Ukraine

[EdwardElizabethHitler]

If this were a country where ppls main transport consisted of donkeys, the US would have no probs attacking. No way will they attack Russia because it won't be so easy. Now in a war between Russia and the US, I think the US would win but only because they are more ruthless. Everyone is screaming about children dying in Ukraine but does anyone actually think that the US never killed kids? The Brits? They killed plenty of them.

Westside

True that. The UK goverment and the US have killed billions between them.

[Westsidex]

I smell a bit of hipocrisy there, you want to decide who can have nukes or even give them to your perceived allies but its not OK if other countries see them as a threat to their own national security?
Which country was first to break pretty much any dissarmament agreement signed, short range, long range missiles? You guessed it, US. Bio weapons check refused, US. List goes on but this not thread for it.

Any volunteers to take less fancy african refugees from Ukraine?
https://www.axios.com/africans-in-uk...e9db7ec91.html

As far as taking in refugees, it's not taking them in I'd be concerned about but getting them out if or when it comes to that.

Westside

PS All single females are more than welcome to apply. Send a recent photo, your vital stats (these will be verified later) and latest bank ac balance.

[Bukar]

Ban one dictator, unban another... So Maduro is good now? Dont remember reading about him reforming his views since yet another US sponsored coup attempt

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exc...us-2022-03-09/

[EscortInspector]

https://www.ft.com/content/61c4032c-...c-e83a15d0bbe2

Oceans of Grain — America, Russia and Ukraine’s breadbasket in flames by Rana Foroohar
Scott Reynolds Nelson’s history of the global wheat trade is a timely warning of how basic food exports can shape empires
MARCH 8 2022

The world’s breadbasket is at war. Russia and Ukraine together account for about a quarter of the world’s wheat, and roughly 12 per cent of its total calories. Should the war interrupt the spring planting season — which it shows every indication of doing — poor countries and rich countries alike could face food shortages and steep inflation. That disruption of grain trade may in turn bring massive economic, political and social upheaval.

It was ever thus, according to an incredibly timely history of the global wheat trade by University of Georgia academic Scott Reynolds Nelson. The subtitle is a nod to fact that with the invention of explosives that enabled the building of the railways to the west, the US was able to transport its own heartland grain via rail and then by sea to Europe in the wake of the American civil war. It was a sort of wheat dumping that contributed to the toppling of the Russian empire, which had previously fed Europeans from the rich soil of Ukraine.

This is where Oceans of Grain begins, with a detailed chronicle of the “black paths” made (according to Ukrainian legend) by ancient warrior-merchants, forefathers of the Cossacks, called chumaki (Turkish for “stick” or “spear”). Ukrainian folklorists believed that the chumaki were there seeding those fertile plains long before the various empires that eventually controlled the region. These travellers hauled leather, lead, slaves and eventually grain across the Eurasian plains, their carts making “black paths” — ultimately very profitable ones — as they rode.

This is a key point in the book: trade built empires, not the other way around. Nelson attributes this realisation to a Russian grain trader and revolutionary called Alexander Israel Helphand, who grew up in Odesa during the second half of the 19th century, witnessing the 1873 agrarian crisis in which cheap American wheat, political upheaval in Russia, a financial crisis and the bursting of a pan-European real estate bubble collided and led to a massive economic downturn that changed the continent.

Helphand pops in and out of the book. But the main character is really wheat itself — how and where it was produced, and how it shaped the course of history. Nelson makes a persuasive case that grain production, storage, transport and trade was the defining factor in the rise and fall of civilisations from Rome to Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia, as well as the key vector in conflicts such as the first world war (Central Power control of “the grain-bottling Bosphorus” threatened Russian grain exports, exacerbating the conflict).

The deepest and most fascinating square-off detailed in the book is the one between Catherine the Great and America’s founding fathers. Both used debt to purchase grain and fuel empire-building. Russia did this throughout Europe, where Odesa became the hub through which most of Europe’s food supply travelled; the US did it via westward expansion, in which wheat (which required less human labour than southern cotton) became the cash crop for northern farmers and coastal industrialists.

The civil war itself resulted in all sorts of advances in the production and shipment of grain, as well the development of the Chicago futures market, which cut the costs and risks of delivery. This, combined with railways and the discovery of nitroglycerine, which allowed ports such as Antwerp to be widened and deepened, enabled a flood of US wheat into Europe. “Because ocean delivery was at least thirty times cheaper than land delivery with horses,” writes Nelson, “a deepwater port allowed an inland city like Antwerp to expand its hinterland far past its own borders in Europe.” Where grain was unloaded, bread — and many other goods — were now produced for burgeoning cities.

All of this reshaped class structures in Europe: peasants became paid producers and consumers of cheap bread, as well as people who could become rebellious when it ran out (Karl Marx paid close attention to the political economy of grain). The nature of war and supply chains shifted (the Prussians fed their armies with grain not from Germany but from Illinois, via Antwerp). Giant grain trading houses — Andre, Bunge, Continent, Cargill and Dreyfus — rose and their owners became some of the richest people on the planet (and remain at the heart of the global commodities sector today).

