SeattleGriz wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 2:04 pm
UNI88 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 1:56 pm
You mean the guy that I already discredited. The one who said that:
- He had no proof that russia was delivering weapon and military equipment to Donbas in 2014 in order to give the false perception that russia wasn't delivering arms prior to the invasion in 2022?
- There were no russian units operating in Donbas before February 2022 focusing on Donbas and not Luhansk or other parts of Donetsk so he could dance around the reality that russia's 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 from within Ukraine?
Dude's overrides his knowledge and experience with his dishonesty.
Blaming the victim is part of the MAGAt yahoo playbook:
- It's Ukraine's fault that russia invaded.
- It's the fault of those women who trump sexually assaulted/raped fault. It didn't happen or it was consensual and they're just looking for money and/or 15 minutes of fame.
- Those people who trump has called juvenile names and/or have received death threats because of his incendiary comments were asking for it. He's just standing up for himself and all of us MAGAt yahoos. And when they respond, they're "lashing out".
Yes. You sitting on your couch in a houseboat know more than an ex intelligence officer who not only worked on Russian small arms but rebuilding the Ukrainian military as he worked for the UN and NATO, in UKRAINE.
This is next level of competence there StOnge. What else are you an expert in?
I didn't say I knew more than him. I question his integrity not his knowledge. I think he intentionally presents information (and misinformation) to mislead gullible people who want to believe a certain narrative. It gets him publicity and helps sell his books.
I can find fringe sources to support alternative points of view as well ...
How Accurate is Jacques Baud’s Analysis of the War in Ukraine?
Baud cites Reuters as having said there are 102,000 ‘far-right extremists’ in the Ukrainian armed forces, a figure that he appears to have considered ‘too good to check’. The Reuters article in fact says there were 102,000 ‘paramilitary’ soldiers in 2022, which isn’t quite the same as ‘far-right extremists’.
...
It’s worth noting here that the coalition of ‘far-right’ political parties garnered only 315,568 votes in the 2019 parliamentary elections in Ukraine (2.2% of votes cast, 0.9% of registered voters), gaining a total of one seat for the leader of Svoboda, whose paramilitary Sich Battalion has a total of 50 members. The threat from the Ukrainian far-right is not zero, but even if one doesn’t consider Putin himself to be the arch ultra-nationalist, we should bear in mind that Russia has its own far-right problems, and ironically the founder (and still apparently the leader) of the Wagner Group, which was sent to assassinate the notably-Jewish Zelenskyy, looks to have Nazi sympathies himself.
...
Considering all of this, I find Baud’s assessment to be misinformed and misleading. The fundamental problem is that he’s clearly an intelligent and articulate man who can string together factoids into a coherent and persuasive-sounding whole – which is pernicious, when those facts are wrong. But I would still urge readers to listen to the interview: it’s informative for its clever-sounding, insidious mendacity.
...
Reading the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission reports from the period, it’s clear there was a marked uptick in ceasefire violations (with ‘explosions’ – everything from RPGs to artillery – recorded at about 20 times the previous 30-day average), although it’s not possible to determine from these reports alone precisely who was responsible for the majority of the fire, or who started it – with both sides making accusations, and explosions reported on both sides of the line of contact. However, the OSCE maps suggest it was roughly an even exchange from both sides. You’d expect one side to respond to shelling from the other, and that seems to be what happened.
But Baud strongly implies that the OSCE reports blame Ukraine for the shelling, which is patently false, and which is again very telling because I’m confident he’s actually read the reports.
...
Baud’s narrative breaks down still further when he asserts that it was only after the supposed Ukrainian shelling that the Russian Duma voted to implore Putin to recognise the Donbas territories. In fact, this happened on February 15th. Then – remarkably quickly – on February 16th Russia put its claim to the UN Security Council. This was part of a planned strategy to establish the legal fiction, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, that Russia was merely defending the supposedly-independent states of Donetsk and Luhansk from outside aggression.
But if Baud is correct that the full-scale Russian invasion on the 24th was an unplanned and necessary response, it was rather convenient that those hordes of Russian troops just happened to be on Ukraine’s borders at the right time, and doubly convenient that – despite claiming on the 15th that they were withdrawing forces – Russia secretly moved another 7,000 troops to the area just before the 16th, in time for the start of these completely unexpected hostilities.
Baud may be cynically hoping that critics of Western foreign policy won’t be bothered to do their own research and will simply nod their heads sagely, feeling themselves privy to secret knowledge and safe in their titanium-lined bunker of naïveté. Sadly, it’s not clear that’s a bad strategy. But with events like the massacres in Bucha (which Baud has also denied), the rapes, forced deportations and the deliberate bombardment of non-military targets, it’s reached the point where those too cocksure to examine the facts look a lot like a modern-day Walter Duranty, albeit without the Pulitzer and with only the stench of death surrounding them.
You need a new source of information.
You make a lot of bold statements without links or other proof.