Russians occupying southern city of Kherson are reportedly trying to call a referendum to establish a new statelet: Kherson National Republic (like DNR and LNR).
Today 44 (out of total 64) members of the Kherson Oblast Council proclaimed that Kherson is part of Ukraine
It really seems to be a genuine surprise to the invaders that there isn't a large minority, or even a majority, in favour of Russian rule. At least they're learning it now I suppose.
It also reminds us to take those surveys in the Crimea showing 90% satisfaction with being ruled by Russia with a very large ladleful of salt.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
No one on PB is commenting on Ukraine in the Pollyanna way you describe. There is no “PB orthodoxy”. People aren’t “furious” at you, just puzzled by your remarks
Honestly, this whole bizarre strand of commentary, from you, perhaps says more about you than about PB
A slightly ominous paragraph in that news report (linked prior) on Covid in Hong Kong
“A senior Chinese official overseeing Hong Kong affairs, Xia Baolong, who has been helping coordinate Beijing’s response to help Hong Kong contain the outbreak, was cited by the China News Agency on Saturday as saying the situation was still severe and told residents to prepare mentally for a “long-term war”.”
Hmm. One of the *good* things about Omicron is that it is so infectious it burns out quickly. By infecting everyone fast. Why should this be a “long term war”?
But perhaps the Chinese official is just steeling the people for a lot of dying
Even though it spreads quickly, UK got Omicron 4 months ago and still plenty around and we are now in mode of COVID isn't going away for many many years. I read thats more China bracing for the fact COVID will become widespread in China and once that is the case you have to prepare for it to be there for the long term.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
You're playing the martyr and it is unconvincing. Many people are suspicious or cautious of overly positive news as put out by Ukraine, even as they hope it to be true. Certainly some take an optimistic view but it is not as universal as you pretend.
The issue is that just as no positive story about Ukraine is automatically to be accepted as factual, that doesn't make any story positive about Russia's position automatically factual by default, yet the article you posted did do that in several points (though not all the way through, certainly).
On the contrary, you seem to be getting angry at people pointing out a few instances where the suggestion of an 'alternative situation' was made without evidence.
So you are getting angry at people doing the very thing you claim to want them to do, which is think a bit more about information that is posted. People have thought about the article you shared and had some critical comments, and you are now whining about them doing so.
Should people also be wary of information putting out nothing but pro-Ukrainian messaging without sufficient evidence to support it? Sure they should. But what does that have to do with being wary of elements of that article which were nothing but supposition (and the bit I highlighted was paritcularly weird supposition about a troop build up being corroboration about an assault plan, without even considering alternative explanation of it being in response to the earlier troop build up by Russia)?
I'm certainly not getting angry about anything; this is PB. As I have said I liked that article because it asks some awkward questions and posits a view that is rarely heard.
Neither am I playing the martyr. I find it interesting to see the reactions on here which in turn have been quite emotional.
We have already had one "truth" overturned. @another_richard joining in the criticism of "my article" said that *of course* Kharkiv hasn't been surrounded whereas the MOD seems to think it has been.
So a very brief and small illustration of my point.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
We're still waiting for you to show some of your self-proclaimed super scepticism about that article.
I like that article because it posits an alternative view of what might be happening, not because I think it is what is happening.
Or shall we discuss the difference between "surrounded" and "assessed encirclement".
If you want to give us the benefit of your knowledge of the technical difference between that use of words, then that would be of genuine use.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
I find it very hard to believe that the front is at Poltava, and the Russian army is reaching the outskirts of Dnipro. We've had recent media reports - e.g. interviews with refugees recently evacuated from Sumy - in Poltava, where they've stopped at Poltava as a safe haven. There were recent reports of a rare missile attack on a shoe factory in Dnipro - not likely to be the picture if Russian forces were at the outskirts.
Where Russia has taken territory in Ukraine this has been well-established by subsequent evidence posted online. If anything, western media reports have often hyped up Russian gains, as part of a "dramatic breaking news" narrative (and equally like to hype up Ukrainian counter-offensives for the same reason), yet there's been nothing about Russian forces at Poltava or Dnipro. That doesn't seem credible.
Why do you accept the official Russian story of the war so uncritically?
Is that the official Russian story? I have no idea.
It paints a picture of a city under constant attack not to say besieged. Perhaps the map meant that.
And it is a government owned Western media report.
Roads to the south and west of the city are still open according to journalists on the ground who are managing to enter and exit without seeing Russians:
The map also shows Chernihiv as occupied (not even contested), when it's trivial to verify that it's still Ukr held. Topping's Russian propaganda map, much like his article are laughably poor - only a fool would be taken in by them.
Again you are getting everything you think you know from the Western media and sources sympathetic to Ukraine.
And it's not my article of course it is an article that gives a different perspective.
Which you don't like. Fine.
What are you saying? You think western media is falsely claiming that Kharkiv is not encircled? Why would they do that?
You can be sure that - if/when the Russians manage to encircle Kyiv - the western media will be competing to be the first to breathlessly report the fact. They won't be claiming to have just driven in from Bila Tserkva and denying the encirclement exists.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
I don’t think many people are furious at you although I’m probably speaking for myself. It’s good to get two sides because, as you say, both sides exaggerate. However, I was more surprised because, even from a cursory reading, it was clear from the language it was coming from a pro-Russian standpoint although, as others have said, done quite well.
My view is that I don’t think the Western intelligence agencies would be sending so many signals that Russia is suffering so badly if it wasn’t true or they thought that. They would be coming up with more nuanced terms.
More to the point, Russian actions seem to confirm this. Asking for Syrian mercenaries is quite a desperate move. It doesn’t suggest things are well .
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
The bits about the air position, and that a lot of the Ukrainians wandering around with state of the art multi-$million NATO anti-tank kit end up firing them at lorries and jeeps, were the most credible bits. Spoiled by the egregious pro-Russian bias later on.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
The fate of the cat (Russia) at the end of the cartoon is surely not what he wants? Unless he is into some... interesting personal stuff....
The speed of the West’s reaction to the Putin War on Ukraine is extraordinary. Corralling dozens of democracies, each with their own decision making processes, into such a united response is a major achievement. Joe Biden has played a key role in enabling it to happen. My guess is that in Europe the 2024 American presidential election is also casting a long shadow. If Trump or an acolyte wins, as seems probable, the US will not be a reliable partner.
The complete reboot of the EU over the last month and the likelihood of an isolationist, America First, Republican President in 2025 leaves the UK in a very tricky strategic position. We’ll pretend it doesn’t, of course, but in the real world that won’t help.
The thought of Trump is a nightmare but the idea the UK will be in a tricky position seems to be unlikely in view of this 2 day meeting in Chequers and Downing Street of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF)
We need to realise that this war has changed everything and the time for them and us is yesterday's news as we move to greater cooperation which does not necessitate UK rejoining the EU
I totally agree. The way forward is for much closer cooperation with the EU, without the need to rejoin. I wonder what the ERG feels about this, though.
I genuinely believe the ERG will be marginalised by circumstances and if not then GE24 is lost to the conservatives
It really is time to move beyond Brexit. That needs realism from all parties. We need to be cooperating closely with the EU on key issues, such as security and energy; while at a time of mounting global uncertainty, we may also want to look again at whether greater access to a single market of 400 million people that is literally on our doorstep might be a good idea. None of which means we must or even should rejoin the EU.
