/u/dekachin is just sperging out with random tl;dr. Actually on subject, https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/15K6JQkegL/x/c/4OezB37bQq9
A few of them later changed their minds, including famously the Crimean meme woman, but not only her. They claimed they were deceived:
The latest member to speak out, Vyacheslav Markhaev, wrote on his Facebook account on Sunday that, under the pretext of recognizing two separatist enclaves as republics, “we hid plans to unleash a full-scale war with our closest neighbor.” Markhaev is a senator from Siberia.
He and the other two Communist members had been among the Duma deputies who voted in favor of a recent resolution recognizing the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. But in his Facebook statement, Mr. Markhaev said that Duma members were not informed of plans for a full-scale invasion, and that he believed a government decree saying troops would be sent in as peacekeepers.
Earlier that week, Oleg Smolin, another Communist member from Siberia, wrote on his Vkontakte social media profile that he was “shocked” when the invasion began. “As a Russian intellectual, I am convinced that military force should be used in politics only as a last resort,” he said, adding: “I could not vote for the recognition of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics without betraying myself.”
The third Communist deputy, Mikhail Matveyev from the Samara region, said on social media that the war must be immediately stopped.
“I voted for peace, not for war,” he allegedly wrote on Twitter and Telegram, “For Russia to become a shield, so that Donbas is not bombed, and not for Kyiv to be bombed.”
He later deleted the posts, explaining in a Twitter thread that he was not doing it because he had changed his mind, but because his words had been reproduced “across the world, most often anonymously, to incite mutual hatred.”
“I just don’t have the time to delete hate comments created as part of the information war,” he added.
Mr. Matveyev explained that he supported peace, but he did not want to be seen as someone who “shoots our soldiers in the back while they are fighting where the politicians have sent them.”
“Ukraine is my Motherland,” he concluded, adding that he is hurt by everything that happens there.
And as for the meme girl (paging u/TheImpossible1):
Former Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya has been dismissed from her post in the Russian government, weeks after criticizing Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin removed Poklonskaya from her post as the deputy head of Rossotrudnichestvo, Russia’s federal agency for international outreach, on Monday.
The 42-year-old took up the role in February 2022, after declining to run for a second term as a deputy for the ruling United Russia party in Russia’s lower house of parliament.
The former lawmaker spoke out against Moscow’s invasion of her native Ukraine, calling it a “catastrophe.”
“People are dying, houses and entire cities are destroyed [leaving] millions of refugees. Bodies and souls are mutilated. My heart is bursting with pain.”
“My two native countries are killing each other, that’s not what I wanted and it’s not what I want,” she said in a video address to an international forum in April.
She later criticized the spread of Russia’s pro-war Z symbol, which has been prominently displayed on buildings and merchandise to symbolize the public’s support for Russian troops in Ukraine.
Her comments sparked outrage from other officials, including her boss, Rossotrudnichestvo chief Yevgeny Primakov. He claimed that the letter Z was a symbol of the “liberation of Ukraine from the obvious evil of terrorists and bandits.”
The only "vote to start this war in Ukraine" was in the Duma and the Federation Council (all for).
TALK TO EM FROSK
Elon should really see how the Russian state TV talks about his proposal: https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1580026795558023170
The sign behind the MT-LB, also a whole bunch of photographers arrived at this spot and focused on this particular frozen bro from all sorts of angles, and so he became a symbol, but ignored all of his friends lying nearby, and the other vehicles from the column too unless they got in the frame.
I'm also a photographer and would do the pictures in this place differently than most did. (I know the scene layout from videos.)
Let's say you arrived there and you walked away a bit (all my homies hate unexploded ordnance) from the others in the trip and you shoot this:
It's okay (pretty well composed) but nothing special, anyone could do it with their phone nowadays, so you can do it like that and make it artsy and personal:
Now that's much better as a professional photo, but when you have something really prominent and symbolic right there in the background you shouldn't just ignore it for the sake of focusing on the human aspect alone.
They already lost a winter campaign in the north in February-March.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMedKI4WUAY-9kK.jpg is an iconic scene from this time, but you know what was behind it and isn't in most pictures?
Belgium was neutral when it was invaded, Mein Fuhrer.
