Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

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marindem01
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Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by marindem01 »

U.S. State Department Is Urging American In Ukraine To Leave.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/2 ... n-00000521.

The State Department on Sunday ordered the departure of eligible family members from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, and said American citizens in the country should consider departing now.

There are reports Russia is planning significant military action against Ukraine,” the State Department said in a statement. “The security conditions, particularly along Ukraine’s borders, in Russia-occupied Crimea, and in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine, are unpredictable and can deteriorate with little notice.”

The statement added: “U.S. citizens in Ukraine should be aware that Russian military action anywhere in Ukraine would severely impact the U.S. Embassy’s ability to provide consular services, including assistance to U.S. citizens in departing Ukraine.”
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by ZoWie »

Pretty standard stuff in crises. Russia can't be trusted, and so preparations for war are in order.

Putin is out of his mind if he thinks he can simply annex Ukraine, but then he's living in the Cold War so he's perfectly capable of making what would be an existential blunder. The resulting war hasn't happened yet, but its possibility is a good reason to cancel your plans for visiting Europe this summer.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by Drak »

Worth keeping an eye on Taiwan as well.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by ZoWie »

In general, this is a good summer to visit our country's many natural wonders. Europe is out, Asia is out, Africa has too many weird diseases, Antarctica is too cold, and Australia is too far. American big cities are too unstable.

Bring masks and vax cards.
"We must remember that we cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation." --Liz Cheney, Republican, 7/21/22
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by marindem01 »

ZoWie wrote: Mon Jan 24, 2022 12:27 pm In general, this is a good summer to visit our country's many natural wonders. Europe is out, Asia is out, Africa has too many weird diseases, Antarctica is too cold, and Australia is too far. American big cities are too unstable.

Bring masks and vax cards.
After Gail has her back surgery, we will be driving down to Monterey and visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We stay at small motel and walk around Old Town.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by ZoWie »

Odd... the Ukraine leaders justifiably want war preparations, and they welcome lethal military aid and troop alerting from the US. Then they get it, the situation ratchets up another level, and the resulting travel warning for dependents and American citizens who might need consular service is seen by them as needless escalation.

Can't have it both ways.

Say... do they still have Soviet nukes in Ukraine, or were those finally taken back to the Russian Federation? Not counting the navy base in Sebastopol, that was annexed by Russia years ago.

Chernobyl is in Ukraine, somewhere outside Kyiv, buried under a huge cover that was built by true heroes. The town itself is still a huge exclusion zone, inhabited mostly by wild animals and a few holdout humans. Short trips into the area are not a radiation hazard, though I think they still advise that you wear dosimeters. The major visible feature besides the reactors is the enormous Steel Yard antenna, from the original backscatter radar system that started tinfoil hat theories before HAARP put them on steroids. It's very tall, and some thousands of feet long. They never scrapped it for obvious reasons, despite there being a fortune in metal sitting there rusting, not having been fed with megawatt pulses of RF for decades now.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by ZoWie »

This guy says the Russians view war as a more incremental and ongoing process than most Americans do, and on some level or other we've been at war with Russia over Ukraine for years.

Comes close to what I'm always saying: Nobody ever said WWIII had to use nukes. Russia is quite adept at psyops, kompromat, agitprop, and all their other tactics which have been refined ever since the Bolshevik takeover a century ago. drumpf was essentially the 21st century version of a first strike.


I'd say that WWIII has been in beta testing since Putin took over, if not longer.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60120217
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by bradman »

Here's a few scenarios......

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-forc ... 02353.html
Russian forces are massing on Ukraine's border. Here's what Russia watchers think could be Putin's next big move.

Further down the page it shows a few battle plans Putin may follow. i pick 2b. Linking Russia with Crimea.

He wants back what Catherine took.

My guess, the land bridge to Crimea....At the very least, the Donbas region for now.
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ZoWie
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by ZoWie »

Russia needs Crimea to project naval power in the Black Sea and deny potential adversaries a means to block its only warm water ports. That's why they simply annexed it and dared the rest of the world to do anything about it, after they lost the Ukraine SSR, and then lost their control over the quasi-independent entity that was supposed to replace it. It's existential for their economy, even more so than Arctic oil/gas drilling and the Nord Pipelines.

