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Comment by lawxls | Hacker News Reader

"By the end of this war Ukraine might end up with the largest tank army in Europe."

As Ukraine officials beg for help, and ask for half of US army armor 4th month into the war, you guys keep inhaling copium, dreaming in your beds about Russia "being destroyed" in Ukraine. I wouldn't expect anything less from western propaganda enjoyers tbh. Also taking oryx stats seriously, that's fun.

While some parts were definitely messy, and it really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way, you'll soon be aware about the real situation in Ukraine, no matter how bad you want to believe the lies.

"The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically" I offer you to check Ukrainian telegram channels, like "труха" for example (2mil followers) which will gladly tell you about this "dramatic decline".

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> really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way

“It’s unfortunate those pesky Ukrainians had the audacity to exist, which forced us to invade their sovereign country, shell their cities to rubble, and mass murder their civilians. Just like we were forced to mass murder Chechens, Georgians, and Syrians. And might have to mass murder Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Romanians, or Kazakhs in the future.”

> Just like we were forced to mass murder Chechens

Just like the US "was forced" to mass murder Iraqis because, in addition to fake WMD claims, the US intelligence was linking Saddam to Bin Laden.

I wonder how exactly you would characterise Khattab, among other "prominent" "freedom fighters", and his role in the Chechen wars. Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin and, possibly, give them a freedom to attract and gather a following among certain kinds of radicals? Would the US be willing to accommodate Al-Qaeda in, say, Texas?

Most people in the USA agree that the Iraq war was a senseless tragedy fought on false pretenses, and a gross violation of international law. Iraq posed no threat to the USA, the USA had no good reason to invade, and the outcomes of the war were tremendously destructive and destabilizing. If it were up to me, the perpetrators would be locked up.

If nothing else, the Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA. With any luck the senseless war of aggression in Ukraine will lead to similar changes in Russia. But since Russia is a fascist dictatorship, peaceful politics is outlawed and any changes are likely to be more violent.

* * *

The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin. Using self-terrorism killing hundreds of your own civilians as a pretense for launching a war and mass-murdering tens of thousands of your unhappy oppressed colonial subjects while obliterating their cities is a hell of a way to cement personal power.

> The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin.

right, and in line with this level of evidence and argumentation, 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI.

“This level of evidence” is pretty significant, though the Russian government did a thorough enough cover-up that it’s hard to meet a strict burden of proof from publicly available information. Unless secret documents are someday published, the public will probably never see a convincing conclusion about what happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings#Rus...

https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-...

> 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI

This is not very plausible given the extensive available evidence about the plane hijackers and their biographies. More plausible (though still unproven) is speculation about the role of Saudi elite. Zacarias Moussaoui claimed in a deposition that major donors to Al Qaeda included “Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.” (quotation from NYT) Of course, while he had the access to know about what happened, Moussaoui is not the most credible source.

In the US where free speech is protected, those who made various claims and conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks (Bush did it! Israel did it! The CIA did it! etc.) didn’t get locked up or murdered, unlike the people investigating or raising questions about the Russian apartment bombings. For instance, Artyom Borovik, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko, all of whom were assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artyom_Borovik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko

> In the US where free speech is protected, those who made various claims and conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks (Bush did it! Israel did it! The CIA did it! etc.) didn’t get locked up or murdered

Only, for some reason the free speech protection did not help Assange from being prosecuted and his life being destroyed for broadcasting US war crimes evidence in Iraq [1]. The same could be said about your prior mentioning of the Battle of Grozny. There were real terrorist groups in Grozny that had to be eliminated, and in a 2007 Baghdad there was nothing but a false pretence.

[1] the infamous US taxpayer-funded "keep shooting" "collateral damage" done in Iraq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYTxuW2vmzk

Assange was arguably mistreated by US law enforcement, but he never went on trial for the crimes he was accused of because he instead fled (to spend years on the run as a pathetic Putin stooge and apologist).

If he ever is successfully extradited to the USA, he will be afforded the same protections of the law as any other accused person. He will face a trial by jury, and have access to an attorney. The prosecutors will need to prove to the jury that he committed a specific crime.

But he won’t be assassinated, summarily executed, or imprisoned without trial, as regularly happens to government critics in Russia.

You are ignoring the existence of secret FISA kangaroo courts.

I think they have serious problems, but FISA courts oversee warrants for wiretapping foreign spies, not extrajudicial murder of dissidents.

> most likely a false flag operation

you are deflecting from the question:

> Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin

Khattab and his friends like Basayev and other "freedom fighters" have a long and undisputed history of butchering civilians that they were proud of. Taking a maternity ward hostage, or beheading western communication engineers, or, say, stuffing an elementary school with explosives and taking the kids hostage, and many other similar things were done in broad daylight with these lunatics officially bragging about killing civilians. But you've conveniently swept it under the rug. Well, here is the answer: if a group like that operated in the US, they would have been shot like rabid dogs at all cost, very quickly.

> Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA

What change? US continued to have troops on the ground in those countries for decades, culminating with the rise of ISIS in Iraq _on Obama's watch_, no less. Matter of fact, there are still several thousand US troops in Iraq _and_ Syria, doing God knows what there, on my dime.

> shot like rabid dogs at all cost

In the USA, violent groups are treated as a law enforcement problem, unless direct police violence is necessary to prevent them from harming someone. Extremists who commit local crimes are arrested and prosecuted, and afforded all of the normal protections of the legal system.

For example, the Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were tried and sentenced to death and life imprisonment, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing

There is a chance domestic terrorists could be let off based on prosecutorial incompetence or sympathy, jurors’ personal beliefs, or a future executive pardon, but going through a legal process is much better than extrajudicial assassination.

The US government has plenty of skeletons in its closet, but there is nothing in its recent history close to the annihilation of Grozny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999–2000)

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