What Do You Think Today?

[Avatar]

"You don't negotiate with aggressors, especially not madmen," you will say. No you don't. You give them whatever they want to defuse their fear, their anger, more especially if they have their finger on the button controlling thousands of nuclear warheads.

Isn't this just appeasement? That could be seen as a big part of the problem.

As long as nobody wants to provoke him, there's no realistic short-term solution to anything he decides to do.

Long term solutions are no consolation to people on the ground in circumstances like this.

The one that really breaks my head is where was this outpouring of support and aid and refugee welcome when it was the Syrians and Yemenis fleeing their own (also Russian involved) conflicts?

It's never as simple as good guys and bad guys. Because of that, the only thing that really matters is actions and effects.

Did Russia feel pressured by the "west" in some way? Maybe they did. Do they really believe that they should be "1 country?" Maybe they do. (Or some do anyway.)

But it's not their civilians dying.

--A

[peter]

Forestal, that would be as good a result as could be possible, but my fear is that the more unstable his domestic position is, the more unstable his psychological one might become in consequence. The risk that he will be driven to ever greater atrocities is a very real one.

That crack at a nuclear power plant was a worrying development as well. Don't know if Putin is that involved on the ground as it were, but it's not the way things should be done. None of it is the way that things should be done.



Thanks for reading my posts by the way. I'm humbled that anyone ever would, genuinely (and amazed that they'd come back for a second one! I think I'm going to put this Ukraine situation down now though: it's beginning to get me down and I'm not sure I really get it very well.

But having said that [because I can't stop myself ] I have this growing sense that this situation will not - cannot - be contained to the Ukraine. An ominous feeling that what that lady reporter said to Johnson is true, that WW3 has already begun. I hope it's just my pessimistic nature playing tricks with me, but there seems to be a sort of incremental ratcheting going on where the situation is taking on a life of its own. There is talk in NATO that attacks on the power plants, if they result in radiation contamination of a third [member] country occurring, would/could be seen as an act of war in themselves that would require a NATO response. President Zelensky is pushing very hard for the establishment of the no-fly zone over Ukraine, his argument being that Ukraine is not part of Russia, and that because of this NATO can quit justifiably establish such a zone without transgressing on Russian 'sovereign' territory. Possibly true, but such a move would inevitably bring NATO fighter planes into contact/combat with Russian planes and then the point would be moot.

All of these things, plus the cumulative effects of the horrendous pictures coming out of the beleaguered country in pushing opinion toward the need for intervention, seem to be giving the widening of the conflict to bring in other countries an almost inevitability that we are powerless to stop. Once the conflict does fan out in this way - well, it's pretty much game over.

but to finish on a more optimistic note, I read something a night or two ago, written by R A Salvatore at the end of one of his fantasy novels {of all places} that I liked and [more to the point] would like to be true. In it, a Dark Elf is referring to the Humans he has met, and is making an observation that he believes pertains more generally to Humankind;

....take faith that the human race will mature to goodness, that the evil in it will crush itself to nothingness leaving the world to those who remain....

Very much do I want to believe that this might be true.

[peter]

I read the papers every morning, I watch the news, but I cannot find it in myself to be sure that we are helping this situation in the Ukraine with what we are doing.

Boris Johnson is this morning putting forward his 'six-point plan' for defeating Putin, and saying that we must not be "afraid" of Putin, that if we hold steadily to our course he will be defeated.

Okay, but is there not a risk that our continual supplying of arms and money to the Ukrainian war effort is simply prolonging the inevitable, or prolonging it to the extent that there simply will not be a country left at the end of it. Are we helping the Ukraine - is what we see on our screens really better than if the country had been delivered up with minimal resistance to survive another day? Sure that would have been capitulation, but would a period of administration change that could have been neutralised from within over time have been worse than this - the complete destruction of the country and the humanitarian crises that is being precipitated thereby. And how long will it be before the Daily Mail is screaming venom about the influx of 'immigrants' into the UK that will result? How long before people are complaining about their jobs, their housing, their services being taken from them as Ukrainian refugees 'jump the queue'?

If the Ukrainian people en masse were not prepared to accept a Russian puppet government, they could by sheer weight of numbers neutralise it's effect. No administration can rule without the compliance of the people (in large part). Day to day life would have carried on, even under a Putin controlled regime (it does in Russia after all) and without the support of the people sooner or later it would have fallen.

