Ukraine War

Quoted from mariner91

Getting involved in a country that we had no right to do using the excuse of made up WMD's. Perhaps not a war criminal in the eye's of the law but it's totally inexcusable to lead that invasion and cause all the deaths and mayhem.

Don't disagree. But why did the US and UK armed forces cause Sunni to kill Shia and vice versa in the aftermath. The removal of Saddam created a vacuum but that didn't make Sunni kill Shia. Are they not sentient beings that can make their own choices? The invasion was wrong, but the majority of the civilian population supported it and the Iraqi army hardly put up resistance. Totally different from Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine is like the UK invading the Republic of Ireland on the grounds of some IRA atrocity in Northern Ireland, like the UK saying the RoI is not a proper country and actually they are all British really because they speak English and then obliterating Dublin when the Irish didn't roll over and surrender.

Quoted from forza ivano

NATO surveillance planes have been operating on a widescale basis. It's pretty common knowledge that the U.S. / NATO are feeding the Ukrainians their intelligence wholesale. The Russians, meanwhile, are trying to communicate via shiite $25 Chinese walkie talkies, which are constantly being disrupted by radio hams. No wonder it's not going to plan.
As an aside because of their shocking communications Russian officers are having to be far nearer the action than they'd like. Today they lost their 3rd major general , out of  a total of c. 20, in just 10 days

PS going back to my post this morning - VERY interesting tweet just came in  https://twitter.com/MaximAlyukov/status/1502337993012658177  Don't also forget that FSB is currently being purged - both the chief of the Ukrainian division and his deputy are apparently under house arrest, whilst 8 generals have been replaced

That tweet has disappeared now. Didn’t get a screenshot did you?

Quoted from codcheeky

An American senator admitted yesterday that there are joint US Ukraine bio lab facilities in the Ukraine that they do not want Putin to get control of.  Do you think if there were similar facilities in Mexico and Mexico was a perceived enemy state they would be happy about it? I don't think this is mentioned on the BBC none of this justifies in any way Russian atrocities.

You’ve got to wonder why Russia’s neighbours don’t like them and want to be in NATO. It’s not a coincidence. Most of them have been invaded as independent states:
Poland 1939
Finland 1939
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 1940
Hungary 1956
Czechoslovakia 1968
In effect Russia occupies part of Moldova (Transdniestria) having taken much of what is now Moldova off Romania in 1940
Georgia 2008
Ukraine 2014

My old lady used to say, ‘do as you would be done by’. So if you don’t want hostile forces in your neighbouring countries, be nice to them. It’s worked pretty well in Western Europe and the EU expansion states since WWII and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

Missiles launched from Iran into Kurdish Iraq and land near an American airbase at Erbil. Another step closer.

Quoted from codcheeky

An American senator admitted yesterday that there are joint US Ukraine bio lab facilities in the Ukraine that they do not want Putin to get control of.  Do you think if there were similar facilities in Mexico and Mexico was a perceived enemy state they would be happy about it? I don't think this is mentioned on the BBC none of this justifies in any way Russian atrocities.

When you live next door to a neighbour who has chemical and biological weapons you're going to want a lab to identify what was those weapons are. Ukraine literally gave up its nuclear arsenal in the name of peace, but suddenly they're willing to create a biological weapon that would threaten the world?

Quoted from scrumble

When you live next door to a neighbour who has chemical and biological weapons you're going to want a lab to identify what was those weapons are. Ukraine literally gave up its nuclear arsenal in the name of peace, but suddenly they're willing to create a biological weapon that would threaten the world?

Very naive, Ukraine until relatively recently had been under the control of influence of Russia,  many of these labs are on sites from the Soviet era, there are bio labs there this has been confirmed by the Americans, we have bio labs here in the UK, if you work in them you sign the official secrets act, you can pretend as much as you like we only make ethical weapons ( it there is such a thing) The Russians say the same about what their bio labs are used for. There are lots of grey areas and nothing is completely black and white, everything either side does threatens the world at the moment, every new weapon we as the West send that tips a balance could push Putin to use nuclear force

Quoted from KingstonMariner

You’ve got to wonder why Russia’s neighbours don’t like them and want to be in NATO. It’s not a coincidence. Most of them have been invaded as independent states:
Poland 1939
Finland 1939
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 1940
Hungary 1956
Czechoslovakia 1968
In effect Russia occupies part of Moldova (Transdniestria) having taken much of what is now Moldova off Romania in 1940
Georgia 2008
Ukraine 2014

My old lady used to say, ‘do as you would be done by’. So if you don’t want hostile forces in your neighbouring countries, be nice to them. It’s worked pretty well in Western Europe and the EU expansion states since WWII and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

