Documents Reveal Hidden Problems at Russia's Nuclear Powerhouse 132
An anonymous reader shares a report: As Russian troops poured into Ukraine at the start of Vladimir Putin's invasion in February last year, alarm was rising at a flagship Kremlin nuclear project in neighboring Belarus, just a short distance from the European Union's border. Engineers at Rosatom preparing a new 1,200-megawatt reactor, which was not yet connected to the power grid, to generate electricity at the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant detected a mysterious and exceedingly rare problem. Resin was seeping into the primary circuit, threatening to seize up critical components, according to internal documents of the Russian state nuclear corporation seen by Bloomberg.
Control rods and fuel assemblies risked being damaged or broken if the problem persisted when uranium atoms began fissioning. In the worst case, according to people familiar with the problem, accumulation of so-called ion-exchange resin, which regulates the purity of water flowing through plant channels and pipes, could impede reactor control, elevating the risk of a meltdown if something went wrong once it was online. So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.
Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the problem compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year. When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. "There were certain shortcomings in the construction," he said. "The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards." The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of problems, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin's war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.
Control rods and fuel assemblies risked being damaged or broken if the problem persisted when uranium atoms began fissioning. In the worst case, according to people familiar with the problem, accumulation of so-called ion-exchange resin, which regulates the purity of water flowing through plant channels and pipes, could impede reactor control, elevating the risk of a meltdown if something went wrong once it was online. So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.
Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the problem compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year. When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. "There were certain shortcomings in the construction," he said. "The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards." The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of problems, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin's war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.
I feel sorry for russians (Score:5, Insightful)
So much potential in that country destroyed by Putin and his corrupt bunch of cronies living in some "glorious" past that never really existed. If ever there was a country and population consistently ruined over the centuries by useless and/or evil leaders whether now or the communists or even the Czars then Russia is it. Whatever you may think of Xi's China, at least he's brought prosperity and is looking forwards, not backwards.
Re:I feel sorry for russians (Score:5, Insightful)
All the way back to the very beginning with Muscovy. First allying with the Golden Horde and acting as their lackeys for tax collection (and learning to fight alongside them), then using Machiavellian hybrid warfare to tear pieces off their neighbors, weakening them until they could annex them, and ultimately replacing their often rather progressive democratic institutions (relative to the timeperiod) with the highly centralized, you-only-own-anything-if-the-Tsar-lets-you system derived from the Horde. Following up with imposition of an extreme form of serfdom that at its peak was little different than chattel slavery in the US. And carrying out expansion into the territories to the east (with the exception of the Qing, who they quickly learned not to mess with) in a system of hostage-based tribute mandates on the locals to efficiently harvest their resources. Whose military was formed of people recruited Hunger Games-style, to serve out the rest of their life at the bottom ranks of the military with no hope of escape except death. A country where any subject peoples who were deemed too rebellious were ethnically cleansed via military-based depletion, deportations of locals to distant regions, and reimportation of ethnic Russians to replace them.
That doesn't mean it's a curse to always be like that. A large number of countries have dark colonial histories. Any country can overcome its past, and many largely have. But glorifying your colonial history and trying to reestablish it in the modern era over those who got away? That leads to very dark places.
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We should actually thank our lucky stars that Russia is the corrupt cesspool it is. Can you imagine what a country could do the the world economy that is sitting on pretty much all resources you could possibly want and has a fairly well educated workforce that is no stranger to hard and long work hours?
What you're looking at is basically Germany before WW2. Just with more resources than the rest of the world. Can you imagine what it would mean if they finally realize what Germany did after WW2, i.e. that wo
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Why would it be a problem? I'd sooner have an economically powerful and democratic russia run by sane people than the current fragile dictatorship run by a delusional psychopath with nuclear weapons at his disposal. Not that any of his possible immediate replacements would be any better.
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It would certainly be beneficial for the stability of the world, but would it be better for the stability of the USA?
We already felt a ripple when we had to share our "consumer goods" with China, and our overall prosperity went down because incomes became lower and prices went up because there were suddenly others that wanted those goods, from certain foods (because the Chinese no longer were satisfied with a bowl of rice but wanted a share of our crops, causing a price spike with quite a few foods) to cruc
Tame population (Score:2)
If ever there was a country and population consistently ruined over the centuries by useless and/or evil leaders whether now or the communists or even the Czars then Russia is it.
