Europe War in Ukraine - Thread 4 - thread rules updated

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This is the thread for discussing the War in Ukraine. Should you want to discuss the geopolitics, the history, or an interesting tangent, head over here:

Europe - Backdrop to the war in Ukraine

This is the thread for the geopolitics, history and framework around the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you want to discuss the events of the war, head over to this thread: https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/war-in-ukraine-thread-4-thread-rules-updated.1376293/page-146
www.bigfooty.com www.bigfooty.com

If a post isn't directly concerning the events of the war or starts to derail the thread, report the post to us and we'll move it over there.

Seeing as multiple people seem to have forgotten, abuse is against the rules of BF. Continuous, page long attacks directed at a single poster in this thread will result in threadbans for a week from this point; doing so again once you have returned will make the bans permanent and will be escalated to infractions.

This thread still has misinformation rules, and occasionally you will be asked to demonstrate a claim you have made by moderation. If you cannot, you will be offered the opportunity to amend the post to reflect that it's opinion, to remove the post, or you will be threadbanned and infracted for sharing misinformation.

Addendum: from this point, use of any variant of the word 'orc' to describe combatants, politicians or russians in general will be deleted and the poster will receive a warning. If the behaviour continues, it will be escalated. Consider this fair warning.

Finally: If I see the word Nazi or Hitler being flung around, there had better have a good faith basis as to how it's applicable to the Russian invasion - as in, video/photographic evidence of POW camps designed to remove another ethnic group - or to the current Ukrainian army. If this does not occur, you will be threadbanned for posting off topic

This is a sensitive area, and I understand that this makes for fairly incensed conversation sometimes. This does not mean the rules do not apply, whether to a poster positing a Pro-Ukraine stance or a poster positing an alternative view.

Behave, people.
 
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sdfc said:
And how is that going to happen? More weapons into Ukraine?
Click to expand...
Ideally with a meteor strike onto Moscow will all the top brass gathered.

Realistically with military and financial pressure.

Or just flat out killing Putin
 
The meatwave production line ...

Mandatory Reproductive Questionnaires for Female Students - [ASTRA TG]
The Ministry of Health is sending mandatory reproductive questionnaires to Russian universities for female students, asking them about menstruation and sexual life. The forms are not anonymous

At the Lysva branch of the Perm National Research Polytechnic University (PNRPU), students were required to take a non-anonymous survey on reproductive health.

The anamnestic questionnaire for women aged 18-49 includes several dozen questions, including: "Do you have heavy menstrual periods?", "At what age did you start having sex?", "Do you suffer from infertility?" At the beginning of the questionnaire, it is necessary to indicate the full name, full age and date of birth. Students were not allowed to refuse the survey and after it they were required to undergo a medical examination.

The head of the "Safe Internet League" Ekaterina Mizulina reported that the survey on students' sex lives is being conducted on the basis of a letter from the Russian Ministry of Health, which was sent to all regions allegedly for the "purpose of assessing reproductive health."

Earlier, similar electronic questionnaires were sent () to students of the Voronezh State University. In particular, the girls were asked whether they use contraception, whether they have sexually transmitted infections, etc. The questionnaire asked them to leave their personal information and contact phone number "for medical assistance or consultation."
Click to expand...


Russian Law Against 'Child-Free Propaganda' Clears First Hurdle In Parliament - [Reuters]
Laws that would ban "propaganda" which discourages Russians from having children won overwhelming approval on Thursday in the first stage of their passage through parliament, part of a Kremlin drive to boost the country's flagging birth rate.
The move to outlaw content that is deemed to promote a child-free lifestyle won unanimous backing from members of the lower house, the Duma, in the first of three required readings.
"It is important to protect people, primarily the younger generation, from having the ideology of childlessness imposed on them on the internet, in the media, in movies, and in advertising," said Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, a powerful ally of President Vladimir Putin.
"We continue to form a unified legal framework for the protection of children, families, and traditional values."
Putin, who portrays Russia as a bastion of moral values locked in an existential struggle with a decadent West, has encouraged women to have at least three children to secure the demographic future of the country.
But critics of the new law see it as an alarming development.
"Women are being essentially turned into vessels for bearing children, not taking into account their circumstances, their motivations and whether they aspire to have a career or a family," said Olga Suvorova, a rights activist who works with victims of domestic violence in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.
"The message is clear: give birth, and that's it," she said in a telephone interview, adding that she feared the bill could pave the way for further encroachments on women's rights including the ability to get an abortion.
BLEAK DEMOGRAPHICS
The demographic challenge has taken on greater urgency for the authorities after official data released last month showed that Russia's birth rate had slid to its lowest in a quarter of a century.
Meanwhile mortality rates are up, with no end in sight to Moscow's war in Ukraine. Official casualty numbers are secret, but a joint project by the BBC Russian service and independent news service Mediazona says it has confirmed the deaths of at least 72,899 Russian soldiers as of Oct. 10.
Deputy Duma speaker Anna Kuznetsova said earlier this month that the law was part of Russia's "national security strategy".
Authors of content that falls foul of the law will be subject to fines: up to 400,000 roubles ($4,125) for individuals, twice that amount for officials, and up to 5 million roubles ($51,550) for legal entities.
Volodin said the law is not about criminalising women who decide not to become mothers.
"The decision to have children or not is up to the woman.
Who she wants to consult about this is, again, up to her," he wrote on Telegram. "But there should be no propaganda that puts pressure on a woman when she takes a decision about having a child."
Click to expand...

