The war in Yemen is not just about religious sectarianism.
The strands of Middle Eastern geopolitics are staggeringly complex. I mentioned Wahabism earlier, which is the dominant force in Qatar but there are, literally, hundreds of competing forces at work. Even in a country like Saudi Arabia there are huge competing factions.
I'm sure you all remember the famous 2013 letter in the Washington Post? Here it is in case you missed it. A lot has changed since then, but much has not:
Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad! Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi. But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood! Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood! Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the U.S.! Gulf states are pro-U.S. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi. And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states! Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day. KN Al-Sabah, London EC4, U.K.
Why have the west chosen to support the sunnis rather than the shias?
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
But to be fair to HYUFD, the rest of his point made sense. He's a young man with very sketchy historical knowledge, so you can surely forgive his Falklands ignorance ?
(edit) I've just seen his follow up posts. He's an idiot.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
Shocking!
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
The war in Yemen is not just about religious sectarianism.
The strands of Middle Eastern geopolitics are staggeringly complex. I mentioned Wahabism earlier, which is the dominant force in Qatar but there are, literally, hundreds of competing forces at work. Even in a country like Saudi Arabia there are huge competing factions.
I'm sure you all remember the famous 2013 letter in the Washington Post? Here it is in case you missed it. A lot has changed since then, but much has not:
Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad! Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi. But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood! Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood! Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the U.S.! Gulf states are pro-U.S. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi. And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states! Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day. KN Al-Sabah, London EC4, U.K.
Why have the west chosen to support the sunnis rather than the shias?
It isn't, there are no western troops in Yemen and of course the West fought Sunni Al Qaeda and Sunni Saddam Hussein
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, plans to meet Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in Moscow on Wednesday, and then head to Ukraine. Turkey has been pushing for a bigger role in mediating an end to the war, including hosting Lavrov and Ukraine’s top diplomat last week.
Until the end of the age of oil and gas arrives, we will have to buy from unpleasant people. This is because the only nice country in the business (pretty much) is Norway.
Oli is the Devil's Piss - nothing worse for a country than finding oil. No, not because people invade etc. Just what the wealth does.
Russia is just the latest example.
This is why I have always advocated getting the economy off hydrocarbons as much a possible. It is worth the price, even without Global Warming.
The Saudis may try and hide it (for example) but it's the "gnawing fear they would feign disguise" - when the money is gone the whirlwind will follow. And they will have no friends.
Russia without the oil & gas doesn't have the hard currency to be more than Mexico with missiles.
Until that time, we should diversify supply - a bit here, a bit there. So, if required, we can drop a supplier at a moments notice.
I liken it to the Clean Air Acts. They were a cost and imposition on society and the economy: and apparently they were not popular amongst many at the time. Yet thanks to them we save thousands of lives yearly by not having polluted air. IMO they were some of the best pieces of legislation ever.
Then there is unleaded fuel: if the connection between banning unleaded fuel and the reduction in crime is proven, then a simple albeit minorly troublesome piece of legislation has been a massive boon.
In fifty years, it's possible we'll look back and see the move to electric or hydrogen vehicles and 'green' energy in the same way: it removed much of our dependence (and the power of) nasty states, improved our air, improved our climate, improves energy security, etc, etc.
There are so many reasons to do it, which is why, although I am *slightly* AGW sceptic, I've been in favour of it for a long time.
Fully agree. I'm also slightly AGW sceptic - but I don't think it matters whether you believe in AGW or not for it to be a good to find better energy sources than fossil fuels.
Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko · 5m Now Lavrov is talking about his “hope of a possible compromise” with Ukraine, wow! I wonder where is that tough son of a bitch from late February talking about “Ukrainian Nazis” and denying Ukraine as a sovereign nation, wow!
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
To summarise, he will be asking for increased oil production, and will be asked for help with increased security in the Gulf region. UK is increasingly a key broker in the region, after a cooling in their relationship with the US in the past decade under Obama and Trump.
Will help with increased security mean more of this?
For some reason, many Western leftists see the Saudis as the aggressors here, rather than the defenders of the legitimate Yemeni government.
I could go on about this all day, but the long and short of the war in Yemen, is that it’s simply the latest incarnation of the centuries-old battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
If I understand correctly - which I may not - it’s essentially a proxy war between Iran and Saud, with the Yemeni people caught in the middle.
That is somewhat different from the situation in Ukraine, which is a war of conquest launched by a man who has clearly lost his marbles.
Although I can imagine for those actually living there it’s a distinction without a difference.
The war in Ukraine is clearly very different, with Russia simply rolling tanks over the border because Putin felt like it.
The Right will continue to tell themselves things like this but the fact is that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are involved in very murky dealings.
As I assume you know, Qatar's strong association with the Wahabi sect of Islam is a source of considerable irritation and fury in other parts of the Middle East, hence why Saudi boycotted Qatar and why Qatar airways were blockaded from flying over the UAE.
The geopolitics of the region is dark with many complex strands and multiple human rights abuses.
We will be doing business with more evil. Classic tories.
Diddums that the West is diversifying its hydrocarbon supplies away from your dear leader
If by 'my dear leader' you mean Putin, unlike you I believe we should stand up militarily to Putin.
You are a coward.
We’ve been through this. The wide ranging sanctions and military relief to Ukraine are working.
Are they though? Really?
I see a country getting pulverised and slowly, inexorably, Russian forces creep forward. I don't think Putin will particularly care if this takes 3 months if in the process Ukraine is reduced to rubble.
We tell ourselves that our actions are working because we need to tell ourselves it. We can't stand the idea that Putin has got away with this. But he has, hasn't he?
If we had courage we would stand up to him and do what Zelensky asked: install a No Fly Zone. Yes it might risk all out nuclear war.
So what?
I'm prepared to die for Ukraine and freedom. Aren't you?
No.
Especially not in an "all out nuclear war" who's going to have "freedom" after that? the Ukrainian cockroaches?
Exactly. Assuming humans survive (not a certainty) the world will be ruled by petty warlords and thugs for 100s if not 1000s of years.
@Heathener has definitely lost it. If he/she? is not a Russian troll I hope he/she is getting help.
(PS We could really do with a neutral personal singular pronoun.)
As my eldest is gender neutral I absolutely agree. "They" does not work when describing a single specific person.
At the risk of appearing to trivialise what is clearly a serious matter, surely the collective brains of PB could come up with the answer?
"They" feels wrong but maybe it will stick in time... "I asked my friend, they is quite happy to adopt this pronoun"?
Alternatively, how about some other variant of he/she? Xe? Ze? Se?
Something needs to become the norm, and I expect it will in time.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
*AKA people with some sanity and morality
We have nuclear weapons as a last resort to defend the UK and British territory from invasion if conventional forces are unable to protect them.
The Falkland Islands are British territory. Thatcher also believed that, hence she went to war. Fortunately we won the war with conventional forces.
No doubt we will find out sadly in due course too whether Putin is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon against non nuclear armed Ukraine if he is unable to defeat it with conventional forces. However that is a war of offence from Russia to invade another's territory, the Falklands War was a war to defend British territory
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
Shocking!
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
Actually, sticking to roads was exactly what was happening in WWII - you needs roads and railways to get anywhere. You would end up fighting off roads, of course, but the idea of just going straight line across the map.... no.
A lot of people argue that the eventual German defeat, in the East, was a function (in large part) of the lack of roads and their inability to get the rail system working well enough in Russia.
It was quite a shock to some in 1991 when the Americans went completely off-road in Iraq, This was because of decades of work in equipping their Army with an off road capability way down the supply chains - vehicles capable of travelling off road to a common specification.
Even that is/was limited by the terrain, of course.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
Our response to the Falklands was successful precisely because Thatcher WAS a wet lettuce. She responded to the initial news like a rabbit in headlights and the Navy saw its chance
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Is there any way we can extrapolate the number of Russian generals and colonels who have been killed to what the expected total losses would be from such a casualty rate among commanding officers ?