People who breed animals tell me that it takes about 10 generations to go from a wild animal to something that can be a pet. It's basically impossible to trust any wild animal, even if it's been raised in captivity as a pup, because it's still "wild". It takes about 10 generations to tame wild dogs. (Silver Fox experiment. [wikipedia.org])
Thinking about this, it occurs to me that there have been about 5 human generations (24 years old when 1st child is born) since the Russian revolution, during which time the Communist reg
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There's a major difference: animals don't usually get a say in whether they'll be tamed, but humans will migrate. The ones that stay are often the ones that were most amenable to being tamed in the first place. That's why it doesn't take ten generations.
Not every animal needs conventional taming though. A bird will imprint on its feeder as a fledgling, and can grow up believing humans are perfectly trustworthy companions, while otherwise still remaining a wild animal.
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Serfs or slaves should never do more than the minimum to keep from starving or being brutalized by the chief th
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Well, that's the problem with war. (Score:4, Interesting)
It inherently disrupts supply lines, it inevitably alters priorities, and - because a lot of people are tied up and/or die in wars - it invariably causes manpower shortages.
Worse, all those recent graduates from engineering schools that could help fix the engineering problems, all those recent graduates from physics schools that could help fix the reactor design issues - a large percentage will now be dead and no longer able to fix anything for anyone, and the rest will be suffering from such bad PTSD that they're more likely to be a liability than a help.
All that expensive schooling, all of the money, all of the lecturers' time, all of the resources expended in teaching them, also wasted. You don't get a refund on life.
The winner of the war won't matter as far as this reactor is concerned. From the standpoint of that one project, the war has robbed them of the people they need and the money they need.
There's a real possibility that they've not fixed the problems. When projects on this scale are forced to cut corners and rely on less expertise than planned, it's not unknown for them to do a "good enough" hack job. And that's really what you don't want in a reactor. Especially with a nervous public that isn't going to tolerate failures.
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Especially with a nervous public that isn't going to tolerate failures.
You can die now in Donetsk by complaining about safety. Or years in the future from a case of metastasized cancer. Your choice.
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It's the inherent problem with nuclear power. Even if your country is stable now, even if war seems far off, even if you don't think some loony populist would ever get elected like just happened in Argentina... If you are wrong any time in the next ~100 years, it could be extremely bad.
Just the threat of someone blowing up your nuclear plant would be a major national security issue.
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Bullshit
My wifes cousin served 25 years including 3 tours in iraq. He is still in therapy weekly, and loud noises set him off scared.
The reason you dont see iraq and afghanstan vets like Nam vets is because we treat their mental condition too. Help them work through it with therapy. Not say your done get the f out like we did for nam vets.
We treat PTSD as the condition it is and not abandon them to a bottle of alcohol.
Only idiot doesnt know that.
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Not having visible PTSD issues is not the same as not having PTSD. You cannot extrapolate from the worst case to diagnose others. I don't care where you served, you aren't medically qualified and your assumption that symptoms have to be extreme to matter shows why you could never qualify.
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Your cutoff point was when a person was self-medicating with booze and pills.
The cutoff point in my earlier post was when the person did not provide a net benefit in a highly sensitive, highly delicate engineering operation such as a nuclear reactor, where a single mistake, a single pause, a single misread, the slightest bit of inattentiveness or the slightest gap in situational awareness has the potential to devastate multiple countries for several years.
That's nowhere close to the booze and pills stage. I
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Most returning soldiers get on with their lives, but please don't discount or disregard the suffering of those that come back with severe mental scars. Cliches are real, and common, by definition.
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So the percentage of 'Nam vets with PTSD is the second lowest of all wars going back to WW II/Korea. Why, then, are almost all of the vets shown on TV or in movies with PTSD from 'Nam?
Blame Rambo.
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But, the difference may be a lack of diagnosis, not actual differences in rate. PTSD was not added to the DSM as a diagnostic category until 1980.
