Taking it with a big pinch of salt, but still, after the situation in LNR and DNR, I don't know..
The FSB are an outfit who have no problem openly murdering individuals with exotic nerve agents or radioactive substances
No, I think the West/NATO have done the right thing for the greater good of humanity. They've called Putin out - and the more they threaten Nuclear war the more it sounds hollow. BUT, I don't think NATO should engage Russia over Ukraine. I do think they WILL engage Russia if Russia attacks a NATO country. The rest of the non Russia sycophant countries should continue to hammer Russia with sanctions.
yea very decent
Macron and Scholz tried all this - went to Moscow and gave him all sorts of assurances and guarantees and then he went and invaded Ukraine (and must have already have decided to invade at the time he was talking to them).
good read
Giving him an inch is how he's become a despotic ruler.
The west should give an inch because the alternative is a third world war. And then there will be no kids to teach, because they will all be dead. I do not like saying these things. But yours are fighting words, and fair play to you, but you should know that a fight between Great Powers in 2022 will mean the end of the world and the permanent destruction of the future.
He needs a huge force to take and occupy the country. He can't even take a few cities with this large force. Ukraine will fight and he can't beat down an insurgency as he runs out of money. There are many phases of this to go and none of them favour Russia.
Personally, I fear dying in the nuclear winds, or living long enough after to face famine, starvation, radiation sickness and cannibal tribes who just want me for my body.
But that's me.
Russia scores 19, Ukraine 61 (Ireland 97). So therefore because Ukraine is not perfect, its as bad as Russia and we can both sides this?
Speaker of Russian parliament on Russian TV. This is now North Korea levels of propaganda
Da Cor utterly wrong, as is usually the case, no surprise.
Well, this is the quandary, isn't it? Your scenario would seem to be zero sum: Let Putin have Latvia or... Or what? Engage in a nuclear exchange that would end all human life on the planet? The choice is binary and those are the stakes. It's as stark and bleak as that. If you think there's a straightforward answer to that, you're a better man than me, Gunga Din!
Why should the West give an Inch.. What has Putin done that should make any of us give anything to him. Are we at the stage of rewarding terror. What does that teach any of us, what message does that teach our kids.
Putin if he so wished could have taken a different route, a positive route for the Russian people but he has chosen to inflict terror & now he will pay & now he should suffer & now we all need to make a choice of living in a world where we accept and lie down in the face of evil or we stand united and face our aggressors.
Nuclear threat or not, this question must be asked of us all.
I'm not sure how much it will change the West's strategy. The only thing it tells them is that he has no interest in peace negotiations and has no intention whatsoever of withdrawing from Ukraine. It's the first time he has admitted though that the intention is to take all of Ukraine (and presumably install a puppet regime).
A hell of a lot of rumours coming out of Russia that hes about to declare martial law.
I wonder are the Chinese themselves surprised at the coordinated western sanctions and their immediate impact. Surely they would take serious note, at least privately.
I'll take Western utopianism over Putinist nihilism every day of the week, where demoralised and propgandised citizens greet wars of national extinction with a shrug.
@[Deleted User]
@Drumpot
As Wibbs said, if you look at the thread, when people try to expand out from “Putin is bad, we have to save Ukraine” (which is fine to be the general narrative), people are accused of trying to deflect or somehow imply it’s ok what Putin is doing.
You don't even have to expand on anything. All you have to say is tanks get stuck in the mud. 😆
Putin is laying down the challenge then. What is the West going to do? Not much we can do really, other than cut off Russia financially, economically, logistically and socially. If those sentiments are true, Ukraine is gone
I assume you include Ireland and Irish troops as part of this?
Would you be willing to enlist if that's the case?
Have you not heard the expression give an inch and take a Moldova?
How far are you willing to let Putin go before he is confronted - everything up until the NATO countries? If he attacks Latvia should NATO still do nothing? Or is it if it DIRECTLY affects Ireland you think it's getting a little serious?
At this point, western utopianism is going to get us all killed, because it has ignored the fact that there are other, lethal powers out there who won't allow liberal democracy to encroach into what they see as their back yards...
I don't see the sanctions as sustainable or conducive to peace. Crushing sanctions is what caused the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. If you don't think that they will lead, at the very least, to a crippling cyber attack on western infrastructure leading to unparalleled chaos and escalation, just wait and see.
These lethal "powers" are already in our "back yard". No scratch that they are in the house, living it large, sneering and laughing at us. So many minds hacked with their bullshít which is free to spread and eaten up by lots of people, so many elites bought and sold and utterly corrupted. So much dependence of the West on them, esp. Putin's smirking pals in Beijing. See this thread for examples. It's not all "bots", as they say.
Putin has pulled his mask off now, and its clear to most what is underneath. The sanctions are necessary. Cut them off and close them out from the West, hopefully for a generation or more if current set up there survives and endures. I suppose I am a broken record at this stage but neither Russia nor China have some God given right to the extensive trade and economic and social interactions with us that they built up. Cutting them off isn't utopianism.
I think if Russia didn't implode after the breakup of the USSR, it's unlikely to any time soon. And a common cry in Russian circles these days is "Why do we need the world if Russia won't be in it?".
I suspect it's happening already, but they need to go in 'unofficially'.
Kind of. China will earn significant political capital if he brings Putin to heel, but in terms of China as an alternative pole of political power, it really is a lonely power as well.
China can only really count Pakistan, Cambodia, North Korea and a couple of other pliant states as reliable political partners.
This would send Moscow Mick and fellow travelers over the edge, but we should be very very careful about cheerleading the end of the US backstopped peace in critical parts of the world. East Asia and Europe would be back to normal service of taking lumps out of each other were it not for the American security umbrella.
I read a nice little summation of NATO and it's ultimate purpose the other day: "It's about keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down."
It's hard to argue with a compact like that, and it makes sense to this day. And the US aren't running around overthrowing EU governments, they've actually facilitated the growth and development of the most powerful force for European democracy and prosperity since dot.
If someone has a better formula for protecting the European peace if we send the Americans back across the Atlantic, I'm all ears, but I don't think there is a credible one to be completely frank.
Yes, he's dropped all talk of "liberating the Donbass". He now openly admits he wants to take all of Ukraine (this is what the 'de-Nazifying and demilitarising Ukraine' euphemism has been about).
Time for NATO and the West to step it up and stop Putin before it's too late. Now would be the ideal time to attack Russian forces when they are struggling in the Ukraine. Forgot Negotiations and diplomacy a waste of time against Putin. He needs to faced right on. Nothing to be feared but fear itself.
Experts on existential risk hypothesize that humanity has a one-in-five chance of wiping itself out within the next few hundred years. I personally think the odds are grimmer than that. If the west negotiates in good faith a new geopolitical architecture with China and Russia, and then those countries break what was agreed, then we know for sure that there will be a nuclear war, and those who survive will live in a Mad Max type hellscape. But we have to try to settle it in good faith first. At the moment the west isn't giving an inch and this isn't sustainable.
Genocide is a very specific crime. It's not about numbers, it's about acts that specifically have "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" . And to be clear, I'm not down-playing how wrong Russia's actions are, denying that they're committing other war crimes, or saying that intervention isn't warranted.
However, innocent Ukrainians being killed in war, no matter how unjust, that is occurring in Ukraine does not in itself necessarily reach the threshold of genocide. Indeed, genocide is discriminate killing, rather than indiscriminate.
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