When the dust settles on this awful chapter the real heroes of this story will be revealed - the German company who managed to fleece the Russians for training their military and managing things so the Russians didn’t realise the trainers didn’t have a clue about military tactics.
Interesting article here on what is going wrong with the Russian BTG organisation of the military:
Interesting - do we have any Independent verification that the Russians have been deploying individual battalions (non-conscript) from each brigade? That would certainly lead to a confused mess..
Interesting point he makes about 1st April and new conscripts. Is all this peace talk from Lavrov just stalling for time some how?
I do wonder if a lot of this comes down to the widely reported confiscation of soldiers' mobiles before the invasion? This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given? Do they even have maps? No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
"Russian forces are struggling to overcome the challenges posed by Ukraine's terrain."
Which seems odd, as many people were saying that much of Ukraine is as flat as a billiard table, and that the Russians would be at the Polish border in a few days.
I wonder if those bridging units we saw destroyed in the early days of the conflict have been sorely missed?
The war in Yemen is not just about religious sectarianism.
The strands of Middle Eastern geopolitics are staggeringly complex. I mentioned Wahabism earlier, which is the dominant force in Qatar but there are, literally, hundreds of competing forces at work. Even in a country like Saudi Arabia there are huge competing factions.
I'm sure you all remember the famous 2013 letter in the Washington Post? Here it is in case you missed it. A lot has changed since then, but much has not:
Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad! Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi. But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood! Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood! Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the U.S.! Gulf states are pro-U.S. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi. And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states! Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day. KN Al-Sabah, London EC4, U.K.
Why have the west chosen to support the sunnis rather than the shias?
It isn't, there are no western troops in Yemen and of course the West fought Sunni Al Qaeda and Sunni Saddam Hussein
Saddam may have had Sunni heritage but Iraq under him was a secular state. It's rather vanished from the headlines now, but I've certainly formed the impression that in some respects the Iraqis are worse off now than they were under Saddam. There is, though, some improvement in at least some of the country and it's to be hoped that that continues.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
Our response to the Falklands was successful precisely because Thatcher WAS a wet lettuce. She responded to the initial news like a rabbit in headlights and the Navy saw its chance
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
Our response to the Falklands was successful precisely because Thatcher WAS a wet lettuce. She responded to the initial news like a rabbit in headlights and the Navy saw its chance
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
Our response to the Falklands was successful precisely because Thatcher WAS a wet lettuce. She responded to the initial news like a rabbit in headlights and the Navy saw its chance
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
*AKA people with some sanity and morality
We have nuclear weapons as a last resort to defend the UK and British territory from invasion if conventional forces are unable to protect them.
The Falkland Islands are British territory. Thatcher also believed that, hence she went to war. Fortunately we won the war with conventional forces.
No doubt we will find out sadly in due course too whether Putin is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon against non nuclear armed Ukraine if he is unable to defeat it with conventional forces. However that is a war of offence from Russia to invade another's territory, the Falklands War was a war to defend British territory
If you think that we we would fire a nuclear weapon into Buenos Aires if we had lost the Falklands, then you could not be more wrong
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
Our response to the Falklands was successful precisely because Thatcher WAS a wet lettuce. She responded to the initial news like a rabbit in headlights and the Navy saw its chance
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
See that "and should"? Wouldn't have been his call when Churchill was PM
Churchill like Thatcher would have defended them, he was also no wet lettuce
Yes. My point is he told the RN what to to. The RN told Thatcher what to do.
Asking the military what is possible is quite often a good idea.
The biggest problem with Churchill was his plans that ignored minor problems. Like geography. Fortunately, it was possible to talk him down from them. Some of the time.
Alan Brooke really, really deserved that peerage. He should have got a dukedom, I reckon.....
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
"Russian forces are struggling to overcome the challenges posed by Ukraine's terrain."
Which seems odd, as many people were saying that much of Ukraine is as flat as a billiard table, and that the Russians would be at the Polish border in a few days.
I wonder if those bridging units we saw destroyed in the early days of the conflict have been sorely missed?
"The fucking maniac - he had his bridging units right next to the primary targets!" - Red Storm Rising
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
I do wonder if a lot of this comes down to the widely reported confiscation of soldiers' mobiles before the invasion? This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given? Do they even have maps? No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
Hence you stick to the main roads. And become a sitting target when you stop.
Actually, sticking to roads was exactly what was happening in WWII - you needs roads and railways to get anywhere. You would end up fighting off roads, of course, but the idea of just going straight line across the map.... no.
A lot of people argue that the eventual German defeat, in the East, was a function (in large part) of the lack of roads and their inability to get the rail system working well enough in Russia.
It was quite a shock to some in 1991 when the Americans went completely off-road in Iraq, This was because of decades of work in equipping their Army with an off road capability way down the supply chains - vehicles capable of travelling off road to a common specification.
Even that is/was limited by the terrain, of course.
"Russian forces have remained largely tied to Ukraine’s road network and have demonstrated a reluctance to conduct off-road manoeuvre. The destruction of bridges by Ukrainian forces has also played a key role in stalling Russia’s advance."
I am not sure they have thought this through. If you have rivers you need bridges. Are bridges capable of taking large armoured vehicles generally A. arbitrarily positioned so as to join one field with another in the middle of nowhere or B. integrated in the road network?
No rivers in Iraq of course. In muddy Europe it is delusional to think that if you have 8 wheel drive or tracks or whatever crossing country is quick and easy. It isn't.
The latest in Tallinn is that a large shipment of ambulances, food, equipment, Javelins etc. has now reached Ukraine. Meanwhile Ukrainian refugess are to have free public transport and free access to all museums, which is the kind of charming and worthy thing that makes this country such a joy to live in. We now have well over 20,000 here.
Amongst a lot more weapons I see that more Stingers and other, more sophisticated weapons are going to Ukraine, and although the flow of kit is still not fast enough, it does seem to be faster than the Russian replenishments. Clearly the Russian line about "attacks on Belgorod" (i.e. inside Russia) suggests that they may be expecting counter artillery strikes from the Ukrainians. The losses on the Russian side are still significant, and the situation around Kyiv seems to be stable at least. Better AA weapons will make a NFZ unnecessary, so I think there is a need for very cool heads. We need to be patient in order to allow the considerable pressure on Russia to do its work.
Clearly deals are being done to help out the Chinese (considering Yuan payment for oil - probably won´t happen, but at least shows awareness of the Chinese problem) and even even the most difficult issues with Venezuela and Iran are being addressed. I truly hope that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is finally released. Modi of India has not made many friends in the West, but Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all abstained in the UN vote so he can get away with it for a while yet. Clearly, significant diplomacy is going on between the US and China too. I can see little to no Chinese interest in fully backing Putin, but as good mercantilists the Chinese will be asking the West for its pound of flesh.
Spring is coming, the snow is melting, but there is much toil and pain ahead.
While Putin distracts the West with his invasion of Ukraine, China invades Taiwan. It is not impossible and Putin and Xi had a lengthy summit just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine
You think China wants to be on the wrong end of the level of sanctions Russia has been hit with? I suspect there is a whole lot of wargaming in Beijing of this new world where the players actually DO something about state aggression.
China isn't going to kill its markets for Taiwan. It's just a festering sore, not an existential threat.
China wants Taiwan and will do anything to get it.