... one woman posted that the initiative made her feel like a surrogate for the state, while another compared the plan to Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, where women are forced to produce offspring for the political elite. - [CBC News]
While addressing a crowd at the Eurasian Women's Forum in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed government policy geared toward helping women achieve the ultimate balance — professional success while being the linchpin "of a large, large family."

He went on to joke that Russian women can manage it easily, and still remain "beautiful, gentle and charming."

His comments are the latest in a public push by government officials to try and reverse Russia's sinking birth rate by appealing to a sense of patriotic duty and promising financial incentives to sway prospective parents.

Russia's fertility rate — which measures the average number of children born to a woman over a lifetime — stands at approximately 1.4, less than what is considered the rate for population replacement, which is 2.1. Kremlin officials have labelled Russia's statistic "catastrophic," and it comes at a time of higher mortality among younger Russian men due to the war in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, a lawmaker told state media that just as Russia decided it needed to launch a special military operation in Ukraine, it needs a "special demographic operation" at home to ensure the country's future.

The push to procreate
In some regions, full-time students who become new mothers will receive financial compensation, while in Moscow, the health authority is expanding free access to fertility testing and treatments.

Russia's strategy to grow families is part of Putin's broader push toward more traditional conservative values. In an effort to reach the younger generation, a new course is being rolled out for students in grades 5 to 9.

A course published online in August stated the goal was to instill positive attitudes toward large families. It's part of a state narrative that encourages women to become moms for the motherland.

Some women believe its disturbing and intrusive.

"Even for women who have children and who want to have more children, [the language] is upsetting," said Lada Shamardina, a Russian journalist for the independent medical publication Medivestnik.

Women "believe having children should be only their decision," she said.

She continues to cover Russia's attempts to prompt a baby boom, which in addition to incentives includes curbing access to abortions.

Low birth rate
According to data published by Rosstat, the country's statistics agency, 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024 — 16,000 fewer than in the same period in 2023 and the lowest since 1999.

While Russian officials have expressed alarm at the birth rate for years, in recent months lawmakers have been making sweeping, panicked proclamations about the importance of procreation.

At the beginning of September, Yevgeny Shestopalov, the minister of health for the region of Primorsky Krai, told a Russian news outlet that having a busy career wasn't an excuse for not having a family, and that people could choose to "create offspring" during work breaks.

A few days later, Zhanna Ryabtseva, a deputy in Russia's State Duma, said that 18- and 19-year-olds should consider having children, because "the best families are student families who then go through life together."

To help with that, the Russian regions of Karelia and Chelyabinsk are rolling out programs where women under the age of 25 who are full-time students can receive a lump-sum payment if they become new mothers.

In Russia's Karelia region, which borders Finland, students who have a baby can receive the equivalent of $1,500 Cdn.

In Chelyabinsk, a region in Russia's Ural mountains, the payout is nearly $15,000 Cdn, and it can be spent on housing, education or medical services.

Access to fertility testing
Earlier this week in Moscow, women between the ages of 18 and 40 began receiving referrals for fertility testing as part of a new city-wide program.

The women were invited to take part in a test that measures the amount of anti-Mullerian hormone in their blood. The hormone, which is produced by the ovaries, reflects a woman's ovarian reserve, or the number of healthy, immature eggs in her reproductive system.

