Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

We still have time to mess this up!

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War for Ukraine Day 305: Christmas Day

War for Ukraine Day 305: Christmas Day

by | 33 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , ,

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

I’m going to keep tonight’s post short.

Here’s President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump:

Ukrainians!

Today, millions of people celebrate Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar. And I once again congratulate everyone who is celebrating right now, these days.

And I want us to once again express gratitude – together – to all those who both these days and at any other time are doing everything so that we can live. Live our life and in our country.

I thank each of our warriors – all military personnel. All fighters of the Air Forces, anti-aircraft fighters, intelligence officers, border guards, national guardsmen, warriors of the territorial defense, Naval Forces. Thank you to every soldier and sailor, to every sergeant and sergeant-major, to every officer and general who are holding the front and trying to push it further – to our borders that we have to reach.

Thanks to everyone who repairs and supplies equipment. To everyone who volunteers.

Thanks to all our medics and everyone who saves the wounded on the battlefield. Thank you to all the nurses who perform their work selflessly under any circumstances.

Thank you to everyone who helps provide hospitals with everything necessary. To all those who come to donate blood for the wounded… And to all those who came now in Kherson to help. To save the wounded from the attack of terrorists on Christmas… Artillery and mortars against ordinary streets of Kherson… Savages!

We will find every Russian murderer. And I thank everyone who works for this: all investigative teams, all prosecutors, officials and diplomats.

Thank you to each and everyone who helps get Ukrainians out of captivity.

Thank you to all our energy workers and repairmen, sappers, policemen, employees of the State Emergency Service, utility workers.

Thank you to the educators who continue to build our future and the builders who take care of our present.

Thank you to the transporters who keep our economy alive and the financiers who maintain our stability.

Thank you to the IT specialists who chose Ukraine.

Thank you to officials who care about people and businesses who help society to be resilient.

Thank you to our farmers, thank you to the agrarians who did not give up last spring and are preparing for the next one.

Thank you to all journalists who spread the truth and public figures who help our people to keep faith in themselves and in victory.

Thank you to all the leaders and peoples of the world, who this year, together with Ukraine, became leaders in the defense of freedom and next year, I believe, together with us, will do everything to become leaders of peace. It’s possible.

Fellow Ukrainians!

There are only a few days left this year. We must be aware that our enemy will try to make this time dark and difficult for us. Russia lost everything it could this year. But it is trying to compensate for its losses with the gloating of its propagandists after the missile strikes at our country, at our energy sector.

I know that the darkness will not prevent us from leading the occupiers to their new defeats. But we have to be ready for any scenario.

Please pay attention to air alarms these days. Search again and remember where the nearest Point of Invincibility is located.

Tell your parents how to find the Point of Invincibility if needed. More than 5,500 points have already been opened throughout the country.

Please take care of yourself. And be ready to help others.

When Ukrainians are together, when Ukrainians are grateful to each other, we cannot be defeated. May it always be so! And it will be so, I’m sure!

Glory to our strong, beautiful, best people!

Glory to Ukraine!

https://mobile.twitter.com/RabbiUkraine/status/1606276517591502848

This is interesting:

Here’s some Ukrainian Christmas music to keep you going:

Your daily Patron!

Lot’s of replies from Patron to the people replying to him, so click through and give it a look.

There isn’t a new video tonight on Patron’s official TikTok, so here’s last night’s again:

@patron__dsns

Коротко про те, як я люблю свою нову подушку🤭 #песпатрон #патрондснс

♬ Better off alone – G <3

The caption (still) machine translates as:

Briefly about how I love my new pillow🤭 #PatrontheDog #PatronDSNS

I hope everyone is having a merry Christmas and/or enjoyable long weekend.

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    Alison Rose

    Even with how difficult it must be for many of them to celebrate the holidays this year, I feel a bit of defiance in their doing so anyway — showing russia once again that they will not be cowed or frightened out of normalcy. It’s quite baffling that the enemy still doesn’t get this. These people will never break.

