Russia-Ukraine War

It is a stretch to call "Bild" journalism.

Chinese banks reducing their business with Russia, obviously not for ethical reasons, but if it adds financial pressure to the Kremlin criminals can still be welcomed:

nice

Ah the smell of burning Mordor in the morning

Stuff going boom 💥 all around Moscow this morning

How crap must Putins air defences be if they can hit Moscow that effectively with drones ffs. It's not as though they shouldn't have been expecting it either given that they're nearly 3 years into their 3 day war, have approaching 750,000 dead and injured, and Ukraine has already demonstrated its willingness and ability to strike deep into Russia with drones.

Even the partisan Russians have been well and truly hung out to dry by Putin. Will they turn on him? I won't be holding my breath.

Ukraine should pick out government institutions/military sites and power plants in Moscow and concentrate on them for about a month. No where else just there, give them a taste of this everyday in their capital. Day and night a few drones slamming in. Would really unsettle them in their beds and day to day life.

Russia is just too big an area to defend even just western European Russia. Especially when they've lost a lot of AD to Ukraine attacks already and they've to push them up to defend ammo dumps and air fields closer to the front line. It leaves a lot of their refineries exposed.

So todays Apple ruling raises interesting questions

EU member state (us here in Ireland) has to collect and hand over 13bn from Apple despite multiple referendum where we were told our taxes are our own affairs yada yada and smacks of laws/rules being applied retroactively

While EU continues to refuse to transfer 300bn of seized Russian criminal state assets to Ukraine

It’s a fine day for rule of law when criminals are treated better than those following the law at the time

its about not taking anything for granted, if you straight-lined the US from now it would end in bankruptcy its up to them to renew themselves, 36Trillion in debt is not a good place to be, it makes holding US assets a little less desirable even if there is no other game in town presently

Most of US debt is owned by people and institutions in US or allied countries

US debt is big because debt is money and US being the richest in the world has a lot of money

Now Chinese debt on other hand is something else to behold all tied up in worlds largest property bubble in a population that’s about to lose 300mn people (as much as live in US) couple decades and are very anti immigrant

But we going off topic on a tangent now

@silverharp I would recommend this book (it’s free from libraries and internet archive)

Without wanting to sound like I'm buying into any of Putin's derisory red line threats, what you're proposing could set in train devastating consequences for millions more people and cause massive global instability. Global instability that I'm pretty sure suits a lot of very wealthy people by the way… the likes of Musk etc. It'll be the plebs in the street who will suffer if the Middle East completely falls to s**t… Iran, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria etc… with tin pot dictators elsewhere in South America and Africa given free reign while the rest of the world is distracted… and China eyeing up opportunities to flex its military muscles in the midst of wars in Europe and Middle East.

I'd much prefer if the US slapped Netanyahu down to calm tensions in that region, and at the same time the West did the same to the autocrat in the Kremlin and gave Ukraine the military hardware it needs to decimate the Russian forces on its territory.

All this pussy footing around doesn't seem to be doing anything to stabilise things either in the Middle East or in Eastern Europe. D**king around with policies on migration, environment etc which just creates a vacuum for right leaning populists to fill. But then again, the rich are absolutely coining it these days, so I wonder why the boat is being kept from being rocked…

I don't know how Zelensky has kept so much calm over the past couple of years as the West prevaricates endlessly. He's without doubt one of the Statesmen of the 21st century so far, which is pretty remarkable when you consider his background and relative obscurity up to a few years ago.

Exactly, and they have no way out. Russia (even without this war and the sanctions) was already in a perilous state, it has 2 major issues, it has always been a developing nation, it never reached the economic footing of a developed nation, something Ireland arguably only achieved in the mid 90s, and it has a demographic deficit.

One of those factors is a problem for any nation, Germany is developed but has a demographic deficit (offset slightly by immigration), India has no demographic deficit but is still developing. The USA is developed and has a growing population, the best of both worlds. Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg is undeveloped and has an ageing, poorly educated and unhealthy population.

The US has no issue with borrowing or its economy, in fact if it did, it would be the rest of the world who would suffer.

They don’t need to resort to any overt threats

Just imho it renders “but but DA BOMB” type posts silly

Yes Ukrainians don’t have nuclear weapons (big mistake giving them up it turned out) but if Putin does the evil act of exploding a nuclear device or more Ukrainians clearly have the technology to render large parts of Russia uninhabitable with existing homegrown tech they have

And that’a before we get to what NATO or Chinese would do in such a situation

So this war will most likely remain conventional

I think sky news was saying its the quantity that was given as they can use these Iranian ballistic missiles more for short range attacks in eastern and central Ukraine as their range isnt huge and use the more advanced longer range Russian ballistic missiles on targets in western Ukraine.

Actually I agree with you to a large degree, Netenjahu is a vile and reprehensible individual and I would only ever propose supporting him if it has a big knock on benefit for Ukraine. In this case it might. The Iranians, much like the Russians, are very big on threats, but as we've seen they're basically afraid of Israel because they know they'd be hammered in a war and very rarely follow through on threats.

But yes, the most effective strategy would be to give Ukraine more and better weapons, but 2.5 years in with Ukraine on the back foot and facing what Blinken himself calls a "critical moment", do any of us believe the West is going to deliver those weapons?