Or:
NOTE: The data in this table is from Veterans alive at the time of the study. As such, it does not include Veterans in any service area who have died and may have had PTSD.
...the fact that only surviving servicemen are included in the tally may make a difference, if the ones with PTSD died earlier.
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Not all PTSD is severe. Most of it isn't. Most PTSD will have no significant or debilitating effects. The distribution of symptom severity is hard to say, but the two statistical distributions that seem good candidates would be Poisson or Normal. So either mold symptoms will be most common or moderate ones will be.
I know of no commonly used statistical distribution that would mean the highest frequency would be with the most severe. It's not a scenario that happens often.
So a person can very easily have PTS
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Getting on with your life has zero to do with whether you have PTSD. I have PTSD but am able to hold a steady job and function in the world. You don't get to claim only the worst cases count.
Anecdotal evidence also doesn't rank highly, even in psychology. Your claim to not have PTSD does not mean you get to extrapolate that to anyone else.
And all you have is a claim. Unless you're a qualified psychologist, you don't get to diagnose even yourself.
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I posted the numbers from the VA above, but they do not include the deceased. so the numbers may be scewed, but they show the highest rates of PTSD occurrence in the more recent wars.
This also may be explained by more acceptance of counseling with less fear of being stuck in a looney bin, with soldiers from the earlier wars just "sucking it up" as the primary way to deal with it
Your insistence that you are unaffected makes one wonder if you are doing something like that
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Weak Link (Score:3)
The article tries to link the failures at a nuclear plant with
the Ukranian war.
It fails.
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Maybe... (Score:2)
"...including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies,..."
Maybe they should have had Ukraine build the power plant...
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You are half-joking, but most examples of Soviet engineering going right had significant Ukrainian participation, and/or happened in Ukraine. It's a shame Russia is so keen on destroying all signs that they used to be at least occasionally competent.
Oooh, nice... (Score:2)
That device was a sub-10MWth prototype which blew a radioactive plume into the valley but realistically had minimal off-site consequences.
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I have a friend who's a former nuclear safety engineer in Finland, who in his career worked with nuclear engineers in various former Soviet states. He had very good things to say about the Ukrainians he worked with, for example. But very much not good things about a lot of the Russians. He felt their safety culture was broken.
Re:Safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Safety culture always ends up broken under regimes where the guy aware of a problem needs to weigh his OWN safety against the safety of the stuff he's working with. When you are at risk of punishment for pointing out a flaw you stop pointing out, then even seeing the flaws - all in your own interest of survival.
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Safety culture always ends up broken under regimes where the guy aware of a problem needs to weigh his OWN safety against the safety of the stuff he's working with. When you are at risk of punishment for pointing out a flaw you stop pointing out, then even seeing the flaws - all in your own interest of survival.
Agreed. Pointing out an issue that pushes back deadlines sucks in the best of corporate cultures.
Pointing out such an issue in autocratic/fascist Russia? Far safer to do as little as possible and hope that someone else becomes the fall guy if something bad happens.
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Safety culture always ends up broken under regimes where the guy aware of a problem needs to weigh his OWN safety against the safety of the stuff he's working with. When you are at risk of punishment for pointing out a flaw you stop pointing out, then even seeing the flaws - all in your own interest of survival.
Agreed. Pointing out an issue that pushes back deadlines sucks in the best of corporate cultures.
Pointing out such an issue in autocratic/fascist Russia? Far safer to do as little as possible and hope that someone else becomes the fall guy if something bad happens.
Still better is to deliberately position someone else to become the fall guy....
You can't have public safety without individual safety, including psychological safety. Those who say otherwise are kidding themselves.
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What safety culture?
To have a safety culture, first and foremost you need a culture where safety matters. That entails a requirement for accountability. In a regime where corruption runs rampart, such a thing is nonexistent.
And if nobody is responsible for embezzlement, negligence and incompetence, why would anyone do anything about it?
Re:The hopeless resistence (Score:5, Informative)
Dang hopeless resistance that, without any modern airpower, has retaken half the conquered territory and left Russia so desperate in scrounging for materiel that they're relying on over-half-a-century-old artillery shells from North Korea, the same terrible-quality ones used in the bombardment of Yeonpyeong, and has seen the return of the friggin' T-54 to combat. What's next, rolling into combat on Iosif Stalin tanks? Cavalry charges? Spear throwers?