    This post gave me a very proud chuckle: The Ukrainian 12 Days of Christmas. The tl;dr of it all:

    On the twelfth day of Christmas, my partners gave to me twelve HIMARS himing, eleven Javelins javling, ten mortar systems, nine NLAWs nixing, eight Harpoons howling, seven Cougar MRAPs, six Abrams tanks, five Eagle drones, four Brimstone missiles, three Stinger launchers, two Bayraktars and a Patriot missile battery.

    Thank you as always, Adam.

  4. 4.

    PaulB

    Happy holidays, Adam, and thank you for these posts. I wasn’t really expecting a Christmas day update. Please do give yourself a holiday rest.

  8. 8.

    dm

    Adam, lately I’ve been seeing claims of “the CIA” using a “NATO network” of saboteurs in Russia, making shopping malls and other things burn and explode.

    I guess the disinformation network has something new to try to get to stick to the wall.

  10. 10.

    Another Scott

    @dm: Along those lines, VOANews.com has a summary in today’s Ukraine update:

    2:05 p.m.: Utility-related disasters in Russian towns raise suspicions of sabotage linked to the war in Ukraine. But poorly maintained infrastructure is a long-standing and persistent problem in Russia — the result of old Soviet-era systems in need of repair and costly maintenance, decades of endemic corruption, and the government’s prioritization of defense and security budgets, as well as the development of major cities over regional towns, The Washington Post reported.

    A huge gas pipeline explosion outside St. Petersburg last month, major fires in two separate Moscow shopping malls allegedly caused by dodgy welding, and faulty power grids that have left tens of thousands without heat and electricity are just some of the incidents reported since Russia’s efforts to obliterate Ukraine’s infrastructure that began in October.

    In late October, two sewer pipes burst in the southern city of Volgograd, flooding several streets with feces and wastewater, and leaving 200,000 of the 1 million residents without water or heating for several days.

    Ilya Kravchenko, a local lawmaker who collected testimony from more than 1,000 victims of the incident and filed a lawsuit against the corporation that owns the sewer system, said the sight was “not pretty.”

    “This is the worst year on record. The city has never had so many problems,” Kravchenko said.

    Blaming outsiders is the oldest excuse in the book. But, being in day 305 of a “3 day” war invites all kinds of unintended consequences…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  13. 13.

    oldster

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I’m so spoiled now — I see a big boom like that, and I start chanting, “I want secondaries! I want secondaries!”

    Well, maybe there was a good fire afterwards, like at the bridge to Crimea. Getting that fuel train to burn long and hard did a lot to reduce rail traffic.

    Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

  14. 14.

    Adam L Silverman

    Oldster, I just accidentally trashed your comment. I’m going to try to restore. My apologies.

  16. 16.

    Lums Better Half

    With all the beets and cheap alcohol in their diet you would think they would be used to gas exploding.

  18. 18.

    Alison Rose

    Oh my. I’m not sure who actually posts videos on Zelenskyy’s YouTube (his secondary one, not the official Office of the President one), but ummmmmm…..this little short has a very interesting song choice on it! I mean, the side-by-side pics of him leaving Congress with everyone reaching out to him with a shot of Superman in a crowd is clever, but like…that track has some dirty (and rather problematic) lyrics. The bit of it they used says “Sit your drunk ass on that fuckin’ runway, ho, cause I can’t be your Superman” so I’m not sure if they even heard it correctly, but the rest of the lyrics are a LOT.

    Did make me laugh, though, so there’s that.

  22. 22.

    patrick II

    @Another Scott:

    “Well done” is an understatement.  Brave, brilliant, pointed, and disturbing.  I am amazed Pussy Riot isn’t in jail.  Are they still inside Russia?

  24. 24.

    Cmorenc

    I could ignore the russian trolls in the ukraine twitter threads (calling zelinsky a corrupt leader ripping off the us for unaccountable billions) with a shrug if only none among them were instead RW US citizens posting from living rooms in the suburbs of American cities, led on by our own 5th column traitorous scum like Fucker Carlson

  26. 26.

    The Moar You Know

    I hope the inventor of the land mine is broiling in hell with an anti tank mine stuffed up his ass.  Those things are the spawn of satan.

  27. 27.

