NFR Ukraine...Little Did I Know

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jasmillo said:
Don’t worry - I think one of them is close to solving this situation. Should be very soon, I’d say within a page or two….
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We're not here to solve anything. This is a big deal and talking it out to better understand outside of the usual echo chambers is healthy. We'll let it continue so long as the bad actors don't flare up again.
 
Evan B said:
We're not here to solve anything. This is a big deal and talking it out to better understand outside of the usual echo chambers is healthy. We'll let it continue so long as the bad actors don't flare up again.
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Definitely was not advocating to have this shut down. Just a half ass attempt at a little levity after reading through a few pages…
 
RCF said:
The issue regarding Ukraine has been simmering for years/decades. IMHO everyone just buried their heads in the sand hoping a war/invasion would not occur. Looking at Putin's past history and his 'annexations' it was inevitable. Either the world needed to help Ukraine more before the inevitable or let them into NATO. NATO was out of the question due to Article 5.

So the answer that they came up with was Sanctions. Whooptido! Sanctions take a fairly long time to have an effect. They are also applied after the fact as punishment and not beforehand as a deterrent and part of the diplomacy tool kit. Sanctions can work when dealing with a country and leader that goes by 'understood/accepted norms'.

Putin is not a leader. He does not care about his citizens nor his country. He cares about his legacy and all the money he steals from the country and it's citizens. By the time he invades and takes over a country/region sanctions are just beginning to be implemented. He already got what he wanted. The fallout does not matter to him. Sanctions hurt the oligarchs, some industries and everyday citizens but not him. The oligarchs are not going to stand up against Putin. Putin provided them those jobs/positions and made them filthy rich. Sanctions are not put, or maybe a very limited basis, on Putin because the world wants to keep the door open to future diplomacy. When was the last time Putin was a trustworthy diplomat? When he was in the KGB!

Putin is a rogue. He defies all norms. Learn from past history. It did not work the last couple of times he 'annexed' areas, Time to change the approach. Place sanctions of him directly and make it hurt. There is already discourse in Russia starting to show up in the streets. Wonders how much more they will take.
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Can't say I disagree with any of this. These aren't rational and motivated actions by a rational person. Logic stays one would not encroach on a NATO country in Putin's place, but logic would also show how little there was to gain in invading Ukraine. This is an egotistical and ideological endeavor to restore the holdings of the former Soviet Union (albeit with crony capitalism rather than crony communism). This likely does not end at the eastern Ukrainian border.
 
Flymph said:
www.theguardian.com

Thousands join anti-war protests in Russia after Ukraine invasion

Police make more than 1,700 arrests as protesters take to the streets in cities across countryRussia-Ukraine crisis: live updates
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

I hope all these people can not be poisoned!
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“I am embarrassed for my country. To be honest with you, I am speechless. War is always scary. We don’t want this,” said Nikita Golubev, a 30-year-old teacher. “Why are we doing this?”
Pretty much sums,it up, doesn't it ?
 
I am surprised that NATO got back together so quickly and are working together so well. There must of been a lot of meetings and calls to get to this point. I am also pleased it went so well. IMHO NATO is working better than the UN.

In 1945 the UN was created so that what happened in WWII would never happen again - big and powerful countries taking over smaller ones. Exactly what is happening with Ukraine.

Looking into the UN, a country can not be removed from the Security Council. There are no provisions for that to happen. There are provisions to remove a country from the UN General Assembly. It requires the approval of the General Assembly and the Security Council. Looks like Russia is here to stay permanently.

So the UN can not accomplish much as long as there is a dissenting vote on the Security Council...

(I'll stop there...)
 
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NATO stood up because Sleepy Joe woke up and found his jock..whoda thunk
RCF said:
So the UN can not accomplish much as long as there is a dissenting vote on the Security Council...

(I'll stop there...)
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China and Russia play the UN like it's a banjo..

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Rob Allen said:
For what it's worth Russia has vowed not to use nukes unless Russian land is attacked. Again, for what it's worth.
I think it's rather silly to think that Putin is going to stop with Ukraine. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.
Kasikstan. The list goes on. I hope I am wrong and I pray for the people of Ukraine. My brain tells me we need to be blasting the hell out of the Russian troops but I don't know if that's the wise thing to do or not. I guess we needed to know months ago how important Ukraine is to us. If Ukraine isn't important to us then who else also isn't important to us?

I think if I was trained and in shape I might be on my way to Ukraine on my own.
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“I think it's rather silly to think that Putin is going to stop with Ukraine. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.
Kasikstan. The list goes on.”

Well, isn’t that the lesson learned when Hitler gave material support (Stuka dive bombers and their saturation bombing) to Spain’s Francisco Franco assault on Guernica? And then into Czechoslovakia? What did England and Neville Chamberlain do? Give an inch and it’s permission to take a mile.

As far as China is concerned, I do find it heartening that they called for restraint from Russia. Given their issue with Taiwan, I was afraid they would be silent as a panther and wait for the US to be distracted. But, if we did nothing at all?

At this point, it’s kind of obvious that the PRC is sensitive towards their economic trade relationships with the rest of the world. They can’t afford the kind of civil and social unrest that this war will incur if their industrial economy got flipped on its head. Maybe Nixon was right?

The value that Taiwan has appears to be more the matter of territorial waters than the extractive resources that Ukraine has to Russia. China fish like pirates. Just ask many of the African coastal nations. I’ve even noticed PRC fish boats just outside of Hawaii’s 200 mile limit. However, Russia’s kleptocrats have become billionaires since the collapse of the USSR off of the wholesale extraction of natural resources. Given what Ukraine has, the motivation is very obvious.

