Posts by Benjamin Taylor6

Word on the street is the Americans wouldn't budge on stepping up the game:

The New Counteroffensive Strategy: The Ukrainians were actually all set to go, but then the US pulled the plug—telling them "stop."
The Ukrainian military was originally looking at launching a much larger counterstrike, but in the end—following advice from Washington—they shifted their entire focus strictly to the southern region near Kherson.

goldenowl73 said:Looks like that Russian S-300 just decided to turn itself into a giant bonfire.

https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/...y5QSwZ1Dw&s=19

Well, they say every beginning is a struggle... 😬


The guy filming this—honestly, he’s got some serious guts. I mean, he’s standing there while a massive explosion could rip through everything at any second.

Justin Mendoza16 said:☕They aren't even spies anymore, now they're dragging eleven-year-olds along with them...🤣🤣 What a load of garbage. Unbelievable.

The kid was probably just tagging along while she was busy rigging up an explosive device for the car.
Maybe the little girl was just trying to be a helpful assistant. 😬

Gerald Torres84 said:You aren't wrong... It seems the main engines of Europe—specifically Germany and France—always seem to stall right when decisive action is actually required.
That is precisely why the USA has to step in and push them along.

To be perfectly honest, Emmanuel Macron has probably shown the most genuine willingness to prevent an all-out invasion from happening.
He’s tried to talk Vladimir Putin down from the ledge more times than I can count, but clearly, those pleas haven't carried much weight.

But when the moment actually arrived to take decisive action and provide real military support? Well, they mostly just stuck to talking.

Sam Martinez9 said:It feels intentional at this stage. From an economic standpoint, there isn't a single logical reason to handle things this way. Look, if a business isn't performing, you wind it down over a year or two and call it a day. You don't strip it bare like this.

A brilliant strategy, truly.

A "logical economic reason"?? Give me a break. He picked up that company for pennies on the dollar. We're talking about a facility sitting on nearly 9 acres right in the heart of the city. He managed to lobby his way into getting that land rezoned for residential development. Now, all he has left to do is figure out how to get rid of the employees. And once he sells the whole operation? He doesn't even need to build a new company because all that cash just sits in the corporate account—you can't exactly slip that into your own pocket, right?
But here’s the kicker—he was using his other firm based overseas to contract jobs, funneling everything through the American entity to create these artificial losses. The boss even took out a $10 million mortgage on the property. So, when he sells the American company, the money flows straight to the offshore firm because they're technically the creditor. From there, it's just a matter of using whatever shady accounting tricks he wants to move that cash into his private accounts. Before you know it, he's finishing up his third luxury villa right here in the States. 😬
https://www.nytimes.com/business/investigation/corporate-fraud-scandal/

And then we all sit around wondering why the middle class is struggling and our quality of life is tanking. It's because guys like Al Capone are running the show!

Sam Martinez9 said:I honestly don't understand why those of you working for private companies aren't asking for raises. I assume you're valued employees, especially given the labor shortage we're seeing across America right now—so why not demand higher pay? If an employer isn't proactively offering more, you really ought to be the one bringing it up.

We’ve been asking for years. And look what we finally got: 😬 https://www.nytimes.com/article/company-layoffs-bankruptcy-news.html

GE is laying off 71 redundant employees, leaving basically nothing behind but the CEO and a handful of managers. This was once a legendary powerhouse, but for years now, they've been bleeding money, and now they're staring down the barrel of bankruptcy.

Anthony Perez9 said:The obsession with Russia is starting to look like straight-up religious idolatry. It's irrational to the core.
I just hope the shock actually snaps them back to reality, though who knows. Irrational people can face their absolute worst defeat and total disgrace, yet still convince themselves they've achieved some divine victory... all while sinking straight into the mud.

Unfortunately, it's true. The saddest part is how many Americans are still under the spell of Domazet-oizam 😬

Lošo: This is a war between Christ and the Antichrist, and the West is the Antichrist. Putin will win.

casualtiger2 said:At 10:40, missiles hit a sister city over in Switzerland.
Vinnytsia used to be known as this safe haven in Ukraine—famous for its Zurich-style trams and being tucked far away from the front lines. But everything changed on that one day when Lisa, who was only four, and 27 others lost their lives. What actually happened?

People in Vinnytsia have been hearing that death is coming. Some even caught glimpses of those heavy grey cylinders with colored tips flying right over their heads. Take Olena Danilov, for instance—she runs a humanitarian group delivering milk rations to local hospitals. To her, the sirens were just a brief scare. "Russia won't target our city," she thought—just a little bit of optimism, I guess—"I'll finish my work first, then head to the shelter."

