Ukraine

When nuclear war seemed to be almost inevitable in the 70s I used to think that I'd rather be right underneath it. Vaporised in a blinding flash, you'd not feel a thing. Compare with a slow death from radiation poisoning or starvation during the subsequent nuclear winter. Just trying to cheer up the residents of Catterick.
Muttley, I've seen and will forever be haunted by the film Threads. I lived in Berlin in the Cold War. I am probably overdue some therapy.
 
You have to look at Putin's personal history. (This is from memory but I think broadly correct) He was a fairly low ranking KGB officer in Dresden when the wall came down. He advocated a violent response to stop the collapse of the Warsaw Pact but there were no instructions from a paralysed Moscow and consequently with the structures of an authoritarian regime nobody on the ground would do anything hence the troops watching as the wall was torn down. He felt humiliated by what he saw and the collapse of the Soviet Union which he believed in. There were at the time something like 100,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany entirely legally under the WW2 surrender terms. Germany wanted to unify with the fall of the wall and Clinton negotiated with Yeltsin. Clinton came to a "gentleman's agreement" that in return for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. As Yeltsin drifted into alcoholism and Clinton left office nothing was ever signed and the US led NATO reneged on the agreement. Hence why Russia and specifically Putin feels and acts like he does about NATO expansion. I don't believe he intends to invade Ukraine, it would be enormously costly in Russian (and Ukrainian) lives and he could not hold it even if he won, His best chance is to install either through influence or a coup d'etat a puppet government. That said the people of Ukraine are pretty much ideologically opposed to Russia and it would probably be another Afghanistan - a long drawn out guerrilla conflict fought over many years and ultimately fruitless.

I've seen and will forever be haunted by the film Threads
Watch "When The Wind Blows" it'll cheer you right up...
 
If a foreign power wanted to harm another country then they would target the infrastructure.
Main target would be to disable the internet. There are a few sites where the cables go into the see. Knock those out, or the undersea cables and there would be chaos worldwide.
 
You have to look at Putin's personal history. (This is from memory but I think broadly correct) He was a fairly low ranking KGB officer in Dresden when the wall came down. He advocated a violent response to stop the collapse of the Warsaw Pact but there were no instructions from a paralysed Moscow and consequently with the structures of an authoritarian regime nobody on the ground would do anything hence the troops watching as the wall was torn down. He felt humiliated by what he saw and the collapse of the Soviet Union which he believed in. There were at the time something like 100,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany entirely legally under the WW2 surrender terms. Germany wanted to unify with the fall of the wall and Clinton negotiated with Yeltsin. Clinton came to a "gentleman's agreement" that in return for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. As Yeltsin drifted into alcoholism and Clinton left office nothing was ever signed and the US led NATO reneged on the agreement. Hence why Russia and specifically Putin feels and acts like he does about NATO expansion. I don't believe he intends to invade Ukraine, it would be enormously costly in Russian (and Ukrainian) lives and he could not hold it even if he won, His best chance is to install either through influence or a coup d'etat a puppet government. That said the people of Ukraine are pretty much ideologically opposed to Russia and it would probably be another Afghanistan - a long drawn out guerrilla conflict fought over many years and ultimately fruitless.


Watch "When The Wind Blows" it'll cheer you right up...

The “gentleman’s agreement” is a myth continually pushed by Russia. Even Gorbachev has said expansion was not discussed. An American president could not make those guarantees as NATO is a member organisation and agreement would have to be reached.
 
Nothing new under the sun>>>>>>>>
Destabilisation of the situation in the Balkans, US arming Ukraine Nazis and pushing for a US Nato - war by proxy in Europe - didnt happen just before Christmas. Its been in the "plan" for the last 10 years. Though you wont find that in the "media" [unless you look behind the "red lines"]

In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia

Washington's role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime's neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world
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Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a "brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis", as if the truth "never happened even while it was happening".

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his "updated summary of the record of US foreign policy" which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world's most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – "our" terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato's campaign in 2011, "Libya has become a terrorist safe haven".

The name of "our" enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.
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Washington's role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington's planned seizure of Russia's historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But Nato's military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained "pariah" role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
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Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend's provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine's population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country's ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither "separatists" nor "rebels", as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.

Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of "special units" from the CIA and FBI setting up a "security structure" that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by.
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America’s Collusion With Neo-Nazis

Neo-fascists play an important official or tolerated role in US-backed Ukraine.

(published 2018)
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A doctor described trying to rescue people, "but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate. What occurred yesterday didn't even take place during the fascist occupation in my town in world war two. I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent." [see footnote]

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta's defence secretary, Andriy Parubiy – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that attacks on "insurgents" would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow "trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation", according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama's grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its "remarkable restraint" after the Odessa massacre. The junta, says Obama, is "duly elected". As Henry Kissinger once said: "It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true."
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Biden lays bare Nato divide over Russian aggression against Ukraine​

Analysis: Greatest tension is between US and Germany over arms sale and energy dependency
(Published 20th January 2022)
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In the US media the Odessa atrocity has been played down as "murky" and a "tragedy" in which "nationalists" (neo-Nazis) attacked "separatists" (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal damned the victims – "Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says". Propaganda in Germany has been pure cold war, with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning its readers of Russia's "undeclared war". For the Germans, it is a poignant irony that Putin is the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe.