We are absolutely on the same page
As am I - an a lot of people also are on this page. So the question remains why neither the ruling party nor the official opposition are yet there. Both seem to be held captive by the referendum war - the Tories are still trying to portray the EUSSR as the Big Bad, Labour in hoc to petty-minded bigots who think we have to keep the forrin out even if they are women and children fleeing for their lives.
When we come out of this Ukraine crisis we will find a world where alliances are more valuable than ever and with both NATO and the EU strengthened by it. Several EU countries aren't in NATO and feel vulnerable enough to be reconsidering that position. If the UK is sensible it will reconsider its EU position so that we stop attacking them and become partners again like Norway.
I think that in a war concentration has to be on the complexities of it but a time will come when we move into calmer waters and cooperation with the EU in all aspects is certain to follow as a direct result of the change in circumstances
It is good that the UK has acted largely in unison with the EU, and let's hope that our desire to have a much better relationship between ourselves follows on and it is time to call out both extremes on the leave and remain sides, as they only serve to continue the division
I hope so. The petty one-upmanship has been depressing. Our inability to accept the EU as been good for anything or its senior politicians doing anything worthwhile. Some of the press seem to think Macron is as big an enemy as Putin and we have continued to see the petulant war of words and lack of grace from ministers.
For me the king turd remains our disgusting policy towards the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the war. Refusing to grant them safe haven is bad enough, branding them a "security threat" thanks to the Irish government showing the humanity that we cannot is beyond belief.
The government didn’t brand women & children a “security threat”
MI6 said that abandoning the visa policy created a “security threat”.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
You're playing the martyr and it is unconvincing. Many people are suspicious or cautious of overly positive news as put out by Ukraine, even as they hope it to be true. Certainly some take an optimistic view but it is not as universal as you pretend.
The issue is that just as no positive story about Ukraine is automatically to be accepted as factual, that doesn't make any story positive about Russia's position automatically factual by default, yet the article you posted did do that in several points (though not all the way through, certainly).
On the contrary, you seem to be getting angry at people pointing out a few instances where the suggestion of an 'alternative situation' was made without evidence.
So you are getting angry at people doing the very thing you claim to want them to do, which is think a bit more about information that is posted. People have thought about the article you shared and had some critical comments, and you are now whining about them doing so.
Should people also be wary of information putting out nothing but pro-Ukrainian messaging without sufficient evidence to support it? Sure they should. But what does that have to do with being wary of elements of that article which were nothing but supposition (and the bit I highlighted was paritcularly weird supposition about a troop build up being corroboration about an assault plan, without even considering alternative explanation of it being in response to the earlier troop build up by Russia)?
I'm certainly not getting angry about anything; this is PB. As I have said I liked that article because it asks some awkward questions and posits a view that is rarely heard.
Neither am I playing the martyr. I find it interesting to see the reactions on here which in turn have been quite emotional.
You're presenting yourself as Cassandra in the face of the unreasonable masses, yet you are yourself being very defensive about people criticising some of the views posited in the article. I genuinely don't get it, since if you aren't seeking to defend every point made in it (and they seem to be of varying quality) and just putting it up as an interesting counterpoint, why object to people questioning it, which despite your protestations you do appear to be doing, despite that questioning being something you presumably want people to do more of.
America is undoubtedly weaker now under Joe Biden.
(Which when you consider the chaos of his predecessor is quite remarkable.)
Why all the hate for Biden this morning?
His policy on Ukraine is identical to ours and the EU: supply arms, intelligence and economic support, but no direct military involvement.
His policy on the Afghan withdrawal was Trump's policy, already underway when he took over, having been prevented from having a transitional handover. We scuttled out too.
What he said.
Odd how those who profess to despise the “strong man” (sic) of Russia seem to hanker after one in the US.
I have no doubt that Biden has been instrumental in getting the Western coalition to cooperate across such a wide range of measures - including getting a leading member to dump decades of foreign policy literally almost overnight.
The chances of someone like Trump achieving as much? Pretty close to zero.
And yes, the UK has played a leading role - mainly by having been right about Russia and acting on that basis for much longer than most western powers. Johnson has been a good frontman for a policy which well preceded him.
Indeed, what Biden is good at is organising support into a coalition. That was his role in Senate and as VP.
It's times like this that I am relieved that Trump is sulking in Florida rather than the White House. What would it be like with him in charge? Would he still be cheerleading for Putin, or be bombing Moscow? More likely he would revert to type and American Isolationism.
I'm genuinely very worried now about Trump winning in 2024. Previously it was more a case of just really hoping he didn't because he's so odious, now it could truly harm people globally.
Trump has now said the US 'can't stand by over Ukraine.' Suggesting he might take a harder line than Biden
I see @carolecadwalla tweeting about Russians and Brexit again. Here's a reminder of what she told a court under sworn oath in her evidence: "I have never said that Russian money went into the Brexit campaign. I have always stressed that there is no evidence to suggest it did."
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
At least you've given up making up a moral equivalence between this and Iraq like you were for the first week of the invasion.
That was pure "А у вас негров линчуют"
Putin lives in a world where might is right as evidenced by the Iraq invasion and hence thought he'd have a bit of it himself.
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
I see @carolecadwalla tweeting about Russians and Brexit again. Here's a reminder of what she told a court under sworn oath in her evidence: "I have never said that Russian money went into the Brexit campaign. I have always stressed that there is no evidence to suggest it did."
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed.
You don't think they planned to capture Kiev in the first 2-3 days?
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
There are alternative launch systems now, so perhaps it’s time to tell them to piss off from the ISS and leave the Russian space agency with nothing but it’s unrealistic future plans.
A slightly ominous paragraph in that news report (linked prior) on Covid in Hong Kong
“A senior Chinese official overseeing Hong Kong affairs, Xia Baolong, who has been helping coordinate Beijing’s response to help Hong Kong contain the outbreak, was cited by the China News Agency on Saturday as saying the situation was still severe and told residents to prepare mentally for a “long-term war”.”
Hmm. One of the *good* things about Omicron is that it is so infectious it burns out quickly. By infecting everyone fast. Why should this be a “long term war”?
But perhaps the Chinese official is just steeling the people for a lot of dying
Even though it spreads quickly, UK got Omicron 4 months ago and still plenty around and we are now in mode of COVID isn't going away for many many years. I read thats more China bracing for the fact COVID will become widespread in China and once that is the case you have to prepare for it to be there for the long term.
Yes. Perhaps it is the beginning of the end for Zero Covid in China and this is an early straw in the wind
Russians occupying southern city of Kherson are reportedly trying to call a referendum to establish a new statelet: Kherson National Republic (like DNR and LNR).
Today 44 (out of total 64) members of the Kherson Oblast Council proclaimed that Kherson is part of Ukraine
It really seems to be a genuine surprise to the invaders that there isn't a large minority, or even a majority, in favour of Russian rule. At least they're learning it now I suppose.
It also reminds us to take those surveys in the Crimea showing 90% satisfaction with being ruled by Russia with a very large ladleful of salt.
Perhaps, though the fact that Russia went through Crimea like a dose of salts, and they seem to have encountered very little discontent since indicates to me that Crimea was different, and perhaps they thought it would all be like Crimea, or at least more like Crimea.