If tests show that women have a low ovarian reserve, they will be offered follow-up treatments, including the option of freezing some of their eggs.

Shamardina believes the free testing is an excellent service for women interested in family planning. But she notes that some of the reaction on Russian social media was negative, as women started receiving unsolicited invites from Moscow health authorities for testing.

In response to an article published on the social media platform Telegram, one woman posted that the initiative made her feel like a surrogate for the state, while another compared the plan to Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, where women are forced to produce offspring for the political elite.

"I think the main problem is that people in Russia, and most of the women in Russia, do not have trust in our government," Shamardina said. "All of these topics are very intimate ... and I think women are scared to open up this information to the government."

CBC News spoke to one young woman living in Moscow who received an invite for the testing. She said it left her "terribly outraged."

The woman, who connected with CBC through Shamardina, asked not to be identified because she was criticizing the state. She said the premise of the program is positive, but rolling it out unannounced to women is problematic.

"This created a feeling of coercion and invasion of personal boundaries," she wrote to CBC through a messaging app.

"The topic of family planning is already delicate.... the media periodically calls for Russian women to give up their careers and have children, and openly condemns those who do not put family first."

The politics of family values
While Russia's fertility rate remains higher than many Western countries, including Canada (which stands at 1.33), Putin has said Russia's ethnic survival depends on women having at least two children.

But he has made it clear during more than two decades in power that he would prefer to see much larger families.

The country honours families of "parental glory" who raise seven or more children. Lilia Syropyatova, 40, and her husband Maxim, 43, were given the award in 2019, and they and their nine children met with Putin in person.

"Giving birth to children is a duty," Lilia Syropyatova told CBC News, which reached out to her through social media.

The couple, which lives in Yekaterinburg, now has 11 children between the ages of two and 20.

"Without people, there would be no state, and in order for there to be people, it is necessary to give birth to children," Syropyatova said.

In 2022, Putin reinstated a Soviet-era honour award called Mother Heroine, which recognizes and honours women with 10 or more children.

"They think that they should return Russia to the 19th century, when it was seven children for every woman," said Alexey Raksha, an independent Moscow-based demographer who spoke to CBC News via Zoom.

"The main propaganda and main message in the media is that women should start bearing children earlier."

Questionable strategy
Raksha says several countries are trying to raise their fertility rate, but the actions take on a different tone in "non-democratic states" like Russia, where the government is equating a larger population with state power.

He says government will keep trying to encourage women to have more children through public messaging, but believes the campaign won't work.

The government's demographic quest is part of of a broader strategy of building a society on more conservative values aligned with Orthodox Christianity.

Putin — who fathered two children with his now ex-wife and is rumoured to have more with his alleged girlfriend, Alina Kabaeva, who has been sanctioned by the West — frequently frames Russian values as superior to those in Western societies. He has accused Western nations of rejecting "moral norms" and being Satanic.

Raksha says the family studies classes are an attempt to try and "brainwash" the population, and that it is "nonsense" to think it will correct the demographic trend that was predicted years ago.

He says the main driver of current low birth rate dates back to the 1990s, when there was a substantial drop in annual births in the years following the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Fewer babies then means there are fewer women of childbearing age now.
Click to expand...

Man [Sharing] Image of LGBT Flag Found Guilty Of “Displaying Symbols of an Extremist Organisation” - [The Guardian]

Two Russian courts have this week handed out the first convictions in connection with what the government calls the “international LGBT social movement” which was designated as extremist last year.

On Thursday, a court in the southern region of Volgograd found a man guilty of “displaying the symbols of an extremist organisation” after he posted a photograph of an LGBT flag online, according to the court’s press service.

The man, known only as Artyom P, who was ordered to pay a fine of 1,000 roubles (£8.69), admitted guilt and repented, saying he had posted the image “out of stupidity”, the court said.

On Monday, a court in Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, sentenced a woman to five days in administrative detention for wearing frog-shaped earrings displaying an image of a rainbow, according to Aegis, an LGBT rights group.

The woman was called to the police station after a man filmed himself approaching her in a cafe and demanding she remove the earrings, and posted it online.

A trial will resume next week in Saratov, south-west Russia, of a photographer who posted images of rainbow flags on Instagram, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported.

The rainbow flag represents the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Russian law prohibits anyone in the country “displaying the symbols” of organisations it considers extremist, a list that includes the social network Meta.

Russia’s supreme court banned the “LGBT movement” last November, continuing a pattern of increasing restrictions on expressions of sexual orientation and gender identity.

