pure headcount contest. Ukraine has been inflicting disproportionate losses with drones, long-range strikes, and cheaper systems. Russian casualties have run two to three times higher than Ukraine's for most of the war, and in early twenty twenty-six the ratio climbed towards eight to one in some estimates. Russia is also struggling to replace its own losses at the same rate. She's calling for surrender at the exact moment the attrition is working against the side she wants to surrender to.

She got the NATO point backwards. NATO membership was never the war's purpose from Ukraine's perspective. It was Russia's stated grievance. Putin invaded to stop Ukraine from drifting West and it backfired spectacularly. The invasion is exactly what pushed Finland and Sweden into NATO.

She's right that martial law restricts speech and suspends elections. But she's treating emergency powers as proof the war's purpose failed, when they're the predictable cost of being invaded. Every country under attack does this. Britain during World War Two detained citizens without trial through regulation 18 b. The US suspended habeas corpus in Hawaii and locked up Japanese Americans. The question isn't whether Ukraine's democracy is imperfect under siege — it's whether surrendering restores it. It doesn't. Occupation doesn't bring back elections; it brings Russian law, Russian courts, and Russian imposed censorship.

Last but not least, on the matter of fighting on, let's listen to the Ukrainians themselves. A KIIS poll from late Aug to early Sept this year found 77% of Ukrainians say the country should keep fighting. Only 12% would accept Russian demands. Let's not let Ukraine down. If we do then we tell every future aggressor that invading a country and outlasting the world's attention span is a winning strategy.

[Reiner Otto]

https://spectator.com/article/zelens...de/?edition=us

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. ....

Some parts in this article are true. Unfortnately, because of the failed trust in Gods own country.

How about delivery of Patriots, for example?

Shame on that once great country.

[Amadeuss]

Iuliia Mendel. Is she available on a dating app? I would take her. But she must shut up with this political stuff when we fuck.

[Sirioja]

https://spectator.com/article/zelens...de/?edition=us

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv and the many western media outlets that repeated it was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it's September, and Ukraine says it's facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky's first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I'd come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.

Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelensky approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an "influence operation," designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks..

But Ukrainians dont want to be under dictator Putin, when many Russians leave Russia because of Putin.

[Questner]

https://spectator.com/article/zelens...de/?edition=us

For Americans who follow the Russian-Ukrainian war, the past few months must look very strange. In the first half of summer, the story from Kyiv – and the many western media outlets that repeated it – was that Ukraine was winning. Then, not long after the NATO summit in July, Kyiv announced it lacked the interceptors to prevent a winter disaster. The country needed 300 missiles to survive, we were told. Even if these 300 missiles arrive, they are unlikely to protect a country as large as Ukraine from the sheer volume of Russian ballistic attacks and glide-bomb strikes. Now it's September, and Ukraine says it's facing a $27 billion shortfall in defense funding. There seems to be a vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality in Ukraine.

I know a little about that public relations campaign. I was President Zelensky's first press secretary, entering office alongside him in 2019. I left in 2021 and remained sympathetic to the President as he fought the Russian invasion. But by 2025, I'd come to the conclusion that Ukraine will never be able to win this war militarily. The only solution is a negotiated peace.

Under the current Ukrainian regime, the chances of peace seem remote. In late June, President Volodymyr Zelensky approved a 40-day campaign of long-range drone strikes within Russia to force the Kremlin to end the war. It was supposed to be an "influence operation," designed to show the Russian people the true cost of the conflict. But it was Ukrainians who suffered the most. The Kremlin instead escalated, bringing more destruction, more death and none of the negotiations that would ultimately save lives. Russia, it seems, was only emboldened by the attacks. The Kremlin merely reiterated its conditions for ending its aggression.

It is, of course, Russia who started this war. Its forces have tortured, raped, deported and killed Ukrainians. There is no moral symmetry between Kyiv and the Kremlin. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian heroism of 2022 is long gone. Kyiv's war policies have hardened into permanent mobilization and superficial PR – empty slogans and moral posturing are all that's now offered. The desperate situation in Ukraine's streets is concealed so that the refusal to compromise can be dressed up as courage.