However the economic sanctions on Russia would be repeated for China if it tried, this showing there would have been a cost to that
Hopefully China will think again about taking Taiwan by force but we can't assume the two are equivalent. China is a much greater power, Taiwan does not border Nato territory and I'm far from convinced that the west, particularly Europe, would stand by Taiwan to the extent it has Ukraine. The sanctions would probably mean much more pain on our side.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
The 32 Welsh Guards who lost their lives with 11 other army personnel and 5 crew on Sir Galahad in the Bluff Cove attack on the 8th June 1982 was horrific, and I remember the news coverage at the time and looked on in horror
Actually, sticking to roads was exactly what was happening in WWII - you needs roads and railways to get anywhere. You would end up fighting off roads, of course, but the idea of just going straight line across the map.... no.
A lot of people argue that the eventual German defeat, in the East, was a function (in large part) of the lack of roads and their inability to get the rail system working well enough in Russia.
It was quite a shock to some in 1991 when the Americans went completely off-road in Iraq, This was because of decades of work in equipping their Army with an off road capability way down the supply chains - vehicles capable of travelling off road to a common specification.
Even that is/was limited by the terrain, of course.
"Russian forces have remained largely tied to Ukraine’s road network and have demonstrated a reluctance to conduct off-road manoeuvre. The destruction of bridges by Ukrainian forces has also played a key role in stalling Russia’s advance."
I am not sure they have thought this through. If you have rivers you need bridges. Are bridges capable of taking large armoured vehicles generally A. arbitrarily positioned so as to join one field with another in the middle of nowhere or B. integrated in the road network?
No rivers in Iraq of course. In muddy Europe it is delusional to think that if you have 8 wheel drive or tracks or whatever crossing country is quick and easy. It isn't.
I would reckon as a complete amateur with no real knowledge that the Russians thought they would be able to make better use of quick shock troops landing by helicopter to take key points and grossly underestimated the effectiveness of Ukrainians with rocket launchers etc and so hadn’t prepped for the long war (professionals think logistics and all that).
They have discovered the prophetic words of the arch military strategist Mike Tyson “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
*AKA people with some sanity and morality
We have nuclear weapons as a last resort to defend the UK and British territory from invasion if conventional forces are unable to protect them.
The Falkland Islands are British territory. Thatcher also believed that, hence she went to war. Fortunately we won the war with conventional forces.
No doubt we will find out sadly in due course too whether Putin is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon against non nuclear armed Ukraine if he is unable to defeat it with conventional forces. However that is a war of offence from Russia to invade another's territory, the Falklands War was a war to defend British territory
I doubt more than 10% of the electorate are either sufficiently stupid or sufficiently morally depraved to think that resorting to nuclear weapons in conventional conflicts is something we would contemplate. Which of the two things are you ?
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
Actually, sticking to roads was exactly what was happening in WWII - you needs roads and railways to get anywhere. You would end up fighting off roads, of course, but the idea of just going straight line across the map.... no.
A lot of people argue that the eventual German defeat, in the East, was a function (in large part) of the lack of roads and their inability to get the rail system working well enough in Russia.
It was quite a shock to some in 1991 when the Americans went completely off-road in Iraq, This was because of decades of work in equipping their Army with an off road capability way down the supply chains - vehicles capable of travelling off road to a common specification.
Even that is/was limited by the terrain, of course.
"Russian forces have remained largely tied to Ukraine’s road network and have demonstrated a reluctance to conduct off-road manoeuvre. The destruction of bridges by Ukrainian forces has also played a key role in stalling Russia’s advance."
I am not sure they have thought this through. If you have rivers you need bridges. Are bridges capable of taking large armoured vehicles generally A. arbitrarily positioned so as to join one field with another in the middle of nowhere or B. integrated in the road network?
No rivers in Iraq of course. In muddy Europe it is delusional to think that if you have 8 wheel drive or tracks or whatever crossing country is quick and easy. It isn't.
A big part of the reason that Russia dropped heavy tanks was the issue of roads and bridges - the Maus is all very well as a semi-portable fortification, but actually getting to the battle is kind of handy...
Yes, bridges are always choke points - hence the interest in serious armies with bridging equipment that can take all their equipment.
But sticking to roads for the whole advance means that you are leaving the countryside to the defenders.
The American spec for off road was based on Europe, of course. It was a compromise between mechanical capability and cost - unless you put everything in the army on tracks, you will have limits.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscripts even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
That is an absolute mistruth.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
One of the funniest conspiracy theories I've read is the one that claims the Argentinians sunk a British aircraft carrier during the war, but it was covered up. Apparently the Americans built another Invincible-class carrier for us in secret to replace the loss...
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
No, we used that one, when the Argentines secretly sank Invincible. We re-named it secretly and secretly resurrected the entire crew. Shhhhhhhh!
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscripts even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
That is an absolute mistruth.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
It wasn't. Thatcher was prepared to do whatever it took to win and our troops and pilots were better trained than the Argentines and we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscripts even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
That is an absolute mistruth.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
It wasn't. Thatcher was prepared to do whatever it took to win and our troops and pilots were better trained than the Argentines and we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time
We didn't have 4 carriers. We had 2 - plus a floating scrap heap whose engines didn't work, and one that was still being built.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carriers she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
*AKA people with some sanity and morality
We have nuclear weapons as a last resort to defend the UK and British territory from invasion if conventional forces are unable to protect them.
The Falkland Islands are British territory. Thatcher also believed that, hence she went to war. Fortunately we won the war with conventional forces.
No doubt we will find out sadly in due course too whether Putin is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon against non nuclear armed Ukraine if he is unable to defeat it with conventional forces. However that is a war of offence from Russia to invade another's territory, the Falklands War was a war to defend British territory
I doubt more than 10% of the electorate are either sufficiently stupid or sufficiently morally depraved to think that resorting to nuclear weapons in conventional conflicts is something we would contemplate. Which of the two things are you ?
Nuclear weapons are there as a last resort to defend the UK and British territory if conventional forces have been unable to.
Otherwise there is no point having them. If you are too much of a wet lettuce to realise that that is your problem
"Russian forces are struggling to overcome the challenges posed by Ukraine's terrain."
Which seems odd, as many people were saying that much of Ukraine is as flat as a billiard table, and that the Russians would be at the Polish border in a few days.
I wonder if those bridging units we saw destroyed in the early days of the conflict have been sorely missed?
Ukrainians knew what they were doing, taking them out whilst blowing up the bridges.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscripts even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
That is an absolute mistruth.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
He dis-respects the lives lost in a difficult and at times bloody confrontation
One reason Kyiv’s under curfew until Thursday morning: Ukraine believes Russian agents are trying to sneak into the capital, posing as residents returning to their homes. I’ve also been told the military expects Russia to ramp up its offensive after artillery resupplied. https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1504014634600255490
The latest in Tallinn is that a large shipment of ambulances, food, equipment, Javelins etc. has now reached Ukraine. Meanwhile Ukrainian refugess are to have free public transport and free access to all museums, which is the kind of charming and worthy thing that makes this country such a joy to live in. We now have well over 20,000 here.
Amongst a lot more weapons I see that more Stingers and other, more sophisticated weapons are going to Ukraine, and although the flow of kit is still not fast enough, it does seem to be faster than the Russian replenishments. Clearly the Russian line about "attacks on Belgorod" (i.e. inside Russia) suggests that they may be expecting counter artillery strikes from the Ukrainians. The losses on the Russian side are still significant, and the situation around Kyiv seems to be stable at least. Better AA weapons will make a NFZ unnecessary, so I think there is a need for very cool heads. We need to be patient in order to allow the considerable pressure on Russia to do its work.
Clearly deals are being done to help out the Chinese (considering Yuan payment for oil - probably won´t happen, but at least shows awareness of the Chinese problem) and even even the most difficult issues with Venezuela and Iran are being addressed. I truly hope that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is finally released. Modi of India has not made many friends in the West, but Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all abstained in the UN vote so he can get away with it for a while yet. Clearly, significant diplomacy is going on between the US and China too. I can see little to no Chinese interest in fully backing Putin, but as good mercantilists the Chinese will be asking the West for its pound of flesh.
