Russia v Poland World Cup qualifier in Moscow should be interesting.
Russia v Poland World Cup qualifier in Moscow should be interesting.
The UN have Inspector Gadget on the case.
I agree with Jimmy re the sanctions and freezing everything Russian out of every international thing. Won’t happen of course as they’ll get away with this as they’ve done with Georgia and Crimea. Unless their monetary elite turns on him as a whole Putin can do whatever he wants ‘til he dies. It’s not like he’s going to lose any ‘elections’ before 2036 and I highly doubt he plans on stepping down then either.
Honestly though, this whole thing is a different beast than both 2008 and 2014 isn't it? It's a three front assault on the largest country in Europe (not counting Russia itself), from the largest one in military manpower on the second to third largest one. And they're already bombing across the whole country.
I assume the play is similar to Georgia in that they Russians overreach a bit, then "deescalate" and lay claim to all of Donbass as well as maybe a full landbridge to Crimea, but again, Ukraine isn't Georgia in terms of "managing" a population during an invasion.
It's all very exciting, but it won't go beyond sanctions lads calm down.
I've not seen western establishment/self-declared clever person Twitter go as mental as it has this morning. Just a complete inability to drill down to the crux of anything as they lose themselves in posturing. Woe betide us when the Americans wake up and start complaining that Putin's generals are all white men.
So why's he bombing wider Ukraine? They went into LPR and DPR under the guise of being peacekeepers, so why's it turned into this today?
Where do I put my money to prosper from pain?
I didn't think he'd actually do it but since he has, there's surely no stopping Putin now, is there? The man's working through the classic post-lockdown nihilism and I don't see how a crashing economy would stop him.
It depends on the Ukrainians really. If they go full Guerilla war on them - which seems to be the aim - then they could be looking at another Afghanistan.
Vlad wants a puppet pro-Russian government akin to the ones he has in Belarus and presumably some of the central Asian -stans (I need to read twitter for a bit longer before I'm a true expert on this), but Ukraine is a large and proud country with a large population and borders with multiple western allies, so this is not going to be an easy thing to accomplish.
It's obvious Putin wants the pre-1990 Russian empire back and ideally before he dies, so that's probably the overarching motivation. I hope he's shot his bolt a bit with this one but honestly, who knows.
What use are western allies when they're all too scared to wade in? There's nothing in it for them.
If you're right next to Poland, Slovakia etc then a guerrilla resistance is going to be quite easy to supply and support. Obviously Our Boys will not be heading over, but draining Russia over a sustained period of time would be in western interests.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 24-02-2022 at 12:08 PM.
He wants to annex/occupy the two breakaway regions and give the rest of the country a decent going over before retreating back to them. The stuff about puppet governments and all the rest of it seems a bit far fetched.
Speaking of which, these Conservative MPs calling for RAF support and NATO no-fly zones want running out of public life.
The BBC have just had a Ukrainian bloke on saying that they are the only nation that has given up their Nuclear Weapons.
Why the fuck did they do that? That seems mental. Was it in response to Chernobyl or something? Not that it would make any more sense, but at least I could kind of understand that
Probably didn't want the Russians invading them and taking them at will.......
And I’ve thought about this long and hard on a drive home I did this morning and it all ultimately eventually points to one conclusion - buckle up boys, we’re going to war with Russia.
What would a war with Russia actually look like? Would it be all cyber?
"We'll give up the means to defend ourselves if you promise to leave us alone."
"Of course! Why would we, Russia, renege on such a deal?"
I also don't see what's in it for the West to go to war with Russia over this. Unless you think they'll do it to Do The Right Thing in which case bless you.
Take it from me, the man who on the first page of the COVID thread compared it to bird flu, swine flu, etc.
Anyone talking about western military getting involved is an idiot, but I don't see why we shouldn't go full-on Russophobic in our response here. Chucking two thousand Russian kids out of our boarding schools was one decent wheeze I saw earlier. That hurts them far more than David Davis dusting off his khakis.
Abramovich should absolutely get locked up and Chelsea should probably get relegated or have some sort of embargo put on their activities for as long as he's owner.
The Champions League final has been taken off them.
It's started
To clarify, I’m not talking about a ground invasion to Moscow as that would be insanity, but sending troops into Ukraine. The clamour to do so is going to be immense when the pictures of dead Women and Children start to emerge.
We've only ever fought the Russians via proxy wars, so I can't see it unless they pull this shit against a Nato member.
The Ukrainians have been well and truly fucked over here. Our refusal to let them join Nato shows exactly what our intent is.
"To show Russia we mean business we are adding 1p to every Smirnoff purchase."
"But isn't Smirnoff British-owned?"
"TAKE THAT YOU RUSKIE SWINES!"
https://twitter.com/girkingirkin/sta...54488933715972">View Tweet
Sheeesh
How obese do I need to be to avoid conscription
Isn't this the moment that Bojo has always been waiting for?
It kind of is, yeah. You could hear the relish in his voice using the phrase 'By air, land and sea'.
These distractions from absolutely horrific local/national policy and performance is quite unreal. Lucky bastards.
They were just the legacy systems the Soviet Union left over (Belarus and Kazakhstan inherited loads as well), which they wouldn't have had the money or expertise to maintain (Russia barely managed it in the nineties), so they made a big show of 'giving them up' in return for security guarantees. They might technically be allowed to build their own now those are presumably void, so there is that to fall back on.
The only country to properly give them up having made them was South Africa, who seemingly only built them to prove some sort of point to nobody.
Be interesting to see how Putins version of the Red Army gets on, normally they're only slightly more dangerous to their opponents than to their own troops who take every opportunity to sell their equipment.
@TwitterSupport PLEASE HELP MY COUNTRY IS BEING INVADED
Fighting around the Chernobyl plant. Mad bastards.
Important to take the best bits of land first.
People are panic buying petrol again
Oh fuck off