But they fled to Russia... 814,000 of them so far... something is wrong with your calculations. Wouldn't they flee to Kiev or further into EU if they wanted to be in EU?

Could the answer be, that he does not want to invade Ukraine? If you look at it that way, he has done everything humanly possible to avoid invading Ukraine and still safe face and be seen at home as protecting Russians and Russia's interests. But the US and the Ukraine government are making it absolutely impossible for him, no ceasefire, just sending in more and more troops, killing civilians, aiming for total unconditional victory as the only possibility. That gives Putin no way out. There is absolutely nothing he can do to come out of this without looking like a big loser. So if this is going to continue, eventually he will have no other option than to invade Donbas. I just think it is very bad policy to try to corner the Russians. They are extremely dangerous when cornered.

I'd like you to understand, I am not on the Russian side, my own country was invaded and occupied by them and I don't have any reason to like them doing it to someone else, I am just trying to explain how it looks from their side.

Ukraine is absolutely nothing to want to deal with. If Ukraine joins EU, we will have a new Black Friday and the world economy would go in tail spin. If Russia took them, it would bankrupt the country just as well. It is 50 million of impoverished people with almost no industry, limited natural resources and the only thing going for them is their agriculture, which is bad news for EU. EU has quotas on agricultural production and has a huge oversupply of food. It is the hottest political issue in EU just after the federalization attempts. Ukraine is the size and population of Greece, Portugal, Romania and Bulgaria combined and their economy is worse off than either of those countries four poorest EU countries. Nobody in their sound mind wants Ukraine.

No it is not. There was a coup and the government that came out of coup invited foreign governments to help in military operations to quell unrest caused by the coup. That is just as bad as what the Russian's are doing. It is in fact exactly that same and the only difference is the way the press is reporting on it. If Ukraine was a democratically leaning country, the Russians paid for and organized a coup and then send their army to help the coup appointed government to quell the ensuing unrest, we would be all up in arms about it. The press would have a field day.

You have to look at the situation with neutral eyes. I condemn what both sides are doing in Ukraine equally, because both sides are doing something completely unethical.

Yes, but you claim that what he says is outright lie. I don't see it that way, so ... you disagree with him on what is true. That is called disagreement. There is no -1: disagree. You don't understand the mod system at all. We have it to have interesting comments, even though they can present radically different point of view. If all comments say the same, the discussion will be dull. If you mod down all comments with one view, even though it might not turn out to be correct, you never have a discussion about why it is not correct. You are an intellectually small person and we have a mod system exactly for people like you to mod down posts like your where you call for modding down someone who disagrees with you.

Yeah, you can dismiss everything one way or another. Same as I could find a way to dismiss the other side of the story. The point is that when you want to look at what is actually happening, you have to do three things: 1) Give it some time for all the facts to show up. 2) Listen to all sides 3) Apply some filters based on reputation, previous misinformation, what is actually physically possible, what makes sense for someone to do, if it brings him any benefit if he does it, etc.

Sorry to bust your bubble, but there wouldn't be any more reaction than there is right now.

Ukrainian High Command? You mean Andriy Lysenko actually said something that turned out to be true? Just recently he claimed that: "Russian troops are transported by the Aid Convoy", "Russia plans to shoot the Aid Convoy and blame Ukraine", "Russia dismantled Ukrainian factories and stole the equipment to bring it back in the Aid Convoy trucks". He has claimed to destroy several of Russian incursions into Ukraine and claimed that separatists shot at vehicles with refugees traveling under white flag that was traveling 40 km away from the nearest separatist artillery position.

I mean that is just one week. I could look for statements made by Rasmussen, but while much more believable, there are similar pearls, that are easy to pick up. Same for Putin and official Russian sources. They all lie.

None of them are truthful. They either outright lie, or they at least try to confuse the topic and push their own agenda. Sometimes you have to give those statements time and then not forget they were made by the time the lies actually come out.

