I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
Just wondering. Is this a rare if not unique occasion of a geopolitical event completely uniting PB?
Do we have a single PB-er cheering on Putin and the Russians? I can’t think of one
A momentous unanimity. Which says something in itself given the wide variety of opinions on here
You REALLY have to be a contrarian to be cheering on Putin.
Or a Trumpist Republican.
Be entertaining if Putin's greatest achievement is keeping the White House Democrat controlled for a couple of decades.
Sadly, Plato is no longer with us.
Unfair. I know you can’t libel the dead but Plato, bless her, would - I am sure - have reviled this horrible war. She was eccentric and lonely but she was also humane
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
I remember A. Neils approach to marketing his sales figures...
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
Just so we are clear here, the Russian attack on Ukraine isn't going badly wrong because some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. The assault on Kiev as yet hasn't hit full pelt but isn't yet a disaster. The attack in the south east is going ok. Only the North Eastern/Eastern assaults appear initially to have gone badly in the first stages. If there is one failure though its the suppression of air defences. I'm not sure how much of the Ukrainian airforce is left but the ground based air defence appears to be functioning. Russia has large air superiority but doesn't seem to have applied it as you'd think they would. Whether its that they haven't or can't is an open question.
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
I cannot understand why a conservative party leadership election taking upto 8 weeks at this time of war could be justified or indeed accepted by the voters
When the PM is an incompetent buffoon, I cannot understand why you would want him in post for a second longer
I agree with BigG that right now is not quite the time. This will have largely played out in a week or 2 and the key focus will have to be how to stop Putin going any further and Johnson needs to be got shot of right away because he won't bother putting in the hard work to achieve that objective.
In truth the Conservative Party should never have allowed the Brexit issue to blind it into choosing an incompetent, weak and dishonest leader. However we are where we are and at the end of the day Johnson is only a buffoon and is not in the same evil and dangerous category as Trump.
The Tories need to act sooner rather than later once this is over. We are stuck with Brexit now and If they cannot now see that he is not the right leader for a pandemic or an international crisis then they never will and any further disasters will be on their heads.
If the Tories had not picked Boris in 2019, the Brexit Party would still have stood candidates in Tory seats, the Tories would not have got a majority, Brexit would still not have got done and Corbyn would still be Labour leader
The fact that Johnson is the PM rests squarely with Tory MPs and Tory members. Once we lets had a choice between him and Corbyn the game was already over.
Even if I accept your scenario for the sake of argument, what is stopping the party getting rid of him now? Brexit's "done", Corbyn's gone - hardly anyone believes he is fit for office but only Tory MPs have the power to remove him. What is stopping them?
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
I remember A. Neils approach to marketing his sales figures...
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I wonder if, what ultimately will do it for Putin, is the last few years of budget cuts etc, that have enabled him to balance his budget and build up his war chest.
He’ll have to rely on ever greater repression to stifle dissent. That strategy has its limits.
If he gets bogged down in an expensive war, what does he do, then?
Slashing budgets further - along with shaking down the oligarchs is pretty high risk, but that’s probably what he’ll have to do.
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
The Spectator seems increasingly to be pushing an anti-British viewpoint. But why?
There's probably some psychology at play. For years the Speccie crowd has been yearning for Britain to be ruled by, if not Boris, someone like him. Now the great man himself is in charge and it isn't all it was cracked up to be. That must be a hellava coming down.
People across the political spectrum are being brutally disabused of closely held beliefs.
A clown does not make a Prime Minister in troubled times. British military equipment is highly effective. People will fight and die for their country. Nuclear alliances bring peace. The rush to renewables has undermined the west. Macho politicians are just thugs. The French have balls. There is a limit to corporate greed. Western intelligence is really good.
They dashed past the army before getting ambushed, and slain. Seems like either Russian comms are diabolical, or the national guard are trying to one up the army.
