khokhol

You've got a lot of very confused, misinformed people on this site, Dan -- and that's assuming the very best of intent.

If patiently correcting them is considered "battle" then I guess we live in different universes.

I don't think it's necessarily better or worse than email

It's greatly worse than an email because it (1) primes the candidate with a false set of a (highly positive) expectations, only to simply (2) gouge very significantly into their time (as with any scheduled video call). The fact that these companies have no grasp of what should be obvious to them -- in particular as regards item (2) -- is central to what's so toxic about the current job application process.

That's the spin of those two observers. But there was a lot to more to the actual chain of events at the time.

And lo and behold, the fact of two guys stating a certain narrative about those events (then embellished up a bit by the publications quoting them) does not make it so. Even the article you're citing about Arahamiya's version of events isn't so clear-cut about the matter (it says Boris's advice was but one factor among many) as you're making it out to be.

That "peace deal" would have required that Ukraine permanently recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbas (on top of other concessions).

This is why Russia is called "expansionist". Because it likes to expand its territory.

Before Boris arrived to scupper it.

That's not what happened. I know you read some snippet somewhere that made it sound like that's what happened. But simply put, you're being played. And that's not actually what happened.

2027 is the target that both China and the US have projected for the invasion of Taiwan

The US has not released a definitive assessment. Jinping apparently did make some announcement that the PLA should be "ready to" invade Taiwan, but that's not the same as "is going to." And may just be propaganda for the PLA's 100th anniversary.

No, it's just that the dead Russians seem to start piling up with greater frequency after the 2022 invasion.

2027 is the current aim

That's what some say. But how do you know?

Outer Manchuria - including Vladivostok - will be the next target.

Very unlikely, even if Taiwan collapses quickly.

First of all, many people in Ukraine speak Russian. So those people very clear 'speak essentially the same language'.

Yikes - you definitely lost me there, man. I'm going to have to let you hash this stuff out on your own.

Seems you're drifting away from the scope of the issue I was referring to.

And are basically talking about something else.

Since you're still dodging the 2009 issue - you'll need to put forward actual evidence re: 2014.

I acknowledge my quote was imprecise.

This is a dodge, and you are (rather verbosely) wiggling away from acknowledging a plainly counterfactual statement you just made:

   In 2022 Ukraine shut down the pipeline to the EU in 2009 and again in 2014

This isn't worthy of a flame war, but we'll just note what you're telegraphing to us here: Namely your view that the basic situation with the current blockade of food and humanitarian supplies into Gaza is a matter of people being deprived of "nice things", as you say.

Either that, or that the people concerned about the blockade (and the bombings, and you know, those awful trenches full of bodies and stuff) are just whiny that they can't have "nice things" -- like a world without blatant genocides happening in the open for all to watch, with the support of major Western governments.

The basic point is that, while you seem to think that if people oppose Operation Iron Swords, it's because they take issue with "Israel taking necessary action to defend itself" -- when very obviously that's not what they take issue with at all.

What they object to, rather with extremely high (by all appearances intentionally so) number of civilian fatalities. Combined with numerous blatant statements by government officials and public figures in support of a complete removal of the entire population of Gaza.

What is normally called a genocide, in other words.

Attitudes towards the Iraq war changed massively during the presidency of George W Bush [1].

Sure it changed once they saw the (wholly predictable) actual reality of the war. But the fact that a solid majority supported the debacle at the outset, despite Bush's lies at the time being roughly on par with Putin's lies about Ukraine today (in terms of being transparently BS) -- does tend to support the point the above commenter is making.

I have been studying Russian history as a hobby for decades

If you've been studying the topic for "decades", and then you say things like "they speak essentially the same language" (in reference to Russians and Ukrainians) -- then I don't know what to tell you.

We assigned a task to one guy in Ukraine and two months latter he didn't complete it. One of our colleagues did it in three days.

Given the vast discrepancy in turnaround times -- I would seriously start to wonder about the person on your own team who was responsible for cutting out and assigning work to people outside the company.

Who apparently had not even a ballpark idea of how long the task should take. And who perhaps didn't do such hot job of communicating the requirements, now did they. And on top of that, apparently went to sleep on the task of, you know, tracking the status of the project, checking whether the intermediate deliverables (were there any)? actually worked and where up to team standards in terms of quality, etc. And yet they're still on the job, for some reason.

