Every time this thread gets bumped, I want a fag.

>>42175
>>42176
I did think of that but I suppose I just assume most countries are capable of smuggling or building surveillance in other countries if they want to check out technical data, a covert listening post could get more while being unseen for a greater period of time than a flyby - and the scrambled response time to a single plane doesn't correlate (at least to my mind) with how quickly they'd react to a show of real force.

>>42179
>the scrambled response time to a single plane doesn't correlate (at least to my mind) with how quickly they'd react to a show of real force.
Again talking out of my arse, nobody wants a full force open fight where the likelyhood of victory is uncertain. Hopping the fence, however, is entirely possible without provoking serious issues. I presume the likelyhood of triggering outright war is unlikely considering diplomatic channels and that.
So that single fighter jet might be enough 'show of force' to achieve an influencial given end, say the targetting of a general at an opportune time, without actually having to commit to an all out war (granted, openly assassinating a general is a heavy attack and would trigger war. Maybe someone knowledgeable could offer a more realistic scenario).

Perhaps their covert listening posts have identified shift patterns and they're poking a very specific seargent for their response under preasure (or whatever has the control in the situaion, I don't know). With that info they could better judge how well interference in their personal life might influence future responses. From there they could develop a strategy based on that potential vulnerability.

Whether that's worth risking the possibility of a significant retaliation comes down to how confident the parties are in their relationship.

There are a number of intelligence types (at least 5 off the top of my head, can name only 2) that all come together to stack the odds, rather than a single listening station picking up all the secrets.

>>42180
>whatever has the control in the situaion, I don't know). With that info they could better judge how well interference in their personal life might influence future responses. From there they could develop a strategy based on that potential vulnerability.
This seems a bit far-fetched, if you test that sergeant then his behaviour will change because of it. Notwithstanding that him taking a while to respond due to being out collecting his free Big Whopper this time doesn't mean you can rely on it happening twice.

>So that single fighter jet might be enough 'show of force' to achieve an influencial given end, say the targetting of a general at an opportune time, without actually having to commit to an all out war
I don't understand what this means.

>>42181
>This seems a bit far-fetched
Yes it absolutely does, which is argueably enough to convince targetted people it's not really happening. Does the person know it's a test? When they see the approaching threat is their thought and decision making process influenced by anything?
I recognise I'm swerving from the original scenario but it's relevant to a degree.

>I don't understand what this means.
Neither do I to be honest. I'm thinking there might be situations or opportunities that could radically change the playingfield if exploited in time - but doing so would require a great range of capabilities.

So if an actor can reliably generate a 30 second window of insecurity, their sides position on the world stage could be radically changed (by introducing the responsible officer to a love interest who influences them to eat a chemically contaminated Big Whopper that causes them to shit themselves throughout the entirety of their next shift).

So bringing it back to reality; maybe regular tests of response times reveal a baseline behaviour from which to can measure deviations.

>>42182
>Does the person know it's a test?
I would imagine telemetry is good enough to tell that it's just the one plane and not a full-fledged invasion force. They could use a full fledged invasion force if they wanted a realistic simulation but that would probably have repercussions.
The asset in place could just as easily murder the sergeant in a real situation in which case giving him the shits would be pointless to measure - doubly pointless as presumably there's someone who'll take over the post If the primary is incapacitated due to Big Whopper shits. If the fly by was happening simultaneously with honeypots poisoning the men on duty I can think of better ways to test the effects of drugs that don't involve so much expenditure and risk of losing the asset planting the drugs or otherwise burning the whole setup. What you're suggesting seems out of the realms of cost/benefit and realistic expectations of human competence.
Though now I am wondering how many Russian sleeper assets are spread around Europe in the guise of Ukrainian refugees.

I have no doubt left in my belief now that Donald Trump is a Russian asset.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKNzPxnpqVQ

>>42184

I still don't think so, if he was there would be some solid evidence, and it WOULD have been leaked by now.