Today I authorized the @DeptofDefense to provide an additional $350 million in immediate military assistance to Ukraine to help defend itself from Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war. #UnitedWithUkraine
The Russians are struggling and taking heavy casualties. They are beatable. Our best chance to defeat Putin’s threat to Europe is now. We should be giving Ukraine everything it wants. Despite the risks, that should include a no-fly zone. Putin’s victory would be the greater risk.
He will not nuke us because we’ve shot down some of his planes.
Fucking ludicrous. To do a No Fly Zone you've got to be prepared to a) shoot down Russian aircraft and b) do SEAD/DEAD on the Russian side of the border.
NFZ is basically speedrunning the process of going to war with Russia.
I'd be worried if a mindset that denigrates any solution not flirting with WW3 as "appeasement" starts to take hold in influential places.
Russia is literally flirting with WW3. By invading Ukraine. There is no getting away from that.
I sort-of think we should change the word 'Russia' for 'Putin'.
I'm far from convinced the Russian people are into this.
We're dealing with someone who has gone doolally.
As I said below, I starting doing that about 24 hours ago, but it now means the only person I want to die is Putin, I don’t want any combatants to die, I want them to have children they proudly watch play international football between the two countries, and that don’t happen if they don’t get home to their partners, so it leaves you unable to follow it and feeling very confused and emotional.
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
I remember A. Neils approach to marketing his sales figures...
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
I think it’s “requested” rather than “implemented” - bit like the no fly zone.
It would be a clear violation of the Montreux Convention, and the Turkish FM has pointed that out. OTOH Erdogan does not like being bound by the convention, hence the building of the new ship canal which would be a Turkish sovereign internal waterway.
Seems Russian warships may be banned from the Black sea.
I thank my friend Mr. President of 🇹🇷 @RTErdogan and the people of 🇹🇷 for their strong support. The ban on the passage of 🇷🇺 warships to the Black Sea and significant military and humanitarian support for 🇺🇦 are extremely important today. The people of 🇺🇦 will never forget that!
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I sort-of think we should change the word 'Russia' for 'Putin'.
I'm far from convinced the Russian people are into this.
We're dealing with someone who has gone doolally.
As I said below, I starting doing that about 24 hours ago, but it now means the only person I want to die is Putin, I don’t want any combatants to die, I want them to have children they proudly watch play international football between the two countries, and that don’t happen if they don’t get home to their partners, so it leaves you unable to follow it and feeling very confused and emotional.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
and just how much Sat Nav has changed navigation in warfare so armies do not rely on signs
I'm not sure if the convoys will be using sat nav. Might be traceable. lots of western drones hanging around and I'm sure the Americans will be v-good at intercepting satellite signals
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
lol. It seems to be coping without your subscription
Maybe They must be paying for cheaper, step down in quality, hacks.
I doubt they need to. The Speccy has a subscription of 112,000 and rising.
It is also now the longest running current affairs magazine in history.
It wasn’t an attack on Specy I been reading it for years, it was a cheeky quip aimed at, as it says down thread, recent contributor…
My cheeky quips never seem to work. Humour fail. 🤦♀️
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I suppose an equivalent in Britain would be a Scot asking someone English to pronounce “loch”.
Och aye!
The Leith police dismisseth us. The Met stop and search us.
My sat nav driving around Aberdeenshire used to tell me to turn on to Farochie Road (satnav pronounced the 'ch' as in satchel, it's actually pronounced as in hockey), and I was only later disabused of this notion by people laughing at my pronunciation of it.
and just how much Sat Nav has changed navigation in warfare so armies do not rely on signs
Actually the grunt still sometimes needs real physical indicators. There are plenty of stories of military units in the GPS era still getting lost. There is also an assumption that GLONASS will always be working. That kind of thing can be interfered with if a proper state actor put a bit of thought into it.
Kyiv under curfew for 15 hours in half an hours time - 5pm to 8am, extended from 10pm to 7am. Another long night for Kyiv's civilians, especially as electricity is expected to be put down.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I've followed EU affairs from close and far for over a decade and I can't recall anything like this. Polish PM gatecrashes Berlin to lobby for sanctions.
