Macron is over chatting about cultural stuff now. Big investor in cultural are the russians and french doesnt want to see all that hard work lost.
Printable View
Macron is over chatting about cultural stuff now. Big investor in cultural are the russians and french doesnt want to see all that hard work lost.
I don;t think they're mobilizing all those forces and weaponry so they can sit around and play tiddlywinks on the border in the middle of winter. I think some time this month the custard is going to start hitting the fan.
China will have suggested they wait until after the Olympics are over first. Can’t have the neighbours detracting from your open-home..
Or into March, I guess. Extra optionality for Putin to keep everyone guessing, see what he can extract, etc.
Hopefully a face saving end can be achieved. Putin can withdrawl, publicly saying it was the end of drills and gets to say how unnecessarily shrill the West was, get a few concessions. Problem is Ukraine is getting a boat of smaller weapon systems by the day that they can one day employ in the donbass (they have already used their turkish drones once to the ire of Russia). And ukraine is getting closer to some of their immediate european neighbours so if russia withdraws they are left with a worse position than they started off with. And Nato is now running more drills alongside ukraine in response to the build up and parking more troops along the border which russia defo doesnt want.
I suppose governments come and go they may just bide their time until a pro russian gov comes or 'wins'. Ukraine wont ever join nato in reality, if russia pulls back nato will pull back the troops they put there over the last few months, some new arms control treaties, new found respect for russia, handful of other concessions, make the west look shrill - hopefully that is enough. They won't like it when the west says they deterred / forced russia to back down .
I saw the announcemet the nord pipeline won't go ahead if russia invades. sticky situation.
There was a link to all the media on Russian buildups on the Ukraine boarder since 2014 in QnAs under the breakfast briefing on Interest this morning, can't find it now but sure sounded the same all the way through.
Our kids and their kids aren't so different after all - Russian & Ukrainian...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/...2_AVorSU-CU8Bv
Fact or Psych ops to undermine moral?
US intel indicates Russian officers have had doubts about full scale Ukraine invasion
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/07/p..._cMjpyILlHFrqh
Winne the Pooh is published in russian...and is well know and read..Posted this before..