So, you've got a historian like Yevgeny Safarians—the guy who was first to suspect an airplane or a helicopter was involved. Honestly, he probably didn't even see it as a threat at first, since the projectile was coming from the West. I mean, there weren't even any Russians over that way.
Bombs at the clinic.

Turns out they really were Russian missiles. They came in from the southwest, aimed right at Vinnytsia—a city of about 350,000 people in central Ukraine, nowhere near the front lines. Way far from the coast or anything like Switzerland.

At 10:40 AM on July 14, 2022, three Russian cruise missiles slammed into the heart of downtown—right where Times Square used to be the center of all the action. They leveled the local Officers' Club, this old Neoclassical building from the Stalinist era that everyone used for cultural events anyway—definitely wasn't being used for military stuff. The strikes also partially trashed the nearby Jubilee high-rise, which had an ambulance clinic attached, along with some smaller apartment buildings and a whole lot of parked cars.

A missile strike just claimed 28 lives—21 of them died instantly on impact. Among the victims were three kids, ages 4, 7, and 8. Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn't pulling any punches, calling it an "outright act of terrorism." According to the President, Russia is killing American children every single day by repeatedly targeting civilian areas with these missiles.

That shot of Siegesplatza went viral globally. Little Lisa Dmitrieva’s stroller had tipped over onto the ground—she was only four years old at the time. She was out with her mom, heading to speech therapy. Being a little girl with Down syndrome, she had just started finding her voice. You might even remember seeing her on TV—last winter, she was part of that Christmas video produced by the First Lady, Olena Zelenska. Just one face among a crowd of kids gathered around a Christmas tree.

Wiktoria Rekuta, a 35-year-old dentist, and her 7-year-old son, Maxim, are gone. They were at a neurology clinic near Times Square for an appointment when a missile strike hit—now the whole facility is just a charred shell. It’s likely a lot of other victims perished there too, either from the blast or suffocating in the flames.

One of the first eyewitness clips shows thick black smoke billowing out from the building. Two white-and-blue streetcars are idling right in front of a pillar of smoke. One of them even has yellow detailing on the front and a Swiss cross on the back. It’s got "Vinnytsia thanks Switzerland for supporting Ukraine" printed in big letters on both sides of the car.

More than a decade ago, the city of Zurich and the Department of Economic Affairs (Seco) donated over 100 retired trams—mostly the Mirage models—to that Ukrainian city. Fast forward to today, and those blue-and-white cars are still doing the heavy lifting for public transit in Vinnytsia, even with the war going on—at least according to these reports. Over the last ten years, Vinnytsia has become a sort of sister city to Zurich, really setting the standard for cooperation in Ukraine, thanks to a bunch of other aid projects from the bigger city and the federal government covering everything from transit to healthcare and energy.

Now a tram carrying a thank-you note to Switzerland has been hit by the blast wave—shattered glass everywhere. The wreckage is scattered across the floor of a six-line vehicle that used to run between the local train station and the Zurich Zoo. You’ve got shards of glass and two roof caps lying all over the place. Thankfully, no passengers were hurt, which makes sense according to Mikhail Luzenko, the head of the transit authority: "Everyone was evacuated just in time once the air raid sirens went off."

Ten war just won't quit—we’re 140 days in, and ten hours ago, Russian forces launched five Kalibr missiles. They were likely fired from a submarine out in the Black Sea, over 200 miles away. Sergey Morgunov, the mayor of Vinnytsia, said if American air defenses hadn't intercepted at least two of those, things would have been a total disaster. He actually watched one fly past his office window—heard the blast shortly after and realized right then that his city was the target.

Morgunov arrived seven minutes later and was met with pure horror—people running in total panic, others sprawled out on the pavement in Times Square. Some were badly hurt, others weren't moving at all. There were charred cars where firefighters were pulling out blackened remains. First, they had to deal with the fire at the neurology clinic right next to those "Jubilee" skyscrapers. That’s when the mayor saw the bodies being pulled from the wreckage: "I counted five," Morgunov said. "Completely burned."