Today there is no time for the selfishness that we see also here in #Germany.
This is why I came to @OlafScholz to shake Germany's conscience so that they decide on firm and crushing sanctions that would influence Putin's decisions.
Just so we are clear here, the Russian attack on Ukraine isn't going badly wrong because some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. The assault on Kiev as yet hasn't hit full pelt but isn't yet a disaster. The attack in the south east is going ok. Only the North Eastern/Eastern assaults appear initially to have gone badly in the first stages. If there is one failure though its the suppression of air defences. I'm not sure how much of the Ukrainian airforce is left but the ground based air defence appears to be functioning. Russia has large air superiority but doesn't seem to have applied it as you'd think they would. Whether its that they haven't or can't is an open question.
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I just received a text from a Ukrainian friend of ours that apparently the invading Russian troops headed to Kyiv was outpacing its supply line and got lost. So apparently they went and started asking for direction how to get to Kyiv, and consequently were arrested and are now prisoners of war.
I spoke to @markrutte this afternoon to thank him for strong cooperation in ensuring a supply of defensive aid to Ukraine. We discussed SWIFT and the need for urgent action to exclude Russia. The UK and the Netherlands are united in our condemnation of Putin’s attack on Ukraine.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I suppose an equivalent in Britain would be a Scot asking someone English to pronounce “loch”.
Och aye!
The one that seriously sets my teeth on edge is “Syne” - who the feck put a Z in it?
The real test is to ask a Southron to describe the route from Milngavie to Rutherglen and then Anstruther.
Via Strathaven.
I know (forgive me paraphrasing) Mulgai and Ainster, but how are Rutherglen and Strathaven pronounced?
Ruh-thir-glen and Straiven imo (other opinions will definitely be available)
Ace. Possibly saved me a future withering glance. There's a place in Perthshire called Grandtully, but actually pronounced Grantly. It trips everyone up.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I just received a text from a Ukrainian friend of ours that apparently the invading Russian troops headed to Kyiv was outpacing its supply line and got lost. So apparently they went and started asking for direction how to get to Kyiv, and consequently were arrested and are now prisoners of war.
In that sort of context, you can see why the locals fucking about with the road signs could actually be useful.
They dashed past the army before getting ambushed, and slain. Seems like either Russian comms are diabolical, or the national guard are trying to one up the army.
Just a question, and don't what to be downbeat, but is there any possibility that some of these videos we keep seeing of destroyed Russian vehicles and convoys are actually Ukrainian?
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
I remember A. Neils approach to marketing his sales figures...
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
Mostly true. But you’ve broadened things somewhat, there, from the original point about London property.
Just a question, and don't what to be downbeat, but is there any possibility that some of these videos we keep seeing of destroyed Russian vehicles and convoys are actually Ukrainian?
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
I think the white Z is the identification mark for the Russians
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I suppose an equivalent in Britain would be a Scot asking someone English to pronounce “loch”.
Och aye!
The one that seriously sets my teeth on edge is “Syne” - who the feck put a Z in it?
The real test is to ask a Southron to describe the route from Milngavie to Rutherglen and then Anstruther.
Via Strathaven.
I know (forgive me paraphrasing) Mulgai and Ainster, but how are Rutherglen and Strathaven pronounced?
Ruh-thir-glen and Straiven imo (other opinions will definitely be available)
Ace. Possibly saved me a future withering glance. There's a place in Perthshire called Grandtully, but actually pronounced Grantly. It trips everyone up.
It would certainly trip me up. I dimly recall that there’s Stra’in option but might be a bit ambitious for non native Strathaveners.
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
The Spectator overtook the Guardian in sales for the first time ever last month.
Powerful. A Ukrainian approaches unknown soldiers and yells at them to say "palyanitsa". Realizing they're Russian, he tells them they can't tell him not to videotape, as Ukrainians constitution allows him to.
I suppose an equivalent in Britain would be a Scot asking someone English to pronounce “loch”.
Och aye!
The Leith police dismisseth us. The Met stop and search us.
