https://www.rt.com/russia/603929-ukraine-concentration-camps-kursk/
Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk Region have rounded up local civilians and placed them in “something like concentration camps,” RIA Novosti reported on Thursday, citing a Russian Foreign Ministry report.
When Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into Kursk Region last month, thousands of civilians were evacuated or themselves fled deeper into the Russian heartland. Some however, including elderly people and those with disabilities, were unable to leave, and their settlements fell under Ukrainian control.
According to a new report seen by RIA Novosti, those left behind were subjected to detention methods synonymous with World War II.
“In a number of territories controlled by militants, something like ‘concentration camps’ were created, which civilians who did not want or were unable to leave the territory captured by the enemy were forcibly driven into,” the report said, according to RIA Novosti. These claims were based on eyewitness accounts collected by the Russian Red Cross in Kursk.
Of those detained, between 70 and 100 were taken to a school in Sudzha, where some of the fiercest fighting took place. Once there, they were subjected to psychological abuse and presented to foreign journalists, RIA Novosti claimed.
https://www.rt.com/news/603943-taiwan-beijing-navy-seal/
The US Navy’s elite special operations unit, SEAL Team Six, has been training to “help Taiwan” in case of a “Chinese invasion,” according to the Financial Times. The unit is most famous for the 2011 mission that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
SEAL Team Six “has been planning and training for a Taiwan conflict for more than a year at Dam Neck, its headquarters at Virginia Beach about 250km south-east of Washington,” FT reported on Thursday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
So far, the only hints of US plans for a potential conflict around Taiwan have come from Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, in an interview in June.
“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything,” Paparo told the Washington Post.
https://www.rt.com/business/603925-china-western-investment-drop/
Western firms pulling back from China
Declining economic growth and the rise of other manufacturing centers in Asia are slowing investment, lobby groups claim
China is gradually losing its appeal as an investment destination for Western companies, according to reports released this week by the EU Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai.
The two lobby groups conducted surveys among investors and owners of businesses in China. According to their findings, many respondents have been consolidating their operations in the country and no longer see the Chinese market as a primary investment destination.
An annual poll by the American Chamber of Commerce shows that the number of businesses considering China as their top investment destination has dropped to 47%, the lowest in 25 years. A survey by the EU chamber shows that only 15% of respondents named China as their top investment destination, while previously the figure stood at 20%.
“Some European Chamber members have begun both siloing their China supply chains and operations, and shifting investments previously planned for China to other markets to increase supply chain resilience, take advantage of comparatively lower labor costs and hedge against future geopolitical shocks,” the EU lobby group stated in its report.
Experts from both lobbies suggest that one of the main drivers behind the trend is the slump in China’s economic growth. According to official figures, China’s growth slowed to the worst pace in five quarters in April-June this year, at 4.7%. Other factors are intensifying competition from local companies and the appearance of alternative manufacturing centers in Asia.
For instance, around 20% of the businesses surveyed by the US business lobby said they would be slashing investment in China this year, while 40% stated they would be redirecting it to countries such as India and Vietnam.
Many of those surveyed said China’s trade tensions with the US were also affecting investor confidence. Washington has been tightening economic restrictions and hiking tariffs on Chinese goods since 2018, when then-President Donald Trump launched a trade war with Beijing. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, has taken a similarly hostile approach, despite Beijing’s repeated warnings that these measures violate the principles of fair trade. Around 70% of respondents in the survey by the American chamber called US measures targeting China the greatest challenge to the country’s economic growth.
The cruelty is the point. Nazi-loving bastards like these think if they torment and abuse and terrorize and do human rights atrocities on enough civilians that Russia will submit to more favorable terms or that it will somehow benefit them militarily by making them divert more to defense. Besides that from the US point of view it's about punishing the civilian population for not submitting to them, no different than bombing the Vietnamese or Korean people or using depleted uranium in Iraq.
