Author: Blazingcatfur

Russian president said to have told tech billionaire nuclear strike was on the table if Ukraine refused to cede annexed territories

Elon Musk spoke directly with Vladimir Putin before tweeting a “peace plan” which would involve Ukraine permanently ceding illegally annexed territory to Russia, according to reports.

During the conversation, the Russian president is said to have told the tech billionaire that a nuclear strike was on the table if Ukraine refused to recognise Moscow’s annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as Putin demanded.

The alleged conversation was reported in an email sent to Eurasia Group subscribers on Tuesday by Ian Bremmer, the group’s founder. Mr Bremmer wrote that the Tesla CEO told him two weeks ago that Putin would accomplish his goals “no matter what.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for a preemptive strike against Russia in a Thursday speech. “But what is important, I once again appeal to the international community, as I did before February 24 – we need pre-emptive strikes, so that they’ll know what will happen to them if they use nukes, and not the other way around,” he said. “Don’t wait for Russia’s nuclear strikes, and then say, ‘Oh, since you did this, take that from us!’ Reconsider the way you apply pressure. This is what NATO should do – reconsider the order in which it applies pressure [on Russia].”

In Bakhmut the AFU is actively repulsing PMC Wagner attacks. The enemy struggles to take terrain while sustaining huge losses. Already between 1200-2000 PMC Wagner soldiers died in the last 2-3 weeks during the Zaitseve offensive. pic.twitter.com/aPzswUxC04

— NOËL 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 (@NOELreports) October 11, 2022

Interviews in Kraków offer a collective portrait of their experience.

Three weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I arrived in Poland intending to volunteer, maybe by ladling soup for refugees or by unpacking boxes of humanitarian aid. Instead, I began a series of interviews with refugees in Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, located just a few hours from the Ukrainian border.

By the time I arrived, Poland felt, if not quite like a country at war, certainly a nation poised to support a war. The trains and train stations overflowed with evacuees, mostly women and children. Volunteers in dayglow vests manned help points in train stations, bus depots, airports, and shopping malls. Blue and yellow flags were everywhere. Even local shopkeepers were stepping up. One convenience store I visited had posted a sign on a shopping cart: “Please take an item from your bag to help feed our Ukrainian visitors.”

Zelensky must make concessions, or prepare for the worst.

For the sake of the world, no less, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky needs to heed the events of Oct. 1962.

That’s when the Soviet Union and the United States came too close to nuclear war.

The United States considered it intolerable when it found Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida. Remove them, or prepare for retaliation.

Both sides were bloated with nuclear weapons. It was a time of advancing communism and when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev blustered, “We will bury you.”