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It looks like this guy served in the Ukrainian military.
What should I, an American citizen, make of that? A presidential candidate is trying to end their war, and one of their soldiers shows up here to try and kill him?
What in the hell?
The establishment lied wildly about Vietnam. The lies about Iraq were next level inventing WMD in Iraq. They lied about Jessica Lynch, abu ghraib, the UN weapons inspectors and long list of other things.
In Afghanistan they claimed that the 120 000 000 000 dollars wasted on the Afghan national army created an army of 300 000. After a decade of claiming this they changed the narrative in a week admitting that they had basically fabricated this military. Unfortunately, they hadn't fabricated all the spent money.
The Ukraine war has to be the war in modern history with the least investigative journalism. There is basically only narrative and press releases from think tanks being published in the media. In 2003 Bagdhad Bob was interviewed on American TV. In this war, nobody would ever dream of bringing a Russian general on TV for an interview.
It is going to be interesting to see the reaction when the lies start falling apart and the true believers find out their war was roughly as fake all the previous ones.
Baghdad Bob was a meme, not a general or a person who would have been interviewed due to his particular importance.
Sergey Lavrov, for instance, has been interviewed by Western media countless times.
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Uhhh
(Oops, looks like I can't tell one Slav from another. Never mind)
Well tbf the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian ethnicity is also a media fabrication and Syrskyi was born in Russia and his family all lives in Russia.
It appears the Ukrainians would disagree strongly with you on that.
Besides, I don’t see how the morality of the war is any different even if they are the same ethnicity. Would Colombia be justified in invading Venezuela?
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Is a Ukrainian general
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This one is not Russian. What's your point?
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The biggest lie of all was that Ukraine could give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by the West. They fell for the gun control argument. Keep your guns.
They didn't have nuclear weapons, the USSR had weapons that were stored there. It's like if Turkey left NATO and refused to give back the nukes the US keeps there. They wouldn't have the codes to actually use them and would have to reverse engineer new bombs.
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Anyone that gives up their WMD's gets punished (see Libya, Iraq etc). Think of the incentives that sends to states like Syria, Iran and North Korea.
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The most frustrating part of having a even a barely decent understanding of history is having to constantly deal with people claiming that this time it's different and we must upend all norms to deal with a novel evil which is always made up to be unprecedented.
Don't you worry, they'll sweep this under the rug like all the other ones and continue basking in incompetence like nothing happened.
Even if Putin annexed all of Ukraine you'd find some people to spin this as a win because it unites Europe or something. Western elites are immune from accountability.
Amusingly, having watched various sides discussing the Ukraine Conflict for so long, this applies to so many perspective and positions on it that I'd have no idea what position on the conflict this is supposed to be without checking someone's past posting history.
Is the 'this time it's different' mean to refer to the people who are aghast at a war which is the third continuation war of a decade? The credulity given to claims of nuclear thresholds at odds with decades of practice and saber-rattling? The multi-year sustainment of imminent collapse narratives? Are the novel threats justifying upending norms supposed to refer to the Russian imperalists, the Ukrainian nazis, the dreaded American/Western influence? And this is without the issues that come from barely decent understandings of history often also routinely carrying about deliberate misunderstandings that make it into pop history.
It almost certainly wasn't intended to be as omnidirectional as it was, but I thank you none the less.
It's intended at Western elites, but I'll stand by it omnidirectionaly.
I hate how unserious it all is.
What would a “serious” attitude look like to you? In other words, what would you expect of western elites instead?
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Which is why I thank you.
(Which was what I meant to write instead of 'think you', so embarrassment on me.)
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I mean things like that only work until they don’t. The sheer incompetence of the western elites is on display. The entire plan, as far as I can tell is “Ukraine is the good guy here. We arm them to the teeth, let them do whatever they want, and hope they win before something bad happens.” It’s not working, and worse, we’re putting ourselves in an extremely weak position by doing so, and for little strategic gain. Ukraine doesn’t have much beyond farmland. It’s not Taiwan with a big chip manufacturer base. And we’re depleting weapons and risking nuclear exchange to save Kansas.
How is it not working? They’re losing some land here and there, but otherwise appear to be attritioning the Russians pretty well.
Besides, I thought we were only sending over surplus reserve equipment. Is there any indication that US military readiness has been meaningfully reduced due to this aid?
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Calling it now, there will be a terror attack on US soil by Ukrainian aligned elements bitter about the US abandoning them by 2034 (40% chance). (Not counting this one)
Mostly justified, quite frankly, unless they pick civilian non-elite target.
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So far Ukrainian and Ukrainian inspired terrorism has: attempted to assassinate a US presidential nominee, attempted and nearly assassinated a European Prime Minister, blown up a major piece of German infrastructure causing serious damage to their economy.
From a strategic point of view they've been more successful than any recent anti western terrorist group other than al-qaeda via 9/11. Since ISIS never really got close to people in power or major infrastructure. They've also managed to get more free military gear from the west than al-qaeda.
