Full disclosure: I kinda like Strelkov and will miss him after his inevitable window accident.
Yeah, it was in Diablo, he remembers it better than I do: https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Gargoyle
I only remember The Butcher (FRESH MEAT), the basic ass skeletons, and the topless Succubi with huge racks.
America (under Trump, who also wasn't a pussy like Obama in that he started slowly arming Ukraine) already smashed Russian military forces (back then still pretending to be a "private military company" but they stopped pretending since, they're the GRU component answerable almost directly to Putin through only his fellow "former" gangster Prigozhin while bypassing the Stavka) in the very same Syria and there was no nuclear response (nor any other). Because they respect strength and fear the strong (to quote Putin's famous saying, "the weak get beaten", he thought Biden would be weak like Obama).
Ukraine is "invading the Russian soil" (post-annexation) and still there's no nuclear response (and probably won't be, people have feared it since the beginning, but making totally clear we're going to let it happen will ensure it in fact won't happen).
It's just an absurd joke and they don't even believe there can be a nuclear attack ("there's no panic" is a running joke about the Russian mantra, but really there's no panic about that).
Unlike Putin, who never did, Zelensky regularly visits the war zone. Which makes the Russian state TV mad about how they failed to get him again.
Also unlike Putin, Zelensky doesn't try to play a military commander. Which is why he's winning.
The fuck is a "Khizr read"?
Anyway it's just a black humor joke, like millions of Americans signing up for similarly absurd "let's Naruto run into Area 51, they can't kill us all".
She's obviously yellow and slant eyed in the pic.
It's not about eliminating the entire Russian arsenal but merely foiling what people believe can be some sort of a very small Russian tactical nuclear strike (maybe even with a prior warning about the target to be nuked, like let's say an isolated strategic bridge or an air base, if the Russians want to not look the worst doing it), instead of reacting to it with a NATO air campaign in Ukraine post fact. A conventional pinpoint attack based on precise intelligence, assuming there's such.
Think about like how Israelis only demolished the Iraqi and Syrian reactors with the F-16 raids or assassinated several key Iranian scientists over the decades (one recently, with a remote controlled gun), instead of going all in and destroying everything and killing everyone related to the programs at once.
But what he does really mean is for NATO to speak to Russia in the clear terms, not still diplomatically as in before February 24 when the merely vague warnings didn't work. And there's a good chance that actual direct threats of doing what they did would have been enough for Putin to stand down and thus defused the initial crisis. The "Zapad-21 exercises" would have finally ended, Russian troops would went back to their bases as they were officially supposed to (long overdue), and that would have been all of it if they just plainly said what's in the cards and also managed to showed they're not bluffing (because they/we really weren't bluffing and were serious about it), properly talking like you should speak to an elderly former Leningrad gangster without pretending they deal with some kind of a politician.
That's like with Saddam and Kuwait in 1990. The Americans didn't comprehend how Saddam was too isolated and "too stupid" (that's a quote from the later Congress hearings) to correctly understand their diplomatically wrapped warnings, with none of his terrified underlings daring to tell him. Putin's similarly both isolated and stupid, even if he doesn't have people from his meetings hauled out and shot outside right away like Saddam did.
Not "now", but to thwart the (potential, hypothetical) nuclear attack.
It can be a bomber, using an air-launched cruise missile fired from Russian territory rather than a bomb (presumably, assuming they're not totally insane, a very low yield warhead on some sort of isolated military target, or just Zmiinyi Island for that matter, unless Putin's all "fuck the optics I'm going in" and does a straight up terror attack), or it can be something else (you can even use an artillery gun to conduct a nuclear strike, even with a suitably low yield - unless, again, they're totally crazy and want to go big).
But the Americans have all sorts of intelligence tracking the Russian nuclear weapons (and everything else but these are high priority), and that's apparently including some kind of a mole on the very top of Russian leadership (people like to half joke about the comically nervous SVR chief Naryshkin, or General Shoigu whom the Russians love to scapegoat in public because they can't criticize the Supreme Leader).
Of course NATO (and friends, from Australia to Japan) can punish Russia. We even do it right now if you really somehow failed to notice.
Also https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/15JnU9dOZ6/x/c/4Oeyr0j0m1f
A nuclear strike followed by a NATO air offensive would be quite an escalation, the subject is averting it. Preferably by just saying what they're going to do, instead of current vague "most severe consequences"
It's often said that Putin didn't quite get Biden's cautious threats seriously and thought he can get away with his escalation in February, and that he wouldn't go with it if he has been told about how he would in fact face the almost 1% of NATO land forces potential that would demolish his army as it did happen.
Sort of similar of how Saddam wasn't straight up told DON'T OR WE'LL FUCK YOU UP in these very words instead of the cautious diplomatic crap in the case of Kuwait 1990. He also didn't take it seriously, because they didn't tell him in the terms he would understand. (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-21-mn-658-story.html)
Intercepting a Russian nuclear bomber would be "crazy", but not Russia sending the bomber and then America bombing the shit out of Russian forces in Ukraine as the punishment?
He's not "calling for a nuclear strike" at all.
A conventional attack on Russian military is in the cards anyway but as a punitive response.
Nuclear winter theory (from the 1980s) probably wouldn't have happened even during the Cold War, and nowadays the nuclear arsenals are relatively small. Some talk of nuclear autumn instead. There's also an alternative nuclear summer (think Fallout).
No nuclear spring as in FarCry 5.
Anyway, in case if there's a confusion, and I think there is, it's about foiling a nuclear strike in first place, before it could take place.
Instead of (as it's being threatened now) NATO obliterating Russian forces in a massive conventional (mostly USAF) offensive as a response to a nuclear attack only after it happened.
If it's an attack to foil the nuclear strike that he's just ordered, I don't know where his confusion could go from.
Yeah, it's one of the previous attempts.
A curious detail not in the article: https://twitter.com/xmascolors/status/1577909164114075648
From the other side of the old abandoned trenches: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/mermaids-and-the-worldwide-push-to
I didn't even know I did send it.
From another GG War veteran in the issue: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/mermaids-and-the-worldwide-push-to
Also some other small things, like the caption said the guns were lying "outside", but the soldier says literally "on the street".
I'm actually quite a translation purist, and especially hate when they just don't translate half or even most of dialogue lines as they routinely do with films in Poland. Which is why I can't fucking watch anything on the TV when it's a voice over speaking (also can't stand any and all dubbing, with the only sole exception of JP dubbing that can be amusing besides well done).
It can confirm it's a faithful translation. It's a bit Americanized, as in there's no Russian concept of an "assault rifle" (a German WWII phase that the American picked up and changed) and the avtomaty means automatic guns/rifles (as in Avtomat Kalashnikova). Avtomaty is also often mistranslated as "machine guns" but that's pulemioty.
Russian cattle (ruskie bydło) is a Polish idiom about Russian conscripts from at least the 18th century (when Russian conscription lasted a lifetime for any unlucky muzhik who pulled the short straw, that is until he either died or was too badly maimed - it was later shortened to 25 years of service in 1793, to 20 in 1834, and 12 in 1855).
Also the pre-reforms Tsarist recruits could've been as young as 12 years old. Then it was eventually became just 6 years for everyone of a more fit age in 1874.
And they also mention how they have to buy their own food. Which is how the enlisted were famously selling weapons and ammunition for food (cigs, vodka, drugs, sex) in and around Chechnya, besides their officers gunrunning on a mass scale (to other countries too).
The soldiers talk about it (including the penal code paragraph involved) in the video.
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1577752565839806472
The South shall rise again