In 2022, when the war began, the whole country stood up to defend itself. Men lined up at recruitment offices, and cities that Moscow tried to seize successfully resisted. All this naturally produced admiration throughout the world – and glorification in the western media and political circles. Today, that same glorification has become an unbearable burden. There is a feeling that the western political establishment would rather see Russia burn than Ukraine saved. Our daily losses are treated as an acceptable price for that end.

Ukraine has lost more than half its population in the 35 years since it declared independence from the Soviet Union. The largest collapse in population has happened since Russia's full-scale invasion. By the most sober estimates, some 20 to 25 million people remain in the territory Kyiv still controls. Roughly half are of retirement age. At most, four million men are of conscription age. Russia can draw on the recruitment pool of approximately 10 times the number of fighting age men. Waging a war of attrition is therefore national suicide, not valor. Yet this is the strategy that the Zelensky government pursues.

The economy tells the same story. Ukraine is now entirely dependent on western aid, which is shrinking. Money that was supposed to be used to rebuild the country is being consumed by war. Public debt has crossed 110 percent of GDP. Russia, by contrast, has not had to borrow anywhere near this scale to wage its war, and it is still selling energy to the European Union. Since 2022, European countries have paid Moscow well over $230 billion for fossil fuels – more than they have given Kyiv in aid of all forms. Despite the innumerable sanctions packages, Russia keeps earning money and has a much stronger fiscal position than most EU states. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being crippled by the death of its people and the destruction of its productive base, while its debts keep accumulating.

Since the "influence operation" this summer, more than 90 percent of Ukrainian warehouses have been hit, our energy system has been torn apart and a humanitarian catastrophe will arrive with the winter snow. In the fifth year of full-scale war, the state's offer to civilians in the worst-affected regions is often simply: leave. People on the front line who have no money and no means are told to go somewhere else.

Every day Ukraine loses more of its people. Those who want their children to have proper healthcare and education are forced to emigrate. The number of people dying in Ukraine is roughly four times the number of births. The nation is perishing, and yet the war grinds on.

Finland lost land after a devastating war, yet it managed to preserve its nation and its future. Ukraine could still become a frontier between the West and Russia: armed, sober and alive. But the present strategy is pushing us down a different path: that of Afghanistan.

The West spent 20 years pouring trillions of dollars into that conflict. All it achieved was flourishing corruption, decades of death and eventually the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. As in Ukraine, there was heavy censorship in western media. Most of those who reported from the region were uncompromising in their support of the Afghan state machine and the war, no matter what.

We see many of the same parallels in Ukraine. Extraordinarily, corruption rivals the war in rankings of public opinion as the biggest national problem. There are those in the Ukrainian government who are making millions of dollars from this war. I have just been sanctioned by the Zelensky government for saying so publicly.

Meanwhile, normal Ukrainian men do not leave their homes for months, for fear of press gangs who hunt them in the streets. There are reports of the disabled being pushed into frontline combat, of men dying mysteriously in recruitment offices, of women fighting to save husbands from being kidnapped in plain daylight. According to the Ukrainian ombudsman, only 2-3 percent of those seized in press gang raids ever reach the frontline. Many pay, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, to buy their way out. The corruption around this system runs into the billions of dollars annually. I do not blame my people for refusing to fight for a machine they no longer believe in.

If the purpose of this war was to create a path for Ukraine to join NATO, that prospect is already off the table. If the purpose was to recover territory, Ukraine is losing more of it, not taking it back. If it was to protect democracy, then the wartime martial law has already killed it. Freedom of speech has been greatly restricted, institutions have been corrupted, basic political rights suspended, the constitution violated, political opponents persecuted. All of this with a casualness about human life that would be recognized as deeply authoritarian anywhere else.