Or is there (from the UK's point of view) something else going on here? Under the guise of 'supporting the Ukrainian people' are we actually using them as troops to fight our own Western war against Russia? Doing this at arms length so we can claim otherwise, but in reality prosecuting the war against Putin that we can never really have. Because what is our hand wringing grief and anger on the one hand, while feeding the flames of conflict with our military support (in terms of arms, hardware and intelligence) on the other, actually achieving if not simply prolonging the conflict at the Ukrainian people's expense? Would the alternative of rapid administration change, followed by a period of readjustment and reproach from the external world really have been worse? No wonder President Zelensky is loosing patience with the West - we have led him into war with assurances of support that is not forthcoming when the chips are down. Using his forces as proxy Western soldiers to resist the ambitions of Putin to redraw the lines Europe (or at least put them back to where they previously were), are we in reality already prosecuting the war, but simply at arms length?

No, it cannot be so. Boris Johnson tells us, and we know he can be trusted. All of those arms and intelligence are going in purely because we think that this is the right thing to do, because we want to support the Ukrainian people, not thwart Putin. What is happening in Ukraine is the best thing for their country, their people and if 'we' remain resolute in our purpose, Putin will fail. And then the people of Ukraine will be free to.... return........ to........... their..........

Oh dear!

I mean, let's be clear: Putin is going to do the Ukrainian cities what the Russians did in Aleppo, in Chechnya, in Georgia. He's going to flatten them with bombardment until there is nothing left. Can we stand back and allow this to happen? Surely under such circumstances we either have to do what President Zelensky asks, to provide the air cover that allows the Ukrainian forces to have a fighting chance - or alternatively do nothing such that the fall of the country occurs as rapidly as possible minimising the destruction of life and property to the maximum extent possible (even in the face of seeming capitulation to Russian aggression). Surely the worst thing that we can do is to occupy this halfway house, where we fuel an ongoing resistance that demands Putin do his worst, but never show the real committment that is needed in order to get the job done. Surely this must be the worst of all possible worlds for the poor Ukrainian people. And it is their fate that most concerns me in this - not our stupid twats of leaders who engineer these situations. It makes little difference to the man in the street whether it is Vladimir Putin or Boris Johnson that is creaming off the wealth at the top end of the country - he still lives his life. If we were to bite the bullet and declare the no-fly zone that Zelensky is requesting would it really prompt the Russians to respond by destroying the world? I have my doubts that even Putin is that mad or stupid. But either way, I think what we are doing at present is the equivalent of using half a course of antibiotics; it appears to be a good idea at the time but in the long run only serves to make things worse.


-----------------------Joke Time---------------------


Man goes into a nightclub and the bouncer stops him. "You can't come in here - you haven't got a tie on!"

"Bugger," thinks the bloke and then has an idea. He goes to the boot of his car and gets his jump-leads, puts them round his neck like a tie and then goes back to the club.

The bouncer eyes him doubtfully. "Alright, you can come in - but just don't start anything!"

Boom Boom!

[peter]

I'm glad that things in the world are not complicated. That war, when it happens is easily broken down into the good versus the bad - nice black and white scenarios mimicking the worlds of video games and fantasy novels. It must be so because that's exactly the way our media is portraying it.

In the Ukrainian conflict that is unfolding before our eyes (and the gathered cameras and microphones of the world media - war experienced from the comfort of your chair in 'real-time') the Russians break humanitarian cease-fires and rain down bombardment on defenceless civilians, the Ukrainian forces give cuddly toys to distressed children and carry prams over rubble blocked roads.

This is exactly how I like my world: heaven forbid that it should become messy, like for instance in Skyrim where good and bad can be found fused and mixed, stirred into a messy grey that is hard to understand and yet harder to deal with.

But then of course stupid Priti Patel has to go and mess things up. Here was I, comfortable with my grasp of the straightforward dichotomy of 'Ukranian refugees good - Syrian refugees bad', when she goes and messes it all up by insisting that they too must fill in nasty forms before being allowed to come here, that to simply throw open the doors to anyone that wanders in from the east side of Europe might be a bit risky....... but then, that's her all over.

(And that's the trouble with starting a piece in satirical vein - how do you get out of it back into serious mode without using a cheap stunt like this to pull it off......)