The perverse incentives globalism and empire creates makes for some bizarre politics.
edit: oh they also keep a 180k person list of enemies of the state with personal info of Ukrainian enemies which includes westerners like Elon Musk, Viktor Orban, Roger Waters, Roy Jones Jr, and Berlusconi.
The man who's absolutely critical to their war effort through Starlink and could trivially sabotage all of it?
Quite an outrageous claim.
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Also: lied about Russia shooting a missile into a Poland in a very obvious attempt to grow their war into WW3 by dragging NATO into it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland?useskin=vector
(It was a Ukrainian missile)
Or, more likely, a very obvious attempt to avoid taking the blame themselves.
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I thought he was just a NAFO guy, a hanger-on looking to help Ukraine but not actually associated with it officially, (though he was in an ad for Azov at Mariupol?) Definitely a sketchy person with these seeming Afghanistan-Ukraine connections. And all the other stuff he's been doing, running around with machineguns and punching rapists: https://x.com/718Tv/status/1835491672857137620
Does he really have any connections ? That's the thing. He's very sketchy but those pictures of him in a cheap suit looking lost in Kiev don't inspire confidence in me. He had websites where he was soliticing passports numbers and saying he could get these people visas.
He appears he wants to have connections, and people on X are making a big deal out of him following some CIA girlboss on there, but people are generally stupid and confirmation bias is king.
Personally I'm leaning towards the guy being basically a fantasist and not very competent.
The only thing he did right was apparently camp out for 12 hours on the golf course, expecting that Trump will go there to relax. Had he used the time to properly camouflage himself, he might have succeeded.
It seems that he fought in Ukraine, he wrote a book about it: https://www.newsweek.com/ryan-routh-donald-trump-encouraged-assassination-book-1954433
Nobody is leaping out to debunk this: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829
I don't think he's CIA either, surely the CIA has more sophisticated tools than this guy? But he could definitely be a useful idiot for somebody.
Stop reposting this everywhere
On this very thread, 2 days ago @bro linked: https://search.pullpush.io/?kind=submission&until=1726297200&q=%22ryan%20routh%22&size=100 which has the group he claims to have volunteered in disavowing his membership, 7 months ago...
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but if there was ever a would be assassin that could be a CIA asset it sure wouldn't be hard to convince me this guy is
Why do you say that? He seems awfully incompetent at… everything
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Bit late now but looks like I was wrong, Blumenthal says he fought in Ukraine and even wrote a schizo rant about it: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829
I hope the CIA hires people who can write out a full gramatical sentence though, the competence crisis is really severe if this is the kind of people they get.
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The obvious joke is that this is the CIA op whilst the previous one was the FBI one, and inter-service communication is as good as it usually is.
Does Trump have a dog for the ATF entry into this contest to shoot? Maybe we can work in the DHS somehow?
If ATF gets involved trying to kill Trump, they'll probably wing Harris. If she had a pet they'd get that, but they don't.
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2 months ago:
Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point
Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:
I mean no offense here but some random “they them” with 700 followers and a rainbow flag in their name doesn’t seem like an official spokesthem for the Ukrainian military[1]. Here’s another equally uncredible person saying the opposite: https://x.com/raheemkassam/status/1835440928074736007
Also your first link had like 10 different redirects and popups and stuff. Here is just a direct link: https://x.com/v8mile/status/1804097069876916506
[1]: what I mean is that this person seems focused on some sort of gender crusade. An equivalent would be linking me to a page dedicated to the San Francisco 49ers football team, but that wants to talk authoritatively on Iranian nuclear policy.
Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.
Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.
He was also in a NYT article in March 2023
The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.
I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.
lmao, "TaiwanForiegnLegion?" So he wasn't just a (attempted) Ukraine volunteer, he also wanted to volunteer for Taiwan? And then he goes off on his own to shoot Trump?
Yeah. "attracts high-agency crazy people" indeed.
But hey, give him credit for "taking heroic responsibility" like a good rationalist. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R4f4RdGBdZsPzyJYk/a-discussion-of-heroic-responsibility)
edit: he has a website too! https://taiwanforeignlegion.com/. And it's really crazy, just a giant block of text with no paragraphs.
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If you had asked me beforehand which special interest would be most likely to produce radicals who try to kill Trump, I would not have guessed Ukraine. Trying to make sense of it in hindsight, maybe the fact that volunteers for Ukraine tend to be violence-oriented boosts their likelihood of committing violence.
Trump has been pretty vocal about ending the war. I’d go as far as saying it’s one of his main talking points.
Frankly I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of this.
If you ignore most of what he or his campaign says, I suppose. It certainly doesn't make his platform, or his campaign website, or most of his speeches, and when more distant campaign associates raise end-the-war proposals, they often come with caveats like 'and if Russia doesn't agree to what we think is reasonable, big increases in Ukraine aid.'
Trump has repeatedly said that, if elected, he will negotiate an end to the war before he even takes office.
Presumably what this means is telling Ukraine they get no more assistance until they agree to a truce.
Trump has also said that if Russia did not agree to his terms he would give more assistance to Ukraine, so the presumption would not only be unfounded, but false.
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