My sat nav driving around Aberdeenshire used to tell me to turn on to Farochie Road (satnav pronounced the 'ch' as in satchel, it's actually pronounced as in hockey), and I was only later disabused of this notion by people laughing at my pronunciation of it.
Use any British made satnav in Europe, and everything is pronounced as it is written were it an English word.
The baffling failure of Russian air power and ability to defend it's own supply lines make no sense. Mavbe he really did expect Ukraine to just roll over?
I'm inclined to think that "somebody* on the Russian side is a little complacent, or over-confident.
It must require a large number of assumptions about risk to line up 90 helicopters parked nose to tail on a road 20-25 miles inside Belarus.
RAF Basingbourn (still an MOD site) is just down the road from me. It was home to B17 aircraft of the USAAF.
Nearby there is a stately home, Wimpole Hall, which coincidentally had a wide two-mile long avenue stretching between it and the base. So the air force used it as distributed parking for their aircraft - and there are photos of these massive bombers arrayed along it.
Whenever I walk the avenue, I think of what it must have been like with all those bombers there.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
Fck me, I immediately thought this was a piece from years ago, but last week. The Spikedtator..
It’s a perfectly legitimate view. One held by Emmanuel Macron, I believe
The Putin of 10 years ago was a very different beast. Lucid, clever, sane. A ruthless patriot, a brutal soldier, but amenable to logic. Perhaps we could have handled him better; certainly our rapid expansion of NATO right up to his borders, immediately after the humiliating collapse of the USSR now appears questionable
Does any of this excuse Putin’s satanic and pointless assault on Ukraine? Of course not. It’s pure evil. It’s also pointless even for mad dog Putin, it might well backfire quickly and even if he “wins” in the short term he loses in the end. What’s the endgame for him? I can’t see a good one
Your analysis doesn't account for the long gap -- some 6-8 years -- between the Baltic states' accession to NATO and Putin going "bad".
It's easy to compress timelines when looking at the past, but Putin was acting fairly sensibly long after 2004. All the attempts to explain this in terms of NATO membership or the Iraq war fall down on the same point, and until someone even tries to account for that huge time lag, I do not take such a view seriously.
You might be right. I’d have to go back and look at the timelines. But we agree there was a time when Putin was “sensible” - and that seems to be Liddle’s point (tho I haven’t read the article, just the headline, and Liddle does say some foolish things to provoke)
Either way Andrew Neil is quite right. One big reason we hate the new mad Putin is that he wants to crush free speech and dissent. Free speech means seeing printed opinions you might fiercely dislike
Free speech also means being allowed to whine about Woke and being cancelled when someone highlights all-to-predictable contrarianism, or in this case just reproduces an image of the headline of an article. Then everyone can point & laugh at those whiners and their endless attempts to pretend being challenged is some kind of censorship.
It’s great.
In my experience, criticism of the Spectator nearly always comes from a peculiar subset of people who genuinely dislike its viewpoint yet secretly would love to be published inside it, as it is so prestigious. A curious phenomenon
It's interesting. A decade or so ago I was a regular reader of the Speccy and found it a pleasant zippy-in-places recreational read. I now see it as bow-tie reactionary faux man-of-the-world drivel you'd have to pay me serious money to allow through the letterbox. So, has it changed or have I changed? Bit of both, I guess, but I think it's mainly me. The last 10 or 12 years, coinciding with not having to earn a living, I've made a concerted effort to really *think* about things rather than forever chasing around in a daze, swilling coffee, running for trains and planes, and it's made a big difference. It's been the decade of my enlightenment - with my Spectator habit one of its minor casualties.
On and off Speccie reader for decades. Currently off. A few reasons:
Its diversity is good, but it currently lacks a coherent editorial world view. it should be the voice of a considered philosophically coherent conservatism. It isn't.
Bias is good; but careful slanting of facts and fact selection isn't.
It's too incestuous (politically) in its people makeup.
It reviews too many incrowd/luvvie books and books which are not worth publishing (usually the same thing). Its 'arts' covers too much trashy self regarding junk.
