Some of the images of crying children and murdered pensioners are beyond shocking. The scum that exists in our world is really sickening. It's hard to get it out of your mind.
A little simplistic to say just accept price hikes in petrol/gas. 40% of gas supplies for Europe come from Russia, there is no alternative sources to cover that. And will take decades to reverse this dependance.
I think what happened there is that the lorry was taking pre-emptive action to prevent a different truck with dishonourable motives from smashing those gates.
I'm not going to tackle everything in that post because it's so long, but I don't think autocracies have 'almost nothing to worry about' besides the war. There are certain hard realities even an autocracy must face, no matter how much they try to control the flow of information, and one of them is that if they run out of money to finance their war, that war is f*cked. And so, there is an amount of calculus that must be performed in deciding to go to war and which target you pick. By going to war with Ukraine, Russia has alienated many economic partners. That, in turn, will create austerity for the Russian population, which will be oxygen for the anti-Putin sentiment that exists in the country.
Those who admire autocracy, either openly or in secret, would admire its apparent strength, but they forget it's also brittle. Enough pressure and it will crack. Putin's doing himself no favours, here. He can try to tell his people one thing, but he probably underestimates just how readily information travels these days.
Blinken is playing a blinder in his tour of the neighboring countries, today he's in Estonia. Estonia's Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, after meeting with him:
The Kremlin’s war tactic is to terrorise civilians and put them at the frontline of this war.
What #Ukraine needs urgently now is our military help. This is our first priority. 1/6
The democratic world has stepped up against this war with speed, strength, determination.
But we need to be prepared that the worse is still to come.
Putin's violence must be in correlation with further decisions to isolate his war machine politically and economically. 2/6
We are in this for the long haul.
We see already tremendous policy shifts vis-à-vis Russia across the EU and the rest of the democratic world.
What we need next is the strategic patience to keep these decisions in place. 3/6
Russia expects us to take a step back soon.
We will prove them wrong.
We will keep on finding new tools in our toolbox until Putin’s war machine has been paralysed and isolated. 4/6
Our new reality demands rapid changes to our defence. Estonia has long spent over 2% of our GDP, and we are increasing it.
@NATO needs to adapt quickly, too. Decisions we must make include permanent and meaningful forward defence in our region - on land, in air and at sea. 5/6
Our unity & scale of joint decisions prove the strength of our democracies.
I thank the U.S. administration for their leadership in building the unity of Allies and partners. #StandWithUkraine 6/6
Enormous amounts were pumped into Afghanistan to train and equip the military. In the end they were not bothered fighting, so the end result is the Afghans get the government they wanted or at least couldn't be bothered fighting against. The situation in Ukraine is completely different.
😁
Ah yes the Neville Chamblerlain approach. It didn't work in 1938 and it aint going to work in 2022 either.
You do realize that the only reason why Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt were able to extract unconditional surrender from Germany in 1945 is because Hitler didn't have atomic weaponry, right?
It annoys me that people who know a little about some historical events (almost always WW2) - but little to nothing about the forces that drive them - refer liberally to WW2 as though it offers some sort of cheat sheet to solving today's issues.
WW2 was a just war -- but not a good war. War is never good. It is often necessary, but never good. You will not get an unconditional surrender from Russia, and this will ultimately have to be resolved at a negotiating table.
Disparaging comments on a person's looks.
Smig git!
Indeed! Very little spoken about that agreement. Instead of repeatedly asking NATO for no fly zone, if I was Ukraine I would be focusing on highlighting the content of that agreement!
Right, and I addressed the point about why families and single women might be more conservative (and have more opportunities) when settling for 'acceptable' safe haven. Personally, I can well understand why - having been driven out of my home by war, and losing everything - I might as well risk going further to get to somewhere with (what I perceive as) more opportunity.
So we aren't debating whether it is acceptable for a male to be a refugee (although another poster took issue with that). We are just debating how incovenient it is when they turn up near us.
Edit: to clarify, I accept that there will be a proportion of young males in that population who are neer do wells. It would be the same if, by some misfortune, a couple of million Irish people had to become refugees.
There was a reasonably compelling debunking of "Russian tank crushes car" by a fact-checking group affiliated with France24.
https://observers.france24.com/en/europe/20220301-video-debunked-russian-tank-crush-civilian-car-kyiv
They believe it was a Ukrainian Strela-10 that accidentally ran over the car due to confusion nearby. The have only done one or two debunkings related to the conflict so I don't think they are part of any pro-Russia conspiracy.
