Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Ah...my favourite aircraft. Well, the King Air that provides the platform.

Slightly off topic, but Nancy Pelosi's aircraft, a USAF C-40, has just activated it's transponder on the tarmac at Taipei as she gets ready to depart.

Even it's callsign, SPAR19, is quite apt.

It's been on the cards for a while.

Yeah I read that the American navy etc. they have done a lot of war games in regards to this and America has lost most of the battles against China. The problem is the closeness of Taiwan to China and that the Chinese can launch ship killing missles from the mainland against US ships if they were trying to help Taiwan.

I agree 100% with your first sentence re Pelosi, but as for Putin being open and fair???? That's the last thing he is, Look at what he has turned Russia into in 20 years? He is just a mafia gangster, he thinks about himself, and himself only and has absolutely no compunction about using the iron fist against his fellow Russian's when he feels he has to, or even when he does not have a valid reason, but just to remind the population of the power he has over them. Monsters are monsters, wherever they come from, be it Russia or China. or elsewhere, and there are no good monsters any where in the world.

Oh, give him the same situation as the commies faced, and then you will see what he's capable of,,,do you think that he would not turn his military on his fellow Russians if he had too??? AKA Tiananmen square? Is he capable of murdering thousands and thousands if the need arose? He has already shown what he is capable of in Ukraine.

If the west was taking a long term view here, I think it should be something like as follows. Give Ukraine everything it needs and wants to win this war and rout Russia. Grind the Russian economy into absolute dust. Push into some of Russia as insurance, with the possibility of retuning some of that land after a period of good behaviour. Force Russia to come to the most humiliating of peaces. Demilitarise it. Basically do to the Russians what was done to the Germans after World War II.

Then offer to bring them in from the cold on the explicit proviso that Russia's land, resources and people will be used to work as part of a new western order, over which it gets no say, at least in the initial period, but which will benefit it massively in the long run.

The west exploited Germany's geographical dilemma to bring Germany in from the cold. Germany was trapped between two superpowers - the west, and the Soviets. West Germany was extremely happy to be on the western side post World War II because the alternative was being controlled by the Soviets (and obviously a portion of it was, which worked out disastrously). West Germany being on the western side brought peace and prosperity, freedom, sensible social democracy.

Russia faces a similar geographical dilemma. It is a failed power which is trapped between two superpowers. On the other side of it lies China.

If Russia is routed in this war, as it needs to be, does it then want to be a vassal of China, or a vassal of the west - with the long term possibility of becoming an integral part of the western order like Germany is now, if it undergoes decades of real reform?

I think it would choose the latter. But to do that it first has to be utterly routed.

IAEA: Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant 'out of control.' Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that "seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety and security are being violated" at the Zaporizhzhia plant

You are making no sense at all .... Hungary is a NATO member and part of the EU .... Orban did not threaten to shoot down any aircraft as you previously suggested.