Ukraine Watch...

[Vortex2]

[Default0ptions]

The Moskva was a tired heap of junk.

That said, it was 25 miles out to sea.

I would very much doubt that the Ukrainians knew where the Moskva was ... it's likley that NATO provided targetting information for the Ukrainian anti-ship Neptune cruise missiles.

This is becoming - or always was - a NATO-v-Russia conflict.

TBH nobody asked me if I would support active NATO involvement against Russia.

It's all very well waving Ukrainian flags ... but pushing, pushing, pushing Putin could well lead to doom.

I agree. Real Politik would be let Russia manage its own back yard.

It really doesn’t matter what we believe about the rights and wrongs of this. The fact is that Russia regards it as an existential issue and will continue up to the point of nuclear war.

[BritDownUnder]

I don't wave Ukrainian flags. I acknowledge that Russia has some historical claims on Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in the same way as the UK administered Bengal for 200 of the last 300 years.

The problem is that Russia is not managing its own backyard very well. it has a mentality, along with China, that all other countries are either tributaries/vassals or enemies and is being very disruptive on the world stage. It even murdered several hundred Westerners by poisoning and airline shoot downs. Also has caused numerous cyber disruptions over the years.

For the above reasons I want to see Russia pay and pay big time in lives. So I am more than happy to see Russia suffering material losses and also manpower losses. I see no reason upping the ante to a NATO-Russia battle. Much better to keep the bear standing but suffering lots of little cumulative blows in the same way Muhammad Ali kept Floyd Patterson standing during one of their bouts just to make him suffer longer.

I am happy to see these occasional pinprick attacks on their navy and if NATO helped by detecting its position then that is just fine by me. After all, the Soviet Union was more than happy to help the fascist Argentine government by telling them the positions of British ships during the Falklands War. The UK should be more than happy to return the favour more than 40 years later.

[kenneal - lagger]

TBH nobody asked me if I would support active NATO involvement against Russia.
,...............

Nobody asked me either but I vote for a government to protect me from psychopathic, murdering, megalomaniacs like Hitler, Stalin and Putin. If that involves providing intelligence about the enemy's position or even "selling" our allies military equipment to take the battle to the enemy all well and good.

Hitler showed us that if you appease people like him you will end up fighting him anyway so the sooner you bloody his nose and show him you are not going to roll over the better things are in the long term. If Putin is going to use nukes he will do. The advantage of him using them sooner rather than later is that he won't have time to go through his inventory to ensure that they work better than the rest of his arsenal.

[Vortex2]

Russia 1, a Kremlin mouthpiece which has championed the war, came close to acknowledging Ukraine sunk the Moskva by demanding a crushing response.

Olga Skabeyeva, one of Vladimir Putin’s leading propagandists, told viewers Western support for Ukraine amounted to direct conflict with Russia, saying: ‘What it’s escalated into can safely be called World War Three. That’s entirely for sure.

‘Now we’re definitely fighting against Nato infrastructure, if not Nato itself. We need to recognise that.’

Brilliant.

Another brick in the wall.

Re WW2 and Churchill : Boris WANTS to be a Churchill but he couldn't organise a p***s up in a brewery.

[UndercoverElephant]

I have been saying this looks like the start of WW3 for a month now. The problem is that it looks very much like a fight to the end between Putin's leadership of Russia and Ukraine's independence. Neither side is willing to compromise, and so long as NATO and the rest of the western world continues to support Ukraine with intelligence and equipment then it is very hard to see how either side can "win" any time soon. However, I am not so sure that this means it inevitably leads to a nuclear exchange either, because mutually-assured destruction very much remains in play. On the other hand, the conflict can still get a whole lot bigger and a whole lot worse than it currently is without going nuclear. Certainly it can get bad enough to destroy what is left of the existing global economic system, and the UN-based global political order is already beyond repair. It is the end of the world as we know it, and nobody knows what the new version is going to look like because that's what this war is ultimately going to be about.

[Mark]

Russia 1, a Kremlin mouthpiece which has championed the war, came close to acknowledging Ukraine sunk the Moskva by demanding a crushing response.

Olga Skabeyeva, one of Vladimir Putin’s leading propagandists, told viewers Western support for Ukraine amounted to direct conflict with Russia, saying: ‘What it’s escalated into can safely be called World War Three. That’s entirely for sure.

‘Now we’re definitely fighting against Nato infrastructure, if not Nato itself. We need to recognise that.’

