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Post by racingteatray on Mar 3, 2022 14:00:06 GMT
And Ukraine wasn't and hasn't to date been allowed to join NATO. The Ukrainians have long wanted membership and have long been denied it, because it was sensibly deemed an unwarranted provocation of Putin.
The point is that this invasion gives the lie to Putin's true intentions. He never wanted a buffer zone. He wants a greater Russia - they even accidentally released a victory tape (hastily deleted) crowing about achieving the reunification of the Russian peoples. The reason for objecting to NATO membership is extremely simple - countries inside NATO are nigh on impossible to subjugate whereas those outside can be targeted with far more impunity (accompanied by threats to blow everyone to smithereens in a nuclear holocaust if anyone stops you).
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Post by garry on Mar 3, 2022 14:33:14 GMT
Putin's true intentions seem quite transparent.
When NATO flirted with Georgia becoming a member he said it was a red line. They ignored him, he started a war.
Now NATO flirted with Ukraine becoming a member he said it was a red line. They ignored him, he started a war.
Not quite triangulation, but a pattern of behaviour.
We can make any number of assumptions as to why he doesn't want a NATO border, but he's pretty clear that he doesn't. As for him wanting a greater Russia, perhaps he does, but it strikes me that it's worth exploring whether the thing that he keeps telling us he wants (and starting wars because he says it's so important) is the thing he actually wants.
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 3, 2022 14:47:02 GMT
He doesn’t want a NATO border but is happy to keep moving west until he meets one…… then another …… then another. When the Soviets controlled Hungary they didn’t like the relative freedoms of Czechoslovakia so went there in 1968.
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Post by PG on Mar 3, 2022 14:47:35 GMT
It seems to me the only possible weapon we have against Russia is to squeeze them financially. Change can only come from within. There's a danger the sanctions will only strengthen Putins power but its a risk we take. I see Musk is turning off charges in Russia and giving free electric to Ukrainian drivers. I've no idea if this is possible and I don't imagine Teslas are very popular in downtown Kiev but its a good start. I look forward to other companies doing similar. Yes, but that can be done more diplomatically without the chest-thumping and rubbing their noses in it. Russians have long memories and I do not think it is sensible to unnecessarily alienate an entire country when we really just want to stymie their leader. I think it risks being highly counter-productive in the longer term. Unfortunately just targeting a leader is hard and, short of managing to kill him, not going to change his mind. Putin isn't going to starve / be poor / have to live in a hovel. But if enough of his people do suffer, especially the middle classes and officer class, internal rebellion is more likely. War (and we are now back in the new Cold War, whether we like it or not) requires a nation's people to suffer - and be able to see that there are better alternatives - in order to make that nation change its view. The end of the last Cold Wart gave Russians access to the full spectrum of Western fringe benefits and created a whole new Russian middle class. Those benefits need to be removed again to make the see that removing Putin and his cronies is the only long term solution. |
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Post by garry on Mar 3, 2022 14:58:53 GMT
He doesn’t want a NATO border but is happy to keep moving west until he meets one…… then another …… then another. When the Soviets controlled Hungary they didn’t like the relative freedoms of Czechoslovakia so went there in 1968. A bit of poetic licence there! As well as being 50 years ago, in the Soviet era when the Warsaw Pact was in full swing, the two events were 15 years apart I think? |
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 3, 2022 15:15:12 GMT
He doesn’t want a NATO border but is happy to keep moving west until he meets one…… then another …… then another. When the Soviets controlled Hungary they didn’t like the relative freedoms of Czechoslovakia so went there in 1968. A bit of poetic licence there! As well as being 50 years ago, in the Soviet era when the Warsaw Pact was in full swing, the two events were 15 years apart I think? 12 years. I agree on the timescale but the reforms being pushed from Prague (ie more like Western Europe) were the trigger to invade a neighbour. As to the Warsaw Pact element I don’t think the pact was the kind of collegiate forum NATO is: Moscow led end of story. Putin’s views were formed by this period of Russia is boss and any view of even semi independence from Moscow is anathema. |
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 3, 2022 15:47:21 GMT
French news is reporting an hour long conversation between Macron and Putin this morning in which Putin said he was having Ukraine and nobody and nothing was going to stop him.