But the cameras and microphones thing is a true point - and one that is going to become increasingly problematic in the coming days.

Everybody and his mother is warning us that "this is going to get much worse before it gets better". You're not kidding there mate - best case scenario, a running sore of suffering in the centre of Europe for the next decade plus and complete division of the world into two tribes, eyeing each other with suspicion and animosity, collapsing world economy, soaring poverty, inequality and inflation. Worst case scenario nuclear holocaust and Armageddon - fallout and nuclear winter, coming to a town near you.

And in the immediate term, those cameras will bring us an on the spot fly-on-the-wall view of the destruction of people just like me and you. There homes being blown to shit, their mangled corpses strewn across streets reduced to wastelands of smoking rubble, those children's toys so carefully handed over to uncomprehending little ones, now lying filthy in oil-smeared potholes.

And tell me that you won't want to see NATO plans enforcing an air blockade, that you won't be shouting for 'boots on the ground' in order to stop this carnage, because I'm damn sure that I will be.

And that is why it will never be stopped from spreading.

And now, today, I'm off to the Tate, St Ives to see a new art exhibition that is showing there. For at least in art, you occasionally find colour, nuance and complexity. Because when it comes to black and white, I prefer it in the form of the old Carry-On films that I have downloaded from Sky for my evening's entertainment, rather than in the news bulletins from which I take my understanding of the world.

[peter]

It is not insignificant that the first response of a new -born baby to its birth is a wail.

It is a wail for that which has been lost. For the wrench that has torn it away from the comfort of its former state, the state of being part of something that is bigger. Suddenly it finds itself alone, wrenched into a state of being that is alien to its experience. This is what self-consciousness is - self-isolation: the sealing of ourselves inside the boney prison of our skulls. The separation of our being from the world-consciousness from whence we are drawn.

But this sense of 'I' is (as the Buddhists have so long realised) is an illusion. Even science now recognises this: that at the fundamental level all is one - that the separation of the world into 'things' has no meaning at the quantum level. When it comes to being alive, it is not the word alive that is the significant one, it is the word being. So do not give thought to the loss that you will suffer upon your death. It will have no more meaning to you than flicking your fingers. When a cup of water is poured into the ocean it is not water of the cup that is diminished - it is the ocean that is made the greater. And if the 'I' is lost, then what of it. That too, is just illusion at the end of the day, and what is lost is insignificant in comparison to what is gained.

Death is not an end - it is a returning home. This is not religion. This is the fact of the world, even by a scientific understanding of it. That the deep thinkers of the world came to the same conclusion via a different route should not suprise us. Truth is after all truth, whether arrived at by science or any other means.

Once having attained being, you aren't going to get out of it that easily - and that's a fact.

[peter]

So the Kremlin have set out their conditions under which (they say) the war could be stopped "in a moment" following Ukrainian agreement.

Assuming that the papers are relating the most significant of these demands, they would seem to rest on Ukraine ceasing all claims to the Crimea and recognition of Russia's right to rule the territory. The Ukraine should also recognise the independence of the two regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and finally the administration in Kiev should return to a position of neutrality and cease its attempts to join either the EU or NATO.

Now I'm the first to recognise that there are problems with all of these conditions, but are they so insurmountable that the current regime should risk its very continuation, the continuation of the very country on the back of them. Because let's face it, this is the likely end result if they do not do something to end the hostilities that are destroying their country from the ground up. Certainly the Russian advance is not going to plan - Putin in his worst nightmare could not have envisaged the mess he has found himself in - but it is by far from done. In fact it has barely started, and once the Russian war machine gets into full swing it is unlikely that much of the country will be inhabitable, far less governable, at the end of it.

This war will end with compromise, now or ten years down the line - all wars do. Were President Zelensky to concede to the Russian conditions (and there was no talk of the current administration falling, no denying of the Ukrainian right to exist as an independent state) then their country could remain intact and largely functional in order to begin the task of rebuilding, of preparing for people to return to their homes. Yes, concessions would have been made to Putin's aggression (and a price would be paid for that) but lives would be saved, probably in the thousands, the risk of escalation into global conflict could be averted, and order could be restored to where currently chaos rules. It is a concession that the world would owe the Ukraine a debt of gratitude for accepting.

