Lionator

so completely pointless, just a continuation of the war as Putin won’t agree to a ceasefire which involves British and French troops in Ukraine and we won’t intervene for obvious reasons.

Yes. My whole point is that we don’t need act hysterically and make any dramatic moves over this whole thing. Keep calm and carry on.

Do what we’re doing, give weaponry to stabilise the front lines, while engaging in forms of diplomacy with Russians (Americans can do this for us if we really, really don’t want to talk to Russians). Again it comes down to the idea that you either think Putin is Hitler pt.2 who wants to role through Europe, or is just another Russian tyrannical leader whose influence is actually very limited outside the Russian geopolitical sphere.

Therefore it’s not credible on a wider scale if it’s not credible to either the United States or Russia. I could credibly think that I could pull Sydney Sweeney but if that’s not a credible thing to her, then it’s not going to happen. It would be my job to make that a credible option to her. Throwing an underresourced British and French army onto the ground in the plains of Ukraine is not going to stop the war.

Seems like they’re going on their own little imperial adventure in Syria too.

Fair and credible are two different things though.

This is the best analysis on it all that I’ve seen.

So we keep saying to Ukraine that they can realistically take back Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk?? We should 100% be sending weapons to freeze the frontlines where they are. All of the European ‘peace plans’ involve one side of the war. The sad truth is Putin doesn’t respect us, but he would respect the United States and Zelenskyy knows this hence why he’s so desperate for security guarantees from them. That he’s not going to get. We’re lying to ourselves over and over again.

And yet only one out of the two of them has a semi-credible plan for ‘peace’. Giving Zelenskyy hugs and giving him a red carpet to Buckingham palace doesn’t bring us any closer to peace, it just prolongs the war by gaslighting Ukraine into thinking we’d actually fight for them and makes us feel better about ourselves while the Ukranian (and Russian) 20, 30 and 40 year olds continue to get killed en masse.

A war with Russia would be a damn lot more expensive than Iraq because you’d need to take measures at home. Iraq didn’t have the capability of obliterating the whole country in a few minutes for example (hence why even the mere thought of going to war with Russia is insane). Also, imagine what happens to the world economy when two nuclear powers start a war against each other. It would crash.

We’d want Russia to think they would but let’s be honest they probably wouldn’t. Not to begin with anyway. It would have to escalate. But again we’d have to work out what motivation Putin would have to actually try and attack Estonia. Because it would be an almighty and needless gamble now he has his man in the White House.

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.