It makes sense that they would rather have it as a contiguous territory. So would some other people. It has a bloody history, even more so than the rest of Eastern Europe.

For a country that is 1/6 of the world's inhabited land mass, Russia has a rather small economic foundation. It has an awful lot of empty space that contributes mostly bad weather and melting permafrost. Costs money to administer all that.

I wish they'd play nice, but that does not seem to be in their cultural DNA. They mistrust anything on their western border, and a quick look at European history indicates that sometimes paranoia is justified. Also, it sticks in Putin's craw that it's not an SSR any more. Even Chernobyl.

The "Ukranian War" has actually been going on for some years now. Russia gives military aid to "rebels" in, where is it, Donbass? Some place like that. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it's one of those places in the east of Ukraine. Guns go bang and bombs go boom. People die. You just don't hear about it.

It's the hottest hot spot in Europe.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by Number6 »

ZoWie wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:57 am Russia needs Crimea to project naval power in the Black Sea and deny potential adversaries a means to block its only warm water ports. That's why they simply annexed it and dared the rest of the world to do anything about it, after they lost the Ukraine SSR, and then lost their control over the quasi-independent entity that was supposed to replace it. It's existential for their economy, even more so than Arctic oil/gas drilling and the Nord Pipelines.

It makes sense that they would rather have it as a contiguous territory. So would some other people. It has a bloody history, even more so than the rest of Eastern Europe.

For a country that is 1/6 of the world's inhabited land mass, Russia has a rather small economic foundation. It has an awful lot of empty space that contributes mostly bad weather and melting permafrost. Costs money to administer all that.

I wish they'd play nice, but that does not seem to be in their cultural DNA. They mistrust anything on their western border, and a quick look at European history indicates that sometimes paranoia is justified. Also, it sticks in Putin's craw that it's not an SSR any more. Even Chernobyl.

The "Ukranian War" has actually been going on for some years now. Russia gives military aid to "rebels" in, where is it, Donbass? Some place like that. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it's one of those places in the east of Ukraine. Guns go bang and bombs go boom. People die. You just don't hear about it.

It's the hottest hot spot in Europe.
The question I have is how long can Russia afford to keep it's troops deployed along Ukraine's borders? Russia isn't exactly flush with cash so the costs of keeping those troops deployed must be having an impact on the rest of Russian government. If Putin does invade, then he'll have the added costs of maintaining troops there as well as having to support the lands he took. The economic sanctions Biden and NATO place on Russia will have to be so severe they threaten to bring down the Russian economy.
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by Motor City »

Number6 wrote: Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:19 pm The question I have is how long can Russia afford to keep it's troops deployed along Ukraine's borders? Russia isn't exactly flush with cash so the costs of keeping those troops deployed must be having an impact on the rest of Russian government. If Putin does invade, then he'll have the added costs of maintaining troops there as well as having to support the lands he took. The economic sanctions Biden and NATO place on Russia will have to be so severe they threaten to bring down the Russian economy.
They have this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_R ... llionaires

Ukrain has this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U ... _net_worth

then there is this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... llionaires
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Re: Breaking News From POLITiCO: U.S. State Department Urges Americans To Leave Ukraine.

Post by Motor City »

Biden Weighs Deploying Thousands of Troops to Eastern Europe and Baltics
we are very much focused on building up defense, building up deterrence,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken
senior Pentagon officials presented Mr. Biden with several options that would shift American military assets
NATO itself will continue to be reinforced in a significant way
Biden officials have recently warned that the United States could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency
During a phone call this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III warned his Russian counterpart, Sergey Shoygu, that a Russian incursion into Ukraine would most likely result in the exact troop buildup that Mr. Biden is now considering.

A former top Pentagon official for Europe and NATO policy, Jim Townsend, said the administration’s proposal did not go far enough.
those 5,000 should be just a down payment for a much larger U.S. and allied force presence. Western Europe should once again be an armed camp.”
the first whispers of foreplay.


signs
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ ... c vehicles

General Motors is on a hiring spree.

The day after telling the Free Press it looks to hire about 400 software specialists, the automaker said Wednesday it will hire more than 8,000 people across various technology teams and other areas of the company.

The hiring extends to GM Defense, GM's wholly owned subsidiary that makes products for the military.
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