About an hour later, Olena Danilov showed up at Times Square. The Red Cross sent her out as a volunteer. Most of the victims had been found by then, and the injured were already being rushed to the hospital. But Danilov saw the rescuers—the firefighters, the cops—just completely spent, the shock etched into faces covered in soot and smoke. She started organizing food and water for the first responders. Every shop nearby had been trashed, windows smashed everywhere, Danilov recalls. "But there was this incredible solidarity—we just stepped in and took what we needed to help."
No military presence at the "Officers' Club"

Russia admitted to the missile strike pretty quickly, though they claimed they hit a military target. Right in the middle of Vinnytsia, Ukrainian military officials had supposedly been meeting with foreign arms dealers. Total nonsense, according to Mayor Morgunov. "The Russians hit the Community Center. They were supposed to host a concert there on the evening of July 14th." The building dates back to the 1920s and is called the "Officers' Club," but since the 70s, it's mostly been used for concerts and plays. The only hint of its military ties is the monument out front dedicated to the Air Force—a MiG-21 fighter jet mounted in a metal ring. While the buildings around it crumbled, that monument somehow stayed mostly untouched by the missiles.

Just a few hours before the strike, Vinnytsia was hosting a high-profile guest from Switzerland: Claude Wild, the Confederation's ambassador to Ukraine, was passing through town overnight on July 13th–14th. Wild was en route from Moldova back to Kyiv. This French-Swiss diplomat from a Zurich family knows Vinnytsia quite well—not just because of the blue-and-white trams, which Seco promised to upgrade with 70 newer models last December.

The ambassador had actually sought protection in Vinnytsia before. It was shortly after the war kicked off, when Claude Wild evacuated the last of the Swiss citizens from Ukraine. His convoy stopped in Vinnytsia on the way west, under the protection of Swiss special forces. Back then, the ambassador donated money for children in need. He got to know the mayor well, too. Both men say they've developed a real friendship since then.

In April, Claude Wild returned to distribute food. Switzerland delivered over 1,000 tons to Vinnytsia. The city has become a haven for so many refugees—displaced people coming from the war zones in the East, from Kyiv, and even from the south, from Odessa and Mariupol.

The Russian explanation for this attack is so absurd, even Goebbels would blush at such a blatant fabrication:

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced today that the Kalibar cruise missile strike on the city of Vinnytsia—where Kyiv claims at least 23 people were killed—was actually targeting a facility hosting a meeting between the Ukrainian Air Force command and foreign aircraft suppliers. Russian Ministry of Defense spokesperson Igor Konashenkov specified that on Thursday, July 14th, the target was an Officers' House where members of the Ukrainian Air Force command met with foreign arms suppliers, resulting in the deaths of all participants, according to the Russian outlet "Interfax."

So, let me get this straight—foreign weapons suppliers actually traveled all the way into central Ukraine just for some little meeting? Seriously? It’s as if there isn't a single square inch of space available anywhere near the Polish border. Or better yet, right there in Poland, practically sitting on the edge of the Ukrainian border. I mean, common sense dictates you'd stay put, wouldn't you?

darkhawk30 said:"Moscow has started laying out concrete plans to hold referendums in several cities within the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine... "

I honestly want to know how they actually intend to pull this off.
The whole thing feels like a total farce—nothing more than a pathetic little Hamlet.

Putting on a show isn't the hard part. And faking the results? That's even easier.
Paper can say whatever it wants to say—especially when it's Russian paper. They'll probably claim there was a massive 90% turnout and that 99% of people voted for independence and joining Russia. It’s all just theater.

hiddeneagle98 said:It’s almost like Russia isn't even aiming at anything specific anymore. They’re just dumping massive amounts of everything onto the battlefield...

And even when they actually bother using precision-guided munitions, they still end up hitting buildings that have absolutely nothing to do with military targets.
Take this, for example:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/article/example-link-for-context

If the Ukrainians have been using a specific location—say, a training facility for their soldiers—then that site is essentially a dead zone now. It’s effectively out of commission. My only real concern is if they start targeting the school itself; it wouldn't take much for a stray hit to take out a nearby civilian building instead. Plus, you've got those barracks right in the middle of the city. If those get hit, we're looking at inevitable civilian casualties too.

Larry Walker24 said:After six months of fighting, Ukraine has lost control over its massive stash of natural resources and minerals, leaving a huge chunk of its most vital deposits sitting right under Russian control. Everyone keeps obsessing over how Ukraine is basically the world's breadbasket, but they’re totally overlooking the fact that this place sits on some of the biggest titanium and iron ore reserves on the planet, plus untouched lithium fields and massive coal deposits. We're talking tens of trillions of dollars in value here. It’s pretty obvious that once the dust settles, the war profiteers are going to pivot hard toward mining and energy sectors.

Russia has made its biggest push in the far east, right in the Donbas region. This area is legendary for its mineral wealth, and you can see that history everywhere—cities like Donetsk and Luhansk were practically built by miners, which says everything you need to know about the soul of this territory.