I know very little about the area but I believe a lot of Russians holiday in Crimea. Perhaps they are more in touch with the place through that, and Crimeans are more used to Russians. A bit like the British invading Benidorm.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
We're still waiting for you to show some of your self-proclaimed super scepticism about that article.
I like that article because it posits an alternative view of what might be happening, not because I think it is what is happening.
Or shall we discuss the difference between "surrounded" and "assessed encirclement".
You seem to be somewhere between blustering and backtracking.
I don't want to bang on about it, OK I do, but our exchange proves my point. You said, as clear as day, and in an effort to show what rubbish I (actually the article I posted) was saying, that Kharkiv was not surrounded. There, you said, this proves that you are talking rubbish.
But then it turns out that Kharkiv is, according to the MOD, indeed surrounded.
You perhaps wanted to believe that the article was wrong but it turns out that you were wrong. How many other instances of this are there I wonder in PB's assessment of the situation in Ukraine.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
The fate of the cat (Russia) at the end of the cartoon is surely not what he wants? Unless he is into some... interesting personal stuff....
Yup. All this requires is for a few of his replies to show the full version, which isn’t so great for Tom.
It would be even more if HMG give @MarqueeMark his Swansea Bay barrage.
I am also quite content to look out of my windows and see 1,000 wind turbines in the Bristol Channel
Swansea is the test-bed - powers a mere 150,000 homes. The prize is the lagoons built after that - Cardiff lagoon would power 1.6m homes. As would half a dozen others. The (admittedly, more technically challenging) Bridgewater lagoon would be nearer to 3m homes.
A million here, a million there - soon you are talking serious numbers....
I love the idea, but have no idea how practical/economic it would be, do we have a cost estimate? and/or know how expensive the electricity would be? I've not heard of any large scale versions being built elsewhere or am I wrong?
The Cardiff-type lagoons would cost c.£7.5bn (versus £24bn for Hinkley C). The power output is almost identical. The price of the electricity is in the range £50-£55 (versus £92.50 for Hinkley C). The abandonment costs are negligible (and in 120++ years) (versus god knows how many billions for Hinkley C in supposedly 60 years - but they rarely seem to last their projected life before "cracks" are found in the structure).
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
You're playing the martyr and it is unconvincing. Many people are suspicious or cautious of overly positive news as put out by Ukraine, even as they hope it to be true. Certainly some take an optimistic view but it is not as universal as you pretend.
The issue is that just as no positive story about Ukraine is automatically to be accepted as factual, that doesn't make any story positive about Russia's position automatically factual by default, yet the article you posted did do that in several points (though not all the way through, certainly).
On the contrary, you seem to be getting angry at people pointing out a few instances where the suggestion of an 'alternative situation' was made without evidence.
So you are getting angry at people doing the very thing you claim to want them to do, which is think a bit more about information that is posted. People have thought about the article you shared and had some critical comments, and you are now whining about them doing so.
Should people also be wary of information putting out nothing but pro-Ukrainian messaging without sufficient evidence to support it? Sure they should. But what does that have to do with being wary of elements of that article which were nothing but supposition (and the bit I highlighted was paritcularly weird supposition about a troop build up being corroboration about an assault plan, without even considering alternative explanation of it being in response to the earlier troop build up by Russia)?
I'm certainly not getting angry about anything; this is PB. As I have said I liked that article because it asks some awkward questions and posits a view that is rarely heard.
Neither am I playing the martyr. I find it interesting to see the reactions on here which in turn have been quite emotional.
You're presenting yourself as Cassandra in the face of the unreasonable masses, yet you are yourself being very defensive about people criticising some of the views posited in the article. I genuinely don't get it, since if you aren't seeking to defend every point made in it (and they seem to be of varying quality) and just putting it up as an interesting counterpoint, why object to people questioning it, which despite your protestations you do appear to be doing, despite that questioning being something you presumably want people to do more of.
I haven't been defensive about it at all. I have been interested in how vituperative people have been in dismissing it all out of hand. Likewise, I haven't, because I don't know, dismissed or accepted any or all of it. Some of what it says sounds sensible and as @IanB2 notes some seems wildly "pro-Russian" although that is again seen through our prism.
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
You are behaving quite strangely. I’m curious as to why. Perhaps it is just your broken collar bone making you dyspeptic
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
We're still waiting for you to show some of your self-proclaimed super scepticism about that article.
I like that article because it posits an alternative view of what might be happening, not because I think it is what is happening.
Or shall we discuss the difference between "surrounded" and "assessed encirclement".
You seem to be somewhere between blustering and backtracking.
I don't want to bang on about it, OK I do, but our exchange proves my point. You said, as clear as day, and in an effort to show what rubbish I (actually the article I posted) was saying, that Kharkiv was not surrounded. There, you said, this proves that you are talking rubbish.
But then it turns out that Kharkiv is, according to the MOD, indeed surrounded.
You perhaps wanted to believe that the article was wrong but it turns out that you were wrong. How many other instances of this are there I wonder in PB's assessment of the situation in Ukraine.
It's possible the MoD are wrong, of course. Multiple reports contradict their assessment of encirclement.
I have it down at the moment as an interesting anomaly, rather than proof of the mendacity of western media.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed.
You don't think they planned to capture Kiev in the first 2-3 days?
Russians occupying southern city of Kherson are reportedly trying to call a referendum to establish a new statelet: Kherson National Republic (like DNR and LNR).
Today 44 (out of total 64) members of the Kherson Oblast Council proclaimed that Kherson is part of Ukraine
It really seems to be a genuine surprise to the invaders that there isn't a large minority, or even a majority, in favour of Russian rule. At least they're learning it now I suppose.
It also reminds us to take those surveys in the Crimea showing 90% satisfaction with being ruled by Russia with a very large ladleful of salt.
Perhaps, though the fact that Russia went through Crimea like a dose of salts, and they seem to have encountered very little discontent since indicates to me that Crimea was different, and perhaps they thought it would all be like Crimea, or at least more like Crimea.
I know very little about the area but I believe a lot of Russians holiday in Crimea. Perhaps they are more in touch with the place through that, and Crimeans are more used to Russians. A bit like the British invading Benidorm.
Crimea IS different. It was Russian for 200 years until Kruschev gifted it to Ukraine for reasons of commie politicking.
In any peace, Ukraine probably would - probably should - accept the loss of Crimea
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
You are behaving quite strangely. I’m curious as to why. Perhaps it is just your broken collar bone making you dyspeptic
As I said when you are drowning your posts tend to focus exclusively on the person you are discussing with rather than the issues under discussion.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
There are alternative launch systems now, so perhaps it’s time to tell them to piss off from the ISS and leave the Russian space agency with nothing but it’s unrealistic future plans.
The Russian Space program is dead. Stick a fork in it. It is done.
Even before this it was reaching the end - OneWeb was changing providers, and their booked launches were getting thinner and thinner.
They used to have 3 things going for them
1) Cheapest launches 2) Reliable 3) Good business partners
They don't have 1, 2 or 3 anymore. In fact, on 3, they have burnt their bridges.
Moral of the story. Don't spit on the table in front of Elon Musk. It's the Third Classic Mistake.
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
You are behaving quite strangely. I’m curious as to why. Perhaps it is just your broken collar bone making you dyspeptic
As I said when you are drowning your posts tend to focus exclusively on the person you are discussing with rather than the issues under discussion.