The war in Ukraine has lost any plausible theory of victory. At this point, it only lines the pockets of a corrupt and narrow circle of elites while the country itself perishes. Ukraine can still choose the Finnish road: stop the bleeding, hold what can be held, restore the economy and a way of life to which people can return. The other road is already visible. It is a road down which we lose land and people every day – and with them, the chance that there will be a Ukraine left to win.

Written by Iuliia Mendel.

Iuliia Mendel is a Ukrainian journalist and the former press secretary of Volodymyr Zelensky.

[Xpartan]

Russia spends a third of its entire federal budget on defense; Ukraine's doing the same math with a smaller economy and no oil money.

Actually 44% now.

https://defence-blog.com/russias-mil...-of-its-budget

https://x.com/jakluge/status/2095861691070177525

And that's military spending only. My understanding is that security apparatus spending isn't included in this.

[Paulie97]

I'm confused. Didn't you say we shouldn't use whataboutism and red herrings back when you outlined deceptive debating? Just want to make sure I follow the rules, Roberts Rules of Debate or whatever

Contemporary financial corruption and politically motivated murders in Russia are fair game when discussing the war. I gave details in some recent posts. It's also all fair game when someone brings up the lessor corruption in Ukraine that I've acknowledged. That's not whataboutism, it's a rebuttal.

Whataboutism is ignoring your opponents points while making a beeline to Hiroshima or even 19th see. Manifest Destiny, as we've witnessed from you in the past.

[Paulie97]

Hmm, You want me to make my case, but don't want me to spend my time posting in political threads in a hoe forum. Could you please provide some guidelines? Like how much effort should I make and how many characters should be in the reply?

Simply offering assertions without arguments while handing me a homework assignment is not only lazy but arrogant.

Briefly though, you're partly right. There wasn't a formal signed document where NATO agreed not to expand eastward. Instead the West Germans, British, French, Canadians and Americans pulled a bait and switch.

Yes, no written agreement is the bottom line. Best strategy is not to lose wars, and in that case, the Cold War as the Kremlin wasn't negotiating from a position of strength and Gorbachev knew it. The outcome would have been similar had the roles been reversed. So what were we supposed to do? Keep the Soviet Empire nice and warm for them until they decide they want it back decades later?

You're retired, so presumably you're over 60. Were you in a coma from 1990 to 2010?

That's not only irrelevant but ageism. Aren't you the guy who used to complain about ad hominems?

Russia in the 1990's was radically democratizing. If it had been pulled into the western economic and security sphere, things would have been radically different. And in fact initially the West was on board with that. Russia was too, and agreements were signed to create partnerships with NATO and the EU. Putin expressed an interest in joining NATO. In the late 1990's however, the Clinton Administration pushed NATO to enlarge. George Kennan, one of the chief architects of the cold war, shouted from the rooftop that adding Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO was madness. The West ignored him. This was followed by the NATO attack on Serbia without consultation with Russia. Then the USA invasion of Iraq. Further enlargement of NATO that included Baltic states. And finally, in 2008, as Blood Red said, NATO hammered the nails in the coffin, with its announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO. The West crossed a line in the sand with Ukraine.

This whole paragraph is a list of grievances each one with a hole in it. The "radically democratizing" claim is an assumption not a fact. Russia was shelling it's own parliament in '93 and invaded Chechnya in '94. That's not a country NATO was going to vote in, and one member's vote would have killed it anyway. The UK called it farcical in '95. They also weren't getting in the EU. They never applied and there were no invitations. Russia at times wanted partnership with NATO but with veto power, joining the club to run it. Kennan did call the first round madness but he was a minority voice. The senate ratified the first enlarge 80-19 in 1999. Again you completely ignore the agency of these former Eastern Block countries that were eager to join.

As to the failure to consult Russia on Serbia, Russia was bombing Chechnya at the same time, so its moral standing to lecture as usual was zero. And the Kosovo war ended with a UN resolution Russia signed. Iraq was a US-led coalition, not NATO and had nothing to do with expansion. Stop trying to muddy the conversation.