It shows insufficient regard for ordinary poor people and their lives and at the same time is not intelligent enough. (In this regard the NS is starting to overtake it - much improved recently).
It has too much illiterate economics.
Too many of its writers are self absorbed.
I exempt Matthew Parris from all of this.
PS You can get its gist online for free, but don't tell them.
Alternatively, the editors at the Spectator have realised that the future of an intellectual, highly prestigious but ancient current affairs magazine lies in appealing to a younger net-savvy readership, not the elderly gents who populate PB?
This would explain why so many of the pensioners on here have decided it is in decline, yet mysteriously it is racking up record sales, unlike almost every other printed journal in the western world
The Spectator overtook the Guardian in sales for the first time ever last month.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
Just a question, and don't what to be downbeat, but is there any possibility that some of these videos we keep seeing of destroyed Russian vehicles and convoys are actually Ukrainian?
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
I think the white Z is the identification mark for the Russians
Just so we are clear here, the Russian attack on Ukraine isn't going badly wrong because some people thought the place would be taken over in 48 hours. The assault on Kiev as yet hasn't hit full pelt but isn't yet a disaster. The attack in the south east is going ok. Only the North Eastern/Eastern assaults appear initially to have gone badly in the first stages. If there is one failure though its the suppression of air defences. I'm not sure how much of the Ukrainian airforce is left but the ground based air defence appears to be functioning. Russia has large air superiority but doesn't seem to have applied it as you'd think they would. Whether its that they haven't or can't is an open question.
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
I suspect that's all true. However, there's a long way to go, and it's important we keep up Ukrainian morale and the will to resist.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
The Russians are struggling and taking heavy casualties. They are beatable. Our best chance to defeat Putin’s threat to Europe is now. We should be giving Ukraine everything it wants. Despite the risks, that should include a no-fly zone. Putin’s victory would be the greater risk.
He will not nuke us because we’ve shot down some of his planes.
Fucking ludicrous. To do a No Fly Zone you've got to be prepared to a) shoot down Russian aircraft and b) do SEAD/DEAD on the Russian side of the border.
NFZ is basically speedrunning the process of going to war with Russia.
So far, the Russian military is resembling a paper tiger.
I must admit, I did enjoy reading in the Telegraph this morning how British anti-tank weapons are taking out Russian armour near Kharkiv.
Ukrainian soldiers were shouting 'God Save The Queen', after successful strikes.
Just saw that and made me smile. We have sent them 2000 of 20k apparently. Send the rest!
Apparently they have an expiry date, so might as well
They last 20 years, and were delivered from 2009. So a few years to go yet.
Given that the original drawing is of Warhammer 40k’s Cadian Imperial Guard, who take a beating in pretty much every engagement, exist solely to be bailed out by the militarily superior Space Marines, and whose home planet is now an asteroid field, the comparison may be apt…
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Russia has a gigantic nuclear arsenal and control of it rests in the hands of a delusional, megalomaniacal, paranoid fascist lunatic. And if, pray God, the bastard dies before he decides to go down in a blaze of glory and turn us all to ash with him, then whatever comes after him likely won't be very much better.
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
Putin has wrapped himself up in religious orthodoxy, that of the Eastern Orthodox of the Russian variety. Its an under studied part of the guy's motivation. Its not just the religion but the political bent that goes with such institutions. He certainly shows plenty of the markers of a swivel-eyed religiously inspired case.
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
I've been calling for a clean up of dirty Russian money for years.
The problem here is that the Premier League is awash with dirty money and so is London. We host the Arms Fair every two years which directly contributes to dirty regimes.
And whilst I definitely want to ban Abramovich and his fellow Putin-loving Russian mafia, what about Saudi Arabia? What about Qatar?
I love Qatar Airways but I'm under no illusion about the country behind it.
Corruption runs deep and money talks. That's why the stock markets soared yesterday. They know our sanctions are feeble.
