Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
The main issue is even if most reform voters are disaffected tories, it doesn't follow they will come home this year. If they are angry or despondent enough, or don't fear Labour enough, they won't feel a need to return.
If you are a "we can still win!!!" person then you need both an explanation for why you are in the current terrible mess and then a plausible route out of it.
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The US has provided very little support in terms of ammunition and equipment for many months now. The baton is on the ground and gathering dust. The crisis is now.
I am cynical enough to think that the French are more interested in helping Ukraine now that the US is not, because it is now possible for them to play the leading role, rather than a supporting one.
Would it be also cynical to think that the UK is as usual reflexively following big daddy USA and concentrating on wearing little Ukraine-UJ badges rather than putting £s and weapons on the line (or even spouting BJ-esque bluster)?
I don't know. Shapps released what looked like a very strong video from Kyiv recently, so the propaganda is still there. There are a few hints that Britain has been providing quite a lot of support behind the scenes - helping with the development of the sea drones that have been successful in the Black Sea, for example, and in suggestions that we might take German Taurus missiles so that we can send more Storm Shadows and they don't have to send their long-range missiles to Ukraine.
But I do think Johnson would have pushed for more to be done if he was still PM. Sunak gives the appearance of going through the motions. I have a sense that they've looked at the British budget and military inventory first, and decided what can be spared, rather than looked at what Ukraine needs to win and worked out how to provide it.
I fear that Starmer will be the same and will later decide it is futile. There's a real risk that Ukraine loses because the West chooses defeat.
I agree, save for the last point. I think Starmer is just as committed as Johnson and it's his commitment to Ukraine that stops him using it as a stick to beat the Government. Generally I think Starmer subscribes to the view, formerly prominent in the US but pretty defunct since Iraq, that politics stops at the coast and the opposition should not be undermining the Government in foreign policy. When the election campaign starts I think we will see Labour talking about going further than the Government in support of Ukraine.
Yes, in this country at least there is still mostly unity, even if general support internationally is dropping and the urgency is not here either.
I think 2024 is when pushes for 'ceasefire' become the norm in the West, and the line becomes as permanent as occurred in 2014. They realised that in 2022, but ate forgetting again.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Strongly disagree. There was a massive British effort to get military hardware into Ukraine in advance of the start of the war, several flights per day full of NLAW anti-tank missiles for a start, that made the difference between Kiev falling in a few days and not. Flights that had to avoid German airspace, because they didn’t have permission to overfly. Yes, Johnson was good at promoting the UK, undoubtedly one of his skills even if you don’t like him, and the Ukranians genuinely love him for the support he showed in those early days of the war.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Boosting was a key skill of his, and sometimes its very useful. When he was no longer PM he still got specific praise (rather than praise for the UK generally) when Zekensky spoke to parliament. He didn't have to do that as part of diplomatic schmoozing.
So I find it hard to think Boris did nothing useful playing the more hawkish angle. I'm more disappointed he's not focused more on it post premiership, which would enhance his reputation.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The US has provided very little support in terms of ammunition and equipment for many months now. The baton is on the ground and gathering dust. The crisis is now.
I am cynical enough to think that the French are more interested in helping Ukraine now that the US is not, because it is now possible for them to play the leading role, rather than a supporting one.
Would it be also cynical to think that the UK is as usual reflexively following big daddy USA and concentrating on wearing little Ukraine-UJ badges rather than putting £s and weapons on the line (or even spouting BJ-esque bluster)?
I don't know. Shapps released what looked like a very strong video from Kyiv recently, so the propaganda is still there. There are a few hints that Britain has been providing quite a lot of support behind the scenes - helping with the development of the sea drones that have been successful in the Black Sea, for example, and in suggestions that we might take German Taurus missiles so that we can send more Storm Shadows and they don't have to send their long-range missiles to Ukraine.
But I do think Johnson would have pushed for more to be done if he was still PM. Sunak gives the appearance of going through the motions. I have a sense that they've looked at the British budget and military inventory first, and decided what can be spared, rather than looked at what Ukraine needs to win and worked out how to provide it.
I fear that Starmer will be the same and will later decide it is futile. There's a real risk that Ukraine loses because the West chooses defeat.
I agree, save for the last point. I think Starmer is just as committed as Johnson and it's his commitment to Ukraine that stops him using it as a stick to beat the Government. Generally I think Starmer subscribes to the view, formerly prominent in the US but pretty defunct since Iraq, that politics stops at the coast and the opposition should not be undermining the Government in foreign policy. When the election campaign starts I think we will see Labour talking about going further than the Government in support of Ukraine.
Yes, in this country at least there is still mostly unity, even if general support internationally is dropping and the urgency is not here either.
I think 2024 is when pushes for 'ceasefire' become the norm in the West, and the line becomes as permanent as occurred in 2014. They realised that in 2022, but ate forgetting again.
I don’t think there’s any prospect of a ceasefire. If Putin got one, it would just be to regroup and press on. This is existential for much of the old ‘bloc’ and it’s high time the west realised it. Macron seems to, others not so much, and as stated a few moments ago, our contribution looks increasingly derisory.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The US has provided very little support in terms of ammunition and equipment for many months now. The baton is on the ground and gathering dust. The crisis is now.
I am cynical enough to think that the French are more interested in helping Ukraine now that the US is not, because it is now possible for them to play the leading role, rather than a supporting one.
Would it be also cynical to think that the UK is as usual reflexively following big daddy USA and concentrating on wearing little Ukraine-UJ badges rather than putting £s and weapons on the line (or even spouting BJ-esque bluster)?
I don't know. Shapps released what looked like a very strong video from Kyiv recently, so the propaganda is still there. There are a few hints that Britain has been providing quite a lot of support behind the scenes - helping with the development of the sea drones that have been successful in the Black Sea, for example, and in suggestions that we might take German Taurus missiles so that we can send more Storm Shadows and they don't have to send their long-range missiles to Ukraine.
But I do think Johnson would have pushed for more to be done if he was still PM. Sunak gives the appearance of going through the motions. I have a sense that they've looked at the British budget and military inventory first, and decided what can be spared, rather than looked at what Ukraine needs to win and worked out how to provide it.
I fear that Starmer will be the same and will later decide it is futile. There's a real risk that Ukraine loses because the West chooses defeat.
I agree, save for the last point. I think Starmer is just as committed as Johnson and it's his commitment to Ukraine that stops him using it as a stick to beat the Government. Generally I think Starmer subscribes to the view, formerly prominent in the US but pretty defunct since Iraq, that politics stops at the coast and the opposition should not be undermining the Government in foreign policy. When the election campaign starts I think we will see Labour talking about going further than the Government in support of Ukraine.
Yes, in this country at least there is still mostly unity, even if general support internationally is dropping and the urgency is not here either.
I think 2024 is when pushes for 'ceasefire' become the norm in the West, and the line becomes as permanent as occurred in 2014. They realised that in 2022, but ate forgetting again.
I don’t think there’s any prospect of a ceasefire. If Putin got one, it would just be to regroup and press on. This is existential for much of the old ‘bloc’ and it’s high time the west realised it. Macron seems to, others not so much, and as stated a few moments ago, our contribution looks increasingly derisory.
It is high time they did, but I don't think they will. I'm pleased support has been kept up even this long, but it's slipping outside eastern Europe.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Boosting was a key skill of his, and sometimes its very useful. When he was no longer PM he still got specific praise (rather than praise for the UK generally) when Zekensky spoke to parliament. He didn't have to do that as part of diplomatic schmoozing.
So I find it hard to think Boris did nothing useful playing the more hawkish angle. I'm more disappointed he's not focused more on it post premiership, which would enhance his reputation.
What has Boris done since resigning? Nothing very visible. Having let Parliament, he can't even do his Incredible Sulk Ted Heath tribute act from the backbenches.
I guess he's earning money on the lecture tour somewhere. Even Theresa May managed to get people to pay her.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
Yeah I referred to that earlier. Its bloody stupid. Especially when you think about the detail:
Crime capital of the world! So lets cut police budgets more, cut criminal justice budgets again, and have to release people already in prison because they are full and there isn't any money.
If Hall was proposing a Giuliani-style clampdown on "crime" where an empowered Met would ensure all the criminals went to jail, then maybe they could play that card. But she isn't - instead she is the candidate for the "let them out" party.
Just how stupid do they think voters are? And why haven't they yet realised that voters aren't that stupid?
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
Early support cannot be discounted, not least as encouragement to others.
It's like when people started dismissing the covid vaccination efforts when others caught up in the final figures. Which is great, but early take up was also a key factor, else getting to 100% after 50 years would be better than say 75% in a month.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
The polling says that Penny Mordaunt is the only candidate to find.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
The main issue is even if most reform voters are disaffected tories, it doesn't follow they will come home this year. If they are angry or despondent enough, or don't fear Labour enough, they won't feel a need to return.
If you are a "we can still win!!!" person then you need both an explanation for why you are in the current terrible mess and then a plausible route out of it.
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
Almost without exception, judging by polls, Reform voters are ex-Conservatives. But, I’m sceptical that they amount to anything, away from a computer screen,
Unlike UKIP, or Reform Canada, they have no presence in local government, nor any record on by-elections.
I expect that on the day, a fair proportion of their “voters” will grudgingly back the Conservatives.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
If defeat under Sunak begins to look inevitable then the chance of a different leader doing better will obviously appeal to many.
