93 comments

  1. Putin has accomplished many goals.
    Expanding NATO, increasing NATO arms expenditure, reducing
    European reliance on Russian gas and oil, etc.
    Well done Putin!🙄🙂

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    1. @Sabine Hahn lol that’s all you got buddy. Shows how much you really know whays going on. Just keep watching your cnn and fox news you have the brain capacity perfect for it

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    2. You sound so stupid as F, NATO are 30 countries cowards cause one to one not one country is a match for Russian militar power

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    3. US western is biased. The root cause of this war is Zelensky approved Azov to kill Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas.
      Thank God there is Putin to save those people in Donbas.

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    4. Ce qui est sûr, c’est que le jour où toi tu disparaîtra, personne n’en aura rien à foutre tant tu es nul.

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    5. @Theresa Santiago he fell from a one story house…and landed with his back and head on 8 stray bullets that happened to be on the sidewalk and the from the impact bounced and landed face first into a puddle in the concrete that had a toxic poison in the shallow water ….it’s very common in 🇷🇺

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  3. It is so sad to see how human beings are destroying each other. Where is wisdom in all these wars, hatred and bloodshed? Nothing good is ever achieved.

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    1. US western is biased. The root cause of this war is Zelensky approved Azov to kill Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas.
      Thank God there is Putin to save those people in Donbas.

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    2. From the beginning of recorded history, wars have been the path for ambitious power-hungry leaders of nation states, empires, and factions within, to defeat and kill those they declare as their enemy from whom they can wrest control over territory. Collateral damage of the deaths of innocent people is just part of the process. There will always be war somewhere, but it will only draw our attention as to how it affects us or those we feel kinship with. They will take different forms based on weaponry and technology, and innocent people will be killed or made homeless.
      * To get perspective on human thirst for war, take a read of a profound short story, Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer”.

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    3. your statement infers there is a equivalence with the Russian peoples and the Ukrainian peoples so sad that you can’t be arsed to look at the politics and instead come out asinine statements

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    4. Boring! If you want to remain outside of reality, you can. But, please, don’t try to sell your cheap dreams to anybody else. Cause war isn’t an activity where only humans engage in and war is as old as humanity. Get a grip on yourself and look at reality like it is.

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    5. This is such a common — and profoundly useless — sentiment. It takes my intellectual breath away every time I read it or some variation of it.
      OF COURSE it’s terrible! The obviously important question that is never addressed with this sentiment, and what renders it absolutely meaningless, is: What should we do about it? What choice should be made? To do nothing is to allow evil to flourish.
      So you support evil, don’t you?

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  4. I can’t wait until we have a video of him being served justice by his own people, like the Iraqis served justice to Saddam and the Libyans served justice to gaddafi.

    And once Putin is gone, don’t think we forgot about you Assad…

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    2. Germanic nationalism ends. Ukraine started the war when they allowed the Azov, a neo Nazi regiment , into their national military. Also, Germanic neo Nazi propoganda is being taught in European schools. I know this because I have to argue with the little Nazis. They identify as nazis and they believe Romans and Greeks were all blonde and they want to fight about it. So for Russia and it’s allies , this war is about ending Nazism, because the Germanic Nazis always attack, just like the trump movement was a fascist germanic movement. There are consequences to your actions .

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    4. @Edgardo Martinez You replied your bot comment to the wrong thread. Or do you just go to any statement and reply NO THE AMERICANS DID IT.

      LOL

      What a waste of oxygen. BotBGone.

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    5. I watched a documentary and it seemed libyans were better off under gadafi. I wish someone would give Hilary a dose of what goes around comes around.

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  5. I always thought Freidman was unprecise in his writings; it appears he has no idea how many Russians were killed in WW2 either, more like 27 million, not 5.

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    1. @Jim McLoughlin Jacq may be off, but as Snoopy Snoop pointed out, that was the total for Soviets, not Russians. It included really large numbers of non-Russian Soviets (neither ethnically, or, by current nationality, Russian). A large part of that is that because a lot of the Western portions of the Soviet Union the Germans managed to occupy wasn’t ethnically or isn’t currently nationally part of Russia (the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine). I haven’t seen a breakdown of the starvation deaths during WWII, but after WWII starvation deaths continued, and were focused largely on ethnically non-Russian populations as Stalin tried his own reforms, including punishments, that went about as well as China’s Great Leap Forward did later.