Regarding Georgia and Ukraine, the political promise made in 2008 was in response to their clear desire for protection and integration into Western institutions, even though Germany and France blocked the action plan, meaning it wasn't and still isn't an active path to membership.

P.S. So why has Russia's response to Finland's entry into NATO been so muted? Many analysts argue that Russia's stance on NATO is less about security threats and more about maintaining it's "sphere of influence" with neighbors that want nothing to do with them. While the move of the historically neutral Finland was a direct result of Russia's actions.

[Tiny 12]

As is typical Questner refuses to engage while posting a highly biased take. Questner did Alexi Navalny die of natural causes, yes or no?

I'm confused. Didn't you say we shouldn't use whataboutism and red herrings back when you outlined deceptive debating? Just want to make sure I follow the rules, Robert’s Rules of Debate or whatever

[Tiny 12]

No, I'm not doing all the work here. Retirement is too damned fun. Please make your case as all I've seen so far is assertions which aren't arguments. I've already responded to the arguments those documents are most often used for when operating from the sympathetic to Russia angle. Here it is again.

Hmm, You want me to make my case, but don't want me to spend time posting in political threads in a hoe forum. Could you please provide some guidelines? Like how much effort should I make and how many characters should be in the reply? Please note that the leader of the "free world" spends A LOT more time on social media than I do. He posted over 100 times over labor day weekend!

Briefly though, you're partly right. There wasn't a formal signed document where NATO agreed not to expand eastward. Instead the West Germans, British, French, Canadians and Americans pulled a bait and switch. Again, see the historical documents in the National Securities Archive link.

You're retired, so presumably you're over 60. Were you in a coma from 1990 to 2010? Russia in the 1990's was radically democratizing. If it had been pulled into the western economic and security sphere, things would have been radically different. And in fact initially the West was on board with that. Russia was too, and agreements were signed to create partnerships with NATO and the EU. Putin expressed an interest in joining NATO.

In the late 1990's however, the Clinton Administration pushed NATO to enlarge. George Kennan, one of the chief architects of the cold war, shouted from the rooftop that adding Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to NATO was madness. The West ignored him. This was followed by the NATO attack on Serbia without consultation with Russia. Then the USA invasion of Iraq. Further enlargement of NATO that included Baltic states. And finally, in 2008, as Blood Red said, NATO hammered the nails in the coffin, with its announcement that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of NATO.

The West crossed a line in the sand with Ukraine.

[Sirioja]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/w...-war-cost.html

Only 27 billion USD is missing from this year Ukrainian budget.

During this week's corruption hearing the prosecution had to repeat to the audience the known Russian proverb (don't worry, everyone in Ukrainian government speaks Russian, and broken synthetic Ukrainian on camera), which was obtained during covert audio recording: 'If to fuck, but the queen, if to steal but the million'.

And how dictator criminal Putin made building his hidden castle? When millions of Russians are poor from his inflation. Putin and Trump mean inflation for their citizens. Did You see so many Russians running away from Putin. Both are to be eliminated. World would be better.

[Paulie97]

https://globalinitiative.net/wp-cont...April-2026.pdf

A further case study on Ukraine examines one of the region's most significant scam call centre ecosystems. It traces the development of a highly networked illicit industry, its links to organized crime actors and corrupt protection, and the ways in which technology and crime-as-a-service may reshape the model in the years ahead. Read alongside the global and Eurasian analyses, the Ukraine report illustrates how locally embedded scam operations can acquire global reach.

And here's what Questner leaves out.

Ukraine's own anti-corruption agencies — NABU and SAPO — exposed the call-center protection racket and raided the Prosecutor General's Office itself. The prosecutor general resigned.

Russia's corruption dwarfs it: Kremlin prosecutors seized eighteen point six billion dollars in corruption cases last year alone, and kickbacks in state procurement average twenty-two and a half percent. Russia never polices its own — Ukraine just did.

None of this means hand Ukraine to Putin. A state actively raiding its own top prosecutor's office to break up criminal rackets demonstrates functional checks and balances—the exact opposite of a systemic failure that would justify abandoning support.