Lionator

Preventing war through deterrence is by orders of magnitude less expensive than going to war.

Of course! I highly disapprove of the slaughter of Palestinians but it doesn’t stop it does it?

And this is the issue isn’t it. “We stand with Ukraine”, “Winning the peace”, “for as long as it takes”. Slogans that have misled the Ukrainians into believing that we’ll be there for them while we do not have the hard or soft power to actually do any of these things.

Basically how it’s always been, we’ve just had a 30 year break since 1991. USA and Soviet Union have been doing this since 1945, it’s just a sad continuation of that. Our generation live in a bubble where we see right and wrong as deciphers of geopolitics, but geopolitics is about greed and injustice, it’s just that Trump says the silent part out loud.

Yes. We’re all emotionally tied to this and the injustice of it all. But ask yourself and your family members, are some towns in the east of Ukraine worth completely transforming your life for? Air raids, risk of escalation to nuclear war, massive cuts on healthcare and other welfare systems to fund urgent defence measures massive alteration to your way of life. Because that’s what war with Russia would entail. And I think if you laid it out as starkly as that, it’s simply not in our interest. What is in our interest is to stop this war, invest in our armed forces to ensure Putin isn’t tempted to go any further and to work on maintaining our relationship with the states and other EU powers. As I’ve said in other posts, and posted on the old Ukraine thread. It was ALWAYS going to end like this once the counter offensive of 2023 failed. You’ve been duped into thinking Ukraine could expel Russians from Ukrainian lands, people now still think they’re imminently going to see Ukranian tanks rolling into Crimea. It’s not happening. So Zelenskyy either ends it now with the best deal he can get with the US or he just slowly loses more ground until both sides run out of steam.

But Russia will never agree to a ceasefire that leaves British or French troops in Ukraine. So the war would roll in regardless. And it simply is not in our greater interest to engage in an active war with Russia. Putin will simply call our bluff on that.

I’m sorry but so many reactions are bordering on insane, it’s actually becoming incredibly dangerous. If Europe falls? How would it fall? Who is going to make it fall? The army that couldn’t even take a fifth of one of the poorest countries in Europe? Do you really think Putin has any intention of rolling across Europe?? Listen and read to actual experts on this topic rather than the sound bites on sky news and on social media by people who haven’t got the first clue about foreign policy, who only flit from one crisis news topic to another. Europe is not falling. Europe will be fine. It just needs to grow a backbone, and believe itself again. Putin is a bad man, he is not insane.

Europe isn’t sending troops to Ukraine so that won’t be a problem. We won’t engage in a war with Russia unless we’ve lost our collective minds.

The only defence you can offer the Millwall keeper is that it was an ginormous cock up rather than anything malicious but the consequences were awful.

Game over already. Even if Root and Brook go big, we’ve lost too many wickets too early to get a defendable score.

China is essentially the only rational major power in the world. The amount of trade they’ll do off the back of this is insane.

Using a nuke would be insane in these circumstances. Putin would only do that if his regime was about to die and we’ve never been further away from that.

Russia is not a communist country. It’s one of the most appalling examples of an ultra capitalist country where a rich 0.00001% own everything while the plebs suffer.

Georgia has a Russian friendly government now though so why would he? Armenia is in the CSTO, and has enough issues with Turkey and Azerbaijan, if anything getting strong armed by Russia would be a blessing for them. To get to Moldova, he’d need to have a path. The only genuine risk I think is militarisation of the Arctic which would be devastating for so many reasons.

It was always going to end this way by the way. People had the wool pulled over their eyes for three years. Now you’re feeling the betrayal. It’s probably better in the long run that it happened like this than a long drawn affair. The anger in Ukraine and parts of Europe will last for decades. Europe and the west is mainly led by short sighted idiots that haven’t a clue. Zelensky will always be a hero but he’s finished.

I don’t care for Trump, he’s a lunatic. My discomfort is with the last administration. Frankly there’s two ways to view the world, the first is that there is a right and wrong way to be ie liberal democratic values good, everything else bad (even as a Liberal Democrat myself), the second is the Kissinger style real politik. A cynical, disgusting world where everything is transactional. Unfortunately the last administration gaslighted Zelenskyy into thinking the first one is reality, when as we see now, and have seen since 1945, it’s the second. And yes maybe this will bite me on the arse, but Putin the loser hasn’t been able to take a fifth of Ukraine, while destroying his economy, wiping out the next generation of Russian males and blowing all of Russia’s Soviet stockpiles. Why should I believe that he’s going to take on the whole of Europe?

Sickening rudeness aside, Trump is just doing what Biden was afraid to say. For three years they lied and gaslighted Ukraine into thinking they could join NATO when they had absolutely no intention of that ever happening. It was a pathetic, weak policy, it was dangerous. Of course the USA is never going to fight against Russians because we all know where that leads. Yet Biden and Blinken made the Ukrainians think that that was a possibility. So while what happened today was disgusting, it is not a new issue, it is a culmination of muddled geopolitical thinking. Putin also won’t need to rebuild his army to attack Ukraine again because he’s probably going to get what he wants anyway now. A neutral Ukrainian state not in NATO. Unless of course you believe he’s Hitler pt.2 and is going to roll through Europe.

A lot of people are saying that the ‘peace deal is off’, are completely misunderstanding how much Ukraine have relied on the United States. Europe cannot go this alone, our economies are not designed for it. We can let our elderly freeze or choose to massively fund and arm Ukraine. We can’t do both. Ukraine don’t have a choice, if they ‘reject’ a peace deal, then they’ll collapse.

Orban is going to lose in 2026 and even despite all the bluster, those countries still go along with most of the policy decisions in the EU. Hungary are still funding Ukraine for example.

The problem is that Trump doesn’t see Russia as an enemy. He’s sees them as a much bigger financial ally than Ukraine and maybe even the rest of Europe at this point.

It’s also stupid for America. Any country on earth faced with the choice of a trade deal with a man child in America or stable, trustworthy autocracy in China, is surely going to choose the latter. At this point I’d rather us economically align closer to China.

Damn, Trump telling Zelenskyy that the US is now a neutral country is the war and that Ukraine is losing. Awful. This press conference is an absolute disaster

He does look a bit like Brussel.

Beat Burden, Trump, Holt and Murphy to get there too, some run that.

Ant Middleton, wannabe hard man that did the SAS show on channel 4. Got sacked and is now trying his hand at politics. Prize plank if you ask me, would probably sell all of our black players.