There are times, particularly during the sections of the book that track the end of slavery in the US and serfdom in Russia, the rise of Marxism and beginnings of first world war, when it feels like Nelson has bitten off a bit too much for a single book.

Yet after a chapter filled with a few too many facts or dates, Nelson will surprise the reader — how working-class Europeans in the mid-19th century became shorter because white bread rather than brown became more affordable (albeit less nutritious). Or how America’s European migrant boom in the late 1800s was enabled by the fact that so many ships that went over with grain returned with people looking for a better life in the New World. These many fascinating details are worth the occasional slog through complex and somewhat confusing history.

Certainly, it’s hard to imagine a book more relevant for our moment. The last time there was a major global food shortage, stemming in large part from a poor harvest in Ukraine and Russia, the Arab Spring was the result. We may be on the verge of a similar crisis.

Certainly, as China gobbles up the commodities that Russia can no longer sell to the west, we are reminded that grain and great power politics go hand-in-hand. As Nelson writes, “at its deepest level, an empire may be a monopoliser of food along ancient grain pathways that it never fully understands.” We are only beginning to understand what the latest shift in the grain trade may mean for today’s world.

[robbie9]

I think Ukraine are going to put up a real fight of it !

The trenches they have built will work wonders & have already pushed them back!

My only worry is air strikes, they can wipe out a lot of fighters from above!

[UnFulfilledScott]

Ban one dictator, unban another... So Maduro is good now? Dont remember reading about him reforming his views since yet another US sponsored coup attempt

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exc...us-2022-03-09/

Amazing how they all of a sudden stopped pretending Guaido was the Venezuelan President when it became a serious matter.

[UnFulfilledScott]

I reckon the US should mint an NFT of Ukraine and give it to Putin.

That way Putin can think he owns Ukraine and the rest of us can laugh at him and get on with our shit.

[Forceuser]

Fighting rages outside Ukrainian capital Kyiv

https://www.rte.ie/news/ukraine/2022...ssia-invasion/

UK Considers Sending Anti-Air Missiles To Ukraine Warning: 'We Will Not Back Down'

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...5942?ncid=yhpf

Russia says it could target Western arms supplies to Ukraine

https://www.thejournal.ie/ukraine-mo...08977-Mar2022/

[joggon]

[EscortInspector]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...ia-dumb-bombs/

Pentagon rules out sending warplanes to Ukraine, says benefit would be ‘low’ by Karoun Demirjian
U.S. assessments also show signs that Russia is using ‘dumb bombs’ and hitting civilian targets
March 9, 2022

The Pentagon on Wednesday firmly ruled out any U.S. participation in efforts to supplement Ukraine’s inventory of fighter aircraft, warning that such a step could be seen by Russia as “escalatory” while assessing any potential benefit would be “low.”

“We do not support the transfer,” the Defense Department’s chief spokesman, John Kirby, told reporters at the Pentagon, citing intelligence suggesting that the United States taking such steps at this time could be a “mistake.” In a separate statement, Gen. Tod D. Wolters, head of U.S. European Command, labeled the prospect of sending additional jets to Ukraine “high-risk and low gain.”

The debate over equipping Ukraine with warplanes has grown more urgent in recent days, with President Volodymyr Zelensky appealing to NATO member countries for help establishing a no-fly zone — or at least supplying Kyiv with the means to better police its skies alone. On Tuesday, the Pentagon quashed a Polish proposal to put its Soviet-origin MiG-29s in Germany to be used by the United States in aiding the Ukrainian war effort.

There was “no desire to see them in our custody,” Kirby said Wednesday, adding that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has communicated as much to Poland’s defense minister. The transfer of MiG-29s would not “appreciably increase the effectiveness” of Ukraine’s air force, Wolters added.

Rather, the Pentagon maintains that supplying Ukraine with ground-based air defense systems, such as surface-to-air missiles, has proved effective at weakening Russian forces, including its air capabilities. The United States is evaluating how to provide Ukraine with more of those types of weapons rather than the aircraft its leaders have asked for.

The United States already has shipped Ukraine a number of Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Javelin antitank missiles, alongside shotguns and other materials useful for fighting in urban areas, as The Washington Post first reported last week.

Russian forces continue to close in on key population centers. A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules established by the Pentagon, said earlier Wednesday that Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and Mykolaiv, a possible staging ground to attack the large port city of Odessa, appeared particularly vulnerable.

Ukraine claimed that a Russian strike destroyed a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol. Russia has launched more than 710 missiles over the first two weeks of war, the U.S. defense official said, and there are also “indications” that its military is using “dumb bombs” instead of precision-guided munitions to conduct some attacks, though it was “not totally clear whether that is by design or by default.”

