Russia

[La_Dolce_Vita]

10 hours ago, P.K. said:

The concern is that NATO weaponry striking into Russia will be viewed as a NATO provocation.

However if the Ukrainians use homebrew, which is apparently happening, then NATO has nothing to do with it.

Still a bit of a gamble though...

And i agree, though that's not bizarre, that's just understandable, unless those supplying the weapons want to greatly increase the risk of escalation.  Though even if the Ukraine was supplied with such weapons, I wouldn't have thought enough would be made available to have a marked effect on Russian's capacity to wage war or greatly affect public support for the war.  The attacks would need to penetrate further into Russia which would be difficult with any limited supply of weapons.

[Apple]

In my opinion Putins strategy hasn't worked. And now his own people know that. They have suffered with the effect of the sanctions and the loss of life of their forces. 

He has used mercenaries, prisoners and introduced a form of national conscription. He doesn't want to use the nuclear option as he is aware his country will come off worse and also never recover.

Now I think it is about what he can salvage and what his legacy will be. He wanted to be the one who reconciled the USSR but it concerns him not what happens next but what will he actually be remembered for. Will the people ever form a queue to visit his resting place when this is all over ? 

[GD4ELI]

5 hours ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

Say that were true, how would Putin and his cronies be defeated? It is far from certain that continuing the conflict would eventually lead to Putin and his cronies being removed. And even if Putin was gone, that wouldnt mean that Russia would hand the Crimea and Donbas. But the stated aims of the US have been to weaken the US until the Ukraine is in a better position to negotiate.  That's what is claimed anyway.  Yet the longer the war carries on I think the harder it will be for either side to compromise. 

Benefiting NATO is not the same as benefiting Europe. NATO is essentially a United States club.  Expansion and strengthening of NATO only strengthens the US ability to exert its power and influence whilst reducing Europe's ability to act independently in the future. But worse are the economic effects. Europe only becomes economically weaker from this.  It's more expensive getting energy supplies from the US.  But the Ukraine, Europe, and Russia have all lost much out of this and it will only get worse.  And what good is strengthening NATO for Europe?

Russia isn't likely to invade any other countries after the huge mistake it has made in Ukraine.  Presuming that Putin is rational, as I don't think he is mad, he knows that the invasion of Ukraine was a massive miscalculation.  

But for Ukraine and Europe it is likely to be more death, more economic problems and more dependence on the US, and Russia will just get cosier with China and India which isn't in Europe's interest.  I'd want the Crimea retuned to the Ukraine but the deaths and prospects for Europe aren't worth it, even if it was likely to happen. 

Putin's internal support will collapse, it's already happening. The destruction of Russia's military equipment and the exposure of the incompetence of the officer core gives NATO countries a breather. As for China - they would drop Russia in a heartbeat.

[genericUserName]

4 hours ago, GD4ELI said:

Putin's internal support will collapse, it's already happening. The destruction of Russia's military equipment and the exposure of the incompetence of the officer core gives NATO countries a breather.

That vacuum may be filled by competing factions who will argue that the war against Ukraine was not prosecuted with adequate tenacity. Prigozhin and Ramzan, for example, currently represent rival factions each with their own armies. The gradual breakup of the Russian Federation into rival nuclear factions is not a positive scenario.

[code99]

I won’t go into the details of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurance (which was effectively ‘sponsored’ by the USA and the UK), but I do wish to highlight one of the key agreements/principles - which was respect for each “signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders”. Russia has repeatedly violated that core agreement. Under Putin, Russia is progressively becoming a totalitarian terrorist state – a state which is increasingly characterised by combination of the worst features of fanatical groups which terrorise ‘others’ and also autocratic states which, as a matter of everyday policy, terrorise their own peoples into submission. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a declaration of war on the whole of Ukraine. Sadly then, the USA and the UK failed to act on the assurances pledged to Ukraine under the Budapest Memorandum. They are now paying a heavy price for that inaction.

In 2022,  Putin on a concocted pretext that Russian speaking Ukrainians were being victimised by ‘Nazis’ unleashed a brutal war against his innocent neighbour. But throughout the last 300 days it is the Russian military that is behaving like Hitler’s Nazis. From the first day of this war, it has been Putin’s modus operandi to target civilians; to murder, torture and rape Ukrainians (women, children etc) not because they are Nazis, but because they do not want to live under the crushing heal of a dictatorial Kremlin. Anybody who is in doubt about Russians’ atrocities committed in Ukraine should try to speak to the traumatised Ukrainian refuges (mostly Russian speaking Ukrainians) who arrived on the Island this year. Now Putin is obsessed with destroying civilian infrastructure which civilians need to survive the oppressive cold of Central European winters. This latest strategy is a barbaric indiscriminate attempt at genocide – to create mass deaths by freezing. Putin is waging war ‘by any means’; without regard to any international or moral conventions. The only ‘means’ he hasn’t used, so far, are biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Ukraine cannot negotiate with monsters like Putin. He and his henchmen must be indicted in the Hague for war crimes and countless atrocities. No one, especially Ukraine can trust Putin and his cronies - any weakening of resolve by Ukraine to fight on until all of Putin’s Nazis have been evicted will only invite more Russian aggression.