I think you have to face the conclusion which is worse than him being a Manchurian Candidate, he's basically just got a very genuine and earnest mixture of fear and admiration for Russia/Putin, and he wants to be mates with Russia much more than he thinks he will lose from backstabbing Europe to do it. He's not being coerced or working for The Enemy, he genuinely legitimately thinks he's doing the right thing for America by pacifying a long term adversary, and then the unspoken part, trying to pull them away from China.

It's that last part where he'll come undone. The error in his calculations is that he thinks Russia will, after the better part of a century of being the defacto villain for mainstream American politicians, take a friendship with America at all seriously, just because one guy comes along who really wants to butter them up. They're not stupid. They'll use it to their advantage, but under the full understanding that America's word is as good as meaningless.

Europe just needs to take that lesson to heart too.

>>42185

If it looks like a duck.

The argument of he is a fanboy protodictator jingoist or if he is directly a spy is somewhat immaterial, what matters is his actions make him a direct enemy of the west, and friend to all of it's traditional enemies.

>>42172
>>42173
The NATO agreement is irrelevant in a Russian border war with a non NATO member

The state of NATO has always been quite simple anyway
If you read the original NATO agreement
It says that the 'all for one and one for all' concept, where members will back up each other with military force, is actually optional
Not compulsory
And many of the countries could hardly show up if they wanted to

So when you sweep away all of the mediocre media chatter over the decades since its creation, really the underlying purpose and framework of NATO is this -
The USA is going to swoop in and back up whatever country with their military, but only if they feel like it
It was simply a message to Russia - 'Stay back, the Soviet Union is big enough already. We will help the capitalist west of Europe against you if we have to'

The wind has changed and so has the landscape. Russia is not trying to expand the Soviet union beyond the East Germany of yesterday. It isn't invading France, or trying to retake Poland. It isn't 1949 anymore
Russia is having a border war with a place that used to be called 'Little Russia' long before the Soviet years, and the place has a large population of Russian speakers
Zelensky requesting a fast track into NATO membership, putting NATO on the border of modern Russia, trying to absorb the nearby Russian diaspora into an anti-Russia military force...
The modern USA-UK alliance lecturing Russia on unjust wars is also a hypocritical farce, and the NATO agreement was written on tissue paper to begin with
No one who speaks English can find Ukraine on a map
How many layers of futility are we trying to stack up in this thought experiment? What is the actual point of anything that has happened in the last 3 years?

>>42360
I like this post. You really slow rolled the Vatnik BS in a way I barely saw coming, Mr Galloway.

>>42360

>What is the actual point of anything that has happened in the last 3 years?

That's a loaded question. I know most people in Europe think that the Democrats are the good guys compared to the imperialist capitalist swines that the MAGA Republican lot admittedly are. But even though the Democrats tend to use less hard power and more soft power, they are very firmly in the neoliberal camp as well, and their agenda has, with no less determination, been to assert America's global dominance and prevent another superpower from (re-)emerging, just as much as the Republicans. It's not self evident trying to pinpoint when the Democrats turned neoliberal, but at least in recent years, you can consider Hillary Clinton a driving force, if you study her stance and opinions more closely, and especially her work as Secretary of State under Biden.

The Americans have a long history of fostering pro-Western governments in Ukraine, all the way back, and even beyond the Orange Revolution of the early 2000s. This was done knowing that influence over Ukraine is of material importance to Russia, both for its natural resources and as being a bridgehead into the rest of eastern Europe and giving Russia access to the Black Sea. To cut Ukraine off from Russian influence is to deprive Russia of one of its main building blocks for a reemergence as a superpower. Putin knows it, and the Americans know it. And in that sense, it's not just a tug of war over Ukraine. It's about whether Russia can be kept down and will not threaten American global predominance.

