News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


When they made an alliance with the Poles, we warred with the Cossacks for 38 years before finally breaking them.

We fought with them for another two years, when they stabbed us in the back and allied with the Swedes during Peter's reign.

Quite recently we fought with them for nearly four years, after some of them figured that the collapse of the Russian Empire was a good opportunity to "hop off the train". Kicking and screaming... but they were brought back home.

-//-

It's not our first rodeo, sluggin it out with the Hohols.

The West should listen to Putin when he states that this is an existential battle for Russia, where cost and time are not material.

Listen to him - and do a deal. End this stupid war.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


How can we believe you, when you already "called" the collapse of the Russian economy in 200 other instances within the past 3 years?

Is this the same as Putin, who is about to die "at any moment" from Stage IV cancer for the past 3 years?

-//-

Russia will always have money for war.

There is a Russian joke:

Son: Papa! Papa! They've raised the prices on vodka - surely you will drink less now!

Father: No son, it is you who will have to eat less from now on..

Life / Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Day) // Dzien Zaduszny (All Souls day) [106]


Hahahaha!

The same thing I am always thinking when someone makes me watch some stupid horror film.

I don't want to be some Karen ghost, hassling civilians.

I want to drink with Hitler and Stalin, and never get hungover.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


You are telling me you would actually watch a Russian video if I posted it?

Off-Topic / USA News and Poland - part 17 [1010]


Oh dear...

That's a great electoral platform.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]

@Novichok

One feels the worst for the wounded, because rarely does anyone want to bother with taking them prisoner.

It's a huge physical effort to transport them, and the entire time you are liable to get killed by the drones of their friends.

Instead, what typically happens, is that anyone who discovers the wounded immediately make them a permanent part of the past.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Depending on who you ask, they are either still fighting or already withdrawing.

Russian soldiers have penetrated nearly every district of the city.

Escape routes for AFU are shrinking by the hour.

If the personnel manages to get out by walking on foot throughout the night, the equipment and the ammunition will certainly have to be abandoned.

The wounded will likely be abandoned as well.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


What will you ask me now, once Pokrovsk is taken?


Well... in front of Pokrovsk you had one of the densest urban agglomerations in Ukraine.

Behind it is nothing but fields, for a good 40-60 kilometers, until you start hitting the larger population centers of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

In addition to this, the fields beyond Pokrovsk lie at a lower elevation than the city. Plus - Pokrovsk is a city with many high rises - which means Russian antennas will broadcast significantly farther than they can now, further crippling Ukrainian rear logistics.

Finally - as a reminder to everyone - the environs of Pokrovsk contained Ukraine's largest anthracite coal mining operation, on which their entire metallurgical industry depended, as well as Ukraine's largest lithium deposit.
-//-

It's not just Pokrovsk and Mirnograd which are about to fall, but also Kupyansk and Lyman.

Kupyansk is arguably a bigger deal, since it allows Russia to once again threaten Kharkov. We had lost it in 2022, during the Ukrainian Kharkov Counteroffensive.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Yes he is correct.

Russians (as a whole) suffer from a certain megalomania and feeling of mission.

But so do Americans, and not just now (when they are a world hyper power), but even when they were a tiny country focused primarily on its frontier. Some say the Puritans made them this way...

So do Chinese, who call themselves the only proper rulers under Heaven.

So Maf's comparison to Jews and Gypsies does not offend me.

Poles are the same way. That's why I love them.

Nobody gives a **** about the "square" nations of Netherlands, and Belgiums, and Switzerlands - who suffer from no psychological problems and live quietly and mind their own business.

People only love the psychopathic countries like England, and Russia, and France - that feel they know exactly how everyone else should live. That's fun. That's drama. That's sexy.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


As we Russians say - "to whom, and how?".

What I realize, and what you realize, and... what matters... can be three different things.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


You realize you just wrote an ode to Russians, as practically no Russian could write himself?

Thank you for this text.

You have earned your Russian History Ph.D.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Ok... I misjudged you.

You are actually a Russian patriot, but of a different vintage than Torq.

I will listen more carefully to you now.

I thought previously that you're animated only by a pure racial hatred towards Easterners.

Off-Topic / Random Chat Thread [892]

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Off-Topic / Random Chat Thread [892]

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Off-Topic / USA News and Poland - part 17 [1010]


He's the next mayor. Only a miracle can help Cuomo now.

As Maf and Kania say - as a Russian I'm naturally inclined to be very deferential towards pedigree and status.

Thus, how can I not support the son of a former governor, and a former governor himself, versus... some overeager upstart?

Cuomo saved my ass during Covid, so I feel I have to close my eyes also to his sexual harassment problems.