No-one who decides to try a different leader will believe that they are choosing someone as inept as Truss. But they might be mistaken.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
Scotland says welcome to our world, though here it's more a cross Unionist party thing. Anas Sarwar patrolling the streets of Glasgow looking for unemptied bins during COP 26 was particularly fine.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Boosting was a key skill of his, and sometimes its very useful. When he was no longer PM he still got specific praise (rather than praise for the UK generally) when Zekensky spoke to parliament. He didn't have to do that as part of diplomatic schmoozing.
So I find it hard to think Boris did nothing useful playing the more hawkish angle. I'm more disappointed he's not focused more on it post premiership, which would enhance his reputation.
What has Boris done since resigning? Nothing very visible. Having let Parliament, he can't even do his Incredible Sulk Ted Heath tribute act from the backbenches.
I guess he's earning money on the lecture tour somewhere. Even Theresa May managed to get people to pay her.
BJ has been pimping for Trump and a couple of folk on here seem to think Trump will be better than Biden for Ukraine. Surely they can't be wrong?
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
The UK has provided £12bn in aid, £7bn of it military, to Ukraine, and trained 40,000 soldiers, which is certainly handy.
But, right now, Western powers are simply keeping Ukraine in the game, rather than giving them an advantage. Germany’s refusal to provide Taurus is daft.
Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
The main issue is even if most reform voters are disaffected tories, it doesn't follow they will come home this year. If they are angry or despondent enough, or don't fear Labour enough, they won't feel a need to return.
If you are a "we can still win!!!" person then you need both an explanation for why you are in the current terrible mess and then a plausible route out of it.
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
Almost without exception, judging by polls, Reform voters are ex-Conservatives. But, I’m sceptical that they amount to anything, away from a computer screen,
Unlike UKIP, or Reform Canada, they have no presence in local government, nor any record on by-elections.
I expect that on the day, a fair proportion of their “voters” will grudgingly back the Conservatives.
There is a wildcard possibility that they are rootless NOTA voters who will end up voting Lib Dem. You could see how Boris Johnson would attract such voters, but I don't see an appeal to vote Tory to stop Labour working on NOTA voters who want to vote for a "plague on all their houses".
The Lib Dems used to attract a fair number of that sort of vote. They might do so again.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
I think that unduly pessimistic. They're not going to try another NATO style assault, that's for sure - but if the US were to pass the aid bill, they'd likely have military superiority over Russia's attacking forces.
The DoD have $3.91b of drawdown authority they could use to send shit to Ukraine but they choose not to. The US are over it.
On Ukraine, the Americans only have themselves to blame. They wouldn't let Ukraine us weapons to hit Russians stockpiles of men, equipment and arms dumps in Russia. So the very resourceful Ukrainian arms industry has developed drones that can do the job with homegrown weapons.
The Ukrainians are quite within their rights to tell the Americans they will do what they can to make the war as costly as possible for Russia, by trashing Russian domestic infrastructure. If the Americans want that to stop, then they need to supply all the weapons and minute-by-minute intel to allow the Ukrainians to destroy so much Russian kit that the invasion of Ukraine is unsustainable.
Ideally in tandem, some uber-rich benefactor will buy several Republican Congressmen, get them to retire early with well paid sinecures, allowing the Democrats to get a huge aid package through Congress.
More radically, Ukraine and Poland should form a combined mega Eastern European state that would properly terrify Russia. In the EU, in NATO, it would stop Putin in his tracks.
Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
The main issue is even if most reform voters are disaffected tories, it doesn't follow they will come home this year. If they are angry or despondent enough, or don't fear Labour enough, they won't feel a need to return.
If you are a "we can still win!!!" person then you need both an explanation for why you are in the current terrible mess and then a plausible route out of it.
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
Almost without exception, judging by polls, Reform voters are ex-Conservatives. But, I’m sceptical that they amount to anything, away from a computer screen,
Unlike UKIP, or Reform Canada, they have no presence in local government, nor any record on by-elections.
I expect that on the day, a fair proportion of their “voters” will grudgingly back the Conservatives.
There is a wildcard possibility that they are rootless NOTA voters who will end up voting Lib Dem. You could see how Boris Johnson would attract such voters, but I don't see an appeal to vote Tory to stop Labour working on NOTA voters who want to vote for a "plague on all their houses".
The Lib Dems used to attract a fair number of that sort of vote. They might do so again.
Reform and the LibDems are political bookends. Start telling Reform voters you want to rejoin the EU. The number attracted to that from Reform will be statistically indistinguishable from zero.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
On Ukraine, the Americans only have themselves to blame. They wouldn't let Ukraine us weapons to hit Russians stockpiles of men, equipment and arms dumps in Russia. So the very resourceful Ukrainian arms industry has developed drones that can do the job with homegrown weapons.
The Ukrainians are quite within their rights to tell the Americans they will do what they can to make the war as costly as possible for Russia, by trashing Russian domestic infrastructure. If the Americans want that to stop, then they need to supply all the weapons and minute-by-minute intel to allow the Ukrainians to destroy so much Russian kit that the invasion of Ukraine is unsustainable.
Ideally in tandem, some uber-rich benefactor will buy several Republican Congressmen, get them to retire early with well paid sinecures, allowing the Democrats to get a huge aid package through Congress.
More radically, Ukraine and Poland should form a combined mega Eastern European state that would properly terrify Russia. In the EU, in NATO, it would stop Putin in his tracks.
If only somebody had written an article about Poland's strategic interests in the area based on it's extensive history...
Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
I seem to be in a small minority who expect Farage to be Tory leader within the next few years. Interesting quote about Canada.....
“Reform basically reverse took over the Conservatives and Stephen Harper became Prime Minister,” Farage explains. “If there was a model, it’s Canada."
They only did that after Reform overtook the Canadian Conservatives on votes and seats in 1993. It was also only after ten years of the right being split in Canada under FPTP helping re elect the Liberals that Reform’s successor party and the Conservatives merged in 2003 to form today’s Conservative Party of Canada. Finally winning again in 2006.
Under PR of course centre right and populist right parties can remain separate, as they do in Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden and New Zealand. Coming together sometimes still to form a government
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
The UK has provided £12bn in aid, £7bn of it military, to Ukraine, and trained 40,000 soldiers, which is certainly handy.
But, right now, Western powers are simply keeping Ukraine in the game, rather than giving them an advantage. Germany’s refusal to provide Taurus is daft.
IMV it's like the argument over 'strategic' bombing. It's fine to argue, now, eighty years after the event, that it was unnecessary, and Monday morning quarterback the decisions. But at the time, with the uncertainties there were, was it an *understandable* decision?
Or the use of nukes on Japan, etc, etc.
When you go to war, you go to win - otherwise you end up in a worse state. You don't go to win a war using half-measures - because that could easily lead to defeat. We are currently in a worse situation than in the Cold War, with a hot war on Europe's borders, yet many in Europe are turning a blind eye to the threat, or even doing the direct equivalent of appeasing Hitler in 1938.
If we want Ukraine to win, then we need to support them totally - as if they lose, with us having hardheartedly supported them, then we're in a much worse state.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
What do you think Russia is trying to achieve in Ukraine?
Meanwhile, I went to a London PL match yesterday. Thudding and incredibly loud drum and bass before the kick off, but that seems endemic now at football, rugby, and limited overs cricket fixtures, oh and bonfire nights.
As if somehow the entertainment on offer isn’t sufficient? Or have we become as a race incapable of quiet, collecting thoughts, or savouring natural atmosphere?
I guess for a nature-lover like me, this is basically London life and so I can’t have it both ways. Come here for a long weekend and it’s what you get.
Anyway off to Borough market for some nosh and then Greenwich.
xx
For my sins, I am a St Mirren season ticket holder. The last two songs played over the PA before kick-off are: "The Saints Are Coming" by The Skids, and "Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty.
"When You are smiling" at Leicester City, dating back to 1928.
We do get "goal music" and "goal flags" though. Both hated by traditionalists.
On the last thread you criticised the preference for using private sector outsourcing vs locums - implying they are the same thing (both using private sector resources).
Locums just patch a failure by the NHS to provide staffing and do so at the premium price - you are buying in capacity to fit your schedule.
Outsourcing takes advantage under-utilised NHS facilities (eg weekends) or diverts activity which don’t need to be in a hospital setting (eg low complexity services such as wart removal) and thereby increase capacity - and is cheaper than the NHS as a result.
They are absolutely not the same things, the cost is different, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
We don’t know what the future will bring in Ukraine but you’re either on the right or wrong side of history .
What the west does in terms of help impacts not just Ukraine but bad actors leading other countries . Putin wants to destroy Ukraine . We can’t stand idly by whilst a European country ceases to exist .
There is no middle ground here , you’re either with Ukraine or you’re not .
Thats hyperbolic. Putin doesnt want to destroy ukraine if they sue for peace. Obviously if they dont Putin will go all out for the win which includes destroying ukraines energy infrastructure to make ukraine uninhabitable.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
Have you practised zooming through red lights, while snarling at the pedestrians scum who attempt to impede your progress?
Edit: for full effect, you need to brake in a shower of gravel at a car park, put your bike in the back of an enormous SUV and drive off. Zooming through red lights.,..
We don’t know what the future will bring in Ukraine but you’re either on the right or wrong side of history .
What the west does in terms of help impacts not just Ukraine but bad actors leading other countries . Putin wants to destroy Ukraine . We can’t stand idly by whilst a European country ceases to exist .
There is no middle ground here , you’re either with Ukraine or you’re not .
Thats hyperbolic. Putin doesnt want to destroy ukraine if they sue for peace. Obviously if they dont Putin will go all out for the win which includes destroying ukraines energy infrastructure to make ukraine uninhabitable.
He absolutely does want to destroy 'Ukraine', in that he wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, because as far as he's concerned, that identity does not exist. He's made that very clear in his long rambling and fictional rantings about Ukrainian 'history'.
That attempt to destroy Ukrainian identity is also why he's importing Russians into Ukrainian territory he holds, and expelling many Ukrainians. It's also one reason the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Short-term maybe, whilst he rebuilds his military and undermines his opponents. But in the medium- and long-term, what gives you *any* confidence that he will settle for just that?
Remember the guarantees we gave Ukraine in the past, and the way we abandoned them (e.g. the Budapest Memorandum). He will expect us to do the same again if we let him 'win' now.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
We abandoned the undertakings of the Budapest Memorandum. Given that, it's only fair that we give back to the Ukrainians the capabilities they lost in return for those undertakings.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
I bought my Pashley Roadster in part because its larger diameter wheels would cope with potholes more easily, but whenever I've ridden a road bike I've appreciated the much reduced rolling resistance.
I am down in East Wight for the holiday, so looking at the MRP gives me pause for thought. This seat has never been Labour, not in 1997 or 1945, but has been LD in recent times, and had a strong Green vote at last GE. The Isle of Wight has a low income economy, but surely one of the oldest demographics in the country. Can it really be a Lab gain as this MRP suggests?
The Greens have hit their ceiling it seems, and LDs haven't done well in recent GE, with Lab in second place in the last 2 GE (all Island wide of course). The obvious tactical vote here is for Lab, but Lab aren't going to sweep up it all. The Green vote here is more green than Corbynite, so squeezable, but a good well known candidate, with flyers out in a hipster pub that I went to last night, but limited ground game.
So I really don't know. I wonder what @IanB2 thinks?
I'd see it as a real long shot for Labour. You may remember we had a county council by-election in town here just in December; Labour put up the town mayor and expected to win, but got pipped by the Tories (who also put up a candidate with strong local ties). The people involved in civic life lean centre-left or green, but the sleeping vote comes in for the Tories, especially by post.
I agree the Greens have peaked; last time it was their principal target after Brighton, yet their organisation was abysmal. The same Green candidate is standing again, but she's proved a bit marmite even within green circles, partly because her partner is heavily involved in the mining industry in developing countries. It's not one of their main targets now. The LibDems were almost moribund when I moved here, but they've picked up in terms of organisation and members and now have a group of four on the council. They'll be giving it a good go. Labour hasn't done well in local elections but is confident based mostly on the national polling. However I hear from a good local contact that the candidates who have put their name in the ring for Labour so far aren't very strong, and Labour HQ continues to block their making a selection. With Labour that often means they're saving the spot for someone who can be parachuted in once the election is called, as under Labour rules HQ makes last minute selections. So who knows who they will put up?
There's an active primary campaign here, modelled on the Devon one, but both Labour and LibDems have refused to take part, so it's not clear how much impact it will have.
As I said on the previous thread, a weakness of the MRP is that it is building an overlay based on demography on top of relatively small local samples, and therefore is good at picking up how national trends will play out in particular localities, but not so good at picking up exclusively local factors unless it gets lucky with its local sample.
I suspect the Tories may get lucky with a divided opposition, despite the efforts of the primary campaigners.
William Keegan has done a piece on Rachel Reeves in The Observer. Not what I would call inspiring. She differs from the Tories in believing that capital expenditure should be ignored from the borrowing rules and that we need a better trading deal with the EU. Hurrah! It sounds like under a Labour government we could be returning to the Cameron era but with a more relaxed approach to capital investment. No doubt all those who thought everything was all fine and dandy in 2016 will be satisfied. Ignoring the fact that the Brexit result should have told them that actually no it wasn't. Lest we forget that two years before that 45% of Scots had wanted to tear the UK itself apart.
We have got the most unaffordable housing since Victorian times. The stock market has gone almost nowhere since the millenium. We had a huge financial crisis in which a fraction of the population had got very rich and then the system was bailed out. Whilst this was due to our over exposure to the USA, our banks were in theory saved (as Mervyn King joked) by the fact we never built any houses. So we have QE and ultra low interest rates pushing up asset prices - nice enough for those who own them - whilst productivity stumbles. And at the end of this there has been almost no new thinking among the political classes about what has gone wrong.
Personally I would like to see a Labour government commit to reducing the house price to income ratio from 9 to 6 or 7. This does not mean a massive crash if it happens over several years and wages are rising by 4-5%. What this would do is disincentivise the buying and renting of residential and commercial property that is killing our economy. What is the point of a major pension fund investing in high tech firms when they can instead own land and claim rent off it instead? Surely the retreat away from shares and towards land ownership shows that modern capitalism has failed in Britain.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
This isn't right. There's no peace in defeat for Ukraine, only a bloody Russian occupation. Even though I don't think Ukraine is being supplied with enough support, the situation would definitely be worse if no support was provided.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
I bought my Pashley Roadster in part because its larger diameter wheels would cope with potholes more easily, but whenever I've ridden a road bike I've appreciated the much reduced rolling resistance.
My *guess* would be that the issues is the narrowness of the tyres and the higher pressure they're inflated to, meaning that the tyres give much less shock absorption. That's leaving aside the shock absorbers on the front forks of my mountain bike, if only because I haven't had them serviced in well over a decade....
I'm getting used to the road bike more. I have a pair of insulated running gloves that help absorb the worst of the vibrations on m,y delicate little hands...
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Dunno about Kharkov, it's a Russophone city but it's an economically deprived shit hole of little strategic importance. I agree that Odessa, both romantically and strategically, is a great prize for VVP in the sense that it would help justify the enormous costs of the SMO.
However, the RF forces look completely incapable of taking it so the only way it could be acquired is through some highly unlikely land-for-peace deal where VVP agrees to stop smashing the fuck out of what's left of Ukraine.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
I bought my Pashley Roadster in part because its larger diameter wheels would cope with potholes more easily, but whenever I've ridden a road bike I've appreciated the much reduced rolling resistance.
My *guess* would be that the issues is the narrowness of the tyres and the higher pressure they're inflated to, meaning that the tyres give much less shock absorption. That's leaving aside the shock absorbers on the front forks of my mountain bike, if only because I haven't had them serviced in well over a decade....
I'm getting used to the road bike more. I have a pair of insulated running gloves that help absorb the worst of the vibrations on m,y delicate little hands...
I also recently bought a road bike, and I too have struggled with my hands going all uncomfortable. I also struggled a bit with how much more aggressive the geometry was, but by bringing my seat forward a little, and working on my stretches, I seem to have solved that issue.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
The UK has provided £12bn in aid, £7bn of it military, to Ukraine, and trained 40,000 soldiers, which is certainly handy.
But, right now, Western powers are simply keeping Ukraine in the game, rather than giving them an advantage. Germany’s refusal to provide Taurus is daft.
I would like to believe it is daft but I'm not sure that it is. I'm unconvinced that the US and Germany have ever really been in Ukraine's corner in this war. Biden gets a lot of charitable praise because Trump could well be worse.
Worth reading the comments on this article to understand the Reform surge and why it will be so difficult to get them back.
Do we have a Reform voter on PB? Would be a useful perspective.
Indeed. It is a tired and somewhat lazy assessment to assume that Reform voters are Tory voters making a protest who will come home at the election.
So many of them were never Tory voters. And they did not come home in 2019....
The main issue is even if most reform voters are disaffected tories, it doesn't follow they will come home this year. If they are angry or despondent enough, or don't fear Labour enough, they won't feel a need to return.
If you are a "we can still win!!!" person then you need both an explanation for why you are in the current terrible mess and then a plausible route out of it.
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
Almost without exception, judging by polls, Reform voters are ex-Conservatives. But, I’m sceptical that they amount to anything, away from a computer screen,
Unlike UKIP, or Reform Canada, they have no presence in local government, nor any record on by-elections.
I expect that on the day, a fair proportion of their “voters” will grudgingly back the Conservatives.
They didn't in 2019. Look at all the seats held by Labour because the Brexit Party vote didn't go back to the Tories...
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
I dislike and distrust Johnson intensely, but he did occasionally get things right, though for every cycle scheme there was a garden bridge flop, or a scrapped water cannon. For every lockdown or furlough there was a party or delayed lockdown. Brexit was his biggest mistake and like Suez for Eden will be written on his political grave. Ukraine was something he got right. Electorally he won the last Tory majority for a generation, and possibly the last one of our lifetimes.
He generated ideas like monkeys on typewriters and every now and then produced something readable.
He was better at latching onto other people's ideas than coming up with his own, and the only judgement he exercised was whether he'd look good opening it. The bike scheme was really Livingstone's. The cable car to nowhere is an expensive white elephant. The airport proposal was ludicrous. The water cannons were a shocking waste of money just to win a cheap media story. The grip and judgememt during the pandemic were risible, even making allowances for his illness, and the only really significant achievement of the vaccine programme was got right largely because, after the PPE fiasco and scandal, Johnson was told in no uncertain terms to let the scientists and businesspeople get on with it without interference.
Ukraine was the correct judgement, but it remains my view that he acted so quickly to distract and cover over his previous Russian connections; if we live until papers are released this may be a bigger story in decades to come.
How does a 2019 Labour voter interpret the question "Should the Conservative party change its leader before the election?"?
1. "If I imagined myself in their shoes..." 2. What's good for the country between now and the election? 3. What's good for the country? 4. What's good for me?