Frankly, if London property prices crash as a result of getting dirty money out of London, that would be a good thing. I am frankly sick of hearing about ludicrously overpriced properties, of whole areas going dark because houses are bought and not lived in, of local businesses failing because there is no local population and knowing how hard it will be for my children to get onto the property ladder because of the effects of London property being treated as a bank by the crooked and corrupt of the world.
The Chinese are worse.
The Chinese regime is dreadful, but it does at least have the advantage of being led by rational actors with clearly defined and comprehensible aims, even if we don't agree with them. If Xi were anything like Putin he'd be sending the troops in to bite random chunks out of Vietnam and Mongolia and install client satraps, and threatening to nuke Bhutan if it ran away screaming into an alliance with India.
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
I think like everyone, Putin's actions are pulling him ever closer to the thing he fears most, the disintegration of his state apparatus at the hands of the West. After his formative experiences in the collapse of the GDR, when he called for back up and it never came, his whole career has been built on preventing this from happening, but his own actions will bring it about. We can scream 'Yes' at something and it will come; we can scream 'No' at something and it will still come.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Of course Russia is more of a threat to us than China. It is on the same continent as us for starters while China is on the other side of the world.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
We are not on the Continent.
This is basic geography.
In which you are wrong. We are part of the European continent by any normal definition.
Comments
It’s not my taste but I have spent a long time investigating this world
https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1357717251231776770?s=20
And when you remove the Libdem filter...
Nonetheless it is an irrelevance, but why not add it to the list of irrelevancies?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60517447
if you're going to bullshit at least be realistic about it. Might as well claim Putin was elected with 100% of the vote.
https://www.railscot.co.uk/news/17/624/
If Kiev is under effective Russian control in a week and the country (or whatever part of it Putin is aiming for) is under effective control within 3 weeks that's still good going. Plus the Russians have more formations to play and stories have it the Belarussians are apparently due to commit their forces in next 48-72 hours after Russian demands of old President Big Hat. Its not known if the Ukrainians have the anywhere between 50-75k of reservists fully committed either admittedly but the assumption they have less cards to play.
There was a post last night on attacking the Russian logistical tail as both a tactical and strategic aim and I mentioned that I'd not seen much evidence of it. Today there is some evidence of this occurring, columns of fuel vehicles, engineering kit and so on being destroyed/abandoned, largely it seems, via airstrikes.
From a wider point of view if the West is shipping substantial kit via South East Poland what are the Russians going to do to interdict it and where are they going to try it? |Anyone who follows the aircraft tracking sites can't help but see US tankers up in the air frequently in that part of Poland. Part of that is supporting air intelligence craft but part of it is refuelling fighter aircraft that appear to be providing an air screen over the main logistics hub.
If continued high-grade supplies of anti armour and anti-air weaponry can get to the likes of Kiev, its going to get messy, especially since the Russians look to be on for some kind of large scale heliborne assault somewhere in that area. The possibility of losing several tens of aircraft over a week or so is a lot to contend with. Can the West, though, really move with enough speed?
As for the reported Bosphorus Straits closure that's a real wildcard. Hard to know its impact.
Even if I accept your scenario for the sake of argument, what is stopping the party getting rid of him now? Brexit's "done", Corbyn's gone - hardly anyone believes he is fit for office but only Tory MPs have the power to remove him. What is stopping them?
Next week (the 6th) will be two years since my last Scottish rail expedition - Aberdeen to Inverness via Keith.
Sadly, the pandemic has stopped me doing everything west and north of Inverness!
A clown does not make a Prime Minister in troubled times.
British military equipment is highly effective.
People will fight and die for their country.
Nuclear alliances bring peace.
The rush to renewables has undermined the west.
Macho politicians are just thugs.
The French have balls.
There is a limit to corporate greed.
Western intelligence is really good.
And so on.
As you were.
Another Rosgvardiya (riot police) convoy of troop transports, torched with their cargo inside, this time in the East.
