Am I missing something? I thought they hadn't met yet. What's the 'deal'?
Am I missing something? I thought they hadn't met yet. What's the 'deal'?
Quite, are the BBC about 3 days behind?
Well, there's "reports" from the Telegraph and others, that the deal is basically:Originally Posted by Ben
"Give Russia what they have already taken, agree to never join NATO and give us $500 Billion of rare earth minerals to repay what Biden gave you. Then you can have peace. If you - or Europe - say no, we will pull all American Armed Forces out of Europe and will actively work against you."
Could be bollocks, but it's coming from quite reputable sources.
Also makes sense given the 'no-one who would object to these terms is permitted to attend'
It's UK politics but the Ukraine stuff was happening in here.
It's going to be funny when the Ukrainians get pissed off with being a US vassal state if the Telegraph story is to be believed and end up cosying up to the Russians in a few years anyway.
Still beats sending 10,000 of our kids to die in the Battle of Bialystok, which is what we are on course to do unless something happens to the Putin regime in the next ten years.
£12.8 billion, plus many times that subsidising energy bills. The entire endeavour has been all-ends-up retarded, and the spastics are still at it crying 'appeaser' at Reform MPs.
Makes you wonder what Mauritius will do with their £18 billion. Full scale invasion of Madagascar?
We just spent 3 billion quid on rescuing Thames Water.
Better than spending it on Donbas water.
At least Donbas water has minerals that aren’t cocaine in it.
£12bn gets you a station platform and a foot of rail on HS2.
Surely it would be better if didn’t have to spend all that money propping up Ukraine and our energy bills and also didn’t need to give money to a private company to stop them going bust? I don’t think this is an either or, just a case of money being spunked up the wall in all directions for no real benefit.
It’s genuinely one of the dumbest things we’ve got involved in my years of caring. Made all the more lol by the fact that we’d been sucking the Russian cash cock for the previous 20 years.
I don't get this position. It's the one justified foreign policy decision outside of Kosovo this countries had in my 35 years on this planet.
I think my thoughts on it are we’ve done just enough to keep Ukraine going but not enough to make a big enough difference. Either go fully at it if you are the west or don’t and just let Putin do what he wants. We’ve just ended up in this shitty halfway house which has cost a fortune and achieved nothing.
850 thousand dead Russians, 15-50 dead Britons. The country still exists. I'm not sure we could get a better result. The price of energy is now the same as it was prior to the invasion, we're just being ripped off by energy companies.
Plus one big dead Ukraine.
My question to the Lewis/Yevrah position is to what point you think Russian expansionist aggression should be appeased (or realpolitiked, you choose) out to?
If Putin goes in for the Baltics are we pretending Nato doesn't exist? What about Finland? When does our strategic interest become invoked?
As for Trump, the only thing he ever wants is a 'deal' (i.e. to screw someone over for his material benefit), so nothing he does here should be a surprise. The bigger traitors are, as always, the Germans for actively enabling Putin over the last 25 years.
Finland and the Baltic countries shouldn't be in NATO, so I would quite happily wave them off along with anyone else on the Russian periphery (anyone who thinks we should be defending Georgia is out and out deranged and can be ignored).
We have an interest in Central Europe, and even then the Europeans should be doing most of the actual dying, as was the expectation during the Cold War.
So you basically agree with Putin that Gorbachev caused a 'historical aberration' or whatever the phrase was.
The tide will turn again when Putin goes under and some useless kleptocrats and/or warlords take over.
At least Keir Starmer is being made to re-arm and possibly even re-industrialise. Here come those pesky events.
Can I genuinely ask why Russia taking over anything East of Germany is fine but once it hits that artificial line it becomes bad?
And a follow up question on that, wouldn't Russia taking over those places make them a more well resourced, harder to beat opponent that would require far more resources in capital, industry and people than our current investment.
I don't regard the old borders of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union as being inviolable, but the existence or non-existence of any peripheral country within those boundaries is simply not a critical matter for the United Kingdom (or anyone past Poland).
As for re-arming, we have had three years to do that and haven't, which shows how seriously we are really taking all of this. Re-industrialising from relatively trivial increases in defence spending is not going to happen.
Anyone in NATO is a red line and we gear up as a result. Which is presumably the reason Ukraine aren’t in it, because everyone in the know knew this would happen and we’d be forced to (actually) act (as opposed to whatever this shit is were doing now) if they were.
And you can debate who should or shouldn’t be in Nato, but a deal’s a deal.
Hang on, didn’t we do exactly the same by turning London into an Oligarch’s playground?