On 3 and 4, I would imagine many 2019 Labour voters would like the Tories to get walloped in the election, believing that would be good for themselves and the country. For them the question amounts to would a change of leader make it even more likely that the Tories will get walloped. Of course there are two possible answers to that.
So you have different respondent groups looking at the question in different ways, and the question is moronic, although doubtless the pollster got paid good money for asking it.
I am a 2019 Labour voter who will be abstaining in the next election because I will not vote for a party led by Keir Starmer. If I were intending to vote Labour and had no bets on, I'd want the Tories to keep the crappy leader they've got.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
So your offer to the people of Odesa is what exactly? Surrender to Russian rule or be killed? I think the Russian history of raping torturing and murdering Ukrainians is such that they are unlikely to surrender their cities like that. Losing Odesa would also cripple their economy as they'd be without access to the Black Sea. Given attempting to conquer either would likely be a reverse Stalingrad for the Russian army I suspect Ukraine will be happy to dare them. Stupid even by the standards of a Russian troll.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
That's assuming anyone sensible would want the job.
"Sinking ship seeks new captain" is hardly the most attractive of opportunities. All that's in it for taking over from Sunak pre-GE is a chance to get your name onto the list of PMs. your mugshot on the Downing Street staircase, and a batch of your friends/cronies/donors/illegitimate children onto the honours list.
Rethinking, given its the Tories, maybe there might actually be a bunfight for it?
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Short-term maybe, whilst he rebuilds his military and undermines his opponents. But in the medium- and long-term, what gives you *any* confidence that he will settle for just that?
Remember the guarantees we gave Ukraine in the past, and the way we abandoned them (e.g. the Budapest Memorandum). He will expect us to do the same again if we let him 'win' now.
Bang on.
Not to mention that gutting Ukraine as the allies allowed Czechoslovakia to be gutted in the late 30s doesn't sound like a recipe for defeating the fascist leadership in Moscow.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
How do you stop aggressive states that have nuclear weapons?
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
That's assuming anyone sensible would want the job.
"Sinking ship seeks new captain" is hardly the most attractive of opportunities. All that's in it for taking over from Sunak pre-GE is a chance to get your name onto the list of PMs. your mugshot on the Downing Street staircase, and a batch of your friends/cronies/donors/illegitimate children onto the honours list.
Rethinking, given its the Tories, maybe there might actually be a bunfight for it?
Two months - actually, less - were good enough for Ms Truss to have an honours list, rather more than one honour a week in office IIRC.
William Keegan has done a piece on Rachel Reeves in The Observer. Not what I would call inspiring. She differs from the Tories in believing that capital expenditure should be ignored from the borrowing rules and that we need a better trading deal with the EU. Hurrah! It sounds like under a Labour government we could be returning to the Cameron era but with a more relaxed approach to capital investment. No doubt all those who thought everything was all fine and dandy in 2016 will be satisfied. Ignoring the fact that the Brexit result should have told them that actually no it wasn't. Lest we forget that two years before that 45% of Scots had wanted to tear the UK itself apart.
We have got the most unaffordable housing since Victorian times. The stock market has gone almost nowhere since the millenium. We had a huge financial crisis in which a fraction of the population had got very rich and then the system was bailed out. Whilst this was due to our over exposure to the USA, our banks were in theory saved (as Mervyn King joked) by the fact we never built any houses. So we have QE and ultra low interest rates pushing up asset prices - nice enough for those who own them - whilst productivity stumbles. And at the end of this there has been almost no new thinking among the political classes about what has gone wrong.
Personally I would like to see a Labour government commit to reducing the house price to income ratio from 9 to 6 or 7. This does not mean a massive crash if it happens over several years and wages are rising by 4-5%. What this would do is disincentivise the buying and renting of residential and commercial property that is killing our economy. What is the point of a major pension fund investing in high tech firms when they can instead own land and claim rent off it instead? Surely the retreat away from shares and towards land ownership shows that modern capitalism has failed in Britain.
The easiest, and most logical, and also expedient for Labour for obvious reasons, way to achieve that is to push up the tax on property, and for holding it rather than just buying and selling it. Which reflects practice in other European countries. Whether they will be brave enough, is another matter.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
Surely the best way to peace is to make forget aggression too costly for both parties?
Fascinating prediction at the end of the previous thread by @Mexicanpete - a Tory win at the GE.
In today’s politics you would have to be crazy to decry anything as impossible. So it *could* happen, it’s just a very very low order possibility.
I have respect for honest political opinion across the board. But I do have to ask the remaining Tory optimists if they have considered *why* the party deserves to win again.
Simon Calder in the Independent. Pointing out that in English Tourism Week the Tories are spending big attacking England’s biggest 3 cities as places you definitely shouldn’t visit.
After 14 years in power and all you have left is to try and trash tourism - driving away all that tourist money. Why do you want to win? Why do you deserve to win? All you have left is hope against hope - but hope for what?
The thing is we know they are like cockroaches and they survive Armageddon.
Despite devastating the nation in so many ways they still have the entire media contingent behind them and the more absurd the offer they make to the electorate the more likely they are to prevail. Some of the PB never again Tories are already back on board.
Part of me is also fearful that if Labour get the blame for any future national woes what comes after is unthinkable. Comparatively, Rishi as a wannabe small state, low tax, hard-line fiscal hawk is better than what Refuk Tories will offer up next.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
That's assuming anyone sensible would want the job.
"Sinking ship seeks new captain" is hardly the most attractive of opportunities. All that's in it for taking over from Sunak pre-GE is a chance to get your name onto the list of PMs. your mugshot on the Downing Street staircase, and a batch of your friends/cronies/donors/illegitimate children onto the honours list.
Rethinking, given its the Tories, maybe there might actually be a bunfight for it?
I still see Mordaunt as the most likely candidate to win, and have any impact.
Even a competitive leadership election could be completed in a fortnight if the party board decided such....
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
If you are not in favour of 'nuclear escalation', then you should be calling for Ukraine to win ASAP.
Many appeasers say things like: "Russia may use their nukes against us!!!!!" as a reason not to support Ukraine, or minimise our support.
That is stupid one-dimensional thinking. Because *every* state, and perhaps even some non-state actors, will be watching what is happening and thinking: "Aha! Just the possession of nuclear weapons will protect me if I do EVIL!", and hence try to become nuclear-capable. In the same way the appeasers protect Russia.
And hence the appeaser's argument becomes one for increased proliferation, and an increased chance of becoming cinders.
Which is so obvious that I wonder why they call for it. Either because they're too stoopid to realise that is where it will lead, or because they actually want Russia to 'win'...
We don’t know what the future will bring in Ukraine but you’re either on the right or wrong side of history .
What the west does in terms of help impacts not just Ukraine but bad actors leading other countries . Putin wants to destroy Ukraine . We can’t stand idly by whilst a European country ceases to exist .
There is no middle ground here , you’re either with Ukraine or you’re not .
Thats hyperbolic. Putin doesnt want to destroy ukraine if they sue for peace. Obviously if they dont Putin will go all out for the win which includes destroying ukraines energy infrastructure to make ukraine uninhabitable.
He absolutely does want to destroy 'Ukraine', in that he wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, because as far as he's concerned, that identity does not exist. He's made that very clear in his long rambling and fictional rantings about Ukrainian 'history'.
That attempt to destroy Ukrainian identity is also why he's importing Russians into Ukrainian territory he holds, and expelling many Ukrainians. It's also one reason the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
Here is an article by Vladimir Putin on Russia, entitled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians". Can you point to anywhere in it, from the title on, where he says or suggests that the Ukrainian identity does not exist? I would call him a neo-colonialist but that's different.
Fascinating prediction at the end of the previous thread by @Mexicanpete - a Tory win at the GE.
In today’s politics you would have to be crazy to decry anything as impossible. So it *could* happen, it’s just a very very low order possibility.
I have respect for honest political opinion across the board. But I do have to ask the remaining Tory optimists if they have considered *why* the party deserves to win again.
Simon Calder in the Independent. Pointing out that in English Tourism Week the Tories are spending big attacking England’s biggest 3 cities as places you definitely shouldn’t visit.
After 14 years in power and all you have left is to try and trash tourism - driving away all that tourist money. Why do you want to win? Why do you deserve to win? All you have left is hope against hope - but hope for what?
The thing is we know they are like cockroaches and they survive Armageddon.
Despite devastating the nation in so many ways they still have the entire media contingent behind them and the more absurd the offer they make to the electorate the more likely they are to prevail. Some of the PB never again Tories are already back on board.
Part of me is also fearful that if Labour get the blame for any future national woes what comes after is unthinkable. Comparatively, Rishi as a wannabe small state, low tax, hard-line fiscal hawk is better than what Refuk Tories will offer up next.
Sunak is too right wing for the undecideds, but too left wing for his natural voting base. Hence the current problems.
Whoever follows him will hopefully have learned that you can't just say you're pro Brexit, pro small state, pro business etc, but actually continually waver on EU relations, grow the state, and support anti-business taxes and more regulation.
William Keegan has done a piece on Rachel Reeves in The Observer. Not what I would call inspiring. She differs from the Tories in believing that capital expenditure should be ignored from the borrowing rules and that we need a better trading deal with the EU. Hurrah! It sounds like under a Labour government we could be returning to the Cameron era but with a more relaxed approach to capital investment. No doubt all those who thought everything was all fine and dandy in 2016 will be satisfied. Ignoring the fact that the Brexit result should have told them that actually no it wasn't. Lest we forget that two years before that 45% of Scots had wanted to tear the UK itself apart.
We have got the most unaffordable housing since Victorian times. The stock market has gone almost nowhere since the millenium. We had a huge financial crisis in which a fraction of the population had got very rich and then the system was bailed out. Whilst this was due to our over exposure to the USA, our banks were in theory saved (as Mervyn King joked) by the fact we never built any houses. So we have QE and ultra low interest rates pushing up asset prices - nice enough for those who own them - whilst productivity stumbles. And at the end of this there has been almost no new thinking among the political classes about what has gone wrong.
Personally I would like to see a Labour government commit to reducing the house price to income ratio from 9 to 6 or 7. This does not mean a massive crash if it happens over several years and wages are rising by 4-5%. What this would do is disincentivise the buying and renting of residential and commercial property that is killing our economy. What is the point of a major pension fund investing in high tech firms when they can instead own land and claim rent off it instead? Surely the retreat away from shares and towards land ownership shows that modern capitalism has failed in Britain.
The easiest, and most logical, and also expedient for Labour for obvious reasons, way to achieve that is to push up the tax on property, and for holding it rather than just buying and selling it. Which reflects practice in other European countries. Whether they will be brave enough, is another matter.
I would support a modest increase in council tax and it's absurd that it stops at band H. I've heard stories of people taking a row of housing and converting them into one mansion so as to reduce their council tax bill. We also have to consider foreign ownership and empty homes in London.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The bigger matter of all the dead Russians don't matter to you clearly, otherwise you would be urging Putin to "sue for peace".
Fascinating prediction at the end of the previous thread by @Mexicanpete - a Tory win at the GE.
In today’s politics you would have to be crazy to decry anything as impossible. So it *could* happen, it’s just a very very low order possibility.
I have respect for honest political opinion across the board. But I do have to ask the remaining Tory optimists if they have considered *why* the party deserves to win again.
Simon Calder in the Independent. Pointing out that in English Tourism Week the Tories are spending big attacking England’s biggest 3 cities as places you definitely shouldn’t visit.
After 14 years in power and all you have left is to try and trash tourism - driving away all that tourist money. Why do you want to win? Why do you deserve to win? All you have left is hope against hope - but hope for what?
The thing is we know they are like cockroaches and they survive Armageddon.
Despite devastating the nation in so many ways they still have the entire media contingent behind them and the more absurd the offer they make to the electorate the more likely they are to prevail. Some of the PB never again Tories are already back on board.
Part of me is also fearful that if Labour get the blame for any future national woes what comes after is unthinkable. Comparatively, Rishi as a wannabe small state, low tax, hard-line fiscal hawk is better than what Refuk Tories will offer up next.
We don’t know what the future will bring in Ukraine but you’re either on the right or wrong side of history .
What the west does in terms of help impacts not just Ukraine but bad actors leading other countries . Putin wants to destroy Ukraine . We can’t stand idly by whilst a European country ceases to exist .
There is no middle ground here , you’re either with Ukraine or you’re not .
Thats hyperbolic. Putin doesnt want to destroy ukraine if they sue for peace. Obviously if they dont Putin will go all out for the win which includes destroying ukraines energy infrastructure to make ukraine uninhabitable.
He absolutely does want to destroy 'Ukraine', in that he wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, because as far as he's concerned, that identity does not exist. He's made that very clear in his long rambling and fictional rantings about Ukrainian 'history'.
That attempt to destroy Ukrainian identity is also why he's importing Russians into Ukrainian territory he holds, and expelling many Ukrainians. It's also one reason the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
Here is an article by Vladimir Putin on Russia, entitled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians". Can you point to anywhere in it, from the title on, where he says or suggests that the Ukrainian identity does not exist?
I hate to tell you this: Russian media is state-controlled. They released a different version of the Tucker interview for domestic audiences to the one Tucker released to American ones. I don't expect an English 'translation' of his words to express his full views: just what he wants us to think.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Ordinary ukrainians dont have much choice. Zelensky has near dictatorial powers and there is a massive war propoganda machine in ukraine. Why are so many ukrainian men hiding fron conscription if they are happy to fight.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
The nuclear balance of power can't just change in a moment because somebody wants it to. Only very few powers have big fuck-off nukes they could break the NPT with and donate to the Ukraine. If you want the USA to send a message to Russia why not just urge Biden to give Putin an ultimatum? "Hand over the Crimea to Zelensky and restore the 2013 status quo or else Moscow gets it. I'm really hard, me. Make my day."
Then there's the question of what exactly Elon Musk is playing at by going on about Odessa. The status of Odessa is unlikely to be at issue however the war develops. Possible, but very unlikely.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
If you are not in favour of 'nuclear escalation', then you should be calling for Ukraine to win ASAP.
Many appeasers say things like: "Russia may use their nukes against us!!!!!" as a reason not to support Ukraine, or minimise our support.
That is stupid one-dimensional thinking. Because *every* state, and perhaps even some non-state actors, will be watching what is happening and thinking: "Aha! Just the possession of nuclear weapons will protect me if I do EVIL!", and hence try to become nuclear-capable. In the same way the appeasers protect Russia.
And hence the appeaser's argument becomes one for increased proliferation, and an increased chance of becoming cinders.
Which is so obvious that I wonder why they call for it. Either because they're too stoopid to realise that is where it will lead, or because they actually want Russia to 'win'...
Which are you?
But sadly i dont think a ukrainian win is possible now so your point is moot.They dont have either the men or equipment.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Ordinary ukrainians dont have much choice. Zelensky has near dictatorial powers and there is a massive war propoganda machine in ukraine. Why are so many ukrainian men hiding fron conscription if they are happy to fight.
You are a Russian troll.
For one thing, I think you're wrong in all you said that post. For another. if you want to mention 'dictatorial powers', just look at Putin...
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
If you are not in favour of 'nuclear escalation', then you should be calling for Ukraine to win ASAP.
Many appeasers say things like: "Russia may use their nukes against us!!!!!" as a reason not to support Ukraine, or minimise our support.
That is stupid one-dimensional thinking. Because *every* state, and perhaps even some non-state actors, will be watching what is happening and thinking: "Aha! Just the possession of nuclear weapons will protect me if I do EVIL!", and hence try to become nuclear-capable. In the same way the appeasers protect Russia.
And hence the appeaser's argument becomes one for increased proliferation, and an increased chance of becoming cinders.
Which is so obvious that I wonder why they call for it. Either because they're too stoopid to realise that is where it will lead, or because they actually want Russia to 'win'...
Which are you?
But sadly i dont think a ukrainian win is possible now so your point is moot.They dont have either the men or equipment.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
A bit like Hitler was absolutely fine with the Sudetenland and annexing Austria and just left it at that?
I am down in East Wight for the holiday, so looking at the MRP gives me pause for thought. This seat has never been Labour, not in 1997 or 1945, but has been LD in recent times, and had a strong Green vote at last GE. The Isle of Wight has a low income economy, but surely one of the oldest demographics in the country. Can it really be a Lab gain as this MRP suggests?
The Greens have hit their ceiling it seems, and LDs haven't done well in recent GE, with Lab in second place in the last 2 GE (all Island wide of course). The obvious tactical vote here is for Lab, but Lab aren't going to sweep up it all. The Green vote here is more green than Corbynite, so squeezable, but a good well known candidate, with flyers out in a hipster pub that I went to last night, but limited ground game.
So I really don't know. I wonder what @IanB2 thinks?
I think this kind of critique of an MRP is misplaced. No model is going to catch the various local intricacies of voting patterns, and the importance of each demographic factor will change constituency by constituency, candidate by candidate. This is even more obvious in Scotland, with some very odd predictions coming out of the MRP.
It does work on a national level for England and Wales, assuming that everything averages out to what their model suggests.
I treat the seat by seat predictions with a pinch of salt and look instead at the overall picture. The ELE election is no longer an absurd assumption - its real, its shown in repeated polls as a possibility, and the longer we go with more and more polls showing the same, the more baked in that assumption gets.
ELE does one of two things. For a country where even the Tory voters are sick of the Tories, the prospect of obliterating this disgrace of a party becomes tangible, exciting, desirable. Remember that in 1997 the Labour landslide only happened because of a pile on - the desire to hurt the Tories.
However, the further down the ELE road we get, the more that a Labour super-landslide causes its own problems. My assumption is that MRP gets the seat by seat bit wrong in that it starts applying national % and swing by (new) seat and coming up with bonkers. Yes, in a demolition election you can win from 3rd. But some of the seat assumptions are silly. I have to assume more LD seats because thats what both polling, council seats on the ground and sanity suggests.
You could apply a crude adjustment to those seats where Labour is 3rd to get a feeling for how tactical voting changes things.
I think a further one as well - because it is true that Labour should win some from third. Just not necessarily the ones highlighted. (I mean, over and above my own constituency, Labour coming from 12% in a very poor third place in Carshalton and Wallington to a photo-finish with the LDs for the win just looks wrong).
Seats where Labour is 3rd and significantly back from second, where the LDs are a clear second (especially where they held the constituency very recently) and where local council strength forms a stark difference would be ones where you'd suggest would go one way.
Ones where the third place is pretty close to second, or the second place is still a very long way back, and where local strength is either similar or absent for both LDs and Labour would point to places where the air war would be a far bigger factor, and you might well see real shocks from third.
You could then go seat by seat to estimate tactical voting (or lack of it). A pretty big task and unavoidably subjective.
The trouble is that the questionable predictions we are seeing with the latest survey (and its ilk) do have real world ramifications. There will be many seats in the Blue Wall where voters would be fine having a LibDem MP but would react against having a Labour one.
As such, whilst disgruntled Tories may sit on their hands and not vote to prevent the former, they will come out to prevent the latter.
If I were a Tory MP in some of the seats mentioned I would be secretly quite pleased about this survey and play up the supposed threat of a Labour victory in my area. It may give a few of them just the extra votes they need to hold on.
Not even Jeremy Corbyn disliked the UK as much as the Tories do.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”. In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”. Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”. The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
You have to admire the cheek of criticising a lack of eco-friendly transport in Manchester while railing against London's cycle lanes.
The local cycle lanes appear to have been designed by people who once saw a picture of a bicycle. After being dug and rebuilt multiple times., they are slightly less insane.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
Having just got a 'road' bike after decades of riding mountain bikes, I'm surprised how different the experience is. I was a very relaxed cyclist on a mountain bike, as it could go over *most* potholes and imperfections on the road, allowing me to get closer to the kerb. I am trying to go faster on my road bike, and I feel any imperfections of the road's surface on my bum and hands, so I ride wider and faster.
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
I bought my Pashley Roadster in part because its larger diameter wheels would cope with potholes more easily, but whenever I've ridden a road bike I've appreciated the much reduced rolling resistance.
My *guess* would be that the issues is the narrowness of the tyres and the higher pressure they're inflated to, meaning that the tyres give much less shock absorption. That's leaving aside the shock absorbers on the front forks of my mountain bike, if only because I haven't had them serviced in well over a decade....
I'm getting used to the road bike more. I have a pair of insulated running gloves that help absorb the worst of the vibrations on m,y delicate little hands...
I also recently bought a road bike, and I too have struggled with my hands going all uncomfortable. I also struggled a bit with how much more aggressive the geometry was, but by bringing my seat forward a little, and working on my stretches, I seem to have solved that issue.
I found gloves with gel filled padding useful. For London roads, outside Richmond Park, I prefer front suspension.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
The nuclear balance of power can't just change in a moment because somebody wants it to. Only very few powers have big fuck-off nukes they could break the NPT with and donate to the Ukraine. If you want the USA to send a message to Russia why not just urge Biden to give Putin an ultimatum? "Hand over the Crimea to Zelensky and restore the 2013 status quo or else Moscow gets it. I'm really hard, me. Make my day."
Then there's the question of what exactly Elon Musk is playing at by going on about Odessa. The status of Odessa is unlikely to be at issue however the war develops. Possible, but very unlikely.
Actually using nukes is a bit OTT.
Putin recognises force and threats to himself.
“Play nice or the weather where you live will be sunny, with temperatures reaching 100 million degrees, winds gusty up to about Mach 8, and clouds up to 100,000 feet (mushroom)”
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Strongly disagree. There was a massive British effort to get military hardware into Ukraine in advance of the start of the war, several flights per day full of NLAW anti-tank missiles for a start, that made the difference between Kiev falling in a few days and not. Yes, Johnson was good at promoting the UK, undoubtedly one of his skills even if you don’t like him, and the Ukranians genuinely love him for the support he showed in those early days of the war.
It has been said that the plotters have the numbers, but they're withholding letters because they don't want to go off now and Sunak just win the VONC. After May the opportunity will have ripened a bit. They should spend the time finding a candidate, putting a programme together for the remaining months in Government, and planning how to deal with Sunak, whether to offer him a Government post or an ambassadorship somewhere nice.
I am not sure what planet you live on politically, but the idea the conservative party can spend time choosing another pre GE leader is not only extraordinary but an insult to the electorate beyond compare
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
If you're still blaming Truss when Sunak has had over a year to establish himself and try and get the country moving again, what was the point of getting rid of her at all?
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The bigger matter of all the dead Russians don't matter to you clearly, otherwise you would be urging Putin to "sue for peace".
Only 450,000 dead Russian soldiers so far, half the size of their standing army before the war, and with another 150,000 unfortunates about to get their call-up papers for the meat grinder. That’s more than a million wives and mothers, worried that they won’t be seeing their husbands or sons again, and half of them suffering just that fate.
On Ukraine, the Americans only have themselves to blame. They wouldn't let Ukraine us weapons to hit Russians stockpiles of men, equipment and arms dumps in Russia. So the very resourceful Ukrainian arms industry has developed drones that can do the job with homegrown weapons.
The Ukrainians are quite within their rights to tell the Americans they will do what they can to make the war as costly as possible for Russia, by trashing Russian domestic infrastructure. If the Americans want that to stop, then they need to supply all the weapons and minute-by-minute intel to allow the Ukrainians to destroy so much Russian kit that the invasion of Ukraine is unsustainable.
Ideally in tandem, some uber-rich benefactor will buy several Republican Congressmen, get them to retire early with well paid sinecures, allowing the Democrats to get a huge aid package through Congress.
More radically, Ukraine and Poland should form a combined mega Eastern European state that would properly terrify Russia. In the EU, in NATO, it would stop Putin in his tracks.
I always liked the et idea of merging Poland and Ukraine (and Lithuania) to recreate the Commonwealth of Lithuania. That would, of course, be a member of NATO and the EU as Poland’s successor state
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Ordinary ukrainians dont have much choice. Zelensky has near dictatorial powers and there is a massive war propoganda machine in ukraine. Why are so many ukrainian men hiding fron conscription if they are happy to fight.
You are a Russian troll.
For one thing, I think you're wrong in all you said that post. For another. if you want to mention 'dictatorial powers', just look at Putin...
Fuck off back under your bridge.
Zelensky does have immense power under martial law and has suspended presidential elections.
Ukraine do have a recruitment problem, not least because of the political deadlock resulting from nobody wanting to own the horribly unpopular mobilisation legislation. See the two recent WSJ articles.
There is an immense Ukrainian propoganda effort targeted at the west. You have been doggedly and uncritically regurgitating their lines on here for two years.
So, yes comrade, the bones of old mate Trent's post were correct.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
Somehow, I don't think the Ukrainians yearn for reunification with their Russian "brothers", and it's only the evil West that is preventing this, by pushing them into a fight they do not want.
They know through bitter experience what Russian control will mean for them.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
I dislike and distrust Johnson intensely, but he did occasionally get things right, though for every cycle scheme there was a garden bridge flop, or a scrapped water cannon. For every lockdown or furlough there was a party or delayed lockdown. Brexit was his biggest mistake and like Suez for Eden will be written on his political grave. Ukraine was something he got right. Electorally he won the last Tory majority for a generation, and possibly the last one of our lifetimes.
He generated ideas like monkeys on typewriters and every now and then produced something readable.
He was better at latching onto other people's ideas than coming up with his own, and the only judgement he exercised was whether he'd look good opening it. The bike scheme was really Livingstone's. The cable car to nowhere is an expensive white elephant. The airport proposal was ludicrous. The water cannons were a shocking waste of money just to win a cheap media story. The grip and judgememt during the pandemic were risible, even making allowances for his illness, and the only really significant achievement of the vaccine programme was got right largely because, after the PPE fiasco and scandal, Johnson was told in no uncertain terms to let the scientists and businesspeople get on with it without interference.
Ukraine was the correct judgement, but it remains my view that he acted so quickly to distract and cover over his previous Russian connections; if we live until papers are released this may be a bigger story in decades to come.
Surely adopting someone else’s good idea and executing it effectively should be encouraged?
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Ordinary ukrainians dont have much choice. Zelensky has near dictatorial powers and there is a massive war propoganda machine in ukraine. Why are so many ukrainian men hiding fron conscription if they are happy to fight.
You are a Russian troll.
For one thing, I think you're wrong in all you said that post. For another. if you want to mention 'dictatorial powers', just look at Putin...
Fuck off back under your bridge.
Zelensky does have immense power under martial law and has suspended presidential elections.
Ukraine do have a recruitment problem, not least because of the political deadlock resulting from nobody wanting to own the horribly unpopular mobilisation legislation. See the two recent WSJ articles.
There is an immense Ukrainian propoganda effort targeted at the west. You have been doggedly and uncritically regurgitating their lines on here for two years.
So, yes comrade, the bones of old mate Trent's post were correct.
Just like the UK government in WWII suspended its own election until the war's end, and gave itself immense emergency powers. There's nothing sinister about it.
We don’t know what the future will bring in Ukraine but you’re either on the right or wrong side of history .
What the west does in terms of help impacts not just Ukraine but bad actors leading other countries . Putin wants to destroy Ukraine . We can’t stand idly by whilst a European country ceases to exist .
There is no middle ground here , you’re either with Ukraine or you’re not .
Thats hyperbolic. Putin doesnt want to destroy ukraine if they sue for peace. Obviously if they dont Putin will go all out for the win which includes destroying ukraines energy infrastructure to make ukraine uninhabitable.
He absolutely does want to destroy 'Ukraine', in that he wants to destroy the Ukrainian identity, because as far as he's concerned, that identity does not exist. He's made that very clear in his long rambling and fictional rantings about Ukrainian 'history'.
That attempt to destroy Ukrainian identity is also why he's importing Russians into Ukrainian territory he holds, and expelling many Ukrainians. It's also one reason the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
Here is an article by Vladimir Putin on Russia, entitled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians". Can you point to anywhere in it, from the title on, where he says or suggests that the Ukrainian identity does not exist? I would call him a neo-colonialist but that's different.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
I am in favour of supplying them with nuclear weapons. Big, fuck off ones. That’s the kind of message that sticks in the mind.
Sure if you want to be incinerated in a mushroom cloud.
Why wouldn't you want Ukraine to have nuclear weapons?
Ukraine is losing and desperate so launches a nuclear attack on Moscow. Moscow responds by nuking Kyiv and other western cities perhaps. Everyone loses.