Spring is coming, the snow is melting, but there is much toil and pain ahead.
While Putin distracts the West with his invasion of Ukraine, China invades Taiwan. It is not impossible and Putin and Xi had a lengthy summit just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine
You think China wants to be on the wrong end of the level of sanctions Russia has been hit with? I suspect there is a whole lot of wargaming in Beijing of this new world where the players actually DO something about state aggression.
China isn't going to kill its markets for Taiwan. It's just a festering sore, not an existential threat.
China wants Taiwan and will do anything to get it.
However the economic sanctions on Russia would be repeated for China if it tried, this showing there would have been a cost to that
Hopefully China will think again about taking Taiwan by force but we can't assume the two are equivalent. China is a much greater power, Taiwan does not border Nato territory and I'm far from convinced that the west, particularly Europe, would stand by Taiwan to the extent it has Ukraine. The sanctions would probably mean much more pain on our side.
Then Japan and South Korea would be next up on the menu for the Chinese shark if the West does not even respond with economic sanctions against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, even if like Ukraine it is unable to respond militarily
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
The key thing, as normal, is @hyufd had changed the goal posts. His original claim was that retaking the Falklands was a piece of cake. When challenged on that he moves the goal posts to suggest that because we point out he is wrong we are whimps. On the contrary whimps only take on fights they know they can win. The brave take on fights they might lose. I find @HYUFD comments on the Falklands insulting to those involved.
And where he got 4 aircraft carriers from just shows his ignorance.
Also he seems unaware of the restraint to limit the war to the Falklands in particular not to sink ships outside of the exclusion zone, hence the debate over the Belgrano.
Like most here, but unlike @HYUFD we lived through it and knew people who fought in it. @HYUFD comments are an insult to those brave people.
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
Nick has called nothing right in this entire mess. He has been all over the place, looking to excuse Russia for their evil. We should not 'poke' the Russians into attacking. We told the Russians we would not expand eastwards, etc, etc.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
Ah, my friend, but you are Centre Right and I am Centre Left. The optics are, consequently, different!
To summarise, he will be asking for increased oil production, and will be asked for help with increased security in the Gulf region. UK is increasingly a key broker in the region, after a cooling in their relationship with the US in the past decade under Obama and Trump.
Will help with increased security mean more of this?
For some reason, many Western leftists see the Saudis as the aggressors here, rather than the defenders of the legitimate Yemeni government.
I could go on about this all day, but the long and short of the war in Yemen, is that it’s simply the latest incarnation of the centuries-old battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
If I understand correctly - which I may not - it’s essentially a proxy war between Iran and Saud, with the Yemeni people caught in the middle.
That is somewhat different from the situation in Ukraine, which is a war of conquest launched by a man who has clearly lost his marbles.
Although I can imagine for those actually living there it’s a distinction without a difference.
The war in Ukraine is clearly very different, with Russia simply rolling tanks over the border because Putin felt like it.
The Right will continue to tell themselves things like this but the fact is that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are involved in very murky dealings.
As I assume you know, Qatar's strong association with the Wahabi sect of Islam is a source of considerable irritation and fury in other parts of the Middle East, hence why Saudi boycotted Qatar and why Qatar airways were blockaded from flying over the UAE.
The geopolitics of the region is dark with many complex strands and multiple human rights abuses.
We will be doing business with more evil. Classic tories.
Diddums that the West is diversifying its hydrocarbon supplies away from your dear leader
If by 'my dear leader' you mean Putin, unlike you I believe we should stand up militarily to Putin.
You are a coward.
We’ve been through this. The wide ranging sanctions and military relief to Ukraine are working.
Are they though? Really?
I see a country getting pulverised and slowly, inexorably, Russian forces creep forward. I don't think Putin will particularly care if this takes 3 months if in the process Ukraine is reduced to rubble.
We tell ourselves that our actions are working because we need to tell ourselves it. We can't stand the idea that Putin has got away with this. But he has, hasn't he?
If we had courage we would stand up to him and do what Zelensky asked: install a No Fly Zone. Yes it might risk all out nuclear war.
So what?
I'm prepared to die for Ukraine and freedom. Aren't you?
No.
Especially not in an "all out nuclear war" who's going to have "freedom" after that? the Ukrainian cockroaches?
Exactly. Assuming humans survive (not a certainty) the world will be ruled by petty warlords and thugs for 100s if not 1000s of years.
@Heathener has definitely lost it. If he/she? is not a Russian troll I hope he/she is getting help.
(PS We could really do with a neutral personal singular pronoun.)
They.
No, no, no, no, no. 'They' is plural. I can't abide words which were doing a perfectly good job being co-opted for some other purpose. See also 'disinterested' being used as a synonym for 'uninterested'. My first thought when I hear some attention-starved individual declare that henceforth they wish to be known as 'they' is not that the individual in question is taking some creative approach to gender identity but that the individual in question now believes that there are several of it. And of course, I mentally re-calibrate, and know what the person means, but still. Once upon a time we had a third-person gender-non-specific: he. It meant a male person or a person without specific gender. Admittedly that was also a less than ideal situation.
'They is plural' ?!? Didn't them teach you anything at school @Cookie? They are plural! ;-)
(PS The rest of your post is a bit obnoxious tbh. Back to school for some diversity lessons please.)
I think you have your tongue in your cheek here - but I think in this sense They is plural is correct! As to the obnoxious bit, if that's how I come across then I sincerely apologise. There is a lot of heat and noise on the gender identity debate, but this post wasn't meant to be part of it - my point is entirely linguistic: about the mental discomfort of hearing a single person referred to as 'they'. An agreement that it is a pity there is a non-specific word - not just for those few individuals like RochdalePioneers 's eldest who are genuinely uncomfortable with he or she but also for those countless occasions when the English language forces us to use 'he or she'.
I was hoping the ;-) would provide the hint that I was indeed being tongue-in-cheek.
I reacted, possibly over-reacted, to your 'some attention-starved individual' comment. I fear that assuming those with gender issues are attention-starved may trivialise what is clearly a very important issue.
But I fully accept your comments were not intended that way - no need to apologise.
Ha, yes, but on reflection - and especially with you highlighting that bit - I do apologise. Your comment is totally justified. I had in mind in particular a) Sam Smith, and b) the teenage stepdaughter of a friend of mine. Both of whom I am led to believe fall into that category - but in reality neither of whom I know well personally, so I should tread more carefully, even - no especially - in the context of an anonymous internet forum. And I certainly don't mean to imply that everyone who feels uncomfortable with their gender falls into that category. I shouldn't have cast aspersions about people I don't know personally, and I should have been more careful about what I clumsily and accidentally implied about others. I may find woke suspect, but that doesn't excuse impoliteness - especially as I am not posting under my real name.
'Twas a throwaway but crass comment and not really necessary in a wider comment about something else.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
I would *guess* that Zelensky is trying everything, on all fronts.
By pursing the peace talks, at a minimum, he can gauge how bad things are for the Russians, and show to Europe and the world that he is being reasonable.
The only way this would end, from the start, is some kind of negotiated armistice.
Ukraine isn't going to conquer Russian after all, nor will it be able to push the Russians out of the country, 100%.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
No, we used that one, when the Argentines secretly sank Invincible. We re-named it secretly and secretly resurrected the entire crew. Shhhhhhhh!
That’s what they want the Scots to think. The HMS Edward I is sitting in a fog bank waiting to unleash hell on anyone with woad on their face.
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
Nick has called nothing right in this entire mess. He has been all over the place, looking to excuse Russia for their evil. We should not 'poke' the Russians into attacking. We told the Russians we would not expand eastwards, etc, etc.
Quite a staggeringly misinformed comment. You have evidently been seeing in his comments what you wanted to see rather than what he has written.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
Shocking!
