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Ukraine: WAR Huh - What Is It Good For Absorootly Nothing

cb1111

Newbie
Location
Virginia, USA
What the hell, here is some more

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U.S. and Turkish officials discuss Ukraine and NATO in unannounced meeting (msn.com)

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EU countries summon Russian ambassadors in a coordinated manner (msn.com)


Yeah I was thinking about what they did to the German civilians at the end of ww2. Some things never change. Fucking war.
Funny you say that. My mom just wrote an op-ed this weekend. Here's the draft:

Two months ago, I had my 98th birthday. I was 14 when Hitler annexed Austria and 20 when Soviet troops entered Vienna. I had been an “afterthought” and my parents were elderly, though that didn’t save my father from being drafted and, no longer fit for combat, being posted as a guard on munitions trains.

The conflict in Ukraine and the stories of torture, mass graves, looting and wanton brutality perpetrated by Russian soldiers, bring back dark memories. My mother and I spent the war years in Vienna and witnessed the entry of Russian troops and their vicious conduct. In Ukraine, I see that nothing has changed. Human Rights Watch has documented rape, including of children.

In post-war Vienna, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when the real liberators – the Americans, British and French troops – finally arrived, to rule and administer the city jointly. The soldiers of those three nations behaved with discipline and even with some kindness towards the exhausted, half-starved civilian population that – with the men either dead or in prisoner of war camps or still making their way slowly back from distant front lines - consisted almost exclusively of old people, women and children.

The agreement among the Allies had been that they would enter and occupy Vienna together. Whichever army got there first, was to wait at the outskirts. But the Russians broke that agreement and unleashed a reign of terror. The German soldiers had fled their barracks and abandoned Vienna, and there was no resistance to the incoming troops. Later, when the British and French and especially, the Americans arrived, they divided the city’s districts among themselves and began to create an orderly system of distributing food to the half-starved populace. But until those three armies brought order and civilization, we were at the mercy of barbarism. The Russian soldiers were savages, and most seemed to come from backward rural areas and have little education. For example, they thought the brass doorknobs standard in Viennese homes at the time, were solid gold, and gleefully ripped them off the doors, believing themselves to be amassing spectacular treasure. Any unfortunate person who encountered them on the street had to hand over their watch and wedding ring. If the ring couldn’t easily be removed, they cut it off along with the finger. They were fascinated by pianos, which they would haul out of peoples’ homes, without giving any thought to how they would transport them home to their distant village. You could see piles of pianos abandoned on street corners for weeks, until the elements gradually destroyed them.

But worst was their propensity for rape. They would enter apartment buildings and go door to door in search of young women, dragging them away and forcing them into trucks to be gang-raped by them and their friends. Every night, from the streets below we heard their latest captives, screaming vainly for someone to rescue them; no one could. If you even just looked out the window, the soldiers would shoot at you.

We owned a particular kind of sofa bed where the mattress could be raised to reveal a narrow storage compartment below it, for blankets and such. I spent many hours in that compartment. The concierge of our apartment building was from Eastern Europe and spoke Russian. Whenever soldiers came into the building, she would “converse” with them in her loudest voice, to warn us. My mother would hastily stash me away in the storage drawer, then seat herself on it looking as elderly and feeble as she could manage. Another trick that sometimes worked was to place statues of saints in very prominent positions in your foyer. Some Viennese reported that the soldiers were apparently religious, or maybe just superstitious, and would cross themselves and turn back if they saw a holy statue “watching” them.

The horrendous brutality of the Russian soldiers was not much discussed in the years following. The post-war conditions were so dire and the work of rebuilding so massive, that most of us - including the victims, if they survived – were focused on recovering and rebuilding. Later, historians would estimate the number of German women raped by Russian soldiers as “likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.” [1] They found that the vast majority of rapes went to the account of the Russian soldiers, which certainly matches my recollections. When I hear Putin talk about how the Europeans experienced the Russians as “brotherly liberators”, I can only shake my head. That was a sentiment we felt towards the British, French and American soldiers, who were indeed welcomed, and who behaved with discipline and generosity towards exhausted, war-weary and half-starved civilians.

But why were, and are, Russians so prone to steal, murder, pillage and rape? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the answer lies with their leadership and their culture. War is a time of chaos. Soldiers must be trained and ordered to transgress the bounds of normal behavior and be willing to kill. Without proper leadership and firm boundaries, other moral barriers can fall as well. In the armies of the other Allied nations, pillage and rape were not permitted and certainly were not condoned. A soldier who crossed that line could find himself before a court martial. There were even a few death sentences handed down, a deterrent to others who may have contemplated a similar transgression. Nor did the prevailing group culture support barbaric conduct. My husband, a GI I met when we broke the lesser rule against “fraternizing with the enemy” – told me that in the final days of the war, his unit regularly encountered lone young German soldiers who surrendered to them. They caught one of their fellow soldiers marching a young prisoner into the forest with the intention of shooting him, stopped him by force, and after that kept a close watch on him. You didn’t shoot someone who had laid down his arms. But in the Soviet army, it was – and clearly still is – a different story. Their officers evidently turn a blind eye, or even encourage, the terrorizing of civilians. And among the soldiers, looting and rape, abuse and murder are group sports, not the rare outlier by individual sociopaths.


[1] Norman M., Naimark, Norman M. (1995). The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge: Belknap Press. p. 70.
 

Corprin

Autocross Champion
Location
Magrathea
Car(s)
A car
A disciplined and professional military stands apart from what the Russians, and others, pull.

My anecdotal example:

It was Baghdad, mid 2004, and still very much a war. We went to a Iraqi Police (IP) station on the outskirts of the city to meet with some locals for reasons and things. When we arrived our interpreter overheard some of the IPs discussing one of the soldiers assigned to that site and something he’d done. Our interpreter gave us the skinny and over three days and lots of chai, we found the whole story.

This E6 was not particularly liked by the IPs, nor his own squad. He had been abusive to his troops. We were interested in him forcing a young E3 to kill two puppies the squad leader had gravely wounded in a failed attempt to kill them. The E6 had berated the soldier and forced him into killing the puppies through direct orders, coercion, and threats. On the third day we were told by one IP the E6 had also been interrogating detainees, outside his authority, using every cliche tactic from bad war movies. Pistol to the head, threatening to rape/kill family, threats to ship to GTMO, and “how we treated your people at Abu Ghraib.” He had done this to at least three detainees that we could corroborate. This guy was a real pice of shit.

After we cleared the IP station that evening we met CID at the FOB and handed our findings to them. They thumbed through the packet, looked over and asked his company commander where he was. Us, the CO, 1SG, LT, PSG and CID walked into the chow hall and apprehended him. Reading his rights and charges loud enough for everyone to hear… to be a lesson. He was on the next thing smoking out of Iraq.

72 months of confinement later and this newly minted E1 was bumping the streets of Tacoma, WA with his fresh bad conduct discharge, all born of his plea.

Three days of hearing about a turd, and hours after hearing of detainee abuse, this MF was on his way to a cell in the states. They didn’t fuck around with it and let everyone know it wasn’t tolerated. Was a lasting memory about how fast the wheels will turn when someone crosses the line under professional leadership.

What I’ve seen in Ukraine since February has been very telling. Just hope we can keep better track of their toys when they implode as a nation because of all this.
 

Superfreak

Autocross Champion
Location
Denver
Car(s)
‘19 M2C, ‘05 Taco
What the hell, here is some more

Russia: Protests against Putin's mobilization | Watch (msn.com)

Putin’s Claims to Donetsk Are News To Some Residents of Newly-Liberated Lyman (msn.com)

Pentagon chief warns ‘no checks on Mr. Putin’ amid nuclear threats (msn.com)

Ukrainian Forces Are Advancing In Southern Ukraine (msn.com)

Elon Musk Says Russia and Ukraine Must Do One Thing for Peace (msn.com)

Russian Army at 'Breaking Point' After Putin's Lyman Defeat: Lt. General (msn.com)

Zelenskiy says Ukraine forces liberated Arkhanhelske, Myrolyubivka in Kherson region (msn.com)

U.S. and Turkish officials discuss Ukraine and NATO in unannounced meeting (msn.com)

US meets with skeptical Turkey over Finland, Sweden NATO accession (msn.com)

Another Defeat in Ukraine Undermines Putin’s ‘Forever’ Goals (msn.com)

Chief Putin Critic Clinches Key Election Victory in Latvia (msn.com)

Putin bound to ‘escalate’ war as Russia continues to lose, prominent Kremlin critic says (msn.com)

EU countries summon Russian ambassadors in a coordinated manner (msn.com)



Funny you say that. My mom just wrote an op-ed this weekend. Here's the draft:

Two months ago, I had my 98th birthday. I was 14 when Hitler annexed Austria and 20 when Soviet troops entered Vienna. I had been an “afterthought” and my parents were elderly, though that didn’t save my father from being drafted and, no longer fit for combat, being posted as a guard on munitions trains.

