How far will Putin’s folly go?
Russia ‘losing 6,000 more troops in Ukraine each month than it can recruit’
The Guardian
I’m to the left of Marx and aggressively anti-American, but I’m no Putin fanboy.
Putin’s cataursophic miscalculation when invading the Ukraine has seen 400 000 dead and 1 million wounded.
NO Democracy could lose 1.4million in dead and wounded and not have the Government kicked out, Russia is effectively a dictatorship masquerading as democratic meaning Putin can keep feeding his own people into the mincer of war without any groundswell movement against him.
The only threat he really faces is from his own inner circle turning on him as the war worsens and as the economy turns.
The Ukraine’s capacity to hit Russia far from the frontlines with missiles sourced from the West is a dangerous friction point that is driving concerns that Russia might manufacture a new front with NATO. CIA boss John Ratcliffe visiting Moscow to warn Russia not to attempt that is deeply concerning.
An increasingly desperate Putin twisting in the wind from his inability to defeat the Ukraine and seize their territory risks destabilising things even further.
How far will Putin’s folly go before his inner circle turn on him?
Independent Media is more important than ever, especially in the lead up to the Election. TDB is the largest Left Wing Blog in NZ and we have been operating for 13 years. We get zero funding from NZonAir and we don’t have no rich backers. If you can donate please do so here or directly into our account –12-3065-0133561-56
Some light (fingered) relieving –
US Special Envoy Witkoff had gold cufflinks stolen in Kiev
The envoy discovered the loss at his hotel after visiting the office of the so-called president of Ukraine. Searches for the missing items yielded no results.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad/176527
Why isn’t he being accused of genocide?
“NO Democracy could lose 1.4million in dead and wounded and not have the Government kicked out.”
Martyn Bradbury
Were the Russian people ever polled on whether Russia should invade Ukraine.?
Of course not.
In February 24, 2022, Even many Russian soldiers were unaware they were being sent to war, believing instead that they were participating in routine military exercises.
Wars are imposed on nations by elites. Rulers who give the order to go to war without any participatory demociratic oversight.
This phenomenon was famously summed up by the French poet Paul Valéry, who wrote:
“War is a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who do know each other but don’t massacre each other.”
‘I didn’t even know I was here. I thought I was on exercises. No one told me I was going to war. No one told me I was going to kill Ukrainians,’ Captured Russian soldier.
The Guardian:
(This article is more than four years old)
Demoralised Russian soldiers tell of anger at being ‘duped’ into war
Luke Harding, Lviv
Fri 4 Mar 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russian-soldiers-ukraine-anger-duped-into-war
……Several videos show young men calling their mothers back in Russia, who have no idea their sons are fighting in Ukraine. The mothers typically break down.
The Guardian, used to be a good paper, back in the day, even Glenn Greenwald wrote for them. Those were the days. Now, its just another establishment rag, mouthing off what best serves US, therefore UK interests.
Otherwise, what is being said here best describes what Ukraine is going through. It is scary what Ukraine is facing now, makes me wonder why the Ukrainian people have not risen up against Zelensky, bearing in mind that they don’t have elections anymore, so talking about the illusion that is democracy!
In my news world, things are getting dire in Ukraine now. More and more people are suffering while we are being led to believe otherwise. Tragic.
Yeah, looks like the wheels are falling off for the Ukrainian Dictatorship, the GRU vs the SBU involved in a running gun battle on the streets of Kiev for the last two days over the protection rackets of scam call centres no less, is highly indicative of just how catastrophic things are going for the criminal regime.
Also the links provided cite “Sources say…”, what sources? What agencies do these sources work for or are close too? What Countries do these sources work for? The links provided above are the journalistic equivalent of “A guy down the pub reckons…”.
The recent bombing in Monaco could have been related to the criminality and crime rackets happening in Ukraine …..
“A Bomb in Monaco and a Torture Room Near Kyiv
On the evening of 29 June 2026, Vadym Iermolaiev walked home from dinner into the lobby of his apartment building on the Rue Révérend-Père-Louis-Frolla, a few metres from the line where Monaco stops and France begins. He had his partner and their thirteen-year-old son with him. Someone had left a backpack at the entrance. Inside it was a charge packed with buckshot and bolts — shrapnel engineered to kill in a confined space — and it was detonated by remotecontrol at the instant the family reached it.
The person who left the backpack was named by French police as Anastasiia Berezovska, thirty-nine, a Ukrainian citizen ….. she boarded a bus and travelled home to Ukraine, to her town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. ….. On 6 July her body was recovered from woods near the village of Yuriv, sixty kilometres west of the capital. She had gunshot wounds to the head.
Two men were arrested for killing her. And here the story stops being a crime and becomes a problem for a government.
The man who pulled the trigger worked for military intelligence
One of the accused, Vladyslav Reut, thirty-three, appeared in a Kyiv courtroom on 10 July. Reut is not a gangster picked up in a bar. He studied law at Kyiv’s national university and served in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, in unit A2772 ….. The Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, moved with a speed that several observers found remarkable in itself. It announced the arrests…….