A popular truism is that "the world changed" following 9/11. But what has changed? According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a silent coup has taken place in Washington and rampant militarism now rules. The Pentagon currently runs "special operations" – secret wars – in 124 countries. At home, rising poverty and a loss of liberty are the historic corollary of a perpetual war state. Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?

(Published 2014)!
www.johnpilger.com
 
Russia has been poking its former ‘colonies’ for longer than that, they are masters of hybrid warfare - just ask the Estonians who warned about it 15 years ago. There’s a reason former Soviet and satellite states have turned west to the EU and NATO, because they actually lived under totalitarianism. Something you have to do some mental gymnastics to compare the west to. Do you think the Caucasus countries and Central Asians really want a return to Moscow’s benevolence? They certainly didn’t when I lived and travelled there.

There was genocide in the balkans, an area famously unruly. The US does not want a destabilised Europe. They would rather be worrying about China.

And take it from someone actually over here, there are plenty of neo-nazis and fascists in Russia. They are of course present in Ukraine and Eastern Europe too, but it’s also a convenient trope dating back to WW2 and Stepan Bandera and commonly pushed in the media over here.
 
You have to look at Putin's personal history. (This is from memory but I think broadly correct) He was a fairly low ranking KGB officer in Dresden when the wall came down. He advocated a violent response to stop the collapse of the Warsaw Pact but there were no instructions from a paralysed Moscow and consequently with the structures of an authoritarian regime nobody on the ground would do anything hence the troops watching as the wall was torn down. He felt humiliated by what he saw and the collapse of the Soviet Union which he believed in. There were at the time something like 100,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany entirely legally under the WW2 surrender terms. Germany wanted to unify with the fall of the wall and Clinton negotiated with Yeltsin. Clinton came to a "gentleman's agreement" that in return for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. As Yeltsin drifted into alcoholism and Clinton left office nothing was ever signed and the US led NATO reneged on the agreement. Hence why Russia and specifically Putin feels and acts like he does about NATO expansion. I don't believe he intends to invade Ukraine, it would be enormously costly in Russian (and Ukrainian) lives and he could not hold it even if he won, His best chance is to install either through influence or a coup d'etat a puppet government. That said the people of Ukraine are pretty much ideologically opposed to Russia and it would probably be another Afghanistan - a long drawn out guerrilla conflict fought over many years and ultimately fruitless.


Watch "When The Wind Blows" it'll cheer you right up...

This explains the situation around the agreement and how it relates to today:
 
The US does not want a destabilised Europe. They would rather be worrying about China.
They perhaps should be worrying about China. But they're not. US elites have already sold out to China. There's sabre rattling of course, but most of Biden's key backers are so heavily invested in China they stand to lose many billions if there was conflict. Biden's own son has considerable investments in China. So Xi will rattle on about Taiwan, but I doubt he'd push the US into doing anything. China is far more subtle in how they gain power. Unrestricted Warfare is their template, and they're extremely effective at infiltrating all aspects of western society. Barely a global institution or western country is immune.

Within days of the US leaving Afghanistan, Chinese military aircraft were spotted at Bagram airport. It would make a great base to patrol the skies over their local competitor India. They regularly met with the Taliban since 2014, and have agreements to develop Afghanistan's mineral wealth. As of last year they were developing a $4.2 billion copper mine, a number of oil projects, $550 million in bilateral trade and $630 billion in infrastructure projects. And then there's the rare earth metals and lithium. You might think Joe Biden left the field clear for China deliberately.

Russia has a GDP just over half the size of the UK, and 1/15th the size of the USA. They do have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the entire planet, but that's not much use to capture and hold Ukraine. And the US - even if it is almost bankrupt - could outspend them now just as it did in the 1980's. The noise is probably useful to both Putin and Biden. Biden desperately needs something to resurrect his presidency. His ratings are the worst in memory. But an actual war with casualties would be a colossal vote loser, even if his corporate backers would rejoice.
 
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1) Thats the question. I guess you don't think it's worth defending?
2) London the centre of the UK, Catterick the largest military camp in Europe. Both prime nuke targets.
Why would they nuke the UK?

With all the donations to the Tory party and manipulating the Brexit vote they are doing much more damage through political means then they can do with weapons.

Even if they weren't influencing our politics, even for Putin, a nuclear war with Europe is a bit of an over reaction no? They already occupy the Crimea and Pro Russians occupy much of the east of the country anyway. No one get particularly excited about both of these invasions, in fact no one talks about the latter (I only knew about it when I was looking in to why Shaktar Donetsk were playing home games in Kiev)

I don't think, even if it does go to war with Ukraine, it'll be as dramatic as people think (Except for the Ukranians of course). Russia are still having political negations with countries like Italy so there is not likely to be a war with Europe.
 
How are you anyway Jimmy (aside from the looming vapourisation)? How's your recovery going?
It's going fine, thanks. I'm easing myself back into work. The hardest bit has been getting IT issues sorted after various accounts were suspended due to lack of use. Physically I think I'm better than I was before the op now. The odd ache and pain and the odd day of tiredness/lethargy, but I am regularly walking over 10k steps a day and feel like I could push more. Obviously want to be careful and am waiting for my follow up clinic with the lead surgeon at Papworth.
 
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