Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Gatling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528387#Comment_118528387

They have units already in Ukraine mainly special forces (possibly Green beret's) Canada also has special forces deployed , there's been numerous American units in Ukraine over the last few years including an marine exercise very recently (seabreeze )

Pa ElGrande

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ2PG1myG5c

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov press conference on January 21st.

A few calls from the Kremlin to South and Central America in recent days (Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua)

The presidents discussed further coordination of Russia’s and Cuba’s actions in the international arena in line with the principles of strategic partnership and the traditions of friendship and mutual understanding.

• Interfax: Peskov on whether Russia might deploy missiles in Cuba, Venezuela: Russia exploring security options
• Speculation how the Russian military campaign might unfold here & here & here
• Belarus: Lukashenko signed a decree on convening an extraordinary session of parliament on January 27

Phil.x

Ukraine is going to be a boxing ring for nuclear powers who don't want to get their house dirty.

Gatling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528435#Comment_118528435

If nato is cancelled I suppose you would be willing to help reconstruct the Berlin wall.

No nato Russia invades and we go back to 1945

Would I be right in thinking that for ordinary Ukranians the choice is between oligarchs that are allied with the EU/US and oligrachs that are allied with Russia?

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528179#Comment_118528179

Sweet Jesus, what a post in the context of what we are witnessing. Every Western media outlet is full of slavish propaganda on behalf of the US and their allies, there is hardly a dissenting voice in the media of the rank hypocrisy of the US. One wonders how Blinken and his ilk can keep a straight face when talking about standing with democracy and defending the sovereignty when the US undermine both when and where it suits them - though they've been doing it so long they're expert at it. They spent much of last year covertly and overtly intervening in Chile to try and ensure that Pinera wouldn't win the election, thankfully they failed and ironically the granddaughter of Salvador Allende who the US helped topple and murder in 1973 is now in government...That's Chile, never mind Venezuela, bombing Libya, 750 military bases in 80 countries, financing mass slaughter in Yemen, supporting IDF slaughter in Palestine...Where are the questions on any of this, where's the objective and critical journalism?

As for Coveney, he actively facilitates the US war machine through Shannon, ignores many of the crimes of the same war machine but is whinging about some Russian manoeuvres miles off the coast!

Lastly, Putin isn't going to invade Ukraine and was never going to, this is a response to NATO expansion in the East, the Germans and the French have been far more circumspect in their response than the US and the Brits because they know it's not going to happen. The US approach here is nothing to do with Ukraine but everything to do with the changing global balance of forces as we move from the unipolar globe they have dominated since the early 90s to a position now where the growing economic and military power of China, India and Russia to a lesser degree is a challenge to the dominance of US imperialism.

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528466#Comment_118528466

China is the oldest Imperial power in the world, by some margin.

Russia has a long, long imperial history.

Gatling

@MFPM As for Coveney, he actively facilitates the US war machine through Shannon .

passenger flights that's what comes through Shannon , Russian forces too along with another 40 other countries who use Shannon or Dublin...

Russia isn't going to invade this was said 7 years ago and guess who currently occupies Ukrainian Territory oh yeah Russia

.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118526194#Comment_118526194

What, no modh coinníollach ?

brickster69

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528460#Comment_118528460

And more NATO then what ? Yeah sure, if NATO is done away with and the USA get the **** out of the region old Vlad will try and conquer Europe all the way to Portugal.

A good article to get some perspective of how this **** all came about.

https://www.rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against_all_walls_40673.html

https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1485751889681657859?s=21

connected?

Gatling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528559#Comment_118528559

The Soviet empire fell , its was never an empire in the first place it was Russia and the European countries they forcibly occupied and oppressed for 75 years.

There was no agreement not to expand East ,and for most part there has not been any NATO bases built since the fall of the paper Soviet union ,

Putin seems to think he's still in cold war trenches

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528496#Comment_118528496

Indeed, we can draw up lists of Imperial countries all day long, not really the point being made but of course, you know that...Russia has also been subject to invasion quite a bit too BTW!

brickster69

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528580#Comment_118528580

All empires were just one country who occupied others. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Spanish, British, Austrian - Hungarian, Nazi you name it.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528505#Comment_118528505

I think you should look a little closer at the US war machine through Shannon and stick to facts. The million innocent people slaughtered in Iraq bear a fair testament to the role of Shannon and Ireland in that war.

As I said Russia isn't going to invade, it's a fabrication by the CIA and US intelligence in response to Putin's manoeuvres to force negotiation of the expansion of NATO. Open your eyes and ears FFS.

Manic Moran

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118526495#Comment_118526495

No, it's a standard three-BCT diivision. Its three components are all light infantry brigades, though, so as the lightest division in the active Army, plus being used to cold weather, it's the division sized unit best suited to mountain operations. Being right next to the mountain training center, I also suspect a good portion of the personnel are also mountain qualified.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528580#Comment_118528580

Isn't that how all empires were built?????????????

