I doubt it... you heading to it?
There being withdrawn to prepare for the big parade in Moscow ,😂😂😂
Wow
The days when what is today the EU was just to use your words" a trading block" have long since passed. Defense and security are very much part of the obligations and duties of the member states and it is well beyond high time we stopped behaving so selfishly and pulled our weight in terms of the security and defense of the EU as a whole instead of being the freeloaders that we are in that regard just because a direct conventional attack on Ireland is currently unlikely.
Quite a few people who were in or at the Mariupol theatre escaped to the west after the bombing (I saw one of them interviewed on the BBC). There's absolutely no way the Russians will be able to cover up anything that happened - there are numerous witness testimonies.
I'm fairly sure it wouldn't.
i dont care what anyone says, the above is indictable to as high as the war crimes court in Den Haag
To lose one may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
There’s a realistic balance to be struck. We aren’t strategically all that significant but we aren’t entirely irrelevant either. I think we have been naive about our position and our defence, particularly in areas like cyber security, being abused as a weak spot for espionage and having an inability to use active radar to protect flight paths.
We need to improve our defence infrastructure but we also don’t need to totally lose the run of ourselves either. We are absolutely not in the high risk position Ukraine is in nor that Finland, Sweden, Poland, Estonia etc all find themselves in.
We are too close to the UK, US and also France to be at significant risk.
I think that Russian missile test in the Atlantic however is a bit of a wake up call and so is the weird infrastructure that Russia was trying to build at the embassy.
We can’t just take things absolutely for granted either and I think we do need to formalise our defence relationships with the neighbouring countries, even if that doesn’t involve joining NATO.
I would see a future for Ireland investing in high tech, coast effective defence of the island, mostly focused on advanced radar, maybe some drone capabilities and a lot of cyber security, which probably should draw on support from some of the mega IT companies with a lot of infrastructure here.
I would also think it’s quite urgent that we wind down the scale of the embassy. There’s ludicrously oversized diplomatic operations relative to scale of trade and population. Either just end diplomatic relationships or reduce it to just the ambassador and a couple of support staff. We didn’t even have a USSR embassy here until the early 70s and we frankly don’t need that level of diplomacy. The prospects for normal relations between anywhere and Russia are dim at this stage.
"Love this account"
Me too. It really brightens what are otherwise dark days.
The EU was a trading block. It has been much much more for at least three decades now.
The hint is in the name.
The EU is a trading block. What's it got to do with defense?
At the very least as a member of the EU we need to stop behaving so selfishly and being free loaders when it comes to defense and upgrade our military and overall security capabilities until we have a legitimate defense capability and are carrying our weight in terms of overall European security. Our current selfishness is not just about not spending enough on defense it is also the mentality that well its highly unlikely that we will be attacked so feck it no need to spend on defense let other countries do that. We are part of the EU and better off for it overall as being part of the collective gives us so much more then just been out there on our own. We need to pull our weight as well on defense with the mentality of being part of a bigger overall picture and stop being so selfish.
It a bad day for the Russians it seems.
Delighted.
Edit: wrong word!!!!
Tsk tsk.
Towing from the top link. Driver will be fired.
That's because a lot of the thread banned from here and those saying Ukraine should fight to the death but their families aren't welcome here are venting their usual sh1te
Right now with Biden in power its pretty much a forgone conclusion that the US back Ireland if we're invaded. You get Trump or someone of his ilk in charge and we'll be left swinging. Then again, with Trump in charge, Putin could probably have annexed the Baltics and they wouldn't have got backing such was his distain for NATO.
I think we need to join NATO, get their input on what they want to see on the Island. I'm guessing it will be upgraded radar, anti ship missiles and possibly a mobile SAM launcher or two. It won't be huge but it would be a deterrent to anyone with designs on attacking us just because its so easy as it stands.
Maybe that's because the Russians have reached a special military stalemate. All downhill for them now?
Well it's a hypothetical future but at this moment in time absolutely I would expect the US to intervene on our behalf if we were being invaded. It's one of the reasons we let things like transport of prisoners slide in Shannon but also historically the us has always supported Irish independence
Off to bikini bottom....
Still waiting on news of the other 400 missing sailors from the Moskva
:D
..
I hope that the guy in Russia with the jerrycan and box of matches sets fire to somewhere oily in Moscow, directly in Putin's line of sight on the 9th. Doesn't have to be too close, just as long as Putin sees the plume while reviewing his parade.
Yes, I guess that is true.
This is still the busiest of the three threads currently relating to Ukraine,
It's not exactly dieing now
There's not as much to discuss. The conflict has "slowed" quite a bit. New developments have also decreased.
If the Brits were invading who would they be fighting? And if it's about controlling the Eastern Atlantic then whoever they're fighting will just launch 50 missiles to **** our **** up instead.
For some people it's still unthinkable that Russia would invade Ukraine. For some they wouldn't believe it til it happened. The only reason 25 years ago it would be unthinkable for Russia to invade Ukraine was because they were completely under Russia's thumb so they had no call to invade. Was it unthinkable they'd invade Poland/Hungary/Estonia/Bulgaria/Lithuania/Latvia? Because those countries seemed worried enough to jump into NATO ASAP. They were invading and **** around in places in the 90s even before Putin came to power, only the naive expected them to stop acting like an empire all of a sudden.
If world politics gets to such a position that the UK has left NATO then maybe. But if things get to that point then NATO likely doesn't exist anymore. If the UK and France leave then its a fairly pointless cooperation as you have only the US as a nuclear state and although they currently provide the vast majority of NATO capabilities, if they are also then the only nuclear power its not really much of an alliance.
Being part of NATO isn't going to help if NATO doesn't exist anymore, and the UK invading Ireland isn't going to be happening, even though the UK is clearly the biggest military threat to Ireland.
I find it a bit depressing that the thread about Ukrainian refugees seems more active than the thread about the conflict.
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