dogandstick
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- on the horizon
A war might focus consumers minds on food supplies. Wheels tend to go around.
Invasion bets
- Thread starter beardface
- Start date
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- Bay of Plenty NZ
The USA,UK and EU send a vast amount of capital to Palestine, perhaps if they used those funds to build hospitals, schools and housing instead of firing rockets into Israel then the Israelis would have less need to defend themselves.
Hindsight
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- Location
- Lincolnshire
Well Cuba tried and look what happened then! And look what Ronald the Donald Reagan did when the Grenadians had the temerity to build a runway!!
- Location
- NSW, Newstralya
Herald indulges UK Foreign Secretary’s demented remarks on China - Pearls and Irritations
Australia’s foreign and defence ministers are giving respectability to Britain’s lunge for old-time glory. Remarks by the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that China could engage in military aggression in the Pacific, encouraged by Russia’s contingent moves against Ukraine, are nothing short...
johnmenadue.com
Time will tell but China's actions arent exactly one world are they, plenty of cyber attacks, building new islands for military use and look at their response in Hong Kong, they are a far bigger danger to world peace than Russia, if only due to their huge population and yet western consumers fall over themselves buying cheap sh!t from them.Herald indulges UK Foreign Secretary’s demented remarks on China - Pearls and Irritations
Australia’s foreign and defence ministers are giving respectability to Britain’s lunge for old-time glory. Remarks by the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that China could engage in military aggression in the Pacific, encouraged by Russia’s contingent moves against Ukraine, are nothing short...
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Is Ukraine really any of our business? Could it end up just another Afghanistan?
Thousands of lives lost, billions spent and all for nothing.
Ukraine is a big country with lots of resources. They have had 20 years to sort themselves out. Is there a politician on either side there who can lie straight in bed at night?
I can see why Russia is concerned about NATO rolling right up to its borders. It’s neighbours are strategically, logistically and economically very important to Russia. If all neighbours fall entirely under the western sphere of influence, Russia could be slowly throttled to death.
As with Afghanistan, I’m not quite sure we will ever impose our form of democracy into these countries without perpetual occupation or effectively colonisation. And ultimately we won’t be thanked for that.
Leave it, offer a few concessions, and if a pro Russian government takes power in Kiev well it does. I’ll bet it will be business as usual the day after and not much difference in your average Ukrainians life.
What’s the alternative? Blow the country to smithereens and raise a flag over a rubble heap?
Thousands of lives lost, billions spent and all for nothing.
Ukraine is a big country with lots of resources. They have had 20 years to sort themselves out. Is there a politician on either side there who can lie straight in bed at night?
I can see why Russia is concerned about NATO rolling right up to its borders. It’s neighbours are strategically, logistically and economically very important to Russia. If all neighbours fall entirely under the western sphere of influence, Russia could be slowly throttled to death.
As with Afghanistan, I’m not quite sure we will ever impose our form of democracy into these countries without perpetual occupation or effectively colonisation. And ultimately we won’t be thanked for that.
Leave it, offer a few concessions, and if a pro Russian government takes power in Kiev well it does. I’ll bet it will be business as usual the day after and not much difference in your average Ukrainians life.
What’s the alternative? Blow the country to smithereens and raise a flag over a rubble heap?
linga
Member
- Location
- Ceredigion
And after Ukraine what next for Putin?
- Location
- Montgomeryshire
Herald indulges UK Foreign Secretary’s demented remarks on China - Pearls and Irritations
Australia’s foreign and defence ministers are giving respectability to Britain’s lunge for old-time glory. Remarks by the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that China could engage in military aggression in the Pacific, encouraged by Russia’s contingent moves against Ukraine, are nothing short...
I’ve a feeling that fella’s not going to like the idea of coming back into the British Empire.
- Location
- Limousin/Charentes toad land
I’ve a feeling that fella’s not going to like the idea of coming back into the British Empire.
I am sure a quiet word from @Danllan and he will see the light
Exfarmer
Member
- Location
- Bury St Edmunds
Exactly, Putin will not stop if he annexes the rest of the Ukraine. It is always the same with Dictators they need to keep the populace onside. Puutin is worried that as Ukraines forges ahead of Russia his own people will question him. We all know that him and his cronies have robbed the country blind, just as his old friends in the Ukraine were doing until the were voted out in 2014.
Ukraine is a natural Western country by nature Christian although a small minority of Muslims. If has never had the mentality of the Arab countries.