Er, OK
Tell you what, you’re completely right and everyone else is wrong. There. Now we can move on
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
We're still waiting for you to show some of your self-proclaimed super scepticism about that article.
I like that article because it posits an alternative view of what might be happening, not because I think it is what is happening.
Or shall we discuss the difference between "surrounded" and "assessed encirclement".
You seem to be somewhere between blustering and backtracking.
I don't want to bang on about it, OK I do, but our exchange proves my point. You said, as clear as day, and in an effort to show what rubbish I (actually the article I posted) was saying, that Kharkiv was not surrounded. There, you said, this proves that you are talking rubbish.
But then it turns out that Kharkiv is, according to the MOD, indeed surrounded.
You perhaps wanted to believe that the article was wrong but it turns out that you were wrong. How many other instances of this are there I wonder in PB's assessment of the situation in Ukraine.
It's possible the MoD are wrong, of course. Multiple reports contradict their assessment of encirclement.
I have it down at the moment as an interesting anomaly, rather than proof of the mendacity of western media.
IT'S NOT MENDACITY OF THE WESTERN MEDIA.
Ahem.
It's not mendacity of the Western Media. It is the fog of war which prevents any clear picture of the overall "success" or otherwise of the campaign. Which is my point.
The article posited some thoughts which several people on here have dismissed as ridiculous and this example was one. @another_richard said it's absurd, the article shows Kharkiv as surrounded whereas it is not surrounded (he implied). But the MOD thinks it is surrounded and hence my point is that all the "obvious untruths" of the article aren't necessarily so obviously untrue. .
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed.
You don't think they planned to capture Kiev in the first 2-3 days?
I have no idea.
Then why send paratroops in to capture airports etc?
1) The Russian plan was for paratroops to hold these advanced positions for weeks 2) The Russian plan was to rapidly advance to these positions 3) The Russian plan was to reinforce via air, but decided not to. After they had sent in the paratroops.
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
You are behaving quite strangely. I’m curious as to why. Perhaps it is just your broken collar bone making you dyspeptic
As I said when you are drowning your posts tend to focus exclusively on the person you are discussing with rather than the issues under discussion.
Er, OK
Tell you what, you’re completely right and everyone else is wrong. There. Now we can move on
Quite a banal rhetorical device but I'll take it because lunch beckons.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the origins of the war seems to have all the subtlety of George's diagnosis of the causes of the First World War.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: The war started because of the Villainous Hun and his Empire Building. Captain Edmund Blackadder: George, the British Empire presently covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consist of a small sausage factory in Tangyanika.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the progress of the war seems to be equally primitive.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk?
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed.
You don't think they planned to capture Kiev in the first 2-3 days?
I have no idea.
Then why send paratroops in to capture airports etc?
1) The Russian plan was for paratroops to hold these advanced positions for weeks 2) The Russian plan was to rapidly advance to these positions 3) The Russian plan was to reinforce via air, but decided not to. After they had sent in the paratroops.
?
Also no idea. Really, I am not a military stragegist focusing on Russia/Ukraine.
Everyone else on here obviously is but I am not so I can't help you.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the origins of the war seems to have all the subtlety of George's diagnosis of the causes of the First World War.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: The war started because of the Villainous Hun and his Empire Building. Captain Edmund Blackadder: George, the British Empire presently covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consist of a small sausage factory in Tangyanika.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the progress of the war seems to be equally primitive.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk?
The irony being that George was essentially right.
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
Have you read that article in depth and paid attention to the language the author uses? It talks about, for starters, the Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol deliberately using civilians for cover and, most laughably, that Russia has a clear and consistent policy of not using middle strikes to ensure there are no civilian casualties. And those are not the only examples (a fair few examples of what they call Ukrainian ‘tropes’ chucked in there as well).
It was also very disingenuous about the risk of false flag chemical attacks being a western plan to enable NATO to intervene amongst other dodgy commentary.
It really read like an article pumped out of Russia but designed to look neutral and reasonable with plenty of nudges and winks about Ukrainian nationalism and threats by Ukraine.
I'm wondering now whether it's @TOPPING's favourite article precisely because it is so obviously ridiculous and biased - the point being that all the news we are receiving is ridiculous and biased, and he likes this one because it's so blatant.
I think you can go a bit too far with the idea that, because both sides lie in war there is nothing that you can accept as the truth. I think there are ways to establish the reliability of competing claims, and to get some sense of the way that the war is going - which I would summarise as, hard going for Russia, but Ukraine still being pushed back, little sense of whether a change in momentum is possible or likely.
It does back up Topping’s wise and correct point the other day that nobody really knows what’s happening. We put together little pieces of evidence with various degrees of strength and mix them with our prejudices and hopes and maybe some Gin and come up with an idea of what we think is happening!
But I would put the article down as nicely disguised propaganda expressed as thoughtful balanced critique.
What do you mean by the bit in bold?
People have a habit of thinking about knowledge in black and white terms. If we can't be 100% sure about something then people react as though that means we know nothing, but either extreme is very rarely the case. There are a whole bunch of things that we can say about the war with very high levels of confidence, and a whole bunch more with decreasing levels of confidence. What is particularly hard is to put all of that information together and make a judgement about which side is winning, or what the conflict is likely to look like in two month's time.
Is that latter bit what you mean by "what's happening"?
There are a whole bunch of things that the article Topping linked to which have got no supporting evidence for at all - Russian forces reaching Dnipro, or Odessa imminently to face encirclement - and so it shows that the limits to our knowledge are not as restrictive as he argues.
@Topping is weirdly keen for us all to accept that “no one can know anything”, when, in reality, social media means a layman can know more than ever before: tho you do need to use your critical faculties to sift through the ample disinformation
Isn’t @Topping ex military? If so, perhaps this is just status anxiety. He feels this is his specialist field and his views are not afforded enough unique respect. Others are rudely opining, as well as him
You see this a lot. Virologists get huffy when non experts talk about Covid origins. Popes and priests don’t like plebs chatting about church doctrine. Probably a universal human trait
My apologies to @Topping if I have misidentified him as ex-army
LOL. Talking of church doctrine. I posted an article which goes against the PB military strategists' view of what is happening in Ukraine and all hell broke loose.
The guy may or may not get stuff right or wrong but people are queuing up to say how ridiculous it is. Fair enough - I believe you yourself have written on confirmation bias. It is a much better story to hear that Russia is suffering setback after setback rather than slowly but surely achieving its war aims.
I do indeed say "no one can know anything" but you misunderstand what this means, perhaps understandably, given your flitting around the various key issues of the day before becoming expert on all of them. My point is that snippets from twitter or indeed journalists can't stitch together the overall progress of the war, nor gain any insight in what the hell Putin wants to do and/or how successful he is doing it.
Posting a picture of a Russian platoon coming under fire and then saying: "ah ha, proof if proof be needed..." is just absurd but it is what most people on PB have been doing since the invasion began. Most recently everyone was amazed that Ukraine hadn't been conquered in a fortnight.
“PB military strategists”. The sneering tone is the giveaway
Status anxiety
There is a turning point in any discussion with you when you start insulting your interlocutor as you realise you are talking bollocks and lo this moment has arrived.
You are behaving quite strangely. I’m curious as to why. Perhaps it is just your broken collar bone making you dyspeptic
As I said when you are drowning your posts tend to focus exclusively on the person you are discussing with rather than the issues under discussion.
