The person in the west most facilitating towards Putin doing this is the guy you picked as US President. The Country most beholden to Putin because of their energy independence is Germany, and their influence on the EU bloc may well be telling. The UK had the foresight to reduce our dependence on Russia, and having built up a legal fiscal rapport with Russia are in a far better position to punish Putin than anyone except possibly the USA, financially. A huge amount of Russian trade is carried out in Sterling in UK financial institutions. Cutting them off from that, as Boris announced in Parliament, will have a huge effect in their economy. Germany pausing on the pipeline will potentially put as much, or more, pressure on the EU than it will Russia. Your attempt to cope with the situation is not a good look at the moment.
Absolutely heartbreaking. It's been almost impossible trying to imagine what it's like to be an ordinary Ukrainian going about their day-to-day business wondering what the next step will be. Fearing for their families and livelihoods. Wondering whether to stay put or try to escape to safety. Wondering if Belarus or Moldova is actually going to remain safe. A total failure by Western Governments, financial institutions, media, and even sporting authorities to recognise just how they were being played over two decades or more. The tentacles of soft power extending ever deeper and the people who gained (financially) turning a blind eye thinking that the hand feeding them would never turn on them. Surely not. Not me. Not after they've given me all this money. In isolation these things were dismissed as unimportant, or at least not particularly significant. I wonder what certain individuals really think when they switch off the lights tonight. Utterly shameless, and too stupid and gullible, greedy, arrogant and lazy to recognise their own parts in the whole thing, no doubt. There are so many examples on the record that at the time were, understandably, dismissed as just things that happened. Part of doing political business, but when the dots are joined a pattern forms. What did Chernukhin get for the £160,000 he paid Boris Johnson to play a game of tennis? What did Mrs Chernukhin get for her nearly £2m donation to the Conservative Party. Why are foreign donations to our political parties not just tolerated but excused? What about Matthew Eliot of 55 Tufton Street? Founder of the Taxpayers' Alliance (ha, what a joke). Chief executive of Vote Leave. Founder of Conservative Friends of Russia. What about Aaron Banks and Leave.EU? How many trips did he make to Russia and why did he make them? And Lebedev, who bought the Evening Standard, appointed George Osborne as editor and is now an unelected member of the House of Lords. I was under the impression unelected foreigners having a say over our laws was to become a thing of the past (!) Strikes me that sport has a role to play now, too. I don't hold out much hope but Uefa and Fifa should take strong action. It's utterly absurd that Zenit St Petersburg, sponsored and owned by Gazprom, are playing in the Europa League tonight. They've apparently 'rested' their Ukrainian player Rakitskiy for expressing sorrow and solidarity with his compatriots. Suspend all the clubs and the national team from Europe. Take the Champions League final away from Russia. Governments should freeze the money of all the Russians who own clubs outside Russia. These people own the clubs and host the events for performative reasons so while western Governments will struggle to take steps that plunge half a continent into the cold and dark they could take performative measures instead. Yes, it harms ordinary Russians who want nothing to do with what their leader is doing. Yes it sets a difficult precedent. But if you don't stand for something you stand for nothing.
Genuinely not convinced. I think your description of him fits his image a few years back - but the guy I see now, I think something has switched in him and there are parts of him now where he genuinely comes across as unhinged.
I agree. I'm not sure if he's insane as such. But as an analyst said on one of the news channels, he's been in power for a couple decades now and must feel invincible. He will also be surrounded by sycophants who will undoubtedly say what he wants and feed his ego. I still think he's made a massive mistake this time. There are already reports of strong resistance from Ukraine forces and anti war protests in Russia.
Well, feel free to tell me "I told you so" if he ever attacks NATO, in the small period before the nukes start flying.
Poland has suspended all visa requirements at their border with Ukraine. All Ukrainians need is a passport or ID. Meanwhile the UK is not offering any safe route out to this country: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ukraine-war-refugees-uk-visas-b2022567.html I do hope we will do "our bit" to deal with inevitable refugee crisis this conflict generates.
Do you want to get to work in the morning and find a Ukrainian doing your job for a fraction of the price? Didn’t think so. #TheyTookOurJobs
Plenty of twitter vids of burning Russian armour, including their latest T80, it's no pushover Hard buggers those Ukrainians
I do think they are finding the Ukrainians far more stubborn than they believed they would be. That said, Putin absolutely won’t care about suffering casualties or losses. He will purely see that he has an overwhelming number to draw from and can’t fail to take Ukraine/Kyiv. There seems to some stories coming out about captured Russians telling stories about being lied to regarding their reasons for going in. Who knows. A desperate situation.
Apparently the vast majority of Russian troops are in reserve and haven’t crossed the border. The Ukrainian fighters are incredibly brave, but they don’t have control over the skies, have far worse weapons, and have an enemy attacking them from all sides. Ukraine is massive and they don’t have the men or the geography to hold Russia off for long. I’d predict a quick ‘win’ for Russia, then a bloody, long term guerrilla resistance.
And yet we take only 4% of our energy from Russia and they rely heavily on us for financial services. Go figure. No wonder Putin's always peed off with us. All that effort and little to show for it, apart from people pointing fingers at things that may look bad, but may not be what you think it is. They are a major customer of ours. What do you expect the government to do? Tell them to bugger off? Or encourage them to pay for more of our services, whilst resisting their efforts to sell us more gas? Sometimes the answer is far simpler than we might imagine.