You will rightly say that the Orange Revolution happened during the Bush jr. days. But it was during the Obama and then Biden years that Western foreign influence in Ukraine was again stepped up, and efforts were made to tie Ukraine even closer into the Western sphere of influence.

Does that justify Putin's actions? No. It does not. He still attacked a sovereign country which was free to choose its political alliances in accordance with widely agreed-upon international law and treaties. But the whole thing wasn't as entirely unpredicted as you are meant to believe.

>>42362

This has been what has consistently bothered me since the start of it all. As soon as it all kicked off, the last decade or so of western relations (and interference, you could call it) were immediately memory holed and it was boiled down to this simple narrative about Putin invading entirely unprovoked and for no reason other than because he wants to take over the world. Which, without exclusing it at all, is just entirely dishonest.

The problem is that quite apart from the morally correct stance of supporting Ukraine's defence, it still entirely undermines the western stance. Look at everything that has suddenly changed now that Trump and co are in and calling the whole thing a sunk cost. Europe is left with its dick in hand, between a rock and a hard place.

>>42363

Also, nobody remembers all the headlines from before the war, as recently as 2020 or 2021, when government and institutional corruption in Ukraine was rife and the country was a bottomless pit for foreign investment of any kind. Not few commentators saw Ukraine teetering on the brink of being a failed state. And then after the invasion, suddenly there was talk of fast tracking Ukraine for NATO and EU membership. When Ukraine has at no point been in a position, both before and after the invasion, of fulfilling the criteria for EU membership.

I'm not saying that Ukraine shouldn't aspire to EU membership, but even without the war happening in the meantime, it probably would have taken Ukraine at least a decade or two to get its shit together enough to realistically be a promising EU candidate.

Also though, NATO statutes forbid the joining of a country with active and ongoing border disputes. Which is a very understated way of saying that Ukraine should normally not have a chance in hell while the war is still going on.

In the end, as we've said, it's about far more than protecting the virtue of one peripheral European country. It's a Great Game around global geostrategic dominance.

In other news; I for one welcome Kaja Kallas as the leader of the Free World.

It really is a case of the right man at the right time, EU positions are normally stacked with ineffectual bureaucrats by design but she's really come into her element and it's obvious this pisses off EU member states.

>>42362
>>42363
>>42364
No I think we've now seen what the opposite is to supposed unparalleled domination of the world by the West and its institutions which is barbarism clothed in the language that has evolved into nothing but naked imperialism. By the way, Russia was interfering in Ukraine long before any election with the shameless poisoning of its leader and the West was lukewarm at best on Ukraine. It's a total lie that the west fermented revolution and its people throughout waved the flags that represent European ideals while under fire from autocrats and thugs that represented the tip of the spear for a global conspiracy of autocracies.

>Also, nobody remembers all the headlines from before the war, as recently as 2020 or 2021, when government and institutional corruption in Ukraine was rife and the country was a bottomless pit for foreign investment of any kind

Ukraine has in recent years done everything asked of it.

>>42361
When did you serve?
I'm assuming that you physically went to Ukraine to volunteer in the military?

>Vladimir Putin’s chief delegate at peace talks with Ukraine is a historian who once claimed that Russians have an extra chromosome due to their superiority.
https://archive.is/P6xX2

Is the world getting more cartoonish over time?

>>42444
The new tactic of saying literally anything as long as it gets into the news has been around longer than we thought. Our politicians, and the American ones, say imbecilic bollocks all the time, deliberately trying to ensure they stay in the public consciousness. Five years from now, they’ll be in charge and people will dig up the bollocks they’re saying now, but it’ll be too late then.

>>42445
I don't think we've ever had a politician on either side of the Atlantic claim that we have down syndrome. Yet.

>>42444

It's not the first time that a Russian with close ties to the leader has talked absolute bollocks about chromosomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#Lysenko's_claims

Stalin sent thousands of biologists to the gulags for saying such wild and subversive things as "genes can randomly mutate".