Er, OK
Tell you what, you’re completely right and everyone else is wrong. There. Now we can move on
Quite a banal rhetorical device but I'll take it because lunch beckons.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the origins of the war seems to have all the subtlety of George's diagnosis of the causes of the First World War.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: The war started because of the Villainous Hun and his Empire Building. Captain Edmund Blackadder: George, the British Empire presently covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consist of a small sausage factory in Tangyanika.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the progress of the war seems to be equally primitive.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk?
The German military thought process at the start of WWI was quite interesting
1) If we don't invaded Belgium, we can't successfully attack France. 2) Therefore we must invaded Belgium. 3) Britain won't interfere, because if they do we might lose the war.
They actually got to the stage of believing that since violating Belgium neutrality was vital to Germany winning the war, it was a crime for Belgium to resist.
The sane thing would have been to consider (1). If it was impossible to invaded France across only the Franco-German frontier, the reverse was true - especially for the smaller French army.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
Given what happened to that news crew the other day - car shot up, hit on the body armour etc.... This was sadly inevitable.
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
Given what happened to that news crew the other day - car shot up, hit on the body armour etc.... This was sadly inevitable.
To misquote Hornblower, a shell doesn't stop to ask whether somebody is an enemy soldier, a reporter, or a wholly innocent civilian.
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Crickey.....Shenzhen locked down for any period of time = world shortages of anything electronic incoming.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed.
You don't think they planned to capture Kiev in the first 2-3 days?
I have no idea.
Then why send paratroops in to capture airports etc?
1) The Russian plan was for paratroops to hold these advanced positions for weeks 2) The Russian plan was to rapidly advance to these positions 3) The Russian plan was to reinforce via air, but decided not to. After they had sent in the paratroops.
?
Also no idea. Really, I am not a military stragegist focusing on Russia/Ukraine.
Everyone else on here obviously is but I am not so I can't help you.
Maybe
4) For political reasons, someone in Russias military wanted the Russian paratroops to fail.
reminds me of the story of a war-game of Sea Lion being played at Sandhurst. When asked what the hell he was doing, the player of the part of Herman Goering said that he was playing to advance the cause of Herman Goering in the Nazi hierarchy, rather than just win the battle.
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Crickey.....Shenzhen locked down for any period of time = world shortages of anything electronic incoming.
Yes. Really not good
World’s fourth largest port. A massive cog in the Chinese economic machine
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
I actually meant the non-war correspondents that Sky and BBC sent over the past 2 weeks. Also, in recent years, they have been very wary about sending people to be actually there when the hardcore fighting is going on.
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
Russians occupying southern city of Kherson are reportedly trying to call a referendum to establish a new statelet: Kherson National Republic (like DNR and LNR).
Today 44 (out of total 64) members of the Kherson Oblast Council proclaimed that Kherson is part of Ukraine
It really seems to be a genuine surprise to the invaders that there isn't a large minority, or even a majority, in favour of Russian rule. At least they're learning it now I suppose.
It also reminds us to take those surveys in the Crimea showing 90% satisfaction with being ruled by Russia with a very large ladleful of salt.
Perhaps, though the fact that Russia went through Crimea like a dose of salts, and they seem to have encountered very little discontent since indicates to me that Crimea was different, and perhaps they thought it would all be like Crimea, or at least more like Crimea.
I know very little about the area but I believe a lot of Russians holiday in Crimea. Perhaps they are more in touch with the place through that, and Crimeans are more used to Russians. A bit like the British invading Benidorm.
Crimea IS different. It was Russian for 200 years until Kruschev gifted it to Ukraine for reasons of commie politicking.
In any peace, Ukraine probably would - probably should - accept the loss of Crimea
TBf, it’s always been a melting pot, owing to its geography. Stalin simplified things by forcibly deporting a large proportion of its population to thousands of miles away.
After the singing of Sweet Caroline, all set for the likely showdown between UK champions Focus and European champions, from Belgium, the Roadrunners. But four teams enter the contest…
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Crickey.....Shenzhen locked down for any period of time = world shortages of anything electronic incoming.
Yes. Really not good
World’s fourth largest port. A massive cog in the Chinese economic machine
I am not sure they will be able to repeat what they did in Xi'an, where they made a special exemption for the Samsung factory and made the employees isolate among themselves. Just far too much factories and interlinked economy in which if you started to make a special exemption for one, you would need to basically doing it for the whole area.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Shenzen îs also home to China's genomics factory, BGI.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
There are alternative launch systems now, so perhaps it’s time to tell them to piss off from the ISS and leave the Russian space agency with nothing but it’s unrealistic future plans.
The Russian Space program is dead. Stick a fork in it. It is done.
Even before this it was reaching the end - OneWeb was changing providers, and their booked launches were getting thinner and thinner.
They used to have 3 things going for them
1) Cheapest launches 2) Reliable 3) Good business partners
They don't have 1, 2 or 3 anymore. In fact, on 3, they have burnt their bridges.
Moral of the story. Don't spit on the table in front of Elon Musk. It's the Third Classic Mistake.
The OneWeb thing was bonkers. At least look the other way, let it launch, and get paid in FX. India must now be licking its lips. Plus the economic of our impending domestic launch vehicles for micro sats just changed.
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Crickey.....Shenzhen locked down for any period of time = world shortages of anything electronic incoming.
Yes. Really not good
World’s fourth largest port. A massive cog in the Chinese economic machine
I am not sure they will be able to repeat what they did in Xi'an, where they made a special exemption for the Samsung factory and made the employees isolate among themselves. Just far too much factories and interlinked economy in which if you started to make a special exemption for one, you would need to basically doing it for the whole area.
“China has instituted new COVID-19 restrictions that included URGING THE PUBLIC NOT TO LEAVE BEIJING and closing schools in Shanghai while the leader of Hong Kong warned that its coronavirus outbreak has yet to reach its peak.”
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
I actually meant the non-war correspondents that Sky and BBC sent over the past 2 weeks. Also, in recent years, they have been very wary about sending people to be actually there when the hardcore fighting is going on.
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
I was defining war correspondents as journos corresponding from an, er, active war situation.
Struggling to comprehend your last sentence: "...tiresome left wing bent..." - sounds like a practical impossibility to me. ;-)
OT Sainsbury's sitrep. Masks down to 20-30 per cent but perhaps the weekend gets a different demographic than weekdays (more school-age children for a start). Went Sunday because it is Cheltenham this week. Goods rearranged on shelves and those helpful signs that say what is in each aisle have been removed. To put the tin lid on it, my support bubble's car broke down (or rather would not unlock the doors) which is why I can also report Sainsbury's has done away with the courtesy minicab phone.
It would be even more if HMG give @MarqueeMark his Swansea Bay barrage.
I am also quite content to look out of my windows and see 1,000 wind turbines in the Bristol Channel
Swansea is the test-bed - powers a mere 150,000 homes. The prize is the lagoons built after that - Cardiff lagoon would power 1.6m homes. As would half a dozen others. The (admittedly, more technically challenging) Bridgewater lagoon would be nearer to 3m homes.
A million here, a million there - soon you are talking serious numbers....
Best wishes with your ventures.
If these projects ensure HMG investment in Hinkley Point is diverted elsewhere I couldn't be happier. @Mexicanpete reporting from inside the 30km blast zone.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
I actually meant the non-war correspondents that Sky and BBC sent over the past 2 weeks. Also, in recent years, they have been very wary about sending people to be actually there when the hardcore fighting is going on.