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
Its genuine comedy that coked-off-his-tits Govey can try and blame Liam Byrne for the current government's "keep out the forrin terror from Ukraine" policy.
A hostile environment against people here illegally is very different from a hostile environment *to prevent* anyone getting here legally.
Our policy is a disgrace, an amoral stain on this country and really can't be defended morally. Sometimes the issue is as simple as Right and Wrong. We are Wrong.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscripts even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
That is an absolute mistruth.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
It wasn't. Thatcher was prepared to do whatever it took to win and our troops and pilots were better trained than the Argentines and we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time
I assume you monitored every bit of the progress of the Falklands or are you relying on nonsensical hearsay
He calls Ukraine "an intermediate step" in Russia's ambitions.
Visegrád 24 @visegrad24 Putin’s highest-paid propagandist, Vladimir Soloviev, is now threatening that the Russia won’t stop at Ukraine’s western border.
For years, Soloviev has been issuing the threats Putin can’t say in public.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
Neither Ark Royal(aka Indomitable) or Illustrious were ready to actually fight. In the case of Illustrious all the corners were cut to get her ready for sea and she was still too late for the war.
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
I would *guess* that Zelensky is trying everything, on all fronts.
By pursing the peace talks, at a minimum, he can gauge how bad things are for the Russians, and show to Europe and the world that he is being reasonable.
The only way this would end, from the start, is some kind of negotiated armistice.
Ukraine isn't going to conquer Russian after all, nor will it be able to push the Russians out of the country, 100%.
Yes. It seems the Russians want to establish as favourable facts on the ground as possible in advance of the possible "off ramp" discussions.
At some point Zelensky will have to call it. Putin doesn't appear to be ready to yet but of course fuck knows what's in his head.
I do wonder if a lot of this comes down to the widely reported confiscation of soldiers' mobiles before the invasion? This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given? Do they even have maps? No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
An oddity about that report is that Ukraine has broadcast intercepted phone conversations between Russian troops and their families, expressing bewilderment and dismay. If they don't have phones, then the conversations are presumably fake? There's plenty of disinformation out there on both sides, and that's pretty normal in a war, though the Ukrainians are definitely better at marshalling global public opinion.
What we don't really know and is obscured by claims and counter-claims is what the current near-pause is about. Russia reeling from military setbacks and about to retreat? Building up for a major offensive and about to advance? Pausing to see if the peace talks succeed? It's a good thing whatever it is, while it lasts, but...?
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
Neither Ark Royal(aka Indomitable) or Illustrious were ready to actually fight. In the case of Illustrious all the corners were cut to get her ready for sea and she was still too late for the war.
She would still have been there if needed had the war continued
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
Wrong
What aircraft carriers were in the Falklands War?
The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands came at a time when the Royal Navy was experiencing a reduction in its amphibious capability, but it still possessed the aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible, the landing platform dock (LPD) ships HMS Fearless and Intrepid, and six landing ship logistics (LSL) ships ...
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
No, we used that one, when the Argentines secretly sank Invincible. We re-named it secretly and secretly resurrected the entire crew. Shhhhhhhh!
They came back as White Walkers. Argentina never stood a chance....
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
Nick has called nothing right in this entire mess. He has been all over the place, looking to excuse Russia for their evil. We should not 'poke' the Russians into attacking. We told the Russians we would not expand eastwards, etc, etc.
Quite a staggeringly misinformed comment. You have evidently been seeing in his comments what you wanted to see rather than what he has written.
Those are things he said, so it is hardly misinformed.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
Did he also have the gall to say that Labour ensured there was no money left?
Liam Byrne - about the only honest Labour politician, so lefties love to just pretend everything he said never happened or was a joke.
Makes you wonder what the Internet reaction would have been when thou art was dying off.
My understanding is that we once had four words for 'you': You/Ye: equivalents of I/me for plural/formal: Thou/Thee: equivalents of I/me for singular/informal
There must have been a time at which using You to mean Ye felt as wrong and clunky as saying 'Me went to the shops'. Using the polite form of you for talking to your friends must also have felt odd, though less clunky.
Trying to speak using the above structure uses quite a bit of thought, unless you do it a Yorkshire accent, and then it is oddly intuitive.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
Neither Ark Royal(aka Indomitable) or Illustrious were ready to actually fight. In the case of Illustrious all the corners were cut to get her ready for sea and she was still too late for the war.
She would still have been there if needed had the war continued
So just like Heathener will be here if needed if the war spreads? Chocolate teapot springs to mind.
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
Nick has called nothing right in this entire mess. He has been all over the place, looking to excuse Russia for their evil. We should not 'poke' the Russians into attacking. We told the Russians we would not expand eastwards, etc, etc.
Quite a staggeringly misinformed comment. You have evidently been seeing in his comments what you wanted to see rather than what he has written.
Its not misinformed, Nick did refer to the west poking Russia and spread the entirely fake misinformation that NATO had promised Russia that it wouldn't expand Eastwards.
I'm assuming he was simply mistaken and I don't know if he's acknowledged he was wrong, but he categorically was wrong and on a matter of grave significance.
I do wonder if a lot of this comes down to the widely reported confiscation of soldiers' mobiles before the invasion? This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given? Do they even have maps? No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
An oddity about that report is that Ukraine has broadcast intercepted phone conversations between Russian troops and their families, expressing bewilderment and dismay. If they don't have phones, then the conversations are presumably fake? There's plenty of disinformation out there on both sides, and that's pretty normal in a war, though the Ukrainians are definitely better at marshalling global public opinion.
What we don't really know and is obscured by claims and counter-claims is what the current near-pause is about. Russia reeling from military setbacks and about to retreat? Building up for a major offensive and about to advance? Pausing to see if the peace talks succeed? It's a good thing whatever it is, while it lasts, but...?
Quite a few amateur radio types have reported hearing vast amounts of what appears to be plain language, un-encrypted Russian radio communications. The comments have been that if that is all fake, the Ukrainians must have a division of guys on the radio all day....
Trying to confiscate all the phones in an army would be... interesting. That would just guarantee that the price of phone would soar, I would think.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
We had 4 aircraft carriers, Hermes, Invincible, Ark Royal and Illustrious
Wrong
What aircraft carriers were in the Falklands War?
The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands came at a time when the Royal Navy was experiencing a reduction in its amphibious capability, but it still possessed the aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible, the landing platform dock (LPD) ships HMS Fearless and Intrepid, and six landing ship logistics (LSL) ships ...
It also had the Illustrious which was ready had the war continued (though we won it anyway with 2 aircraft carriers) and the Ark Royal could have joined soon too
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
The key thing, as normal, is @hyufd had changed the goal posts. His original claim was that retaking the Falklands was a piece of cake. When challenged on that he moves the goal posts to suggest that because we point out he is wrong we are whimps. On the contrary whimps only take on fights they know they can win. The brave take on fights they might lose. I find @HYUFD comments on the Falklands insulting to those involved.
And where he got 4 aircraft carriers from just shows his ignorance.
Also he seems unaware of the restraint to limit the war to the Falklands in particular not to sink ships outside of the exclusion zone, hence the debate over the Belgrano.
Like most here, but unlike @HYUFD we lived through it and knew people who fought in it. @HYUFD comments are an insult to those brave people.
I don't get the "it was easy" line. The exclusion zone was not easy. Black Buck and its successors were not easy. And had it been a little later and we had scrapped the V-bombers and sold Invincible as the idiotic Nott / Thatcher plan had it, what then?
Lets not forget - the Nott / Thatcher defence review was the thing that opened the door to Galtieri in the first place...