The conflict in Ukraine and the stories of torture, mass graves, looting and wanton brutality perpetrated by Russian soldiers, bring back dark memories. My mother and I spent the war years in Vienna and witnessed the entry of Russian troops and their vicious conduct. In Ukraine, I see that nothing has changed. Human Rights Watch has documented rape, including of children.

In post-war Vienna, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when the real liberators – the Americans, British and French troops – finally arrived, to rule and administer the city jointly. The soldiers of those three nations behaved with discipline and even with some kindness towards the exhausted, half-starved civilian population that – with the men either dead or in prisoner of war camps or still making their way slowly back from distant front lines - consisted almost exclusively of old people, women and children.

The agreement among the Allies had been that they would enter and occupy Vienna together. Whichever army got there first, was to wait at the outskirts. But the Russians broke that agreement and unleashed a reign of terror. The German soldiers had fled their barracks and abandoned Vienna, and there was no resistance to the incoming troops. Later, when the British and French and especially, the Americans arrived, they divided the city’s districts among themselves and began to create an orderly system of distributing food to the half-starved populace. But until those three armies brought order and civilization, we were at the mercy of barbarism. The Russian soldiers were savages, and most seemed to come from backward rural areas and have little education. For example, they thought the brass doorknobs standard in Viennese homes at the time, were solid gold, and gleefully ripped them off the doors, believing themselves to be amassing spectacular treasure. Any unfortunate person who encountered them on the street had to hand over their watch and wedding ring. If the ring couldn’t easily be removed, they cut it off along with the finger. They were fascinated by pianos, which they would haul out of peoples’ homes, without giving any thought to how they would transport them home to their distant village. You could see piles of pianos abandoned on street corners for weeks, until the elements gradually destroyed them.

But worst was their propensity for rape. They would enter apartment buildings and go door to door in search of young women, dragging them away and forcing them into trucks to be gang-raped by them and their friends. Every night, from the streets below we heard their latest captives, screaming vainly for someone to rescue them; no one could. If you even just looked out the window, the soldiers would shoot at you.

We owned a particular kind of sofa bed where the mattress could be raised to reveal a narrow storage compartment below it, for blankets and such. I spent many hours in that compartment. The concierge of our apartment building was from Eastern Europe and spoke Russian. Whenever soldiers came into the building, she would “converse” with them in her loudest voice, to warn us. My mother would hastily stash me away in the storage drawer, then seat herself on it looking as elderly and feeble as she could manage. Another trick that sometimes worked was to place statues of saints in very prominent positions in your foyer. Some Viennese reported that the soldiers were apparently religious, or maybe just superstitious, and would cross themselves and turn back if they saw a holy statue “watching” them.

The horrendous brutality of the Russian soldiers was not much discussed in the years following. The post-war conditions were so dire and the work of rebuilding so massive, that most of us - including the victims, if they survived – were focused on recovering and rebuilding. Later, historians would estimate the number of German women raped by Russian soldiers as “likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.” [1] They found that the vast majority of rapes went to the account of the Russian soldiers, which certainly matches my recollections. When I hear Putin talk about how the Europeans experienced the Russians as “brotherly liberators”, I can only shake my head. That was a sentiment we felt towards the British, French and American soldiers, who were indeed welcomed, and who behaved with discipline and generosity towards exhausted, war-weary and half-starved civilians.