“There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” US Secretary of State James Baker 1989.

The Cold War is being fought by the US and the US only...they've had their own way for 30 years and it's changing, I'm no fan of Putin or China but nor am I a fan of US imperialism who do as they wish and are subject to none of the interrogation that Russia and China are yet the US has caused far more instability in the globe that either of the other two in the last two decades.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528648#Comment_118528648

Apart from Mongolia, countries don't really ask (without a gun to their head) to join with Russia.

OTOH Nations DO ask to join NATO, and why wouldn't they having been oppressed by Russia for decades or longer.

Those nations deserve to control their own future.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528648#Comment_118528648

Baker made that verbal promise (not a treaty or memorandum of understanding) to Gorbachev, the head of a country that no longer exists. And when it went away the calculus changed. May as well be talking about a promise to the Holy Roman Empire. The US doesn't go around coercing countries into NATO, they do the calculations themselves and (correctly in my view) hold that security guarantees for their young republics and democracies are better backstopped by treaty with the US and Western European countries than not - and apply of their own volition.

Countries like Belarus or Khazakstan made their own calculation and came up with different conclusions. How's that working out for them? Vassal states to Moscow with calcified autocratic governments and second fiddle economic partnerships with a moribund Russian economy. Not exactly an attractive proposition.

Economics101

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528611#Comment_118528611

What a lot of nonsense: Putin's recent demands would shove Poland and the Baltics(never mind Ukraine) back into the embrace of Russia. I can understand why Irish leftists might have some misplaced sympathy for the Soviet Communist regime, but your defence of an out an out gangster state is quite disgusting.

The idea that the current Russian military deployments do not constitute a clear threat of invasion shows that you will believe whatever nonsense the Russian ambassador spouts.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528675#Comment_118528675

Yemen, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Guatemala, Bolivia, Congo..............US + Gun - to name a few, now cop the f@ck on and learn some history.

Gatling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528611#Comment_118528611

The Russian war machine that's bombed over 100 hospitals and schools in Syria to dust ,how many Syrians have died at the hand of Russian bombs and Putin's puppet Asad's forces.....

It's all a CIA conspiracy , you can tell covid restrictions have been lifted going by the amount of drunken rants we've seen

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528737#Comment_118528737

Hey, look over there! much?

I'm quite familiar with history thanks, lived through a good deal of it already.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528714#Comment_118528714

Interesting you ignored my original reply to you, I know it's tough when confronted with facts! I made no defence of Russia, that's a lazy trope. I repeat Russia will not nor was never going to invade Ukraine, it's a bargaining tool as the Germans and French are only too aware hence their differences with their NATO allies Imperial US and Britain on the issue. You're just swallowing the CIA playbook word by word, they've done this so often they're experts it....'We stand with (insert nation)'....while all the while they intervene to destabilise any country that poses a threat to their interests...

cheezums

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528466#Comment_118528466

You can't equate NATO which is a defensive alliance of sovereign states to Russia potentially invading a country and taking their sovereignty from that country by force. "NATO expansion" is pure russian weasle words.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528708#Comment_118528708

I'm well aware it wasn't a treaty but it does illustrate the dishonest approach of the US then and now. The US may not coerce countries into NATO but they make it beneficial for countries (of their choice) to be in NATO and they then create a narrative around other countries 'axis of evil', 'anti democratic', 'anti freedom' - take your choice to then intervene, persecute, destabilise as they see fit without a shred of critique in the Western mainstream media - an approach you seem to be adopting yourself.

Yurt2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528757#Comment_118528757

Do you think the CIA are some sort of magic warlocks putting post-Soviet countries under a wicked spell?

I've been to enough places in the world to know the more f*cked up and corrupt the political class is, the more likely they are to hallucinate CIA spooks in their mushroom soup at dinner time. Easier to blame some sort of all-knowing CIA spook architecture than concede you're mismanaging a country.

You give the CIA too much credit. In any given country there's probably a couple of them in a corner office in an embassy compiling dull reports and waiting for their posting to end so they can go somewhere nicer - not running across rooftops with poison-tipped umbrellas.

Pussyhands

You'd think if Trump was so in bed with Putin like everyone says, then Putin would have invaded Ukraine during Trumps term.

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528784#Comment_118528784

NATO expansion is a fact, even NATO wouldn't dispute that FFS. Tell the Libyans who witnessed their country bombed back to the stone age that NATO is a 'defensive alliance'? Tell the slaughtered Yemeni that the bombs dropping on them by the Saudis are ok because they are financed and provided by NATO members the US and the UK!

MFPM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118528756#Comment_118528756

Just the facts ma'am, just the facts! You may have lived through it, perhaps learn to critique it by opening your eyes!