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Post by PG on Mar 3, 2022 20:56:38 GMT
French news is reporting an hour long conversation between Macron and Putin this morning in which Putin said he was having Ukraine and nobody and nothing was going to stop him. That is very sad but probably true. There is nothing militarily that NATO can do. He may well inherit a pile of rubble and bodies (Ukranian and Russian) and ruin his own country in the process, but that won't stop him. Only other Russians can stop Putin. And if nobody does, the west has to learn to live in Cold War II. That's going to be complete mind-fuck for a huge percentage of populations who are too young to remember the Cold War I. Defence spending will have to rise at the expense of social policies, that or people are going to have pay a lot more tax. Freedom is not free - we have to pay for it. The important thing is that Putin has to understand that that is it. One boot in a NATO territory and he's declared war on NATO. |
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 3, 2022 21:20:51 GMT
So we've had the white horse and now the red horse.
When are the black one and the pale one arriving?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2022 21:23:17 GMT
In Putin's mind, NATO declared war by allowing eu expansion right up to his borders. He is an old school communist former KGB man.
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Post by PG on Mar 4, 2022 9:59:28 GMT
So we've had the white horse and now the red horse. When are the black one and the pale one arriving? Famine? Oh, he'll be along shortly.... from the business pages of the DT online this morning: “China has bought enormous quantities of US soy in recent weeks,” said Rabobank. One might ask if Xi Jinping knew something in advance.
Record food commodity prices are an ordeal by fire for some 45 poorer countries that rely heavily on food imports: the Maghreb, the non-oil Middle East, swaths of Africa, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan. The World Food Programme warned of “catastrophic” scarcity for several hundred million people last November. The picture is worse today.
“Everything is going up vertically. The whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, the ex-head of agro-markets at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
“I have never seen anything like it in 30 years and I fear that prices are going to go much higher in the 2022-2023 season. The situation is just awful and at some point people are going to realise what may be coming. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, and the mood could get very nasty even in OECD countries like Britain,” he said.
Energy and farm commodities are interlinked. Natural gas is a feedstock for fertiliser production in Europe, and lest we forget, Russia and Belarus together account for a third of the world’s exports of potash. Rocketing oil prices are driving a switch to biodiesel in South East Asia, further tightening the global market for vegetable oils.
Roughly 33pc of world exports of barley come from Russia and Ukraine combined, 29pc of wheat, 19pc of maize, as well as 80pc of sunflower oil. Much of this is usually shipped through the Black Sea ports of Odesa, or Kherson - scene of hand-to-hand street battles until it fell on Wednesday - or Mykolaiv, where a Russian missile hit a Bangladeshi-flagged bulk carrier this week and killed one of the crew." |
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Post by PG on Mar 4, 2022 10:03:46 GMT
And just to cheeer everyone up, I see Russian forces shelled a nuclear power station yesterday, starting a fire. I can think of a few reasons why they'd do that:
They're fucking stupid
They think that if they cause a nuclear meltdown Ukraine will capitulate
Putin knows that any meltdown will hit the west worse than Russia due to the prevailing winds so this is his "response you've never seen before"
He's trying to goad NATO into taking action
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Post by garry on Mar 4, 2022 12:42:48 GMT
And just to cheeer everyone up, I see Russian forces shelled a nuclear power station yesterday, starting a fire. I can think of a few reasons why they'd do that: They're fucking stupid They think that if they cause a nuclear meltdown Ukraine will capitulate Putin knows that any meltdown will hit the west worse than Russia due to the prevailing winds so this is his "response you've never seen before" He's trying to goad NATO into taking action What are the risks with shelling a nuclear power station? It sounds like a crazy thing to do and certainly gets lots of attention, but I suspect the chances of a shell penetrating a nuclear core are zero. I seem to remember reading that a fully loaded commercial jet flown into one was very unlikely to penetrate to the core. These will be water cooled reactors so I guess worse case scenario is that they will shut down. Feel free to correct me if anyone knows more about this topic, but I strongly suspect that the risk of some nuclear explosion is zero (there'd be nothing like the density is a nuclear reactor vs a nuclear bomb) and the chances of radiation leaks are tiny (see above). Not suggesting it's a good idea, but i think it might be more calculated and 'sane' than first appears. |
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 4, 2022 12:58:37 GMT
Current storage design for waste decrees two simultaneous hits by a pair of A380s (guess what I’m working on…….) The problem with ordnance attacks is that they’re not factored in as the assumption is the most likely attack will be terrorist based, not military as attacking a nuclear power plant is banned under the Geneva Convention.
Any uncontrolled release of very active material is horrendous - remember that stored material is already depleted but still has a 100 year storage requirement. The act of attacking one is more a sign of reckless insanity and desperation than anything else as the aim of gaining land is ended by not having land that is usable.
For Russia and ROTW the only “out” is a change of leadership allowing a change of policy allied to immunity for Putin’s inner circle.
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Post by Ben on Mar 4, 2022 13:36:36 GMT
Putin argues that his sovereign concerns trump those of Ukraine, the Baltic States, Finland etc, and that effectively those countries do not enjoy the same sovereign rights as others to self-determination. This is a simple fact. Big, powerful countries exercise more sovereign rights than their near neighbours when it comes to security. It's not ideal, but it's true. Is Mexico free to exercise its sovereign rights and form an alliance with Russia? Could Canada form a military alliance with China? We should also be very careful on what we wish for with regards to self determination. Let the buffer zone countries become members of NATO and because of Article 5 a minor regional conflict could escalate to world war three. That's a slippery slope to go down, because it means going back to the days of colonisation. I don't think that's where we want to be heading towards. |
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Post by Alex on Mar 4, 2022 13:51:06 GMT
I'm still trying to work our what possible end game Putin has here. It feels like the obvious outcome is to overthrow the Ukrainian government and take out the president by either forcing him to flee or murdering him. But what then? How does the Russian army of 250000 troops manage a population of 40m spread over a country the size of Ukraine? Especially when the cost of keeping them armed is restricted by international sanctions and said 40m people are rather nonplussed at having had their homes bombed? If the government survive to the end of this month I'll be surprised but Putins war could rumble on for years.
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Post by Tim on Mar 4, 2022 14:09:42 GMT
And just to cheeer everyone up, I see Russian forces shelled a nuclear power station yesterday, starting a fire. I can think of a few reasons why they'd do that: They're fucking stupid They think that if they cause a nuclear meltdown Ukraine will capitulate Putin knows that any meltdown will hit the west worse than Russia due to the prevailing winds so this is his "response you've never seen before" He's trying to goad NATO into taking action What are the risks with shelling a nuclear power station? It sounds like a crazy thing to do and certainly gets lots of attention, but I suspect the chances of a shell penetrating a nuclear core are zero. I seem to remember reading that a fully loaded commercial jet flown into one was very unlikely to penetrate to the core. These will be water cooled reactors so I guess worse case scenario is that they will shut down. Feel free to correct me if anyone knows more about this topic, but I strongly suspect that the risk of some nuclear explosion is zero (there'd be nothing like the density is a nuclear reactor vs a nuclear bomb) and the chances of radiation leaks are tiny (see above). Not suggesting it's a good idea, but i think it might be more calculated and 'sane' than first appears. I imagine that since the reactors require a lot of water cooling all you'd have to do to cause mayhem would be damage the pipes, or even the control system. Anyway, they hit an admin building so can we have a minutes silence for all those pen pushers who have been eviscerated. |
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 4, 2022 14:41:58 GMT
If the water supply is disrupted then the controls would remove the rods to perform a controlled shut down I would imagine.
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 4, 2022 14:55:03 GMT
If the water supply is disrupted then the controls would remove the rods to perform a controlled shut down I would imagine. How modern is this particular power plant? |
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 4, 2022 14:55:34 GMT
I'm still trying to work our what possible end game Putin has here. It feels like the obvious outcome is to overthrow the Ukrainian government and take out the president by either forcing him to flee or murdering him. But what then? How does the Russian army of 250000 troops manage a population of 40m spread over a country the size of Ukraine? Especially when the cost of keeping them armed is restricted by international sanctions and said 40m people are rather nonplussed at having had their homes bombed? If the government survive to the end of this month I'll be surprised but Putins war could rumble on for years. Nonplussed is a spectacularly British way of putting it! |
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Post by garry on Mar 4, 2022 15:41:43 GMT
This is a simple fact. Big, powerful countries exercise more sovereign rights than their near neighbours when it comes to security. It's not ideal, but it's true. Is Mexico free to exercise its sovereign rights and form an alliance with Russia? Could Canada form a military alliance with China? We should also be very careful on what we wish for with regards to self determination. Let the buffer zone countries become members of NATO and because of Article 5 a minor regional conflict could escalate to world war three. That's a slippery slope to go down, because it means going back to the days of colonisation. I don't think that's where we want to be heading towards. It's not a slippery slope. It's the playing field we've been on for generations. What were the Cuban missile crisis or the Vietnam war or the Georgian war about? The slippery slope is to pretend that powerful countries cannot and do not exert a sphere of influence. Imagine a world where every country decides it has the right to complete self determination - how many minutes after Taiwan joined NATO would an invasion start? |
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Post by alf on Mar 4, 2022 16:28:47 GMT
I found this interesting: edition.cnn.com/2022/03/02/europe/russia-ukraine-shifting-map-analysis-intl-cmd/index.htmlThe somewhat worrying conclusion of which would be that Putin would need to re-take the Baltic states, and possibly Poland, to really secure his position. As people have said - what does he need a buffer zone for??? Like with China in the south china sea, it suggests a desire to crack on with things that he knows the world will object to, and he wants to get into what he perceives an invulnerable position first. I get very annoyed with the "its ours/the US's fault for taking Ukraine away from Russian influence" point of view. The citizens of countries within Putin's influence, as in the Communist days, have looked at what he and the West have to offer and have chosen the flawed - but better - options for democracy, freedom, safety and personal development/wealth in the west. Ukrainian voters went that way, we did not force them. NATO is not the US. It's a battle of ideologies between cronyist dictators and western democracy and is it any suprise voters in those countries have gone the way they have? Aspects of Russian culture did indeed develop in Kiev, but Poland has had more influence over Ukraine over the last millenia than Russia by far. We should not legitimise the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia annexed free countries and forcibly kept them close through murder and deprivation. They invaded Finland and Poland for no better reason than Hitler invaded various countries, and treated the people there much the same. Stalin was the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, it is scandalous how close the West was to him for a time, before they worked him out. As I said before, I don't believe for one moment that victory in Ukraine will be the last big project of Putin. And if people would like to explain why he is not like Hitler, I'm all ears - he faces a more connected world and a much more unified opposition than Hitler ever did, but his ramblings about Russian speaking peoples, and buffer zones, and so on are very familiar. As are his total focus on the outcome while playing at diplomacy entirely to distract - what we say or offer makes no difference. And his propaganda grip on his own people, cult of personality, and public chiding of his close circle are eerily similar also. He has used banned chemical and radioactive weapons on UK soil, he has invaded a major European democracy with an army hundreds of thousands strong, he does not give a flying fuck what we might offer him in terms of NATO limitations. Give him what he wants there, and he'll crack on with whatever his master project is with some other bunch of pretexts. The only silver lining is that his army is not performing remotely close to expectations, his or the West's. Continued difficulties, and massive sanctions (we should stop buying their blood-soaked oil and gas right now) might cause conditions that mean his own people remove him. But - unlike in Soviet days - there is no real mechanism for that now, and no obvious way out of this. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 4, 2022 17:07:43 GMT
What this situation needs is a 'friend' of putin to administer a lead aspirin. He is costing them their wealth, they and the ruski mafia should do the deed and settle this thing. Nobody else will get close enough.
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 4, 2022 17:27:18 GMT
What this situation needs is a 'friend' of putin to administer a lead aspirin. He is costing them their wealth, they and the ruski mafia should do the deed and settle this thing. Nobody else will get close enough. It seems that a good portion of the ruski mafia is in Ukraine trying to assassinate Zelensky on behalf of Putin, so that Putin can ostensibly plead innocence... |
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Post by Tim on Mar 4, 2022 19:20:20 GMT
What this situation needs is a 'friend' of putin to administer a lead aspirin. He is costing them their wealth, they and the ruski mafia should do the deed and settle this thing. Nobody else will get close enough. It seems that a good portion of the ruski mafia is in Ukraine trying to assassinate Zelensky on behalf of Putin, so that Putin can ostensibly plead innocence... Somewhat undermined by some of their own telling the Ukrainians what the plan was. Anyway good article here www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340 about why Putin is doing this. Basically he looked at an old map and thought he should recreate it! |
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Post by garry on Mar 5, 2022 7:39:22 GMT
I found this interesting: edition.cnn.com/2022/03/02/europe/russia-ukraine-shifting-map-analysis-intl-cmd/index.htmlThe somewhat worrying conclusion of which would be that Putin would need to re-take the Baltic states, and possibly Poland, to really secure his position. As people have said - what does he need a buffer zone for??? Like with China in the south china sea, it suggests a desire to crack on with things that he knows the world will object to, and he wants to get into what he perceives an invulnerable position first. Why does he want a buffer zone? Because he doesn’t want what he sees as hostile and expansionist forces camped on his border. NATO started as 8 countries, its now 30. Most of that growth coming from Eastern Europe. It’s hard to argue that it’s not expansionist. And if Ukraine can join NATO can Cuba establish a military alliance with Russia? |
