Loving the sense of victory.

"In the Red Corner, an an enourmous army, thousands of missiles, cluster bombs, thermobaric weaponary, thousands of troops and a bunch of fairly shit Generals. In the blue corner, about 500 blokes in a factory with a few guns. This should be over in the first 10 seconds ladies and gentlemen!"

4 months later..

"And its victory! The Red's have done it people of Russia, what a victory, what a milestone, the 500 blokes have emerged and they are beaten, they are down. Next up, we have asked all our troops to surround the bungalow down the street where Mr and Mrs Zlodomir, the retired dentist couple, are holding out with their dentists drill and some packets of pasta. This could be a long, drawn out battle but Russia will prevail!"

You missed a bit. I've added it for you.

	Quote:	The Times
	In the end, it came down to a brutal calculation. How many men was it worth seeing killed in the Azovstal steelworks to keep the Russian forces surrounding them tied down? ...their last stand prevented up to 17 Russian battle groups, amounting to thousands of troops, from redeploying to the battle further east in the Donbas. The balance finally shifted in favour of rescuing the final defenders. The word surrender is being avoided but that is what it is. Still, Russia’s victory over Azovstal, cementing the capture of Mariupol, is pyrrhic. Throughout the conflict, Russian advances have met a resistance on the Ukrainian side that is both military and political. The more aggressively the Russians attack a city, the more fiercely it has been defended — and the more that defence has been used by Ukraine’s leadership to win sympathy and then military support from around the world. That has been President Putin’s strategic error throughout the conflict.

The Times quotes take from this article (paywall).

At last you had a lightbulb moment, welcome to the club.

One can only wave the nuclear shroud a few times before people start to realise the threat is not in earnest. Think of Aesop's fable "the boy who cried wolf".

Finland and Sweden have handed in their applications to join NATO, the military alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said today. Turkey's leader Erdogan has said he will block their membership, if he succeeds possibly there are other alternatives like some sort of associate membership or a mutual defence pact, I don't know.

North of Kharkiv, Ukrainian troops have reached the Russian border in several places. There are claims they are being shelled from inside Russia, if the Ukrainians retaliate then this may lead to a difficult situation.

Difficult how? I can't see why they would cross the border. You can't hide behind a wall throwing stones and then act surprised when someone comes over the wall and gives you a smack.

Didn't something like this already happen and Russia threw a hissy fit that the war should not be on it's land?

Is that this club where "The world's most obvious contradictions" are developed?

I thought that you were worried about nuclear threat and hunger previously.
So - if you seem to care, then for whom today does it matter if someone will not care in 60 years?

to understand the sense of 'victory' you would need first need to have some understanding/sympathy for the ethnic russians who were tormented by these thugs for years.

Well, Mariupol was, emphasis on was, a Russophone city. 30-50% people spoke Russian there and see what happened to it.

In order to save you from the thugs I had to destroy you first. Why are you not thankful? I'm empathetic, why don't you acknowledge it?

That just appears not to be Russia's doing but our media's.

The "Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence" seems pretty clear on this, especially pt 19. The document is from 2020 and as such should be rather current.

Bits and pieces were taken out of context en masse to create as much clickbait as is possible. That outrage can only last so long but that's none of the media's concern nowadays.

Yes, that it is part of the rationale (aka lies) given by the Kremlin for invading Crimea etc. in 2014.

Well done.

Were they? How?

Please, provide reliable source.
To predict doubts - Komsomolskaya "Pravda" doesn't count.

This thread starts to remind me of the Covid thread.

The problem I have with the current situation and stance of Western politicians is that they - publicly - make the impression that there is a military solution to this conflict, that they can literally force Russia to wave the white flag and go back to the bargaining-table.

Is that really going to happen?

Well, it may be and it might actually work, for now.

But if you look ahead, we will have many, many millions of famine victims in the 3rd world - and as a result, many million more refugees in Europe, further destabilizing our political systems.

At the same time, our industrial base is quickly eroding, because we refuse to use Russian fossil fuels (resulting in price-increases for Energy for both consumers and industrial users, making our products more expensive) and export our manufacturing industry to China and South-East Asia, due to cost and vague ESG dreams.

So, we might even "win" this one, Russia might retreat. For now.

But are we sure that next time something like this happens, we are actually in a better position to respond?

Germany has almost no capable military force left, the number of acceptable applicants has been declining every year and the equipment is mostly outdated and for the largest part broken, spare parts often being canibalized from other broken machinery - it's like a deja-vu of the late stages of WW2 and we all know how that one ended.

The US has now actually shipped a large part of its arsenal of JAVELIN and STINGER rocket-launchers to Ukraine - and due to shortages, no supply is coming forward until 2023.

Should another conflict elsewhere arise, the US may no longer be in a position to respond conventionally.

So, in essence, I fear that all parties in this conflict have put themselves into positions where their options are getting smaller and smaller with no way out.

Unfortunately, this is neither 1914 nor 1938 - because back then, nobody had nukes.

Some interesting things I noticed:

1) Mikers stopped posting on 25.05.2021 https://www.englishforum.ch/search.p...rchid=22383479
2) vushka joined the forum on 27.05.2021 with no introduction, immediately posting in threads like he had been here a while https://www.englishforum.ch/search.p...&pp=25&page=13

Both appear to be only EF members to write the phrase: "a bit sus" https://www.google.com/search?q=engl...hrome&ie=UTF-8

Mikers https://www.englishforum.ch/485676-post15.html
vushka https://www.englishforum.ch/3313315-post110.html

vushkas posts started off very well written in terms of vocabulary, grammar and punctuation with syntax and vocabulary like that of a native English speaker. However over time his posts seem to have, one can imagine only purposefully as the intention of the persona evolved, devolved into lack of punctuation and semi-broken sentences.

1) vushkas early posts that are well-written and using native English language, quite like Mikers used to. https://www.englishforum.ch/search.p...&pp=25&page=13
2) vushkas most recent posts which consist of badly written English and literally look as though a different person is writing them to his earlier posts https://www.englishforum.ch/search.p...9&pp=25&page=2

I'm not saying it's a suspicious coincidence, but... ok yeah it's a suspicious coincidence and I think there is a distinct possibility that vushka is Mikers carefully cultivated troll account.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/03...nflict-zone-un

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...d-misreported/

I can say that I am a bit jealous of vushka.

He found someone to go Inspector Barnaby all over his posts to find some minutia over how he posts, grammar…….just wow

Somebody clearly has too much time on his hands and is barking up the wrong tree.

There will be many millions of famine victims because Russia invaded Ukraine, blockaded the Black Sea so preventing food exports, and likely will disrupt the usual July/August wheat harvest.