Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Similar to Irish/English close ties etc? Or the fact that English people currently live in a free society where they could educate themselves?

Again you're giving humanity too much credit. Countries write their own history and we, the sheepish masses tend to swallow it whole and move on.

That's even more the case in a highly sensored, authoritarian state like Russia. So I won't be holding my breath for the average Russian to realise they're the bad guys.

And IMO so they should be winning the propaganda war, they are the ones who have been invaded for no justification at all, and are seeing the horror of their homes, hospitals, ect being bombed out of it, killing countless civilians.

But my worry is that this is going to take its toll on the population of Ukraine, maybe within the military or civilains. And their will be some who will only want revenge for whats happening, unfortunately it may lead to revenge atrocities committed from the Ukraine side.

Anything that does happen will be played down by the Ukrainian side but more than likely be used by the Russians as proof for why they needed to invade in the first place. (Which of course would be ludicrous, but I think its what we may see as things pan out)

The Russians have already lost the propaganda war. There is virtually nothing the Ukrainians could do to make public opinion switch to "there are two sides to this argument" or "they are nearly as bad as the Russians". They were a neutral and peaceful country and violently attacked and invaded by a country that is three times bigger.

Russian soldiers opened fire on protesters in Kherson

We're already into a Bloody Sunday type scenario then and a blatant war crime. This will go down very badly in all the western countries.....opening fire on innocent civilians is a big 'no no'.

He said they could, not should, and he's right.

It was something I was thinking about this morning. I think here in the West, we expect Russians to be questioning why Western media and social media has been suppressed in Russia, and that the inevitable conclusion that they will come to is that their government is hiding something from them. Carrying on from that, when stories filter through from the families of soldiers you would think that they would definitely know that the government is lying.

But then we banned the russian news networks. Now, obviously I know it's because they are pure propaganda, but isn't that what every Russian thinks about the Western news networks and social media? It'd be easy to paint a picture to say that the West is desperate to sow discord in Russia, and will mock up news reports and plant content creators on instagram solely to lie to the Russians. And Russia is massive, even 40,000 soldiers dying will only mean sporadic stories amongst a massive population. Easy to disregard as conspiracy theorists.

I think it'll be a long time before ordinary russian accept what is truely happening in the Ukraine.

On the topic of Russian comms - we've heard that their secure comms were not working or malfunctioning, and that the Ukrainians were jamming the single-channel backup comms, which forced some Russians to go to cellphones but the Ukrainians blocked the Russian prefix, and that led on to Russian soldiers using stolen Ukrainian cellphones...

This makes me wonder how much working power is left in the country because cellular towers are not impervious to power outages, so if the Russians continue to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, they could end up inadvertently knocking out the only reliable communication method they have, unless they get their proper comms sorted.

Still unclear if anyone was actually killed here, it may have been mainly shots into the air and tear gas. It does show that tensions are rising though....it may be only a matter of time before we see a very serious 'incident' with multiple fatalities.

"Yes it will really hurt us short term"

If ever there was an understatement. Those calling for such measures really ought to spell out the consequences of what they are asking for. Because it's really easy to say you want to isolate China and Russia, but are you willing to have next to no electronic devices? Are you willing to pay substantially more for clothes? For fuel? Even if we choose to wean ourselves away from Chinese goods it will take decades, and then the question is what will it achieve.

If Chinese wealth is dependent on the west buying their stuff, isolating them will mean that they no longer have a stake in the economic success of the west. The relationship will become even more adversarial as the great powers, now compete for resources rather than sell them to each other.