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Ukraine III

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Bob McC said:
Article in todays Times suggests that at the published rate of attrition of tanks in this conflict the entire U.K. tank force of 150 would last a week.
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Quite possibly, but given the effectiveness of modern NATO man-portable anti-tank weaponry, you have to ask yourself if the tank has a future? They are also very vulnerable to air attack and are looking increasing useless, as the Russians are helpfully demonstrating.

Edit: Just noticed @TheDecameron has already nailed this.
 
Bob McC said:
Article in todays Times suggests that at the published rate of attrition of tanks in this conflict the entire U.K. tank force of 150 would last a week.
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As Gulf War 1 showed, we tend not to commit them w/out air superiority / dominance and mobile infantry support.
 
Somafunk said:
I don't doubt you have, makes perfect sense reading your posts.
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Respectfully, I would state yes I have spent much time on the subject of 9/11. I was born after the Kennedy assassinations, but have listened carefully to Americans who were alive at the time of the Kennedy assassinations. I recall clearly when I was a late teen watching 6pm news coverage of the Iran contra affair, when Ollie North claimed the 5th.

suffice to say over the passage of time my worldview has been formed. Also I have observed the trajectory of the internet. Early days the approach was to flood it with mis/disinformation thus frustrating casual people. Nowadays the approach is outright censorship sometimes in blunt form and other times using Algo’s to suppress or shadow ban content.

What I ask myself is, what are “they” scared of? I thought we were in the “free world”. Look what happens to Assange, Chelsea Manning. Worse happened to Michael Hastings, Seth Rich, Serena Shim.

This war like all wars is a great tragedy. Sometimes I say to myself it’s a double tragedy when people die for a pack of lies.

Back in 2004 an American colleague almost punched me in the head when he heard my views on the Iraq war and GW/Tony Blair. Turns out his son was in Iraq at the time.

i recall in 2006/7 spending many hours on listening to internet radio/blog talk shows. Was highly enlightening to listen to returning US soldiers. The contrast in their views when joining up and how they saw things on return to the Us. Others were neutral on the right/wrong and went into paid security work in conflict zones. The rationale being if your a@@ is on the line may as well get paid properly.

but I digress. I am a simple guy, I know there are much smarter and more erudite people who frequent PFM. I just try to use common sense and try to observe the flow of events over the medium to long term to figure things out.
 
gints said:
In 2014 Ukraine decide not to stay with Russia anymore and change it's direction to Europa. Putin did not like it and step in. Nothing fishy about it.
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Pretty much. Of course after Ukraine went all Democratic, Putin insisted it shouldn't join NATO, despite all evidence that NATO has only ever been a defensive alliance with voluntary membership.... as compared to Russia which remains a belligerent authoritarian Dictatorship which invades (weaker) neighbours almost at will.

Putin really has no moral or political case for his crimes. Even if he succeeds in getting control over Ukraine, or a 'puppet' Belarus style govt. in place, he will still have Poland as a neighbour and will just start making further ludicrous demands. It seems to be taking a very long time for it to sink in with Putin and many of his countrymen, that Democracy, Press/Media freedom etc., etc... are actually quite popular. He needs to quit while he's behind....
 
I wonder how fast or slow Britain’s contribution to sanctions is going? I see they sanctioned 380 odd members of the Duma who voted to recognise the breakaway Ukrainian republics but haven’t noticed anything similar within the upper chamber, the Federal Council. These are the individuals whom Angus Roxburgh said would be far more profitable targets than the oligarchs. The Council is absolutely stuffed with Putin’s party cronies acting as a rubber stamp for his orders. They will naturally have a lot of assets, likely in the West.
 
laughingboy said:
My take on the leaked Nuland conversation from 2014 is, for what it's worth, that the US anticipated the possibility of a change of government, and wanted it to be democratic and stable. In the leaked conversation, they said "we want to keep the moderate democrats together." That seems to have been the aim.