The big problem with economies supported only by extracting natural resources is that market forces can make or break a dependent economy. Venezuela is a prime example. When the crude oil market dropped, that government couldn’t afford its largess.

Another element Russia has to deal with is very limited access to ports for commerce. Like, why is this pipeline to Germany so important? Probably because Russia only has maybe one significant port in each of The Baltic (St. Petersburg), The Sea of Japan (Vladivostok), and The Black Sea (maybe?). Ports allow both economic and military extension to the rest of the world. And Ukraine blocking Russia’s access between annexed Crimea and the Black Sea. Get it?

Meanwhile given how Russia emerged out of the USSR, folks like Putin were well positioned to take over state-owned resources and industries to line their pockets. But it’s probably safe to say that they are aware that their mode of kleptocracy is running out of time.

So what really is Putin’s and his cronies’ stake? Life for the average Russian has sucked—but not so bad that they haven’t been able to be brainwashed by Putin-controlled media. During the time Ukraine was controlled by a Russia puppet government, life really sucked for Ukrainians—up until relatives in Poland and other places in Europe realized that life in an “economic satellite” nation was nothing better than institutional slavery. Time to vote in a new government and look westward.

If you ask me, now is the moment that Putin and his cronies realize that they will need to reclaim “slave states” to feed and placate their own polis like the Roman Empire did. If they can’t do that, they will have to face both a hungry, angry, and cynical population and lint in their own pockets. Obviously, that will only buy short-term time for Putin and Co.

But do they care beyond their own immediate selves? Like, what do they have to lose? That’s the scariest question.
 
Mingo said:
I'm part Ukrainian. I grew up on the food, the hugs, the music, the laughter and the stories. My 89 year old dad is in tears today, watching the land his grandpa and grandma escaped from being attacked YET AGAIN by Russia. There is a long ugly history of annexation, brutal takeovers, occupations and starvation of the Ukrainian people by Russia. Read the book 'The Harvest of Sorrow' for a sobering reality check of the history between the two countries and the brutality of Stalin's murderous dictatorship.
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I had a similar conversation with my mother today. She was very sad. I too grew up with the culture.

I am just glad that my grandparents aren't alive to witness this tragedy. They witnessed enough.
 
Mingo said:
My heart bleeds for Ukraine today. The body count is already piling up. Imagine waking up to air raid sirens and the knowledge that SeaTac or Portland International or any other airport near you was under the control of an enemy invader, and that hundreds or thousands of our soldiers had been killed? That's their reality today. Some of them could be my relatives.

I'm part Ukrainian. I grew up on the food, the hugs, the music, the laughter and the stories. My 89 year old dad is in tears today, watching the land his grandpa and grandma escaped from being attacked YET AGAIN by Russia. There is a long ugly history of annexation, brutal takeovers, occupations and starvation of the Ukrainian people by Russia. Read the book 'The Harvest of Sorrow' for a sobering reality check of the history between the two countries and the brutality of Stalin's murderous dictatorship.

There are some excellent comments in this thread, but I'm compelled to correct something I see repeated here and other places.

There is no "the Ukraine." It is called Ukraine, an independent nation. Calling it "the Ukraine" would be the same as saying "the Ireland" or "the Sweden."

The term "the Ukraine" was deliberately coined by a corrupt pro-Stalin, pro-commie propagandist named Walter Duranty who was the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times following the Bolshevik victory. He coined that phrase to minimize and deliberately manipulate public perception of Ukraine as being merely a "region of Russia." He did this to help his buddy Stalin. He also kept all mention of the Russian starvation of millions of Ukrainians out of the public eye. He (and several of his cohorts in the foreign press) said nothing while millions of human beings were deliberately starved to death by Stalin.

Russia has attacked and occupied Ukraine many times in the past and Putin flatly said he sees it as his turf. So here we go again...
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Thank you. This fills in more of the history gaps.
 
Mossback said:
Are you advocating for a military response ?

Sanctions typically come before military actions, as a deterrent approach. They don't always work of course, and the effects fall more on the citizenry at times, but with a brutal dictator who will kill his own citizens to stay in power and as you pointed out doesn't play by any rules, without a military response what is left is economic, cyber, bankingand trade responses.

It's disingenuous to assume a military response was ever on the table here I think.
I doubt Putin ever seriously considered that NATO or the US was going to send troops to fight a ground war in Ukraine was a possibility. I doubt NATO was considering sending troops to defend a non NATO member, and I doubt seriously the US was going to be mobilizing ground troops to send to Ukraine.

Did you think that was going to happen?
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Sanctions are the 20th and 21st Century versions of “laying siege.”
 
wanderingrichard said:
Not far away from Chernobyl is the Russian Woodpecker... might not be the right name. Basically its a giant over the horizon billboard radar operating on a very low frequency. Hasnt been used in decades, was featured on Mysteries of the Abandoned. If they can get that thing up and running again, any inbound aircraft from as far away as England will be seen before they're even at cruising altitude. Most of its power came from the reactors at Chernobyl. With them encased in containment, it would be hard to reactivate the radar.
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I would imagine the background radiation would render any effective imaging useless.
 
One thing we can and should do is make it clear that Putin is a wanted war criminal. Next time he travels outside Russia we arrest him and try him for war crimes and hang him. Publicly at the UN.
I guess I am in favor of barbarism against him.
Unapologetic about it too.
 
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