Alas, family, loyalty, and tradition means nothing to voters in NYC these days...

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Meaningless.

In the last days of the war, nearly the entire "cream" of Germany's scientific class began escaping into what would become the western occupation zones.

The most important physicists and chemists in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden nearly all fled. This is how we missed people like Von Braun, and Heisenberg.

America took nearly all the top tier talent - as I wrote above. The USSR got second rate folks, like plant directors, metallurgists, chemists, and draftsmen. Basically infrastructure and mid-level industrial experts who hadn't been mobile or foresighted enough to flee.

-//-

In a fundamental sense - America got "system level innovators", while Russia gained reverse-engineering talent and production know-how.

Comparing by simple numbers of people "taken", gives you a wrong sense of what was going on.

Everyone important in the eastern universities, had known by May/June that if they fell into Soviet hands it could be a very long time before they would be allowed to return home. In the event, the last Germans were only allowed to go home in 1958.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]

Another fun fact - Dugin was kind of at the root of the movement in Ukraine, which eventually bore Azov.

Now, of course, Dugin calls them a "satanic inversion" - an apostate offspring of Eurasianism that turned against its parent civilization.

He thinks... Western influence "corrupted" the Slavic unity he imagined.

But whether he likes it or not, Biletskiy for many years considered Dugin a guiding light.

-//-

Russian nationalism has a hard time coexisting with Ukrainian nationalism. Which is why the Bolsheviks correctly identified it as a cancer.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Yes, they carry on the torch of the 19th century Slavophiles and Pan-Slavists. Like Aksakov, Pogodin... And the old Eurasianists which appeared after the Revolution, attempting to explain how Russia collapsed to Bolshevism (like Prince Trubetzkoy, and Vernadsky).

It's not new.

Even in the times of Ivan the Terrible, there were people attempting to argue that Russia represents a unique axis in the world - a blend of Tataro-Mongol militarism, and Byzantine merger of church and autocracy.


They are not simple dummies who didn't study well at school. But they are lazy.

Dugin went through an evolution, as wide spectrum as the evolution Russian went through between 1989 and 2025.

Like the young Viktor Orban, Dugin was an unapologetic liberal. Was part of the underground Soviet intelligentsia, mixing with artists, poets, and philosophers. Read forbidden texts, and listened to Western punk rock.

Then something happened to him in France, where he met Alain de Benoist, the founder of the European Nouvelle Droite.

So... it is pretty funny when people say Russian money is fueling Marine Le Pen.

Right politics did not come to France from Russia, but from France to Russia.

Further - when Russia's reformers were designing the power vertical of Russia in the early 1990s, they borrowed primarily from two systems. The French and the American - because they felt that the Uber-Powerful presidencies of France and America fit Russia's cultural and historical profile.

Putin is a big fan of De Gaulle and Mitterrand.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


America got the lion's share of Nazi scientists. Werner Von Braun alone, was worth his weight in gold. He built the American space program.

They got nearly all the nuclear physicists. We got two dudes that knew isotope separation and gas diffusion, while the Americans got the other 80% of what it takes to make an atom bomb.

The Americans got access to all of Germany's chemical geniuses. To Japan's biologists (who collected that data by killing tens of thousands of Chinese).

Quite strange to accuse the USSR of benefiting from Nazi technology, when it was the "Free World" that got the majority of the dividends.


Russia's old school historians - like Gumilev, Solzhenitsyn, and Klyuchevsky have argued that what explains Russia's backwardness is geography and history.

Endless open plains, and no natural borders left Russia constantly exposed to invasions. Because of this... Russia could never afford weak central power or decentralized feudalism like in Western Europe. But it was precisely decentralized feudalism which sowed the seeds of a future bourgeoisie and a working class.

So these historians, then see Russia as a "fortress civilization", always centralizing, militant, and constantly paranoid.

-//-

Modern Russian reformers, like Gaidar and Mau, subscribed more to your view. That Russia suffers from a "Dutch Disease" on steroids.

That is, that Russia's wealth in land and raw materials removed the incentive for modernization and innovation. The economy and state became addicted to resource rents (first serf labor and land, later oil and gas).

The elite, living off extraction rather than production, had little interest in legal or civic development. As Gaidar put it: "Russia learned to live by distributing resource rents, not creating value."

-//-

Finally we have neo-conservative (or Eurasianists
as they call themselves) historians now, like Dugin and Panarin.

To these guys - nothing is wrong with Russia.

They reject the premise of backwardness itself. They think we have our own unique civilization, based on communitarianism and autocracy, as opposed to the West's decadent individualism and commercialism.