And would acceptance of these conditions actually be so bad? Crimea is not returning to Ukraine control no matter what Zelensky might want - at least not while Russia exists as a state - so a bit of realpolitik here would be no bad thing. The areas of the Donbas that he is being asked to cede have been a running sore in Ukrainian affairs for the best part of a decade and the establishment of areas where those Ukrainians who feel more closely tied to Russia than others can set up home doesn't seem such a bad resolution to the problem to me. The said areas have been essentially under Ukrainian sepratist control for years anyway. Finally the issue of Ukrainian neutrality. This is a difficult one - perhaps the hardest of the conditions to swallow. The right of a country to decide for itself who it allies with, what associations it joins should be a given. A third country has no right to make demands in this respect, far less to pursue an aggressive war in an attempt to enforce such demands. But this is ideal world stuff. In reality countries are effected by what their neighbours do - and they can be threatened by it. The Cuban missile crisis is the classic example of this. America said what it was not prepared to accept and it was right to do so. Other countries might just as easily find themselves in the same position and I leave it to you to decide if the Russian/Ukrainian situation is comparable. But this aside, would the return to the neutrality of the Ukraine that pertained from (what) 1991 to 2014 be such a terrible thing. The country was stable, it was developing as an independent state, there was no unrest at that point amongst its people. Was it really so awful?

But, the argument against any kind of capitulation to these demands will run, Putin cannot be trusted. Well, no he can't. But this would be no reason not to grasp at the opportunity to bring this carnage to a halt. Because where it is going at the moment will do no-one any good. Of all of the future possibilities that pertain, the continuation of this conflict leads to the worst. And it is the Ukrainian people, the men, women and children that bear the cost. War only ever destroys, it never does any good. For this reason, for the sake of his people and ending this descent into nightmare, Zelensky must think very carefully about what his response should be to the Kremlin offer. It is an opportunity that might not arise again.

(Edit: but this suggestion that the Ukraine might treat with the Kremlin is in no sense an appeasement. It is rather an expediance to get the immediate situation under wraps. If the West so chooses, Russia can be punished in the longer term by all manner of actions (a movement away from the western dependence on Russian gas and oil as an example) once the immediate threat to the lives of the Ukrainian people is dealt with.)

[I'm Murrin]

That's not compromise. That's complete capitulation on everything Russia was asking for prior to the invasion.

[peter]

Sorry Murrin - I've just added an edit on this very point to my above post. Didn't see yours before doing so. Perhaps it gives more of a flavour of what I'm thinking.

[wayfriend]

Putin lies. Giving him those things will not stop the war. It is a pretense at being reasonable, which, being unobtainable, gives him a "plausible" excuse to continue the war.

Remember that everyone's first response to the Third Reich was appeasement based on the belief that their appetite was finite and quickly satiated.

[peter]

Mmmm.......

Yes Putin is a liar. Giving him those things might not stop the war, but it might. Not giving them to him definitely won't. He probably would never expect the demands to be agreed to, so yes, they are probably suggested as a means of projecting an image of reasonableness. Agreement to them would no doubt suprise him, but it would also give him a route out of this - and God knows, he needs one. He might find a reason not to live up to his word, yes - but then nothing would be lost. If he does live up to it (and the clever money would be for him to do so - he could present it as a win, which it would be, to his domestic audience) then thousands of lives, maybe tens of thousands could be saved.

Appease is defined as 'to placate or pacify (someone) by acceding to their demands. It doesn't have to be bad. We can live with that. The alternatives are to watch these poor people and their land bombed into oblivion, or to go down the road of escalation into God knows where - an alternative that is not really one at all.

We can appease/compromise/capitulate (call it what you will) or watch the Ukrainian people and their country be destroyed on the anvil of the failure of our foreign policy. This is the stark reality of this situation.

(Sleepy Joe has spoken today of stopping all Russian oil imports, and EU leaders are talking about doing the same. That way, the sanctions that hit disproportionately the poorest people in Russia will be mirrored by fuel and energy price increases that hit disproportionately the poorest people in the West. In both cases the wealthiest members of society walk away pretty much unscathed. Nice one.)

[Zarathustra]

So this is where you guys have been hiding. Y'all realize we have an entire subforum for this stuff, right?

(Sleepy Joe has spoken today of stopping all Russian oil imports, and EU leaders are talking about doing the same.

I actually agree with Joe and applaud the move, a year late as it is.

