CNN article: Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Kyiv Friday of delaying the negotiation process during a call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Somebody is getting antsy …
(time is a friend to the Ukr. and a foe for Russia)
so many signals of distress
I get the feeling Russia is now at the equivalent point of time of “early to mid-1944” for Nazi-Germany
also CNN: and the decision by Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil company, to call on Putin to end the conflict as evidence of the impact.
Maybe. But Germany didn’t have nukes back then. Even without them, they were still plenty dangerous, despite the lack of prospects of eventual victory.
I do agree with that part. I don’t see any way for Russia to win. Their best case scenario at this point is seemingly taking over empty land after a genocide by artillery.
I was going to say much the same. He doesn’t assume any goodwill on the part of his intended audience based on his celebrity. Spends about half the message explaining why he has respect for the Russian people. Goes to lengths to forgive them their situation, laying no blame at their feet. Doesn’t even begin to tell Russians they’re being fed false propaganda until the latter half of the message. On the whole, I could scarcely imagine doing a better job in the winning hearts and minds department.
With the caveat that if Lukashenko is deposed, it most likely won’t be a popular revolution, but a political decapitation by a hardliner allied with, or actually from, the military.
Also, Lukashenko won’t be put against the wall; he’ll smell the danger and hightail it to Russia like Yanukovych.
Putin would still have cyberspace capability and sneaky ways of eliminating his enemies, even without his military, but it still wouldn’t be enough to fully cow other countries without his nukes.
I keep seeing news articles referring to the “UK Defense Ministry”. My first impulse is always to wonder why the United Kingdom has any special knowledge of what’s going on in Ukraine, before realizing that in this context UK is a reference to Ukraine. I wish there were a more unique abbreviation for Ukraine in common use.
The IOC three letter system is probably the most easily decipherable. Ukraine is UKR and the UK is GBR. Just hope Austria (AUT) and Australia (AUS) never go to war…
I had no idea. Through this entire thread I assumed those blue boxed infographics were the product of the Ukrainian government and took them with a huge grain of salt. Why the Hell are they all dressed up in Ukrainian colors? The whole design and content screams propaganda.
Sorry, I thought it was clear. To me UK means United Kingdom, and nothing else.
The official two-letter abbreviation for Ukraine is UA, but otherwise it’s simply written out as Ukraine. I’ve literally never seen UK used to refer to Ukraine.
Are you referring to the tiny stripe in the Ukrainian flag colors in the top right corner?
Or are you objecting to the Navy Blue background color which has been used on UK government websites for almost 30 years? You do realize that the use of yellow as a contrasting color to deep blues is pretty much Style 101 right?
Thanks for trying (and @GreenWyvern as well). The images you post look identical to me and clicking simply brings the same image up at the same size. Not your fault, the Ministry is failing to make an accessible publication.
From what I’ve read around the Cold War, the UK has often served as the US’s intelligence arm in Europe. CIA were always more busy trying to convince people to do things and were less focused on long-commitment tasks like infiltration and wire taps. (Though, it could just be a matter of our spreading out to cover the world, versus the UK being able to focus on Europe.)
They have a strong intelligence capability, from what I’ve seen.
I’ve never seen Ukraine abbreviated, except as UKR in the Olympics; it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be something other than UK, since UK was already taken by Queen Elizabeth and her royal subjects. All that means is I didn’t really think this through - so thanks for the lesson.
I would have thought that the logo in the top left corner would have been clear. It’s not the Ukrainian trident. It’s the symbol of the UK armed forces, complete with Crown.
As for the blue and yellow stripes, that’s a quick visual identifier of the subject matter.