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
I was defining war correspondents as journos corresponding from an, er, active war situation.
Struggling to comprehend your last sentence: "...tiresome left wing bent..." - sounds like a practical impossibility to me. ;-)
Vice News certainly give it a bloody good go. Which is a shame, because as I say their reporting from active war zones over the past 5+ years has been far superior to any of the major news outlets.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
I would have said it's extraordinary more because the implication is NATO while hobbled for now will eventually come to Ukraine's aid, kick Russia's arse and keep it tied up to be booted by anyone who wishes for all eternity.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
I actually meant the non-war correspondents that Sky and BBC sent over the past 2 weeks. Also, in recent years, they have been very wary about sending people to be actually there when the hardcore fighting is going on.
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
I was defining war correspondents as journos corresponding from an, er, active war situation.
Struggling to comprehend your last sentence: "...tiresome left wing bent..." - sounds like a practical impossibility to me. ;-)
Vice News certainly give it a bloody good go. Which is a shame, because as I say their reporting from active war zones over the past 5+ years has been far superior to any of the major news outlets.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
The essence of Greater X Nationalism is that country X is (1) persecuted and (2) a Great Power and (3) deserves the right to build a pyramid of skulls.
I am surprised the likes of the BBC haven't pulled their journalists out of Kyiv, as clear the Russians will shortly just be shelling the hell out of it.
These war correspondents are brave people imo.
I actually meant the non-war correspondents that Sky and BBC sent over the past 2 weeks. Also, in recent years, they have been very wary about sending people to be actually there when the hardcore fighting is going on.
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
I was defining war correspondents as journos corresponding from an, er, active war situation.
Struggling to comprehend your last sentence: "...tiresome left wing bent..." - sounds like a practical impossibility to me. ;-)
Vice News certainly give it a bloody good go. Which is a shame, because as I say their reporting from active war zones over the past 5+ years has been far superior to any of the major news outlets.
I was joking of course.
I know. So was I (to some extent)
I think Vice News provides some super interesting content. The sister channel Vice less so.
One up to the Aces for the third place trophy….a fault by the Magnets, but then a fault by Aces, the fifth dogs get sent in…Magnets pull through with their extra dog. Evens.
And Aces win the decider, the faster team. Looks like a dropped ball by the Magnets as well.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
Fair. Depressing, but fair.
Pay rent to the shire landlords for placing the windmills on their land. That'll win them over.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
I would have said it's extraordinary more because the implication is NATO while hobbled for now will eventually come to Ukraine's aid, kick Russia's arse and keep it tied up to be booted by anyone who wishes for all eternity.
So he's effectively just tweeted high treason.
That point has been made around the InterWebs already....
The combination of being both bully & victim is a common one in Greater X Nationalism.
Of course the real threat is Russian sleepers masquerading as Ukrainian refugees rather than those who already have easy access to the PM, No 10 tech and the highest levels of our government.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
Fair. Depressing, but fair.
Pay rent to the shire landlords for placing the windmills on their land. That'll win them over.
Landowners love wind farms. They get paid a rent and get to use about 95% of the land for other things.....
It is quite noticeable that in Texas they are more popular than having the pump jacks. Oil can make a mess of the land, runs out etc etc. The wind money rolls in much more smoothly. Apart from the odd freeze up, of course.
So the British title holders meet the Belgians….Focus from Selby are going to have to push their changeovers here….
Very close on the first three legs but the Belgian’s faster dog sneaked it on the final leg. And yet another course record falls - its now 14.71 seconds!!
False start by the Runners - Focus just have to finish clean.
And it’s one apiece! The decider….
Slow start by the Belgians…but a fault by Focus….they pushed it and crossed the starting line early…the Belgians just need to finish clean, and they have.
The first European team to make the final at Crufts takes the trophy!
After the presentation, a break for everyone to refresh and eat before the evenings show climax….
TL;DR we don't know much but what we do know doesn't necessarily align with Western media reports.
He makes some good points. Lot of "I told you so", which is always irritating if somone else does it, especially when he got his core prediction wrong - that Putin wouldn't invade. FWIW I suspect he underestimates: firstly the degree to which Putin has failed in his war aim of dealing with the "Ukraine Problem", which makes any negotiation difficult for him; secondly that Ukrainian nationalism is a thing in East Ukraine, which would make it difficult for Russia to occupy that part of Ukraine as well.
I'm no military strategist, but even I can see the existential risk to the Ukrainian army (green squares) on this map. The Russians can head north from Crimea and cut off the bulk of the Ukrainian Army (the green squares) and grab all of east Ukraine including Kharkiv and possibly Kyiv. I don't see an equivalent risk to the Russian positions. Of course the Russians haven't done this yet and hopefully never will.
The point about the article is that it posits, contrary to accepted PB wisdom, that there is an alternative situation and Russia is not suffering catastrophic defeat after catastrophic defeat. Or that there is a plan being executed.
People on here are furious about even thinking such s thing could be possible.
Fine - keep watching Twitter where every clip is proof if proof be needed of Russia's imminent military defeat. Much more comfortable that way.
Well in the end it comes down to the question of whether, as a layman which almost all of us here are, you believe the claims of Russia and their apologists or the Western Intelligence agencies. I know which side I find more believable.
Now I still think Russia will probably manage to take most of their pre-war targets so long as they were limited - I don't for example think it is now possible for them to even take, let alone hold, the whole of Ukraine. But all the evidence from those in the know seems to point to the fact they have suffered far heavier losses than expected, they still don't have control of the air and they are being bled so badly that any victory they achieve will definitely be Pyrrhic and will make it utterly impossible for them to hold any of their gains in the medium to long term.
You seem to disagree with that (at least that is what your postings have always intimated) but the only way to argue against that is to say that all the Western assessments are wrong and that the Pro-Russian commentators are right.
I see no reason to accept that argument.
That's fair enough. My gut feel is that Russia having launched the invasion has a plan somewhere and nothing I have seen so far has shown this to have demonstrably failed. That is just a gut feel and hence informs my caution when people on here post a 30-second video of two T-72s doing a pirouette on some street somewhere and taking that as proof of an imminent Russian defeat.
But I also from Day One said that if Russia does occupy the whole of Ukraine then we are back to an Afghan situation and that seems absolutely bonkers but then perhaps Putin is absolutely bonkers. Because if nothing else we all know how that ended.
As for not control of the air I think that article was interesting both on Ukraine and Russia air power limitations (he asks for example about the famous and untouched Russian convoy). I have no idea why it wasn't targeted but it wasn't. He also poses some other interesting questions which contradict the PB orthodoxy and hence why everyone is furious at me for posting it and calling it "my article".
It is a very strange phenomenon on PB but perhaps not surprising, given PB's nature.
But there is masses of information coming from both Western intelligence agencies and independent verification sources to show that, assuming the Russians did have a plan, it has gone seriously wrong. That is also clear from their own actions. Current Western estimates are that, in terms of equipment losses the Russians have lost around 2/3rds of the Ukrainian claims. This is without any reliance on twitter or the Ukrainians themselves.
So I am afraid that, to a large extent, you have been indulging in straw man arguments.
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
The essence of Greater X Nationalism is that country X is (1) persecuted and (2) a Great Power and (3) deserves the right to build a pyramid of skulls.