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    3. Friedman is a complete and utter hack. Do people remember the ever-famous “Freidman units” relevant to the U.S. war in Iraq? “Combat will decrease in six months, starting…now.” “Oops, I meant, starting now.” “Starting now?” “Well, any day now?” “Well, certainly, six months from /now./” And I could go on and on and on. How this imbecile is given even an iota of credence is beyond me.

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    4. The Russians threw their troops at the Nazis. Many didn’t even have guns. They were supposed to pick up the guns from the fallen and carry on. Agree on high 20+mil.

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    5. You are confusing Russians and the ‘Soviet’ numbers. He is still wrong on either count (around twice that number) but don’t lump the occupied State figures in with ‘Russia’.

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  6. I think highly of Friedman. But he overlooks that Putin would probably be ousted by someone even MORE nationalist, not more liberal.

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    2. Perhaps. But a more pragmatic leader than Putin would understand the strategic calculus heavily disfavours Russia in this war and would move to cut the country’s losses, then turn inward to “cleansing” Russian culture of all foreign influences. It’s the go-to political strategy to completely suppress dissent and snuff out any democratic tendencies that might now be stirring in the population. Concurrent to this would be a rebuilding of the Russian military for a future war years down the line.

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    4. @C B Everyone said whoever came to rule Iraq after Sadam Hussein would be worse! Who the hell is in charge of Iraq now?

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    5. @Alex Kuznetsov please, Russians don’t want another Stalin or Putin, they can have a more western type of government like the rest of Europe

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  7. There’s a 4th path although unlikely which is a complete uprising within Russia by the population. They have the best opportunity to end this if they can find the courage.

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    1. @TheHighlanderprime It’s not a lack of courage; it’s a lack of perspective. These people have never been free. Ever. Like ever-ever-ever. They are not of the Western mindset.

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    3. They don’t have the courage. They’re weak & they’ve always been. That’s why they always need some dictator to tell them what to do. So sad

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    4. @onikin it doesn’t matter. Just like in any other country, Russians don’t want to shoot other Russians. If the us government turned corrupt, I doubt you’d see police shooting protesters on the streets,

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    2. Germanic nationalism and Nazism will end. Ukraine started the war when they allowed the Azov, a neo Nazi regiment , into their national military. Also, Germanic neo Nazi propoganda is being taught in European schools. I know this because I have to argue with the little Nazis. They identify as nazis and they believe Romans and Greeks were all blonde and they want to fight about it. So for Russia and it’s allies , this war is about ending Nazism, because the Germanic Nazis always attack, just like the trump movement was a fascist germanic movement. There are consequences to your actions .

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    3. 👋 i hope you’re safe over there? I hope this year brings happiness prosperity love and peace 💞❤️🕊️🕊️ all over the world 🙏🌍
      I’m originally from Ireland🇮🇪currently living in Santa Barbara, CA🇺🇲☀️☀️☀️☀️and you where are you from if i may ask?💭💭

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    5. MELITOPOL (Sputnik) – Referendum on accession of the Zaporozhye region to Russia is transparent and well-organized, observer from Germany Stefan Schaller, a manager of Energie Waldeck-Frankenberg GmbH, told Sputnik on Saturday.

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  9. It will end with Russia’s military being completely depleted they can’t replace anything their losing as in tanks , helicopters , weapons etc so once they run out of those they have no choice but to surrender.

    Like for example when they abandoned all those supplies to Ukraine in the great Ukrainian push

    all that stuff will now be used against them and they have no way of replacing that stuff and even if they did it would take time to reach the front.