But why were, and are, Russians so prone to steal, murder, pillage and rape? I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the answer lies with their leadership and their culture. War is a time of chaos. Soldiers must be trained and ordered to transgress the bounds of normal behavior and be willing to kill. Without proper leadership and firm boundaries, other moral barriers can fall as well. In the armies of the other Allied nations, pillage and rape were not permitted and certainly were not condoned. A soldier who crossed that line could find himself before a court martial. There were even a few death sentences handed down, a deterrent to others who may have contemplated a similar transgression. Nor did the prevailing group culture support barbaric conduct. My husband, a GI I met when we broke the lesser rule against “fraternizing with the enemy” – told me that in the final days of the war, his unit regularly encountered lone young German soldiers who surrendered to them. They caught one of their fellow soldiers marching a young prisoner into the forest with the intention of shooting him, stopped him by force, and after that kept a close watch on him. You didn’t shoot someone who had laid down his arms. But in the Soviet army, it was – and clearly still is – a different story. Their officers evidently turn a blind eye, or even encourage, the terrorizing of civilians. And among the soldiers, looting and rape, abuse and murder are group sports, not the rare outlier by individual sociopaths.


[1] Norman M., Naimark, Norman M. (1995). The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge: Belknap Press. p. 70.
Well thought out and written. I had been reading the cited reference just a short time ago and it’s a staggering number. Pretty cool that your mom writes and is speaking out. We all need to hear those that have gone through this before.
 

cb1111

Newbie
Location
Virginia, USA
Well thought out and written. I had been reading the cited reference just a short time ago and it’s a staggering number. Pretty cool that your mom writes and is speaking out. We all need to hear those that have gone through this before.
Yeah, not bad for a 98 year old - tapping away on her iPad. I want to be like her when I'm like 70....
 

cb1111

Newbie
Location
Virginia, USA
A disciplined and professional military stands apart from what the Russians, and others, pull.

My anecdotal example:

It was Baghdad, mid 2004, and still very much a war. We went to a Iraqi Police (IP) station on the outskirts of the city to meet with some locals for reasons and things. When we arrived our interpreter overheard some of the IPs discussing one of the soldiers assigned to that site and something he’d done. Our interpreter gave us the skinny and over three days and lots of chai, we found the whole story.

This E6 was not particularly liked by the IPs, nor his own squad. He had been abusive to his troops. We were interested in him forcing a young E3 to kill two puppies the squad leader had gravely wounded in a failed attempt to kill them. The E6 had berated the soldier and forced him into killing the puppies through direct orders, coercion, and threats. On the third day we were told by one IP the E6 had also been interrogating detainees, outside his authority, using every cliche tactic from bad war movies. Pistol to the head, threatening to rape/kill family, threats to ship to GTMO, and “how we treated your people at Abu Ghraib.” He had done this to at least three detainees that we could corroborate. This guy was a real pice of shit.

After we cleared the IP station that evening we met CID at the FOB and handed our findings to them. They thumbed through the packet, looked over and asked his company commander where he was. Us, the CO, 1SG, LT, PSG and CID walked into the chow hall and apprehended him. Reading his rights and charges loud enough for everyone to hear… to be a lesson. He was on the next thing smoking out of Iraq.

72 months of confinement later and this newly minted E1 was bumping the streets of Tacoma, WA with his fresh bad conduct discharge, all born of his plea.

Three days of hearing about a turd, and hours after hearing of detainee abuse, this MF was on his way to a cell in the states. They didn’t fuck around with it and let everyone know it wasn’t tolerated. Was a lasting memory about how fast the wheels will turn when someone crosses the line under professional leadership.

What I’ve seen in Ukraine since February has been very telling. Just hope we can keep better track of their toys when they implode as a nation because of all this.
Yes, that's the thing that many don't understand.

I wonder how professional that manual laborer from outback Siberia is after his one week of military training.
 

cb1111

Newbie
Location
Virginia, USA
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1664847490777.png
 

cb1111

Newbie
Location
Virginia, USA
1664926505838.png


As Ukrainian Forces Advance, West Plays Down Threat From Russian Nuclear Weapons (msn.com)

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India's words are anti-war, but New Delhi's actions are propping up Putin's regime (msn.com)

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/othe...sedgntp&cvid=76929559279640219651951e3e973ba1
 
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GTIfan99

Autocross Champion
Location
FL
Living in an alternate universe is more like it. They should all go volunteer for Putin's folly.

They're cowards, they won't put skin in the game, just incite others.
 

dtfd

Autocross Champion
Location
Massachusetts
Car(s)
MK7.5 GTI
Idk if you guys noticed it but with z being gone last week that thread actually got pushed to the second page. It would disappear without the constant twitter links from one person keeping it going.
 
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