I'm With Vanderleun and Denninger on This One...

From Vanderleun's site.  The only thing KD didn't add was that in '62, the US almost went nuclear over Khrushchev's attempt to plant missiles 90 miles off the Florida coast in Cuba.  Monroe Doctrine and all that.  Now, the roles seem to be reversed, as it were.  Except that the US pResident keeps taking Russia's oil and kills of the US' organic oil supply, and courts Venezuela and the House of Saud for more... and a host of other things, let alone the corruption that binds the 'first family' with the government of Ukraine.

The US has no business expanding NATO to the borders of the Russian Federation, because it's a threat to Russia.  Attempting to do so has stripped NATO of its legitimacy.  Especially when Germany wants Russia's oil exports, as does other EU nations.   

It would seem that Putin is reacting to the US expansion of NATO just as JFK did against Khrushchev and Castro. 

The US Government is the aggressor here.... when the US is wrong, it's wrong, and needs to be called out.  PS, all of the military age war hawks beating the drum need to grab themselves by the balls and go down and take their jabs and join the wokeness that used to be called the US military.  Maybe draw a rainbow rifle....or something.

WE (The US) Started This War

Here are the conditions Russia has set forth to stop it.

KREMLIN SPOKESMAN SAYS UKRAINE MUST AMEND CONSTITUTION AND REJECT CLAIMS TO ENTER ANY BLOC

UKRAINE MUST RECOGNISE CRIMEA AS RUSSIAN, AND DONETSK AND LUGANSK AS INDEPENDENT STATES

IF THESE CONDITIONS ARE MET, THEN RUSSIAN MILITARY ACTION WILL STOP IN A MOMENT - SPOKESMAN

A reminder for all you war-mongering *******s who support "whatever it takes" to make Russia "stop":

• We, the United States, repeatedly promised Russia when the Iron Curtain came down and the Warsaw Pact dissolved that we would not expand NATO eastward toward the Russian border.  Go look at the nations our Senate admitted by formal treaty in 2004.  We did this.  We deliberately and intentionally lied and by doing so proved to Russia that we were not to be trusted and our word was worthless on the international stage.
  
  
• We, the United States, formally and openly supported the shooting revolution at Maidan Square during the 2014 timeframe which included the killing of civilians and installation of Zelenskyy.  There was a serious sniping incident during that time.  Not one person who was involved in same was arrested and prosecuted.  This ought to inform you as to which side committed said offense since the other side, the sitting government at the time, was deposed.  If you're so ****ing stupid as to believe that the sitting government of the time committed that atrocity and Zelenskyy's government then "forgave and forgot" about the snipers rather than arresting, prosecuting and executing them you are so ****ing stupid you deserve to be nuked, especially considering that Ukraine just summarily executed one of their peace negotiators who they deemed "disloyal."  The current Ukrainian government certainly has no problem with capital punishment, even when employed summarily without trial.
  
  
• Crimea contained a Russian NAVAL PORT all the way back through and to the USSR.  Indeed that land has been part of whatever was called "Russia" all the way back through the time of Nicholas II and before!  If you think Russia was going to give that up at the behest of a United States supported shooting revolution, having it literally taken by force of arms you're out of your ****ing mind and your entire genetic line ought to go sit in an operating nuclear reactor and be recycled.  Russia went into Crimea and secured that which was theirs before Ukraine was split off.  If you claim to honor national boundaries and reject the use of military force to change who owns what then you damn well have to extend it to when its inconvenient to your other goals.  If not then just sit down, shut the **** up and deal with the fact that political entities take and protect land by force and, when it was theirs and someone takes it in a shooting revolution this sort of action should be expected.  This is no different than what we would do in the United States if China agitated and supported Mexico and California in breaking away, affiliating with Mexico with explicit Chinese backing, did so by shooting people and seized San Diego in the process.
  
  
• Zelenskyy has continued siphoning off the same sort of bribes his predecessors did.  If you think for one second that his former job, or his current one, was and is worth over one billion dollars you ought to immediately cut off your own genitals and kill any children you already produced so you cannot propagate your genetic line.  You really are that ****ing stupid and neither you or your children have business drawing oxygen from the air as your stupidity is materially adding to the probability of half of this nation being killed in a nuclear war and the starvation that will follow it.  These are the same oligarchs in Ukraine that funneled cash through Hunter Biden and myriad other people and which provided the "10 percent to the big guy" who is the douchebag that is our current President.  Everyone with more than two firing neurons knows that Ukraine has been a corrupt cesspool for decades and our politicians along with those in myriad other nations are on the take, getting rich off of it while directly supporting and steering the political climate there for profit, including killing those people who get in their way.
  