At least the Russian people are now being told that it's a war, instead of a 'special military operation'....
We're getting into very dangerous territory with this language.....
We all know that WWIII is code for nuclear conflict....

Hopefully somebody in Russia is planning a palace coup....

[Stumuz2]

Re WW2 and Churchill : Boris WANTS to be a Churchill but he couldn't organise a p***s up in a brewery.

Maybe, but he organised the worlds best vaccine programme, in the shortest time for a large country, with the most take up. People in Shanghai would definitely swop with us.

Don't mention the cake.

[Stumuz2]

At least the Russian people are now being told that it's a war, instead of a 'special military operation'....
We're getting into very dangerous territory with this language.....
We all know that WWIII is code for nuclear conflict....

Hopefully somebody in Russia is planning a palace coup....

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Putins bark is worse than his bite.
He calculated that by supplying EU's energy and USA inability to replace it, he had Nato over a barrel.

Hasn't turned out that way. Germany is reverting to moral type ( genocide is a price worth paying) France is dependant on the German credit card and willing to trade bits of Ukraine to curry favour with Putin.
Putin never thought these two countries would isolate themselves diplomatically, but they have.

Putin is now trying to carve out the resource rich part of Ukraine and failing to take Kiev. NATO is supplying Ukraine with weapons.

The west has turned a blind eye to Putin's aims in Georgia, Syria, Chechnya. Ukraine could not be ignored.

Basically, if he decides to use a nuke. It is game over for Russia and China. TPTB know this.

[UndercoverElephant]

We all know that WWIII is code for nuclear conflict....

I don't agree. WW2 ended in nuclear warfare only because one side had nuclear weapons and the other side did not. Since then there has been an assumption that war between nuclear-armed world powers is made extremely unlikely because both sides have got them, and it seems to follow from that that if there is a war, then it will go nuclear. But maybe that will turn out to be a false analysis. Maybe instead you just get "mission creep" from both sides, while both sides remain constrained from using nuclear weapons precisely because they know that doing so will still make their situation infinitely worse than it currently is. Maybe it is better to lose a non-nuclear WW3 but remain a sovereign state than lash out with nukes and be wiped off the map completely. Perhaps even Putin can see that, even if he threatens otherwise.

[UndercoverElephant]

Re WW2 and Churchill : Boris WANTS to be a Churchill but he couldn't organise a p***s up in a brewery.

Maybe, but he organised the worlds best vaccine programme, in the shortest time for a large country, with the most take up. People in Shanghai would definitely swop with us.

He didn't organise that. He just took an executive decision to throw unlimited amounts of money at it.

[Mark]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Putins bark is worse than his bite.
Basically, if he decides to use a nuke. It is game over for Russia and China. TPTB know this.

You may be right, or you may be wrong, but it's a very high risk game of poker.
Who knows what's going on in Putin's mind as he stews in the Kremlin...
Basically, we're gambling that 1 man is still sane and rational.

If it goes nuclear, it's game over us too...
I'm sure that we'll be No1 on Putin's target list, even above the US.
Russia has 6,257 nuclear warheads of which 1,456 are currently deployed.
The UK has 215 nuclear warheads of which 120 are active warheads.
Can't see any circumstance where we would fire first.

[UndercoverElephant]

..
Basically, we're gambling that 1 man is still sane and rational.

Maybe. But I think it is also true that the less sane and more irrational he becomes, the more likely it is that he'll be removed by somebody on his own side. And he must know that too.

[Stumuz2]

You may be right, or you may be wrong, but it's a very high risk game of poker.
Who knows what's going on in Putin's mind as he stews in the Kremlin...
Basically, we're gambling that 1 man is still sane and rational.

He is sane and rational, have a read of his Phd. Energy and politics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/ ... xt/212739/

He hates weakness, respects strength, and will try to regain as much of the former USSR as possible. He plays the long game.

If it goes nuclear, it's game over us too...
I'm sure that we'll be No1 on Putin's target list, even above the US.
Russia has 6,257 nuclear warheads of which 1,456 are currently deployed.
The UK has 215 nuclear warheads of which 120 are active warheads.
Can't see any circumstance where we would fire first.

Game over for everyone. That's why it won't happen. MAD.

[kenneal - lagger]

Russia is now threatening Kyiv with more attacks because the Russians blew there own ship up in the Black Sea. If Ukraine didn't blow it up why the necessity for retaliation? The Russian PR machine is as bad as its military performance it would seem. This is an obvious admission that the sinking of the Moskva was as a result of a successful Ukrainian strike.