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Ukraine Invasion Day 288: Bells and Spectators of the Theater of War [1]

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Date: 2022-12-07

More disinformation: Rumors about a possible invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are spreading in the city of Kursk and the region.

The foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, defended that tactic last week by saying the Russians had also shelled Stalingrad during the second world war.

Russia has been forced to abandon some of those “annexed” territories, notably fleeing the city of Kherson last month due to a sweeping Ukrainian counterattack. Russia now shells the city of Kherson regularly from the other side of the Dnipro River, in effect attacking what it considers its own territory.

“As for the slow process of the special military operation, then, of course, it can be a long-term process,” Putin said. “But then you mentioned that new territories had appeared. This is such a significant result for Russia … The Azov Sea has become an internal Russian sea. Even Peter I had fought for access to the Azov Sea.”

But mainly the Russian president defended the “special military operation” – his preferred term for what he openly admitted was a Russian war of conquest that he compared with the territorial ambitions of former Russian tsars.

Speaking to members of his personal human rights council on Wednesday, Putin claimed that Russia would not use nuclear weapons first in any conflict, denied that Russian troops were deserting en masse from the field of battle, and claimed he would not need to mobilise more troops, a process that has caused considerable upheaval in Russia.

Vladimir Putin has admitted Russia’s war in Ukraine could turn into a “long-term process” as he sought to defend an invasion in which Russian troops have been forced to retreat and even airbases deep inside Russia have come under attack.

x ICYMI: When Putin's rule finally ends, what will come next for Russia and the world: more of the same or a democratic opening? Responses by Garry Kasparov, John Mearsheimer, Michael McFaul and others. https://t.co/GkQVMZifuZ via @WSJ https://t.co/BYsMJ8QKuh — Michael McFaul (@McFaul) December 7, 2022

x As a Ukrainian friend reminded me today, Ukraine did not just give up nuclear weapons when signing the Budapest Memorandum, but also the strategic delivery vehicles - bombers and rockets - that would have been very useful to Ukraine in the fight to repel the Russain invaders now. https://t.co/FOwTiAv831 — Michael McFaul (@McFaul) December 6, 2022 The Soviet Union’s demise in 1991 took everyone by surprise, including the man most directly responsible for it. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had launched perestroika (“reconstruction”), a reform program aimed at radically restructuring Soviet society. A crucial aspect of this initiative, glasnost, promised that the party-state’s work would from then on be “transparent.” In other words, Communist officials could be criticized openly. Among the many unexpected consequences of these reforms was the emergence of new civil-political organizations that broke the Communist Party’s monopoly on public space. In the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe, perestroika emboldened domestic opposition movements that helped launch the series of “gentle” revolutions, such as Solidarity in Poland and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, that brought down Communist regimes in 1989. But the reforms, as the historian Mark Kramer has shown, also encouraged resistance within the Soviet Union itself, including the popular fronts in the Baltics and the nationalist movement in Georgia that called for independence. Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s second-largest republic, lacked a unified national opposition. Yet on December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukrainians voted in support of independence. Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected president of Russia in June, had assumed that even if the USSR dissolved, Ukraine would remain attached to Russia. When a Ukrainian journalist criticized his reluctance to let go of the republic, the Kremlin press secretary snapped: “You don’t want to live with Russia in a Union? This is a Communist legacy for you? Then go, but return Crimea and Donbas to us!” To justify his war of aggression against Ukraine, now in its ninth month, Vladimir Putin has deployed the same rhetoric Yeltsin and his associates used then to argue that Ukraine was an invention of the Soviet Union, unimaginable outside of Russia. Like all powerful propaganda, the claim rests on a grain of truth: post-Soviet Ukraine was in many respects a product of decades of Soviet rule. From the Soviets, Ukraine inherited a state apparatus and institutional structures spanning territories that prior to being incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) after World War II had been under different administrations, including at various points those of Poland–Lithuania, Austria, and tsarist Russia. The Soviets brought into being both an expansive state—as much Soviet as it was Ukrainian—and a Ukrainian identity that reflected the newly urban, multiethnic, and bilingual character of Soviet Ukraine’s population. That identity was no longer defined in opposition to Russia, as it had been in the age of Romantic nationalism. Russia was seen as a friendly older sibling, further along down the path to Communism. For two hundred years Ukrainians have responded to their shifting circumstances by creating narratives about their national past. Over the course of the twentieth century they declared their independence five times: in 1918 in Lviv and Kyiv, in Transcarpathia in 1939, again in Lviv in 1941, and in Kyiv in 1991. Each time, they needed not only to recreate a Ukrainian state but also to redefine a Ukrainian nation. What that nation should look like was by no means self-evident. Nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalists, for instance, had disagreed about what made Ukrainians distinctive and whether Poles or Russians posed a greater threat to Ukrainian identity. Among Galician Ruthenians alone, there were no fewer than five different orientations: Polonophile, Ukrainophile, Russophile, Old Ruthenian, and Little Russian. During World War II some Ukrainians put their faith in Nazi Germany, while others reckoned their chances of achieving some form of statehood would be higher under Soviet rule. New divisions surfaced after 1991 between Eastern Ukrainians, who remained attached to post-Soviet Russia, and Western Ukrainians, who looked to the West rather than to Moscow. The Russo-Ukrainian war is the latest bloody stage both in the Soviet empire’s unfinished collapse and in this long history of Ukrainian nationalism. www.nybooks.com/... x ⚡️Stoltenberg says Ukraine has right to defend, as Russia accuses Ukraine of striking its territory.



“What we see is that Ukraine is defending itself. And we need to understand this in the wider context,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. — The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) December 7, 2022 x Tu-141 reconnaissance drone, which Ukraine may have modified into a cruise missile with 1K km range - enough to strike Russian strategic bomber air bases. Thing is, only 142 of them were made, we don't know how many UA has, and the Soviets used to use them for target practice. pic.twitter.com/koqURwtLpM — Euan MacDonald (@Euan_MacDonald) December 7, 2022 One of these is known to have crashed in Zagreb, Croatia, 550 km from Ukraine, on March 10, presumably after having suffered a catastrophic navigation failure.

Unknown weapons, but within the Tu-141's range, struck the Saki airbase in UA's Russian-occupied Crimea on Aug 9. On Oct. 9, an explosion struck the Crimea bridge between UA's Crimea and Russia - at a distance even further than the Saki attack, but still within Tu-141's range.

If we assume that the same drones were used to attack Russian air bases on Dec. 5 and Dec. 6, then we know that at least four have been used. How many did the Soviets destroy. How may were used in tests? How many are left? Nobody knows.

Ukraine, however, is a highly developed, industrial country. It can produce rockets, aircraft, and advanced avionics using its own resources. Its people are innovative and ingenious. It has already produced an indigenous sea attack drone. Expect more surprises.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/7/2140642/-Ukraine-Invasion-Day-288-Bells-and-Spectators-of-the-Theater-of-War

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