If Putin grabs the Ukraine his attention will turn swiftly to the Baltic states which he believes are rightly Russian based on 19th. Century conquests by his Tsarist forebears, and of course Poland which they conquered alongside Hitler in the early days of WW2.
He has spent the last few years rewriting Russian history , quietly excluding Stalins genocides and gross criminality , he has been painting him as a saviour of Mother Russia in the retreat war , but in fact of course Stalin colluded in the start and probably directly caused the death of millions by his direct orders forbidding the tactical retreats that his generals pleaded for.
Putin though is looking through the eyes of Hitler in truth, demanding territory to be handed directly to himself as being historic lands. He demands the demilitarisation of countries, by the removal of NATO so he can just march in whenever it pleases him.
The problem we have in the UK we have placed so much faith in Nuclear and our expense in the projection of power ( the building of grossly expensive flagships ) ignoring the fact that we have lost the power to fight. How many tanks and aircraft have we today?
Danllan
Member
- Location
- Sir Gar / Carms
Yeah... I'd expect objective writing from that prat about as much as I would from Guy 'Europe is an empire' Verhostadt.I am sure a quiet word from @Danllan and he will see the light
Seems to me very convenient for our government to play up the threat & to get heavily involved with arming the Ukrainians with our expensive weapons that are likely to never be used, it does after all deflect handily from growing Tory problems back here.
Does anyone really believe Russia wants to get into a bloody endless fight or is it simply a bluff to give them leverage in negotiations.
Crimea's annexation was a different kettle of fish as it was full of mostly Russians who were quite happy to become part of Russia, the rest of Ukraine is not like that & will resist as the Russians know only too well.
smallholder99
Member
Attachments
Hindsight
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- Lincolnshire
From today's Sunday Times.
DOMINIC LAWSON
Sunday January 23 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
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Taking a brief break from Operation Big Dog (the attempt to keep him in Downing Street), Boris Johnson expressed his opinion on another campaign last week — one of more than parochial significance. The PM declared that if Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it would be “a disaster not just for Russia but the whole world”.
In terms of the loss of life, both Ukrainian and Russian, it would indeed be horrifying. But, in the geostrategic sense, it would be a disaster only if the result were successful from Putin’s point of view. That is, if a further exercise of military force by Russia against its neighbour (after the annexation of Crimea and continuing support for armed secessionists in the east of Ukraine) resulted in anything that could be termed a victory.
But if that were not the outcome, then it might spell doom for Poisoner Putin — and the West, in particular the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, could begin to feel more, rather than less, secure.
For the Kremlin is not just demanding that independent Ukraine be acknowledged as a permanent satrapy of Moscow, but that Nato remove its few thousand troops now in eastern Europe — though they are there at the host nations’ request. This was angrily described as “ridiculous” and “blackmail” by Estonia’s ambassador to the UK (there are British soldiers in his country).
Putin has long claimed that by agreeing to the application for Nato membership by eastern European states — and the accompanying military guarantee of their territorial sovereignty — the US broke a commitment made at the end of the Cold War. But no such promise was ever made by President George HW Bush. The only related commitment made by the US administration was that Nato troops would not set foot in East Germany until after Russian forces had left. Indeed, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, recalled: “The topic of Nato expansion was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years.”
It is only Moscow that has broken one of the relevant agreements of that period. This is the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in which Russia, the US and the UK pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine and to refrain from the threat or use of force against” that country. That’s what it took to get Ukraine — which had voted by a colossal margin (92.3 per cent) for independence — to give up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Given the UK was a signatory of the Budapest memorandum, it is appropriate that we are now providing Ukraine with anti-tank weaponry, as Russia appears to be massing on the border for invasion.
As the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, pointed out on January 17, Russia’s argument about Nato enlargement, in respect of the Ukrainian crisis, is “a straw man”. He rightly directed attention to an extraordinary 7,000-word article published under Putin’s name last summer and provided to all members of Russia’s armed forces. A somewhat mystical tract, entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, it contains just a single paragraph about Nato. As Wallace noted, despite the clear passion of Putin’s revanchism: “Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united.”
It was a former defence secretary from another country, Poland — which shares a 330-mile border with Ukraine — who most robustly explained to me the real nature of Putin’s mindset. This was Radek Sikorski, who two weeks ago launched a Twitter missile against the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, after the Russian embassy in London had posted Lavrov’s remark that “Nato has become a purely geopolitical project aimed at taking over territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation and the Soviet Union”.
