It is none of Russia's business whether or not Ukraine wishes to join NATO. If Canada wanted to join the EU, America wouldn't have to like it but it would not be acceptable for them to try and stop it. And America hasn't committed any genocides against Canada in the past century that have left Canadians understandably touchy.

UVB-76 (The Buzzer) numbers station has been broadcasting Gangam Style and spectrograph trollfaces since the 15th.

Forgot the image. >>36689

>>36688

Imagine if there were a small island just of the coast of America, which allied with the Russians and the Russians proposed to put missiles on. How do you think the Americans would react to such a situation? It's not like they'd have a massive meltdown that almost caused nuclear war over the mere prospect, I'm sure.

>>36691
If such a thing happened, which obviously it never would, I would disapprove of that too. Because you're not meant to tell other countries how to run their business.

>>36692

Unfortunately, countries are a lot like neighbours. You might want them to mind their own business, and you might not give a fuck what they're doing in their own property. But sometimes, you have no choice but to confront them over how they keep leaving their bins at the end of your drive. Only the bins are nuclear missiles.

>>36688
>It is none of Russia's business whether or not Ukraine wishes to join NATO

This. Russia's recent ultimatum to NATO involves an effective sphere of influence in not only Ukraine but even Poland where the US is perceived as in need of grand bargain to counteract China and the European security alliance as faltering thanks to the vanity of France and Germany. But despite the limp-wristed attitude of Biden the West has already seen off one pressure tactic where Belarus attempted to force a refugee crisis.

Its threat that we know from the long-term predictions of the Russian economy will be used in future to bully economic concessions and as we see from the Caucasus and history of Ukraine itself will still seep in to sow internal conflict or even outright annexation. There's a reason even the Swedes are going mental at the moment and its not good at a time when Russia has spent year building up foreign currency reserves while the west is perilously sensitive to Russian gas diplomacy.

On the broader realist perspective; the problem the school has is it too often presumes a state (that you're in at time of writing) to have free-will. NATO expansion was an inevitability and the weight of Poland alone will pull the west deeper into conflict. EU expansion couldn't have been stopped by the US despite Moscow's view that it's a stalking horse and Ukraine fell into the western orbit because the people living in Ukraine (now run by a Jewish fascist president as Mendeleev recently went to point out) threw their puppet government out of power. What the West could've done to avoid all this was to integrate Russia into the west during the 90s and avoid the country becoming a basket case but we didn't so there we go.

>>36693
Or in the case of Eastern Europe, anti-ballistic missiles. Or in Ukraine, the red-line recently moved to having any sort of western military presence such as training a countries military to defend itself against a neighbour that illegally occupies 7% of the country. Whataboutism doesn't really work in this situation.

>>36687

>Standing back from the situation it seems obvious that US led brinkmanship and almost psychopathic foreign policy only makes a bad situation worse.

The problem with almost all of U.S. foreign policy has always been that Americans have a hard time admitting when they are wrong. Their world view is that they are the beacon of freedom and democracy, that they are the most compassionate and generous nation on Earth, and that they must spread those values across the globe, much in the same way that evangelists think they have to proselytise their religious faith. It's also maybe no complete coincidence that much of the Ukraine kerfuffle that still persists today happened under Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who is a devout Methodist, a Christian fundamentalist denomination that is particularly known for its proselytism and the belief in its own moral superiority and the urge to spread its gospel.

Then again, when it gets down to down-and-dirty power politics, there are enough realists in the American government who know they are only doing it to further and cement the sheer power that the U.S. wields over the rest of the world. There is no room for idealism at that level, it's all about dominance, strategic influence, and access to critical resources and raw materials.

NATO's Eastern Expansion, then, wasn't as much an act of wide-eyed liberalism as the linked article suggests. I'm very sure there were at all times enough hawkish realists in the American government who simply spotted a chance to weaken their old adversary of Russia by diminishing and geographically reducing its sphere of influence. It was probably a welcome side effect that the former Communist satellite states transformed into Western-style capitalist parliamentary democracies that opened up to international trade, but the real Great Game the hawks in the American government and in NATO were playing was a different one.

Funny actually isn't it, there wasn't really any bickering at all with Russia under evil orange anti-christ man, but now a Real Politician is back at the helm, we're back on the doorstep of nuclear annihilation almost immediately.

I feel quite bad for the people of Ukraine. The way they are being played as pawns here is really disgusting, Nobody ever thinks of the human cost of bullshit like this. What does the ordinary Ukrainian citizen gain from two crumbling superpowers having a slap fight over them?

>>36701

I think your memory might be failing you, lad.

>>36701
It's absolutely correct that the man who was actively supported by the Russians was much less confrontational with the Russians.

I still don't expect this to be a real Armageddon, though. The only reason everyone is so afraid is because Russia is lining up a 100,000-strong invasion force on the border of Ukraine, but countries often put soldiers in places without starting wars there. The Americans, and we, certainly do. But if there is a war, we're going to fight back primarily with pathetic wimpy sanctions, and Russia will retaliate by switching off all their natural gas pipelines, and then our heating bills will go up even more than they currently are doing. If it came down to it, the rest of the world could beat Russia quite effectively, but paying electricity bills won't be much fun for a while.

>>36703

>But if there is a war, we're going to fight back primarily with pathetic wimpy sanctions, and Russia will retaliate by switching off all their natural gas pipelines, and then our heating bills will go up even more than they currently are doing

This is the daft bit about it. We could have been mates with Russia years ago after the fall of the USSR and none of this would ever have happened, but America insists on penalising Russia for making them look bad 70 years ago and won't ever let it go.

What is the US offering us? We could do with Russian gas but what are the Yanks giving us in return for all this bollocks? The "global security" argument is totally invalid at this point because the whole thing is demonstrating they simply don't have the cajones for it any more. If Russia invaded us tomorrow, nevermind Ukraine, I seriously have my doubts if the Americans would come rushing to our aid.

>>36704

>We could have been mates with Russia years ago after the fall of the USSR

Russia doesn't really have "mates", only allies of convenience. A rekindling of the cold war was almost inevitable after the rise of Putin. A strong man without enemies isn't a strong man.

>>36701

>What does the ordinary Ukrainian citizen gain from two crumbling superpowers having a slap fight over them?

Nothing, but they have even less to gain from being invaded by Russia. Before giving Trump any credit, it is worth noting that the ceasefire in Donbas collapsed in the first months of his presidency. Ukraine are continuing to fight the war in Donbas, they will fight as hard as they can against any further Russian incursions, but they're massively outnumbered and outgunned. Ukraine want military support and they're asking for our help.

>>36705

>Russia doesn't really have "mates", only allies of convenience

Do you think that's somehow different to any other country? Do you think America really gives the slightest fuck about Britain?

There was always a way to prevent this. Russia should have been brought into NATO and possibly even the EU.

>>36706
>Do you think that's somehow different to any other country?

It's interesting how so many countries talk about having a "special relationship" with the US. All of them have a slightly different way of saying it but it's the same.

>>36706

>Do you think that's somehow different to any other country?

It's no different to the US, but plenty of other countries have deep and lasting alliances.

>There was always a way to prevent this. Russia should have been brought into NATO and possibly even the EU.

Do you think that Russia at any point wanted to be part of NATO or the EU? The Yanks believe that they have a god-given right to run the world, the Russians believe that they're a global superpower rather than a washed-up dictatorship with a smaller GDP than Italy. They both have a continual desire to expand their spheres of influence and those spheres will inevitably intersect somewhere in Europe. Wishful thinking or appeasement can't stop global conflict.

>>36708

>Do you think that Russia at any point wanted to be part of NATO or the EU?

Um, yes, actually, in the early 90s they very much did. After the fall of the USSR, Russian capital certainly wanted to be part of the global free trade and financial party. Our rejection and refusal to integrate Russia into the west is part of the reason Putin rose to power at all.

>>36696
>It's also maybe no complete coincidence that much of the Ukraine kerfuffle that still persists today happened under Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who is a devout Methodist, a Christian fundamentalist denomination that is particularly known for its proselytism and the belief in its own moral superiority and the urge to spread its gospel.

What are you implying here?

>>36704
It's Yankee ignorance that if anything that caused this. Russia was ignored when the missile shield was first proposed and it was ignored when the West started to interfere in the Caucasus during the War on Terror. This is what absolutely infuriates Russia because its a dead empire that wants to restart the Concert of Europe.

The argument of a decepticon conspiracy to destroy Russia was nonsense in the 2000s because everything was focused on terrorism and Iran.

>The "global security" argument is totally invalid at this point because the whole thing is demonstrating they simply don't have the cajones for it any more. If Russia invaded us tomorrow, nevermind Ukraine, I seriously have my doubts if the Americans would come rushing to our aid.

They would, stop being a retard. It's in the West's interest to maintain the stable and rules based international order against the new revisionist powers, not least owing to our level of economic integration. We actually even know from the leaked diplomatic cables that the US is unusually fluffy with us beyond any material gain and from Syria (and Iraq) that the US looks to Britain for a thumb up owing to the scars from Vietnam.

That doesn't mean we should be naïve on US interests but the reason the West's security alliance remains so strong is because if how aligned our collective interests are and how useful the components are. Ukraine is outside this umbrella but the reason much hand-wringing is going on compared to Kazakhstan is the threat this poses to the Baltic states and the way that Russia has undermined the fundamentals of the Post-WWII international order by stealing territory.

>>36706
There is talk of suspending voting rights for Poland and Hungary because their democratically-elected (in Hungary's case, that's debatable) leaders are mad fucks who just want to ruin everything. I don't think the rest of the EU would be very happy to welcome Russia into the fold. And Russia knew this; the only really valid argument they have here is that they very clearly asked NATO not to approach their borders in 1990, and that promise has been broken repeatedly by ex-Soviet countries looking to get away from the bear outside the tent. If Russia hates NATO that much, inviting them to join is unlikely to have succeeded.

>>36709

>Um, yes, actually, in the early 90s they very much did.

Russia is a member of the EAPC and the PfP. It has the option of applying for NATO membership via the PfP, but it has never exercised that option. 14 members of the PfP have successfully joined NATO via the PfP; Russia actively opposed their membership, regarding it as a threat to their national security.

Russia was a member of the G8 until it decided to invade Crimea. There are a substantial number of EU-Russia cooperation agreements, but EU membership has never been a serious option given Russia's active opposition to many of the Copenhagen Criteria.

The door has always been open for Russia to join the club, but they are unwilling to play by the rules. A NATO that allows its members to go to war with each other is utterly pointless.

>>36711

>the only really valid argument they have here is that they very clearly asked NATO not to approach their borders in 1990, and that promise has been broken repeatedly by ex-Soviet countries looking to get away from the bear outside the tent

The fatal flaw of post-Soviet transformation in Eastern Europe was then that Gorbachev didn't ask to get that promise in writing. In the negotiations to redraw the European map in 1990, assurances were limited to verbally telling the Russians, oh yeah, don't worry, NATO will stay put where it is. Gorbachev in the end accepted what the Russians assumed was a gentlemen's agreement. But as with anything you don't have in writing, it's difficult to then hold somebody, in this case NATO and the Americans, to their promise. They are now saying, well no, that was never actually part of the deal. And it wasn't, because it wasn't codified in the treaties. The Americans knew what they were doing though, and that a verbal promise was never going to be binding, and you could even say it was a ruse to sucker Gorbachev into agreeing to relinquish power over those satellite states.

It's also imprecise to say that the former Soviet satellite states simply joined NATO of their own volition because they were somehow scared of the big bad wolf Russian bear. What is true is that during the Communist Bloc era, Soviet political and ideological dominance over those countries often left them severely short changed. But on the other hand, the U.S. in particular has by now a 30-year history of intense influencing and outright meddling with domestic politics and public opinion in those countries. It operates NGOs, think tanks and other organisations whose sole purpose at least tacitly it is to foster pro-American political elites in those countries who will be loyal to the U.S. and NATO. There has been a lot of talk about Russian government-sponsored NGOs in the West in recent years. And they exist, and they often do damage in undermining and destabilising the political system and public opinion in countries like Germany or indeed the UK. But pound-for-pound and in terms of the kind of budget the Russians set aside to finance those NGOs, it's simply dwarfed by what the Americans spend a year on supporting pro-U.S. NGOs worldwide. We're talking on the order of 20 times the kind of money the Russians dedicate to it.

>>36713
Why do you seem to always show the Americans as being the only ones with any agency? For starters the Visagrad group emerged before any consensus was agreed by the US, who instead acted from fear of displacement by a new European security architecture, and Russia's actions in its near abroad during the 90s already fuelled the opinions a population who saw European integration as they key to future prosperity. Even today when Poland's Kaczyński talks about a Polish strategy autonomy to survive a Russian attack it cleaves from NATO doctrine.

The Americans bumble about on the world stage, they're not a smart people or hivemind.

>>36710
"Rules based international order" is one of my least favourite phrases. The most charitable way I can interpret it is that Russia is objectionable because it's a destabilising force, which is a perfectly legitimate view. Yet tipping it over into "they break the rules" becomes a step too far. I immediately want to point to Iraq, or to the nicked Chagos Islands, or god knows what little example that invariably invites dismissal with "whataboutism" even though the specifics of any example aren't quite as important as a general idea that we'd never let the rules get in the way of our perceived interests (I might say: 'damn right too!') and that I can't stomach pretending otherwise. Making the cynics case for doing so seems easy: it's much easier to keep all the little countries on-side if they think they might be able to catch you out by appealing to the rules. But as individual human beings rather than institutions it seems unnecessary to play along with such a game. It's not likely any countries that lose out from it are going to find out via a post from an idiot like me.

>>36714

>Even today when Poland's Kaczyński talks about a Polish strategy autonomy to survive a Russian attack

Why would Russia attack Poland then?

It's this kind of thinking that prevents any kind of levelheadedness.

>>36716
>Why would Russia attack Poland then?
Why wouldn't Russia attack Poland?

>>36717

You just proved my point. Well done, you.

It's funny how so many of you are repeating things that the OP's article already clearly went over. It's as though none of you read it.

I mean you're not wrong, most of you, but it does go to show how on the internet, we just start talking directly out of our arse without even acknowledging the information presented.

Anyway carry on, this is one of the more interesting threads we've had in a while. I think you might all get a sticker on the fridge.

>>36719
I did worry briefly, "What if the link I didn't read disproves everything I'm about to say?" But then I would dismiss it as fake news and consider my time wasted for reading it. I will read it now (unless it's boring).

It's a much better article than I was expecting. It's not pro-Russian propaganda, I don't think. It still doesn't give any reasons why NATO could be framed as an evil force, aside from equating it with America and listing all the bad things America has done. But then maybe I'm just too passionate about liberalism.

Ukraine declaring itself to be neutral, and refusing to get too close to either Russia or NATO, would perhaps work for a bit, but I think they have too much history with Russia, of getting invaded and massacred over and over again, for the Ukrainians to do such a thing and just hope Russia chills out for the first time in history. All the arguments that Russia is just bracing itself against potential attacks, just in case, can also be made for Ukraine, which would get its shit pushed in by Russia without a larger alliance.

>>36715
Your argument is that the rule of law law isn't valid because of abuse by the powerful so we should throw out the concept of law altogether. International law is challenged by the lack of global policeman but even the US suffers a cost for breaking the rules through community feedback, hence why states avoid launching wars of aggressive conquest because it has become completely taboo post-Kellogg–Briand Pact.

>>36716
>Why would Russia attack Poland then?

Russia has attacked Poland multiple times through hybrid-warfare, recently demanded that NATO cease the deployment of weapons in Poland, simulated an nuclear attack on Warsaw during Zapad exercises in Belarus and in more broad terms the Poles have every right to be distrustful of the bear to their east which they're wholly unprepared to counter. It's not like the Poles have been busying themselves since the 90s or don't have better things to spend their money on, they have an aggressive power to their East whose regime carries a geopolitical ideology bent on dominating their state.

To top it off there is absolutely no reason for Putin to fear NATO expansion, other non-NATO neighbours are ambivalent because they have no interest in bullying other countries quite like Russia has when it whinges about the Baltic states.

>>36719
The problem with FP is they've started aggressively pay walling their articles so it can be a roll of the dice whether someone can read it. The problem with Stephen Walt is that he's a realist windbag whose only trick is to talk about the 90s and American decline.

>>36722

>To top it off there is absolutely no reason for Putin to fear NATO expansion

Because it never happened, right?

Just imagine if the Russians started a new international military alliance and incorporated one country after another into it, in the Western Hemisphere, no less. Wouldn't we here in the UK or the Americans get a smidgeon nervous? Wouldn't that be considered a blatant act of "Russian aggression"?

And don't give us the whole "But NATO and the Americans are the good guys". Well, not entirely so, if you look at history. And while the Warsaw Pact was completely dissolved and Russia never reversed its geographical retreat, NATO was assimilating former Soviet satellite states left, right and centre.

Just because somebody says they're the good guys, doesn't mean they're not going to pull the trigger of the gun they've got pointed at your head the whole time.

>>36723

>Just because somebody says they're the good guys, doesn't mean they're not going to pull the trigger of the gun they've got pointed at your head the whole time.

Pretty much.

What we're essentially asking Russia to do is get their bollocks out, and put their bollocks on the table, which we are stood on the opposite side of, holding a hammer.

Obviously we're not going to do anything with the hammer, we just so happen to be holding it, complete coincidence. Absolutely no reason to be concerned at all, you're just paranoid if you think so. But nevertheless, would put your bollocks on the table?

It really doesn't matter who's the good guys and who isn't, that's the thing. It's that we're expecting Russia to submit, and Russia is not, nor has it ever been, a sub.

>>36724

It's the old double standard of good versus evil and war propaganda. These days, it's pretty much Russian aggression when Putin lets off a fart during Easterly winds. While nobody among the Western political elite even permits the question, without branding you an enemy of the system anyway, if the country-by-country eastward advance of NATO in the last 30 years could be construed by Russia as a latently hostile act.

The old mantra always goes that the other side does everything they do because they're evil, and "our" side only does essentially the same things because we're good, and you've got to break some eggs to make omelette.

This tactic is probably as old as warfare and all geostrategic jostling itself. Except since the mid-20th century, it has essentially been a game of nuclear chicken that almost turned ugly a few times, with no side really having been able to claim moral high ground. And just because nobody got hurt the first time around during the 1946-1990 Cold War, doesn't mean it won't happen in Cold War II. Can we really take that chance?

>>36723

A number of Eastern European countries made the decision to join NATO, because they believe it to be in their own best interests. Russia has repeatedly aggressed against many of those countries and is currently illegally occupying large parts of Ukraine.

There is no moral equivalence here. Russia has absolutely no legitimate grounds to oppose NATO expansion. Eastern European countries have every right to join NATO if they so wish. There is zero evidence that the expansion of NATO poses a threat to Russian security or territorial integrity, but it does pose a clear threat to Russia's expansionist aims.

There was no provocation in 2014; Russia simply assessed that the West would not support Ukraine to defend against an invasion. We cannot de-escalate this situation by appeasement. The international community needs to stand firmly in support of Ukraine's right to territorial integrity and self-determination.

>>36726

>Russia has absolutely no legitimate grounds

This is the part you don't seem to understand. There's no such thing as "legitimate". It's in their interests not to have NATO on their doorstep, and that's all the legitimacy they need to act in their own self interest.

It's delusional not to expect a country to act in its own self interest just because you've convinced yourself of some artificial construct on what it is and isn't okay to do.

Jeremy Kyle was a cock, wasn't he?

He had his own TV series, where he would invite dysfunctional people on, many of whom needed help, and he would berate them. What a twat. He was the rich millionaire TV celebrity, getting rich off the back of Callum and Chantal from the local council estate, and then they barely saw a sniff of the profits. Prick. But at the same time, Callum was a prick too. He kept getting invited onto the show because he was an alcoholic who would get blackout drunk and beat the shit out of Chantal. And Chantal hated this, but she never left, not even when Jeremy Kyle told her to. And two months later, they'd both be back on the Jeremy Kyle, being chastised for being worthless basket cases.

We are Jeremy Kyle. We're rich and we hold all the cards, ultimately. Chantal is the abused, barely-literate Ukraine. That poor woman. And finally, she has taken a stand and said she is dumping Callum for good. She's moving in with Jeremy Kyle, because he has a big house, and she's taking the kids. No more violent beatings from Callum after a weekend vodka bender.

Now Callum is in the street, shirtless and yelling for Chantal to come out. He has been insulted by Jeremy Kyle so many times that he really can't accept that Chantal would rather live with him than with Callum. That's the only reason Callum is so angry. He hasn't changed, and he will definitely abuse Chantal again while drinking even more vodka, reading unendingly miserable 19th-century literature, and sleeping around with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Chantal's still a hopeless thicko, but she looks at you, and asks, "Should I get back with him?"

Obviously fucking not. Come on.

>>36728

(Let's assume you, the reader, are Jezza, that makes it more personally relatable.)

But also, in this analogy, Callum is actually part of a quite serious gang on the estate, and if you don't let him in to see Chantal, him and his 'ard mates are going to break in at night and beat the shit out of her and the kids. They'll look at you and go "Well, gonna stick up for 'er are you mate?" and you'll just shake your head.

You know she's not worth a black eye over, and you always did. Deep down inside yourself you know you never actually intended to look after her, stand up for her, protect her. You were just using her for the council slag blowies, and you had only temporarily convinced yourself otherwise, you think to yourself, as a single tear rolls down your cheek and into your glass of Famous Grouse.

>>36729
>Famouse Grouse

You mean High Commissioner, Lad. That's your brown equivalent of Glen's Vodka.

>>36730
>Famouse

FUCK. Proof that even something as "posh" as Glenfiddich Solera 15 doesn't stop yu making a clown of yerself on the interwebs.

But I never punched a Lass. I have that going for me.

I fear we've left analogy behind and are just writing out sublimated fantasies.

>>36723
No. It would be considered a strategic failure of the west but by definition a defensive alliance shouldn't be regarded as an offensive act, you certainly wouldn't have even the Yankees annexing 7% of said country for smiling in the wrong direction. Not that anyone would ever be keen to host Russian soldiers of course.

That's the thing, it is perfectly legitimate for Ukraine to enter into an economic agreement with Europe and it's perfectly legitimate for sovereign states to enter into a defensive alliance. It says so in the UN Charter and and national sovereignty has been THE fundamental precept of international law for at least 100 years. On the other hand invading a country because they've frankly had enough of you and stealing territory is absolutely outrageous and may have even raised heckles in the 19th century. You only have to look at the limited number of countries that have accepted Russia's annexation of Crimea and the actions of even non-NATO members to know which side of history Putin is operating on.

Now you have to ask yourself what 100,000 Russian soldiers are going to invade for, what pretext are they going to use here when the limited equipment Ukraine has had delivered from NATO consist of anti-tank rockets and Turkish drones. Are the "fascists" coming to kill all the Russians or is it the Jews this time?

>>36728
>Chantal's still a hopeless thicko, but she looks at you, and asks, "Should I get back with him?"

ARE Chantal would never say this. She's made repeatedly clear she's going to fight back and if she ends up too broken then she won't be able to tend her ganja farm which is going to send prices for green rocketing across the estate.

>>36729
You wouldn't go in swinging against a group of chavs who have broken into your home and are looking to beat a woman and her children?

>>36726

>The international community needs to stand firmly in support of Ukraine's right to territorial integrity and self-determination

Would've been nice if the West had applied that same high moral standard to countries like Syria, or indeed Afghanistan or Iraq.


>There was no provocation in 2014

Except there was. The 2013 revolution in Ukraine was bought and paid for by Western shell NGOs. Whose operatives were literally giving protesters in the streets cash money handouts, and the opposition movement as a whole also received generous funding from countries including, but not limited to the United States.

Crimea's problem admittedly was that it has been home to one of (Soviet) Russia's most strategically important military bases on the planet since before the Cold War. A new pro-Western Ukrainian government could have simply evicted the Russians at some point, which would have weakened Russia's military posture as a whole.

Ultimately, just declaring Crimea a part of Russia was without a doubt a rarely before seen violation of international law and multilateral treaties. But what are you going to do. There is no feasible way of returning Crimea to Ukraine, without very literally risking an all-out nuclear war. Eight years of intense political pressure and sanctions have yielded absolutely no results, and the West is still deluding itself that yet anoter round of new sanctions over and over again is somehow at some point going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

>>36733

>You wouldn't go in swinging against a group of chavs who have broken into your home and are looking to beat a woman and her children?

Well, no, because the point of this analogy is that we (The West and Are Jezza) are absolutely just going to sit on our hands and watch Chantal get beaten up.

We can yammer on at length about what Russia has done wrong and how NATO hasn't done anything to provoke them, but at the end of the day what are we going to do? We don't want a fight with Russia, certainly not over a shithole like Ukraine. We don't give a fuck.

We're just acting like bigmen, but if we get called on it, we'll have to back away, and then we're going to look like right dickheads, and the whole estate will know we're not hard like we used to be. Past it. Has been. Next thing you know all these other upstarts are selling baggies down the Lion, and when you confront them, they just laugh. Get out of here, old geezer, you're done with.

That's the greater issue with all this. We've painted ourselves into a corner and we've fucked up. This is a moment of reckoning for the future, and the US is looking absolutely impotent right now.

>>36735

>We're just acting like bigmen, but if we get called on it, we'll have to back away, and then we're going to look like right dickheads, and the whole estate will know we're not hard like we used to be

It's all about how far you want to take a bluff.

As you said, ultimately, despite all the huffing and puffing, the West isn't going to start a nuclear war over a shithole country like Ukraine, and all the territorial pissing that both sides are doing isn't going to change that. Putin knew that the West wasn't going to send troops to pry Russia's most important European naval base from him at gunpoint to return it to Crimea. So he got away with it by successfully gambling on Western governments not being bigger lunatics than him. As far as our governments were concerned, it was better to just accept that Putin had made the West look like complete fools, and not risk global nuclear stability over a speck of land in the Black Sea that ultimately wasn't worth it.

>>36734
>Except there was. The 2013 revolution in Ukraine was bought and paid for by Western shell NGOs. Whose operatives were literally giving protesters in the streets cash money handouts, and the opposition movement as a whole also received generous funding from countries including, but not limited to the United States.

Goodness, it's amazing how much money we must have considering the past 8 years the Ukrainian people have rejected pro-Russian candidates.

>>36735
>but at the end of the day what are we going to do?

Supply weapons, training and the like to Ukraine, you may have seen it on the news. Maybe kick Russia out of Swift and whatever other sanctions are needed to cripple the Russian economy as it was in Russia's last financial crisis. Your entire argument hinges on the assumption that "just let Russia do whatever it wants" is some viable option like it's not equally Russia that is skating on thin ice and isn't likely scrambling to save face.

>>36737

We've been trying to cripple the Russian economy for the best part of the last decade, and by the looks of it, it hasn't done much.

Probably because most of the people who would feel the pinch of those sanctions don't actually have many financial interests in Russia itself, instead they own half the real estate market in London and fund the Tory party.

The Russian war plan for this is insane (from 6:10 on):

Cities with millions of people under siege and a pincer movement cutting along and probably through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Transnistria pulling Moldova in and Russia facing an insurgency that puts Iraq to shame. I can't imagine there's much margin for error.

>>36739
>We've been trying to cripple the Russian economy for the best part of the last decade, and by the looks of it, it hasn't done much.

It has. So much so that Russia has now stockpiled foreign reserves to avoid a repeat of the 2014-16 financial crisis where the majority of the economy fell into state ownership and millionaires fled the country despite targeted sanctions. Most of Russia's exports flow to the EU and the alternative once that dries up is falling into China's orbit as a low-wage economy for primary goods.

The one's coming next are suggested to be brutal, cutting even Sberbank alone off would cripple the Russian economy:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/21/russia-sanctions-stop-putin-energy-markets-us-invasion-527524

>Probably because most of the people who would feel the pinch of those sanctions don't actually have many financial interests in Russia itself, instead they own half the real estate market in London and fund the Tory party.

I don't get why you would think that oligarchs holding assets outside of Russia, who made their fortune in the chaos of the 90s, would be pro-Putin. Nor why you assume the UK is in any way Russia's largest trading partner or the anchor that Germany is. Russian = Foe is a dumb way of looking at it even if a few MPs are pretty regular bought off by anyone who wants a slice.

ITZ, or not?

Can only imagine the smug grin that Putin has right about now.

For some reason, I'm reminded of that passage from Illuminatus:

>He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality. In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.

Invasion on Wednesday, apparently.

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/krise-in-osteuropa-cia-rechnet-mit-russischem-angriff-kommende-woche-a-2e10a45f-b6eb-4b1a-b692-2edc64c04adf

>>36954

Good to know Gerry is taking notice.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but so far, we've only got the West's thoughts on all that. While Russia still maintains that it's just a military exercise and that there are no plans to invade at all. It'd be a bit anticlimactic if the Russians actually don't invade and at some point just call off their "exercise". Like back in school when rumours went around that the school bully was going to kick the wimpy kid's arse behind the gym after school one day, but he never even showed up.

On the other hand, maybe the Russians just think that what goes around, comes around. They paid bitterly for believing Hitler's assurances as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. And then look what happened. Which also led to the Seven Days To The River Rhine strategic plan during the Cold War, whose aim it was that in the event WWIII broke out, the Warsaw Pact would push westward and overrun West Germany with all their available ground forces in seven days to make sure that NATO wouldn't do the same to Russia with their troops moving eastward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine

So it could be part of their strategy to completely go pokerface with it until the first Russsian MiGs or tanks cross into Ukraine.

The problem that the West has is that Biden has said very firmly that the U.S. is not going to send its own troops into Ukraine in the event of a Russian invasion, because it would trigger WWIII. While that's a somewhat prudent decision on Biden's part, one we in the West should probably thank him for out of sheer self interest and the fact that it means we won't be waking up to mushroom clouds in the sky next week, it also means that Putin will get away with invading Ukraine. He knows the worst he is going to have to endure from the West is a lot of huffing and puffing in diplomatic and political circles and a few more toothless sanctions that Putin can't be arsed to care about, but ultimately, the West will settle into the reality again, like with Crimea, that what Russia is doing is a grossly illegal act under international laws and treaties, but that there isn't anything you can really do to kick the Russians back out. Again, short of kicking off WWIII.

>>36955
This is one of those situations where because I don't know what will happen, I try to take a smug intellectual approach and scrutinise everyone's real motivations to predict how it will go. But Putin wants to portray the outside world as evil to his people, to cement his position in the face of existing sanctions, so he could well go to war for that.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden has very low approval ratings, which would be hugely helped in the midterms by a war with Russia. Our own government is mired in scandal, and saying Keir Starmer loves pederasts and hates justice didn't work, so they too stand to gain from a war. All across Europe, other NATO governments are finding themselves unpopular in a way that a war with Russia would really help with.

The war itself, of course, if it happened, wouldn't really benefit anybody except the politicians. Nobody is defending freedom and justice; both sides are just telling themselves they'd be putting a bully in their place for illegitimately trying to claim Ukraine. Based on what I've seen, Russia is going to try and cheat and invade Ukraine while claiming they're not really invading Ukraine. Then we'd look like the bad guys for fighting them when they never really invaded anywhere. So fuck Russia. But I don't know if that's what Russia is really planning, because I read all those reports in the dreaded m-m-m-mainstream media, which cannot necessarily be trusted.

I guess the ideal outcome would be cyberwarfare, with everyone switching off each other's power stations and Sky Sports but nobody actually dying. If we could remove Putin simply through filling Russian infrastructure with Goatse and Billy Herrington, I'd sign up today. But all governments everywhere have spent far too much on real weapons not to use them, so even that would probably ultimately kill us all.

>>36958

>Meanwhile, Joe Biden has very low approval ratings, which would be hugely helped in the midterms by a war with Russia. Our own government is mired in scandal, and saying Keir Starmer loves pederasts and hates justice didn't work, so they too stand to gain from a war. All across Europe, other NATO governments are finding themselves unpopular in a way that a war with Russia would really help with.

Except this time it wouldn't be a proxy war over which Western governments could do the usual circle jerk in telling each other, and their people, how much they condemn the barbaric acts of the enemy. This time, they're really running around with matches inside a dynamite factory. And the approval of your voters doesn't mean much if they all get vaporised by a Russian ICBM as a result of your gung-ho decision making.


>Based on what I've seen, Russia is going to try and cheat and invade Ukraine while claiming they're not really invading Ukraine

You can do that with a handful of military trucks in the vast expanses of the rural Donbas. You can even show footage of some nondescript landscape with Russian tanks in it and with the possible exception of undeniable landmark features in shot, nobdy will be able to prove from those images that the Russians aren't on their own territory, But once you've got eyewitness mobile phone video popping up on social media of entire formations of Russian jets laying fire on Kyiv, you'll know the Russians are right in the middle of Ukraine, and Putin won't bother denying it.

My guess is that because Kyiv is only about 120 miles from the Russian border and also not far from where Russia and Belarus are currently holding a joint military "exercise", the first wave of attack is going to be by air right on Kyiv. They'll do a decapitation strike and then take it from there as strategic targets will continue to be bombed by air and ground troops begin their advance into Ukrainian territory. While the West and NATO in particular will shy away from direct counteraction in order not to invoke Article 5.

>>36935
It's too late now.

In practical terms, Russia has started up drills that will be a ball ache to now quickly untangle into fighting and in particular amphibious operations aren't known for a quick turnaround. It also has no element of surprise and what is more the full attention of Europe focused upon it which is normally the point in any conflict when it opts for a negotiated settlement.

In strategic terms even NATO members have expressed doubt, Russia has a limited cost tolerance where intervention in Syria was defined by mercenaries and air-strikes (and involved backdoor guarantees that the Coalition would not supply anti-aircraft weapons), Georgia wasn't destroyed because the diplomatic cost was viewed as too great and Azerbaijan was allowed to humiliate Armenia because there was no open route to send aid. A war now would cut Russia from it's largest export market, dooming it to China's orbit and be a ruinously expensive conflict that would certainly cost some advanced equipment Russia can't afford to lose.

The whole thing has been sabre-rattling to see how the West reacts and it's probably sussed us as a little wanting. Same thing will now become a regular occurrence to undermine western confidence following the formula that began to emerge from Zapad and simulated strikes on Warsaw. Soon we'll have a similar display in the Baltics to test American resolve where Russia knows the NATO can't prevent them being overrun and where they might come to seek some accommodation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60361983

>More than a dozen countries have urged their citizens to leave Ukraine amid warnings from Western powers that an invasion by Russia could be imminent.


Nice knowing you, otherlads.

Time to pack your rice and wellies.

I watched that Lukashenko BBC interview the other day and what he said about NGOs was quite interesting, went something like that
>Yeah, all those NGOs you've set up? We've liquified them and they're all Western propaganda hubs
or something to that effect and it made me wonder if Lukashenko has tipped Russia off about similar things happening in Ukraine.
Not to sound like a Russian bot or anything but the way Ukraine was slowly being taken into the fold of the West and NATO made me wonder whether we have, oh let's be honest, we HAVE been nudging them closer and closer to NATO but perhaps Putin wasn't looking in the right places whilst it was happening. Now he's had a word with Lukashenko and Lukashenko has clued him in on it.
It does sort of feel like the West has been caught doing something it shouldn't have been doing and is now getting all defensive about it.
sage for absolute schizophrenic, rambling bollocks

My white knuckle ride of investing in Ukraine is paying off. Feels weird to be making money on peace for a change when everyone else has been throwing money at defence companies.

>>36984

How did you do this? As in, who did you invest through?

>>36964

This really does seem like an absolute reversal of the truth. Isn't Russia seeking a legally binding agreement to stop NATO expansion to the east?

It really seems like we're being geared up for war, primed to see Russia as the enemy.

>>36985
HL, FXPO wasn't a bad punt either for a smoother ride. Third largest iron ore pellet exporter in the world and a lot less risk of Green men, Kiev setting a price ceiling or corruption.

>>36986
Russia has openly signalled it's ​deescalating and it was always just a military exercise despite the Americans and media screaming. The Russian demands were always a bullshit high-ball ask if the west wanted to strike a grand bargain.

Ukraine gave some mixed signals that it won't be joining NATO anytime soon but they'll probably just apply once they feel they can credibly deter a Russian attack. Nothing ever happens.

>It really seems like we're being geared up for war, primed to see Russia as the enemy.

Annexing a chunk of a country like it's 1938 and running a low-intensity conflict in another nation's borders that has created 1.5 million refugees will do that

>>36984
I admire your brass balls ladm9.

>>36986
How do you expect sovereign nations to stop being sovereign and applying to join NATO? Agreeing with Russia's demands essentially means eastern Europe is part of Russia.

>>36989

I think your question is very much based on a false premise. It makes about as much sense as saying those countries in NATO are part of the US.

>>36986

>It really seems like we're being geared up for war, primed to see Russia as the enemy.

Russia have already invaded Ukraine. They might strenuously deny it, but there is irrefutable evidence that Russian special forces and mercenaries have been acting in Crimea and Donbas since 2014.

NATO rules specifically disallow membership to countries with an active territorial dispute, making Ukraine ineligible to join. However you slice it, Russia are the aggressor in this situation and acting unlawfully.

>>36987

>Annexing a chunk of a country like it's 1938 and running a low-intensity conflict in another nation's borders that has created 1.5 million refugees will do that


Maybe, but in this case, so far at least it has all just been a big hyped up nothing. Putin does a little flex on Ukraine's doorstep, and the West's intelligence and media completely run with all kinds of horror scenarios which, in fairness, don't seem all that likely to materialise. It may be good for newspaper and TV readership and viewership numbers, and to reinforce the image of Russia as the evil empire, but it really borders on mass delusion by now.

And Putin isn't actually going to send his 100,000 men to invade Ukraine because he knows there is a high risk of it ending up like Afghanistan. The reason why the Soviet-Afghan War played an instrumental part in the Soviet Union's demise was that the Soviets spent themselves to death trying to gain the upper hand, while the U.S. was secretly supplying wholesale weaponry to the Mujahideen the whole time, thus dragging out a conflict that should have lasted no more than a year or two to last ten years.

The Ukrainians today also wouldn't go down without a fight, and they would likely receive oodles more weapons than they'd ever need from NATO and the U.S., without the two getting directly involved, resulting in the exact same kind of quagmire for the Russians as Afghanistan.

And not wanting to slip into too much Putinsplaining here, but NATO has quite openly a geographical containment strategy against Russia. Which isn't limited to NATO's eastern expansion in Europe, but also extends to increased military presence in recent years and decades in southern Eurasia and East Asia. Imagine if the Russians did that. They're already painted as the scourge of world peace by gathering 100,000 soldiers on their own soil near a neighbouring country's border, so far with no stated intent but to hold a large-scale military exercise. While the U.S. sent half its Navy down to the Caribbean and openly threatened nuclear war when the Soviets shipped missiles to Cuba. And it should not be forgotten that the Russian missiles in Cuba were a direct response to NATO having Jupiter ballistic missiles stationed in Turkey and Italy, each equipped with a 1.5 Mt warhead targeted at Moscow and many other cities in western Russia. These missiles were all very quietly taken down, as part of the agreement to remove the Russian missiles from Cuba. But you don't ever hear much about that in History Channel documentaries.

>>36992
I would argue that annexing thousands of square miles of a neighbouring country, in violation of international law, is actually quite a large flex. It's certainly a bigger flex than anything NATO has done to Russia lately.

>>36993

Nicking a small corner off someone else's country is still not a large flex. Not a small one either, but it's not a large flex.

>>36994
Has anyone done that since WW2 other than Russia (multiple times by the way)? Are you a RussianBot by any chance?

>>36994
I also find it funny that you call nicking an area larger than Wales, just a minor flex.

>>36996
Even England could nick an area the size of Wales. It needs to be at least several times that to be a proper flex.

>>36995
Israel.

>>36996

I called it "not a large flex. Not a small one either".

The Ukraine is also a lot bigger than the UK in relation to Wales.


Total land area of Ukraine: 233,062 sq mi

Land area of Crimea: 10,000 sq mi (~4.2%)


Total land area of the UK: 93,628 sq mi

Land area of Wales: 8,023 sq mi (~ 8.5%)

>>36999
Is that how far you want to go to justify the annexation, RussianBotLad?

>>36954
Are they doing it yet? Or have we been betrayed by the duplicitous Western media? Or even, were the Russians really going to invade today, then called it off to make our media look stupid, so we no longer trust them when they [I]do[I] invade?

>>37001
I'll reply to myself again, since my post seems more sarcastic and aggressive than I meant it to. There are now videos of tanks leaving Crimea, and pulling away from Ukraine, but NATO and the Americans are saying that this is all fake, and that actually, if anything, Russian troop numbers are increasing on the border with Ukraine. I really am very confused right now.

I dunno, I kind of feel like there was never any real intention to invade, but simply an attempt to make the West look like charlatans.

I mean it doesn't really cost anything to have a bunch of tanks and soldiers sat there on the border looking like they could invade at any minute, and sit back to watch as America loses its shit for months on end while at the same time displaying complete impotence to do anything about it.

Both sides are playing a pretty cynical game here- The west wants Russia encircled, Russia wants a sphere of inbendsence to retain some global heft. But the West is definitely the one coming out of this looking like our towel fell down.

>>37002
There were reports about a week ago about Russia potentially deploying fake footage. Of course, we didn't get to see what that footage was or what it depicted, for good reason. For the same reason, NATO aren't going to confirm or deny whether what we're seeing is that fakery.

>>37003
>I dunno, I kind of feel like there was never any real intention to invade, but simply an attempt to make the West look like charlatans.
You should probably stop watching RT.

>>37005
I don't know; he could be right. Putin certainly has a track record of manipulating foreign media and.spreading the message that they can't be trusted. If he can make the West look like a bunch of mugs, that's great news for him. And remember that if he does want to invade, he's effectively inviting the entire world to treat his government like that of Afghanistan in terms of how unwelcome they would be, all in exchange for some space, which they have plenty of already, in one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe. Eastern Ukraine is hardly prime real estate for any government other than the Ukrainian one.

>>37006
>If he can make the West look like a bunch of mugs
For what? Responding to a credible threat of invasion?

>>37007
A credible threat of invasion can easily look like incredible hysteria when the invasion doesn't materialise, especially when the government that found it credible has a record of getting it horribly wrong before (credible evidence of WMD in Iraq) to stain its own credibility.

>>37003

Putin is expanding his sphere of inbendsence, but not in the way the news would suggest.

It's all a charade and the audience are Orban, Duda and Erdoğan. Putin has no intention of a full invasion of Ukraine, because it'd be far too costly for far too little gain. The point of the exercise is to send a message to populist leaders (and their electorates) in Eastern Europe - that the major NATO powers consider them to be expendable and that their future security depends on closer ties with Russia, not the west.

If Putin can gradually turn Poland and Hungary into Belarus-esque puppet states, then dominating Ukraine is a fait accompli. Russia get to punch a massive hole in NATO's eastern frontier without a shot being fired.

>>37008
>(credible evidence of WMD in Iraq)
My calendar says it's 2022. What does yours say?

>>37010
I'm not sure, I can't read it because my bastard 6 year old has written "people can remember things and make inferences from them in the future" in black ink over the entire calendar part, leaving it as nothing but a collection of poorly framed shots of Australia's four landmarks.

>>37011
>"people can remember things and make inferences from them in the future"

Is this a wordfilter, or do you have a really precocious kid?

>>37008
This situation is completely different. Russia doesn’t deny it has troops surrounding Ukraine and no country, anywhere, has said it will send forces to protect them if an invasion did take place. That second point is also why talk of WW3 is so silly too, you’re going to need more than two countries for a world war.

>>37007

Well yes, duncelad. It wouldn't be much of a gambit if the West just immediately sussed "nah, he's bullshitting" would it? Christ.

>>37016
I don't get it. There's a credible threat of invasion, and every indication that Putin means it. Do the fire service look like mugs when they turn up to a hoax call?

>>37020

This is a faulty analogy because the fire service would at least show up to a hoax call.

That's the point you're missing. The west (or at least the Americans) look like mugs over this because of how much noise they're making despite expressly ruling out even the possibility of showing up, because they know they can't.

The longer it goes on, the more of a floppy dick we look.

>>37013

> Russia doesn’t deny it has troops surrounding Ukraine

Yes, but that isn't the point, is it. The point is if Russia will attack Ukraine or not.

So far, all we have to go on is the West carrying itself like a bunch of headless chickens in reiterating over and over again the alleged imminent threat of a Russian invasion, while Russia denies such plans. We're not talking about Russian troops that are already in Crimea and with some degree of probability in the Donbas, but a full-scale hostile military invasion.

If the Russians actually end up not invading Ukraine and withdrawing their troops because it all really was just a large-scale exercise, then NATO and Western governments will all end up looking like right twats.

Let's just see how everything unfolds. Part of me believes that the West just wants to goad Putin into an invasion. They're essentially presenting the Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter by saying look, we've flown out all our diplomats and other local personnel, and we won't send in NATO troops if you attack.

Would Russia look like twats if NATO didn't attack them? Because NATO isn't going to. So perhaps looking like a twat isn't the end of the world in terms of international diplomacy.

>>37024

What I meant was, what's missing from the narrative of an unstable rogue leader threatening world peace is that Putin hasn't made any open threats to attack Ukraine. He has spoken out vociferously against NATO's eastern expansion and has said that Russia would be prepared to defend its interests both with diplomacy and its military might. But that isn't the same as a direct threat to attack and invade Ukraine. And in the absence of that, all we ever hear is warnings from Western governments and NATO that an attack is directly at hand in the next few days. So far, with no results. Which leads me to believe that the West is really overdramatising the situation because it hopes to achieve political gain from it.

>>37025
That's exactly what Putin wants you to think.

He hasn't made explicit threats against Ukraine, but he has, repeatedly, said the equivalent of "Nice country you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it."

>>37026

In the end, the proof of the Putin pudding is still in the eating. The West is placing its bets on a Ukraine invasion, but it will still make itself look stuipid if that invasion never happens. And to paint over the fact that NATO and Western governments incorrectly predicted an invasion, they'll probably reframe it as their diplomatic success that it didn't happen. Which would be more than a little bit dishonest.

>>37027
Mate, just take your 5 rubles and fuck off already.

>>37020
This hinges on the credbility of the threat, which can always be contested in hindsight. People aren't probability computers, there's a reason they're lazy with seatbelts.

>>37024
The domestic politics of looking like a twat differs from country to country. In NATO countries, by and large, if nothing happens things look like unwarranted panic. In Russia, it's much easier to steer it to look like unwarranted hostility from NATO, even if you started it.

>>37026
>>37029
If, no matter what happens, "that's what putin wants you to think", why is it so implausible that he could set up another win-win situation for himself? Set up a probable invasion, judge the reaction, then either back down (making the reaction look like an overreaction), or, if there's no reaction, invade and grab a nice chunk of land.

It's bizarre that we can imagine posters and politicians are in his pocket, uncritically repeating lines practically penned by himself, but the moment you suggest the man might actually have had a clever strategy going into this that's proof you're on his side.

>>37025

>Putin hasn't made any open threats to attack Ukraine

Putin has already attacked Ukraine. He has invaded and annexed Crimea. Donbas has been taken over by a Russian-backed separatist army that calls itself "New Russia". The leader of that separatist government is a card-carrying member of Putin's party. 13,000 people have died in the conflict. There's fighting happening right now.

The troops massing on the border aren't threatening to start a war, they're threatening to escalate a war that has been going on for nearly eight years.

Regardless of how the fervent Yank-wankers ITT want to feel about it, it already is a win win for Putin.

He doesn't have to do anything. He just puts his tanks and artillery and loads and loads of soldiers on the border, when goes "What? I can put my soldiers wherever I want, it's my own country isn't it?" and in technical terms, he's absolutely right.

Every minute he leaves them there without invading when the Yanks keep saying "Invasion TUESDAY!" is a propaganda victory for him, essentially. "Me? Invade? Oh, would you just look at how impolite these Americans are! My army is just minding it's own business, completely harmlessly, six inches from the Ukrainian border. It's like the US wants me to invade!"

Meanwhile day after day we do nothing, continue to do nothing, and explicitly broadcast to the world our intention to do nothing. But if he does! if he does! Why, we'll... We'll... We'll huff, and we'll puff, and we'll... Impose economic sanctions! Thus reassuring all the countries we want to remain friendly and allied to us in eastern Europe that we're definitely going to stick our necks out for them if it ever comes to it. Because they're in NATO, so that's totally different, isn't it. We'd definitely start WW3 over them, just not Ukraine.

Will some of you take off your red vs blue sports team glasses for a minute and stand back to look at the bigger picture?

>>37034
See, this is like the "casus belli" wankery you can find elsewhere. It's herd insanity at a grand scale, nothing more and nothing less. The dress up game people who cannot accept that humans are fucked play doesn't change that. Just like that prince's death didn't kick off a war, if bullets start flying it's psychos leading psychos inexplicably following orders given by psychos.

>>37032

> It's bizarre that we can imagine posters and politicians are in his pocket, uncritically repeating lines practically penned by himself, but the moment you suggest the man might actually have had a clever strategy going into this that's proof you're on his side.

This. In any game of strategy, the biggest way you can set yourself up to lose from the word go is a) by underestimating your opponent's capabilities and b) by believing too much in your own, and thinking you've got your opponent all figured out.

In other words, whatever else you think of Putin, you have to accept what allies and adversaries alike have always said about him, and that is that he is a brilliant strategist. And realistically, you don't get to the top of an ailing democracy-turned autocracy just by playing nice. Putin is President of Russia with an estimated personal wealth of more than $100 billion because he has spent a lifetime scheming, forging alliances and outsmarting rivals, to a point where his power is absolute. Even in a failed democracy like Russia, that is no mean feat. To then think that Putin somehow just doesn't have it in him to show up the West and to make it and NATO look bad as a result of this crisis is just negligent.


>then either back down (making the reaction look like an overreaction), or, if there's no reaction, invade and grab a nice chunk of land.

Exactly right. And the gamble that the West is taking right now is that it is pretty much handing the Ukraine to Putin's troops, because all foreign personnel has been flown out or told to leave the country, and Putin has been guaranteed that NATO forces will not intervene against Russia, for obvious reasons. The West naturally doesn't like the idea of Putin invading and taking over Ukraine, but they're also not really doing anything to stop him. And once the Russian army controls the territory in a meaningful way, there is also going to be no way for Ukraine to receive new weapon supplies to continue fighting off the Russians on their own.

In the end, the Ukraine is too unimportant for the U.S., which still calls the shots in NATO, to start WW3 over. NATO's containment strategy against Russia is already in place and will work with or without Ukraine being a part of NATO's eastern flank.

If Putin chooses to invade Ukraine, the most likely outcome is going to be crippling sanctions against Russia and a wave of bitter condemnation and disgust from Western politics, but Putin will get to keep Ukraine and possibly incorporate it into Russian territory like they have done with Crimea. The only way to stop it from happening, again, would be WW3.

>>37032
>It's bizarre that we can imagine posters and politicians are in his pocket, uncritically repeating lines practically penned by himself, but the moment you suggest the man might actually have had a clever strategy going into this that's proof you're on his side.
Nobody's suggesting he doesn't have a clever strategy. Some Russiabot keeps harping on about how the West are apparently mugs for rising to Putin's sabre-rattling when in fact he's making a credible threat that he's perfectly capable of following up on, given he's literally done it before.

The Russians aren't stupid. They already know that NATO isn't sitting idly by. They already know that supplies are incoming. They already know that Ukraine is preparing its troops and training civilians in guerilla warfare. Putin knows he has second move advantage. He knows he can basically swing his massive dick around as much as he likes.

>>37037

> when in fact he's making a credible threat that he's perfectly capable of following up on, given he's literally done it before.

So far, he isn't making a threat, at least with respect to actually invading Ukraine. And nobody said that he's not capable of following up on it. But that's exactly part of his strategy. Everybody knows that he's capable of just invading a neighbouring country and taking a chunk out of it, as he has shown with Crimea.


What worries me is that Western politicians are now saying Putin could be looking to stage a false-flag operation as a cause for war. Some sort of very minor incident or attack on Russian forces upon which Putin would then declare his right to start a war against Ukraine after all. The problem with that is that it goes both ways. If such a minor attack is a false-flag operation or is really carried out by the West and then blamed on Russia as a false-flag attack is something you will not be able to unpick once one thing leads to another and we've actually got a full-blown war on our hands.

>>37037

You can go "durr russiabot" all you want, but the point is the west DO look like mugs, because they're playing right into his hands. They're giving him exactly what he wants.

Yes, it's a credible threat. Of course it's a credible threat. That's the fucking point. Let's say you're robbing a bank- Do you use a realistic replica firearm, or a bright orange water pistol? You don't intend to kill anyone, but you won't get far if you don't at least look like you might.

You don't have to support Russia to say the West has cocked this right up. As someone who lives in the West, I'd very much like us to remain the dominant global force, maintain our relative prosperity, and live in security. The reason to be angry with our diplomats right now is because they're putting all that at risk by being such inept fucking twats.

How dense are you lad.

>>37039

>You can go "durr russiabot" all you want

What's that about anyway. I'm by all means not a Russian bot, nor some sort of Kremlin-paid social media comment poster. I'm just somebody who likes his own take on many things.

It bewilders me that .gs is normally a place that encourages people to feel at home with their off the wall and non-mainstream ideas, but that that somehow doesn't go for any discussion we have about politics. Are we really still nothing more than Airstrip One in this country?

>>37038
>So far, he isn't making a threat
I don't know, turning up at a meeting you weren't invited to and telling NATO and the EU to fuck off, and then massing substantial numbers of troops on the border sounds suspiciously like a threat to me.

>What worries me is that Western politicians are now saying Putin could be looking to stage a false-flag operation as a cause for war.
You say "looking to", it literally happened earlier today. Civilians were evacuated from the rebel provinces to Russia, then Russian state media all reported simultaneously that there had been an attack.

>>37039
>Yes, it's a credible threat. Of course it's a credible threat. That's the fucking point.
Right. And so the West has to respond to it.

>The reason to be angry with our diplomats right now is because they're putting all that at risk by being such inept fucking twats.
Do go on. Please, give us an abstract of your forthcoming paper in the Britfa.gs Journal of Foreign Policy and Diplomacy.

>>37040

Probably similar sorts of lads who were dead set on pretending the rednecks tazing themselves in the balls on January 6th last year were in fact daft militant wogs instigating a genuine and serious coup against the US government. Bonafide patriots.

Half of the Ukraine is basically Russia. The only real solution for this quagmire of a nation is neutrality and federalisation.

Regards,
Putinshill/Kremlinbot

>>37038
>The problem with [a false-flag attack] is that it goes both ways
I'm completely with you on this. So far, we're getting reports that some shells were fired at a Ukrainian kindergarten. That's unspeakably evil and I'm sure we're all aghast at the evil Russians firing their death bombs at all the cute widdle kiddies, but if you were Russia, why on Earth would you pick a kindergarten to shoot at? It's like the Gulf War thing where Iraqi soldiers supposedly went into that hospital and threw all the babies in incubators out of the windows, except if they then left and didn't do any more fighting. All it would achieve, from a military perspective, is to make absolutely everyone furious at you while gaining absolutely nothing. It's a terrible way to start a war. And, for anyone not aware, the incubators story was a lie too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony#Investigations

I don't think Putin could win a real war. He prefers to fight media wars, because he's very good at those, and he's winning this one. I second-guess everything our own media tells me now, even though I remain confident that Putin is the bad guy and we're the goodies. Justice is on our side, but our news is looking much more duplicitous and fake than it normally does, and that's a very weird coincidence when we're on the brink of war with the king of making people not trust the news.

>>37044

Even if you're not a kremlinbot, you have to recognise that Ukraine's strong Russian minority complicates things.

>>37040
I don't personally think you're being paid to hold these beliefs (and that's if it's just you defending Putin, which it might not be). But there are plenty of left-wing old-skool commies, like Jeremy Corbyn's own personal Dominic Cummings Seumas Milne, who are very suspiciously pro-Russia. Left-wing old-skool commies are the heart of this community, and I think you are Seumas Milne or at least very much aligned with him. Unfortunately, loving Mother Russia is not a very common left-wing ideal these days.

>>37042
>And so the West has to respond to it.
It doesn't have to, it could choose Charybdis over Scylla. That whichever choice it makes is a terrible one is why it's a clever trick.

>>37047

You are aware that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, right, Pentagonlad? This is not uncle Joe the red menace we are talking about, modern Russia doesn't even pretend to be sort-of-but-not-really communist like China does. It's extremely right wing and every bit as capitalist as the good ol' US of A.

That being the case, I'm not sure why you think those of the lefty persuasion might be pro-Russia, but on the other hand, I do think the inability to wake up to this reality does explain a lot about America's attitudes towards them. The old bear is a shadow of its former self, and America should really rather be keeping its eye on the sleeping dragon; but out of a perverse sense of pride and racial chauvinism, it doesn't want to let go of Ivan as the great enemy, and admit it should really be the slanty eyed insect people who make the iPhone.

>>37045

I refer you to >>38033. The big lie from our side is that this is a new situation rather than an escalation of an old one. Eastern Ukraine has been shelled to buggery for years. They're saying "shelling has started" rather than "the shelling is heavier than usual", because they don't want to admit that they were ignoring a war for years. By "they" I mean politicians, diplomats and the media - they're all complicit in turning a blind eye.

>>37050

*>>37033

>>37049

The world was a simpler place when Russia still fit the enemy stereotype of the evil commies who kept their people in slavery and without democratic rights - and the spoils of capitalism, because they were denied their four-bedroom home in the suburbs with a custom kitchen and a big Chrysler V8 in the driveway.

While consumerism and participation in capitalism have always at least tacitly been seen as the epitome of an individual exercising their democratic freedoms, Russia nowadays is by no stretch of the word an actual democracy, but it is ruthlessly capitalist nonetheless. It far outranks countries like the United States in socioeconomic inequality of its people, and of course virtually all Western European market economies.

It's interesting that nobody attacks Russia for its ruthless capitalism, but that the criticism of its system tends to center around it being a failed democracy. Which it is by all means, or has at least become in the last 20 years with Putin in power. And that's decidedly not a minor problem. But I guess you still need a good narrative of "us vs. them". So that next to all its neo-imperialistic aspirations (with which it is far from alone), there is a sense established that Russia isn't like us and that it's the enemy or at least an antagonist or adversary because it isn't. While a lack of democracy, on the other hand, is often openly tolerated by the West in other corners of the globe, e.g. in places of Saudi Arabia, because they are a friendly regime.

I guess what I am saying is, without a proper sense of relativism, you're just going to fall into that habit of "us vs. them". When in reality, the world is rarely that black and white.

>>37052

The term "democracy" itself is a funny one, when you think about what it means when used by different facets of the state/media/propaganda machine.

On the one hand it means the freedom of a people to choose their leaders, and therefore ultimately express their will, as is good and proper, according to the largely liberal values we have attempted to impress upon the globe. But on the other, it also tacitly stands for a certain kind of free market economy, a certain model of government, a certain style of doing things, wearing suits and being just generally quite decidedly Anglo. It implicitly means being aligned with the West, the "shared international order" and all that. In some ways, it's sort of a dogwhistle. A country being democratic means they are like us. If they're not democratic, they're one of the baddies (unless they're our pet baddies like Gadaffi).

In that way I have cynically pondered, at times, whether a country being democratic is important solely because it means they are within our sphere of inbendsence. Our media can saturate their news, our intelligence agencies can inbendsence their politics. We can pull the strings without really having to get our hands dirty at all. And that doesn't work if you're not democratic.

With countries like Russia, Iran, North Korea et al... Their real sin is that we don't have a hold on them.

>>37053

I think you're spot on in that the "democratic" West somehow only accepts political systems as equal which follow and abide by a quite narrow set of political and socioeconomic tenets.

While one thing that falls flat on its face at the first hurdle is that a country is free to choose its leaders. It's the idea that a freely chosen leader must be democratic and in the end also pro-capitalist and pro-liberal. One instance where all that was led ad absurdum was the 1970 Chilean elections where the Chilean people freely elected a socialist head of state. The U.S. back then tolerated socialist governments in the Americas as little as they do today, and the coup that followed in 1973 where Pinochet was put in power by a CIA-backed military junta brought the Chilean people anything but freedom and democracy.

Other more recent examples are the U.S.'s involvement in Venezuela's domestic affairs to the point where without any legal basis, they suddenly declared the opposition leader the country's rightful president.

Or the Greek elections during Austerity where the Greeks elected a socialist president who showed the middle finger to Merkelian market radicalism and rolled back many of the austerity measures imposed by the EU. Or when Portugal elected a left-wing government in the 2010s which led the country back to a balanced budget despite rejecting austerity measures.

So the West is essentially saying you're free to elect your leaders, as long as you don't elect those kinds of leaders. And to be clear, we're not talking about the German people freely electing Hitler in 1933. It's about refusing to accept that a socialist government can be freely elected by the people, because socialism, for all its shortcomings and its general undesirability, somehow violates the principle that free elections and capitalism must go together.

But if you limit freedom of choice to a handful of options that suit the West's economic ideology, then you're really less free than you think.

>>37054
I often think about a Peter Mandelson quote:
>No serious challenge on the Left exists to Third Way thinking anywhere in the world. This is hardly surprising as globalisation punishes hard any country that tries to run its economy by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finances. In this strictly narrow sense, and in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all "Thatcherite" now.
Every time I read it, without fail, I mentally interject "then what is the point of Democracy?" after the italics. Is it for deciding social issues? Is it just for picking which face puts forward similar policies? Is it for fiddling at the edges? Is it just too hard to replace? Or is it just a fetish, a cargo-cult ritual with purely spiritual meaning?

And despite my left-wing instincts, those questions seem even stronger from the right - if you accept that the market holds the veto anyway, that it's urgent to do as the market wants or you'll be punished, why not simply leave everything to the market? Why waste all that money on a democracy without the ability to vote down market decisions when you could put that money in people's pockets and boost their ability to vote with their wallets? I can see a million objections to that idea, but none consistent with Mr. Mandelson's logic.

>>37055

While it's a good thing that the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Union as the motherland of socialism are no more, the problem is that it instilled a sense of hubris in the Western world that its system of a democratic capitalist market economy survived because of its superiority over communism. I would even argue that it's actually true that communism was the inferior system. But Soviet communism didn't fail because it was the inferior system, but because the Soviet Union was bankrupt (in no small part due to the enormous military budget as a result of the Soviet-Afghan War) and because communist governments in the Soviet Union's satellite states dug their heels in against much needed social and political reforms. It's worth noting that in history, revolutions didn't always only arise against socialist governments, but against capitalist/pro-market governments as well. And believe it or not, in some of the Soviet satellite states during the 1989 revolutions, there were actually still strong pro-socialist movements which wanted to keep socialism, but under different conditions. Their objectives were to oust their country's current leadership and political elite, but not universally to end socialism.

The reason why capitalism's hubris is a problem is that it likes to tout itself as the one and only true gospel. In my opinion, and having spent a good amount of time in Yankland, it's no coincidence that Americans are the main proponents of global market liberalism. American-style religious evangelism and market liberalism are really two sides of the same coin of a country which wants to spread its own ideals, both economic and religious, across the globe. It believes those to be the only God-given truth. What plays into it very substantially is Americans' ignorance towards other cultures and their inability to comprehend them. So what American-style market liberalism does is that it seeks to conquer by assimilation. It wants to establish similar conditions in countries across the globe so that economies function the same way as the American one, and so that there is less friction when doing business with those countries and exploiting their resources.

And much like religious evangelism which tolerates no other religions beside it, market liberalism isn't happy seeing countries and democracies function based on different principles than its own. It's one reason why the Americans were grappling so much with the reinsurgence of socialism in the Americas in the early 2000s, but by extension also why the European Commission struggled to accept the emergence of freely elected left-wing/socialist governments in Greece and Portugal during Austerity.


>if you accept that the market holds the veto anyway, that it's urgent to do as the market wants or you'll be punished, why not simply leave everything to the market?

There is a whole discipline in economics that concerns itself with reasons why that is a bad idea. Basically, if you completely give markets free rein, you will end up with extreme inequality and wealth distribution, which is then irreconcilable with democracy as we understand it, or at least pretend to understand it. It can then erode that democracy and cause political unrest, which, in turn, is bad for business.

Some theories even posit that markets could not function for long at all without (democratic) institutions in place to bridle capitalism's excesses that it is prone to.

What market-radical liberalism gets wrong in our time is that it doesn't just see a functioning democracy as the necessary underpinning of a stable capitalist economy, and maybe even as an intrinsic ideal for its own sake, but that that democracy's primary purpose altogether is to ensure the functioning of liberal markets. And because popular vote and what the people in a democracy want isn't necessarily always what the big economic actors want, there is bound to be friction.

>>37056

I once had a thought that what if we can take the principles of free market liberalism, and political democracy, and literally fuse them together via the mantra vote with your wallet.

Think about the way you choose which energy company you're with- Even though it's a totally absurd concept, because the same leccy comes down the same wires from the same station, somehow we've democratised the energy grid through the free market.

So why not do it for government? You could subscribe for citizenship of whichever one appeals to you the most. If your party starts throwing parties in lockdown or you suspect their front-benchers are all fiddling kids, you just switch to a different provider, and become a citizen of another government.

I think this is the future. There's something in it. When we all live hooked on the VR pipes delivering fully immersive 3D furry porn direct to our sponge, what use will physical borders be anyway?

>>37055
>then what is the point of Democracy?
I have been thinking while reading the past couple of posts, about what democracy really means, back to when I was at school, aged 16-17 like all edgy yutes, and I challenged my Philosophy teacher about this political consensus. This education happened outside the UK, so maybe yours was different.

My Philosophy teacher taught us the usual stuff in the book that I didn't really care about, at the time, and when it all got political, the message was, "This is theocracy, this is autocracy, this is oligarchy, but this, this right here, this is democracy, where everybody votes and that's how the government decides what to do. And that's the absolute best, and you always get your way every time, and in this classroom, where you are encouraged to debate the pros and cons of every ideology and political system, you must not question this. Democracy is the best, it gives you everything, and that is non-negotiable." Maybe that's not exactly what I was taught, but my description of it 18 years later is pretty close to how it felt at the time, and you better believe I kicked off. I wasn't standing for this shit. Everyone turned on me; they were all indoctrinated too. They had no arguments, just, "B-b-b-but MUH DEMOCRACY!" Such a lively debate must have been a dream for the teacher, except he joined in, chatting shit and calling me a fool for questioning the accepted wisdom.

Nowadays, I'm not like that. I know that democracy, really, just means voting, but I too use the word as a shorthand for "the right way" for anything political. When the Iranian people vote in a hardline extremist, that's no good; they need democracy. Not the voting system that they have, which is perfectly free within some very strict limitations, but real democracy, where they vote how I would vote. Google and Amazon are so powerful they can act unilaterally to inbendsence government policy without asking anyone else; that's the sign a good proper democracy. Brexit wasn't democracy; it was a bad idea and therefore all those votes weren't real democracy. Democracy, now, is just whatever the right answer is, and so the wrong answer by definition cannot be democracy. It's like science for all those people who Fucking Love Science.

And again, I mentioned Iran above. Which of the following was more democratic: Iran under the Shah, a pro-Western literal king who made Iran into a popular and welcome player on the international stage, or Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an extremist who called America "The Great Satan" and made multiple speeches about nuking Israel, but who did in fact win elections?

I have never in my life missed an opportunity to vote, but I almost never pick a winner and I almost never get my way. But we're still better than Russia because I'm freer than I would be there. But isn't it weird how successfully society has convinced me, without actually giving me anything to persuade me?

>>37058
>inbendsence
Why do you keep doing this across the whole thread?

>>37059
That's the first time I, personally, have done that, I think. Sorry. I also forgot to sage even though a long essay all about myself is something I would encourage others to sage.

>>37059
Are you sure it's on purpose? Could be a conbendsence of bendskes.

>>37059

Our mods in their infinite wisdom sometimes like us to forsake certain combinations of letters, no matter what context they may appear in, for they are forbidden runes that shall bring out the devil.

Keep that in mind when you next go for your bends jab.

>>37058
>Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an extremist who called America "The Great Satan" and made multiple speeches about nuking Israel, but who did in fact win elections?
This is facile. Kim Jong-il won multiple elections, but nobody's about to paint DPRK as democratic other than themselves.

>>37063
In fairness, it might be fun to think about the matter of degree - and to what degree it applies in the DPRK.
My recollection is that in the USSR, although you'd always have the one nominated CPSU candidate, it was a perfectly valid option to vote against him or to not vote for him, and if he didn't get half the vote he wouldn't get in and you'd get a new candidate, so they did have to make a bit of an effort. North Korea is probably much worse, but there could always be more to it than it seems, even if nobody's pretending Kim Jong Un is elected.
Maybe you could even be cheeky and pick out a few UK MPs who're so useless, but in seats so safe, that they're probably less "democratically elected" than the candidate from the most assertive Soviet constituency, since nobody here's going to be kicked out for uselessness if their rosette matches the right candidate for PM.

>>37064

Elections in the DPRK have a single candidate for each seat. You can spoil your ballot, but there's no secrecy. The whole thing is of course a complete mockery of democracy, but it's quite a useful exercise for the party, as they get a neatly compiled list of traitors.

Officially, their elections have 99.99% turnout with 100% of votes being cast for the approved candidate.

>>37065

>Officially, their elections have 99.99% turnout with 100% of votes being cast for the approved candidate.

Similar to the German Democratic Republic in its final throes. It held its final general elections in spring of 1989 under the old regime, unbeknownst to everybody at the time, and had both a voter turnout and a ballot approval rate in the upper 90 percent. Except by that time, discontent among its people was already growing, and the opposition movement was able to prove that the government had commited voting fraud on an enormous scale by forging the numbers. Which only increased the people's wrath and was an important catalyst in the run-up to the peaceful revolution that autumn.

On the other hand, in faux-democracy communist countries, voter turnout is actually higher than in Britain where barely two-thirds of the electorate can be arsed to go. Because people fear the repercussions if they don't vote. There was a woman on a documentary about the German Democratic Republic, and she said that as a school teacher and thus somebody who was entrusted by the state with instilling socialist ideology into her pupils, she was simply expected to vote. And by the afternoon of that election day in 1989 when she still hadn't turned up to vote, the government sent secret police to her house to persuade her to go. She refused, and was laid off from her teaching position the next day.

>>36984
>Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko have extended military drills which were due to end on Sunday.
>At a sandbagged lookout position 24-year-old Taras told us there had been three days of heavy incoming fire. "I think Putin is doing it on purpose to provoke us," he said. "The situation has gotten worse, but we tolerate it, and we wait."
>Ukrainian forces say they have orders not to return fire - except in exceptional cases - as Russia is "looking for any excuse to invade".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60451955

Probably should've sold when I was on a high but I got smug. Now my investment will be tied up for weeks and is dependant on Taras not doing anything silly - I should send him a postcard.

>>37064
>nobody's pretending Kim Jong Un is elected.
He isn't. Kim Jong-un declined to stand in the 2019 election, preferring to focus on his various executive positions.

Iran's elections are not exactly free and fair, mostly the candidates get vetted beforehand. Radical reformers won't be attacked viciously in the press during their campaigns - they just won't be allowed to run.

Putin is in many ways trying to get the band back together. He's trying to go back to the glory days of the USSR, except that unlike those redfash types he's not bothering with the disguise of socialism.

>>37084

Even if he is trying to do that (which I don't think he is, because that would be patently daft when they're all already in NATO and the EU) why is that Britain's problem?

I can see it being the EU's problem and obviously the Americans have a problem with anything that wasn't their express wish. But I don't see why it should bother the world's biggest off-shore tax haven. We want to be mates with everyone we possibly can these days, not pretend we're still the great Empire of old.

>>37085
>Even if he is trying to do that (which I don't think he is, because that would be patently daft when they're all already in NATO and the EU)
Belarus has a "Union State" agreement with Russia, which is basically the beginnings of a return to the Union. He's made manoeuvres on Ukraine and Georgia. Things are looking a bit uneasy in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, which have moved away from Cyrillic, but they're both dictatorships so are pretty easy to bring to heel if necessary. The mere fact of the Baltic states having joined the EU and NATO hasn't stopped him constantly trying to put the willies up them, almost as if to teach them a lesson. He's used it to pressure at least one of them to end their system of not extending citizenship to ethnic Russians unless they learn the local language, which was arguably somewhat unfair, but then again see the Nazi bar analogy which seems to have played out quite nicely in the Donbas.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60451955

>Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko have extended military drills which were due to end on Sunday.

>A statement cited the "deterioration of the situation" in east Ukraine as one reason for keeping an estimated 30,000 Russian troops in Belarus.


Was this his strategy all along? Pretending to innocently move 100,000-plus troops into close proximity to Ukraine for an exercise, secretly counting on their presence to cause turmoil in the Donbas, and to then move in because he really "has no choice", given that Russian minorities in Ukraine are suddenly in danger?

Putin has always been known as a shrewd strategist. This would enable him to maintain that it really was just a military exercise, but that things suddenly got bad and something needed to be done, and it then fell on his troops, which out of sheer coincidence just happened to be in the region in the hundreds of thousands.

>>37090
I still think he's trying to do something that will look like a clever move that outsmarted everyone else. What you're suggesting, I think, is what the West is predicting, which is why I don't think he'll do it. It's a crafty plan, but it doesn't have the full 4D chess vibe that I'm expecting.

Maybe it's like those people who stormed the Capitol to make Donald Trump remain President, and Vladimir Putin is just innocently stomping around outside Ukraine to embolden the pro-Russia parts of Ukraine into rising up all on their own. But I can't tell if that's cleverer or much, much dumber.

>>37091
>Maybe it's like those people who stormed the Capitol to make Donald Trump remain President, and Vladimir Putin is just innocently stomping around outside Ukraine to embolden the pro-Russia parts of Ukraine into rising up all on their own.

Very much that. Friends of mine who visit Russia often describe Putin as most like the ex leader of the UK Independence Party - someone who appeals to baser nationalistic sentiment.

>>37091

It does have that whole "piss on my leg and tell me it's raining" vibe though that Putin is famous for. Like when they had that referendum in Crimea, to give it just a bit of veneer that a whole region with a substantial majority of the vote suddenly wanted to secede from Ukraine because they loved Russia so much.

Up to this point today, I thought maybe the West was just hyperventilating with its warnings of an imminent Russian invasion into Ukraine. But you can't deny that there are threads coming together now that really could end up spelling doom. And it could very realistically result in a new world war. If we just look at how quickly the entire European continent got drawn into WWI because of alliances and assurances that countries would come to each other's aid.

I've been thinking about just effing off to some remote island while there is still time. But realistically, what are you going to do when you're there and there's really a global nuclear war. With all supply routes severed and nuclear winter reaching even the most remote corners of the globe, places like St. Helena would quickly starve and would not be able to sustain a population of locals and other refugees for long. So it's best to just sit back on your sofa in Essex and wait to be vaporised.