That way, the sanctions that hit disproportionately the poorest people in Russia will be mirrored by fuel and energy price increases that hit disproportionately the poorest people in the West. In both cases the wealthiest members of society walk away pretty much unscathed. Nice one.)

It wouldn't hit the poorest people if we'd continued being energy independent and a net exporter, as we were during the previous admin. We have enough oil. We've just allowed our hands to be tied by the illogical demands of the environmental Left extremists. It makes no difference to the atmosphere which country CO2 comes from.

[peter]

In the ultimate irony it appears that we in the West, having spent years alienating and demonising Iran, will now be needing to butter them up to step up to the plate and help fill the shortfall that the decision to stop oil imports from Russia will create. Similarly, our need for oil will further demand that we keep on-side with the odious regime in Saudi Arabia, already engaged in its own very questionable activities in the Yemen.

Such is the elasticity of our high-handed approach to the rest of the world, when it comes to looking after our own interest.

In a further ratcheting up of the dangers of this situation, Poland has announced that it will deliver its entire MiG-29 fleet to the Ramstein air base in Germany, where the US forces will then oversee their transfer to the pre-trained pilots of the Ukrainian air force. How the Russians will respond to this remains to be seen, but they will undoubtedly regard it as intervention of some kind. It would be naive not to see the American hand behind this, even though it is done at a distance via the agency of Poland. Three guesses as to which country the Russians will exact any reprisals upon.

And meanwhile, President Zelensky addresses a packed House of Commons via video link from his Kiev redoubt, in a rousing speech lifted directly from that of Winston Churchill (fight them on the beaches - you know the schtick). Our saucer eyed MPs seemed to take it well enough (hear, hears and standing ovations etc) as have our fawning press, but whether his calls for the West to enforce the much requested no-fly zone will be heeded, remains to be seen. (I suppose that the fighter jets from Poland are in part a response to this.)

Hey Z! Nice to see you man! I tend to post here because what I say is mostly opinion and I don't 'do the research' to the depth that I feel the tank warrants.

There are moves in the UK to lift the two year moratorium on fracking in order to help make up the shortfall that the Russian oil/gas embargo will cause. Sounds reasonable, but it will no doubt elicit the same environmental concerns on this side of the pond as in the US.

But at the moment, this all seems to be going in the one direction - that of escalation. I'm pressed to see a way of stopping this other than the one I have outlined above (which is clearly unpalatable to many for obvious reasons).

What a complete fuck-up our so called leaders have made of this world. They've battered the shit out of it with their now discredited response to the Covid threat, and in it's punch-drunk state are leading it reeling into a new cold war (at best) and further economic punishment. How much, exactly, do they think it can stand? Our systems are fragile at best, 'just-in-time' and always teetering on the edge of disaster. Carry on like this and the only jumping we'll be doing is back into the frikkin' stone-age. Bet all those tech billionaires are pleased they've got their New-Zealand hideouts sorted out now. Hope they've got good bunkers and lots of old vids!

Edit: Couple of other points I forgot to mention. As per usual, our mainstream media cannot be trusted to present a balanced picture of what is going on, preferring instead to go for the 'black and white' narrative that plays into the easier to understand version of events that our administration would rather we held. Take for example the presentation of the Russian people's response to Putin's war of aggression. Our broadcast media go almost exclusively for the expression of anti-war sentiment in Russia, focusing on the (undoubtedly) heavy-handed response of the state to any kind of deviation from the view that the war is entirely justified.

But this of course, is not the whole story. There is much popular sentiment in support of what Putin is doing, as evidenced by the rise of the social media inspired 'Z' movement, in which Russians from across the board sport Z emblems in demonstration of their support for their own forces. In fairness, I saw this story on the BBC news page on its website, but there has been no widespread coverage to speak of on televised news outlets. Of course, in Russia as elsewhere, there will be opinion on both sides of the argument, some being n favour and others against. I just wish our media could be more trusting of our ability to understand this - not deciding that it must play the role of moulding public opinion rather than simply presenting facts upon which people can form their own views. I'm aware that this has ever been the case, but still, it rankles........