-//-

As many Russians as there are, so many opinions there are about why we are living like we live.

Off-Topic / Random Chat Thread [892]

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Off-Topic / Stock Market Talk and Trading - part 2 [747]


It's what I think, and many other people...

But my friend - who's much more knowledgeable on the subject - continues to make fun of me. Telling me, "You called the last 46 recessions correctly".

Yes... I'm a bear. And us bears, we have been fighting an unfair fight - against Powell, Yellen, Bessent, and the rest - where the government drops trillions of dollars from the sky during CoVid and its aftermath.

Any bear would die fighting against those kinda odds.

But sooner or later - us bears will have our day, when all our concerns will finally manifest.

-//-

My friend has answers to all the questions however:

1) AI Boom - a true boom, mostly of a real estate nature. Driving semiconductors, steel, concrete, cement, energy, and property.

2) Problems of the "Poors" - Who cares about the poor. The US stock market and economy has become completely disconnected from the poor (this is what he tells me). If they can't pay for their car loans, or default on their mortgages - it doesn't matter. It's not 2008. The rich drive the economy forward, and the poor are just an unnecessary appendix. If they all died tomorrow - nothing would change.

Even McDonald's no longer depends on the low income folks for its revenues.

3) Debt - just a number.

4) Inflation - tail of tariff wars, otherwise would be zero

5) Tariffs - have you seen the tremendous amount of receipts Trump is collecting?

And so on, and so forth...

-//-

I still think we are all f*cked, but most of my friends think the gravy train will keep chugging along.

Off-Topic / Stock Market Talk and Trading - part 2 [747]

Because I love everyone on PF, regardless of how many times they've called me a butcher and an orc...

I will give you my macro advice.

Fix your profits, and get the hell out of the market.

The way things are looking now is very... frothy.

Smart, important people - like Jay Powell and Jamie Dimon - are saying equities are significantly overvalued.

Economists are saying that if you strip out the AI boom - the US economy is in a technical recession, or about to enter one.

America's "poor", are as poor as they've ever been. The wave of auto loan delinquencies is the first sign.

Off-Topic / Stock Market Talk and Trading - part 2 [747]


As they say in Russia - "one cannot drink his talent away".

Talent is talent.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


It is stronger than any European army.

Objectively.

On short legs, with uncertain funding, and faltering manpower pipeline... but still stronger than anything on the Continent.

The implication then, is that Russia is stronger by far.

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]


Ukraine has a strong army. Very strong army...

Cossack spirit is there, but directed in unorthodox directions.

Law / A tree obscuring a satellite dish - illegal in Poland? [15]


If "thuya" is the same thing as "туя", or "white cedar" .... then this is a sh*t tree.

I would never cry over a 6 meter thuya.

If we were discussing some Tien Shan pine, or old and mighty oak - I would get upset.

You can have a whole row of tall thuyas in 5-6 years.

Law / A tree obscuring a satellite dish - illegal in Poland? [15]

My advice, plus 10 zloty - will buy you a cup of coffee.

Law / A tree obscuring a satellite dish - illegal in Poland? [15]

The way you had written your original post - it was exactly the reverse of what you had just said.

Well done.


I'm not Polish. I don't live in Poland. I have zero familiarity with Polish law... but this seems strange on some fundamental juridical level.

It's hard for me to imagine, why there may be such a law in existence on a national level.

Instead, your neighbor may be referring to some local level laws, or maybe even ordinances written by your local homeowners association.

Law / A tree obscuring a satellite dish - illegal in Poland? [15]

@Kasper2025

Have you considered that it may be easier to move the dish, than to move the tree?

News / Poland's aid to Ukraine if Russia invades - part 26 [1183]

Ukrainian serviceman that underwent training with the Bundeswehr, claims that a single Ukrainian corps could conquer all of Germany.

Hilarity ensues in the comments.

Source: x.com/denisslatin/status/1981597656649457759?s=46

The point of the post is not that Ukraine is planning an invasion of Germany, but to highlight how ridiculous it is that in year 4 of this war, NATO armies still have a dismissive and unrealistic estimation of Ukrainian capabilities. Still viewing the Ukrainians as junior partner, and still confident in the superiority of their way of war ("We won't need drones - we have large air forces").

The author goes on to talk about the absurdities witnessed in Germany.

-//-

Several months prior, you had the head of Ukraine's Unmanned Forces, Robert Brovdi (callsign "Magyar") say that with just four of his UAV groups, he could turn any NATO airbase into Pearl Harbor, in just 15 minutes.

Then, there also followed a lot of indignant noises from NATO experts, who are uncomfortable with the idea that a poor Eastern European country can "kneecap" their armed forces.

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