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Post by garry on Mar 5, 2022 8:01:22 GMT
I get very annoyed with the "its ours/the US's fault for taking Ukraine away from Russian influence" point of view. The citizens of countries within Putin's influence, as in the Communist days, have looked at what he and the West have to offer and have chosen the flawed - but better - options for democracy, freedom, safety and personal development/wealth in the west. Ukrainian voters went that way, we did not force them. NATO is not the US. It's a battle of ideologies between cronyist dictators and western democracy and is it any suprise voters in those countries have gone the way they have? This is idealistic and simplistic. Most countries have political and military limitations because of where they are geographically and who exerts power around them. The extent of those limitations mostly diminishes with distance (but not always, America was worried enough about the rise in communism in Asia to start a war with Vietnam). Canada has self determination, but it could not have become a member of the Warsaw pact. International peace is finely balanced and requires compromises that take away some rights from some regions. |
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Post by garry on Mar 5, 2022 8:18:09 GMT
As I said before, I don't believe for one moment that victory in Ukraine will be the last big project of Putin. And if people would like to explain why he is not like Hitler, I'm all ears - he faces a more connected world and a much more unified opposition than Hitler ever did, but his ramblings about Russian speaking peoples, and buffer zones, and so on are very familiar. As are his total focus on the outcome while playing at diplomacy entirely to distract - what we say or offer makes no difference. And his propaganda grip on his own people, cult of personality, and public chiding of his close circle are eerily similar also. He has used banned chemical and radioactive weapons on UK soil, he has invaded a major European democracy with an army hundreds of thousands strong, he does not give a flying fuck what we might offer him in terms of NATO limitations. Give him what he wants there, and he'll crack on with whatever his master project is with some other bunch of pretexts. Hitler was an expansionist, Putin is a protectionist.Hitler invaded how many countries? 10? What’s Putin record? 2? In a league table of world leaders with a penchant for invading sovereign nations he’s languishing at the lower end of the board with the likes of the Bush clan. Putin shows no New World Order type mindset, just a “leave me the f… alone”. And this point that keeps getting raised about the NATO thing being a smokescreen and he’ll continue with his master project. I’m keen to know how people are so sure of this. The two countries he has invaded are both related to membership of NATO. Both times he said it was a red line, both times he was brushed off, both times he invaded. He couldn’t really give a clearer signal. |
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 5, 2022 8:27:54 GMT
Why does he want a buffer zone? Because he doesn’t want what he sees as hostile and expansionist forces camped on his border. NATO started as 8 countries, its now 30. Most of that growth coming from Eastern Europe. It’s hard to argue that it’s not expansionist. And if Ukraine can join NATO can Cuba establish a military alliance with Russia? Yes, Cuba can - but would it be along the lines of NATO? Putin sees NATO as as hostile and expansionist but in reality its expansion is by countries that were subjugated by Moscow for half a century+. They made the choice to join NATO not for aggression but to protect themselves from the horrors and restrictions they had already experienced. NATO does not tell each nation state how to behave but offers a guarantee of joint action to protect - something done to avoid a divided internal European war. Putin doesn't like NATO not because it is expansionist and aggressive but because it prevents Russian domination of its neighbour states, who (I'll repeat) have independence from one another and both Russia and the USA.* The Warsaw Pact era was nothing like that: you did what the Kremlin said or were imprisoned or shot and so were your family and associates. This is why attempting to blame the NATO expansion as the cause of Putin's aggression riles many: it's an excuse to grab very fertile and ore-rich lands for Moscow's benefit not for the befit of the local nation or the wider market. *Even the EU states have independence from one another and EU wide rules and directives are only enacted after representatives from ALL member states have ratified them. This independence was clearly demonstrated by the individual rules applied by states during COVID. |
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Post by garry on Mar 5, 2022 8:36:06 GMT
And for clarity I’m not a Putin supporter. I’m a right-of-centre free marketeer who wants to live in a world where the playing field is level and kids from any background and any region have the same opportunities that I’ve had to carve out the life that I want. I’m also a pragmatist. Putin is a bad man, but he’s what we’ve got to work with. To write him off as our version of Hitler seems short sighted and potentially dangerous.
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