I also heard a report that the administration in China had been forced to present more clearly its position in respect of the Ukrainian invasion (I'm not sure how so, but so it was said) and in so doing had issued a bullet-point style statement of where it stood. It seemed to be a surprisingly balanced position, in which it unequivocally damned the Russian actions in invading a sovereign state and recognised the right of Ukraine to exist as an autonomous nation, but simultaneously recognised the justified concerns of Russia pertaining to NATO expansion toward its western borders. China has much to answer for in its own behaviour toward its neighbouring countries, but in this case at least, it seemed to be taking an entirely reasonable position. Would that our leadership could have been so reasonable in the pursuit of its foreign policy that has played no small part in the precipitation of this crisis.

[SoulBiter]

All that being said Peter, we have to get this energy problem sorted out. Its obvious that the "West" cannot continue to rely on energy from countries that hate us (regardless of why they hate us). Even looking at electric vehicles and such, much of the minerals used to make the batteries comes from those same countries.

I know that many believe that the climate crisis should come first but we have to expand oil production while simultaneously looking for alternatives and using less of it to allow it to last.

On the war in Ukraine, I agree that Putin cannot be trusted. He will continue to tell you what you want to hear while going ahead and doing what he says he isn't doing. We cannot continue to ignore nor can we allow him to bully all other countries by dangling "Nuclear war" over our heads. At some point you have to stand up and say ENOUGH. Bully's only understand one thing. Strength. Appeasement will only cause him to draw the line further.

[peter]

Then we must intervene must we not? And 'if were done when t'is done, 'twer well it were done quickly' - no? This has always been an option and I'm not necessarily against it; the worst place of all (to me) is this hinterland, this halfway house of doing something and nothing simultaneously.

I see that I was wrong about the American hand being behind the Poland planes offer - or if it was it was a different one from the pentagon one that dissed the idea yesterday.

On the energy front, I'm a nuclear man; don't like the stuff and can't relish the idea of stepping up nuclear power production with the development of new plant, but in the current situation (climate and geopolitical) it seems like the least bad way of providing something like a sustainable energy policy. In the immediate term, yes, we'll have to deal with some pretty shady regimes to make up for the Russian shortfall; but I still feel justified in pointing out our hypocrisy in doing so. It's just a good thing to keep in mind that we cannot paint ourselves in as the world good guys all of the time. We all play our grubby parts for good or ill.

On the military intervention side, I'm thinking that we are going to be forced in in some capacity (greater or lesser) and will just have to hope that Putin (or someone on our side) isn't stupid enough to start pushing buttons that shouldn't be pushed. The Ukrainian forces are putting up a good fight, but they ain't going to drive out the Russian forces any time soon, and their capacity to fight is finite.

[Avatar]

As I said above, if countries are too concerned about the possibility of a nuclear response from Russia to intervene militarily, then that is effectively cart blanch for them to do whatever they want.

All the talk about Ukraine joining NATO and the EU is just "jam tomorrow."

Uncharacteristically hawkish as it may be, I too lean toward the "bite the bullet and get it over with" camp at the moment.

At the very least impose a no-fly zone and see if there's a bluff going on...

Economic sanctions are all very well, but we know that their effectiveness is limited, particularly in the short term, and especially when there are places like China willing to disregard them.

--A

[peter]

Excuse me while I sit down. Count to ten. Breath deeply and engage in a bit of mindfulness.

The egregious hypocrisy of the woman. The bald and blatant humbuggery. The shameless effrontery.

I refer of course to Foreign Secretary Liz Truss's quote in this morning's Times which I will - if I can stop my fingers from punching a hole in the screen of my tablet, such is the emotion with which I type - give in full. Referring to the freezing of the UK assets of erstwhile Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, she said:

Today's sanctions show once again that oligarchs and kleptocrats have no place in our economy or society. With their close links to Putin they are complicit in his aggression. The blood of the Ukrainian people is on their hands. They should hang their heads in shame.

Let's just look at that.

The oligarch's connections to the UK go back as far as 2002 when he bought (some say at Putin's bidding) the said top end football club. Abramovich was by no means the only oligarch who had benefited from the wholesale ransacking of the ownerless industries of the fallen soviet Union (in which all the state owned assets were simply grabbed by those with the closest proximity or family connections to them, irrespective of the illegality of their claims on assets that by right belonged to the people of the constituent countries in which they were situated) - nor the only one heavily invested in the UK. By this time the City of London was awash with the stolen money of the fallen Union, and much of it was finding its way into the pockets of the Conservative Party in the form of donations, ex-gracia payments and outright backhanders in order to grease the wheels of the mutually beneficial relationship.