This video was originally accepted without question by many posters.
Please explain to me what the neo-nazis in the Azov regiment have done that is worse than what the Russians have done to Ukraine?
The whole thing is utterly absurd. Talk about whataboutery and deflection.
Considering what they are doing in the Ukraine they think a fella reversing a truck into a gate is ' barbaric ' !? NURSE !!!!!
State shouldn't pay a cent... the state didn't do it and they have insurance...
I think just claiming it was Chernobyl is a tat simplistic.
The Afghanistan war had huge ramifications and was very costly.
What Chernobyl highlighted was the poor standard of Soviet technology.
They tried to keep a lid on it like they did with their often very dangerous or even failing subs, but they just couldn't.
Added to that US military technology was getting more and more hitech and the Soviets just could not financially compete even if they stealing the tech.
Sovert defense budget spending in 1980s was estimated to be 15-17% of GNP whereas the US as around 7% of GDP.
Russia is doomed. I'm of the opinion that we just need to accept the inevitable price hikes in petrol/gas and cut Russia oil/gas for Europe off completely. Let the revolution begin in Russia when everything closes.
Embassy van man is exactly how I pictured him.
that agreement is null and void now, it was supposed to protect the "independence and sovereignty" of ukraine, i did neither
Europe needs to follow ASAP.
No more excuses or deliberations!
Putin is bluffing and is unlikely to use nukes - that comes from someone far more expert than anyone posting on Boards and most of the commentators online.
I therefore think getting some non-nato countries to put boots on the ground and provide air cover with a clear rule not to engage any targets within Russia, is what the west should do.
Putin is using the alleged breaking of an alleged verbal assurance given to Gorbachev that NATO wouldn't expand eastward in order to give himself the moral impetus to break an agreement with Ukraine which was actually signed, sealed and delivered.
Looks like US is going to go ahead on the ban Russian oil imports (just for the US)
The Russian troll farm element seems to have calmed down on this thread.
Yes. I understand the excuses often given. Which is why I pre-empted this point by saying it was legitimate to ask why the women and children are able to take a pit-stop on the way.
You should at least acknowledge that there would be people who claim to fleeing war who really just want to be given status to remain in Europe.
Lets be honest, we had a huge amount of people come into this country in the late 90's and early 00's who were all fleeing for their lives. Out of those there are examples who, once they got status here and eventually got their passports, now travel back and forth for family events, seemingly oblivious to the life-threatening dangers they must obviously remain in. Nobody is claiming that about Ukrainians or actual Syrians.
1994 agreement between Ukraine, Russia, USA and UK would oblige USA and UK to intervene.
You really need to identify what's a win and what's a loss in this war.
It'll become much clearer once you look at this war from a macroscopic point of view.
Ukraine is just a battlefield, the real war is between Russia (and the camp it belongs to) and US/Europe.
From the get go, Russia has the upper hand simply because Autocratic regimes have almost nothing to worry about except how the war progresses, while democracies got lots to consider before participating in such war.
Add to that the fact that Putin seem determined to win in Ukraine as it's a strategic interest to him and with every day passing it appears that his objective is to turn the country to rubble leaving it less and less relevant to the west to invest in rather than occupying it and he's willing to sacrifice the already drafted troops for it.
One the other hand from a western perspective, we're fighting a proxy war - that alone is a proof who Ukraine really matters to more.
Now if you pay attention to how americans handle proxy conflicts eventually they're going to pull the plug and abandon whoever is fighting, the last 2 examples for this were the Kurds in Syria and the Afghan army in Afghanistan.
if you keep an eye around the world today, this is what you see happening:
keeping the above in mind, and with all the implications on world economy, the Russians are putting up a show in Ukraine while blackmailing the west coming to the negotiations table. <-- this is the only relevant negotiation table, and not the one in Belarus.
The real question in Putin's and everyone's mind is, how long can world economies survive before they pull the plug and abandon the Ukrainians to their doom and come to the negotiation table to save their economies.
what is worrying here is that if those negotiations fail, then direct military conflict will be unavoidable.
So you're saying all Russian soldiers and equipment are perfectly entitled to open fire on any and all civilians without any regard for the situation? Are you for real?
Can you think of reasons why single, male refugees would tend to make it further from the warzone, and thus make an increasinly large proportion of the population as you get further along the stream?
Ukrainians starting to use some interesting tactics
CNN put up a piece about a Ukrainian hotline that Russians are calling, looking for information on the whereabouts of soldier family members.
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