Sikorski returned fire: “Get this, @RussianEmbassy, once and for all, in a language you can grasp. We were not orphaned by you because you were not our daddy. More of a serial rapist. Which is why you are not missed. And if you try it again, you’ll get a kick in the balls.”
When I called Sikorski last week, he recalled that he had been among the participants at a closed session of the Nato conference in Bucharest in 2008, shocked when the (then still welcome) Russian president told them that Ukraine was “not a country, a mistake in history, not normal”. Or, as Sikorski told me: “Putin always wanted to exterminate Ukraine as an independent nation.”
I put to the former Polish defence and foreign minister my theory that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine would eventually spell disaster for Putin. For there seems no doubt about the resolve of the Ukrainian people — a recent poll there showed that millions of their citizens were prepared to offer armed resistance — and such independent polls as we have seen in Russia have shown little support for the idea of attacking “fellow Slavs”.
Sikorski countered that “Russian state propaganda will be highly influential if he invades. Many if not most will be persuaded that it was all the Americans’ fault. And Moscow would begin with a decapitating missile onslaught that would destroy Ukraine’s central command infrastructure.”
But, he went on to point out: “Ukrainians have a long history of partisan warfare. It would depend on how deep Putin went into their territory. It might be like the US invasion of Iraq. The initial military campaign was highly successful. Then came the insurgency.”
There is the additional point that, whereas the US army is a volunteer force, Russia has conscription. So a parallel might not just be with Iraq, but Vietnam. And while Putin may even believe that Ukrainians would want to be reunited with “Mother Russia”, it is real Russian mothers who might be his biggest problem, domestically, if their sons were slaughtered, over months and even years, by a resourceful Ukrainian insurgency. Indeed, it was the public grief of mothers of Russian lads perishing at the hands of the mujahideen in Afghanistan that contributed to the Soviet decision to withdraw from that campaign — and this military debacle was in turn one of the main factors in the end of the Soviet system.
It was the Soviets who engineered the famine of 1932, in which an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians starved to death. Not surprisingly, Putin’s charge against the Communist rulers he once served as a KGB officer is directed elsewhere. In his magnum opus on Historical Unity he denounces the way they “chopped the country into pieces ... One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.” But Putin leaves the most remarkable claim for his final words: “What Ukraine will be, it is up to its citizens to decide.”
If he does invade, their response will determine his future, too.
[email protected]
Global politics
Russia
Vladimir Putin
Ukraine
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DOMINIC LAWSON
This could just be Putin’s Afghanistan
If Russia invades, anything but a decisive victory will doom its president
Dominic LawsonSunday January 23 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
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Taking a brief break from Operation Big Dog (the attempt to keep him in Downing Street), Boris Johnson expressed his opinion on another campaign last week — one of more than parochial significance. The PM declared that if Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it would be “a disaster not just for Russia but the whole world”.
In terms of the loss of life, both Ukrainian and Russian, it would indeed be horrifying. But, in the geostrategic sense, it would be a disaster only if the result were successful from Putin’s point of view. That is, if a further exercise of military force by Russia against its neighbour (after the annexation of Crimea and continuing support for armed secessionists in the east of Ukraine) resulted in anything that could be termed a victory.
But if that were not the outcome, then it might spell doom for Poisoner Putin — and the West, in particular the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, could begin to feel more, rather than less, secure.
For the Kremlin is not just demanding that independent Ukraine be acknowledged as a permanent satrapy of Moscow, but that Nato remove its few thousand troops now in eastern Europe — though they are there at the host nations’ request. This was angrily described as “ridiculous” and “blackmail” by Estonia’s ambassador to the UK (there are British soldiers in his country).
Putin has long claimed that by agreeing to the application for Nato membership by eastern European states — and the accompanying military guarantee of their territorial sovereignty — the US broke a commitment made at the end of the Cold War. But no such promise was ever made by President George HW Bush. The only related commitment made by the US administration was that Nato troops would not set foot in East Germany until after Russian forces had left. Indeed, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, recalled: “The topic of Nato expansion was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years.”