>>42447
It's a tangent, but I can't stop thinking about the possibility that the only thing we've got on Stalin is that our powerful people are wealthier and more secure in their position and so can use subtler means of control. We imagine that because nobody will be gulaged over having the wrong idea, we're pretty free, but why gulag a scientist when you can just say you'll only fund him if he works on something else? Use the carrot and the stick, and if he complains it's a normal workplace grumble about funding rather than a sign of severe political repression. A lot of carrot and a little stick, or all stick, both get the same results but one makes you look benevolent - if you can afford it.

>>42448
No lad, I've read some bollocks on this website before but even with the levels of corruption from back then everyone called him a monster.

>>42449

Eh, some people called him a monster some of the time. A lot of people who really should have known better were willing to overlook or downplay his crimes when it suited their ends. Uncle Joe was our best mate during the war. Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for helping to cover up the Soviet famine. Orwell made a lot of enemies on the British Left for being staunchly opposed to Stalin.

I'm sure that if Stalin were around today, he'd have plenty of defenders.

>>42451

>Orwell made a lot of enemies on the British Left for being staunchly opposed to Stalin.

My favourite kind of lefties are the ones on Rudgwick who immediately sperg out and seethe about Orwell being a grass. Like, yeah, and thank fuck he was, we didn't and don't need deranged tankies making us all look like fruitloops. Stalin is not somebody you want to be defending if you want at all reasonable optics for your particular sub-genre of leftyness.

Those people are also forgetting that at the time, the left was not so completely and utterly frozen out of the establishment as it is today. Ratting a few tankies out was not the open contempt and betrayal of socialist ideals as, say, publishing hit pieces about Corbyn being an anti-semite was in 2019. There was still a concrete and viable coalition of the trade unions and popular working class support back then.

TL;DR Getting deranged about Orwell is the quickest way to spot a nutjob in your socialist reading group.

>>42451
>Uncle Joe was our best mate during the war.

Churchill said of an alliance with Stalin 'If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons'. They weren't friends and everything was subject to intense negotiation even when it looked like the Soviets were going to be knocked out.

Stalin would have plenty of defenders yes but equally I don't doubt that if that story of him breaking a calf's leg were true then the British public would have him swinging on a lamppost.

RIP Russia's nuclear bomber fleet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cgrg7kelk45t

I wonder if they'll ever nerf this OP drone rush strat, or if that's just going to be the meta from now on. Boring.

>>42479
>Moscow has said Ukraine carried out a "unabummer attack"
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDRONE

Sorry.

The US are plotting another coup, so they can install somebody more pro-Russian to make a peace deal that involves surrendering the occupied regions.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are holding a joint press conference after their summit to discuss the war in Ukraine. It's starting off with a load of bumf from Putin, so I suspect there won't be any big announcements, but you can follow along here if you want:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c2kzn1nw1d4t

For anyone who slept through it or was in the pub, all the journalists on TV now are complaining that it wasn't even a press conference. Vladimir Putin made a boring speech full of vague platitudes about friendship, Donald Trump did the same, then they both left the stage without taking any questions. The news media are furious that they've had their time wasted by this. It certainly wasn't thrilling.

>>42742
He's said all the right things for Trump, that the war would never have happened with him in the office. Trump has revealed in a follow up interview that Putin told him that no other country in the world has postal voting and that he definately won in 2020.

I wonder what the US will look like in 2028. Maybe we'll look back on the 2020s with nostalgia one day.

So, do you two think those drones shot down over Poland will lead to more wide scale angry shouting and dick waving?


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c147065pzdzo

>Addressing Polish lawmakers on Wednesday, Tusk said three - or perhaps four - drones were shot down overnight.

>He said Polish authorities had no information suggesting anyone was injured or died "as a result of the Russian action".

>"The fact that these drones, which posed a security threat, were shot down changes the political situation.

>"I have no reason to claim we're on the brink of war, but a line has been crossed, and it's incomparably more dangerous than before."