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
The key thing, as normal, is @hyufd had changed the goal posts. His original claim was that retaking the Falklands was a piece of cake. When challenged on that he moves the goal posts to suggest that because we point out he is wrong we are whimps. On the contrary whimps only take on fights they know they can win. The brave take on fights they might lose. I find @HYUFD comments on the Falklands insulting to those involved.
And where he got 4 aircraft carriers from just shows his ignorance.
Also he seems unaware of the restraint to limit the war to the Falklands in particular not to sink ships outside of the exclusion zone, hence the debate over the Belgrano.
Like most here, but unlike @HYUFD we lived through it and knew people who fought in it. @HYUFD comments are an insult to those brave people.
Absolutely and he needs to show some contrition for his insensitive and frankly misleading and plainly wrong comments
As I said earlier my daughter had her 11th birthday on the day of the attack on Sir Galahad and we were all in tears at the horrific pictures
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
The Windrush immigrants weren't here illegally, were they?
Patent EW Bravemansgame 14:10 Cheltenham Stage Star 1:30 Cheltenham Thyme White 16:50 Cheltenham
Interesting Malc thanks some classic racing yesterday Constitution Hill an absolute machine.
Yes that and Honeysuckle were tremendous results. I like Bravemansgame today, last 2 wins have been very easy and looks a good one. Could be a few favourites today.
More intensive hostilities from both sides is an augury of negotiations as each side attempts to bargain from a strong position. A Ukrainian counter offensive is very much in the offing.
I do wonder if a lot of this comes down to the widely reported confiscation of soldiers' mobiles before the invasion? This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given? Do they even have maps? No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
An oddity about that report is that Ukraine has broadcast intercepted phone conversations between Russian troops and their families, expressing bewilderment and dismay. If they don't have phones, then the conversations are presumably fake? There's plenty of disinformation out there on both sides, and that's pretty normal in a war, though the Ukrainians are definitely better at marshalling global public opinion.
What we don't really know and is obscured by claims and counter-claims is what the current near-pause is about. Russia reeling from military setbacks and about to retreat? Building up for a major offensive and about to advance? Pausing to see if the peace talks succeed? It's a good thing whatever it is, while it lasts, but...?
Lots of stories of Russian troops looting. No reason that mobile phones wouldn't be on their list....
This is another linguistic hiccup. By 'incredible' does he mean 'not credible' - i.e. he doesn't believe it - or does he mean 'amazing, surprising'. I guess the latter, because that's how it's used. But that leaves us having to say 'not credible' where if we were of a more literal turn of phrase we could use 'incredible'. I find myself tending to use the word 'incredible' to mean 'not credible', but it gets inferred to mean 'amazing'; 'incredibly', which I use to mean 'unbelievably' simply gets inferred to mean 'very'. I recognise I'm pretty alone on this one!
To summarise, he will be asking for increased oil production, and will be asked for help with increased security in the Gulf region. UK is increasingly a key broker in the region, after a cooling in their relationship with the US in the past decade under Obama and Trump.
Will help with increased security mean more of this?
For some reason, many Western leftists see the Saudis as the aggressors here, rather than the defenders of the legitimate Yemeni government.
I could go on about this all day, but the long and short of the war in Yemen, is that it’s simply the latest incarnation of the centuries-old battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
If I understand correctly - which I may not - it’s essentially a proxy war between Iran and Saud, with the Yemeni people caught in the middle.
That is somewhat different from the situation in Ukraine, which is a war of conquest launched by a man who has clearly lost his marbles.
Although I can imagine for those actually living there it’s a distinction without a difference.
The war in Ukraine is clearly very different, with Russia simply rolling tanks over the border because Putin felt like it.
The Right will continue to tell themselves things like this but the fact is that both Qatar and Saudi Arabia are involved in very murky dealings.
As I assume you know, Qatar's strong association with the Wahabi sect of Islam is a source of considerable irritation and fury in other parts of the Middle East, hence why Saudi boycotted Qatar and why Qatar airways were blockaded from flying over the UAE.
The geopolitics of the region is dark with many complex strands and multiple human rights abuses.
We will be doing business with more evil. Classic tories.
Diddums that the West is diversifying its hydrocarbon supplies away from your dear leader
If by 'my dear leader' you mean Putin, unlike you I believe we should stand up militarily to Putin.
You are a coward.
We’ve been through this. The wide ranging sanctions and military relief to Ukraine are working.
Are they though? Really?
I see a country getting pulverised and slowly, inexorably, Russian forces creep forward. I don't think Putin will particularly care if this takes 3 months if in the process Ukraine is reduced to rubble.
We tell ourselves that our actions are working because we need to tell ourselves it. We can't stand the idea that Putin has got away with this. But he has, hasn't he?
If we had courage we would stand up to him and do what Zelensky asked: install a No Fly Zone. Yes it might risk all out nuclear war.
So what?
I'm prepared to die for Ukraine and freedom. Aren't you?
No.
Especially not in an "all out nuclear war" who's going to have "freedom" after that? the Ukrainian cockroaches?
Exactly. Assuming humans survive (not a certainty) the world will be ruled by petty warlords and thugs for 100s if not 1000s of years.
@Heathener has definitely lost it. If he/she? is not a Russian troll I hope he/she is getting help.
(PS We could really do with a neutral personal singular pronoun.)
As my eldest is gender neutral I absolutely agree. "They" does not work when describing a single specific person.
At the risk of appearing to trivialise what is clearly a serious matter, surely the collective brains of PB could come up with the answer?
"They" feels wrong but maybe it will stick in time... "I asked my friend, they is quite happy to adopt this pronoun"?
Alternatively, how about some other variant of he/she? Xe? Ze? Se?
Something needs to become the norm, and I expect it will in time.
Hallelujah - a post I can agree with 100%
You usually form "they" with the plural form of the verb, even when it is referring to a single individual. Just like singular and plural "you". e.g. "It looks like they are standing on a rock." Same when used as a gender-neutral pronoun. [edited for simplicity]
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
The Windrush immigrants weren't here illegally, were they?
No but since they lacked paperwork to prove they were here legally they were caught out by measures introduced to catch illegal migrants, that's the problem.
If you create a hostile environment for illegal migrants, that environment exists for others who aren't illegal but whose paperwork is a mess.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Do I take it from the lack of commentry that people have reassessed their optimism about Ukraine?
Obviously I hate to be pessimistic but it looks to me like the Russians are slowly (and clumsily) pounding the country to obliteration whilst arranging for a 'peace' deal that humiliates Ukraine. No NATO. 'Neutralisation'. Loss of parts of the country that have already been invaded by Russia. It is 'finlandisation', but by force and not by consent and mutual respect.
I can't see such an arrangement working out well - not least because many people in Ukraine won't be happy about it. There is the small matter of the 2000 or so Azov fascists, who we have inadvertantly armed, who are likely to turn against the Ukranian government. So the destablisation of Ukraine will continue apace.
Zelensky and co effectively have no choice other than to agree to whatever they are being presented with. Putin can just move his troops up to the border with, Georgia, Finland or whoever is next on his list. The west can go back to its comfortable decadence and denial.
Am I wrong?
Ukraine might well be screwed. But so is Russia.
Is it?
Morally, yes. But is it really screwed or do we just tell ourselves this to make ourselves feel better because we sat on our hands and failed to come to Ukraine's military aid?
Yet again utter nonsense
The UK has been arming Ukraine and training them for years and our arms are being used by a very grateful Ukraine
Indeed their President and Boris are in near daily contact with each other and the goodwill the UK has with Ukrainians is well documented
Until it comes to sheltering refugees!
Our two refugees have been told they will have a visa interview within 10 days and a decision within 12 weeks. Well done, Gove. 👓🍆💦
Bloody hell.
Can't you just nick a plane and smuggle them over?