Russia's Soviet-relic military yards are vast, but they're not limitless, and they've been burning through them damned quickly, at a rate that's only been accelerating, with Putin desperate to show some sort of meaningful battlefield progress before the "election".
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... and has seen the return of the friggin' T-54 to combat.
It may be an old design but the T-54 looks a lot like the new M-10 Booker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At the time the T-54 was new it may have been considered a main battle tank but today it can fit the role of an infantry support self propelled artillery. The USA has kept the old M48/M60 Patton in this infantry support role for a long time because of the utility of what might be more of a light or medium tank. The T-54 might not even be expected to move while in bat
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Nailed it: This is pretty much the only role that something that obsolete can usefully fulfill. At this point, the Russians are basically doing only two things with their tanks - this (as lousy artillery) and as lightning raiders, because any attempt to use them as armor is supposed to be used accomplishes nothing but getting them torn to shreds like tinsel paper by AP munitions.
If it weren't for the
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The problem that Ukraine has is that Russia has mined much of their country. The summer offensive had to be abandoned because they couldn't progress through minefields.
Forcing Russia out is going to be incredibly hard, unless someone invents a very effective mine clearing tool. The current stuff is unreliable and small scale. They need to clear large areas, while attack by defending Russian forces.
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Sure, but doing that for kilometre after kilometre, while under attack from Russians... And then you only have a narrow path that you must follow, making basic stuff like outflanking the enemy impossible.
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Dang hopeless resistance that, without any modern airpower, has retaken half the conquered territory and left Russia so desperate in scrounging for materiel that they're relying on over-half-a-century-old artillery shells from North Korea, the same terrible-quality ones used in the bombardment of Yeonpyeong, and has seen the return of the friggin' T-54 to combat. What's next, rolling into combat on Iosif Stalin tanks? Cavalry charges? Spear throwers?
Russia's Soviet-relic military yards are vast, but they're not limitless, and they've been burning through them damned quickly, at a rate that's only been accelerating, with Putin desperate to show some sort of meaningful battlefield progress before the "election".
They're way ahead of you Broski. Russia reactivated their remaining T10 tanks last year (IS10's were renamed T10's after the death of Stalin). I think they're using them mostly as static defences.
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The US has spent 5% of it's DoD budget on Ukraine.
FIVE percent.
And that's only one NATO country. The EU has put in more than the US has. So clearly while not inexhaustible, having the backing of something like 60% of the world's GDP against Russia's ~6% clearly helps.
And I forgot that the authoritarian dictator cunt that loves to saber rattle about nuclear weapons "have proven without any doubt that Russia poses ZERO threat to the United States." Does threats to countries that we've been allied with for
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Russia has fucked th
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The only reason the US is spending a dime is so that the various defense companies can sell us a bunch of new replacement munitions.
Not the only reason (as you yourself went on to point out in the very next sentence), but that is, in fact, a good reason!
The US' military production capacity is at a very low ebb, frighteningly so given the increased belligerence of China -- which, unlike Russia, is actually a significant threat to the US. We have stockpiles of a lot of stuff, but a lot of it is pretty old stuff, and even if it weren't the stockpiles aren't large enough to carry us until we can restart manufacturing in the event of a sig
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Logistical warfare (Score:5, Interesting)
The hopeless resistance in Ukraine endangers the entire world.
Two things of note: Ukranian hackers have destroyed thousands of servers [therecord.media] managing the Russian tax service, and Ukrainian saboteurs blew up two freight trains [aljazeera.com] in southern Siberia.
Wars are won by attacking infrastructure, and (typically) not by head-to-head conflict of armies. This has been known forever - it's in "The Art of War" and the tactic was used by Belisarius [wikipedia.org] during the Byzantine period.
The tax service hack might cripple Russia's ability to get income from the population, or at least add a fair bit of friction to that process.
The railroad thing is interesting because it's one of the few ways for Russia to trade with China and North Korea. It's thousands of miles away from the battlefront (and Moscow), it happened in a tunnel, and ignited a train carrying fuel. The second train blew up on a bridge, which was the reroute track for the 1st train route.