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It is only Moscow that has broken one of the relevant agreements of that period. This is the 1994 Budapest memorandum, in which Russia, the US and the UK pledged to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine and to refrain from the threat or use of force against” that country. That’s what it took to get Ukraine — which had voted by a colossal margin (92.3 per cent) for independence — to give up the nuclear arsenal it had inherited after the dissolution of the USSR. Given the UK was a signatory of the Budapest memorandum, it is appropriate that we are now providing Ukraine with anti-tank weaponry, as Russia appears to be massing on the border for invasion.
As the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, pointed out on January 17, Russia’s argument about Nato enlargement, in respect of the Ukrainian crisis, is “a straw man”. He rightly directed attention to an extraordinary 7,000-word article published under Putin’s name last summer and provided to all members of Russia’s armed forces. A somewhat mystical tract, entitled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, it contains just a single paragraph about Nato. As Wallace noted, despite the clear passion of Putin’s revanchism: “Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united.”
It was a former defence secretary from another country, Poland — which shares a 330-mile border with Ukraine — who most robustly explained to me the real nature of Putin’s mindset. This was Radek Sikorski, who two weeks ago launched a Twitter missile against the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, after the Russian embassy in London had posted Lavrov’s remark that “Nato has become a purely geopolitical project aimed at taking over territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation and the Soviet Union”.
Sikorski returned fire: “Get this, @RussianEmbassy, once and for all, in a language you can grasp. We were not orphaned by you because you were not our daddy. More of a serial rapist. Which is why you are not missed. And if you try it again, you’ll get a kick in the balls.”
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When I called Sikorski last week, he recalled that he had been among the participants at a closed session of the Nato conference in Bucharest in 2008, shocked when the (then still welcome) Russian president told them that Ukraine was “not a country, a mistake in history, not normal”. Or, as Sikorski told me: “Putin always wanted to exterminate Ukraine as an independent nation.”
I put to the former Polish defence and foreign minister my theory that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine would eventually spell disaster for Putin. For there seems no doubt about the resolve of the Ukrainian people — a recent poll there showed that millions of their citizens were prepared to offer armed resistance — and such independent polls as we have seen in Russia have shown little support for the idea of attacking “fellow Slavs”.
Sikorski countered that “Russian state propaganda will be highly influential if he invades. Many if not most will be persuaded that it was all the Americans’ fault. And Moscow would begin with a decapitating missile onslaught that would destroy Ukraine’s central command infrastructure.”
But, he went on to point out: “Ukrainians have a long history of partisan warfare. It would depend on how deep Putin went into their territory. It might be like the US invasion of Iraq. The initial military campaign was highly successful. Then came the insurgency.”
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There is the additional point that, whereas the US army is a volunteer force, Russia has conscription. So a parallel might not just be with Iraq, but Vietnam. And while Putin may even believe that Ukrainians would want to be reunited with “Mother Russia”, it is real Russian mothers who might be his biggest problem, domestically, if their sons were slaughtered, over months and even years, by a resourceful Ukrainian insurgency. Indeed, it was the public grief of mothers of Russian lads perishing at the hands of the mujahideen in Afghanistan that contributed to the Soviet decision to withdraw from that campaign — and this military debacle was in turn one of the main factors in the end of the Soviet system.
It was the Soviets who engineered the famine of 1932, in which an estimated 3.5 million Ukrainians starved to death. Not surprisingly, Putin’s charge against the Communist rulers he once served as a KGB officer is directed elsewhere. In his magnum opus on Historical Unity he denounces the way they “chopped the country into pieces ... One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.” But Putin leaves the most remarkable claim for his final words: “What Ukraine will be, it is up to its citizens to decide.”
If he does invade, their response will determine his future, too.
[email protected]
Global politics
Russia
Vladimir Putin
Ukraine
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- LINCOLNSHIRE/KENYA
That’s what I’ve been thinking. I have wondered if Putin is looking to blackmail and frighten rather than fight. If things weren’t to go so well his conscripts are liable to hit the vodka and the antifreeze and then it might not end up as planned. Well that’s what I’m hoping a war is not good for anybody really.
oil barron
Member
- Location
- Aberdeenshire
To be any good at blackmail, you have to be willing to see it through though.
As Bush & Blair found to their cost, using a bluff in negotiations is playing a very dangerous game!
holywell farmer
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- holywell, north wales
War crimes court
- Location
- West Suffolk
A Russia-Ukraine War Could Ripple Across Africa and Asia
Beware of food price spikes and revolutions if Ukrainian grain deliveries are disrupted.
foreignpolicy.com