    Like that train full of tanks that got obliterated behind Russian lines so yeah no guarantees they would get those supplies either

    with them being cut off from the world and not making anything themselves and getting it from other countries they really handicapped themselves

    So I see this being the ending along with them being pushed back over the border because they won’t have enough firepower left to hold their ground

    Russia knows this that’s why they went straight for the capitol in the beginning

    Time is Russia’s biggest enemy the longer this goes the weaker they get as they lose assets

    Meanwhile Ukraine will just keep getting stronger because the entire world backing them and sending them infinite assets

    Times entirely on Ukraine’s side

    The only way Russia could possibly win now is if china decided to get involved and send in troops and that seems unlikely to happen since they are saving them for a future Taiwan invasion

    Edited to clarify things

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    2. China is not going to do that. IF they did they would incur the wrath of the west. No Joke. They would lose their markets overnight. They are already teetering on the brink of some kind of 2008 crash due to mortgage lending. China had an 11 week drought that is drying up rivers. They’re in sh/ts creek without a paddle or water. China is not getting involved for a moron in the Kremlin.

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  10. Mr Friedman is wrong about even suggesting that we will be negotiating our territories. Our Ukrainian land is not a pie. The only thing we will be “slicing” on our territory is russian occupants. Glory to our Ukrainian heroes! 🇺🇦

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    2. Friedman is a billionaire by marriage and has not known a moment of adversity in decades. To him Ukraine is not a country, it is only real estate.

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    3. No one listens to so called main stream media.
      It’s better to simply ask a local to look out of the window now.
      The media just don’t realise their scare tactics to get drama viewers is over years ago.
      Read the comments not the presenters bee s

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    5. @keshab644 being invaded erm…. Maybe if Canada comes and burns down your Whitehouse again don’t call us then. Edit: Or Iraq or Afghanistan go do it and loose as you always do.

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  11. Far more Russians died in WW2 than 5 million. The Soviet Union lost around 23 million in total during the war. About 12 million of that was ethnic Russians with the rest from the other Soviet states including Ukraine.

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    3. The soviet union lost an estimated 1 million men in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. Nazi Germany lost like half a million. And hundred thousand taken prisonder. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet union lost more men in that single battle than the US or the UK lost during the entire war. The blood bath of ww2 in Russia was insane. In the seige of Lennigrad like 800,000 civilians were starved to death. Which is nearly the amount of all the WW2 deaths in the US and the UK combined. Like a million Soviet citizens were killed in Stalin’s own labor camps. I could go on and on about the amount of people that died in Russia in ww2. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the amount of death. I laughed out loud at the inanity of 5 million deaths. Lol a quick Google search could debunk that.

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    4. The Russians shot nearly 200,000 for desertion. About 450,000 vanished into other countries. Russia would never have lost as many if it hadn’t been an ally of Nazi Germany, until the day they invaded.

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  13. I love hearing Americans react to European resolve. We Europeans are resolved. I am sitting in a house without light, in the dark except for the glow of my computer screen. Not because I cannot pay the bill. But, I do not want to inflate the bill for less privileged people.

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    2. @Mark Anthony NOPE…you give CHANCE too much credit…the resolve is there..the MORAL COMPASS …Points toward APATHY!

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    3. @Dirk Gonthier hey genius….where ya gonna get the ships? building an LNG port is one thing, but you have to have ships to go to America, pick up the gas, and then take 2 weeks to get it across the atlantic, off load it, then 2 weeks back to the USA for another load.

      right now you got around 620 LNG tankers already servicing other places in the world. you’re gonna havve a long cold winter bud.

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    5. @MrSGL21 Like I stated very clearly in my comment, there’s still gas flowing through pipelines to the EU from other suppliers than the USA, genius. The EU imported 40% of its gas from Russia. Now it’s only 9%. Different countries have different dependencies. There are even countries that don’t depend on Russian gas. Just like a genius like you knows without a doubt. You probably know them by heart, so I won’t list them here. The dependency on Russian gas (and, to state it more broadly: Russian energy) is, except for Austria, Germany and Italy, mainly an Eastern-European problem. Except for Lithouania, that already receives LNG-ships and promissed to take care of Poland, Estonia and Latvia. Not that we will let our Eastern European brothers stand alone, of course, genius.

      Furthermore, so far the EU has replaced all the gas that Russia exports less to the EU by gas from other suppliers, like Norway, the Netherlands and Algeria. All by pipline. Apparantly you didn’t read the story of Zeebrugge, which a genius like yourself should do. But obviously you didn’t. It is a part of the explanation how we could fill our national reserve tanks, despite Russia’s refusal to honour the contract it signed.