Fixing a railroad is straightforward, but inside a tunnel is more challenging, and fixing a bridge is even more challenging. Most of the people who have the skillset in Russia are in retirement, most of the people who would *do* the repair have been drafted into the war effort, and both attacks happened in the middle of nowhere where there aren't a lot of people (and thus available labor and support for an encampment).
Russia is now seriously cut off from China and N. Korea. This is interesting because N. Korea was supplying Russia munitions for the war.
Time will tell if this has any effect but I keep being surprised at how long Russia keeps holding out in the face of continuous setbacks like this.
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Cute.
You know, it's kinda sad to see that even their propaganda ain't what it used to be. You know, Russian propaganda at least was until very recently really good. It sometimes really took effort to tell bullshit from reality. But what you're pushing out right now, that just reeks of the last twitches of a corpse.
Re:The hopeless resistence (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that Russia is trying to expand their backyard. Sooner or later you will be in it just by waiting and doing nothing.
Re:The hopeless resistence (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember that Russia is trying to expand their backyard. Sooner or later you will be in it just by waiting and doing nothing.
More to the point, NATO still remembers what happened the last time Europe adopted a policy of appeasement [wikipedia.org]. They won't make the same mistake twice.
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The people of the world need to inform America's Trump supporters and its pro-Putin shills that Putin is the enemy. Unfortunately, this has a prerequisite of convincing mostly lower IQ Americans that authoritarianism and xenophobia are morally repugnant.
Not sure how to fix that. The very fact that bullies like Giuliani, Trump, etc. get elected is baffling to me, but for some reason, a lot of Americans equate strong leadership with being an a**hole. It's the last vestige of paddlin' culture, I guess.
In the face of senators bribed with gold bars and the election of alt-right wingnuts, there is an unmet need for PACs and lobbyists to buy politicians to act on behalf of the interests of America and all Americans who aren't billionaires.
Not going to happen. The billionaires are the ones who can afford to fund PACs. The only way to fix American politics is to eliminate private campaign funding entirely, and instead require you to get a certain number of signatures, then take money only from
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Lebensraum.
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And there we have it. All you're saying is "Fuck you, got mine".
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Apparently, this is the new conservatism. Unless it's Israel, in which case the evangelical wing considers that the 51st state.
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There are still a few non-NATO countries that Putin can use as a buffer zone between himself and the West. Fewer now that his intentions have been revealed.
Re:The hopeless resistence (Score:5, Insightful)
So we should just throw an ally under the bus because it's more politically convenient?
What do you think happens to our ability to make other strategic partnerships when the prospective partner sees that we won't be standing with them if the going gets tough because the next election features a Kremlin puppet backed by a bunch of spineless shitbags that are more concerned with keeping their twice-impeached, four-time-felony-indicted party leader happy then they are with any of the following:
- doing the morally and ethically right thing by standing with an ally who is trying to protect themselves against a genocidal war of conquest from a dictatorial cunt neighbor
- doing the fiscally right thing (we spent $0.05 per dollar of our DoD budget on completely degrading the Russian military to the point of them having to buy weapons from North Korea and Iran, with exactly zero American lives lost)
- doing what their constituents want (there is still majority support for helping Ukraine, just not unlimited financial support, which is the correct choice)
- doing what is good for the US economy (over 90% of this Ukraine aid stays right here in the US to buy US-made weapons and munitions, because ours are the best)
It would seem the Kremlin troll army has it's gaze on Slashdot this morning with all the anonymous appeasement commentary. Better step your game up, or you're in the next conscription draft an on a bus to Donbas, comrade.
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I do suspect that much of the right wing disdain for Ukraine comes entirely from the Dear Orange Leader who tried to make a perfect phone call and was unable to get manufactured evidence for campaign purposes from Zhelenskyy. So Trump hates Ukraine, therefore all loyal followers must also hate Ukraine.