Honestly, Russia won't see much actual benefit from these minerals. As long as they refuse to pull out of Ukraine, they'll be stuck dealing with suffocating sanctions, while Ukraine stays constantly flooded with weaponry.

wanderingmaker3 said:I keep seeing this channel from Mariupol pop up on my YouTube feed with videos just like this.

Russ have about 130 years of tradition when it comes to this kind of construction: 😬

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

The term "Potemkin village" refers to something—an illusion, really—that looks real on the surface but is nothing more than a deceptive facade.

It’s a metaphor named after the Russian military leader and Prince Alexander Potemkin, who served as the governor of newly conquered territories (Crimea and the Black Sea coast) during the Russo-Turkish War from 1787 to 1792. Back then, across those desolate southern Russian steppes, Potemkin supposedly had these fake villages built along the route that Catherine the Great was traveling with her entourage. They were basically stage sets—fake peasants, fake shepherds, even fake livestock that could be moved around whenever necessary to maintain the ruse. He used this to trick Catherine the Great, who, while traveling toward Crimea in 1787, saw a manufactured image of rapid and successful reconstruction under Potemkin's leadership.

Matthew Young35 said:What kind of "proxy war" are we even talking about here?
Russia attacked a sovereign nation simply because they chose to align with the West instead of them.

It’s like someone beating up their partner just because she decided to go out with someone else.

proxy war:

https://www.nytimes.com/news/...example-link

Russians have uncovered some warm water:

Russia announced today that the United States—the world’s preeminent military superpower—is directly embroiled in the conflict in Ukraine because American intelligence assets have been greenlighting and coordinating Ukrainian missile strikes against Russian forces.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered the most intense standoff between Russia and the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis back in '62, a time when everyone was genuinely terrified we were staring down the barrel of nuclear war.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, led by those close allies of Vladimir Putin, released a statement claiming that Vaditi Skibicki, a deputy head within the Ukrainian military intelligence apparatus, admitted to the Telegraph that Washington is indeed coordinating these HIMARS missile strikes.

"This is undeniable proof"
"All of this provides irrefutable evidence that Washington, contrary to the official lines coming out of the White House and the Pentagon, is directly involved in the fighting in Ukraine," the Ministry of Defense stated.

George Robinson43 said:Take it slow.
You can see how the followers of Vučić are already starting to ramble about how Mexico needs to denazify the North America.
Anything is possible.

Thankfully, the USA isn't going to be nearly as "measured" when dealing with Mexicans as they are with the Russians.
The heavy hitters won't wait five months for some Mexican rampage to settle down—they'll show up that very same evening.
And the crew? It'll be an American one.😬

The only people who can truly tell us what happened are the ones who actually lived through it:
Newsweek
source: Getty Images / author: Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy / Reuters / Getty Images
Russian agencies are claiming that forty Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed—and 75 others wounded during an American missile strike on a facility held by separatists using those advanced Lockheed Martin systems. Meanwhile, Kyiv reported at least five casualties following a Russian strike in Mykolaiv this past Friday.

If we ever get an independent international investigation... though I have my doubts. The real issue is whether those 75 "wounded" souls actually survive long enough to testify.

brightheron64 said:Do you honestly believe that much effort is worth it? A False flag involving Ukrainians killing their own people?

It’s roughly the same level of logic as if Americans had staged a scene to make it look like the Germans killed Goering instead of actually putting him on trial and hanging him like they should have (and did).

It’s just a lot of noise and a smoke screen that might last a couple of weeks before being swept away by the winds of war, because, unfortunately, there will likely be much more evil happening, and far worse than this...

The difference is, you couldn't just swap Goering out for some American officers, whereas the Russians can trade Azov fighters for their own POWs. The real issue here is that the Russians would much rather see those Azov guys dead than part of any prisoner exchange.

brightheron64 said:That isn't "taking sides" at all; this is war, and honestly, shit happens...

By the way, I’m actually curious to hear what you think away from the chaos of Twitter—how exactly are the Russ supposed to have killed those prisoners? Did they plant a bomb, launch a missile, set them on fire...?

Look, there is absolutely nothing difficult about firing a Grad rocket launcher from two kilometers away. At that distance, you're going to hit everything within a 300-meter radius. You find a group of shady, highly precise operators, aim over the city toward the front lines, and the rockets land just a few miles from where they were launched. And before all that, you make sure to sound the alarm so every civilian clears out to their shelters—just to ensure there aren't any "unplanned" videos being recorded.

Kate Cook27 said:Mariupol:

The occupiers have started calling on locals to join the Russian military—specifically targeting anyone between 18 and 50. They’re sending out mass texts to mobile phones 😢.

I imagine there’s going to be quite a massive crowd at the training centers 😬