That was obviously a provocative gesture of a known alt-righter (he was a godsend to Erdogan; I would argue far right parties have a strong link to Russia) and the Swedes have already apologised for it.

Turkey just wants to find pretexts to make Sweden extradite the Kurdish refugees they deem dangerous.

Btw, it will be interesting to watch how Russia will take Finland's bid to join Nato as they have a common border....will they invade Finland too?

Cannot find the opinion piece now but read somewhere that Mr. Erdogan couldn't care less about Kurdish refugees in Sweden. His issue seem to be the partial ban of weapons exports in the last few years from EU to Turkey to supply his geopolitical games in Syria, Cyprus, Iraq, Qatar, etc.

On the weapons export ban from 2019 https://www.politico.eu/article/turk...-arms-exports/

Sweden ends the weapons exports ban to Turkey (Sep 2022) https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/reuters...p-bid/47943552

Most of those 90k km2 was open land "that has no obvious strategic value" (your own words).

The point is, Ukraine is no longer on the advance in the Donbas, quite the contrary. The game change the media kept harping about did happen, just not in UA's favor.

For the time being that's the situation.

Well, for one reason or another they'll try to stop Sweden's accession to Nato in order to get what they want.

Politics is a dirty, dirty thing.

Erdogan needs to block this until the (last ever?) election in Turkey so that he can campaign with the picture of that asshole who burned the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.

Politics is dirty, disgusting, execrable....but compared to war, it's such a beauty.

Erdogan profiting again from Ukraine's misery

Looks like Biden is calling Scholz's bluff

"
The Biden administration is finalizing plans to send US-made Abrams tanks to Ukraine and could make an announcement as soon as this week, according to three US officials familiar with the deliberations."

"Germany today said it would agree to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine after weeks of stalling and negotiations with Kyiv and its international partners. "

Well played Biden!!

"World War 3 or just a local spat in Ukraine?"

WW3... unfortunately.

I get the feeling that this period we are currently going through is comparable to the Phony war in the west and the slogan: "Why die for Danzig?" (Pourquoi mourir pour Dantzig) on the eve of WW2. Sending Nato MBT´s to Ukraine is just going to escalate the conflict, Scholz knows this, seems that the Americans have forgotten history, again.

A quarter of a million military dead or wounded, at least 30,0000 civilians killed, 90,000 sq Km of Ukraine under Russian occupation, Ukraine's energy infrastructure mostly destroyed, 8 million Ukraine refugees plus another 8 million displaced.

What do you define as "escalate the conflict"?

A direct conflict between NATO and Russia? Duh! Send in NATO tanks and you are already half way there.

Of course. Mr. Putin has some secret thing hidden in the closet that will change significantly the war. For some secret reasons, Mr. Putin has not used the secret thing in spite of 11 months of war where Russian army failed to take the capital and the weakness of their air and land weapons has been shown in HD videos around the world.

So, don't dare to send 40 YO tanks to Ukraine because the secret thing not yet used for secret reasons will be used, right?

But it is no secret, the weapons are there. What part of a nato-Russia war are you having problems with understanding?
But we have done this to exhaustion for almost a year and the war is still on. Russia hasn’t chucked in the towel. Ukraine is being supported by NATO and nato is willing to fight Russia till the last Ukrainian.
At what point is Putin going to say something along the lines of: „ah fornicate it?

Aaaaaand we loop back to post #8739...

Ah, thee of little faith.

Look. We appease Putin, we're fskd. We don't appease Putin, worst case, we're fsked.

Now while some of you may welcome our new Soviet overlords, I think the odds are with us. It's not "better dead than red", rather "there's a much better chance of not being red, than dead".

And since we can invidually and personally do F.A. about it, I prefer to think positive.

It’s not about appeasement. More like after „A“ for Apple and „B“ for bunny, we get to „N“ for nuke before ending with “Z“ for Zombie apocalypse.

Another red line being bent

"Switzerland Takes Step to Allow Arms Re-Exports to Ukraine"

One big problem was the blockage of the Swiss-made ammo for the Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns so effective against drones.

One other aspect is that it would take around three to six months to train a crew to convert to either the Abrams or the LeoII tank and only on a basic level and only if the crew has received tank training on the Soviet tanks.
The US has opened a tank training ground in Poland where "Polish" tankists are to be trained on Abrams.
So what methods are going to be used to make sure that these nice new Leo´s are not good target practice as soon as they are fielded?