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Back when the US pulled out of Vietnam, we promised to support the south if the north invaded again. When they did, congress reneged on their promise and left the south hanging in the wind. Later, when the Taliban overran Afghanistan, the US cut and ran. Again. Both routs were the direct responsibility of Joe Biden. How much crede
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Wait... Biden was responsible for the fallout south Vietnam? As far as Afghanistan, Trump was the one who made a "deal" with the Taliban to withdraw troops; Biden was stuck having to abide by that treaty, by law.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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https://historynewsnetwork.org... [historynewsnetwork.org]
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Leaving Vietnam [Re:The hopeless resistence] (Score:2)
What do you think happens to our ability to make other strategic partnerships when the prospective partner sees that we won't be standing with them if the going gets tough?
Back when the US pulled out of Vietnam, we promised to support the south if the north invaded again. When they did, congress reneged on their promise and left the south hanging in the wind.
...Both routs were the direct responsibility of Joe Biden.
Say what???
The US abandoned South Vietnam when Gerald Ford was in office. I'm old enough to remember the TV News showing the last helicopters leaving Saigon as the North Vietnamese closed in.
... Later, when the Taliban overran Afghanistan, the US cut and ran.
It was Donald Trump who pulled the US out of Afghanistan. Here's Trump, in his own words [rev.com] (July 2021): "And as you know, I started the move out of Afghanistan. I think it was impossible for him to stop it.'
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Yes, Ford was in office. However, it was Congress that decided not to honor our commitment, and it was Senator Biden who was responsible for that.
You think the president had nothing to do with withdrawing from Vietnam, and the junior senator from Delaware, his first term in office, "was responsible for it"?
First term senators simply don't have that much power, sorry. And first-term Senators most certainly aren't put in charge of deciding whether to withdraw from supporting Vietnam (or any other country). That's not the way American politics works.
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It's amazing how during Ford's presidency it wasn't the president's responsibility, but during Biden's presidency it was the president's responsibility. What a crazy coincidence.
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I didn't say he made the decision, but that he got enough other congressmen to vote against funding any supply efforts to stop it,
He was a freshman senator. He did not have any power to "get other congressmen" to do anything.
(by the way, here in the US we use the word "congressmen" to mean members of the House of Representatives. Biden was a Senator; he was never a congressman.)
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So you're saying that Biden, who was a freshman Senator in 1975 when Saigon fell, somehow set US foreign policy?
Are you sure about that? Do you know what committee assignments he had, which could accomplish such a thing? And how did a freshman Senator from Delaware whip all the votes single-handedly to create that outcome, and manage to override Gerald Ford's veto power?
Do you have any evidence at all to back up what you're saying there? You had better produce some, because the other thing you point to i
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This all feels way too much like pre WWI isolationism. Turtling was never that good for the economy. Granted, at times the Us went too far in defense of some countries governments, but it feels like there's a backlash by some wanting a full withdrawal from planet Earth. I agree that the cost here is pretty small overall, and it generates economic activity in the US (interestingly, Russia's econmy is somewhat propped up by its own internal military spending).
It's fine that the Kremlin focuses it's eyes on
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Re: The hopeless resistence (Score:2)
Even if your narrative were correct, and it is not, at best it would show Putin to be a spectacular dipshit for thinking he would get what he wants from China. How did those Chinese tires work out? Stuck in the mud, you say?
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Neville Chamberlain, is that you?
Sorry, the era of appeasing dictatorial cunts that invade their neighbors expired about 80 years ago. No rubles for you today, comrade.
Re:The hopeless resistence (Score:4, Informative)
Funny thing, it was Russia who started the war. Funny thing, it's Russia who keeps saying it can't see a way to stop the war.
Willing to fight to last Ukrainian and probably lining your pockets.
Name one country which wouldn't fight to its last to defend itself. If memory serves, Russia lost millions of people fighting Germany. Why didn't they just give up rather than lose all those people?
At the cost of your fellow citizens and the blood of the typical Ukrainian family.
Again, it was Russia who started the war. If you're so concerned about the lives of Ukrainian families then perhaps you should tell the Muscovite Midget to get out of Ukraine. What's funny is you don't seem to care about the hundreds of thousands of Russians who have been killed or injured, such as those lost when the Moskva was sunk.
FUCK YOU - you are NEARLY as responsible for the deaths there are Putin is.
Nope, this all falls on the Muscovite. None of this would happening if he didn't start the war.