      Nobody will freeze in the EU. Nobody will have cold. Perhaps it’s needed to wear a pullover this winter. For some people, who are accustomed to wear only a T-shirt in the winter at home, it will be an inconvience. But not for me, since I never heat my appartment warmer than 18 degrees.

      What will change is the price that we pay for our energy. Since the times of cheap deliveries from Russia are most definitely over. Next year, the prices will be reasonable again. Not like before, but reasonable. This winter they’ll remain high. To the pleasure of our energy-companies that make billions of profit. But, the EU is planning to introduce an extra tax on the profits and this money will go to our vulnerable citizens and our vulnerable companies.

      And, to end, I don’t believe that it is the job of the client to ensure the delivery of gas. Like I said, Lithouania is already receiving gas as an LNG product and I don’t believe that it happens because Lithousnia has such a massive fleet of tankers. Furthermore, I live in Antwerp, another Flemish city that has the 2nd largest port in Europe (it always had an important port; together with Rotterdam (200 km further) we take care of the bulk of imports to Europe). And I’ve seen Russian tankers off loading oil in the time that we had Russian oil. Not all of its oil came by pipline. They stopped building them at Germany. Eastern European nations got provided by pipeline. Western European nations, that always were less dependant of Russian energy, got provided by Russian tankers. So, what’s applicable to oil is, according to me, also applicable to gas. In any case, you don’t convince me with your scaremongering.

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  14. Seems that Friedman could benefit from educating himself on some basic historical facts! First, it was not Russia that fought in WW2 but Soviet Union. Thus second, it was to a large extent the Ukrainians and Belarusians (as part of Soviet Union) in the frontlines that bared the heaviest burden in the fights.

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  16. Im glad he said something about the collective character about most Russians being apathetic about what theyre country is doing in Ukraine and elsewhere as long as it didnt affect them in any major way which up until now it really hadnt. I feel for the opposition in Russia but the Russian people as a polity I believe largely brought this on themselves for largely agreeing to the social contract Putin offered them of an exchange of basic freedoms, rule of law and kleptocracy for greater economic standards and snazzy consumerism. History has shown that Russians will put up with quite alot of degradation of their rights as human beings as long as national pride, living standards and prestige are largely kept intact. Now they face losing it all and they have no recourse to correct it and now only face the choice of going along with it yet again at the risk of losing all of that or fleeing the country. Well the majority of them can lie in the bed they made for themselves as far as Im concerned.

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    1. They may not be fleeing for much longer. If Russia doesn’t stop them first, others have started to close their borders. Those that haven’t yet, should – Russians need to hold both their leaders and themselves to account, and to think hard about their support of this war. I have no sympathy, except for _genuine_ refugees.

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    3. Is the American public any different? We don’t even have the excuse of a history of being beaten down. There was silence throughout the Korean war, there was silence for years during the Vietnam war, and I don’t recall a lot of attention paid to Iraq. Even Afghanistan went on mostly unnoticed, though maybe that war was kinda justified. We,too, may “end up in a bed we made for ourselves”. I think people are more alike than different.

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    4. @Carol Hill Americans do not have a history of being beaten down??? Your rulers have divided you since the beginning and you beat down on each other. Why do you think white nationalists are so scared of losing privelage? They know once the boot is on the other foot, it will be their turn. There is no solidarity between Americans.

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  17. The mention of Russian men breaking their own arms to avoid the war reminds me that 40 plus years ago I knew a guy that cut off two of his fingers to avoid the Vietnam draft.

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  18. Below Mariupol and Donbass, Ukraine are extremely large deposits of Lithium (used for production of batteries). Putin is not an idiot, he is going after those lands to ensure financial success in Russia during the EV and solar energy age to come when oil and dirty fuel demand dies off.

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  19. He mentioned that in Crimea the approval was 97% approval with 3% margin of error. Not by a long shot. The margin of error for that vote was 97%!

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  20. Yea, that book glosses over one major fact in Putin’s thinking that no one wants to seem to bring up: Putin cannot “resign”, he will be “retired” if he ever leaves office. It is unknown at this time if he could even arrange wardship for his grandchildren, because Putin and his entire family would never survive the night if Putin ever leaves office. So for Putin the outcome was never in question. He either wins, or he’s a dead man.

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