Russians occupying southern city of Kherson are reportedly trying to call a referendum to establish a new statelet: Kherson National Republic (like DNR and LNR).
Today 44 (out of total 64) members of the Kherson Oblast Council proclaimed that Kherson is part of Ukraine
It really seems to be a genuine surprise to the invaders that there isn't a large minority, or even a majority, in favour of Russian rule. At least they're learning it now I suppose.
It also reminds us to take those surveys in the Crimea showing 90% satisfaction with being ruled by Russia with a very large ladleful of salt.
Perhaps, though the fact that Russia went through Crimea like a dose of salts, and they seem to have encountered very little discontent since indicates to me that Crimea was different, and perhaps they thought it would all be like Crimea, or at least more like Crimea.
I know very little about the area but I believe a lot of Russians holiday in Crimea. Perhaps they are more in touch with the place through that, and Crimeans are more used to Russians. A bit like the British invading Benidorm.
Crimea IS different. It was Russian for 200 years until Kruschev gifted it to Ukraine for reasons of commie politicking.
In any peace, Ukraine probably would - probably should - accept the loss of Crimea
It wasn’t a gift - it was a trade for part of the Donblas basin
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
Fair. Depressing, but fair.
Pay rent to the shire landlords for placing the windmills on their land. That'll win them over.
Landowners love wind farms. They get paid a rent and get to use about 95% of the land for other things.....
It is quite noticeable that in Texas they are more popular than having the pump jacks. Oil can make a mess of the land, runs out etc etc. The wind money rolls in much more smoothly. Apart from the odd freeze up, of course.
Will they keep my lawn mown if they can have a quiet corner?
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
Crickey.....Shenzhen locked down for any period of time = world shortages of anything electronic incoming.
Yes. Really not good
World’s fourth largest port. A massive cog in the Chinese economic machine
I am not sure they will be able to repeat what they did in Xi'an, where they made a special exemption for the Samsung factory and made the employees isolate among themselves. Just far too much factories and interlinked economy in which if you started to make a special exemption for one, you would need to basically doing it for the whole area.
“China has instituted new COVID-19 restrictions that included URGING THE PUBLIC NOT TO LEAVE BEIJING and closing schools in Shanghai while the leader of Hong Kong warned that its coronavirus outbreak has yet to reach its peak.”
When we come to consider the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after this terrible business is over, would it be appropriate and legal to use those frozen Russian assets, including the Russian National Wealth Fund?
I usually side with Tom more than Jerry, but what an odd meme of choice since it would show Russia as the bullying aggressor in this case.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.” https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
If true, that is extraordinary, and goes a long way to explaining how the West has misplayed Russia since South Ossetia/Abkhazia and the how Putin misjudged Ukraine and the West now.
The essence of Greater X Nationalism is that country X is (1) persecuted and (2) a Great Power and (3) deserves the right to build a pyramid of skulls.
Because history.
It's to be discouraged.
Greater X Nationalism is to Nationalism what National Socialism is to Socialism.
When we come to consider the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after this terrible business is over, would it be appropriate and legal to use those frozen Russian assets, including the Russian National Wealth Fund?
Appropriate? Yes. Legal? Probably not.
It would be a political decision and I can see it being tied up in court for years.
When we come to consider the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after this terrible business is over, would it be appropriate and legal to use those frozen Russian assets, including the Russian National Wealth Fund?
Yes.
And then we get to argue about reparations for the next 30 years
Russia's negotiator Slutsky says there's been "significant progress in the negotiations" and he expects there may be a signed deal in the next 2 to 3 days. https://ria.ru/20220313/progress-1777935859.html This is a notable development in light of the growing awareness at the Kremlin of the decrepit state of the RU army & the blunders of the pre-invasion intel. If confirmed by UA side, this would likely mean a truce on Zelenskys' terms.
When we come to consider the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after this terrible business is over, would it be appropriate and legal to use those frozen Russian assets, including the Russian National Wealth Fund?
Appropriate? Yes. Legal? Probably not.
It would be a political decision and I can see it being tied up in court for years.
Most of the money will go in direct claims - the airliners that the Russians have effectively seized from Irish leasing companies, the OneWeb launches they paid for, the defaults on Russian bonds...
Russia's negotiator Slutsky says there's been "significant progress in the negotiations" and he expects there may be a signed deal in the next 2 to 3 days. https://ria.ru/20220313/progress-1777935859.html This is a notable development in light of the growing awareness at the Kremlin of the decrepit state of the RU army & the blunders of the pre-invasion intel. If confirmed by UA side, this would likely mean a truce on Zelenskys' terms.
That will really piss off their base, no wonder Farage has pivoted to net zero is bollocks manta.
Not necessarily, if clothed in the security language of the article and accompanied in a boost to defence. “Accept a shit view to beat the Russians” will appeal to some Tories.
I'm unconvinced by that. People are really angry right now about Russia, and perhaps that will be more sustained than usual, but ultimately people really really really really don't like things being built near their nice villages.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
Fair. Depressing, but fair.
Pay rent to the shire landlords for placing the windmills on their land. That'll win them over.
Landowners love wind farms. They get paid a rent and get to use about 95% of the land for other things.....
It is quite noticeable that in Texas they are more popular than having the pump jacks. Oil can make a mess of the land, runs out etc etc. The wind money rolls in much more smoothly. Apart from the odd freeze up, of course.
Will they keep my lawn mown if they can have a quiet corner?
Now I have a vision of you plugging your electric mower into a 200 meter tall wind turbine.... in the corner of a suburban garden.
When we come to consider the cost of rebuilding Ukraine after this terrible business is over, would it be appropriate and legal to use those frozen Russian assets, including the Russian National Wealth Fund?
Comments
https://twitter.com/guardiannews/status/1502989186131017737
Honestly, this whole bizarre strand of commentary, from you, perhaps says more about you than about PB
Neither am I playing the martyr. I find it interesting to see the reactions on here which in turn have been quite emotional.
We have already had one "truth" overturned. @another_richard joining in the criticism of "my article" said that *of course* Kharkiv hasn't been surrounded whereas the MOD seems to think it has been.
So a very brief and small illustration of my point.
The head of the Russian space agency followed this meme up with the tweet: “A brief description of the current geopolitical situation in the language of a cartoon, since our Western colleagues do not know or understand anything more serious than comics.”
https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1502383213339099139?cxt=HHwWhoCyudLkxNkpAAAA
.
My view is that I don’t think the Western intelligence agencies would be sending so many signals that Russia is suffering so badly if it wasn’t true or they thought that. They would be coming up with more nuanced terms.
More to the point, Russian actions seem to confirm this. Asking for Syrian mercenaries is quite a desperate move. It doesn’t suggest things are well .
MI6 said that abandoning the visa policy created a “security threat”.
Facts matter
12:51
A New York Times journalist has been killed near Kyiv, the region’s head of police has confirmed.
Award-winning video journalist Brent Renaud, 51, was shot when Russian forces opened fire on a car near Irpin.
Another journalist with him at the time has been taken to hospital for treatment after the attack."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/mar/13/ukraine-news-russia-war-ceasefire-broken-humanitarian-corridors-kyiv-russian-invasion-live-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelenskiy-latest-updates-live
I know very little about the area but I believe a lot of Russians holiday in Crimea. Perhaps they are more in touch with the place through that, and Crimeans are more used to Russians. A bit like the British invading Benidorm.