    Amir Khalid

    I exposed myself to some YouTube video of self-professed realist John Mearsheimer the other day — his 2022 Holberg Debate over this war with Carl Bildt, Swedish former PM and Foreign Minister. Mearsheimer is exasperating. He gives Putin way too much credit for honesty, good faith, and rational action; he thinks Putin lashing out with nukes  must be prevented at all events, even if it means letting him carve Ukraine up or conquer it. That’s two hours of my life I won’t get back.

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    @Cmorenc: Jill Stein is getting in on the anti-Ukraine act too. I don’t think Carlson has had Stein on his show yet, but maybe he has.

    Reactions to this war have been very revealing of what some people call the “horseshoe effect.” That model has the extreme right and left curving towards each other and meeting on certain issues. This is based on a single left-to-right axis.

    Another way to look at the phenomenon is to posit a another axis: Liberal to anti-Liberal. The Democratic establishment exemplified by Joe Biden and Nancy  Pelosi, would be at one end and Carlson and Stein at the other.

    This axis has elements of magnetic polarity; when the Democratic establishment is for something the anti-Liberals are repelled by it. So while Carson and and Stein might seem like strange bedfellows on the issue of aid to Ukraine they are really two sides of the same anti-Liberal coin.

    This alliance is more obvious now that “Liberal” has become a derogatory term among some leftists like it has long been among conservatives. I even see the two different anti-Liberal groups using “Woke” in the same way, as an invidious term for liberalism.

    The fact that the Black community wields institutional power through the Democratic Party explains a lot here, I think. Black people contribute a lot of electoral strength to the Democratic coalition, and that has helped keep both the left-and right-wing elements out of power. The Black community is much resented for this.

    Now I may have rambled far away from the war in Ukraine.  But maybe not so far, if I re-imagine Russian President Putin as Sheriff Bull Connor, and re-imagine the Ukrainians as the Black people terrorized by Connor’s deputies and attack dogs. Both peoples’ struggles are unique, but they each exemplify the greater struggle of might versus right.

  31. 31.

    Bill Arnold

    @the pale scot @ gmail:
    That I am aware of, no CIA-affiliated saboteurs have been arrested deep in Russia, paraded on television, and convicted in showy trials. (Events near Ukraine involving military targets are in a different class.)
    So it is possible (!!! :-) that Jack is lying, or is being fed carefully crafted disinformation, or is being fed fever dream speculations, or is fever-dream speculating himself.
    Also, no proclamations of sabotage have been made by Russian authorities. To some extent, that can be a choice to shape the internal information landscape, as Jack notes, but there are enough incidents that somebody probably would have slipped up and called one of them sabotage.
    Also, these stories about the CIA provide cover for things like simple insurance fraud, which is not all vehicular[1] ( Podstava ).
    Or, it could be a serious of sophisticated sabotage operations, all carefully crafted and executed to look like random failures. :-)

    [1] (Paywalled. so I only read the abstract.) Current trends in insurance fraud in Russia: evidence from a survey of industry experts (01 October 2019)

  32. 32.

    Andrya

    @Bill Arnold:  My opinionated opinion:  it is unlikely that putin would conceal CIA sabotage if it existed.  putin faces a difficult problem:  he spent the past two decades convincing russians to let go of any expectation of influencing politics, and in return the government would not bother them.  Now that continuing the attack on the attack on Ukraine requires major sacrifices, especially large numbers of young men killed and disabled, he needs to convince russians to be passionate about his policies.  russian propaganda has already been spewing the lie “we had to do it, or the Ukrainians/NATO would have attacked us”.

    Any NATO sabotage inside the russian homeland, and far from the war zone, would be (from putin’s point of view) excellent fodder for stirring up the masses to accept extreme sacrifice.  (Look how the regime exploited the assassination of Darya Dugina.  Also the apartment bombings of 1999, in the context of the Second Chechen war- there is evidence that was a false flag operation perpetrated by the FSB.)

    Just my 2 cents.

  33. 33.

    S Cerevisiae

    @Cmorenc: unfortunately one of the people taken in by the Russian maskrova is a friend of mine who I respect as someone who served in Iraq as a cavalry scout and is a real Anishinaabe warrior but he keeps telling me the same bullshit and I just don’t have the gravitas to convince him otherwise. I keep sending him links to Adam’s posts but it’s not seeming to do any good. It’s sad.

Comments are closed.