Given the aim, the US was looking to broker an agreement between the relevant opposition leaders as to who would be Prime Minister in a kind of Government of National Unity with all three moderate democratic leaders involved. Nuland suggested that Arseniy Yatseniuk had the experience, and that if Vitaly Klitschko (then mayor of Kyiv) tried to do it, he would essentially be deferring to Yatseniuk anyway. So, they were hoping to get Yatseniuk as nominal leader, to agree to work closely alongside Klitschko and Eloh Tyahnybok.

The rest of the conversation is about trying to confer authority on this arrangement. "I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it."

"we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast."

So, it's fishy in the sense that the US was trying to guarantee a stable transition of power. Which to my way of thinking is just pragmatic statecraft.
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yeah sounds plausible. My take on it at the time was I thought it was odd that the US was putting forward specific people to be the leaders in another country.

IMHO that seemed very odd, and I’m highly suspicious of the Obama state department. I think it’s interfering in the affairs on another country. Also if I recall correctly McCain and Nuland were highly supportive of the uprising and made multiple trips to UKR to show their support and meetings. Not neutral but US is a powerful country I guess they can do it.
 
What would happen if Italy...

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gx502 said:
yeah sounds plausible. My take on it at the time was I thought it was odd that the US was putting forward specific people to be the leaders in another country.

IMHO that seemed very odd, and I’m highly suspicious of the Obama state department. I think it’s interfering in the affairs on another country. Also if I recall correctly McCain and Nuland were highly supportive of the uprising and made multiple trips to UKR to show their support and meetings. Not neutral but US is a powerful country I guess they can do it.
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So is this sort of pragmatic statecraft in accordance with your standards or not? It is first of all non-violent, that's a plus isn't it? There's no discussion here of blowing up people we don't like, or poisoning or kidnapping them. The levers of power being exercised are the usual political ones: we like who we like, and dislike who we don't, and everyone knows that our favor carries tangible benefit in aid and business and stuff, as well as opinion influence, with elites and with the public, in the form of power figures further affirming where their favor lies. If all that's bad, then there is no acceptable politics at all.

Shoot, we weren't even discussing employing troll farms.
 
DonQuixote99 said:
So is this sort of pragmatic statecraft in accordance with your standards or not? It is first of all non-violent, that's a plus isn't it? There's no discussion here of blowing up people we don't like, or poisoning or kidnapping them. The levers of power being exercised are the usual political ones: we like who we like, and dislike who we don't, and everyone knows that our favor carries tangible benefit in aid and business and stuff, as well as opinion influence, with elites and with the public, in the form of power figures further affirming where their favor lies. If all that's bad, then there is no acceptable politics at all.

Shoot, we weren't even discussing employing troll farms.
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No it’s not in accordance with my views, but Obama and Hillary didn’t return my calls at the time.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
So what would be in accordance with your views?
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Look, the US is a very powerful country so they can do such things. But that doesn’t mean that I really agree with them. I think they shouldn’t meddle in the affairs of other nations.

Obviously we see things differently but that’s my view.
 
gx502 said:
Look, the US is a very powerful country so they can do such things. But that doesn’t mean that I really agree with them. I think they shouldn’t meddle in the affairs of other nations.

Obviously we see things differently but that’s my view.
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You don't know my view, so we may not see things differently. How, for starters, are you defining 'meddling'? Does providing arms and logistics support to Ukraine in its defence against Russia constitute 'meddling'? If not, why not?
 
Tony L said:
I would assume so. FWIW any UK person travelling to fight is breaking the law regardless of what grandstanding popularist Tories such a Liz Truss may claim. The featured person clearly shouldn’t have been there, and it is no surprise he found the brutalities of war somewhat unpleasant. I sincerely hope he is prosecuted to the full extent of the law on return as folk from NATO countries fighting in Ukraine clearly presents Putin with a propaganda defence to escalate matters.
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I didn't realise that was the case.
What law prohibits that out of curiosity ?
 
-alan- said:
I didn't realise that was the case.
What law prohibits that out of curiosity ?
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If you have a look at the linked Sky article I was responding to there is some legal detail inset in a box towards the end. Truss’s idiotic popularism likely means he couldn’t now be prosecuted, but the legal situation is pretty clear.
 
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