It seems much mroe likely to me that people would agree with proposal, up to the point it happens near them. I'm all fo rit, but there are plenty of better sites somewhere else, will be the cry.
A good rule of thumb, even if you are not generally against NIMBY's as a concept, is that there are none so unreasonable in the face of development proposals as those who live in the rural shires. I've long since ceased being surprised what they will object to.
But then it turns out that Kharkiv is, according to the MOD, indeed surrounded.
You perhaps wanted to believe that the article was wrong but it turns out that you were wrong. How many other instances of this are there I wonder in PB's assessment of the situation in Ukraine.
I have it down at the moment as an interesting anomaly, rather than proof of the mendacity of western media.
In any peace, Ukraine probably would - probably should - accept the loss of Crimea
Even before this it was reaching the end - OneWeb was changing providers, and their booked launches were getting thinner and thinner.
They used to have 3 things going for them
1) Cheapest launches
2) Reliable
3) Good business partners
They don't have 1, 2 or 3 anymore. In fact, on 3, they have burnt their bridges.
Moral of the story. Don't spit on the table in front of Elon Musk. It's the Third Classic Mistake.
Tell you what, you’re completely right and everyone else is wrong. There. Now we can move on
Ahem.
It's not mendacity of the Western Media. It is the fog of war which prevents any clear picture of the overall "success" or otherwise of the campaign. Which is my point.
The article posited some thoughts which several people on here have dismissed as ridiculous and this example was one. @another_richard said it's absurd, the article shows Kharkiv as surrounded whereas it is not surrounded (he implied). But the MOD thinks it is surrounded and hence my point is that all the "obvious untruths" of the article aren't necessarily so obviously untrue.
.
1) The Russian plan was for paratroops to hold these advanced positions for weeks
2) The Russian plan was to rapidly advance to these positions
3) The Russian plan was to reinforce via air, but decided not to. After they had sent in the paratroops.
?
of the First World War.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: The war started because of the Villainous Hun and his Empire Building.
Captain Edmund Blackadder: George, the British Empire presently covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consist of a small sausage factory in Tangyanika.
Most of pb.com's analysis of the progress of the war seems to be equally primitive.
Lieutenant George St Barlaigh: When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk?
Everyone else on here obviously is but I am not so I can't help you.
1) If we don't invaded Belgium, we can't successfully attack France.
2) Therefore we must invaded Belgium.
3) Britain won't interfere, because if they do we might lose the war.
They actually got to the stage of believing that since violating Belgium neutrality was vital to Germany winning the war, it was a crime for Belgium to resist.
The sane thing would have been to consider (1). If it was impossible to invaded France across only the Franco-German frontier, the reverse was true - especially for the smaller French army.
#BREAKING China places 17 million residents of Shenzhen under Covid lockdown: govt
https://twitter.com/afp/status/1502972209811369985?s=21
Shenzen is huge, and economically highly significant. I fear we could be seeing half of China going into lockdown. Not great for a battered global economy
*On the dangers of intelligence*
He kept an open mind so long
That everything fell out
And true and false
And right and wrong
Were scrambled into doubt
4) For political reasons, someone in Russias military wanted the Russian paratroops to fail.
reminds me of the story of a war-game of Sea Lion being played at Sandhurst. When asked what the hell he was doing, the player of the part of Herman Goering said that he was playing to advance the cause of Herman Goering in the Nazi hierarchy, rather than just win the battle.
World’s fourth largest port. A massive cog in the Chinese economic machine
That has been left to the likes of Vice News to be actually embedded people in Syria, Iraq, Eastern Ukraine and although Vice News can have some tiresome left wing bent on social issues (making the Guardian look right wing), their coverage of those conflicts has been top notch.
After the singing of Sweet Caroline, all set for the likely showdown between UK champions Focus and European champions, from Belgium, the Roadrunners. But four teams enter the contest…
New COVID19 cases in U.K. hit record high! 221,000 cases per day and still rising - Scotland the worst hit but affects every region.
https://twitter.com/timspector/status/1502996099392540678?s=20&t=hOVHCuyEnwt_koaeKgQu4A
And two. Focus go through to the final round.
(My capitals)
https://twitter.com/ksatnews/status/1503000427813609472?s=21
It looks bad. I think it is bad
The Runners surely will take this. Runners in red.
Runners take the first, a crossover fault by the Aces. Aces pushing their changeovers to try and beat the Runners’ speed.
And two to the Runners…so it’s the final round everyone has been waiting for. Runners just break the course record yet again!!
The atmosphere would do the Sheffield crucible proud.
But first the third place runoff…
Struggling to comprehend your last sentence: "...tiresome left wing bent..." - sounds like a practical impossibility to me. ;-)
I've given up on covid now - I can only cope with one Horse of the Apocalypse at a time.
If these projects ensure HMG investment in Hinkley Point is diverted elsewhere I couldn't be happier. @Mexicanpete reporting from inside the 30km blast zone.
So he's effectively just tweeted high treason.
Because history.
If China locks down it’s hard to see the world avoiding a terrible recession, what with European war as well. Great
I think Vice News provides some super interesting content. The sister channel Vice less so.
And Aces win the decider, the faster team. Looks like a dropped ball by the Magnets as well.
Phosphorus bombs on civilians, almost-NATO base bombed. Looks like deliberate pushing of the envelope.
The combination of being both bully & victim is a common one in Greater X Nationalism.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/russian-owned-megahertz-downing-street-media-refit_uk_604e42c0c5b672fce4ed8649?ncid=tweetlnkukhpmg00000001
Of course the real threat is Russian sleepers masquerading as Ukrainian refugees rather than those who already have easy access to the PM, No 10 tech and the highest levels of our government.
It is quite noticeable that in Texas they are more popular than having the pump jacks. Oil can make a mess of the land, runs out etc etc. The wind money rolls in much more smoothly. Apart from the odd freeze up, of course.
Very close on the first three legs but the Belgian’s faster dog sneaked it on the final leg. And yet another course record falls - its now 14.71 seconds!!
False start by the Runners - Focus just have to finish clean.
And it’s one apiece! The decider….
Slow start by the Belgians…but a fault by Focus….they pushed it and crossed the starting line early…the Belgians just need to finish clean, and they have.
The first European team to make the final at Crufts takes the trophy!
After the presentation, a break for everyone to refresh and eat before the evenings show climax….
I'm no military strategist, but even I can see the existential risk to the Ukrainian army (green squares) on this map. The Russians can head north from Crimea and cut off the bulk of the Ukrainian Army (the green squares) and grab all of east Ukraine including Kharkiv and possibly Kyiv. I don't see an equivalent risk to the Russian positions. Of course the Russians haven't done this yet and hopefully never will.
source: @JominiW
So I am afraid that, to a large extent, you have been indulging in straw man arguments.
Legal? Probably not.
It would be a political decision and I can see it being tied up in court for years.
And then we get to argue about reparations for the next 30 years
This is a notable development in light of the growing awareness at the Kremlin of the decrepit state of the RU army & the blunders of the pre-invasion intel. If confirmed by UA side, this would likely mean a truce on Zelenskys' terms.
https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1503005194090688514
They’ll be celebrating in Zonhoven tonight!
False report? Mutiny?
Still hasn't barked.