“While we can’t prove a certain dumb bomb is hitting a certain target … what we see manifested is increasing damage to civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties,” the official added.

As Russia’s attacks have intensified, Zelensky’s pleas have become more desperate. On Wednesday, he issued a challenge to the West over the hospital strike in Mariupol.

“How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now! Stop the killings!” he wrote on Twitter. You have power but you seem to be losing humanity.”

The Biden administration has been adamant it will not involve U.S. troops in the war and thus far has dismissed calls from Zelensky and others to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, saying enforcement could risk putting U.S. and NATO military personnel in direct conflict with Russian forces.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials indicated that Ukraine is not using the fixed-wing aircraft it already has, as Russia has arrayed surface-to-air missile systems such that there is little to no corner of the country’s airspace where such planes could avoid the risk of being shot down.

But as the advance on major cities continues, the humanitarian situation is becoming more dire. Pentagon officials back claims that civilians trying to flee along humanitarian corridors have been struck. And the United Nations counts more than 2 million refugees having left Ukraine in the last two weeks.

As refugees spill over NATO borders, the United States has taken some steps to reassure skittish allies that Washington will come to their defense should the conflict also spread westward. On Wednesday, two U.S. Patriot missile batteries arrived in Poland to bolster defenses along the alliance’s eastern front.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-b2033346.html

Johnson rules out no-fly zone despite Russian hospital strike by Gavin Cordon
The PM said the conflict in Ukraine will only end when President Putin accepts he has made a ‘disastrous miscalculation’.
March 11, 2022

Boris Johnson has again ruled out imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, despite Russia’s strike on a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol.

The attack on Wednesday was said to have killed three people, including a child, and injured 17 others. It led to renewed calls from President Volodymyr Zelensky for Western warplanes to intervene.

However, Mr Johnson said that while Vladimir Putin had abandoned “all norms of civilised behaviour”, a no-fly zone would bring the UK and Nato into direct conflict with Russia – something he was determined to avoid.

Speaking on Sky New’s Beth Rigby Interviews, he acknowledged that some of his conversations with Mr Zelensky had been “deeply upsetting” as the Ukrainian leader appealed for more help.

“What’s happened in Mariupol in that maternity hospital really shows that Putin is prepared just to reject, to abandon, all norms of civilised behaviour,” he said.

“The difficulty is that there is a line beyond which, quite frankly, the UK and Nato would be deemed to be in conflict – direct conflict – with Russia.

“It’s agonising. It’s absolutely agonising. And I’ve had this conversation at least a couple of times now with Volodymyr, but I think the difficulty is that it will require me to order RAF jets, UK pilots into the air with a mission to shoot down Russian fast jets.

“I think we’ve got to be realistic… there’s a line that is very difficult to cross.”

Mr Johnson said the he believed the conflict would only end when Mr Putin accepted he had made “a disastrous miscalculation” and withdrew his forces.

“I don’t think that he can conquer Ukraine. Ukraine is a country of 45 million people,” Mr Johnson said.

“The best way out for Russia, for the Russian people, is for withdrawal of the Russian forces and for total cessation of hostilities.

“Vladimir Putin has himself made it very difficult to find an off ramp, and he has, I think, driven his tank, so to speak, down a cul de sac from which it will be very hard to extricate himself but he must.

“I can’t see a way out that doesn’t begin with the realisation by the Kremlin, that they made a catastrophic mistake and that it’s time to begin to withdraw it, and to withdraw immediately.”

https://www.thejournal.ie/russian-oi...09038-Mar2022/

Government rules out turning away Russian oil from Dublin Port by Eoghan Dalton
The tanker is landing in Dublin Port today.
March 12, 2022

THE GOVERNMENT HAS ruled out supporting Siptu’s call to turn away a cargo ship carrying Russian oil that is due to land in Dublin Port today.

Transport Minister Eamon Ryan said he accepted the trade union’s concerns but added that oil product does not currently fall under sanctions agreed by the EU, so there “would not be any legal basis to refuse to accept” Russian oil.

Siptu had asked yesterday that the minister and Dublin Port prevent the oil tanker STI Clapham from landing.

Siptu Divisional Organiser Karan O’Loughlin said that “given the unfolding horror in Ukraine” their members and other workers “who are expected to unload this vessel are angry and upset at being put in this position”.

But Ryan has ruled out such a move for now.

In a statement he said: “We fully understand the concerns of the Siptu members with regard to the cargo of oil due to arrive to Dublin Port over the weekend.

“However, the strongest pressure we can put on the Russian government now is to continue to ensure that we maintain a resolute, united European response on already agreed sanctions.”

He said the current sanctions are effective and that “discussions continue” with the EU on implementing further measures.

“As matters currently stand, the European sanctions applying to Russia exclude oil product.

“Petrol, diesel, home heating oil and kerosene are not subject to sanctions and there would not be any legal basis to refuse to accept such products.”