So Ukrainian commanders like to have a chocolate or two. Hey, they're only human...
This is the thing I've been hammering on about, NATO expands through co-operation and mutual protection. Russia expands through war, landgrabs and subjugation. The whole 2 sides thing really falls apart quickly. It was the Eastern European countries who were pushing at the start, not the yanks or the Brits who thought it'd be done in a week. It was only when there was a chance that the Brits and Yanks jumped on board. Obviously one can criticise them for that but it's a pretty flimsy criticism when coming from the default position that NATO "expansion" or "aggression" was the trigger in the first place.
Actually a good while back on this forum, there was a poster whose wife was Russian, and her advice to stop the war dead in its tracks, was to offer every Russian Soldier and EU passport.😄
The same trope is often levelled at the EU, that it somehow engages in aggressive expansion in order to become a supposed EU super state. It's the same crowd pushing the narrative - anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-Zelensky, anti-Biden, pro-Trump, pro-Brexit, pro-Putin.
Because one is harder than the other. We rely a lot on middle distillates from Russia that can not be as quickly/easily replaced as crude oil as the refining capacity isn't there.
It's a fallacy that's pushed by the disingenuous and consumed by ignorant to say that NATO expands into anywhere. I could understand it being said on social media, which is the intellectual wild west, but when politicians start saying it - people who should be held to a slightly higher standard - that's when it gets annoying.
If Russia worked to become the kind of country that other countries want to follow, it would have plenty of buffer zone, but it hasn't so it doesn't.
I am sure a large country like Russia has a certain number of fires, but would love to know if the current number of them is out of the ordinary
I can relate. My daughter has no interest in current affairs*, but she also keeps her thoughts to herself, so when she expresses a concern like that, we know it's something that's really worrying her. Her ability to keep her own counsel and stand up to questioning, combined with a relentless ability to ferret out information herself has led us to conclude that she'd be a natural as a secret service analyst. 😁 I had know idea she was so aware of the Ukraine situation, apart from me telling her to expect some new classmates in September. She must have locked on to something that filtered through.
*Neither of them is a chip off either parental block that way, but I sometimes think they may have right idea. Maybe life is nicer like that.
What part of countries "expand" into NATO by exercising their democratic right to free association is so difficult for people to comprehend? When was anyone ever forced to join NATO? Other than forced through their knowledge that they live next door to a deranged regime which at any moment could invade to re-assert Russian imperialism
8 months away (May is only 4 days in), unless you have speeded up time mysteriously. I imagine there are different usage patterns and complexities around supply chain switching but you usually get a more detailed readout from the actual Energy commissariat. So wait for that - this is just the headline.
Must be global warming - https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1521779058878689282?s=20&t=Gfo5oDarVZWyCWOBZEjFUw
And more here https://twitter.com/kiranjoshi235/status/1521739489177001984?s=20&t=ZQuhX9RFyRXR4iml-v3WYQ
Anyone have any concrete truth to the whole "Putin going for surgery" rumour.
Why have they set two different time limits? The end of the year is only 7 months away, so why specify a seperate 6 month limit for one type of import?
If you look at the people cheering for Wallace on that tweet, and then look at the other stuff they are posting on their own accounts, it tells a little story.
Clicked on one there and other stories they appear to be retweeting include stories about 1000 Ukrainian Nazis burning 48 people to death in Odessa
Oh, and anti-vaxx stuff too
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Francis reflected on Russia’s lethal aggression toward its neighbor and said while he might not go as far as saying NATO’s presence in nearby countries “provoked” Moscow, it “perhaps facilitated” the invasion.
Would you disagree with any of that?
He's not a patch on JP.
https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-francis-nato-cause-ukraine-invasion-russia/
JP was a way better soccer player to boot.
As these successive waves of sanctions build up, it becomes harder and harder for the Russian state to ameliorate their effects. They will become crippling.
Obviously eliminating EU imports of Russian oil is the big part of today's announcement, so I missed that Sberbank has also been kicked off SWIFT.
That's one that will hit ordinary Russians hard. Sberbank is by far the biggest retail bank in Russia.
Regardless of whether nato expansion has anything to do with this, this is not the time for the pope to go into politics. Russia is committing atrocities in plain view of the whole world and the pope should focus on this. Leave the politics till after the war. No 1. on the agenda is the welfare of the Ukrainian people and anything that compromises this is to be frowned upon.
Meanwhile, a $7.5 billion contract with Rosatom to build a nuclear power plant was also terminated.
Pretty big financial losses for the Russian state nuclear energy company. The plan included building a reactor pressure vessel, but the factory that can build those is located in Kramatorsk, Ukraine - and it was damaged by Russian attacks. So the Russians shelled their own supplier.
I didn't read of him justifying anything.
Same here, it's so full of contradictions and impulsive decisions etc it's so hard to keep up with it.
People leaving on mass, politicians and celebs going in it's very strange.
I hope the Pope can sleep happy with expressing opinions like that, which just seek to justify the mad Russian dogs of war. He might just have lost whatever credibility he has managed to scrape together for his beleaguered institution.
I went to make a meme but this one was already there
I was going to go with
No idea. If I could predict the future accurately, I'd be a very rich man though...
The pope can go take is Co*ck out of his gang of peadophiles a*sholes, punish and remove them from his organisation before commenting on anything.
why that fella has any standing in any context is beyond me.
the Pope lol.
If a person doesn’t like their neighbour because the neighbour refuse to be pressured into being a slave, and then call them Nazis, take their land, burn down their house, rape them, murder them….is that the neighbours fault too?
The Pope's observation that NATO was partly to blame for the invasion is timely and overdue. Posters on this site making a similar observation were 'devoured'. He only stated the obvious.
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