>>42832

Fuck knows. Putin would have to be absolutely insane to declare war on a NATO country, so I reckon it's about 50/50 that Article 5 gets by the end of the year.

>>42832
I am quite pessimistic about any repercussions for Russia. Russia is the troll country, and they have a lot of experience in pushing boundaries to see what they can get away with, without ever getting into proper trouble. All the NATO countries will tut and shake their heads, and next time Russia will blow something up in Poland "by mistake", and we won't do anything then precisely because it's only a tiny escalation from when we didn't do anything now. It seems quite obvious to me that we really, really don't want to go to war with Russia under any circumstances.

Wierd one innit.

I've become increasingly convinced that if we want our way at all in this, we're going to have to suck it up and just go over to give Ivan a kicking. I am pretty confident the combined might of European militaries (frankly even just us and the French could probably manage it) would easily defeat the badly motivated gopnik conscript corps, even if at regrettably high cost.

But of course it's all about the nukes. Somebody's going to have to go first in a game of red button chicken. It seems like that's what it's all leading towards. Russia is playing and can afford to play the long game, Putin has Trump under his spell like the fucking Demon Headmaster, so no peace talks will ever go anywhere, he's perfectly happy to sit there and run down the clock until Ukrainian resolve inevitably dries up.

I think this is what the Polskis are being primed for. They'll be the main source of meat for the grinder.

>>42834

>Putin would have to be absolutely insane to declare war on a NATO country

It's one thing to say he would be insane. Or to say that if he attacks NATO, a much bigger war will ensue in accordance with Article 5. But what if he does attack? Although in some ways, you could almost argue that we're already past that point since last night.

The trick that NATO could be falling for is that they will find themselves in a corner, and not pushed into it by Putin, but by their own resolve to defend the alliance and its territory. Are the NATO members really prepared to vote among themselves to declare war against Russia?

It's one thing to start a war as a sole autocrat or dictator or whatever you want to call Putin. He has shown with Ukraine that he has little qualms. But to get a unanimius majority at the NATO Council to invoke Article 5 against Russia will be much harder. Because of the possible ramifications, which could obviously be infinitely more serious than when Article 5 was invoked against Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.

And that's the trap NATO could fall into. Cornered by its own resolve, but gun shy among its members at the all-decisive moment. To be clear, if Putin wanted to annihilate the West, he could do so at any given moment. Whether NATO then chooses to retaliate or not. But because it's not a smart idea to jeopardise your own country's existence in the process, he's betting on NATO falling over its own feet responding to what could be a quite minor attack, and the alliance becoming unable to make decisions, thus causing its own self to unravel. Which would be just the kind of 4D chess that Putin is quite adept at.

Well, hopefully the silver lining to all these drones is that we see SPAAGs come back.

Those bloody Ukrainians. First, they secede from glorious Mother Russia, then they invade their poor innocent homeland by inviting Western forces to move into Ukraine (which is Russia anyway, you see), and now, most egregiously, they must have destroyed some purely defensive Russian GPS satellite or something because first the drones got lost in Poland, then more drones got lost in Romania, and now three actual fucking fighter jets have been intercepted in Estonia. I assume "intercepted" is not the same as "shot down", but it's still looking ominous.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrp6p5mj3zo

>>42846

Learn to fly an FPV drone while you've still got time. You'll still be going to war, but you'll be slightly further from the front in a nicer trench.

>>4287

>You'll still be going to war

Can't we exit NATO as well so we won't have to?

I'll do a bit of war. I'm too old, unfit and shortsighted to get any interesting jobs, mind. I've said it before, but if they're putting the likes of me in the infantry, we've long since lost/the war is against an alien invasion.

>>42849
I'm so unhealthy that I would get everyone else in my, erm, company (?) killed as well as me, so I've always been smugly confident that I wouldn't get drafted. But if there's a cyberwarfare division where I have to hack into Russian servers, I would probably quite enjoy that. And that's lucky, because no amount of glasses, obesity, medical conditions or age would stop me from getting called up to sit in a windowless room with a laptop and an anime figurine for the next 4-5 years.