>>37093
If I'm going to get nuked, I'm going to get nuked at the pre-nuke orgy in a major British city. The world still owes me the post-coronavirus pandemic orgies that I promised myself. I'm not going to look like the start of Terminator 2 on my bloody own like a mug.

Besides, there is, I assume, still time to learn how to hack into critical Russian infrastructure and make poo come out of all the shower heads. And I can picture no nobler death than dying while doing that.

>>37093
>If we just look at how quickly the entire European continent got drawn into WWI because of alliances and assurances that countries would come to each other's aid.

Everyone's ruled out properly helping Ukraine so it'll be fine. But onto your scenario it would be the northern hemisphere that gets shafted, South America will escape the worst of it although perhaps the living will envy the dead.

>>37095

>Everyone's ruled out properly helping Ukraine so it'll be fine.

I'm not sure though that the West is actually going to stand by and just watch Putin take Ukraine. Sanctions obviously haven't done anything to make him see the error of his ways, and are unlikely to do so in the future. So they'll probably be looking at more decisive ways of punishing Putin.

Even with no direct involvement of NATO troops in Ukraine, it could end up becoming another proxy war like the Soviet-Afghan War, which gets dragged out because of constant arms deliveries to the Ukrainian military, but with the Afghan quagmire of 1979-89 still in Russian living memory, for somebody like Putin anyway, he's probably not going to let that happen again. At some point, he could just threaten to invade Poland or the Baltic states or whatever NATO country lends active support to the Ukrainians. Of course that would trigger WW3 proper, but as wars can go, even if they are regionally limited at first, often one thing can lead to another.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHLU0Uej1WA

>>37096
So you're saying that, in order to avoid another Afghanistan, Putin will trigger another Great Patriotic War that he is certain to lose and which he doesn't have the forces to even attempt to fight.

Nah, the Russian battleplan was already leaked and involved him taking Ukraine step-by-step with phases for new negotiations. The West knows that the combination of sanctions and military aid to Ukraine raises the cost of war and Russia has historically been cost-sensitive in how it conducts wars. Russia can't even afford to occupy Novorossiya much less with the West supporting the insurgency, it can't afford it in terms of the economic cost nor the soldiers (unless it tries a draft) nor the equipment. So Georgia II.

>>37096
>Sanctions obviously haven't done anything to make him see the error of his ways, and are unlikely to do so in the future.
Well, there are sanctions and then there are sanctions. Sanctions are what we've done to Afghanistan, and everyone's starving to death there now. I know there's some international payment system that most people have never heard of (Swift?) which lets banks transfer money internationally or something like that. If we got angry enough with Russia, we could just switch that off and then Russia can't transfer money to other countries, nor receive money from foreign countries, at all. This all sounds incredibly dull, but it would be very harmful to the Russian economy. If it annoys the people enough, he'll have another Russian Revolution on his hands, although to be fair, I can't think of any revolutions off the top of my head that started due to the effects of economic sanctions.

Russia have also spent a lot of money to build Nord Stream 2, so if nobody buys the gas, they're lumbered with a gigantic money sink. Of course, this also means much higher gas prices for all of Europe, and this is why we haven't done it yet. You're absolutely right that sanctions haven't made Vladimir Putin see the error of his ways yet, but he doesn't have to see the error of his ways if all the other Russians can see that they're suddenly broke and can no longer afford their Adidas tracksuits, flat caps and swastika tattoos.

>>37098

>I can't think of any revolutions off the top of my head that started due to the effects of economic sanctions.

Revolutions start when a critical mass of average people are so disgusted with their country's leadership that they just don't want to put up with it anymore.

In every country, there's always a fringe minority of people dreaming of revolution, even if they live in a country which by reasonable standards has a government that by and large treats its people fairly. But as a leader, if you piss off too many people at once, then it can get the ball rolling and once it's beyond that critical mass, even all the fence sitters and those who were just mildly dissatisfied with their leaders will join in.

If Russia gets cut off from SWIFT, it could be that a lot of Russians are going to say "I'm probably more adept at climbing a tree than somebody like you, that's it!!". Then again, it's not certain. Especially with the sanctions of the last couple of years, Russia is not as dependent on international trade anymore as it once was. I'm not sure with what technology Russia handles domestic money transfers, but it will probably not bring their whole financial system to a halt, as SWIFT only processes international transactions.

>>37099

>it could be that a lot of Russians are going to say "I'm probably more adept at climbing a tree than somebody like you, that's it!!"

Mirth.

>>37099
> SWIFT only processes international transactions.

Not the case - banks routinely use SWIFT to send each other money and confirm transactions, it's a bit like a special internet for banks; that isn't to say that there aren't other methods that Russian banks could fall back on domestically, but it's a big deal to lose access to it. Still don't think it would make that much difference to Putins planning; they'll just do it the old way, using Telex or Fax.

The gas part is relevant - as we get further into the year and weather warms up, gas prices drop so Vlad loses some of that leverage. Again, not convinced it's going to make a huge difference to his thinking.

>>37101

Russians are used to making sacrifices. Not only did they put up with 70 years of communism, but if you look at things like Stalin's Scorched Earth strategy in WWII which ordered retreating Russian troops to destroy all useful supplies and food resources of villages along the way so they wouldn't fall into the hands of the Germans, they are not above cutting off a limb to save their lives.

>>37101

The Russians started their own interbank transfer system (SPFS) in 2014, in response to the threat of US sanctions. This system has connections to a number of international banks, so blocking Russian access to SWIFT would be an inconvenience rather than a crisis. They also have their own domestic card payment system due to sanctions restricting Russian access to Visa and Mastercard networks.

Banning Russia from SWIFT has already been ruled out. Ostensibly this is because of concerns over debt repayments to European lenders, but I think there's a fear that disconnecting Russia from SWIFT could be the first step in creating a new iron curtain. Russia built SPFS as a backup option, but forcing them to rely on it could increase the adoption of it in countries with significant economic ties to Russia. SWIFT is effectively controlled by the US and monitored by the NSA, so creating a viable alternative would be a massive own-goal.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/swift-off-russia-sanctions-list-state-banks-likely-target-us-eu-officials-2022-02-11/

Can we just send Andrew in to sort them out like he did with the Argies? Kill two birds with one stone by keeping him away from here in case Brenda dies.

The thing I think sanction fetishists are forgetting is that for much of the 20th century, Russia was pretty much cut off from the Western world entirely, and did reasonably alright for itself. It just seems a very odd line of logic, to me, if you think Putin wants to bring back the USSR, that imposing our own iron curtain on him will somehow do much to discourage it.

It always comes off as a naively Seppo, neoliberal way of viewing things. Those kind of sanctions might be terrible and topple governments if they were imposed on France, or the UK, or Australia, or wherever. But Russia isn't one of those places. It has more than enough of it's own natural resources to tick along, it's friendly with plenty of countries we're at best ambivalent with,but most importantly of all, it doesn't have much of a commitment to providing a high standard of living for it's people.

This is the bit that braindead Yank-worshiping NYT reading twats can't wrap their head around. Russia doesn't feel the effects of sanctions, because Russians are already eating rats and harvesting organs and turning themselves into zombies with krokodil and all kinds of shit. It's a different world. You're assuming that Russia would somehow fall apart like we nearly did when Waitrose didn't have our favourite brand of chips, but you're failing to understand Russia, on a fundamental civil level, is made out of nails and rusty razorblades.

>>37103

>Banning Russia from SWIFT has already been ruled out. Ostensibly this is because of concerns over debt repayments to European lenders

That consideration is much less tinfoilhattery than it seems.

Remember when Greece was allowed to join the Euro despite its sketchy public finances? Well, Greek companies but also government entities were deep in debt to banks in future Eurozone countries, most of all Deutsche Bank. Which feared that not including Greece in the Euro would run its Greek debtors bankrupt due to an imminent massive devaluation of the Drachma against the Euro. And so Deutsche Bank helped the Greek government manipulate its ledgers and present Greece's finances in far better health than they actually were.

>>37104
>Can we just send Andrew in to sort them out

I'm not sure how Christmas cheer could fix this situation.

>>37105
>The thing I think sanction fetishists are forgetting is that for much of the 20th century, Russia was pretty much cut off from the Western world entirely, and did reasonably alright for itself.

That's wrong though. Even without getting into the high-cost of doing business with the West throughout its existence, Soviet autarky is grossly overstated and the export of food is a big example of bad things happening.

>This is the bit that braindead Yank-worshiping NYT reading twats can't wrap their head around. Russia doesn't feel the effects of sanctions, because Russians are already eating rats and harvesting organs and turning themselves into zombies with krokodil and all kinds of shit.

That's just some racist chest-beating. I can certainly think of one case where economic hardship combined with an unpopular war led to revolution in Russia, technically two.

>>37109

>Soviet autarky is grossly overstated

Is it though? Whichever way you slice it, they were doing well enough behind the iron curtain that their existence was the only reason our leaders gave us concessions like the welfare state. Their decline is the reason our leaders got complacent enough to do away with those things.

>I can certainly think of one case where economic hardship combined with an unpopular war led to revolution in Russia, technically two.

While this is true, you've got to be daft to think Ukraine and Putin will be one of those times. Putin is still insanely popular, Ukraine has a sizeable ethnic Russian base. What we're looking at here could be much more akin to the Troubles (and the same way the Yanks always drastically oversimplify that in such a way as to piss off paddies and prods alike).

>>37110
>their existence was the only reason our leaders gave us concessions like the welfare state
I appreciate it's tangential but this strikes me as a very self-congratulatory view from those sympathetic to the USSR. Our welfare state in particular has its roots before the Russian revolution, and a lot of Labour's postwar extension of it is arguably an overhyped extension of that Liberalism rather than "really" being social democratic, let alone socialist. The NHS stands out as an exception in being universal, not really having a contributory element (except glasses/dentures, thanks Gaitskell.), but when looking at the USSR the incentives for starting a national health service are as much hard-headed as altruistic - "buying the workers off with human dignity so they don't revolt" can be counterbalanced with a bit of"making sure the workers aren't riddled with disease so they can take up a rifle or a post in a rifle-factory in the next war."
Then we've to ask why the groundwork was laid for the crushing of the unions in the 1970s, when the USSR was still with us. Stagnant, sure, but even the final collapse came as a bit of a shock. If the capitalists aren't outright seers, at the time where postwar worker-power peaked they certainly decided to risk a revolution the USSR might've supported over continuing along the compromise route of incomes policy balanced by social spending.

It's also worth adding some interesting trivia: I forget the precise decade, 70s, 80s, or 90s, but in the British case it was quite recently that we actually started to spend more on welfare than on warfare. (David Edgerton's got some good writing on this.) We're arguably more of a welfare state now than we were under Attlee in that respect, even if that money isn't always finding its way to the right people due to the desire of successive work and pensions ministers to design the most kafkaesque systems possible, and the last Labour government accidentally triangulating away all sympathy for the unemployed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60454795

There you have it lads. He has gone and done it. Similar to what he did in Georgia and Crimea. There will be sanctions and nothing else.

>>37112
>>37113

I have to say I didn't think he'd go in for quite such a shameless smash and grab. Up until today, I still had a little bit of doubt and thought that just maybe, the West was being overdramatic. Especially when Biden predicted the invasion.

But it was planned all along. The point of having 100,000-plus troops in that region wasn't a military exercise, however much he tried to pull the wool over our eyes. Far from it.

So what comes now? Ukraine getting arse raped by Putin while the world is watching and doing little more than yet more sanctions? NATO increasing its troops in the bordering regions? World war 3?

>>37114
Nothing much will happen, until Putin does something similar again. And even then, nothing more than just "limited sanctions" will be tried.

>>37114
Finger wagging, dissatisfied sighing and not much else.

>>37114

>So what comes now?

Several more rounds of "Do anything like that again and there will be serious consequences!". There will not be consequences.

>>37116

He has ruined Palindrome Day for everybody though. A lot of people are going to get married on 22-2-22. What if one day, this date will be looked back on as the beginning of WW3?

Then again, a lot of marriages end up feeling like that anyway.

>>37117
Can you envisage any "serious consequences" that wouldn't result in countless deaths?

>>37114
>Up until today, I still had a little bit of doubt
That's a good point actually. I've been telling people it's just been posturing and Russia doing the aggressive shrug-and-lean-forward move for weeks now, and yet now that Russian soldiers are entering the areas that Russia has unilaterally decided aren't Ukraine anyway and so it's okay, my thoughts immediately changed to, "Exactly what I knew would happen!" and I never even noticed. I guess it's the magic of unreliable media.