They openly did: https://anna-news.info/boevoe-primenenie-tos-1a-solntsepyok-v-mariupole/
And I of course meant Mariupol, don't you know how it's extremely short range and the thread is about how they hit the faraway cities? (With cruise missiles and Iranian loitering munitions, no bombs.)
That's not true at all, the troops evacuated from Dunkirk (and they fought mostly in Belgium not France) were being rearmed and in the process of being sent back to fight when France surrendered - also trapping tens of thousands of Polish soldiers who have made their way from occupied Poland to France, only to be either being captured there or spend the war in the internment in Switzerland.
Also it was a German offensive, and the Allied counterattack was a failure.
A pedastrian partially glass-bottom tourist attraction overpass bridge linking two city parks, located hundreds of kilometers from the nearest front line. Stretch this.
Or a (luckily empty) children's playground in a park down below. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lDNQaZsHwH4 A stretching exercise.
These drones (Shahed-136) are not a laughing matter at all. They usually hit Odesa with them.
Russian Grad shelling of Mariupol city in 2015 had a similar video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Tbd3qfeX7U (second camera view).
WWII rules, which Moscow helped to establish in Helsinki 1939.
They've already arrested many traitors, but they have no death penalty at all.
Plus they keep using them in prisoners swaps.
There were many attacks on Ukrainian military installations in the initial missile barrages and bombing raids of February 24. One of them for example destroyed an entire S-300 battalion worth of equipment (12 launchers parked next to each other outside) still in its base, others hit radars etc. Guys on the eastern frontline got hit super hard by artillery (but withstood, and have held on there for over half year since then in some still very same places).
There were 5 killed and over 30 wounded only in that "One of the targets was the headquarters of the SBU" of yours that didn't hit it.
The supposed negotiator (military intelligence officer) died in combat and not in the city.
The center of Donetsk (I guess you mean the Donetsk city here) isn't pelted with cluster munitions by Ukraine.
Not just Crimea, but the Southern Front. The route west from Donetsk is under the HIMARS fire from the north.
Btw, Ant believed a lie (either they missed the SBU office or the missile was just shot down, it fell on a street nearby and killed only 5 random people in their cars at an intersection).
Another one hit a playground further down.
But I don't think it all even matters as they keep just leveling entire villages and towns elsewhere (currently mostly in the Bakhmut direction where the Wagner conscripted criminals are continuously thrown in frontal attack) and a few more missiles hitting this or that is but a distraction.
They hit the street (and random civilians in cars) and not the building, and the other thing you said also didn't happen.
This is the scene: https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1579406437813751809 (possibly this missile had been shot down, as in this very rare incident of civilian casualties in Donetsk city that you are still hyperventilating about so much for over half year continuosly - they shot down slightly over half of all Russian cruise missiles and Iranian drones from the barrage)
Why do you just continue to believe the Russian lies?
It's a glass bridge no less.
They used mostly cruise missiles (from bombers over Belarus and from ships in Crimea) and Iranian drones, but they also fired a couple of S-300 SAMs as artillery rockets again (this is simply bizarre and just absurd but nothing new).
Besides the Uragans.
The truth, if Russia decides to go bigger and do a themobaric bombardment on a city next
You mean to go their normal, they've been doing this for decades and in Ukraine too (such as in the Skhidnyi residential district of Mariupol, made to look like that: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RdJyc6cHkw4).
There's also nothing actually shocking about what they did yesterday, that's nothing special compared to their earlier achievements in the country such as destroying an isolated and well-known main bomb shelter marked with huge signs of CHILDREN written on the ground on both sides, also in Mariupol.
I don't know why a special distinction should be made between what Russia does in Donbas or in Kharkiv region and what they do in the further west so the latter is any special. Nothing really special happened compared to what they do normally. This time they didn't even hit any hospital, which is more remarkable and unusual than most other aspects.
The total of 17 (seventeen) billion, which is a tiny part of America's annual defense budget (722 billion for 2022).
That's hilarious how so little demolished Russia's "superpower" army that actually believed they would could steamrolled all of NATO.
This is by far the most cost-effective American large scale military investment of all time. Ridicalously so. So much that you (plural as you got upvotes without being corrected) thought it must have been "hundreds of billions" involved.
To compare, Vietnam cost America 1 trillion in today's dollars, Iraq about 2 trillion, and the F-35 program maybe even more. (Also they just sentenced Alex Jones to pay 1 billion.)