>>42849

The maximum age for conscription in Ukraine is 55. You might be old and unfit and basically a bit of a coward, but you can still fetch and carry. The tip of the spear in Ukraine's army are men in their twenties who have the bravery or foolishness to charge a machine gun nest, but they're immediately followed by blokes with receding hairlines and bad knees.

>>42851
Those jobs are how you end up in the infantry.

I can't find it in the book itself, annoyingly. But in Anthony Beevor's D-Day* there is an excerpt from a young, British officer's diary in which he's recounting a battle that took place in some woods. This was during the fairly early stages of Britain's increasingly troublesome manpower crisis, and as there was virtually no Luftwaffe to worry about some AAA gunners had been transfered to the pointy end of things. Anyway, once the German artillery opened up these two chaps were immediately rendered incoherent with panic, hid in a crevice and sobbed, a reaction the officer put down to their advanced age - IE, being about thirty.

I'm not sure how true it is that you lose the ability to fight a world war at that meagre age, but it was an interesting perspective.

Apologies, this has almost nothing to do with what you said.

Ivan has done airspace incursions since at least the 1950s and we're just seeing them become more frequent without going deeper into NATO airspace. I think the real news is that the Ukraine War is somehow still going on.

>>42852
>I'm not sure how true it is that you lose the ability to fight a world war at that meagre age, but it was an interesting perspective.

I remember reading the reflections of someone who had volunteered with the YPG whose experiance was that in war old men either deteriorate quickly or they end up feeling and looking 20 years younger. It seems to be true when you look at squaddies who drink hard for decades but still look younger than they should be.

I guess there's a balance between all the additional war stress against the exercise and simply getting away from the horrors of everyday life.

>>42853
Do you think the cyberattack that has currently disabled multiple major European airports is also due to the Russians? Because I do.

>>42852

The Ukrainian army is the oldest in history, making it an important test case; the minimum age for conscription is 25, recently lowered from 27. Their logic was based on the expectation that this was going to be a long and attritional war, so it was important to allow young men to start careers and families to prevent a future demographic crisis.

Other countries have been watching on with great interest. It seems like the Ukrainian war is particularly well-suited to older men, because it's a conflict that rewards caution and discipline. Drones and thermal imagers have made the front lines even more dangerous than the First World War - you don't even have to stick your head above the parapet to get yourself killed, because the threat is everywhere all at once. You might be four miles behind the front, but if you're careless about camouflage and concealment, you're easy pickings for a drone. You could be sneaking through dense woodland at 2am, but to a thermal drone you're literally glowing white hot. If you aren't constantly paranoid, you're dead.

Ukraine's allies are still pushing them to lower the conscription age and largely believe that the age of their army is a contributory factor to the relatively static nature of the front line, but they've also been given cause to re-evaluate their pre-existing beliefs about the usefulness of older conscripts, at least in rear echelon roles and conflicts of this nature. The kind of brave boy who would have been a hero in 1918 or 1944 would just become a statistic in 2025.

>>42853

I'd be talking out of my arse but I suspect soldiering has a similar kind of vibe to being a chef or a long haul driver or one of those deep sea crab blokes. To most people it's the stuff of nightmares, because it's dangerous, unsociable, and most of all bloody hard work, compared to sitting at a desk. But there's some lads who have always struggled to be a "normal" person and end up taking to it like a fish to water. The traits that are a disadvantage or make them hypersensitive to the existential angst of working in an office are the very reason they excel at these "outsider" jobs.

>>42856

Loads of the lads who joined the Ukrainian Foreign Legion would agree with you. An under-appreciated aspect of the difficulties that ex-servicemen face is that they're often just much better adapted for military life; war didn't damage them, it was just the place where they truly belonged.