People love to blame freelancers, and they especially love water-cooler tales about how some project (whether by a person/team inside the company, or outside), and then was done by another person/team in a small fraction of the time. But usually there's more to the story.

It looks a lot like they've set up a puppet government in Ukraine

It "looks like", but only if we glance casually at a couple of articles (or sometimes even just headlines of articles) here and there, without taking the time to, like, actually read them.

Or we pick up random partial factoids (like about the Nuland cable), and we start thinking "Hmm, this would align with [some vastly larger mental model we have the world works]" without stopping to think about what the factoid is actually about, or whether it actually has much of any significance to begin with.

What you have here is article that says "CIA, Ukraine" and you're thinking right way it's about Ukraine being a puppet state. But that's not something the article asserts, or even comes close to talking about as a topic.

A mild annoyance within Ukrainian politics. But in reality, bearing no connection to the problem that Putin makes it out to be. A bogeyman basically.

Per the Wikipedia definition:

The bogeyman (/ˈboʊɡimæn/; also spelled or known as bogyman, bogy, bogey, and, in North American English, also boogeyman)[1] is a mythical creature used by adults to frighten children into good behaviour.

A UN resolution by itself, perhaps not.

But you're getting off track here. We were discussing the total package of US support for Israel as a driving factor in the current, grotesque horror we are all witnessing.

And it is the main driving factor. If that support were to vanish, Israel's expansionist adventures in Gaza and the West Bank would grind to a halt in very short order indeed.

[US financial, military and diplomatic support] is far from the only reason for the war [and genocide] is Gaza

But it's clearly the most important. To an extent that it dominates all other factors.

The Soviet Union, witch was a country

An empire, not a country.

Which dissolved itself peacefully enough and with no outside prodding of any kind on 26 December 1991. In the process, fully and unequivocally recognizing the complete sovereign independence of all of its constituent members at the time -- along with their inviolable borders -- including Ukraine.

End of story, full stop.

This idea you have that it's basically "still one country, hashing things out" is seriously misinformed nonsense.

Kievan Rus

And the idea that anyone, anywhere should be fighting a full-scale war in 2024 based on (or "explained" by) events of the 9th-13th centuries is, by all objective standards -- batshit crazy.

^ Was meant to be attached to the sibling comment (rather than to its current parent), obviously.

Humans aren’t special

But it seems so much more fun to believe otherwise. So why not?

If you were to remove the Russian forces from these two oblasts (as well as Crimea and Zaporizhzhia) these proxy forces would collapse immediately.

As would all of the so-called rebellions in the East from the very start (2014).

While there were indigenous elements - even their own leaders acknowledge they wouldn't have gotten anywhere without support (or at least the hope of support) from the Motherland.

Actually it was what you might call a "joke".

I have no idea what you think I'm defending, but whatever.

Yep, and they're literally worse than Stalin in this regard.

At least he had an appreciation for statistics, and accurate body counts.

You're confused. The 600k figure doesn't mean what you think it does. Or even relate to the conversation in the way you think it does.

That is the Nakba in a nutshell.

The standard (and perversely broken) right-wing narrative of said events, anyway.

A lesson that is apparently difficult for Palestinians to understand.

At least you're making clear for us where you're coming from.

For the last 400 [barely 300 actually] years the were part of the same country

The same Empire, you mean. Are you saying that all empires that ever existed need to be maintained into perpetuity?

They speak essentially the same language

Absolutely not the case. Are Spanish and Portuguese "essentially the same language?"

And use the same national origin story

Nope.

I think its totally fair to call it a civil war.

You really are very misinformed.

After 250 years of British history, calling that a civil war would be totally reasonable.

And if you tried walking into a bar, and telling an Irish person that the whole situation with England has been just a "civil war" and that they really ought to get over this idea of Irish independence -- I think you know what would happen.

Beginning in 2019, Ukraine went full-press on seeking NATO membership.

We've gone through this already. Yes, Ukraine wanted to join NATO - but the bigger fact was that Europe was against it. So it wasn't going to happen.

If one country has been saying for almost 2 decades that if another country joins NATO it means war

Have you actually read the Munich speech? It doesn't even mention Ukraine, and doesn't come close to using the belligerent language that you're saying it does.

I suggest that you develop a practice of reading original source materials, such as for the the 2007 Munich speech, directly -- rather than uncritically relying on random snippets from Wikipedia quoting what certain pro-Russia commentators (like Mearsheimer and Cohen) say about them.