Russia - threadbanned users in OP

I was with you up to your last sentence. Good win for Liverpool 😁

NATO is a mutal defence treaty. It's purpose, at least ostensibly, is to protect its own members by reacting to attacks against one of them. Ukraine wasn't a member.

Interesting. Bolsonaro seemed to be a wannabe buddy for Putin. And then there was the Brazilian politician who got in trouble at the start for sending messages, when he visited the Ukrainian border, about how good looking the women were and given that they were so desperate that it would be easy to exploit them...so much that he was planning to come back soon to take advantage

@Kermit_de_frog You are totally wrong to say that we Irish can't be arsed. As a neutral country, we are tied but as a nation we are very much "not arsed". Our family hooked up with a Ukrainian family this week, as a result of a post that a Ukrainian lad put up on FB enquiring about fishing shops in our area. We took him to the fishing shop. He was about to pay 50 euros for his purchase but the owner of the shop gave him everything for free. His aunt, who accompanied him with us to the fishing shop was overwhelmed. She has perfect English and told us all about their escape from Kherson. I'll post details of that tomorrow. She had nothing but praise for what the Irish people/government are doing for them.

If you mean Gazprombank - then like most banks they no longer keep their Euros and dollars in an old style safe anymore. Gazprombank as per most banks is doing business every day and being facilitated by European countries such as Germany and Austria.

There's an old adage along the line of

There's no point in worrying about things they haven't happened yet

And if they do happen then we won't have to worry any more

Otherwise known as the theory of How I Learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb.

"In the occupied Kherson, 58 orphans were taken from the basement of the church in an unknown direction, - former Commissioner for Children's Rights Mykola Kuleba.

The children were allegedly taken away by representatives of the FSB – he blames the Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova, who announced the whereabouts of the children."

The speed and deliberation with which they sought and kidnapped these kids suggests to me there might be an official purpose and policy of truly horrific motives and nature such as to make most of the other outrages committed by the orcs seem minor.

Something seems badly off.

Add the 6 from Australia that just arrived, and within the coming week, Ukraine could be fielding 60-70 new 155mm Howitzers. If the orcs were making only minor advances recently, this lot might be enough to bring them to a halt or better.

First of all it's not something any of us have any power over; so worrying and talking about it constantly is entirely counter-productive.

Second of all it is absolutely a concern people have cited numerous times in this thread and on social media, in the news, etc.

And thirdly there are many other rungs on the escalation ladder before we would get to actual nuclear war. More likely shorter term escalations might include a general mobilisation in Russia for example; or maybe some sort of isolated tactical nuclear or chemical weapon usage in Ukraine before a global nuclear conflict would be in the offing.

Live link to Nato press point.

Apologies for the late link.

Posted as soon as I saw it.

Questions appeared to be about Finland joining Nato.

There are a number of people on this thread and elsewhere who just cannot admit that Russia are making any progress in any area of Ukraine.

Plenty of independent and pro-Western organisations and analysts admit that Russia is making some progress in some areas of Ukraine and has made some positive adaptations after their initial failures.

Here is one example with some key quotes over the past few days from https://www.understandingwar.org/:

I mean Russia has focused tens of thousands of troops and thousands of pieces of equipment around Izyum so it's hardly all that surprising they're making some gains there; but apparently even mentioning this fact on this thread is enough to warrant repeated claims of being a Putin supporter or bot or whatever.

Looks like further Russian advances last night in the Izyum area. Looks to be slow but steady progress. The big question is just how much damage the Russians are taking. They are assaulting prepared and well defended territory. Both sides are taking a lot of punishment I'd say.

I had read that they want to sell these rounds and not just send them for free; in which case I don't see why it wouldn't. The US is fronting a lot of money for Ukraine to buy ammunition so maybe they'll add this batch to the list.

Yes helping taking refugees is critical and Irelands efforts are acknowledged. But you are saying lets do one but not the other.

Why cant we do both?

If we dont have any weapons, why cant we fund purchase of such for Ukraine?

Im sure Daly & Wallace could answer that!

Zelensky's messaging is unambigious.

They need weapons to defeat the invaders. Otherwise we are going to be housing a lot more Ukrainians for a lot longer.

Because one would take away from the other, why sacrafice funding that could be used to help refugees to send a meager few weapons? I mean the rest of the world is pumping in the weapons and money as is?

Our role and most effective role is humanitarian, could we help out with military aid? Probably to some extent should we focus on that over other help? No.

I don't think any military aid we could muster would be significant enough to "defeat the invaders"