Airliner Shot Down over Ukraine

[pmulcahy11b]

Does Putin actually want a war? They'd end up with a pyrrhic victory at best.

I like Sting's take on this: "It's such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too."

[Schone23666]

Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b

Does Putin actually want a war? They'd end up with a pyrrhic victory at best.

I like Sting's take on this: "It's such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too."

No...not exactly a "full-blown war" in the old Cold War sense if you will, I think Putin is just applying the old Soviet playbook of war by proxy against the "evil Western Imperialists", much the same way we (the West, that is) played against the Soviets during the Cold War. Problem is, you have to be careful not to gamble too much when rolling the dice, which some are afraid Putin or some idiot is going to do at some point, which is not without historical precedence.

Putin's not stupid enough (I think anyway) to want an all out war, but he and his inner circle really do miss the glory days of the U.S.S.R. and they've also got a bit of a chip on their shoulder in regards to the U.S. for various reasons, real and imagined. So none of this is surprising, it's just a question of how much he thinks he can control the situation.

To whit, here's an interesting article from Daily Beast (no, I'm not a fan of the site, but the article is interesting, take it with a grain of salt of course):

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...le-defeat.html


Everyone knows the Pentagon has been watching this mess. Now it seems, the rumors are confirmed they are "dusting off the old books", according to this article, make of it what you will:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/dempse...ry?id=24713043



And to top it all off...it seems Putin's decided he's riding the tiger now and he's not getting off:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...usaolp00000592

The Russians are transferring heavy artillery rocket launchers (Anyone know more about these or what model they might be, BM-9P140 Uragan perhaps?), and more APC's and MBT's to the separatists, and it seems they're building up Russian troops along the border, AGAIN.

[Askold]

Russian claim that an Ukrainian SU-25 shot down the plane is facing some problems. Mainly that an SU-25 cannot go higher than 7km (and that is without weapons. If armed the max altitude is 5km.) To combat this problem someone from Kremlin tried to edit the wikipedia pages of SU-25 to make it look like they could have flown to 10km.

http://gawker.com/did-russian-offici...gus-1609071757

Oops...