Okay, we will have to agree to differ on that, the indiscriminate shelling of civilians from late 2014 is where I would start, I’ll try and see if the photos I have taken during various visits are postable. It was truly shocking to my “Western imperialist” (her words) eyes.
As I've said upthread, Putin is mates with far right biker gang the 'Night Wolves.' Would someone be okay to invade Russia to sort them out?
Without the Azov’s he’d have just found a different excuse!
Oh, she’s quite well aware of history all right, $DEITY help me if I get something wrong.
She sounds like the Kremlin Stooge.
I don't believe they are. From what I heard, the Ukrainian government were stopping men up to the age of 60 leaving the country, but that does not necessarily mean they're going to be stuck on the front line.
Well, she’s just seen this and thrown her hands up in the air. I think she actually despairs of the shallow, binary approach to thinking, with everything having to be crystallised down to ‘us’ or ‘them’. Suitable for a 140/280 character posting medium but misses the deeper underlying and long-standing reasons why things may or may not happen.
That's incredibly ironic coming from anyone who supports Putin in this!
That is the one certainty in life - we will all die.
I believe they more like substantial support such as trade agreement.
The article does not mention the specific details of the wheat trade agreement. For example, China allows wheat from all regions of Russia to be exported to China. Previously, China only allowed wheat from designated regions. If you don't think it matters, keep in mind that almost every major grain export countries has cut production since the Covid-19 pandemic.
China knew perfectly well that Russia would veto the motion, so it knew that it would fail anyway: abstaining was not going to change the result much. It might annoy the Russians a bit, but they are not going to do anything drastic as they will hope that China will eventually support them. China will have decided that it is probably eventually going to upset one side or the other, but there is no need to make a decisive move until it either has to or it is clear which option is most in China’s interests.
Agreed. The Chinese government will act in China's best interests, which may well not align with Russia's.
Officially as in you'll find it in school geography textbooks . I agree that in most conversations, the use of endonyms where popular exonyms exist can be pretentious (Chernobyl is a good example). Some less popular ones are pretty interchangeable, like Cologne and Koln.
I didn't know about these programs, but I'm not surprised that they exist. It seems rather odd to have a second order exonym anyway.
The difficultly for the UK, US, Europe, etc is that if don’t condemn Putin enough or help Ukraine too little, then Russia may conquer Ukraine fairly easily and may feel emboldened and decide he can invade more territory such as Moldova or the Caucasus. However if they punish Putin too much and / or provide too much support to Ukraine then you risk starting a much larger conflict.
Even with Russia's currently very large cash reserves, to follow up one invasion with another immediately would be prohibitively expensive and economically damaging.
The question is not so much, “Does Russia want a nuclear war,” as, “Might Putin want a nuclear war.” If he sees it all falling apart or the goons coming from him, can we be sure he wouldn’t take everybody else down? There is already speculation, which I take with a large amount of salt, as to whether he is already losing touch with reality. ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’
I suppose that's a fair enough response but, as others have pointed out, death is inevitable.
Err, ALL decisions are basically binary… We humans just dress them up and then think that they are not binary.
May kill you anyway…
Depends if you have a weapon to fight back with.