It's not an 'artificial line'. Eastern Europe is further away and less relevant to us than Central Europe (and even then I really mean Germany). If Russia took over the Baltic countries it would make no difference to anybody other than Latvians and Estonians. If Russia took over Poland - not that they would want to do this even if they could - then that enables them to exert unwanted influence on our affairs.
I mean they literally tried to be in it and got invaded for it.
Yes, that was bad.
But they’ve said they want to do exactly that so isn’t it better to stop them when they’re far away than when they have an extra third of europes resources to play with?
Ok, but I don't think this is realistic in a mass media age. When there's footage of dead white children being pulled out of apartment blocks, public opinion is going to go postal. Support for Ukraine is not a fringe view in the UK, particularly not in 2022 - the opposite is true. We have democratic politics and any PM in 2022 saying 'You know what, old Vlad's got a point here' would have been destroyed and replaced by someone who agreed with the public. Today's leaders don't have the luxury of Gladstone and Disraeli inviting the Russian ambassador to their club for a game of cribbage and to carve up Poland, they have to sell everything they do to the domestic mass market.
No such concerns for Putin of course.
Historically one of the main justifications for us and France maintaining our independent nuclear capabilities was that, in the event of the Soviet Union invading Western Europe, the Americans would think actually fuck it France and Germany aren't worth the almost inevitable nuclear war. And those are important countries. If Russia did try to call our bluff over somewhere pointless like Lithuania you could easily see the countries expected to do all of the fighting soft-peddling it.
Slightly unrelated but I saw a map of Churchills suggestion on how to carve up Italy and it was one of the most mental things I’ve ever seen.
Bad, but laundering Abramovich and Lebedev's money is just venal, whereas (as Gerhard Schröder did) deliberately orienting your national energy policy towards Russia in exchange for personal kickbacks is criminal.
In theory. But we haven't stopped them (if Ukraine was a buffer it isn't anymore), and we never had any means of doing so short of direct intervention, so what do you propose?
I’m no war expert, I’m not even Yevrah, but haven’t the lines of war been practically frozen for a year and Russias taken slightly under a million casualties. Isn’t that the definition of stopped?
And isn't most of our contributions just buying arms off ourselves and then giving it to Ukraine therefore just a way of funding ourselves?
I think you drastically under-estimate the extent to which people are conditioned to give a shit about particular things. Most people in this country still couldn't find Ukraine on a map, and the most vocal proponents of our continued involvement think that they are winning. Do you think people would send their kids off to die for Ukraine?
Everyone being brain dead after Covid paved the way for our main political parties to do a right number on the populace regarding Ukraine. The fact we’re distracted constantly with all manner of other largely inconsequential shit didn’t help either.
Two of the top 5 things people are concerned about are the NHS and Climate Change and you think both are a load of shit. What's your point?
They literally are winning. A country with 1/4 of the population and 1/8th of the GDP have the lines of occupation at a standstill.
Why they felt the need to do that is the bit I can’t square. Did any of them really believe that delaying Putin moving his drinks cabinet a few hundred miles West would make and difference to us whatsoever?
Mate, take a look in the mirror.
That sounds suspiciously like net spend territory.
Yeah that's kind of how war works. The goal is to kill more of them than they kill of you.
I don’t need to, I had an appreciation for where Ukraine ranked in my countries of concern both before and after the invasion and that hasn’t changed. Where were all of these people and our main parties when he annexed Crimea? Pitch it differently, bit of emotive ‘brothers and sisters’ language and we’re all in. Which is back to Luke’s point and one I’ve been making since the start - in that we’re not really all in as this halfway house approach is pointless.
Russia hasn't taken a million casualties, and has - arguably to its overall detriment - managed to do all of this without upending normal life all that much. They will annex about a third of Ukraine and neutralise the NATO threat on their border. This was obviously not what they had planned and it has cost them a lot more than they had originally intended, but what remains of Ukraine will be a failed state for the next fifty years because the only people left will be seething freaks, seventy year olds, and criminals. Meanwhile, Western Europe has collectively spent about a trillion pounds setting our economies back a decade and all of its industry has died.
All of this could have been avoided by simply recognising that a country with ten million Russians in was of far less value to us than Russia, and therefore the worst possible candidate for NATO membership.
How many miles West does Putins drink cabinet location make a difference?
Population size and GDP are factored in when it comes to deciding who has won? News to me.
Poland seems a sensible cut off point.
Im quoting the foreign office who had it at 700,000 in October: https://www.gov.uk/government/speech...nt-to-the-osce
Western Europe has spent 132 billion pounds. The UK has spent 13 billion. 10 Billion of that being military which is us buying arms from ourselves.Meanwhile, Western Europe has collectively spent about a trillion pounds setting our economies back a decade and all of its industry has died.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-a...pport-tracker/
Who won the War in Afghanistan?
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