Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Yeah sub continent India 1946 led to massive ethnic cleansing due to the brits (Cyril Radcliffe and lord mountbatten) drawing lines on maps.

😊,

In total, about 3,000 Hurricanes were sent to the USSR between 1941 and 1944 to support the Soviet war effort. Most were either destroyed in combat or dismantled later for parts.

But some Hurricanes were deliberately broken up and buried after the war so the Soviets did not have to pay back the United States. Under the Lend-Lease legislation, the USSR was required to pay for any donated military equipment that remained intact after hostilities ended.

Ungrateful bastards. Man I wish the allies just let them get steam rolled by Germany.

Is he saying for the West to continue supplies at the rate needed they would need to move their economies to a war footing? This is what Putin had been gambling on all along. If the west had gone all in this warning would not have needed to be sounded at all. In any case I think he is wrong, I still believe Ukraine will achieve a sudden breakthrough at some stage and the Russian resistance will collapse. If they had air supremacy the breach would happen far sooner. As a poster said a few days ago look what happened at Normandy, in the earlier stages progress was glacial then suddenly there was rapid advancements.

What relevance has this fact to anything that is happening today….it’s hardly like the Ukraine or Russians can ‘fire them up’ and use them..🤔

You don't even have to go as far as India......even the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher admitted that Churchill made a major blunder when he partitioned Ireland.

Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy

Since the late 1980s, BBC news crews have filmed all across the Soviet Union and Russia, but only a tiny portion of their footage was ever used for news reports. The rest was left unseen on tapes in Moscow. Filmmaker Adam Curtis obtains these tapes and uses them to chronicle the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, and today’s invasions of Ukraine. The films take you from inside the Kremlin, to the frozen mining cities in the Arctic circle, to tiny villages of the vast steppes of Russia, and the strange wars fought in the mountains and forests of the Caucasus.

I haven't watched it yet but anything by Adam Curtis is brilliant

I like Michael Clarkes analysis. He seems to be fairly unbiased to either side and knowledgeable.

Sean Bell however. In my armchair general opinion is an absolute fool. Since the very start of the war he's been banging on about how Russia won't be beaten and Ukraine can only lose slowly. He was on Sky calling for peace talks as Russia was flattening Sieverodonetsk. He's constantly harping on about how Russia should be let keep the Donbas and Crimea and the land its stolen for the sake of negotiating with Putin. An absolutely abhorrent proposition unless we want to end up in WW3 in a few years. And one the Ukranians would never go for.

He's constantly been pessimistic about Ukraines potential to achieve anything at all. It may be true that the offensive won't achieve as much as some hoped as quickly as hoped. But I'm relatively confident Sean is talking out his arse.

I watched that when it came out. It's excellent. Really gives you a sense for the absolute chaos of the 1990s and the absolute pillaging of the country by the oligarchs that emerged. Their greed was rapacious and entirely at the expense of the common people. The American's really dropped the ball too. They effectively allowed libertarian economists to advise "shock therapy" to try and move the country from communist to capitalist. It was a failed experiment and paved the way for Putin to crush the nascent free press and opposition in the name of "stability".

The other thing I took from it was the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Nowadays he's mostly seen as the doddering drunk making a show of himself at formal occasions. Before all that though he was a deft political operator who ran rings around Gorbachev. He also laid the path for Putin though, in that he essentially took power away from parliament and placed it in the hands of the President after a constitutional crisis in 1993 where he literally sent the tanks in to fire on the parliament who were thwarting him and trying to impeach him.

Beyond all that though are the many small stories showing regular people just living their lives and trying to get by. Since it's Russia, lots of them are odd and lots of them are heart-breaking.

File alongside:

Belarus is entering the war on Friday.

Kiev will fall in 3 days.

Putin has cancer and two months to live.

Etc etc.

Don't forget:

• My secret source had to talk pilots out of dropping nuclear arms when they were in the air
• Progozhin has seized a nuclear arms depot and I'm including a picture of the wrong place

His problem is that he just repeats every rumour he hears and doesn't do any due diligence. Who knows maybe Kadyrov really is dying but I'll wait til I hear it from a more credible source before I believe there is any substance to it.