Please notice that Nord Stream is a different pipeline than Yamal. Yamal actually fluctuates a lot, a few weeks ago it even operated backwards, pumping gas from Germany to Poland. So while it is concerning when nothing flows through Yamal, it is not unusual to happen.
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
- Thread starter Wednesday at Stoke
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
Kennedy handling that well is a myth. He did plenty of bungling apparently. I remember reading a really in depth article about how it actually went a few years ago.
In the middle of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have this. Anyone still think that Trump is not a Russian intelligence asset?
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Wow does he ever look like shit. AIDS or polonium?
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If they wanted to use chemical/biological, I’m sure they’d bomb a few Russian civilians themselves, military targets are fine , there people are starving/dying, if they go further we all understand.
I mean yeah he always looks like shit, but he somehow looks even worse here.
Trump is just a miserable nasty hateful individual.
And that is the nicest thing I can say about him.
More like a sociopathic person who doesn’t experience any empathy towards different people and uses literally anything for his individual advantage.
A cnut you mean?
Yeah.
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The de-escalation doesn't seem to concern the Eastern front.
Russian-backed separatists claim that UA is shelling civilians. He is talking like they are not part of the RU-UA negotiations, and somewhat not bound by its results so far.
Russian-backed separatists claim that UA is shelling civilians. He is talking like they are not part of the RU-UA negotiations, and somewhat not bound by its results so far.
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I don't think he's anyone's asset per se. Not in his mind, anyway. He's just a dumb, self-serving, immoral, deluded, narcissist who cares only for himself. I doubt he recognises that he furthers the interests of Putin (I reckon he truly believes he is being tough on Russia), but even if he does somehow recognise it deep down he clearly has no capacity for caring for America. It just doesn't matter to him at all.
The biggest irony of all is the idiots who vote for him thinking he's a "patriot". How detached from reality must you be to believe that.
Peace isn't in the interest of the leaders of the DNR and LNR. Their entire use to Putin and existence is defined by being an antagonist to the rest of Ukraine. Early leaders of the DNR and LNR were already replaced by various means once they exhausted their usefulness. These current leaders will be just the same.
Just compare what Mariupol and Volnovakha look like compared to Donetsk, if you want to understand which parties are invested in a prosperous and peaceful future, and which want to maintain power through a campaign of terror.
And you wonder why people are disgusted about the Red Cross seriously proposing to facilitate the evacuation of Ukrainian refugees to Russia:
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There are times I doubt it... Mainly becuase so many others do and consider it a conspiracy theory. Then I actuallly put some thought into it and realise that's just silly.
Yanukovich, Lukashenko, Trump and whatever other Russian puppets exist across the world, I don't see really much difference.
It's not an irony for many of them, because they have perverted the definition of "patriot" so that (for them) it now means opposition to genuine democracy, opposition to law and order, and support for authoritarian "strong men" like Trump. Much of the alt-right in America is now pretty much indistinguishable from Russian ultra-nationalist supporters of Putin.
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Quelle surprise
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You read Tom Clancy novels where the US opponents have similar dynamics, and yet you think "surely no one would be like that in the real world". Then you read that the Japanese did similar in WWII, not reporting their carrier losses at Midway to the emperor, falsely claiming more US carriers sunk than the US even had, and again you think "surely no one would be like that in 2022". Yet apparently here we are.
Were they actually conscripts or conned into signing processional contracts very early?
Then you read hundreds of tweets from journalists that meant nothing but made for a good story and you still see posts like this actually believing Putin does not know what his military is up to. He knows. Losses and all. He's not just playing ps5 getting calls from his generals.
Does he really? All reports suggest that he lives extremely isolated since Covid started to be an issue, and also that he doesn't use modern technologies like smart phones etc, but instead relies on reports on paper. Someone has to get those to him, and it is plausible that those are carefully done in a way that favors the reporter.
So it is absolutely plausible that a lot of his military decisions are/were based on very wrong information.
Corruption hinders Russia's attempts to replace losses with old vehicles - Ukraine:
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-702428
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-702428
He definitely knows what's going on. The problem is that the logic of his decision making is based on the paranoia of his own isolation, as well as his inner circle not wanting to give him assessments they think would anger him (thereby jeopardizing their own positions and safety). In the absence of a proper advisor who isn't afraid of him, he will continue to blunder his way through a series of miscalculations.
How can he fully know what's going on if, as you suggest, his inner circle don't want to give him assessments they think would anger him?
CNN's David McKenzie reports from London where the National Crime Agency has seized a yacht believed to be owned by an oligarch with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin:
This is a quote from a US govt official, so the journalist didn't make it up. The US official might have made it up, or it could be bad intelligence. But there is precedent for this sort of self-deception, in the case of Japan in WWII that I mentioned but also you could argue that in the case of the US govt itself and evaluations about the situation in Afghanistan all through the last 20 years.
As someone obsessed with his own self-image, he watches a lot of TV and not just his own Russian channels.
That might give him a bit of a reality shock now, but in the build up of the war Western TV stations were mostly believing that Russia would seize Ukraine in 2-3 days, in line with his own believes.
How can anyone believe he is living in a shell like that. It's a simple case of losing men and armory and miscalculations but not affording to back out to face the nation. I am not one of those folks who thinks Putin is some sort of chess master but the lengths people go to, to make it seem like he's in a basement thinking nothing wrong is going on, is pretty silly imo.
Honestly, if you look at Putin I've never seen him look more panicked and worried. His comments have never been more aggressive. He knows exactly what's going on and is stressed as hell about it.
I don't think I've seen US officials saying that Putin knows nothing. But rather that he's not being informed honestly or accurately.
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I think the truth probably sits somewhere in the middle. One the one hand, he clearly didn't realise that Ukraine wouldn't just roll over and surrender, nor that most Ukrainians would be hostile to incoming Russian troops, nor that his forces would perform so badly due to poor equipment, poor leadership, low morale (etc etc). All that speaks to him having previously been living in a shell of some kind.
One the other hand, he was probably aware of the shattering of those illusions within the first week of the invasion. And now he's stuck with it: unable to retreat his forces back into Russia/Crimea, because that would probably be the end of him, but also seeing his forces unable to make significant breakthroughs.