I reckon I could get them into the UK through a midnight run on the back roads of Leitrim and Fermanagh under the doleful gaze of so many of my ancestors' ghosts. But then what? I've got two undocumented and illegal minors in my house. If they are going to have any sort of life then their status has to be regularised.
Mrs DA has gone to the Netherlands and moved into an apartment with them so at least they are safe and looked after for now. Very few people have the resources to be able to do that so the system is failing a lot of people who desperately need help.
I am full of admiration for your efforts and it is incredibly frustrating how slow we are being. But the Home Office is built on the premise that they want to make asylum as hard and slow as possible and are clearly struggling to change their ways.
My daughter is organising a pick up from a Ukrainian charity of medical and sanitary supplies on Friday. She has received a fair bit of money and is going to be doing a megashop tomorrow, using the money she has been given. People are desperate to help as you and your wife have vividly demonstrated and the government remains behind the curve on this.
Is it just the Home Office though? Surely the UK government has just made a calculation of how many extra school places and doctors appointments they would have to provide for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and they want other countries to deal with it.
It is the whole Tory government , the Home Office does not call all the shots. Plainly and simply like they do always they will talk it out with great gusto but in the end will take a miserly amount of people and will then trumpet about what a great job they did. We will not see many Ukranians in the UK.
Gove had the gall to say in the Commons that it was a Labour Home Secretary that introduced the "hostile environment" policy.
I think this is what he was referring to
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
Byrne, who was, of course, also responsible for the 'No money' joke, referred to 'Illegal' immigrants. Nothing about making it harder for the genuine. Nor did he, as May and her successors have, done apparently, regard all immigrants as illegal unless they're very rich.
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
Ah, my friend, but you are Centre Right and I am Centre Left. The optics are, consequently, different!
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
He’s thinking of the one that cannot he named that is stationed secretly off Scotland in case they declare independence.
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
No, we used that one, when the Argentines secretly sank Invincible. We re-named it secretly and secretly resurrected the entire crew. Shhhhhhhh!
We have an HMS Secretly now? And the ship is capable of resurrecting people? BRITISH TECH FTW.
How much credence are we giving the Zelensky peace talks comments.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again. .
Nick has called nothing right in this entire mess. He has been all over the place, looking to excuse Russia for their evil. We should not 'poke' the Russians into attacking. We told the Russians we would not expand eastwards, etc, etc.
Quite a staggeringly misinformed comment. You have evidently been seeing in his comments what you wanted to see rather than what he has written.
Its not misinformed, Nick did refer to the west poking Russia and spread the entirely fake misinformation that NATO had promised Russia that it wouldn't expand Eastwards.
I'm assuming he was simply mistaken and I don't know if he's acknowledged he was wrong, but he categorically was wrong and on a matter of grave significance.
Nah we went through that. He (Nick) rowed back from the guarantee comment and we all found the evidence of NATO's "endeavour" (or whatever it was) about Eastern expansion.
She was quite prepared to go to war with Argentina over the Falklands as we could easily beat them.
There was nothing easy about it and we very nearly didn't.
Not much more would have had to go wrong for the operation to fail.
Rubbish.
We very easily beat them once we committed to the task force.
The Argentines were poorly trained and full of conscrips even more than the Russians and Thatcher of course sunk the Belgrano without much difficulty
If you speak to anyone who was there then you would know that is rubbish.
We had a more effective army than Argentina and a bigger navy and better trained pilots.
It was not that difficult. Plus of course we had submarines with nuclear missiles and Argentina did not have nuclear weapons.
Russia however does have nuclear weapons
You really do talk nonsense . We lost the Atlantic Conveyor to exocets which was a huge blow. If we had lost an aircraft carrier in the same way there would have been no way of getting troops to the Falklands as we would not have had air cover. That would have been a fatal blow.
It makes not a joy of difference that we had better soldiers, navy and air force if you can't get any of them there.
So what, we still sunk more Argentine ships than they sunk of ours which is the main aim in war.
Thatcher was also not a wet lettuce like you and had the Argentines sunk our aircraft carrier she might even have nuked Buenos Aires who knows. She was not going to lose that war.
However that would have been an absolute last resort to defend the Falklands if we had lost a our aircraft carriers. As we had 4 aircraft carriers at the time even had we lost 1 we would still have had 3 to replace it and could still have continued with the Task Force with them
A) The object of war was not to sink Argentina ships, in fact we made a point of avoiding doing so and could have done so at will, hence the fuss over the Belgrano.The objective was to reclaim the Falklands which we could not have done without the aircraft carriers which were at risk from exocets.
I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
Bulwark was a pile of floating rust by 1982. Completely unusable and decommissioned.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
The key thing, as normal, is @hyufd had changed the goal posts. His original claim was that retaking the Falklands was a piece of cake. When challenged on that he moves the goal posts to suggest that because we point out he is wrong we are whimps. On the contrary whimps only take on fights they know they can win. The brave take on fights they might lose. I find @HYUFD comments on the Falklands insulting to those involved.
And where he got 4 aircraft carriers from just shows his ignorance.
Also he seems unaware of the restraint to limit the war to the Falklands in particular not to sink ships outside of the exclusion zone, hence the debate over the Belgrano.
Like most here, but unlike @HYUFD we lived through it and knew people who fought in it. @HYUFD comments are an insult to those brave people.
Absolutely and he needs to show some contrition for his insensitive and frankly misleading and plainly wrong comments
As I said earlier my daughter had her 11th birthday on the day of the attack on Sir Galahad and we were all in tears at the horrific pictures
I am not going to be a wet lettuce no. Thatcher would correctly have done whatever it took to retake British territory no matter what the cost, as would I had I been PM.
War is horrific no doubt with many sacrifices but it was a just war to defend British territory and a people who wished to stay British after Argentine invasion
Patent EW Bravemansgame 14:10 Cheltenham Stage Star 1:30 Cheltenham Thyme White 16:50 Cheltenham
Interesting Malc thanks some classic racing yesterday Constitution Hill an absolute machine.
Yes that and Honeysuckle were tremendous results. I like Bravemansgame today, last 2 wins have been very easy and looks a good one. Could be a few favourites today.
Comments
He's a young man with very sketchy historical knowledge, so you can surely forgive his Falklands ignorance ?
(edit) I've just seen his follow up posts. He's an idiot.
"Ukraine says it launches counteroffensives against Russian forces"
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-launches-counteroffensives-several-areas-ukrainian-presidential-adviser-2022-03-16/
@DPJHodges
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45m
This analysis is incredible. Russia are basically relying on tactics not seen since World War One.
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1504011255710896128
It was the Labour Immigration Minister.
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/16/immigration.immigrationandpublicservices
NY Times blog
Let’s hope the rest of them are just as ‘elite’ as that team.
Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦
@IAPonomarenko
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5m
Now Lavrov is talking about his “hope of a possible compromise” with Ukraine, wow!
I wonder where is that tough son of a bitch from late February talking about “Ukrainian Nazis” and denying Ukraine as a sovereign nation, wow!
https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko
I'm normally on the 'don't pile on to HYUFD' section of this site, but.... wow.
I sincerely hope that you never get anywhere near the levers of power and that we are forever governed by 'wet lettuces'* who refuse to use nuclear weapons against non nuclear-armed states.
*AKA people with some sanity and morality
The Falkland Islands are British territory. Thatcher also believed that, hence she went to war. Fortunately we won the war with conventional forces.
No doubt we will find out sadly in due course too whether Putin is prepared to use a tactical nuclear weapon against non nuclear armed Ukraine if he is unable to defeat it with conventional forces. However that is a war of offence from Russia to invade another's territory, the Falklands War was a war to defend British territory
A lot of people argue that the eventual German defeat, in the East, was a function (in large part) of the lack of roads and their inability to get the rail system working well enough in Russia.