So you would support giving them tactical nukes?
I dont like nuclear escalation period so no.
If you are not in favour of 'nuclear escalation', then you should be calling for Ukraine to win ASAP.
Many appeasers say things like: "Russia may use their nukes against us!!!!!" as a reason not to support Ukraine, or minimise our support.
That is stupid one-dimensional thinking. Because *every* state, and perhaps even some non-state actors, will be watching what is happening and thinking: "Aha! Just the possession of nuclear weapons will protect me if I do EVIL!", and hence try to become nuclear-capable. In the same way the appeasers protect Russia.
And hence the appeaser's argument becomes one for increased proliferation, and an increased chance of becoming cinders.
Which is so obvious that I wonder why they call for it. Either because they're too stoopid to realise that is where it will lead, or because they actually want Russia to 'win'...
Which are you?
But sadly i dont think a ukrainian win is possible now so your point is moot.They dont have either the men or equipment.
France is preparing a new military aid package for Ukraine, which will include hundreds of "old but serviceable" armored vehicles and Aster missiles, French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu has said in an interview with La Tribune, Le Monde reports. https://twitter.com/Hromadske/status/1774355574672458035
France is one of the countries that is starting to understand the threat
The threat from Europe's point of view is that the US drops the baton if Trump is elected. All European countries, including us, should be gearing up to fill the hole if that happens.
The point of all the tedious Trent style propaganda is to create a perception that the Russian invasion can't be defeated, and that we should bow to the inevitable.
It's considerably more likely that a regular and reliable supply of western arms would see the opposite outcome.
And Putin isn't offering peace anyway. He's demanding capitulation, with no guarantees.
We can stop him now, or we can stop him next time, when he's rebuilt his military, at far greater cost.
What is clear, sadly, is that last summer's offensive campaign by Ukraine was a disaster. I think that there was a belief that the superior kit that they had received from NATO could cut through where the Russians had failed and they learned at terrible cost that that was not the case. There were also delusions that the Russians were running out of kit, ammunition, missiles, even men and one more heave could see their collapse. These delusions proved wildly optimistic and costly. Even with modern tech defence has enormous advantages in both shaping and using the battlefield to expose your enemy to the unspeakable power of modern weaponry.
Ukraine now face several years of grim defence slowly losing ground for Russian lives. It is not an enticing prospect but we need to do all we can to help them.
The thing that can change the calculation is long range weaponry. With long range weaponry Ukraine can hit Russian equipment and supplies away from the front line, and they can inflict damage without incurring casualties with a direct assault.
Two years into the war and Ukraine still has fewer artillery shells, isn't being provided with all the long-range weapons the West has available, and it's having to rely on it's own drone developments to try to fill the gap.
There's a route to victory for Ukraine which lies in providing Taurus, ATACMs, and using the much-vaunted economic superiority of the West to produce long-range missiles and artillery shells in sufficient quantity to obliterate the Russian Army from a distance. Get It Done.
The Storm Shadows have certainly had a major impact, particularly in the Black Sea and they show the merits of your point. What we certainly need to do is to make the price of continued warfare simply unbearable for Russia bringing down Putin and his gang. Longer range weapons are a good way to do that and to retaliate against the never ending destruction of Ukrainian cities. I believe we can and should do this.
I think this is where we see evidence of Ukraine suffering for the absence of Boris Johnson.
We saw it with cycle infrastructure in London, with resolving the Brexit impasse, with the vaccines and with sending ammunition and weapons in February 2022. There have been these times when Boris Johnson recognised what needed to be done and made sure it was done, regardless of who it upset, or whether it broke convention.
I didn't like the man. I cheered his downfall. But it seems clear that his successors, and other Western leaders, have failed to measure up to the example he set on Ukraine.
Nonsense. Johnson actually did rather little for Ukraine. He used his full skillset to make it look much more. Germany has delivered much more, but quietly.
Germany has delivered more because it has more to give, but I think Johnson would have spent the money necessary to start up the production lines to produce new kit to send.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
That help was delivered before the invasion. It was actually Ben Wallace's project pushed through in the face of Boris Johnson's scepticism.
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Im.not sure now what the west is trying to achieve in ukraine. They seem to be supplying ukraine with just enough to allow them to lose slowly. Surely its best upping the ante and going all in or calli g for peace.
The latter is not an option. Putin does not want 'peace'.
Im pretty sure if you offered Putin eastern ukraine and perhaps odessa and kharkiv he would be ok with peace. Kyiv and western ukraine would then be left alone.
Why would we want to give Putin anything when for trivial cost to the Western World thousands of Russians are being killed and hundreds of units of Russian military equipment are being destroyed each and every week ?
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
Mmm theres just the small matter of all the dead ukrainians. Or dont they matter to you.
The Ukrainians are happy defending their own land from occupation and genocide.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Ordinary ukrainians dont have much choice. Zelensky has near dictatorial powers and there is a massive war propoganda machine in ukraine. Why are so many ukrainian men hiding fron conscription if they are happy to fight.
You are a Russian troll.
For one thing, I think you're wrong in all you said that post. For another. if you want to mention 'dictatorial powers', just look at Putin...
Fuck off back under your bridge.
Zelensky does have immense power under martial law and has suspended presidential elections.
Ukraine do have a recruitment problem, not least because of the political deadlock resulting from nobody wanting to own the horribly unpopular mobilisation legislation. See the two recent WSJ articles.
There is an immense Ukrainian propoganda effort targeted at the west. You have been doggedly and uncritically regurgitating their lines on here for two years.
So, yes comrade, the bones of old mate Trent's post were correct.
It is total war for Ukraine (and Russia...), and there are always manpower issues in such affairs. Russia is also suffering: if not, why the penal battalions?
Also, the ' ukrainian men hiding fron conscription' is a) not a new thing, and b) that it is happening at a large scale seems to an invention of the Russian media that you slurp the anal dribblings from, and c) effects Russia to. Look at the amount of young Russians who have fled their country.
If I am 'regurgitating their lines', then you are 'regurgitating' the lines of a fascist and imperialist state. Lines which are no less true, and IMV far less true.
Because you aren't against imperalism and fascism, are you?
Comments
Refuk being the Tory protest so just add their vote tally to ours is one such thing. Not true in either sense, but makes you feel better as you see the abyss open up a little more beneath your feet.
I think 2024 is when pushes for 'ceasefire' become the norm in the West, and the line becomes as permanent as occurred in 2014. They realised that in 2022, but ate forgetting again.
Johnson made sure that Ukraine had the equipment it needed to defend Kyiv in the first month of the war - at a time when Germany was promising to send non-lethal equipment only.
So I find it hard to think Boris did nothing useful playing the more hawkish angle. I'm more disappointed he's not focused more on it post premiership, which would enhance his reputation.
Hi from London, “crime capital of the world”.
In Birmingham? Beware “rotting rubbish” and “boarded-up buildings”.
Manchester is “the worst city in Europe for eco-friendly transport”.
The ruling party’s new social media campaign is doing wonders for tourism
https://x.com/simoncalder/status/1774318764646941143?s=46&t=rw5lNVUgmRPVyKpxfV_pPQ
The USA is key of course.
I guess he's earning money on the lecture tour somewhere. Even Theresa May managed to get people to pay her.
Crime capital of the world! So lets cut police budgets more, cut criminal justice budgets again, and have to release people already in prison because they are full and there isn't any money.
If Hall was proposing a Giuliani-style clampdown on "crime" where an empowered Met would ensure all the criminals went to jail, then maybe they could play that card. But she isn't - instead she is the candidate for the "let them out" party.
Just how stupid do they think voters are? And why haven't they yet realised that voters aren't that stupid?
It's like when people started dismissing the covid vaccination efforts when others caught up in the final figures. Which is great, but early take up was also a key factor, else getting to 100% after 50 years would be better than say 75% in a month.
Sunak leads into the next GE for better for worse and whenever, then the conservative party can take as long as they want over their own internal battles while the country moves on under an overwhelming majority Starmer government
Truss did more harm to the conservative brand in just 6 short weeks than even Boris did with his partying and handed Labour the biggest gift of all in political terms
Unlike UKIP, or Reform Canada, they have no presence in local government, nor any record on by-elections.
I expect that on the day, a fair proportion of their “voters” will grudgingly back the Conservatives.
No-one who decides to try a different leader will believe that they are choosing someone as inept as Truss. But they might be mistaken.
But, right now, Western powers are simply keeping Ukraine in the game, rather than giving them an advantage. Germany’s refusal to provide Taurus is daft.
The Lib Dems used to attract a fair number of that sort of vote. They might do so again.
The U.S. is far from over it. Though there's a large information operation ongoing trying to make that so.
The Ukrainians are quite within their rights to tell the Americans they will do what they can to make the war as costly as possible for Russia, by trashing Russian domestic infrastructure. If the Americans want that to stop, then they need to supply all the weapons and minute-by-minute intel to allow the Ukrainians to destroy so much Russian kit that the invasion of Ukraine is unsustainable.
Ideally in tandem, some uber-rich benefactor will buy several Republican Congressmen, get them to retire early with well paid sinecures, allowing the Democrats to get a huge aid package through Congress.
More radically, Ukraine and Poland should form a combined mega Eastern European state that would properly terrify Russia. In the EU, in NATO, it would stop Putin in his tracks.
RUAF used:
- 36 tanks
- 12 BMPs
It’s the biggest amount of armour that was used in one charge since the beginning of the war.
12 tanks and 8 BMPs were taken out. Pure madness.
https://twitter.com/OSINTua/status/1774387800978100329
Furthermore there just aren't enough conservative mps who would support it
Johnson very quickly identified the bandwagon and he jumped on quick. Rhetoric does matter and Johnson is good at it. But it had no effect at all on the Russian advance. For that you need hard weapons and cash. The main suppliers of those have been elsewhere.
Just need to take out the electric moped riders who push all the other users out of them.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/01/29/the-intermarium/
Under PR of course centre right and populist right parties can remain separate, as they do in Italy, Germany, Spain and Sweden and New Zealand. Coming together sometimes still to form a government
It's a rather different mental state, and a somewhat more 'aggressive' one.
Or the use of nukes on Japan, etc, etc.
When you go to war, you go to win - otherwise you end up in a worse state. You don't go to win a war using half-measures - because that could easily lead to defeat. We are currently in a worse situation than in the Cold War, with a hot war on Europe's borders, yet many in Europe are turning a blind eye to the threat, or even doing the direct equivalent of appeasing Hitler in 1938.
If we want Ukraine to win, then we need to support them totally - as if they lose, with us having hardheartedly supported them, then we're in a much worse state.
Not a rhetorical question.
Locums just patch a failure by the NHS to provide staffing and do so at the premium price - you are buying in capacity to fit your schedule.
Outsourcing takes advantage under-utilised NHS facilities (eg weekends) or diverts activity which don’t need to be in a hospital setting (eg low complexity services such as wart removal) and thereby increase capacity - and is cheaper than the NHS as a result.
They are absolutely not the same things, the cost is different, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise
Edit: for full effect, you need to brake in a shower of gravel at a car park, put your bike in the back of an enormous SUV and drive off. Zooming through red lights.,..
That attempt to destroy Ukrainian identity is also why he's importing Russians into Ukrainian territory he holds, and expelling many Ukrainians. It's also one reason the Ukrainians are fighting so hard.
Remember the guarantees we gave Ukraine in the past, and the way we abandoned them (e.g. the Budapest Memorandum). He will expect us to do the same again if we let him 'win' now.
I agree the Greens have peaked; last time it was their principal target after Brighton, yet their organisation was abysmal. The same Green candidate is standing again, but she's proved a bit marmite even within green circles, partly because her partner is heavily involved in the mining industry in developing countries. It's not one of their main targets now. The LibDems were almost moribund when I moved here, but they've picked up in terms of organisation and members and now have a group of four on the council. They'll be giving it a good go. Labour hasn't done well in local elections but is confident based mostly on the national polling. However I hear from a good local contact that the candidates who have put their name in the ring for Labour so far aren't very strong, and Labour HQ continues to block their making a selection. With Labour that often means they're saving the spot for someone who can be parachuted in once the election is called, as under Labour rules HQ makes last minute selections. So who knows who they will put up?
There's an active primary campaign here, modelled on the Devon one, but both Labour and LibDems have refused to take part, so it's not clear how much impact it will have.
As I said on the previous thread, a weakness of the MRP is that it is building an overlay based on demography on top of relatively small local samples, and therefore is good at picking up how national trends will play out in particular localities, but not so good at picking up exclusively local factors unless it gets lucky with its local sample.
I suspect the Tories may get lucky with a divided opposition, despite the efforts of the primary campaigners.
We have got the most unaffordable housing since Victorian times. The stock market has gone almost nowhere since the millenium. We had a huge financial crisis in which a fraction of the population had got very rich and then the system was bailed out. Whilst this was due to our over exposure to the USA, our banks were in theory saved (as Mervyn King joked) by the fact we never built any houses. So we have QE and ultra low interest rates pushing up asset prices - nice enough for those who own them - whilst productivity stumbles. And at the end of this there has been almost no new thinking among the political classes about what has gone wrong.
Personally I would like to see a Labour government commit to reducing the house price to income ratio from 9 to 6 or 7. This does not mean a massive crash if it happens over several years and wages are rising by 4-5%. What this would do is disincentivise the buying and renting of residential and commercial property that is killing our economy. What is the point of a major pension fund investing in high tech firms when they can instead own land and claim rent off it instead? Surely the retreat away from shares and towards land ownership shows that modern capitalism has failed in Britain.
I'm getting used to the road bike more. I have a pair of insulated running gloves that help absorb the worst of the vibrations on m,y delicate little hands...
However, the RF forces look completely incapable of taking it so the only way it could be acquired is through some highly unlikely land-for-peace deal where VVP agrees to stop smashing the fuck out of what's left of Ukraine.
The defeat of Russia's energy war against the West means that the West now has all the options.
When the election is over, PB should award you some kind of campaign medal for valour under fire.
Ukraine was the correct judgement, but it remains my view that he acted so quickly to distract and cover over his previous Russian connections; if we live until papers are released this may be a bigger story in decades to come.
1. "If I imagined myself in their shoes..."
2. What's good for the country between now and the election?
3. What's good for the country?
4. What's good for me?
On 3 and 4, I would imagine many 2019 Labour voters would like the Tories to get walloped in the election, believing that would be good for themselves and the country. For them the question amounts to would a change of leader make it even more likely that the Tories will get walloped. Of course there are two possible answers to that.
So you have different respondent groups looking at the question in different ways, and the question is moronic, although doubtless the pollster got paid good money for asking it.
I am a 2019 Labour voter who will be abstaining in the next election because I will not vote for a party led by Keir Starmer. If I were intending to vote Labour and had no bets on, I'd want the Tories to keep the crappy leader they've got.
"Sinking ship seeks new captain" is hardly the most attractive of opportunities. All that's in it for taking over from Sunak pre-GE is a chance to get your name onto the list of PMs. your mugshot on the Downing Street staircase, and a batch of your friends/cronies/donors/illegitimate children onto the honours list.
Rethinking, given its the Tories, maybe there might actually be a bunfight for it?
Not to mention that gutting Ukraine as the allies allowed Czechoslovakia to be gutted in the late 30s doesn't sound like a recipe for defeating the fascist leadership in Moscow.
Despite devastating the nation in so many ways they still have the entire media contingent behind them and the more absurd the offer they make to the electorate the more likely they are to prevail. Some of the PB never again Tories are already back on board.
Part of me is also fearful that if Labour get the blame for any future national woes what comes after is unthinkable. Comparatively, Rishi as a wannabe small state, low tax, hard-line fiscal hawk is better than what Refuk Tories will offer up next.
The killing of Russian soldiers and destruction of the Russian army is a good thing wherever it would happen.
The more Russia is damaged the better for the Western World.
Does it upset you that Russia's energy war against the West has failed ?
Even a competitive leadership election could be completed in a fortnight if the party board decided such....
Many appeasers say things like: "Russia may use their nukes against us!!!!!" as a reason not to support Ukraine, or minimise our support.
That is stupid one-dimensional thinking. Because *every* state, and perhaps even some non-state actors, will be watching what is happening and thinking: "Aha! Just the possession of nuclear weapons will protect me if I do EVIL!", and hence try to become nuclear-capable. In the same way the appeasers protect Russia.
And hence the appeaser's argument becomes one for increased proliferation, and an increased chance of becoming cinders.
Which is so obvious that I wonder why they call for it. Either because they're too stoopid to realise that is where it will lead, or because they actually want Russia to 'win'...
Which are you?
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
Whoever follows him will hopefully have learned that you can't just say you're pro Brexit, pro small state, pro business etc, but actually continually waver on EU relations, grow the state, and support anti-business taxes and more regulation.
What can be afforded is what will matter.
See Dizzy Lizzy Truss if you doubt me.
But to be clear:
https://time.com/6150046/ukraine-statehood-russia-history-putin/
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/peace-is-impossible-while-vladimir-putin-denies-ukraines-right-to-exist/
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ukraine-history-fact-checking-putin-513812/
Then there's the question of what exactly Elon Musk is playing at by going on about Odessa. The status of Odessa is unlikely to be at issue however the war develops. Possible, but very unlikely.
For one thing, I think you're wrong in all you said that post. For another. if you want to mention 'dictatorial powers', just look at Putin...
Fuck off back under your bridge.
As such, whilst disgruntled Tories may sit on their hands and not vote to prevent the former, they will come out to prevent the latter.
If I were a Tory MP in some of the seats mentioned I would be secretly quite pleased about this survey and play up the supposed threat of a Labour victory in my area. It may give a few of them just the extra votes they need to hold on.
Putin recognises force and threats to himself.
“Play nice or the weather where you live will be sunny, with temperatures reaching 100 million degrees, winds gusty up to about Mach 8, and clouds up to 100,000 feet (mushroom)”
Ukraine do have a recruitment problem, not least because of the political deadlock resulting from nobody wanting to own the horribly unpopular mobilisation legislation. See the two recent WSJ articles.
There is an immense Ukrainian propoganda effort targeted at the west. You have been doggedly and uncritically regurgitating their lines on here for two years.
So, yes comrade, the bones of old mate Trent's post were correct.
They know through bitter experience what Russian control will mean for them.
I said that Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole
He denies the existence of an *independent* Ukrainian identity
Robert - this guy is getting boring now.
Also, the ' ukrainian men hiding fron conscription' is a) not a new thing, and b) that it is happening at a large scale seems to an invention of the Russian media that you slurp the anal dribblings from, and c) effects Russia to. Look at the amount of young Russians who have fled their country.
If I am 'regurgitating their lines', then you are 'regurgitating' the lines of a fascist and imperialist state. Lines which are no less true, and IMV far less true.
Because you aren't against imperalism and fascism, are you?