After a couple of decades of this cozy association, following claims that both the referendums on Scottish independence and brexit had been subject to significant interference from Russia, the situation was deemed so serious that it demanded attention and thus was spawned the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia Report.

Damning in its findings, the report, which has never been acted upon to this day, was first held back from publication by the Johnson Government (it was said to list the names of various Russian donors to the Conservative Party over the years) for what they said were "perfectly usual" reasons in which there was a delay to the release of such reports. It just so happened that there was a general election in the offing and the release of such 'sensitive' information at this particular time could have been damaging to public perception of the party to say the least.

The said report, in the words of the Washington Post when it was finally released, demonstrates that British Governments have

... welcomed the Russian oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London 'laundromat', and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures.

So forgive me Truss, if these words of yours ring hollow - if I take them with a hefty pinch of salt when you talk of the unwelcome attitude of the British establishment to the oligarchs and kleptocrats. Because when it comes to complicity in the supporting of the Putin regime (and it is said that without the support of the said oligarchs Putin could not have remained in power in Russia) perhaps the blood has rubbed off on some of the hands shaken in those grubby deals. When it comes to the spreading of shame, perhaps some heads closer to home should join in the hanging.

Putin may well be the monster that our media in it's Disney-like simplicity chooses to paint - but let's not forget who made him.

[Zarathustra]

I'll copy this here since so many are hiding from the truth we're discussing in the Tank . . .

Ted Cruz has a devastating analysis of what instigated the Ukraine invasion. His points are as follows:

1. Russia has long wanted to invade Ukraine, as shown by Putin's public remarks about reuniting the Soviet Union and his actions in taking Crimea (once a part of Ukraine) in 2014. So why did he not invade all of Ukraine earlier? Why now? Read on!

2. Russia's economy depends crucially upon exporting fossil fuels, chiefly to Europe.

3. Prior to the construction of Nord Stream pipelines, the bulk of Russia's natural gas went through Ukraine. Attacking Ukraine would threaten those pipelines.

4. The year following Putin's capture of Crimea, construction began on Nord Stream 2, a Russian pipeline that circumvents Ukraine by going under the Baltic Sea to deliver natural gas to Germany. The purpose of this pipeline was to enable the invasion of Ukraine without threatening Russia's natural gas exports.

5. In 2019, Cruz authored legislation to sanction Nord Stream 2 to stop it, legislation that had overwhelming bipartisan support. Trump signed it into law. Putin stopped building Nord Stream 2 the day Trump signed this legislation. Construction was halted for a over a year.

6. Four days after Biden was inaugurated as President, Putin resumed construction specifically because Biden projected that he would waive those sanctions (which he did a few months later that year), giving Putin the greenlight to build Nord Stream 2.

7. When this happened, both Poland and Ukraine predicted that this would result in Putin invading Ukraine--which is exactly what happened, and for precisely the reasons they predicted.

I repeat: it was entirely predictable. Biden caused this by doing what Putin wanted (allowing the building of Nord Stream 2). Trump stopped it by opposing Putin (sanctioning Nord Stream 2). But Trump was supposed to be in collusion with Russia?? People who collude together don't oppose each other's desires. Trump stood up to Putin. Biden caved.

You Trump haters have been so fooled. Trump was the only thing holding Putin back. Biden handed Putin exactly what he wanted (continuing a tradition Obama started). You guys were 100% wrong. And look at the result of your foolish, gullible, irrational beliefs. You were led like sheep into believing an outright lie. We tried to warn you. You were too blind to see. And now the world stands on the brink of WWIII because of your stupidity.

Being wrong matters. You were wrong. Catastrophically. You elected this buffoon and his moron VP. It's your fault.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

I'll copy this here since so many are hiding from the truth we're discussing in the Tank . . .

[…]

[Zarathustra]

You criticize the messenger when you can't criticize the message.

[wayfriend]

Well, I liked posting in here to escape the bullshit attack shit of the Tank.

Or at least I thought so. Now Zarathustra has used his magic mind reading powers and told us why I am really posting here.

Bullshit attack shit of the Tank, illustrated.

Z, do you have any evidence of this accusation? Moderators delete my posts when I don't have evidence to support the accusation. Then they send me mail.

Wait ... what? Not you? Just me? Oh.