It was quite a shock to some in 1991 when the Americans went completely off-road in Iraq, This was because of decades of work in equipping their Army with an off road capability way down the supply chains - vehicles capable of travelling off road to a common specification.
Even that is/was limited by the terrain, of course.
"The following day, during a crisis meeting headed by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, advised them that "Britain could and should send a task force if the islands are invaded" ".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War#Initial_British_response
See that "and should"? Wouldn't have been his call when Churchill was PM
Who introduced hostile environment?
Minister Liam Byrne
In May's own words: "The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". Whilst the concept of a 'hostile environment' had first been introduced in 2007 by then New Labour Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, 2012 saw the first systemic implementation of this strategy
This is a generation raised with them. Has any training in something as basic as map reading been given?
Do they even have maps?
No mobile, no map, or the inability to use one, and all road signs altered and you soon get lost.
Which seems odd, as many people were saying that much of Ukraine is as flat as a billiard table, and that the Russians would be at the Polish border in a few days.
I wonder if those bridging units we saw destroyed in the early days of the conflict have been sorely missed?
There is, though, some improvement in at least some of the country and it's to be hoped that that continues.
- Thatcher asked what could be done.
- Leach, said it was possible but risky.
- Thatcher approved.
- Leach started initial preparations.
Then
- Immediately after the invasion, the cabinet met and formally decided to send the task force.
You do say some unbelievable things at times
The biggest problem with Churchill was his plans that ignored minor problems. Like geography. Fortunately, it was possible to talk him down from them. Some of the time.
Alan Brooke really, really deserved that peerage. He should have got a dukedom, I reckon.....
B ) I have never said we should not of reclaimed the Falklands. I just said it wasn't easy like you claim. It was a really big task and not a foregone conclusion or easy like you said.
C) W were never going to launch a nuke on Argentina. You are being ridiculous.
D) And we only had 2 aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible not 4.
E) Your comments disrespect the brave men who fought that war and the politicians who made the decisions. It was not easy. It was hard. Many died and it was not a foregone conclusion.
And become a sitting target when you stop.
I am not sure they have thought this through. If you have rivers you need bridges. Are bridges capable of taking large armoured vehicles generally A. arbitrarily positioned so as to join one field with another in the middle of nowhere or B. integrated in the road network?
No rivers in Iraq of course. In muddy Europe it is delusional to think that if you have 8 wheel drive or tracks or whatever crossing country is quick and easy. It isn't.
I wonder what was the 4th carrier he is thinking of? Indomitable/Ark Royal was afloat, but commissioned long after the war.
It was also my daughters 11th birthday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmN4cLRTeX8
They have discovered the prophetic words of the arch military strategist Mike Tyson “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
Which of the two things are you ?
"What we are proposing here will, I think, flush illegal migrants out. We are trying to create a much more hostile environment in this country if you are here illegally," said Mr Byrne. "We have to make Britain much less of an attractive place if you are going to come here and break the rules."
To be honest I see little difference in his words and Mays intention
Of course if the Scots sink it we will nuke Edinburgh or something before the tanks roll in.
Yes, bridges are always choke points - hence the interest in serious armies with bridging equipment that can take all their equipment.
But sticking to roads for the whole advance means that you are leaving the countryside to the defenders.
The American spec for off road was based on Europe, of course. It was a compromise between mechanical capability and cost - unless you put everything in the army on tracks, you will have limits.
Read the historical evidence rather than the Sun narrative The anecdotal accounts I heard back from serving officers were the UK was very close to failure but Galtieri blinked first.
Your final statement is both bizarre and tasteless.
If material then it looks like @NickPalmer has called it right again.
.
Otherwise there is no point having them. If you are too much of a wet lettuce to realise that that is your problem
Single EW
Stage Star 1:30 Cheltenham
Patent
Bravemansgame 14:10 Cheltenham
Tiger Roll 16:10 Cheltenham
Shishkin 15:30 Cheltenham
Patent EW
Bravemansgame 14:10 Cheltenham
Stage Star 1:30 Cheltenham
Thyme White 16:50 Cheltenham
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1504014634600255490
And where he got 4 aircraft carriers from just shows his ignorance.
Also he seems unaware of the restraint to limit the war to the Falklands in particular not to sink ships outside of the exclusion zone, hence the debate over the Belgrano.
Like most here, but unlike @HYUFD we lived through it and knew people who fought in it. @HYUFD comments are an insult to those brave people.
And I certainly don't mean to imply that everyone who feels uncomfortable with their gender falls into that category.
I shouldn't have cast aspersions about people I don't know personally, and I should have been more careful about what I clumsily and accidentally implied about others.
I may find woke suspect, but that doesn't excuse impoliteness - especially as I am not posting under my real name.
'Twas a throwaway but crass comment and not really necessary in a wider comment about something else.
By pursing the peace talks, at a minimum, he can gauge how bad things are for the Russians, and show to Europe and the world that he is being reasonable.
The only way this would end, from the start, is some kind of negotiated armistice.
Ukraine isn't going to conquer Russian after all, nor will it be able to push the Russians out of the country, 100%.
A hostile environment against people here illegally is very different from a hostile environment *to prevent* anyone getting here legally.
Our policy is a disgrace, an amoral stain on this country and really can't be defended morally. Sometimes the issue is as simple as Right and Wrong. We are Wrong.
Visegrád 24
@visegrad24
Putin’s highest-paid propagandist, Vladimir Soloviev, is now threatening that the Russia won’t stop at Ukraine’s western border.
For years, Soloviev has been issuing the threats Putin can’t say in public.
He now says that either NATO leaves Central Europe or Russia will invade.
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1504030091386490881
At some point Zelensky will have to call it. Putin doesn't appear to be ready to yet but of course fuck knows what's in his head.
What we don't really know and is obscured by claims and counter-claims is what the current near-pause is about. Russia reeling from military setbacks and about to retreat? Building up for a major offensive and about to advance? Pausing to see if the peace talks succeed? It's a good thing whatever it is, while it lasts, but...?
What aircraft carriers were in the Falklands War?
The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands came at a time when the Royal Navy was experiencing a reduction in its amphibious capability, but it still possessed the aircraft carriers HMS Hermes and Invincible, the landing platform dock (LPD) ships HMS Fearless and Intrepid, and six landing ship logistics (LSL) ships ...
Liam Byrne - about the only honest Labour politician, so lefties love to just pretend everything he said never happened or was a joke.
You/Ye: equivalents of I/me for plural/formal:
Thou/Thee: equivalents of I/me for singular/informal
There must have been a time at which using You to mean Ye felt as wrong and clunky as saying 'Me went to the shops'. Using the polite form of you for talking to your friends must also have felt odd, though less clunky.
Trying to speak using the above structure uses quite a bit of thought, unless you do it a Yorkshire accent, and then it is oddly intuitive.
I'm assuming he was simply mistaken and I don't know if he's acknowledged he was wrong, but he categorically was wrong and on a matter of grave significance.
Trying to confiscate all the phones in an army would be... interesting. That would just guarantee that the price of phone would soar, I would think.
Lets not forget - the Nott / Thatcher defence review was the thing that opened the door to Galtieri in the first place...
As I said earlier my daughter had her 11th birthday on the day of the attack on Sir Galahad and we were all in tears at the horrific pictures
I find myself tending to use the word 'incredible' to mean 'not credible', but it gets inferred to mean 'amazing'; 'incredibly', which I use to mean 'unbelievably' simply gets inferred to mean 'very'.
I recognise I'm pretty alone on this one!
If you create a hostile environment for illegal migrants, that environment exists for others who aren't illegal but whose paperwork is a mess.
Would be great to hear @stodge & @MoonRabbit ‘s opinions, too.
Good luck to all the Cheltenham punters, today!
War is horrific no doubt with many sacrifices but it was a just war to defend British territory and a people who wished to stay British after Argentine invasion