40-some million PTSD victims, sadly - utterly tragic.
Imho Offering poisoned food and alcohol to Russian troops is a serious mistake. That’s just asking for reprisals.
A new cold war in which Russia doesn’t have the resources of the USSR. There’s apparently been a tremendous brain drain of young people fleeing Russia to avoid the war and conscription, and Russia won’t have the industrial resources of its Warsaw pact satellites to help it. Putin has spent 20 years turning Russia into a corrupt pariah petro-power, not an industrial heavy-weight.
All my fingers crossed that this will happen. I don’t see any other way out of this that isn’t massively more of a disaster than there already is.
That’s for sure.
And it’s extremely unfortunate that so many humans break in a way that causes them to then break others.
And some of those Russians who flee, even those who do so to protest the war, are also bearing the burden of Russia having been turned into a pariah.
Washington Post, but should be a gift link, so anyone should be able to read it:
I’m sorry for them, but I can also understand the feelings of Georgians towards Russians, after years of battle and occupation.
WTF are they already getting, preprisals?
The problem Russia faces in this regard is AGW. As the world seeks to move away from burning trilobites, the global market for Russian burny juice will contract. If they fail to adapt to this (which they tried to do by installing a coal-and-oil-loving stooge in the US WH), their economy will be in, shall we say, a world of hurt. This could well lead to more aggression, as economics is the base foundation of war to begin with.
The global community needs to tread carefully here, if it wants relative peace. Empowering Russia by helping them work through the imminent difficulties we all face promises to be problematic if they continue to take the expansionist position. On the other hand, fuel is major facilitator when it comes to maintaining a large country, and it is difficult to see how the major powers will be able to persist across a drastic fossil fuel draw-down.
Unfortunately impossible until Dombas and Crimea are either ceded to Russia or retaken by Ukraine. But heck at this point Ukraine ought to develop its own short-range tactical nukes.
If it tried to do that, it would come under sanctions of its own, designed to prevent nuclear spread. Plus, its GDP is not high; developing nukes from scratch is tremendously expensive. And there’s a war on, which is taking up its resources.
Does anybody have non-nuclear tipped ICBMs in their inventory, or a conventionally tipped tactical missile with sufficient range, that could be given to Ukraine, that could be targeted at Moscow?
I guess this is well-known, but I don’t remember it coming up in this thread. Ukraine had nuclear weapons left over from USSR, but agreed to give them up in a show of good faith.
Agreeing with both parts of that.
I posted that story to point out additional complications in the situation (and, I suppose, to point out yet another way in which Putin is screwing up other Russians; though I don’t think he cares.)
How do you do this? I’m a subscriber too, and I’ve looked but can’t figure out how to do it.
That’s the kind of action civilians take in response to an occupying force. And it really only works if the occupying force thinks they are not as unwelcome and hated as they actually are. I mean, why would you accept food and drink from the residents of the place you’re occupying? It may lead to reprisals against those involved, but it also sends a strong message about the chances of Russia actually being able to hold parts of Ukraine.
Somewhere near the top of the page , I think it was right above the text, there’s a batch of symbols; one of them looks like a gift box. Click on that, and you get a batch of options; I used the one that says “copy the link” and then pasted it into the post.
You get ten shares a month, I think. I don’t know whether it’s more if you’re paying more than the budget deal price for the subscription.
When have sanctions ever worked? Because I can’t think of an instance. I do hope someone can point to a case there there was a positive effect.
More often, it seems that society’s elite can evade them and it’s the common/poor people that suffer the worst.
Didn’t sanctions help end apartheid in South Africa?
(I originally wrote that I was an early teenager as an excuse for not having paid attention at the time, but turns out I was 20.)
South Africa. I remember when South African wines were not available, and some people were saying that the sanctions just hurt people who worked in the industry, who didn’t make a lot of money. And then we heard from South African labour unions who said to keep the sanctions on, even though it did have that immediate effect, because the long-term effects were positive.
There’s also the article I posted earlier that sanctions are starting to bite Russia’s war industry, by denying them high tech chips and components that they need to keep building tanks. It will always be difficult to point to particular measures, but that doesn’t mean they have no effect.
I see your point, but do those people have any other alternative? Because it sure seems like the Russians might kill them no matter what, in which case why not take a few any way you can?
Not that I’m OK with that, but I can see a certain sort of reasoning there.
^ Yeah, that.