Putin’s Russia must be treated the same way as the USSR and the allies treated Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1945. Only complete defeat of Putin’s regime including the removal of every Russian soldier from Ukraine including Crimea has to be the T&C for the negotiations. That does not mean of course that Russian kleptocrats should ever be warmly accepted back to the Western bosom the way they were previously welcomed. Europe (Germany in particular) deluded itself about the true nature of Russian politics and the threats these presented – because it wanted Russian gas. The West naively left their own doors open for Putin’s oligarchs to wash the riches they stole from ordinary Russians. This situation must never be allowed to occur again.

There will never be peace and reconciliation in Europe unless the day of reckoning for Putin and his murderous cronies is decisive and thorough.    

[genericUserName]

1 hour ago, code99 said:

Putin’s Russia must be treated the same way as the USSR and the allies treated Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1945.

Rightly or wrongly, that is not going to happen. More likely there will be some kind of deal done over Crimea.

Putin seems like the bogeyman to us. But we should more concerned about people more scary than him.

[Apple]

The business firms that have left Russia over the war in Ukraine will never return after the hostilities. As Europe gradually turns to alternative measures for energy rather than Russian gas the lesson of not being held to ransom again has been clearly learned.

With the further falls in the rouble / dollar yesterday Russia's economic future looks bleak for many years to come. Aid will be hard to come by this time.

[Steady Eddie]

[genericUserName]

14 hours ago, Apple said:

The business firms that have left Russia over the war in Ukraine will never return after the hostilities.

I bet you are wrong. And many are still doing business or providing services. Even here.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a Russia apologist.

[Chinahand]

 

[Non-Believer]

19 hours ago, Apple said:

The business firms that have left Russia over the war in Ukraine will never return after the hostilities. As Europe gradually turns to alternative measures for energy rather than Russian gas the lesson of not being held to ransom again has been clearly learned.

With the further falls in the rouble / dollar yesterday Russia's economic future looks bleak for many years to come. Aid will be hard to come by this time.

Russia will continue to have gas customers worth billions of roubles, a new deal was recently struck with China wasn't it?

And where there's big business to be done and big money to be earned; morals and sanctions are quickly pushed onto the back burner.

[GD4ELI]

5 hours ago, Non-Believer said:

Russia will continue to have gas customers worth billions of roubles, a new deal was recently struck with China wasn't it?

And where there's big business to be done and big money to be earned; morals and sanctions are quickly pushed onto the back burner.

China has no morals.

[Apple]

Interestingly Russia does not want Iran to become a nuclear power and wants the US to continue their negotiations to prevent that happening.

The US have argued so far that a deal is not achievable  and I read recently that talks are suspended. 

All wheel within wheels and all about leverage. All done at much higher levels than gets reported.

 

[code99]

Russia and China may not have what we think of as civilised Western-democratic morals and codes of conduct, but neither do numerous other autocratic states in the Middle East and elsewhere. These regimes remain in power, often enabled by Western supporters. In the pragmatic pursuit of ‘business/ profits’ numerous professionals in the West are willing to ignore our core values. Politically the West uses a mishmash of criteria to pick and choose which dictators we will do business with and which ones we will shun, or even sanction. I.e., we don’t mind F1 shindigs in Bahrain, despite their atrocious human rights record, but we are much more selective when comes to countries like Venezuela or Iran (for now at least).

In the UK, many politicians from ‘loveable reprobate' Boris to supposedly ‘virtuous’ Theresa Maybot, to Labour and Lib Dems MPs have been routinely accepting donations from (and presumably being politically influenced by) wealthy foreign chums who have potentially nefarious source of wealth. Here on the Island, there will undoubtedly be some dodgy companies and people, who are business-amoral and who have been doing deals with dodgy regimes and autocrats around the world. Once the IOM Company Register becomes publicly accessible, I recon a few savvy international journalists will sieve through it, find the ‘dross’ that has been hiding here and then reveal to the world quite a few morally-nasty surprises.     

Ukraine’s completely justified demands that, after the war has been won, Russia must pay reparations will invariably cause certain Russian kleptocrats to camouflage their wealth by any means possible. They will look to willing financial specialists and politicians in the West to help them do this.

[Apple]

Following on from @code99 post above the report in todays Sunday (Murdock) Times (yes, sad I know) shows the details of the £150 billion invested by China in UK companies. Ranging from healthcare, property, stock market etc and even a £1.4 billion stake in BP. Thames water and Heathrow airport even feature for having Chinese stakes.

As for UK companies in Russia the top four (or is it 5) accountancy firms fled Russia earlier this year and the likelihood of them returning is slim. It will not portray any returning business in a good light if Putin remains in office even after whatever resolution is reached. he faces new elections this year I think. Doing business with a regime that has been declared guilty of war crimes might just be a step too far.

Meanwhile the death of people and the calculated destruction of a nation continue on a daily basis.