You are completely right and I am in no way defending Russia or the old USSR,  since the middle of the last century the good old  USA has attempted to force regime change in 50 different countries, many because they did not agree with who the population voted for, from South and Central America to Asia and the Middle East . I am just pointing out that it is like the pot  calling the kettle black, if You look back at our own history of global colonisation we can have little moral ground in calling out others. We still have Gibraltar, bits of Cyprus and other areas and islands, we shout about Hong  Kong as if it had a great history of Democracy under British rule.   It is easy to point fingers but every major power wants and seeks to maintain it's sphere of influence

Quoted from codcheeky

You are completely right and I am in no way defending Russia or the old USSR,  since the middle of the last century the good old  USA has attempted to force regime change in 50 different countries, many because they did not agree with who the population voted for, from South and Central America to Asia and the Middle East . I am just pointing out that it is like the pot  calling the kettle black, if You look back at our own history of global colonisation we can have little moral ground in calling out others. We still have Gibraltar, bits of Cyprus and other areas and islands, we shout about Hong  Kong as if it had a great history of Democracy under British rule.   It is easy to point fingers but every major power wants and seeks to maintain it's sphere of influence

Yeah, I’m not saying Britain or the US is morally superior to Russia. Well I suppose I am a bit, in that I’d rather live in a world with the Anglo style system than the Russian.

But at the end of the day what counts now is this is a big war. The biggest in my lifetime, except maybe Vietnam, and it’s bloody close to home. You could say it’s hypocritical to care more about Europeans than Africans or Asians, but the main protagonist has said it wants to control the other neighbours’ foreign policy and in some cases take their territory. I feel this personally because right now my mother-in-law* is worried that they are in the firing line and not a NATO member.

* she could quite easily have not been born if Putin’s forebears had been a bit luckier

I’m sure there are many more people in Britain now who have friends and family and colleagues in Eastern Europe. They’re no longer far away countries of which we know nothing.

Quoted from KingstonMariner

Yeah, I’m not saying Britain or the US is morally superior to Russia. Well I suppose I am a bit, in that I’d rather live in a world with the Anglo style system than the Russian.

But at the end of the day what counts now is this is a big war. The biggest in my lifetime, except maybe Vietnam, and it’s bloody close to home. You could say it’s hypocritical to care more about Europeans than Africans or Asians, but the main protagonist has said it wants to control the other neighbours’ foreign policy and in some cases take their territory. I feel this personally because right now my mother-in-law* is worried that they are in the firing line and not a NATO member.

* she could quite easily have not been born if Putin’s forebears had been a bit luckier

I’m sure there are many more people in Britain now who have friends and family and colleagues in Eastern Europe. They’re no longer far away countries of which we know nothing.

In terms of deaths hopefully this will get nowhere near the scale of Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria,  or even Yugoslavia which was even closer and still bubbling away, but I know what you are saying, we have Ukranian friends trying to get relatives here and plans to visit friends in Lithuania again in the summer,  their families are building shelters and are  very fearful of Putin. This war is waste of life and there should be better way of sorting disputes. The truth is we have pandered to Putin for years, the government is full of MPs and a Party taking Russian donations to turn a blind eye . We even have Russian oligarch owning the London Standard Paper( and the Independent) who has been made a Lord against the advice of MI5.  Nothing much was really done in 2014 when Crimea was annexed and it would be the same now if Russia had won a swift victory. The truth is the Ukrainians have surprised not only Putin but the West too. Putin cannot win now even if he occupies the whole country, like us they have appeared to learn nothing from their time in Afghanistan.
But what next? Putin cannot admit he has made a massive error, any replacement to him won't want to see Russia humiliated, although it can be spun, as our  defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan have. The difference is many, many Russians see Ukraine as absolutely part of Russia and care much more than we ever did about Arabs, the majority of the Russian population agree with Putin's special military intervention. They believe they are fighting neo- Nazis just like that Grandfathers did and they are not wrong in knowing Ukraine has some pretty unsavoury far right wing militias.

I agree codcheeky. I think talk of war crimes has just made it harder for Putin to back out of it. He’s painted himself in a corner, but what we don’t want is for him to blow a hole in the wall to get out. The settlement negotiations need to be predicated on no fixed lines. Russia has genuine security concerns, and so does Ukraine and all the other neighbours. Personally I would suggest that NATO guarantees Ukraine’s independence, but Ukraine doesn’t join, with the proviso the Azov Battalion gets dismantled and neo-Nazi individuals banned from military/police service, Russia can inspect the labs, and Ukraine is allowed to make up its own mind on things like the EU. A similar formula (NATO guarantees non-member states) for Finland and Sweden.

Apparently those bio labs the US senator referred to are for researching things like African Swine Feaver which has decimated pig stocks in Russia (though the outbreak occurred years before a lab opened in Georgia that the Russians claim was responsible).

https://www.washingtonpost.com.....eapons-labs-ukraine/