There are also Ukrainian troops in Russia. In far bigger numbers as well. Last time there were 400 soldiers who strayed to Russia, now there is a report of about 1000 soldiers encircled by the separatists that might be seeking refuge in Russia after being abandoned by their commanders. It is not as simple as some news outlets let you believe. Most of the headlines are sensationalist anyway, that's how you sell newspaper. There is also 300 US active military "advisors" embedded with the Ukrainian military, helping with tactics, logistics and strategy. But I don't see you being upset over that.

I am mostly upset that nobody is talking, they could have had a week long cease fire couple months ago to at least talk through what each side wants, but Ukraine pushes for a complete victory in the east. Maybe that is a good strategy, maybe not, but US is the only one benefiting right now. Ukraine, EU and Russia are all losers in this conflict. And I am also upset with the rhetoric of people that drive us into a military conflict with Russia. It is almost as if everyone forgot the 2000 nuclear warheads aimed at pretty much the entire world. But let's say they won't use them. Won't they maybe sell them? Or sell the technology to make them? What is their incentive not to?

You don't mod people you disagree with.

Yeah, I remember, you shouldn't have made fun of the Olympics, Sochi and Putin so much during that time, he's hurt now. You joke, he jokes. You know how it is? His newest joke is to send Russian soldiers to vacation in Mariupol :)

It is interesting that everybody just repeats this. The source of the "confirmation" is Ella Polyakova, which is a chairman of organization Soldier's Mothers and opposition politician. She has an advisory role on human rights. This is a person with an axe to grind at the very least. It is hard to take her as some official spokesman of the Russian government and definitely not someone in-the-know about the situation. All the articles make her seem like some member of Putin's inner circle of advisors.

The amount of disinformation that is coming from Russia, but also Ukraine and the NATO command is vast and it is very hard to sift through it to get to the truth. Very likely Russian troops are somehow involved in the conflict, but trust me that if Russia started an invasion of Ukraine, they could take Kiev the next day. So Occam's razor applied, this is not an invasion.

And why do they do that? Because they feel safe. They feel the safety of the first amendment. "If there was something truly wrong, someone would violate the constitution and we would know..." But as long as we have freedom of speech and no fraud in the voting process, we are fine. That is the lullaby. The fact that both candidates are picked by the same guys and they agree on 90% of the important stuff and just argue about fluff, the fact that press is actually controlled by the same people who pick the candidates for elections, those are things that are hidden. They are hard to understand, people who point them out look like lunatics, because they are not featured in any of the mainstream press and when they are, there is some talking head trashing their reputation to pieces. These things are hard to understand, but "fair elections", "democracy", "freedom of speech", those are simple concepts, easy to explain. We are the good guys after all, right? And that's why the first amendment is actually a population control tool.

I lived through it in a socialist state on the other side of the iron curtain, so don't tell me I don't understand it. I've experienced "Chilling Effect" or "auto-censorship" as we used to call it first hand.

But I am telling you that this is not going to happen here, because the government is making extra sure that it doesn't. First amendment violations are simply sacrosanct, because the first amendment is the best tool of population control. There is an extremely powerful lullaby in effect: "We still have free press and if something really bad happened, the government would first have to stomp on the free press. As long as that is there, we are safe."

What I am telling you is that a total population control can be reached without affecting the free speech in any way whatsoever, which is so much worse than any chilling effect.

No, it won't. The US govt. figured out something that the Russians still didn't. Talk is cheap, actions are rare. You can let them talk and talk and talk, you just make up some excuse to arrest or harass the few who act. There won't be so many so you can usually hide it under drug arrests or something else innocent looking. With enough laws on the books, everyone is guilty of something and since you know what everyone is doing, you can arrest pretty much anyone for a legitimate on the books crime. And if you cannot arrest them, maybe their family or friends did something illegal. You can blackmail, bargain, ... That is the power of NSA.

True that, I remember the stores at that time and they were pretty much empty... :)