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Ukraine

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My guess is that we will soon see a desperate and dangerous wannabe dictator start a nuclear war to save his leadership and distract from problems at home.

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We can only hope that wife Carrie and/or Sue Gray stop him before he does.
 
droodzilla said:
As far as I can tell, neither Putin nor Biden is an idiot or a maniac.

I expect more sabre-rattling, and an escalation of sanctions.

The very worst case is relatively localised military conflict in Ukraine. Horrible, but it's not WWIII.
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Also my expectation. The West is certainly not going to war over an incursion into Ukraine. It will be very hard for poor Ukraine, but unfortunately, back in the 1990s, the West was all to happy to dance on the grave of the Soviet Union. It ignored completely the traditional Russian sensitivity to its borders (one of the reasons why it moved into Afghanistan when that country fell to bits in the Brezhnev era, and the reason why it wanted the buffer of the Warsaw Pact/Comecon countries).

That Putin is an unpleasant ex-KGB thug who regards the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century is not in dispute, but a bit more adroit handling back then might have led to a better situation.

A very good summary by Fiona Hill:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/russia-ukraine-putin-biden.html
 
Barrymagrec said:
Indeed, but it appears to have little effect in the rest of Ukraine.
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If I can make a prediction. Russian forces will take more Ukrainian territory claiming to protect ethnic Russians. Low-level conflict / asymmetric fighting will now be continued over a wider area. Russia will be subjected to more sanctions and will say "meh" to that and carry on regardless. World press will forget about it all IDC until Russia does it again.
 
Or there's always this guy:

FJ82y8KWUAY1NQR
 
I am hoping both sides will see sense. But as that relies on politicians seeing sense, I am not that hopeful as they nearly always have an agenda, normally about winning the next election or distracting the electorate from other issues.
 
When fantasy crashes into reality, fantasy invariably comes off second best. This is what happened when Mikhail Gorbachev became Chairman of the Soviet Communist Party. He might have been a Communist believer, but he was also a trained economist. He looked at the books, saw that the USSR was a superpower only in military terms, a pygmy in everything else, and realised that this simply couldn't go on. And so ended the USSR.

Fast-forward to today, and the situation is almost the same. Apart from raw materials and the occasional weapons, Russia makes absolutely nothing that anyone wants to buy. It is an economic pygmy with a shrinking population, and I can't help wondering whether this is a desperate attempt by Putin for relevance in a world where Russia is being supplanted by the big neighbour, which has been much cleverer (Deng Xaioping keeping political control but unleashing the traditional entrepreneurial abilities of the Chinese). The rising power of the big neighbour probably concerns him, and he wants to strut the world stage as a great power.
 
paulbysea said:
I am hoping both sides will see sense. But as that relies on politicians seeing sense, I am not that hopeful as they nearly always have an agenda, normally about winning the next election or distracting the electorate from other issues.
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Totally with you on this.

I can't imagine Britain taking any serious action against Russia as there is a lot of Russian money invested in the UK.
The only ones who win out of this are those who want/need higher oil/energy prices. So the 2 main protangonists are also coincidentlly in the top 5 oil exporters ?
 
I dread to mention this but I will; Croatia to withdraw troops from potential NATO effort in Ukraine crisis.....if North Macedonian troops are involved.
 
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