A study by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime estimates Ukraine’s scam call-centre industry generates as much as $1 billion a month, employing roughly 60,000 people — about two-thirds the headcount of the country’s legal banking sector. The centres operate in all twenty-four of Ukraine’s oblasts, and the industry is now, by some estimates, more profitable than drug trafficking.”
https://karat.substack.com/p/a-bomb-in-monaco-and-a-torture-room
Leaving aside the criminality and western cultivated fascism / nationalism of Ukraine ,,,,, Russia and the Russian people know they are fighting NATO / the west ,,, western bullets, Ukrainian blood.
It’s an existential war for Russia so no Syrian or Iranian type ceasefire is going to cut it for them …. they are not fools.
Germany whose governments are Israel uber alles to their core are also staunchly pro-Ukraine ,,,, thats not coincidence. …. ” Germany’s support for the war in Ukraine continues to be accompanied by military cooperation with Israel. In response to a parliamentary inquiry from the left party Die Linke, the government reported it had approved military exports to the occupation entity worth approximately USD 930 million in the first half of 2026. According to Anadolu Agency, German military exports to Israel were four times higher than in 2025 ….. Further cooperation between German industry and Israel’s arms producers is proceeding despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza. ” https://popularresistance.org/germany-escalates-tensions-with-russia-continues-military-exports-to-israel/
“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” ,,,, look at Ukraine
Ukrainian kidnapping / press ganged / forced mobilisation https://www.bitchute.com/video/oWw5FrubMPH9
New Zealands attached ourselves to the wrong horse and is going to be dragged over a cliff ( named after donald Trump ) if we don’t wake up
“Events in Ukraine” is a substack poster who has done some exceptional reporting on the machinations of all of the criminal oligarchs, the neo-nazis, the sorosites, the government corruption and infighting of the different factions.
How is it possible for AO to be this ignorant?
“In my news world, things are getting dire in Ukraine now. More and more people are suffering while we are being led to believe otherwise. Tragic.” Kremlin Troll, AO
The whole world knows of the Ukrainian people’s tragic suffering.
AO ‘news world’, must consist solely of a narrow Kremlin propaganda channel newsfeed supplied to him by his troll farm handlers.
It is not Western news outlets like the Guardian that deny the suffering of the Ukrainian people. It is the Kremlin controlled media and their ignorant stooges that continually and repeatedly deny the atrocities and the suffering of the Ukrainian people, that they have been subjected to by the Russian army and air force.
“It is scary what is facing now, makes me wonder why the Ukrainian people have not risen up against Zelensky” Kremlin Troll, AO
The Ukrainian people have risen up.
The Ukrainian people have risen up against the vile imperial power, directly oppressing them, bombing their cities, killing their people, and trying to take over their country.
To blame the Ukrainian people for their suffering at the hands of the Russian imperialists is a new low for AO.
Yes it is ‘tragic’ and this tragedy is caused solely by the aggressor imperialist power that invaded and is trying to conquer and forcibly subjugate Ukraine to the Kremlin.
“The whole world knows of the Ukrainian people’s tragic suffering.”
The only Ukrainian suffering the world sees is when civilians or civilian infrastructure is hit. Relative to Palestine, Lebanon and now Iran, these instances are few and far between. Otherwise, what the Russian military is doing to its counterpart and now to Ukrainians themselves (this a response to Ukrainian actions), this rarely sees the light of day in MSM news feeds. And this is what is tragic because all of Ukraine is under the hammer now.
Meanwhile, thanks to the MSM, again, the world believes that Ukraine is not only winning this war but “will” win this war. The world also believes that Russia is suffering, but not only at the hands of Ukraine, but because of the actions of its tyrannical, yet idiotic leader, Putin as well. This piece reflects this viewpoint.
It is tragic for Ukrainians, that the world, as I see it, is not seeing the light of day. And who is my world? Well, that would be my Edward Snowden type, media crowd (i.e. news commentators largely made up of ex- (Western) intel, military, political or diplomatic personal whom have become disillusioned with their Govt’s) coupled with plain Jane independent media commentators like The Grayzone and Caitlin Johnstone.
Ukraine is suffering, and the longer this war drags on, the more they were suffer. Mainstream media is prolonging this suffering, through misinformation, we the people need to see pass the MSM in order to help bring this war – all war – to an end.
“Yes it is ‘tragic’ and this tragedy is caused solely by the aggressor imperialist power that invaded and is trying to conquer and forcibly subjugate Ukraine to the Kremlin.”
There’s only one superpower in this world at that is the USA, aided and abetted by the West. This is the power that is raging war on Iran, Palestine and Lebanon. The same power that recently took control of Venezuela and Syria and the same power that holds significant sway over the rest of the world, including China and Russia.
Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, South Africa and others, are trying to form a power bloc of their own – BRICS is its name. The war on Russia, Iran and soon to be, China, aims to put an end to this rival power bloc. This is but one reason why this shyt is happening.