Convoy was seen approaching the border earlier today:
https://twitter.com/fpleitgenCNN/status/1497504471277969417
Russia are doing a *really* bad job of securing areas and defending vulnerable convoys.
Meanwhile CIT report on the Rosgvardiya convoy destroyed in Kyiv that Ukr MoD posted such a graphic video of.
https://twitter.com/CITeam_en/status/1497573785414901760 (thread)
They dashed past the army before getting ambushed, and slain. Seems like either Russian comms are diabolical, or the national guard are trying to one up the army.
https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1497562842735812608
Quite a use of social media by the Ukrainian military and just another example of how much has changed in warfare in the Twitter age. https://twitter.com/defenceu/status/1497573115550961670
The Met stop and search us.
“Turkey hasn’t made a decision to close the straits to Russian ships yet,” a senior Turkish official tells me
https://twitter.com/ragipsoylu/status/1497569348386496513?s=21
Putin is a far more dangerous and volatile proposition, and so is Russia itself. The escalating rupture to economic and cultural ties - in everything from football to banking transactions - does at least suggest that the penny is finally dropping, even (it would now appear) amongst hitherto sympathetic states like Hungary and Cyprus. If the Russians won't junk Putin and reform - and I'm betting that they won't - then the rupture should be total. We will have to deal with the buggers at the United Nations, but other than that let's have nothing more to do with them.
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets
Mister Krushchev said, "We will bury you"
I don't subscribe to this point of view
It'd be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too
How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?
There is no monopoly on common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology, regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
There is no historical precedent
To put the words in the mouth of the president?
There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't believe anymore
Mister Reagan says, "We will protect you"
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
We share the same biology, regardless of ideology
But what might save us, me and you
Is if the Russians love their children too
Songwriters: Gordon Sumner / Serge Prokofieff
My cheeky quips never seem to work. Humour fail. 🤦♀️
Edit: https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1497580512638083081
Just been extended to be continuous until Monday 8am. 39 hours of curfew.
But sorry, in no way is Russia more of a threat to us than China. They haven't unleashed a pandemic on us for one thing.
Whoever would have thought they might need a new Doctrine?
https://ura.news/articles/1036278272
Russia claiming “no one’s told us”
Response to that is “fuck off Russian warship”
So what is the impact? Surely Russians have everything place now they were steaming some across med last few days?
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1497578120232288256
Prime Minister @MorawieckiM in #Berlin 🇩🇪:
Today there is no time for the selfishness that we see also here in #Germany.
This is why I came to @OlafScholz to shake Germany's conscience so that they decide on firm and crushing sanctions that would influence Putin's decisions.
https://twitter.com/spignal/status/1497560481921482752
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1497583637822328832
The West can play the long game with China, with a reasonable degree of confidence that it won't end with us all dying horribly. Russia, on the other hand, is a lost cause. It is the land of despots, it's a vicious antagonist, and the leopard won't change its spots. And, since we can't defang the leopard - we can't wish its nuclear weapons away, sadly - then the next best thing we can do is try to cage it. All of the doors between civilized Europe and the Russian Federation should be slammed and welded shut.
Likely bad news for Ukraine if true. His replacement will no doubt have given Putin assurances that the job will done, "WHATEVER IT TAKES...."
I really hope not, but I think they have much of the same equipment?
I dimly recall that there’s Stra’in option but might be a bit ambitious for non native Strathaveners.
So, they're a little bit upset.
Post vaccination Covid is also now much less of an issue. China may be more of a threat to Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia than us, Russia is more of a threat to Europe and us however than China is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_shelf
@PaulMauser1898
Observed Russian vehicle markings corresponded to rough incursion areas. I'm sure this is not comprehensive and I am not claiming this is accurate but this is what I've seen so far. #Ukraine #Russia #Z #V #O
https://twitter.com/PaulMauser1898/status/1497528093195444226
There are many ways to ultimately 'win'.
These people just make up their own facts to suit them. They end up looking like complete idiots, posting tripe like that.
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1497570412041064454?s=20&t=WJuxCxnyocz1Bq1FjVIr0g