Bladdermir Poopin is going to be utterly livid next week, though, when China annexes absolutely all of Eastern Siberia and there's nothing he can do about it. And using Yandex for your porno searches is now going to be an act of treason. Without wanking, I might as well sign up to be shot at.

>>37114
NATO will want to send a strong message which probably means energy prices are going to spike (we'll be better on this - Germany is fucked), banks and large financial institutions are being shafted as we speak for continually investing in Russia. Grain production will be hit in Ukraine which is the breadbasket of the Middle East - expect to see the ordinarily peaceful Middle East get bumpy on the back of rising food prices. We'll have more hour-long rambles from Putin on the news about how Ukrainians don't exist and the problem of the USSR was decentralization. Oh, and the government has ruled out taking in Ukrainian refugees so don't expect any fanny out of this.

I might open the Covid thread again just to remember the halcyon days of 2020 when the only thing we needed to worry about was a deadly airborne plague and 'adjusting' to a life of working from home in our pyjamas. Maybe I'll say the same about this thread in 2024 when the next box of horrors lands.

I have half been looking at rt.com and their coverage of the situation for a few days, with a mixture of amusement and disgust, but now they have decidedly gone from crude political cheerleading to dadaism.

https://www.rt.com/russia/550172-donetsk-lugansk-recognition-celebrations/

>Street celebrations broke out in breakaway republics, which Ukraine claims as its own territory, late on Monday after President Vladimir Putin said Moscow will “immediately recognize the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) People’s Republics.”

>Footage from the scene shows fireworks lighting up the skies above Donetsk, which has been the capital of the DPR for nearly eight years.

>>37118
YouTube just recommended Bad Day by REM to me. Admittedly, I did listen to it a couple of months ago, but not since and it's not the music I normally listen to on YouTube.

Of course, the Americans have been arming the Ukrainians, and we how much they spend on their military. There's still a small chance that Ukraine will unleash a thousand laser-shooting Terminators to walk all the way to Moscow, wiping out absolutely everything in their path.

Is this really much of a change in the status quo?
I'm not trying to engage in Putin apologia, I'm just finding it hard to tell if he's "really" invaded Ukraine, or if he's "just" sending more troops into the area he invaded ages ago (but pretended not to), thus dropping the pretending, which is bad but a little bit less bad than grabbing a "new" area of Ukraine.

>>37124
"He" isn't doing shit. If this escalates it involves many more people.

>>37124

Putin has denied all involvement with the coup in Donetsk and Lugansk. Russian engagement thus far had been mainly through mercenaries and non-uniformed Spetsnaz soldiers. This change will see a huge increase in the Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, greatly increasing the likelihood of further invasions. It also greatly reduces the possibility of Ukraine regaining those territories.

IMO the evacuation of civilians from the disputed region is a particularly worrying sign, as it suggests that Putin is planning to fight.

The OCSE looks like a good resource for reporting on violations of ceasefires and de-escalation agreements:

https://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/reports

The UK, US, and Canada have recently withdrawn their staff, and now briefing their media that the OCSE is biased. Make of that what you will.

>>37123

Isn't it more like they just get a shitload of old M4s that their troops are unfamiliar and untrained with because they normally use AKs? They're not in NATO either so they probably won't even take STANAG mags and ammunition, so they'll be a liability more than anything else. If they're lucky there might be some fancy missiles and a couple of drones, but I don't think the US is giving much of the good stuff away.

Surely they've learned their lesson about that now after they spent months doing it with anti-Assad rebels and then suddenly out of nowhere in a completely unforeseeable turn of events, ISIS started existing.

Have we considered sending Gaza to the Kremlin with a KFC bucket and a fishing rod?

Whoops, *Gazza. First post wouldn't help much.

>>37128

Ukraine has a weird hodge-podge of small arms, so a big box of M4s wouldn't be the worst thing as long as they come with an equally big box of ammo.

What they really need is MANPADs, which they're being supplied in useful quantities by their near neighbours. Lithuania and Poland have agreed to supply a useful quantity of Stinger and Piorun systems respectively. The Yanks have chipped in some SMAW-D systems, but I'm honestly not sure what use they'd be.

>>37131
I don't think getting their nails did will help them, lad.

>>37128
>>37131
I've been trying to resist playing armchair general on this but:

Ukraine has been armed with squad-based anti-tank and anti-air weapons - for the past 8 years the Ukrainian army has been built up with support from the West to fight the kind of defensive war it will be fighting against Russia where small isolated pockets of mostly Ukrainian infantry will need to cause havoc against overwhelming Russian armoured and air superiority.

As we saw from the Nagorno-Karabakh War your superior air power is totally neutralised if you're afraid of losing it and just as then Turkish drones instead take the skies. Even in Syria this was made apparent by Russia ensuring both before and during its intervention that anti-aircraft weapons would never fall into rebel hands with diplomacy. This also applies to artillery where Ukraine has been supplied with tracking technology so that when Russian artillery opens fire it will be quickly found and destroyed. If that gets magically jammed then the US can just supply the Ukrainians with information by satellite.

In Syria the rebels were never armed with the kind of weapons Ukraine has. It's a different game much as you might want Ukrainian ISIS.

If Ukraine is part of Russia, doesn't that mean Russia will be invading Russia, in winter? We all know how that goes.

>>37134

> invading Russia, in winter? We all know how that goes

The Germans made the miscalculation that a victory against Russia in WWII would be a quick affair, much the same way that Hitler overran Western Europe within a few months. The German invasion into Russia started in late June and Hitler thought his troops would long be in Moscow by the first snow. Where things started going wrong was that the autumn of 1941 was an unusually wet and rainy period across much of western Russia, and the Germans got stuck in the mud in their thousands on countless unfortified roads. This slowed the advance considerably, and as winter drew closer, new problems arose in that they went to Russia with relatively light gear to begin with, which was adequate for a summer invasion, but was no match for the fierce Russian winter. Soldiers lacked such basic things as proper warm coats. And it all just derailed from there. But they also didn't take into account the tenacity of the Russian army and their determination to defend their country with all their might.

>>37135

>>37134
Spring thaw's the worst part, because the ground turns to soup. Also Napoleon nor Hitler didn't have modern fighter-bomber jets.

I think I hate Ben Wallace.

>>37140
He's seemed all right to me in general so far. As a Conservative minister, I'm sure he can't be; what don't you like.about him?

>>37141
Today's the second time he's made some idiotic historical comparison in an attempt to sound intelligent, despite said hitorical event being at best meaningless and at worst actively unhelpful in the current situation. I highly doubt the Russian government are hanging on our defense secretary's every word, but beating your chest and hooting about the Crimean War at this time is just plain stupid. Not to mention there was another, much larger, war between then and now that might be worth bringing up as a more positive example of internation cooperation and how smaller conflicts can quickly spiral out of control. After all, Adolf Hitler's plan was to fight a few small wars, more like fait accomplis, for territory he wanted before starting The Big One in 1941. Not that I think Putin is Hitler or this will turn into a world war, but therein lie the limits of tracing historical events onto contemporary ones, you have to spend twice as much time explaining why it's unlike what's happening than you did saying why it is like it. However, it's still more relevant than talking about what a bunch of top lads the Scotch Guards are because 30 years ago you were in the regiment while it sat around in post-everything-Germany, and how they'll stick it to Ivan like it was 1855 and the Russians are still using smoothbore muskets wielded by a terrified serf.

>>37142
>Wallace, a former Scots Guards officer, argues his regiment "kicked the backside" of Tsar Nicholas I in the mid-19th century Crimean war, adding "we can always do it again".
For fuck's sake. What a tit. I would say that this is the sort of political insight an eight-year-old would offer, and it is, but the worst thing about it is that this country is full of people who really love to hear such puerile imbecility. He's saying it for them, not for us, I hope.

In other news, the big strong Western media is pointing out all the flaws in various false-flag attacks:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/60470089
For example, there's a video of a chlorine tank being attacked by Polish soldiers, except the metadata shows the video was made ten days before its release, and its sound was taken from 2010 footage of a Finnish shooting range:
https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1495355366141534208?s=24
There's also a car that was blown up, except it has no numberplates and there is no blood, suggesting it was just some random abandoned car the Donetskians blew up for a photo, and the leader of the Donetsk region made a video saying, "Today, on the 18th of February..." and the metadata says it was recorded on the 16th.

I've been saying the Russians are good at media manipulation. Maybe they're not. I'm happy to not always trust Western media unquestioningly, but I'd like to think the BBC wouldn't make such rookie errors.

>>37145
I think the sort of people they're aiming the stuff at are those not likely to actually go poking into it.

America really suckered Putin with this Ukraine plan, eh?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/24/russia-has-invaded-ukraine-what-we-know-so-far
There we go then.
Do I get any points for being the first to jump on the "Well, I didn't expect that" bandwagon?

>>37152
Stupid quoatation marks AND it's from The Daily Express? Don't post this sort of shite on here again, please.

Worth remembering that part of the reason Hitler invaded Poland, according to him, was that Poland was allegedly mistreating the German population of Gdánsk, and that the safety of Germany as a nation was at risk. Putin took a page out of none other than Hitler's playbook to justify this invasion?

Will it lead to WW3? Part of me thinks that question is pointless from today. But let's hope not.

Is this the first war without an ideological struggle at its heart?
I'm listening to the radio and I really don't see the 'we need to stand up for Western Democracy' arguement that's being parroted.

I may be speaking from britprivilege, but is our brand of neoliberalism really that different from the Russian version? I'm far too much of a coward anyway, but at least I can imagine being motivated to go off and fight for the Kurds etc., but can't really see anyone laying down their life to defend First Past the Post.

I'd love to know if non-NATO Europeans still see the Western social democratic model as aspirational, or have they become more cynical over the last decade?

>>37156
I should add I understand the issue of Ukrainian sovereignty, I'm just navel gazing to the wider international support and the possibility of the war spreading.

>>37156

Say you have two countries that profit from exporting kicks in the bollocks but one of them also oppresses the gays and goes on little lebensraum wars occasionally and the other is ok to the gays and occasionally invades far off places to depose random dictators for no good reason.
It's all shit.

I think we all owe 2020 an apology.

>>37156
Ukraine is a democracy. That's the issue driving this whole escapade.

>>37158

I've never really liked the inbendsence that NATO has on the Western world, in that it is very realistically the military arm of American foreign policy. On the face of it, NATO may be organised democratically in that the decision making process is usually subject to member state votes. But that doesn't mean the Americans, and the Americans only aren't calling the shots behind closed doors.

That said, NATO is our only hope against the red Russian menace right now. Unless Putin truly has a death wish, he isn't going to invade the former Soviet satellite states that are now in NATO, and thus expand what is currently still a regional conflict.

Could all still go horribly wrong. Putin has already said that any meddling of the West in Ukraine will be met with never seen before consequences. My guess is that the likelihood of global nuclear war has risen by about 30 percent over night. Nice knowing you, lads.

>>37160
>My guess is that the likelihood of global nuclear war has risen by about 30 percent over night. Nice knowing you, lads.

I had a horrifying moment last night when I realised the last post on .gs and my last thought would be shagging Ant & Dec in drag.

>>37155
They've certainly seized a lot of Ukraine and all of Belarus in that picture, but also, where is the sovereign NATO state of Lithuania? Ukraine is apparently quite a rubbish place, but if they go after my national waifu Lithuania I am going to be very angry indeed.

>>37161

As a consolation, if WW3 really breaks out, there will be nobody left to point fingers at you.

Being in the Southeast here should make everything quick. London will probably be flattened by one or two thermonuclear devices, and their immediate kill radius should include much of Essex.

https://The Metro is owned by the Daily Mail./2022/02/22/nuke-map-reveals-deadly-impact-russias-bombs-could-cause-if-dropped-on-london-16147987/

Worryingly, the site nuclearsecrecy.com where you can create those maps is unreachable at the moment. I guess a lot of people right now are pondering their chances of survival in a nuclear attack on their local area.

So, are we likely to be directly affected by any of this?
Gas & Leccy rationing?

Buy the dip now that the panic has set into the market or wait and see if it goes lower tomorrow?

>>37164
I hope you're not running low on toilet paper.

>>37165

>Buy the dip now that the panic has set into the market or wait and see if it goes lower tomorrow?

With a view to owning your stocks for a longer period of time, and provided we don't all get nuked by Moscow, today could be a good day to start bargain hunting.

The start of a war has usually been a very good long-term opportunity. What keeps retail investors from profiting from it a lot of times is that they either speculate on stocks going even lower and then missing the rebound, or getting scared and selling at the lowest point.

Your money, your decisions. No investment advice.

If you're talking about investments I think you just hang yourself. Vile cunts.

>>37167

Now, now.

Hate the game, not the players.