To be honest I think we may be a bit overly optimistic about how a conflict here would go. Meaning that the US may have area denial weapons including advanced naval mines, hunter-seeker semi-autonomous or swarm-directed naval (undersea) and air drones, etc which they may be able to use with other capabilities (I wouldn't put it past them doing something like deploying chemical or radiological weapons to be honest among other things) to stop the PLA from being able to take Taiwan right away and buy enough time to change the course of things.
Given the US will likely instigate the actual war over it and know the time and place so be prepared when they tell their pawn to declare independence or do something else unacceptable they will have that advantage.
Then for the US it's simply a matter of more area denial, sending in their own troops via air and fighting a vicious and bitter fight to inflict casualties on any attempted landings or air-drops all while pounding and destroying China's navy to the best of their abilities with beyond the horizon weapons leaving China only the option of hitting US land bases in Japan, occupied Korea or using very long range weapons to hit further afield but certainly denying China any kind of conventional naval battle. People like to imagine and I myself am guilty of this the US just kind of steaming in while whistling and doing an attack run on a Chinese naval blockade, where-after the Chinese use dongfeng missiles to send their carriers to the bottom. Sadly the US knows this possibility which is likely why they'll keep most of their ships away or at shallow port in Taiwan itself and use their island chains plus mines and drone warfare launched from beyond the horizon and their puppets in Japan to do continuous area denial.
As with Ukraine the point isn't to win, it's to kill Chinese, attempt to humiliate them, cause friction internally by killing large numbers of people to prompt anti-militarist/anti-government/anti-party sentiment they can work with. I would expect other humiliations like blowing up the chip foundries and destroying all the data while killing or forcibly evacuating all their chip scientists. Other humiliations and offenses include seeing to the removal of most of the valuable historical objects from Taiwan's museum that the nationalists looted on their way out of the mainland to be taken to US museums as plunder and prizes.
Basically it looks like decoupling is going full steam ahead and we are heading back to a cold war situation with two camps and some groups trying to straddle between them. Many, many people doubted this could happen. I hoped it wouldn't happen but they're going to do it and no having to rely on some raw materials type inputs from China doesn't mean much, the US relied on Soviet titanium it bought up through shell companies and that didn't change the nature of the blockade and embargo the US effectively had on the entire Soviet bloc.
The US's task is not easy here given how many countries want to get involved with BRICS but even if they lose most of the global south they still have enough plundered wealth, technological head-start, and momentum to continue on fighting bitterly for some decades I think.
One must remember the situation for the US at the end of WW2 and the start of the last cold war was hardly ideal either. Europe was full of communist resistance fighters and the left was genuinely popular, anti-imperialist movements were sprouting across the globe, many of them sympathetic to the USSR or helped by them. Yet over the decades that followed they did Gladio, they did a variety of coups, of fostering instability, of color revolution type activities, of installing dictators and so on and managed to stop the pink/red tide and claw back wins. They only really lost in direct confrontations with Vietnam and China by proxy in Korea (DPRK would have lost were it not for China's help) and even in those cases they severely punished and set an example for any who would resist them by bombing their peoples viciously, subjecting them to biological and chemical warfare, and of course destroying their industry, homes, crops, etc and setting their development back decades.
Overall I am feeling less hopeful than I was a year ago or three years ago. Anyone have any push-back (ideally with sources) to make me feel a bit better? Because it looks like we're settling in for a long and very hard battle with the strong possibility of many more proxy wars like in the first cold war and China facing some serious headwinds of their own with the US and Europe potentially being able to decouple before China can have alternatives in Africa able to cushion the impact.
and Laos!
They bombed Laos simply because the fighter jets could find any valid targets in Vietnam, fucking scum.
The KMT doesn't represent Taiwan. And the CPC actually has zero plans to invade Taiwan. Their threats are purely a face thing.
This is just dumb US propaganda that serves 2 purposes. It reinforces the idea that the US has a competent military (it does not), and that China is bad. Killing the US soldiers in Kinmen would take negative effort for China. They're simply tripwire forces and also used to troll China by playing the game "I'm not touching you", which China likes to play as well, but against Taiwan.