Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/lostweapons/status/1500400072932003842
So far only Ukranian sources are reporting this so be skeptical, but if true this is major. Belarus Troops refusing to follow orders from Lukashenko, could mean an end to his dictatorship.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/idreesali114/status/1500490557663158272?r
Putin is truly in danger if he's doing something like this, Most civil servants in Russia are delibraty underpaid with a tacit understanding that this allows them to engage in bribery so long as it's not too blatant as to generate public outrage. He's eroding away one of the key pillars to his power

As we have noted, Russia is among the world's most corrupt states. As such, the political logic of private goods can be seen vividly in the workings of its corruption. Low salaries for police forces are a common feature of small coalition regimes and Russia is no exception. At first blush this might seem surprising. The police are crucial to a regime's survival. Police officers are charged with maintaining civil order—which often boils down to crushing antigovernment protests and bashing the heads of antigovernment activists. Surely inducing such behavior requires either great commitment to the regime or goodcompensation. But as elsewhere, the logic of corruption takes a more complex turn.

Though private rewards can be provided directly out of the government's treasury, the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty—includingtheir willingness to oppress their fellow citizens—is to give them free rein to be corrupt. Pay them so little that they can't help but realize it is not onlyacceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime letsthem accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted. Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky? He used to be the richest man in Russia.

We do not know whether he was corrupt or not, but we do know that he was not loyal tothe Putin government and duly found himself prosecuted for corruption. Police face the same threat. Consider former police major and whistleblower, Alexei Dymovsky. 8 Mr. Dymovsky, by his own admission, was a corrupt policeman in Novorossiysk, a city of 225,000 people. He noted that on a new recruit's salary of $413 a month (12,000 rubles) he could not make ends meet and so had to turn tocorruption. Dymovsky claims he personally only took very small amounts of money. Whether that is true or not, we cannot know. What we do know is what happened next. In a video he made and sent to Vladimir Putin before it became famous on YouTube, "Mr. Dymovsky also described a practice that is considered common in Russia: When officers end their shifts, they have to turn over a portion of their bribes to the so-called cashier, a senior member of thedepartment. Typically, $25 to $100 a day. If officers do not pay up, they are disciplined."

According to his own account, Mr. Dymovsky eventually grew tired of being corrupt and feeling compelled to be corrupt. As the New York Times reported, he inquired of Vladimir Putin, "How can a police officer accept bribes? . . . Do you understand where our society is heading? . . . You talk about reducing corruption," he said. "You say that it should not be just a crime, that it should be immoral. But it is not like that. I told my boss that the police are corrupt. And he told me that it cannot be done away with." Dymovsky became something of a folk hero in Russia. It seems his whistle-blowing was much appreciated among many ordinary Russians. The official response, however, was quite different. He was shunned, fired, persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned. The public uproar that followed led eventually tohis release.

No longer a police officer, he established a business guiding tours of the luxurious homes of some of his police colleagues. Most notableamong these is the home of Chief Chernositov. The chief's salary is about $25,000 a year—yet he owns a beachfront home on land estimated to beworth $800,000. The chief offers no account of how he could afford his home and, it should be noted, he remains in his position as chief. He certainly hasnot faced imprisonment for his apparent corruption, but then, unlike Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Aleksei Dymovsky, Novorossiysk's police chief has remained loyal to the governing regime. As for Dymovsky's whistle-blowing, it did prompt a response from the Kremlin. Russia's central government passed a law imposing tough penalties on police officers who criticize their superiors. As the Times notes, the law has come to be known as "Dymovskylaw." Corruption is a private good of choice for exactly the reasons captured by the Dymovsky Affair. It provides the means to ensure regime loyalty without having to pay good salaries, and it guarantees the prosecutorial means to ferret out any beneficiaries who fail to remain loyal. What could be better from aleader's perspective?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1500812687009267712
Putin offered to graciously allow durg-addled jewish neo-nazi Zelensky to remain the puppet president puppet of his Ukrainain puppet if he appoints Putins favoured crony as PM

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1503154188355870724?
Here's hoping to a lucky sniper, drone or missile meeting with Mr Kadyrov.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Ukraine is denying they were responsible for the helicopter attack.

https://twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1509945260499255308

This is them trolling the Russians who used the same excuse in 2014 when they invaded to deny them having deployed troops and claiming all the russian soldiers found in ukraine were just taking holidays there. The Belgrod Peoples Republic after all doesn't exist.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Keep in mind when ever people always make the point how a regime isnt the Nazis they fail to take into account that the Nazis wouldnt have become the Nazis if they were stopped in the in the late 1930s when the British/French had the ability to stop them.

If this was 1938-1939 I am sure there would be many posters who would say it would be crazy to compare the Nazis to Kaiser's Germany only to realize when it was too late(during the Fall of France) how big of a threat the Nazis really were and how evil they really were.

The lesson we learned from WW2 is that we should not wait for a regime to become the Nazis before taking action.

Most of the American intelligentsia (famously including the New York Times) and to a lesser extent the British and French throughout the 30s did in fact think that Nazis might be slightly unsavory characters but that they weren't as bad as their critics made them out to be and probably had some legitimate concerns, and that their critics were hand-wringing and being hyperbolic. Everything that's being said about Putin's Russia now.

I think a nice example of how mudance this phenomena was among the intelgientis even those who didn't consider themselves anti-semetic is this absolutely amazing Atlantic article from a collumist discussing their marriage interfaith marriage to a jew and the tension it has caused from 1939.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1939/01/i-married-a-jew/306262/

Of course we eventually come to Hitler, Ben and I. In the eyes of Ben, as in the eyes of all his people, Hitler stands for the Jewish equivalent of the Antichrist—a little, strutting monster whose sole purpose and pleasure in life is to flog, imprison, impoverish, humiliate, and plague Israel. Few history books trace the path of persecutions against the Jews as they have occurred throughout the ages. They have occurred in ancient Rome, Poland, Russia, Spain, England, and France, usually whenever Jewry becomes too numerous and too powerful, whenever it becomes, in the eyes of Gentiles, a threat, potential or actual, to Gentile supremacy. I try to tell Ben that Hitler is merely writing another page in a history that will continue so long as the status quo between Jews and Gentiles remains—a status that only the willing shoulders of both protagonists can remove.

But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. He looks upon Hitler as something malignantly unique, and it is no use trying to tell him that a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century—an expulsion that remained in strict effect until the time of Cromwell, because a hundred years hence another country will be having its Jewish problem, unless…