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Name one country which wouldn't fight to its last to defend itself.
Precisely. If people gave in on defending their nations then where does that end? You think they won't invade individual homes too? It is because such land grabbing is unlikely to stop that Ukraine is getting so many weapons from around the world. It is because Poland is right on the border of this all that they are arming themselves to the teeth. Poland has to know that they'd be next if Ukraine falls. The only thing holding everyone back is the NATO treaties. I suspect that if there wasn't this mut
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Putin could do this AND remain in power. He has no real opposition. Russia loses nothing except some face in the world, but it already lost face greatly just by going in originally, and further by being so inept. Putin loses some popularity, yes, but he won't lose his rigged election and he will continue to collect his dues from his puppet oligarchs. It won't be as much money, but that economic engine has been hurt and is only being propped up by oil sales and taxes on internal military industries.
Right
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It's also charmingly naive (by which I mean disgusting) how we're supposed to sell out Ukraine, as if Russian Hitler has not openly admitted that he has no intention of stopping if he's allowed to invade and annex Ukraine.
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Yeah, not wanting to incentivize autocrats to invade their neighbors by standing by and letting it happen is exactly the same as being "another typical war monger."
Are you naturally that stupid, or do you have to practice it through false equivalence arguments?
I'd rather the Ukraine war never happened - does that sound like "another typical war monger" to you? However, since a fascist kleptocratic dictatorial cunt couldn't be bothered to ask my opinion first and decided to start the war regardless of my de
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What money? The money already spent during the 80s and 90s for the ancient weapons they now get to send over to Ukraine?
That Ukraine war is by some margin and then some the best that could have happened to NATO. Quite frankly, the longer I watch this train wreck, the more I wonder whether Putin is a Western mole. Not only does the Russian army get trashed beyond repair and beyond its capability to prop up the regime, NATO gets to scuttle its obsolete technology (that is really starting to pile up, the stock
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You missed the best part. Not only do we get to use up our old stockpiles, we get to test firsthand, in real time, how our newest stuff does or does not work, and can make modifications to improve the weaponry. It's the greatest sales presentation ever!
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Well, not the latest because ever since the debacle with the Shah and Persia, where that wuss decided to beat it after we delivered kick-ass tech to him and hand it over to that Ayatollah (we were just damn lucky that Saddam was around the corner and was so easy to convince to throw his people against them), we don't deliver our bleeding-edge tech to a non-NATO country, or at least not one where we don't have enough army bases to ensure that they will do as we say.
But hey, even our second-line equipment is
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Hell, we don't even share our latest tech with our closest allies. Japan wanted in on the F-22 back in the day. The answer was, and still is, a hard no. Hell, not even the UK, Canada, or Australia were allowed to buy the F-22.
But we'll go ahead and sell the F-35 to pretty much anybody who asks. Kind of makes one wonder just what we've never been told about the F-22's capabilities (And just what the F-35 fanboys *don't* know about the F-22.) that justifies keeping it to ourselves but sharing the newer, s
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Japan wanted in on the F-22 back in the day. The answer was, and still is, a hard no.
I recall the answer was a maybe. UK and Canada wasn't going to get the F-22 but there was some consideration that Japan might.
The F-22 is old enough now, and had such a short production run, that it might see an early retirement. The F-35 has had most of the bugs shaken out and had a few upgrades that it could fill most roles the F-22 would be put to use to do. It's not that the F-22 is bad, it is a top notch weapon that has no match. The problem is that things changed so much since the F-22 was first c
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> I recall the answer was a maybe
It really is a hard no. Congress actually passed legislation specifically forbidding the F-22 and its technology from being exported; something they declined to do for the F-35. And that law is still in effect to this day. Now... whether that dimwitted pack of non-engineers was actually qualified to evaluate the technologys and make intelligent and informed decisions on the subject is another matter, of course.
But laws also don't just pop up out of thin air. And you c
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Except Ukraine is not Russia's backyard. It's Ukraine's front yard. They are in the same neighbourhood, but they're not in the same HOA. Russia is the author of all of its own grief at this point.
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It would be best for Europe if we just let the globally inconsequential Germany annex the Sudetenland.
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