  
• Speaking of oligarchs why is it that seizing the assets of the Russian ones is fine but the Ukrainian ones who are supplying bribes to western government officials are free to operate and keep their stuff?  If we have suddenly grown a conscience with corrupt, embedded *******s who are part and parcel of foreign governments why haven't all the ones who are feeding Zelenskyy and who fed Hunter and Joe Biden had their assets seized?
  
  
• The current Ukraine government had, just prior to the Russian incursion, massed tens of thousands of troops on the border of Donetsk province.  It is reasonable to presume that their intentions were less than honorable considering that Zelenskyy's government had been shelling that province on and off for the last eight years.
  
  
• BOTH Donetsk and Lugansk are majority-Russian and declared their independence.  If it is legitimate for Ukraine to do so and if it is legitimate for the United States to have done so then it is also legitimate for these provinces to do so and to decide they'd prefer affiliation with Russia.  I remind you, once again, the current Ukraine Government has been shelling the people who live there.  What would you think of our government if you lived in Florida and our military was, on occasion, lobbing shells at the "deplorables" who lived there?  Uh huh.

Putin is an ******* but you can both be an ******* and, from your side of the desk, see a repeated, two decade long pattern of aggressive behavior including shelling and shooting people, along with moving nuclear weapons to your front door, held by nations in an alliance that no longer has a reason to exist as the "adversary" it was formed to combat dissolved more than 20 years ago and which appears, based on their pattern of behavior, to be hell-bent on eventually fomenting a shooting revolution in your nation exactly as it did eight years ago in Ukraine.

Then to add to it you have a sitting US Senator who has called for exactly that -- your literal assassination, and having done so he was not forced out of office by the body to which he is a member and which has the right and capacity to expel him by vote.

Is Putin's belief as to NATO's and the United States' intentions what you would expect from a reasonable, thinking person?

You tell me.

Think about the above two conditions folks.  They're not only reasonable the first one is what we promised Russia we would prevent more than two decades ago and we have serially broken that promise since.

Who's responsibility is that?

Ours.

So is the corruption of the current and Obama Administrations with respect to Ukraine and the cross-membership on Burisma's board, as well as Zelenskyy's personal wealth accrued as a direct result of said corruption is both well-documented and has reported on for many years prior to Russia's invasion.  That is not wartime propaganda given the depth and time of said reporting it is fact.

So, it appears, is our direct sponsorship and operation of biolabs in Ukraine, which if true is not only a wild provocation it is also a direct violation of the United Nations charter to which the United States is a signatory.

You want my considered opinion?

We're risking a nuclear war to protect a corrupt piece of **** named Zelenskyy and an entire ******ned family of corrupt *******s who was proved long ago have sucked off that source of corruption, the head of which is currently the President of the United States and who directly and personally profited from it.

If you support this bull**** and do not insist that we stop it NOW you deserve it if we all glow in the dark.

That's no bull**** America.  If YOU let this continue to where it is headed today roughly one quarter of the population of this nation has a high probability of being a rapidly expanding ball of 5,000F gas with more than half of the remainder starving or dying of disease and cold over the next five years as our capacity to produce electricity, fuel and food, along with distributing same, never mind medicine, drinkable water and sanitation will be returned to roughly the time of the 1800s and remain there for at least five if not ten or more years.

THAT is our fault as well because WE shipped all of our production capacity and the people over to China, Vietnam, India and similar.  Oh, you'd like a whole new set of transformers for your electrical grid?  That's nice; we have no ability to make them here nor any people who know how anymore.  The American people's obsession with stock prices and virtue signaling about "pollution" while shipping all of our production to where literal slave labor and poisoning of the air, land the water take place run by a literal communist nation, which, incidentally, shares a border with Russia and thus they can and will help one another after its over insures that if this happens there will be no road back to modern civilization for a very long time and your odds of living that long are not good at all.

By the way if you think being rich and/or powerful (politically or otherwise) will protect you in some bunker or compound you're wrong.  Your own security people will kill you because every one of them will know someone who got BBQ'd as a result of what you either did -- either directly or when you sat back and let happen while virtue signaling with sanctions and business "suspensions" -- and if they don't frag you whoever remains alive will be extraordinarily motivated in making damned certain your entire genetic line is extinguished, never mind that you can't stay in that bunker long enough to outlast the damage and as soon as you come out you will be exactly as ****ed by the cold, disease and famine as everyone else.