A law passed last July outlawed legal or medical changes of gender for transgender Russians, and a law banning the promotion of “non-traditional” sexual relations has been on the books for more than a decade.
Click to expand...
 
Mobbs said:
The meatwave production line ...

Mandatory Reproductive Questionnaires for Female Students - [ASTRA TG]


Russian Law Against 'Child-Free Propaganda' Clears First Hurdle In Parliament - [Reuters]


... one woman posted that the initiative made her feel like a surrogate for the state, while another compared the plan to Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, where women are forced to produce offspring for the political elite. - [CBC News]


Man [Sharing] Image of LGBT Flag Found Guilty Of “Displaying Symbols of an Extremist Organisation” - [The Guardian]
Click to expand...
I wonder if this could backfire and make women in an oppressive regime, which punishes all forms of protest, to think this is a good outlet protest and not to have children or to only have 1 child.

Even the fact the message appears to "forcing" women to have children and for them effectively to be seen as baby making factories would instill a motivation to resist and go against that message.
 
Frank Grimes said:
I wonder if this could backfire and make women in an oppressive regime, which punishes all forms of protest, to think this is a good outlet protest and not to have children or to only have 1 child.

Even the fact the message appears to "forcing" women to have children and for them effectively to be seen as baby making factories would instill a motivation to resist and go against that message.
Click to expand...
Every day there's a new Russian threat of nuclear family escalation.
 

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Just Germany left now not offering up TAURUS.

Once they transfer their older TAURUS stocks to Ukraine (seems inevitable now) Putin really is up shit creek. It becomes a much easier decision for him to save Russia as a functional state by withdrawing in disgrace from Ukraine. Protect his power too otherwise another insurrection is also inevitable.

Alternatively since Putin has pretty much copied Hitler's playbook to a tee perhaps he can finish up the same way in his bunker.
 
sdfc said:
And how is that going to happen? More weapons into Ukraine?
Click to expand...

Yep. Putin's a coward, loser. His red lines are a running joke. Did you see Ukraine has signed a new 12 nation defensive pact (separate to NATO)? Putin will be told in no uncertain terms that if he doesn't agree a withdrawal plan their troops will secure Ukranian territory,eventually.

Start sanctioning nations dealing with Russia. Let Putin run a dysfunctional state with only North Korea, Iran, Belarus & Syria as allies. European Russians are going to eventually be fed up with Russia's exclusion from Europe all in the name of Putin's delusions of creating a new Russian Empire.

Putin is a desperate deluded fascist that is running out of options.
 
Zidane98 said:
Yep. Putin's a coward, loser. His red lines are a running joke. Did you see Ukraine has signed a new 12 nation defensive pact (separate to NATO)? Putin will be told in no uncertain terms that if he doesn't agree a withdrawal plan their troops will secure Ukranian territory,eventually.

Start sanctioning nations dealing with Russia. Let Putin run a dysfunctional state with only North Korea, Iran, Belarus & Syria as a state.

Putin is a desperate deluded fascist that is running out of options.
Click to expand...
Hey Zidane can you remind me the signatories to the 12-nation pact. I saw it mentioned here when I was at work and I couldn't visit the link to see the nations listed. I never got a chance to see who they were.
 
Mobbs said:
Hey Zidane can you remind me the signatories to the 12-nation pact. I saw it mentioned here when I was at work and I couldn't visit the link to see the nations listed. I never got a chance to see who they were.
Click to expand...



No Hungary for obvious reasons
 
Zidane98 said:
Denmark Sweden Iceland Finland Norway Baltics X 3 UK Poland Germany Netherlands Ukraine.

That's quite the lineup.
Click to expand...
Baltics must = Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as Finland for example are specified separately.

It's really good news - those nations alongside Ukraine itself are basically defending the species. I guess France is absent maybe only due to geography.
 
Mobbs said:
After about a year and a half of radio silence, just got these 2 IG messages from an old Russian mate who lived out in the far far far east of the country. The last text is just the second line repeated but in his native russian. No idea of his status, had no idea he had brothers, and until now had only guessed at his opinion on the war, now confirmed.

View attachment 2173449

Yes I've responded but not sharing that here - apart from these messages he's otherwise just asked how I'm doing.

Hard morning.
Click to expand...
Hope they were encrypted and not clear text messages :(
 

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Europe War in Ukraine - Thread 4 - thread rules updated

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