Also, not sure if it’s just me, but the sanctions look very light, given the hardline speeches by leaders. Here, a huge number of complicit cronies escape sanctions. The Germans and the Italians have no intention of cutting Swift access. No one with any appetite to sanction the most significant funding bank in Russia, or gas companies. Looks like leadership from everyone from me.
You can say that again. Here is the final audio from a "Snake island" that had just 13 Ukrainian troops on it. They tell a Russian warship that threatens to open fire to go feck itself; https://twitter.com/WorldWarTV/status/1497099209706651650?t=a1nhs01iaUjJXj8k0fCDrw&s=19 Sadly it's believed that all 13 Ukrainians died in the subsequent attack.
They do.. except for the 5000 Javalins and NLAWs the US and UK sent the other week But yes, best hope is Ukraine wins the long game
You are right that Putin won’t care, but it is not so clear that the rest of Russia won’t. More so than at any other time, people in Russia will have access to information about what their army is doing abroad and sanctions will hurt. Though they do not say so, many people in Russia will already be of the opinion that their leader is a dangerous dictator and a crank. Some of the most brutal regimes ever have succumbed to internal unrest. At the moment, that looks impossible. By the end of this year things may look different.
Lets hope they manage to use all of them before they fall into Russian hands. Wouldn't be surprised if we / the US sent in special ops to go and retrieve them if there's a risk of that.
Without remotely intending to fall down a conspiracists' rabbit hole, it's a bit weird the Russians haven't gone too far into the cyber / electronic warfare side of things so far. It's a very old fashioned tank and artillery war so far really. Ukrainian mobile networks still working, they're on the internet, their government is able to Tweet messages to the population, their President is able to address his people... I'm a bit surprised by that.
Putin has been tipped off as to where England keeps all its nukes and top minds in the country. Spoiler: Russia's top missile target
Yes. Maybe they are a bit less capable than we thought at online warfare and best at inventing Brexit/anti-woke/climate sceptics on Twitter.
I agree. It feels performative, an old school and very obvious demonstration of power and will to show up just how compromised the West is. Just in the world of sport seeing Schalke take Gazprom off their shirts, UEFA dithering about the Champions League final, an F1 team taking Russian colours and logos off their cars etc shows just how effective Russia’s soft power efforts have been. Europe can’t go harder with sanctions without risking plunging half the continent into darkness. Britain is swimming in Russian money and the Government is utterly compromised. Knocking Ukraine offline doesn’t give Putin the pictures he wants of air raid sirens playing over Kyiv, plumes of smoke in the sky. It’s provocative and it may be opening moves or it may just be sabre rattling. But it has exposed just how effectively the West can be bought.
Being widely reported that the Ukrainian Air Force has hit inside Russia, attacking the Rostov military airbase, destroying several Russian planes.
Russian gas is important, but it’s not nearly enough to turn the lights out if Europe cooperates over power supply. In any case, all NATO Countries receiving Russian gas must assume that the supply could end at any time.
Here's an extract from a longer piece that endorses @Burnsy's view that Putin may have gone ever-so-slightly crackers Sitting alone at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned behind a vast desk in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin’s idea of social distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little more than 48 hours, Putin’s sensible, peace-talking statesman act flipped into something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters. As Putin’s hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: ‘Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out].’ Indeed. Putin’s rambling and uncharacteristically emotional address to the nation and the bizarrely staged Security Council meeting that preceded it carried the distinct whiff of the dying days of the USSR. The ministers standing by to publicly agree (some more convincingly than others) with the boss; the formulaic tropes about protecting Russian-speaking people from ‘genocide’; the clichés about the ‘illegitimate’ government in Kiev. The spectacle resembled nothing so much as Leonid Brezhnev’s slurred 1979 announcement that the Soviet Union had to fulfil its ‘internationalist duty’ to protect the people of Afghanistan. How did Putin, the three-dimensional chess player whose cynical but often brilliant opportunism leveraged Russia from a middling regional power to world player, come to this? Covid distancing could have something to do with it. According to members of the Kremlin press pool, Putin’s paranoia over the virus has been extreme. He has forced everyone in his entourage to do frequent tests and pass through a disinfection tunnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. The information bubble in which Putin — who famously doesn’t use a computer or the internet, which he considers a CIA creation — has lived for two decades has, over the past two years, become an echo chamber. His access to anything resembling a dissenting opinion has been more restricted than ever.
Sure, but there's enough reliance that a complete switch-off could cause disruption, price spikes, and strengthen the hands of other suppliers. All factors which have to be weighed up and which perhaps explain why sanctions have been relatively light so far? I don't know but the words seem to be stronger than the actions so far. In any geo-political dispute there are two things Governments consider – international effects and domestic effects. The last thing Western Governments need is their populations experiencing local difficulties that reduce their sympathies with Ukraine and make them think it's not worth standing up to Putin. That is a pretty delicate balance. I mean, you can already see from some of the absolute barmpots on Fox News who think that Trump would have stood up to Putin (despite being more compromised by Russia than almost anyone) that there's an effort in certain quarters to engineer some pro-Putin sentiment. That's why I said that the West should switch off Russia's ability to continue to exercise soft power in trivial pursuits like sport. Of course, Uefa and others will be fretting about cutting off their income streams.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1497135949180026881 https://twitter.com/NotWoofers/status/1496990787539595280 MOD's I know the f-word is banned *but* can I suggest you give this one a bye in some sort of tribute to those stubborn, brave men. A quote from the extremely rapidly evolving ARRSE thread dedicated to the invasion:
