Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Also if russia has lost 500000 men how many have ukraine lost. Assume a generous 2 russian killed for every ukrainian that still leaves 250000 ukrainians dead.
Judging by these flags I saw in Maidan square, Kyiv, last week - each one representing a dead Ukrainian - 200,000 dead Ukrainians seems a perfectly reasonable guess
I suggest that this is fairly patent BS.
No one known to me is suggesting "500k Russians killed".
If we are talking about the stats from the Ukraine MOD that have proven to be generally reliable, afaik they cover casualties knocked out of the fight, rather than just killed.
So would include eg amputees aka in Russian WW2 terminology "samovars".
The British Ministry of Defence assessment is:
"The total number of Russian casualties (killed and wounded) since the start of the war in February 2022 has now likely reached 500,000. Russian losses have continued at a high level in 2024, and in May average Russian personnel casualties were over 1,200 per day – the highest reported since the start of the war."
The large majority of these casualties are dead, because the Russian forces lack an organised system for medical evacuation.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
It does explain the surprise of the Russian army 2 years ago. They seemed to believe their own propaganda that they would be received as liberators from the Ukranian "Nazis".
I spoke to a Ukrainian movie maker in Kyiv who told me exactly this. The Russian soldiers didn’t even shoot anyone at first as they literally expected to be greeted with relief and celebration, that’s partly why the initial invasion was so crap. They didn’t anticipate major resistance
It was when Ukrainians started shooting russians that all hell broke loose - as Russians then suspected everyone and killed everyone on sight - hence massacres like bucha
@Peter_the_Punter I did matched betting for a number of years and I am stake limited on virtually every large bookmaker.
Same. I've always preferred Betfair because of the trading aspect, but was sometimes tempted by free bets or other offers from the trad bookies until most of them suddenly limited me within the space of about 6 weeks in late 2015.
It wasn't even as if I was making big bets or winning consistently. I assume that they're doing some form of data-sharing behind the scenes, and I was flagged because they were able to see that I only bet when there was an offer available.
But there were no warnings, no indications that I was doing anything wrong, and no way to restore my status. I felt like I was being implicitly accused of cheating, and it's put me off ever dealing with them again even.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
What percentage of Austrians speak German as their "main language"?
Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage · 10h I am one of the few figures that have been consistent & honest about the war with Russia.
Putin was wrong to invade a sovereign nation, and the EU was wrong to expand eastward.
The sooner we realise this, the closer we will be to ending the war and delivering peace.
His second sentence is an oxymoron. If sovereign nations aren't allowed to join supranational bodies, they're not sovereign nations are they? And likewise, if supranational bodies aren't allowed to accept members, are they supranational bodies. [1]
[1] Just to clarify, subject to their own internal rules on membership acceptance. The EU wouldn't accept (say) Canada, despite Canada meeting all the economic and political requirements because Canada isn't in Europe.
Oops, I accidentally invaded my neighbour because I was scared of a military bloc they weren't in.
Russians do not see Ukraine as a neighbour in the way you are using the word. They see about half of Ukraine as fundamentally - culturally, linguistically, historically - a part of Russia. They founded and built Odessa. They developed Crimea - it is full of tsarist mansions
Westerners arrogantly pontificating about the war without knowing the history are not helping
It’s a shame @Dura_Ace has disappeared (I do hope he’s not lying in some hospital in Kharkiv) - he might be a mad bastard but he knows his onions in this matter
That’s how the British originally thought of Ireland though, and before that the USA. Georgian Dublin was a British city. So were Boston and Philadelphia.
Nobody doubts Russia feels like that, but I’m not sure what the sequitur is.
If nothing else it puts paid to the idea this is some kind of defensive war provoked by NATO expansion. It’s a war of irredentism.
It’s a war of reconquest maybe
I made the Ireland comparison a few weeks ago and it’s pretty good but it doesn’t quite capture the spiritual link between Ukraine and Russia (as Russians see it) - and the way Russia was birthed in Kyivan rus
Imagine if English was first spoken in Dublin, and the English reformation was an originally Irish affair, and Ireland was physically part of the island of Britain, then you’d be closer
But there is no perfect analogy and none of this exculpates Putin - he’s a horrible murderous tyrant - and it doesn’t exonerate Farage - he made stupid remarks which, even if true in some narrow way, were badly timed and clumsily phrased and he might have blown up reform just as they were about to overtake the Tories. Dumb move
An interesting question however, given that Farage doesn't act randomly, is: Who is he particularly speaking to; and who is he speaking for; what are his political goals.
If he really wanted any sort of reverse takeover of the Tories, would he not at least have to pretend to be part of the UK liberal (small 'l') tradition. I don't think (am I wrong) that Clacton's Reform voters greatly admire an illiberal state that looks to North Korea's best friend for inspiration.
I doubt Farage has political goals.
Its more that he likes to be the centre of attention.
If he has political goals he's more likely to get them fulfilled by hanging around with Trump than being a backbench MP in Westminster.
So he disappeared after apparently cutting himself on a cactus after an all night rave but that morning he was seen going to a nearby villa with two strangers. He has been conning people in Tenerife and was caught red handed trying to steal a watch. Now his, also dodgy, mum has added herself to a Go Fund Me page which was set up by Lucy, also a known drug dealer on the island, without any explanation as to what it's for.
Sometimes the British press need to pull their fucking finger out
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
Oops, I accidentally invaded my neighbour because I was scared of a military bloc they weren't in.
Russians do not see Ukraine as a neighbour in the way you are using the word. They see about half of Ukraine as fundamentally - culturally, linguistically, historically - a part of Russia. They founded and built Odessa. They developed Crimea - it is full of tsarist mansions
Westerners arrogantly pontificating about the war without knowing the history are not helping
It’s a shame @Dura_Ace has disappeared (I do hope he’s not lying in some hospital in Kharkiv) - he might be a mad bastard but he knows his onions in this matter
That’s how the British originally thought of Ireland though, and before that the USA. Georgian Dublin was a British city. So were Boston and Philadelphia.
Nobody doubts Russia feels like that, but I’m not sure what the sequitur is.
If nothing else it puts paid to the idea this is some kind of defensive war provoked by NATO expansion. It’s a war of irredentism.
The two things are not mutually exclusive. You could say that the war was provoked by the weakness of the West because we courted Ukraine to leave the Russian sphere of influence and join our institutions without realising the stakes that were involved.
We might regard it as an evil throwback to the 19th century for Russia to think that way about Ukraine, but the fact is it does, and we knew that, so it was negligent to move ahead with steps towards political and economic integration without offering any security guarantees.
courted =/= invaded
Russia also "courted" Ukraine. And threatened and subverted and finally tried to murder them. Our provocation is being open to cooperation. That's not a reasonable casus belli unless you start from the point that Ukraine already belonged to Russia.
I think you illustrate the problem with legalising international relations. Trying to hold everything to an objective standard invites whataboutery and charges of Western hypocrisy.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
The fact a Ukrainian speaks Russian, even as a first language, has no bearing as to their opinion on Russia. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with central and eastern Ukraine would know this
Farage is clown. A dangerous one. He seeks attention for himself. He loves shit- stirring and enjoys provoking chaos and confusion. I do not believe that he is happy within himself. Deeply unhappy and is on a permanent power trip.
So he disappeared after apparently cutting himself on a cactus after an all night rave but that morning he was seen going to a nearby villa with two strangers. He has been conning people in Tenerife and was caught red handed trying to steal a watch. Now his, also dodgy, mum has added herself to a Go Fund Me page which was set up by Lucy, also a known drug dealer on the island, without any explanation as to what it's for.
Sometimes the British press need to pull their fucking finger out
The fact a Ukrainian speaks Russian, even as a first language, has no bearing as to their opinion on Russia. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with central and eastern Ukraine would know this
No one is claiming that. It was @ydoethur who falsely claimed that only a third of Ukrainians speak Russian, which is bollocks. That’s all
I’ve met plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who are out there actually fighting Russia and prepared to die doing so
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
Every Welsh person I've ever met - and I mean every one over the age of six - speaks English just as fluently as they do Welsh. That does not make them English.
But that wasn’t your claim. You claimed that “only a third” of Ukrainians speak Russian and I’m saying - from what I’ve personally witnessed - that sounds like bullshit. For a start anyone over 40 will have been a child when Ukraine was part of the USSR and everyone learned Russian. That’s half the country right there
"Learned" Russian ≠ "speaks" Russian.
I learned French at school. I don't speak French today.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Also if russia has lost 500000 men how many have ukraine lost. Assume a generous 2 russian killed for every ukrainian that still leaves 250000 ukrainians dead.
Judging by these flags I saw in Maidan square, Kyiv, last week - each one representing a dead Ukrainian - 200,000 dead Ukrainians seems a perfectly reasonable guess
I suggest that this is fairly patent BS.
No one known to me is suggesting "500k Russians killed".
If we are talking about the stats from the Ukraine MOD that have proven to be generally reliable, afaik they cover casualties knocked out of the fight, rather than just killed.
So would include eg amputees aka in Russian WW2 terminology "samovars".
I’m sorry. Are you arguing with what I saw with my own eyes? Tens of thousands of flags?
No, I'm pointing out that the "250k Ukrainians killed" and "500k Russians killed" numbers based on a 'generous 2:1 ratio' from our just-banned Moscow based tourist are patent BS, because the 500k number is from the Ukraine MOD (500k reached 3 weeks or so ago) and covers both Killed and Seriously Wounded.
His numbers are a straight category error putting in wounded with killed, without even needing to interrogate the 2:1 assumption. Therefore patent BS.
On your numbers, tbf, you just jumped from "Judging by these flags I saw in Maidan square, Kyiv, last week - each one representing a dead Ukrainian - 200,000 dead Ukrainians seems a perfectly reasonable guess " to "tens of thousands of flags" in the space of one comment.
That's a *jump*, and you are not clear about your categories. Who do you mean? Civilian, military etc? Killed, wounded? Do you suggest that the representation is comprehensive, or are known there dead Ukrainians without a flag present?
The official Ukrainian military deathssince the full invasion published by Zelensky in Feb 2024 were 31,000 in 2 years, plus 7-15k "missing". Ukrainian civilian deaths are stated as around 11k+ killed confirmed, plus as many again missing. *
So I suggest that 200k may be a reasonable number for Ukrainian casualties covering military and civilian ie killed and seriously wounded, *not* for killed.
Seriously, did you count or estimate the actual number of flags?
Oops, I accidentally invaded my neighbour because I was scared of a military bloc they weren't in.
Russians do not see Ukraine as a neighbour in the way you are using the word. They see about half of Ukraine as fundamentally - culturally, linguistically, historically - a part of Russia. They founded and built Odessa. They developed Crimea - it is full of tsarist mansions
Westerners arrogantly pontificating about the war without knowing the history are not helping
It’s a shame @Dura_Ace has disappeared (I do hope he’s not lying in some hospital in Kharkiv) - he might be a mad bastard but he knows his onions in this matter
That’s how the British originally thought of Ireland though, and before that the USA. Georgian Dublin was a British city. So were Boston and Philadelphia.
Nobody doubts Russia feels like that, but I’m not sure what the sequitur is.
If nothing else it puts paid to the idea this is some kind of defensive war provoked by NATO expansion. It’s a war of irredentism.
The two things are not mutually exclusive. You could say that the war was provoked by the weakness of the West because we courted Ukraine to leave the Russian sphere of influence and join our institutions without realising the stakes that were involved.
We might regard it as an evil throwback to the 19th century for Russia to think that way about Ukraine, but the fact is it does, and we knew that, so it was negligent to move ahead with steps towards political and economic integration without offering any security guarantees.
courted =/= invaded
Russia also "courted" Ukraine. And threatened and subverted and finally tried to murder them. Our provocation is being open to cooperation. That's not a reasonable casus belli unless you start from the point that Ukraine already belonged to Russia.
I think you illustrate the problem with legalising international relations. Trying to hold everything to an objective standard invites whataboutery and charges of Western hypocrisy.
I think that it’s better to approach Russia/Ukraine from the viewpoint of enlightened self-interest, rather than moralising about it.
Russia is an irredentist power that will seek further territorial gains, if it succeeds in Ukraine. It’s better for us that their armies are being ground down in Eastern Ukraine, rather than pushing into the Baltic States or Moldova.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
Maybe a family analogy might help. Imagine we, the west, live in a semi detached house and we’re doing quite well - got a good business going
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
It is quite amusing that this website is full of people who like to think highly of their knowledge about the world, but the acceptable analysis of Ukraine cannot go beyond 'they have to win and we have to keep giving them whatever they need to do it'. Anyone who disagrees is 'evil' and 'literally a Hitler appeaser'. The standard of debate about this is at a school yard level. Perhaps people are seeking reassurance that they are 'in the right' and they get it, because they have created a climate where no one can actually offer a critical perspective. When someone like Nigel Farage comes along and says something critical, they cannot handle it, jumping to the conclusion that 'he's Putin's shill. It must now be over for him and the Reform Party. Bet accordingly'.
The situation in Ukraine reveals a paradox. Every time Russia starts losing ground, it ramps up talk of using nuclear weapons. When Russia starts looking like it may succeed, then more funding is put in to the defence of Ukraine by its Western backers. This appears to have little to do with good and evil, it is more like a proxy for a great power conflict. The conflict will probably go on and on even after Ukraine has been concluded, as the regime in Russia has been found to be stable and resilient, it is aggrieved and feels under threat, it has a psychology that it is in a state of war, so it is likely to start up another conflict.
If you want to avoid this, you have to think at a strategic level about how to resolve the problem, but not many people appear able to do that.
Farage is clown. A dangerous one. He seeks attention for himself. He loves shit- stirring and enjoys provoking chaos and confusion. I do not believe that he is happy within himself. Deeply unhappy and is on a permanent power trip.
There’s one concern I have about this where some of the pro-Farage posters may have a point.
We’ve had a pretty unbreakable consensus in Britain about supporting Ukraine in its time of need. Polling on this shows Brits among the most supportive anywhere. That may partly be because of our long and problematic relationship with Russia, who see us at times as their primary strategic foe, up there with Poland as a rent-free tenant of their brains.
The danger is that Farage pulls people away from that consensus because they agree with him on other issues, like immigration. It wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing has happened. A few loud voices have done the same to the previous fudged consensus on trans people, for example.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
I’ve given you the stats. At least half of Ukrainians speak Russian. I’ve also travelled widely around Ukraine and they all speak Russian - except in the west. There. That’s it
Farage is worse than them all. The west provoked the war. Was it the west that cut off Ukraines gas supply over a price disagreement of natural gas etc.Tosh all of it.
So he disappeared after apparently cutting himself on a cactus after an all night rave but that morning he was seen going to a nearby villa with two strangers. He has been conning people in Tenerife and was caught red handed trying to steal a watch. Now his, also dodgy, mum has added herself to a Go Fund Me page which was set up by Lucy, also a known drug dealer on the island, without any explanation as to what it's for.
Sometimes the British press need to pull their fucking finger out
Interesting. And I am sure substantiatable.
The Press and the Police have known all this since the outset, but have been understandably reluctant to go public. Must have been frustrating for them. Now these matters are out in the open, I suspect they will feel a little freer and the reporting will be a bit more open.
My source? Conversation with a journalist yesterday, although the lad's conviction is of course a matter of public record.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
Maybe a family analogy might help. Imagine we, the west, live in a semi detached house and we’re doing quite well - got a good business going
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
That analogy is so tortured I will be haunted by its screams for the rest of my life.
Oops, I accidentally invaded my neighbour because I was scared of a military bloc they weren't in.
Russians do not see Ukraine as a neighbour in the way you are using the word. They see about half of Ukraine as fundamentally - culturally, linguistically, historically - a part of Russia. They founded and built Odessa. They developed Crimea - it is full of tsarist mansions
Westerners arrogantly pontificating about the war without knowing the history are not helping
It’s a shame @Dura_Ace has disappeared (I do hope he’s not lying in some hospital in Kharkiv) - he might be a mad bastard but he knows his onions in this matter
That’s how the British originally thought of Ireland though, and before that the USA. Georgian Dublin was a British city. So were Boston and Philadelphia.
Nobody doubts Russia feels like that, but I’m not sure what the sequitur is.
If nothing else it puts paid to the idea this is some kind of defensive war provoked by NATO expansion. It’s a war of irredentism.
It’s a war of reconquest maybe
I made the Ireland comparison a few weeks ago and it’s pretty good but it doesn’t quite capture the spiritual link between Ukraine and Russia (as Russians see it) - and the way Russia was birthed in Kyivan rus
Imagine if English was first spoken in Dublin, and the English reformation was an originally Irish affair, and Ireland was physically part of the island of Britain, then you’d be closer
But there is no perfect analogy and none of this exculpates Putin - he’s a horrible murderous tyrant - and it doesn’t exonerate Farage - he made stupid remarks which, even if true in some narrow way, were badly timed and clumsily phrased and he might have blown up reform just as they were about to overtake the Tories. Dumb move
An interesting question however, given that Farage doesn't act randomly, is: Who is he particularly speaking to; and who is he speaking for; what are his political goals.
If he really wanted any sort of reverse takeover of the Tories, would he not at least have to pretend to be part of the UK liberal (small 'l') tradition. I don't think (am I wrong) that Clacton's Reform voters greatly admire an illiberal state that looks to North Korea's best friend for inspiration.
Its a few things:
A lot of the country admire "strongmen" like Putin. Being willing to say things outside the overton window is a key part of what he is selling. To many who want change, but dont know exactly what change, someone willing to say controversial things becomes their only hope vs the status quo limited by the reality of tough demographics and budgets. Attention, just like one of our prolific posters, he just wants attention.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
The use of the Ukranian language has increased dramatically as a result of the war. Before 2022, everyone would mostly converse in Russian (or English in Kiev and Lviv). Think Welsh language use in Wales for a reasonable comparison.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
Maybe a family analogy might help. Imagine we, the west, live in a semi detached house and we’re doing quite well - got a good business going
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
That analogy is so tortured I will be haunted by its screams for the rest of my life.
It gets to the core of Putin’s psychology tho. He does see Ukraine as a kind of wife that has strayed but ultimately - surely - still loves him. Hence his troops expecting to walk into Kyiv and be greeted with acclaim
It may also be a tasteless analogy so I shall make tea and contemplate my itinerary
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
Maybe a family analogy might help. Imagine we, the west, live in a semi detached house and we’re doing quite well - got a good business going
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
That analogy is so tortured I will be haunted by its screams for the rest of my life.
I just skip over Leon's posts now, every time I did read his posts I felt my IQ dropping.
Darkage. How would you reslove the problem exactly? If you cut a deal with Putin how could you be sure he would keep his word?
You can’t cut a deal with Putin
Ultimately this will end - at least for a while - with some frozen armistice and both sides rearming and a long period of cold hostility but not actual fighting. Like Korea. If we’re lucky
I have heard Ukrainians predict this, so it’s not me being a “fucking appeaser”
It is quite amusing that this website is full of people who like to think highly of their knowledge about the world, but the acceptable analysis of Ukraine cannot go beyond 'they have to win and we have to keep giving them whatever they need to do it'. Anyone who disagrees is 'evil' and 'literally a Hitler appeaser'. The standard of debate about this is at a school yard level. Perhaps people are seeking reassurance that they are 'in the right' and they get it, because they have created a climate where no one can actually offer a critical perspective. When someone like Nigel Farage comes along and says something critical, they cannot handle it, jumping to the conclusion that 'he's Putin's shill. It must now be over for him and the Reform Party. Bet accordingly'.
The situation in Ukraine reveals a paradox. Every time Russia starts losing ground, it ramps up talk of using nuclear weapons. When Russia starts looking like it may succeed, then more funding is put in to the defence of Ukraine by its Western backers. This appears to have little to do with good and evil, it is more like a proxy for a great power conflict. The conflict will probably go on and on even after Ukraine has been concluded, as the regime in Russia has been found to be stable and resilient, it is aggrieved and feels under threat, it has a psychology that it is in a state of war, so it is likely to start up another conflict.
If you want to avoid this, you have to think at a strategic level about how to resolve the problem, but not many people appear able to do that - the preference is to apply a simple good v evil analysis.
I think you're doing a great disservice to the people on here who have been discussing this with considerably more nuance than your sketch portrays. My working assumption is that you simply haven't read what people have been saying.
The whole debate could perhaps be tightened if each poster were required to end a post with the following:
“Therefore I think the correct policy for Western countries is the following:”
I’ve done that many times since 2022 but to restate here, the correct policy is to equip Ukraine to fight properly with Russia until it is ready to negotiate a peace, on its own terms. And to ratchet up sanctions enforcement which is becoming increasingly leaky.
From that MEE story, this photo of Wes Streeting's constituency office shows it is next door to a shop offering private tutoring of schoolchildren. There are several such shops around here. This is the modern face of private education, soon (one imagines) to be hit by 20 per cent fees alongside Eton and Winchester.
Alex Wickham @alexwickham · 2h — there is total fury among Tories at the quality of their campaign
— two ministers say they think Sunak should announce this weekend he understands the public want change and hand over the campaign to Cabinet to make the case for a strong opposition
ARRSE by no means solidly behind Mercer. Thomas possibly a twit but not a full on Walt is the consensus, and Mercer talks a good game of standing up for vets.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
I suspect Russian invasion, pillage, rape and slaughter of Ukraine might be a problem for assimilation.
Alex Wickham @alexwickham · 2h — there is total fury among Tories at the quality of their campaign
— two ministers say they think Sunak should announce this weekend he understands the public want change and hand over the campaign to Cabinet to make the case for a strong opposition
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
I’ve given you the stats. At least half of Ukrainians speak Russian. I’ve also travelled widely around Ukraine and they all speak Russian - except in the west. There. That’s it
Are you still in Ukraine? Perhaps ask some people whether they *choose* to speak Russian?
I think that there are a lot of people for whom Russian has been their 'family' language who have opted to speak Ukrainian. It is a badge of identity, and an expression of national independence.
"Ability to speak Russian" and "choose to speak Russian" are different things, and there has been a shift.
A report from 2023 (Ukrainian via Goole Translate):
During the year of full-scale war, 22% of Ukrainians have switched to using the Ukrainian language more often. This is evidenced by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Group.
The vast majority of respondents identify themselves as citizens of Ukraine (compared to 2021, the figure increased from 76% to 94%). Half identify themselves as Europeans (a double increase).
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Why do you describe the EU and NATO expansions as 'aggressive' ?
Take a look at what neorealist international relations theorists like John Mearsheimer have been saying, quite consistently, on the topic, over the last decade or more. His view is that we have regional hegemons that seek to control the smaller countries in their immediate orbit. The US does this. Iran does this. It's not a value judgement, but rather a statement of objective reality of international relations viewed through a neorealist lens. Under that view, one hegemon expanding as far as the other's borders would be seen as aggressive by the other power.
That doesn't mean that Putin isn't a fascist dictator, nor, as Leon puts it, does it mean we shouldn't arm the Ukrainians to the teeth if they want to fight him. We absolutely should. The Western democratic system is objectively better than Putinist fascism, and I see no reason why we have to let Putin have Ukraine just because he sees it as his back yard. Hitler thought the same thing about his immediate neighbours.
When you have a clash of ideologies, even the existence of the "other side" is a provocation. This is what C20th was all about: rival ideological systems, broadly liberalism, fascism, and communism, trying to do away with one another because the legitimacy conferred upon states depended on the material well-being of the population. Very, very broadly, liberalism is about freedom, fascism is about hierarchy, and communism is about equality. Any success exhibited by rival systems represented a weakening of the powerbase of your system. So Cuban medicine is an affront to America, Nazi military might was an affront to the Soviet Union, and American technological capacity was an affront to both.
Liberalism and consent-based international organisations are fatal to the legitimacy of Putin's regime and that's why he seeks to undermine them. Hence sowing discord within Western countries to "prove" that democracy is sclerotic and that we'd be "better off" with a strongman leader like him. Hence Russian disinformation attacking the EU, NATO. Hence Russia cosying up to other countries "threatened" by liberal internationalism: China, North Korea. Hence Russia being very keen on amplifying divisive politicians in the West who will weaken those institutions or the countries themselves, e.g. Trump, AfD.
We have provoked Putin: by existing. By standing up for the freedom of countries like Romania and Estonia to choose their own future. The fact that they have chosen "us" is entirely predictable because our system is objectively better. The ideology of freedom has rolled right up to Russia's border because it's been invited in. We can't avoid being provocative without ceasing to exist. We annoyed the Nazis and we annoyed the communists. And we'll continue to annoy Russia until it, or we, change. If we deny freedom to countries near Russia who seek it out, that would be us changing. I propose we don't do that, but continue to be ourselves. We will probably win, again.
I agree entirely with this post.
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
Maybe a family analogy might help. Imagine we, the west, live in a semi detached house and we’re doing quite well - got a good business going
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
That analogy is so tortured I will be haunted by its screams for the rest of my life.
I just skip over Leon's posts now, every time I did read his posts I felt my IQ dropping.
As for Farage. He still has time to blow up and loose it. Just needs a bit more time before he does it.
The same happened to Clegg a couple of weeks after the gasm started in 2010. Started to get much more negative attention particularly from the Tory press after having an easy ride up until then.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
The fact a Ukrainian speaks Russian, even as a first language, has no bearing as to their opinion on Russia. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with central and eastern Ukraine would know this
So he disappeared after apparently cutting himself on a cactus after an all night rave but that morning he was seen going to a nearby villa with two strangers. He has been conning people in Tenerife and was caught red handed trying to steal a watch. Now his, also dodgy, mum has added herself to a Go Fund Me page which was set up by Lucy, also a known drug dealer on the island, without any explanation as to what it's for.
Sometimes the British press need to pull their fucking finger out
Interesting. And I am sure substantiatable.
The Press and the Police have known all this since the outset, but have been understandably reluctant to go public. Must have been frustrating for them. Now these matters are out in the open, I suspect they will feel a little freer and the reporting will be a bit more open.
My source? Conversation with a journalist yesterday, although the lad's conviction is of course a matter of public record.
The creation of a Go Fund Me is interesting.
And with this happening so soon after Michael Mosley's death.
Perhaps I'm being cynical but it gives me echoes of the Madeleine McCann / Shannon Matthews imitation.
Sir Bradley Wiggins’s fall from cycling superstar to sofa surfer
The financial troubles of the Olympic gold medallist and Britain’s first Tour de France winner have left him homeless and bankrupt
Sitting on a gold throne after winning a fourth Olympic gold, Sir Bradley Wiggins was at the peak of a glittering career that catalysed a British cycling revolution.
He was the first Briton to win the gruelling Tour de France, won five Olympic gold medals and built up an estimated net worth of £13 million.
But little more than ten years on from London 2012, the hero affectionately dubbed “Sir Wiggo” has been left bankrupt and in effect homeless, “sofa surfing” between family and friends.
His marriage has collapsed, his £975,000 family home has been repossessed and the Mallorca villa he once called a “home from home” is believed to have been lost in the scramble to cover his debts.
He was even said to have spent some time living in a VW camper van, which was lent to him in return for social media posts and was later said to have been found “trashed” in a car park.
A house he rented for six months in the Lancashire resort town of Lytham St Annes was allegedly left looking like a “dosshouse” with cigarette butts on the floor, according to a source.
The bankruptcy means he may have to sell his Olympic medals to repay the debts. It is a sad downfall for a sporting hero who helped turn cycling from a niche sport into a national obsession. Wiggins is said to blame “the ‘professional negligence’ of others” and is considering legal action.
I'm sure the Olympic fraternity and the cycle fraternity will get together to make sure he's OK. Unfortunately it's something all too common with sportsmen who find it's all over and they aren't yet 40. The applause and adulation for some is difficult to live without
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Also if russia has lost 500000 men how many have ukraine lost. Assume a generous 2 russian killed for every ukrainian that still leaves 250000 ukrainians dead.
Judging by these flags I saw in Maidan square, Kyiv, last week - each one representing a dead Ukrainian - 200,000 dead Ukrainians seems a perfectly reasonable guess
I suggest that this is fairly patent BS.
No one known to me is suggesting "500k Russians killed".
If we are talking about the stats from the Ukraine MOD that have proven to be generally reliable, afaik they cover casualties knocked out of the fight, rather than just killed.
So would include eg amputees aka in Russian WW2 terminology "samovars".
The British Ministry of Defence assessment is:
"The total number of Russian casualties (killed and wounded) since the start of the war in February 2022 has now likely reached 500,000. Russian losses have continued at a high level in 2024, and in May average Russian personnel casualties were over 1,200 per day – the highest reported since the start of the war."
The large majority of these casualties are dead, because the Russian forces lack an organised system for medical evacuation.
So not 500K dead, but not that far off it.
I disagree there. I have never seem the MOD publish a killed:wounded ratio for Russia. If they have, I would love to see it.
Reputable published stats (well summarised by parts of the Wiki piece linked earlier) suggest that it is perhaps 1:3 killed:wounded for Russia, and 1:5 or 1:6 for Ukraine.
Estimates for Russians killed are of the order of 150k.
Which - even with the significantly worse ratio for Russia, is still nothing like 500k killed.
Alex Wickham @alexwickham · 2h — there is total fury among Tories at the quality of their campaign
— two ministers say they think Sunak should announce this weekend he understands the public want change and hand over the campaign to Cabinet to make the case for a strong opposition
Give Leon a break.Lets focus on the what people think will happen in last part of the campaign and what the final result will be. The person who calls the number of seats for each party will get a congratulations message from me.
Farage is clown. A dangerous one. He seeks attention for himself. He loves shit- stirring and enjoys provoking chaos and confusion. I do not believe that he is happy within himself. Deeply unhappy and is on a permanent power trip.
There’s one concern I have about this where some of the pro-Farage posters may have a point.
We’ve had a pretty unbreakable consensus in Britain about supporting Ukraine in its time of need. Polling on this shows Brits among the most supportive anywhere. That may partly be because of our long and problematic relationship with Russia, who see us at times as their primary strategic foe, up there with Poland as a rent-free tenant of their brains.
The danger is that Farage pulls people away from that consensus because they agree with him on other issues, like immigration. It wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing has happened. A few loud voices have done the same to the previous fudged consensus on trans people, for example.
Well a victory for Ukraine in the war is likely to lead to at least a quarter of a million emigrants from the UK, so anyone opposed to immigration should be all in favour of doing everything possible to help Ukraine.
Darkage. How would you reslove the problem exactly? If you cut a deal with Putin how could you be sure he would keep his word?
You can’t cut a deal with Putin
Ultimately this will end - at least for a while - with some frozen armistice and both sides rearming and a long period of cold hostility but not actual fighting. Like Korea. If we’re lucky
I have heard Ukrainians predict this, so it’s not me being a “fucking appeaser”
An armistice that stopped the fighting for decades was easier in Korea because:
1. Both sides had ended up pretty much where they started, neither was occupying substantial territory that had previously belonged to the other side 2. The US was able to credibly promise security to South Korea by stationing troops there indefinitely. You can't make a deal like that here because having western troops in Ukraine is the main thing Putin is trying to avoid 3. Unlike Ukraine the parties in Korea hadn't already tried this approach, only to end up with a bigger war
Man is jailed and banned for driving for 20 years after driving wrong way on a road whilst on bail. He killed two people (a passenger) and a mother of 8.
At what point do people get banned from driving for life?
Give Leon a break.Lets focus on the what people think will happen in last part of the campaign and what the final result will be. The person who calls the number of seats for each party will get a congratulations message from me.
Impossible to call this election! We just don't know how the reform surge will play out in seats. Could be very few, or could be many if their vote is concentrated.
Farage was foolish to make those comments yesterday - in a basic political way. Bad timing, bad optics. His first big unforced error
He also has long links with Putin’s Russia - like working for RT even after Crimea - which raise eyebrows. I would not be at all surprised if some Russian money is making its way to Reform - but then I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin is pro-SNP either. His aim is to roil and divide the west
However I’ve now spent a month in total in wartime Ukraine. I’ve been to Odessa, Kyiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi and multiple small towns. And I’ve talked to a lot of Ukrainians and read just about all the Ukrainian history there is
The situation is a lot more nuanced than we like to admit. A fair chunk of Ukraine was founded or developed by Russia and has always been seen as quintessentially Russian - eg Odessa. Crimea likewise. Even now a lot of Ukrainians will express a liking for Russia and Russians, a cousinhood - and they speak Russian - even if they loathe and fear Putin
The west was misguided in its fairly aggressive expansions - by NATO and the EU - and the apparent attempt to pull Ukraine permanently into a western orbit and thereby forever estranged from mother Russia.
Admitting this is not popular. We prefer to see everything in black and white as it is easier and morally satisfying. But the history is not black and white
All that said, Putin’s war is hideous and satanic and ultimately disastrous for Russia itself, and Putin must be stopped. He’s a menace to the rest of us and to his own people. And as long as Ukrainians want to fight him we should arm them to the teeth
Also if russia has lost 500000 men how many have ukraine lost. Assume a generous 2 russian killed for every ukrainian that still leaves 250000 ukrainians dead.
500 000 major casualties, not all dead, but probably about the right ballpark.
The only one who can stop the slaughter is the Aggressor. Ukraine has no ambitions beyond its borders.
Losing 500,000 people is a disaster for any state bar perhaps China and India. And it's actually worse. Putin's a heartless bastard, and he'll raise a small smile when someone on his side dies rather than is permanently wounded.
Permanently wounded is a 30 year commitment (well, would be..... I suppose Russia will just cast them aside even worse than the US did with its Vietnam vets). Death means no such problem.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
I’ve given you the stats. At least half of Ukrainians speak Russian. I’ve also travelled widely around Ukraine and they all speak Russian - except in the west. There. That’s it
Are you still in Ukraine? Perhaps ask some people whether they *choose* to speak Russian?
I think that there are a lot of people for whom Russian has been their 'family' language who have opted to speak Ukrainian. It is a badge of identity, and an expression of national independence.
"Ability to speak Russian" and "choose to speak Russian" are different things, and there has been a shift.
A report from 2023 (Ukrainian via Goole Translate):
During the year of full-scale war, 22% of Ukrainians have switched to using the Ukrainian language more often. This is evidenced by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Group.
The vast majority of respondents identify themselves as citizens of Ukraine (compared to 2021, the figure increased from 76% to 94%). Half identify themselves as Europeans (a double increase).
They speak russian naturally and switch between the two at will. In my experience
I’m not disputing that there is now a real desire to make Ukrainian dominant. It’s one of the ironies of Putin’s war - he is helping to forge a real Ukrainian identity - something which was much more blurred before he sent in his stupid army
It is quite amusing that this website is full of people who like to think highly of their knowledge about the world, but the acceptable analysis of Ukraine cannot go beyond 'they have to win and we have to keep giving them whatever they need to do it'. Anyone who disagrees is 'evil' and 'literally a Hitler appeaser'. The standard of debate about this is at a school yard level. Perhaps people are seeking reassurance that they are 'in the right' and they get it, because they have created a climate where no one can actually offer a critical perspective. When someone like Nigel Farage comes along and says something critical, they cannot handle it, jumping to the conclusion that 'he's Putin's shill. It must now be over for him and the Reform Party. Bet accordingly'.
The situation in Ukraine reveals a paradox. Every time Russia starts losing ground, it ramps up talk of using nuclear weapons. When Russia starts looking like it may succeed, then more funding is put in to the defence of Ukraine by its Western backers. This appears to have little to do with good and evil, it is more like a proxy for a great power conflict. The conflict will probably go on and on even after Ukraine has been concluded, as the regime in Russia has been found to be stable and resilient, it is aggrieved and feels under threat, it has a psychology that it is in a state of war, so it is likely to start up another conflict.
If you want to avoid this, you have to think at a strategic level about how to resolve the problem, but not many people appear able to do that.
Man is jailed and banned for driving for 20 years after driving wrong way on a road whilst on bail. He killed two people (a passenger) and a mother of 8.
At what point do people get banned from driving for life?
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
I suspect Russian invasion, pillage, rape and slaughter of Ukraine might be a problem for assimilation.
In much the same way that the Irish ordinary public in Dublin, who were virtually spitting at the 1916 Easter Rising rebels when they were defeated and rounded up, turned on the British when they were treated so harshly by a closed military tribunal not a court of law, including executing those were badly injured one of whom had to be carried to the place he was shot.
Obviously they saw things diffently in the north, just as they did in Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.
Partition is inevitable, just as it was in Ireland.
Leon. I see where you are coming from. At home I would bet they talk Ukrainian. Many of them can speak Russian but as you say Russian cannot be very popular at the moment unless you live in one of the three Russian provinces and even there I have seen enough studies to show me that Ukrainian is not used. They must learn Ukrainian in school surely in the three provinces?
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
I’ve given you the stats. At least half of Ukrainians speak Russian. I’ve also travelled widely around Ukraine and they all speak Russian - except in the west. There. That’s it
Are you still in Ukraine? Perhaps ask some people whether they *choose* to speak Russian?
I think that there are a lot of people for whom Russian has been their 'family' language who have opted to speak Ukrainian. It is a badge of identity, and an expression of national independence.
"Ability to speak Russian" and "choose to speak Russian" are different things, and there has been a shift.
A report from 2023 (Ukrainian via Goole Translate):
During the year of full-scale war, 22% of Ukrainians have switched to using the Ukrainian language more often. This is evidenced by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Group.
The vast majority of respondents identify themselves as citizens of Ukraine (compared to 2021, the figure increased from 76% to 94%). Half identify themselves as Europeans (a double increase).
They speak russian naturally and switch between the two at will. In my experience
I’m not disputing that there is now a real desire to make Ukrainian dominant. It’s one of the ironies of Putin’s war - he is helping to forge a real Ukrainian identity - something which was much more blurred before he sent in his stupid army
That’s correct. My wife is one of many who considered themselves ‘russian’ (small R) before the war, but now very much blue and yellow Ukranian. Ukraine has only existed since 1991, so there’s many people with a mixed identity, well there were until Feb 24th 2022.
If the Tory party had mounted another leadership challenge to get rid of Sunak before this election it would of made no difference to the result of this election. It just would of made them look a bigger joke than they already are.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
The use of the Ukranian language has increased dramatically as a result of the war. Before 2022, everyone would mostly converse in Russian (or English in Kiev and Lviv). Think Welsh language use in Wales for a reasonable comparison.
Welsh, of course, is a radically different language from English although Welsh speakers are happy to drift in and out of English as appropriate, much as educated English drift in and out of Latin or French occasionally. I'm not conversant with Russian or Ukrainian but Russian nationalists seem to regard Ukrainian as either a dialect or, even worse, an accent. Someone once said a language is a dialect with an army, so Ukrainian has certainly passed that test. Are the languages radically different or is it more of a continuum?
Darkage. How would you reslove the problem exactly? If you cut a deal with Putin how could you be sure he would keep his word?
You can’t cut a deal with Putin
Ultimately this will end - at least for a while - with some frozen armistice and both sides rearming and a long period of cold hostility but not actual fighting. Like Korea. If we’re lucky
I have heard Ukrainians predict this, so it’s not me being a “fucking appeaser”
An armistice that stopped the fighting for decades was easier in Korea because:
1. Both sides had ended up pretty much where they started, neither was occupying substantial territory that had previously belonged to the other side 2. The US was able to credibly promise security to South Korea by stationing troops there indefinitely. You can't make a deal like that here because having western troops in Ukraine is the main thing Putin is trying to avoid 3. Unlike Ukraine the parties in Korea hadn't already tried this approach, only to end up with a bigger war
True. But how else does it end?
I don’t see Ukraine seizing back serious amounts of territory. But Russia is equally stuck
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
Every Welsh person I've ever met - and I mean every one over the age of six - speaks English just as fluently as they do Welsh. That does not make them English.
But that wasn’t your claim. You claimed that “only a third” of Ukrainians speak Russian and I’m saying - from what I’ve personally witnessed - that sounds like bullshit. For a start anyone over 40 will have been a child when Ukraine was part of the USSR and everyone learned Russian. That’s half the country right there
"Learned" Russian ≠ "speaks" Russian.
I learned French at school. I don't speak French today.
I was in the pub last night and people weremt talking about it. Theres also some subtle admiration for Putin as a get things done strong leader.
He hasn't got Ukraine or his Economy "done", has he?
That's an important question. What has Putin done for Russia, especially outside of Moscow and St Petersburg?
Russia was in terrible trouble in the 90s, but had great potential. It had massive oil, gas and mineral wealth; it had a gigantic industrial base, and a highly-educated population. If he had invested the money from the oil and gas into the general economy and infrastructure, then Russia might have become an economic powerhouse by now.
Instead, he chose to allow his allies to steal much of that wealth, and much of the population, especially outside the major urban centers, saw little benefits from that wealth.
Look at how South Korea has picked itself up between 1960 and 1980, or Taiwan. Russia had a much better starting position than either of those two countries, and yet Putin chose a different route.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
You're likely overestimating it because its more likely to be spoken in the big cities you visit.
No I’m not. Wiki:
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
You're still talking about cities, which are often different to the surrounding areas and even more so to rural areas.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
I’ve given you the stats. At least half of Ukrainians speak Russian. I’ve also travelled widely around Ukraine and they all speak Russian - except in the west. There. That’s it
Are you still in Ukraine? Perhaps ask some people whether they *choose* to speak Russian?
I think that there are a lot of people for whom Russian has been their 'family' language who have opted to speak Ukrainian. It is a badge of identity, and an expression of national independence.
"Ability to speak Russian" and "choose to speak Russian" are different things, and there has been a shift.
A report from 2023 (Ukrainian via Goole Translate):
During the year of full-scale war, 22% of Ukrainians have switched to using the Ukrainian language more often. This is evidenced by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Group.
The vast majority of respondents identify themselves as citizens of Ukraine (compared to 2021, the figure increased from 76% to 94%). Half identify themselves as Europeans (a double increase).
They speak russian naturally and switch between the two at will. In my experience
I’m not disputing that there is now a real desire to make Ukrainian dominant. It’s one of the ironies of Putin’s war - he is helping to forge a real Ukrainian identity - something which was much more blurred before he sent in his stupid army
That’s correct. My wife is one of many who considered themselves ‘russian’ (small R) before the war, but now very much blue and yellow Ukranian. Ukraine has only existed since 1991, so there’s many people with a mixed identity, well there were until Feb 24th 2022.
There was briefly the Ukrainian People's Republic though in 1918.
It ends because Putin gets bored. He says. We give them bloody nose. North Korea is not my friend. I have problem with them now............. I am making a joke!
With the benefit of a nights sleep I have come to the conclusion that Farage does not want to lead a group of 40 Reform MPs. He is trying to hit 20% of the vote but not win more than 2 or 3 seats allowing him to claim the establishment are against him and his turning round the U.K. is being prevented by ‘the blob’. That is, in his mind, the way to maximise brand Nigel and gain his best financial return. Frankly the idea that anyone can possibly think he has the best interests of anyone other than himself at heart is bonkers.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
I suspect Russian invasion, pillage, rape and slaughter of Ukraine might be a problem for assimilation.
In much the same way that the Irish ordinary public in Dublin, who were virtually spitting at the 1916 Easter Rising rebels when they were defeated and rounded up, turned on the British when they were treated so harshly by a closed military tribunal not a court of law, including executing those were badly injured one of whom had to be carried to the place he was shot.
Obviously they saw things diffently in the north, just as they did in Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.
Partition is inevitable, just as it was in Ireland.
Yeah, partition is inevitable. But the question is how much of Russia does China get?
Man is jailed and banned for driving for 20 years after driving wrong way on a road whilst on bail. He killed two people (a passenger) and a mother of 8.
At what point do people get banned from driving for life?
In the real world I imagine he'll be released after five minutes because of overcrowding about 9-12 years.
UK law is weird on some of these points. It should be a punishment element, and then indeterminate from then until he has proven his mental stability and psychological suitability to be given control of vehicles that can harm others.
There is considerable discretion to impose driving bans where the Courts deem appropriate - even at Magistrates Court level, but it is hardly used. Plus more loopholes than a colander around eg 'exceptional hardship'.
The Sentencing Council did a consultation this spring, but even they did not ask many of the right questions.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
The use of the Ukranian language has increased dramatically as a result of the war. Before 2022, everyone would mostly converse in Russian (or English in Kiev and Lviv). Think Welsh language use in Wales for a reasonable comparison.
Welsh, of course, is a radically different language from English although Welsh speakers are happy to drift in and out of English as appropriate, much as educated English drift in and out of Latin or French occasionally. I'm not conversant with Russian or Ukrainian but Russian nationalists seem to regard Ukrainian as either a dialect or, even worse, an accent. Someone once said a language is a dialect with an army, so Ukrainian has certainly passed that test. Are the languages radically different or is it more of a continuum?
Welsh and English are at least both indo European. There's ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania who are obliged to learn indo European Romanian on top of their Uralic first language. They all pride themselves on being very very bad at Romanian.
Nigel needs to be careful here. His instinct will be to retaliate and slag Zelensky off in a snide and dismissive way, but he'd be well advised to bite his tongue - brand Nigel is in a precarious situation and the slightest ill-judged remark could kill it off.
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
I suspect Russian invasion, pillage, rape and slaughter of Ukraine might be a problem for assimilation.
In much the same way that the Irish ordinary public in Dublin, who were virtually spitting at the 1916 Easter Rising rebels when they were defeated and rounded up, turned on the British when they were treated so harshly by a closed military tribunal not a court of law, including executing those were badly injured one of whom had to be carried to the place he was shot.
Obviously they saw things diffently in the north, just as they did in Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.
Partition is inevitable, just as it was in Ireland.
It's the easiest thing in the world to assert that the thing you want is inevitable.
Probably a couple of years ago you would have been asserting that it was inevitable that Ukraine would be incorporated into Russia by force.
Did Ceaușescu really think, when he started to make that speech in Bucharest, that he would be dead four days later?
The total value of the minerals in Ukraines are estimated to be from 10 to 14.8 trillion depending on who you believe with more than 70.0% concentrated in Donetsk, Luhansk and Dnipro. Apart from Oil and gas,coal, Titanium, Lithium. It has 5% of the earths mineral resources. Iron Ore , Copper, Nickel, The list is endless and this is the main reason Russia has the interest in the country. Not only the defense argument we are given.
Also the people. Russia is in a demographic crisis and if Putin can add 20 million white Christian Slavic Ukrainians - who speak Russian anyway - to the Russian empire then that is a massive win - there’s no problem with assimilation etc etc
Well, it might be (probably is) a factor in what passes for Putin's thought processes, but rather less than a third of Ukrainians are Russian speaking so it won't even be close to 20 million.
I’m dubious of that language statistic. I’m not dismissing it but nearly all the Ukrainians I’ve met - in Ukraine - seem to speak Russian in addition to Ukrainian. They are bilingual. And you hear it everywhere - except places like lviv but they have a very different history - Lviv was part of austro-hungary
Maybe a third of Ukrainians speak Russian as their “main language”. That would make more sense
Every Welsh person I've ever met - and I mean every one over the age of six - speaks English just as fluently as they do Welsh. That does not make them English.
But that wasn’t your claim. You claimed that “only a third” of Ukrainians speak Russian and I’m saying - from what I’ve personally witnessed - that sounds like bullshit. For a start anyone over 40 will have been a child when Ukraine was part of the USSR and everyone learned Russian. That’s half the country right there
"Learned" Russian ≠ "speaks" Russian.
I learned French at school. I don't speak French today.
Nigel needs to be careful here. His instinct will be to retaliate and slag Zelensky off in a snide and dismissive way, but he'd be well advised to bite his tongue - brand Nigel is in a precarious situation and the slightest ill-judged remark could kill it off.
Well, we can all hope but he's been walking this tightrope for a long, long time. It's not his first rodeo.
There’s constituency polls showing the Greens might have a viable shot at 4+ seats.
Sunak campaigning in seats with 20,000+ Tory majorities.
Lib Dems optimistic about tons of targets.
Reform shooting themselves in the foot but still appearing to have some viable skin in the game.
What signs are we currently missing to make us think that Labour 500 seats / Lib Dems official opposition / Tories under 50 seats (or a combo of the above) is actually on?
Nigel needs to be careful here. His instinct will be to retaliate and slag Zelensky off in a snide and dismissive way, but he'd be well advised to bite his tongue - brand Nigel is in a precarious situation and the slightest ill-judged remark could kill it off.
Yes, to go back to the original point - which was Farage rather than Ukraine - I think this might have done real damage to Reform. Its headline news
It’s not so much the specifics of his point - it’s that it reinforces the latent image of Farage as a bit dodgy. That’s always there - hovering. The spivviness, the guy who went on Russia today. It badly tarnishes his carefully curated image as the plain honest speaker and makes him something significantly nastier
So a lot of people who might have been considering a Reform vote will now think again, perhaps. It therefore stops the Reform momentum at exactly the wrong time
He should have found better words - or found a way to evade the question entirely
Comments
"The total number of Russian casualties (killed and wounded) since the start of the war in February 2022 has now likely reached 500,000. Russian losses have continued at a high level in 2024, and in May average Russian personnel casualties were over 1,200 per day – the highest reported since the start of the war."
The large majority of these casualties are dead, because the Russian forces lack an organised system for medical evacuation.
So not 500K dead, but not that far off it.
It was when Ukrainians started shooting russians that all hell broke loose - as Russians then suspected everyone and killed everyone on sight - hence massacres like bucha
It wasn't even as if I was making big bets or winning consistently. I assume that they're doing some form of data-sharing behind the scenes, and I was flagged because they were able to see that I only bet when there was an offer available.
But there were no warnings, no indications that I was doing anything wrong, and no way to restore my status. I felt like I was being implicitly accused of cheating, and it's put me off ever dealing with them again even.
If sovereign nations aren't allowed to join supranational bodies, they're not sovereign nations are they?
And likewise, if supranational bodies aren't allowed to accept members, are they supranational bodies. [1]
[1] Just to clarify, subject to their own internal rules on membership acceptance. The EU wouldn't accept (say) Canada, despite Canada meeting all the economic and political requirements because Canada isn't in Europe.
Its more that he likes to be the centre of attention.
If he has political goals he's more likely to get them fulfilled by hanging around with Trump than being a backbench MP in Westminster.
As you probs know [do you?] he's a convicted criminal and Class A drug dealer. He was convicted of violent behaviour after splitting a boy's head open in a machete attack.
https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2023-08-05/teens-exposed-boys-skull-after-machete-attack
So he disappeared after apparently cutting himself on a cactus after an all night rave but that morning he was seen going to a nearby villa with two strangers. He has been conning people in Tenerife and was caught red handed trying to steal a watch. Now his, also dodgy, mum has added herself to a Go Fund Me page which was set up by Lucy, also a known drug dealer on the island, without any explanation as to what it's for.
Sometimes the British press need to pull their fucking finger out
According to July 2012 polling [of ukraine] by RATING, 50% of the surveyed adult residents over 18 years of age considered their native language to be Ukrainian, 29% said Russian, 20% identified both Russian and Ukrainian as their native language
So that’s 49% of Ukrainians who perceive Russian as either their only native language or one of their native languages. Half the country. Add in Ukrainians than have acquired Russian as they grow up or move (eg to Kyiv where Russian dominates) and it means well over half Ukrainians speak Russian
And that accords with what I’ve witnessed - Lviv is the only city where I heard barely any Russian
Indeed I was quite surprised by the amount of Russian spoken in Moldova
Western liberal democracy is better to live under than authoritarian fascism, just as it was better to live under than communism - for the same reason you didn't see many westerners hopping over to the other side of the Berlin wall, you don't find many of Putin's near neighbours eagerly clamouring to join him.
Putinists like Mearsheimer because they would have us throw near neighbours of fascist states under the bus to create buffer zones, but that's just a fancy academic way of justifying appeasement. However, when you strip out the good and evil from internatrional relations (which arguably is impossible) and seek only to describe states' behaviours as rational actors, irrespective of their ideology, it explains why a fascist regional hegemon can't suffer a liberal democratic neighbour on its doorstep. And hence you get war. Which I think the neorealists consider inevitable, hence Mearsheimer's concept of offensive realism.
https://x.com/TomTugendhat/status/1804451082979910083
Obviously that makes me pro-French.
I’ve met plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who are out there actually fighting Russia and prepared to die doing so
Brexit aside.
I learned French at school. I don't speak French today.
His numbers are a straight category error putting in wounded with killed, without even needing to interrogate the 2:1 assumption. Therefore patent BS.
On your numbers, tbf, you just jumped from "Judging by these flags I saw in Maidan square, Kyiv, last week - each one representing a dead Ukrainian - 200,000 dead Ukrainians seems a perfectly reasonable guess " to "tens of thousands of flags" in the space of one comment.
That's a *jump*, and you are not clear about your categories. Who do you mean? Civilian, military etc? Killed, wounded? Do you suggest that the representation is comprehensive, or are known there dead Ukrainians without a flag present?
The official Ukrainian military deathssince the full invasion published by Zelensky in Feb 2024 were 31,000 in 2 years, plus 7-15k "missing". Ukrainian civilian deaths are stated as around 11k+ killed confirmed, plus as many again missing. *
So I suggest that 200k may be a reasonable number for Ukrainian casualties covering military and civilian ie killed and seriously wounded, *not* for killed.
Seriously, did you count or estimate the actual number of flags?
HTH. I do, by the way, enjoy the travel coverage.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
Russia is an irredentist power that will seek further territorial gains, if it succeeds in Ukraine. It’s better for us that their armies are being ground down in Eastern Ukraine, rather than pushing into the Baltic States or Moldova.
And Russian doesn't dominate in Kyiv.
Note that while Russian as a native language was 25% in Kyiv city it was only 7% in the Kyiv oblast which surrounds it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language_in_Ukraine#/media/File:Ukraine_census_2001_Russian.svg
Now imagine that next door there’s an unhappy marriage with a paranoid and possibly violent husband and a drunken despairing wife who has cuckolded him. The husband is angry and bitter
We like the wife and we know she wants to escape the marriage. She would like to work in our thriving business
Probably the best thing for the wife is that she moves out and lives on her own for a while - let the husband get over his anger or drink himself to death. Let it pan out
Then we can employ her and he won’t care and the problem is solved
Instead we decided to go on a camping holiday with her with just one tent. It was innocent - we both like camping - but, really, one tent? What did we expect to happen?
Now we sit in our living room and we can hear him beating the shit out of her as he accuses her of sleeping with us in that tent
Eek. Ultimately it’s all his fault. He’s the evil wife beater. But the camping holiday was an error by us
There. That’s sorted it. Now I must pack for France
The situation in Ukraine reveals a paradox. Every time Russia starts losing ground, it ramps up talk of using nuclear weapons. When Russia starts looking like it may succeed, then more funding is put in to the defence of Ukraine by its Western backers. This appears to have little to do with good and evil, it is more like a proxy for a great power conflict. The conflict will probably go on and on even after Ukraine has been concluded, as the regime in Russia has been found to be stable and resilient, it is aggrieved and feels under threat, it has a psychology that it is in a state of war, so it is likely to start up another conflict.
If you want to avoid this, you have to think at a strategic level about how to resolve the problem, but not many people appear able to do that.
We’ve had a pretty unbreakable consensus in Britain about supporting Ukraine in its time of need. Polling on this shows Brits among the most supportive anywhere. That may partly be because of our long and problematic relationship with Russia, who see us at times as their primary strategic foe, up there with Poland as a rent-free tenant of their brains.
The danger is that Farage pulls people away from that consensus because they agree with him on other issues, like immigration. It wouldn’t be the first time that sort of thing has happened. A few loud voices have done the same to the previous fudged consensus on trans people, for example.
My source? Conversation with a journalist yesterday, although the lad's conviction is of course a matter of public record.
A lot of the country admire "strongmen" like Putin.
Being willing to say things outside the overton window is a key part of what he is selling. To many who want change, but dont know exactly what change, someone willing to say controversial things becomes their only hope vs the status quo limited by the reality of tough demographics and budgets.
Attention, just like one of our prolific posters, he just wants attention.
It may also be a tasteless analogy so I shall make tea and contemplate my itinerary
Leon hasn't been banned.
Ultimately this will end - at least for a while - with some frozen armistice and both sides rearming and a long period of cold hostility but not actual fighting. Like Korea. If we’re lucky
I have heard Ukrainians predict this, so it’s not me being a “fucking appeaser”
“Therefore I think the correct policy for Western countries is the following:”
I’ve done that many times since 2022 but to restate here, the correct policy is to equip Ukraine to fight properly with Russia until it is ready to negotiate a peace, on its own terms. And to ratchet up sanctions enforcement which is becoming increasingly leaky.
One of those wonderful sentences where you can put the emphasis almost anywhere and true in a different way.
@alexwickham
·
2h
— there is total fury among Tories at the quality of their campaign
— two ministers say they think Sunak should announce this weekend he understands the public want change and hand over the campaign to Cabinet to make the case for a strong opposition
https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1804428407272353814
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2024/06/spain-pre-qualifying2024.html
No tip, but would've backed Hamilton each way at 11 for pole.
I think that there are a lot of people for whom Russian has been their 'family' language who have opted to speak Ukrainian. It is a badge of identity, and an expression of national independence.
"Ability to speak Russian" and "choose to speak Russian" are different things, and there has been a shift.
A report from 2023 (Ukrainian via Goole Translate):
During the year of full-scale war, 22% of Ukrainians have switched to using the Ukrainian language more often. This is evidenced by the results of a survey conducted by the Rating Group.
The vast majority of respondents identify themselves as citizens of Ukraine (compared to 2021, the figure increased from 76% to 94%). Half identify themselves as Europeans (a double increase).
82% consider Ukrainian to be their native language, and 60% speak it at home, which is the highest figure since 2012.
https://chytomo.com/en/more-than-20-of-ukrainians-started-using-ukrainian-more-often/
And with this happening so soon after Michael Mosley's death.
Perhaps I'm being cynical but it gives me echoes of the Madeleine McCann / Shannon Matthews imitation.
Reputable published stats (well summarised by parts of the Wiki piece linked earlier) suggest that it is perhaps 1:3 killed:wounded for Russia, and 1:5 or 1:6 for Ukraine.
Estimates for Russians killed are of the order of 150k.
Which - even with the significantly worse ratio for Russia, is still nothing like 500k killed.
1. Both sides had ended up pretty much where they started, neither was occupying substantial territory that had previously belonged to the other side
2. The US was able to credibly promise security to South Korea by stationing troops there indefinitely. You can't make a deal like that here because having western troops in Ukraine is the main thing Putin is trying to avoid
3. Unlike Ukraine the parties in Korea hadn't already tried this approach, only to end up with a bigger war
At what point do people get banned from driving for life?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cprr08wx8vlo
And it's actually worse. Putin's a heartless bastard, and he'll raise a small smile when someone on his side dies rather than is permanently wounded.
Permanently wounded is a 30 year commitment (well, would be..... I suppose Russia will just cast them aside even worse than the US did with its Vietnam vets). Death means no such problem.
I’m not disputing that there is now a real desire to make Ukrainian dominant. It’s one of the ironies of Putin’s war - he is helping to forge a real Ukrainian identity - something which was much more blurred before he sent in his stupid army
So in theory it's a two year driving ban.
In the real world I imagine he'll be released after
five minutes because of overcrowdingabout 9-12 years.Obviously they saw things diffently in the north, just as they did in Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.
Partition is inevitable, just as it was in Ireland.
Lab 39.9%
Con 19.7%
Ref 17.8%
LD 11.3%
Grn 6.1%
SNP 2.8%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_United_Kingdom_general_election#National_poll_results
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13557583/Nigel-Farage-blasted-echoing-Putins-vile-justification-Ukraine.html
I don’t see Ukraine seizing back serious amounts of territory. But Russia is equally stuck
🤷🏼♂️
Russia was in terrible trouble in the 90s, but had great potential. It had massive oil, gas and mineral wealth; it had a gigantic industrial base, and a highly-educated population. If he had invested the money from the oil and gas into the general economy and infrastructure, then Russia might have become an economic powerhouse by now.
Instead, he chose to allow his allies to steal much of that wealth, and much of the population, especially outside the major urban centers, saw little benefits from that wealth.
Look at how South Korea has picked itself up between 1960 and 1980, or Taiwan. Russia had a much better starting position than either of those two countries, and yet Putin chose a different route.
"Peter Hitchens & Konstantin Kisin debate the Ukraine war"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fd392zi2uc
There is considerable discretion to impose driving bans where the Courts deem appropriate - even at Magistrates Court level, but it is hardly used. Plus more loopholes than a colander around eg 'exceptional hardship'.
The Sentencing Council did a consultation this spring, but even they did not ask many of the right questions.
Probably a couple of years ago you would have been asserting that it was inevitable that Ukraine would be incorporated into Russia by force.
Did Ceaușescu really think, when he started to make that speech in Bucharest, that he would be dead four days later?
Sunak campaigning in seats with 20,000+ Tory majorities.
Lib Dems optimistic about tons of targets.
Reform shooting themselves in the foot but still appearing to have some viable skin in the game.
What signs are we currently missing to make us think that Labour 500 seats / Lib Dems official opposition / Tories under 50 seats (or a combo of the above) is actually on?
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet
It’s not so much the specifics of his point - it’s that it reinforces the latent image of Farage as a bit dodgy. That’s always there - hovering. The spivviness, the guy who went on Russia today. It badly tarnishes his carefully curated image as the plain honest speaker and makes him something significantly nastier
So a lot of people who might have been considering a Reform vote will now think again, perhaps. It therefore stops the Reform momentum at exactly the wrong time
He should have found better words - or found a way to evade the question entirely